Berlinale Final

I suppose that every film playing at the Berlinale has been announced now, thanks to David Hudson. Still no Claire Denis, but here's the full list of additions, which includes the new film Raging Sun, Raging Sky from Julián Hernández, who previously gave us the glaringly awful, humorless Broken Sky and A Thousand Clouds of Peace Fench the Sky, Love; Your Being Love Will Never End (yes, that's the full title). Enough with titles that reference the sky. Groan.

IFC Films in 2009, including Assayas, Ozon, Garrel, Sang-soo, Arcand, Tarr

In a press release, IFC Films laid out a number of films they'll be presenting through their various platforms of release, which includes theatrical, Festival Direct Video-On-Demand and their DVD rental partnership with Blockbuster (which seems to have stopped their releases of DVDs elsewhere, which is extremely disappointing). I use Netflix, and my cable provider doesn't offer Festival Direct... so I'm sort of fucked when it comes to their releases, but I have to hand it to them for getting so many films out there. Their 2009 release schedule includes:

Angel - dir. François Ozon - with Sam Neill, Charlotte Rampling, Michael Fassbender
Frontier of the Dawn [La frontière de l'aube] - dir. Philippe Garrel - with Louis Garrel, Laura Smet
Summer Hours [L'heure d'été] - dir. Olivier Assayas - with Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche, Jérémie Renier
La belle personne - dir. Christophe Honoré - with Louis Garrel, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet
Let It Rain [Parlez-moi de la pluie] - dir. Agnès Jaoui - with Agnès Jaoui
Days of Darkness [L'âge des ténèbres] - dir. Denys Arcand - with Diane Kruger, Rufus Wainwright, Emma de Caunes
Night and Day - dir. Hong Sang-soo
Disengagement [Désengagement] - dir. Amos Gitai - with Juliette Binoche, Jeanne Moreau
Dog Eat Dog [Perro come perro] - dir. Carlos Moreno
Everlasting Moments [Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick] - dir. Jan Troell
Fear Me Not [Den du frygter] - dir. Kristian Levring - with Ulrich Thomsen, Paprika Steen
I'm Going to Explode [Voy a explotar] - dir. Gerardo Naranjo - with Daniel Giménez Cacho
The Man from London [A Londoni férfi] - dir. Béla Tarr - with Tilda Swinton
The Necessities of Life [Ce qu'il fait pour vivre] - dir. Benoît Pilon
Paris - dir. Cédric Klapisch - with Juliette Binoche, Romain Duris, Fabrice Luchini, François Cluzet, Albert Dupontel, Karin Viard
When a Man Comes Home [En Mand kommer hjem] - dir. Thomas Vinterberg
White Night Wedding [Brúðguminn] - dir. Baltasar Kormákur - with Hilmir Snær Guðnason
A Year Ago in Winter [Im Winter ein Jahr] - dir. Caroline Link
Alexander the Last - dir. Joe Swanberg - with Jess Weixler, Justin Rice, Jane Adams, Josh Hamilton
Zift - dir. Javor Gardev

There are more titles at the link above, and I've also heard from elsewhere that Jean-Claude Brisseau's À l'aventure and Antti-Jussi Annila's Sauna are on the roster for 2009. I could be wrong, as I thought both Paris and Disengagement belonged to Samuel Goldwyn and Sony Pictures Classics, respectively. Expect plenty more acquisitions throughout the year following 2009's big film festivals.

Sorry, Kids

Word on the street is that Lionsgate has canceled their DVD release of Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy as part of their Meridian Collection. The disc was set for 3 February, but all signs are pointing toward a cancellation. Bite.

