AFI Dallas »

Indie Roundup looks back at the past seven (or, sometimes, eight) days of news in the indie film community, along with a peak ahead to what's coming soon.

Opening. The highest-profile "indie" is Woody Allen's Whatever Works, wiith Tatia Rosenthal's stop-motion animation feature $9.99, Francois Velle's NYC drama The Narrows, Andy Abrahams Wilson's Lyme disease doc Under Our Skin, and Tommy Wirkola's Nazi zombie flick Dead Snow vying for attention on a limited number of screens. On the festival circuit, CineVegas drew to a close on Monday (Eric D. Snider covered it for us), the same night that Silverdocs opened in Silver Spring, Maryland. The Los Angeles Film Festival starts tonight and the New York Asian Film Festival kicks off tomorrow.

Box Office. Last weekend saw several strong openings, with Robert Kenner's doc Food, Inc. leading the way ($20,171 per-screen), followed by Duncan Jones' sci-fi drama Moon ($17,006 per screen), and Francis Coppola's family drama Tetro ($15,252). The doc Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love ($10,866) and Le combat dans l'ile ($10,217) also debuted nicely, while the expansion of Sam Mendes' Away We Go brought in good business ($12,463). Daryl Wein's very informative AIDS activist doc Sex Positive drew $3,408 at one theater.

Online Viewing. How about a doc about a doc? Keir Moreano's documentary As the Call So the Echo follows an American doctor who unexpectedly finds himself in Vetnam after he decides to donate unused medical equipment. The film is available for free streaming at Babelgum, courtesy of the good folks at Cinetic.

After the jump: How will AFI Dallas the Dallas International Film Festival fare without AFI?

James Faust loves movies. That's a good thing, especially since he's the Director of Programming for the AFI Dallas International Film Festival, which wrapped its third edition last week. Some film programmers will brook no negative comments about their selections, but James was quite willing to listen when I questioned his sanity for picking Oskar Roehler's Lulu & Jimi, an out-of-control, absurdist melodrama that veers from one mad scenario to the next.

He readily admitted that he and a friend were the only two people laughing when the film played at Sundance, but he defended some of the same things that I had derided. James is a pleasant, humble man, but he's not about to back down just because you don't agree with him. That same spirit is evident in some of the films in the program. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's terrific Soul Power, in which music history comes alive, consists of footage shot in 1974 as final preparations were being made for a music festival in Zaire, intended to accompany the "Rumble in the Jungle" boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, and other notable musicians appear; it made me nostalgic for the days when Ali spoke his mind.

Judging from the crowds lining up in advance, AFI Dallas sells far more individual tickets than passes, which means that completely different audiences show up from one film to the next (as opposed to, say, SXSW, where you start to recognize fellow pass holders in line). So a late evening screening of Daniel Burman's Empty Nest drew a Spanish-speaking crowd that reacted more strongly than I did. Still, I liked the picture that Burman created of a long-married couple (Oscar Martínez and Cecilia Roth) dealing with life, and each other, after their children leave home.

"A man's got to know his limitations." So said Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force, and the same sage advice could be applied to film festivals. The third edition of the AFI Dallas International Film Festival bears evidence that the organizers and programmers recognize their limitations. Robert Koehler in Variety noted that the number of features has been cut nearly in half from last year's edition (from 150 to 77). Most of the screenings now take place at just two venues rather than three, making it easier to see more films.

A steady stream of sell-outs have been reported throughout the first weekend of the festival, which opened on Thursday with a gala presentation of Rian Johnson's caper comedy The Brothers Bloom, with stars Adrian Brody and Rinko Kikuchi joining director Johnson on the red carpet. (John P. Meyer of Pegasus News has a report and photos.) Screenwriter and director Robert Towne received an award on Friday night before a screening of the classic Chinatown and talked with film critic Richard Schickel afterward. Director Kathryn Bigelow received an award on Saturday night just before her powerful dramatic thriller The Hurt Locker screened locally for the first time. (Unfair Park has brief comments from Towne and a photo of Bigelow.)

