Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

The Czech Republic Taps 'Home Care' as Oscar Submission

Carlos Aguilar — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 11:44:30 GMT

The Czech Film and Television Academy (ČFTA) has announced that "Home Care" (Domácí péce) by Slávek Horák as the country's official Oscar submission in the Best Foreign Language Film category. The film was selected from 39 features including documentaries and animated works.

READ MORE: Mexico Picks '600 Miles' Starring Tim Roth as Oscar Entry

"Home Care" is Horák's debut feature. The filmmaker's only other major credit is as 2nd AD in Jan Sverák's "Kolya," which coincidentally is the country's only film to ever win the Academy Award after the split of Czechoslovakia. "Home Care" screened at this year's Karlovy Vary International Film Festival where it won the Best Actress award for Alena Mihulová.

Centered on a devoted home care nurse whose existence revolves around those that rely on her, the film points out that even the strongest of people need to be cared for. This drama, which is said to have comedic undertones, beat other strong contenders such as Jan Prusinovský's "The Snake Brothers," the film that took home the Best Actor award at Karlovy Vary.

READ MORE: Latvia Selects Gambling Tale 'Modris' as Oscar Entry

International sales are being handled by production company TVORBA Films. U.S. rights are still available.

The last time the Czech Republic was nominated for the award was back in 2004 with Ondrej Trojan's "Zelary."

Richard Gere Is Having a Moment

Tom Christie — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 16:13:00 GMT

Waiting for my ten minutes with Richard Gere in Karlovy Vary, sweating it out with about 20 other journalists in a cramped and steamy anteroom of the neo-baroque Grandhotel Pupp, I felt as though I was auditioning for a role in an Eastern European production of “A Chorus Line.” (When the door finally opened and I was nudged inside, I half expected to be facing a young Michal Dûglašek shouting, “A five, six, seven, eight!,” or, more likely, “Pět, šest, sedm, osm!“) But, no, it really was Richard Gere, looking not at all 65 with his boyish smile and perfect white hair.

Having arrived the day before to hundreds of cheering fans outside the dark grey functionalist Hotel Thermal, the hillside home to KVIFF, Gere was here to screen his new film “Time Out of Mind” for the opening night gala as well to receive the festival’s main award, the Crystal Globe for Artistic Contribution to World Cinema. The ceremony was festive, of course, but Gere did speak of the Dalai Lama and commended former Czech president Vaclav Havel for ignoring pressure from China and welcoming the Dalai Lama to Czech Republic, one of the few countries to do so. He intimated that the Czechs understood all too well what it’s like to live under communist rule, and preached patience for Tibet. “It will change eventually as it changed here,” he said, “and there will be a Prague Spring in Tibet.”

Gere seems to be having a moment, and making the most of it. He came to Karlovy Vary with two films, the second being Andrew Renzi’s first feature, “Franny.” And with “Time Out of Mind,” in which he plays a homeless man losing himself on the streets of New York, he clearly has ambitions, both personal and political. His movie-star status may help in the latter arena, but I’m not so sure about the former. Absurd as it sounds, it may come down to his hair, which is not easy getting beyond, even when it spends much of the movie under a beanie. Take the beanie off and there it is again, about an inch-and-a-half long in that ubiquitous style known as “movie star messy.” In all seriousness, it distracted me from an otherwise compelling performance, and those who don’t much like “Time Out of Mind” tend to mention his hair, as in they simply can’t buy Richard Gere as a homeless man.

Gere and director Oren Moverman were very much aware of this risk, and to be fair, it’s not an easy balance to find. At his press conference in Karlovy Vary, the actor told of a test shoot they made prior to committing to the film: a beanie-clad Gere was sent out into lower Manhattan’s Astor Place to beg for change. If he was recognized at all, they knew the film wouldn’t work; if he wasn’t, it might. For an hour or so the actor asked passersby for change as Moverman and crew filmed from a distance -- and not one person recognized Gere. But then, as far as I know -- a bit of the scene remains in the film -- he didn’t take off the beanie, which may well have made a difference.

“Time Out of Mind” was intended to be (and is) a different sort of film – immersive rather than propelled by the usual narrative tricks – and this is both its strength and weakness. “You can imagine if this was a TV movie,” Gere told me, “there would be bad guys, the original script had a court case, it would end up going to such normal expected places in terms of story telling. We stripped away everything we felt we’d seen before and went more directly into what it feels like, not where the narrative is pulling you towards something but just to get at what it feel like immersively. That’s why the sound became so important.”

Read: Oren Moverman 'Time Out of Mind' and 'Love & Mercy' Q & A

The sound is indeed notable -- loud, close, jarring, claustrophobic; you hear and feel the city, as intended. But Gere’s true co-star is the photography. Watching the film, I thought of the work of the late street photographer Saul Leiter, who in the 40s and 50s captured New York in warm colors, often through windows or in reflection. It turns out that in fact Leiter inspired the look of the film: Moverman and his DP Bobby Bukowski always carried a pane of glass with them, said Gere, and shot from a real distance so that Gere’s George Hammond is always alone, surrounded by actual life rather than a movie crew.

Martin Harrison, author of “Saul Leiter Early Color, writes of Leiter, “He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances." That’s a fairly good representation of “Time Out of Mind” as well.

“He’s a very still character,” said Gere. “In a moving, vibrating city, he stands out because he’s silent and still. He doesn’t say anything. Again, the film is immersive in what it feels like, not what it does. And to me that was much more important than trying to string together a kind of recognizable narrative.”

But of course when you take away narrative, you also lose something. And while Gere and Moverman avoided the usual tropes, the film also leaves one wanting a bit more. Of Jena Malone, for one thing, who as Hammond’s estranged daughter is but an occasional wisp of wind and still manages to be sharp and memorable, especially in a final scene all the more moving for its remarkable subtlety. (“Most of our emotions,” said Gere, “are in the silences” and the filmmakers have set out to prove it.) This ending almost makes you fully content with Moverman’s stripped-down drama, even as it underscores just how much the film might have benefited from more of Malone.

“She’s one of the best actresses I’ve ever worked with,” Gere said. “Of being real and affecting and alive in the moment; totally reactive. There are some actors where if you do something different, they don’t do nothin’ different; they do what they are programmed to do. She’s extremely alive, and both those scenes that we had were for me incredibly moving to be part of.”

The film also includes a small, nicely weird turn by Kyra Sedgwick as a homeless woman who takes up with Hammond briefly – in what is sort of the homeless version of Tinder. (Hammond is left half naked in a city park, lying on some flattened box cardboard.) And then there is Ben Vereen’s spectacular performance as Hammond’s homeless friend Dixon, who may or may not be a jazz pianist and never stops talking, talking, talking and/or yelling obscenities – and may in fact exist only in Hammond’s increasingly damaged mind. Notably, other than his voice, Vereen is unrecognizable.

“There are two ways we could have gone in terms of casting Dixon,” Gere told me. “In the original script, the character Dixon really was a pianist, he was what he said he was. And I had gone to see real jazz guys, like Dexter Gordon, thinking to get a real guy, not to put any pressure on him to act, but just to let him be. That was one way of doing it. The other way was to find an actor who could immerse himself enough to do this but without too much baggage. There are a lot of black actors who could have played this part but they bring so much of where they’ve already been. So the decision was made, Let’s go with someone who can really act; he’s going to have almost all the dialogue so it has to be someone who can handle that. And Ben came in and he just kind of blew everyone away with his audition; he wanted this part very badly, and fought for it.”

As did Gere himself, who developed “Time Out of Mind” over the course of 12 years. For most of that time, he also worked on behalf of the Coalition for the Homeless, acting as spokesperson and also contributing financially. He hired Moverman, the talented Israeli writer/director known for “The Messenger” and “Rampart” and the screenplays for “I’m Not There” and “Love & Mercy.” The two of them whittled and honed the script down to its current, almost audio-visual skeleton. One of the things that particularly impressed me about the film is the way it represents through several small roles the many thousands of men and women who work in homeless shelters; these characters felt especially real and honest, as if we had suddenly found ourselves in a shelter. I asked Gere if for this film he was thinking beyond the usual creative motivations, if he imagined it playing a more social role.

“I was thinking beyond but that wasn’t the reason to make it,” he said. “I think this is one of those few instances when you can make a good movie, be as creative as you can possibly be, but it also can be used for social change and policy. And so we’ve all been putting a lot of energy into exploring that side of it as well. On July 15, I’m speaking at the national convention of homeless organizations in Washington, and we have a screening for senators and congressman. And we’re going to do the same thing in the major markets where we’re showing it.”

“Time Out of Mind” is clearly closer to Gere’s heart than “Franny” in which he costars with Dakota Fanning and Theo James. Gere’s titular, extravagant billionaire is everything “Time Out of Mind”’s homeless George Hammond is not, and his performance here is far broader, louder, messier. In “Time Out of Mind,” he actually plays a little jazz piano in an improvised scene that became key to understanding the film; in “Franny,” he briefly fronts a rock band in a scene that should be forgotten as quickly as possible. The two films are oddly paired: high and low; both dealing with issues of addiction and mental illness; embattled lives; a man trying to connect with his daughter in one, the daughter of his dead friends in the other. Renzi’s film has its moments, though I’m having trouble remembering anything but the wacky hair piece and beard Gere wears in an early scene; “Franny,” both character and movie, wears thin and eventually out.

Back at the Grandhotel Pupp, a Gere assistant began leaning in to our collective space – my ten minutes was up. By way of saying goodbye, Gere recommended a couple of Saul Leiter books to me, and readied himself for the next interviewer. Rinse and repeat.

Interview: Ben Mendelsohn On 'Mississippi Grind,' 'Blackbird,' Gareth Edwards And 'Rogue One'

Jessica Kiang — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 17:05:00 GMT

"Mississippi Grind," the new film from directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (review), may be a two-hander (as you can tell from this new trailer), but the focus and the driver of the action is undoubtedly Gerry, the character played by Ben Mendelsohn. Emerging from the film's Karlovy Vary International Film Festival gala screening, I found myself trying to work out what exactly it was about the Australian actor in that role that was so different from almost everything else we might know him from recently —his incendiary turn in "Starred Up," his breakout "Animal Kingdom," his memorable supporting appearances in "The Place Beyond the Pines" and "Killing Them Softly," his pivotal performance in Netflix's "Bloodline." The closest I got was that as messed up and flawed as the character is (it's no spoiler to say he's an inveterate gambling addict), Gerry has no violence in him —in fact, he has a streak of soulful sweetness that makes you root for him to prevail, often against his own better nature. Mendelsohn has a simpler explanation: "Gerry? Oh Gerry's lovely," he told me during our Karlovy Vary interview, as though talking about a mutual friend. "Lovely" isn't a descriptor one would readily apply to many of the characters for which Mendelsohn has carved out such a distinctive niche over the past few years.

It applies very well, however, to the actor himself, as I discovered instantly, being rather disarmed when after a few words of introduction, Mendelsohn correctly identified my accent and suggested that I hadn't lived in my native country for a while and was possibly first-generation anyway. Right on all counts. "Ah, an actor's trick" he said, and so we got to talking about accents, before moving on to topics of perhaps wider interest, like how he came to this film, his changing philosophy on acting, and some stuff about some mooted role in a little film called "Star Wars Anthology: Rogue One." "Mississippi Grind" premieres August 13 on DIRECTV and opens theatrically September 25.

Your American accent obviously is flawless now. Your accents, I should say.
Yeah, we try to get specific and I’ve had the benefit of working with some of the best, like Thom Jones, a brilliant dialect coach. [On "Place Beyond the Pines"] we went out, we taped people talking, listened to those and tried to map out where we wanted to go. And then hopefully your range of error is not so bad.

But one of the things you learn is that an accent is something that actors really obsess on, and it’s a useful thing to a degree. But I think audiences don’t really give a shit as long as they’re not taken out of the production.

So was it Gerry's accent or something else in "Mississippi Grind" that unlocked the character for you?
With Gerry, I don’t think there was a particular thing… but I don’t really think of acting the way that I used to, in terms of what a character is or isn’t, those concrete conclusions. What I now think is acting is just offering up a series of what-ifs, and what ends up being constructed ends up being the character.

Was there a particular film or moment when your philosophy towards acting changed?
I think the idea that you are essentially offering up a set of propositions is fairly recent. For me, it was around "The Place Beyond the Pines." I think you try to get a couple of things technically as correct as you can, and then after that… you see on that film that we flipped the character 180 degrees from what was written and what we shot the first day. And at that point, I’d been thinking about it for a long time. I’m very into what has come before me, trying to understand strengths and weaknesses, ideas and practices, so it was around that time. And then as part of the same extended family of filmmakers, from Derek [Cianfrance] onward, we produced these films.

So you see them as an "extended family," because I was struck by how you haven’t really gone back and established an ongoing working partnership with any one director.
There are many people I’d love to go back with, but I don’t get to propose these things. In this sense, I’m a very traditional actor: a guy that’s around, things come up, and people might say "what about him?" That’s essentially how it works. I audition, as it were, for stuff. I’m a very traditional actor that tries to get a job. But I would be up for working again with most of the people I’ve worked with in the last years at the drop of a hat. I’m very very proud of some of the stuff from the last several years,

READ MORE: Interview: Ben Mendelsohn Talks 'Slow West,' 'Bloodline' & Doing His Best Nick Cave Impression in 'Lost River'

From the outside, it certainly seems like "Animal Kingdom" was the demarcation. Is that true for you too?
Absolutely. I was something of a venerable presence in Australia but not outside, and David [Michod, director of "Animal Kingdom"]… let's just say nothing that happens after "Animal Kingdom" happens without him. David gave a lot of people a really great career, and I’m really proud of the collaboration we had on that film —I think we did something pretty special. I was very comfortable, I was able to stretch out, feel the space, and that’s not always the way. I felt very sure of myself in that environment.

So do you now approach projects for the director or the script?
It’s horses for courses —it changes and depend on a few different things. I’m currently shooting a film called "Blackbird," which is directed by a guy called Benedict Andrews. And I had worked with him in theater, so I knew Benedict, but this is his first film. I knew Rooney Mara was doing it, I read it and I immediately had to do it. And I rang him that night. So sometimes you just get captured —that’s the absolute ideal.

"Mississippi Grind" was pretty close to that. I read it, and I had to take a breath and try to keep my cool. Here’s the thing that people that don’t act may not understand about the process: once you read a script, it’s a love affair. You start to fall in love with that character and that project, and you develop very strong attachments to it. When it doesn’t work out, it’s really painful, and that's one of things you’ve got to learn to deal with as an actor. And I really felt like that going in to "Mississippi Grind." I was like, "it’s a lead and come on, they’re not gonna go for me…"

But I read it, and I fell in love and I went in there and I was like "look [adopts comedy seductive voice] I know I’m not the guy you want, but I would really be good to you… so good to you…"

So it’s a seduction!
Always! You're always using the finer arts of seduction. You want to develop a relationship over that material, and how you do that can be pretty fraught. Now Ryan [Fleck] and Anna [Boden] tipped their hand pretty early on [you can read Fleck’s take on that meeting in our interview with him], and I went away very giddy. But it was a very long time waiting to see if and how it might come together. And then finally it did, and our film doesn’t get made unless Ryan Reynolds comes and says "I want to do this!" See, now, Ryan Reynolds is a person that can say "I want to..." —he can carry a cart. I can’t carry a cart.

But you can put a shoulder to the wheel.
Oh absolutely! And that is something I have diligently tried to do since I first got a whiff of this business in 1984.

That’s right, you’re just after your 30 year anniversary, since [Aussie TV show] "A Country Practice"?
That was actually probably about my fourth job. It was "The Henderson Kids," wherein I can remember very distinctly being really upset that maybe I wouldn’t ever get to do this again. And that is the fear that hangs over your life as a young actor: can I get another job? So I have always put all my effort in —I will say that.

And all these types of roles, I notice there haven’t recently been many romantic leads.
I did a few of those in my late teens, so not for a long time now. And that whole thing changes with who I am now. I’m not what people might reach for in those instances.

Yet my favorite scene in "Mississippi Grind" was between Gerry and Vanessa, that little tender moment by the piano.
Oh, that’s my favorite part too! I’m game for most things, and if it was a matter of my wishes dictating stuff, yeah, I’d do that. And I’d do a comedy, I’d do an action thing. I’d go to Asia and do a domestic Asian action film.

I know you're quite the cinephile too.
Oh, a bit. And that was one of my early dreams —fantasies more than dreams— to do a French film in French, and a German film in German. Pipe dreams, really. Maybe that will be stuff I get to do, but timing is so prohibitive in this exact pocket of time.

But yes, I believe cinema language is so universal that’s it’s sort of a bummer we haven’t all got our act together to do a bit more cross-pollinating. Without it being a solely commercial consideration.

And speaking of commercial considerations —might "Rogue One" change things for you there?
I don’t know whether that’s going to be a go in terms of me. It’s still something that I am in the dark about! I know I’m trotting out the line here, but really, no one’s gonna be happier about it than me should it come to pass. But I’m just not sure and it’s gotta be coming up pretty soon, they start shooting before too long…

It may just be that I’m still circling that planet… God only knows. How do I do this without hanging myself? This might be a move on the chessboard that I don’t have in me, but…[he is really struggling with what he is "allowed" to say] I’d love to do "Rogue One." Let’s just put it that way. I. Would. LOVE. To. Do. It.

