Indie Focus

An additional online home for Mark Olsen. I write about movies, all kinds, for the Los Angeles Times, including a regular feature on independent, documentary & foreign language films. I also curate & host a regular screening series in Los Angeles. To quote from The Counselor, "You see a thing like that, it changes you."

[indiefocus]

The first two films, “Mad Max” and “The Road Warrior,” helped make an international superstar of Mel Gibson and announced Australian filmmaker George Miller, onetime emergency room doctor turned high-impact visionary, as a force to be reckoned with. Thirty years after the third film, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” George Miller is unveiling a new Max and a world he describes as “uniquely familiar” with “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

Max is now played by Tom Hardy, best known to mainstream audiences as Bane from “The Dark Knight Rises” but also an actor who combines physical brawn with wounded sensitivity like few others. Max comes across Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who is shepherding a group of women away from the tyrannical Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played the villain in the original “Mad Max”).

The four “Mad Max” movies nevertheless exist on a single timeline, with the previous three films taking place in the space between now and “Fury Road.”

“As I say to people, the apocalypse starts next Wednesday,” explained Miller, 70, the day after his South By Southwest Film Festival presentation of “The Road Warrior” and a bit of footage from the new film.

“All the bad things we see in the news come to pass: all the economic collapse, oil wars and water wars, even stuff we never see coming,” he added. “Then we jump 45 years in the future.”

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Three characters trapped in a house debating human consciousness may not sound like the most exciting backbone for a movie. Yet in "Ex Machina," the directing debut for writer Alex Garland, that dry-sounding concept becomes the basis for a sci-fi thriller of sleek, gleaming surfaces and impressive intellectual depth, somehow managing to feel modern, futuristic and classical all at once.

"The challenge is — and this is such a bad way to sell a movie — the challenge is how do you make a movie which is basically a film of ideas?" Garland said recently. "And then part of the challenge is making those ideas accessible and dramatically interesting and trying to understand them."

The film begins with young computer programmer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) winning an internal company contest for a private visit with the reclusive tech industrialist Nathan (Oscar Isaac) — think Mark Zuckerberg plus Steve Jobs plus Howard Hughes — on his remote nature preserve estate. There, Caleb discovers that Nathan has created Ava (Alicia Vikander), a lifelike and beautiful robot with an artificial intelligence strengthened with data from the company's online search engines.

What begins as Caleb administering a series of tests designed to determine whether Ava has gained sentient self-awareness becomes a twisting game of wills and wits as the three characters battle for dominance and survival.

Taken together, what Garland has put on screen as writer and now director creates a startling view of humanity and the ramifications of a tech-inflected culture. Though he doesn't shy away from the label "dystopian" — "That describes what it is" — he also doesn't see his body of work as some bleak end-times revelation or futurist prophecy.

"It's where I feel we're at more than where we're heading," Garland said. "Actually, for me, it's an uplifting film, 'Ex Machina,' for what it's worth. I'm on the side of the machines. I like the machines. I have problems with humans. Humans are doing some really bad stuff. I think it's actually reasonable to say that a sentient machine might be more reasonable than us about some things. I don't find that scary."

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Turns out putting together one French filmmaker, one international grande dame and two young American stars makes for lightning in a bottle. "Clouds of Sils Maria" is an electric combination of self-awareness and emotional exploration told via a story that touches on time, celebrity and meteorological phenomena.

"Clouds of Sils Maria," written and directed by Olivier Assayas is a slippery treatise on identity and artistic persona and the passage of time. Juliette Binoche plays Maria Enders, a famous actress who is about to appear onstage in a revival of the play that made her a star. Yet now she will take on the role of a fading older woman while her former part as the seductive young ingénue will go to a tabloid-notorious starlet (Chloë Grace Moretz). Enders' devoted assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) struggles to keep her boss on course while also trying to maintain her own sense of self.

"At some point I realized that one layer of the film was that this is a movie where the identity of the actors is always present," he said. "Usually in movies you forget about them, you're trying to erase as much as you can of whatever the actor is, so that the audience focuses on the character. Here it's the opposite."

In the role of Valentine, with offhand remarks about teen audiences, werewolf movies and the craft of acting in franchise films, there are moments Stewart in particular seems to be directly addressing the audience regarding her own feelings on the conflict between celebrity and art. In a sense the character is able to say things that the actress playing her cannot.

