2006 SF HOLEHEAD—The Ghost of Mae Nak

It's absolutely appropriate that the (Yet) Another Hole in the Head Festival has included Mark Duffield's The Ghost of Mae Nak in this year's line-up since the ghost has a big ol' hole in her head! How much more relevant could this movie possibly be?

Just before today's press screening, filmbud Brian Darr—who lived for a while in Thailand—advised me that Duffield's film is only the latest incarnation of the Thai folk legend of Mae Naak Phra Khanong. A little research reveals that it's about the 20th incarnation, the most popular of which has been Nonzee Nimibutr's mega hit Nang Nak (1999). As I understand it, Ghost of Mae Nak kind of takes up where Nang Nak leaves off, shifting the story into a modern setting and doing Nang Nak one better through computer graphics that have improved much since 1999.

Yesterday Variety reported that one bit of business that's taken place at this year's Cannes Film Festival has been Tartan Film's acquisition of North American and U.K. rights to Ghost of Mae Nak. Tartan Films' Asia Extreme line is well-known to aficionados of Asian horror. Ghost of Mae Nak, which reached No. 3 at the box office in Thailand and No. 2 in Malaysia, now seems poised to give Nang Nak a run for its international money! It's already done quite well on the festival circuit.

Watching Ghost of Mae Nak reminded me of comments made by Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien at a December 2002 seminar and published in Rouge. His concern was about finding new directions and new genres for Taiwan's film industry and he approached that issue from various angles. One such angle was the effect of J-horror on Asian cinema. He stated: "We can now approach the issue from another direction after the success of the Japanese film Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1988), which was the ignition point that brought about an explosion of ghost movies. Just like Shiri was the ignition point of Korean cinema, Ring started the Asian frenzy for making ghost movies. The crucial element of their success lies in the use of local elements. The films are firmly rooted in local culture." He offered by way of example the fact that the Taiwanese often pray to the god of house foundations. "If we come to think about this god," Hsiao-hsien proposed, "he is in fact quite terrifying, for he protects you by staying in your house and constantly watching you high up there. He has his own biography. So if you want to tell a story about him there will be plenty."

What struck me about that statement was how the alphabetical momentum of Asian horror has shifted from J-horror to K-horror and now to T-horror in an enthused appropriation of, as Hsiao-hsien states it, "local elements."

I had never heard of the legend of Mae Nak before. There are various versions where the details differ, but in gist, Mae Nak was a beautiful young woman from the Phrakhanong district who married a handsome man named Mak. Some sources state that the couple were childhood sweethearts who grew up together. While she was pregnant with their first child, Mak was conscripted into the army and—during his absence—Mae Nak died with her baby still inside her. Although they were buried instantly according to local tradition, her strong spirit refused to perish so that when Mak returned from the war, he found them waiting for him. When they embraced he was shocked to feel her unusually cold and thin body but thought nothing of it. In most versions it is while she is preparing him dinner that she reveals herself to be supernatural. Some say a sudden gust of cold wind made Mak drop his spoon, some say a knife, others say Mae Nak dropped a lemon, the point being that traditional Thai houses were elevated on piles and whatever fell went two meters below the floor. Mae Nak lengthened her arm through the floorboards to reach it and it was then Mak realized his wife and child were ghosts.

In other versions—more in line with the current story in Ghost of Mae Nak—it is Mak's neighbors who inform him that he is living with a ghost. This is where the supernatural romance transforms into a macabre horror. Mak, terrified, runs away from his ghostly wife and she relentlessly pursues him, enraged that her neighbors have exposed her. She takes her anger out on them for interfering and kills them. Eventually an exorcism has to be performed in order for the community to be freed of Mae Nak's vengeful spirit. In one version an exorcist (mhor phi) puts the ghosts in a pot or a bottle and throws it into the water. But in this movie's version trepination is performed upon the skull of Mae Nak and the medallion of bone is configured into a broach. This accounts for the hole in her head.

Ghost of Mae Nak is not really a scary movie as much as it is a haunting love story. If you're expecting to jump out of your seat, it's not going to happen. Variety describes the film as "unhurried without dragging its heels." Where it will appeal to horror buffs is in its gory, gruesome deaths, which are reminiscent of The Omen, Final Destination, and 13 Ghosts. The ghost herself resembles that of The Grudge. Though there's not really a lot that's new in Ghost of Mae Nak, its blend of gothic modernity has a certain appeal, though I imagine not to all.

Ghost of Mae Nak will be screening at the Roxie Film Center on Sunday, June 11, 2006, at 7:00 and Tuesday, June 13, 2006, at 2:30.

2006 SF HOLEHEAD—Press Conference Line-Up!

Hot on the heels of DocFest, San Francisco's Indie Film Festival officially announced their program line-up at today's press conference for (Yet) Another Hole In the Head Festival (aka Holehead)—eight nights of Sci Fi, Fantasy and Horror, June 8-15, 2006, at the Roxie Film Center—though Fangoria humped the bones and posted their line-up earlier this month. Programmer Bruce Fletcher enthusiastically previewed the creeps, jitters and gross-outs San Franciscans can soon expect!!

A few have already been previewed by the Twitch team, such as Todd's initial review of HeadFest's opening night U.S. premiere of Rampo Jigoku / Rampo Noir, and the subsequent updates helpfully grouped together by Gommorahizer, who has faithfully done the same for Yûdai Yamaguchi & Jun'ichi Yamamoto's Meatball Machine, Jay Lee's The Slaughter (announced as well at HorrorMovies.ca), and Mark Savage's Defenceless: A Blood Symphony.

So which are the ones you would want to see? And which should I absolutely not miss?!

MALAYSIAN CINEMA—Censorship in Malaysia

When Dave Hudson alerted via the Greencine Daily that Amir Muhammad's latest film The Last Communist was banned in Malaysia, I was disconcerted and meant to write an entry, but was overtaken by reportage from 2006 SFIFF.

The Last Communist had its world premiere at last February's Berlinale. Russell Edwards reviewed it favorably for Variety, complimenting Amir for blending "humor, humanism and sleight of hand . . . to create something out of virtually nothing." Greencine's Berlinale correspondent David D'Arcy described it as "an odd mix" and noted: "The documentary is not alone in raising the issue of just how one goes about making a documentary today. At the core of this film is an absence." Ekkehard Knörer, reporting to Die Tageszeitung, conjectured that Amir had broken the rules of documentary films, "to save its heart and soul", thereby creating "something completely different." Tony Rayns, reporting to Sight and Sound, claimed The Last Communist was by far the "smartest and wittiest" from the Berlin Forum and called it an "essayistic delight" that confirms Amir "as the only visible heir to the Chris Marker tradition." Further favorable reviews came from Christoph Mayer at Sign and Sight, Thomas Hadjuk of Film Kritiken, and only a couple of weeks ago Ben Slater—reporting from the Singapore International Film Festival to the Greencine Daily—found The Last Communist, despite some reservations, to be "a truly fascinating tale", adding that "Amir deftly uses this 'lost history' to raise pertinent questions about modern 'Malaysia' and the post-9/11 specter of the terrorist."

So in the face of such international acclaim, why then censorship? Amir has commented from the frontlines on his blogsite for the film and has received considerable online support.

This morning The Great Swifty forwarded Yasmin Ahmad's New Straits Times article likewise protesting the censorship of The Last Communist and recent backlash criticism against her own work (Sepet, Gubra), both allegedly engineered by the Malaysian newspaper Berita Harian, whose editorial policy relishes in its reactionary racism. Ahmad quotes George Bernard Shaw: "Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."

I wish Amir and Yasmin and all future Malaysian filmmakers strength and fortitude in the years of censorship to come.

05/21/06 ADDENDUM: For continuing updates on the Malaysian censorship issue, Fathi Aris Omar has taken it upon himself to keep everyone abreast of developments on his blogsite Patah Balek. His first update went up on May 11 and his second (which includes this entry) went up today (Malaysian time). Of course, Amir tracks the life of the documentary on his own blogsite.

Liza Minnelli—An Appreciation

In Tenterfield Saddler—his autobiographical tribute to his Australian grandfather—Peter Allen sang: "The grandson of George has traveled all around the world and lives no special place / he changed his last name and he married a girl with an interesting face…."

That girl with an interesting face was none other than Liza Minnelli, who was introduced to Peter through her mother, Judy Garland, when Peter was Garland's opening act. Liza and Peter eventually parted ways, of course, when Liza found Peter in bed with another man.

Allegedly, the only existing print of Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon—which had originally been scheduled with The Sterile Cuckoo as part of the Castro's mini-Minnelli retrospective—was discovered to be unscreenable and was replaced at the last minute by a repeat screening of Cabaret. I don't know which is more sad: that Liza's early films are already falling into disrepair or her recent "outbursts" on Larry King.

