From my regular column in AnOther magazine.

Pedro Almodóvar was recently in New York for the premiere of his new film, The Skin I Live In, at the New York Film Festival. Some months ago, my editors and I decided that it might be nice to meet occasionally with non-New York artists as they’re passing through town, musing that it would lend itself well to the “New York Minute” theme. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to meet with Almodóvar, one of the true great living auteurs.
     When I arrive to his suite at the Peninsula Hotel he is surrounded by staff – a translator, a pr agent, and a personal assistant – but they quickly disperse and Almodóvar and I sit down on the sofa to talk. I notice a book on the coffee table that I had just seen a couple of nights earlier in his film. It’s a collection of short stories by Alice Munro, a Spanish edition titled Escapada (Escape), though the title in English is Runaway. In the film, it appeared ever so briefly, a visual cue inserted at just the right moment in a story about abduction, captivity, and physical transformation against one’s will. The book seems as good a place to start as any, so I ask him if it’s the one in the film. “Yes, he says, “that is the one. I like her very much as a writer, but I have lots of these things in my movies, various clues and references. Of course, they are there as part of the movie, the story, so if you watch it two or three times you can still discover things. But I don’t only do it for the story and the audience; they are there also for me.”

In her captivating debut documentary Bombay Beach, Alma Har’el has managed to combine seemingly disparate elements into a unique vision that’s not quite like anything else in the genre. Using interviews, dance sequences, evocative music and the unusual and beautifully shot landscape, Har’el introduces us to denizens of southern California’s Bombay Beach, a rundown desert community situated on the Salton Sea. This unlikely body of water, formed when the Colorado River flooded the desert in the early 20th century, was once a glamorous resort destination. Its decline is emblematic of the now-tarnished American Dream, but Har’el finds beauty in both the desolate setting and her struggling subjects.
     Bombay Beach looks into the lives of three main characters: Red, a weathered but upbeat octogenarian who makes a living selling bootleg cigarettes; CeeJay, an NFL-aspiring teen who escaped the violence of inner L.A. for the relative calm of the desert; and Benny, a gifted, hyperactive 7-year-old whose devoted parents were once jailed for weapons possession. Woven into their stories are casually performed dances, inspired by each subject’s circumstances. Adding to the film’s dreamy ambience are Bob Dylan songs and music by Beirut’s Zach Condon, with whom Har’el has collaborated on several music videos. Bombay Beach was named Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

PLANET spoke to Har’el a few days before her film opened in New York.

Directed by Alex Mallis + Lily Henderson, Cinematography by Ed David, Edited by Lily Henderson + Alex Mallis

From my regular column in AnOther magazine.

Jonas Mekas is a man who clearly loves a good archive. Besides being a filmmaker, artist, writer and poet, Mekas is probably the most dedicated and genre-conscious pack rat in New York City. Over the last forty years he’s become widely known for being a co-founder and chief guardian of the Anthology Film Archive, the largest collection of underground and experimental film in the world. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when I arrived at his Brooklyn loft the other week and discovered the entire space filled with loosely stacked boxes, folders, photographs, glassines and slides of cut film reels, writings, poems, magazines, posters, and so on. They covered every available surface. Books and binders lined the walls. Nothing was overly fastidious or ordered – in fact, the stacks were actually rather loosely assembled – but there was nothing messy either. And Jonas knew exactly where everything was. At first, I was confused. I thought perhaps he was housing a portion of the Anthology Film Archives in his own living room. But he assured me he wasn’t. This was his own work, he said, a lifetime of thought and creativity and its artifacts. The next logical thought that came to mind was, How did he live here? There seemed to be no place to relax, recline, or spread out a big feast for family and friends. There was nowhere to not work. But after only a few minutes visiting I realised this is how he lives. Mekas is so consumed with the art of documenting life and collecting its leftovers that it has become entirely second nature to him, as automatic as breathing air.

When Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories was released in early 2008, critics and civilians alike embraced the young filmmaker’s tense, tragic tale of a feud between two sets of half-brothers. Heading the solid, mostly unknown cast was Michael Shannon, who’d previously given an awesomely unhinged performance in William Friedkin’s psychological thriller ‘Bug.’
     Nichols’ current film, Take Shelter, which opens this Friday, also stars Shannon, this time as Curtis, a husband and father whose nightmarish visions of an apocalyptic storm leave both character and audience questioning his sanity. The visually and emotionally intense film won the Critics’ Prize at Cannes and was a Grand Jury Prize nominee at Sundance.
     Take Shelter has a lot in common with Nichols’ debut – spare dialogue, heartland setting, strong family theme, and a solid cast (Jessica Chastain plays Curtis’ wife). But just as Shannon has gained visibility since his scene-stealing (and Oscar-nominated) turn as a troubled neighbor in Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road, Nichols himself has become sought after. His next movie, Mud, about two teens who find a fugitive on the Mississippi River, stars Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon.

PLANET spoke with Nichols during pre-production for Mud, currently being shot in his home state of Arkansas.