And how about working with Gareth Edwards?
I’d love to work with Gareth —he made one of the most beautiful images that I’ve ever seen in any film anywhere, which is the HALO jump in "Godzilla." I want that as a big poster, it is so beautiful.

And of course, he’s was very instrumental in the career of your friend Scoot McNairy.
I know! "Monsters!" Beautiful little "Monsters." I just saw Scooter in Variety, and thought how random that Scoot and myself would have all these crossovers.

You’re also both involved in prestige TV. Can you tell me if we’ll see you again in "Bloodline" Season 2?
I think it would be unfair of me to spoil, given that "Bloodline" is so brilliantly constructed. I understand they’re going again fairly soon, so there won’t be too much keeping a lid on it one way or the other for very much longer. [update: since we conducted this interview, Mendelsohn has been confirmed to return for season 2.]

And do you find that TV flexes different muscles as an actor from film work?
Ultimately, I’ve done probably as much TV as film. I started in TV, and I’ve done more TV than most of the cast, and so I’m very comfortable. And to go back to that earlier point, it’s about taking a scene, coming up with some different propositions for that scene and working through it like that, so it’s not different in that regard .

You’ve got to rise to the writing, and that’s the hardest bit —actually being able to interpret and give it its life, so the writing is occurring while the camera is rolling. That’s the art and that’s all I do. Or try to do.

"Mississippi Grind" opens September 25th theatrically, but will premiere exclusively first on DIRECTV, August 13.

Here's How This First-Time Canadian Filmmaker Made an Uncompromising Debut Film

Tina Poglajen — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 17:02:55 GMT

When trying to get your film made, rejection can be tough. The knee-jerk reaction is to compromise: to make the jokes funnier, the romance steamier and the sex, well, sexier—that is, to adapt your screenplay to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. François Péloquin, a first-time Canadian filmmaker, did exactly the opposite after being rejected for funds to make his debut feature film, "The Sound of Trees." Instead of compromising, he dove full force into his artistic vision, ultimately getting the funds and landing a world premiere for his film in the official competition in one of the major European film festivals—in Karlovy Vary.

READ MORE: Karlovy Vary Film Fest Lineup Lures Adventurous Cinephiles, Young Directors

Admittedly, things in the U. S. work differently than in Péloquin's native Canada, where the majority of the films are state funded. But the state system of funding can also be less forgiving than privately-owned production companies: you only get three chances to apply—and after that, if unsuccessful, you can no longer use the same screenplay to apply for film funding. Péloquin and his production team had already used up two chances. "We wrote a more conventional script and we were trying to get funds for it. We tried twice and it didn't work, only leaving us with one chance left," he recently told Indiewire.

"The Sound of Trees," as it premiered in Karlovy Vary (and opened in theaters in Canada last week), is a melancholic coming-of-age story set in a lumberjack community in rural Québec. The teenage Jérémie (played by Antoine L’Écuyer) dreams of a better life away from home, but is torn between a promise of freedom and what he perceives as duty to his family and the lumberjack business. The community of "The Sound of Trees" and its way of life is not represented in the media, much less in mainstream film.

"It's not just this particular place, it's regions outside of the center in general—they are very under-represented. As a consequence, the people of those regions don't have an image of themselves. All they see is the city, American culture, things other than what they do in their everyday life," said Péloquin.

Needless to say, making a film about an underrepresented culture means forging an untrodden path: besides worrying about audiences quickly losing interest, there are no role models or a body of work to step into a dialogue with. "It's a society that doesn't have a good mirror. If it could see itself, it could see that it could be proud of itself. But the mirror nowadays is the media, like the images that are brought to us by television. They are not very concerned with these regions. It's difficult to have a positive self-image and to feel good about yourself when you don't see yourself. It feels like you don't exist," said Péloquin.

Still, he decided to take a chance. "We changed the film, thinking the way we did it at first is not a good way to go. I did quite the contrary from what is usually done. I made the film so peculiar that it had to be done. We were confident in our script and it was our last chance at the game. So, we gave it all."

Together with Sarah Lévesque, Péloquin cut the 110 scenes of the screenplay that they wrote previously into just 30 moments that they deemed most important. But they also made the film much more personal in form and set it in the forest, a setting he felt close to. "We decided to be more particular. That is when we changed the setting, changed the form," he explained. "We wrote a story more like the things we like. We allowed ourselves to do a film like the films we love. We threw away the storyline and focused on the moments—the moments that are important to tell the story, the 30 moments that can explain the evolution of the character through the summertime. It became a pleasure to write it, because the scenes were longer, and there was a lot of movement and emotion. For example, I really liked the idea of the sound of trees. It's something that gets to you so much that at the certain point, you want it to stop."

The casting was also crucial in making Péloquin's vision come true. "It was important because I was shooting everything in a possible sequence. All the things in the film could have been presented in one shot. Or, a series of continuous shots without editing. So the actors needed to feel the emotion and let it lead the scene," he explained.

There was no place for stopping in-between. "The camerawork is very precise, like a choreography. I would place the mise-en-scène, place the camera. Once they were in place, the actors had to follow an emotional cue to be true in long takes. They had to be in a continuous state of realness, following their instinct and their feelings so they could stay coherent," he said.

In a naturalistic film, where nuances of body language speak louder than words, an experienced actor was key to provide impetus for the younger actors to follow. Péloquin cast Roy Dupuis, the French-Canadian star, in the role of the father to a 17-year-old longing to venture out into the world: "Roy was a good choice because he is able to bring a scene across without dialogue," he said. "There's a lot of emotions, different subtleties, states of mind coming out from his gestures and his posture. I really needed that in my film, where action speaks more than words. The dialogue is just small talk. That way, Roy was a good example for Antoine L’Écuyer, the younger actor."

And finally, Péloquin noted that artistic vision, however peculiar, is not necessarily at odds with accessibility of the film. "I did the film I had inside of me, and I learned a lot in the process. I really like this film, but now, I started a dialogue with a certain public, and I want to try to reach more people. I want to stay true to my vision of cinema, but at the same time, I don't want to be cryptic and demanding of the audience—I want my films to be seen. I think I can be as true and bring some good moments. That's what I will try to do in the second film."

Watch a clip from "The Sound of the Trees" below:

READ MORE: Tensions Rise in Canadian Drama 'The Sound of the Trees'

The Grandeur of Ben Mendelsohn and Ryan Reynolds in 'Mississippi Grind' (Trailer)

Tom Christie — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 16:17:00 GMT

A lot of people in Karlovy Vary (and elsewhere) are talking about Ben Mendelsohn’s performance in Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Mississippi Grind,” and with good reason; he’s brilliant in it. But as good as he is I don’t think you can separate his performance from that of his co-star Ryan Reynolds, whose charming, affable Curtis offers Mendelsohn’s schlubby, sad-sack Gerry a lifeline, as he does the film. Without Curtis, we would bail on Gerry about as fast as you can say, “weak link,” despite his sweet nature. Both are gamblers, Gerry of the unstoppable variety. He’ll do almost anything to get money to use on a poker game or at the casino, including steal from his ex-wife, always with the hope that he’ll hit it big and can pay back everyone he owes, which is just about everyone he knows.

And then one night big, good-looking Curtis walks into a poker game like an offshore breeze, and Gerry sees it as a good omen. When Curtis says he’s heading to New Orleans, somewhat mysteriously, Gerry suggests they combine forces and gamble their way down the Mississippi to NOLA, where Curtis knows a guy who runs a big game (James Toback in cameo). And so begins their road trip in, amusingly, Gerry’s Subaru Legacy. There are stops along the way to visit the women more or less in their lives – Gerry’s ex (Robin Weigert), a prostitute Curtis may or may not love (Sienna Miller) and her friend Vanessa (a delightful Analeigh Tipton). There are tightly drawn gambling successes, and colossal near-misses, leaving the two men much where they began. And when Gerry’s bad luck seems to descend like a plague, Curtis opts out, saying, “It had to end this way, Gerry.”

READ MORE: Karlovy Vary: Mel Gibson Plays Mel Gibson in B&W Festival Trailer

And so it seems will “Mississippi Grind.” But there are surprises to come – another woman in Curtis’s life, another chance for redemption for Gerry. Win or lose, we will not easily forget his humanity. For Mendelsohn imbues Gerry with such pain, such sweet cat-loving Subaru-driving weirdo madness, we’re on his side even when he is, admittedly, not a good person. It’s not an easy role to pull off. If it was played by Ben Stiller, for instance, we would just loathe him. Paul Giamatti? With that voice? Slap! But Mendelsohn is like a bad dog, his sad, devious eyes winning reprieve after reprieve. And we feed off of Curtis’s understated and understanding response -- he knows Gerry is capable of winning, sometime, somewhere. Mendelsohn is genius but Reynolds is key.

It’s odd to mention writer-directors Boden and Fleck (“Sugar”) almost as an afterthought, but with “Mississippi Grind” it feels as if they have built a fairly sturdy if unspectacular boat and steered it down the river without hitting any major obstacles or running aground. It’s not likely to win them many plaudits, other than from SAG members, but if there’s an award for casting good actors, providing them a moving platform and then getting out of their way, they deserve it.

A24 premieres the film September 25.

Karlovy Vary Interview: Oren Moverman Talks 'Time Out Of Mind,' The Process Of Storytelling, And More

Jessica Kiang — Tue, 21 Jul 2015 15:06:00 GMT

It will have been almost exactly a year since its TIFF 2014 premiere when Oren Moverman’s "Time Out Of Mind," starring Richard Gere, comes to theaters. In the meantime, the film has been on the international festival circuit, most recently at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The film earned opening night slot — a curious but bold choice for a festival opener in that it’s hardly the glitzy/feel-good/crowd-pleaser that the slot might usually suggest. Instead, Moverman’s film (our review here) is an unsparing look at the minute pivot points that separate a life on the bottom rung of society from a life unmoored altogether — those small desperate instances that mark the transition from hard times to homelessness.

Over the course of just three directorial films, Moverman, who is also a writer and has recently started producing (Bill Pohlad’s "Love & Mercy" sees him wear both those hats), has quietly established himself as one of the most confident and distinctive of independent directors. All three of his films to date ("The Messenger" and "Rampart" being the other two) have a quality of restrained intelligence, and are built around compelling central performances. However, Gere’s turn in "Time Out Of Mind" feels like it falls into a slightly different category from the powerhouse roles that actors, like Woody Harrelson, have embodied for the director previously. Having already spoken to him briefly by phone after TIFF last year, this disconnect was just one of the things we got to discuss with the articulate, thoughful Moverman when we met him (on his birthday!) in lovely Karlovy Vary.

It’s strange and admirable that Richard Gere brought you this project initially, yet you essentially spend the whole film erasing him.
Hah! Yes. But we were very clear about that approach and that was one of the things that he liked. He came to me with an old script and it was much more conventional, much more a classic narrative — there was a court case and all that. He’d been trying to make that movie for a long time. And I said, why don’t we just make it about process, why don’t we just go to the shelters, see what the world is like and work from there — make it about a character who nobody wants to look at. That was basically the concept.

But it also stuck me that it had to be him — it had to be a star, at least initially, because we have to have a reason to search him out in frames where he’s often backgrounded, almost lost.
Exactly. You look for him because it is him. I think he was very aware, even before we started to work on it, that this was an opportunity to highlight a cause that he cares about very deeply — he’s on the board of the Coalition for the Homeless, he’s been involved in homeless issues for a while. So to take that and call attention to it — how do you do that? And I can tell you for a fact, that if we made this movie with someone you never heard of, we wouldn’t be talking about it now. And we’re very aware it is an honor and opportunity, to take someone who draws attention to himself, because of who he is, and then go in a completely different direction.

And he wanted to do that — not the Richard Gere persona, not the image he projects which has always been alpha male glamor, and star power and sex appeal. All of a sudden all that is erased, as you say. And what emerges is a human being that I think after a while, if you go with the movie — you can resist it, but if you go with it — you’re actually starting to feel, if this is happening to Richard Gere, who is immune? There but for the grace of God go I. We’re all two turns away, two mistakes away from ending up in a bad situation like that. And then it’s important to also make it as intimate as possible, so that you hopefully gradually forget that it’s Richard Gere — it’s simply someone you want to pay attention to.

So, much of the movie is about calling attention to the character because we’re in everybody else’s point of view except his. It’s like Where’s Waldo.

Ha, I think I wrote Where’s Waldo in my notes…
My son has this joke — everyone’s asking "Where’s Waldo?" and nobody’s asking "How’s Waldo?"! This is the movie where we ask, "How’s Waldo?"

And that exteriority is also something I noticed, instead of the embedded, subjective perspective of say "Heaven Knows What" — a film this calls to mind — we are only ever looking at him, from the standpoint of a passerby.
Well, yes. In many ways it’s about New York too, and that means it’s about community or lack of community — lack of awareness of the people around you. If we really let him blend into reality, then it becomes about that reality, about the world in which someone like this exists and not just about him. It’s about trying to find a perspective that allows us also to get closer and therefore feel compassion for the character. That’s the strategy.

It’s a film that feels destined to be lauded for Gere’s performance, and yet it kind of feels less like a traditional performance piece than, say, something like Robert Redford’s turn in "All Is Lost."
That’s absolutely true and when we were talking to people about financing the movie we did mention "All is Lost." It is a similar situation, someone very recognizable, who has a long extra-filmic history that’s beyond the movie you’re making right now, doing something unexpected. And also, he’s carrying it, but giving himself up to the movie at the same time, as opposed to taking it and leading it.

You mentioned an awareness, though, that some people may be resistant to this mode of storytelling. Have you a particular way you deal with negative criticism/reaction?
I don't think of it as "negative criticism." Every one of us comes from a different background and we have different references, aesthetics, ways of seeing the world, and, of course, we each have a different understanding and preferences for what narrative is, especially these days when a new narrative language is emerging in our living rooms, on our iPads and computer screens. I was a film critic for a while myself. I get it. Whatever turns you on, turns you up and keeps turning. When it doesn't, it just doesn't.

If we made a layered, demanding film that everyone liked, I would be worried. It would mean we were not trying hard enough to create friction, dialogue, provoke a reaction, go deep and test our compassion within the context of film language. Of course, that can backfire and be dismissed. I accept that in advance. But, then again, I'm human, certain things hurt more than others and you have to realize for yourself that this is a film that is trying for something different. If it is criticized beyond what we've seen up to now — and we've seen more good reactions than bad, by the way, including the Critics Prize at Toronto -- so be it. At least it is criticized in context and after engaging the work. That's a lot to ask for in itself.

You have perhaps a more eclectic writing resume than a directorial one, do you find you write differently if the project is not one you’ll direct?
Hm, it doesn’t affect how I write the project. I've always written from a director’s perspective; I think this is why I’ve had luck working with directors. And I don’t feel like I’m a true writer — and I don’t feel like screenwriting is true writing anyway, but that’s a whole other thing — so I tend to write director-friendly and actor-friendly scripts and I treat them all the same whether it’s for myself or in for someone else. I'm just writing what I’m seeing — a lot of it is transcribing. It lets you be God for a little while, pick these characters and start them talking and then I’m really just transcribing what they’re saying. I know it sounds insane, it probably is, but it’s my livelihood, so what am I going to do? They are voices in my head, yes, but it’s under control I think. I haven’t been medicated. Yet.

Though "Time out of Mind," now that you mention it, I did write that differently. I wrote it much more sparingly, and then I made it shorter and shorter, so the actual script was only 81 pages, knowing there’d be long takes and so on. So it’s the shortest script I’ve ever written and the longest film I’ve ever made.

And at the other end of the process, you’ve said elsewhere how you like "finding the film" in the edit. Did that happen here to the same extent?
Yes and no. I do love that process but in this case the visuals were pretty much constructed along with the script, with some changes. Of course, the process of color grading and visual effects is part of 'finding" in post for me. And what really evolved to a great degree was the sound. I wrote a few more off-screen scenes, and the sound team, the editor Alex Hall and I kept recording and finding new elements as the sound design grew to reflect the insane soundscape that is New York, but also what is going on in Gere's character's head.

Your fruitful partnership with Woody Harrelson was also to possibly continue on some sort of Manhattan murder mystery — is that still happening?
It’s happening in our heads, we keep talking about it, and it’s one of those things we’re going to brew for a while before we can move forward. Especially since he’s the busiest actor I know of right now, busy making sequels to sequels. It’s remarkable what has happened. Since 'The Messenger,' really his career looks completely different, which is fantastic of course. So we get together once in a while and we talk about what this movie is, but it’s not gonna be for a while.

And you’ve a TV project, "Laughs Unlimited," that’s been cast?
That’s not gone to pilot, it’s still in development and looking…iffy.

Is there a particular attraction to TV, to longform storytelling?
The attraction is getting people to see it. We live in an era when TV is dominant in the independent world, as you know. And its hard to get people to come to see indie films.

