August Evening

August Evening is a small film that pays off with big dividends. Celebrating some bright as well as dull aspects of multicultural existence the film as made by Chris Eska, functioning as multi-hyphenate writer/director/editor, entices audiences with nuanced performances. The emphasis is on atmosphere and ethnic portrayals with non-actors pulling off some astute moves.
When the film screened at the local museum a couple of months ago, Eska surprised the audience by hinting how little was spent making the film. All sorts of camera favors and deferred payments as well as the casting of non-SAG actors were crucial to actually producing a film at that expense. Eska seems in tune with the Mexican experience because all of August Evening revolves around an elderly undocumented worker Jamie (euphemism for illegal alien played by Pedro Castaneda) and how he gets shuffled around from relative to situation. Accompanying him is his daughter-in-law, recently widowed (Veronica Loren as Lupe) and their relationship, one of respect and sharing chores, provides the core of the movie.
In some sense there's the feeling that Eska is like the Luke Wilson character in Bottle Rocket, instead of an Anglo being enamored with a mujer soltera he's obsessed with an entire culture. It's a vivid picture of how people (Jamie's daughter with her upscale middle class life for instance) will deny their heritage for a short term gain. There's also a bit of navel gazing when you consider how much of the film occurs over characters eating dinner or snacks. Eska wants you to ask questions, like why does Lupe always carry around a guitar yet we never see her strum, play or even take it out of its case? It's all part of the plan. the plan to make a little movie with style. The titles speaks volumes about the film, August Evening is like being particularly mellow on a midsummer night.
In limited engagements August Evening is currently unwinding at the the Angelika Film Center in Houston and Cinema Latino in Pasadena, a theater that specializes in Spanish language films.

Felix, Bond's Langley brother

Felix Leiter is a reoccurring character in James Bond novels and movies. One of the tightest moments of drama in the current Bond, Quantum of Solace, unfolds between Bond (Daniel Craig) and Leiter (Jeffrey Wright reprising his role from Casino Royale) where they briefly meet in a South American bar, exchange a few quaint words and then Leiter tells Bond to run, as in he's got half a minute before the military raids the joint. In this case there's a grey area of allegiance since Leiter's CIA partner wants to kill Bond.
Leiter appeared in the first feature length Bond Dr. No, played by Jack Lord (forever associated as McGarrett in his 70s role from TV's Hawaii Five-0). Leiter subsequently turned up in Goldfinger, played by Cec Linder, and Thunderball, played by Rik Van Nutter, a rock and roll name if we ever heard one. Bond's American doppelganger appears in the last Connery EON Production Bond, Diamonds Are Forever, with Norman Burton as Leiter and then in the non-EON Never Say Never Again, bigger and rougher and played by Bernie Casey.
The Roger Moore Bonds kicked off with David Hedison (perhaps best known as the second lead behind Richard Baseheart in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) as Leiter, who otherwise remains absent from the rest of the Moore efforts. But Leiter's back in the two Timothy Dalton Bonds, first in The Living Daylights played by John Terry, and then, and undoubtedly the secret agent's most important appearance, in Licence to Kill with Hedison reprising his role from Live and Let Die. For Licence to Kill Leiter has switched to the DEA and the murder of his wife and his abduction, while on their honeymoon, sets the film's plot in motion. In a sequence that Ian Fleming wrote in one of the Bond novels, Leiter gets his leg eaten by a shark while being tortured by the villains. And with Benicio Del Toro and Robert Davi as baddies Licence to Kill has plenty to offer. Another CIA ally turns up in Licence to Kill, Pam Bouvier played with tremendous assurance by Carey Lowell. Her personality is duplicated but not equaled by Halle Berry as Jinx in Die Another Day.
Since Leiter was wounded he was not brought back for the Brosnan Bonds, although there is the character of CIA agent Jack Wade played by Joe Don Baker in Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies. Baker had also played a corrupt general in The Living Daylights.
Wright brings a flair for the mysterious to his current re-booted portrayal of Leiter. After all we're in another century ruled by knowledge rather than secrets and the spy business has to acclimate to the times.

