Bride of the Woodsman: FFC Interviews Kyra Sedgwick
October 17, 2004|Taller than you'd think and luminescent on a drizzly autumn day in Denver, Kyra Sedgwick has a smile that lights up a room, even this cavernous warehouse space rented out for the 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival in LoDo. Best known for playing prettier versions of the down-to-earth romantic interests in which Amy Madigan used to specialize, Ms. Sedgwick is approachable and engaged in person, holding a cup of hot tea between her hands for warmth as she talks about the importance of hope in her films, even as her work of late has tended towards a darker hue. This is no doubt the influence of her husband Kevin Bacon's recent forays into the territory of the haunted, spotlighted by the fact that the couple have three collaborative projects out or in the works. Their latest, The Woodsman, finds Ms. Sedgwick cast opposite Mr. Bacon as the girlfriend of a recently-released child molester, a character reminiscent in her sexual liberation of the one she played in Personal Velocity. Ms. Sedgwick has never struck me as the type looking for fame–there is a quality to her work that suggests something as indefinable and inadequate as "carefree." It wasn't that much of a surprise for me to learn that Carole Lombard is one of her idols.
DIFF ’04: The Woodsman
DIFF ’04: Stage Beauty
DIFF ’04: Imaginary Crimes
DIFF ’04: À Tout de Suite
DIFF ’04: Kinsey
DIFF ’04: Unknown Soldier
Ray (2004)
***/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Clifton Powell
screenplay by James L. White
directed by Taylor Hackford
by Walter Chaw Jamie Foxx is so mesmerizing as Ray Charles in Ray, Taylor Hackford's biopic of the legendary performer, that the typical Hackford-isms threatening to weigh down the piece don't seem as heavy as they usually do. At its heart, the film is really just another faux epic from Hackford: another glimpse at the rise and fall (and rise) of a uniquely American persona (Everybody's All-American, An Officer and a Gentleman), another recent-historical essay, and another picture that begins to feel a little repetitive in the hermetic rises and falls in action that comprise such things. But then there's Foxx. He's the real deal, I think, and between this and Michael Mann's Collateral, 2004 is the year that Foxx becomes a top of the line, bona fide superstar. He's going to win the Oscar in a couple of months–and as the third African-American to claim the Best Actor prize, he's going to deserve it more than Denzel Washington did for Training Day.
TIFF ’04: Saw
TIFF ’04: Palindromes
TIFF ’04: Keane
TIFF ’04: p.s.
TIFF ’04: Sideways
TIFF ’04: I ♥ Huckabees
TIFF ’04: White Skin
TIFF ’04: Tarnation
TIFF ’04: Blood
TIFF ’04: 5×2 – Five Times Two
Film Freak Central Does the 2003 New York City Horror Film Festival
November 5, 2003|Held at the Tribeca Theater for the second year in a row, the New York City Horror Film Festival (NYCHFF) is a collection of low-budget feature and short genre films that, like the San Francisco Film Society's lamented Dark Wave festival (after two amazing years, there is no third instalment pending), gives weight to a much-deserved critical re-evaluation of horror film as an important artistic, sociological, academic endeavour. With special awards this year honouring Troma's Lloyd Kaufman, underestimated horror director Stuart Gordon, drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, my favourite independent horror director Larry Fessenden, and special effects legend Tom Savini, the 2nd NYCHFF is an emerging niche festival run by folks who care about the genre and, better, have an idea about how to present the material in a way as enthusiastic as it is savvy.