It does feel like for your style of character-based drama it might be a more natural progression than for others, though.
More necessary than natural I think! I tend to be more abstract than television likes…

So what is next?
I don’t know — there are some choices I have to make but right now I’ve been producing a few movies. So we’re editing, we’re in post — because I didn’t think I had enough hats. So "Time out of Mind" will come out, and "Love and Mercy" has its life around the world now.

You must be proud of "Love and Mercy" — how involved were you with it?
Oh yes, I was very involved, I was on set and I worked very closely with the director, he’s a close friend and he was one of the producers of "Time Out Of Mind." And now we have a new movie that we’re working on together. It’s not official yet, but I will say it’s a historical piece

With Bill Pohlad?
With Bill Pohlad, that we wrote together and he will direct and I’m one of the producers. So the beat goes on…

And how about having "Raised Eyebrows," the Groucho Marx biopic you wrote, recently announced for Rob Zombie. Was that a surprise to you?
Yes. But that's the point. You want to be surprised. You want to mix things up and explore. That's the idea! Rob is a brilliant horror filmmaker and the end of Groucho Marx's life was an emotional horror show. Rob doing it really excites me.

Also the film mooted as Cate Blanchett's directorial debut, "The Dinner" was a script from you. You seem to remain involved with your scripts even after they're attached elsewhere so do you know what's happening with that?
I'm usually involved. I will remain involved in "The Dinner" although I'm not sure making it fits into Cate's world right now. There may be a new director coming on board. I may know him well. You may too.

Intriguing! Finally, is there a script of yours that you consider your favorite? Do you play favorites?
I honestly don't have one favorite. Each one of them (except the ones, the few, that were "just" a rewrite job) is deeply special to me and has a filmmaking story that I was emotionally involved with. I am partial, of course, to the films I direct, only because they were made with permission to be myself completely. And that's an overwhelming privilege.

"Time Out Of Mind" opens on September 9th.

Karlovy Vary Interview: Director Ryan Fleck Talks 'Mississippi Grind,' Digital Vs. Film, And More

Jessica Kiang — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 16:02:22 GMT

Co-directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden carved out a niche for themselves within the indie filmmaking community, releasing three features at regular two-year intervals from 2006 to 2010. Indeed, "Half Nelson," their debut after a clutch of short films, was the kind of first go-round that any aspirant director might dream of. It was critically lauded as a serious-minded, socially conscious character piece on the one hand, and a launchpad for Ryan Gosling into a new, high-profile, Oscar-nominated "oh he can actually act," phase on the other. Follow-ups "Sugar" and "It's Kind of a Funny Story" received mixed receptions, but there has always been a sense of the pair being most at home with character-led dramas in that groove of low-budget, independent films that give character actors a chance to flex their muscles. Their latest collaboration, "Mississippi Grind," which played at Sundance this year (our review) was different, as Fleck told us (Boden was back in LA having recently had a baby) when we spoke with him recently during the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

The loose-limbed '70s-inspired down-at-heel gambling tale, which stars Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn, took longer than their other features to come together, and in some ways may be the last of its type from the pair. Here's Fleck talking about the changing indie filmmaking landscape and its effects, as well as about the movie, starting with Mendelsohn's (stellar) involvement and contribution.

I just spoke to/was totally charmed by Ben Mendelsohn [that interview will arrive soon], and he mentioned basically trying to seduce you guys into giving him the role of Gerry...
Really? If that's the case it worked incredibly well and it was a very easy seduction...

Ah, you were an easy lay?
Ha, yeah! Anna and I met with Ben about this part years ago. We were meeting him for the first time and it was sort of last-minute, a general thing. I guess I didn't know I was being seduced but that's totally what happened, because he was so charming, so unique, so bizarrely fascinating that Anna and I --- and this never happens -- at some point just looked at each other and just smiled and nodded and offered him the part. Which I don't even think we had the power to do.

Usually it's like we leave and we talk about it and we'll get back to the actor's people… but we were just like no, this is the guy. This is the guy. And I think he knew it after that and he called when we were at the airport on our way back to New York, leaving this like 5-minute-long voicemail talking about the role and Anna and I are putting it on speaker, going "Wow! I think he actually wants to do it!"

But of course that was a long time before you actually started filming.
Yes. I think that next year maybe or not long after, Ben Mendelsohn's name and face alone will be able to trigger significant financing. But at that time people didn't really know who he was outside of Australia. He was just kind of that interesting character actor who popped up every now and then. So it wasn't a slam dunk, but then thankfully Ryan Reynolds stepped up. And he is a movie star, he did trigger the financing. And he's also terrific.

But also it's how different they are that lends a particular flavor to the film. Did you find you had to negotiate their contrasting approaches?
Really there wasn't much negotiating to be done. Ben is so loose and different from take to take that I think any actor who's working with him just has to be on their toes -- that's the joy of working with him. For an actor, but also to watch as a director -- because he helps us learn what the movie is even about. Sometimes it's oh, this is what this scene was about and I didn't even know it till I saw Ben find it and Ryan react to it. And Ryan did a terrific job of keeping up with Ben -- once Ryan realized what Ben was doing he was like, "I can play this game too, and they kind of just one-upped each other in a way that I think works beautifully.

The film does have a looseness to it that comes from you as directors giving the actors space to find their own rhythms -- that's a very unusual thing, especially nowadays.
Well, I'm glad you think so. It's the kind of movie that we like to watch as moviegoers. And we don't only get to watch the finished thing, we get to see everyday how it got made -- it's like the ultimate film geek fantasy. Like we're living a behind-the-scenes DVD extra.

You obviously share so much in taste, how does your working partnership with Anna [Boden] work?
We only talk through our attorneys.

Heh, no, we've been close for fifteen years. When we first stared she was a Columbia undergrad doing some school documentary project, and she asked for my help because I'd done the NYU thing, and so we were feeling this thing out together. And these were just silly short films we made back in the day, but we learned a lot from making those, about how to work together and get past our own egos. And now, fifteen years later we have a total shorthand and a trust and respect for one another.

Do you split up the duties on set as some other directing pairs do?
We don't split it, it's all very fluid. There might be an occasion where I'll be like, "No, I got this," there might be another scene where that works for her. Any conversation that's happening between takes is usually just a technical thing. Basically in pre-production Anna and I have had all the debates, all the discussions, we kind of anticipate everything that could come up, so by the time we're shooting there's really little discussion. We trust each other to handle it.

And does that extend into the edit?
That's one area where Anna does more because she is the editor. So she's in the cutting room, putting together the first cut and I'll come in in more of a traditional director/editor relationship after that point. It's similar but reversed at script stage -- I'll start cranking out the first draft, and she'll come in and start to give it some shape as we go. But I'm usually the one in front of the computer writing.

So I found a way into the film when I realized how much gambling was part of Gerry's worldview -- he's trying not just to read the room, he wants to read the world. Like it's a way to assert control over chaos, almost instead of a religion. Did you come to the story with a theme like that in mind or was it the world of gambling you were drawn to and the characters emerged?
God, I wish it was. What you just described is very interesting and I wish I could talk more on that -- I'm fascinated too. I bet Anna could talk through that better. But no, really I think it started with the locations, with the world, not a philosophy.

When we were shooting "Sugar," in a small town in Iowa that was right on the Mississippi river, they have these riverboat casinos, that are not the glamorous Las Vegas casinos that we've seen in big movies. They're pretty depressing, sad places filled with really interesting characters and we thought there's something here. Like a "Fat City"/John Huston thing, a really interesting Americana. I guess "Fat City" is to "Rocky" what we are to "Casino" or maybe "Ocean's 11." So we wanted to make that version of the gambling movie, in these real, down and dirty places, the dog tracks, the horse tracks...

Even the living rooms...
Yeah, we wanted to hit up that world. And we did that trip, kind of in reverse, we started in New Orleans and then went up to Iowa. At first it was exciting -- we played poker for the first time, in a tournament, I was the guy at the table that everyone was looking at, because I was doing everything wrong. I had no idea what I was doing, so I wasn't just playing badly, I was playing wrong, like they were all "no, thats not how you do that…"

"Your cards are the wrong way round"
Ha! Not quite that bad. But close. But as we worked our way through these locations they became more and more the same. You kept running into the same types of people--the everyday gambler.

Like, the rainbow theme in the movie, that came about because the first day of research in a casino in Mississippi, Anna was sitting at a table and she was the only woman and she was eavesdropping on the poker conversation. And the topic of rainbows came up and a guy literally said "I drove to the end of a rainbow once. Wasn't nothing there." And how great is that? Without any sense of the irony of what it means to be chasing a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And so we worked that into the movie.

The rainbow is of course the first shot and I so enjoyed the grain of that shot, the look. You shot on 35mm, with your regular cinematographer Andrij Parekh.
We've made all four of our movies on film, Andrij is a huge proponent, and I don't know that we'll be able to make another one. Just after we finished shooting the lab we used in New York stopped processing film, so there's only one left, in LA, maybe one in London... So I'm really glad we could do this '70s-inspired movie and have that real film grain, not the electro-added grain.

Because of the way movies are made now it was assumed we'd be doing it on the Alexa HD. But Andrij was adamant and with mine and Anna's help, we found a way to convince the financiers that the added costs were minimal for shooting on film. That's what you were paying extra for -- the film developing -- you were getting back with the ease of the shooting process. So we were able to work much faster.

That seems counter to prevailing logic about film vs digital.
Well, when you're nitpicking every little detail… with digital, you're seeing what the finished product is, right there on set, and that's when you start to lose a lot of time. You lose time staring at that image trying to make it perfect. Film has a magical process to it. The dailies, and the thing you see on your little film monitor, that's not the same thing that's going to be projected. So there's a magical quality to filmmaking that I think is thematically relevant to our movie too.

It's a roll of the dice.
Exactly, and we were able to convince the financiers that it might seem a little more on paper, but we were gonna be able to get this done much faster.

It seems paradoxical, though given the "convenience" of digital.
I know, but the people that understand that film running through a camera costs money, the crews, there's a certain kind of respect for that process. Nowadays when you're shooting HD people will walk in front of the camera, it can just be rolling all the time -- nobody cares. When there's film rolling through the camera, there's a heightened awareness of the importance of that moment, from the actors and the crew. It creates a much more old-school respectful atmosphere for the process.

And it's romantic.
It is!

So your next project may not be on film. Speaking of, what is the status on "Hate Mail" a project that seems to have gone dormant?
It could come up again in some form. We had Philip Seymour Hoffman attached to it at one point and sadly that went the way it did...

And is the reason it's off the table mainly due to Hoffman's death?
That was particularly troubling, but really we started to put that film together when it was just different time for financing movies. It's a big movie, sort of like a "Short Cuts" -- a big New York City movie, and when we started writing it we perhaps could have made it. But by the time we'd finished the landscape for film financing had become so specifically star-oriented and it became very frustrating to try and do something so big and yet so intimate. Not many people are interested in financing that. I mean even with Philip Seymour Hoffman, they were like, "Well, ok, great but which part is Brad Pitt gonna play?"

And how about those rumors you were attached to "Guardians of the Galaxy"? Was there any truth to that at all?
No! None! That was one of those weird things. Craig, my agent, sent me the link that was saying that with a kind of "Did you know about this??" and I was like "What? No, did you?" So then a retraction was put out on whatever website, but then in the comments section -- which I don't normally read but I happened to here -- they were all like "Yeah, likely story. They couldn't book it so they're covering their asses." And I'm like, no, wait! That's even worse!

But a move into that big-budget comic book territory, is that something you'd like to do?
I'm not opposed to it, I honestly just don't know much about those movies, or the comics.

That's a dangerous admission, these days.
Yeah, I mean, I don't wanna say anything negative! Because who knows. One day when those are the only movies getting made, I'm going to need a job. So I'm not shutting anything down, but I am not aware of what it would be.

You've been doing a fair bit of episodic TV for other people's shows, how has that experience been and would you think about creating your own TV project?
It's just an excuse to keep the directorial muscles in shape and work with new actors, and to get outside the vacuum of your own process -- and I haven't worked on anything I'm not fan of. And to see how shows are put together, because, yes, Anna and I have something that we're gonna try and get made, as creators. But it's probably not that close to happening, and meantime we'll do some more episodic stuff and try to figure out what this next movie is. We're really not sure yet, we could return to "Hate Mail," or it could be something else.

Finally, you called out "Fat City," but tell us some of the other direct influences on "Mississippi Grind"
Well, an obvious one is "California Split" the Altman gambling picture, but "Five Easy Pieces," and "Midnight Cowboy" is probably one of my favorite movies ever made. There's a core to the relationship in that movie that I think a little bit of that sticks on everything I make -- that strange male relationship. "The Last Detail," and "Scarecrow" is one of our favorites as well. And the original 'Gambler' -- obviously we've that nod to James Toback in the movie [Toback cameos]. You know, basically all the '70s Criterion stuff. Especially the BBS Collection -- we feel like this movie could slide right in there on the shelf between "King of Marvin Gardens" and "Five Easy Pieces."

"Mississippi Grind" opens in the U.S. on September 25th, and we'll have our interview with star Ben Mendelsohn to you soon.

Best of the Karlovy Vary Fest, from '45 Years' to 'Heil'

Tom Christie — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 21:18:41 GMT

The big big films are not here, first and foremost, so it’s more about catching up on those films that have already appeared at Cannes or Venice or Berlin, and seeing more Czech or eastern European films, perhaps, than one might otherwise have an opportunity for. Likewise, film publications aren’t requiring their critics to file a review one hour following the screening, as is apparently the trend, and the journalists don’t seem to be running around so much, literally. Although no doubt the directors of the KVIFF would like the bigger films (and resulting hoopla), why shouldn’t it be enough to simply present and celebrate some of the world’s best cinema, in a warm and genial atmosphere? Surely a festival, like an art biennial, is about art and curation – and the art of curation -- rather than size, muscle or star-power.

One of the things I had hoped to see in Karlovy Vary, but ran out of time for, was the tent encampment in a recreation area outside of town where hundreds of mostly students stay during the festival, at less than $4 a night, and pay absurdly low fees for festival passes. (A student can attend the entire festival for $36!) For my money (and theirs), this is a far greater thing than the red carpet at Cannes, Marion Cotillard notwithstanding. In this spirit, the films below are the best and/or most interesting of the films I was able to see.

Rarely does one feel that a film is perfect, or nearly so. “45 Years” is such a film, perhaps because, based on a short story by poet David Constantine, it knows what it wants to be, and nothing more, and sets out to be that with subtlety and understatement and two especially fine actors, Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling. Directed with great sensitivity by Andrew Haigh (“Weekend”), “45 Years” revolves around the anniversary of Geoff and Kate’s marriage, which seems like one of those very special ones until a few days before their celebration, when Geoff opens a letter having to do with the death of a former lover.

That letter is like a fissure, revealing previous unknowns; through actions and reactions by both Geoff and Kate, separately and together, the fissure threatens to become a crevasse into which they might irrevocably slip. As their anniversary party looms, Geoff does his best to vanquish a grief he thought behind him, but his evident pain is like a drug to Kate, who cannot help but search for clues that could well render the previous 45 years false and empty. Never giving themselves over to the maudlin, and with the precision and tact of a William Trevor short story, Haigh, Courtenay and Rampling build quietly, surely, almost casually to a moment of clear and awful suspense. Devastating.

A couple of years ago at the Berlinale, Spanish actress Paulina García had a breakout performance in Sebastián Lelio’s “Gloria.” I thought of her while watching Alena Mihulová in “Home Care,” the Czech film that had its world premier in Karlovy Vary. Mihulová’s Vlasta is a home-care nurse who spends her life looking after other people with selfless grace and devotion. Those people include a rather strange selection of patients, a not altogether present daughter and her loving but somewhat detached husband Ládí, played by renowned Czech actor Bolek Polívka, who for sheer physical presence was the most notable person I saw in Karlovy Vary. (As one once said of Philippe Noiret, in a just world, this guy would be a movie star, not the usual suspects.)

But this is Mihulová's show, and she is a wonder of sweet, soulful humanity. Vlasta is so dedicated that when a medical check-up reveals a serious problem, she barely skips a beat, until her illness progresses to a point where she – and those she normally cares for – cannot ignore it. A foray into alternative treatments functions as a path to self-realization for this woman who in a way is just coming into her own. Credit director Slávek Horák for basing his first feature on his mother’s life (so I heard), rather than on his own, and for treating such a “serious” story with so much loving humor. After the premiere in the Hotel Thermal’s grand hall, Mihulová received a prolonged standing ovation from the Czech crowd that was almost as moving as her performance. It was no surprise when she later received the best actress award.

If Dietrich Brüggemann didn’t know how difficult it was to make a comedy before and during the production of “Heil,” he’s beginning to understand now, as critics weigh in on what they think his neo-Nazi comedy should have been. Even I admit to being slightly surprised at how broad the comedy was; I was expecting something in a more “serious” vein. When it’s now clear that Brüggemann simply wanted to make a silly film about Nazis. (And who can blame him?). At his press conference in Karlovy Vary he invoked the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers, and I later had a conversation with the director, in which he talked about Monty Python and other silly geniuses.

