You have to hand it to the Coen brothers: they never make the same movie twice. Their latest, A Serious Man, is an odd addition to the Coen catalogue. It’s a quirky, low-budget film steeped in Jewish culture and set in the bleakest imaginable outpost of 1960s suburbia, and it is essentially a philosophical meditation on the meaning of life, or lack thereof. Market that, suckers.

Read more.

I know all eyes are on the new Coen Brothers movie, A Serious Man, which opens Friday—but there’s another high-quality, locally shot movie opening this week: Rob Perez’s Nobody, an indie comedy about an art student seeking the inspiration he needs to finish his final project. The movie opens Thursday, Oct. 1, at the State Theatre, then starts a run on Friday at Block E. It features several local actors, including Sam Rosen and Emily Gunyou Halaas, and contains scenes shot at MCAD, Porky’s on University Ave., The Black Forest Inn, and several other recognizable locations around town. Last week, I attended the cast/crew party at the Riverview Theater in Minneapolis and spoke with Rob, Sam, and Emily about the new film—and discovered, much to my chagrin, that there are no zombies, vampires, time travelers, amnesia victims, or apocalyptic disasters in it. Or, for that matter, very many serious men.

Read more.

Caught a sneak preview yesterday of local writer/actor/director Patrick Coyle’s excellent new movie, Into Temptation, and I wholeheartedly recommend that you try to see it during its brief run at the Lagoon from Aug. 28-Sept. 3. It’ll be released nationally on DVD Oct. 27 by First Look Studios, but this is one of the best films yet to emerge out of our nascent indie-film scene, so the more exposure it gets the better—for all of us.

Read more.

I haven’t seen any of the films being shown in the 27th annual Mpls/St.Paul International Film Festival over the next two weeks, and that’s pretty much the point. I know from past experience that if I don’t take the opportunity to see at least a few of the more than 150 movies and documentaries long-time festival coordinator Al Milgrom has brought to town, chances are I’m never going to get a chance to see them again—ever.

Read more.

There’s something lonely about the way we watch movies these days, with everyone bunkering at home in front of their recession-discounted HDTVs. Gimmicks like Blu-Ray My Chat are bringing social networking to the housebound movie nut, but as a portal to deconstruct that heady masterpiece The Bourne Ultimatum? Really now, I think we need to get out more.
 
Here’s something worthy of a trip: live director commentaries. Watch the movie with its director in a proper movie theater and with a crowd of equally obsessive fans—basically a DVD/Blu-Ray commentary track, except the director comes to you and you get to talk back. Florida transplant Tim Masset calls these freewheeling events The Talkies, and he has organized ones with John Waters, George Romero, and Herschell Gordon Lewis. Last night he brought John Cameron Mitchell to The Heights Theatre to do play-by-play of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the Plato-quoting tranny rock musical Mitchell created, wrote, directed, and starred in off-Broadway and then eight years ago made into an unexpectedly fabulous film. 

Read more.

Some of my best moviegoing experiences have been had in some of the most unhygienic theaters. The places that seem to take movies most seriously often have grubby floors, ticky-tacky construction, and undernourished ticket-tearers, and I happen to have no problem with filth (or famine) in the name of cinephilia, so I happily suffer. You might not be so inclined.
 
But let’s agree on this: Where we see a movie inevitably shapes our experience of that film. And when a movie plays in the Walker Art Center Cinema, it comes with helpful baggage that the lovable, fleabag arthouse cinema is increasingly unwilling or unable to provide. Beyond superior technical presentation, unobstructed sightlines, and spitspot floors, what you’re really getting is assurance that the film has a place in the cinematic canon or at least something very interesting (and periodically aggravating) to say. With a glut of good films competing for theater space and your dollars, the Walker imprint provides a critical sieve.

Read more.

If Thomas Friedman is convinced the world is flat, he needs to take another look at how our movies are distributed. You'd think that with the rise of Netflix and with subtitled "independent films" playing in every other mega-multiplex, you could pretty much see any movie anywhere these days. In truth, most movies made outside the United States cannot be seen by American audiences.

Read more.

Filmmaker Mike Leigh makes funny-sad chronicles of the daily slog set in notoriously class-conscious England. His stars are doughy working- and middle-class Londoners with thrifty wardrobes and a repertoire of verbal and physical tics. They live in cramped flats decorated with tacky curios or in vanilla starter homes of upward mobility. At first these characters seem like caricatures, until you realize it’s the people we’re so used to seeing in movies that are the parodies.

