Interview: Josh Koury on "We Are Wizards"
Thursday, November 20, 2008 | 9:08 AM
By Aaron Hillis
Even if you're the rare bird who has never heard of a Muggle, Hogwarts or Lord Voldemort, you won't feel left out while watching "We Are Wizards," a heartfelt and hugely entertaining doc about the Harry Potter fan phenomenon. Directed by Josh Koury (of 2002's "Standing By Yourself"), the film isn't just about groupies but what the Potter-verse has inspired among a few chosen subjects, including wizard rock bands like Harry and the Potters, Draco and the Malfoys, and the pint-sized Hungarian Horntails. Self-made activist Heather Lawver chronicles her successful fight against Warner Bros. over their persecution of Potter fan sites, and eccentric artist Brad Neely explains his "Wizard People, Dear Reader," a hilarious audio commentary to be played in conjunction with the first "Harry Potter" film. Koury, who also teaches on the film faculty at NYC's Pratt Institute, spoke with me between classes about his own Potter fandom, the ambiguities of copyright infringement and his decision to abandon the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival.
On DVD: The Minoru Kawasaki Collection, "The General"
Tuesday, November 18, 2008 | 9:24 AM
I have to be honest: Japanese pop culture terrifies me. While American pop culture, with its adolescence fetish, prideful ignorance, superhero love and submergent video game fantasias, can merely make me queasy, what I see flowing out of Japan triggers a flight response: the cute cult, the schoolgirl obsession, the giant-penis-monster animated porn, the apocalyptic visions, the oceans of twisted-fairy-tale manga, the deification of inexplicable toys, the combinations of all of the above, and so on. It's as if, by Western junk-culture standards in the last three or so decades, Japan is going joyfully, helplessly insane.
IFC News Podcast #103: Alison at the Wedding/Matt Getting Married
Monday, November 17, 2008 | 10:14 AM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
Podcaster, IFC News on-air host and general man about town Matt Singer is getting hitched, and in honor of his impending nuptials, this week's podcast takes a look at significant film wedding scenes, two of our favorite wedding movie clichés, and the heated discussions that have sprung from this year's major marital-themed picture, Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married."
Download now (MP3: 32:26 minutes, 29.7 MB)
[Photo: "Rachel Getting Married," Sony Pictures Classics, 2008]
Opening This Week: Indie superheroes, teen vampires and Russian shysters
Monday, November 17, 2008 | 9:49 AM
By Neil Pedley
Superpowers, real or imagined, along with a bevy of culture clash dominate this week's offerings. Prince Caspian tries to score big in London, renowned cinematographer Ellen Kuras tells of a family who fled Laos, and a group of vampires run wild in Northern Washington, during the day - the day!
"The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)"
Co-director Thavisouk Phrasavath teams up with veteran cinematographer Ellen Kuras to bring his heart-wrenching story to the screen, a film about courage and survival that's been 23 years in the making. Recounting the bitter memories of the U.S withdrawal from Laos that left the communists in power and his family in tatters, Phrasavath describes how he swam to a Thai refugee camp after his father, a CIA operative, was branded an enemy of the state, and subsequently moved to a Brooklyn slum with his ailing mother and nine siblings in tow. In English and Lao with subtitles.
Opens in New York.
List: Fan Faction - Five Documentaries About Nerd Culture
Thursday, November 13, 2008 | 5:00 AM
By Matt Singer
In honor of the new documentary "We Are Wizards," about people who take Harry Potter way beyond simply reading the books or watching the movies, we take a look this week at obsessive fan culture and the documentaries that chronicle their fandom. Fanaticism in these films takes on many different forms. Some fans only want to take what their idols give them; others want to give back by creating derivative works of their own, like fan fiction or fan songs. Some become unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Some -- like a dentist who turned his office into a "Star Trek" tchotchke paradise called "Starfleet Dental" -- willfully reject the distinction altogether. Some love to become lost in escapism; others obsess about it until they are trapped by it. On this list, we'll look at what makes these fans tick and find the exact point when their inevitable weirdness begins to tick us off.
Trekkies (1997)
Directed by Roger Nygard
When George Takei (a.k.a. Lt. Sulu) attended his first "Star Trek" convention in the early '70s, he had only one thought as he looked around and saw people crammed into every available inch of the hotel ballroom, some of whom had traveled thousands of miles: "These people are foolish!" A reasonable reaction, though fandom's most famous nerds don't endure much additional skepticism in Roger Nygard's exceedingly affectionate documentary. Between commentary from Takei and a raft of other "Star Trek" creators, Nygard and host/producer Denise Crosby (a "Star Trek: The Next Generation" alum herself) introduce us to all sorts of nutty Trekkies (or is that "Trekkers?" -- nobody seems entirely sure). One of them is 14-year-old Gabriel Köerner who's designing the special effects for his very own "Star Trek" film. Years later, Köerner actually became a digital effects artist who worked on the finale of "Enterprise," though he now describes the person he was during that period of his life as "snide, condescending...and so damned whiny."
We also meet Barbara Adams, who wore her "Star Trek" uniform when she served as an alternate juror on a trial in Arkansas related to the Whitewater investigation in 1996. Explaining her unusual decision, Adams, who runs a fan club called "The Federation Alliance," explains, "I don't want my officers ever to feel ashamed to wear their uniform," and compares wearing her "Trek" costume to court to a football player wearing his jersey during the offseason. Let's take her at her word and assume that football players do this (even though they don't). Adams' comparison illustrates the belief held by many of the Trekkies that they are more than simply viewers of "Star Trek." In their eyes, they are full-fledged participants, and the universe displayed on the show is more than a piece of speculative science fiction, but rather a tangible and achievable future.