Perhaps it is the director’s last and overtly solemn film, “Stations of the Cross,” that set up expectations for a certain kind of gravity. It’s clear now that Brüggemann had a very different direction in mind -- an American-style spoof. But of course spoof and silliness do not in fact suggest a lack of seriousness. Moreover, his plotting is seriously complex, setting many plates to spinning and somehow getting them to fall together more or less at once. I don’t have room to explain the various plotlines, but let’s just say it’s about two vying groups of neo-Nazis, one more stupid than the other, and some equally numbskull politicians and intelligence policemen and even anti-fascists, all of whom run rings around each other until they pretty much self-destruct. One reviewer actually castigates Brüggemann for making fun of the anti-fascists, which is rather perfect – it takes a fascist to suggest that anti-fascists are above being made fun of. “Heil” itself is certainly not above criticism, not any more than any of its characters. The more the merrier, Herr Brüggemann, take the piss out of the whole lot. It’s precisely the sort of comedy Germany needs, not that they will necessarily appreciate it.

I didn’t fully engage with Ciro Guerra’s “Embrace of the Serpent,” largely due to its structure -- two intertwined stories set forty years apart in the Amazon. The first story, based on real-life German scientist Theodor Koch-Grunberg’s experiences in the jungle, is compelling; the second, this time inspired by the follow-up journey of American botanist Richard Evans Schultes four decades later, is less so. And yet the Colombian film is entirely memorable, thanks in large part to David Gallego’s stunning black-and-white photography and the exquisite performances of two native actors, Antonio Bolivar and Nilbio Torres, who play the shaman Karamakate, young and old. Unfortunately, Guerra goes all “Apocalypse Now” and then “2001”/”Tree of Life” on us near the end, almost ruining what he has up to then created by turning to scenes of in-bred horror and hallucinogenic imagery. If only he’d toned it down instead. Still, “Serpent” left a lasting impression on me, and a desire to see it again.

Another film that may not completely add up is Matteo Garrone’s “Tale of Tales.” But this piece of fanciful trivia from the director of “Gommorrah,” based on 17th-century fairy tales by Giambattista Basile, is a transient delight. (Not everyone at TOH agrees!) Shot in English, and starring Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, John C. Reilly, Toby Jones, among several others including the ubiquitous Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher in a cameo, the film is set in three neighboring kingdoms, with plots too many and too fun to reveal.

In general the scene is wacky, a little tacky and joyously violent. (As in the tales of Grimm, potential pain and death wait around every corner.) Sumptuous and sensuous in color and texture, “Tales” appears to be enriched with art historical references, Bosch or some Italian version thereof. If Garrone doesn’t know how to end his tales, or if in fact there is no real ending (as I assume), it matters little, no more than it does in “Mad Max: Fury Road.” It’s all about the getting there, and I enjoyed every bit of it. For one thing, how often do you get to see a black-gowned Salma Hayek in a white room chomping down on the big red heart of a sea monster?

A number of the films at Karlovy Vary reflect the dynamic social tensions facing the world in general and Europe specifically. I didn’t quite buy the explosive, somewhat schizophrenic young mother in “A Blast,” especially after Greek director Syllas Tzoumerkas (“Homeland”) told his audience that he and writer Youla Boudali started with the breakdown she suffers and built her character from there. (I don’t believe that good characters can be created backwards.) Regardless, that this breakdown is precipitated by debt and mismanagement of the family business leaves little doubt that the filmmakers believe that such aggresive and irrational behavior is a possible result of the problems currently besetting Greece. Whether it’s believable or not, the role handed to actress Angeliki Papoulia is a meaty one, and she makes the most of it.

A similar violence born of socio-political failures is integral to Jonas Carpignano’s “Mediterranea,” which follows a pair of African immigrants on the perilous journey from Burkino Faso to the not altogether welcoming shores of Italy. The older Ayiva has an easier time than the younger Abas, primarily because he’s willing to work harder and to accept certain degradations in order to make it stick. But when an immigrant is killed by Italians, both men engage in a night of rioting. Carpignano, whose father is an ethnic Italian and mother is black, lived among a group of immigrants, including the primary actor Koudous Seihorn (a real find), and the film is a direct re-creation of their actual experiences. The power of fictional film to illuminate a politically sensitive situation, and the people involved – on both sides – is on full view here. “Mediterranea” doesn’t reach too far, aiming simply to immerse us in a world most of us leave to the daily newspaper or evening news. There were better films made last year, but few more important.

There is no such volatility in Laura Bispuri’s “Sworn Virgin,” which stars Alba Rohrwacher as a rural Albanian woman who lives as a man for 14 years before deciding to undo her decision. Her original choice was made possible by an Albanian tradition whereby a woman can become a man by committing to a life without sex; she takes a man’s name and is treated fully as a man in a society still very much divided in terms of gender roles. (Women were not allowed to carry a gun, for instance.) Moving back and forth between her life as a young person in the Albanian mountains, and her current self in the city to which she’s come, we follow her slow metamorphosis back into a woman. The message appears to be that contemporary life allows for differences once unthinkable, that now she can carry her lipstick or gun as she chooses, without swearing off anything. I can’t say I particularly enjoyed “Sworn Virgin,” but at the same time I can’t forget it, thanks largely to this talented actress. When she finally allows herself to let go and smile, I felt a sense of relief I didn’t know I needed.

I sat through about two thirds of Guy Maddin’s “The Forbidden Room” on my last afternoon in Karlovy Vary before deciding that I had other things to do. I didn’t leave because I hated it, or was made angry by it, or was particularly put off, I left because I could. That’s to say, the film allowed me to – I rarely walk out of a movie or don’t finish a book but in this case Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson didn’t seem to care whether I stayed or left and came back some other time. Which is all right by me. The day was a glorious one, I picked up a warm vanilla oplatky wafer, helped save a little boy from being run over by one of the KVIFF BMWs when the boy lost his balloon and turned into the street to get it without looking, and wandered down to the Grandhotel Pupp for one last free lunch. Certainly as valid as one more scene in that submarine with Udo Kier et al and that logger, staving off asphyxia by eating oxygen-rich flapjacks. Though just about now, that sounds pretty good.

Karlovy Vary Review: Off-Kilter, Thoroughly Icelandic Cannes Winner 'Rams'

Jessica Kiang — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 18:16:24 GMT

Anyone lamenting the underpopulated nature of the subgenre "Droll Dramas Revolving Entirely Around Icelanders' Relationships To The Animals They Rear" had cause for celebration in May, when "Rams" picked up the top Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes, thereby doubling the category by fifty per cent, with last year's "Of Horses And Men" being the other entry. But Grimur Harkonason's "Rams" pulls back a little on the drollery and mines the drama to deliver a more thoughtful and ultimately more affecting film, albeit one whose gentle-trot pacing makes getting to its rough-hewn heart a more difficult affair: the layers of stubbornness, tradition, and taciturn rivalry must be shorn away like so much shaggy wool.

It unfolds slowly in rural Iceland, in a valley community of sheep farmers, but particularly revolves around Gummi (a terrifically sympathetic Sigurdur Sigurjonsson), whose prized and beloved ram Garpur is the first ovine character we get to know. Gummi lovingly but with a practised and unsubtle hand polishes Garpur's beautiful horns and checks his muscle and fleece according to some arcane standard. Garpur is being entered in a local competition, which he loses by half a point to the ram owned by Gummi's neighbor and brother, the belligerent, hard-drinking Kiddi (Theodor Juliusson, who gradually comes into focus as equal MVP with Sigurjonsson), to whom Gummi has not spoken in 40 years. Harkonason has a documentarian's eye for detail and these fascinatingly alien lives amid wild, unforgiving landscapes yield plenty of moments of simple, anthropological interest: the importance of the thickness of the back muscle on a ram; the oddly intimate way the farmers clasp the animals between their legs to feed or examine them; the ancient, embedded knowledge of how the herd will move, what the sky is threatening, and what winter means around here.

With just a couple of quick examinations of Kiddi's ram, first motivated by pique at Garpur's loss, Gummi suspects he has scrapie, a wildly infectious disease that will require the culling of the entire valley's sheep population and a period of enforced quarantine before new sheep are allowed to be brought in. It will devastate the residents of area, who are wholly reliant on the animals for their livelihoods. But Gummi does his duty and alerts first Kiddi by means of a friendly sheepdog who acts as a Pony Express of sorts, carrying written messages between the two brothers, and the authorities, represented by the local vet. His suspicions are confirmed, and the cull is ordered —leading to probably the saddest scene of sheep slaughter ever filmed: it is made expressly clear that these animals are not just Gummi's livelihood, but his life, his pride, his tradition (having been bred from ancient familial stock) —they are his soul. Without them, as Kiddi rails at him one night from outside, what will there be through this long winter? Only the two estranged brothers living alone, side by side with no sheep to tend.

The stubborn edifice of silence that is Gummi and Kiddi's fraternal relationship (and how like lost Marx brothers they sound!), with its handy sheep-related idioms of "butting heads" and "locking horns," starts to crumble as time goes on. Despite being the whistleblower and apparently the most compliant farmer, Gummi is defying the rules in a much more insidious and dangerous way than Kiddi, who rails and roars and tries, in a comically deadpan long shot, to physically block the vets' access to his flock. He fails, of course, and nursing a ticking-time-bomb secret of his own, Gummi twice saves Kiddi from freezing to death where he's fallen down drunk —the second time using a digger as an unceremonious ambulance to deliver his corpulent older brother to the hospital.

All of this action unfolds in crisp and calm mid-toned shots from DP Sturla Brandth Grovlen, proving his remarkable versatility in delivering a style so unlike his last film, the feat of handheld athletic prowess that is the 140-min one-take wonder "Victoria" (review here). And it's not just in the rugged and forbidding exteriors that the images have a bleak beauty. The interiors, whether of eminently functional barns and sheds or the lonely kitchen of a lifelong bachelor, are shot and dressed with an eye for details so banal they illuminate: a radio on a window sill; the clutter of a desk; an elbow that seems to constantly poke through an eternally torn shirtsleeve.

This is, to use an unavoidable word in the context of Iceland's artistic, musical and filmic output, quirk. But where "Rams" differentiates itself is that this particular quirk is shot through with melancholy (aided by Atli Ovarsson's fine score) and a truly lived-in sense of the reality of these hardscrabble, unglamorous lives, built from the ground up in a welter of tiny details. It's a gently rewarding approach, but it can also be somewhat numbing before the film's strands come together in its crescendoing finale. The pacing is so restrained that there are times when "Rams" feels like it has already sailed past its total 93 minute runtime, as though clocks in this remote enclave occasionally run counter-clockwise.

But when it reveals its true colors late on, as less of an examination of a rarefied lifestyle and more of an ancient story of brotherhood broken and remade, the cumulative power of all those observed moments comes through. It's like a dam has held the film and its characters in unbroken check for so long, only to finally burst, and it's a surprise how affecting it becomes. If it's a little hard to see why the simplicity of "Rams" won the Un Certain Regard jury over in a strong year featuring Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Cemetery of Splendour" and Corneliu Poromboiu's "The Treasure," among other great titles, it's a likely bet that the sudden rush of blood through its veins that is its moving and desperate finale was a major factor: after so much modulation and tamped-down eccentricity, we get the catharsis of a sudden overwhelming rush of pure emotion that takes shelter from a raging snowstorm outside, but rivals it in sheer elemental power. [B]

Karlovy Vary Interview: George Romero Talks Modern Zombies, Ripping Off Orson Welles, And More

Jessica Kiang — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 15:05:00 GMT

One of the most diverting new flourishes introduced to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival for its 50th incarnation this week, is a brand new sidebar in which six international directors were invited to present their favorite films not from their own oeuvres. Dubbed "Six Close Encounters" it gave us Mark Cousins presenting underseen Iranian jewel "A Moment of Innocence"; Michael Roskam ("Bullhead," "The Drop") presenting Jules Dassin's anointed classic "Rififi"; Kim Ki-Duk presenting Lee Chang-dong's immaculate "Poetry"; Sergei Loznitsa ("Maidan") presenting raw Russian epic "The Asthenic Syndrome"; and, in an oddly apropos choice, Sion Sono ("Tokyo Tribe") presenting "Babe." The first one, not the weird dark second one.

Rounding out the line-up, however, was George Romero, who introduced Powell & Pressburger's "The Tales of Hoffmann" in its pristine new 4K restored version. Romero has long been on record as having this film represent his favorite, and the first film he remembers igniting not just a love of the medium, but a desire to explore it himself. And it gave us a chance to have a brief chat with the Man Who Invented The Zombie™.

In person, Romero is as charming as he is recognizable--the white hair, the thick, black-rimmed glasses, the impish grin. And despite a pretty grueling round of interviews and press conferences that morning, at 75, he has the energy and demeanor of a man half that age, and the laugh of a 12-year-old.

READ MORE: Director David Robert Mitchell Reveals The Biggest 5 Influences On It Follows
So "Tales of Hoffmann" went down a storm. Presenting the film that made you want to be a filmmaker, did it reinvigorate a desire to get back in the saddle? Anything on the horizon?
Filmically no, I'm taking an, ahem, sabbatical right now. There are too many zombies in the world...

I wondered if you were ever sorry you brought the dead back to life?
Sometimes, yes. I wasn't up until all this stuff--the remake of 'Dawn,' "Zombieland," "World War Z" and then "The Walking Dead"--that was the nail in the coffin. No, actually "World War Z" was.

Sure, I lament! I used to be the only guy doing it. And I had my own reasons for doing it, which was social satire of some kind, and I don't find any of that anymore. 'Walking Dead' is purely a soap opera and the rest is an entertainment, purely an entertainment.

In what way do you feel it was "World War Z" that killed your kind of zombie film?
Not so much because of the film itself, but in terms of trying to raise money to do something small. Now all of a sudden the wisdom is that if you want to make money with zombies you gotta spend $200 million. And I'm here to say, no you don't--I did it on 170 grand!

So what about away from zombies, have you any dream projects that might happen?
There are a couple of dream projects -- old scripts that my partner and I wrote and the rights have come back to us because they never got made. But now, I just don't think it's gonna happen. I think maybe I have one or two films left in me and that's all. Right now instead I've been writing a comic book for Marvel...

"Empire of the Dead"
Yes, and someone has now bought that for television. I don't know if it's ever actually gonna hit the screen, but it's been purchased and I've been hired to write the pilot, so I'll be doing that for a little while. Other than that I'm really waiting for zombies to go away again. And I'm writing my memoirs--having a lot of fun doing that.

Being brought into the Marvel machine a little, I wonder what you think about Marvel at the movies--though I know you don't want to bite the hand that feeds…
No, listen, I mean, all the credit in the world to those guys. They've become basically a whole new studio--a whole new place to go. But they don't own the rights to my comic, we were able to hold out.

It's impressive to be able to hang on to a modicum of independence within that structure.
Well, that's what I've always tried to do and that's the only way that I care about anything. I would rather just be me, it's just so unfortunate that you need money to do things.

I thought of you recently, or rather your films, when watching "Mad Max: Fury Road." It was analogous to me for being socially astute and provocative within a genre framework.
Also [laughs delightedly] analogous just because George Miller is also still around! Still doing it!

True, and not just doing it, reinvigorating it. I mean this sense of genre film's ability--almost its duty--to pursue a progressive agenda.
Well that is really something. I mean, I used zombies. Some of the other guys used something else… there were a bunch of us. There's a doc called "The American Nightmare," it's about a bunch of us who were contemporaries and chose different paths--you know, Carpenter and Craven and so on. There was a group of us that didn't know each other but somehow we were all cracking out of the eggshell at the same time. There was something in the air. And actually Miller, I remember when I first brought my film "Martin" to Cannes...

Oh I love that film! I think it's my favorite of yours.
It's my favorite so thank you so much, I'm glad! But when we went to Cannes, Miller was there with the first "Mad Max" and it felt like a collective unconscious, something going on.

A tacit drive toward making genre films that said something more?
That's always what I've tried to do, and I'm sure he'd say something very much similar. It's the only reason to do it, and so many people, so many of these films are just thoughtless. Like the "Friday the 13th" films, for example--it's just like, ok a guy with a knife. Even though Carpenter started all that with "Halloween." But "Halloween" was a beautifully executed film, a beautiful exercise. And it was the grandaddy of all of those slasher films that then just took the idea and trashed it, just did away with it. John was genuinely trying to be spooky, to be Halloween, and it's so well crafted...

Those other films, it's like they took the costume but they didn't take the soul.
That's exactly right, that's a wonderful way of putting it.

The are kind of the zombie versions. Going back to which, we reported on your involvement with "Zombie Autopsies" not so long ago, but you seem unsure that will happen?
I still am attached, but I don't know if anyone's going to finance it. It's something that I didn't write, it was written by a doctor--a Harvard medical doctor, no less...

So he should really know better.
He should, he should! But he explains it, he explains everything about zombiedom, he's got it physically described, and reasons for it, for the behavior and for the physical phenomena. Wonderful guy. And he asked me to so I wrote a screenplay and we've been shopping it, or our agents have, but no takers so far. It's a bit….dark.

A dark zombie movie? Heaven forbid!
I know! But hey, he's writing the second novel, a sequel, so maybe that will revitalize the project overall.

