The Screengrab : mister lonely

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Nov. 22- Dec. 5, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Because I was busy digesting turkey, stuffing and pie while forming a deep groove in my couch, I neglected to post a highlight reel last week. That means you’re in for a treat – it’s the very first Supersized Highlight Reel! That’s right, we’ve got two weeks worth of leftovers for you. That means not only our Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six) but our list of the Top Biopics of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six).

But we’re just getting warmed up. We’ve also got reviews of not only Gus Van Sant’s new biopic Milk, but the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. And we’ve got more William Friedkin posts than at any time since 1974 (when the Screengrab was only available via short-wave radio): William Friedkin Has No Sense of Social Obligation, The French Connection Influenced Everything and The Screengrab: Your One-Stop Site for All Things William Friedkin.

You want more reviews? How about The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage, Waterloo, Mister Lonely, Frost/Nixon and the Stop Making Sense soundtrack? How about the first installment of Leonard Pierce’s 12 Days of Christmas, The Nightmare Before Christmas? How about the latest in Ozsploitation, Roadgames?

Still not enough? Check out these other headlines from the fortnight past:

Roman Polanski: Wanted in Los Angeles, Desired in Turin

Roger Ebert: The Death of the Film Critic is the Death of Society

Oscar Launch: The Silly Season Commences

All The Real Girls Is One of the Most Influential Movies of the Decade

Site of the Day: A John Waters Christmas

Reviews By Request: Mister Lonely (2007, Harmony Korine)

Paul Clark — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

I find myself sort of at a loss at how to review Harmony Korine’s latest film, Mister Lonely. Here is a film with plenty of ideas without enough ways to satisfactorily tie them together, yet it’s also so rich and strange that it’s impossible to ignore. That it doesn’t really work in any of the usual ways is to its credit. Just because I have such a hard time pinning the movie down doesn’t diminish my admiration for it.

Like all of Korine’s films, Mister Lonely deals with characters who live on the fringes of society. In this case, his protagonist is a Michael Jackson impersonator (played by Diego Luna) who ekes out an existence in Paris. Most of time, he performs on the street, although occasionally his agent (fellow filmmaking enfant terrible Léos Carax, who’s really overdue to direct another movie) will find him a job. It’s at one of these jobs- a “personal appearance” at a nursing home where he cheerfully tells the residents, “don’t die! Live forever!”- that he meets another impersonator, a Marilyn Monroe played by Samantha Morton, who invites him to live with her in a commune just for impersonators.

The commune, an old castle in the Scottish Highlands, is inhabited by Marilyn’s husband Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant) and their daughter Shirley Temple (Morton’s real-life daughter Esme Creed-Miles). There’s also the Pope (James Fox), Queen Elizabeth II (Anita Pallenberg), Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange), Madonna, James Dean, Sammy Davis Jr., Buckwheat, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Three Stooges. A rather eclectic mix, I’m sure you’ll agree. Here, Marilyn promises, they can all live the lives they’ve chosen in an environment where they will be understood and welcomed.

The early Paris scenes are good, but the movie gets really fascinating once Michael makes the journey to Scotland. It’s also here that the idea of impersonation becomes complicated- for some celebrity impersonators, it’s primarily about making money or indulging their fantasies in a relatively healthy context. Yet the residents of the commune are another breed entirely, having substituted the lives they’ve assumed for their own. Korine shows us the Pope getting drunk at dinner, Buckwheat tending to his chickens, and so on. But try as they may to escape who they are, their real natures end up coming out- Lincoln reveals himself to be a foul-mouthed petty tyrant, Chaplin alternately abuses and neglects his wife, and Marilyn begins to unravel. Even the sheep end up getting sick and having to be put down.

