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Posted on 10.03.07 by Charlie @ 8:14 pm
 We’re delighted to report that the excellent documentary Toots, which played at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival (click here to see our review from the festival) has been extended another week at theaters in New York City (its third extension). The film tells the story of New York bar-owning legend Toots Shor. He learned the bar business during the prohibition era, and when that came to an end, he opened what came to be one of the most legendary bar “scenes” in New York history — where regular New Yorkers would bump elbows on a nightly basis with players from the New York Yankees, TV and movie stars, politicians, journalists — you name it. One of my favorite stories from the film ended up with Jackie Gleason passed out — the victim of some kind of drinking game — right in front of the door as you walked into the bar, where Toots made sure he remained undisturbed for hours so that everyone would see him. It’s hard to imagine that today, and part of the fun of Toots is being whisked away to that other era. I’m sure the theatrical run promises a DVD release in the near future, but for those looking for a fun documentary about old New York, we suggest you check out Toots while it’s still playing in theaters. Filed under: General and Movie News and Movie News: USA and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: 2 Comments |
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Posted on 04.19.07 by Charlie @ 11:32 pm
Ever since seeing Street Thief, an excellent, gritty crime film from last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, I have been anxiously awaiting news of its distribution. As noted in our review from when it screened, it generated a lot of controversy at the festival because it claimed to be a “filmed record” of the committing of real crimes, of which the director had something that came close to first-hand knowledge of, though the details were always kept fuzzy. At the time of the festival, either as high-level hype or because it was true, there was talk of legal battles, and possible real-life arrests of people involved in the film, which seemed to lend credibility to the film’s claim. This possibility seemed all the more real when the film’s website disappeared, and for months (nearly a year) we didn’t hear any information on what was happening with the film. I began to worry that one of the most interesting films from last year’s Tribeca Fest wasn’t going to make the cut! Which makes today’s news all the more exciting. As part of my periodic search, tonight I found this encouraging link, which indicates the film is set to air on A&E on June 21st, 9pm, which other links indicate will be followed by a dvd release. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the link (which appears to be selling ad space for the initial airing) presents the same story that star/director Malik Bader conveyed at the festival: “Viewers will meet Kaspar Carr, a fictional character created by director Malik Bader, but based on Bader’s real-life experiences and observations.” No doubt this will generate a new round of controversy. There are several articles claiming the film was initially set to screen earlier (variously, in March, April, June, etc. Here’s one example). But this new date is listed on Time Warner’s website, and so is probably the real thing. Currently there is no confirmation of this up at A&E’s website. The film is reported to be under A&E’s IndieFilms banner, which has also released such well-known films as Murderball, Rock School and Jesus Camp. I know most of you have not seen this film, but trust me on this one — if you like crime films, mark your calendar for June 21st, and let’s all cross our fingers and hope that the rumors are true. Filed under: Movie News and Movie News: USA and DVD News and Contributors: Charlie and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: 3 Comments |
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Posted on 06.08.06 by Charlie @ 7:53 am
 World Premiere, 86 min. Review by: Charlie Prince
When scrolling through the films playing at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, there was only one movie that I decided I absolutely had to see: Journey to the End of the Night. Many of our readers might not have heard of Eric Eason. He’d only directed one film prior to this one and though it was a darling on the festival circuit, it has only had distribution through the little-known dvd-of-the-month club Film Movement (in fact, I originally subscribed to Film Movement because they had this film). I had heard about Eason during a brief stint interning for a production company out in Hollywood – everyone in the office was excited about his first film Manito, and they even attached him to direct a movie about the capture of FBI double agent Robert Hanssen. But that movie has yet to surface and in the meantime four years had gone by since Manito tore up the festival circuit. Until this year’s Tribeca Film Festival that is. And given the City of God-like crime plot set in Brazil, I had high hopes for this one. Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: USA and Contributors: Charlie and Rating: Good ★★★ and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: None |