Most American movie characters are fantasies—consistent, predictable, superhumanly self-aware, and blessed with dependably better hair and makeup. Leigh’s ensemble comedies bring into focus the far more fascinating and messy minutia of everyday life, where most of us have little grasp of the big picture and muddle through in our own disorganized way. The drama in Leigh’s films turn on micro shifts in relationships, how parents and kids relate or don’t, how couples grow and don’t. Conversations often go nowhere (as they tend to in life) and characters continually push against or retreat into prescribed roles. Work, sex, food, and family preoccupy because that’s the stuff of most lives.

In ten feature films over almost four decades (and many more for British television), Leigh’s distinct oeuvre has been deservedly showered with prizes but quite modest commercial success. His most widely seen movies (Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake) picked up Oscar nominations; his most controversial, Naked, was infamously pilloried by feminists. His latest, Happy-Go-Lucky (opening October 24 at the Uptown), is a paean to optimism and maybe a sign of a softening of the salty Brit whose 1992 MoMA retrospective was titled "Life Could Be Better."

This month the Walker Art Center is feting Leigh with its own retrospective, highlighted by last night’s Regis Dialogue with the sixty-five-year-old writer/director whose curmudgeonly reputation precedes him. Regis Dialogues are formatted a bit like Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio but handier for revealing outsize egos than James Lipton’s lovefest. LA Weekly film critic Scott Foundas successfully wrangled director Milos Forman at April’s Dialogue, but was outmatched this time by a droll, occasionally testy Leigh whose meandering monologues and frequent plugs for his new movie made for a fun but disorderly dissection of his craft.

The evening’s frequently one-sided conversation kicked off with Leigh’s stories of his youth as a theatrical doctor’s son, growing up in a working class neighborhood of Manchester, England. A voracious consumer of American films (the only ones playing), he wondered, “Wouldn’t it be great to sit in a movie and see people acting like people and not like people in movies?”

At seventeen, a scholarship sent him to London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he trained as an actor (but rejected the school’s rigid pedagogy). He also sampled for the first time a world cinema that had much more in common with the movies he wanted to make than those he grew up watching. His drive to make relatable narrative films drawn from life seemed square to some of his contemporaries in the 1960s London scene who were watching Warhol’s films just like their counterparts in New York.

Leigh paid his dues working in the theater (onstage and off) throughout the decade until actor Albert Finney, also from Leigh’s hometown of Salford, financed his first feature, Bleak Moments. Released in 1971 to great reviews, the comic study of four awkward, lonely singles previewed some future themes. “One endless preoccupation is the collision of people with a sense of humor and those without a sense of humor,” Leigh offered following a clip of Bleak Moments’ excruciating botched seduction.

The film also showcased his particular talent with actors, who he works with in an unusually collaborative (and as he pointed out several times) misunderstood manner. When Leigh first casts his films, there is no script. “The film doesn’t exist. We’re going to discover the film” is his proposition to his casts, by now a repertory for great character actors (Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, Sally Hawkins, ex-wife Alison Steadman).

Occasionally, Leigh begins with a particular idea he wishes to explore. In Vera Drake it was the notion of a 1950s London housewife who has a secret life as an abortionist, and in Secrets & Lies it was the journey of an adopted woman who seeks out her birth mother. For films like Naked and All Or Nothing, Leigh acknowledged “I just had a sense of the spirit of the thing” going in.

In all cases, he starts by working privately with each actor to build a character from the ground up, work that’s informed by research and the creation of elaborate backstories that will inform the final performances but likely never make it into the movie in any overt way. During the many months of rehearsals that follow, the characters meet for the first time and improvise within situations Leigh devises, often in the lived-in locales from which the films are eventually shot. From all of these improvisations, narrative possibilities unravel and are shaped by Leigh into a final, tightly choreographed shooting script.

Recalling the ten-hour rehearsal for Vera Drake’s climactic scene in which Imelda Staunton’s character is arrested at her daughter’s engagement dinner, Leigh said it “was very traumatic for everyone involved, including me” to be there when the movie’s central concern was revealed. His actors never know anything that their characters aren’t privy to, so Staunton didn’t know her character was going to jail at that moment and the actors playing her family didn’t know of her secret life . . . only Leigh, juggling each of their trajectories in the weeks preceding, waiting for the big reveal.