Complicating matters even more is the show they put on for the locals- a few of the impersonators do their own chosen celebrity’s shtick, but some do other people’s famous routines, with such strange sights as James Dean doing stand-up comedy. Indeed, all Three Stooges are never onstage at the same time. Could it be that these people are so uneasy in their own skin that they’re forever searching for another identity to assume? Regardless of the intent, the show is hardly the success that it was intended to be, no doubt because if people are paying to see celebrity impersonators, then by gum want to see them impersonating those celebrities.

All the while, Michael mostly keeps to himself, practicing his routine, never quite giving himself over to the commune’s vibe. If most of the other impersonators have turned the celebrities’ identities into their own, it becomes clear that Michael is more of a seeker, using the Michael Jackson persona as a way to find fulfillment in his own life. Once it’s clear to him that he won’t find it at the commune, he makes his way back to Paris and gives up his Michael Jackson persona, seeking fulfillment from something different altogether.

Perhaps it’s this search that best explains a strange subplot involving a group of nuns led by a priest who’s played by longtime Korine friend Werner Herzog. One day, when air-dropping bags of rice in Central America, one of the nuns falls out of the airplane only to discover that if she prays hard enough, she will survive the fall unharmed. In contrast to Michael, who has searched all his life for some kind of inner peace, the nuns happen upon it by accident, and seize upon the opportunity to experience transcendence through their literal leaps of faith.

After rising to prominence as the writer of Larry Clark’s Kids, Harmony Korine has made three features to date, all of which have attempted to push the boundaries of cinema. But while julien donkey-boy and particularly Gummo were dragged down by Korine’s need to turn them into freak shows, with Mister Lonely he has matured as a filmmaker by showing a real curiosity for his characters and a willingness to approach his ideas with real sincerity. In an interview earlier this year, Korine described his directing style by saying, “I try to create a place where you feel that anything's possible.” With Mister Lonely, I believe he has successfully accomplished this, and in doing so he’s made his best film to date.

What’s next for Reviews By Request? Once again, I’m playing catch-up on my 2008 releases, and this week’s choices include two of this year’s most acclaimed documentaries, a comic corrective to the rather humorless Quantum of Solace, a celebrated Danish drama, and a David Gordon Green-produced family tragedy. So, what’ll it be?

What should I watch for my next Review By Request? | BuzzDash polls

Voting closes on Monday night. Feel free to stump for your favorites or to recommend future candidates in the comments box. See you in two weeks!

DVD Digest for November 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, some of summer’s biggest hits arrive in stores in time for the holiday shopping season, along with a handful of choice classics.

DVD of the week: With all the care Pixar devotes to creating their theatrical releases, it’s amazing that they have any time left for their DVDs. However, Pixar’s DVD editions are almost invariably first-rate, and this week’s release of WALL-E would appear to be no exception. We begin, of course, with the razor-sharp transfer of the movie itself, which comes directly from the digital master, making it arguably crisper than could be found in the theatre. But that’s only the beginning, with two animated shorts (one seen in theatres, the other a DVD original), featurettes on the film’s sound design, visual design, music, character design, and more. Finally, there are a number of features on WALL-E that take viewers into the world of the film, including a documentary about the movie’s robotic cast, and short films about the nefarious “Buy N Large” corporation from its inception to their Earth Exit plan, and beyond. Needless to say, WALL-E is an ideal DVD for kids, but it’s also a must-have even if you don’t have a family to buy for this holiday season.

Other recent releases coming to DVD this week: Ben Stiller’s Hollywood action satire Tropic Thunder (Paramount, also Blu-Ray); America Ferrara, Amber Tamblyn and friends in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a quartet of acclaimed indie films- Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (Image); the documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson (Magnolia); Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (Genius); and Audrey Tautou in Priceless (First Look).

On the classics front, the big release this week is David Lynch: The Lime Green Box Set (Absurda), which includes the new-to-DVD Industrial Symphony No. 1, plus the remastered Eraserhead, a Lynch-approved 5.1-surround version of Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart, The Short Films of David Lynch, Dumbland, along with new extras for Elephant Man and Wild at Heart, the Eraserhead soundtrack, and a “Mystery Disc” full of exclusive Lynch goodies. Or if you’re looking for something a little more “classical”, pick up the new Criterion editions of Martin Ritt’s masterful adaptation of the John le Carre novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, or the French swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe. Also worth mentioning is the release of Fred Schepisi’s long-unavailable classic of Australian cinema, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Ryko Distribution).

