HalHartley Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It's Monday -- the beginning of the work week, the end of fun, the day that elicits groans from coast to coast, country to country, pole to pole. To perk up the monotonous weekday grind, Cinematical is now kicking off a daily pick from AOL's /SlashControl. In other words: Every day we will pick an excellent, notable, time-wasting, or terrible-but-good must-see movie that you should watch today. Why bother? Because it's free. You don't even have to offer up your first born. Simply use these picks to increase your cinephile clout, or to reintroduce yourself to a flick you haven't seen in years.

I almost decided to go the way of Dolly Parton to kick things off, but then decided to be slightly more serious and infinitely more cinematic with Hal Hartley and Henry Fool. (Yes, the one that inspired be to write a Scenes We Love back in March.) This 1997 film won Hartley Best Screenplay at Cannes in 1998, and it confused but intrigued Roger Ebert. Now you get the chance to decide for yourself.

The black comedy follows the young Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) as he lives through a lower-class Queens existence -- a life that immediately changes with the arrival of Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan). A faux-intellectual rogue, Henry strikes up an affair with Simon's sister Fay (Parker Posey) while teaching Simon how to become a writer. Soon, Simon is thrust into a world of infamous literary notoriety as Henry's own past catches up with him.

But Henry Fool is one of those films that fails to live in brief descriptions. It only thrives as a moving piece of art, so:

Watch Henry Fool for free over at /SlashControl.

"There will be no peace before Israel is safe within its borders," a captured female terrorist deadpans about halfway through this film -- you almost expect her to pop gum, she says it so casually. A straight-faced spoof of espionage films in particular and serious intentions in general, Fay Grim is also a sequel to 1997's Henry Fool, from writer/director Hal Hartley. Fool followed the adventures of a Queens trio: aspiring writer Simon Grim (James Urbaniak), his half-asleep Martian sister, Fay (Parker Posey), and a drifter named Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), who walks into the Grims' lives claiming to have authored a multi-volume literary masterpiece called 'Confessions.' When Simon's writing ambitions start to net results in the real world, Henry's dream of being discovered as a some kind of working-class Chaucer falters. He eventually drifts on the next town, another adventure, but leaves Fay with a son. That's where we meet her now, years later, being dragged to a principal's office because the son has been caught with a pornographic viewfinder. "You're grounded, like, forever," she tells him.

The viewfinder, it turns out, was actually sent to the boy by the long-disappeared and presumed-dead Henry, and is itself a ludicrous piece of spycraft and the keystone of a worldwide conspiracy that involves the CIA, the Turkish government, Cuba, Islamic terrorists, the French government and Israel-Palestine. I think Denmark and Sweden were also implicated somehow, but it becomes hard to keep up. The feds, represented hilariously by Jeff Goldblum (he tells one fellow agent, "Carl, go take a walk in the rain") spin a tall tale for the impressionable Fay about how Henry's 'Confessions' were actually a deeply coded text that, if found and read properly, can unlock untold political secrets, but the truth is that they want to draw out Henry himself, believing him to be closely linked to an Osama bin Laden-type figure.In no time at all, Fay is whisked off to Paris on a mission to find Henry. To get herself in spy-mode, she takes to wearing a long coat and lingerie underneath and even assumes a catchy spy alias -- Emily Hopper.

*A guest review today, from Nick Schager, of Slant Magazine


Regrettably but inevitably, Waitress's tenacious optimism is partially offset by the recent, tragic murder of its writer/director/co-star Adrienne Shelly, an actress who made her name in Hal Hartley's early indies and, with this funny, charming slice of Southern country life, appears to have found her voice as a filmmaker. However, the bittersweetness that accompanies the film's arrival is, coincidentally, in tune with its story's miserable protagonist, a young, pretty waitress at Joe's Pie Diner named Jenna (Keri Russell). Stuck in a loveless marriage to her controlling, abusive husband Earl (Jeremy Sisto), and prevented from running away by a lack of cash, Jenna is a forlorn woman who sees dreams of a bright future dissipating before her eyes. To cope, she pours all of her grief, longing and sadness for happier times-gone-by into her unique homemade pies, which – described, at one point, as "biblically good" – are concocted with an array of inventively combined ingredients, and named after the moods that inspired them (such as her "I Hate My Husband Pie" and "Falling in Love Pie").

Tending to her louse of a spouse, wasting time gabbing in the diner bathroom with co-workers Becky (Cheryl Hines) and Dawn (Shelly), and waiting on outspoken, lewd diner proprietor Old Joe (a consistently hilarious Andy Griffith) while decked out in her '50s-style blue-and-white uniform – Jenna's life is, at the outset, in a rut. Waitress is too, as its early attempts at establishing a mood are a tad shaky, vacillating unevenly between cutesiness and seriousness. That balancing act becomes much smoother, however, once Jenna – after learning that she's pregnant with Earl's baby thanks to an ill-advised drunken roll in the hay – goes to see her OBGYN and finds, to her surprise, that her lifelong doctor has suddenly semi-retired and been replaced by attractive Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion). Though she's been stashing money around the house for an eventual escape, Jenna makes clear to the married Pomatter that, while she isn't thrilled about the baby (who'll further tie her down), she nonetheless intends to keep it. Her plan to disappear into the night, however, is complicated by the almost immediate and overwhelming mutual attraction that blossoms between doc and patient.

