Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Marineau ‘s
Cote D’Azur
Tribeca Film Festival

“An unbalanced kind of balance”

Cast: Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Gilbert Melki, Jean-Marc Barr, Jacques Bonnaffé, Édouard Collin, Romain Torres, Sabrina Seyvecou, Yannick Baudin, Julien Weber, Sébastien Cormier, Marion Roux

Written and Directed by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Marineau

Reviewed by Diedre Kilgore

Cote d’Azur is a beautiful and charming story set with the Mediterranean Sea as a backdrop. Set in a world that encourages languid desire, Cote d’Azur is an engaging film full of absurdly humorous twists.

When Marc (Gilbert Melki) and his sexually charged wife Beatrix (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) inherit Marc’s family’s seaside house, they relish the opportunity to have the summer home they’ve always dreamed of. A little less enthusiastic are their two children seventeen year old Charly (Romain Torres) and 19 year-old Laura (Sabrina Seyvecou) who begrudgingly come along. When Charly’s homosexual friend Martin (Edouard Collin) comes to visit, Beatrix begins to amuse herself with the possibility that young Charly might be gay.

A delightfully fun, sexually charged vaudevillian comedy, Cote d’Azur takes us on a wild ride. We explore the parent’s constant suspicion regarding their son’s sexuality; the anxiety the parents feel as they realize Laura is dating and most likely having sex; on through the privately indulgent world of Beatrix’s summer fling; and finally, the introduction of Marc’s old hidden romance. Through watching these lives slowly unravel and coming together at a climax, Cote d’Azur delivers a passionate yet adorable story of a uniquely unconventional family. It is reminiscent of any Shakespearean comedy, chalk full of mistaken identities, reversals and presumptions.

See http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org/ for times and dates.

 

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Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda
Chech House April 25, 2005
Photo Mary Blanco


Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda’s
Czech Dream
2005 Tribeca Film Festival

Reviewed by Wendy R. Williams

Czech Dream is a hysterical mockumentary about how two Czech film makers, Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda, created the ultimate reality show with the opening of a fake hypermarket in the outskirts of Prague. In this mockumentary we follow the film makers as they buy new Hugo Boss suits, plan their ad campaign, do market research and record a “song.”

Here is a quote from the Czech Dream press release, “For two weeks, the streets of Prague were saturated with advertising for the fake hypermarket. The campaign (designed by a renowned advertising agency) involved television and radio spots, 400 illuminated billboards, 200,000 flyers promoting Czech Dream brand products, an advertising song, a website, and advertisements in newspapers and magazines. The ads proclaimed: Don’t Go; Don’t Rush; Don’t Spend. However, 5,000 people turned up with camping chairs at 6am on the “opening” day.”

The film is filled with funny scenes: the two film makers standing in their blue underwear to be fitted for Hugo Boss suits; the recording of a promotional song with a school girl choir and an ORCHESTRA OF VIOLINS (I was laughing so hard I thought I would have to leave the theater); and the reactions of the Czech citizenry as they attend the fake opening and walk all the way across an un-mowed field to a fake building façade and then back to the parking lot.

This film is both utterly bizarre and excruciatingly funny. After watching it and meeting the film makers (briefly), I realized that I had just seen two incredible talents. Their idea was very funny, but the dead pan approach they had to making this film was pure genius.

I have read a lot of the other media coverage of this film and most of it mentions the theme of consumerism and the political aspects of a government funding such a movie. But regardless of what people may or not read into it, Czech Dream is first and foremost a comedy, made by two very whacked-out Chech “blokes” who really need to learn to speak English and go to Hollywood. Great job!

P. S. Klusak and Remunda are two incredible comedic actors.

See www.czechdream.com for more information. Also, For more information about this film and the Tribeca Film Festival in general, log onto: http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org.