In a slow week for TV on DVD, the most noteworthy title is Bones Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week presents the most definitive argument that Blu-Ray has really arrived, with a plethora of mostly crappy Blu-Ray only releases. The exceptions are Curtis Hanson’s pretty-good Eminem vehicle 8 Mile (Universal) and the Neil Gaiman-scripted Mirrormask (Sony). But other than that, it’s looking pretty dire, with the Martin Lawrence double feature of Blue Streak (Sony) and National Security (Sony), Guy Ritchie’s Revolver (Sony), and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (Sony), which if nothing else remains the most definitive cinematic statement about the ongoing war over teen horniness. I’m for decriminalization, by the way.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of May 2-4, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Sometimes, the headlines just write themselves. A stronger-willed writer than I might be able to resist, but alas, I can’t. So I might as well give in. Here goes: “It’s Lonely at the top.” That’s right, this week’s top indie per-screen average is Harmony Korine’s latest effort, Mister Lonely (IFC Films), which brought in a mighty $16,769 in its single-screen showing at the IFC Center in New York City. Some of the credit should go to the infamous auteur/enfant terrible, but don’t discount the eclectic cast (Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Werner Herzog), or the unique hook (a commune full of celebrity impersonators). All of these factors practically confer cult status on the film right off the bat, which never hurts a movie’s chances at the Indie Box Office. What remains to be seen is what kind of legs the movie will have outside of NYC.

But while many prognosticators pegged this as a slow weekend at the indie box office due to the release of Iron Man, several other films played to strong business, with a total of four taking upwards of $10,000 per screen. Debuts of note were the festival hit Son of Rambow (Paramount Vantage) and David Mamet’s mixed martial arts film (still feels weird to type that) Redbelt (Sony Pictures Classics), which ran almost neck and neck for third and fourth place, respectively, behind the weekend’s top holdover, Claude Lelouch's Roman de Gare (IDP/Samuel Goldwyn). Rounding out the top 5 was another debut, the French sexploitation-inflected drama Viva (Vagrant Films).

Also worth mentioning is the continued presence on the chart of Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor (Overture Films), which expanded its release again, this time to 130 screens, while residing comfortably here at #8. The film has brought in more than $1.5 million to date, and with its strong word of mouth it doesn’t show signs of letting up.

Finally, I feel compelled to mention the box-office take for the Kentucky Derby documentary First Saturday in May (Truly Indie), which expanded its release to seven screens just in time for this weekend’s Run for the Roses. However, the timeliness of the expansion failed to goose business, as it brought in a meager $572 per screen average.

Top 10: Weekend of May 2-4, 2008:
1. Mister Lonely [IFC Films] ($16,769 per screen)
2. Roman De Gare [IDP/Samuel Goldwyn Films] ($11,267)
3. Son Of Rambow [Paramount Vantage] ($10,758)
4. Redbelt [Sony Pictures Classics] ($10,560)
5. Viva [Vagrant Films] ($8,688)
6. Up the Yangtze [Zeitgeist] ($6,838)
7. The Dhamma Brothers [Balcony Releasing] ($4,718)
8. The Visitor [Overture Films] ($4,666)
9. The Singing Revolution [Abramorama Entertainment] ($4,411)
10. Fugitive Pieces [IDP/Samuel Goldwyn Films] ($3,407)

Source: IndieWire.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Mister Lonely"

Peter Smith — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

By Bryan Whitefield

By now you're probably aware that Harmony Korine's third film as director follows a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) in Paris as he meets and follows a Marilyn Monroe look-a-like (Samantha Morton) to a castle in Scotland filled with even more people dressed as iconic figures as varied and ridiculous as Queen Elizabeth, James Dean and Abraham Lincoln. Ironically this wildly original concept is also Korine's closest attempt at a traditional narrative. That said, the bizarre but beautiful opening shot of Luna as Michael on a miniature motorcycle set in super slo-mo to the Bobby Vinton classic the title refers to is a quick reminder that Korine's films are as close to belonging at the Whitney Biennial as they are the Tribeca Film Festival.

