When I interviewed director Kelly Reichardt at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival about her gut-wrenching masterpiece Wendy & Lucy (2008), she spoke of watching many old Westerns in preparation for her next project. She delivered the exquisite Meek's Cutoff at the 2010 Toronto Film Festival. The film follows three families as they make their trek along the Oregon Trail circa 1845. As they follow their hired mountain man through the Cascade Mountains they start to question if their leader really knows where he is leading them. And when they come across a Cayuse American Indian, the emigrants are forced to question who to trust. While Wendy & Lucy seemed inspired by the Italian Neo-Realists Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, Meek's Cutoff draws upon cinema's earliest documentaries, like Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922).

Collaborator Jon Raymond, who also wrote Reichardt's Old Joy (2006) and Wendy & Lucy, uncovered the infamous story of Meek's Cutoff while doing local research in Oregon. The tale seems perfect for Reichardt's distinctive visual storytelling by exploring humble characters who are confronting everyday troubles while taking a journey outside of their natural habitat. The striking style strips down her character's actions and allows the viewer to feel the weight of each procedure. Since Reichardt emphasizes her camera over dialogue, the solitary result can culminate in a truly transcendental experience for a viewer, while for others (like at the press screening in Toronto) a long nap. Somehow the fact that a film can evoke such extreme yet internal reactions conjures up the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu and most recently, Claire Denis. Read more »

Where do you go from global warming?

Director Davis Guggenheim won an Academy Award for 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth. His latest film, Waiting for “Superman”, takes on the United States’ failing public education system. In some ways, the documentary represents a return to Guggenheim’s first subject. “The very first documentary I made followed first-year teachers, because I believed that teachers were the answer to our schools,” he says. “And I still believe that. Now I wanted to talk about the kids and their families, and what’s at stake for them.”

The kids and families in question are the subjects of Waiting for “Superman”, which follows five young people in search of a better education. While the scope of the film is large — covering the history and bureaucracy that has created this national epidemic — Guggenheim is careful never to stray far from the victims of the crisis.

“The really hard part about it is how complicated this issue is, and it’s hard to simplify it,” he explains. “And I wanted it to be understandable to everybody. Whenever I got lost, I would always bring it back to the kids. It’s a very simple story: five kids, all they want is to go to a great school.”

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When Let Me In — the film which dares an Americanized do-over of 2008 Swedish import Let the Right One In — was first announced, fans of the original film let rip synchronized screeches of "Whyyyyy?", shortly followed by angry, ten-point arguments as to why Hollywood is really sucking balls lately. Consensus was that Let the Right One In, which picked up armloads of festival and critical awards (including the San Francisco Film Critics' Circle's Best Foreign Language Film honors), was not a film that deserved to be put through the remake machine. Sure, it only made a couple of million bucks stateside, but maybe it wasn't the kind of film (unlike 2008's similarly vampire-themed Twilight) that the masses were supposed to gobble up. After all, it had subtitles. Such a drag.

Matt Reeves, he of Cloverfield (2008) and Felicity fame, is aware of the fanboy-hater contingent that awaits his latest release. His Let Me In is a largely faithful retread, with some recognizable kid actors — Kodi Smit-McPhee (stronger here than he was in last year's The Road) and tween It Girl Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick Ass) — and the lure of legendary British horror house Hammer (back in the producing biz after decades) helping him attract audiences. I suspect many people who'll go see Let Me In may not have seen Let the Right One In — either because the original's release wasn't wide or lengthy enough, or because of that whole foreign-film bias. (Also, diehard fans of the first film may boycott the new version, just on principle. Hey, I did it with the recent A Nightmare on Elm Street, which in my mind NEVER HAPPENED).

Gotta say, though, Let Me In could have been worse than "faithful," which is way better than "redundant" or "totally offensive." Reeves, who penned the script from John Ajvide Lingqvist's novel (Lindqvist himself wrote the script for the 2008 film) stays true to the material, shifting the action to the snowy New Mexico mountains and injecting some Cold War and new wave flair into the 80s setting. I spoke with him recently, just after the film's screening at Austin, TX's Fantastic Fest — coincidentally the very festival where Let the Right One In won the Jury Prize for Best Horror Feature in 2008. He kindly put up with my many remake-themed queries.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: How was Fantastic Fest? Read more »

Every time a new Woody Allen film arrives (a near-annual event since 1969) the same old, lazy complaints (“It’s not one of his best”) arrive faster than you can say “pontificate.”  Yet 10 or 20 years later it seems that somehow many of those uncelebrated films seem to become “one of his best.” See Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Husbands and Wives (1992), or Sweet and Lowdown (1999).

