AWN Blogs

Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disorder where the sufferer's lungs produce an excessive amount of mucus. Nowadays CF sufferers only live till their mid-30s. When Bob Flanagan was born in 1952, people with CF rarely lived into their 20s. Bob lived to be 43. This arresting documentary about his life and art seems to claim that extreme masochism helped keep him alive.

Director Kirby Dick followed Flanagan for several years chronicling his stand-up comedy, performance art, installation exhibits and personal life. At an early age, Flanagan began experimenting with masochism, evolving into more and more extreme behavior as he got older. When he met Sheree Rose, he found his soul mate. She became his lover and dominatrix. Dick remarkably makes the couple likable and understandable in the face of some bleeding-edge fetishes.

The saying goes in Hollywood – never work with kids or animals. Well, don't tell director John Sayles he can't do something. For this delightful family film, he does both and weaves a magical tale steeped in Irish folk lore.

When her mother dies, 10-year-old Fiona (Jeni Courtney, 1998's BABY DOLL) goes to live with her grandparents on the Irish seaside. Her family -   her grandfather (Mick Lally, ALEXANDER), grandmother (Eileen Colgan, ANGELA'S ASHES) and cousin Eamon (Richard Sheridan) – work the sea and miss the days when the whole clan lived on the island of Roan Inish, where it is rumored that selkies, half-seal/half-humans, live. Most of her family is blonde, but every once in a while a dark one comes out. Her cousin Tadhg (John Lynch, THE SECRET GARDEN) is one of the dark ones, and tells her, with complete sincerity, the family legend of her great-great grandfather marrying a selkie. Her little brother, who was washed out to sea in his bassinette as a baby, was also a dark one, and when she visits Roan Inish she believes she sees him.

With the release of STATE OF PLAY on DVD and Blu-ray this week, This Weekend's Film Festival sets out to look at five films that present journalism on the screen. Films like Alan J. Pakula's ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, Sidney Lumet's NETWORK, and James L. Brooks' BROADCAST NEWS are just a few of the classics that have showed the good and bad sides of journalism. For our lineup, we look at the changing nature of journalism. How reporters can help right wrongs. The ruthlessness of the newspaper business in a comical way. The ethical responsibility of reporters. And of course their bravery to get to the bottom of dangerous, but important, stories.

STATE OF PLAY is actually a remake of a British miniseries of the same name. But director Kevin Macdonald and writers Matthew Michael Carnahan (LIONS FOR LAMBS), Tony Gilroy (MICHAEL CLAYTON) and Billy Ray (SHATTERED GLASS) have transformed the film into a contemporary look at the changing nature of journalism. Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) is a veteran reporter who is under pressure from his editor Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren) to turn around stories as quickly as the young bloggers like Della Frye (Rachel McAdams). McAffrey doesn't want to print rumor and conjecture, but wants to put in the hours to get to the bottom of a story. And a big story has just broke. The assistant of the bright young congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) has been murdered. Sex, political back dealings with weapons manufacturers and fraud are all part of the story. But McAffrey is old friends with Collins, so where does his loyalty to his friends and to the truth start and stop? Remarkably, the film shows a journalist working a story to its end, whether the story goes where he wants it to or not. To quote my original review, "[The film's] most important point is that in journalism, the most important part of the job is getting the story right, not first. But if you can get it right and first, that’s even better."

This is one of the most unique renditions of Lewis Carroll's classic children's tale, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, that you might ever see. Animation auteur Jan Svankmajer twists household items and hand-crafted puppets into a surreal fantasy world. In Svankmajer's first feature, one can easily see the influences he's had on Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam. While the young Alice is still at the center of this story, this "children's" tale might not be for the youngest kids. The image of the white rabbit in this version might follow a little one into their nightmares.

Alice (Kristyna Kohoutova) is a bored little girl. Sitting around her house one day, the stuffed white rabbit with bulging eyes comes to life and breaks out of his glass case. Astonished, she follows the rabbit into the drawer of a writing desk and down into a twisted wonderland where bleached animal skulls, wooden puppets and playing cards come to life.

This nature documentary is really just an hour and half repackaging of the TV series PLANET EARTH. Walt Disney Pictures commissioned the film to kick off its Disneynature brand, a contemporary take on its 1950s True Life Adventure series. The film is like getting a highlight reel of the impressive series.

Using the theme of families, the film follows various animals and their young. A mother polar bear coaxes her two cubs out of their den after a long winter. Their father struggles to find food on the ice, which is now melting quicker and quicker due to Global Warming. A mother elephant and her baby make the arduous trip across the dry plains of Africa with their herd to the summer watering hole their ancestors have traveled to for decades. A mother humpback whale and her calf travel from tropic waters to the Arctic, the longest journey of any ocean animal.

Based on Frances Hodgson Burnett's children's classic, the film version was brought to the screen by Polish director Agnieszka Holland (EUROPA, EUROPA). Like some of the best family films, the story might have children at its center, but it's not just a story for children. This magical story about inner healing can touch the oldest in the crowd as well.

Mary Lennox (Kate Maberly, FINDING NEVERLAND) had a privileged life living in India. She had servants waiting on her hand and foot. But she wasn't happy. Her parents paid little attention to her. Then, when they are murdered, she's forced to move to her uncle's estate in England. He, Lord Archibald Craven (John Lynch, IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER), isn't any more attentive to her than her parents. He's been grief-stricken since the death of his wife and the following illness that has keep his son Colin (Heydon Prowse, only screen performance) bedridden.

When I first heard that Rob Zombie was remaking John Carpenter's classic horror film HALLOWEEN, I thought he was either one of three things — terribly gutsy, completely arrogant or monumentally stupid. Now having seen the film, I can say he was the first. When approaching a remake of this classic, he did everything that could be asked of him in being true to the original, while expanding on it in new and interesting ways. His reverence for the material shows his love for Michael Myers. However, his love for Michael Myers is also the film's undoing to some degree.

Unlike the original, Zombie's film takes us deeper inside the mind of Michael Myers, played as a child by Daeg Faerch and as an adult by Tyler Mane. As a child, Michael was tormented by kids at school, but his taste for comeuppance is bloody and cruel. His home life is not stable at all with his white trash mother Deborah (Sheri Moon Zombie, THE DEVIL'S REJECTS) constantly fighting with her deadbeat boyfriend Ronnie White (Robert Forsythe, THE DEVIL'S REJECTS). His older sister Judith (Hanna Hall, FORREST GUMP) is a crude teen who is only interested in sex and boys… in that order. On Halloween night, he snaps and goes on a murder spree that lands him in an asylum. While under the care of the kind doctor Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE), he sinks further and further into a world of his own and becomes more disturbed as his time in confinement grows.