"I'm not allowed to say them," Stewart agreed, "but somebody on the outside, they're allowed to speak candidly about something because it's not personal to them. So they won't be condemned for whatever projected ungratefulness. You're standing behind something, but it's very thin, so it's like, 'I still think this.'

"And by the way, I had nothing to do with the words, they were fully written before I ever had the part. And Olivier didn't plan on finding someone who has this personal experience with what she's commenting on, it just happened that way. You can see in those scenes I'm stifling joyous laughter.”

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L.A.'s Cinefamily is be presenting the first local retrospective of Hal Hartley's dry, non-naturalistic, comedies; running throughout April, it includes the feature films "Henry Fool," "Fay Grim," "The Unbelievable Truth," "Trust," "Surviving Desire," "Simple Men" and "The Book of Life."

The theater will kick off the local theatrical run for Hartley's first feature in eight years, "Ned Rifle." The third part of a trilogy, the new film is already available digitally via online video platform Vimeo.

Taken together "Henry Fool," "Fay Grim" and "Ned Rifle" — the films' titles are the character names of father, mother and son — are a portrait of a troubled family.

The big addition to Hartley's world in the new film is the appearance of Aubrey Plaza, best known for her work on the recently concluded TV comedy "Parks and Recreation." A longtime Hartley fan who first discovered his work while she was in film school, Plaza came to the project very quickly and was excited to work with the filmmaker. She fits in well to Hartley's stylized performances with slightly mannered, offbeat rhythms, what actress Adrienne Shelly once called the "emotional choreography" of Hartley's work.

Before shooting began Plaza consulted with Hartley regulars Parker Posey and Martin Donovan for any guidance on how to best prepare for the non-naturalistic performance style.

"They told me that working with Hal is like working on choreography, the scenes are like dances," Plaza said. "You have to really allow him to direct your movements and just trust that it all makes sense in the end. At first it was a little scary for me to be so specific about what I was doing but I got used to it and then I really liked it."

With the release of "Ned Rifle" and the Cinefamily series leading the way, local audiences now have an overdue chance to reconnect with the director's films. .

"All of these stories are my manner of thinking," Hartley added, "how I make sense of the world and make sense of myself. They're certainly not autobiographical, but the issues are personal."

[indiefocus]

The film "Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter" is a fictional take on a true story that was initially distorted and misunderstood and transformed into some sort of tech-age urban legend. The filmmaking team of brothers David Zellner and Nathan Zellner have followed the fiction to create something emotionally true, veering toward the magical unpredictability of a dream.

The film has its grounding in the story of Takako Konishi, a 28-year-old Tokyo office worker mysteriously found dead outdoors in Minnesota in 2001. As news of her story began to filter out, mostly online, it seemed she had mistakenly believed the money left hidden in the snow at the end of the 1996 Coen brothers movie "Fargo" was real and she had gone off in search of it. Except that wasn't the real story at all.

The Zellners first heard the story when its buried-treasure twist was still believed to be true. They had already been working on a screenplay based on the story when they learned that Konishi was actually in search of an American man who had broken her heart, with the inaccurate "Fargo" connection rising from miscommunication with police in North Dakota.

"At first we were caught off-guard," said David Zellner, during a recent interview in Los Angeles alongside his brother and their star, Rinko Kikuchi. "But then we loved it all the more that it was a legend. It was the antiquated notion of someone going on a treasure hunt across the globe, from the age of exploration like the conquistadors or such. So we stayed true to that and then filled in the gaps with what felt right."

"After a while we stopped looking," added Nathan Zellner of their research. "We had already done all this creative investigation, we came up with our own reasons why this woman would have gone on this journey, her motivations and the kind of person it would take to make this leap of faith."

[indiefocus]

"In my head I wanted to make a kind of adult comedy like I would have seen as a teenager in the '80s," said Noah Baumbach on his “While We’re Young,” "like 'Broadcast News' or 'Tootsie' or 'Working Girl.' That was in my head, and I was thinking of it as a traditional comedy of remarriage, a married couple take a detour to come back together.

"I think that was maybe a new idea for me. 'Greenberg' and 'Margot' were very much for me the characters kind of leading the story and this maybe I had more of an idea of structure and story ahead of time."