"Tales of Hoffmann" is not the only classic you're on record as loving, in fact I was struck by recent list I found--which also included "The Thing from Another World," "The Quiet Man," "On The Waterfront" and Welles' "Othello"--that there's a difference between the type of film you love and the type of film you make. Or do you view it more as a continuum?
I don't, except for the fact that in my early days making film, I didn't know what I was doing and so I was just ripping off techniques and lighting--largely from Welles. If you look at some of my lighting with just a little blinder on you can see Welles hiding in there. So Welles was the guy I ripped off the most.

If you're gonna rip someone off...
Uh-huh, and you know, it's a parasitic medium. You don't get to sketch, so you need to copy.

Styles rather than ideas hopefully, though I know you've been pretty scathing about the state of modern horror in that regard. Are there any recent horror films you admire?
You know there probably are and I shouldn't be so unequivocal about that, but I don't go to see a lot, only if something is recommended. I guess I've just been too often disappointed.

There's a couple of titles, like "It Follows" whose director cited "Night of the Living Dead" as a direct influence, that have been at least trying to do something new with the horror genre. I hope something like that might someday restore your faith.
I haven't seen it, but yes, I think I've read something about that… And oh, I'll tell you what did not restore my faith--"Insidious," which came highly recommended.

Doh! And now you have to cut another person out of your life.
[And there's that kid's laugh again]

Ode to Karlovy Vary

Tom Christie — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 21:18:42 GMT

It was my first visit and for those readers unfamiliar with KVIFF, or why one might want to attend in future, herewith a few random observations, historical notes, and user tips. KVIFF is the largest film festival in Eastern Europe, but obviously can’t compete with top international festivals for the top premieres. What it offers instead is a genial, more relaxed environment in which to see them later – it’s a great place for even critics to catch up with films they’ve missed – and a beatific setting in which to spend a few days.

Over the past 50 years, there have been periodic calls for the festival to relocate to Prague, which on one hand makes some sense and on the other makes as much sense as the Cannes festival relocating to Paris. For the uninitiated, Karlovy Vary, AKA Karlsbad in its German days, is a renowned spa town dating to 1370, when it was founded by and named after Charles IV, King of Bohemia. Located in the mountains some 80 miles west of Prague, KV is almost perfect for a festival of this nature. Spread along the warm, meandering Teplá River, it’s home to 13 major hot springs and an absurd number of beautiful buildings, basically the entire historic downtown – neo-baroque, secessionist, art nouveau, art deco. Nothing is too far away, one and a quarter miles between the festival’s two major sites.

READ MORE: "Bob and the Trees" Tops Karlovy Film Fest Prizes

Perhaps the best word to describe both town and festival is a German one, gemütlich: cozy, comfy, snug, homey. It would be crazy to move the festival to Prague but they should consider renaming it – even German friends didn’t know where Karlovy Vary is until I mentioned Karlsbad(!) The festival actually makes fun of its anonymity in one of their trailers, when Harvey Keitel tells a New York barkeep that he’s just back from Karlovy Vary and gets a clueless shrug in response. Given all of this, KVIFF should instead be called the Bohemian International Film Festival. For one thing, it sounds cooler. For another, it would be excellent to have a festival known as BIFF. Finally, the acronym could be shortened to BFF, because it’s that kind of festival.

READ MORE: Best of Karlovy Vary Fest, from '45' to 'Heil'

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE CZECH PEOPLE
They are funny and soulful and sexy. Granted, it’s a spa town but they seem to have a relaxed sense of time, strolling very slowly in and across and around the streets in a way Germans would never think of doing. This is refreshing unless you are in the back seat of a fast German car and are late to a screening; then it’s just annoying.

BMWS BY THE DOZENS
A lovely aspect of KVIFF is its car service for participants and some journalists. BMW donated a fleet of 64 cars this year, including some electric, driven by drivers hired from all over Czech Republic. One of our drivers was an accountant who works the festival every year and considers it a vacation. It’s understandable because for a week, the drivers have a lot of power, and practically live in these big black Beamers. Plus they get to ferry celebrities such as myself around. How much does all this cost? Gas and diesel alone amounted to more than $40,000.

A TALE OF TWO HOTELS
Festival central is the towering functionalist Hotel Thermal (tare-máll). Functionalist, which should be self-evident, is Czech for ugly and serves as a reminder of communist days, when people thought it a good idea to tear down really beautiful 19th-century buildings and put up something massive and gutter grey. Termite architecture, a friend called it, which brings to mind Kafka. The Thermal was designed by the husband and wife architectural team of Věra and Vladimír Machonin, which just goes to show what happens when married couples work too much together: bland, heavy, complex. All this said, the Thermal functions (!) remarkably well, even if I was still getting lost in its endless, artless spaces after a week. It features a grand hall, where the opening night ceremonies were held, and there are several small screening rooms upstairs – and lots of other rooms, cafes, and a bar called Hell (more on that below).

READ MORE: Richard Gere Gets Another Tribute at Karlovy Vary: He's Having a Moment

At the other end of town and the spectrum stands the wondrously neo-Baroque Grandhotel Pupp. Imagine the love child of Steve Wynn and Liberace, and you’re close. The Pupp, its current incarnation designed by two Austrians at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century and an inspiration for "The Grand Budapest Hotel," is kind of like its own little city, with bars, cafes, a restaurant, party rooms and a movie theater. How amazing it was sitting in the opulent Pupp Cinema to watch "Embrace of the Serpent," Ciro Guerra’s black-and-white film about an Amazonian shaman meeting a dying German scientist, Theodore Koch-Grunberg, around the same time the hotel was completed in the early 1900s. Well-known guests at the Grandhotel Pupp include Karl Marx (1874), Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Johann Sebastian Bach, Richard Wagner, Antonin Dvorák, Franz Kafka, and Queen Latifah.

THE WATERS
You’ve heard about the waters, which come from deep springs below. They have various temperatures, and taste a bit like water mixed with baking soda. Not particularly good, in other words, but you get used to it. Porcelain mugs with little sippy handles are sold around town in all shapes and sizes and themes, including one in the shape of a toilet, which gives an idea of one possible effect. (According to one source, pardon the pun, the lower temperatures have mildly laxative effect, the warmer temperatures are more generally relaxing.) Locals and visitors alike walk around town and its parks slowly sipping from their handles. Go ahead, buy a mug – this may be the closest you’ll ever get to the 1890s.

PEAT BATH
I knew about the peat baths from several reliable sources, i.e., women. I took one at the Alzbetiny Lazne spa, where a nice lady told me to take my clothes off and get into the big stainless steel tub that appeared to be full of coffee. I got in for a 15-minute soak in the mineral water mixed with peat. That’s all the time they give you because the minerals in the peat – which is gathered some 40 miles away and from deep down – are cooking you, apparently. I felt little except that after about ten minutes, I did notice that perspiration was streaming down my face -- profusely. After the soak, the nice lady returned, ordered me to lie down on the platform, then covered me in heavy blankets for a very warm and somewhat claustrophobic ten minutes, after which I emerged like a butterfly from its pupae, renewed. As its primary benefit is the joints, repeat visits are recommended. Cost: $19.

READ MORE: The Grandeur of Ben Mendelsohn and Ryan Reynolds in "Mississippi Grind"

BECHEROVKA, THE SILENT KILLER
There is a subset of quasi-alcoholic known as the festival drinker, not to be confused with the festival smoker, who is usually the same person after three drinks. Every culture has its silent killer beverage and in the Czech Republic it is Karlovy Vary’s own Becherovka herbal bitters, known in German days as Karlsbader Becherbitter. A secret mix of herbs and spices – it has a golden hue and tastes a bit like cloves – Becherovka was developed in the late 18th century by one Josef Vitus Becher. Warning: Becher fathered 16 children by two women, which may have had something to do with his middle name or Becherovka’s 38% alcohol by volume (76 proof), or both. As far as I know, I fathered no children in Karlovy Vary, but then after the night that ended at the bar in the Hotel Thermal, I don’t entirely remember everything. I think the bar is called Hell; it certainly felt like it the next day.

BECHER’S BAR
Located in the basement of the Grandhotel Pupp, its circular stairway guarded by two burly bouncers, Becher’s Bar provided free warm meals to festival participants and some lucky journalists. As my father always taught me, never look a gift goulash in the mouth.

THE VIDEO LIBRARY
Miss a screening? No problem, just book some time at one of the video library’s multitude of computers. Almost all of the films in the festival are available, and it’s a great way to check out a film you’re unsure about. It’s also a great way to skim through a film you’ve heard really bad things about. Don’t quote me.

THE SWEET STUFF
Besides the waters and the spas and the architecture and the Becherovka, KV is known for these sweet round wafers called oplatky. About ten inches wide, they come in several flavors, including vanilla, chocolate and hazelnut, and can be brought fresh and warm (best) or boxed. When living out of a hotel, having a box of triple-layer chocolate oplatky around can be a life-saver and/or a very bad idea.

And then there is the thin round cinnamon-roll thing cooked over coals on a big wooden spit. You know, that. It’s really good.

Finally, there is the giant white-chocolate and banana crepe that our friend Calum bought, thinking somehow that he had ordered a pizza. Just a translation issue, hopefully. Well, in Canada, no doubt that passed for a pizza.

SPEAKING OF LANGUAGE
The Czech Republic is one of those countries in which you are not expected, or even necessarily wanted to speak the language because, well, you will screw it up and things will take much longer than if everyone simply speaks English. Though not everyone does speak English. In any case, translation is ubiquitous at all KVIFF events, which keeps things at a pleasingly moderate pace. My one language lesson was fittingly cinematic: the d in dēkuji (thank you) is pronounced like Django (Unchained). Djeh-quí.

ONE SOUR NOTE
As great as my week in Karlovy Vary was, I have to say that I heard the worst music in my life, mainly from car radios stuck on one station, Radiožurnál. As I write this the station is playing George Michael’s “Fast Love” and Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings,” which gives an idea. Mister sings, “Take these broken wings/and learn to fly again/baby live so free/and when we hear the voices sing, the book of love will open up and let us in/ yeah, yeah.” Listen for yourself, here’s the playlisty. Yep, playlisty.

And then there were the live musicians at the Karel IV restaurant who were evidently auto mechanics or miners during by day and vampires by night. Worst was the violinist who, as my friend said, hit all the right emotions but all the wrong notes.

Radiožurnal is now playing the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.”

FINAL NUMBERS
KVIFF 2015 had 12,857 accredited participants, of whom 547 were filmmakers, 1017 were film professionals, 670 were journalists and the rest (10,623) were holders of a festival pass. 135,105 tickets were sold, 488 screenings were held. From the 223 feature films featured, 35 were world premieres, 26 international premieres and 12 European premieres. 25 short films and 40 documentaries were screened.

ENDING ON A HIGH NOTE
The same restaurant that provided such horrendous music also provided perhaps the sweetest moment of the week. Karel IV is located on the third floor of a building built on a large rock, and its terrace provides an amazing view of the surrounding town and hills. A couple of colleagues and I arrived late one night and though the restaurant had already closed, the kind staff allowed us to order a couple of rounds of drinks from the terrace, and even agreed to turn off the bright lights. For an hour or so we sat in near darkness, wrapped in blankets, stars overhead as the lighted windows of Karlovy Vary began to go dark one by one.

5 Must-See Films From the 50th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Celluloid Liberation Front — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 20:51:31 GMT

"The Red Spider" (dir. Marcin Koszalka, 90' – Poland, 2015)

The feature debut of Polish documentarist and cameraman Marcin Koszalka, "The Red Spider" recounts in carefully reconstructed details the stories of Poland's most infamous serial killers: the teenager Karol Kot and the fictitious "hoax" Lucjan Staniak. For allegorical purposes, the film intertwines the life trajectories of these two characters who terrorized Poland in the late 60s. Unlike what we see in the film, the two never acted together for the very simple reason that Lucjan Staniak turned out after 50 years to have never existed, and the true perpetrator who had left a trail of blood in his wake remains a mystery to this day. Karol (Filip Plawiak) leads a featureless life. Reluctantly going about his daily routine, he seems to be searching for higher dosages of adrenaline that his swimming pool diving fails to provide. When he accidentally discovers the murdered body of a young kid, he tracks down his assassin and, in his methodical obstinacy to kill, finds an almost father-like figure. Unable to carry out the senseless murders he's so fascinated by, he will nonetheless take responsibility for every single one of them. Presented in the official competition, "The Red Spider" boasts its director's visual prowess in the choreographic rendition of Krakow circa 1967 but struggles in its attempt to probe the sinister fascination the protagonist feels towards evil. While the serial killer's surroundings and daily life come through vividly, his disturbed inner dimension fails to take any meaningful shape, leaving the spectator seriously puzzled as to what exactly drove Karol's bloodlust.

"Heil" (dir. Dietrich Brüggemann, 103' – Germany 2015)

One of the most hyped titles competing for the Crystal Globe in Karlovy Vary this year, "Heil" is a satirical look at German neo-nazis, but it is the kind of satire that lets its subject matter off the hook rather then one that pulls it apart. Sebastian Klein (Jerry Hoffman) is an Afro-German liberal writer advocating greater racial integration for German society. When kidnapped by Neo-Nazis and hit on the head, he becomes an unlikely supporter of their xenophobic cause and the new, clean face of their political campaign. Meanwhile, a respectable gang of powerful Nazi-sympathizers is plotting an armed insurrection, while a cop is trying to prevent the worst from happening and is joined by Klein's pregnant wife and a former girlfriend. An "attractive" Neo-Nazi girl tells his admirer that he will consider being with him only if he invades Poland. This bunch of stereotypical and benevolent characters cross paths throughout what, at least on paper, is supposed to be a funny film. German humor notwithstanding, "Heil" is shabbily put together -- the plot twists are hardly surprising and the satirical edge of the whole operation is not only dull, but it is also overtly reactionary. At a time when the rise of Neo-Nazi movements throughout Europe is anything but a joke, satire should demolish the basis upon which xenophobia thrives, not trivialize them. Also, to depict anti-fascists as even dumber than neo-nazis is a dubious choice indeed.

"Gold Coast" (dir. Daniel Dencik, 114' – Denmark, 2015)

An ambitious but only partially successful attempt at regenerating the historical drama and its stiff formulas, "Gold Coast" is set in Danish Guinea in the aftermath of Denmark's historic decision to make the slave trade illegal. Yet the gap between legislation and reality is precisely what the young idealist at the center of this film, Wulff Frederik (Jakob Oftebro), discovers at his own expenses once he leaves Copenhagen for the African colony to start a coffee plantation with the help of the colonized natives. Fascinated by the lush flora he finds there, the budding botanist soon discovers that behind this idyllic beauty lurks the most inhuman behaviors. Far from over, slavery is not only a profitable trade but also an immoral contagion that mows down anything that stands in its way -- anti-colonialist feelings first. The first half of the film stands out for its atmospheric enactment of the peripheral space that separates beauty from horror, idealism from corruption. Helped by an immaculate score by Angelo Badalamenti, the film pushes towards Malick-esque heights but never quite gets there. The final crowning of the "white savior" by the grateful natives feels overtrite and most importantly at odds with the fruitful ambiguity that director Daniel Dencik artfully suggests at the beginning of his film.

"Shop on the High Street" (dir. Jan Kadar & Elmar Klos, 125' – Czechoslovakia, 1965)

Fifty years since it was filmed, the Academy Award-winning "Shop on the High Street" was screened in Karlovy Vary in the "Out from the Past" section. A true gem in its own right, Kadar and Klos' timeless masterwork is also one the very best films made about the moral blackout that allowed Hitler's anti-Semitic insanity to materialize itself into the worst atrocity ever committed against mankind. The film is set during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, which like the rest of Europe had passively bowed to the Werhmacht without offering much resistance. Tono Brtko (Jozef Kroner) leads a very humble life and has no sympathy whatsoever towards the Germans, but when his brother-in-law offers him the chance to become an "Aryan inspector," spurred by his wife, he reluctantly accepts. Tono is "assigned" the shop of an old, senile Jewish widower who's too confused to understand what's going on, and kindly agrees to hire him. The couple develops a heartfelt friendship, but Tono's true reasons, which he skillfully hides from the poor woman, will be exposed by the impending pogrom. Faced with the choice between his own petty interests and the looming fate of the Jewish woman and her whole community, the protagonist of the film has to face the harshest of all judges: his own consciousness. A probing moral tale on the viciousness of conformism and the horrors of self-interests, the drama is as relevant today as it was half a century ago.

"Mallory" (dir. Helena Třeštíková, 97' – Czech Republic, 2015)

Winner of the Crystal Globe for Best Documentary, "Mallory," by veteran Czech documentary filmmaker Helena Třeštíková, is an interesting if not exceptional exercise in humanistic minimalism. The documentary follows the strenuous recovery of the titular character, an ex heroine addict struggling to inaugurate a new chapter in her troubled life. Homeless, Mallory sleeps in a parked car with her partner while her son is in a foster home. Determined not to give up, she looks for a job, finds it, loses it and finds another one. Along with her partner, she also manages to find a small flat, which they share with a rat with a penchant for cigarettes. Without indulging in any self-help rhethoric, the director shows us how even the most desperate life is still worth living. Mallory rarely feels sorry for herself, and so does the director who never victimizes the life she's documenting with her camera. Her struggle to give meaning to her life, however filled with obstacles, is in fact framed without any humanitarian condescension. So much so that Mallory's everyday preoccupations and vexations, decidedly of a rather harsh nature, feel nonetheless close enough to the kind we all experience in the never-ending challenge that life itself is.

