Dearest CriterionCast listeners,

If you haven’t heard through pensive whisperings, in Ustream, or in our latest episodes, Episode 29 and 29.5 will be my last appearances on our podcast for a few months. In my personal life (rather, in that minuscule part in which I am not in front of a movie or [...]]]>

Dearest CriterionCast listeners,

If you haven’t heard through pensive whisperings, in Ustream, or in our latest episodes, Episode 29 and 29.5 will be my last appearances on our podcast for a few months. In my personal life (rather, in that minuscule part in which I am not in front of a movie or television or computer screen), I am making a big move from Portland, Oregon and back to North Carolina from whence I came. My motivations are in very large part for family, but I will have added bonuses of warm weather, sweet tea, and good ol’ Southern hospitality.

As a last hurrah to the Pacific Northwest, though, I will be leaving on tour with my good friends in Horse Feathers (who are featured in our main episodes’ closing music). We’ll be all over the United States and Canada for quite a few weeks, so if we are in your area, I implore you to come out an make yourself known to me. We’ll exchange pleasantries and high-fives, most assuredly.

In my absence, James McCormick will be keeping my seat warm on the podcast. If you haven’t been reading his posts on our blog, you certainly should — he’s quite insightful and sharp. Plus, you’ll likely find his humor less arid and alienating than mine. Truly, I am bummed that I won’t be joining him on the next handful of episodes.

Thank you for your listenership and readership. You’ve turned our hobbies into Sundances and SXSWs and Tribecas. Be good to Rudie and Ryan while I am gone — I’ll be checking in with them and you as often as I am able — and you’ll find me again (suntan and potbelly-clad) sometime in June.

Dream of divinity!

[Note from the Editor - hopefully Travis will be keeping us all up to date with his Twitter feed, which you can find here.]

Horse Feathers Spring 2010 tour dates:

While Travis and I were in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, we stayed in a condo with a group of other movie bloggers. It was one of the best work environments I have ever worked in. Long days turning into nights filled with watching movies and writing reviews [...]]]>

While Travis and I were in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, we stayed in a condo with a group of other movie bloggers. It was one of the best work environments I have ever worked in. Long days turning into nights filled with watching movies and writing reviews and everything in-between consisted of eating junk food and creating long lasting friendships. It was like summer camp but for movie bloggers.

One of the groups we were staying with was filmmaker Scott Hutchenson and A.J. Meadows of (formerly) WeAreMovieGeeks[DOT]com. They were shooting a documentary about film bloggers covering the Sundance Film Festival. Every film site that were invited to cover the festival had complete access to movies, filmmakers and celebrities in Park City. Truly we were treated like rock stars by publicist wanting us to give good reviews and P.R. for their films. Some films were good and some were bad but as film journalist we have an obligation to our readers first and foremost. Needless to say, it was a trip!

Redford Sent Us captures the behind the scenes of the Sundance Film Festival through a blogger’s point of view. In this teaser trailer, the filmmakers get interviews with John Cooper, filmmaker Katie Aselton, Devin Faraci of CHUD[DOT]com and our friends, Rusty Gordon and Chase Whale of GordonAndTheWhale[DOT]com.

Redford Sent Us : Teaser Trailer from Anthony Meadows on Vimeo.

Sundance was a wonderful experience that I wouldn’t trade with anything in the world. Travis and I saw a lot of movies, sometimes the first to see these movies, we got to meet and hang out with some of the best people in the film blogging community. There was actually a moment where we felt we were a legitimate part of the community and were treated as such by the ones around us. There was the one night after screenings where we got to hang out with Scott Weinberg and Eric D. Snider from Cinematical[DOT]com in their hotel room. What a crazy and surreal night that was. Just to get a chance to discuss a movie after it being screened with the writers and personalities you have gotten to know through their work was just so rewarding. It was a blast!

I have a feeling at next year’s Sundance Film Festival, Scott and A.J.’s film will be showcased and we’ll get to watch it in a theater full of the same people who were in it. I can’t wait for next year!!

If you can spot Travis and I in this trailer, I’ll buy a cookie for you next time I see you.

