This absorbing character study features a startlingly raw performance from Stella Schnabel as an aspiring actress who drifts through a series of meaningless sexual encounters, failed auditions, and public breakdowns, repeatedly lashing out at the world she struggles to comprehend. Like an updated version of Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, You Won’t Miss Me astutely taps into the psychology of a frustrated generation—privileged and talented but, for all its potential, unfulfilled.
Showtimes: Fri, Jun 19 at 9:30pm, followed by Q&A with director Ry Russo-Young Tue, June 23 at 6:30pm, followed by Q&A with director Ry Russo-Young and actress Stella Schnabel
Trailer is here, but somehow not on YouTube (correction—the trailer is on YouTube and embedded below), which has, however, an interview with Ry Russo-Young.
Reeling from a brutal break-up, Kira (Kenya Miles) sleeps with Max (Wiley Wiggins), a charming but disheveled wreck already committed to long-term girlfriend Sara. Max (no emotional sophisticate) becomes obsessed, mostly with Kira, but vaguely with his curious lack of conscience as well. Kira, fighting to win a job she hates and running aimless romantic loops, faces the precarious double challenge of choosing a next step and charting a course back to sanity. Good luck leading with your heart, when your heart is an utter emotional idiot.
Showtime:
Wed, Jun 24 at 9:30pm, followed by Q&A with director Dia Sokol
Holy Steampunk, Sherlock Holmes! Screen idol Takeshi Kaneshiro is back and this time he’s showing his respect for Lupin, Raffles and all the great thieves and masked penny dreadful heroes of the turn-of-the-century in this massive steampunk blow-out directed by Shimako Sato, one of the few female directors in the big budget end of the Japanese film industry.
It’s 1949 and World War II never happened. Nikola Tesla has just won a Nobel Prize rather than dying in obscurity and the Japanese Empire is an undying aristocracy where the rich sip tea out of bone china, while the poor die in the gutters. K-20, the Fiend with Twenty Faces, steals from the rich and gives to himself. But now, on the eve of the marriage between society princess, Yoko Hashiba, and chief of police, Kogoro Akechi, the fiend frames simple circus acrobat Hekichi Endo (Takeshi Kaneshiro) for his crimes and the poor sap is arrested and sentenced to death. But he escapes at the last minute and assumes the guise of K-20 in order to clear his good name.
Starting with a falling chandelier from Phantom of the Opera and continuing with the Tunguska Explosion, Tesla coils, gyrocopters and all manner of pulp touchstones, this flick is constantly zooming, panning, gliding and skidding to a stop, suffused with old fashioned showmanship and skill. For sheer entertainment value it’s like all the Saturday morning matinees you never saw wrapped up in one film and given a big budget gloss. But more than the skill and style, the actors are a delight. The young princess, Hashiba (Takako Matsu) describes herself as “just a modest girl from a good family,” but really she’s a two-fisted adventurer in waiting, hemmed in by good breeding but secretly yearning to sock a baddie in the jaw and fly a helicopter into the sunset. Takeshi Kaneshiro is charm itself, and it’s a pleasure to spend two hours in his company. By the time the last zeppelin has cleared the screen you’ll want to know where you can buy a ticket and stand in line to wait for the sequel.
Showtimes: Sat June 20, 8:15pm at the IFC Center Tue June 30, 1:45pm at the IFC Center
Eric Tsang produced the youth film project, Winds of September, which resulted in three feature films about kids coming of age, one set in Taiwan, one set in Mainland China and one set in Hong Kong. Each movie is based on the exact same screenplay, written by Tom Lin who directed the Taiwanese segment, and so you’d expect the same movie three times. Nope. Each movie reflects the film industry in which it’s been shot and audiences and critics agree that the one to see is High Noon. Sure it’s a teen angst movie and we’ve all seen plenty of those before, but few other movies capture the frenetic energy of Hong Kong and few other filmmakers are willing to push the youth movie as far as this flick’s 24-year-old director, Mak Hei-yan.
Set in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, Mak zooms in on seven high school students who spend their time screwing around, eating, playing video games and studying. Shot on DV, the visual style is what keeps things hopping early on, with Mak filling her frame with so much zippy visual panache that you begin to feel like you’re trapped inside a sixteen-year-old’s head while they IM their friends, scan Youtube, watch TV and talk on the phone all at the same time. But then things take a turn for the worse and the movie begins to live up to its tagline: “There’s one ridiculous event after another every day.”
Most Hong Kong movies aimed at the teen demographic are shallow sex comedies, sappy love stories or ponderous lectures about the dangers of one thing or another. Mak eschews all that guff and sprints into Category III territory (Hong Kong’s equivalent of the NC-17 rating) full speed ahead. As the movie turns darker and the unwanted pregnancies, drug addictions and murders pile up you realize that you’ve been tricked into lowering your guard just long enough for the director to get under your skin. Veering wildly between youth drama and exploitation picture, High Noon pulls itself together in the end to deliver a powerful punch. As Variety says, “Young Mak is one to watch.”