I've never seen Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, but was long intrigued by a comment Liza made about having to do the role after seeing Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. Now lord knows when I'll ever get to see it. It's not on dvd.

At least I finally got a chance to see The Sterile Cuckoo. I was in my mid-teens when this movie came out and—I'll admit it—heavily into Rod McKuen at the time. Even then I knew I wanted to live in San Francisco, just so I could experience Stanyan Street and other sorrows. So what I remember very clearly about The Sterile Cuckoo was not only the Sandpipers singing "Come Saturday Morning" but the trailer to the film. If I remember correctly it went something like this: "First love is beautiful. First love is hurt. First love is beautiful hurt." Steeped a little too long in McKuen, I just couldn't help being impressed with that, even if I wasn't impressed enough to see the movie when it was first released. I sure did want to go away with my Saturday friend, though, and Saturday spend til the end of the day.

So here it is nearly 40 years later and I finally got around to seeing The Sterile Cuckoo, with maybe about five other people in the audience. And you know what? I actually enjoyed it. Partly because of that interesting face, which like Streisand's nose and Ali McGraw's crooked tooth, signified the idiosyncracies of individuality that were all the rage in the late 60s and early 70s, reconfiguring our cultural notions of beauty into heightened appreciations of visible nonconformity. But mainly I liked The Sterile Cuckoo out of a nostalgic appreciation of a time period when this young actress was first testing her chops and I was first thinking about going out into the world.

Liza had a powerful vulnerability that looped back to but through her mother's career. Her "absolutely wacky" portrayal of Pookie Adams (a role first offered to but refused by Patty Duke) established a template for Liza of characters whose bravado barely guised their insecurity and their deeprooted fears of inferiority. Cabaret's Sally Bowles was actually not that different than Pookie, likewise estranged from her father, and likewise overcompensating, with divinely decadent green fingernails no less. Both waved goodbye as a gesture over the shoulder. Both operated off of ancient instincts lacking worldly wisdom.

I had just graduated from high school a year before when Cabaret came out. I was living in Twin Falls, Idaho, all my former high school friends were taking off to college, and I had no money to go to college, and didn't know what I wanted to do even if I could go. I remember watching Cabaret seven times in a row at the Idaho Theater on Main Street. I couldn't get enough of it. Because it told me that even if I didn't know what to do, even if I didn't know who I was, or what I specifically wanted out of life, I did want life, I wanted experience, I wanted lovers and cities and Cabaret confirmed for me that a little theatrical energy—especially in Twin Falls, Idaho—could go a long ways. Afterall, what good was sitting alone in your room?

And though it took a little while, another year or two, I finally did make it here to where the music plays. I have found myself and lost myself all in the searching and the longing and am curiously back to where I started, unsure, not knowing quite what I want to do with my life, but knowing that I want life, and I never tire of experience, even if experiences have tired me out. I'm not so keen on lovers anymore and am even a little weary of cities but, what can I tell you? A little theatrical energy still goes a long ways.

2006 SF DOCFEST—Diameter Of the Bomb

Steven Silver and Andrew Quigley's Diameter of the Bomb takes its title from a 1972 poem by Yehuda Amichai (translated by Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell):

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.

The structure of Amichai's eponymous poem compares a bomb to a stone dropped into a pond, with concentric circles of impact—from the center of the blast to the bomb's furthest point of grief. Amichai's poem asks the reader to think about just how much damage a bomb can do, and how the violence of the act is not just physical, but metaphysical. It considers "the figurative diameter of the bomb and its trajectory of human suffering." But being asked to think about something as horrific as a suicide bombing and its physical and/or metaphysical impact is not quite the same as being asked to witness the forensic evidence of such a tragedy. Eschewing poetry in an effort not to sugarcoats facts, filmmakers Silver and Quigley offer a pill that is almost too bitter to digest.

There have been over 75 Palestinian suicide bombings since the renewed Intifada began in September of 2000. Diameter of the Bomb tells the story of one: the bombing of Bus 32A in the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem on June 18, 2002, which killed 20 people (including the bomber) and injured 50 more. This bus traveled near the border of Palestinian and Israeli territory, and its passengers held a diverse mix of political and religious affiliations.

When Paul Goldin and Georgina Townsley of Rainmaker Films began conducting their initial research on the Bus 32A bombing, they soon discovered that the impact of the bomb was life-changing not just for those on the bus, but for scores of people, if not hundreds of people, indirectly connected to it. Providing names for five of the numbered bodies—Michal, Galila, Shani, Aiman, and Mohammed (the bomber)—the filmmakers then structure a collage of impressions from family members, forensic specialists, hospital trauma staff, and almost everyone else you can possibly think of associated in any way with this tragic event. They do this through one-on-one interviews with family members, forensic footage released by the Israeli army, Hamas military training videos, home movies by the bomber, and location filming, with unprecedented access into Israeli prisons, commando units, Palestinian refugee camps and hospital trauma wards.

What searingly comes across in Diameter Of the Bomb is how we all inevitably dalliance with cubic centimeters of chance. Had a husband driven his wife where she needed to go instead of dropping her off at the fated bus stop, had a flatmate encouraged his friend to not be in such a hurry to get to the bus stop and to wait for him until he took a shower, had a bus driver not swapped shifts with another, had a man not been such a gentleman in allowing a young woman to be the last allowed on the bus before him, had a mother said a true good-bye to her daughter instead of just a flippant "see you"—all attest to how ruthlessly fate demands its due.

Comparable to the recent Paradise Now, which was criticized for taking sides in favor of the Palestinians, Diameter of The Bomb skirts such obvious polemics. As Kurt at Twitch opines: "If there is a strength to this film, it is how the film-makers managed to take a subject and region where everything is political and tell the human story without the politics. If you think about it, this is no easy feat. This is one of the very few documentaries which manages to come as close to the ideal of 'unbiased' as I've here seen." As has elsewhere been written, Diameter Of the Bomb "won't be upsetting anyone with its politics, just its depiction of the brutality of the reality of terrorism."

Describing that "depiction of the brutality" in his capsule for the Toronto International Film Festival, Steve Gravestock observes: "Reminiscences and regrets give way in Silver and Quigley's documentary to the discourses of a chilling new science, one peculiar to our age. Forensics experts explain the ways they can identify bombers and victims in the destructive wake they leave behind. Firemen detail the minutiae of how a bomb blast actually kills you." Kobi Levy—the fireman who was one of the first to report to the scene of the Bus 32A bombing, and whose own brother Yoni was killed in a 1999 bus bombing—recounts in grisly, graphic detail what he witnessed, how hair is always the first to burn, even before clothing. But do I really need to know that? Does that make the horror of this event any more palatable or does it simply overburden and fatigue compassion?

How inured can we become to color photos of atrocities? I ask that even as with unerring prurience I find myself anthropologically fascinated with the bearded Zaka volunteers, who bike between the bombsites in order to sponge up with large rolls of paper every last drop of blood from the roadside. Their task is spiritual. Like many cultures of the world—including the Maya of Central America who recognize the chul'el or vital life force inherent in blood—these unpaid caretakers of the dead commit themselves to providing proper burial for this "forensic evidence", insuring that all parts of the body can be buried as one.

This heightened focus on the forensic evidence, however, "unbalances" the film according to Adrian Hennigan of the BBC, who likewise finds such a clinical focus overly "cold" and "difficult to watch." Hennigan concludes: "Laudable but ultimately unsuccessful, Diameter just doesn't aim wide enough."

Gravestock continues: "Emphasizing the effects of war and strife on a neighborhood, on families, on frightened survivors and mourning mothers, the film takes the classic definition of terrorism—spreading fear and suspicion among the civilian populace—and brings it home in the most direct way possible." I couldn't help thinking while watching this documentary what it would be like to hazard San Francisco's MUNI or BART systems cognizant of terrorist threats.

"Instead of hope or resolution," Xan Brooks writes for The Guardian, "Diameter of the Bomb spotlights an endless flow of despair, waste and bewilderment. It suggests that the 2002 ripple is still in motion and that there are plenty of others close behind."

Diameter Of the Bomb is screening this evening, Friday, May 12, at the Roxie Cinema at 9:00 pm; and on Monday, May 15, at the Little Roxie at 9:00 pm, as part of the 5th annual SF DocFest.