Those of us who are romantically-involved with that special someone (and really, even those of us sitting at home alone on a Friday night blogging) are well-aware that this Sunday is Saint Valentine’s Day. Window displays, television commercials, and grocery store aisles have been tinged with reds [...]]]>

Those of us who are romantically-involved with that special someone (and really, even those of us sitting at home alone on a Friday night blogging) are well-aware that this Sunday is Saint Valentine’s Day. Window displays, television commercials, and grocery store aisles have been tinged with reds and pinks for weeks now — a constant reminder that we Americans are commercially-obligated to express our feelings in rations of flora and chocolate cubes. We here at the Criterion Cast have but one love above all others, and that love has surprised us today with an early Valentine’s present, leaving us open-jawed and squealing to our besties.

That love? The Criterion Collection. That early present? Their releases for May 2010.

Representing the more, er, carnal aspects of Valentine tradition, we have five films by Nagisa Oshima making up Eclipse Volume 21.  If his Criterion selections IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES and EMPIRE OF PASSION are any indication of the overall air of his body of work, these films will no doubt be filled to overflowing with tons and tons and tons of graphic, unbridled sex.  Happy viewing!

Often called the Godard of the East, Japanese director Nagisa Oshima was one of the most provocative film artists of the twentieth century, and his works challenged and shocked the cinematic world for decades. Following his rise to prominence at Shochiku, Oshima struck out to form his own production company, Sozosha, in 1961. That move ushered in the prolific period of his career that gave birth to the five films collected here. Unsurprisingly, this studio renegade was fascinated by stories of outsiders—serial killers, rabid hedonists, and stowaway misfits are just some of the social castoffs you’ll meet in these audacious, cerebral entries in the New Wave surge that made Japan a hub of truly daredevil moviemaking.

Available on May 18th, 2010 on DVD, the Collector’s set includes:

I took a good amount of video in Park City during Sundance. I wish I would’ve taken more, but I was pre-occupied with writing reviews and watching movies. Here is a collection of candid moments and reaction to some of the films we screened during the short amount of time Travis and [...]]]>

I took a good amount of video in Park City during Sundance. I wish I would’ve taken more, but I was pre-occupied with writing reviews and watching movies. Here is a collection of candid moments and reaction to some of the films we screened during the short amount of time Travis and I were in Park City.

Park City, Utah is a beautiful city, surrounded by gorgeous, majestic mountains. This was the first time in my life that I’ve actually seen mountains and let me tell you, I was truly in awe. The snowy backdrop to a wonderful film festival of eccentric, poignant and touching collection of films was perfect. The people I met and experiences I had were simply unforgettable. The only way to easily describe Sundance is to compare it to a summer camp for film bloggers. Please enjoy the videos and thank you for making this all happen. Without the listeners there would be no CriterionCast.

Travis and I met 20 minutes before this was taken. I was the first to arrive at the bloggers condo which was dubbed “Snow Country For Old Men”. We stayed with people from WeAreMovieGeeks.com, Cinematical.com, Film.com and PASTE Magazine.

This was the first day of Sundance for Travis and I. It is Friday at 7am. Travis recounts his experience at the Sundance Opening Day Party.

Our reaction to a screening Gasper Noé’s ENTER THE VOID. We are joined by Jeremy of WeAreMovieGeeks.com

Getting ready to do a video with Travis but he was twitting….

Travis talks about BOY while I try to flirt with local women.

Day 4 of Sundance Film Festival. Early morning blogging before we back into the press theater. Look how much we trashed the condo after only 4 days.

Travis showing off his skillz….

I hope you enjoyed these video. There should be some more to come….

The immediacy of information in the age of the Internet, at the most basic consideration, has been double-edged.  Knowledge at our fingertips, though infinitely convenient, can be seen as a hindrance to sense of satisfaction evoked from its pursuit.  The microscopic lens over the plane of our world has made us at [...]]]>

The immediacy of information in the age of the Internet, at the most basic consideration, has been double-edged.  Knowledge at our fingertips, though infinitely convenient, can be seen as a hindrance to sense of satisfaction evoked from its pursuit.  The microscopic lens over the plane of our world has made us at once both intelligent and unappreciative of said intelligence.  Our social networks, our search engines, our satellite-powered maps that eliminate the distance between us are givens, when two decades ago, they were science-fiction.  We use them instinctively.  We use them perpetually.  Often, we use them maliciously.

Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s CATFISH introduces us to Yaniv Schulman, a charming but naive twenty-something working as a photographer in New York.  One day, he receives a painting of one of his photographs from an eight-year-old admirer, Abby Pierce, who lives in rural Michigan.  Through Facebook, the two burgeoning artists forge a professional relationship (Niv sends Abby photographs, she paints them and mails them to him).  This relationship grows more professionally with Abby’s mother, and romantically-but-unexpectedly with Abby’s older sister, Megan.  They seem a perfect family — perhaps too perfect to be true — and emerging from a charming tale of unlikely friendship is heartbreaking revelation and an impromptu search for truth.

CATFISH is many things:  inspiring and cautionary, charming and caustic, uplifting and enraging.  Its language and its reliance on social networks serves as a true-to-life portrayal of the cybersocial 21st century.  As a slide beneath the aforementioned lens of a microscope, it will be received by this generation as an honest testament to the state of social life, and by the previous generation as an alien, voyeuristic, and almost maddening disassociation from what is genuine and tangible in the world.  CATFISH created a dialogue among us bloggers immediately after its closing credits began to roll, and I can it doing the same with the public.  In this, it is apparent that this film is quite possibly the most powerful socially relevant of the Sundance Film Festival.

Thanks to MakingOf.com for the following interview video, you can find more interviews here.

Alright folks, we are treated to our third installment of Rudie and Travis discussing the various films they’ve seen on their third day of the Sundance Film Festival 2010.

In this episode, they discuss Douchebag, Happythankyoumoreplease, Hesher, His & Her, [...]]]>

Ah, the life of an internet blogger.

Alright folks, we are treated to our third installment of Rudie and Travis discussing the various films they’ve seen on their third day of the Sundance Film Festival 2010.

In this episode, they discuss Douchebag, Happythankyoumoreplease, Hesher, His & Her, A Prophet (Un Prophete), Catfish, and Splice.

You can find Rudie’s review of Douchebag here.

Rudie discusses Hesher for a bit on WeAreMovieGeeks video blog, found here.

You can read Travis’ review of His & Her here, and his thoughts on A Prophet here.

The horror/thriller/suspense/whatever genre tends to suffer from an inherent douchebaggery in its leads. When bad things happen to people with few redeeming qualities, we are sometimes hard-pressed to decide whether we are supposed to feel terror or satisfaction.

Adam Green’s Frozen is no different in this regard. Parker, Dan, and Lynch are three [...]]]>

The horror/thriller/suspense/whatever genre tends to suffer from an inherent douchebaggery in its leads. When bad things happen to people with few redeeming qualities, we are sometimes hard-pressed to decide whether we are supposed to feel terror or satisfaction.

Adam Green’s Frozen is no different in this regard. Parker, Dan, and Lynch are three over-priviledged, overly-attractive college kids that make jokes about “retards” and treat “minimum-wage workers” as lower lifeforms put on this earth to serve them. One such lower lifeform is a ski lift operator, whom they bribe into letting them take one final lift before the resort prematurely closes due to an impending blizzard.  Miscommunications ensue, and out terrible threesome is trapped some fifty feet above the ground, presumably for five days and nights until the park opens again.

Frozen’s scenes of terror are precisely that — terrifying.  Aided by both a rather intuitive attention to sound editing and a not-too-entirely-unbelievable premise, it creates a frantic uncertainty in its first act, an unthinkable and macabre turn of events in its second, and a desperate, exhausting final fight for survival in its third.  Sure, it’s Open Water on a ski lift, but even Green recognizes this enough to make cheeky mention of shark attacks in his film.  Spice it up with a couple of songs by Helicopter Helicopter (an unsung but personal favorite of my indie rock early twenties), and Frozen gets my seal of approval.

“What if the hero you’ve been waiting for is a dick?”

That is one of a few choice taglines of Taika Waititi’s BOY, the tale of an eleven-year-old living with his grandmother, brother, a slew of cousins, and dreams of fame and family. His mother has died during childbirth, and Boy believes [...]]]>

“What if the hero you’ve been waiting for is a dick?”

That is one of a few choice taglines of Taika Waititi’s BOY, the tale of an eleven-year-old living with his grandmother, brother, a slew of cousins, and dreams of fame and family. His mother has died during childbirth, and Boy believes his father to be an athlete, war hero, and anything other than the imprisoned deadbeat he actually is. When his father finally returns, Boy must face the truth of who he is, why he left, why he’s returned, and what dreams can be salvaged in the aftermath.