So how can Leigh’s longtime producer (and Thin Man Films partner) Simon Channing Williams court investors to bankroll pictures made in this way? “I’m the guy with no script. I can’t tell you the story. And I won’t talk about cast,” Leigh told an audience member who asked about the limitations of finding financing for his films.

Adding that Williams is “out there now with a begging bowl” try to drum up money for their next film, he acknowledged that his organic, actor-centered approach has put a definite ceiling on the scale of movies he can make. It’s also given him incredible freedom. I feel lucky, he said, “to have made eighteen films where no one has interfered at any stage.”

Screenings of Mike Leigh’s films continue at the Walker through Oct. 25.

Some film score composers churn out aural wallpaper that’s kindly dismissed as “movie music,” others overcompensate for directors who can’t deliver emotion without cueing a weepy violin solo or sentimental melody. And the consensus on the supposedly controversial Philip Glass? Either he’s a genius or an example of what can go very, very wrong when you don’t follow the shopworn mold of John Williams.

Specializing in what documentary filmmaker (and frequent collaborator) Errol Morris has dubbed the sound of existential dread, Glass writes maniacally repetitive compositions that seem to cycle for hours before coming to an abrupt end. In The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line, Notes on a Scandal, and, most famously, Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy, Glass’s peculiar brand of musical dystopia partners quite well with what’s on screen. In a star pageant like The Hours, he traps you in an overwrought, overlong music video.

Glass’s critics point out that his hired-gun work for the movie studios is but a piece of a career that has always prized ubiquity over quality. And The Glass Sound is certainly everywhere: in twenty-plus operas, eight symphonies, numerous concertos, string quartets, piano and organ solos, and collaborations with David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Richard Serra, Twyla Tharp, Allen Ginsberg, and Patti Smith. If you’ve only heard Glass at the multiplex, you haven’t really heard the half of it.

It seems only appropriate that the man himself is now the subject of a largely adoring documentary that surveys the highlights of his distinguished career, gently probes the psyche of the genius, but doesn’t ultimately reveal a lot. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts, which had its area premiere last night at the Walker Art Center (where Glass has performed many times), doesn’t pretend to be a definitive biography or a particularly objective one. It’s the kind of breezy, loosely assembled love letter Sydney Pollack made about his architect buddy Frank Gehry and on those terms it’s a satisfying, entertaining 112 minutes.

Director Scott Hicks (of the tortured pianist drama Shine and also the Glass-scored Aaron Eckhart/Catherine Zeta-Jones foodie romance No Reservations) keeps a reverential distance from his likable subject. Dropping in on Glass family gatherings and professional assignations, he is an interloper who steals moments to ask about and observe The Process, but he isn’t, as far as I can tell, able to get Glass to sit still for many in-depth interviews.

The documentary is divided into twelve thematic chapters, starting with wife Holly’s tour of the maestro’s messy home office and ending in Germany for opening night of his latest opera, Waiting for the Barbarians. We hear from a smattering of Glass intimates (his first wife, his oldest son) and famous friends (Chuck Close, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen), visit him in the studio and before performances, and drop in at his seaside Nova Scotia retreat as he assembles homemade pizzas.

We learn that Glass was among the artists who colonized 1960s SoHo, introducing “minimalist music” to the scenesters sprawled on the floors of downtown lofts and galleries for his musical endurance sessions (made all the easier to endure with plenty of drugs). In 1976, he shook up The Metropolitan Opera with his avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach and though many other respectable engagements would follow, Glass was then (and has remained) something of a punching bag.

The movie shares some of those withering headlines from back in the day (“Music By Torture—6 Hours of Monotony”), but Glass insists that his lifelong “strong hate faction” doesn’t bother him. The film paints the seventy-one-year-old composer as a globehopping workaholic, distracted husband/father to wife #4 and two toddlers, and a spiritual searcher whose grab-bag of religious studies (Taoism, Buddhism, Judaism, the Toltec tradition) mirror his eclectic musical roots as the star pupil of sitarist Ravi Shankar and French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger.

Some of the film’s most revealing insights come from his sister, Sheppie, who scoffs at her brother’s marital requirements (“his wives must be half his age, plus seven”) and who speculates on how 1950s family dynamics played out for a Julliard-bound prodigy who shared his father’s love of classical music but not his desire for a traditional career.

Does all this add up to a particularly deep, rounded portrait of Glass? No, but that probably won’t bother anyone except those already tuned into his career. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts is perhaps the best we can expect of a drive-by documentary of this complex, stubborn talent. It’s as opaque and, at times, as maddeningly redundant as a Philip Glass film score. And the best thing about it is the soundtrack of Glass’s greatest hits.

Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts plays through Sunday at the Walker.

There was a time in the late eighties and early nineties when it seemed every Hollywood studio had a comedy in the production pipeline in which a luckless schmo either swapped bodies with or was reincarnated as a woman, a child, or (in the best case scenario) a rich old guy.

The drama got dialed up a titch as our protagonist discovered that the body swap was an impediment to rekindling a romance with a former love (Chances Are) or igniting one with someone new (Switch). At heart though these were comedies played veeeeery broadly, frothier than a venti cappuccino—their charm directly commensurate to the chemistry and charisma of the stars.

Then four years ago Sexy Beast director Jonathan Glazer made Birth—a reincarnated-soulmate-story for the arthouse crowd. A dark comedy disguised as a psychological thriller, Birth cast Nicole Kidman as a widow who is at first amused and eventually hot for a ten-year-old boy who claims he’s her dead husband.

Birth examined reincarnation skeptically and yet more seriously than any of its predecessors. It was the first film of this type to acknowledge that if your dearly departed were to return as someone under the legal age of consent you’d be processing more than boatloads of grief and a few awkward encounters—you’d be having a freakin’ nervous breakdown.

Glazer shot Kidman’s world in still, chilly monochromatic gloom and set her moods to a writhing orchestral score. He gave her a pixie cut that channeled Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby and surrounded her with crusty Upper East-siders who thought reincarnation was ridiculous but great dinner party chatter. The film hit all the right notes (droll, suspenseful, creepy, even, uh, romantic) without turning reincarnation into a gimmick.

Bill True, I’m afraid, hasn’t been so lucky. In his script Incarnation, the local screenwriter tells the story of a grieving husband who has been on a cross-country mission to find the seven-year-old girl who he believes is the reincarnation of his late Indian wife. When he thinks he’s found that girl, he instead falls in love with her mother and is pursued by an FBI agent who is convinced he’s a child molester. If True gets his supernatural romantic thriller greenlighted, I hope he’s paired with a visual stylist as savvy as Glazer and with actors as gifted as Kidman. He’s gonna need it.

True previewed his Incarnation screenplay at the Ritz Theater last night as the latest installment in The Screenwriter’s Workshop ScriptNight series. Staged reading is one way of describing ScriptNight, but that conjures up a rather tweedy image for what’s really a fun night of barebones theater. The actors recruited to read Incarnation were a coterie of recognizable local talent (Aditi Kapil, Ansa Akyea, and Prairie Home Companion’s Sue Scott) and two weathered film/TV vets from LA, Chris Mulkey and John Ashton.

Film director Dean Lincoln Hyers, who hatched Incarnation’s story with True and also directed last night’s reading, warned the audience that what we were about to hear was a script (the fifth draft, True tells me)—not a movie. And that bears repeating here. Depending on the casting choices, the budget, and the behind-the-camera talent, True’s screenplay could become ten very different movies. The problem is, right now it feels like all ten of them.

True is clearly aiming Incarnation for the commercial multiplex market and that demands a certain adherence to genre conventions (the car chase, for instance, though True adds a horse). We also shouldn’t be surprised by the playbook of familiar character types—the lonely cop obsessed with catching his prey but haunted by his own loss, the single urban mom beaten down by alcohol/drugs/poverty/a bad man and reluctant to love again, and the sweet seer-like little girl who is the key to it all.

No one of these elements in themselves suggests a broken script. It’s that the screenplay piles on so many of them and none convincingly enough. Our widower protagonist collects evidence against the single mom’s drug dealer ex and pretends to be a lawyer to help her win back custody of the girl. There’s a silly flashback to his visit to a Hindu temple where he receives a prophetic message that helps him narrow his hunt for his wife. And there are lots of scenes of riding, communing with, and talking about horses that just seem so hokey I can’t imagine any filmmaker actually pulling it off.

Two characters, the dead wife (who we visit in flashbacks) and the FBI agent on our widower’s trail seem particularly thin, indistinguishable outside of the broad outlines of their character types. The single mom doesn’t fair well either but she has the advantage of more screen time.

Really, though, won’t this ultimately be about performance, tone, and the discipline to tell one story, just one, really well? It seemed to me a very thin line that kept a film like Birth from being ridiculous. Let’s see what’s in store for Incarnation.