The Screengrab : gael garcia bernal

Screengrab Review: "Rudo y Cursi"

Nick Schager — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

A flagrantly contrived piece of Hollywood-style hokum masquerading as serious drama, Rudo y Cursi gets the producing careers of the “three amigos” – Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñarritu and Guillermo del Toro, working under the banner “Cha Cha Cha” – off to a very inauspicious start. Written and directed by Cuarón’s younger brother Carlos, who co-wrote Y Tu Mamá También and who reunites that hit’s two headliners, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, for his behind-the-camera debut, the film attempts to mask its story’s creakiness with local flavor, exhibiting a comfortable, intimate familiarity with both its rural Mexico and Mexico City settings. Anyone who’s seen a cautionary tale about the dangers of fame and fortune, however, will likely groan their way through this saga about two banana-harvesting brothers, Luna’s hard-headed Beto, nicknamed “Rudo” (i.e. “tough), and Bernal’s wannabe singer Tato, aka “Cursi ” (i.e. “corny”), who both discover the pleasures and perils of having their superstardom dreams come true after they fortuitously meet, and then are signed to athletic contracts by, soccer agent Batuta (Guillermo Francella).

Cuarón’s relaxed, unhurried direction creates a convivial atmosphere, even if his conspicuous avoidance of showing actual game footage (instead, only depicting on-field incidents during stoppages in play) seems curious given the material’s passionate interest in the sport. And boy oh boy, is it ever interested, as evidenced by the clog-your-ears-incessant narration by Batuta, which is so rife with soccer metaphors (sample: “Loving a woman and a ball is the same”) that one comes to think Cuarón must be subtly mocking the entire notion of narration. Alas, he’s not, since when Batuta isn’t comparing his beloved pastime to life, he’s simply offering up overcooked stand-alone platitudes (“Pity, nowadays games are mistaken for wars and wars for games”) in an effort to spell out every single obvious point Rudo y Cursi has already, or is about to, make. Batuto’s verbal diarrhea epitomizes tell-don’t-show storytelling and Cuarón never lets up, piling on endless third-person blather in an apparent effort to give his storybook parable some profundity. Instead, however, it merely serves as insult to injury, rubbing in our faces the fact that, for all its attention to crafting a realistic sense of time and place, the film is the type of formulaic careful-what-you-wish-for jibber-jabber that domestic cinema has been churning out, to generally awful results, for decades.

Bernal and Luna’s collaborative history lends a modicum of weight to their depiction of squabbling, yet devoted, brothers. Still, although they attempt to downplay their characters’ schematic relationship, Cuarón’s script puts them through such hackneyed paces that any glimmers of authenticity found in their performances are overwhelmed by the narrative’s excessively melodramatic developments. Cursi becomes a soccer superstar but squanders his potential by pursuing a misguided music career and shacking up with a stunning gold-digger TV celeb. Rudo chases a soccer-goalie record but puts his life in jeopardy by gambling himself into deep debt. The two, having first embarked on their pro athlete paths thanks to a single penalty kick in which Rudo’s instructions to Cursi were misinterpreted, eventually wend their way to another monumental penalty kick at film’s conclusion, their personal and professional futures once again hinging on their ability to effectively communicate. They’re plot developments straight out of an Afterschool Special, yet treated by Cuarón with an undeserved level of self-satisfied import, the director oblivious to the fact that just as his protagonists don’t quite know “right” from “left,” his film doesn’t know novelty from banal clichés.

