The Life Before Her Eyes

The Life Before Her Eyes is a movie with a twist. So we can refer to the movie in two manners. One the movie as it is, a cold, sometimes harsh, yet beautiful evocation of life. The director Vadim Perelman will be remembered for his equally severe yet poetic House of Sand and Fog. This is a kind of filmmaking that doesn't take prisoners.
Regarding the twist, I won't reveal that - but I've heard comments from those that saw the film and the films they want to mention in regards to the twist didn't hold water. Yes, all those films have "the twist" but they all take the ending in different directions.
In The Life Before Her Eyes we view circumstance as seen by Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) and later through her traumatized adult eyes (as Uma Thurman). What shakes the adult Diana is the journey of her own young daughter, the images of a violent incident from her high school days, and her husband (Brett Cullen) having an affair.
Perelman uses repetition of images, particularly lush swimming pool imagery and close-ups of nature in bloom (another title for the film), to make his talking points. The cinematography strikingly enforces the duality of the story.
As we switch back and forth between teen Diana and adult Diana there are visual clues, like bracelets, that carry weight long after the film has ended.
The clip below shows Eva Amurri (daughter of Susan Sarandon who plays Wood's friend in the film) speaking about the film.

Marfa Film Festival

It’s a big year for movies in Marfa, a remote outpost in far West Texas near Big Bend National Park. Two Oscar-winning films were shot there (THERE WILL BE BLOOD and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN), and now the first annual Marfa Film Festival arrives.
Not unlike the Coen Bros and Paul Thomas Anderson shaking up Hollywood with career defining films, Marfa Film Festival is already sending shock waves through the arts community coast to coast. They’ve just announced their innagural festival will open with a 35mm screening of THERE WILL BE BLOOD on the set where it was made, which follows a closing night announcement that Dennis Hopper will return to Marfa for the first time since making GIANT there over fifty years ago with a presentation of his rarely seen western THE LAST MOVIE, winner of the 1971 Venice Film Festival.
The Masses, an integrated film and music collective, will be premiering a series of music videos directed by Matt Amato, Shannyn Sossamon, and Jon Ramos. They will also honor the never before screened work of Heath Ledger that was created within the collective. Another Masses artist, Alex Ebert, will bring his band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, joining the musical lineup that includes Victoria, and Los Angeles DJ Collective Small Town Talk. The Masses will also be hosting an art exhibit featuring the work of wildlife photographer and filmmaker Tristan Bayer, illustrator Daniel Auber, and Icelandic photographer Borkur.
Since Marfa doesn’t have a movie theater (pop. 2000), screening THERE WILL BE BLOOD on the set where it was filmed is a very special event for locals, especially since the town (where the screening will take place) will soon be torn down because of high winds.
“We’re reaching out to the local cast and crew to come see the movie, some for the first time,” says festival director Robin Lambaria. “We’re hoping Paul Thomas Anderson is able to make it. We know he really wants to. People are already talking about Dennis Hopper coming back after so many years. This just adds to the excitement.”
The festival will be playing other classics under the starry skies – Marfa is home to the nearby McDonald Observatory -- including NIGHT OF THE HUNTER starring Robert Mitchum, THE INNOCENTS with Deborah Kerr, and a late show dance-party with David Byrne’s TRUE STORIES. All outdoor movies, including THERE WILL BE BLOOD and THE LAST MOVIE, will be projected in 35mm on a gigantic 40 x 20 foot blow up screen, courtesy of Austin’s famous Alamo Drafthouse Rolling Roadshow.
During the day, the festival will play over 40 features, docs and shorts at the Goode-Crowley theater in downtown Marfa, with several world premieres. Festival headquaters is the Paisano Hotel, where James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, George Stevens and Hopper stayed during the filming of GIANT. --- MARFA FILM FESTIVAL PRESS RELEASE

Made of Honor

This movie squeaks by on charm and Michelle Monaghan is hot especially after exemplary work in Gone, Baby Gone as well as just keeping a straight face in Heartbreak Kid. I kept feeling that Patrick Dempsey was upstaged in Enchanted by James Marsden, but in Made of Honor there is no upstaging his role because all the other parts are written on the level of a thinly sketched sit com. There are good romantic comedies in 2008 (Definitely Maybe) - but Made isn't one.
Made of Honor has two good leads only everything from their friends to the situations are so lame and stereotypic that you feel the filmmakers just quit trying well before this idea was polished. It's about a guy and girl who are real friends and have been for years. Only now, of course, the guy has sewn his oats and wants to marry the woman of his dreams, who happens to be his best friend. She, in turn, meets Scottish royalty (okay, he's a Duke) and wants her buddy, the lovelorn guy, to be her maid of honor.
Yes, they get together at the end but not before the plot gets so ridiculous you want to break off the engagement. I could tell you more but it would just ruin whatever sense of mystery remains about the actual film, which will do a whirlwind of initial date movie business. Suffice it to say that the naive grandmother finds a string of anal love beads and wears them as a necklace.

Filmmaking tips for the new millennium

I read this in Movie Maker magazine the other day. It's a way to make your cell phone movies and pics look rad. At a hardware store get a peep-hole lens for doors, only attach it onto your cell phone camera. Now your images will have a fish eye wide angle look.

Iron Man

Pace yourself because there's a lot more coming down the pike than one superhero. In other words if you rush to see Iron Man because you think it'll be great you could be rushing to judgement. In a movie shot in late 1967 and early 1968, Le Gai Savoir, Jean-Luc Godard's "return to zero" film he has a pretty woman reading a poem in front of a wall adorned with large images of the following: Batman, the Hulk, and Spiderman. None of those mutated heroes were well known outside culture mongers and kids reading comics in that era. Flash forward about 40 years. Those iconic images are what sell current movies, in fact they're all present this summer if you replace Peter Parker with Tony Stark. Name a filmmaker working now with a film that has a single frame that identifies the zeitgeist of 2048.
No, films now aren't as heavy (there are always exceptions). Just as the Iron Man that had his genesis in the 60s was far more complex (drug addiction) than the "family friendly" version played by Robert Downey, Jr. in the film opening Friday. For today's Iron Man the deepest it gets is a kind of spiritual epiphany that allows him to justify killing people with his weapons. Industrialist Stark (Downey) could be a bastard combination of Shaw's Andrew Undershaft and pop spy Matt Helm the way he profits from arms and dispatches evil doers. Maybe in the sequel (Downey has signed for three) Stark donates his profits to Greenpeace.
Here is my main problem with Iron Man other than it's lack of cinematic hoopla (Where is Sam Raimi when you need him?) Other superbeings are legend (Thor) or atomic mutations (Spiderman, Hulk, Fantastic Four). The reality of their powers is more sci-fi than attached to the physics of our present world. But Iron Man lives in the world of real science and his powers are all inventions in a lab, or cave as the case may be. So when Iron Man files from Malibu to Afghanistan the reality is it took him a day to fly at jet speeds, yet the film makes it look as exhausting as driving down the street to the store. Iron Man makes a small ring out of the element palladium that he uses to power his suit. Fine, only the entire movie seems constructed out of voodoo science.
I didn't have a bad time at Iron Man, but the seen it done that attitude I left the theater with bemoans ever wanting to see this on DVD or care about sequels. Stan Lee turns up in a cameo where he's transformed into Hugh Hefner.