Quantum of Solace

A spy thriller for the new millennium or just another copy cat sequel? The new James Bond features a quizzical title - Quantum of Solace - that's bound to have people mispronouncing or misunderstanding the whole mission. The title actually comes from Ian Fleming's book of five Bond short stories For Your Eyes Only. Frankly Quantum of Solace is a little bit of both a pot boiler spy chase flick mixed with a psychological thriller that finds 007 on a vengeance fueled journey around the world.
Quantum observes some Bond cliches, like an action packed opening sequence, and twists other conventions, like the Bond in the iris visual motif that always started the opening credits. In Quantum of Solace that bit of business signals the end of the film and the commencement of the end credits. Quantum picks up right where Casino Royale left off, with Bond cruising down a highway in Italy with Mr. White in the trunk, only we realize this after a crash bang auto chase through winding tunnels and mountain roads, all seemingly shot in close-up.
The actual opening credits features typical silhouettes against a graphic background while the song “Another Way to Die” performed by Jack White and Alicia Keys doesn't strike a lasting chord. Bond (Daniel Craig) is focused on finding the people behind Vesper's death (Casino Royale) and this leads to an open conflict between Bond and M (Judy Dench). Bond goes off the radar and starts a one-man vendetta against environmentalist CEO Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric from The Diving Bell and The Butterfly). Greene secretly has engineered the acquisition of the water supply of a South American country.
Director Marc Forster makes sure the series recalls early 60s Bond films in its architecture while giving the action a modern feel by editing at the speed of Bourne films. The good things are the portrayal of a spy in today's society as a kind of outcast spurred on by murderous rage rather than loyalty to a flag. Greene, the villain, is cold and stares a lot but his characterization avoids the overblown aspects of many previous Bond baddies. Forster most vividly recalls Goldfinger with the death of a Bond girl suffocated and nude in oil. Femme protag Camille (Olga Kurylenko) matches Bond for revenge impulses and looks good in torn clothing, a big consideration in Quantum as she and Bond must endure scorching deserts, aerial pursuits and burning buildings. CIA operatives are corrupt as well putting Bond and one time ally Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) on opposite sides of the ring.
Quantum ends quickly, way less than two hours, which is only a consideration in view of previous installations. This is meant to be a new chapter of the saga. Craig at times has a raging, almost suicidal motivation in some of his actions. This is a Bond devoid of humor, and considering most of the the Roger Moore outings that's a good thing. Perhaps not ironically this Bond resembles most the Moore headlining For Your Eyes Only, which was a bare knuckles action filled 007 excursion that was the exception of the Moore Bonds.
Regardless, Quantum of Solace will only perpetrate the series since Daniel Craig and the producers have etched this new Bond persona in a way that makes him an anti-hero, forlorn killer, and go-to guy for action in one package.

Midnight Movie

Briefly playing in a late night engagement before moving to the eternal netherworld of DVD comes Midnight Movie. MM hit me with a double assault of celluloid. It was confusing me and boring me at the same time. At the beginning a mental patient is allowed to see a horror film he once directed against the concerns of one of the doctors. Naturally events go ballistic as the entire sanitarium is massacred.
Years later The Dark Beneath is booked into a movie theater. The main characters consist of two pairs of youngsters who look and overact cute. Aside from them the theater audience consists of a horror film geek, a biker and his chick, a detective who's been warned to stay away from the movie, along with the doctor from the beginning, and stir in a couple of nerdy employees also teens. As Dark Beneath, which itself is a black-and-white evocation of low budget 60s/70s horror films, unwinds various members of the aud start to die when the wander off to the bathroom or go to another part of the theater. Then we see the killer dragging them down the hall in the movie within the movie. Get it, the director was not a victim but the sanitarium killer and now his soul inhabits the film and turns the theater into his own personal version of hell.
Wes Craven could do this sort of twist with verve in a film like Shocker (where the killer was in the electricity after his was executed). Midnight Movie inhabits a circle of hades below B-grade genre crunchers. The film within a film brought to mind The Dark Backward a 1991 Adam Rifkin movie although the glint of humor never glistens in Midnight Movie. While the lighting never contributes any terror the sound design is nothing but loud grinding noises (the killer sharpening his unique twisted metal killing device) that annoy more than scare. None of the actors stand out although a few, like the biker, are stereotypically cast.
Even with its modest budget a film like Midnight Movie enjoys a certain half life on disc due to the popularity of the horror genre. The filmmakers have obviously watched a lot of these types of movies, but Midnight Movie doesn't deserve cult status.

HIMC Presents: Deserter Nov 14 at Rice Cinema

'Deserter' is the journey a deserting soldier and his young wife as they flee across the country to seek refugee status over the Canadian border. As they move from safe house to safe house, we get to know Ryan and Jen - two, shy, small-town kids from the Central Valley who joined the military because there were no jobs, and find they must make a heroic stand in order to escape an illegal and immoral war. 'Deserter' is a political road movie with one of the few happy endings that this war has given us.

After the Film Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War will talk about their experiences and facilitate a discussion.

Cosponsored by Iraq Veterans Against the War, Rice for Peace, Veterans for Peace, and Military Families Speak Out
Rice Cinema is Located at Entrance #8 to Rice University at University and Stockton Ave.