4 Rare Oshima Films in France This March

Carlotta has announced four hard-to-come-across films from Nagisa Oshima from the 1960s for 4 March 2009 in France. The four films are À propos des chansons paillardes au Japon [or Sing a Song of Sex or A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs] from 1967, Été japonais: Double Suicide [or Japanese Summer: Double Suicide] from 1967, L'obsédé en plein jour [or Violence at Noon or Violence at High Noon] from 1966 and Le retour des trois saoulards [or Three Resurrected Drunkards] from 1968. Carlotta released five other Oshima films, all of which are unavailable in the US, last summer: La Trilogie de la jeunesse [Trilogy of Youth] (which includes Contes cruels de la jeunesse [Cruel Story of Youth], Une ville d'amour et d'espoir [A Street of Love and Hope] and L'enterrement du soleil [The Sun's Burial]), Nuit et brouillard au Japon [Night and Fog in Japan] and Les plaisirs de la chair [Pleasures of the Flesh]. As far as I know, the DVDs only include a French subtitle option (which is pretty commonplace with French DVDs), but several of the titles have also been released through Yume Pictures in the UK with English subs (Violence at High Noon, The Sun's Burial, Night and Fog in Japan, Pleasures of the Flesh and Cruel Story of Youth [under the title Naked Youth]).

2009 Notebook, Volume 2: Expanded

There's a scale I use to place a certain type of film - the micobudget, tongue-in-cheek horrorcomedy. The scale slides along a plane with Terror Firmer (or Citizen Toxie) at the highest pole and Gutterballs at the furthest. Most of these films flutter around the Gutterballs arena with their tasteless (and humorless) gore fests, but Yeti: A Love Story is probably one of the few that sits on high. It's intermittently amusing, particularly in its coining of the sexual term "Mellancamping," which is described by the douchebag frat guy who eventually falls in love with the yeti as "making one hurt so good." Though heavy on beastial sodomy, it never reaches the brilliance of Toxie giving birth to his mother in Terror Firmer, but color me amused.

Queer cinema has always been my focal point in writing about the medium, which forces me to endure some of the most scathingly awful pieces of celluloid (or, more likely, consumer-level video). Piccadilly Pickups is easily one of the most taxing endurance tests I've undertook in this realm. Starring a pre-op Alexis Arquette as a porno film director named Henri de la Plus Ooh Arrgh, the film crawls its way through thankless gender-fucking sex scenes like Bruce LaBruce's two-legged puppy. It doesn't deserve any of the words I'm using for it, which is about the biggest crime I can give any film, and if you need perspective, I dedicated at least twenty-five pages of my thesis to Another Gay Movie.

On a happier note, I finally got around to Christopher Larkin's seminal A Very Natural Thing, one of the first American films to explicitly deal with the love life of a gay man, played by Robert Joel who also starred in Russ Meyer's Up! Megavixen. A Very Natural Thing is appropriately flawed by its mix of documentary and fiction footage, the former of which containing interviews with individuals at the 1973 New York City Gay Pride Parade. However, its intentions are always just, and its vision is always surprising. In addition to the film's final, breathtaking slow-mo nude run across a beach, A Very Natural Thing hits so many right notes in terms of narrative disposition, a brilliant precursor to some of queer cinema's more recent high points (Presque rien being the most obvious).

Christophe Honoré is such a perplexing figure in French cinema. He's absolutely inferior to his co-patriot peers (François Ozon, Sébastien Lifshitz), and yet there's still some sort of attraction in his glaring failures. While Les chansons d'amour suggests he might be heading in the proper direction (his more recent film La belle personne was bought by IFC Films last year), his directorial debut, 17 fois Cécile Cassard, is a giant mess of a film. Supposedly divided into seventeen "moments" of a woman's life, surprisingly downplayed by the wonderful Béatrice Dalle, the film begins awkwardly with Dalle speaking to her dead, naked husband (Johan Oderio-Robles), rear-projected into her otherwise empty bedroom. Every "moment" in not just this film but all of his others excluding Chansons and Tout contre Léo has been done before more successfully by finer directors like Arnaud Desplechin and Jean-Luc Godard, whom he embarrassingly emulated in Dans Paris. And yet, there's still something mildly compelling here. With the benefit of enlisting actors who are too good for their material (Dalle, Romain Duris, Jeanne Balibar), Cécile's confusing journey to Toulouse after abandoning her young son seems guided by good intentions, even if the overall result is a bit lackluster. None of the characters make much sense in their life decisions. Why did Cécile abandon her son and become Toulouse's resident fag hag all of a sudden? What exactly does Duris see in his friendship with Cécile anyway? Like Ma mère and Dans Paris, it's easier to just allow for Honoré to thoughtless throw the occasional juicy sequence to hide the dramatic shortcomings.

