Evel Knievel, 1938-2007.

The daredevil has passed away at age 69 after a long illness. From the AP:

Immortalized in the Washington's Smithsonian Institution as "America's Legendary Daredevil," Knievel was best known for a failed 1974 attempt to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered cycle and a spectacular crash at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. He suffered nearly 40 broken bones before he retired in 1980.

"I think he lived 20 years longer than most people would have" after so many injuries, said his son Kelly Knievel, 47. "I think he willed himself into an extra five or six years."

Fortunately, Knievel lives on, in rock operas, as the star of one awesomely terrible film, 1977's "Viva Knievel!" (in which Gene Kelly can be found playing Knievel's alcoholic mentor) and as the subject of a documentary, a televised biopic in which he was played by Sam Elliott and a theatrical one in which he was embodied by none other than George Hamilton.

The latter, 1971's "Evel Knievel," can actually be watched, in memoriam, in chunks on LikeTelevision.com — Sue Lyon, of "Lolita," plays Linda Knievel. 

+ Iconic Daredevil Evel Knievel Dies at 69 (AP)
+ Evel Knievel (LikeTelevision.com)

Critic wrangle: "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."

In many ways, Julian Schnabel's often majestically off-putting presence in person makes the excellent reviews that "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is receiving all the more impressive — one never wants to encourage someone so secure in the conviction of his own genius. The film, which is based on the memoir Jean-Dominique Bauby dictated by blinking his left eyelid after a stoke left the rest of him paralyzed, is now looking like a major year-end best-of/award candidate. We liked it too, though not as much — our review from the New York Film Festival is here.

"Whatever Schnabel’s posturings as a painter," writes David Edelstein at New York, "he’s a major film director, alive not only to light and texture but to characters’ emotions—which twist the light and warp the textures and permeate the canvas." Raves David Denby at the New Yorker, "Schnabel’s movie... is a gloriously unlocked experience, with some of the freest and most creative uses of the camera and some of the most daring, cruel, and heartbreaking emotional explorations that have appeared in recent movies." Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly is cautious of the overly gorgeous film, noting that "I tend to be wary of ethereal composition applied to unpoetic, human, physical mess, for its romanticizing, narcotizing effect," but in this case finding that "this assertive adaptation brings Jean-Dominique Bauby's phenomenal memoir... to life honestly." Armond White at the New York Press, chooses to devote most of his review to ragging on "Control," but still declares that "Diving Bell" "tells a real person’s life story so inventively you might forget how rotten recent biopics have been."

Glenn Kenny at Premiere notes that "Diving Bell" is "an exemplary film about the so-called triumph of the human spirit by largely upending every cliché the usual cinematic treatment of the triumph of the human spirit indulges." "At times, 'Bell' seems heightened and romanticized, particularly in the way everyone around Bauby remains supportive and attentive, even at their own expense," adds Tasha Robinson at the Onion AV Club. "But that just prevents the film from becoming standard-arc disease-of-the-week fare, with its programmed trials and inevitable victories. Instead, Schnabel's sleepy, drifty, at times morbidly funny film tackles something more ambitious, by getting into the head of someone who's trying to get out of there himself."

A.O. Scott at the New York Times writes that Schnabel "demonstrates his own imaginative freedom in every frame and sequence, dispensing with narrative and expository conventions in favor of a wild, intuitive honesty," and Salon's Stephanie Zacharek muses that "The picture is so imaginatively made, so attuned to sensual pleasure, so keyed in to the indescribable something that makes life life, that it speaks of something far more elemental than mere filmmaking skill: This is what movies, at their best, can be." "Conscious life itself, even at its most extremely limited parameters, has never been so richly ennobled on the screen as it is here," concludes Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer.

