A lot of compliments have been thrown around for Tom Ford’s directorial debut, A Single Man. But personally, I’m not sure that I’m convinced.

Based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man tells the bittersweet story of George (Colin Firth), a gay English professor who is dealing with a recent death of his lover. The film takes place basically within one day, with flashbacks to days before George was told of the tragic accident.

The film does a good job setting a tone. Within the first ten minutes of the film, it is quite clear where the film is heading. For a debut, Ford has done a really good job establishing a clear, focused aesthetic and mood that supports the melancholic, romantic tone of the film. This seems rather appropriate, since he’s a designer and all.

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Belated Happy Holidays all, it’s been a while. Here’s an amazing little short film to warm you up on a cold winter night.

Unless you’re in the tropics. Cause, you know. It’s nice and warm here.

Writing about ANTICHRIST is almost as intimidating as the anticipation of seeing the film. Lars von Trier’s latest, that I caught at the New York Film Festival, definitely has made a lot of people talk. People vomited, walked out, passed out and loved this film. It is clear that ANTICHRIST is a film that you just can’t keep quiet about.

Shot by a long-time collaborator, Anthony Dod Mantle (he also lit SLUMDOG MILLIONARE), ANTICHRIST looks wonderful. I was plenty surprised, pleasantly I may add, when I learned that most of the film was shot in HD on the RED camera. The over-saturated, at times romantic and dreamy atmosphere that Dod Mantle created for the film works well with the nightmarish quality of the narrative.
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I’ll be honest. I came to the 2009 New York Film Festival’s screening of Trash Humpers rather terrified of what I was going to see. It really is a logical fear, especially if you’ve seen the trailer. Especially after my last experience with David Lynch’s Inland Empire, I really doubted my ability to sit through at least an hour of jarring absurdity, the one that I came to know from one of Harmony Korine’s most famous movies, Gummo.

Trash Humpers is Korine’s return to the exploration of nihilism and juvenile absurdities, a very different creature altogether in comparison to Mister Lonely. In Trash Humpers, a group of creepy looking cretins (a woman and three guys, played by Korine, his wife and two friends in old people masks) wreck havoc around Nashville, Tenesse. Constipated, the Humpers roam seemingly aimlessly through small town America, vandalizing, teaching kids to put razors in apples and humping trash.
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So, yeah. School kind of sucks and leave me no time for movies, for the most parts.

But for those of you who don’t really pay attention on what’s going on around the city, the New York Film Festival is here.

And they have a lot of really cool shit going on, if you can afford it. Yeah, tickets are pretty expensive and they are mostly sold out anyway but there are some rush tickets available at $10 bucks each for all the movies. This year around, they are setting over around 50 tickets in total(?)

The festival opened with the 50th anniversary screening of a remastered Wizard of Oz (yay!). There are director talks, and awesome movie screenings, and stuff. You know, the usual shindig.

This year, I’m seeing Michael Haneke (Funny Games) and Pedro Almodóvar (Volver, Bad Education) talk. Both of them have movies playing at the fest. Haneke has White Ribbon and Almodóvar has his fourth movie with Penelope Cruz, Broken Embraces.

I just got back from Harmonie Korine’s Trash Humpers, so expect a review of that up by the weekend, and I’m seeing Von Trier’s controversial Antichrist tomorrow at 0900 PM.

Other movies I’m looking forward to are Todd Solondz’s Life During War Time and Joon-ho-Bong’s much talked about Mother.

I wish I could afford to see Broken Embraces and Push (the one with the black people and Mariah Carey). But alas.

Check out more details on the festival, see some movies with strangers in the dark, and maybe bump into someone famous.

The Interview Project is a 20,000 miles road trip over 70 days, across and back the United States.

Ok so it’s been quite a bit since my last post, but now that I’m finally settled in my new apartment life can finally go back to normal. So —

In a way, THE INTERVIEW PROJECT is a stepping stone for the career of another Lynch. Austin Jack Lynch, the son of David Lynch (who produced/funded this), interviews a bunch of very interesting people in this documentary project.

As we speak Austin Lynch is traveling across the United States, interviewing interesting strangers that he meets in his path. I’ll have to say, Austin definitely inherited some of his dad’s sensibilities. The cast of interviewees will often remind you of the characters in a David Lynch movie.

However, the humanity of these interviews are most often unflinching, sometimes even heartbreaking. While David Lynch tends to opt for the dreamlike and the surreal, THE INTERVIEW PROJECT proves that Austin has a stronger interest in finding the absurdities (often found in his dad’s films) within reality.

The interviews are released episodically over the duration of the trip, so far there are 31 interviews up on the site. You should really, really, really check this out. There’s a new one up every three days.

Watch some. Get to know some people that you wouldn’t usually meet, really.

Here’s the site. CLICK!

Just to be honest, when I first heard of INCONVINIENT TRUTH’s Davis Guggenheim’s second documentary, IT MIGHT GET LOUD, I was not all that interested. The idea seemed interesting, but the trailer made it seem like it was a very music oriented film. No, no, I don’t hate music nor do I have anything against music based films. It’s just sometimes, music-based films, tend to focus on technically oriented details of making music. Either that, or it’s your typical ‘life of a rock star’ type thing. Well, IT MIGHT GET LOUD has some of those two elements, but the film explores a process that transcends merely the medium of music.

The basic premise of IT MIGHT GET LOUD is to explore the relationships of three very famous, very successful guitarists and their instrument of choice, the guitar. The film features Jack White, of the White Stripes and the Raconteurs, together with U2’s David Howell “The Edge” Evans and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. Each musician represents a very distinguished style that is his own. One of the things that make the film works really well is exactly that. The three guitarists different approaches to music their personal characteristics interact really well together. They present interesting contrasts to each other, keeping the flow of thoughts in the film interesting.

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