The morbid curiosity of witnessing Tony Ward, model and former love interest to Madonna, expose himself in just about every way is the only thing that keeps Jochen Hick's Sex/Life in LA interesting. His attempts to name-drop the icon at every given moment, including a story about her burning him with a cigarette, are just as curiously desperate as allowing the director to film him jerk-off in a bathtub. Nothing about Sex/Life in LA, or its sequel Sex/Life in LA 2: Cycles of Porn, is particularly revelatory or enlightening, even though it stands as a weird Behind-the-Music exposé of many of the people involved with Bruce LaBruce's Hustler White. Along with Ward, performance artist Ron Athey, co-director and photographer Rick Castro and irritating surfer boy porn star Kevin Kramer are all featured here, alongside shitty sub-porn music and under no worthy direction at all.

Poor Anne Hathaway. She's just begging to keep that Oscar out of her grasp. After giving me (and probably many others) justification for liking her in Rachel Getting Married, she's following that up with films like Passengers and Bride Wars. Though I don't think I can bring myself to watch anything with Kate Hudson in it, I did sit through Passengers which finds Hathaway treating the reluctant survivors of a terrible plane crash. With Hathaway finally finding the shoe that fit in Rachel, her role choices of bland romantic leads and professional women feel even more out of place. Under the pretense of being a mystery, Passengers waits until the end to reveal its cop-out "twist," which almost pushes the film into Seven Pounds territory. Strangely though, Rodrigo García actually has dramatic reasoning for the shitty rug-pull he does, and even though it doesn't work on the dramatic level he wanted it to, the fact that he didn't just want to pull the strings of his audience keeps Passengers from being the utter failure it might have been. You've seen it before, trust me.

I'm not planning on speaking at length about any of the 2000-and-beyond films I'm revisiting, as many of them will turn up on my planned best of the decade list, but I've learned a thing or two about myself with another viewing of Vicky Cristina Barcelona. I know Woody Allen has a pretty large fan base, and I know most of which has lost faith in the director's recent oeuvre, but falling in love with Vicky Cristina Barcelona all over again just proved that I will never have my finger on the pulse of America. I saw Vicky show up on plenty of top 10 lists this year and I've enthusiastically suggested many of my friends to go see it, and I have yet to find anyone I know personally that shares the relief and elation I felt with both viewings. It's so ravishingly complex in terms of characterization, narration (which is brilliant, despite many people's gripes about it), visualization and humor that I just can't wrap my mind around all the people I know who thought it was "good, but didn't blow me away." More on Vicky around the month of November, for sure. PS: It's my dark horse candidate for a Best Picture Oscar nomination.

2009 Notebook: Vol 2

I still haven't quite figured out how to categorize the films I watch yet, so most of them are getting their own special categories until I can think of something more universal. [I know this sounds really anal, but I'm really pissed off with iPhoto, as it won't let me set a cropping size for my photos... annoying, I know]

Better Than Expected

A Very Natural Thing - dir. Christopher Larkin - USA - 1974 - Water Bearer Films - with Robert Joel, Curt Gareth, Bo White, Anthony McKay, Marilyn Meyers

Yeti: A Love Story - dir. Adam Deyoe, Eric Gosselin - USA - 2006 - Troma - with David Paige, Brie Bouslaugh, Laura Glascott, Eric Gosselin, Adam Malamut, Joe Mande, Loren Mash

Passable

17 fois Cécile Cassard [Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard] - dir. Christophe Honoré - France - 2002 - N/A - with Béatrice Dalle, Romain Duris, Jeanne Balibar, Ange Ruzé, Johan Oderio-Robles, Tiago Manaïa, Jérôme Kircher, Julien Collet, Jérémy Sanguinetti

Disquiet - dir. Matthew Doyle - USA - 2006 - Self-Distributed - with Matthew Doyle, David Tuchman, Brandon Slagle, Niki Notarile

Lousy, Though Not Without Some Small Amusement

Pieces [Mil gritos tiene la noche] - dir. Juan Piquer Simón - Spain/Puerto Rico/USA - 1982 - Grindhouse Releasing - with Linda Day, Christopher George, Edmund Purdom

