under the same moon Tagged Articles at Cinematical

In my recent celebratory rant about the new Latin American cinema classics, I failed to mention any films from Chile. This was not my intention, but admittedly I am not familiar with that country's film production, as most Americans are not. The most well-known contemporary Chilean filmmaker is probably Raoul Ruiz (or Raúl Ruiz), who is likely more associated with French cinema and is considered even more generally to be an international filmmaker. Like Ruiz, a lot of Chile's filmmakers left their country 35 years ago when Pinochet came to power. Fortunately, since Chile became a democracy again in 1990, film production there has been on the rise and will fortunately one day be as big as neighboring Argentina's film industry.

Chilean cinema could have a boost thanks to Lionsgate, which has just picked up Rodrigo Ortuzar's All Inclusive for U.S. distribution. The film, about a family trapped at a resort when a Hurricane hits its Yucatan location and co-starring Street Kings' Martha Higareda (pictured), is set in and was co-produced by Mexico, which is fine considering the association allows the film to be lumped with recent partially Mexican films like Under the Same Moon and the Spanish-language work of Guillermo Del Toro. Lionsgate also handled distribution for last year's U.S.-produced Spanish-language film Bandoleros, Lionsgate has yet to announce a release date for All Inclusive.

It started as a joke, became a documentary, and now it's on DVD. Comedian Doug Benson undertook a bold initiative: to smoke marijuana every day for 30 days. Of course, he'd already been smoking pot pretty much every day of his life, so to make things really interesting, he first stopped smoking for 30 days and took a battery of tests so he could later compare the results of smoking vs. non-smoking on his thirty-something body. Super High Me is the result.

The stoner crowd laughed much harder than I did at SXSW, but, as Erik Davis wrote, Super High Me is still "funny as hell," and the doc, directed by Michael Blieden, manages to sneak in plenty of social and political commentary. The DVD doesn't appear to have any extras, but it is available with two different covers. See if you can tell the difference. To quote Erik again, "True stoners, however, will most likely place this film on a shelf among their favorites of all time ... then forget it's up there five minutes later."

One of my SXSW favorites also premieres on DVD today. Following on the heels of Anton Corbjin's biopic Control, Grant Gee's doc Joy Division is a rousing, illuminating peek into the lives of the original members of the band, featuring interviews with almost all of the key players.

• Larry Pizer (1925-2008) - Cinematographer who shot Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise and the director's music video for Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark", James Ivory's The Europeans, Ismael Merchant's The Proprietor and In Custody, Karl Reisz' Isadora and Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, as well as Timerider, Folks! and Mannequin 2: On the Move. He died of cancer February 27, in New York. (Variety)

• Iris Burton (1930-2008) - Dancer-turned-agent who appears in The Ten Commandments and Top Banana and who helped launch the careers of River Phoenix and Henry Thomas. Other child stars she represented include Joaquin Phoenix, Drew Barrymore, Kirk Cameron, the Olsen twins and Fred Savage. She died after suffering from pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease April 5, in Woodland Hills, California. (Variety)

Not many people care to admit it, but Hollywood is run by fear. Fear is an emotion generated by things that are not known or understood, and in the movie business, no one ever knows what's going to happen. (William Goldman was right when he said, "Nobody Knows Anything.") All those accountants, producers, publicists, entertainment TV shows, ad campaigns, etc. are all an attempt to get a handle on the unknown, an attempt to control the uncontrollable. Anything can happen. The world's biggest movie star can jump up and down on a couch and suddenly become a weirdo outcast. Or the star of a dismal turkey like Showgirls can turn around and find herself cast in a Woody Allen film. This fear, in essence, is why so many movies are so bad. The more investors and business people try to control their investment, the more they clamp down on it, and the more it gets smothered.

See, movies can live and breathe like an organic life form, but they have to have a chance. If brave producers step back and let the movie come to life in the hands of a genuine artist, they could wind up with something extraordinary like Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men (229 screens), a film that somehow pleased critics both highbrow and middlebrow, won a handful of Oscars and has nearly grossed $75 million. This film has already entered the cultural canon as a classic of cinema. More or less the same can be said of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (224 screens), which, having lost the Oscar for Best Picture, is now in a position of being an underrated underdog. But those are exceptions to the rule. No one is immune to the fear: a few years back the Coen Brothers teamed up with sleazy producer Brian Grazer, of all people, and came up with their first dud, Intolerable Cruelty.

The big story of the weekend was the success enjoyed by Under the Same Moon (Fox Searchlight / The Weinstein Co.), which earned $8,910 per screen playing on 266 screens, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady at Movie City News. Our own Jette Kernion described it as "essentially an old-fashioned family melodrama." She pointed out that the film has an "overt agenda" in its message about U.S. undocumented workers, but concluded: "Despite its flaws, Under the Same Moon is an entertaining film that knows how to charm an audience."

Playing at one theater in New York and one in Los Angeles, Planet B-Boy (Elephant Eye Films) made $14,500 per screen, giving it the highest per-screen average. Benson Lee directed the documentary, "which weaves the stories of numerous crews from 18 nations vying in the Battle of the Year championship in Braunschweig, Germany," in the words of Ed Gonzalez in The Village Voice. "What most sticks is Planet B-Boy's aesthetic, which feels jocked from the school of Michael Moore."

Earlier this year, Under the Same Moon (originally titled La Misma Luna) was bought at Sundance by Fox Searchlight and The Weinstein Company for a surprisingly high amount of money. It's understandable because underneath the film's unsubtle messages about undocumented Mexican workers working to survive in the U.S., it's essentially an old-fashioned family melodrama. I caught the film at Austin Film Festival this year, and it's currently scheduled to hit theaters in March 2008.

Rosario (Kate del Castillo) is a young immigrant from Mexico living and working in Los Angeles to support her nine-year-old son Carlitos (Adrian Alonso), who lives with Rosario's mother in Mexico. He hasn't seen his mother in four years and misses her terribly. Meanwhile, Rosario is trying to scrape up enough money for a lawyer to help her bring Carlitos to America legally. When his grandmother dies, Carlitos decides to cross the border himself and travel to Los Angeles to find his mother, because he's scared she'll forget about him. He encounters an unlikely lot of helpers and companions during his attempt, including American college students (America Ferrera and Jesse Garcia) who want to make extra money smuggling children over the border, and Enrique (Eugenio Derbez), a migrant worker who has no desire to deal with a small child on his hands.