People have often worked hard to pick apart what elements of Baumbach's films are drawn from his own life, this character representing that person and so on. He has often bristled at the notion, preferring to focus on their fictional elements. Yet even within the comic universe of "While We're Young," it's tempting to play who's who.

"I've done some interviews where people are like, 'Well, you're the Ben character,'" Baumbach said. "And actually I have more in common with the Adam character, in that I'm very productive and I'm very driven and very ambitious and will devour — when I'm working on something I'll take any good idea I hear or someone says. Friends of mine know to keep quiet if they don't want it in there."

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This year the SXSW Film Festival is going for laughs in a big way with the premieres of three studio comedies — Judd Apatow’s "Trainwreck," Paul Feig's "Spy" and Etan Cohen's "Get Hard."

"On some of my films, we've said, 'Should we show this at Cannes? Oh, I don't think they'll get it at Cannes,'" said Judd Apatow. "But at South by Southwest, I feel like people really enjoy the type of movies we make."

"Sometimes I feel guilty taking a commercial movie to a film festival," acknowledged Feig. 

"At other film festivals you get these serious movies — art movies — which are great," added Paul Feig. "But it becomes this thing of 'these are the real movies, so we can't have these stupid comedies.'”

The mainstream films screened at the festival are still specifically curated. The comedies shown at SXSW may be a bit rude, but they're not dumb.

"I want people to have a good time, but if just some of the audience has an interesting, difficult conversation on the way home, that's really my Grail," noted Etan Cohen. 

"In a way you can reach a much bigger audience than if you made a very serious movie about race and income inequality. And that's kind of the privilege of comedy."

Also, six to watch at SXSW.

[indiefocus]

What determines the life of a movie? Timing, luck and marketing are only a few reasons a certain movie may land with audiences in a certain way at a certain time. With diverse distribution strategies and the long tail of home video platforms, many movies can now find their way well beyond opening-weekend receipts or the awards-season spotlight.

A pair of movies that have perhaps not received the attention they fully deserved but which people will likely be talking about for some time to come are "Beyond the Lights" and "What We Do in the Shadows." The first is an old-fashioned romantic melodrama set in the world of contemporary pop music and the other is a faux-documentary following a group of vampires in Wellington, New Zealand. They really couldn't be more different, but they both will live on, likely picking up acolytes as time moves on.

There was a recent screening of the theatrical version of "Beyond the Lights" for local high schoolers as part of the Pan African Film Festival. Writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood came out after the movie for a Q&A and at one point made reference to her 2000 debut feature, "Love and Basketball." A ripple of excitement swept through the young audience at the reference to a film they seemed to revere even though it was released when some of them may have just barely been born.

The response of those schoolkids is all the proof one needs that a movie can have a life and find an audience well after its initial release. More than ever before, more movies are available more readily to more people. And that can only be seen as a good thing. Whether "Beyond the Lights" will live on in the same way has yet to be seen, but it certainly deserves to be found.

In conversation Prince-Bythewood conveys the same unassumingly low-key authority as her filmmaking. Just after that screening she said, "You just hope you've made the film you wanted to make and it'll be accepted. As an artist, if I hated what's up there and what has happened, I'd be a wreck because at some point I gave in. But I didn't give in on this one. This is a film I'm proud of.

"'Love and Basketball' wasn't a huge hit when it came out," she added, "but years later people are talking about it. If I have that, then I'm good."

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In the new film "'71," set in bloody Northern Ireland during the Troubles between Catholics and Protestants, a young soldier must find his way back to his barracks. It's a story both simple and filled with complexities, a gripping, straight-ahead chase movie that's also politically aware.

Opening to rave reviews in limited release on Friday — it expands to more theaters this week — the picture is bound to draw some attention for its star, Jack O'Connell, recently seen in the lead role in Angelina Jolie's "Unbroken." But " '71" is perhaps most notable as the bold feature debut for director Yann Demange.

"If you had asked me a few years ago if I would make a film about the Troubles, I would have said no way. It wasn't even on my radar," Demange said during a recent interview in Los Angeles.

"I was really nervous; after 'Hunger' and 'Bloody Sunday,' surely that had been the final word on it," Demange said, referring to other, much acclaimed films on the conflict. "After I read [the script], I thought it felt completely different and new. It had a universality, and it spoke about a pattern of behavior that could have been in Algeria or the Ukraine.