Dissenters: Chris Wisniewski at indieWIRE is ambivalent: "So is this art cinema posing as a middle-brow biopic, or a middle-brow biopic posing as art cinema? Either way, it's an engrossing oddity, a film that is too superficial and obvious to be truly profound but also too strikingly vivid and affecting to be dismissed." Nick Schager at Slant is not, and declares that Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood have adapted Bauby's memoir "with only slightly more restraint than that shown by competitive gorger Kobayashi at Nathan's annual hot dog-eating contest. It's Johnny Got His Gun (or, at least, the portions used in Metallica's 'One' video) via My Left Foot, stylistically Miramax-ized to within an inch of its life."  And Scott Foundas at the LA Weekly writes, hilariously, that if the Cannes Best Director award (which "Diving Bell" won) "were determined solely on the basis of quantity, there would be no question that Schnabel’s was deserved, for there is more directing per square inch of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly than one is likely to find in any other movie released this year."

Sundance, 2008.

It's that time of year: the Sundance Film Fesitval competition line-ups have just been announced, and you can find them here.

In the doc competition, plenty of familiar names: Nanette Burstein of "The Kid Stays in the Picture" will be at the festival with "American Teen"; Alex Gibney of "Taxi to the Dark Side" and "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" has "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson"; "Wordplay"'s Patrick Creadon has "I.O.U.S.A."; cinematographer Ellen Kuras (who shot "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Coffee and Cigarettes," among other things) has "Nerakhoon (The Betrayal)," and on and on.

Over in the dramatic competition, we're intrigued by "Sugar," the new film from "Half Nelson"'s Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck; actor Paul Schneider's directorial debut "Pretty Bird"; Rawson Marshall Thurber's adaptation of Michael Chabon's "The Mysteries of Pittsburg" and Clark Gregg's adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's "Choke" (maybe we're more dreading that last one).

World doc and dramatic competitions have also been announced.

These two descriptions struck us as particularly emblematic of the festival, bless it:

A COMPLETE HISTORY OF MY SEXUAL FAILURES/ United Kingdom (Director: Chris Waitt; Screenwriters: Chris Waitt and Henry Trotter)–Chris is a useless boyfriend. Determined to find out why, he consults his ex-girlfriends, medical practitioners, producers, and mother to find out how women really see him. Has this journey made him potential boyfriend material or is he staring a life of loneliness square in the face? World Premiere

PHOEBE IN WONDERLAND (Director and Screenwriter: Daniel Barnz)— Confounded by her clashes with the seemingly rule-obsessed world, a little girl takes her already dysfunctional family down the rabbit hole when she seeks enlightenment from her unconventional drama teacher. Cast: Elle Fanning, Felicity Huffman, Patricia Clarkson, Bill Pullman, Campbell Scott, Peter Gerety. World Premiere

Sweet. 

+ SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES FILMS IN COMPETITION (Sundance.org)

The 2008 Spirit Award nominees.

The full list of nominees are up here. A few to chew on:

BEST FEATURE

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Producers: Kathleen Kennedy, Jon kilik

I'm Not There
Producers: Christine Vachon, John Sloss, John Goldwyn, James D. Stern

Juno
Producers: Lianne Halfon, John Malkovich, Mason Novick, Russell Smith

A Mighty Heart
Producers: Dede Gardner, Andrew Eaton, Brad Pitt

Paranoid Park
Producers: Neil Kopp, David Cress

BEST DIRECTOR

Todd Haynes - I'm Not There

Tamara Jenkins - The Savages

Jason Reitman - Juno

Julian Schnabel - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Gus Van Sant - Paranoid Park

BEST FIRST FEATURE

2 Days in Paris
Director: Julie Delpy
Producers: Julie Delpy, Christophe Mazodier, Thierry Potok

Great World of Sound
Director Craig Zobel
Producers: Melissa Palmer, David Gordon Green, Richard Wright, Craig Zobel

The Lookout
Director: Scott Frank
Producers: Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber, Laurence Mark, Walter Parkes

