October 3, 2004|The restaurant area of Denver's Hotel Teatro is split into two levels: a half-mezzanine sporting a bar that overlooks the street level, which in turn has its own bar and windows. In the late afternoon after the business lunch crowd has siphoned itself back into the buildings in and around lower downtown, the mezzanine is empty, brown, and swathed in shadow–making it an interesting place to meet the mastermind behind the somewhat baroque Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Kerry Conran, who would seem to be at home here in this art deco oasis in the middle a liminal mountain metropolis.

September 5, 2004|Poised on the eve of The Last Shot and the intriguing The Great New Wonderful, Tony Shalhoub had me a long time ago at his three minutes or so in Barton Fink. The best part of Galaxy Quest, playing the guy playing the ethnic guy in a "Star Trek"-like cult television series, Shalhoub also stole the show as fast-talking lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider in his reunion with the Coen Brothers, The Man Who Wasn't There; demonstrated uncommon intelligence and sensitivity in the still-underseen Big Night; and made his feature-film debut behind the camera with wife Brooke Adams in the independent Made-Up, now trickling into video stores. Shalhoub is an Emmy-winner, too, taking home a trophy for cable-series "Monk", which is winding down its third critically-acclaimed season.

August 29, 2004|I entered into Suspect Zero saddled with some of the most venomous buzz for a picture since Catwoman; apparently a critic's screening somewhere in the wild Pacific Northwest had devolved into a hooting match. But I was hopeful, mainly because director E. Elias Merhige's first film, 1991's Begotten, is one of the bravest, most uncompromising experiments to come out of the American independent scene since Jonas Mekas. Silent, hallucinatory, deeply unsettling, it had the power to enrage and intoxicate in equal measure and did so, making no apologies about its debts to sources as highbrow and "pretentious" as Luis Buñuel and Carl Dreyer. (Seriously, in a time when our president is trying to turn "nuance" into a dirty word, who can blame the cattle calls of the brainwashed naysayer?) Begotten is a masterpiece and a Rorschach test in the way that the best experimental cinema can be: it has the conviction and kineticism of early Stan Brakhage–that is, if Brakhage had a background in William Blake instead of William Burroughs.

Vincent Gallo is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being Film Freak Central has ever known

got the call in the middle of a morning screening that a moderator was needed that evening at Denver's Starz Filmcenter for a Q&A after a sold-out screening of Vincent Gallo's notorious The Brown Bunny. After a second screening, a lot of juggling, and a little soul-searching, and with a little less than two hours to research and prepare, I agreed to do it. I'd never met Vincent Gallo before, but his reputation for combativeness bordering on cruelty preceded him; and though I took his side in private in his blow-up with Roger Ebert after last year's disastrous Cannes Film Festival screening of a workprint of his picture, I confess that I've never been more nervous to interview someone.

July 25, 2004|”Hi there, you’re Joshua Marston?”

“Yes. I am.”

Such was my introduction to indie flavour-of-the-second Joshua Marston, writer-director of Maria Full of Grace: a full head of curly hair, and an ego the size of a brick shithouse. He turned away from me in the balconied hallway of Denver’s historic Brown Palace Hotel after confirming his identity–ignoring my hand outstretched–to chat with someone else he’d alienated, then realized that he had to talk to me as part of his publicity duties for his first shot at feature filmmaking. It’s a tough business: you fly in, you spend the night, you fly out, and in between you talk to about two dozen faceless, mostly nameless ink-stained wretches who generally ask you the same questions. It’s one thing to do it in New York and L.A., it’s another altogether to muster the strength to do it in a backwater like Denver. Thing of it is that people don’t always stay where they are at the moment–and that Denver isn’t all that dusty a horse-town as it used to be.

June 20, 2004|It happens this way sometimes: I'm surprised by a film, I write the review, and then I seek out an interview with the director to, in essence, commiserate on how surprising it all is–the liking, the desire to know more about the creation… Such was the case with Zack Snyder and his Dawn of the Dead remake, and I've done it again for Rawson Marshall Thurber because of his smart, incisive Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. It's funny where you find the shards to shore against your ruins, and it's exhilarating to feel like the first member of a cult. The desire to be a critic is tied at least in part, I think, to the desire to be the first fan in the club, as well as its most active recruiter. I spoke with Mr. Thurber on the telephone from Los Angeles the morning that his movie was released to surprisingly strong reviews; sounding a little tired, a little worried about how his debut will do ("I've got a few applications out to Starbucks, just in case"), Mr. Thurber proved himself to be as articulate and well-spoken as his film implies. A self-described "comedy snob," his desire to make films that don't cater to the slowest student in the class seems genuine and borne out by not only his feature, but also his classic short Terry Tate: Office Linebacker. With the imminent success of Dodgeball, the hope is that he'll continue to be allowed to make as many obscure references to Sappho and Lewis Carroll as he pleases.

