Ride 'em, cowboy! My pick of the week, Marquette Williams' Buckle Brothers, is not like any other Western you've seen. For one thing, it's a documentary. For another, it's about four young people from the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles and Compton, California, trying to make it on the modern-day Bill Pickett Rodeo circuit. They're an engaging, tenacious group, determined to rise above their surroundings and achieve something on their own -- and they love horses like nobody's business. The doc is compassionate but unflinching in showing the young bull riders' triumphs and failures. It's the antithesis of slick filmmaking.

The DVD is available from Indican Pictures. The film's official site has a gallery, trailer, and details on the featured riders: Lil Ron, Yah-Ya, Jazz and Mike. Director Williams and producer Marcus Franklin made the doc while working day jobs; the doc is truly a labor of love. The two filmmakers recently completed the thriller Unspeakable.

"Writer-director Jeff Nichols's Shotgun Stories is a tale of the South -- the flat fields and summer heat of Arkansas, where people struggle with the past every day," wrote James Rocchi in his review. "At heart, [it's] a film about people who discover what they have to let go of, and who confront the terrifying possibility of hope."

Jeffrey M. Anderson was slightly less enamored, but still quite complimentary of this tale of two families (with the same recently-deceased father) who come into conflict. Liberation Entertainment's DVD includes an audio commentary with Nichols, an audio track containing the isolated score by the band Lucero, production stills, and trailers. The film's official site has a trailer, stills, cast and crew information, and more.

After the jump: a family drama, and a John Sayles classic finally emerges.

This past weekend kicked off the 12th annual Tel-Aviv International Student Film Festival, an event that was to feature master filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard as one of its honorary guests. But this morning, it was announced that Godard has backed out due to "circumstances beyond his control." Those circumstances, according to someone close to the filmmaker's office, are related to political pressures brought about by a group called The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Godard received an open letter from the group last week urging him to cancel his trip to Israel, making comparisons between the Jewish state and South Africa during apartheid.

Considering the recent celebrations of Cannes 1968, which was partially shut down by protesting filmmakers, including Godard (who wanted the festival to continue, though without prizes awarded), it's interesting to see the Breathless filmmaker still boycotting festivals after all these years. Of course, politics aside, it's probably of great disappointment to the young future filmmakers who were looking forward to meeting the cinema legend.

After mentioning the wonderful Joe Morton in my DVD picks this week (for his stint in American Gangster), I started thinking about one of his early roles -- the lead in John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet. (One I listed in my Sayles primer last year.) It's a great film, even in its cheesiness, but there's nothing quite like this absolutely terrible trailer, which you can check out above.

I wonder what Sayles thought when he saw that, because while it's endlessly amusing now, it's pretty embarrassing for such a solid film. Sporting tacky review quotes like: "It's Cheers goes to Harlem"and "it's E.T. rides the underground railroad," the trailer is just terrible and says pretty much nothing about the film. However, you can enjoy bits of Morton's alien, as glimpses of a very young Fisher Stevens, and both Sayles and David Strathairn as creepy aliens. And to think -- one day he'd bring down the world with Cyberdyne.

One of the most towering achievements in cinema this year, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, finally opened in New York and Los Angeles on Christmas Day and was rewarded with a per-screen average of $91,300 over the weekend, the best average of the year, according to Pamela McClintock of Variety. Of course, the film only played at two theaters, but still, that's mighty impressive. Nineteen cities across the country also hosted a midnight screening on Saturday; no word yet on how those screenings were received. I thought this was an astounding film when I saw it at Fantastic Fest and I can't wait to see it again.

Cinematical's Scott Weinberg has been raving about The Orphanage since he saw the Spanish ghost story at the Toronto film festival (check his Top 10 list), and the film grossed a very healthy $12,260 per screen at 19 engagements, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady at Movie City News. That's just slightly more than the French-language Persepolis, the animated tale about a little girl coming of age during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which earned $12,160 per screen at seven engagements. James Rocchi reviewed the film at Cannes, and Erik Davis recently posted his interview with directors Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud.