"A strange thing happened when I read it — it almost felt contemporary."

Though the mix of politics and action, emotional insight and adrenaline-rush excitement in "'71" seems cohesive in hindsight, it was at the start a risky proposition.  

"It sounds incredibly naïve now to say it, but I never thought I was making an action film," said Demange. "I thought it was about kids growing up in conflict, I thought it was a chase film, many different things. It's not really an out-and-out art-house film, and it's not really an out-and-out multiplex film. If you had told me I was making an out-and-out action film, I'd have said of course not."

[indiefocus]

The writing and directing team of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa specialize in something all too rare in contemporary Hollywood, movies that are entertaining but not dumb. Think of their movies as artisanal popcorn.

Their latest is "Focus," a sleek, globe-hopping con-artist caper with a healthy dose of sex and romance and more than just a dash of existential self-reflection from a charming character played by charming superstar Will Smith.

"It's just where we come from. We're both fans of more intelligent movies," said Requa. "We're very influenced by independent film and foreign film, but at the same time, we're huge fans of genre and kind of more mindless fare. It's just our taste.

"It's what makes it fun for us. Ultimately, how the movies we write all start is just a couple of nerds in a room trying to entertain each other. So we're trying to be smarter and funnier than the last thing the other guy said."

The end credits for "Focus" feature Ray Conniff's so-square-it's-hip take on the tune "The Windmills of Your Mind," a nod to the stylish 1968 film "The Thomas Crown Affair," which made the song famous. That sense of playful acknowledgment, a casual but considered gesture, also gets to the heart of what the duo was up to by turning attention to the witty fun of "Focus."

"We just felt like there hadn't been a movie like that in a while," said Requa. "It's nice when you're working in Hollywood and there's a movie you'd like to see that no one is making anymore. You make it yourself."

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As the filmmakers behind "CitizenFour" left the stage Sunday night after accepting their Oscar for documentary feature, host Neil Patrick Harris made the remark, “The subject of ‘CitizenFour,’ Edward Snowden, could not be here for some treason.”

In an interview on Monday, the film's director Laura Poitras responded by saying, “At best it’s a bad joke. On those questions, I think everyone can reach their own conclusion, but I think I’m pretty sure that history is going to answer that question and that Neil Patrick Harris is wrong.

“What [Snowden] did, he’s a whistleblower and this is an act of conscience,” she added. “That’s my feeling about it and I’m pretty sure that’s what history is going to say too.”

Anyone watching the Academy Awards on Sunday night may have identified onstage Poitras, producers Mathilde Bonnefoy and Dirk Wilutzky and journalist Glenn Greenwald, a key figure in the film.

But there was also a slender young woman in a tutu-inspired dress who might not have been as immediately identifiable. It was Lindsay Mills, Snowden’s girlfriend. (In “CitizenFour” it was first revealed that she has recently been living with Snowden in Russia.)

Poitras noted that Mills was also at the Spirit Awards on Saturday when the film won a prize, but amid a larger group of collaborators onstage no one noticed her. With the smaller group at the Oscars, Mills was easier to spot, although she was not acknowledged or introduced and did not appear with the filmmakers in the press room backstage.

“It was really exciting, I must say, to have her there,” said Poitras, noting that not just Snowden but other figures featured in the film are currently unable to travel to the U.S. “There were a lot of people who couldn’t be there and she could. I think for her to be there, it was really meaningful.”

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Pemiering as part of the Sundance Film Festival’s Next section, Sebastian Silva's “Nasty Baby” starts as a casual comedy of hipster manners and modern lifestyles, but takes a rather shocking turn to something stranger and more disturbing.

“It’s going to lead to a lot of confusion, which I really like,” Silva said, “I don’t think you really know what it is, it just feels like a very real, naturalistic story of friends in Brooklyn and then there’s the thriller part.”

In the film, Silva plays Freddy, an artist who along with his boyfriend Mo (Tunde Adebimpe) wants to have a baby together; their friend Polly (Kristen Wiig) agrees to carry the child. There are complications as to which of the men will father the baby, causing tension between them. At the same time, the three of them are growing increasingly bothered by an abrasive neighbor, a situation which escalates further than they could ever imagine.