Interview: Arnaud Desplechin on "A Christmas Tale"
Tuesday, November 11, 2008 | 9:47 AM
By Aaron Hillis
November may be too early to call it, but as of now, this writer's favorite film of the year has more in common with "The Family Stone" or "Home for the Holidays" than most European filmmakers' oeuvres -- but it certainly ain't a product of Hollywood. Written and directed by the tremendously gifted, expectation-defying auteur Arnaud Desplechin ("Kings and Queen," "My Sex Life... Or How I Got Into an Argument"), "A Christmas Tale" doesn't just freshen up the holiday reunion melodrama. Rather, it reinvents the overplayed genre into a novelistic epic; a banquet of exhilarating sights and naked emotions; a rich ensemble piece so joyous and heartbreaking that any lucid description is bound to get a bit purple. Set in a provincial French town, the film introduces the fractious Vuillard family (including some of the country's finest actors: Mathieu Amalric, Chiara Mastroianni, Melvil Poupaud and Emmanuelle Devos) as they reunite after several years, then learn that matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve) will die without a bone marrow transplant. Bickering and boozing under the same roof, tensions build, secrets are unveiled and resentments both implode and explode, but Desplechin's idiosyncratic filmmaking dazzles in such dense detail that a single viewing can't possibly reveal all the film's treasures. (See what I mean? Purple.) With a little help from a translator, the quite amiable Desplechin and I chatted last month about the film's distinctly American genre, why Michael Mann fascinates him and Angela Bassett's derrière.
On DVD: The Films of Budd Boetticher, "Camp de Thiaroye"
Tuesday, November 11, 2008 | 9:06 AM
The last of the red hot Golden Age Hollywood genre buckaroos, Budd Boetticher represented a long-vanished prototype: the man's man studio director who, before turning gruffly to making pictures, had spent years being a boxer or a stevedore or a soldier or what have you. Today, filmmakers pay their dues by earning six figures shooting shampoo commercials; then, a man who made westerns or war movies or gangster films was a man who had lived in the world and returned with a heartful of brutal and hopeful business you can't learn by watching other movies. In a sense, Boetticher outdid the competition by becoming a professional Mexican matador right out of college -- a scenario difficult to beat for hard-won iron-man chops in Tinseltown. Of course his biography influences how his best films -- the westerns he made between 1956 and 1960 -- have been perceived and why they've been canonized, as they have been now in the new, lovely tombstone of a DVD box set from Sony. Such are the pratfalls of auteurism.
IFC News Podcast #102: Alison and Matt Bond
Monday, November 10, 2008 | 1:22 PM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
Does this Bond need saving? On this week's IFC News podcast, we look at the reinvention of the James Bond character in franchise reboot "Casino Royale" and the new "Quantum of Solace," including what's worked, what hasn't, the shadow of the Bourne films and whether in updating the franchise and the character the new film has done away with too many of the things that made Bond Bond.
Download now (MP3: 33:52 minutes, 31 MB)
[Photo: "Quantum of Solace," MGM/Columbia, 2008]
Opening This Week: Mumbai fairytales, Harry Potter fandom and Bond, James Bond
Monday, November 10, 2008 | 9:19 AM
By Neil Pedley
There is plenty of (semi)lighthearted fare at the art house this week with Danny Boyle tracking a "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" whiz kid in Mumbai, Arnaud Desplechin looking at a family reunion in France and a Bollywood musical playing out in Miami, followed by films that are distinctively more "hardcore," whether that refers to Harry Potter fans or elderly curmudgeons. Oh, and there's also some globetrotting carnage with our man Craig -- Daniel Craig.
"B.O.H.I.C.A."
If this debut effort from "Melvin Goes To Dinner" producer turned writer/director D.J. Paul is to be believed, the best way to support our brave boys serving overseas is to send them some sunscreen and a truckload of Sudoku books. Marooned in the middle of the Afghan desert guarding a radio tower, four army reservists (Adam Rodriguez, Nicholas Gonzalez, Kevin Weisman, Brendan Sexton III) do battle with the boredom and the baking heat until a crate of beer is mistakenly air-dropped onto their position. An impromptu kegger commences, but the harsh reality of war crashes the party.
Opens in Los Angeles.
List: Pass the Kool-Aid - Five Flicks That Aspired To Cult Status
Thursday, November 6, 2008 | 1:05 AM
By Matt Singer
The trailer for this week's "Repo! The Genetic Opera" announces itself, via a quote from Fearnet editor Joseph McCabe, as "an instant cult classic!" With that idea in mind, distributor Lionsgate is forgoing the industry standard 3,000-screen release and taking "Repo!" on tour as a roadshow ("It's not just a film," the official website boasts, "it's an event!"). Some cultists have already bought in; at "Repo!"'s U.S. premiere at September's Fantastic Fest, at least a dozen people showed up dressed as characters to the movie, even though they hadn't even seen it yet. Terrance Zdunich, one of the stars and co-writers of the film said, "It's already becoming a "Rocky Horror" experience and we hope it continues in that vein."
The phrase "instant cult classic," though, is something of an oxymoron. By definition, a cult film has to first be passed over by the mainstream before a smaller band of passionate fans can obsess over it. Before "Eraserhead" could become a cult film, it had to sustain a disastrous premiere (which as chronicled in J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum's book "Midnight Movies," resulted in a Variety review that called the film "nonsensical" and "sickening"). Eventually it was seen -- and then nurtured -- by independent distributor Ben Barenholtz, who is quoted in "Midnight Movies" saying, "Some people think you can create a cult film, which is nonsense."
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