red Road Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Subtitles. Some people love them, some people hate them. As I see it, the hate often turns into love once movie-liking turns into movie-loving. It's quite hard to be an insatiable movie lover and be a fan of the dub -- not being bothered by lips that don't synch with voices, and the voiceovers that fail to offer the same powerful inflections as the original.

Unfortunately, while I love cinema, I'm really growing tired of the subtitles -- to the point that I sometimes avoid films if I'm not geared up to read them. But wait -- I'm not suggesting that I'd rather hear it dubbed, but rather the whole world of subtitling needs to change. There are two reasons:

1. Lazy Subtitles

While the words that run along the bottom of the screen are usually saved for foreign languages, they are sometimes pulled out when heavy accents come into play, or tricky dialects. This is fine, and often handy. But it has to be accurate. While it's okay to adjust words to flow when translating, it's not okay to change them when people understand the language.

There is nothing more annoying or distracting than following the subtitles and hearing entirely different words. I don't know how many times my mind de-railed from the plot of Red Road because I'd hear something like "excellent," but the subtitles would say "great."

The same goes for certain words in foreign languages. You can change adjectives and what-have-you, but it's quite distracting when the subtitle powers that be get tired of writing down the same title/name and decide to switch it up. In Indigenes (Days of Glory), soldier's titles would often get switched. I might not speak French, but it's pretty easy to understand titles like "Staff Sergeant."

If you're a fan of Red Road, and were itching for the next part of the trilogy, I'm sorry to say that this isn't it. (Is the trilogy plan even continuing?!) It is, however, the second feature for the film's director, Andrea Arnold. Variety reports that Artificial Eye has pre-bought the UK rights to her next film, Fish Tank.

Unfortunately, the piece then goes on to talk about Eye's other projects and executive info, rather than the film. So, we've got this mysterious second picture. However, thanks to the Internet, I can fill in a tiny hole at least. According to MoveThat.com, Arnold was/is looking for her female lead for the film. "We're looking for young looking, white 16-19 year old girls who speak with strong London/South East accents who have attitude and who can street dance. Female breakers, poppers, lockers, and krumpers all very welcome."

UK readers out there, you'll have to fill us North American folk in on the slang, but I think it's safe to say that this is going to be some girl-headed film about dancing. Unfortunately, because of the language request, it'll probably also have really annoying English subtitles that don't match up with the words like Red Road.

That's all Google is allowing me to find right now, but please comment below if you've heard anything else about this feature.

Our own Scott Weinberg recently told you about the canning of quote whore Pete Hammond from the pages of Maxim Magazine, and brought you many of Hammond's incredible quotes, culled all year long by the indefatigable Erik Childress at efilmcritic.com. Now Childress has announced his annual Criticwatch "Whores of the Year" list, saving his "2007 Michael Medved Bag of Douche Memorial Award" for Hammond. Jeffrey Lyons and Earl Dittman made the top ten this year, along with young E! Online critic Ben Lyons -- son of Jeffrey -- for calling I Am Legend "one of the greatest films ever made." Says Childress: "If he were 12 and had only seen 50 movies in his lifetime it would STILL be one of the dumbest god damn statements ever made by a human being named Lyons."

Apparently Childress has taken on the superhuman effort of combing through every blurb on every movie ad for the entire year and cataloging them in such a way as to reveal their hidden hypocrisies. How many films in 2007 were called "masterpiece"? At least 20, and that's including Dittman's assessment of Halloween. Even more films were called "spellbinding" and "a must-see!" I personally escaped this year, but several of my critic friends did not. Even Cinematical's James Rocchi is mentioned, for having used the phrase "raw sexuality and fever-pitched emotion" in his review of Red Road. A big thanks to Erik for keeping score.

In the spirit of the season and goodwill and whatnot, I thought I'd forgo griping about the sorry state of things this week and instead send out some love to the downtrodden, the small films of 2007 that were somehow overlooked, underrated or outright ignored in some way. Let's start with the Russian film The Italian, released in January, which caused critics to dredge up the word "Dickensian" for the first time in a while. But for all that it was a surprising, deeply-felt story of an orphan who escapes the orphanage to find his birth-parents.