Filmmakers, journalists, and industry veterans convened on various panels. James Rocchi of AMCtv.com shared his thoughts on "Scary Symbols: How do Horror Films Show Us What's Really Scaring Us?," while Karina Longworth of Spout.com talked wrote * about "What Lessons Can Indie Filmmakers Learn From Indie Bands?" The festival rolls on through the week, with tonight's highlight looking to be the Centerpiece Gala screening of Guillermo Arriaga's romantic drama The Burning Plain, with the director and actors José María Yazpik and Joaquim de Almeida in attendance.

* UPDATE: Thanks to Karina for pointing out that she wrote about the panel mentioned, but the one she moderated was on documentaries in the age of video blogs. My apology for the error.

The Life Before Her Eyes, the latest film by Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog), opened this weekend in limited release. In part as a response to the negative reviews by a number of critics, Perelman said recently in an interview that he's decided that it's better for audiences to know the ending going in (I did confirm with Perelman that he actually said this, because I was rather surprised that he would). And while I understand Perelman's desire to counter the critical response to the film in this way, I decided to take a look at what the negative reviews actually say.

First, I'm going to largely ignore the reviews (good and bad) that came out of the Toronto International Film Festival last year, because the cut of the film in theaters now is different. So let's look at what critics have to say about the current cut. Let's look at one titled (ever so objectively) "Hollywood and the War on Women", by Prairie Miller over on News Blaze. Miller starts her "review" of the film with a five-paragraph rant that tries to tie films about the Iraq war into a perceived "war against women" in Hollywood, going so far as to make the accusation that this war is fueled, in part, by male directors and producers whose coffers are being drained by alimony and child support payments. Uh, what?

It's been five years since Vadim Perelman's critically acclaimed feature debut with House of Sand and Fog. Now the director is back with his newest film, The Life Before Her Eyes, starring Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood and Eva Amurri. The film is about Diana, whose life starts to crumble as the 15th anniversary of the school shooting she survived nears; it flashes back and forth between older Diana (Thurman) and the younger Diana (Wood) and her best friend Maureen (Amurri) in the weeks leading up to the tragic event. Cinematical sat down with Perelman and Amurri at AFI Dallas to talk about the film, which opens in limited release this weekend.

Cinematical: Eva, can you talk about the challenges of playing this role, which is much more of "nice girl" than you've played in your previous films?

Eva Amurri: The earlier roles I'd had just happened to be more bad girls. This is the first role I'd had where the role was basically all good, this very pure, selfless girl. What's funny is that Vadim really cast us against type – in real life, I'm much more the "bad" girl, while Evan is the serious "good" girl. I was a little worried about it, but I trusted Vadim, and he did a great job guiding us through it. It was an interesting exercise.

(Editor's note: This review originally ran during AFI Dallas. It's being rerun this weekend in conjunction with the film's release.)

I loved House of Sand and Fog, and I've been waiting five long years to see what director Vadim Perelman would come up with next. His latest effort, The Life Before Her Eyes, starring Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood and Eva Amurri, is a lovely, nuanced film packed with imagery, and bracketed by an intriguing storyline. The film revolves around Diana, played as a teenager by Wood and an adult by Thurman; the younger Diana was a survivor of a high school shooting, as as the 15-year anniversary of the tragic event nears, the older Diana begins to unravel.

Perelman is not a director who hand-feeds his audience easy answers. With House of Sand and Fog he made heavy use of its moody, gray and brown pallette to set a dark and unsettling mood. With The Life Before Her Eyes, he turns to brilliantly saturated hues of flowers and water to create a sublime tone that evokes what's going on with Diana. The perfect life with professor husband Paul (Brett Cullen) and daughter Emma (Gabrielle Brennan) that she's worked so hard to create is a fairy tale fantasy built on an unstable foundation of unresolved guilt, and we know from the first frames that, hard as she works to sustain it, it's as fragile as the petals of the flowers that embower her garden.

