Breaking the Line

Mark Webber and "The End of Love": A Father Mourns His Marriage and Celebrates His Son

And in genuinely new stuff, here's my second Sundance dispatch, on Mark Webber's second film as a director, The End of Love. Philadelphians are well aware of Webber's backstory, how he was raised, at times on the street, by local welfare-rights activist Cheri Honkala, and rose from roles in shoestring productions like Todd Solondz's Storytelling to minor movie stardom. (The applause as he took the stage in Park City was as enthusiastic as that greeting any of indie film's biggest stars.) In The End of Love, Webber starts opposite his then two-year-old son, Isaac, as a struggling actor mourning the death of his wife and faltering under the weight of single parenthood. It occurred to me midway through watching the film that you almost never see children that age on screen, for the simple reason that they're too young to act and too old to just lie there like a cute lump of flesh. As the father of a child who's almost exactly the same age as the one in the film, I'm perhaps not entirely objective, but I'm also extremely qualified to report on how accurately Webber captures that particular stage of life. (The most resonant moment for me is when Webber counsels his son to chew his food more thoroughly before eating, then picks up the leftover food when his son abandons it, only to have the boy repeat his father's advice back at him, word for word. That happens in my house at least once a day.) Much more on the pleasures and dangers of shooting with your own toddler in my Inquirer feature.

A Separation: From Domestic Discord to Social X-Ray

Since its rapturous reception at the Toronto Film Festival in September, Asghar Farhadi's A Separation was a shoo-in for a foreign-film nomination (assuming his home country of Iran could be persuaded to submit the film, which they were). But Farhadi also picked up a surprise nod for the film's screenplay, which likely has less to do with recognizing the (substantial) quality of his writing than that category's status as a kind of also-ran best picture slot. I'm not quite as over the moon for the film, which expands a middle-class Tehran couple's domestic discord into a portrait of Iranian society at large, as some of my colleagues, but it's pretty astonishing nonetheless. And Farhadi? Talked to him, too.

Albert Nobbs: Glenn Close's Passion Project Burns With a Low Flame

Sundance hangover and temporary single dad duties kept me from posting last week's reviews, but here's my take on Albert Nobbs, with Glenn Close reprising the role she first played on stage in 1982 and spent 15 years developing as a film. Did I interview her, and her likewise Oscar-nommed costar, Janet McTeer? I sure did.

Katherine Heigl in "One for the Money": "Hookers Always Know Things"

Surprisingly absolutely no one, the Katherine Heigl-starring adaptation of Janet Evanovich's long-running series is an utter stiff, albeit one I couldn't work up much in the way of anger for. My review, which I can confidently promise is more entertaining than the film itself, at the A.V. Club. 

Tim and Eric on Their "Billion Dollar Movie," the Hipster Armageddon of "The Comedy," and Getting Rango'ed

 

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:

    

The Nominees: Talking With Allen, Close, Mara, Chastain, Berlinger, Sinofsky & Farhadi

Sundance is still running me ragged, but I'm taking a brief break to point to my interviews with several of today's Oscar nominees, especially since a number were published during my long blog hiatus. Let's start with Woody Allen, whose Midnight in Paris got three nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture. On to the actresses: Glenn Close for Albert Nobbs, with a cameo from her co-nominee Janet McTeer, Rooney Mara for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Jessica Chastain for The Help (although we talked more about her performances in Take Shelter and The Tree of Life). In the documentary category, I talked to filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, as well as the subjects of Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. And wrapping up, Asghar Farhadi, the director of A Separation, who in addition to a foreign film nomination won a surprise nod for his screenplay. One more to come, with The Descendants' Alexander Payne, which I'll brag on as soon as it's published.

Paradise Regained: Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky and the Saga of the West Memphis Three

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. 

Let Me Down Easy's Anna Deavere Smith on Healthcare, Nurse Jackie and the Future of Acting

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.

Mommy Direst: Tilda Swinton Talks About 'Kevin'

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.

Roman Polanski's Carnage: When Parents Stop Being Polite, and Start Getting Real

I'm all for #TeamMargaret — hell, you can put me on #TeamWarrior and #TeamRealSteel while you're at it — but if there's one 2011 movie I feel was most unfairly maligned, it's Roman Polanski's wicked, delectable Carnage. I go into my reasons in some depth in my review for the Philadelphia City Paper, as well as my "outlier" blurb for the A.V. Club's Best Films of 2011 (which I, er, didn't get around to posting last year), so proceed thence with all deliberate speed, or better yet, just see the damn movie.