Rocket Science
Director: Jeffrey Blitz
Producers: Effie T. Brown, Sean Welch

Vanaja
Director: Rajnesh Domalpalli
Producer Latha R. Domalapalli

BEST DOCUMENTARY

Crazy Love
Director: Dan Klores

Lake of Fire
Director: Tony Kaye

Manufactured Landscapes
Director: Jennifer Baichwal

The Monastery
Director: Pernille Rose Gronkjaer

The Prisoner Or: How I Planner To Kill Tony Blair
Directors: Petra Epperlein & Michael Tucker

JOHN CASSAVETES AWARD

August Evening
Writer/Director: Chris Eska
Producers: Connie Hill, Jason Wehling

Owl and the Sparrow
Writer/Director: Stephane Gauger
Producers: Nguyen Van Quen, Doan Nhat Nam, Stephane Gauger

The Pool
Director: Chris Smith
Producer: Kate Noble
Writers: Chris Smith & Randy Russell

Quiet City
Director: Aaron Katz
Producers: Brendan McFadden, Ben Stambler
Writers: Aaron Katz, Erin Fisher, Cris Lankenau

Shotgun Stories
Writer/Director: Jeff Nichols
Producers: David Gordon Green, Lisa Muskat, Jeff Nichols

+ The 2008 Spirit Award Nominees (IFC)

Spirit Award noms will be announced tomorrow...

...and you can watch them live online (and maybe even seen us!) at 11am ET/8am PT here.

IFC News: Crispin Glover, "I Am Cuba."

This week on IFC News:

Aaron Hillis interviews one Crispin Hellion Glover:

Are there any major misconceptions about you or your work that bother you?

It's going away in general, but there have been conceptions — and you see it written on the internet — that people think I'm insane or psychotic. It felt for a while that that was almost a majority of opinion. But I mean, I've been in the business professionally since I was 13. Is that almost 30 years? Is that possible? I'm 42, or 43? I can't even remember how old I am. What year is this? [laughs] I was born in '64, and this is 2007, so yeah, 43. I started in film when I was 18, so that's a long time to have been around. I've now published four books, I've had a record out, and I've produced, directed and edited two different films that I'm proud of. It's like, at a certain point, how genuinely insane can someone who's done all that be?

Michael Atkinson on "I Am Cuba":

I've had suburban college students, otherwise prone to dozy dismissiveness at the very notion of a black-&-white, subtitled movie, weep openly at "I Am Cuba." Once you're confronted with the famous, two-and-a-half-minute one-shot funeral march sequence, in which seemingly the entirety of the city of Havana is participating, and in which the camera climbs buildings, passes over rooftops and through windows and finally flies out over the crowd in mid-air, without a single cut, you've begun to understand how the film certainly represented a kind of cinematic frontier for filmmakers like Miklós Jancsó, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Sokurov and Theo Angelopoulos, and still does, in many ways, today.

We talk to Morgan Spurlock about "What Would Jesus Buy?", which he produced. Nothing new on that untitled project yet.

On the podcast, we discuss screenwriters on screen.

Matt Singer reviews "I'm Not There": "I deeply respect its intentions, admire both its filmmaker and its subject, but have very little affection for the finished product."

And Christopher Bonet has what's new in theaters.

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

+ IFC News

Atrocities, war...

...and hot-button issues, that's what this year's Best Feature Documentary films are made of. Here's the very serious Oscar shortlist:

"Autism: The Musical"
"Body of War"
"For the Bible Tells Me So"
"Lake of Fire"
"Nanking"
"No End in Sight"
"Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience"
"Please Vote for Me"
"The Price of Sugar"
"A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman"
"The Rape of Europa"
"Sicko"
"Taxi to the Dark Side"
"War/Dance"
"White Light/Black Rain"

Iraq war themes are dominant this year, being central to at least four of the above films by our count, though we have to give a nod to a surprise comeback from World War II, atrocities from which have spurred into existence three of this year's titles. Way to have staying power, WWII!