Sex/Life in L.A. - dir. Jochen Hick - Germany/USA - 1998 - Strand Releasing - with Tony Ward, Ron Athey, Rick Castro

Almost a Nightmare

Passengers - dir. Rodrigo García - USA/Canada - 2008 - with Anne Hathaway, Patrick Wilson, Andre Braugher, Dianne Wiest, David Morse, Clea DuVall, William B. Davis, Ryan Robbins

A Nightmare

Piccadilly Pickups - dir. Amory Peart - UK - 2000 - N/A - with Alexis Arquette, Jake Darby, Shawn Stone, Rod Hunt, Chris Green, B.J. Wallace

Revisited

Mother of Tears: The Third Mother [La terza madre] - dir. Dario Argento - Italy/USA - 2007 - Myriad/Dimension - with Asia Argento, Cristian Solimeno, Udo Kier, Moran Atias, Adam James, Daria Nicolodi

Vicky Cristina Barcelona - dir. Woody Allen - Spain/USA - 2008 - MGM/Weinstein Company - with Javier Bardem, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Chris Messina, Kevin Dunn, Pablo Schreiber

More from Berlin...

New films set for Berlin unfortunately do not include Claire Denis' White Material, which hopefully will see its premiere at Cannes instead, though I doubt in competition seeing as the film stars Isabelle Huppert, the head of this year's jury. The rest include:

Cheri - dir. Stephen Frears - with Michelle Pfeiffer, Kathy Bates, Rupert Friend, Anita Pallenberg, Iben Hjejle
Deutschland 09 - dir. Fatih Akin, Tom Tykwer, Wolfgang Becker, Sylke Enders, Dominik Graf, Romuald Karmaker, Nicolette Krebitz, Isabelle Stever, Hans Steinbichler, Hans Weingartner, Christoph Hochhaeusler, Dani Levy, Angela Schanelec
Eden à l'ouest - dir. Costa-Gavras - with Riccardo Scarmarcio, Juliane Köhler, Ulrich Tukur, Eric Caravaca
Happy Tears - dir. Mitchell Lichtenstein (Teeth) - with Parker Posey, Demi Moore, Rip Torn, Ellen Barkin
Ricky - dir. François Ozon - with Sergi Lopez
Sturm - dir. Hans-Christian Schmid (Requiem) - with Kerry Fox, Anamaria Marinca, Stephen Dillane
Tatarak - dir. Andrzej Wajda - with Krystyna Janda

Full list at IndieWire and on IFC Daily.

DVD Release Update - 16 January

Although I was a little disappointed to see that Last Year at Marienbad wasn't on the list, Criterion named their April releases; and although they weren't the Nagisa Oshima films I would have liked to have seen put out, I do look forward to rewatching both In the Realm of the Senses and Empire of Passion (formerly known in the US as In the Realm of Passion). Unfortunately, as Criterion doesn't put quotes on their DVD titles, In the Realm of the Sesnes will be without Madonna's glowing review: "It turns me on because it's real." In addition to those two, Stephen Frears' The Hit, starring John Hurt, Terence Stamp, Tim Roth, Bill Hunter and Fernando Rey, and 23 short films from director Jean Painlevé.

New Yorker announced Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's Class Relations [Klassenverhältnisse] for 17 March. MGM will be releasing three musicals on 7 April: Goldwyn Follies (which is also available in their big musical box-set), It's a Pleasure with Sonja Henie and Howard Hawks' A Song Is Born.

Watchmaker Films, though Koch Vision, are releasing Profit motive and the whispering wind and Mississippi Chicken on 7 April. And finally, Kino will have Raphaël Nadjari's Tehilim on 31 March.

Bad News, Tennis Shoes!

Well, not really, but a friend of mine told me that his favorite video store clerk once referred to the lovely Ludivine Sagnier as "bad news in tennis shoes." While I hardly agree, the phrase has stuck. I digress, it looks as if Sagnier has become a mother once again, delivering a baby girl with director Kim Chapiron (Sheitan, below), which I suppose means that she's no longer with actor Nicolas Duvauchelle (Inside, Trouble Every Day, Le petit voleur), the father of her other daughter. Congratulations.