The newly sober Korine may not rely as heavily on stunts or shock value here, but there are still several of his signature moments, including Luna's Michael entertaining a French old folks home with dance moves interspersed with chants of, "I want you to live forever! Don't die! Don't die!" There is also a pre-teen Buckwheat riding a miniature pony repeating his love for chickens and women's breasts, "They make me so hot!" But with Korine nothing is literal or necessarily related, as is the case with a strangely satisfying sub-plot with Werner Herzog as a small plane pilot who takes nuns up in the air to skydive back safely to the ground with prayer instead of parachutes. These incredibly beautiful scenes look like found footage from a Super 8 archive and further explore the idea of sublimating one's own identity for a belief in something greater than yourself.

While Luna (in his best performance to date), Morton and Denis Lavant as her Charlie Chaplin/Adolf Hitler husband are all excellent, the impersonator idea ends up a missed opportunity, with only Luna able to carry over any behavioral attributes of the celeb he emulates. A conversation between the Pope and Madonna might've been more interesting than just seeing them at a dinner table together.

Mister Lonely is easily Korine's most personal film; its themes of redemption and rebirth in some ways mirror the director's own struggle to get it made. When Diego Luna's character comes out of the Michael Jackson shell, he is seeing the world for the first time, reflecting how Korine himself might've felt with his vision finally freed from drugs. There are several moments throughout the film that confirm Korine's sharp eye for the potent and absurd in his cinema but he, like other indie auteurs (Michel Gondry, Todd Haynes and Vincent Gallo to name a few) who rely on instinct, image and impression to tell a story, fills the movie with beautifully crafted, half-finished ideas. He does however continue to make uncompromising films that have next to no concern for commercial appeal, and while the movies themselves may be uneven there is a certain joy and excitement in getting a glimpse of a filmmaker's overactive imagination almost completely unfiltered.

Harmony Korine Settles Down

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

There comes a time when all of us have to put our skateboarding, glue-sniffing, bum-fighting, Meryl Streep-pushing, smoking-in-bed-and-burning-down-the-house days behind us, and if the New York Times is to be believed, that time has come for Harmony Korine. Perhaps the only man on earth who counts Werner Herzog and magician David Blaine among his close friends, Korine no longer wanders the mean streets of New York asking strangers to punch him in the face. He’s now married and living in Nashville, and as Dennis Lim reports, “this onetime fixture of the downtown party circuit did not seem nostalgic for the old days.”

The old days were interesting, though – some would say more interesting than the movies he made then. (After Janet Maslin declared his 1997 white-trashterpiece Gummo the worst movie of the year, Korine recalls, “I got a call from Herzog, who was like, ‘This movie is now destined to live forever.’ ”) He managed to burn down not one house, but two. (“The first one I don’t know what happened,” he said. “The second one was my fault. I fell asleep smoking.”) He made a series of Crispin Glover-esque appearances on the David Letterman show, and embarked on a video project called Fight Harm, perhaps the single stupidest movie ever attempted by a name director. This is how Korine explained it at the time: “I go around provoking passers-by, trying to start a fight while the video camera follows me and films everything. It's very brutal -- I've already broken a collar bone and been arrested. The punches and kicks are all real, it's one of the most disgusting things you'll ever see.”

After trips to the hospital and jail, the project was abandoned. “I thought I was making the greatest comedy,” he said. “At the time I really felt like that’s what I was on earth to do — get beaten up.” Some of his critics agree, but Lim cites Mister Lonely as “apparent evidence of a kinder, gentler Harmony Korine.” We trust this means Korine won’t be going the Uwe Boll route and challenging his critics to meet him in the ring.