READ MORE: 6 Auteurs Will Present Their Favorite Films at 2015 Karlovy Vary Film Fest

Karlovy Vary Review: Punchy, Difficult, Allegorically Urgent Greek Tragedy 'A Blast'

Jessica Kiang — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 14:05:00 GMT

A film composed of jagged edges, told in short, staccato scenes that feel not so much edited as fed through a shredder and flung at your eyes, Syllas Tzoumerkas' "A Blast" is a hard, unforgiving and occasionally shrill watch but it explodes through those barriers with its intense energy and pinpoint topicality. It somehow feels appropriate that with the so-called Greek Weird Wave forged in the crucible of the beginning of Greece's economic collapse, now over half a decade later we have "A Blast." It is part of that movement in theme (the legacy of suffocating debt that the older generation has left for the younger, who are thus ensnared in an impossible situation not of their own making) and in allegorical strength, but not at all in style. Gone are the carefully composed frames, colored in controlled, cool palettes that we might have considered the movement's overriding aesthetic to date. Here instead is a nerve-jangling jumble of confused chronology and confrontational high drama; at the time of writing it is an almost perfect reflection of the dramatic situation in Greece, whose fate as regards the Eurozone remains so perilously in the balance.

But as much as it is unavoidably the story of Greece, with people becoming representations of generations, or of attitudes, or of societal injustices it is also the story of one woman, a difficult and often unlikable one, whose accelerating nervous breakdown we follow throughout the course of the film, and whose eventual bid for freedom operates on a personal level as much as it does a metaphorical one. The film zig-zags in time, crashing brief scenes of years-ago bliss or optimism up against current-day scenes of hardship, but the story that gradually emerges is of Maria, played by "Dogtooth" actress Angeliki Papoulia, in a remarkably elastic performance, often informing us of our place in time merely through her expression. Maria is young and pretty and enjoys a loudly vulgar relationship with her slightly slow, less attractive sister Gogo (Maria Filini). She gets accepted to law school, braying with delight at the news. She meets and falls hard for handsome sailor Yannis (Vassilis Doganis) an Adonis with whom she enjoys a passionate, and graphic, love affair, and whom she eventually marries and has two children with. Gogo also marries, and while Yannis is away many months of the year, initially at least, he sends Maria loving messages and Skypes often, in between blissful reunions of yelping sex.

But whatever security such a volatile person could enjoy is shattered by the news that her wheelchair-bound mother and aging father have been hiding mountainous tax debt from her; debts that effectively cripple her own future prospects and involve her in Kafkaesque negotiations with government agencies and accountants and banks. Meantime the priapic Yannis, who has been sleeping with prostitutes while away as well as maintaining an ongoing gay affair with a shipmate, is absent but trying to get home to the wife and kids he still, in his fashion, loves. But Maria's life is fraying--she goes to group therapy, she refuses Yannis' calls, the incandescent vitality of her youth seems to burn away before our eyes, until only bitter cinders remain.

Some of Tzoumerkas' choices are questionable. The heightened soap operatics of the scenes of screaming and roughhousing (whether through giddy joy or inexpressible despair) are so melodramatic as to strain credulity. Maria at one point drags her mother from her wheelchair and spanks her; she screams insults at Gogo, barreling past her on the stairs; she batters herself against Yannis repeatedly demanding protestations of undying love. Individually these moments jar, but cumulatively they do give the sense of Maria's pugnacious reaction to the progressive caging of her ungovernable spirit: she hammers against the enclosing doom like a bird battering itself to death against a window.

In fact, it is unusual how very present Maria is throughout. Tzoumerkas refuses to portray her as anything so uncomplicated as a victim; she is as complicit in her breakdown as any outside force or personality. It's also remarkable for being mediated through a female perspective--were she a man this story would be a much more familiar tale of 70's style "Freebird"-ing wanderlust, baby. Instead, Maria is explicitly a woman--wife, daughter, mother, sister--and some of the scenes of most urgent, shocking power come from quieter moments when she simply, clearly negates or repudiates one of those prescribed roles. She quietly tells her counseling group that she never wants to see her children again. She openly despises Gogo's weakness for allowing her increasingly right-wing husband to beat her. She coolly sits across a dinner table from her father, now a widower, and explains in the cruelest terms how unnecessary and revolting he is to her: parricide over a bowl of soup. In fact Maria's journey can be read as a series of assassinations, of everything and everyone she has ever known.

There are subtle differences in moral judgement between escaping and fleeing and abandoning, and Maria's behavior can be interpreted as any of those--how much sympathy you have for her will likely depend on where on that spectrum you place her. Flawed, challenging but increasingly fascinating the more you think about it afterward, "A Blast" is complicated and demanding and messy, like the world right now, like life. But it is also audacious in asserting an unusually devastating point of view, in which a narrative of personal liberation becomes a political allegory of powerful pessimism: Maria, like her country, may escape the shackles of unfair debt and struggle and poverty, but she can only do it by outrunning her pursuers, leaving a destabilized family behind and eventually facing the future in a state of staggering aloneness. [B/B+]

Karlovy Vary Review: 'The Brand New Testament' With Catherine Deneuve Gently Blasphemes With Wit And Style

Jessica Kiang — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 20:40:58 GMT

So, God exists. He lives in Brussels in a cramped, tatty apartment. He wears a string undershirt and slippers and behaves like a petty tyrant toward his wife. And while we might have heard of his son, who in this reading seems to have defied His will by walking among the people and getting himself killed for his troubles, we probably know less about Ea, his daughter. But it is Ea who is the narrator and heroine of Jaco Van Dormael's, silly, sweet-natured and stylish alternate theology comedy "The Brand New Testament." And at ten years of age, Ea wants to set the world, which her mean-spirited father regards as his own personal playset, to rights.

With apple-cheeked but deadpan precociousness, Ea (played by delightful newcomer Pili Groyne, last seen as one of Marion Cotillard's kids in "Two Days One Night") begins by recounting the Genesis story, but from this uniquely skewed, Belgian-centric perspective. And from the off, Van Dormael, along with cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne, indulge in some striking, droll imagery: a tiger watching static on a hotel TV; giraffes cantering by a deserted crossroads amid blue glass skyscrapers; a control room of infinite filing cabinets in which God (a choleric, ratty Benoit Poelvoorde) devises arbitrary annoyances or inflicts massive disasters on the peoples of the world, with a few taps at his outmoded PC. It's Terry Gilliam without the Dutch angles; Michel Gondry without the handmade aesthetic.

Ea's mother, we learn later is a Goddess, whose own power may match that of her domineering husband, but who is cowed into a subservient domesticity, with embroidery and her baseball card collection her only comforts. God, by contrast, is a hockey fan, which leads Ea to the totally logical assumption that if she can up her brother's quotient of disciples from 12 (the number of players on a hockey team) to 18 (the number on a baseball team) the balance of power might shift toward her mother, which would be better for all Creation. To that end, she escapes the flat via the washing machine and sets about finding six more randomly chosen disciples, so she, or rather the hobo she recruits as a scribe, can write a Brand New Testament. But just before she sets out on her odyssey, she makes a bid to destabilize her father's power base by sending to everyone on Earth (via their cellphones, naturally) the date of their death.

Some of the best and most inventive jokes that Van Dormael and co writer Thomas Gunzig make are spurred by this contrivance. People react in all sorts of ways: some insist on maintaining their lives as before, others become wild hedonists, and in a recurring joke, one young guy takes to flinging himself out of windows, off bridges and from airplanes, safe in the knowledge that some increasingly random trick of fate will save him, because today is not his day to die. And then there are the six characters (Catherine Deneuve's Martine among them) who have to deal not only with this massive ontological revelation, but also with this peculiar child turning up, listening to their "inner music" and insisting that their stories become the new Scripture.

If it feels like I'm giving away too much plot, don't fear, there's plenty more where that came from, including Deneuve doing a "Max Mon Amour" with a circus gorilla, a hitman who falls in love, a priest who punches God, a fish skeleton that sings "La Mer," and so on. It should become exhausting, the endless details and curlicues and flourishes, in the way that untrammelled caprice often can. But Van Dormael's instinct to keep the tone fizzy rather than farcical, to never take anything too seriously and most of all, to cleave to a central note of sweet, melancholic optimism about the wonder of being alive, allows the film to remain fresh and funny.

In fact, if there's a criticism to be made it's that having earned so much goodwill Van Dormael doesn't do more with it, doesn't try to push through a more progressive agenda. The film's overriding white heteronormativity doesn't help in this regard either -- not really addressed until the final chapter which sees a young boy decide to live as a girl, other sexualities and minority ethnicities are practically absent. It seems oddly regressive to have a film in which Catherine Deneuve can be shown in a loving post-coital embrace with a gorilla not feature so much as a gay kiss elsewhere.

But for all it's got a supposedly controversial logline, Van Dormael doesn't really want to rock the boat with "The Brand New Testament," he just wants to splash about in the myths and lore of Christianity like a kid in a fountain on a hot day. And so he takes a self-servingly a la carte approach to the dogmas he lampoons, finding time for a pointed side gag here and there but mostly being content to set up the outrageous basics and let it tick along according to an internal logic that can't really be applied to the real world, and therefore can't truly cause too much offense.

Van Dormael's last film, ambitious immortality sci-fi yarn "Mr Nobody" was a 2009 title not released until 2013 Stateside, to a very mixed response (here's our review), but with "A Brand New Testament" he delivers a more satisfyingly complete film, even if it's a sight less grandiose. Lovely to look at, charmingly played throughout, and with a sense of fun that is more playful than subversive, "The Brand New Testament" is a bouncy treat: not so much heresy as whimsy, with a smooth matte finish and a mischievous grin. [B+]

Karlovy Vary Review: Julien Temple's Documentary 'The Ecstasy Of Wilko Johnson'

Jessica Kiang — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 15:22:49 GMT

"If it's going to kill me," says Wilko Johnson, influential British rock guitarist, and subject of Julien Temple's new documentary, "I don't want it to bore me." He's speaking of his shock diagnosis with terminal pancreatic cancer in his mid-60s, after which he was given ten months to live, and enjoyed, in his own words, "the most extraordinary year of my life." Onetime punk-scene filmmaker Temple (who also directed "Absolute Beginners" and "Earth Girls Are Easy" back in the '80s) has filmed Johnson, onetime punk-scene spiritual godfather, before -- in 2009's "Oil City Confidential," his documentary on Johnson's most well-known band Dr. Feelgood. And perhaps that's why Temple is content to refer to Johnson's musical talent and legacy only in passing in 'Ecstasy.' This is a film about a man, not a legend, and indeed it is the man who emerges as bigger than movie as a result. In its rather standard approach (interviews with Johnson himself in a variety of locations, sometimes contrived into rather strained mini-performance pieces, intercut with on-the-nose footage from old films and elsewhere) Temple's film is a lot more ordinary than the person whose portrait it paints, because Johnson's complex but generous reaction to his death sentence is utterly remarkable.

'Ecstasy' is a good description, "euphoria" another--Johnson speaks movingly and with great sincerity, in his uncompromised Essex accent, of the sense of wonder and relief that immediately filled him. It is precisely the opposite of the reaction we all fear we might have to such a chilling final prognosis, and staying with Johnson as he recounts his experiences, as the sands in the hourglass run out, is a summary lesson in perspective and in taking note of the thrilling aliveness all around. In being denied a future, Johnson says, fate has given him the gift of the present, an eternal now that he can experience without reference to its consequences.

Part of the joy of the film, because it is often quite an uplifting experience, flows directly from the seeming contradictions of Johnson himself. An old-school rocker (the only real celebrity cameo we get is from The Who's Roger Daltrey with whom Johnson finally gets round to fulfilling an often-postponed ambition to lay down a record) and a rugged, bootstraps-style survivor of psychedelia, Johnson is also extremely thoughtful and erudite, peppering his observations with snatches of Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Chaucer. In fact he claims that if he hadn't got into rock'n'roll (something he amusingly suggests he did mainly for the money) he would have been an academic, studying English literature. Temple matches this literary bent with an eclectic selection of clips from their cinematic equivalents: we get Tarkovsky, Cocteau, oodles of Bergman--most notably, of course, "The Seventh Seal." And as for The Bard, Temple chooses footage, oddly enough, from the 1964 television version of "Hamlet," called "Hamlet in Elsinore" which stars Christopher Plummer, Donald Sutherland, Michael Caine and more.

READ MORE: Karlovy Vary Review: Andrew Renzi's 'Franny' Starring Richard Gere, Dakota Fanny & Theo James

The issue really is that as welcome as these snippets are, and as enjoyable to try to parse and recognize, certainly for the film-literate viewer, oftentimes their actual message runs slightly counter to the unique and far less tragic outlook that Johnson has on his mortality, given that it is now an accepted fact. Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, or his "Alas poor Yorick" speech, or even the famous chess with Death scene from "The Seventh Seal" all present a far doomier vision of life's final chapter than Johnson embodies. Perhaps they are there to work as counterpoint, but it's not really necessary as the thrust of the film is Johnson's counterintuitive take on the hegemonic "death is horror" idea they represent. It feels even further askew when the dreamy visuals of Cocteau and the Archers' "A Matter of Life and Death" enter the frame--as they explicitly summon a sense of the afterlife that Johnson, an avowed atheist even after his diagnosis, takes no comfort in.

The most interesting moments, and the ones that feel much less like filler, are those spent with Johnson seemingly in the moment -- footage from a farewell trip to his beloved Japan and a gig he did there, directly connecting with his many fans on the grounds that this would inevitably be the last time he could play for them. It's an immensely moving moment, and while Johnson professes not to feel sad coming off the stage, the audience is visibly emotional. And there's a kind of furious empathy at work while we watch Johnson look at trees, faces, the sea pulling in and out at the shore of his childhood home of Canvey Island, and see briefly through his eyes, as though we too are looking for the last time. This is the real opportunity that "The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson" establishes in its content, but then squanders in form, is to be able to piggy back on Johnson's experiences right up to an answer to the biggest questions of them all: what does it mean to be alive, and what does it mean to die?

However just when that story feels mined for all it's worth, spun off into directions and tangents some more provocative than others, comes a third-act reversal of the most dramatic type. "Turns out the Cosmic Joke" says Johnson, "is actually very very funny." Playing a final gig with a distended midriff where the huge 3kg tumor cannot be concealed, he is encouraged to seek another diagnosis by a fan in the audience with a medical background. Suddenly, into this calmly accepting world of absolute finality, hope floods back in, and it is not necessarily welcome. There is something truly extraordinary about hearing Johnson's reaction to these new developments -- how he almost sounds mournful for the certainty and joy he felt before, and how unsure he is about contending with the idea of a future when for so long he had none. And there, at this fascinating juncture, the movie ends. It's a film that constantly brings us to the brink of revelation but pulls up some way short, be it through the rather indifferent shooting style, the sometimes unilluminating choice of clips and illustration (scythes and hourglasses and constantly flipping calendars). But mostly it's due to the frustrating sense that though Johnson's experience we get to graze our fingers against some profound secret, only to have it snatched away at the last moment. [B-]

Karlovy Vary Review: Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala's Stylishly Sick 'Goodnight Mommy'

Jessica Kiang — Sat, 11 Jul 2015 21:23:00 GMT

The stealthiness of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's "Goodnight Mommy," which creeps around making the noise of someone trying to make no noise, is a good parallel for the sort of life the film has had since its Venice premiere: quietly building both arthouse buzz and picking up genre admirers while it makes the festival rounds. Catching up to it at its Karlovy Vary International Film Festival berth this week, it's easy to see what the fuss is about: it's a resonant, atmospheric horror film that treats its genre and its audience with unusual respect, before escalating in its last moments to a brilliantly uncompromised finale. This is deserving of special mention because in walking the line between indie/arthouse and genre, like David Robert Mitchell's "It Follows," for example, or even something like "The Babadook," which in themes of the potential monstrousness of motherhood more closely parallels "Goodnight Mommy," there is often the potential for a weaker third act, where resolution requires a lessening of mystery/fear. But here, if anything, the final act is the strongest, (it's certainly the sickest), and after a pleasantly shivery beginning, may send you out into the night searching for the flesh that has somehow crept off your bones.

READ MORE: Read All Of Our Coverage Of The Karloy Vary International Film Festival Here

Impeccably crafted, with a chilly, crisp sheen to the photography from DP Martin Gschlacht and extremely precise sound design, the film largely takes place in a single modernist house somewhere in the Austrian countryside. Co-director Franz is a regular writing collaborator with Ulrich Seidl (in fact, she's married to him), and he is a producer here, so there's definitely a feel of shared DNA with recent Seidl films (especially the terrific "In The Basement," which was co-written by Franz and also shot by Gschlacht). More fundamentally, the sensibility feels similar, a kind of unheimlich, dispassionate, coolly assessing vibe: an investigation of dissociative behavior that, if it finds a place in which to flourish, can bloom into all-out insanity, while retaining a strict logic from within. That place is the basement in "In the Basement," but in "Goodnight Mommy" it's located in another freakishly uncanny secret space (all apologies to anyone who's ever shared a womb): the relationship between two identical twin brothers.