When I was a kid, I loved going to the circus. When I wasn't fantastizing about growing up to become a nun, I was hanging out on my backyard swingset daydreaming about running away to join the circus. My dad took me to see Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus and the Shriner Circus every single year -- I knew which of the Ringling Brothers tours was the best, and at one point I had a serious crush on the teenage son of a lion tamer. I'd never given much thought to the jobs the circus animal trainers had; in my circus fantasies, I was a trapeze girl, flying through the air with no paralyzing fear of heights.

Circus Rosaire, a documentary by director Robyn Bliley, gives us a backstage pass into the lives of the Rosaires, a family of "circus people." The Rosaires have been court jesters and circus performers for nine generations, but they live a much less glamorous life now than they did in the good old days when circus people were treated like royalty. Back in the good old days for circus folk -- before there was a Hollywood creating stars and starlets for the world to obsess over - they'd come into towns and be feted like celebrities These days, they're much more likely to be working a small-town carnival than performing at the White House, on The Tonight Show, or in a palace.

Are you ready for Gamers Gone Wild? The opening minutes of Frag play like a scandal-mongering TV news program, featuring surveillance-cam footage of angry public arguments and wet bikini girls cavorting in a hot tub, complete with a stern-voiced narrator asking probing questions. Is this a cautionary morality tale?

No. After that attention-grabbing preamble, the documentary quickly settles down into a more serious groove, delving deeply into a subject that has been mostly ignored by the mainstream media -- but not by filmmakers. Seth Gordon found a deeply emotional human interest story among devoted video gamers in last year's superb The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. Lincoln Ruchti focused on a group of 80s gamers in Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Archive, also from last year. Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza chose to reinforce many of the worst stereotypes about gamers in his zippy, colorful doc Second Skin, which premiered at South by Southwest last month.

At the control of debut doc director Mike Pasley, Frag explores a wider spectrum of issues, digging into racism, corporate sponsorship, jealousy, competition and ambition. The investigative aspects are balanced by a healthy appreciation and respect for the people involved. There's no sense that the film is looking down its nose at an incomprehensible phenomenon, nor is there an excessive amount of hero worship, even though the best known gamers have their own devoted following.

The second year of AFI Dallas was a big hit with locals, with ticket sales way over expectations. Big kudos have to go to fest director Michael Caine* and his stellar team for working out the kinks from last year's fest and making everything flow smoothly this year, while programming a huge lineup for Dallas cinephiles. Here are some of the pics; a rundown of this year's fest highlights is after the jump:

Glamorous photography is no substitute for compelling dramatic content. Far too many scenes in Blood Brothers look and feel as though director Alexi Tan followed a self-imposed dictum to "light first, act later." His film labors mightily to get its narrative ball rolling, to no avail.

More's the pity, because Blood Brothers was inspired by very rich source material. John Woo's Bullet in the Head, released in 1990, is arguably Woo's most personal and potent work, gut-wrenching to the point where it feels that he simply opened a vein and let his blood seep into every frame (as I've written before). That film was set in war-torn Vietnam in the late 1960s and had a very gritty feel; by the end, it felt as though you'd suffered as much pain and heartache as the three main characters, close friends whose bond of brotherhood was tested under fire.

Woo's film was originally intended as a prequel to his action classics A Better Tomorrow and A Better Tomorrow II. After Woo had a falling out with producer Tsui Hark, the story was free to develop into something more original, without having to tie the characters into the other films. From the looks of things, it appears that Woo and producing partner Terence Chang similarly encouraged Tan to follow his own artistic muse. Tan's script, completed in collaboration with Jiang Dan and Tony Chan, keeps only the most basic outline of Woo's film: three close friends seek their fortune in the world.