Tag: Emile Hirsch

Film Feature: Sundance Film Festival Spotlights #2

Sundance 2015 Spotlights: Six Feature Films

Sundance

The Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT, closed last Sunday, February 1st, and the award winners were announced that day; they can be found here.

Spinning Platters Sr. Film Reviewer Carrie Kahn continues her coverage of Festival films, so you can know what to look for in the coming year – and what to avoid – as many of these titles are purchased and widely distributed

As a reminder, we are using our patented Viewing Priority Level (VPL) Guide to advise you accordingly:

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Film Review: Prince Avalanche

‘Prince Avalanche’ takes a humorous stroll down melancholy road.

Where we're going, we don't need lines on the roads.
Where we’re going, we don’t need lines on the roads.

Adapted loosely from the Iceland film, Either Way, Prince Avalanche is a sad, yet, somehow, delightful tale of unlikely friends connecting in an equally unlikely setting.  Alvin and Lance are spending the summer of 1988 re-painting traffic lines on a Texas highway that winds through a burnt out forest.  Their job is repetitive and tiresome, and takes an extraordinary amount of patience to adapt to the disconnect from city life and nearly all social/romantic interactions.  There is a lot of isolation in Prince Avalanche, from within the characters, to the landscape in which they work and pine, yet the film is light and inviting thanks to the humor elicited from a charming script and powerful performances by the two leads.

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SFIFF Spotlights #4: Fill the Void / Prince Avalanche / The Way, Way Back

More spotlights from the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), which ends this Thursday, May 9th. Tickets for screenings still available at: http://festival.sffs.org/

Fill the Void
(Israel 2012, 90 min; Hebrew with English subtitles)

Yiftach Klein and Hadas Yaron in Fill the Void
Yiftach Klein and Hadas Yaron in Fill the Void

In this Israeli Film Academy Best Picture winner, director Rama Burshstein takes us inside the Tel Aviv Hassidic community. Shira (Hadas Yaron) is a conflicted young woman under pressure to marry her recently deceased sister’s husband. Hadas Yaron, resembling Greta Gerwig both physically and stylistically, deftly conveys Shira’s uncertainty and vulnerability. At the Q&A I attended, Burshstein called the film a “journey of feeling,” an apt description of this beautiful meditation on commitment and love.

Next showing:
No U.S. release date yet; has been playing film festivals. Continue reading “SFIFF Spotlights #4: Fill the Void / Prince Avalanche / The Way, Way Back”

Spinning Platters Interview: William Friedkin on “Killer Joe”

William Friedkin directs Emile Hirsch and Juno Temple on the set of KILLER JOE

“Fire away. Anything. Don’t be polite.” William Friedkin is feeling pretty candid these days. Maybe it’s because after nearly six decades in the business, the Academy Award-winning director of such classics as The French Connection and The Exorcist has nothing left to prove. Maybe it’s because he’s been working on his memoirs, due next year from HarperCollins, and is still in confessional mode. Or maybe he’s just well past the age where you stop giving a fuck what anyone thinks about you (he turns 77 this month). The night before our conversation, Spinning Platters attended a screening of his gleefully sadistic new movie, the NC-17-rated Killer Joe, followed by a moderated Q&A with Friedkin that quickly turned into a rowdy one-man show. Refusing to be seated, Friedkin stood in front of the jam-packed theater for nearly an hour and pontificated at length about his career, the controversy over Killer Joe, and anything the audience wanted to talk about. He even volunteered questions he figured we were too sheepish to ask (“Who wants to hear how I discovered Linda Blair?”). When he was informed that the theater needed him to wrap up, he was unfazed. “Why, what are they gonna play? Isn’t it too late to start a movie?”

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