This Weekend’s Film Festival finds women fighting back against injustices in the world. A woman faces her rapists and those that cheered them on. A woman travels to Afghanistan to rescue her sister from the rule of the Taliban. A woman becomes a courtesan to break free from the restraints of her society. A woman stands up to the harassment at her factory job. A woman learns the unofficial story about what her country has done to its people.
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Gordon Gekko would hate this film. If you believe in unfettered capitalism then you will hate this movie. If you believe that for decades the rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer than you might want to see this film. Documentary provocateur Michael Moore is up to his same old antics in making the case that capitalism has destroyed the American Dream.

The film begins with a montage that cuts an old educational film on the fall of Rome over current states in the U.S. that draws an eerie similarity in areas of the greed of the wealthy rulers who engaged in costly wars and left the bottom with nothing. Moore looks at how when he was young his father worked a factory job and was able to provide for his family, take them on vacations and pay for their educations. Now we’re moving into a generation that will have it worse than their parents. Moore makes the argument that capitalism is the root of this problem.
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Jane Campion, best known for THE PIANO, crafted this elegant true love story, which tells the unlikely romance between Romantic poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne. She was a woman of fashion and amusement. He was a man of deep reflection. And yet they developed an innocent love based in a common passion for life.

Abbie Cornish (CANDY) plays Fanny, while the effortlessly charming Ben Whishaw (BRIDESHEAD REVISITED) plays the tragic poet. Fanny is drawn to the mysterious young man who is so different from his boorish poet friend Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider, ALL THE REAL GIRLS). The Brawnes aren’t poor, but with Fanny’s father dead, they have to watch their money. Abbie makes her own lavish clothes based on her own original designs. A romance with a destitute poet would be unheard of.
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Afterschool - Murder, Rage and Videotape

This week’s buzz list is a collection of festival favs that have begun rolling out in theaters around the world. If you read this column last week, I now have a happy ending to the distribution woes of the Charles Darwin biopic CREATION. I’ll be on vacation next week, so check back for this column again on Oct. 9th. But hopefully this buzz will tide you over till then.
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Peter Bogdanovich broke out with his 1971 black & white masterpiece THE LAST PICTURE SHOW. Returning to the artistry of black & white for this film, he crafted another cinematic gem. This con man tale combines the comic timing of his WHAT’S UP, DOC? and the style of PICTURE SHOW.

Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal, BARRY LYNDON) attends the funeral of an old flame and ends up responsible for the woman’s daughter Addie (Tatum O’Neal, THE BAD NEWS BEARS). He’s supposed to drop her off at her aunt’s house on the way to his next job, but along the way she cons him into keeping her with him. Quickly, he finds that a cute little girl is a great asset in his Bible scam business. Addie is convinced this man is her father, but Moses denies it up and down. But that doesn’t stop them from developing a sweet father-daughter relationship. But when Moses picks up the female con artist Trixie Delight (Madeline Kahn, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN), the young girl gets jealous.
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In the vein of I, ROBOT, this sci-fi actioner lives in a world where robots are a way of life. In this world, based on Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele’s graphic novel, robots are all that walk the Earth. Their human operators simply plug-in like they’re in THE MATRIX and their surrogates go out in the harsh world. Since most humans now use these robotic avatars, crime and disease rates are down. Murder is rarely heard of. You destroy a surrogate, the human survives, and the perpetrator is charged with vandalism.

This is until a mysterious man uses a never-before-seen weapon on two surrogates, which sends a pulse back to the users that kills them. One of those humans is the college-aged son of Canter (James Cromwell, BABE), the inventor of surrogates. FBI agents Greer (Bruce Willis, THE SIXTH SENSE) and Peters (Radha Mitchell, SILENT HILL) are assigned the case. Their investigation will wrap them up in politics that involve top surrogate maker VIS, which Canter was fired from; an anti-surrogate faction lead by The Prophet (Ving Rhames, PULP FICTION); and the U.S. military.
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The old adage says that life is stranger than fiction. This Weekend’s Film Festival brings that adage to life through some very strange documentaries. We have an underdog story where the sport is electronic. There’s a profile of the strange residents of a Southern town. Another Southern tale travels General Sherman’s march while traveling the odd road of modern dating. The Festival closes with two brilliant artists with strange fetishes. This is a lineup that has to be seen to be believed.
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Rob Zombie enters the world of animation via a feature adaptation of his comic book. It’s promising to see more adult content coming to 2D animation in America, but I wish it were a bit more sophisticated than this combo of sexual innuendo, easy puns and randomness.

El Superbeasto (Tom Papa, THE INFORMANT!) is a celebrity Mexican wrestler who’s trying to get into porn. His sister Suzi X (Sheri Moon Zombie, DEVIL’S REJECTS) is a buxom crime fighter with a horny robot sidekick named Murray (Brian Posehn, TV’s THE SARAH SILVERMAN PROGRAM), who turns into a motorcycle steered by Suzi via a strategically placed joystick. While Suzi is battling zombie Nazis, El Superbeasto falls in lust with the foul-mouthed stripper Velvet Von Black (Rosario Dawson, CLERKS II). So when she is kidnapped by the geeky Dr. Satan (Paul Giamatti, SIDEWAYS) and his talking gorilla henchmen Otto (Tom Kenny, TV’s SPONGEBOB, SQUAREPANTS), he’s determined to stop Dr. Satan’s plans to marry the dark haired beauty.
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Writer/director Richard Brooks based this message flick on Evan Hunter’s novel, which earned him an Oscar nomination for the adaptation. The film looks at the issue of delinquency. While it has its preachy moments, the key to the film’s success is that it doesn’t pull punches.

Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford, 3:10 TO YUMA) takes an English teacher job in an inner-city school. His wife Anne (Anne Francis, FORBIDDEN PLANET) is pregnant and he’s been out of work for some time. It seems like a great opportunity, but it turns out to be a great deal tougher than he ever imagined. Veteran teachers like Jim Murdock (Louis Calhern, JULIUS CAESAR) have no faith that the students can ever be taught. Fellow new teacher like Joshua Edwards (Richard Kiley, PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET) and Lois Hammond (Margaret Hayes, SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS) have to learn survival skills for teaching at the school. They quickly learn that violence is around every corner.
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Terry Zwigoff’s CRUMB, chronicling the life and art of underground comic artist Robert Crumb, is a collection of one the of bests. It’s one of the best documentaries with its unflinching honesty. It’s one of the best portraits of an artist, as well as an eccentric family. It’s also one of the best films about sexual hang-ups. The film also serves as a historical document of the underground comic movement of the 1960s. It is simply brilliant.

To see the comics Robert makes as an adult, one can describe them as a lot of things — depraved, provocative, sexist, satirical, racist, inspired. His most famous works are the “Keep on Truckin’” illustration, FRITZ THE CAT comic and the cover of Janis Joplin’s “Cheap Thrills” album. Ironically, he became an icon of the 1960s counter culture, which he despised. He was far more into obscure jazz and blues of the 1920s and ’30s. He is obsessed with breasts, feet and large butts with a curious fetish for piggyback rides. Zwigoff spends time going over frame by frame of many of his most shocking comics, which involve all kinds of sexual perversions from incest to sex slaves. One would call him strange for sure. That’s until you meet his family.
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