So, no "In the Shadow of the Moon," despite the astronomically (hyuck!) good reviews the astronaut doc received. No "God Grew Tired of Us" — the Lost Boys of Sudan being a bit 2003. And no "Into Great Silence," though that's not a shocker — Philip Gröning's near-silent, meditative examination of monastic life is far artier than is this category's usual skew.

+ 15 Docs Move Ahead in 2007 Oscar® Race (Oscars.org)

"Southland Tales."

We've still under the weather and are also having terrible trouble writing about "Southland Tales," but don't want to let it go without mention. So this isn't going to be very coherent, which many would no doubt deem appropriate.

There seems to be some alchemical disconnect between the movies Richard Kelly has in his head and what actually ends up on screen. We like "Donnie Darko" plenty, but can't believe that anyone can glean the interpretations Kelly has offered in interviews and on DVD extras from what's in the film alone. There's not enough of it there on screen... and anyway, why would you want to? Those supplemental explanations just drag down something that's better left happily oblique. If Kelly had managed to make clear everything he intended in the film, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as good.

Now, if Mr. Kelly were to stand next to the screen at every showing of "Southland Tales" and offer verbal footnotes, perhaps with backing of the three graphic novels that precede the film and allow it to kick off, "Star Wars" style, on book four, the whole thing would surely unravel, if not elegantly, at least in a way that made some sense. As it stands, though, "Southland Tales" is overstuffed, underexplicated, hubristically ambitious, uneven, bewildering and kind of awesome. We can't imagine it's going to please most anyone, and we have to admit our personal susceptibility to the fabulous disaster, but "Southland Tales" has wormed its way in our brain like few other films this year and is, without a doubt, one of our favorites.

The basics are: It's 2008, Texas has been bombed by terrorists, neocons run rampant in the upper echelons of the government, the U.S. is buckled down under a 'roided-up Patriot Act and at war with Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Syria, the draft has been reinstated, oil is out of the question and Southern California is being powered by an experimental, laws-of-thermodynamics-defying invention called Fluid Karma, housed in a massive structure looming off the Santa Monica shore. This entire scenario is dropped on us in first ten minutes with the help of a animated overview, and from there the story lets forth a dozen tentacles following scattered characters: a famous actor with links to the Republican party and an inconvenient case of amnesia (Dwayne Johnson); a porn star with talk show and franchise ambitions who's written a screenplay that foretells the coming apocalypse (Sarah Michelle Gellar); a Venice Beach-based radical activist group called the neo-Marxists; a scarred former actor turned soldier turned narrator, drug addict and sniper (Justin Timberlake); and a cop with, possibly, a twin and also, possibly, amnesia (Seann William Scott).

How to explicate "Southland Tales"' unearthly pull? It comes in part because the casting is all in air quotes — The Rock, Buffy, Stifler, various SNL escapees, Mandy Moore, an almost unrecognizable Kevin Smith and the current king of the pop charts — but the acting is often as earnest as the over-the-top scenarios will allow, particularly Johnson and Timberlake, who manages to make a sequence in which he imagines himself as the star of a music video set in an arcade, lip syncing to the Killers' "All These Things That I've Done," bafflingly resonant. It's also because the film seems like a hallucination born from years of apocalyptic Los Angeles imagery, the meeting point of "Kiss Me Deadly" and "Blade Runner" (both of which receive nods) and dozens of other tales on celluloid and in print that would have the city constantly on the verge of catastrophe and still soldiering on, cheerfully oblivious to the fact. And its in part because it fearlessly mixes T.S. Eliot references with the cheapest of dumb blond jokes, and because under a front of irony the film has its big sloppy heart out on its sleeve.