2006 SF DOCFEST—Letters From the Other Side

Heather Courtney's Letters From the Other Side, which Variety's John Anderson has described as "sensitive . . . effective and emotionally potent" as well as "a much-needed examination of the collateral damage of illegal immigration" is sadly informative. It is painfully frustrating to watch at times, but not for any lack in the documentary itself as much as for the heartfelt plight of its abandoned subjects. Letters From the Other Side is testimonial documentary that puts a human face on the individuals—wives, mothers and children—often neglected and betrayed by husbands, fathers and sons who have unwittingly succumbed to the lures and lies of exploitive globalization, only to become victimized themselves by unsurmountable circumstance. "Every year," William Goss writes for E-FilmCritic, "statistics continue to rise as more fathers and sons make their way across the border from Mexico into the United States, in hope for providing a better life for their families back home. However, the harsh reality of the American dream comes to light when those who survive the journey are lucky enough to find jobs that barely sustain themselves, let alone their kin. Rural families separate only to find themselves in a financial and emotional stalemate, with children never seeing their fathers or brothers again, mothers never seeing their sons or spouses."

"Even though documenting such hardships usually lends itself to an inevitable sense of emotional manipulation," Goss continues, "Courtney avoids such blatant exploitation with an evenhanded approach, and the resulting empathy is damn near impossible to avoid."

Courtney has been praised for her "unobtrusive" and "steady" camera and Jette Kernion concurs: "While the film doesn't disguise its political leanings, it isn't blatantly manipulative or preachy. Some viewers might consider Letters from the Other Side to be left-wing propaganda in favor of changing immigration and trade laws. If it is propaganda, it is certainly effective without being heavy-handed." Kernion further observes: "Letters from the Other Side brings up one of the perennial questions about documentary filmmaking: how much should you involve yourself in your subjects' lives, and to what extent? Should you run the risk of potentially affecting the outcome of your film, or is it more important to help people you encounter while shooting? . . . Heather Courtney, director of Letters from the Other Side, obviously decided to help—in fact, the stories in the documentary hinge on Courtney's ability to deliver video 'letters' back and forth between women in small Mexican towns and their male relatives working in the United States."

It is Courtney's ability to move freely back and forth across the border delivering these "video-letters" that illustrates the unjust truth of border-restrictive regulations. Her "central project" of providing communication between estranged families via video letters amplifies into a "dialogue" between Laura Almanza Cruz—a Mexican woman whose husband died in 2003, along with 18 others, in the worst immigrant smuggling case in U.S. history—and Russell Knocke, a U.S. Homeland Security official who listens to her concerns and offers paltry condolences. The project further diversifies into a "dialogue" between women in a sewing collective and a wealthy Texan woman who wants to buy more of their work because it's so cheap. The lack of parity is chillingly bittersweet.

As the press notes attest: "The immigration debate is heating up again and as the U.S. Senate begins to debate this divisive and heated issue, Letters focuses on a side of the immigration story rarely told by the media or touched upon in our national debate. In this way, Letters offers a fresh perspective, painting a complex portrait of families torn apart by economics, communities dying at the hands of globalization, and governments incapable or unwilling to do anything about it."

"Every day," the film advises, "thousands of Mexicans line up to collect money sent to them from family working in the U.S. In 2004, Mexicans in the U.S. sent back $17 billion, almost twice the amount sent in 2000. This is more than Mexico makes from tourism and the country's second largest source of income after oil. These remittances have grown nearly 300% in the last decade."

Eugenia Gonzáles asks, "What does the United States have that they forget about Mexico?" Her son Enrique left home at 14 to find out whatever became of their father Héctor, who he found living with another woman. Eugenia, needing to provide for five children, resiliently learned to cultivate cactus with which she makes soap and jellies to sell at local markets, proud of her self-sufficiency. The cactus has become like a dear member of the family that helps sustain them. It's the message she sends her husband who, along with Enrique, watches the video letter. Enrique is obviously moved by his mother's salutations, brought to tears, while Héctor impassively listens. It's painful to then watch Enrique berate his father for not sending more money home and Héctor's feeble attempts to justify his own entrapment and to admit he has failed. He swears he has sent money home every month or every few months but Eugenia, watching his response, shakes her head sadly and in disbelief, stating she receives money at most once a year. The video response makes her both sad and mad. Even though Héctor pleads with her to wait for him and promises to return as soon as he can save enough money, Eugenia isn't sure she really wants him back. Self-sufficiency has grown on her and she is concerned that Héctor might return wanting things to be the way they were before, with him wearing the pants in the family, asking Eugenia to be subservient, which she can no longer do. Her hope for her daughters is that they gain careers that will allow them not to be totally dependent upon their husbands. So Héctor stalls on returning because he hasn't saved enough money and Enrique honestly admits that he does not want to return because all that's back home is desert and he doesn't want to risk his life for that.

"Beginning in the 1990s," the film tells us, "free trade agreements promised gains for U.S. and Mexican businesses and workers. Despite some successes, U.S. and Mexican government statistics show that by 2002, the number of farming jobs in Mexico had fallen by 1.3 million, while U.S. corn exports to Mexico had increased by 240%, and Mexican corn prices had fallen by more than 70%. Meanwhile, the average hourly income in Mexico decreased by 40% in the 1990s. In 1990, there were 2 million undocumented Mexicans working in the United States. By 2004, there were 6 million."

Along with farming corn and beans, Maria Yañez embroiders pillows for a women's cooperative in nearby San Miguel. She gets 40 pesos for a pillow, which takes her three full days to complete. The collective sells them for 150 pesos (roughly $15). The owner of the cooperative states that, though the government does much to help these women learn skills, it does nothing to help them learn how to market what they have made. The hope is that by developing marketable skills, husbands, sons and brothers will be less motivated to leave their families for jobs in the U.S.

Sally Berkshire, a wealthy Texan woman, bravely exposes her privilege, guiding Courtney through her "cave" home. Maria jokingly complains that Sally has lots of money and that she decorates her home as a cave because she likes it, whereas they live in homes that are like caves whether they like it or not. It seemed to me that if Sally Berkshire favored Maria's pillows so ardently, she would purchase them directly from Maria for the price she buys them at the collective. But it's too easy to target Ms. Berkshire for being naïve enough to gloat her privilege before the cameras.

"Since 1994," the film adds, "the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents on the U.S./Mexico border has nearly tripled to 11,000. In 2004, the U.S. government granted 56,280 temporary work visas to low-skilled Mexican laborers, while some 400,000 undocumented Mexicans came to work in the U.S. that same year. In 1994, the average smuggler fee was around $300. By 2004, it was $2000. In 1995, the recorded number of immigrants who died crossing the U.S./Mexico border was 61. By 2005, it was 464."

Carmela Rico and Laura Almanza Cruz, who both lost their husbands in the 2003 immigrant smuggling tragedy, attempt to reconstruct their lives by starting a bakery. The government provides them equipment that is so large that a wall of their house has to be knocked down so the equipment can be placed, but then nothing is done to teach them how to use the equipment, how to hook it up, how to purchase the gas necessary to run the ovens, or the ingredients necessary to bake their goods. It is an "empty blessing" that goes nowhere. What good is it, Laura asks Courtney. It's like you bringing your camera and not having a lens. Though assured by U.S. Homeland Security that the smuggler who transported their husbands across the border to their deaths has been apprehended and will be brought to justice, the women are worldweary and aware. They know that if one smuggler is apprehended, another will take their place. They don't understand why, with an obvious demand for cheap labor, the U.S. government doesn't make it easier to secure work passes instead of driving men to means that risk their lives. Brought to testify against the smuggler in Houston, Texas, the women were conflicted about how easily the government can provide papers when they want to and when it's for their purpose. Insult was added to injury when, during the screening of Letters From the Other Side at this year's South by Southwest festival, the US Consulate in Mexico City denied visas to the women featured in the film despite letters from SXSW and Congressman Lloyd Doggett.

The West Coast premiere of Letters From the Other Side will take place at this year's San Francisco Independent Film Festival's Fifth annual DocFest on Sunday, May 14 at 1:00 p.m. in the Womens Building and Tuesday, May 16, at 7:00 p.m. at the Little Roxie.

POSEIDON

Every now and then there's a moment in one's pop cultural history that imprints forever upon one's psyche. One such moment for me was watching Bette Midler in concert during the late '70s. The Divine Miss M.—with the assistance of a sole chair—offered up her impersonation of Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure. Does anyone else remember that impersonation, that inspiration? I laughed precisely because Winters' sympathetic portrayal of the overweight Belle Rosen and her graceful underwater rescue is unforgettable cinema. That scene is what made Bette's joke work!

Now, over 30 years later, The Poseidon Adventure has been reworked by Wolfgang Petersen into one of the first of this summer's blockbusters—Poseidon. I caught an advance screening of Poseidon last night and found it satisfyingly if not thoroughly entertaining for what it was: an homage to the disaster flick of 1972 that was part and parcel of the Irwin Allen consciousness that permeated my boyhood. I love disaster flicks!! It's something demiurgic in me.