1996 Richard Linklater interview

$30,000 may not seem like enough to make a movie, (although films like El Mariachi to Clerks have been lensed for less). $30,000 is the amount that was doled out to aspiring film and video artists through the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund last year, and, if member of the TFPF board of directors and Austin-based filmmaker Richard Linklater has his way, that amount will be $50,000 this year.
"The NEA quit regional grant programs a few years ago," Linklater stated in a phone interview from his Detour Filmproduction office. "SWAMP would give out $50,000 for this whole region. The worst thing about the NEA turning its back on media arts is that people think that film is such a big business that it doesn't need any financial help.
"It's films that aren't Hollywood films," Linklater continued. "It's the experimental narrative features, shorts, documentaries, innovative video work that we're trying to help out." Filmmakers and video artists submit proposals which are moderated by a panel consisting of filmmakers, curators, and media arts people. Those awarded money can look forward to a few thousand dollars that might be the turning point in a project being finished.
Linklater himself was the recipient of a $2900 grant that allowed him to finish post-production on Slacker, his 1989 breakthrough. Linklater ran the film at the Dobie theater in Austin, one of the few independently owned movie theaters in the country, before it was picked up by a distributor.
"Film is an outlaw medium, you can have your cake and eat it too, if you're smart about it," noted Linklater who less than a decade ago was wondering how he could make a full time living at filmmaking. "My producer was working at a toy store," Linklater said. "We were all scrapping. Getting everybody to work for free: a filmmaker can do that once."
On Monday night, February 3, Linklater will present his new film subUrbia at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with a reception held afterwards at Brasil. Tickets ranging from $25 to $100 will benefit the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund. Based on the play by Eric Bogosian, Linklater calls subUrbia, "As close as I'll ever come to a Dazed and Confused sequel; and much more confrontational than my previous work."
Raised in Houston, Linklater recalled nurturing his film jones while working as a roughneck offshore. "I'd drive in to catch a double feature of Kane and Ambersons or Badlands and Days of Heaven." Linklater looks to films like Eagle Pennel's Last Night at the Alamo or Brian Hansen's Speed of Light or Invasion of the Aluminum People, which is a super-8 film, as the kinds of films that inspired him to pick up a camera.
"When you see the classics - when you see Fellini Satyricon and Roma – you go, 'I love cinema,' but you don't say 'I can make that.' It's when you see somebody with a super-8 or 16-mm camera, who's made something clever within a certain limitation You know you can aspire to that."

Programmers 101

You've seen the best now see the rest. It often occurs to me while watching a mediocre film that at least I saw it in a theater. The reasoning being that it would be a waste of time to have bought or rented it on DVD months down the road. Isn't home entertainment supposed to be for top quality fare? Why bring home a second tier cartoon or weak plotted film. I realize that not every film experience can be best picture material but how are you supposed to feel during The Boy in Striped Pajamas when you come to the realization that its a fantasy concentration camp movie for kids.
During WWII a German officer and his wife transfer to the forest near the extermination camp he commands. All the wide eyed son Bruno (Asa Butterfield) knows is he's been told to stay in the front yard and not stray into the woods. There's elements of films as wide apart as Bridge to Terabithia and The Grey Zone only there's no verisimilitude to make the story anything other than a parable aimed at small fry. Son of Rambo, another English made kids film was a pure joy for adults, which is not the case with Boy in Striped Pajamas.
Likewise Madagascar Escape 2 Africa looked great on the IMAX screen and the jokes certainly work better than the original, but this is a movie whose concept makes Kung Fu Panda look good. Animals from the New York City zoo get shipped to Madagascar and in the sequel they escape with the penguins flying, only everyone crash lands on the savannah plains of Africa. In terms cartoon fans will understand, ME2A rates on a goodness scale like some lower effort Aardman Animation film like Chicken Run. ME2A comes from DreamWorks Animamtion and very soon all their cartoons will be in 3-D. If only the lead roles were the vindictive penguins, then the movie would have some grit.
Soul Men would've been much better considering the talent on display if the script had provided the top drawer duo of Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac room to emote instead of mug. A cross country road trip mixed with Blues Brothers moments gets mired in raunchy antics that one expects in some teen road movie. But Mac and Jackson are magic performing together and that's the main reason to see Soul Men. If you make it to the closing credits a short documentary-like excerpt of Mac (probably shot for the eventual DVD extras) talking about his life and performing for an auditorium of extras reminds just how talented the guy was. On eBay the green convertible Cadillac that Mac and Jackson drive in the movie sold for a mere $5,000.