Coinciding with the release of his newest film, Carnage – screening this month at the New York Film Festival (an adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s Tony Award winning play) MoMa is holding a retrospective of Roman Polanski’s work to date. Possibly the most contentious of living filmmakers – I will steer clear of the great Polanski debate – instead, consider one of his best – Repulsion (1965).
     Opening with a claustrophobic, close-up of a glassy retina, displaying all the frenzied paranoia that’s come to be Polanski’s most persistent concern – this heavy lashed, rapid blinking eyeball belongs to Catherine Deneuve, playing the perennially glum ingénue Carole, incongruously transplanted from France into the hubbub of 1960s, swinging London.
     Meandering through the film, in a constant state of crestfallen bewilderment – Carole works by day as a manicurist, attending to an assemblage of wealthy, cranky women. Living with her long-suffering sister, she displays all the qualities of the persnickety roommate from hell – and is otherwise consumed by averting the attention of an abundance of male admirers.

“Sometimes a story told long ago will come back and speak to you in the present.” So begins Pamela Yates’ narration of her new documentary, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator. The line refers to her acclaimed 1983 film, When the Mountains Tremble, which uncovered the genocide of indigenous (Maya) people in Guatemala. In addition to introducing the world to Rigoberta Menchú, a young Maya exile who served as the film’s storyteller and who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize and run for president of Guatemala, the earlier film included footage that eventually became evidence against the military dictatorship responsible for the killings.
Filmed 20-odd years after When the Mountains Tremble won the Special Jury Award at the Sundance Festival, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator is the story of the efforts to bring General Ríos Montt and his cronies to justice. In 2003 Yates was approached by lawyers orchestrating the genocide case initiated by Menchú. Their quest for more evidence prompted Yates to exhume unused footage from her previous film. She found herself reliving that earlier time when, as a young filmmaker, she gained the trust of both Guatemalan Army generals and young indigenous guerillas, as well as survivors of the killings. Granito features several of these characters then and now, and follows the genocide case’s progress as it reaches the Spanish Criminal Court. The film is both important historical document and history-making in itself.

Blowing on dice has never looked so terrifying. Seated at a casino table over mixed drinks in Hong Kong, Gwyneth Paltrow is the angelic host for a deadly virus unknown to the world’s health agencies. Within days, she will be dead. (Don’t worry – it’s a spoiler that’s also given away in the trailer.) By the time of her vividly filmed autopsy, the infectious agent will have found its way to cities as widespread as Chicago, London, and Tokyo, raising the concerns of the expert few who will have begun to grasp the nightmare situation threatening to emerge.
     “Contagion” arrives in movie theaters this weekend, just as the nation commemorates the 10-year anniversary of one of its most fully realized nightmare scenarios. Following a decade informed by an epidemic of epidemics, whether in the form of terrorist attacks and endless wars, environmental shocks, and financial collapses that spread like viruses from one market to another, director Stephen Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns have picked one of the less-publicized dangers of the modern world as the basis of their film. Now the secret’s finally out – Gwyneth Paltrow isn’t the only one in trouble.
     Just how bad could things get? If we think we’ve seen the worst of the biohazard strain of international crises in the past decade, based on our dealings with the bird flu or H1N1 or SARS, the filmmakers emphatically tell us to think again. It could be a lot worse. Much worse, in fact. Worse to the point that parts of this movie bring to mind George Romero’s zombie classics.

David Weissman’s last documentary, co-directed with Bill Weber, was a Technicolor portrait of the Cockettes, the highest-flying drag queen ensemble in 1960s San Francisco. For his next non-fiction project Weissman moves on to the following chapter of life in that city’s gay community, after the euphoria of finding each other has given way to the struggle of staying together. We Were Here, also co-directed by Weber and opening September 9th in New York, is a gracefully elegiac remembrance of the 1981 emergence of AIDS in San Francisco and the magnificent response of ordinary citizens during the earliest days, before the disease was understood or even named. Weissman follows five central figures, weaving together the perspectives of medical professionals, city caregivers, and, in what are inevitably the most harrowing interviews, those with stricken loved ones. An undercurrent of testimonial pervades the film; as much as it is about enormous courage, it is still the tale of those who died, and this weight has not been lost on anyone in front of or behind the camera.
     David Weissman moved to San Fransisco five years before AIDS was discovered in the city. He spoke with PLANET about the enormous repercussions of the initial AIDS panic and why San Francisco is still an extraordinary city.

With manacled Mormons, oddball accomplices, bondage modeling, and fantasies of celestial unions, Tabloid, the new film by Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Errol Morris, has been said to contain something for everyone.
     A reflection on love and self-delusion, it’s enigmatic and hyperbolic even for Morris’s standards, chronicling the misadventures of beauty queen cum sex vixen, 1970s British tabloid starlet, Joyce McKinney.
     “She’s a real cipher…” Morris muses, as if puzzling over a combinatory algorithm. “A mystery, but a truly romantic sort of mystery.”
     To discuss his new film and its storied femme fatale, I’ve met the director on a hot July afternoon. From his hotel suite in Soho we overlook 180 degrees of Midtown’s shimmering skyline.
     ”[Joyce]’s volatile, and crazy, and smart, and vindictive…I really don’t know what she is, but she’s a great subject for a movie.” He concedes, smiling.
     Joyce McKinney may be a handful. I suppose she’s not the existential conundrum of Abu Ghraib or Iwo Jima (two topics of his past Standard Operating Procedure (2008) and The Fog of War (2003)).
     Morris has always been an expert at locating the mad hatters and outliers in society (be it teenaged assassins, ex military commanders, or pet cemetery proprietors). It might be an inane headline that sets afloat his sail of inspiration.