Robert W. Welkos, L.A. Times staff writer, visited Stage 16—where Peterson filmed The Perfect Storm five years ago—to check out the making of Poseidon. Additionally, Ain't It Cool News has a compendium of production interviews chock-full of anecdotes and facts. There's no doubt that 30 years worth of special effects have made the infamous capsize scene by a rouge wave more realistic than before, if not more imaginative. I should say The Rogue Wave because—just as Kong will forever be the biggest gorilla—The Rogue Wave that capsizes the oceanliner Poseidon will undoubtedly survive as one of Hollywood's great cinematic characters. Peterson gave The Rogue Wave a chance in The Perfect Storm to see what she could do and—finding her more than adequate—cast her in Poseidon, where she makes your breath catch in your throat.

I get all my best ideas eavesdropping on public transit, especially when the bus is full of people who have just caught the film. There were two major complaints that I thought were appropriate: first, that the wave came too soon, that there wasn't enough build-up and, secondly, that The Poseidon Adventure succeeded because of its stellar cast, big name actors in a big budget disaster flick, whereas the actors in Poseidon few people knew, thus some kind of celebrity glamour was missing. There's Kurt Russell, who everyone kind of knows since he's been acting since childhood, and Richard Dreyfuss, who everyone probably knows if they've ever given a passing thought to UFOs and who I recently saw in his first acting role peeking over a shoulder in The Graduate, and Kevin Dillon, who I recognize from HBO's Entourage, and Emmy Rossum, who sang her heart out to the Phantom of the Opera, and Freddy Rodríguez of Six Feet Under fame, and at that I was already way ahead of most people on the bus.

But the true star is The Rogue Wave, right? That's why we came. That's what we wanted to see right away, no dillydallying. So how can we possibly complain about such an eagerly anticipated entrance? And what we should most likely commend is how Peterson maintained our interest thereafter, which he actually does. For starters, Josh Lucas is hunk hot when wet!! You enjoy that man flirting with every woman on the boat. What a killer smile!

Dreyfus is incidentally gay, which is really neither here nor there with regard to the plot other than to give him some sparkly earrings and a few lines of dialogue about being left behind for another man, which amounts to absolutely nothing in the face of The Rouge Wave eager to make her entrance. Dreyfus, as Richard Nelson, is obviously the character channeling Shelley Winters since, like her, he gets stuck in a tight place. But as awe-inspiring as The Rogue Wave is in Poseidon, I really miss the humor of The Poseidon Adventure. I miss Stella Stevens telling Shelley Winters to move her fat ass!

Poseidon opens Friday, May 12.

2006 SFIFF—It's A Wrap!

It's time to wrap-up the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival! As much as I can anyways. First and foremost I want to thank Todd Brown at Twitch for securing me press credentials for the festival and for recruiting me onto the Twitch team to report on Latino film. Secondly, I want to thank Peter Galvin, the publicity intern assigned to me by the San Francisco Film Society, for encouraging my reportage and helping me out whenever he could. Hilary Hart's publicity team—Paula Cavagnaro and Tara Dempsey—have my heartfelt appreciation for arranging my interviews and their overall assistance through the press screenings into and through the festival. Karen Larsen and Chris Wiggums at Larsen Associates are my champions and always a delight to work with. And I'm also grateful to Michelle Jonas at Allied McDonald for her assistance in helping me get an interview with the directors of Half Nelson. Special thanks also go out to Susan Gerhard at SF360 and David Hudson at the Greencine Daily for picking up my entries and helping me gain credence.

I saw 49 and a half films this year at 2006 SFIFF!! Three of those I saw twice so I guess I actually saw 52 and a half films. The half was The Grönholm Method, which stuck halfway through the screener tape (don't you hate that?) and which never timed out for me to catch elsewise during the festival. Anyways, here's what I saw:

Adam's Apples
Art School Confidential
Brothers of the Head
Cartography of Ashes
Delicate Crime
Descent, The
Dignity of the Nobodies, The
Drawing Restraint 9
Eagle, The
Eden
Factotum
Favela Rising
Gabrielle
Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai, The
Grönholm Method, The (halfway through)
Guy Maddin Shorts
Half Nelson
Heart of the Game, The
House of Sand, The (twice)
Iberia
In Bed
Iron Island
Iraq in Fragments
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
Le Petit Lieutenant
Life I Want, The
Look Both Ways
Lower City
News From Afar
Northeast
Obaba
One Long Winter Without Fire
Perhaps Love (twice)
Perpetual Motion
Play (twice)
Prairie Home Companion, A
Princess Raccoon
Regular Lovers
Romance & Cigarettes
See You In Space
Seeds of Doubt
Sólo Dios Sabe
State of Cinema: Tilda Swinton
Sun, The
Turnabout
Underground Game
Viva Cuba
Wayward Cloud, The
Wild Blue Yonder, The
Who Killed the Electric Car?

I look at that list and I grimace at how few of them I had time to actually write up so I hope no one minds if during the next week (month?) or two stragglers come up to take a belated curtain call? For example, I got a great interview with Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden—who won this year's well-deserved FIPRESCI prize for Half Nelson—but, the publicist tells me I can't post it until late August. I'll also have interviews up with Daniel Clowes of Art School Confidential and Dolissa Medina of Cartography of Ashes any day now and I've yet to transcribe Q&A notes for The House of Sand, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, and the screenings of Turnabout and The Eagle. And I absolutely must write something about News From Afar, Look Both Ways, The Wayward Cloud, The Sun, Regular Lovers, Le Petit Lieutentant and Drawing Restraint 9, when time affords. But those are sauces best reduced before serving them up.

The surprises from the festival were Greg Zglinski's Tout Un Hiver Sans Feu / One Long Winter Without Fire and Samir Nasr's Folgeschäden / Seeds of Doubt, which I talked up as much as I could because both were truly worthwhile. The filmgoer enters One Long Winter Without Fire on the backs of two crows who fly into the frame and set the theme for marital loyalty in the face of tragic loss. Seeds of Doubt is the closest to a Hitchcock film that I've seen since Hitchcock. A German woman begins to suspect her Algerian husband of terrorism. Is he innocent? Is he not? The script is tight and the direction suspenseful as Nasr demonstrates how doubt and racial profiling take seed within the home. This is definitely a movie that had to be made outside of the United States.

It was Graham Leggat's promotion of The Descent that caused me to become intrigued with his playful public persona. At the press conference, his announcement of The Descent made me grin ear to ear. I was delighted that a horror piece was being included into the festival! He noticed how delighted I was—I was in the first row afterall—and later, at the members preview, he made me laugh when he said that The Descent made him pee his pants. Such a thing for an executive director of an international film festival to say! But, in his candor he revealed the puer, a quality I very much admire in grown men and a youthfulness I very much admire in an executive director of an international film festival. Even as I was first in line for my screening, he was there again to see the film for the third time. His praise was well-founded. Possibly one of the scariest films I have ever seen, featuring the unexpected and welcome appearance of Nora Jane-Noone from The Magdalene Sisters, The Descent had me apologizing to the young women beside me for screaming like a girl. I loved it and will definitely see it again upon distribution!

Besides those, I really feel a need to make at least passing mention of the following Latino fare: Brazilian director Beto Brant's Crime Delicado / Delicate Crime and fellow Brazilian director Roberto Gervitz's Jogo Subterrâneo / Underground Game both proved to be movies that, disappointingly, couldn't bear the weight of their own ideas.

Alternating between color and black and white film stock for no good rhyme or reason, Delicate Crime offendingly pandered to prurience, offering a one-legged woman who two men—a theater critic and a painter—use for their own purposes. It dissatisfied with vague meditations on "consent" though I could identify with the critic's anguished efforts to find the right words for his critiques.

Underground Game, adapted from a Julio Cortazar's short story "Manuscript Found in a Pocket", "is about a nightclub piano player who spends his days constructing specific routes on the Sao Paulo subway, hoping to meet a woman who follows the same route. However, the most interesting parts of his life happen when he deviates from his carefully planned journeys." "Interesting" is one of those dismissive adjectives that equates to something short of a slap in the face. Both the protagonist and his love interest are both unattractive and unsympathetic and Cortazar's brilliance—his mastery of observation, and narrative—failed by this vehicle.

Hungarian director József Pacskovsky's Eg Veled / See You in Space struck me as an overly-ambitious, messy and contrived assemblage project that couldn't hold together even if you had superglue. The only thing I really liked about the movie was the line: "In Sanskrit war means fighting for one more cow."

