Category: Trailers

LFM Review: Cinema Komunisto @ Tribeca 2011

By Joe Bendel. It was a country that never really existed with an economic system that never worked. Obviously, Communist Yugoslavia needed constant distractions. Avala, the now decrepit Yugoslav state film studio responded with a constant stream of propaganda pictures, varying widely in quality. Mila Turajlic revisits the films and filmmakers who brought Tito’s version of reality to Yugoslavia’s movie-houses in Cinema Komunisto (trailer above), which screens during the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.

It was good to be the Marshal. A lifelong film buff, Josip Broz Tito had a private screening almost every night of his reign. Unlike other Communist strongmen, he enjoyed Hollywood films as well as the Avala productions he took such an active interest in. According to his personal projectionist, one of his favorite actors was none other than John Wayne. He probably appreciated the Duke’s World War II films.

Indeed, the war was nearly ubiquitous in his state propaganda pictures. According to actor Bata Zivojinovic, many of his films simply consisted of him killing Germans from beginning to end. While not exactly ambitious, there is something to be said for the red meat approach. However, Avala also produced some legitimate prestige pictures, including the epic Battle of Neretva, featuring major stars from the West, including Yul Brynner, Orson Welles, and the Zagreb-born Sylva Koscina. A darling on the international festival circuit, Pablo Picasso was convinced to create the film’s poster.

Neretva was not an aberration. Western studios co-financed several productions with Avala and shot a number of films on location in Yugoslavia, often because of the country’s ready supply of vintage WWII era military hardware and their willingness to blow it up when required by the script. The Hollywood-Avala connection arguably reached its pinnacle when Richard Burton agreed to play Tito in the first sanctioned bio-picture of the soon to be declared President-for-Life. (With Elizabeth Taylor in tow, he looks distinctly woozy in vintage publicity footage unearthed by Turajlic.) Continue reading LFM Review: Cinema Komunisto @ Tribeca 2011

LFM Review: My Piece of the Pie @ Tribeca 2011

By Joe Bendel. Steve Delarue is a financial shark. France Leroi is a single mother, who is laid-off when her factory abruptly closes (but what a name she has). The former is so obviously the villain and the latter is so clearly the victim, we can surely put our brains on auto-pilot. Yet, Cédric Klapisch’s latest film is surprisingly more interesting than that (perhaps unintentionally so, but it still counts). Drawing on three year-old headlines, Klapisch tells a messy morality tale in My Piece of the Pie, which screens during the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.

Karin Viard and Gilles Lellouche.

France Leroi is indeed a victim. That is not a subjective judgment; it is the essence of her identity. A union worker thrown out of work by her factory’s financial collapse, she attempts suicide during a birthday party, with her home filled with children. Fortunately she soon recovers, leaving Dunkirk to seek employment in Paris. Through a friend of a friend, she lands a gig working as the cleaning lady for Steve Delarue, a Bonfire of the Vanities style Master of the Universe recently returned to France the country after a long stint in London. Delarue is the kind of guy who administers the death knell to struggling enterprises, like Leroi’s former employer. In fact, unbeknownst to Leroi, he was exactly that guy.

Delarue dates supermodels, but treats them little better than servants like Leroi. Not surprisingly, he’s terrible father material, but fortunately Leroi is there when Delarue’s three year-old son Alban is dumped in his lap. In fact, as she assumes the duties of a nanny, employer and employee start to warm toward each other. However, a perceived betrayal launches Leroi on a reckless course of action. Continue reading LFM Review: My Piece of the Pie @ Tribeca 2011

New 12-minute Battlefield 3 Trailer Shows Marines Fighting Iran-backed Insurgents in Iraq

By Jason Apuzzo. EA has released a new 12-minute trailer (featuring extensive game play) for Battlefield 3, depicting U.S. Marines involved in intense urban warfare in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq against Iranian-backed insurgents along the Iran/Iraq border (the game is set in 2014). See the full 12-minute trailer above. The trailer is gripping and intense, and astonishingly realistic in its imagery. NOTE: THIS NSFW TRAILER FEATURES VIOLENCE AND STRONG LANGUAGE. The trailer was posted at YouTube on Thursday, and as of the writing of this post already has over 1.3 millions views.

Screen grab from "Battlefield 3."

Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter game, and a follow-up to EA’s popular Battlefield series. The game is set to debut on November 2nd, and will apparently feature battlefields in Sulaymaniyah, Tehran, Paris and New York.

Watching the trailer, I’m left with the usual questions: namely, why can’t Hollywood do something like this? I mean, fighting space aliens in downtown Los Angeles is great, but why must stories about these real world, epochal military conflicts of ours be relegated to the (admittedly large) ghetto of video gaming? The imagery in this trailer is astonishing in its detail and subtlety, and thoroughly ‘cinematic’ in its execution – to the point that I actually felt like I was watching a war documentary for much of it. And yet a full eight years after the invasion of Iraq, we’re still waiting on any sort of large-scale Hollywood effort to depict the war, while the gaming industry proves each year that there is a massive market for this kind of material.