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Posted on 06.06.06 by Charlie @ 11:14 am
World Premiere, 90 min. Review by: Charlie Prince  Freedom’s Fury is a historical documentary that tells the tale of Hungary’s piece of the Cold War and an unusual water polo game in 1956 that became a violent proxy for that struggle. I can’t speak for viewers who lived through those times, but as someone really learning about this subject for the first time, I found the documentary absolutely fascinating, among the better documentaries that played at the recent Tribeca Film Festival. Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: USA and Contributors: Charlie and Rating: Good ★★★ and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: 4 Comments |
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Posted on 06.05.06 by Charlie @ 8:39 am
World Premiere, 91 min. Review by: Charlie Prince  Mini’s First Time, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival just recently was, arguably, the most star-studded film in the festival. There were plenty of stars in the other films (Guy Pearce, David Duchovny, James Gandolfini, John Travolta, Brendan Fraser, Emily Watson, Gabriel Byrne – this list could on for a while…) but in Mini’s First Time, half the cast were big name stars, and given that this was director Nick Guthe’s first film, you couldn’t help but suspect that this must be one heck of a script to be attracting that kind of talent. So I made sure that we got in to the premiere of the film to see what the fuss was about. The fuss is about audacity – a screwed up family that breaks taboos left and right, like a funnier and more twisted version of American Beauty. In many ways, the structure is not what you’d expect. Seeing as Guthe rose through the agency world in Hollywood, I’d expected a neat three-act structure with character arcs galore. Not so. In fact, it’s not clear any of the characters had a character arc, the characters at the end of the movie (that survived) were pretty much the same characters who had begun the movie. More on that later. But perhaps just as interesting, it’s not clear the story has any likable characters either – these aren’t even anti-heroes really, they’re despicable through and through. And so, the film’s success (or not) rides with whether you enjoy the twisted ride, the dark black humor and, frankly, the shock value. The individual moments are, for the most part, very funny in an unhealthy kind of way, though I must confess that as the chaos mounted towards the end, with nobody to really root for I was fairly detached, almost indifferent as to how it turned out, which doesn’t make for the most enthralling ending. Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: USA and Contributors: Charlie and Rating: Average ★★ and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: 4 Comments |
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Posted on 05.19.06 by Charlie @ 6:20 am
World Premiere, 87 min., Color Review by: Charlie Prince  David Duchovny shines in his own comic, imposed-upon way in The TV Set, which screened at the Tribeca Film Festival this month. I haven’t liked him this much in a role since the little-known (but, to my mind, very good) Playing God, a spoof on the modern crime film. This time around he’s in a film poking fun at Hollywood itself. His character, Mike Klein, has just sold a television pilot (”The Wexler Chronicles”) to a major studio, and now he must endure the wrecking ball advice of studio executives as they “improve” upon his original idea (including headstrong studio honcho Lenny, played by Sigourney Weaver). Will Mike stand on principle and defend the integrity of his idea, or capitulate to studio demands? Watching Duchovny navigate his project to the finish line is laugh-out loud funny and witty to boot. Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: USA and Contributors: Charlie and Rating: Good ★★★ and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: None |
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Posted on 05.15.06 by Charlie @ 7:55 am
World Premiere, 89 min., Color Review by: Charlie Prince
Boxing + Movie usually works out pretty well, so I was surprised to find myself shrugging at the documentary Blue Blood which played at the Tribeca Film Festival last week. The novelty of the basic premise – a close-up at look at why some of England’s brightest scholars (at Oxford) choose to set aside philosophy and astrophysics to bash each other’s heads in – seems straight-forward enough, but is an ages-old rivalry between Cambridge and Oxford interesting to anyone except alumni of those schools? Remember the last time you heard a college “rivalry story,” perhaps USC vs. UCLA or Harvard vs. Yale? Boring. Perhaps I’m being unfair, but my eyes start to glaze over just thinking about it. So, while it’s clear that the prospect of becoming a “Blue” – one of the few students selected to represent the school against Cambridge at year-end - means a lot to the participants, I think on a more widespread level that a lot of people will be shrugging at it as I did. Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: USA and Contributors: Charlie and Rating: Average ★★ and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: None |