BOY is relentlessly charming. Waititi has painted us a portrait of mid-80s New Zealand; its landscapes shimmer with a downtrodden innocence, and its characters (exceptionally-acted, both child and adult) accentuate this painting with inexhaustible humor and beauty. Tina Cleary, the film’s casting director, should be knighted.

The relationships among Boy, Alamein (his father), and Rocky (his brother), though rather fantastical in nature, do maintain a certain reality and sincerity that endear us to each of them. We become so emotionally invested in keeping this family together that we have difficulty taking sides in confrontation. Yes, there is heartbreak and tragedy, but it is coupled with a humor so rich and genuine, we aren’t allowed any time to remain upset.

Though I have spent the past few days trudging through the snow of Park City, BOY transported me to a seaside summer in the Southern Pacific,  but warmed my heart before my body. It is, by far, my favorite film of the festival thus far.

Jacques Audiard’s Un Prophete (A Prophet) is unlike any other I’ve seen.  It is a veritable molotov cocktail — a prison drama encasing the fuel of a coming-of-age film, ignited with suspense and a touch of the ethereal — thrown at your movie screen to explode and burn for 150 minutes.

A Prophet [...]]]>

Jacques Audiard’s Un Prophete (A Prophet) is unlike any other I’ve seen.  It is a veritable molotov cocktail — a prison drama encasing the fuel of a coming-of-age film, ignited with suspense and a touch of the ethereal — thrown at your movie screen to explode and burn for 150 minutes.

A Prophet follows Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) as he, a 19-year-old illiterate Arab, enters into a six-year prison sentence.  He is immediately sucked into the internal politics, muscled into killing another prisoner for the prison’s Corsican representation, led by a man named Cesar, whose influence is practically without limit.  Malik does his job, securing for himself security, protection, and subsequent larger tasks throughout his sentence.  As he learns and masters the arts of power and crime, whatever innocence he may have retained coming into prison is lost, and what emerges is a seasoned, masterful crime lord.

As Malik gains influence and access to more of the prison, the linear narrative of the film begins to snake through its halls, introducing side plots and characters, each complex and powerful enough to be protagonists themselves.  Trusts and loyalties are created, questioned, and broken at lightning speed, and every character introduced is one to watch closely.

Audiard’s film rages with an intensity similar to films like City of God, but at the same time, harkens back to the likes of Z and Le Trou.  It creates an epic and unforgettable tale in a place that, as an audience, we likely would never know.  Rahim’s performance is also unforgettable, establishing his place in both the history and future of cinema.

From the first line of dialogue in Ken Wardrop’s documentary, I had a smile on my face. His & Hers tells, in 70 vignettes that are never more than 3 minutes long, life-spanning stories from Irish women about their fathers, husbands, and sons. These women, from toddlers just old enough to speak, to [...]]]>

From the first line of dialogue in Ken Wardrop’s documentary, I had a smile on my face. His & Hers tells, in 70 vignettes that are never more than 3 minutes long, life-spanning stories from Irish women about their fathers, husbands, and sons. These women, from toddlers just old enough to speak, to ladies well into their nineties, give us charming and often-hilarious peeks into their lives and relationships in stories of chores, curfews, marriage proposals, domestic lives, and on into widowhood.

Each story is told in a bedroom, living room, kitchen, or hallway — shot as a sort of reality-television confession booth, but shot with a cinematic eye that combines the interior-style of Yasujiro Ozu with that of an Ikea catalog.  Not one of the men highlighted in these stories is shown in the film — instead, we are left to create these men in our imaginations, through their caricatures presented.  The result is a seemingly inexhaustible chain of charming and heartwarming glimpses into the most recent generations of Irish family.

The crowd reaction to His & Hers was priceless.  The laughter contained an air of sincerity that can only come from mouthes drawn into perpetual smile.  The gasps and bemoaning during the sadder vignettes were only indicative of the fact that the audience had found investment within the ninety seconds in which the story was told.  This documentary is a true testament to the power and persistence of family life, which is more and more a fleeting ideal in modern America.

Video clip and poster image courtesy of the filmmaker.