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2008 | 1997

7 articles from 2008

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Stages

6 November 2008 1:01 PM, PST | From avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news

Mijke de Jong's Stages declares its allegiance to the psychodramas of John Cassavetes and Woody Allen in its first minute, as rumbly jazz music plays over a pitch-black screen. For the next hour-plus, de Jong alternates between closely shot, frequently volatile conversations between Elsie de Brauw and Marcel Musters—two recent divorcés still sorting through their old business—and quiet scenes of the couple's teenage son Stijn Koomen reacting to his parents' breakup by behaving erratically. Koomen breaks into other people's apartments and examines their refrigerators, their closets, and their bathrooms, imagining what it would be like to be someone else. Meanwhile, de Brauw and Musters meet in restaurants to talk about Koomen, and to use their competing opinions on how to handle the situation as a way to keep picking at and flirting with each other. Stages is short for a feature film, and because it's not even slightly inscrutable,

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Noel Murray

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Chris Eska’s August Evening: The Little Indie That Could

5 September 2008 3:01 AM, PDT | From MovieMaker.com | See recent Movie Maker news

A multi-generational tale about an undocumented farm worker and his widowed daughter-in-law could be the unexpected box office hit of the Fall. Or, at least, that's what writer-director Chris Eska is hoping for when his first feature film, August Evening begins rolling out in theaters September 5. Winner of the 2008 Spirit Awards’ John Cassavetes Award and the Best Film Awards at the Los Angeles and Woodstock Film Festivals, August Evening has already acquired buzz on the festival circuit. Now, it awaits a larger national audience.

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Opening This Week: Nic Cage's new hairpiece, Billy Elliot's dark side

1 September 2008 9:23 AM, PDT | From ifc.com | See recent IFC news

By Neil Pedley

This week's trip to the multiplex offers a jaunt around the globe where, amongst other things, there's a case of mistaken ethnicity in Boston, Nic Cage gets another wig fitted in Thailand, there's whimsy and surrealism in Scotland and Matthew McConaughey is right at home in Malibu, where he might finally have found something he does well, maybe.

"August Evening"

Strained emotional bonds and the transitory nature of the life of an illegal immigrant provide the backdrop for Chris Eska's quietly affecting family drama that stars Pedro Castaneda as an aging farmhand who loses his job at a chicken farm in a sleepy Texas town, forcing he and his devoted daughter-in-law (Veronica Loren) to relocate to San Antonio to stay with his older children and the grandchildren he never knew he had. As Alison Willmore pointed out in last week's Lunchbox, Castaneda is a first-time actor

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Neil Pedley

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Unrising Son Is A Home Run

21 August 2008 9:42 PM, PDT | From NYPost.com | See recent New York Post news

It's time to stop calling Azazel Jacobs a "promising" filmmaker. With "Momma's Man," Jacobs achieves the promise.

The deeply affecting "Momma's Man" goes far inside John Cassavetes territory. Mikey (Matt Boren) visits his doting parents during a business trip to New York, leaving his wife and child back in California.

Comes time to go home, he encounters two problems. His airline, All American Sky, bumps him (nothing surprising there). Worse, some strange mental paralysis keeps him from leaving his parents' home, a cluttered Chambers Street loft.

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By V.A. MUSETTO

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Felon Fest: Television on DVD

18 July 2008 9:24 AM, PDT | From Spout.com | See recent Spout news

Above: The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: Murder Case starring John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands Television was always for suckers, but there was a time when we were all suckers, happily. Hef remembers. He was born in 1953, though his wear and tear and rock quarry voice initially made me guess 1945. His roommate and best buddy, Kid, is the same age but looks ten years younger. He remembers when TV was good and true, too. They are both living in the quiet afterlife that follows (if one survives) decades of dope and jail time. Plenty of time to conjure up the good-an ...

Steven Boone

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"Bamako," "The Films of Morris Engel"

6 May 2008 4:45 AM, PDT | From ifc.com | See recent IFC news

By Michael Atkinson

Malian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako may have made the one African film everybody needs to see . at least for its disarming fugue of frank political awareness and state-of-the-quotidian African life. In most other ways, though, "Bamako" (2006) is a challenge to orthodoxy, because it's not driven by its narrative, and hardly even provides an establishing context for itself. Before we know it, we're in a sun-dappled Mali courtyard (Sissako's family home, as it turns out), in which a kind of tribunal is going on, complete with black-robed jurists, waiting witnesses, anxious journalists and stacks of documentation. This is, we slowly realize, a fantasy trial in which the African people have taken civil proceedings against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and American-led global capitalism in general, for the crime of exploiting and loan-sharking the continent and its peoples. The testimony is not from actors, but from real African citizens,

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Michael Atkinson

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Platinum Dunes to be Meticulous with 'Baby' Remake

11 March 2008 10:54 PM, PDT | From bloody-disgusting.com | See recent Bloody-Disgusting.com news

Thr confirmed today news that Platinum Dunes and Paramount Pictures are inking a deal to remake Rosemary's Baby, which was a best-selling novel by playwright-author Ira Levin that was adapted in 1968 into a much-loved Paramount movie directed by Roman Polanski that starred Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes and Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar for her role. What was relevant in the article was that "Platinum Dunes plans to be meticulous with the remake, knowing it has been entrusted with a jewel from the Paramount library." The story follows a young couple who move into a gothic New York apartment, where they are befriended by their elderly neighbors. After the woman becomes mysteriously pregnant, she discovers that the neighbors actually are part of a coven of witches and that her husband has allowed her to be impregnated by the devil in exchange for a successful career.

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2008 | 1997

7 articles from 2008

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