There's more to be said, of course, but for now I'll let this suffice and move on to my next focus: the San Francisco Independent Film Festival's 5th Documentary Film Festival!

2006 SFIFF—Adam's Æbler / Adam's Apples

I watched Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen's third feature Adam's Æbler (Adam's Apples)—Denmark's candidate for the Oscar nominations for best foreign film—on the recommendation of my assigned publicist intern Peter Galvin, to whom I'm most grateful as I enjoyed the film very much. Its genre-mashing and "decidedly twisted parody of spiritual redemption melodramas" seemed a heady blend of "sly religious parable", supernatural thriller and morbidly funny black comedy. It's the Biblical story of Job where the Whirlwind cracks jokes.

Adam's Apples has been well-synopsized by various festival program capsules, including the write-up for San Francisco by Steve Mockus, who describes Adam's Apples as "the pitchest of black comedies," and a wickedly funny film that "reverberates with profane dialogue, appalling behavior and strategic use of the Bee Gees." Steve Gravestock, previewing the film for last Fall's Toronto International Film Festival, writes: "Setting the virtuous preacher against the unsalvageable reprobate, Jensen pushes the framework of this sub-genre and constantly tests our sensitivities. Adam may be pure evil, but he's the only tenant of the church who has a passing relationship with reality—and we're often as appalled by Ivan's demented take on things as Adam is. Ivan's deranged optimism isn't just ludicrous, it's dangerous." The Internet Movie Database review likewise queries if Ivan's denial of evil is more dangerous and irresponsible than Adam's evil—but realistic—attitude?

Catching Adam's Apples at Toronto, Todd Brown favorably reviewed the film for Twitch (relieving me of the immediate responsibility). "As you might expect from the title," Todd writes, "Adam's Apples has some rather metaphysical leanings tied in to the normal Jensen blend of existentialism, absurdism, and jet black comedy. While he has flirted with religious ideas in the past with Adam's Apples Jensen moves well beyond batting eyelids at the spiritual and goes ahead and invites God home for a drink or two while he slips into something more comfortable."

"But what do you make of a film," Todd continues, "that clearly takes the existence of God seriously but which casts the only true believer of the lot as a man with some serious mental health problems? . . . Adam and Ivan stand as polar opposites at the beginning of the film, a true Yin and Yang. Ivan has deliberately blinded himself to the presence of evil in any form. Adam has utterly rejected goodness. Both are living half a life and need the knowledge the other has to truly become whole. Ivan needs to be broken down and accept the reality of his life and history while Adam needs to realize that there is truly good in the world and that [] goodness does not equate to weakness."

When Adam's Apples screened at Sundance, Kim Voynar reported to Cinematical: "Is there a constant battle between good and evil? Does the Devil test our faith? And is it possible for one man's faith to change another man's heart?" Voynar notes that these questions are at the heart of Adam's Apples but that the "underlying question is whether it is actually evil for Ivan to be living in this state of total denial of reality, and if he should be forced to see the truth, even it it means sacrificing his life in the process."

"Blind rage meets blind faith," states the program capsule for the 2006 Bangkok International Film Festival, "so whenever Adam throws a punch, Ivan turns the other cheek."

Film Threat's Pete Vonder Haar notes that Jensen "somehow manages to maintain a sense of humanity and impart an almost touching quality" to the film despite "savage beat-downs, haphazard gunplay, and extreme cruelty to animals," let alone jokes about rape, incest, and Down's Syndrome. "This isn't easy," he reminds us.

Arriving in San Francisco with a glowing trail of festival accolades, Adam's Apples is already a big box office hit in Denmark. The film has been sold to 15 countries and Meg Hamel reports that it has picked up a handful of Robert Awards (Denmark's national film awards), including Best Film and Best Screenplay.

Writing for Variety from the Brussels International Fantastic Film Fest, Leo Barraclough reported Adam's Apples scored a triple triumph, earning the Golden Raven for Best International Feature Film, the Pegasus audience award, and the Silver Méliès d'Argent award for Best European Feature Film, which places Adam's Apples in the running for the Méliès d'Or Award, to be handed out by the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation at the upcoming 10th Méliès d'Or Ceremony held at the Espoo Cine International Film Festival in August 2006.

Adam's Apples also tied with Ali Selim's Sweet Land for Best Dramatic Film at the 2006 Wisconsin Film Festival in late March/early April. The program notes for last month's 19th Singapore International Film Festival state Adam's Apples received the Audience Awards both in Hamburg and Warsaw.

Having watched Adam's Apples on screener tape at home, I was glad to read Michael Fox's report to SF360 of the festival audience reaction: "Adam's Apples prompted a steady cascade of chuckles from its absurdist opening sequences. But, incredibly, the nearly full house exploded in laughter at crows being shot out of an apple tree. (The rim shot—a cat meeting the identical fate two beats later—got just a slightly smaller laugh.) Was I really in politically correct San Francisco, where the onscreen depiction of littering can evoke boos and muttered demands for the director's head? Yes, indeed, which should be giving the Danish provocateur a big chuckle himself, wherever he may be."

Adam's Apples was presented at 2006 SFIFF in association with Nordic 5 Arts which since 1993 has periodically been presenting films from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.

2006 SFIFF—Nordeste / Northeast Q&A

The two lead actresses of Nordeste (Northeast)—Carole Bouquet and Aymará Rovera—shared the Best Actress prize at the Stockholm International Film Festival, where director Juan Solanas also walked off with the prize for Best Picture. Rovera flew up from Argentina to help present the film at the San Francisco International. Unfortunately, she contracted laryngitis en route and couldn't speak. So she wrote down her thoughts and had an interpreter read them to us:

* * *

My name is Aymará Rovera and I'm the actress in this film. This is my first important role. I'm from Neuquén in the south of Argentina, but, I've been living for many years now in Buenos Aires because of my work. Juan Solanas will come at the end of the movie so that we can talk some more about the film.

For me it is an honor to be here presenting Nordeste. We want—together with Juan Solanas—to say thank you for being invited. When I was on my way up here traveling from Argentina, I thought about all the things that I wanted to say but my voice failed. Actually, I can't hardly talk, but—through the interpreter—I hope you can hear what I have to say.

Nordeste was filmed in the north of Argentina. This is a movie about two stories, two different worlds of two different women, adoption, the lack of justice, human pain and misery and in a way it touches every one of us. Personally, this film gave me a great opportunity. It was a big break. I feel very fortunate of all the things and all the opportunities life has given me. A few people might know actually that worldwide child trafficking falls in third place after weapons dealing and drug trafficking. It happens not only in my country but in any and all countries where there's poverty and low resources. I wish that this changes and I feel that through films we can tell stories.

This film takes us into worlds that we might not want to look at. Nordeste is a film that must be seen. Juan Solanas did a lot of research before writing the book and heard hundreds of testimonies that were later incorporated into this film. Nordeste was made with a lot of love. I hope you'll enjoy it and I hope you can enter into this world and the world of these beautiful characters and this beautiful film. Thank you for coming.

* * *

After the screening Miguel Pendás introduced director Juan Solanas and reintroduced actress Aymará Rovera. Pendas reiterated that Rovera arrived from Argentina the day before, found her luggage okay, but lost her voice.

Immediately Solanas was asked why he left the ending of Northeast so unresolved? He responded that he filmed it that way so that the audience could wonder what might be a positive and realistic ending for the story. Realistically, such scenarios rarely have a favorable outcome and he didn't want to impose one. Though Chris Knipp states that Solanas has "turn[ed] away from the task of completing his somewhat crudely roughed in story", Solanas himself seems to suggest that task is presumptive. Variety's Deborah Young even suggests that to some extent the film's open ending redeems the film's predictability. Whether the film's ending frustrates or challenges will most likely vary upon expectation.

Asked why the nun in one of the film's final scenes was given the most powerful words in the whole film, Solanas admitted he was an atheist, he does not believe in God, but on one hand the film is an homage to Sister Martha Pelloni, a particular nun in Argentina who discovered there was a huge trafficking of children and the organs of children. Of course while preparing for the movie, Solanas frequently visited with Sister Pelloni and their interaction provided rich information. On the other hand, there are many nuns in the Northeast aware of the child trafficking who are working to help the children. It's reality, Solanas responds firmly, and the world of those nuns is moreorless his world, they are both after the same goal, even though he is an atheist and they the brides of Christ.

A woman in the audience noted how the French woman had been tricked and frustrated many times, not the least of which was being given a diseased baby. She wondered if the baby really had the disease? Or was the same baby being used over and over to scam people and to get as much money as possible?