So "Southland Tales" is about L.A., it's about the end of the world, it's overtly a comedy but also helplessly mournful, it's a genre mash-up particularly fixated on the ever-rewarding oeuvre of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it's, less successfully, a heavy-handed but fervent political satire. It's also 19 minutes shorter than the version that was so poorly received at Cannes, and you can see the edges of a snipped storyline apparently involving Janeane Garofalo, who appears fleetingly toward the film's climax. We'd like to see that first cut, but we'd also just like to see the film again. (We're in the stalwart minority there — though our colleague Matt Singer did allow that he'd see it a second time... in a year.) Certainly it's valiantly, foolhardily its own film, and it's sure as hell like nothing else you'll find in theaters, and that, we'd hope, would be recommendation enough.

IFC News: Baumbach, Burnett.

We're a little under the weather and have been remiss — here's this week's IFC News update:

Aaron Hillis talks to Noah Baumbach:

Even though Margot has some dislikeable qualities, you've said before that you hope audiences will understand her. Reverse Shot wrote about this film that "the compassion [Baumbach] once showed toward his neurotic characters, starting from his 1995 debut, 'Kicking and Screaming,' has turned into rancor." In defense of that, would you personally want to spend time with these characters, and how mean-spirited do you see the film to be?

A lot of us do spend time with these characters. People might not want to see that in a movie, but I think this behavior is a lot more common than what people let on or recognize. On the other side of it, I'm not writing about people I necessarily want to go hang out with. It's certainly not why I'm writing about them. In a lot of ways, I think the question is wrong. I'm not saying yours is; you're reading from a review. I don't really know how to start talking about these people with "Oh, they're unsympathetic." First of all, I don't think that's true from even sensitive people's criteria. Pauline is not a perfect human being, but I think she's very sympathetic. I think Malcolm, the kids and John Turturro's character are sympathetic. I have a lot of empathy for Margot, but I understand how people might... you know, I'll give them a pass on that one. She dominates a lot of the movie, and I know that can be difficult for people, but in the movies and books I like, there is such a thing as an unreliable narrator. I suppose it fits in a Jim Thompson novel, but why not have it in movies that are actually closer to our lives, that are about real human interaction [rather] than trying to sympathize with hitmen, murderers, or some sort?

On the podcast, we discuss motion capture and whether it should be considered animation.

Michael Atkinson tackles "Berlin Alexanderplatz" and "Killer of Sheep." On the latter:

There's no story, but there are people — mainly, Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a poor slaughterhouse laborer with a loving wife and curious children whose life in the outer-urban wastes is in the process of bulldozing his pride and confidence. Burnett's film proceeds from the very beginning as if every image and moment of Stan's life is a mythic truth to gaze upon, and damn if it isn't sweepingly convincing in the process. The action, for instance, of attempting to carry a disembodied car engine down a flight of tract-housing stairs has positively Sisyphean traction. It's not a movie you pick dramatic highlights or even visual memories from; instead, it flows before you like a despairing folk song made real, a blues anthem older than movies or Burnett himself.

Matt Singer reviews "Southland Tales" here ("For all its cleverness and evocative imagery, an incredibly uneven movie") and "Margot at the Wedding" here ("[Baumbach] may have invented [a dysfunctional family] so convincingly screwed up, so far beyond repair that spending 90 loveless, awkward minutes with them could be seen as a waste of time").

And Christopher Bonet has what's new in theaters. And we're headed home to steep ourselves in tea.

+ IFC News

That's so early 2007.

Does Amy Taubin have the New Oxford American Dictionary on her side? While "mumblecore" manages to be a runner-up for 2007 Word of the Year (along with "bacn," "cougar" and "tase"), the distinction ultimately goes to "locavore," a word we have never heard aloud or seen used in print before today, but that apparently distills the zeitgeist of the year better than any indie film movement, whether it be burgeoning or one that "has had its 15 minutes."

Personally, we felt that our year would best be described by another runner-up, the beekeeper-scourge that is "colony collapse disorder."

+ Oxford Word Of The Year: Locavore (Oxford University Press Blog)