Irena Taskovski
Producer
TASKOVSKI FILM Ltd.
Chech House April 25, 2005
Photo Mary Blanco

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The Devil’s Miner
“The Mountain that Eats Men”
US Premiere
2005 Tribeca Film Festival

A documentary film by Kief Davidson & Richard Ladkani

Featuring: The Miners of Cerro Rico, Basilio Vargas, Bernardino Vargas, Vanessa Vargas, Manuela Altica Vargas, Braulio Jancko, Padre Jesus, Saturnino Ortega

Reviewed by Diedre Kilgore

The Devil’s Miner is a fascinating and gripping documentary set in the Bolivian silver mines of Potosi’s Cerro Rico. The film tells a heartbreaking story about the life of a fourteen-year-old boy named Basilio Vargas. After the death of his father, Basilio has spent the last four years working in the mines so he can provide for his mother and act as a father figure for his younger siblings. Basilio proves to be an extraordinarily strong boy; his goal is to work hard enough to provide an education for himself and his brother and sister so they can leave foothills of the silver mines and live a better life. Basilio’s dream is to one day become a teacher. Basilio possesses a simple and matter-of-fact attitude about life and displays great stoicism in the face of adversity.

Devout Catholics, the miners attend church and pray to God, but once they enter the mine, it is necessary for them to also worship the devil (Tio), in order to be protected from the dangerous conditions of a mountain that has been mined and depleted of its resources for the past five centuries. The empathetic priest does not condemn the miners for worshipping the devil, he simply tries to educate them to the fact that faith through love is stronger than faith through fear. The priest at times feels helpless because he understands that they are simply trying to protect themselves from harm by praying to anyone who will listen, in the hopes that they can “double their armor.”

The mines of Cerro Rico date back to the sixteenth century. When they were discovered , they were the largest silver find in the history of the Americas. At one time these mines provided over two thirds of the world’s silver demand. After the mines were discovered by the Spanish Conquistadors, the Spaniards enslaved the local Indios, forcing them to become miners and using the profit from this slave labor to finance Spanish wars. To date, over eight million workers have perished in the mines and currently, there are about nine thousand Potosi Miners, hundreds of them children who have lost their fathers, all attempting to scavenge what silver is left of these nearly empty mines.

Richard Ladkani’s cinematography is breathtaking, a real achievement considering the constrictive and extremely dangerous circumstances that faced his crew. They were hampered by dealing with collapsed tunnels, toxic gases, runaway carts and dynamite explosions and were only able to light their scenes with the open flame carbon lamps used by the Miners. These wonderful images are certainly a wonderful accomplishment. Leonardo Heiblum and Andres Solis have created a beautiful soundtrack which assists in highlighting the constant shifting of tone and emotion of film.

If you wish to help these children, please log onto the film’s website, www.thedevilsminer.com, and follow the links to the organizations listed.

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William A Kirkley’s
Excavating Taylor Mead
Tribeca Film Festival

“Movie star passing through”

Starring: Taylor Mead

Featuring: Jim Jarmusch; Penny Arcade; Paul Morrissey; Gerard Malanga; Michael Auder; Jonas Mekas; Carlo McCormick; Steven Watson; Mary Boone; Wu Tang Clan’s Rza; The White Stripes; & Many More.

Produced by Erik Laibe; Directed by William A. Kirkley; Filmed by Crystal Moselle: Narrated by Steve Buscemi

Reviewed by Wendy R. Williams

Excavating Taylor Mead tells the story of actor, poet, performance artist and barfly Taylor Mead. The star of Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief and one of Andy Warhol’s Super Stars (Taylor Mead's Ass), Taylor is now the octogenarian resident of an amazingly cluttered rent controlled apartment in Manhattan’s actively gentrifying Lower East Side.

Bartender/filmmaker Williams Kirkley came up with the idea. He had been seeing Taylor walk around his neighborhood and had no idea that the old man with the bejeweled walking stick was a former denizen of The Factory. But then he found out and was fascinated. He then enlisted the help of Crystal Moselle, a School of Visual Arts film student.

Together they began to follow Taylor around his neighborhood filming him and becoming his friends. The first night out, they went with him to a party at famed photographer Patrick McMullen’s loft and watched while Patrick took Taylor around and introduced him to all his friends. Taylor was obviously the star of the night.

And on they went, attending poetry readings, house cleaning parties, cat funerals (unbelievable!), and finally ending at the premier for Jim Marmusch’s, Coffee and Cigarettes. Excavating Taylor Mead shows it all, from roaches to limos, and after I watched it, I really felt like I knew Taylor Mead, seeing all his flawed humanity through the filter of his amazing personal charm. So, go see Excavating Taylor Mead and if you are ever seated in a bar on the LES and see Taylor, buy that man a drink. And if you see William, Crystal and Erik, tell them Bravo for a job well done.

For more information about this film and the Tribeca Film Festival in general, log onto: http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org.

