Returned from Sundance last night — 28 movies, 7 interviews, zero parties and a whole lot of peanut-butter sandwiches — and here's the first fruit of my labor: my interview with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, who've parlayed cult TV shows Tom Goes to the Mayor and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! into their first feature, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie. (The film is availble on demand beginning tomorrow, and will be in theaters from March 2.) As is typicall the case with their disassociative oeuvre, the movie both resists summary and renders it moot, or to put it in Heidecker's words, "This isn't a story you tell your friends." But it's as loopy, inspired and fitfully disturbing as their fans have come to expect, another step in their fairly astonishing success story.
Heidecker also stars in the Sundance premiere The Comedy, a substantially more unsettling, and deliberately less funny, portrait of moneyed, amoral hipsters living the Willamsburg life. Heidecker's character, who seals the deal with prospective sexual conquests by taking them back to his boat, doesn't do much of anything, but he has an abiding fascinating with manual labor, pitching in unbidden with a crew of Spanish-speaking landscapers and eventually applying for work as a dishwasher. But mostly, he just fucks around with his friends, a group that includes Wareheim and LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, playing pickup Wiffle Ball or stripping down to their skivvies and spraying each other with cheap beer. It's a grueling watch at times, particularly when Heidecker launches into verbal attacks on service workers who can't fight back, one that apparently prompted some tense exchanges at the movie's second public screening. Not surprisingly, The Comedy is still awaiting distribution, but here's hoping it'll go on to start arguments all over the country. UPDATE: It's not a distribution deal, but The Comedy is now "presented by" David Gordon Green and Danny McBride's Rough House Pictures, which is a step in that direction. Here's a clip, from Alverson's Vimeo page:
And speaking of long-simmering interests, I've been following the saga of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley, Jr., who eventually became known as the West Memphis Three, since the initial release of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. It was almost surreal to sit in a screening room nearly 20 years later with the WM3, only recently freed from prison, and the filmmakers who'd played an instrumental role in getting them out. Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which is now airing on HBO, is more a capstone to a collective masterwork than a great film in its own right, but that it exists is a tribute to Berlinger and Sinofsky's extraordinary dedication, which I was more than happy to talk up for the Los Angeles Times.
Bonus! My 2004 interview with Berlinger and Sinofsky on their excellent documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, and with Berlinger on the subject of his less-excellent foray into feature filmmaking: Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.
Like a lot of people I've been interviewing of late, I've been following Anna Deavere Smith's career for night on two decades (or, to be more precise, since my college girlfriend, a theatre major, hipped me to Smith's work). Furthering the sense of personal connection, her latest play, Let Me Down Easy, began with interviews at Yale New Haven Hospital, where a family member of mine was successfully treated for cancer around the same time I was learning about Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles. So it was a special thrill to get a chance to interview her for the A.V. Club, even if some of the Philistine comments are making my blood boil just a bit at the moment. (To the writer who regales us with the story of how Smith's character impersonations were ridiculed at the recent Television Critics Association meeting by audience members who compared her rigorous embodiment of her interview subjects' speech and gestures to a character on SCTV, I'm sorely tempted to respond, "That's why they write about fucking TV." But I didn't, because I'm a diplomat.) Anyway, you can see a filmed version of Let Me Down Easy on PBS beginning this evening, so judge for yourself.
Bonus! A review of the filmed version of Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles from (gulp!) 2001.
While we're talking animal behavior, Tilda Swinton had some interesting thoughts on the subject when I interviewed her for the Los Angeles Times. The subject was We Need to Talk About Kevin, director Lynn Ramsay's adaptation of the novel by Lionel Shriver, in which Swinton is the mother of a supremely troubled boy who eventually murders several of his high school classmates. The movie itself is more troubled than troubling, due largely to Ramsay's broad-brush symbolism (so much red!), but Swinton's performance is stunning, proving again that she's one of the most fascinating and intelligent people in the game. She's also someone with whom, were I several orders of magnitude cooler, I can kind of imagine hanging out with, which makes her an especially pleasant subject for an interview. Due to space limitations, I sadly wasn't able to include her advice for getting rid of Jehovah's Witnesses, but I look forward to trying her method some day.
Bonus! My 2010 interview with Swinton, on the subject of the sublime I Am Love, Orlando, Derek Jarman, and why she's not a proper actor.
And look, another review! This one's for the A.V. Club, of Tran Anh Hung's Norwegian Wood, which adapts Haruki Murakami's novel. I'm a fan of Tran's previous films, although it's been a long time — apparently his only other output in the past decade is a movie with Josh Hartnett, a prospect not quite dreadful enough to compel my interest — but this one's pretty inert, albeit with a handful of striking sequences.
And now for one of those short posts I mentioned: My Philadelphia City Paper review of David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method. In sum, it's nothing to write home about, but do click through for a more thorough explanation.
With Glenn Close made up as a 19th-century Dublin woman who's spent decades passing as a man, Albert Nobbs was an Oscar contender before anyone had seen a frame of it. But there's more to the movie's substance than the Academy's predictable preference for ostentatious transformation. Close, who first played the part off-Broadway nearly 30 years ago, spent 15 years developing the project for herself. Considering that it's a sweetheart role, that's not surprising, but in my interview with Close, her co-star and good friend Janet McTeer, and director Rodrigo Garcia for the Los Angeles Times, I push the theory that Close's attachment to the part has at least something to do with the fact that when she was 7, her parents joined a quasi-religious order called Moral Re-Armament, a cult-like organization whose most visible aspect was the eerily peppy singing group Up With People. (Or, as The Simpsons would have it, "Hooray for Everything!") Close has never talked about that 15-year period of her life much, and didn't exactly break protocol for me, but she let just a little light shine on why the part she's spent so long pursuing is a woman who spends her life hiding from the world.