The Rep Report (23--May 1)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: One of the strangest and most intriguing new filmmaking talents to emerge in recent years, the Korean writer-director Kim Ki-Duk gets his first complete U.S. retrosepctive, courtesy of the Museum of Modern art, running from April 23 to May 8. Originally typed as a bit of a sickie on the basis of his 2000 film The Isle, with its isolated, watery setting, creepy eroticized atmosphere, and creative use of fishhooks, Kim has continued to turn out deluxe midnight-movie fare (such as Samaritan Girl) while also revealing a more restrained, meditative side in such films as Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring and the weird, mute romance 3-Iron. The MOMA show will be of special interest to old fans eager to get a look at some of his movies that haven't gotten much play here before, including his 1996 debut picture Crocodile.

"Creatively Speaking" (April 25-27) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is a series, curated by Michelle Materre and co-curated and produced by Neyda Martinez, that seeks to showcase "realistic, universal portrayals of people of color." It includes documentaries about the culture and political activism of South Africa, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a concert honoring what would have been Bob Marley's sixtieth birthday, the African-American activist Robert F. Williams, and the roots and spread of hip hop culture, along with a number of dramatic short films. Each screening will be accompanied by a Q & A session afterwards.

FESTIVAL NEWS: In spring, the film geek's heart turns to thoughts of film festivals, where the hardcore faithful can seal themselves up in dark screening rooms to take refuge from all that sunshine and pollen. The Independent Film Festival of Boston, which was founded in 2003 and is already well-established as perhaps the city's premier yearly film event, kicks off on Wednesday, April 23, and runs through the 29th. This year's week-long bash includes new features from Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg, Harmony Korine (Mister Lonely), Werner Herzog (Encounters at the End of the World), and the Hoop Dreams, Steve James and Peter Gilbert (At the Death House Door), as well as documentaries on Joy Division, Harlan Ellison (Dreams with Sharp Teeth), and George W. Bush's home away from home, Crawford, Texas. From April 25 through May 8, Pacific Film Archive will be running standout attractions from the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, including Ermanno Olmi's One Hundred Nails, Bela Tarr's The Man from London, Claude Chabrol's Girl Cut in Two, Roy Andersson's You, the Living, and Mock Up on Mu, the latest "pulp serial-cum-political tract" from Bay Area filmmaker and "culture jammer" Craig Baldwin. Across the border, Toronto's fifteenth annual Hot Docs Candaian International Documentary Film Festival begins on Thursday and spends eleven days showcasing the best in nonfiction filmmaking, including more than a hundred new pictures and retrospectives devoted to the work of Richard Leacock and Canada's own Jennifer Baichwal. And New York's youthful-and-still-growing counterweight to the city's fall festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, begins Wednesday and continues through May 4, with a handsome spread of independent and international films sandwiched in between the premieres of Baby Mama and Speed Racer. We'll have more to come on Tribeca as soon as it lands.

Trailer Review: Mister Lonely

Paul Clark — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I wasn't a big fan of Kids, Harmony Korine's screenwriting debut, or Gummo, his first feature as director. I was more positive on his subsequent film julien donkey-boy, although that film demonstrated that he still had some maturing to do. In spite of this, and the lukewarm notices from last year's Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals, this trailer has me intrigued about his latest film, Mister Lonely. A lot of it is the film's cast — where else are you going to find Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, and Denis Lavant in the same film, much less playing second-rate impersonators of Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and Charlie Chaplin respectively? Part of me fears that this moody trailer is hiding some of the thornier aspects of the film, and I don't have the foggiest idea of how Werner Herzog fits into the whole thing, but I'm certainly curious to find out how it all fits together.