Screengrab Review: "The Limits of Control"

Nick Schager — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Having already combined samurai and noir cinema in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jim Jarmusch begins his latest, The Limits of Control, with none-too-subtle nods to Jean-Pierre Melville’s crime-saga masterpiece Le Samouraï. Shot with gliding, hallucinatory grace by Christopher Doyle, Jarmusch’s film fixates on the preternaturally stoic countenance of a nameless loner (Isaach De Bankolé) as he lies silently in bed (the day turning to night as his eyes remain open), practices his morning Tai Chi, gets a business assignment from two unidentified men in an airport terminal, and travels to Spain, where he follows a schedule of sitting at an outdoor café each day and ordering two espressos. The ritual is the thing for this mysterious agent, whose comportment suggests a criminal vocation but whose motivations remain doggedly opaque, obscurity which Jarmusch, working from his own script (which begins with a Rimbaud quote), amplifies by lacing his set-up with import-heavy declarations like “Everything is subjective” and “Reality is arbitrary.” The mood is Point Blank by way of Jarmusch’s own Dead Man, the action quickly taking on the guise of a dreamscape in which every action, every gesture, every utterance seems a telling, emblem-laced clue.

What begins as an intriguingly symbolic gangster-saga-turned-spiritual head-trip, however, quickly turns into a slab of inert pretentiousness. Jarmusch has always had a tremendous gift for blending genres and moods, for mixing off-the-cuff cool with piercing action and heady profundity. But with The Limits of Control, he almost completely loses the thread – or, rather, clings too firmly to his story’s lifeless atmosphere, refusing for an instant to modulate his one-note tone. With a torpor that’s supposed to imply weightiness, Jarmusch’s film follows De Bankolé’s protagonist from one Spanish locale to another, where he meets a kooky contact – Tilda Swinton in a blonde wig and tan cowboy outfit; John Hurt as a scruffy weirdo; Gael García Bernal’s anonymous nobody – and exchanges boxer-decorated matchbooks that conceal ciphered instructions about his next destination, as well as sleeps with (but does not bed) a nude beauty (Paz de la Huerta). Each pit stop is typified by recurring coded dialogue (“You don’t speak Spanish, do you?”) and bits of ruminative jibber-jabber (about old movies, or about the molecular structure of wood), all delivered with an expressionless solemnity that strives to posit the proceedings as a cerebral trip down the psychological rabbit hole, yet elicits mostly exasperated eye-rolling.

There’s little doubt that Jarmusch intends his saga to represent something profound. Unlike the aforementioned Point Blank or Le Samouraï, however, he neither makes his encompassing point remotely clear, nor attempts to couch his thematic arguments via an engaging, exciting genre vehicle. The Limits of Control plods along with a self-seriousness that borders on parody, far too convinced of its own grave philosophical significance to offer anything approaching a thrill or an alleviating moment of levity, much less a sly wink that would reposition the film as a self-referential riff on affected crime cinema. Do the overhead shots of De Bankolé’s two espressos speak to life’s symmetry? Or are they meant to evoke eyes, which in turn are the “windows to the soul”? And what of the fact that De Bankolé’s ultimate target is a businessman (Bill Murray) ensconced in a soundproof hillside office bunker who – signifier alert! – rests his toupee on top of a skull? Is he a Dick Cheney stand-in? Jarmusch’s oblique story provides no tantalizing hints, a situation that will surely lead some to tenaciously parse the underlying meaning of the director’s self-important rumination, but for most others, will simply test the limits of their patience.

Trailer Review: Rudo y Cursi

Paul Clark — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Having collaborated on several films with his brother Carlos, the talented Alfonso Cuaron has returned the favor by producing (with his fellow filmmakers Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu) Carlos’ debut feature. In fact, Rudo y Cursi represents something of a reunion, as the brothers Cuaron have once again cast their Y Tu Mama Tambien leading men, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, as the title characters in this film. While Rudo y Cursi looks decidedly lighter than Y Tu Mama, the easy chemistry the actors had in that movie is just as apparent here, enough to make them perfectly convincing as brothers, especially when they’re fighting. And while I’m not quite sure about the more fanciful touches in the trailer, I’m hoping some of Alfonso’s prodigious filmmaking skills will rub off on his brother. And if nothing else, this should tide me over until Alfonso decides to make a new film.