Solanas reminded that he moreorless spent years researching the reality of the topic before even writing the script. Each story he discovered was heartbreakingly unique. Northeast is just one story and not necessarily representative of the rest. For him the child has the disease. Could the baby not have the disease? Possibly. Human beings can be crafty, for good or bad. But for Solanas, no, he has no reason to question the baby's health. The baby is sick. It will die. For Solanas the case is real. In fact, he heard a lot of stories of couples finding their babies were sick when they performed medical check-ups. Carrying his father's torch, Solanas dives for the reality of a story, and whether that is rendered as documentary or as fiction borders on irrelevant. He has assembled a fiction made of pieces of real stories. The genres lean into each other to promote a larger truth.

Solanas was asked what motivated such a well-known actress as Carole Bouquet to become involved with Northeast? Solanas replied that three years ago he filmed a short movie that won a Cesar, the French equivalent of the Oscar. Bouquet was on the jury that voted for his movie. He didn't know that. But after completing his script for Northeast, he set his sights on casting a good French actress for the role. He was considering Carole Bouquet, Isabelle Huppert, two or three women, and decided to start with Carole Bouquet. He phoned her agent. To his surprise, he heard back from Bouquet no less than three days later, partly because she loved his Cesar-winning short movie so much that she wanted to meet him. After they lunched together and Solanas told her the story, Bouquet was very touched and informed Solanas that she was the President of an association named Voice of the Child who fight against child trafficking and prostitution. Solanas knew nothing about this beforehand. Thus, the role was perfect for Bouquet, her dedication to resolving the problem was already determined, and she agreed to do the film the day after their first meeting.

Miguel Pendás asked, in turn, how Solanas cast Aymará in the film? The audience gave Rovera a round of applause and she stepped up to the microphone to bravely croak out a "thank you." Solanas answered that he had a large casting call where he saw nearly 300 women, but, when he saw Aymará, he knew she was the right one for the role. He could feel how deeply Aymará felt for Juana's situation. This deep feeling was essential for him.

Moreorless half of the people in the movie were not professional actors, they were playing themselves, yet another blend between documentary and fiction. Solanas doesn't give the script to anyone on the set, neither the real actors nor the non-actors who—if they learn the words, he complains—sound like robots; it just doesn't work. So nobody gets the script, its created through improvisation among the cast, and following his intuition Solanas realized he needed the help of his professional actors to inhabit their roles with complete and genuine feeling. After the authentic deep feeling is there, then they're free to improvise and become real. Solanas felt Aymará could inhabit and embody the character of Juana. "She's incredible!"

Prefacing that I had the great pleasure of interviewing his father a few days before, I commended Juan for carrying on the beautiful work of capturing the soul of Argentina's country folk. I was curious about the opening and closing music. Were they tangos? Yes, he responded, they were contemporary tangos from Buenos Aires, what they call a piazzolla.

One of the audience wanted to know if it was true that the northeast of Argentina is really a child trafficking capital? Solanas replied that poverty is a sad fact of Argentina and—whenever you have poverty—you find corruption. Because the Northeast is one of the poorer regions of Argentina, there is a high incidence of corruption. There is a city named Goya in Corrientes—one of the three states of the northeast—that is called the capital of child trafficking, because there are incredible cases about that, nightmare cases. But, for example, in Santiago del Estero—which is more in the middle of the country—Solanas was contacted by an association who fights against child trafficking in Santiago. Recently they filed a complaint in the courts for 25,000 children in Santiago who have gone missing in the last ten years. As horrific as that is alone, it's just a small part of the larger phenomenon.

While preparing to film Northeast, Solanas spent a lot of time in Formosa, which is in the northernmost part of the state where it borders with Paraguay. He and his assistant lodged in a hotel named the Home Hotel. Solanas was preoccupied concentrating on casting the film and didn't notice—until his assistant pointed it out to him—that every three to four days a foreign couple would arrive to the hotel. Two or three days later they came into possession of a child and two or three days after that, they would return to their native countries to be replaced by the arrival of a new foreign couple.

* * *

Solanas has joined the ranks of filmmakers blogging about their own projects; a welcome development in my estimation. A recent entry sports a fine photograph of him with his father Fernando. His next project will be Air, a futuristic thriller.

2006 SFIFF—"A Prairie Home Companion" Q&A With Lily Tomlin and Virginia Madsen

Lily Tomlin and Virginia Madsen were on hand to introduce the festival's closing night screening of Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion at the Castro Theater. Tomlin asserted how much they loved making the film and working with Altman and Garrison Keillor and Madsen expressed how wonderful it was to be back in San Francisco again.

"And, of course, I got to work with Meryl Streep," Tomlin boasted, adding as an aside, "Although she wasn't my first choice." The audience laughed loudly and she feigned innocence, "What?!!"

"So enjoy it!" Tomlin encouraged the audience, "We loved making it. And we had a great time in Minnesota—right in Garrison's home town where he broadcast his show—and, anyway, we did good."

Madsen added, "We had an incredible time in a beautiful theater—not much different than this one—and so it's very appropriate to be watching the show in this space tonight and, hopefully, you'll enjoy it."

After the screening they returned to the stage where Graham Leggat launched the Q&A by asking the obvious question: What was it like working with such a brilliant ensemble cast and with such a brilliant director?

"Well, it's easy and fun usually," Tomlin offered even as Madsen stated, "Very difficult!" Tomlin explained that Madsen had a really hard part but that she did it so great. "When I saw it on paper, I thought, no one's going to be able to pull this off." "I didn't have to sing," Madsen countered. "I know, that's true, you didn't have to sing," Tomlin agreed and with just the right touch of smugness added, "but … I did."

"I was worried about it," she admitted, "because I'd never really sung a part. I mean I'd sung as characters, just for fun, like on the television show but I was supposed to sound like I could sing. And I told Bob, I took lessons for two months before I went up so I could sing the harmony and I said to Bob, 'Bob, I'm not sure. What if I get there and I can't sing very well?' And he said, 'Well, if you can't sing well, you just can't sing well.' " That helped ease her worries. "I think you did a tremendous job," Madsen complimented Tomlin and the audience concurred with a round of applause.

"That's kind of typical of Altman though," Tomlin stated, "to be so unflappable like that. Even in Nashville I told him, I said, y'know, I don't think Linnea can go to bed with Keith Carradine's character. And he said, 'Well, if the time comes she has to go to bed with him and she can't do it, she just can't do it.' "

Tomlin was asked if—after working with Altman several times now—if his way of handling her or her way of working with him had changed over the past 30 years from the first film to the last?

Tomlin responded: "I think Bob is absolutely the same artist and the same man." She turned to Madsen, "He kind of leaves you on your own, don't you think?"

Madsen agreed, "Yeah, sometimes that's not a good thing." She continued, "No, he does. He said to me the other day that someone was commenting to him on how—why is it that you just make a phone call and any actor will show up and all actors want to work with you?—and he said, 'I think it's because I allow actors what they were meant to do.' In a way that's true. He gives a tremendous freedom, leaves us alone, but also you always kind of feel this gentle hand, guiding you."

"And he's absolutely in charge," Tomlin added, " but he's just very laid back and quiet about it." She started wiggling her fingers, explaining, "And the reason I'm doing my fingers is because he has beautiful fingers; his hands are gorgeous! I've known him now for over 30 years, even though I've only done three movies and only had a tiny part in The Player, but, it seems the same as when we did Nashville, y'know? He's just an older man now. But he's still just as sharp and the same personality and he just seems to know what he wants and what he's doing. We sort of just have fun. You always have the feeling that you can't make a mistake. And John C. Reilly—yesterday we were in Minnesota—and he said something like, 'And if you are making a mistake it's because Altman wants you to.' "

Tomlin went on: "I've said this too about him: It's like going to a playground with a bunch of other kids who play the same games you do and you know there's not going to be any drive-bys. First of all, his style, if you do something really awful, he doesn't have to use it, he can just cut away from it."

Tomlin was then asked how she got her wonderful Wisconsin accent. "I practiced," she said, "but, I'm from Detroit, it's not terribly radically different but it certainly is different and Meryl and I got together and of course she's an accent master. But I have to say, in this case, her mother-in-law's from Wisconsin. So our biggest concern was would we go too far? Particularly me. Would I go too far? Because I've never seen her go too far with an accent." The audience cut up and, again, Tomlin acted like she didn't know why they were laughing, "What? And we just kind of worked on it. I worked with a dialect coach too. You want to be able to speak as fluently as you would in your own dialect, y'know? You don't want to think about it or else you can't really perform."

Madsen reminded her that she also sang as well but Tomlin noted that singers don't sing so heavily in their accent. "Yeah," Madsen responded, "but you could still hear it in certain places." "A little bit, yeah," Tomlin admitted. Madsen insisting on praising her mastery of the accent until Tomlin, in a perfect Wisconsin accent, stated, "That's mighty nice of you." Finishing up her answer, Tomlin said, "So we just worked on it. We wanted to do it so we did. I still worried, I was thinking, 'Oh God, I think I laid a little too heavy on that part.' But I feel fine about it."

