TheWreck Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Arriving at my place of lodging shortly before 3:00 a.m. very late on Saturday night (or early this Sunday morning), it felt like a short night at Fantastic Fest. That's not to say that everybody parties until dawn, but with three (sometimes four) screens pumping out a steady stream of genre flicks all day long -- some of which don't start until well past midnight -- Fantastic Fest attendees might be forgiven for losing track of "normal" hours.

That's what happened to me on Friday night, which stretched well into Saturday morning. But before that craziness ensued, there were the films, and I got to see a typically odd combination, beginning with Ole Bornedal's Just Another Love Story. One of two productions that the Danish director made last year, Just Another Love Story plays like While You Were Sleeping on acid, which is basically how Alamo Drafthouse / Fantastic Fest programmer Zack Carlson described it in his introduction. A family man is mistaken for the boyfriend of an accident victim in a coma. When she wakes up, the deception ensues.

Rather than romantic comedy hijinks, Just Another Love Story pushes quickly into dark dramatics and the fantasy of a mid-life crisis before circling back around to the territory inhabited by Jonathan Demme's Something Wild. I followed that up with The Substitute, also directed by Bornedal, which was a big box office success in Denmark. It's easy to see why. The terrific Paprika Steen lets her hair down, so to speak, as a farmer's wife who is possessed by an alien life form.

• Not to be confused with this year's upcoming thriller called The Wreck, there is a British drama of the same name coming from David Rocksavage, who penned the script along with Margaret Glover. The film will star Jean Simmons (double Oscar nominee for The Happy Ending and Hamlet) as an elderly widower named Hannah, who becomes close with a young man who brings her pot to ease the pain of an on-going illness. However, things get tense when her son (James Wilby of period pieces like Gosford Park) comes to visit and questions the young man's motives -- damn drugged hippies! Add an ex-male model, Jamie Dornan, who I assume will be the young stranger, and you've got a pretty interesting cast list.
• If you're one of those people that can never get to the film fests, you might want to check out the Independent Features Festival. Instead of a star-studded locale, there are more than 200 films, full-length and short, that can be seen online and voted on -- all from the comfort of your couch, bed, toilet, office chair or wherever else you choose to watch them on. Winners will be shown at New York's Tribeca Cinemas next month and the top prize gets a premiere and distribution deal. One of the films in the running is a documentary short called The Tehuacan Project, which is about a Mexican school for the deaf that is narrated by Adrien Brody and executive-produced by Brad Pitt.
• Finally, Michael Moore is finally opening his mouth about Manufacturing Dissent, the recent documentary made about him. One of the accusations in the film is that he actually has interview footage with Roger Smith for Roger & Me -- a doc that was all about how Moore couldn't get an interview. According to The Guardian, Moore says: "Anybody who says that is a f-cking liar. If I'd gotten an interview with him, why wouldn't I put it in the film? Any exchange with Roger Smith would have been valuable." (He does admit to talking to Smith at a meeting before the film, but he says that it was unrelated to the doc.) He went on to say: "I'm so used to listening to the stuff people say about me, it just becomes entertainment for me at this point." Personally, I'd rather have him take on the accusations. It would follow what he is so adamant about on-screen, and could potentially help quash qualms about the integrity of his work.