Trailer Review: The Limits of Control

Paul Clark — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

As a longtime fan of the films of Jim Jarmusch, I sometimes find it difficult to pin down what exactly it is that draws me to his work. Perhaps it has something to do with the melting-pot nature of his stories, which throw together seemingly incompatible elements as a way of testing whether they’ll fit. How else to explain the fusion of samurai lore and sub-GoodFellas mafia movie that is Ghost Dog, or the William Blake-infused meta-Western Dead Man? With his latest, The Limits of Control, Jarmusch appears to be returning to Ghost Dog territory, with the story of a lone-gunman type (Jarmusch regular Isaach de Bankolé) who finds himself embroiled in… well, some kind of intrigue. Rather than going into much detail on the plot, this trailer seems primarily to work as a way of conveying a spiritual, fatalistic vibe and showing off the super-cool supporting cast (Tilda Swinton, Gael Garcia Bernal, John Hurt, Bill Murray, not to mention unnamed favorites like Hiam Abbass and Alex Descas). Beyond that, I have no idea what to expect from The Limits of Control- I just know that I can’t wait to see more.

Morning Deal Report: Scorsese and Day-Lewis Reunite

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:20:00 GMT

Blart has fallen. The Liam Neeson thriller Taken topped the box office with $24.6 million, knocking everyone’s favorite mall cop to the runner-up spot with $14 million. The Uninvited debuted in third place with $10.5 million, with Hotel for Dogs and Gran Torino rounding out the top five.

Martin Scorsese is lining up his third collaboration with Daniel Day-Lewis. Based on a novel by Shusaku Endo, Silence “is set in the 17th century as two Jesuit priests face violence and persecution when they travel to Japan to locate their mentor and to spread the gospel of Christianity,” Variety reports. Benicio Del Toro and Gael Garcia Bernal are also in negotiations to co-star.

Mickey Rouke, who seems determined never to be out of work again, is in talks to star in the gangster movie Broken Horses for Indian writer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra. “Co-produced by Mumbai-based Reliance Big Pictures, Horses, which plans to shoot in New Mexico and New York, is part of a multipicture deal between Chopra and the Indian studio,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Related:
Scorsese and De Niro Heard You Paint Houses
Mickey Rourke's Whiplash

J. Hoberman on "Che" in VQR

Phil Nugent — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

The excellent new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, which is devoted to the fifitieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution, includes a J. Hoberman essay on Steven Soderbergh's epic biopic Che, starring Benecio Del Toro as Ernesto Guevara. "Within eighteen months of his death, this instant immortal had been embalmed—in the form of Egyptian matinee idol Omar Sharif—by Twentieth Century Fox, as the subject of a tediously self-important and ridiculously old-fashioned Hollywood biopic. Early evidence of the hyperreal: noting the production’s budget, John Leonard observed in the New York Times Magazine that making a movie about revolution was considerably more expensive than the revolution itself, 'about $10,000 an hour.' ” Hoberman describes the intentions behind that clueless turkey (which co-starred Jack Palance, in a Silly Putty nose, as Fidel Castro), as having been "in the tradition of Fox’s 1952 Viva Zapata—a melancholy, heartfelt, prestigious, star-spangled tribute to revolutionary failure" starring a "hardcore New Left action tough guy." Actually, as Che's resurrection via T-shirt image (the history of which was described in the recent documentary Chevolution shows, he was the guerrilla as rock star. Consciously or not, most of his modern fans understand him as being part of the lineage of hip rock martyrs that includes Jimi, Janis, the lost Rolling Stone, and the Lizard King. More recently, Gael Garcia Bernal played the hunky young (pre-"Che") Ernesto in the Sundance-friendly The Motorcycle Diaries, based on a road trip the lad took with a buddy, a trip that was immortalized in a book that appeared more than twenty years after his death. Directed by Walter Salles (with Robert Redford acting as executive producer), it was a gorgeous-looking movie that gave receptive audiences the chance to admire it's hero's liquid eyes and bone structure while he visited peasants in pastoral settings and felt his yet-unformed social conscience become all tingly.