With his latest entry, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (opening locally Fri/1), Allen delivers another pitch-perfect mini-guide to the hilarious horrors of growing old … something Allen (according to the director himself, speaking at his Toronto International Film Festival press conference) wouldn’t wish on anyone. What looks and feels like a whimsical rom-com about aging is, in fact, a sobering and even paralyzing blueprint of what exists in most relationships or marriages. Don’t let the fun and breezy vibe of quirky narration deter you. Not only is there more of a bittersweet edge to Allen’s familiar archetypes, but the UK-produced film works as a perfect counterpart to Mike Leigh’s latest monument Another Year (2010). I wouldn't be surprised if Stranger's Gemma Jones earns an Oscar nomination for her performance in what will surely be one of the year's most truthful films.

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By Landon Moblad

The fine art of creating shitty movies can be divided into two camps — intentional and unintentional. And while I have to admit, I’m much more a fan of the latter (Troll 2, The Room and the Blair Witch sequel all come to mind), I really love what the folks at the Asylum are up to. Any film studio with the balls to release a movie called Titanic II (“Looks like history is repeating itself”) is just fine in my book.

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Do not read this interview before seeing Catfish. I say that for a few reasons: 1. It’s mildly spoilery. 2. Some of it doesn’t make sense out of context. 3. I really want you to see Catfish. The documentary — or reality thriller, as it’s been called — follows filmmakers Rel Schulman and Henry Joost as they film Rel’s brother Nev’s online relationship. It’s a unique and contentious experience that I was still mulling over when I sat down with the documentarians and their subject. Here’s a transcript of our interview, minus some digressions about Saturday Night Live in the 80s and my attempts at Facebook stalkage.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: When did you realize you were making the movie that you made?

Henry Joost: When we discovered the songs — that scene. We just turned to each other and were like, “OK, we should probably not stop rolling for the next however long this takes.”
Rel Schulman: Yeah, we sort of just were swimming in the story very innocently up until that point, just trusting the fact that Nev was somehow engaging, and that he’d always been, and that we’d always filmed him and we film each other all the time. Something was happening and it felt like it might go somewhere, but we had no idea where.
Nev Schulman: And also, I have a history in my own life of — to a fault, sort of — pursuing things headstrong, without much consideration, just sort of going for it. And Rel’s observed those many situations where I’ve ended up getting hurt or in trouble or whatever it is, and I think always just sort of regretted not filming them. So he was like, “Henry, if it’s Nev, it’s probably going to get interesting. Let’s film it.”

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Genre junkies, rejoice! Neil Marshall — 2002 werewolf thriller Dog Soldiers, 2005 cave-monster chiller The Descent, and 2008 post-apocalyptic actioner Doomsday — has a brand-new film: Centurion. The latest from the man some call "the new John Carpenter" is getting a release with actual fanfare (however humble in comparision to, say, The Expendables or whatever), though you'd best hustle to the theater if you care to see Centurion, about a Roman soldier doing battle with tribal Picts in what's now Scotland, on the big screen. (It's also now available On Demand, but c'mon: the big screen is always better.) Evident in Marshall's films is the fact that he himself is a movie fan, which makes him all the more pleasurable to talk to. [Spoiler warning: there are some. Just so you know.]

San Francisco Bay Guardian: Centurion takes a documented event, the building of Hadrian's Wall, and creatively fills in some of the history surrounding it. Why did you write the story this way?

Neil Marshall: It was kind of a case of compacting a couple of dates, which weren't that far apart anyway. The myth of the Ninth Legion is based around 117 AD, which is when the film is set. That was when the entire Ninth Legion marched into Scotland and supposedly vanished without a trace. Historians have since been spoilsports and disproved that, and proved that they were attacked but they didn't get massacred, they were dispersed, and such like. But then, in 122 AD, Hadrian's Wall started being built. And I just thought, "Well, couldn't I tie the two in together somehow, that logically, what happened to the Ninth Legion could have been part of the reason for Hadrian to build the wall in the first place?" So, yeah, it was a question of kind of condensing that slightly. Read more »

So you're a gung-ho Hawaiian high schooler who wants to protect your country back in the early '40s. You join the ROTC, which leads to a spin through the Territorial Guard. You're then kicked out of service, because of where your family's from. In fact, you're now considered an enemy alien! Fancy. Such was the plight of the protagonists of Junichi Suzuki's 442: Live With Honor, Die With Dignity (which starts Fri/13 at Viz Cinema), Japanese-Americans who went on to become one of the most decorated squadrons in U.S. military history. Read more »