It is going to be tough for awhile, looking up at the Trust poster on my wall. For as big a fan of Hal Hartley's films as I am, I was taken aback by the news this morning that actress Adrienne Shelley, who starred in Hartley's films The Unbelievable Truth and, of course, Trust, was found dead in her office on Wednesday evening. The cause of death is still unknown, even after an autopsy was performed Thursday, though police are awaiting more results from that autopsy.

I always thought of Shelly as an important part of the New York independent film scene, not just for her Hartley roles, which were her first, but also because she never really broke into Hollywood despite all the buzz she received in the early '90s. She called New York home and even titled her first directorial feature Sudden Manhattan. Her second film, I'll Take You There won her a best director award at the U.S. Comedy Festival, and her third, Waitress, which stars Keri Russell and Nathan Fillion, just recently finished shooting. As far as acting, she'd recently appeared in Factotum, but she was more interested in focusing on writing and directing, and taking care of her 3-year-old daughter. It is unfortunate that we'll never get to see how successful her filmmaking career could have been.

Shelly was waiting to hear whether or not Waitress would screen at Sundance in January when she died. I'd like to suggest that the festival not only give the film a slot, but also give her a special tribute of some kind as well.

UPDATE: Shelly was reportedly murdered.

No one likes to be called "aging" or, God forbid, "old," but it happens to the best of us eventually. The years go by and your mind gets a little fuzzy, the music gets a little too loud from those darn kids next door and if your an independent filmmaker, you might start to wonder why you struggle each year, barely making a living, producing or directing films most people may never see. At some point it has to hit you that doing this for the rest of your life is a much shorter trip than it used to be.

A recent New York Times story takes a good look at the "aging" independent filmmakers out there who, with their work, and struggle to find work, help define exactly what it means to be an independent filmmaker. As the article states, many of them toil in virtual obscurity, producing films that are lucky to find a home on the festival circuit, let alone a place at the local multiplex or in your DVD player. Even the ones that have achieved some measure of success in the past are having a much harder time of it in the modern filmmaking world.

People like Hal Hartley, Mary Harron, Todd Solondz, Lisa Cholodenko, Jim Jarmusch and even indie-godfather John Sayles (his Lone Star and Matewan, both featuring the fantastic Chris Cooper, are two of my favorite films of all time) are having to make films for far less money than before, take jobs doctoring scripts for others (in Sayles' case) or they are forced to leave the business completely. Some directors, like Cholodenko and Harron, are even resorting to -- gasp -- directing TV to make ends meet. It's not exactly in keeping with their indie film street cred but heck, it pays the bills. And according to Harron, directing TV is also a great "corrective" for a director's ego. Something that many directors could probably use every so often.

The people behind the Toronto International Film Festival have released yet another list of titles that will be featured at this year's event, the great majority of which are world premieres, added to the slate to increase TIFF's profile as a film market. Festival co-director Noah Cowan believes the fact that filmmakers are choosing to debut in Toronto rather than at major European festivals is a sign of TIFF's rising status, and says that he's fielded calls from major American distributors about nearly every film on this list.

Among the most interesting films on this latest list are: Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, a fictional version of the story told in his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly; Fay Grim, Hal Hartley's long-awaited follow up to Henry Fool; Scott Caan's second directorial effort debut, The Dog Problem; This Is England, Shane Meadows' story of a boy who becomes a skinhead in 1980s England; the rather frightening-titled Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show, a documentary that "chronicles the personal and professional journeys of four rising comedians as they traverse the country on a tour bus with Vaughn"; Alatriste, the Viggo Mortensen-speaking-Spanish flick we told you about last year.

This year's TIFF runs September 7-16.

I used to really love Hal Hartley. I loved The Unbelieveable Truth and Trust, the fucked-up-suburban-teenagers-in-love films he made with Adrienne Shelly. I love it that he cast Polly Jean Harvey as Mary Magdalene, and Martin Donovan as Jesus, in The Book of Life (which, incidentally, is one of the best-looking miniDV features I've seen). But I haven't really kept up with him lately - No Such Thing was indescribably silly (in fact, I cringe just thinking about how silly I would feel just describing it), which makes The Girl From Monday seem a lot less interesting to me.

Still, I'm sorry I missed his talk at the Soho Apple Store on Friday night - especially the part where he discussed why he can no longer live in America. ""It's not a political statement," he said. "I just can't make films anymore in America. It's too expensive. It's too expensive in New York. If you want to make films that are based on your interests or the people around you, you can't necessarily be tied to being a commercial success. And that's all that happens here." So sad, but so true. Hartley is apparently living in Berlin right now, working with Parker Posey on a sort-of sequel to Henry Fool.