Is Soderbergh's Che a history lesson or the latest act of what Hoberman calls "co-optive commodification"? It "remains a film object—a thing to be experienced. The movie demands to take its time, with both parts taken in at a single sitting." Hoberman, who saw the film at last year's Cannes Film Festival before Soderbergh took a scalpel to it, reports that "Many initial viewers were confounded to the degree that Che appeared as a non- or even an anti-biopic. Despite a stellar performance by Benicio Del Toro, who had initiated the project some years ago with Soderbergh as producer and Terrence Malick attached as writer and director, Che presents its subject almost entirely as the protagonist in the context of two specific events. Moreover, the director seemed to keep his distance and reserve his judgment. Skillfully didactic, as well as nervily dialectical, this feel-good/feel-bad combat film thus had less in common with the touchy-feely Motorcycle Diaries than with Peter Watkins’s spare, self-reflexive reconstruction of the Paris Commune, La Commune (Paris, 1871)." However, since its premiere, "Soderbergh has tweaked his movie's first half in ways that soften its strangeness and blunt its intellectual range." These additions, which interrupt the story of the revolution with flash-forwards to Che's life as a political celebrity during a trip to New York, serve the purpose of "Annotating the past with the 'present' and tightening the movie’s overall sound/image connections," even as "these inserts do allow for another sort of dialectic, but their presence serves to subtly normalize Soderbergh’s distancing strategy. (Or what was taken to be his strategy. “With all the subtitles, we thought it was Jean-Luc Godard,” a colleague joked.)"

"Che," Hoberman writes, "is an act of will rather than a work of art, overtly concerned with technical issues—the revolution’s and its own." In short, it is a movie by Steven Soderbergh, a director who (with his first feature, sex, lies, and videotape) helped invent independent American moviemaking as a concept (and, in part, as a marketing concept); who, with his comeback movie, Out of Sight, showed how just how much smarts and technical pizzazz could be applied to a solid piece of romantic-action-comedy goods while accepting the material on its chosen level; and who has spent the last decade or so veering from one extreme to the next, trying to find the ideal balance between commercial work that won't rot the brain and experimental work that tries to speak to at least part of the mass audience. As Hoberman sees it, "Che is superb filmmaking—forcefully edited, purposefully repetitive. Everything is foreshadowed; each sequence has its parallel. There is no scene that cannot be seen as part of an ongoing argument." But how many movies made by big Hollywood players wouldn't be embarrassed by a phrase like "an ongoing argument"?"Soderbergh is less a driven auteur or even an enthusiastic cinephile than he is a highly intelligent technician who sets himself a problem and goes about solving it. "

Oh Say Can You See: The "Blindness" Controversy

Phil Nugent — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Hot on the heels of the great Tropic Thunder/"retard" controversy come reports that groups for the unsighted are angry about the new movie Blindness, with the National Federation for the Blind planning protests when the film opens in theaters tomorrow. The movie, which was directed by Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian whiz kid responsible for City of God and The Constant Gardener, is a dystopian fantasy that depicts the effects of an epidemic that sweeps through a large city, rendering its inhabitants blind. It stars Julianne Moore as a woman who doesn't go blind but pretends that she has so that she can remain with her husband, played by Mark Ruffalo, when he and others who have been stricken are quarantined. The city is unnamed --the movie was shot principally in Sao Paolo, Brazil, with additional shooting in parts of Canada and Uruguay--and the characters have names like "The Doctor", "The Doctor's Wife", "The Thief", "The Accountant", and "Woman with Dark Glasses." Those capable of taking a hint might conclude that the film is intended as an allegory with symbolic characters, but when representatives of the NFB attended a preview, all they saw--or heard, and had described to them or something--was a major motion picture in which a bunch of people who instantly and mysteriously lose their sight insist on taking a glass-half-empty attitude about it. Christopher Danielson, a spokesman for the 50,000-member NFB, says that the blind "face a 70 percent unemployment rate and other social problems because people don't think we can do anything, and this movie is not going to help — at all." For instance, the movie includes images of people who are struck blind while driving, with unfortunate results. The NFB seems to feel that if anyone who sees Blindness comes away less inclined to hire someone who can't see as a bus driver, then Fernando Meirelles and Miramax will have a lot to answer for.