That sense of facing down the unknown runs through “Nasty Baby” and is also part of the reason why Silva doesn't worry about audiences knowing too much about the movie. Even he doesn’t entirely understand yet what it’s really about

“‘Nasty Baby’ is really the only movie I’ve done so far that I’m not really sure why I made it,” Silva said. “I think it’s going to be fun to have Q&As about the movie. I don’t know what to make of the movie and I really like that.

“When you ask me about ‘Magic Magic’ or ‘The Maid’ or ‘Crystal Fairy’ or any of my movies I’ve made, I really know what the moral conclusion is. And this movie I really don’t, I cannot wrap my head around it.”

[indiefocus]

In a run of work to make anyone both envious and exhausted, French Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan has made five features in five years. He has become the toast of the international film festival circuit, with his most recent film "Mommy" playing in the prestigious main competition at the Cannes Film Festival and sharing a prize with the living legend Jean-Luc Godard.

All this and Dolan is just 25.

On "Mommy," he wrote, directed, produced and edited the film, also receiving credit for the costumes and translating the English-language subtitles himself. Yet recently in Los Angeles, he said he doesn't know any other way to work and doesn't completely get the astonishment at his age or accomplishment.

"To me it's weird to be reflecting on this. I don't wake up in the morning thinking, 'I'm 25, rise and shine.' I don't think about it ever, but people do remind me all the time.

"I don't know that I'm being prolific, I'm just responding, I'm being authentic and I'm just listening to my needs in terms of expression," he said. "And I've been so lucky to have the means to express myself and not wait in the corner for years."

"I could give you the usual 'I'm constantly learning,' but it's true. I am," he said. "I do feel that technically I'm still a neophyte, and that scares me. But I am a nerd, I learn fast, I'm passionate and I'm curious. I don't doubt myself, but I have my doubts."

[indiefocus]

Michael Mann's ongoing interests in detailed process and people at work, how things get done, alongside examinations of the hidden worlds of crime and power, all take root in "Blackhat." Less than two minutes into an interview and he explains the interior architecture of microchips and how energy, and in turn data and malware, move across them.

"There was something spooky and very dramatic to me, and quintessential, in inanimate things moving to make things happen," he says. "It's very exciting, this concept of what a piece of code, what it does, how it defeats defenses.

"That was an awakening for me that we don't live the lives we think we do," he says. "We don't go into our homes and close the doors and close the windows and we're private and everything's fine. We are totally swimming in a sea of interconnectedness."

He rattles off many people he met with in his research — engineers of microchips, counter cyber-intrusion experts, hackers turned security experts, steelworkers and inmates in a maximum-security prison.

"I like doing immersive research," he says. "You bring yourself into a culture to the point where you can get some semblance of an understanding of the patterns and the rhythms and the mores and the values and how people think, how they feel, what do they want. I like that journey."

[indiefocus]

A remake of the 1974 film of the same name, "The Gambler" stars Mark Wahlberg as a man who charts a course of self-destruction aiming to reset his life by losing everything, having found life as a college literature professor born to a wealthy family too much to bear. Everybody's got their problems.

One wants to encourage filmmakers such as Rupert Wyatt and stars such as Wahlberg to step off the treadmill of mega-budget special-effects spectaculars to make films that explore the messy effects of human behavior. Yet taking creative risks, like gambling, means the possibility of failure. Throughout, it is as if the filmmakers are trying to have it both ways, making something that is alienating but not entirely so, walking up to the idea of being difficult without crossing into being unpleasant.

Wyatt, screenwriter William Monahan and Wahlberg never seem quite settled on what they want to say with the character or the story, so the film feels marked not by ambiguity but uncertainty. The original film at least had a sense of conviction in the way it steadily narrowed its focus on the character's downfall, while the remake looks for wiggle room, an angle, an out. The new "The Gambler" comes up short by hedging its bets.

[likecharity]

Rebecca Keegan: Tilda, in Snowpiercer you’re playing a role that was originally written for a man…how did that affect the way you approached it? Tilda Swinton: I think it still is actually written for a man. I don’t think it ever changed.

—Hollywood Sessions: Supporting Actress [x]

[indiefocus]

My top 10 for 2014:

Under The Skin

Inherent Vice

Selma

Listen Up Philip

Only Lovers Left Alive

We Are The Best!

Snowpiercer

Dear White People

The Immigrant

Citizenfour