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From Hobbits to Hooligans, Elijah Wood finds himself a new fellowship in the sometimes brutal, consistently fascinating first time feature by director Lexi Alexander. Hooligans premiered in the US at Austin’s SXSW festival, where it garnered the award for Best Narrative Feature, and now makes an encore appearance at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival. Set in the tightly-knit milieu of impassioned and just as tightly-wound loyal followers of local soccer…ahem…football teams in England known as Hooligans, the film gives viewers a largely honest insight into the conflicted psychology and the destructive effects of such tightly bound, clannish alliances.

Elijah Wood plays Matt Buckley, a gifted, bookish Harvard journalism student wrongly expelled two months before graduation. When the cocaine belonging to his roommate, the wealthy and smug son of a Senator, is found in Matt’s affairs, Matt buckles under the pressure and political influence of his roommate and takes the fall. Matt leaves Harvard for London, to seek refuge with his sister Shannon (Claire Forlani) and her husband Steve and reevaluate his future. Almost immediately, Matt falls in with Steve’s younger brother Pete, the fast-talking alpha dog of the Green Street Elite, one of West Ham United Football’s toughest firms. Just before Pete introduces Matt to the rest of his pals, he warns Matt that “firms” – the name for these organized hooligan gangs – hate two things above all, Americans and journalists. Matt passes himself off as a history student, but in spite of his Yank roots, finds an easy acceptance among the other GSE. Only Bovver, Pete’s right hand in the GSE (played with inscrutable scuzziness by Leo Gregory), finds Matt’s presence in the group an intolerable offense. As Matt becomes closer to Pete and his band of merry, violent hooligans, he learns about fraternity, sticking up for one’s self and one’s friends, and its spiraling, escalating consequences.

Alexander opens the film subtly, striking just the right chord of dread, of impending cataclysm. In an empty tube station, a lone passenger waits for the next train when a gently crescendoing chorus of voices floats up from the vacant stairwell. The rising voices are enough to suggest a carousing band of drunken boors, and it’s not a far leap to imagine ourselves as that lone passenger trapped on that tube platform along with them. Our thoughts spin out the worst of possibilities. Where Hooligans is most successful is in playing with our preconceptions of the world of hooligans, at times challenging them, at other times showing us that we haven’t even begun to imagine the reality.
Elijah Wood seems, at first, an incongruous choice for a hardened hooligan, with his delicate, sometimes feminine demeanor. And when Pete decides suddenly that instead of beating the living shit out of Matt he’ll take him under his wing, its hard not to guffaw at the implausibility. But to Wood’s credit, the disbelief lasts only a moment, and when Matt takes his first real punch to the face, his beatific smile of release and liberation is funny and credible.

Yes, there are moments that don’t ring quite true. Why, for example, does Pete have perfect teeth? (English AND a hooligan? By all rights, he shouldn’t have any at all.) And the story of Matt and Shannon’s emotionally absent father seems clichéd. But the quasi-documentary realism with which hooliganism is treated makes up for these minor infractions. And Charlie Hunnam’s fireball performance as Pete is both engaging and tragic, and truly takes us into the emotional world of these men. Alexander also skillfully manages to involve the viewer while never sanctioning or sensationalizing the violence depicted. The film, ultimately, is thought-provoking, magnetic and repelling, in its sympathetic authenticity.
“Hooligans” will be released in the UK and Europe in August. At press time, the film was still searching for its US distributor, but judging from the critical and audience response both at Tribeca and SXSW, it won’t be long before the hooligans are invading your local cinema.

For more information about this film and the Tribeca Film Festival in general, log onto: http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org.

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Jason Ruscio’s
Laura Smiles
2005 Tribeca Film Festival

Starring: Petra Wright, Mark Derwin, Kip Pardue, Jonathan Silverman

Reviewed by Wendy R. Williams

Suburbia must be amazing for men, kids and dogs because it certainly sucks for women. Ah the life of the suburban housewife – filled with kids, dogs, cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring and smiling; it’s enough to make a woman go mad, or at the very least, kill someone.

So here comes Laura (played by the very talented Petra Wright). Laura lives in suburbia, is married to a hell-of-a-nice insurance salesman husband (played by the charming Mark Derwin) and is the mother to a very nice little boy. She also has an extra friendly neighbor, played by (the hot) Jonathan Silverman. And Laura is having a lot of trouble smiling.