Kino released the documentary Romantico in January as well, and they're apparently counting it as a 2007 release. I wrote a few weeks back about the documentary format; there's certainly a place for journalism and reporting, but the very best documentaries, the ones that stand the test of time, are the ones that capture the details of life, like Crumb, Hoop Dreams and To Be and to Have. Romantico is one of those. It tells the story of a mariachi illegally based in San Francisco who decides to go back to Mexico to see his family, even though he risks never being able to return (of course, his income in the States is much higher than in Mexico). Romantico will most certainly be overlooked in any discussion of 2007's documentaries, but it's worth seeking out on DVD.

A glance at DVD Journal's release calendar reveals a jam-packed week. My personal pick is Jafar Panahi's superb Offside, which manages to pack drama, humor, tension, sports, feminism and social commentary into an Iranian girl's burning desire to watch an important soccer match in person. It's entertaining too! Cinematical's Erik Davis was positive in his review and so was Jeffrey M. Anderson.

If your cinematic diet includes thrillers, check out Antibodies (from Germany) or Red Road (from the UK). Antibodies borrows an idea from Silence of the Lambs by featuring a serial killer who will only talk to a local bumpkin cop. The cop has become obsessed with catching the killer of a local girl, to the point that his family is falling apart and he's suffering from nightmares. As a whole, the film doesn't completely work, the narrative crumbling as it dives deeper into madness, but director Christian Alvart has a terrific visual sense. Andrea Arnold's Red Road is a quieter work that relies more on the slow building of tension. Jeffrey M. Anderson's positive review has all the plot details you'll need.

In the indie comedy/drama aisle, we have Year of the Dog, written and directed by Mike White, which received nods of approval from both Scott Weinberg and Kim Voynar; when those two agree, it's an automatic "must rent." Molly Shannon stars as a lonely women dealing with the loss of her beloved canine companion. Joe Swanberg's second feature, LOL, gets the deluxe treatment from new distributor Benten Films. Karina Longworth quite liked it when she saw it at SXSW last year -- and Mr. James Rocchi offers a brand-new review right here.

Though I haven't seen either The Beautiful Washing Machine (from Malaysia) or The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (from the Philippines), both received good reviews. For example, David Ng of the Village Voice said Washing Machine "demands at least two viewings" and Dennis Lim wrote that Maximo was "further evidence of a mini renaissance in the country's long dormant cinema."

Jackie (Kate Dickie) looks a bit like Chrissie Hynde in a kind of homely/sexy way. She sits gazing into a bank of video monitors. For her job, she watches, godlike, all the people who pass by the myriad of video cameras planted all about Glasgow. If trouble arises, she makes a call and someone (hopefully) shows up on the scene. It seems like the perfect job for her, hovering over other people's lives without the slightest interest in her own. She appears lost, or hollow, and the director Andrea Arnold pulls off the admirable task of making her interesting without immediately giving away her secrets. When those secrets finally come out, they do so in such a way that avoids the obvious "Shyamalan twist." Refreshingly, Red Road is a movie about a person and not a gimmick.

The catalyst comes when Jackie thinks she sees a familiar face in the monitors. We get a flicker of recognition and nothing more. We don't know if the man is a lover, a killer or even whether the man would recognize Jackie if he saw her. After work, Jackie begins to haunt the dingy neighborhood in which the man was sighted. Graffiti sprayed onto crumbling walls is more prevalent than actual intact, livable structures, and the inhabitants seem to be in a perpetual bad mood. After hanging out in a couple of sleazy cafes and bars, she manages to slip into a party at the man's apartment. He notices her and asks her to dance. He begins seducing her and she allows herself to be seduced. Or does she? It would be a disservice to continue any further with the plot, even though only part of the movie's pleasures lies in its discovery.

It happens every year: films go to Sundance, play to packed crowds, win Jury prizes and/or score big deals ... and then essentially disappear. It happened in 2005, when Ira Sachs' Forty Shades of Blue took home the Dramatic Grand Jury prize, only to open nine months later on just three screens and eventually gross barely $75,000 in its 84 day release. It happened again last year, when The Darwin Awards and Right at Your Door landed multi-million dollar deals with major distributors, only to be shelved indefinitely. I guess if you're an acquisitions exec, it's easy to get carried away up there on the mountain, but sometimes the same picture that thrilled a packed crowd at the Racquet Club looks downright unmarketable back at the office in L.A. So, with the caveat that I have neither a crystal ball nor any sort of reliable inside information, here are my picks for five Sundance '07 films that will actually see a meaningful release sometime before Sundance '08.


