Review: Jessica Chastain and those "Eyes of Tammy Faye"

By Nathaniel R

A makeup artist fumbles, discovering she can't undo what Tammy Faye hath wrought. It's not a matter of removing the makeup and starting fresh as some of it is tattooed right on. The former televangelist's lips are permanently lined and the raccoon eyes are there to say; mascara as monument. Was this scene at the beginning or the end of the new biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye? One can never remember with framing devices that flashback to tell you the whole story that got us there but it hardly matters. The point that comes across is not so much how we got there -- though perhaps the filmmakers think go given the framing device-- but that Tammy Faye's clown makeup bioqueen persona is an absolute. She didn't will into it existence so much as uncover and reveal its eternal nature. 

Is this laying it on too thick? The prose, I mean, not the mascara. Of course! But "too much" is just right for anything Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker related...

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Nathaniel in Venice: It's a brutal world but men sure make it worse!

Nathaniel reporting from Venice, final days...

On day one Parallel Mothers set the theme that Venice would be about death. Not Death in Venice, mind you (different movie). And now the death of my Venice trip as I'll be flying across the Atlantic as you read this back to NYC. Power of the Dog  (also on the first day of the fest) also revealed that you would not be able to escape films examining toxic masculinity. So here are three more doing the latter, one from Italy and two from Mexico.

The Catholic School (Stefano Mordini)
This mainstream Italian film which premiered out of competition belongs to the ever popular “true crime” genre. It seeks to analyze the environment that led to an infamous rape/murder committed by three upper class school boys in 1975 that set the Italian nation on edge...

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Locarno Diary #2: Lost men and religiosity

by Elisa Giudici

Heavens Above, a new Serbian film

Locarno has been in, let's say a strange transition period. I first started going when Carlo Chatrian was the Artistic Director (back in 2012). He left for the same position at Berlinale and his successer Lili Hinstin wasn't there long -- under two years which generated a lot of gossip. Giona A Nazzaro is the new director but because of COVID-19 this is his first edition. Maybe I was just lucky or my tastes align more with Nazzaro's than previous directors but this festival started with more energy and verve. (Until now my perception of Locarno was that it held a small number of amazing discoveries diluted in a pull of dull old fashioned auteurial selections.)

I choose today's two movies following my gut instinct and I especially liked how the films were having almost having a dialogue between themselves, despite major differences in tone and setting. Both of them are about the end of the world as known for the male protagonist. Hinterland and Nebesa (Heavens Above) try to describe how men struggle with change and the death of their previous idealogies...

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The Hunchback of Notre Dame @ 25: The first movie I ever saw

by Cláudio Alves

Do you know what the first movie you watched in a theater was? While I have no memory of the event, my parents were kind enough to remember my inaugural trip to the movies. When I was just two, they took me to see the latest Disney flick to hit theaters, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). Supposedly, I was besotted by the sight and, when the picture was released on VHS, proceeded to re-watch it to my heart's content. I still have that videocassette today, a treasured memento of childhood and a token of a kid's blossoming love for cinema. So today, as The Hunchback of Notre Dame turns 25, I revisited that underrated classic of the Disney Renaissance and see if I still loved it…

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Interview: Pixar's Mike Jones on co-writing "Soul" and "Luca"

by Nathaniel R

Pixar's Soul centers around a music teacher Joe, who feels he missed his calling. He always wanted to be a famous jazz musician. Through the course of the spiritually minded adventure, which takes us from Earth to The Great Beyond and The Great Before and back again, Joe comes to understand that his calling was to teach. None us know ahead of time where our lives and career might take us. For instance, I was certain I was going to be an illustrator and ended up in Human Resources and now identify as a writer. This is also true of Pixar's Mike Jones. He was once on our side of the movie world as an entertainment journalist but always planned to shoot movies. "I went to NYU film school to be a cinematographer. You have to take a writing course as an undergrad and the teacher took me aside and said, 'You want to think about writing instead?'" Jones continued to pursue cinematography but, as it turns out, the teacher was right and the seed was planted "I did start to kind of write on my own. And after I got out of film school, I kept writing." This led him to a brief entertainment journalism career until he made the leap to filmmaking, if not in the way he originally intended. Years later he has a thriving career at Pixar as a screenwriter.

We recently spoke to him about the process of developing Soul and what it's like to be a co-writer since Pixar generally has several creatives on each film...

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