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Free Screening Tonight! CAVITE, with Filmmaker Q & A

By Karina Longworth (Subscribe to Karina Longworth's posts), Posted May 15th 2006 2:05PM
Filed under: Drama, Foreign Language, Independent, Site Announcements, Magnolia, Free Movies, Cinematical Indie, Announcements, Cinematical
Some words of praise for Cavite:

"[Cavite] ventures into rarely seen terrain - the slums of greater Manila - even as it pays homage to the Hollywood bomb-on-a-bus blockbuster Speed." -- Dennis Lim,  New York Times

"[A] cross between A Single Girl ... and a great episode of 24 ... this is a great, great example of a true indie film: 2 guys, a camera and a script, traveling halfway across the world to a country considered one of the most dangerous places in the world and shoot a feature film. It makes me want to grab a camera, go to a foreign land like Africa or Colombia and start shooting away. But first I'd have to grow a pair of balls." – Moriarty, Ain't it Cool News

"Cavite tackles such pertinent issues as cultural identity, family and terrorism ... guerilla filmmaking at its finest." -- Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter

"For a guerrilla-style, no-budget Yank indie to even tackle issues of jihad terror and naive Western thinking is noteworthy in itself, but [Ian] Gamazon and [Neill] Dela Llana inflame the issues with a gutsy, athletic filmmaking package that shows what can be done with a minimum of tools." -- Robert Koehler, Variety

Wanna see it yet? If you're in New York, email karina AT cinematical DOT com and we'll put you on the list for the free screening Cinematical is hosting tonight in Manhattan. After the film, I'll be leading a short Q & A with the filmmakers. Check out the distributor's spin on the basics after the jump.
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Free Screening of Cavite -- Tickets Still Available!

By Karina Longworth (Subscribe to Karina Longworth's posts), Posted May 12th 2006 1:29PM
Filed under: Drama, Independent, Thrillers, Site Announcements, Magnolia, Free Movies, Cinematical Indie, Announcements, Cinematical


We're still accepting RSVPs for our free screening of Cavite in New York City this upcoming Monday. The film has won numerous awards since debuting at Rotterdam last year, including the Someone to Watch Independent Spirit Award. I saw it again last night for the first time in awhile, and I'm all the more excited about this event. Cavite is, ostensibly, a low-budget thriller, about a Filipino-American who is called back to the home country and forced to capitulate to the cell-phone-call demands of a terrorist who claims to be holding his mother and sister hostage. It's an effective nail-biter, but at some point watching it last night I realized that the film is almost Antonionian in the way it  insistently anthropomorphizes the landscape of the city in which it takes place. Cavite is much faster paced than, say, Red Desert, and it seemingly has very different politics -- but there's a dreamlike quality that the films have in common which fundamentally sets Cavite apart from any other video-shot, single-actor thriller I've ever seen.

I'll be talking about all of that stuff, as well as the film's shoestring production and the filmmakers' struggles with distribution, with writers/directors/producers/actors/sound editors/cameramen Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana on Monday night after the screening. Wanna come? Send me an email at karina AT weblogsinc DOT com, with your name and plus one info, and I'll let you know when/where it's all going down. If it's within your power to be in New York City on Monday night, you do not want to miss this.

Cinematical Presents: Free Screening of CAVITE, with Filmmaker Q & A

By Karina Longworth (Subscribe to Karina Longworth's posts), Posted May 10th 2006 3:03PM
Filed under: Drama, Foreign Language, Independent, Thrillers, Site Announcements, SXSW, Mystery & Suspense, Magnolia, Cinematical Indie, Announcements, SXSW Film Festival, Cinematical


This upcoming Monday evening (May 15) in New York City, Cinematical will be hosting a screening of Independent Spirit Award Winner Cavite, to be followed by a Q & A with filmmakers Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana -- all lead by yours truly.  Maybe you saw Cavite at festivals such as SXSW or New Directors/New Films -- or maybe you heard everyone talking about it at said festivals, but didn't get a chance to catch it yourself. It's opening in selected markets at the end of this month, as the first feature to be released via Magnolia's Truly Indie initiative, and as excited as I am about all forms of alternative distribution, we at Cinematical wanted to do something to get the buzz rolling before the release. This is the first of what will hopefully be a series of screening events hosted under the auspices of Cinematical.