1) The Ten (Cinematical review)


Stu Van Airsdale thinks Manohla Dargis was talking about this film in the NY Times, when she described a distributor who sat through a "bad comedy that features a clutch of low-level film and television actors" whilst fantasizing about "all those recognizable [actor] names once they are printed on a DVD box." I'm actually convinced Ms. Dargis was referencing Gregg Araki's Smiley Face, a stoner comedy starring Anna Faris and half the cast of That 70's Show, which was apparently so awful that even die-hard Araki fans couldn't sit through it. I think if Dargis had attended a public screening of The Ten -- or if she had even caught a glimpse of the hundreds of high school and college kids lining up for the wait list as long as eight hours in advance of the picture's second-to-last show -- she would have a hard time condemning a distributor for trying to cash in on it.

The movie, which was written and directed by David Wain of Wet Hot American Summer fame, consists of ten short segments, one representing each of the ten commandments, strung together by some filler involving Paul Rudd not being able to decide if he'd rather screw Jessica Alba, Famke Janssen or (this is not a typo) Dianne Wiest. It may be less engaging than a 90-minute stint watching old clips of The State on YouTube, but it's got huge college-campus potential, where boys and girls have been known to consume comedy without bothering to consult the second film critic for the New York Times to see if she approves. With savvy marketing, and maybe a few structural tweaks, this could be the sleeper comedy hit of the summer.

As the year starts winding down, it's time to begin looking into what will come out in the New Year. Tartan Films, the company that brought us everything from Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs to a whole lot of Rocco Siffredi in Anatomy of Hell, is bringing some of this year's quirky and notable festival offerings to the big screen in 2007. Here are five months of funky cinema slated for 2007, some of which have great Cinematical reviews for you to peruse:

February: The Page Turner follows a girl whose botched piano examination leads her to turn away from her passion for the keys, only to be faced with it later when she comes face-to-face with the person whose rudeness shattered her resolve.

March:

Red Road

was the Cannes Jury Prize winner that showed the human weakness behind Big Brother -- a woman's dispassionate viewing of the streets of Glasgow dissolves when she spots a familiar face.

April: Triad Election is filmmaker Johnny To's answer to The Godfather, and the second part to his election epic.

May: Princess is the animated film about a orphan whose mother was a porn star, and the ex-priest uncle who comes to take care of her.

June: 12:08 East of Bucharest is the comedically melancholy story of a man in Bucharest trying to put together a live TV show on the revolution.

Honorable Mention: Taxidermia is worthy of mentioning, although a release date is yet to be determined. It's a tale about an overweight speed eater, a large cat embalmer and a man who shoots fire from his penis -- so what's not to love?

So I'm standing on the subway platform the other day, minding my own, when I just happen to make eye contact with a fellow male human being standing nearby. Suddenly (and for no apparent reason), the dude moves in a bit closer and says, "Yeah, and what's your problem?"

At first, being the sarcastic pain in the ass that I am, I wanted to reply with something along the lines of, "Well, to be honest with you I'm moving in a week, work is pretty hectic, I need to decide which films I'll be seeing at the New York Film Festival and, oh -- for some reason my groin hurts. Perhaps I have a groin pull, then again I thought stuff like that only happened to professional athletes." However, since I wasn't in the mood to rumble, I simply ignored the man, turned around and walked away. Funny, I think he had more problems than me.

As you can imagine, all of the following films feature characters who either have or are about to have some serious problems. Yeah, so what's your problem? Welcome to another edition of Trailer Park:

The organizers of the massive Toronto International Film Festival announced the names of all 25 of their North American premieres (a number that amounts to about 2% of the roughly 30 zillion movies that will screen at the fest) yesterday, and it looks like Toronto is setting up to be Cannes West. Among those titles are such Cannes successes as Red Road, Shortbus, Babel, Nani Moretti's The Caiman and Palme d'Or winner The Wind That Shakes the Barley. The non-Cannes films on display include a refreshingly large group from Asia, including Time (Korea), Bliss (China), Invisible Waves (Thailand) and Takashi Miike's Big Bang Love: Juvenile A (Japan).

Though James covered many of the big Cannes premieres already, we will also be on the ground in Toronto and will catch up with a few of the films he missed (hey, one man can only do so much), hopefully including The Caiman; the 2006 TIFF unspools this fall, running from September 7 to September 16.