Nine years ago, Laura found it easy to smile. She was an actress in New York City and was about to marry the love-of-her-life (the also hot Kip Pardue) when he was senselessly killed in a traffic accident and Laura’s smiling stopped. Now nine years later, Laura’s life is filled with equal parts memory and drudgery and she is attempting to escape her life by engaging in increasingly risky promiscuous behavior.

The movie is told on two layers, the present and ever present memory of the past. The film opens in the past and then move to the malaise filled present and then ends in the past. The story of Laura Smiles, with its lack of conflict in the here-and-now, could easily have become maudlin and boring, but it did not. And the reason it did not is that the cast is utterly amazing and the script is very smart, filled with humor and great dialogue. This film was fun to watch and also stayed with me afterwards with questions like – would Laura have been equally as crazy if she had never lost the love-of-her-life? Or would her beige suburban existence have been enough to take her over the edge? Oh, well. Website: www.laurasmilesmovie.com

For more information about this film and the Tribeca Film Festival in general, log onto: http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org.

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Photo Jessica Cogan

A League of Ordinary Gentlemen
Opens May 27, 2005
Sunshine Cinema
(check newspaper for other locations)

Directed by Chris Browne.
Produced by Wilhelmus (Bill) Bryan and Alex Browne.

Reviewed by Jessica Cogan

Smelly shoes, smoky rooms and beer guts. Isn’t that what comes to mind when you hear the word “bowling”? What happened to the good ole days of the sport -- matching shirts, shiny bowling bags and leagues populated with friends and neighbors?

That question is at the center of A League of Ordinary Gentlemen, a new documentary following the rise and fall and rise again of the Professional Bowlers Association (PBA). The film starts off investigating the current state of bowling in America. Why have bowling alleys across the country closed their doors? Why has the sport’s popularity plummeted while golf – a game of requiring similar levels of athleticism – gets more fans every day?

Whatever the reason, come the late 90s, bowling was in a bad way. That’s when three retired Microsoft executives came to the rescue. They realized that they could buy the entire PBA – the players, tournaments, trademarks and trophies – for about 5 million. So they did. And they brought on board Steve Miller, former Nike executive, Kansas State athletic director and 5-time NCAA coach of the year. As CEO, Steve Miller is aggressive and sometimes abrasive as he tries to turn the PBA around. And he makes is clear that it’s his way or the highway.

The film follows Miller and four professional bowlers as they experience the PBA’s rise from the ashes. We meet the hot-headed Pete Weber, the tour’s bad boy (and Fredo Corleone lookalike) who brings pro wrestling’s “crotch chop” to the lanes; his arch rival, the straight-laced Walter Ray Williams Jr. who is the sport’s highest money earner. Also on the tour is Chris Barnes, a father of newborn twin boys who struggles to find a balance between his profession and family life.

The heart of the film is Wayne Webb. A highly successful bowler through the 80s and 90s, Webb lived hard and ran through his winnings quickly. When we catch up with him in 2002, he’s hoping to resurrect his career in the new PBA but is having difficulties finding his niche – and qualifying for tournaments. In the end, his story is probably most representative of the lot of old school bowlers in the new PBA -- if you can’t keep up, you’re out. No matter how much you’ve contributed to the sport in the past. And sure, that’s probably true for most professional sports, but it’s still sad to see.

A League of Ordinary Gentlemen is at turns funny, sad and touching – and an absolutely fascinating glimpse inside a world few know much about.

Photo Jessica Cogan

A League of Ordinary Gentlemen opens in New York May 27 and Los Angeles June 3. Check local listing for theaters and showtimes.

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John G. Young’s
The Reception
2005 Tribeca Film Festival

Reviewed by Wendy R. Williams

Eric Weber's
Second Best
Opens May 27
The Angelika Film Center

Starring: Joe Pantoliano, Jennifer Tilly and Boyd Gaines

Reviewed by Ronit Feldman on May 24, 2005

Christopher Monger's
Special Thanks to Roy London
2005 Tribeca Film Festival

©ROMANO/Stolen Childhoods
Eagle Pass, Texas
Ten year old American migrant worker cuts onions
instead of going to school.

Len Morris'
Stolen Childhoods: For 246 Million Children, Life is Nothing But Work
Opening May 20, 2005
Quad Cinemas