Gettin' Gay with Kids (and Breillat and Van Sant) at Berlin

Another wave of titles have been announced for Berlin's Panorama section, including, most excitingly, a new film from Catherine Breillat entitled Barbe bleu. I was under the impression that Breillat's new film was to be a remake of her own Parfait amour! with Naomi Campbell; I really hope this project hasn't fallen through. In addition to Barbe bleu, her film Tapage nocturne [Nocturnal Uproar], starring Joe Dallesandro from 1979, will also be screening. Gus Van Sant will be there to show Milk, as well as the doc The Times of Harvey Milk. A pair of films about Quentin Crisp will also be screening in the Panorama this year: the documentary Resident Alien and The Naked Civil Servant, which stars John Hurt as Crisp. The other two films of note that were announced are the new film from Lucía Puenzo, El niño pez, which reunites her with XXY star Inés Efron, who is slowly becoming my favorite young actress and Michael Winterbottom's documentary The Shock Doctrine. Full report over at IndieWire.

Foreign Oscar Short-List for 2009: From 65 to 9

The foreign-language short-list has been officially announced, knocking the sixty-five country submissions down to nine before the official five nominees are announced on the 22nd. Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah was the big oversight this round of elimination, but if that's the only blunder they've made thusfar (remember 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Persepolis didn't even make the short-list last year), they're off to a good start. The 9 are:

Revanche - dir. Götz Spielmann - Austria (Criterion)
The Necessities of Life [Ce qu'il faut pour vivre] - dir. Benoît Pilon - Canada (No US distributor, owned by Séville Pictures in Canada)
The Class [Entre les murs] - dir. Laurent Cantet - France (Sony Pictures Classics, begins limited run 30 January)
The Baader-Meinhof Complex [Der Baader Meinhof Komplex] - dir. Uli Edel - Germany (No US distributor, owned by Momentum Pictures in the UK)
Waltz with Bashir - dir. Ari Folman - Israel (Sony Pictures Classics, in limited release now)
Departures - dir. Yojiro Takita - Japan (No US distributor)
Tear This Heart Out [Arráncame la vida] - dir. Roberto Sneider - Mexico (No US distributor)
Everlasting Moments [Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick] - dir. Jan Troell - Sweden (IFC Films, begins limited run 8 March)
3 Monkeys [Üç maymun] - dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan - Turkey (Apparently owned by New Yorker, but I've found no confirmation other than on the Toronto International Film Festival's website)

Other than Gomorrah, the other two big oversights didn't come as much of a surprise. No one expected Chile's Tony Manero to make it to the finalists; it's too sinister for the crusty Oscar crowd. Tulpan, Kazakhstan's submission, was also missing from the list; the film won the Un Certain Regard award at this year's Cannes. It had already been determined that Argentina made the wrong choice with Leonera as their pick, as it's been regarded as much lesser of a film than the country's other offerings from 08: The Headless Woman, Birdsong, Liverpool. After it's win at the Globes this past Sunday (a first for the Foreign Press to award a non-fiction film) and its increasing topical nature, Waltz with Bashir looks like the film to beat. Again, the Oscar nominations will be announced on 22 January.

Koch Lorber in April

Koch Lorber has announced their April DVD releases. They plan to release stand-alone discs of Marco Ferreri's La grande bouffe and Tales of Ordinary Madness, which were both part of their Ferreri box set from last year. The only new title for April is Scott Hicks' documentary Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. All street on 7 April.

Cocaine jokes and Cate Blanchett shout-outs!

Was it just me or were the Golden Globes a lot more entertaining than in previous years (well, not including last year)? I don't have a lot to say about them otherwise, except than everyone involved with 30 Rock really kept things engaging, and that Sally Hawkins is adorable. However, did anyone else feel a weird sense of superiority when the winners of Slumdog Millionaire kept referring to the folks in Bombay who "will be going mental" when they see this? I've watched enough BBC to know what "going mental" means, but the way they spoke of everyone in Bombay appeared condescending, and not just because the people in question were children. Whatever.