Film
PLAYLIST
The point of the monthly Playlist column is to gently guide you towards material you’re unlikely to find by chance. These films may currently be importable on expensive DVD. or as grainy bootlegs for hardcore connoisseurs, but they’re now available on the internet for a free taste of ‘intertainment‘. to sample as casually as you would a tray of tasty cheese bites in a supermarket aisle.
Let’s start with Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli. who makes trailers for non-existent films. For his trailer for A Remake of Gore Vidal ’s Caligula (wwwyoutubecom), he somehow enlisted the talents of an A-List cast including Helen Mirren. Benico Del Toro, Gerry Butler. Milla Jovovich and even Courtney Love as Roman emperor Caligula. Playing somewhere between Warhol-esque parody and a dirty in-joke. it’s a strange promotional film for a product that exists only in the artist’s imagination.
Not all filmmakers are so reticent to actually make films. Maverick French auteur Claude Lelouch takes off like an idiot in 1975’s C’etait un Rendezvous (wwwdailymotioncom). a ten minute short which unspools in one take as it records the view from the front of Lelouch‘s Ferrari 365 Boxer as he burns rubber through the streets of Paris at dawn.
As if Lelouch's arrogant disdain for the lives of innocent people didn‘t make C’etait un Rendezvous a spiky enough watch. the knowledge that the director was arrested at the first screening of the film lends the digitised images of dangerous driving a genuine edge.
Settle down with the late. great Robert Altman's favourite of his own films. Brewster McC/oud (www.youtube.com). Shot immediately after M’A'S'H in 1970. Brewster McC/oud opens with a brilliant postmodern visual joke involving Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz) singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner‘. and it never lets up from there. Altman’s story about a boy (Harold and Maude’s Bud Cort) who imagines he can fly with homemade wings is a zesty. anti- authority satire which simply isn’t available anywhere. It's yours to watch for free, and it would be nice to think that some internet attention might help Brewster McC/oud get the proper release it deserves. (Eddie Harrison)
42 THE LIST 15—25) Mar 2007
Reviews
COMEDY SLEEPING DOGS (18) 89min 0..
A sexual indiscretion — and that's putting it mildly — kicks of this tasteless but sweet natured comedy about a girl who's hiding a traumatising secret (again, mildly put) from her fiance. But although this consistently amusing and frequently hilarious film. written and directed by American comedian Bobcat Goldthwait. boasts a trashy comic tone reminiscent of the films of John Waters. at heart it's an astute and cute look at the use and abuse of truth and lies between lovers.
Melinda Page Hamilton (the evil nun from Desperate Housewives) is quite lovely as Amy. an unassuming young woman who's blissfully happy until. at the insistence of her golden-boy husband-to-be. she reveals a secret from her past and is promptly dumped by her disgusted beau. When another man enters Amy's life she no longer believes in full disclosure. and is guarded about her past even when taking the serious step of introducing her new boyfriend to her parents. a pair of straight-laced. God-fearing horrors from whom Amy has learned the troublesome lesson never to lie.
Goldthwait presents a good argument for lying to your loved ones. and he handles his cheeky theme with considerable comedic flare. The dismtegration of family values and loyalty in the face of bare-naked truth is wince—inducing hilarious. particularly a scene involving Amy's mother and the revelation she reveals to her daughter about dirty sex with a dead rock star. And there's plenty of gut-wrei'ichingly funny dialogue that's far too filthy to quote here. but that's delivered straight— faced by the film's game cast. lMiles Fielder)
I Selected cinemas from Fri 76 Mar. See profile. index.
DRAMA ESMA’S SECRET (15) 95min 0000
The past haunts the present in this coming-of-age drama from Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Zbanic. which won the a prize at last year's Berlin festival. The film's original title Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams refers to a Sarajevan suburb. where in the civil war of the 1990s a notorious Serbian torture and rape camp was located.
BIOPIC FACTORY GIRL (15) 89min 0..
Director George Hickenlooper (Mayor of Sunset Strip, The Man from Elysian Fields) obviously believes there is a lot of truth in Andy Warhol’s assertion that his sometime muse Edie Sedgwick was just a ‘poor little rich girl’ (the title of the 1965 Warhol film in which she starred). As a Sedgwick biopic this deals only with her time at Warhol’s Factory in the mid-19605.
Surprisingly, the picture painted (or should that be silk-screened) of life in the Factory highlights the banal and eschews the fabulous. It’s a surprisingly boring place. No one in the picture seems like they were really having fun unless they were off their faces on drugs. This makes for an intriguing movie that challenges the popular notion of Warhol as a hero of his time while also questioning the whole notion of celebrity.
Sienna Miller is hypnotic in the lead role. She has the mannerisms of Sedgwick down to a T. Her Sedgwick is naive and gullible, revealing her desire for fame in a monotonous voiceover. She is a completely lost soul. In contrast Guy Pearce plays Warhol as a snake intent of sucking everyone dry to feed his own ego. His affection for Sedgwick lasts only as long as she is of value to him. In promoting Warhol as demon, the important role that Sedgwick’s childhood friend Chuck Wein (Jimmy Fallon) played in pushing her to the limit at the Factory is surprisingly underplayed. Then there is the bizarre decision by Hickenlooper to create the fictional Dylan-esque musician Billy Quinn (Hayden Christensen). The resemblance is so striking that the singer threatened to sue the filmmakers while it was in production. In the movie Sedgwick has an affair with the musician who hates the values of Warhol. It’s never been proved that Sedgwick slept with Dylan and indeed she was having an affair with Dylan’s assistant Bob Neuwirth. Whatever the truth may be, it is in these scenes between Christensen and Sedgwick where Factory Girl loses its way as Hickenlooper seems more concerned with criticising Warhol than probing Sedgwick the icon and the timid child on a more enlightening level. (Kaleem Aftab)
I General release from Fri 7 6 Mar.
Unfolding in today's Sarajevo. Esma's Secret concentrates on the relationship between a hard-up. middle-aged single mother Esma (Mirjana Karanovic. a regular in Emir Kusturica's films) and her tomboyish 12—year-old daughter Sara (Luna Mijovic). The latter is told by a teacher that she can go on a school trip. which ordinarily cost €200. for free because her late father was a 'shaheed' (a military martyr). So why is Esma. who slaves away by day in a shoe factory and by night as a cocktail waitress. so reluctant to provide Sara with a copy of the required death certificate?
An economical. sensitive storyteller. Zbanic grounds her film in a series of credible interactions. including a tender friendship between Esma and a former soldier Pelda (Leon Lucev). who lost his own father in the fighting and who muses. ‘If I remembered everything. I'd kill myself’. And. while eliciting fine performances. the filmmaker paints a low-key. yet revealing portrait of a society struggling to continue with ‘normal' life and deal with the legacy of such traumatic suffering. (Tom Dawson) I Cameo, Edinburgh from Fri 23— Thu 29 Mar (matinees only).
DOCUMENTARY IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS (15) 94min «u
Photographed. edited and directed by the American filmmaker James Longley over a two year period followrng the US invasion of Iraq in April 2003. this haunting documentary doesn't take the familiar perspective of the occupying forces. Instead it goes behind the media headlines to explore everyday life in this war—ravaged country from the vantage pomt of 'ordinary' Iraqis.
The title is reflected in the film's triptych structure. with the first chapter ‘Mohammed of Baghdad focussing on a fatherless l 1-year-old Sunni boy in the capital. who works for a brutish garage mechanic. The second section