The two actresses were asked about the timeline of the movie because it's about a stage performance. Was it shot chronologically when they were filming or did they jump around like a normal film shoot?

"I can't remember how much it was or wasn't," Tomlin said. "I think it was pretty much but certainly not entirely. The nature of the way it was done, a lot of it was interchangeable. There were just certain moments that you … because you're going onstage and backstage and you could have anything playing in the background so I don't even remember. And in the editing process I'm sure they had quite a bit of flexibility."

"Technically what they were doing on stage was quite remarkable," Madsen offered. "It was amazing. Sometimes they had four cameras going at one time and there'd be one camera—it's not that different from this house here, just a bit smaller—but we had a crane coming all the way from those seats [gesturing to the back of the Castro] all the way up onto the stage and flying around, while there was a track here, another camera on the dolly, and maybe one or two cameras backstage. So sometimes as they were building all of that, I could go downstairs and I could kill someone or Lily could be drinking backstage."

"Not nearly enough," Tomlin countered, "but originally in the script—because Meryl had a knee operation or something—and originally she was going to be in a wheelchair so they had made a hole in the floor to drop her down and bring her up, see? She was supposed to be in a wheelchair a lot of the time and then she said she didn't want to do it and I said to Bob, 'Well, let me be in the wheelchair!' I thought it would have been great to make that entrance, y'know, go up and down, but he didn't do it and I didn't have any dibs on the wheelchair anyway. I was going to be able to be pushing her, pushing her everywhere we were going, and I liked that. Constantly in touch…" Madsen corrected her, "In charge."

"There's certain things that you plan to do for a movie," Tomlin explained, "for your part, that never necessarily make it in at all, y'know, a very small percentage of stuff. That scene in the dressing room, we were the first day to shoot, it was a very long … it was a 20-minute scene and Bob would just let us shoot it from beginning to end over and over again and we loved that because that's where we'd talk over each other because we'd forget part of the story and the other person would pick it up and it just became a real style with us and made that intimacy of the sisterhood…."

Madsen inserted, "It's one of the best scenes I think that's ever been shot on film, that stuff in the dressing room." The audience concurred with applause. Madsen said Tomlin was also modestly leaving out the fact that Altman would shoot maybe one or two pages, three pages a day, and then one day would demand, "You're going to shoot the first 10 pages right now" and they all just had to go in there and do it.

"It was a solid script," Tomlin said and then started laughing remembering the filming of the dressing room scene, "but, yes, we fooled around and a lot of times Meryl and I got to where we had a lot of fun together and we would try to make each other laugh. That's why I had that thing in my mouth, y'know? She wouldn't know what I was doing during the scene because she'd be talking and she was so great and all of a sudden she'd look over and catch a glimpse of me in the mirror, y'know? And another time I put weights on my legs and I got up and started doing my exercises. So we never knew what would be in it. And the best part that was left out was that we had tried out for the Lawrence Welk show when we were four little kids. And I was still bitter, 45 years later, I was still real bitter and sore about it and felt that we didn't get the job because we were more talented than the Lennon Sisters." In summary Tomlin thought she should have just had a movie with Yolanda. The audience liked the idea and applauded. "I'm only kidding, y'know," Tomlin laughed, "kind of."

One audience member commented on how much she loved the radio program and wondered why Keillor did not include his "News from Lake Wobegon" monologues? "He did that on purpose," Madsen answered. Asked to talk further on that, Tomlin said, "I think he's hoping and planning that he'll be able to do a film about Lake Wobegon. I don't know if I'm supposed to say that or not. I think originally he may have been thinking he would do Lake Wobegon and somehow he and Bob decided they had better do the show first and, hopefully, later be able to do Lake Wobegon. Because all of us in the diner eventually … you can see the angel comes and we're probably goners and I guess we won't be in Lake Wobegon. Except that damn Lindsay, she escaped the diner, and she'll probably be in Lake Wobegon."

The actresses were asked if they had listened to Prairie Home Companion before? Were they fans of it? And what was it like to work with Garrison Keillor?

"Yes, I knew the show very well," Madsen answered, " I had been listening to it for years. I'm also from the Midwest, north of Chicago, and so it was kind of comforting settling in, trying to settle in Hollywood, and still having that on the radio. I remember my manager calling me and saying, 'Oh my God, you're not going to believe this. Robert Altman wants to call you.' And suddenly I'm deer in the headlights. And I said, 'Well, what's it about? Is there an outline? Is it all improv?' And she said, 'Well, I haven't finished it yet, it's a little strange, I haven't gotten to your part yet but you're called The Dangerous Woman and it has something to do with the Prairie?' " Madsen excitedly realized her manager was talking about Prairie Home Companion and that, if she was going to play the Dangerous Woman it meant she must be in Guy Noir's world. Then she wondered who was going to play Guy Noir? Would it be Garrison Keillor? Then when she found out Guy Noir was going to be played by Kevin Kline, she got excited to think she would get to kiss Kevin Kline! But then, of course, she read the script and found out she was an angel and so much for the kiss….

Tomlin riffed on what Madsen had said earlier about the multiple cameras and never knowing when the camera was on or not. The one thing that didn't get into the movie that just broke her heart was in the scene where she and Yolanda (Streep) were talking about their mom and Yolanda was describing how their mom would be down on the floor scrubbing, commenting how growing up they didn't have any luxuries, no vacations, nothing, and Rhonda (Tomlin) said, "Yeah, but, we had a lot of fun. Remember when Mom would boil an ear of corn and throw it on the floor and all us kids would play like we were pigs eating the corn?" Tomlin started busting a gut on stage remembering that improv, insisting it "was really heartfelt" but it wasn't on camera, it was just one of those adlibbed moments where she was playing with Streep, trying to make her laugh. Streep was playing it straight, seriously sentimental, and then when Tomlin said that about the pigs and getting on the floor and eating the corn, Streep's expression was priceless! "It wasn't meant to be facetious in any way," Tomlin laughed, "it was truly heartfelt, because it was a family story that I've always loved."

Madsen recalled that moment, sitting out in the audience. "Every day I'd just hang out at work all day. Sometimes they'd dress me up in the morning and decide they could use me and Bob would say, 'Throw the angel over there in the corner.' And I'd go, 'Okay.' 'Nah, nah, get her out!' It was so funny. I could sit in the audience and I could watch these guys perform all day long so I remember the corn."

"And of course Kevin [Kline] was hilarious!" Tomlin remembered. Streep and she would be on stage singing and then the audience would start tittering and they knew "that guy was back there doing something!"

Which reminded Madsen that you had to make sure your microphone was turned off if you weren't in a scene because everyone had a microphone on, Altman was one of the pioneers of all of that, and if you were in the audience, you had to make sure your microphone was turned off or else you'd be picked up laughing at the improvs. "Because all the stuff that you've seen was really performed live. They weren't doing this to playback. Unless it was somehow technically necessary. All the stuff that you're seeing is really performed live." "And no fixes!" Tomlin added. "So if you messed up," Madsen explained, Altman would often like it. "Not that you messed up," Madsen said to Tomlin.

"No," Tomlin responded dryly, "but Meryl did! God!" The previous night at the St. Paul premiere Tomlin sat next to Streep in the Fitzgerald Theater and said it was so much fun because Streep and Kevin Kline are really good friends, and every time Kevin would do something, Streep would laugh loudly, "just tickled to death."

One woman in the audience commented that it seemed like a lot of people in the audience—as well as everywhere else in the nation—have a really intimate relationship with A Prairie Home Companion. It's an oral medium, it's voices, and unless you're lucky enough to see it live, most of the time you're just listening, she said. So she wondered how it felt to actually infiltrate this radio, this medium, and actually change it from within and help its evolution to a picture format?

"I'm not sure if I understood that or not," Tomlin joked. Madsen said, "I was just thinking I never thought of Garrison in quite that way. I don't think we really changed anything. I just think it was really incredible to meet Garrison Keillor. Because, you know, I had seen his picture on a bookjacket. And I guess I thought like many of us, I thought he was smaller. You meet this towering man, he's like 6'6" … and he's totally and completely neat and he's very eccentric and he was wearing these red sneakers everyday and I was always running around taking photographs and I took this really—I thought this really cool picture of his sneakers where one was kind of moving and there was a cool kind of red stream coming off of that because, y'know, it's the most that Garrison will ever dance. And I was like, 'Garrison, wow, check it out, look at this great photograph, I want you to have it!' And he was like [mugging a deadpan face]. And that was his whole reaction to the photograph, it was so strange, and he was like [stated drolly], 'Very interesting.' But he was fascinating to watch and I actually found the picture later taped to the camera thing. But he's a very unique individual and I think he opened up a lot. Maybe that's the only thing we did change, he opened up a lot to us."

