darkbluealmostblack Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Gregg Araki's stoner comedy Smiley Face (pictured) mysteriously received only a token theatrical release in Los Angeles and New York after receiving favorable reviews (including two from our own Jette Kernion and Monika Bartyzel) from a short run on the festival circuit. Now the rest of us can see it. The DVD from First Look includes a "making of" featurette; look for Erik's review of the DVD later on today.

Danny Boyle's 'space mission to repair the biggest star in the sky,' better known as Sunshine, inspired Nick Schager to describe it as "a gorgeously crafted intergalactic saga sorely lacking in originality or profundity." You know what that means -- it should be perfect on DVD! Fox Searchlight's release includes an audio commentary by Boyle, two short films with intros by Boyle, deleted scenes, web production diaries and an alternate ending.

I loved Emanuele Crialese's Respiro, which featured a great performance by Valeria Golino, so I'm eager to catch up with his latest film, The Golden Door. Eric D. Snider said that this "story of an Italian family emigrating to America circa 1900 ... completely immerses us in the images and sounds of its world." The Miramax DVD has a "making of" feature and an introduction by Martin Scorsese.

Black Irish should play very well on the small screen. As I've written before, the film "revolves around a sterling, thoroughly engaging performance by Michael Angarano as a high schooler in Boston coming to grips with his family and his future; the script and direction by Brad Gann is solid and features a few surprising, gentle twists." The DVD from Anywhere Road Entertainment includes a commentary track and a "behind the scenes" feature.

Also out this week: Eagle vs. Shark, "(in some ways) even better than Napoleon Dynamite," per Scott Weinberg, DarkBlueAmostBlack, "a subtle, rewarding exploration of family," according to Martha Fischer, and Klimt, an unconventional bio-pic by Chilean director Raúl Ruiz.

Wouldn't you like to have Alejandro Amenabar as a friend? The award-winning director of Open Your Eyes, The Others and The Sea Inside has announced he will produce El Mal Ajeno, to be directed by his friend Oskar Santos. Actress Belen Rueda has been set as the female lead. She described the story to Variety as a "mixed-genre doctor's drama laced with fantasy and suspense elements." Rueda was very impressive in The Sea Inside as a lawyer fighting for quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro's (Javier Bardem) right to die, while battling her own medical problems. Her role in El Mal Ajeno is said to be a patient's wife, but I can't imagine she'll be any kind of wallflower; she has too strong a personality to blend easily into the background. The script is by Daniel Sanchez Arevalo, who recently made a splash on the festival circuit with DarkBlueAlmostBlack, due for a theatrical run in the US later this year.

The Spanish title El Mal Ajeno translates word for word, depending on your free online translator of choice, as either 'the badly other people's one,' 'the badly strange, foreign' or 'the evil somebody else's.' Santos previously made A Trip to The Sea Inside, an 87-minute documentary that was included on the DVD of The Sea Inside. More germane to the making of a picture with fantasy elements, though, Santos also directed two fantasy shorts, Torre and El Sonador. The latter was based on an idea by Amenabar, who also served as producer. Between the making of those two shorts, Santos also contributed a short film to UrbanChillers.com. Filming on El Mal Ajeno is set to begin in early 2008, which means we have to wait until next year to find out if Santos can mix genres like his friend Amenabar -- and also what the heck that title really means.

Being both far too old and nowhere near hip enough to do things like attending midnight screenings and go to cool parties, I arrived home from Toronto last night in much better physical shape than my hipper, younger (at heart) colleagues. Mentally, though, I'm pretty drained -- clearly I'm soft in more ways than one. I did, however, have a great time at the festival -- despite the daily grind of screenings, the little thrill of WAITING IN LINES to see obscure films from Eastern Europe never wore off. I mean, who are these people? Not only do they get excited about the debut feature from some Romanian guy no one has heard of, but they actually take time off from work, buy passes, and see four and five movies a day, aided by intricate, color-coded schedules that let them know what each friend is seeing at every minute. I can't tell you how many women in their 60s I saw taking sandwiches out of their purses and eating in line, because those were their only free minutes for the next 12 hours -- if I'm doing that when I'm 65, my grandkids damn well better realize how kickass their grandma is.

Despite persistent, jaded mutterings that TIFF 2006 wasn't as good as the festival has been in the past, I was really impressed by the quality of the slate, at least as far as it was reflected in the 20-something films I saw. As the designated viewer of foreign movies no one has ever heard of, I was privileged to see some amazing films -- most of which, sadly, are highly unlikely to ever be released on these shores (What distributor is going to buy the rights to a movie about a talk show in Romania?). In addition, though, I also saw a handful of big(ish)-name releases, only one of which managed to meet and surpass my (obviously too high) expectations. Anyway, what follows is a loose, how-I-feel-today list of my five favorite films of the festival -- for the more obscure ones, just hope the programmers of your local festivals see fit to bring them to town. Otherwise, a region-free DVD player is probably your only hope.

There's an impressive, careful complexity to DarkBlueAlmostBlack that belies the inexperience of first-time director Daniel Sánchez Arévalo. When one learns that he's been a screenwriter for 15 years, however, the unassuming detail of his film becomes less of a surprise. In his debut feature, Arévalo takes a story -- an impotent prison inmate enlists his bother to impregnate his girlfriend, a fellow prisoner desperate for a maternity ward move -- ripe for obvious humor and unsubtle sex jokes and turns it into a subtle, rewarding exploration of family, and the lies we tell ourselves to survive.

The ostensible star of Arévalo's film is Jorge (Quim Gutiérrez), a lonely, ambitious 20-something who has spent the last seven years working as a janitor and caring for his invalid father. Going to school part-time since his father's stroke, Jorge managed to get a degree in business administration, but the seven years in school and his unmanageable home situation conspire to get him nothing but rejection in his frequent, desperate job interviews. By turns resigned and resentful, Jorge simultaneously hates his father for trapping him and is plagued by guilt because the two were fighting when the stroke hit all those years ago.