When it played at the Toronto festival, Monika Bartyzel called John Sayles' Honeydripper "a simple and plainly executed ode to the start of rock 'n' roll." Movie City News pointed to Stephen Holden's "withering notice" in The New York Times, which provoked Ira Deutschman of distributor Emerging Pictures to respond: "Do people show their own ignorance–and even racism–when they have a kneejerk reaction to a story that, while set in a certain time and place, is trying to get to something a little different from what is expected?" The picture made just $2,400 per screen at four locations in New York and Los Angeles.

When Honeydripper opens, we see two young boys. One's fingers are pulling away at a string, while the other's are pounding piano keys painted on a piece of wood. While their music echoes only in their minds, their passion is palpable. This sweet scene is, in a way, a perfect metaphor for the work of John Sayles -- his films are, at once, both subdued and sonorous. However, where most of them seek to reveal hidden layers and webs, Honeydripper is a simple and plainly executed ode to the start of rock 'n' roll.

Tyrone "Pine Top" Purvis (Danny Glover) is the proprietor of the Honeydripper -- an ailing club in a town called Harmony, deep in 1950's Alabama. While he offers the stunning voice of Bertha Mae (Mable John), his competition, a hop free of a skip and a jump away, offers a loud and rowdy jukebox that draws in the crowds in droves. Pine Top has one last chance to save his club, or his landlord will rent the building to someone else. The plan -- bring in radio phenomenon Guitar Sam to perform for just one Saturday night. (This is a bit unheard of for the musician-turned-bar owner, as he considers guitar players to be dangerous.)

My personal DVD picks this week are the new editions of Lewis Teague's Alligator (scripted by indie filmmaker John Sayles), John Boorman's Deliverance (which is shockingly indie, even though it was released by a major Hollywood studio in 1972) and William Friedkin's Cruising (c'mon! Al Pacino in gay bars chasing a serial killer? That would definitely be an indie today.). But if you're looking for sometime a little more recent, here are three titles that received (mostly) positive reviews from our Cinematical critics.

Everyone's favorite Danish provocateur, Lars von Trier, made a "refreshing change" with The Boss of it All, according to our own Ryan Stewart. He said the director "turns his attention back to his own side of the Atlantic and finds his faith in humanity just as lacking, and his comic timing as sharp as its ever been." He felt the film "is absolutely a worthy entry in the von Trier canon and a reminder of the natural directing skill that he possesses."

Kim Voynar saw Francois Veber's comedy The Valet at AFI Dallas and enjoyed it. She noted that the plot was "a tad predictable" but "the film is genuinely funny, and at times the laughter from the packed house was so loud I was grateful for the subtitles so I could keep up." On the other hand, Nick Schager did not laugh so much: "This lack of any dynamic energy, any hysterical verve, is what ultimately dooms The Valet's attempts at innocuous whimsy." Sony's DVD includes an audio commentary by the director.

Zoo is a documentary that tackles "the difficult task of exploring the death of a man who had sex with a horse," as Kim Voynar wrote in her Sundance review. That may be enough for you to decide if you want to rent it, but Kim expounded at length if you'd like to know more. The DVD from ThinkFilm includes an audio commentary by writer/director Robinson Devor and writer Charles Mudede.

One consumer warning, I'm afraid. As I've written before, Thai horror film The Victim looks gorgeous, but its unimaginative use of horror movie conventions (loud! bang!!) and "twists" that are telegraphed far in advance quickly become tiresome.

Many people may have done more for independent film -- producers who funded groundbreaking work, directors who brought crowds to theaters with groundbreaking work, pioneers who paved the way -- but, looking at the career of writer-director John Sayles, it's hard to think of anyone who's done more with independent film. Each of Sayles's movies is different , yet they all revolve around his central concerns -- life, morality, the struggles and rewards of life in America. His new film, Honeydripper, debuts at this year's Toronto International Film Festival -- a completely independent "rock and roll fable" about the birth of rock and roll, set in an Alabama juke joint in 1950. Sayles spoke with Cinematical in Toronto about re-creating the distant past on a shoestring budget, how he found young guitar man Gary Clark, Jr. , working with Danny Glover and Charles S. Dutton and recommended specific records where you, too, can hear the sound of rock and roll being born. You can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:



You can also download the interview right here.