British Actor Reports: "I Was a Fake Abe Lincoln for Harmony Korine — and Lived!!"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

"I had been a fan of [Harmony] Korine since his 1997 directorial debut, the disturbingly quirky Gummo. However, I had no idea that the fidgety, punky livewire I recently spent two hours chatting with at a London party was Korine. I never thought to ask him what work he did — we were laughing too much, exchanging ever-more outrageous stories, and comparing near-death experiences. Only when I was leaving the party did we exchange phone numbers. A week later, as I was about to fly to Los Angeles for a three-month run of the Tom Waits/Robert Wilson/William Burroughs theatrical collaboration The Black Rider, Korine called me and announced: 'Hey, I want you to play Abe Lincoln in my new movie. We film in the Highlands of Scotland, June through August. Do the dates work?'" Thus begins actor Richard Strange's account of how he can to appear in Harmony Korine's latest freak-out: Mister Lonely, set in "an isolated commune for retired impersonators. A place where everyone is famous and no one gets old." (The cast also includes directors Werner Herzog and Leos Carax, Samantha Morton as a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson stand-in, and "a man who looked worryingly like Larry, the shock-headed klutz from The Three Stooges.") The piece includes descriptions of Korine at work that will just sound bizarre if you're unfamiliar with his films but are oddly reassuring if you've seen them: "Although Mister Lonely is scripted, Harmony used the script as a working sketch rather than the finished painting. One day, having rehearsed a scene in which we are planning a barbecue for the newly arrived Michael Jackson, Harmony leaned towards me to whisper, 'You are not going to do any of that. I want you to tell them about your experience of acid and napalm in the Vietnam war,' and left chuckling. His directorial style is akin to that of the solicitous hostess of a cocktail party who makes sure that all her guests have their glasses charged, then leaves the room, lobs in a mace grenade, and locks the door." If nothing else, it does sound about like what you'd expect.

Korine, who recently turned thirty-five, is now a married man — his wife, Rachel, appears in Mister Lonely as Little Red Riding Hood — and Strange describes him as now being "cleaner and happier than he has been for many years." (Oddly enough, it's the second part of that combo that seems to me the bigger shocker: he's always seemed unaccountably jolly to me. Trying to imagine him even happier just makes me picture Ed Wynn floating around his study in Mary Poppins.) If nothing else, Mister Lonely will qualify as some kind of event for marking the reunion of two of the stars of the 1970 Performance: Anita Pallenberg, who plays an impersonator of the Queen of England, and James Fox, as Pope John Paul II. Legend has it making Performance weirded Fox out to such a degree that it caused him to retire from acting for almost fifteen years. Now that he's had the experience of being directed by Harmony ("Do a card trick with your ass sticking out, then dance like you're in a swamp"), we may never see him again. Certainly none of Fox's or even Anita's old associates can tell their director anything new about self-destructive behavior. He told Strange that his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor "didn't go out for four years. He stayed in a room, and shat in pizza boxes. He felt bugs under the skin, and used a 100-watt light-bulb to burn them out. Then poured disinfectant on the burns. If you want to know what pain is, try that." Or, if you really want to know what pain is, see Julien Donkey-Boy...

The Five Most Intriguing SXSW Trailers: Narrative Films

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Yesterday we took a look at the most notable documentaries playing at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, which kicks off a week from today in Austin, TX. Today let’s check out the narrative films. Unfortunately, some of the movies we’re most excited about don’t have trailers available online, but here’s the best of the rest.

21

Truthfully, we’re torn about this one. It’s based on the terrific nonfiction thriller Bringing Down the House, about a team of MIT students who become blackjack experts in Las Vegas, and it may actually contain the first bearable Kevin Spacey performance in years. But the casting of bland Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth has us wincing, particularly since the real MIT Blackjack Team was made up primarily of Asian-Americans.

Mister Lonely

A Michael Jackson impersonator falls for a Marilyn Monroe lookalike. "Meanwhile, a miracle is happening somewhere in a Latin American jungle." It could be unbearably precious, but it is Harmony Korine's first movie since Julien Donkey-Boy, so we can’t help but be curious.