Tomlin continued: "Last night in Minnesota he was almost playful. I mean, relatively speaking. It's true we were kind of like intruders into this family that was so solid and that had been working together so long but they made it really easy and comfortable for us. Because they were so well-oiled and worked so wonderfully and easily together, we were just absorbed into it, and the theater, and it was just a big support for us. We were the ones who really relied on them. The band is so exceptional. But Garrison is—well, to answer your question about radio, this is what I wanted to tell you—I went to see him at the Hollywood Bowl last year before we started the movie and I had always listened to the radio show and I loved it and I loved all of Garrison's humor and all the stuff they did, and as I sat at the Bowl watching the show live—which was going to be similar to what we were going to do—it was twice as funny in the theater because Garrison, he has that little scowl that he wears, y'know? You don't get that on the radio necessarily but no matter what they were doing he had that expression on his face and the show was very funny live and I thought [this] will go well for the movie, visually."

Someone asked if the duct tape scene with the man who was making all the different sound effects was improvised. Tomlin answered, "No, not entirely at all. I'm sure it was scripted, I can't remember now, but because we had to like kind of make it … we didn't really learn it and know it, we were kind of reading it and fooling around with as it was on the page as they often do in radio, y'know? You saw Garrison reading stuff too as if he's reading commercials and so on. I think with that gong thing, that came after a couple of takes, I don't know if Meryl had that idea, or somebody finished that section, but, that came up and it worked well to button up that sequence."

An audience member asked what they thought the bust of F. Scott Fitzgerald represented? Madsen said, "Altman would tell you that the movie is just about death" and offered that maybe Fitzgerald was just "another dead person." But then she furthered, "The theater is called the Fitzgerald theater. And it is Garrison's base, it's his hometown, it's where they often performed the show for obvious reasons."

"Maybe in contrast…" Tomlin ventured and then switched gears, "I don't know what it meant frankly. It just was. Altman is very, y'know, he treats things as a matter of serendipity anyway. So, y'know, the fact that the bust was there and everything, somehow it's just going to work into and become part of the play. He takes what comes. So they certainly didn't plan it, y'know, I mean they didn't say, 'Well, let's pretend this is Fitzgerald, we have the bust of Fitzgerald here and it will be metaphorically … something very important.' I think it just happened to be there and, I don't know, Kevin read those lines as if he didn't get who Fitzgerald was entirely. I mean, I knew he did as Kevin but as Guy Noir, he didn't get it." She capped off her response with saying Fitzgerald was "a local boy", qualifying that such a distinction wasn't that impressive, since "even Jesus was just a carpenter in his hometown."

Graham Leggat cued them to speak about the previous night's premiere in St. Paul. Madsen offered, "They built a screen like this [gesturing to the Castro's screen] in the Fitzgerald Theater that we filmed in so you were sitting in the audience watching the audience and the show that you were watching while you were watching yourself watching yourself. It was very surreal and very bizarre."

"Because a lot of the audience were sitting in that film!" Tomlin explained and then she and Madsen proceeded to overlap dialogue comparable to any of the film's funniest sequences.

Madsen: And they also had a parade, which we were all picked up by horses and carriages….

Tomlin: White carriages!

Madsen: White carriages and the high school marching band…

Tomlin: …the high school marching band…

Madsen: …with the big feathered caps and…

L: Thousands and thousands of people from St. Paul, thousands on the streets, thick, thick, and they were so thick that the cops on the horses had to say, "Get away from the back of my horse. Get away from the back of my horse."

V: It was like being the Beatles for example.

L: I felt like I was an astronaut!

They started joking about what it was like to be in different carriages. Tomlin exclaimed, "I wish I had been in your carriage, you don't know what it's like sitting next to Meryl. She got bouquets and people running up and throwing flowers at her."

Madsen: And she was on the cover of the newspaper this morning, did you see that?

Tomlin: [Jokingly disgruntled.] Yeah, I did. She was on the cover and Lindsay was on the cover.

Madsen: Lindsay's picture was this big and Meryl's was half a page.

Tomlin: And then it was like this … like some big teeth on the side, which was my profile. [With weary resignation] Oh, that's okay.

The laughter finally calmed down and the actresses were asked about Dusty and Lefty's song, if it was a collection of old jokes or were they written for the movie? And if they were written, if Garrison wrote them?

Tomlin answered, "No, I think they were—unless Garrison did write them many years ago—to me they're familiar old classic bad jokes, y'know. At least I've heard of most of them." She turned to Madsen, "Have you?" Madsen responded, "They were really bad old jokes." Tomlin qualified, "I think the PMS and Mad Cow was probably not as old as three boobs." Madsen then admitted that some of the jokes were not as funny to her as they were to the guys, that one of them had actually upset her, but she wasn't going to repeat it though people in the audience wanted her to.

"That's also the eccentric thing about [Garrison]," she noted, "is he has this incredible political wit and sarcasm and such intelligent humor, especially in his commentaries and monologues, but then he has like potty humor. [Her Chicago accent comes out in the word "potty".] He has like this ten-year-old boy humor and—when you listen to the show, you're like—How are you even doing that?"

Tomlin suggested it was because they were "refined girls." Madsen laughed, "Oh yes. It's too insulting to us. We're too sophisticated." Tomlin summarized, "The cowboys were pretty cute, it's true. They're like bad kids but they're really cute." Madsen then brought up that there was a fart machine on the set, which reminded Tomlin of when there was a fart machine on the set of Huckabees which the guys—Mark Wahlberg and Dustin and everybody—were totally into. "Especially Dustin, you think he's going to be the most intense, serious artist in the world and there's nothing he enjoyed more than dragging out that fart machine!" Topping off the audience laughter Tomlin shouted out, "And sometime he didn't even use the machine!"

One woman in the audience asked Madsen about her role as The Dangerous Woman, how it was interesting to watch a femme fatale and an angel of death character being woven into the film. She wondered what it was like for Madsen to play that part, especially given what she had said to Tomlin earlier about Robert Altman thinking the movie was about death.

"I think that also kind of grew as we were shooting because I don't think anybody really knew what was going to happen, or what I was going to wear, y'know? He wanted me to glide so … and I kind of walk like a truck driver so they were like, 'Maybe we should build her a platform on wheels. Maybe she should be on a string and fly.' It kind of grew as we were going along. He then decided to kind of have me here and there and then just see what would work in the final cut. I was really kind of at a loss because how are you going to play an angel? I went to him one day and I said, 'Well, you know, it seems like I don't remember humor.' I was trying to figure out what made me stay, after I take Chuck, what makes me stay? Am I just so attracted to these wonderful people, is it making me reminisce about life? And I'm going on and on and on, all my actorspeak and he said, 'Well, I think that all depends on how long you've been dead.' And I then I said to him, 'Right!! Right.' I started thinking about it, I was writing in my journal, it could be years, a month, and then he said, 'Stop thinking about it so much. Just be dead.' But really, then we started doing it in different ways and it was gradually—to answer your question—it was gradually woven in like day to day, giving me something to do because I wouldn't leave."

Another audience member asked Madsen if she had patterned The Dangerous Woman after Sally Kellerman's character in Brewster McCloud?

"No, he specifically didn't want me to pattern it against anything. He just wanted it to grow day to day because I was even saying the way that I speak and the way that I look and, y'know, I had a lot of questions but he just wanted me to be a blank slate and I think he wanted it to grow out of the experience that was going on in the theater and I don't think I was that much a part of it in the beginning but then suddenly I was over there, then I was in the window of the house, then I was up there, it just kind of grew."

Tomlin offered, "I think it's so typical too because Altman, he was really fixed on you being the angel. I think that's a big part of his gift. He just knows that, somehow he's intuitive and he knows if he casts Virginia he's going to get what he's going to need. …He just trusts enough that it's going to fill out and come to fruition because he's picked the right person."

Finally, the two were asked what the reason was for the constant camera movement throughout the film?

"I think that's very much Altman," Madsen answered. "I think the cameras in his films are always like a character in the film. At least, I feel that way. He's always experimenting with new technology and new ways of watching people and new ways of telling stories with the camera being very much involved so I just think that this time it was even more fluid motion that he could do with more cameras."

Graham Leggat then leaned in to Tomlin and asked if there's anything further she'd like to say.

"No!" Tomlin said succinctly and thanked the audience for coming, waving with a huge, radiant smile.