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(03/01/09 11:00pm)
Street: What in particular drew you to Saviano's book and made you want to turn it into a screenplay?
Maurizio Braucci: Before becoming a screenwriter I was a novelist. I collaborated with Roberto Saviano before his book came out, because we have common interests, but my insight is more about the Camorra [Naples' organized crime body] phenomenon. I was involved in the screenplay as a writer and as a natural observer of those realities when Fandango decided to turn the book into a movie. It’s strange to believe, but just before the book was published I told Roberto, “It will become a movie with the direction of my favorite: Matteo Garrone.”
(02/26/09 6:14am)
In Gomorrah, director Matteo Garrone offers a refreshingly meditative take on the crime movie. Though Martin Scorsese’s name is stamped on the opening credits — the film opens with a “presented by” credit going to Scorsese — this isn’t an Italian version of The Departed. The film may be bloody, but it’s deliberate in its pace and understated in its presentation. One gets the sense that the film’s quiet tension is rising to an explosive crescendo, but ultimately the resolution is more devastating for its emptiness than its depiction of violence.
(11/20/08 8:38am)
The trite title of this sprawling family portrait may conjure images of mistletoe kisses and cozy family dinners, but viewer beware, A Christmas Tale is no Dickens novel. Director Arnaud Desplechin isn’t interested in Christmas miracles. Instead he uses the trope of a holiday family reunion as a ploy for examining the detachment and festering hatred that infect three generations of a bourgeois French family. The result is a multi-tiered family drama that is in strides both repulsive and mesmerizing.
(09/18/08 4:00am)
Consider the assaultive title just the tip of the big screwed-up iceberg that is Towelhead, Alan Ball's disturbing portrait of a 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl's coming-of-age in a Texas suburb during the Gulf War. Bloody tampons, porn, pedophilia and racial epithets are just a sampling of the viscera offered up in only the first half of this gruesome opus. Then, for the piŠce de résistance, Ball throws a dead kitten into the plotline. It's not the first time Ball has taken interest in the less elegant details of American life - he wrote the screenplay for the twisted American Beauty - but that film limited its pedophilia to one character's unrequited fantasy. In this case, Ball ups the ante and takes the audience into the center of a very much requited romance between Jasira (Bishil), the adolescent girl at the center of the narrative, and Travis (Eckhart), the macho, patriotic neighbor and Army reservist who preys on her as a way to heat up his tepid suburban life.
(09/27/07 4:00am)
If Philadelphia were to play a role in a teen sex comedy, it would play the girl who can't get a date for the prom - a Molly Ringwald character who somehow goes unnoticed by everybody except one weirdo (seriously, M. Night Shyamalan, give us some breathing room).
(04/12/07 4:00am)
It's not often that one equates gratuitous violence and sexual content with skillful, calculated filmmaking. Then again, it's not often that something like Grindhouse comes to cinemas, at least not in the past three decades.
(04/05/07 4:00am)
Hilary Swank must be content with her two Oscars; she certainly isn't trying for a third with the supernatural thriller The Reaping. Swank plays Katherine Winter, an erstwhile Christian missionary and current skeptical scientist. Winter has investigated dozens of miracles, and she has found dozens of scientific explanations for them. But her obsession with disproving the existence of God falls short when the small Louisiana town of Haven calls on her expertise to explain the local occurrence of Biblical plagues.
(03/22/07 4:00am)
Pride is so faithful to the sports underdog movie formula that a plot summary seems unnecessary. Let's instead imagine a montage sequence, much like the ones interspersed throughout the movie: begin with the run-down Philadelphia Department of Recreation on the brink of closure. There you'll find Elston (Bernie Mac), the grumpy custodian of the PDR, and a gaggle of snickering, trash-talking, inner-city teenagers who use the center as a hang-out. Enter Jim Ellis (Terrence Howard), the city worker - who happens to be a former high school swimmer - sent to shut down the center. Cue the inspirational music as Ellis scrubs down and refills the grimy, abandoned pool and coaches the teenagers on how to swim. Toss in lessons about teamwork and dedication, watch the reluctant swimmers transform into a legitimate team, and see how it all leads up to the championship race at the end.
(03/15/07 4:00am)
Kal Penn proves that he's capable of more than Van Wilder in The Namesake, an intimate portrait of a displaced Bengali immigrant couple forced to cope with isolation and culture shock while raising a son and daughter in Boston.
(02/22/07 5:00am)
Billy Bob Thornton walks briskly into the Jefferson Conference Room at the Philadelphia Four Seasons Hotel and approaches one of two round tables draped in white tablecloths. At the other table, Michael Polish - the co-writer and director of The Astronaut Farmer - is already seated with his brother and Farmer co-writer Mark. The brothers, who also happen to be identical twins, are a thin, fair-skinned, soft-spoken pair. They keep their eyes on the ring of reporters planted in front of them as they respond to a barrage of questions.
(02/15/07 5:00am)
In Breach, the weight of the movie rests on the shoulders of stars Ryan Phillippe and Chris Cooper. Unfortunately, only one of them delivers.