If you're in New York, we'd love to see you there. If you're interested in attending, please RSVP ASAP, sending plus +1 information, to karina AT weblogsinc DOT com. If you keep a blog, please include the URL -- there's limited space in our current location, so if demand provokes a seating crunch, we'll reserve space for those with the ability to spread the meme first. If you're not going to be in NYC on Monday, please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone who may be interested in attending. Info on the film, dragged over straight from the press release, follows after the jump; you can watch the trailer here.
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Tribeca Review: The Road to Guantanamo

By Karina Longworth (Subscribe to Karina Longworth's posts), Posted May 9th 2006 9:08AM
Filed under: Cinematical



The Road to Guantanamo is a thoroughly engrossing, sufficiently cathartic, but frustratingly one-sided indictment of the American military's appalling treatment of foreign "enemy combatants".  Michael Winterbottom (coming off Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which might have been inexcusably silly if it hadn't been unbelievably dull), co-directed with longtime collaborator Mat Whitecross, and the two combine documentary-style interview footage with haunting, disturbing, and surprisingly beautiful reenactments, to tell the story of the Tipton Three -- three British-born Muslims mistaken for Taliban and imprisoned at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for over two years. Winterbottom, the renowned directorial chameleon whose other art house oddity of 2005 was the concert film/episodic porn 9 Songs, proves once again that if anyone is better at polarizing an audience, nobody does it with more style. He's got a potentially stunning piece of propaganda on his hands here -- it's just too bad he hasn't made a better film.

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Tribeca Review: The Treatment

By Karina Longworth (Subscribe to Karina Longworth's posts), Posted May 6th 2006 1:35PM
Filed under: Comedy, Independent, Romance, Tribeca, Cinematical Indie, Tribeca Film Festival, Cinematical


There's nobody better at delivering overwritten and/or expository dialogue than Chris Eigeman. From the three near-masterpieces he starred in for MIA indie auteur Whit Stillman in the 90s, to his twenty-episode arc as love-interest for Lorelai on that hallmark of overwritten genius, Gilmore Girls, there's no one out there as capable of making an artificially literate script seem natural. In Metropolitan, his 19-year-old preppie casually counsels a friend, "barbarism is cloaked with all sorts of self-righteousness and moral superiority" -- in the midst of a conversation that was ostensibly about detachable shirt collars. Such densely packed rejoinders flow out of Eigeman's mouth with perfect naturalism, to the point where one wonders why he isn't called in last-minute by big-money productions to deliver all of the rough, expository dialogue that Hollywood script doctors can't quite smoothe out. This guy could have made Crash seem witty and urbane.
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Tribeca Interview: Jeff Garlin, Writer/Director/Star, I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With

By Karina Longworth (Subscribe to Karina Longworth's posts), Posted May 6th 2006 9:01AM
Filed under: Comedy, Independent, Tribeca, Podcasts, Interviews, Cinematical Indie, Celebrity Interviews, Tribeca Film Festival, Cinematical


I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With is the directorial debut of Jeff Garlin. Known to many as Larry David's manager/sidekick on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Garlin also wrote and starred in the film, which takes a bittersweet, episodic stroll through the work, woman and weight problems of a Chicago-based 30-something comedian (guess who). Cheese, which flirts with being a meta-remake of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, is full of references to film, but in the hands of Garlin, a self-professed "fan of the classics," the pop culture allusions are sharp but never snarky. I sat down with Jeff at the Tribeca Grand this week -- here's the video evidence.

Format
MOV [iPod compatible]

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Tribeca Review: The Yacoubian Building

By Karina Longworth (Subscribe to Karina Longworth's posts), Posted May 3rd 2006 2:00PM
Filed under: Drama, Foreign Language, Romance, Tribeca, Cinematical Indie, Tribeca Film Festival, Cinematical



The Yacoubian Building isn't this year's The Best of Youth, but with one or two positive reviews from American critics wowed by the Egyptian film's scope and polish, it could very easily be marketed as such. This near-three-hour soap opera has a lot going for it: It's apparently the most expensive Arabic-language film ever made; it's based on a best-selling novel of the same name which is considered the most widely read work of popular fiction in the contemporary Arab world; it stars Egypt's counterparts to Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise. More importantly, it does the noble service of serving up a plentiful slice of contemporary Egyptian culture, replete with Big Issues such as homosexuality, colonialism, class conflict, secular Islam, terrorism, and female exploitation. But it's still a soap opera -- which means that even the meatiest issues tackled within are brushed over with a swoony romantic sheen, which threatens to downgrade the endeavor from ethnographic document to lifestyle porn with a heavily moralistic edge.

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