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Posted on 05.11.06 by Charlie @ 3:29 pm
World Premiere, 100 min., Color Review by: Charlie Prince
“The entire film is an excuse for that one scene,” star Peter Krause said after the screening of Civic Duty at the Tribeca Film Festival last week. He was referring to a monologue late in the film that asks (and I will paraphrase to avoid giving away the plot): What would you do if your wife was killed by a US patriot missile? Wouldn’t you avenge her death (i.e., as terrorists today do)? The implication, that such an actor would not be any more right or wrong than violent American efforts to stop it, is potentially controversial in today’s politically-charged and divisive environment. One audience member from Italy thanked the filmmakers for finally making a movie that speaks the truth, for pointing to US actions in Vietnam and elsewhere as a cause of terrorism today. Others, undoubtedly, will find the movie offensive. But regardless of your political viewpoint, the film is undeniably well-made. Whether you like the film may turn on your political perspective, but as a taught thriller that keeps your eyes glued to the screen, Krause’s portrayal of an unhinged and paranoid menace is captivating. Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: USA and Contributors: Charlie and Rating: Good ★★★ and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 05.04.06 by Charlie @ 11:51 am
World Premiere, 84 min., Color Review by: Charlie Prince  It was once thought that documentary filmmakers had a code that insisted they remain “objective” in their filmmaking, almost like a newspaper reporter who is obligated to report “just the facts.” The films of the Maysles brothers (Salesman, Grey Gardens), among many others, are celebrated for their powerfully unintrusive style of filmmaking. Today that standard is changing, and to the extent that documentaries of old were like newspaper articles, the well-executed, but openly one-sided Flock of Dodos: the Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus, which played at the Tribeca Film Festival this past Sunday, is more like an editorial. Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: USA and Contributors: Charlie and Rating: Good ★★★ and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 05.03.06 by Charlie @ 12:54 am
World Premiere, 89 min., Color, HDCAM Review by: Charlie Prince  “Why aren’t you in jail?” That was the first question for director Malik Bader from the audience after a screening of Street Thief at the Tribeca Film Festival this past Sunday. The questions that followed were equally hostile. Someone in the front of the room demanded their money back. The filmmakers seemed pleased with all of this. Street Thief presents itself as audacious: a “filmed record” of an actual burglar committing actual crimes, with a documentary crew following him around to catch it all first hand. Sounds kind of, I dunno, illegal, right? It certainly looks realistic, and the filmmakers confidently told the audience that “everything covered in the film I have first-hand knowledge of, everything in there is real,” but, and here’s where things start to get gray, there were some reenactments, or as Bader said “certain scenes were more planned, staged” than others. Ah. But there was no script, he assured us, he was just telling it like it is. At one point he said something along the lines of “I can take down any score,” aka I am, or at least have the ability to be, a professional criminal. “I cut open a real safe with a saw,” and “everything you see in the film happened in real life.” But, they’re careful to point out, it’s not a documentary, and they never said it was a documentary, it’s called a “filmed record” to acknowledge the re-enactment element. “There is no real Casper per se,” Bader assures us. (Casper is his character in the film). But, they tell us, the Tribeca Film Festival had “a lot of questions,” before accepting it, and then wanted to categorize it as a documentary (it is categorized as a “Discovery” film, along with many fictional features, allegedly at Bader’s insistence). Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: USA and Contributors: Charlie and Rating: Good ★★★ and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: 22 Comments |
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Posted on 05.02.06 by Charlie @ 12:40 pm
