fay grim Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I just got back from a brief Christmas holiday to the distant land of relatives and limited Internet access, so my column is just a tad late this week. Nevertheless, I'd like to pick up where I left off last week, in my celebration of those smaller films that lost their way in 2007, either misunderstood, or misjudged, or just never found.

I saw Hal Hartley's Fay Grim in May as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. It was a sequel to his 1998 film Henry Fool and it had one of those strange near-simultaneous releases in which it debuted on DVD just a few days after it opened in theaters. This technique didn't work at all for Steven Soderbergh's superb Bubble last year, so I can't imagine why anyone would try it again. I found Henry Fool too long with too much navel gazing to be of interest, but somehow Fay Grim worked for me. I felt it was all a huge, deadpan joke that these pathetic writer-types would now be involved in international intrigue. And who is better for a deadpan joke than Jeff Goldblum, with his glaring eyes and sharp delivery?

One of the most disheartening experiences as a critic is when you adore and praise a movie that nobody else likes. In your defense, you start to haul out words like "misunderstood" or "underrated," or -- in extreme cases -- claiming that everyone else on the planet didn't "get it." Almost as bad is when some stupid movie that you absolutely hated becomes a giant hit, often supported by the unqualified praise of all the other critics.

The thing is, I can cook up a perfectly valid reason for every one of my favorite movies that fail as well as for all those bad movies that become huge. It's useless, of course. Not only does this not change a thing, but also it assumes that a giant audience filled with thousands of people has one, easily defined psyche. But just for fun, let me explain a few recent hits and misses.

"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.

We're finally a month and a few days away from the limited release of Fay Grim, Hal Hartley's sequel to Henry Fool. The first was a mellow, quirky tale about James Urbaniak's strange garbageman Simon Grim, and the rogue Henry Fool who inspires him to become a poet when he hands over a crisp, black and white speckled notebook. Parker Posey played Fay Grim, Simon's sex-crazy sister who ends up marrying Fool. This sequel, which Kim Voynar reviewed during TIFF last year, deals with Fay ten years later -- just a bit amped up.

The film still revolves around Henry and his notebooks, but now he's disappeared. Jeff Goldblum's CIA agent convinces Fay to help him find the notebooks, because they're believed to hold information damaging to US security. IGN has gotten a slew of images from the feature that show how the world of Fooling Grims has changed over the years. There are some shots of Hartley, as well as scenes from the film. We've got Liam Aiken, the same little boy from the original film, showing Simon something on the computer. In another, Saffron Burrows is wielding a gun and looking fairly unhappy. And then there's my personal favorite -- Parker Posey looking like a tough arse-kicker. If you're anxious for some media of the moving variety, I linked to some last month. Go out and see it! Go, go, go!

Little bits for you:

• I'm happy to report that Hal Hartley's Fay Grim is finally getting released this May. The film, which premiered at TIFF, was reviewed by Kim Voynar last September. I was able to see it as well, and the movie was so very worth it. Film Ick and a number of other sites had rumblings of a trailer online, but it is locked. However, assistant editor Kyle Gilman's film reel isn't, and the first 2 minutes are Parker Posey in all her Grim trailer glory. I almost forgot how much I liked the movie until I saw the trailer. It's fun, quirky and has Posey at her strange best. There's even an explosion in there, if you need something less wordy and more flashy.
• The above title is not a typo. This bit is about Noearsbunnies (direct translation of Keinohrhasen), the latest German film from actor/director Til Schweiger. You might remember him from Keira Knightly's King Arthur, when he played Cynric, or perhaps you've seen his last written/produced/direct/star feature, Barfuss. Schweiger will also star in movie, which is a romantic comedy about a womanizer who has to do community service in a kindergarten. His female co-star will be Nora Tschirner, who plays a teacher at the school. While the plot sounds run-of-the-mill, I'm interested in what inspired this title...
• I've got one more trailer to wrap this up -- Girls Rock, a documentary that is headed to Hot Docs this Spring. Forget Hanson and all their bubbly pop annoyingness, this film is about The Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls that lets young girls rock out and gain self-esteem in the process. The girls are cute, real and varied. On one level, it looks fun and terribly cute to see young girls composing and performing hard music, on another, it's great to just see real girls doing more than mainstream media would lead us to believe. You can rock out with them in the trailer here, or on their MySpace.

Fay Grim, director Hal Hartley's follow-up to his 1997 cult favorite, Henry Fool, is just about as sharp, dark and funny as a Hartley fan could wish for. Henry Fool, in case you've missed seeing it, is a little gem of a film about a socially repressed young man, Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) who works as a garbage man to support his depressed mother and nymphomaniac sister, Fay (Parker Posey, in one of her best roles).

When Henry Fool, a vulgar, chain-smoking, self-styled intellectual takes up residence in the family basement to finish writing his "Confession" -- which he claims is so astounding it will turn the literary world upon its ear -- Simon befriends him, and Henry becomes his mentor. Simon eventually writes a book-length poem, which gets published and critically acclaimed, while Henry's confession is found to be inept and practically unreadable. When Henry accidentally kills their disgusting neighbor, Simon trades identities with Henry to help him escape.

It feels great to be home after 18 days on the road covering the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. I saw a lot of fantastic films over the last few weeks, and a few that were a little ... well, not so great. After the peace and tranquility of Telluride, it took me a little adjusting to get accustomed to Toronto. Now that a couple weeks has passed, I can kind of look back with a sense of humor on my day spent traveling to Toronto. It went something like this:

7AM -- Load up suitcases into rental car (stylin' Ford Escape) and drive the three or so hours to Gunnison, the airport from which I will be departing.

9AM -- Get stuck on a mountain pass behind three semis hauling livestock, a rental RV hauling a car, and numerous cars between me in a no-pass zone that stretches for miles. And miles.

11:20AM -- Whip into Gunnison Airport parking lot. Park the rental car and go to find a luggage cart. The airport, in spite of serving Crested Butte, Telluride and other ski areas, has no luggage carts, so I must simultaneously get all my stuff out of the rental car and into the airport, by myself, without violating the security rule about leaving bags unattended. It feels like I've stepped into a logic puzzle at a Microsoft interview.

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.