Andrew O'Hehir: Even Farther Beyond The Multiplex

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:30:00 GMT

One of our favorite film bloggers here at the Screengrab is Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. His "Beyond the Multiplex" blog, focusing (as we try to do here in the Nerve Film Lounge) on independent cinema, is a favorite stop on our daily tour of the moviecentric web. If he didn't keep asking for more money and balk at our requests to pose nude, we'd have stolen him from Salon a long time ago; as it is, though, we'll just have to keep stealing from him as long as he's over there.

Luckily, there seems to be a lot more of him lately — "Beyond the Multiplex" has recently undergone what appears to be a major overhaul. It's easier to read and to navigate, and features the usual top-notch comment from Mr. O'Hehir; recent worthwhile entries have included a podcast interview with Cristian Mungiu, director of Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days; an interview with Marianna Palka about her Sundance hit Good Dick; and an interesting take on Michael Haneke's remake of his own Funny Games, which tipped at Sundance last week. A more than welcome reboot of a nifty film blog — check it out.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 3

Peter Smith — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:15:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

So far no good on the Dramatic Competition front — which is a bit of a bummer, since those are the movies I came here to see, for the most part. I must confess that I didn't even last halfway through buzz magnet The Wackness, which expends most of its creative energy in its title, leaving writer-director Jonathan Levine with nothing to do but find jokes predicated on our knowledge that we're no longer living in 1994. ("Does this have anything to do with Kurt Cobain?" asks Ben Kingsley's pothead shrink of a patient.) Apparently, Kingsley makes out with an Olsen twin after I hit the exit; somebody more tuned into the zeitgeist than myself will have to explain why this is a big cultural event. Other Competition titles are such well-intentioned mediocrities that badmouthing them feels like kicking an injured dog, and word on Good Dick, which I was planning to see this afternoon, is so toxic that I'll likely wind up defecting to some obscure foreign film.

On the other hand, this year's documentaries continue to impress, and I say that as someone who much prefers fiction to nonfiction when it comes to cinema. Slingshot Hip Hop, an energetic portrait of the burgeoning Palestinian rap scene, features a bevy of great music and spotlights a truly sobering irony: In a genre that thrives on collaboration — name any significant hip-hop single of the last few years that doesn't include the word "Feat." — it's hard to create and sustain a movement when you're not permitted to travel ten short miles to meet the peers who've inspired you.

Even more politically trenchant is the articulate policy debate called Secrecy, which tackles what is arguably the key question of the information age — namely, how do we reconcile freedom and security? Directors Peter Galison and Robb Moss don't attempt to hide their belief that the U.S.'s government's increasing obsession with classification does more harm than good, and is being used today primarily as a means for the executive branch to avoid accountability. To their credit, however, they also give ample screen time to former CIA and NSA employees, who make a strong case for the opposing viewpoint — so strong, in fact, that I left the movie feeling as if the problem might be inherently insoluble. Like many expository docs, Secrecy sometimes feels more like an animated book than a movie, despite attempts to jazz things up via animated interludes and a propulsive score; you can't help but feel as if the surface of this enormous subject has barely been scratched. But much more than last year's bizarrely overpraised, in-case-you-missed-several-years-worth-of-the-news compendium, No End in Sight, this evenhanded act of advocacy is required viewing for the hundreds of millions of us who have consented to be governed.

The Screengrab : good dick

Andrew O'Hehir: Even Farther Beyond The Multiplex

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 3