World Premiere, 85 min. Review by: Charlie Prince Who was Toots Shor? Thanks to Kristi Jacobson’s excellent new documentary film Toots, I now know the answer: Toots Shor was the man. A bouncer for speakeasies in the prohibition era, Toots had the connections (including mob backing) to rise to kingpin status as the owner of the hippest bar/restaurant in the city in the 40s and 50s. This entertaining look at one of New York’s biggest lugs tells his story in the words of people who knew him and using voice recordings of interviews with Toots himself, combined with fascinating footage of an older New York City. Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: USA and Contributors: Charlie and Rating: Good ★★★ and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: 2 Comments |
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Posted on 05.02.06 by Charlie @ 9:00 am
World Premiere, 78 min. Review by: Charlie Prince  Alone with Her is one of the better movies I’ve seen at the Tribeca Film Festival this year. Conceptually it sounds very unusual, maybe gimmicky: the film is seen entirely from the perspective of various illicit surveillance cameras that our star stalker/pervert has secretly installed in a pretty girl’s room. Now if you’re like me, your first reaction to that description may be to think that it could be annoying to watch surveillance footage for an entire movie, but it turns out that this setup works wonderfully (keep in mind this is much higher resolution surveillance footage than you might see on a monitor at your local 7-Eleven), and that it greatly adds to the suspense. For that reason alone, director Eric Nicholas deserves credit. But in a film as centrally focused on one person as this is (Ana Claudia Talancon is onscreen for pretty much every frame of the film), it must be the tremendous acting that makes this film work, and Talancon (who you may have seen previously in the Mexican mega-hit The Crimes of Father Amaro) gives a fantastic performance. Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: USA and Contributors: Charlie and Rating: Good ★★★ and Movie Reviews: Canada and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: None |
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Posted on 05.01.06 by Charlie @ 12:55 am
World Premiere, 96 min., Color & B&W, 35mm Review by: Charlie Prince  It’s truly a testament to how exciting the Tribeca Film Festival is that I waited in line to see New York Waiting — an out and out cheeseball romance film (though not a romantic “comedy”). And it is cheeseball, make no mistake about it. But it’s also a sweet film, definitely a good date movie. I very rarely watch these kinds of movies, so take this review with a grain of salt, but I enjoyed seeing it, even if I cringed at the dialogue a bit here and there. Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: USA and Contributors: Charlie and Rating: Good ★★★ and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 and Movie Reviews: Sweden Comments: 2 Comments |
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Posted on 04.29.06 by Pete @ 11:59 pm
World Premier 2006. USA 86 min. Reviewed by: Peter C. Bowen  Sam’s Lake is the first feature film effort of Andrew Christopher Erin and is not the most impressive of debuts. The opening of the film is promising enough with the requisite city slickers heading out to the boonies for some relaxation and moral support for mutual friend Sam. Sam’s father has recently died in a hunting accident and her friends who have formed a sort of family want to help her through her difficult time. But Sam seems to be fine. In fact she is the most enthusiastic of the group about the trip. Sam grew up at the lake and it has special meaning to her and her family. Her father loved the lake so much that he named his only daughter after it. Sam is genuinely excited to show her tight-knit group the idyllic wilderness of her formative years. Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: USA and Contributors: Pete and Rating: Average ★★ and Film Festivals: News and Movie News: Czech and Movie Reviews: Canada and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: 2 Comments |
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Posted on 04.29.06 by Pete @ 2:42 pm
World Premier 2006, USA, 82 min. Reviewed by: Peter C. Bowen  Hatchet is director Adam Green’s homage to the slasher movies of the early 1980s. The tagline is Old School American Horror and the movie lives up to this statement in spades even to the point of not using any digital effects. The gore is all lovingly handmade. Green is no poseur. He’s got a true love and appreciation for horror/gore movies going back to his childhood. Green was at the World Premier of his film at the TriBeCa festival and told the enthusiastic crowd how he came up with the basic story for Hatchet as a youngster at summer camp. Apparently the counselors were telling the kids that “Hatchet Face” would get them if they didn’t behave. Green’s reaction was, “Cool, what’s he going to do to me?” at which point the counselors told him to shut up. Later when the kids were back in their cabins young Adam came up with the story of Victor Crowly to fill in the blanks left by the camp counselors. (Click Here To Read More…) Filed under: Movie Reviews and Movie Reviews: USA and Contributors: Pete and Rating: Good ★★★ and Film Festivals: News and Film Festivals: Tribeca Film Festival 2006 Comments: 19 Comments |
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