By Steve Murray | Jun 23, 2011
Here’s a game I like to play. I’ll click on a news site -- HuffPost, say, or Drudge -- and look for the day’s weirdest headline. And once I find a particularly tawdry one (teacher-student sex! real estate scam! dismembered bodies! snake eats alligator!), I’ll bet myself a week's salary that the dateline is from somewhere in Florida. Most of the time, I’m right.
“It has that history, because, you know, it’s where outlaws go,” says filmmaker Robbie Land. “It’s a crazy place.” (Oh, and for the record: I was born and spent the first few years of my childhood in ...
By Steve Murray | Jun 5, 2011
The sweet and rude movie comedy “Bridesmaids” has sold more than $100 million worth of tickets in three weeks. In a world where multiplexes teem with box-office sure bets like superhero epics (“Thor,” the “X-Men” prequel), men behaving badly (“Hangover 2”) and the sequels of summer (the "Panda" movie, the "Pirate" movie), here’s a hit that was never supposed to be one, at least by conventional Hollywood wisdom. It has no marquee stars, 98 percent of the cast are women … and it’s about, um, bridesmaids.
But it is a hit -- and not despite the Jekyll/Hyde push-pull of its ...
By Steve Murray | Jun 4, 2011
Two French-language films -- one a comedy-drama, the other a documentary -- share a couple of odd traits. They’re both eminently watchable, and neither manages to paint a clear picture of its protagonists, whether fictional or real-life.
You can think of “Queen to Play” as a sort of Gallic “Educating Rita,” with chessboards taking the place of books. Sandrine Bonnaire plays Hélène, a Frenchwoman who long ago left the mainland to marry Corsican native Ange (Francis Renaud) and raise a teenage daughter. She works as a chambermaid at a picturesque hotel, and also cleans house for a reclusive American expat named ...
By Steve Murray | May 26, 2011
“Mondo Cinema 2011: Performance, Ritual, Transformation.” 7 p.m. Sunday, May 29. My Sister’s Room, 1271 Glenwood Avenue, 678-705-4585. $7, or included with a five-day Mondo Homo pass.
In his fourth year of programming the film component of Atlanta’s Mondo Homo festival (May 26-30), Andy Ditzler is really looking forward to Sunday’s screening.
“These have been some of the most highly attended things I’ve ever done,” he says. “You end up with pretty interesting reactions. It’s a really receptive audience – and not an uncritical audience, either. I treasure it.”
Now in its fifth year in Atlanta, the five-day festival, at various locations citywide, celebrates ...
By Steve Murray | Apr 24, 2011
Funnyman turned director and a part-time New Orleans resident, Harry Shearer (below) will be on hand Monday, April 25, for the 7 p.m. screening of his documentary “The Big Uneasy” and will hold a question-and-answer session afterward. Fair warning, though: If you’d gotten past any anger you might have felt about the levee failures following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, “Uneasy” could get your blood boiling as hot as a kettle of étouffée. (Note: That was my first and last attempt to give these paragraphs some Louisiana flava.)
A labor of love and civic responsibility, “Big Uneasy” is Shearer’s effort to make ...
By Steve Murray | Apr 15, 2011
The heroines of “Poetry” and “Potiche,” both women of a certain age, share a fondness for writing poems. That’s about all they have in common in these films from South Korea and France, respectively. The protagonist of the first lives in a cramped apartment and barely scrapes by, whereas the other manages countless employees while swathed in furs and ropes of jewelry.
What also separates them, and their movies, is the difference between the genuine sense of cinematic discovery found in “Poetry” and the boulevard-comedy clichés that deliver diminishing returns in “Potiche.”
So, let’s look at writer-director Chang-dong Lee’s movie first. Jeong-hee ...
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