Screw
the big-budget blockbusters, you say? (Don't listen to them, Iron Man!) Well then, check out the latest indie films, and
which ones you should Netflix/stand in line for, should they ever hit the
wide-release screens. Screengrab reports from Tribeca with the latest and greatest:
Baghead,
which “opens with a fairly vicious parody of a half-assed “mumblecore’-style
independent film that looks as if the print had been delivered to the
projection room in a cinnamon roll box with the icing still stuck to the
insides.” (Mmm, cinnamon rolls…)
From
Within, “a good, nasty little horror picture about a mysterious rash of
apparent suicides in a small town setting.”
Bill Plympton’s latest
animated offering, Idiots
& Angels.
Playing,
“Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho's documentary that sounds like a dumb
stunt but plays as a fascinating study in the nature of acting and
storytelling.”
Theater
of War, of which the “prime attraction is supposed to be the chance to see
the Public Theater production coming together and to see a glimpse of the
‘process’ of its star, Meryl Streep.”
My
Winnipeg, in which director Guy Maddin, “eager to get at the roots of his
unresolved childhood issues, decides to move back in with Mom and use some of the
film budget to hire actors and a dog to ‘play’ his siblings and his ‘long,
long, long-dead Chihuahua.’”
Profit
Motive and the Whispering Wind, “a thrilling, one-of-a-kind picture, [that]
by all rights ought to be the election-year movie of 2008. What's frustrating
about it is simply the possibility that it may not be widely seen.”
The
Zen of Bobby V, which “stars Bobby Valentine, a former player and manager
in major league baseball” as well as “professional baseball's meaning to the
Japanese fans and the evolution of the game in that country, where it's in
danger of having already evolved as far as it's going to.”
Elite
Squad, “the latest post-City of God potboiler that depicts Rio de Janeiro as being just like Miami Vice except with
fewer washed-up rock stars.”
Sita
Sings the Blues, a film that is “funny and eye-popping and never bogs down.
It might also double as a great introduction for kids to the Eastern canon,
assuming you don't mind your kids asking you to explain the joke about the
mile-high club.”
Faubourg
Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, filmed five years before
Hurricane Katrina, is ”partly a history of Treme and partly a tribute to its
enduring charm and the people who lived there, and on both those levels, it's a
fine piece of work. But it's most memorable as a requiem, one made all the more
affecting because the filmmakers shot most of it without having any way of
knowing that they were recording a community that was on the verge of being
hammered out of existence.”
The
Auteur, which covers one week in the life of “the most artistically
creative filmmaker working in hardcore pornography.”
Lioness,
an “eye-opening documentary [which] deals with one of the least-covered aspects
of the Iraq war: the role of American women in combat.”
Trucker,
“a throwback, the kind of low-budget, low-impact drama about grubby, ordinary
people that used to be as plentiful at film festivals as fleas on a sheepdog in
summertime.”
David Mamet’s latest, Redbelt.
…and many, many more! Find
’em all at The
Screengrab. Absolutely no waiting in line, whatsoever.