Nothing if not artistically ambitious, Blindness was adapted by screenwriter Don McKellar (who also acts in the movie) from the highly praised 1995 novel by Portuguese author Jose Saramago. (Saramago, who has described his book as "an allegory about the fragility of civilization", apparently took a great deal of convincing to sell the movie rights to anyone, and turned down the first offer he got from Meirelles, as well as an offer from Gael Garcia Bernal, who wound up playing the pivotal role of "the King of Ward 3.") So far, the movie hasn't been able to live up to the book's level of acclaim. It bombed at Cannes last spring and inspired walkouts when it was shown at the more recent Toronto Film Festival. Responding to criticisms, Meirelles has done considerable tinkering with it for its theatrical release, eliminating a voice-over narration and trimming a scene of "sexual violence" that set off the smoke alarms at Toronto. But there's not much he can do to placate the complaints from blind groups, which are grounded in a basic objection to the concept itself. Marc Maurer, the president of the NFB, has said that "The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie," adding, "“The National Federation of the Blind condemns and deplores this film, which will do substantial harm to the blind of America and the world. Blind people in this film are portrayed as incompetent, filthy, vicious, and depraved. They are unable to do even the simplest things like dressing, bathing, and finding the bathroom. The truth is that blind people regularly do all of the same things that sighted people do." Including, it seems, look for reasons to get their noses out of joint over a movie.

Truth and Consequences in the Documentary World

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

As we've discussed previously at the Screengrab, the documentary film is perhaps the most controversial and dynamic genre in contemporary motion pictures. While with most critics, there seems to be a consensus that we are in a sort of golden age of documentary filmmaking, with documentarians suddenly reaching the same level of fame as mainstream movie directors, and a few documentaries making a killing at the box office, others express doubts about what kinds of documentaries are being made, while some insiders are concerned about new techniques in documentary filmmaking that blur the line between fact and fiction.

One of the hot topics in the British documentary field -- and one that's sure to make it to our shores sooner rather than later -- is the fact that many documentarians, unable to secure funding from the usual Hollywood moneymen for their sometimes-controversial movies, are turning to what the Guardian calls "the third sector"; that is to say, charities, non-profit organizations, and advocacy groups. Actor/filmmaker Gael Garcia Bernal, for example, has sought the aid of a number of NGOs, media outlets, and other not-for-profits for his new documentary, Resist. In addition to traditional sources like federal arts funding, documentary filmmakers are seeking the aid of such groups to help them bypass the traiditional Hollywood financing and distribution schemes. "The involvement of charities means that not only will the film inspire people to act, but we can also give them a way to put this inspiration to use afterwards," sayds Bernal.

Less inspiring, however, are questions of conflict of interest. If a filmmaker accepts the money to make his movie from a specific charity, doesn't that make him beholden to reflect that charity's goals and interests in the film? At what point does it stop being documentary filmmaking and start becoming propaganda? Independent journalist Vaughan Smith notes, "I sense that filmmakers often want to make a film and they are not too concerned where they come from. I am a journalist and I like to see things investigated with a critical eye. I am suspicious of all organizations, including news organizations; there always needs toproper controls to protect editorial integrity."

The upside of the documentary boom is that people have more chances than ever to explore their world through film, and learn about who they are in relation to others. The downside is that it threatens to become just another bought-and-paid for advertisement.

Doc Around the Clock

Screengrab Scoops Perez! (or...Gael Garcia Bernal: Baby Daddy)

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:30:00 GMT

It has just recently come to our attention that PerezHilton.com posted the following badly-translated public announcement from the production company of a certain dreamy, diminutive Mexican heartthrob on August 14: "This statement is to say that, after so much speculation and comments, the actors Dolores Fonzi and Gael Garcia Bernal are indeed expecting a baby at the start of next year."

Then Mr. Hilton trumpeted, "We told you, our Perezcious readers, a few weeks ago that there was a baby on the way for the two."