Does EA have a movie division? They might want to consider starting one.

Posted on April 18th, 2011 at 11:55am.

LFM Review: Armadillo & The War in Afghanistan

By Joe Bendel. Just because they are Danish soldiers, that does not mean they should trust the media any more than their American counterparts. A group of Danes serving in Afghanistan learns this PR lesson the hard way in Janus Metz’s embed-style documentary Armadillo, which opened yesterday in New York and elsewhere.

Amazingly, as the film opens, the Danish unit stationed at the Helmand forward operating base (nicknamed Armadillo) has yet to suffer a fatal casualty. In fact, when the group of soldiers Metz follows from enlistment and basic training arrive at Armadillo, boredom seems to be their greatest foe. In a rather clumsy effort to be provocative, Metz makes much of their choice of entertainment: violent video games and run-of-the-mill porn, as if this were shocking for a group of twenty-something men serving in the middle of nowhere without any interaction with women.

The Danish soldiers make an effort to reach out to the locals, but they have trouble overcoming the widespread fear of Taliban reprisals. Isolated and untested, the Helmand outpost is simply too tempting a target for the Taliban to resist for long. Eventually they make their move. Unfortunately, it is impossible to really tell what went down in the soon-to-be-controversial incident. Most of the camerawork is a veritable blur, which is understandable considering that bullets were flying. However, Metz never establishes any reference points for area in question, or sets the scene in any way. Continue reading LFM Review: Armadillo & The War in Afghanistan

The CBGB Film School: LFM Reviews Blank City

By Joe Bendel. In 1968, Amos Poe was a budding photographer visiting family in Czechoslovakia. For obvious reasons, the Soviet invasion cut short his photographic sojourn to the countryside. There were no such constraints in the lawless anarchy of late 1970s New York, where Poe became a trailblazer in the underground Super-8 filmmaking community. Céline Danhier profiles those squatter-auteurs in Blank City, which opens this Wednesday in New York at the IFC Center.

Abe Beam’s New York was about as pre-Giuliani as the City ever got. The rule of law was tenuous at best, but rents in the East Village were relatively affordable—not that anyone even bothered to pay. CBGB’s was the center of the musical universe, also hosting a number of early screenings of what would later be dubbed the “No Wave” movement.

Danhier scored interviews with just about every significant surviving figure on the scene at the time. A portrait emerges of a kind of dormitory-like atmosphere, where everyone knew each other, but nobody had a job. Though they do not confess it outright, “coolness” within the clique was clearly of primary importance. Musician-turned-filmmaker John Lurie admits he hid his saxophone, “because nobody was doing what they knew how to do . . . technique was so hated.”

The great irony of Blank is that Danhier’s doc is far easier to watch than a good many of the films it documents. Fortunately, just about every chaotic shoot generated its share of humorous anecdotes, which generously pepper Blank. Indeed, the film is at its best when filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch reminisce about their early days. However, it is hard to stifle the eye-rolling when her interview subjects get political. At least Lizzie Borden expresses grief for the World Trade Center terrorist attack, while acknowledging the awkward similarity between 9/11 and the conclusion of her film Born in Flame.

Granted, Poe’s Blank Generation is probably not at the top of a lot of Netflix queues. Still, it is bit of an eye-opener to see how many figures from the Blank scene either legitimately crossed over, like Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi, Debbie Harry, Susan Seidelman, and Ann Magnuson, or kind-of sort-of did, such as John Lurie, Charlie “Wild Style” Ahearn, and Bette Gordon.

Like the films under discussion, Blank is best when its participants do not take their illustrious careers too seriously. While the time spent with the subsequent “Cinema of Transgression” lacks the same charm, the film mostly works as a valentine to scruffy independent filmmaking. Surprisingly entertaining, Blank opens today at the IFC Center.

Posted on February 6th, 2011 at 3:24pm.

LFM Review: Yodok Stories & North Korean Tyranny + Watch Film Now for FREE

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By Joe Bendel. For many South Koreans, it is difficult to believe the reports of horrific human rights abuses committed in the North. That is why Polish director Andrzej Fidyk became the prime mover behind Yodok Stories, a stage musical about the inhuman atrocities regularly happening in North Korean concentration camps. Fidyk also documented the controversial theatrical production, undertaken at great risk by defectors who survived the Yodok camp, in his eye-opening Norwegian-produced film, likewise titled Yodok Stories, a standout selection of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival now available for free in its entirety (see above) at Snag Films.

One thing the North Koreans certainly know is how to do is stage huge spectacles of tens of thousands of tightly choreographed participants, like the grand pageant celebrating the fortieth anniversary of DPRK Fidyk recorded in his 1988 documentary Parade. Impressed by the technical skill required to mount such a production, Fidyk wanted to collaborate with a former North Korean director to document the rest of the North Korean experiment in Communist collectivism. After many inquiries, he eventually found Jung Sung San. Continue reading LFM Review: Yodok Stories & North Korean Tyranny + Watch Film Now for FREE