ROB NELSON

Constantine's Sword

ROB NELSON — Wed, 28 May 2008 22:31:00 GMT

At once depressing and exhilarating
Scarier than Jesus Camp (and infinitely smarter), Oren Jacoby’s documentary film of Boston Globe columnist James Carroll’s 2001 book Constantine’s Sword casts Christianity as a lost ark raided by the worst bullies of history.

Son of Rambow

ROB NELSON — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:29:44 GMT

A pint-sized Be Kind Rewind
Funnier than anything in this vaguely dark comedy is the thought of Stallone sitting through it.

My Blueberry Nights

ROB NELSON — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:04:53 GMT

Sexy but emotionally failing
Three years after 2046 , Wong Kar-wai is not in love any more — and I for one am happy for him. Perfectionism can be exhausting for all involved.

Iranian chick

ROB NELSON — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:48:08 GMT

An interview with Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi
At 38, Marjane Satrapi still resembles the kid in Persepolis , her autobiographical graphic-novel-turned-animated-film of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.

“I don’t think artists can change the world, but we can participate, we can ask questions.”

Lifting the veil: Girls just wanna have fun in Persepolis. By Peter Keough

ST. PAUL — At 38, Marjane Satrapi still resembles the kid in Persepolis, her autobiographical graphic-novel-turned-animated-film of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Granted, Satrapi doesn’t practice her Bruce Lee kicks at parties anymore; she doesn’t chant “Down with the shah!” or rock out to Iron Maiden or tell God to get out of her head. But, sipping black tea near the fireplace in the swanky St. Paul Hotel lobby, stumping for the $8 million movie she directed with her best friend, French filmmaker Vincent Paronnaud, she comes across more as a sassy punk philosopher than as a Cannes Special Jury Prize co-winner.

How do you describe yourself?
I am this chick from Iran. I live in France. My husband is Swedish. I speak six languages and travel all over the world. I’m an artist — I can move people and I can tell them stuff. I’m lucky. If all the people in the world had this chance to dream for a living, it would be a better world. There’s a big difference between using a word and using a shotgun.

Are you glad that your humanist movie is coming out at a time of such great international tension?
Yes. We are living in the logic of war, inventing enemies everywhere. Movies can cool people down a bit. What we tried to do with Persepolis was to show that a human being is a human being anywhere. I don’t think artists can change the world, but we can participate, we can ask questions. “Who are these people that we are so scared of? They’re just like us, aren’t they?”

When you began your career, did you choose drawing because of its potential for universality?
Probably, yes. But on one level, comics were just my natural way of expressing myself. I’m not such a good writer; I think in terms of drawing. On the other hand, I always loved the idea that human beings — cavemen — drew pictures long before they wrote or talked. Human expression is universal. A sad face looks sad in any culture.

He’s here!

ROB NELSON — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:40:36 GMT

Todd Haynes talks about his Dylan movie
I’m Not There is an apt name for a bio-pic with six Bob Dylans, none of them the real one.

The unnamable: Todd Haynes’s not-Dylan movie. By Jon Garelick

Covering Dylan: From Newport to I'm Not There. By Charles Taylor

Agent Zimmerman: Bob Dylan? A CIA spy? Wait . . . now it all makes sense. (Or as much sense as his lyrics make, anyway.) By James Parker

I’m Not There is an apt name for a bio-pic with six Bob Dylans, none of them the real one. As if to compensate, co-writer/director Todd Haynes has been everywhere talking about it. No wonder his voice sounds rougher than the Mystery Tramp’s when we chat by phone.

For Haynes fans, who tend to be almost as devout as Dylan fans, the volume of attention to the film comes as a relief. Last year’s news that the director was reuniting with mogul Harvey Weinstein, who had all but turned Haynes’s glam-rock epic Velvet Goldmine into melted wax, was cause for alarm — akin to hearing that Dylan would be forced to make an album with dumpster-diving Dylanologist A.J. Weberman. But I’m Not There got made, and the result, love it or not, is Haynes’s most experimental film since Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, his widely bootlegged Barbie doll bio-pic from 1987.

Do you feel you’ve come full circle since Superstar? Twenty years later, you’re making another iconoclastic musical bio-pic — but you got the rights to the songs this time.
Yes, and it makes me want to wag the film in front of David Bowie, who gave me not one tune for Velvet Goldmine. C’mon, dude — even Bob Dylan gave me rights! What’s your problem?

Dylan has the DVD of I’m Not There that you gave him. You’ve said you want his feedback, but does some part of the Dylan fan in you want him to remain elusive, true to form?
I think I could handle it if he never said anything. But I’d prefer to hear something eventually. I’d hope he could watch the film and have a chuckle. But this is maybe the most impossible thing to hope for. I was just talking to Jesse [Dylan’s son] about this last night. Jesse said, “He really doesn’t look back.” He doesn’t listen to his old records. He doesn’t want to be bothered with “Bob Dylan.”

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

ROB NELSON — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:33:21 GMT

A meditation on 400 years
Lengthy, beautifully composed shots of gravestones and historical monuments encourage us to mourn fallen heroes as well as to recognize our own vulnerability to larger forces.

