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Interview: Chazz Palminteri on "Yonkers Joe"
7 January 2009 7:52 AM, PST
By Aaron Hillis
If New York-born actor (and sometime writer/director) Chazz Palminteri were just a decade older, he probably would've been an Italian-American staple in the '70s films of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. Instead, during that time he studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, then made his way to off-Broadway and TV shows in the '80s before writing the 1988 play "A Bronx Tale" that would eventually be adapted for the screen as Robert De Niro's directorial debut and offer him his breakout movie role. Now one of the most prominent Italian-American actors working today, Palminteri currently stars as the titular Vegas shark in "Yonkers Joe," an entertaining drama about a con man whose seedy world of palming dice, cheating casinos, and conning any poor sucker is uprooted when he's forced to look after his adult son with Down's syndrome. I took a
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Aaron Hillis
On DVD: "The Wedding Director," Michael Powell
6 January 2009 7:53 AM, PST
By Michael Atkinson
Turning 70 this year, Marco Bellocchio has finally attained old-guard respectability, in light of the ironic, seasoned, historically quizzical mastery of "My Mother's Smile" (2002), "Good Morning, Night" (2003) and now "The Wedding Director" (2006). Notorious here as a mere provocateur (largely thanks to Maruschka Detmers' half-hearted blowjob in "Devil in the Flesh"), Bellocchio has always seemed young and ready to rumble ever since his 1965 debut "Fists in the Pocket," fashioned, when he was 26, as a sneak attack on all things Old World Catholic, provincial, late-baroque, aristocratic and traditional. Now, after many darkling family tales and adaptations of Pirandello, Bellocchio has mellowed into a ruminative, absurdist autumnal mood, and "The Wedding Director" is his most sheerly enjoyable film in years. The movie has a pleasantly Rivette-like dimension to it -- however much we see, we're always aware of something unmentioned and mysterious going on at the fringes of the story.
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Michael Atkinson
Interview: John Walter on "Theater of War"
5 January 2009 1:03 PM, PST
By Stephen Saito
At the end of our interview at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, John Walter joked that I should link to Balzac's short story "The Unknown Masterpiece" when writing about his documentary, not because he felt the title was a direct reference to its quality, but rather because he had finished the film only 20 minutes before he had to hand it over to the festival. Pondering some last minute tinkering, Walter conjured up the image of Balzac's protagonist, the eternally disappointed artist Frenhofer who works on a single painting for years, until he remembered a film editor friend that passed along George Lucas' advice, "A movie's never finished, it's only abandoned."
All this talk about an artist's process is no surprise coming from Walter, who has followed up his unconventional biopic of "chop artist" Ray Johnson, "How to Draw a Bunny," with the equally intriguing "Theater of War,
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Stephen Saito
IFC News Podcast #109: Our Sundance '09 Preview
5 January 2009 11:26 AM, PST
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
The 2009 Sundance Film Festival kicks off January 15th. On this week's podcast, we highlight the films that sound worthy of that infamous Sundance "buzz," from John Krasinski's adaptation of the late David Foster Wallace's work to a documentary about an unlikely Slovenian endurance swimmer taking on the mighty Amazon.
Download now (MP3: 36:01 minutes, 33 Mb) Podcast feeds: [Xml] [iTunes]
[Photo: "Adventureland," Miramax Films, 2009]
Alison Willmore
Opening This Week: Horrorfest, a bridal comedy and the best damn Mexican Mennonite drama ever made
5 January 2009 7:26 AM, PST
By Neil Pedley
There's a welcome change of pace this week, with nary a Nazi in sight. Character actors go to work both in front of and behind the camera, there's a white wedding, a black comedy and a bizarre love triangle in Plautdietsch just over the Mexican border.
"8 Films to Die For: After Dark Horrorfest 2009"
For one week only, nasty niche distributor After Dark Films terrorizes 300 screens across the country with their third annual "Horrorfest" showcase featuring a selection of eight indie horror films. This year's selection comprises of: "Autopsy," the Lena Headey-Richard Jenkins' thriller "The Broken," "The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations," "Dying Breed," "Perkins' 14," "Slaughter," the Korean frightfest "Voices," and "From Within," which Alison Willmore noted during its Tribeca premiere wasn't exactly for God-fearing types. Eight films to die for is what they say -- we'll settle for being made to perhaps feel a bit sick afterwards.
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Neil Pedley
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