Note: I posted this review soon after I saw this movie at Sundance, and today it's out in theaters, so I thought I'd share my thoughts again. It has some flaws, but overall I really like this movie.
Henry Poole Is Here was one of the first non-documentary feature films to be snatched up by a studio at this year's Sundance, and I can easily see why.
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When I saw the documentary American Teen at Sundance this year, I was totally wowed, and I knew I was watching something special. It's truly one of the most insightful documentaries on American life to come out in years. The film is in select theaters now, and I highly recommend you check it out.
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One of the more interesting entertainment-related stories I came across this past week is a Salon "Beyond the Multiplex" column about a subject near and dear to my heart: independent film. In the story, writer Andrew O'Hehir looks at the signs that indie films — so hot just a few years ago — are undergoing a pretty serious slide at the box office. Among the evidence:
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Another day, another trailer for a movie from this year's Sundance Film Festival. Today's features Matthew Broderick and Alan Alda as an uncle-nephew duo in Diminished Capacity. The plot is this: "A man (Broderick) suffering from memory [trouble] takes a trip to a memorabilia expo with his Alzheimer's-impaired relative (Alda) and his high school flame (Virginia Madsen), where the trio plans to.
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I was compelled to see the documentary Lioness at the Tribeca Film Festival because the basis is so intriguing. In the press notes for the film, this is the description: "Despite written policy banning women from direct ground combat, military commanders have been using women in direct ground warfare as an essential part of their operations since 2003. Though official policy forbids this operation and publicly denies its existence, this initiative and company of women have a name: they are called Team Lioness.
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OK, that's it. I think I'm tapped out on the ridiculously heartwarming documentaries about elderly folks doing things like singing Coldplay songs or learning hip-hop to perform during basketball games. It's not that I'm sick of them, it's that they reduce me to an overemotional puddle on the floor.
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As is the case with many movies, you can kinda tell how you'll feel about Savage Grace from how you feel watching the trailer. For me, I thought the trailer was tense, dark and disturbing. Julianne Moore looked powerfully off-kilter, exhibiting that magnificent control she utilizes with every role she takes on, but ultimately the trailer left me with a bleakly ominous feeling.
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Trucker largely reminded me of another indie movie titled Come Early Morning, which was written and directed by Chasing Amy's Joey Lauren Adams (who, incidentally, also stars in Trucker). The tone of both movies features a kind of weary, weathered fondness for the southern American landscape (in Come Early Morning it's the South, in Trucker it's the dusty deserts of southern California). At the heart of both movies, too, are hard-edged, tough-talking women in jobs that others in the movie ridicule for not being "women's jobs": Ashley Judd's character in Early Morning worked in construction, while the main character of Diane in Trucker, played by Michelle Monaghan, is a truck driver.
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OK, all this rain quickly went from comforting and good for snuggling up in movie theaters to just plain dreary. But it can't dampen my movie-loving spirit! The Tribeca Film Festival continues to deliver some awesome stuff — and now I have the pictures to prove it.
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Previously, I'd mostly known The Wackness as that weird-looking Sundance movie in which an Olsen twin makes out with Ben Kingsley and which features a ton of pot smoking. While those things are true, I also gotta say I really liked this weirdo pot-smoking movie. I can easily see why The Wackness won the audience award at Sundance this year: it's funny, it's got that tender boy-grows-up storyline, and there's plenty of sex, drugs and a ridiculously awesome, rap-heavy soundtrack.
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