And by "a few weeks ago," he meant August 6...more than SIX WEEKS after your intrepid friends here at the Screengrab SCOOPED his ass with Bernal's suspiciously proud-papa-to-be behavior at the Provincetown Film Festival (way back in June!) with OUR post: Screengrab (Maybe) Confirms a Rumor About Gael Garcia Bernal, Reports Actual Facts About Quentin Tarantino & Christopher Guest

But does Perez Hilton credit us with the scoop? Does he have the common decency to even know we exist? No and no, and then, to add insult to injury, he even titles his Gael Garcia post "Confirmed Spermination - We Told You First!"

The nerve!

Well, that tears it. On behalf of the 567 of you out there who were already bib-shopping for Gael and Dolores' little bundle of joy long before a certain more famous and successful blogger ever caught wind of the story, I intend to write a strongly worded e-mail to this Mr. Hilton (if that's even his real name) and declare WAR (after, y'know, explaining what the hell a "Screengrab" is)!

That'll show him.

(Oh, yeah, and congratulations from all of us here in Blogtopia to Gael and the Fonz on their upcoming production!)

Morning Deal Report: Ice Planets and Food Weather

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Much like yourself, I was just sitting here drinking my coffee and thinking about how Hollywood needs to make more movies based on videogames. And lo and behold, here it is in Variety: Warner Bros. is going ahead with an adaptation of Lost Planet, a Japanese videogame that “revolves around an expedition to an ice planet that harbors an energy source with the potential to save mankind.” The game is by Capcon, which has already seen its Resident Evil turn into three movies with another on the way.

At the other end of the cinematic spectrum, a long-lost screenplay by Gabriel Garcia Marquez will finally go before the cameras if Mexican actor and producer Rodolfo de Anda has his way. According to the Guardian, “de Anda says he has just acquired the rights to the long-forgotten screenplay and plans to start filming next year. Titled Frontera, the film was written before the 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude turned García Márquez into an international literary star… ‘Nobody knew it existed, and the most surprising thing is that it is a Western. I don't think anybody knew he had written anything like that,’ De Anda told Mexican newspaper Reforma.” De Anda is pursing Gael Garcia Bernal for the lead role.

And finally, it warms my heart to inform you that Sony Animation’s first venture into digital 3-D will be entitled Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. “The story is about 'food weather,' and so food falling from the sky lends itself so well to 3-D,” Bob Osher, president of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Digital Production division, told the Hollywood Reporter. I have no argument with that.

Related:
Screengrab (Maybe) Confirms a Rumor About Gael Garcia Bernal
Conglomerated Baddies: The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: June 21-27, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

We’ve had some fun with the Entertainment Weekly list of new classics, but let it be known that we here at the Screengrab have some new classics of our own! Personally I get all choked up thinking about the time we maybe confirmed a rumor about Gael Garcia Bernal, but for others, the seminal moment was the story about how Crispin Glover requires cash and sushi. Reaching all the way back to Monday, here are the rest of the posts we’ve deemed absolutely timeless, to be treasured for generations to come.

America the Critical: 15 Movies That Show What’s Wrong With U.S. (Parts One, Two and Three)

The week in lawsuits: Gibney vs. ThinkFilm and Adams vs. Marvel

The films of yesteryear: Top Gun, Smiles of a Summer Night and Heaven Can Wait

The films of today: The Wackness and Garden Party

The films of never, please: American Soldiers and Soccer Dog: The Movie

The filmmakers of some repute: Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodovar and Peter Jackson

The lovely ladies: Ellen Page, Hilary Duff and The Women

The one that got away: George Carlin

Screengrab (Maybe) Confirms a Rumor About Gael Garcia Bernal, Reports Actual Facts About Quentin Tarantino & Christopher Guest

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

This past weekend, at the 10th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival’s Awards Ceremony, Jane Lynch and Gael Garcia Bernal received awards for career achievement in acting and Quentin Tarantino was honored with the festival’s 2008 Filmmaker on the Edge Award. At a presentation in the non-air-conditioned auditorium of Provincetown High School (attendees received complimentary church lady hand fans), the celebrity guests received trophies in the shape of P-Town’s famous, phallic Pilgrim Monument Tower and spoke about their respective careers in a series of casual sit-down interviews and audience Q&As, during which Lynch revealed the status of the next Christopher Guest movie, Bernal got emotional for reasons that were suspected but not confirmed and Quentin Tarantino broke some news about his long-awaited (and much delayed) Dirty Dozen homage, Inglorious Bastards or Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France.