Elias and Lukas (played by Elias and Lukas Schwarz) play in their large, well-appointed house (one of the things the film evokes is how unconsciously well a child knows the nooks and crannies and quirks of his childhood home), and in the countryside outside — high fields of corn, odd bouncy marshland, rocks and caves. They are passing time till the return of their mother (Susanne Wuest), which, when it happens, is strangely anticlimactic: she is undemonstrative and un-motherly toward them. Oh, and her face is entirely swathed in bandages following a recent round of surgery — we pick up hints it may have been either cosmetic or reconstructive.

As time passes, Elias and Lukas grow continually more certain that the woman underneath the bandages is not their mother, and start to find evidence to support that: a photograph in an album, a missing mole, a wrongly remembered favorite song. But in the believable way that sometimes the most important familial intrigues are the ones that remain unspoken between the family members involved, she is frustratingly reluctant to come clean, and sometimes dismissive, sometimes violent, in her reactions to their childish prying. Retreating more toward each other, progressing through phases of distrust, petty spite, and finally total certainty, they must find a way, however nasty, to force her to tell the truth.

There is a recent trauma obliquely referenced, and the childrens' father is pointedly absent. Indeed, its empty spaces, the minimalist decor of the home, and the quietness of the soundtrack combine to make us feel the presence of absence very cleverly: it's as much a film about what is missing as what is there. The editing is stellar in this regard too, with scenes often cutting on an unanswered question, sometimes literally, sometimes visually as someone looks off camera at something and we never get the reverse shot that tells us what's there. It's a film where the ideas are most plentiful and inventive in the micro, rather than the macro.

In fact, it's the macro picture, the workings of the twists and kinks of the plot, that is probably the least impressive aspect of the movie. You get the impression of the cart leading the horse a little in that Flack and Fiala have so many intelligent filmmaking ideas, they're content to employ a serviceable plot to hang them on, rather than finding any particular original spin on the story itself. This may lead those of us familiar with the various conventions and twists of modern horror to unlock a few too many of the film's secrets before we're quite meant to.

But what "Goodnight Mommy" perhaps lacks in "gotcha!" surprise, it makes up for in unnerving, elegantly ratcheting creepiness. Deliberately unexplained and unremarked-on ellipses in time keep us disoriented and unmoored from the hard feel of reality. And so the film takes on the quality of a nightmare, but not one of those with monsters and lava and naked public speaking — it's the kind of nightmare where you're looking for something you need but you can't remember what it is, and where, turning a corner, you walk into a wall because you expect a door to be where it isn't.

It was Haneke, of course, who established the New Austrian Chilliness, with Seidl bringing a dose of dry social satire into the mix, and here Franz and Fiala nudge that aesthetic further along the scale toward genre. While it may not have the ferocious intellectualism of a Haneke film, nor the social agenda of a Seidl, nor the wholly gross-out excess of classic genre horror, this heady stew of references and notions, which borrows elements from haunted house, body dysmorphia, maternal paranoia, and torture porn movies, does have a very similar Austrian vein of ruthlessness running through it. The story simply goes farther than expected, and for the first time, in the finale, after all those cleverly cut scenes that feel like they finish before they're quite "done," "Goodnight Mommy" delivers one you get to watch all the way through to the bitterest of ends. It's a high compliment the film's horror cred to say that you might not want to, though if you're the right kind of disturbed yourself (guilty!), it might also have you grinning at its sheer audacity. [B]

Karlovy Vary Review: Gripping, Intelligent, Moving Cannes Best Actor Winner 'The Measure Of A Man'

Jessica Kiang — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 07:19:12 GMT

Featuring an extraordinary, almost inexplicably riveting lead performance from Vincent Lindon, who earned a Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his work here, Stéphane Brizé's french-language "The Measure of a Man" is a terrific addition to the low-key social realist genre that is unavoidably dominated by the films of the Dardenne brothers. But while there are unmistakable parallels between 'Measure' and last year's "Two Days One Night," in the main, the links between Brizé's film and the rest of the category are more circumstantial than DNA-based. Brizé's approach to this kind of Dardennes-influenced "invisible" docu-realism is to use that aesthetic ingeniously, almost deceptively; the joltingly naked, handheld immediacy disguises the film's meticulously pointed construction. And so these moments in the life of the wonderfully real Thierry (Lindon) only seem to come to us unmediated; in fact they are refracted through an ever-so-slightly heightened prism, which allows Brizé not just to document Thierry's plight, but to comment on it, and the society that causes it, with sly, incisive humanism. It works: this is a film that makes you want to be a kinder person.

"The Measure Of A Man" unfolds as a series of verité-style encounters, apparently random but each illustrating the debilitating effect of living on the lower rungs of a society in which each new interaction is an assessment: a test you will probably fail. Thierry certainly fails many of these tests, from a job interview via Skype, to his abortive attempt to sell his holiday trailer by the sea, to meetings with bank managers and even classes in interview technique. The film opens practically mid-sentence in one such scenario as Thierry is politely but unmistakably rebuked for expecting a training course he went on to yield employment at the end. In fact, it was probably a waste of time doing the course in the first place he is offhandedly informed by the adviser, blandly unconscious or uncaring of the simple fact that, in his mid-fifties, married with a handicapped son, Thierry has little time to waste. This employment agency representative is the first in a series of middle-management-type factotums noticeably younger than Thierry, brilliantly played by non-professional actors. From their mouths the dialogue sounds so natural as to be fly-on-the-wall real, yet in each case there is at least one, and often several moments of Kafka-esque satire. Not only do they, one by one, fail to help Thierry, they also find a way to tacitly blame him for that failure.

READ MORE: Cannes Award Winners: Jacques Aurdiard 'Dheepan' Wins Palme d'Or; Rooney Mara Ties For Best Actress With 'Carol'

Lindon's performance is so perfectly judged, so inspiring of an avalanche of sympathy and empathy without ever seeking it out, that we are on Thierry's side immediately, feeling every slight and every instance of condescension perhaps even more strongly than he does himself. Just try to prevent yourself yelling "Dickwad!" at the screen when that unseen Skype interviewer critiques the writing style of Thierry's CV. In any other context the "friendly advice" he offers might be kindly meant, but somehow here we know it is not. So many of the pen-pushers Thierry meets have the air from the start of people whose prime concern is to find a way to feel a tiny bit better about themselves at Thierry's expense. But Lindon also projects a fundamental decency and quiet intelligence into Thierry, never better expressed than in the film's two dance scenes, one at a class Thierry attends with his wife, one at home with the rug rolled back as they show their delighted son what they have learned. He is in every way a good man, and we come to love him a little.

Which means it can be grueling going, watching someone you love go through these endlessly deflating rounds of test, judgment and failure. And the handheld grittiness of its style does little to ease the sometimes bruising effect of scenes that are shot crudely, with the camera roaming jerkily back and forth between Thierry and his interlocutor. In fact a great deal of the film happens in profile or quarter profile or with Thierry even having his back to us, yet our identification with him never wavers. It carries through even when Thierry gets a job as a supermarket security guard and the immediate stakes for him shift from being purely economic to emotional--to being about how much he can bear, as a good man, to be on the other side of the table, judging the transgressions of petty shoplifters and cashiers who try to pocket unused loyalty points. It culminates in an act of completely underplayed heroism, shot so anticlimactically that the swift renewed burst of love it engenders for Thierry may feel disproportionate.

The transactional, impersonal, dehumanizing effect of modern life, which is part of the film's remit may be better reflected in its French title "La Loi du Marche" (the law of the market) but the English version does bring us closer to the human essence of what Brizé wants to show us, and does more accurately reflect the depth achieved in terms of characterization. Thierry is constantly assessed, measured, sized up by the world outside, and is constantly diminished and found wanting, yet in our eyes by the time the film ends, it is society that is proven to be coming up short and this extraordinary, ordinary man is a giant. [A-]

Karlovy Vary Review: Dietrich Brϋggemann's Rambunctious Neo-Nazi Satire 'Heil'

Jessica Kiang — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 22:25:00 GMT

There is a brilliantly funny, whipsmart moment in Dietrich Brϋggemann's "Heil" and it's the first thing we see. A lightning-paced glimpse of deeply familiar World War II imagery -- chaos; Hitler salutes; bombs falling in black and white -- smash cuts, almost before we've registered what we're looking at, to a huge, droll title: 70 YEARS LATER. Boom! We're in present-day Germany, and that's all we need to know about that. This arresting, sly opening got a huge laugh, and along with the scrapbooky lo-fi splashy style of the opening credits, primed us for a blast: a punkish, iconoclastic take on a most taboo subject that would be all the more explosive and insightful for coming in a German film (a comedy at that) from a German director. And for a short while that's what "Heil" is, before it careens headlong into its own contradictions, is undone by its writer/director's utter disdain for all of his characters and has to resort to simpleminded farce to claw its way out of the wreckage of its exhaustingly overcomplex plot.

As a confrontational, no-holds-barred assault on the lunatic fringe, designed to deliver a kinetic shock to the system, it would seem to be a stylistic 180 from Brϋggemann's last film, the self-consciously stately formalist experiment "Stations of the Cross" (review here). But look a little closer and the filmmaking attitude is very similar (though 'Stations' was co-directed by Brϋggemann's sister Anna, where "Heil" is not) -- in fact, "Heil" suffers from many of the same credibility issues, amplified here because there's no disciplined format to give the illusion of disciplined thinking. Again there's the sense of the film being constructed as a vast straw man argument: it is a satire about neo-Nazis that does not confront any of the real-world reasons why such a toxic ideology might be flourishing again (there's no examination of social marginalization or economic deprivation, for example). Instead it goes for the soft option of portraying all its neo-Nazi characters as idiots (though no more so than their equally dunderheaded opponents, and the dithery media resolutely plunging its head in the sand about the whole issue). To operate as a satire on neo-Nazism, shouldn't "Heil" occasionally make us laugh at the characters because they're neo-Nazis, not just because they're dumb and make dumb-people mistakes?

The ensemble comedy features many different strands representing (too) many different aspects and points of view, for all of which Brϋggemann is simply dripping with disdain. But in brief: a respected black intellectual with a well-known anti-fascist stance (Jerry Hoffmann) is kidnapped by two bickering Neo-Nazi thugs (Daniel Zillmann and Jacob Matschenz), during which process he is hit on the head which renders him amnesiac, and prone to parroting whatever is said to him straight back. This is recognized as a great opportunity by the thugs' boss, a far-right politician (the extremely Aryan-looking Benno Fuermann) who is involved in a turf war out in the right-wing hotbed of Prittwitz with another fascist politico, and nurses dreams of literally invading Poland, largely in order to win the favor of local committed neo-Nazi Doreen (Anna Brϋggemann).

Doreen is also the object of the affections of a bumbling police officer (Oliver Broeker), who has been chastised by the mayor for even using the word "Nazi" when filmed by an unscrupulous aspiring TV newsman, who embeds himself with the two thugs in an effort to get better footage. Meantime the pregnant girlfriend of the kidnappee tries to find him, only to see him on television babbling the right-wing nonsense being fed to him in a spectacular reversal of his previous politics which no one notices as odd, and which the liberals around him fall over themselves to try and account for. And that's not even getting into the dumb rival politician's logo problems, or the clueless anarcho-leftist group that turns up to disrupt right-wing gatherings or the frequent talk shows, lecture tours and other media events that weave in even more peripheral characters, so as to name-drop a few more issues: feminism, environmentalism, racism, intellectualism -- everything gets a quick set up only to be immediately knocked down by Brϋggemann's increasingly deranged yet decreasingly funny situations.

There are some barbs that land, just none of them on the real issues -- more on their representations. So the media satire sections, in fairness, do add a little more to our understanding of the way the issue is portrayed by Germans, for German audiences. And speaking of, German audiences will undoubtedly get a great much more out of this overloaded, in-jokey film -- many of the crammed-in details feel like arcane references to national and local politics that we don't quite know enough about, and if we just about understand the quick gag about "Hey Jude" (Jude means Jew in German), it can only be imagined how many similar gags are lost in translation.

Brϋggemann replaces the finger-wagging of his last film with a kind of manic finger-pointing ("...and these guys are stupid, and these guys are stupid, and look, they're dumb too, haha") but in the end who is left but the director himself wheeling round in ever faster circles trying to point and laugh at every single other person who dares, however right- or wrong-headedly to actually hold an opinion on these divisive and difficult issues? Furthermore, satire and farce make uneasy bedfellows, and Brϋggemann is no 'Dr Strangelove'-era Kubrick able to wrangle the two impulses into a coherent whole. Resolution, of a sort, only occurs after repeated, numbing returns to the hit-them-on-the-head-and-they-become-pliable-zombies thing, a contrivance so silly it undermines any claim Brϋggemann might have toward making a serious point.

But perhaps he'd make no such claim, and only desires to provoke and shit-stir without the real bravery of supplying an alternative to the ideas and ideals he mocks. In fact perhaps here he's neither wagging nor pointing his finger, but using an entirely different hand gesture: since one gets the feeling that Brϋggemann's contempt for German society is powerful, indiscriminate and all-encompassing, perhaps he won't be satisfied until he has gone around the country knocking on every citizen's door to give them each, individually, the finger. [C+]

Karlovy Vary Review: Andrew Renzi's 'Franny' Starring Richard Gere, Dakota Fanning & Theo James

Jessica Kiang — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 14:13:23 GMT

Even if they hadn't both screened so close together at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, there would be little chance of avoiding comparisons between the debut feature from Andrew Renzi, "Franny" and Oren Moverman's TIFF title "Time Out Of Mind" (our review here). Both films are singlemindedly focused on their central character, who appears in almost every scene, and both are key to the potential career renaissance narrative now circulating around Richard Gere. But where the Moverman film formally works toward a kind of deconstruction of the traditional showy star vehicle, "Franny" stumbles into all the traps and snares of the late-career vanity project, and with Renzi's inexperience showing in his reluctance to rein Gere in, we get a performance that is a lot bigger than the film it's in. The stretchmarks show.

The problems are rooted in the script, which was developed as a Sundance Labs project. Somewhere there is an aspiring-filmmaker handbook which states that since attracting a name star has become more or less vital to getting your independent first feature financed, writing a meaty, eye-catching central role that might appeal to an actor hopeful of reminding everyone of, or even redefining, his appeal as a solid bet. But while the strategy clearly worked here, it feels reverse-engineered, led by a character built from the outside in. So certain elements, many of which are supposed catnip to awarding bodies, feel placed there entirely to get noticed by the kind of star anxious to get onto that radar: a mild but not disfiguring disability, a drug addiction, a Tragic Incident in the recent past. Watching "Franny" it's hard to shake the feeling that the filmmakers just really wanted to get a film made--any film--and devised the one they felt had the best shot at that, rather than having any burning desire to tell this exact story.

A lack of urgency that amounts to narrative inertia, instead of being intrigued by or invested in the eponymous character's self-sustaining predicaments, the film quickly becomes merely a series of episodes and interludes, until it stops and everything sorts itself out via the unlikely medium of an apology to a baby. These contrived episodes all center on Franny (Gere) a magnetic, eccentric man of seemingly unlimited wealth and leisure--he lives in a luxury hotel apartment, owns a private hospital--you know, relatable stuff like that. He is popular and charismatic, beloved by even sullen, seriously ill, bedridden children. Indeed, it seems like there is no one he cannot make a connection with, usually via a grand gesture or a theatrical flourish. But his feelings of guilt for the car accident deaths of his two best friends Bobby and Mia (and indeed he should feel bad, as should Renzi, for securing two such welcome actors as Dylan Baker and Cheryl Hines and then killing them off in the prologue) have driven him to a fully-fledged, if high-functioning, liquid morphine addiction. Five years after the accident, which happened while he was in the back seat irrepressibly horseplaying with Bobby who was driving, he needs a cane to walk, and loses swathes of time in in a drug addled haze on his sofa. It appears he has little to live for.

READ MORE: Tribeca Exclusive: Tracks By Composers Danny Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans From Richard Gere's 'Franny'

But then a phone rings and Olivia (Dakota Fanning), or "Poodles" as he calls her, Bobby and Mia's daughter, announces she's moving back after a five-year absence, and beyond that, she is pregnant and married to Luke (Theo James). Franny takes this as an excuse to get off the sofa, get a haircut and start to indulge his world-class boundary issues by essentially buying his way into Olivia and Luke's life. He gets Luke a position at his hospital, buys Olivia's childhood home and gives it to them as a gift, pays off Luke's six-figure student loans. His redemption seems bound up in making Luke and Olivia into a new version of Bobby and Mia, with himself as just an integral part of their lives.

