Paul Giamatti and others will pay tribute to Harvey Pekar at special screening and discussion at the IFC Center
AMERICAN SPLENDOR (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, 2003)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
Tuesday, October 5, $16, 7:30
www.stfdocs.com/films/american_splendor
www.americansplendormovie.com
AMERICAN SPLENDOR is a vastly creative and entertaining love story should have been nominated for more than just a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. Paul Giamatti stars as Cleveland comic-book writer and all-around schlub Harvey Pekar, with Hope Davis as his neurotic girlfriend, Joyce. The marvelous script and unique visuals, which mimic comic-book panels, are joined by appearances by the real characters discussing how they are portrayed in the film and what their life is really like. You’ll think that Judah Friedlander is overplaying ultimate nerd Toby Radloff until you meet the real thing. The interweaving of fiction and reality is masterful. The film is screening as part of IFC’s Tuesday night series Stranger Than Fiction, hosted by Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen, and will be followed by a Q&A with star Giamatti, producer Ted Hope, artist-collaborator Dean Haspiel, and directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini; the discussion is sure to take on added meaning since Pekar’s death this past July at the age of seventy.
A big hit in France, Pascal Chaumeil’s debut film, HEARTBREAKER, is a ridiculously mundane romantic comedy that is neither very romantic nor much of a comedy. Romain Duris stars as Alex, a sensitive stud who earns a meager living by breaking up couples in which he has determined that the woman does not realize that she is not truly in love with her partner. Working with his sister (Julie Ferrier) and brother-in-law (François Damiens) as a kind of Impossible Mission force, he charms the women just enough so they see their unhappiness, then he walks away, claiming that he is unable to fall in love again and telling them to begin anew. In debt to a local mobster, Alex decides to take a job breaking up an impending Monte Carlo marriage between Juliette (Vanessa Paradis) and Jonathan (Andrew Lincoln) even though he believes the couple is truly in love. Going against his code, he tries to woo Juliette, but she is his toughest case yet, especially when he starts falling for her. Chaumeil previously directed sitcoms, advertisements, and series television in France, and it shows; HEARTBREAKER plays more like a TV program than a feature-length film. The plot is paper thin, the subplots just plain silly, and the humor sophomoric. The film attempts to redeem itself in the end, but it is far too late to save it from drowning in an absurd lack of originality.
In a small Texas town, Deputy Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) has been charged with kicking out local prostitute Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba), but something happens to him when he meets her, leading to a violent sexual affair. The soft-spoken, easygoing cop suddenly goes bad, jeopardizing his relationship with girlfriend Amy Stanton (Kate Hudson), his job, and just about everything and everyone he comes into contact with. Based on Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp noir classic that Stanley Kubrick called “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered” (Thompson worked with Kubrick on the scripts for THE KILLING and PATHS OF GLORY), Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of THE KILLER INSIDE is cold and heartless, a lurid, exploitative film that captures little of what made the book so special. Despite staying close to Thompson’s narrative and including voice-overs taken straight from the book, Winterbottom (24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE, WELCOME TO SARAJEVO) concentrates too much on making the characters realistic and believable, inserting his impressive documentary skills and taking the book far too literally. It’s one thing to have Ford describe a brutal beating in the novel; it’s quite another to show him pulverizing a woman’s face into a bloody pulp. Also, whereas in the book Ford talks about “the sickness” inside him developed from childhood abuse, the film tries to hide that, burying it in a handful of brief flashbacks that add nothing but confusion. This new version of THE KILLER INSIDE ME, which was previously filmed in 1976 by Burt Kennedy with Stacy Keach, Susan Tyrrell, Tisha Sterling, and Keenan Wynn, is a major disappointment.
When we were kids, one of our friends delighted in telling us over and over the story of Cropsey, a supposedly invented child-murdering creep who threatened all children everywhere. (We still think of the monster every time we pass by the Cropsey Ave. exit on the Belt Parkway.) Directors Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio go in search of the real Cropsey in a fascinating documentary that brings to frightening life the scary urban legend. In 1987, Jennifer Schweiger, a thirteen-year-old girl with Down syndrome, disappeared in Staten Island not far from the abandoned Willowbrook Mental Institution, a horrific place where unheard-of abuses had been detailed by a young reporter named Geraldo Rivera fifteen years earlier. The community, led by such activists as Donna Cutugno, came together to try to find Jennifer’s body while the police focused on Andre Rand as the possible perpetrator. Rand refused to say anything as the cops also sought to link him to other area disappearances, including that of Holly Ann Hughes in 1981. Through archival news footage, recent interviews with many of the primary figures involved in the case, and attempts at a face-to-face meeting with Rand, codirectors Zeman and Brancaccio reveal a dark side of humanity that still has devastating effects on a tight-knit Staten Island neighborhood in desperate need of closure.
Winner of the Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN is a heart-wrenching drama from writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve (ALL IS FORGIVEN). Louis-Do de Lencquesaing stars as Grégoire Canvel, a movie producer and married father of three girls who is always on the go, trying anything he can to save his failing company, which prefers making art-house films that go over budget than popular garbage that might actually turn a profit. After Grégoire makes a tragic decision, his wife, Sylvia (Chiara Caselli), and three daughters, Clémence (Louis-Do’s real-life daughter, Alice de Lencquesaing), Valentine (Alice Gautier), and Billie (Manelle Driss), are left to pick up the pieces of what once was a very happy, thriving family. Partly inspired by the life of French film producer Humbert Balsan, THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN is a powerful, emotional work centered on a close family searching for clarity through the despair. Hansen-Løve’s seamless direction allows the strong cast to avoid treacly melodrama as the characters try to put their life back together amid extremely difficult situations.