If there's anyone I could see employing interesting independent filmmaking techniques, it would be John Sayles. And no, it's not only because I love the hell out of his films. He's been making indie films for almost 30 years, and along with partner Maggie Renzi, has always found a way to fund, make and distribute them. (Thank God!) His new movie Honeydripper, which will premiere at TIFF, takes place in Alabama and focuses on a man named Tyrone (Danny Glover) who aims to save his struggling joint with a performance by a famous musician called Guitar Sam. In the film, Tyrone has to get crafty when Sam goes AWOL, and now the film is getting creative with their distribution -- by getting help from university students.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Emerging Pictures founder Ira Deutchman and producer Will Packer are teaming with Clark Atlanta University to start a film marketing and distribution course for African-American college students across the country, including HBCU -- Historically Black Colleges and Universities. It will be organized by a prof, led by industry names and then aired on the Internet. The course will first focus on Honeydripper, before the film is released in New York and LA on December 28 (along with Atlanta and Chicago on January 18 and wide release the month after). Selected students will work with the film's distribution team to create and and put into action a grassroots marketing campaign. How cool is that?! Lucky buggers.

I came into the world of John Sayles late in the game -- the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival with Casa de los babys. I was intrigued by the story, but it wasn't until Silver City the next year that I became a fan. Danny Huston digging through the layers of a murder mystery with that wry style and nonchalance -- I was hooked. With each film that I saw, I became more impressed and more in love with Sayles' structure and aesthetic. He knows how to pull the depth out of each story, making it interesting no matter what your interests. I'm not a big fan of baseball, coal mining stories or many of the other facets of life he dips into, but you don't need to relate to the theme to enjoy and value his films.

As a pioneer of North American indie cinema, Sayles' technique is simple, and it allows strong, diverse characters to thrive. For the most part, his films play like an intricate spiderweb. You start at the outside, spinning around many points that seem disconnected. However, as you are introduced to the myriad of characters, layers of the plot are revealed and the web weaves, trailing inward until each step leads to the inevitable center and crescendo. You have to be patient and willing to take the journey, because he doesn't lay it all out in the first few blinks; you have to watch it unfold bit by bit. He comments on this in Men with Guns: "When people start into a story, they have to see the end, or they aren't happy."

Out of Sayles' 15 films (the upcoming Honeydripper will be his 16th) I've attempted to put together a chronological list that will help you explore the main branches of the writer/director/editor's work. They span themes, locales, technique and age -- and serve as a great springboard to the films that remain. Dip into the films of Sayles and see not only the worlds he skillfully brings to the screen, but the collection of strange characters he steps in front of the camera to play -- a minister, filmmaker, criminal, alien, journalist, blue collar dad and soap opera actor.

I just can't resist any news on John Sayles. Earlier this month, I posted that the director's latest film, Honeydripper, was going to be in this year's TIFF lineup. After starting off fall with a bang, the director is also getting saluted for his work with a Golden Alexander fat the 48th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, which will take place in Greece this November. Honeydripper will have its European premiere at the festival, and Sayles will be there to discuss his films with his partner/producer Maggie Renzi, as well as actors Chris Cooper and David Strathairn. But that's not all -- he'll also conduct a Master Class. Oh, how green I am turning at the thought of the lucky festival patrons in Greece.

I must admit, I came into the world of Sayles late in the game -- when Casa de los babys screened at TIFF in 2003, and I got to hear a talk with him and his hugely-talented female cast. I liked it, but it was the Danny Huston-starring Silver City, which came out the next year, that really hooked me. The man has a talent for dealing with serious, and often psyche-troubling topics, but with a lightness that makes the experience enjoyable. I just about died when I saw that he directed one of my favorite actors, Joe Morton, in an alien flick about Harlem called The Brother from Another Planet. It's a great film that houses not only an amazing performance by Morton, who is seriously underrated, but Sayles' classic, alien bad-guy acting. If you want to hear more about Sayles, stay tuned to Cinematical Indie, because I'm cooking up a bit of a Sayles extravaganza, which will come out in a few weeks.