ray lawrence Tagged Articles at Cinematical

With DVD releases this week tilting heavily toward Halloween-friendly titles, it's harder to pick out non-horror indie fare, but Jindabyne appears to be the best bet. Based on a short story by Raymond Carver, Jindabyne examines a group of men on a fishing trip who find a dead body and then, rather than immediately contact the authorities, simply stow the body so they can finish their fishing. Lantana director Ray Lawrence's sophomore effort received mixed to positive response -- Rotten Tomatoes scored the reviews at 65% positive -- but Cinematical's Kim Voynar was entirely positive, calling it a "subtle and sublime film that peeks around the dark edges of the human heart and searches out the tendrils of light that hold us together." Sony Pictures' DVD includes deleted scenes and a "making of" feature.

In his review for Cinematical, Nick Schager wrote: "Day Night Day Night approaches suicide bombing from an abstract perspective, following a young, nameless, ethnically unidentifiable girl (Luisa Williams) as she prepares for, and then attempts to carry out, a mission to detonate an explosive device in Times Square." Nick felt that, despite Williams' fine performance, "the actress can't counteract an overriding sense of shameless manipulation, of post-9/11 anxieties being aggressively, methodically stoked in service of a thriller without purpose." Out of 40 reviews, Rotten Tomatoes rated 70% as positive. The DVD from IFC features an audio commentary by director Julia Loktev.

Civic Duty divided critics further, with the Rotten Tomatoes score standing at 56% positive. Peter Krause stars as a man who becomes suspicious of his Middle Eastern neighbor. Our own Ryan Stewart said: "The film, despite being at its heart a minor genre effort that latches onto a big issue for effect, still manages to keep us engaged with relatively tight scripting and actors who are committed to putting on a good show." The DVD is released by 20th Century Fox, but none of the DVD sites I checked have details on any additional features.

"Never judge a book by its movie," said someone called J. W. Eagan, who appears to be famous only for saying that one thing. But he (she?) is absolutely right. It's a war that has been waged since the beginning of movies. Do movies steal the souls of books? Are books forever doomed to live in the shadows of their movies? Do we "stay true" to the source material or do we invent new, cinematic ideas? Or worse, what happens to all that stuff that gets lost in translation from page to screen? After all, we're talking two entirely different art forms with different approaches; the only thing they have in common is a narrative flow: a start, middle and ending.

Perhaps these questions are the reason I tend to like movies based on short stories. It's impossible to get a 400-page novel into a 120-page screenplay without losing something, but short stories are far more adaptable to the screen; instead of cramming and condensing, a movie can stretch out with a short story. Some terrific movies have come from short stories: In Old Arizona (1929), Freaks (1932), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Stagecoach (1939), The Killers (1946), All About Eve (1950), Rashomon (1950), Rear Window (1954), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), The Birds (1963), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Christmas Story (1983), Re-Animator (1985), Babette's Feast (1989), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Minority Report (2002), not to mention Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), woven from a selection of Raymond Carver stories.

I saw Jindabyne at the Telluride Film Festival last year, and it is an artfully made, albeit somewhat dark, movie. The film is about what happens when a group of men in Australia go on a fishing trip to a remote mountain river, find the body of a dead girl there, and tether her body to a tree in the river so they can finish their fishing trip, rather than immediately calling the police. This decision has tremendous ramifications for the men, tearing apart their small town, their families, and their friendship. Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne both turn in brilliant performances in the film, which was adapted from a Raymond Carver short story and directed by Ray Lawrence.

Jindabyne doesn't officially open (in limited release) until April 27, but you can still get geared up about it. Sony Pictures Classics has released a trailer for the film, which you can find at the links below. You can also read the review of the Jindabyne from Telluride, and check out our video interview with Laura Linney about the film.

Jindabyne official trailer:

WINDOWS MEDIA
www.sonypictures.com/classics/syndication/trailers/jindabyne/jindabyne_high.asx
www.sonypictures.com/classics/syndication/trailers/jindabyne/jindabyne_low.asx

REAL PLAYER
www.sonypictures.com/classics/syndication/trailers/jindabyne/jindabyne_high.ram
www.sonypictures.com/classics/syndication/trailers/jindabyne/jindabyne_low.ram

QUICKTIME
www.sonypictures.com/classics/syndication/trailers/jindabyne/Jindabyne_Trlr_300.mov
www.sonypictures.com/classics/syndication/trailers/jindabyne/Jindabyne_Trlr_56.mov

Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) and Claire (Laura Linney) live in the Australian town of Jindabyne with their young son Tom (Sean Rees-Wemyss). An unspoken tension lies beneath the surface of their relationship; their marriage is still recovering from Claire suffering a traumatic postpartum nervous breakdown following the birth of their son several years ago. Stewart's mother, who stepped in to help raise her grandson for the first eighteen months of his life following Claire's breakdown, has not yet let go of her need to control Claire's family. Both Stewart and his mother handle Claire as though she is a shattered vase glued back together, and might fall apart again at any moment. Claire, as the film opens, learns she is pregnant again, which terrifies her, but she keeps the pregnancy a secret from Stewart until she can decide what to do.

Claire's best friend, Jude (Deborra-lee Furness) and her husband Carl (John Howard) are raising their granddaughter (and Tom's best friend) Caylin-Calandria (Eva Lazarro), who, in the wake of her mother's death, has developed an unhealthy obsession for dead things and rituals, into which she continually draws Tom. The children's schoolteacher, Carmel, who is of native Australian descent, is dating Stewart and Carl's friend Rocco. The fourth couple, Billy (Simon Stone) and his young wife Elissa (Alice Garner), who have a baby, are young and still in that blissful state of new love that makes their older friends roll their eyes with the wisdom of experience.

Last month I got pretty excited about seeing Jindabyne, the new film from Australian director Ray Lawrence (Lantana), which premiered earlier this year at Cannes. On a few sites around the internet, its release date was listed as July 20, but it turned out that the date was only for distribution Down Under. At the time, I couldn't even get a response from producer April Films about when or how it would be brought to the U.S. Now, though, it has been announced that Sony Classics will be releasing the title here some time in the spring of 2007. For those who can't wait until then, it will also be screening at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The film tells the story of four men who discover a body while on a fishing trip, an incident which consumes their lives. If the plot sounds a little familiar, that's because it's based on a short story by Raymond Carver, which was also adapted as part of Robert Altman's Short Cuts (the part with Huey Lewis' penis). This version stars Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney, whose talent seems to be deteriorating from film to film, and shows promise of being a terrific psychological drama (watch the trailer). It's already a big hit in its homeland and has a strong rating on the IMDb.

Hopefully Sony will have a more specific release date soon.