Love in the Time of Cholera

ROB NELSON — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:15:29 GMT

Film in the Time of Oprah
Granted, this is hardly the first Hollywood film to feature Latinos practicing ESL in their own land, but with lines like “Her smell is in my noh-streels,” it’s among the dumbest.

Kiss him deadly

ROB NELSON — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:30:04 GMT

Richard Kelly on The Box , the Jag, and the critics at Cannes
Bostonians flummoxed by the great whatsits of Richard Kelly’s vaguely Spillanean Southland Tales stand an outside chance of querying the puzzler himself.

THE NEXT WHATSIT? Kelly’s bringing it to Southie.

The wasted land: Richard Kelly goes for broke in Southland Tales. By Rob Nelson.

Bostonians flummoxed by the great whatsits of Richard Kelly’s vaguely Spillanean Southland Tales stand an outside chance of querying the puzzler himself, as the 32-year-old writer/director begins shooting his next feature in South Boston this very weekend. “The tax rebate here is very inviting,” says Kelly of his choice to make most of The Box on Southie soundstages, even though the movie’s set in Virginia circa 1976. Alas, aside from the revelations about its source material (the Richard Matheson story “Button, Button”) and star (Cameron Diaz), this Box is another whatsit. “I don’t want to spoil too much,” he adds. “But I can tell you that NASA [where his scientist dad has worked for many years] is heavily involved in the film and has given us unprecedented access to research materials and authentic props.”

Kelly, who sent a jet engine crashing through a suburban house for his 2001 debut, Donnie Darko, is a fabulist who favors playing with real toys — as real as possible, anyway. Southland Tales doesn’t just fetishize the 1955 film adapted from Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly; it features a precise replica of the kick-ass convertible Jag that Ralph Meeker’s private dick commandeered in that apocalyptic noir. Blink and you’ll miss it, however, since the car — on screen only for several seconds — is among the casualties of Kelly’s war with Sony during the year and a half since Southland’s longer, marginally trippier, and much-reviled version premiered at Cannes.

“When you’re picking your battles and asking [Sony] for more visual-effects money, you try to keep everything as fast-paced as possible,” the director points out. “But the Jag is still in there, you know? When I get to put some stuff back in [for a third, “director’s cut” version on DVD], I’ll probably make that shot a little longer.” Aw, just a little? After all, Kelly says that when he and his crew filmed Boxer Santaros cruising through the manicured courtyard of an LA mansion (this critic’s favorite shot in the Cannes edition), “we let a whole mag [of film] unroll.”

Not to say that Southland’s speedier theatrical cut lacks for va-va-vroom. “I tried to give the movie a very shiny, polished, fun, inviting, sexy look, with charismatic people in bathing suits on the Fourth of July having parties on the beach, everyone watching everyone else. I wanted to seduce people into accepting this nightmarish version of our American existence.”

The wasted land

ROB NELSON — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:58:00 GMT

Richard Kelly goes for broke in Southland Tales
Richard Kelly’s wildly ambitious and widely loathed Southland Tales now seems among the most believable works of film futurism ever made in this country.

VIDEO: The trailer for Southland Tales

Southland Tales | Written and Directed by Richard Kelly | with Dwayne Johnson, Justin Timberlake, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Kevin Smith | Samuel Goldwyn Films | 144 minutes

Kiss him deadly: Richard Kelly on the box, the Jag, and the critics at Cannes. By Rob Nelson

Re-edited to minimize such nuttier notions as infant flatulence’s triggering the Apocalypse, Richard Kelly’s wildly ambitious and widely loathed Southland Tales now seems among the most believable works of film futurism ever made in this country. Indeed, sci-fi satire hasn’t come so dangerously close to imagining reality since Terry Gilliam brought Brazil to a horrified Hollywood in 1985.

Like its real-world targets, Kelly’s epic American spoof — reduced from 163 minutes to 144 — has stupidity to spare. Lethal baby farts have been cut, the better for the young director’s doomsaying Donnie Darko follow-up to emphasize more-familiar threats to our national security — including Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore, and Kevin Smith, to name just three in the pointedly absurd, totally awesome cast. “Teen horniness is not a crime,” asserts the porn-queen-turned-chanteuse played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, and she’s right — though Kelly and his ensemble have been read the riot act by most adult reviewers. Leading the charge from Cannes, Variety deemed the film a “pretentious, overreaching, fatally unfocused fantasy” best suited to “gullible undergrads.” (C’mon, kids — are you gonna listen to Pop or pop?)

More knowingly juvenile than witty, Southland Tales is so similar to network “news” it’s not even funny — which is the joke, lost on plenty. Might the film’s proximity to current affairs help explain its misinterpretation as failed parody? Consider Kelly’s crystal-ball predictions. In the near-future an alarmingly buff action star (Dwayne Johnson, a/k/a the Rock) will govern the fate of California, if not that of the entire planet. Gas prices in wartime will escalate to the point where a European corporation can peddle ocean waves as alternative energy. Cops with SWAT-team outfits and itchy trigger-fingers will patrol US borders. Stars-and-stripes will be ubiquitous; ditto computer screens and cameras, even in airport toilet stalls. Scariest of all, perhaps: the leading Democratic presidential ticket will be Clinton/Lieberman.

Martian Child

ROB NELSON — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:51:37 GMT

Get out your hankies
John Cusack has held up well for a man in his third decade of Hollywood hustling.