There is something interesting buried here--the idea of the tyranny of generosity, and how much we might consciously or unconsciously expect of the people to whom we give time and love. But with Dakota Fanning's usual air of far-away-ness often literally complemented by her being offscreen, or away from the action at home pregnantly sitting on a sofa, the majority of that work is done in the relationship between Franny and Theo James' handsome milquetoast Luke. And Luke's actual behavior in regards to Franny's insistent insinuation into their lives is so inconsistent with the peeveishness of his stated reactions that we can't help but despise him a little bit. "I'm absolutely not going to take ecstasy with you" the promising young doctor adamantly exclaims to Franny during a seemingly unmotivated night on the town (while his pregnant wife, and supposed apple of Franny's eye lies listlessly couchbound at home). One quick, cliche smash cut later and the two of them are in a taxi on a Molly high, leaning their heads out of the windows and howling like dogs. He lives in the house Franny bought them, works at the well-paid job Franny arranged and for all his protestations and pique, when it comes right down to it, Luke is putty in Franny's over-eager hands. So much so that we're almost surprised he has the spine to refuse to supply Franny with more morphine after his regular supply dries up. But that would be a Bad Thing to do, and where transgressions are indulged throughout, no one in this universe of Renzi's is actually bad. In fact most of their problems arise from all of them trying to be too nice to one another, leaving lots unsaid in the name of not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings.

Mostly, though, it's the Richard Gere show and within Renzi's scenario and sometimes even within single scenes, he is certainly given the latitude to swing from manic charming high to desperate angry low and back again. So the film's best scenes are with Franny when he's away from the wateriness of Olivia and Luke. Though even these moments can come marred by rather obvious soundtrack cuts, often related to Franny's mercurial internal weather system--"My Girl" when he's up, "The Dark End of the Street" when he's down. Elsewhere rising composers Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans' orchestral score feels unusually anonymous.

The essential problem with "Franny" is that, right down to its title, it promises a minute character study, but Franny, though embodied by a game Gere who in all fairness does visit places in his performance we have rarely seen him even stop by before, is less a person than a collection of quirks. And his wealth is problematic too for the purposes of us relating to him: he's "a philanthropist" but we get no sense of history from him, no real idea where this money came from, nor how it has influenced his development, only that it provides the vehicle for him to act erratically at high-class parties and buy large houses on a whim. This is "rich" not as a description of financial status, but as a character trait, and as such it needs more accounting for than we get here. As it is, with "Franny" we get a character study of a character almost entirely composed of screenwriting conveniences and actorly flourishes--some sort of mythological beast that it's hard to believe could ever actually exist, let alone relate to or feel for: Richard Gere as a troubled billionaire unicorn. [C]

Karlovy Vary: Mel Gibson Plays Mel Gibson in B&W Festival Trailer

Tom Christie — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 17:01:58 GMT

Among the many small pleasures of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival are the trailers featuring recent recipients of the main award, the Crystal Globe For Artistic Contribution to World Cinema — this may be the only award that is easier to say in Czech— including Helen Mirren, Jude Law, Harvey Keitel, Miloš Forman, John Malkovich, Andy Garcia, Jiří Menzel and Czech director Věra Chytilová. The trailers gently spoof the prizewinner interacting with the physical award itself, a solid glass globe held aloft by a golden female figure. The best of them has the now elderly Chytilová trying to put a smashed globe back together with scotch tape, then eyeing her little coffee-table Frankenstein while blowing her nose loudly. I’m not sure I get the specific joke, but it’s funny anyway.

This year’s trailer features last year’s winner, Mel Gibson, and plays on the actor’s reputation for, well, for being Mel Gibson. Directed by LA-based Czech filmmaker Martin Krejčí, who splits directing duties with fellow Czech commercial director Ivan Zachariáš, the trailer was shot in one day in Beverly Hills on a $40,000 budget, less than a third of the usual LA costs. (Gibson appeared without a fee, as did the others.) Krejčí managed this in part by calling on friends. “One thing I really like about this festival is that camaraderie and friendship still play a large role in it,” he says.

In an early meeting, Gibson mentioned how “Apocalypto” crewmembers were always joking about death by blowgun; the actor then asked if he could use a blowgun in the trailer. Apparently Krejčí missed the memo explaining that when Mel Gibson asks if he can use a blowgun in your film, you say no; maybe it was a language issue. The director then unwittingly came up with the idea of two unwitting burglars being caught in the act of stealing Gibson’s Crystal Globe. The actor, says the director from the bar of Karlovy Vary’s Grand Hotel Pupp, did not need to work too hard. “For the scene, you’re doing Mel Gibson, so it’s easy for him to do Mel Gibson.”

Again Krejčí seems to have missed the memo noting that when Mel Gibson wants to play Mel Gibson, you also say no. To be fair, this was Krejčí’s assignment, and he handled it well. In fact, he says, Gibson was extremely professional, coming in after a long night of working, and despite being really tired stayed for the other actors' scenes to help out. That’s rare, says Krejčí: “Maybe because he’s a also a director, he understands. He stayed the whole day with us. I really appreciated it.”

Karlovy Vary Review: Elegant, Mysterious, Paranoid 'Partisan' Starring Vincent Cassel

Jessica Kiang — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 14:01:00 GMT

Like a stone skimming across the surface of a lake of unknowable depth, a beautiful line of inference and connection exists across the enigmatic expanse of Ariel Kleiman's inexplicable yet involving "Partisan." The involuntary flexing of an aching hand cuts back to a man with a bandaged knuckle which then infers (perhaps erroneously) a connection to the bruises that blossom on a woman's face. She is in a maternity ward and suddenly we are at a birthday party and the child is now a boy; the man a paternal figure, if not his father. The boy is surrounded by children of both sexes, but, aside from that man, all the other grownups are women. In such quick, quiet moves we are dropped into the world of "Partisan," a film which expects something of the viewer--indeed it is unusual to encounter a story, let alone a feature debut, that withholds so much--but one that trusts its audience to find its way, led by an elegant breadcrumb trail of clues, to its heart of darkness.

READ MORE: Sundance Trailer: Vincent Cassel Gets Moody In Atmospheric 'Partisan'

Making good on a sneaking suspicion that many attentive cinemagoers have had for a long time--namely that Vincent Cassel's face is one that could perhaps inspire a doomsday cult--it is centered around two charismatic and perfectly modulated performances. One is from Cassel, whose quicksilver ability to oscillate in mood between charmingly sentimental and viciously choleric has maybe never been better mined than in his role as Grigori, the leader and lone male adult in this odd, cloistered community. (He so suits the part that it's hard to believe he was a last-minute choice after Oscar Isaac, who had been attached to star, dropped out). The other is from the boy, Alexander, played by newcomer Jeremy Chabriel, Grigori's surrogate son and most devoted disciple, who has only ever defied Grigori's authority thus far in simple, childish ways: climbing down drainpipes to play football with his friends; smuggling in trinkets from the world outside. Amid a well-shot film (by DP Germain McMicking) Chabriel's clear-eyed gaze, in which adoration of Grigori is gradually replaced by suspicion and finally blank hostility, is the film's most evocative image.

It gradually, elliptically becomes clear that Grigori's urban fortress, of padlocked hidden entrances and concrete passageways, is a kind of commune, in which strict rules are laid down by him supposedly for the good of all its members. The women, who live in apartments round the courtyard with their children, seem content to share Grigori's affections between them, and have formed a community and a support system of their own; it is hinted that most of them have come to escape domestic abuse elsewhere. For some time, a mood of foreboding exists despite the banality of the proceedings we observe--karaoke night as a reward for good behavior, a gardening class, a morning roughhousing session between Grigori and the jumble of kids who clearly all adore him. But that foreboding, enhanced by Daniel Lopatin's moody score of uneasy drones and by off-kilter moments like an arcane roleplay masquerading as a game of paintball, soon comes to a head. Alexander races into the bleak world outside on a motorbike with a friend, knocks on a door, asks for confirmation of a man's name and the promptly shoots him dead, like it ain't no thing.

READ MORE: Watch: Evocative New Trailer For Sundance Winner 'Partisan' Starring Vincent Cassel

The kids are being raised to be killers, and Grigori finances his whole operation by the contract murders that his indoctrinated children fulfill. But in this Fagin-archetype persona, his venality is tempered by a genuine, if horribly warped affection for the kids, and a sincere, almost fanatically messianic belief that he has rescued them from the terrors of the world outside. A symptom of extreme class rage, Grigori is the most dangerous and seductive type of criminal--an ideologue.

What precisely are the circumstances of the societal collapse outside, Kleiman never makes exactly clear, or even whether that collapse has really occurred or if it's simply Grigori's paranoiac exaggeration of the poverty-bred desperation and extreme economic hardship that is endemic right now in less developed parts of the world. So initially, the use of real-world locations (the exteriors were shot amid the abandoned-looking Eastern European tower block architecture of suburban Georgia) is disconcerting, as is the fact that everyone speaks in differently accented English--you spend time wondering where exactly, and when exactly, the film takes place. But that is a secret Kleiman keeps close to his chest, and soon it becomes clear that the film's strengths as a "Lord of the Flies"-style parable and a distinctly Oedipal tragedy become more apparent when unmoored from a real time and place.

If three is a trend, then we have an international arthouse trend on our hands, with powerfully shot, willfully enigmatic, meticulous examinations of the mechanics of paranoia and the survival instinct in the face of an undefined, enveloping darkness. Yes, its a pretty specific trend. But after "History of Fear" (review here) and "Parabellum," (review here) both of which were modestly well-received festival titles, "Partisan," might be its culmination so far--it is slow and it is ambiguous but it is supremely sure of itself, as it moves, with singleminded grace from chilly to all-out chilling. [B]

Guest Post: Making Films for and About Canadian Native Women -- And Competing at Karlovy Vary FF

Sonia Bonspille Boileau — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 19:00:00 GMT

Sonia Bonspille Boileau is the first female director of Canadian native origins (Mohawk) to have her debut feature premiere at a major international festival. "Le Dep" premieres this Saturday, July 4, as part of the Forum of Independents competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Made by an all-Native cast starring actors Eve Ringuette and Charles Buckell-Robertson (both Innu), "Le Dep" was produced by the Native-owned Nish Media, led by producer Jason Brennan.

Canada’s First Nation tribes have been in the spotlight recently, as government reports and media exposure reveal the difficult conditions under which many communities and families live.

"Le Dep" is not a political film, as the director explains below, but its close-up and personal drama is driven by many of these issues.

I recently had the opportunity, thanks to the aboriginal component of Telefilm Canada’s Microbudget Program, to write and direct my first feature film, "Le Dep." My main objective was to tell a drama that had both suspense and social value. And I wanted it to be driven by a woman -- an indigenous woman. That's not an easy task when your industry is male-driven and the society you live in (and therefore your audience) doesn’t seem to value indigenous women.

1181. That is the number of aboriginal women who have been murdered or gone missing in Canada over the past thirty years. Indigenous women go missing and are murdered at a much higher rate than other women in Canada. We account for one quarter of homicides and disappearances in this country, even though we only represent 3% of the general population.

What does this have to do with cinema? Nothing. And everything.

I’m 35 years old. If you ask me about the indigenous women I remember seeing on screen growing up, my answer would probably be limited to various versions of Sexy Pocahantas and that white lady who played an adopted Indian in "Dances with Wolves." As a teenager, I remember watching great documentaries about First Nation and Inuit women. But drama? Fiction? Hollywood films? Not so much. There are great Indigenous films -- don’t get me wrong -- like "Smoke Signals" in the late '90s and "Atanarjuat" in the early 2000s, just to name two. But male characters drove almost all the good aboriginal films.

Some would argue that the talent pool is thin. I disagree. It’s not the talent pool that's thin, but the opportunities to play anything other than stereotypes. Stereotypes that devalue our roles in society. Stereotypes that alter even the way we see ourselves. If we constantly see ourselves on screen as exotic temptresses, wise but vulnerable elders or tough drunks and/or junkies, how are we supposed to change the way society sees us? We become what we consume. If our pop culture, art and media teach us to see aboriginal women as only one of three things, that is what consumers are sadly going to believe.

There are many talented indigenous actresses, and several who have had success and recognition. But in mainstream cinema, aboriginal female roles have been limited to simplistic characterizations, one-dimensional and romanticized. They lack context, emotional range and depth. Heck, television tries harder than film to bring solid indigenous female characters to mainstream audiences ("North of 60," "Blackstone," "Mohawk Girls").

So what does cinema have to do with missing and murdered indigenous women? It all boils down to how women are portrayed and how the collective we identifies with what we see on screen. I’m not saying cinema kills aboriginal women. But it does help feed a larger social problem, which is the relationship between Canada and First Nations women. We need to see ourselves on screen in a powerful and resonant ways, not just in a stereotypical way.

I believe that by creating strong female roles, we’re working towards breaking the stereotypes. We are now slowly -- with films like "Rhymes for Young Ghouls," for example -- starting to see multi-dimensional characters and powerful lead roles for female indigenous actors.

"Le Dep" is a female-driven drama. Even with a miniscule budget and minimal input from funders, I often had to reiterate that my main character was her and not him while I was writing and asking for feedback from different people. Even I struggled with not letting my protagonist fall into the “victim” category. Yes, in the storyline, Lydia is a “victim” of a crime, but I wanted her to take control of it. I had to constantly reaffirm Lydia’s role as the lead character. On set, the actors appreciated that. They also told me that as First Nation actors, they are often limited as to what type of roles they can play, even if they are extremely talented actors. They are often typecast and, even worse, asked to speak with an “Indian” accent (whatever that is!) at auditions with a slow and stoic voice. They are rarely asked to give emotional performances.

But we are not folklore. We are talented. Trust us.

Five years ago, this film would not have been made, because five years ago, there was no such thing as an aboriginal component to the micro-budget program at Telefilm Canada. But things move fast when you are in an era of reconciliation. So I am hopeful. There are so many talented female actors, but also filmmakers who put these talented women at the forefront of their projects. Indigenous women are talented, multilayered, able, powerful. They kick ass. Period.

Karlovy Vary: A Female First Nation Canadian Makes Her Very Personal Film Debut (Exclusive)

Ryan Lattanzio — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 17:45:32 GMT

Director Sonia Bonspille Boileau digs into her First Nation roots for her new film "Le Dep," which heads to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czech Republic this weekend. An award-winning documentary filmmaker, Boileau's feature debut offers timely reflection on aboriginal struggle in Canada, where natives struggle to wrest their autonomy.

For this psychological drama set in a small First Nations community in rural Quebec, Boileau cast relatively unknown actors and real Innu tribe members Eve Ringuette and Charles Buckell to tell the story of a young native woman (Ringuette) who recognizes her attacker when she's robbed at gunpoint in her father's convenience store. The encounter unearths secrets buried in her family.

READ MORE: Karlovy Vary Film Fest Lineup Lures Adventurous Cinephiles, Young Directors

Produced by Nish Media, whose Jason Brennan is also native, "Le Dep" is the inaugural First Nation production to come out of Telefilm Canada's Micro-Budget program, designed to target and support emerging Canadian film voices.

"Le Dep" screens July 4 in Karlovy Vary's Forum of Independents competition.

Watch: Tensions Rise in Canadian Drama 'The Sound of the Trees'

Kaeli Van Cott — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 22:03:20 GMT

READ MORE: Karlovy Vary Film Fest Lineup Lures Adventurous Cinephiles, Young Directors

François Péloquin takes on the challenges of Canadian family life in his latest work, "The Sound of the Trees."

The drama stars Roy Dupuis and Antonie L’Écuyer as a family in the Quebec countryside. Seventeen-year-old Jérémie wants to be a normal teenager -- drive around in his car, listen to hip hop and hang out with his friends. His father Régis, the owner of a sawmill, is upset by his son's attitude and wants him to shift his focus to becoming a lumberjack. When Jérémie's older brother leaves the two of them alone together, their relationship becomes even more strained.

The film will have its world premiere at the 2015 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on July 6. Check out the trailer above.

READ MORE: Watch: Exclusive First Look at Gorgeous Black and White 'Chorus' Trailer

Richard Gere's Good Year, From 'Time Out of Mind' to Karlovy Vary

Ryan Lattanzio — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 16:23:59 GMT

From Toronto to New York and Rome last Fall, critics and audiences embraced Oren Moverman's cinema verite drama "Time Out of Mind," starring an Oscar-worthy Richard Gere as an alcoholic drifter aging and surviving on the streets of New York.

Now, the 50th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will honor the distinguished American actor with its highest award, the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema. (Last year, it went to Mel Gibson.)

READ MORE: Karlovy Vary Film Fest's 50th Anniversary Program Is a Love Letter to Cinephiles

Karlovy Vary will showcase the versatile actor with screenings of both "Time Out of Mind," which also nabbed Gere a San Francisco Film Fest tribute this year, and Andrew Renzi's drama "Franny" about a philanthropist entangled in the lives of a young married couple in an attempt to pay for past traumas. Samuel Goldwyn Films could push this tough-to-classify character study into the awards corridor as well.

KVFF also recognizes Gere's philanthropic stances, from a personal friendship with the Dalai Lama to his defense of human rights and independence in Tibet, and support of numerous charities and donor organizations.

READ MORE: Watch: New 'Time Out of Mind' Trailer, Writer-Director Oren Moverman Q & A

"Time Out of Mind" will open this 50th edition of Eastern Europe's flagship film festival on July 3. Lesley Hedlund's "Sleeping with Other People" closes the fest on July 11.