New Orleans Mon Amour

Director Michael Almereyda made the little-seen but weirdly compelling Happy Here and Now (which played SXSW in 2003) in pre-Katrina New Orleans. After the flood, Almereyda returns to the Crescent City tell the story of a surgeon trying to get his life back together as the city tries to do the same.

Goliath

Austin’s own Zellner Brothers may not be following the Coens to the Oscar podium anytime soon, but they do have their own special brand of comedic deadpan. Their latest feature Goliath, about a man searching for his lost cat, got a mixed reaction when it premiered at Sundance, but the hometown crowd is sure to be on their side.

Baghead

Greta Gerwig is the undisputed queen of mumblecore, starring in no less than three such films at this year’s SXSW festival. One of them is the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead, the mumblecore horror-comedy about four friends spending a weekend at a woodsy cabin, where they are menaced by a man with a paper bag over his head. Even if you can’t stand these sort of inarticulate twentysomething characters, you can at least hold out hope that Baghead will do something terrible to them.

As a bonus, here’s a short film that will be playing this year’s festival. It’s called "I Slammed My Dick in the Drawer." We think it’s self-explanatory.

Vanishing Act: Harmony Korine

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Attention Diablo Cody: you are not the first oddly monikered young screenwriter whose first script became an indie sensation. Way back in the 20th century, there was a fella name o’ Harmony Korine, no more than a teenager when his screenplay Kids became photographer Larry Clark’s 1995 directorial debut. An instant controversy, the documentary-style look at the sexually-charged, drug-fueled life of a group of New York teens was slapped with an NC-17 rating that prevented its distribution by Miramax (then as now owned by Disney). The Weinstein brothers released Kids on their own to a mixed reception; some critics swooned, others proclaimed it exploitative sleaze.

Still, Korine made enough of a name for himself to secure his own directorial debut two years later with Gummo. A fragmented, impressionistic ode to white trash, the film was if anything even more divisive than Kids. Janet Maslin of the New York Times opened her review with the line “October is early, but not too early to acknowledge Harmony Korine's Gummo as the worst film of the year.” But while sophisticated metropolitan tastemakers were busy pointing out how condescending and hateful Korine was toward his “nonprofessional actors, often freakish individuals” (jeez, no condescension there, Janet!), Gummo was well on its way to becoming the cult favorite of the trailer park. And why not? Among other things, it featured the greatest battle of man versus chair ever captured on film:

Korine followed Gummo with his Dogme 95 entry, Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), an uneven tale of a schizophrenic that garnered the now-predictable mixed reception ( I offered qualified praise: “Shot on digital video, with blown-out colors and punishing graininess, Julien Donkey-Boy has the look and feel of something unearthed in an archeological dig - a primitive piece of folk art.” Admittedly, I haven’t revisited it since.) That was nearly a decade ago, so where has Korine been?

For a while, there was talk of a disturbing movie in the Jackass vein, wherein Korine would antagonize random people on the street into fighting him and document the resulting damage done to him. In 2002, Clark directed Korine’s script for Ken Park, but that had been written years earlier. There were whispers of heroin addiction and, perhaps even more disturbing, a friendship with doofus magician David Blaine that resulted in the British television special Above the Below. But there were no new Harmony Korine movies...until now.

Mister Lonely, which will have its U.S. premiere at South by Southwest in March, is exactly what you’d expect: a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton), who brings him to a commune full of faux celebrities and historical figures. Having shown at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the film breaks no new ground as far as its critical reception: it’s as divisive as ever, sometimes within the same review. The UK Telegraph describes it as “by turns idiotic, over-extended, childish and half-baked.” Then, in the very next sentence: “But when it’s not those things, and sometimes even when it is, the results are brilliantly bold, moving and tenderly, rhapsodically beautiful.” Sounds like a Harmony Korine movie alright.