1. Just before receiving the Faith Hubley Memorial Award (named for the Academy Award winning animator who passed away in 2001), Jane Lynch was asked if she had any news about the next Christopher Guest improv all-starts project. The news was not good. According to Lynch, “It’s getting to be about the time we’d start talking about the next one,” but when she spoke with Guest recently, the actor/filmmaker/fake rock star revealed he has no current plans to create another ensemble comedy in the vein of Waiting for Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind or the 2006 disappointment, For Your Consideration. On the plus side, he may adapt Guffman as a Broadway show (unless he was just pulling Lynch’s leg with some of that trademark deadpan humor of his).

2. Gael Garcia Bernal is an attractive little bastard. That part isn’t news, of course, but it’s worth mentioning: in person, he’s the sweetest, tiniest Mexican you’ve ever seen, with lips and eyes like Julia Roberts and a sultry accent capable of seducing straights, gays and maybe even the occasional lesbian. While accepting his P-Town Festival award for Excellence in Acting, Bernal got surprisingly choked up...surprising, that is, until he mentioned something about how the honor made him think about all the exciting things in his future and how “one person in the room knows what I mean.” Then he went back to his seat and embraced a beautiful lady who looked an awful lot like Bernal’s current squeeze, actress Dolores Fonzi, who, according to internet speculation (and Screengrab’s deductive reasoning), is almost certainly preggers. Congrats, Gael!

3. And then there was Quentin. Let me start by saying QT often comes across (especially in Jane Hamsher’s Hollywood tell-all Killer Instinct) as a pompous, annoying ass, and after all the pop-culture-spouting protagonists and stylized violence spawned in the wake of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (and after the underwhelming, unintentional self-parody of Death Proof), it’s easy to take the writer/director (and part-time actor) for granted. But seeing him in the flesh reminded me of an R.E.M. performance I witnessed at the all-day outdoor Austin City Limits music festival a few years ago. I haven’t bought a new R.E.M. album in years, it’s easy to mock Michael Stipe and I’d gotten out of the habit of thinking of the R.E.M.s as one of my favorite bands...that is, until they kicked my ass with a blow-your-face-off set of, like, a thousand songs I suddenly remembered I fucking loved. Same with Quentin: the man has given me far, far more enjoyment than grief over the years, and he’s a riot live...especially when being interviewed by fellow film geek raconteur John Waters, as he was on Saturday in P-Town. As it turns out, Tarantino and Waters are buddies and I could have watched their odd couple bantering for hours. (Seriously, IFC: get these two a weekly show!) After chatting amiably about topics ranging from the best gifts QT ever received from his fans (short answer: pussy, but the Pez dispensers shaped like Jules and Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction were nice, too) to the directors’ shared love of torture porn as one of the few true remaining forms of exploitation cinema, Tarantino revealed that 24 hours previously, he’d really, actually, finally finished the screenplay for Inglorious Bastards and was hoping to complete the film in time for Cannes 2009...so stay tuned!