June 6, 2004|Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song (1971) is arguably the most influential African-American film of the modern age, a zero-budget independent picture hailing back to a time in the early-Seventies when the term still meant something outside the studio boutique and the Weinstein brothers' Miramax Xanadu. The man behind the picture, writer/director/star Melvin Van Peebles, still has the sort of aura around him at the age of 72 that suggests just how good it is to be the king. A giant figure in any study of black popular culture (earning entire chapters in Donald Bogle's survey history Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Film and Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara), Van Peebles has interviewed Malcolm X, borrowed money from Bill Cosby, been nominated for three Grammys, won an Emmy, written a few books, collected no fewer than eleven Tony nominations, and received the French Legion of Honor. A kind of socio-political renaissance man, then, Van Peebles is still best known in the United States as the director of a curious little exploitation film that became, for a time, not only the highest-grossing independent picture in history, but also a polarizing force in spawning a race dialogue in American cinema, with an entire genre, Blaxploitation, flowering briefly in the aftermath of its release. Not a solution by any means, Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song represents a great start–the hope now that filmmakers like Antoine Fuqua, the Hughes Brothers, and Spike Lee can begin to/continue to bear up against the slings and arrows, the siren's call allure, of outrageously offensive mainstream fluff. (For a victim of temptation, look no further than John Singleton.)

May 2, 2004|Mark S. Waters looks a little like Colin Firth and hails from the banal horrors of South Bend, IN. As we chatted politely in his suite at Denver's Hotel Teatro, I noticed that his speech is halted by a little stammering now and again, which I interpreted as nerves or excitement or, perhaps, both. Mr. Waters's laughter, though, when it comes, is booming and infectious. Mainly there to ask him about his interesting debut film The House of Yes, about his treatment of Asians in his two Lindsay Lohan vehicles, and about how it was that he found himself directing a parade of 'tween flicks after so auspicious a beginning, I have to say, after a time it dawned on me that Mr. Waters was in fact desirous of a mainstream career. Call it hopelessly Pollyannaish, but it had literally never occurred to me that people who make debuts as cunning as The House of Yes would consciously move on to safe and popular films. That being said, Mr. Waters has expressed that Mean Girls will be the last flick of this sort for him, and as swan songs go, one could do worse: it's not very good, but in a culture of lowered expectations, sometimes you take what you can get.

April 4, 2004|A long time has passed between big-screen assignments for filmmaker Martha Coolidge, the first woman president of the Director's Guild of America. It's been seven since her unofficial conclusion to the Grumpy Old Men franchise, Out to Sea–and thirteen years since her last good film, Rambling Rose. Making her mark in the early Eighties as a distaff John Hughes with a pair of teensploitation classics (Valley Girl and Real Genius), Ms. Coolidge, though she'll only hint at it, seems to be the victim of a particular sexism in the United States among directors (something perhaps exacerbated by her aforementioned election to the head of the DGA in 2002), a phenomenon relegating her to television projects, place-markers, and the occasional flyer on something that might actually be accidentally worth a damn with a little coaxing.

Omar Epps takes the gloves off to talk about AGAINST THE ROPES and more

February 22, 2004|Just three days after a surprise blizzard shut down Denver for an evening, I met Omar Epps at the Hotel Teatro, where we chatted about how when it's above freezing in the surprisingly sunny Mile High City, there's a line around the Dairy Queen. We discussed the strange social caste system that's developed in Aspen, what with trailer parks inhabited by all the service industry workers ringing the jewel of the Rockies like a Dickensian indictment of excess, and eventually, we worked our way around to the subject of minority directors and his new film, Charles S. Dutton's Against the Ropes. In truth, I was more interested in his work with personal hero "Beat" Takeshi Kitano in Kitano's English-language debut Brother, and how an actor still somewhat on the margins of stardom (despite one of the truly memorable "ER" turns as Dr. Dennis Gant, the poor sot who throws himself under the L after half a season) has managed to assemble a filmography diverse enough to incorporate titles like Breakfast of Champions, Love and Basketball, and Dracula 2000. This is to say nothing of his extracurricular projects, such as a music production company called "BKNYC Records," which already has a few artists in its stable. Maybe the question's the answer.

January 11, 2004|I reread Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast in the days leading up to a chat with Campbell Scott regarding his new film as director, Off the Map. It is the book that Off the Map's matriarch (Joan Allen) reads by lamplight throughout the picture, one that transfers its philosophy of nautical reflection to not only the picture's rhythms but also a visual scheme that re-imagines Dana's vast deeps as the smothering doldrums of the New Mexico desert. Scott's fourth film behind the camera, Off the Map is surprisingly sticky, offering up echoes for days after a viewing and displaying a confidence of voice and purity of spirit of an artist hitting his stride in the last couple of years as actor, director, and sometime producer. So I went to the underground grotto of Denver's Magnolia Hotel with the intention to talk to the generous Mr. Scott about tranquility, Zen and the art of filmmaking if you will–to take a peak into that treasure chest that has offered forth, in addition to Off the Map, one of this year's best films in The Secret Lives of Dentists, and one of last's, Rodger Dodger.