Film

Oakland, Calif., documentary filmmaker Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s Wonder Women!, the untold story of super heroines, is one of the documentaries defining BendFilm as a festival not just for features, but ideas.
Former Source staffer Josh Beddingfield caught up with Guevara-Flanagan in California:
the Source: Your previous film, Going on 13, followed the lives of four young girls in the process of becoming adolescents. I’m guessing you came at Wonder Woman! more from the perspective of a cultural observer than as a comic fan per se?

Cosmopolis might be Cronenberg’s most personal film and that is pretty scary. The guy who brought us Rabid, Scanners, The Fly, Videodrome and History of Violence (to name a few) has gone back to the high tech stuff that fueled his version of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and his film Crash—not the Oscar winning one that sucked.
Based on Don Delillo’s novel of the same name, Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis uses the source material surreptitiously to weave a web of futility. There’s an “inside is safe and outside is turmoil” feel to this flick. This film is a vehicle for a socio-political discussion about corporate greed and the media. Cronenberg tries to tackle what is really wrong with this country and how truly paranoid we’ve become as a society.

Is The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s hauntingly intimate epic, about Scientology? That’s been the focus of attention for many with only peripheral interest in the film itself, hoping perhaps for some kind of searing roman-a-clef takedown of L. Ron Hubbard and his movement. And, after all, it’s easy enough to do a certain kind of math in putting together the inspiration for Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the author/philosopher/guru from whom the film takes its name. If you’re looking for clues that The Cause is in fact a thinly-disguised stand-in for Dianetics, you’ll find them.
You’ll also be missing something fairly extraordinary.

With attention to detail and a filmography time table to rival Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson seems to be deriving pleasure from emulating other director’s styles while being fiercely independent and creating a unique world of his own with a stable of consummate actors.
Hard Eight (1996)
A hard luck gambling saga showcasing the repertory of actors Anderson would come to draw upon in later films. John C. Reilly is mentored in casino logic by an ailing Philip Baker Hall. Gwyneth Paltrow and Phillip Seymour Hoffman round out this flick. Even Samuel L. Jackson shows up before he was in everything.

Killer Joe’s opening credits gives us the heads up that we are seeing the second collaboration between writer Tracy Letts and Director William Friedkin—the first joint effort produced Bug. Sporting an NC-17 rating due to some full frontal rampant nudity and graphic sex, Killer Joe has an even weirder vibe that hangs over the entire flick.
Here the writing/directing duo tries to recapture the critical acclaim of Bug with this screwed up potboiler, but Killer Joe only half translates to film. The whole viewing time I was wishing I were watching the play on which it is based and not this mostly defective film. What’s weird is that, even for all its flaws, the film left a haunting memory. Replaying scenes in my head and the strange, warped, uncomfortable feeling I got from watching this flick has somehow morphed into the same feeling of recalling a dream, like, ‘did that really happen?’

I truly thought William Friedkin had a much more illustrious career.  Yet when I look back, I find he has his share of some real truly great films and some horrific duds.
The French Connection
Gene Hackman deserved his Academy Award for his role as Manhattan homicide detective Popeye Doyle who furiously tracks down a heroin ring. Boasts one of the best car chases of the time, rivaling Steve McQueen’s Bullitt.
The Exorcist
The movie that has scared audiences around the world for decades still does today. The film stays true to William Peter Blatty’s bestseller and gives us our first glimpses into demonic possession, not to mention a little girl cursing, growing lesions on her face, spinning her head around and puking green bile into a priest’s face.

Bust out the popcorn and get yourself some tickets! BendFilm is just around the corner. We met with Orit Schwartz, BendFilm’s festival director and all around great gal, last week and she assured us that this year’s slate of indie films, documentaries and shorts is tops. Stay tuned to the Source for all BendFilm news, events and previews leading up to the big weekend, Oct. 11 through Oct. 14. Here’s our exclusive look at the lineup.
OPENING NIGHT FILM
Ethel
This deeply personal look at Ethel Kennedy is a revealing portrait told through interviews with members of her family. Directed by her Emmy-Award winning
daughter, Rory Kennedy.

Good Lord, another exorcism movie and with the tagline, “based on true events.” Holy crap, the only thing worse is a haunted house movie with the same dubious claim. Yet The Possession achieves the near impossible; it makes us care for the two central characters Clyde (Jeffery Dean Morgan) and Emily “Em”  (Natasha Calis). This hasn’t happened since the original Exorcist where we sat on the edge of our seat out of concern for Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair and Jason Miller.
Filmmakers working in this horror subgenre cannot escape the inherently generic formula. All they can do is embellish on a tired old tale. Most of the time it’s done with smoke and mirrors, overdone special effects and /or piling on the bone snapping, contorting and gallons of gory blood oozing. Here, Danish Director Ole Bornedal (Nightwatch, Just Another Love Story) brings some nice ambient tricks to the table while setting a somber mood amidst the stereotypical shenanigans.

Exorcism movies have a high rate of sucking. There are a slew of terrible, and I mean god-awful, grade z, drive-in bad Exorcism flicks. Too many to mention, but let me take a stab at a few highlights.
The Exorcist
William Peter Blatty’s best seller comes to life in the big granddaddy of them all. When it came out, I thought it sucked and was laughably bad. Now I appreciate it after the flock of copycat regurgitations. Groundbreaking in its day, the film keeps the tension up with director William Friedkin’s excellent camera work and special effects that have withstood the test of time. It’s still overly quoted; but I don’t know anyone who hasn’t said, “Your mother sucks c*#k$ in hell.”

Lawless is a portrait in anti-heroism, the real-life story of larger-than-life characters whose appeal comes from their refusal to play by the rules. Perhaps what makes it frustrating is that the only reason it’s not unequivocally awesome, is that it seems to give in to expectations.
Make no mistake: Director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave seem unlikely to build a movie around seeking out a mass audience. Their 2005 collaboration The Proposition was a jagged, uncompromising Australian “Western” built on a terrific premise; Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was a tone-perfect interpretation of the novel’s despair. There’s a fundamental edge to Hillcoat’s filmmaking that can’t be entirely polished over, and it’s part of what makes Lawless so engrossing so much of the time. It just never feels quite the same when it takes tentative steps towards the conventional.