Me-Sook (Kong Hyo-Jin) is probably not the finest teacher that the South Korean educational system has to offer. A paranoid, ruddy-faced stick of dynamite, she lives in the faculty lounge, teaches middle school English without knowing the language, and has been in love with colleague Mr. Seo (Lee Jong-Hyeok) since she was his student. Mr. Seo has a family now, but as far as Me-Sook is concerned, they’re just temporary obstacles. When she learns that dizzy colleague Lee Yu-Ri (Hwangwoo Seul-Hye) has been carrying on an affair with Seo, Me-Sook goes thermonuclear, forming an unholy alliance with a student who's a born loser, just like her: Mr. Seo’s daughter. Imagine a movie based on a team-up by Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction and Reese Witherspoon from Election, and you’re just starting to understand the pathology on display here.
"People like us must work harder than everyone else," Me-Sook warns Jong-Hee, Mr. Seo’s daughter, at the start of their mission. And they do. In between rehearsals for their ill-advised performance of Waiting for Godot at the school talent festival, the girls spend their nights posing as Mr. Seo on the Net, luring the virginal Yu-Ri into cybersex trysts, but to their dismay, the more perverse the chats become the more aroused Yu-Ri gets. As their scheme expands and begins to collapse, comedy becomes dramedy, laying bare the fragile bonds not only between outcasts but between women. When Mrs. Seo (a magnificent Bang Eun-Jin) puts it all together, it's time to put on your headphones in the language lab, and choose your future through guided meditation and soul-shattering confessions.
Crush and Blush is helmed by first-time female director, Lee Kyeong-Mi, who splices thriller, satire and, yes, chick flick DNA to create a gorgeous monster. Upending all the tired "female stalker" cinema tropes, she places you in the headspace of the supposed “psychos” while the prey remains at a distance. Co-written and produced by Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy)—who cameos in the film along with Bong Joon-Ho (director of The Host)—the film took home "Best New Director" and "Best Screenplay" at the Blue Dragon Film Awards. Kong Hyo-Jin won "Best Actress" at the Korean Film Awards for her tour de force as the unstoppable Me-Sook, whom she transforms from an object of derision to one of shocking identification. These characters do horrible things, but for profoundly human reasons, and unlike Fatal Attraction, nobody gets stabbed, shot, or boils a bunny. Catharsis, when it comes, is both hysterical and heartbreaking. Crush and Blush is a subversion of the stalker picture, a love letter to the world's losers. "No one cares about people like us," Me-Sook tells Jong-hee late in the picture. "But I care," Jong-Hee replies. By the end of this film, so will you.
Showtimes: Wed June 24, 9:15pm at the IFC Center (with actress Kong Hyo-jin in attendance) Thu June 25, 5:00pm at the IFC center (with actress Kong Hyo-jin in attendance)
Puerto Rican American rapper Hamza Pérez ended his life as a drug dealer 12 years ago, and started down a new path as a young Muslim.
Now he’s moved to Pittsburgh’s tough North Side to start a new religious community, rebuild his shattered family, and take his message of faith to other young people through his uncompromising music as part of the hip-hop duo M-Team.
Raising his two kids as a single dad and longing for companionship, Hamza finds love on a Muslim networking website and seizes the chance for happiness in a second marriage.
But when the FBI raids his mosque, Hamza must confront the realities of the post-9/11 world, and challenge himself. He starts reaching for a deeper understanding of his faith, discovering new connections with people from Christian and Jewish communities.
New Muslim Cool takes viewers on Hamza’s ride through the streets, projects and jail cells of urban America, following his spiritual journey to some surprising places — where we can all see ourselves reflected in a world that never stops changing.
The Israeli writer Etgar Keret possesses an imagination not easily slotted into conventional literary categories. His very short stories might be described as Kafkaesque parables, magic-realist knock-knock jokes or sad kernels of cracked cosmic wisdom. When such vignettes are strung together into a feature — as in Jellyfish (2007), which he directed with his wife, Shira Geffen, and now in Tatia Rosenthal’s $9.99 — they become even more elusive and strange. To watch these films is to enter an eerily realistic parallel universe where people and emotions are at once perfectly recognizable and completely bizarre. This effect is doubled by the extraordinary technique used in $9.99 to bring Mr. Keret’s world to life. Ms. Rosenthal, an Israeli animator, has cast some of Australia’s finest actors, including well-known performers like Geoffrey Rush and Anthony LaPaglia, to provide voices for figures made of modeling clay.
The film has its own cute but frustrating-to-navigate website.
As you may know, the percentage of women directors hovers around 9%, which is a ridiculous statistic in 2009 (or ever). It's not (just) that Hollywood is sexist—-if female directors brought in the big bucks on opening weekend, studio heads would certainly sit up and take notice, as might Oscar voters. But how to find out when these films are showing? Well... come here! (Update: Hmm, the same year I start this blog, the Academy nominates TWO female-directed movies for Best Picture! Coincidence?)