Related stories: Chevolution, Provincetown Film Festival Review: The Wackness

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Chevolution"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Trisha Zitt and Luis Lopez's documentary Chevolution may be the closest thing you'll ever get to see to an episode of Behind the Music or E! True Hollywood Story about an image. The movie stars the face of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, as it was captured in a photograph taken in 1960 that was mass reproduced in poster form on its way to turning into an iconic fashion and advertising image. (One of Guevara's most sympathetic biographers, Jon Lee Anderson, appears in the film sitting at a table with a coffee mug adorned with Che's kisser.) The most fascinating information in the movie is about the man who got this avalanche rolling, Alberto Diaz, popularly known as Korda. Korda had been a high-flying fashion photographer before developing a political conscience during Castro's war against the Batista dictatorship, during which he became a photojournalist vowing to use his skills to serve the revolution. (He wound up serving as Castro's personal photographer.) But he retained the eye and the instincts of a fashion photographer, and that's what made his news photos continue to stand out. They were certainly in evidence in the photo of Che, which was taken when Guevara showed up at the docks after an explosion aboard a Belgian cargo ship delivering a load of munitions. One of Korda's old colleagues says that he doesn't believe that he realized that he'd caught anything special, because he only took two or three shots when he had Guevara in his line of sight, and if he'd thought he had the makings of an important photo, he would have snapped ten or twelve. Maybe so, but Korda must have noticed at some point that he'd gotten a portrait of the camera-shy Guevara looking especially intense and fiery-eyed. Instinctively, he proceeded to crop the other figures out of the shot, leaving something that looks very much like a movie star's head shot.

Korda was unable to sell the picture to the Cuban newspapers in 1960, but years later, it fell into the hands of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, an Italian who had recognized the potential of easily reproducible, easily disseminated graphic posters as a political medium and who was not above profiting from this insight. Korda was above it; because of his devotion to the ideals of the socialist revolution, he declined to copyright the image or even make a public show of taking credit for it as it was being widely proliferated around the world. Shortly before he died in 2001, Korda did begin to go after companies that exploited Che's image by associating it with products he deemed inappropriate to the point of being degrading, such as cigarettes and booze, an ongoing battle that is now overseen by his daughter. Among the things they regarded as tarnishing to Che's memory is apparently leftist sludge rock, because they also went after Rage Against the Machine for decorating their drum kit with Che's face. The movie includes a wistful Tom Morello recalling how he and the guys used to think of Che as a fifth member of the band until a squad of lawyers showed up to announce that they were there to audition for the role of Yoko Ono.

Chevolution would be a stronger documentary if it included a meatier picture of who Che himself was and what he did and stood for. Most of the people who speak about him in the movie's first half do so in a tone that's respectful bordering on worshipful. That includes Gael Garcia Bernal and Antonio Banderos, both of who have played Che in movies--I guess Omar Sharif had prior commitments--and who speak of him, not unintelligently, as a fellow celebrity. In the movie's final third, which shows how thoroughly the Che image has entered the advertising culture, we do get to hear from a few young campus-conservative types, one of whom rants bitterly about the shallow ignorance of the radical chic and expostulates that if you want to live in a doctrinaire police state that tells you what to think and what you can say and how to live your life, then you should definitely wear Che's face on your T-shirt. (At the screening I attended, one guy in the audience chose this moment to applaud and hollar, "Yeah!" Ah, New York.) One way or another, the movie does demonstrate that the Che image is now so cut off from actual history as to mean whatever the person who wears it thinks it ought to mean, which is one reason it's had a much longer shelf life than Che himself did.

Trailer Review: Blindness

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This is a first-rate teaser in the classic sense, in that it gives audiences a taste of the film's premise and little else. I'd venture a guess that all of the footage we see here is taken from the opening twenty minutes of the film- we meet the characters, the plot (taken from a novel by Jose Saramago) is introduced, and the titular malady escalates to epidemic proportions. It's tantalizing and highly effective. Like Children of Men's Alfonso Cuaron before him, director Fernando Meirelles appears to bring a certain level of deep-seated spirituality to the film's science-fiction roots, something that's apparent even in this relatively short teaser, which is nonetheless full of ethereal fades to white and Gods'-eye-few camera shots. Also, it's nice to see Julianne Moore working in a project worthy of her talent again, after too many ill-fitting comedies and cookie-cutter melodramas, and costars like Gael Garcia Bernal and the always-compelling Mark Ruffalo should make a good match for her.