#sundanceselects

Check out the new trailer for IFC Films & Sundance Selects new documentary – WEINER ~ Opens in St. Louis May 27, 2016

WEINER, Opens in St. Louis Theatres on May 27th from Sundance Selects Synopsis: Sexts, lies, and Carlos Danger: watch the wildest political meltdown in recent history as it unfolds. It’s 2013 and Anthony Weiner—still reeling from the sex scandal that ended his political career two years earlier—is back in the spotlight as he mounts…

Check out the trailer from Sundance Selects on IFC Films Documentary – WEINER – opens in St. Louis May 27, 2016

  WEINER, Opens in St. Louis Theatres on May 27th from Sundance Selects Synopsis: Sexts, lies, and Carlos Danger: watch the wildest political meltdown in recent history as it unfolds. It’s 2013 and Anthony Weiner—still reeling from the sex scandal that ended his political career two years earlier—is back in the spotlight as he…

2 hours 59 minutes

Rated NC-17 (Explicit Sexual Content)

Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche

Starring Lea Seydoux, Adele Exarchopoulos, Salim Kechiouche, Aurelien Recoing, Catherine Salee, Benjamin Siksou, Mona Walravens, Jeremie Laheurte, Alma Jodorowsky, and Sandor Funtek

4 out of 4 stars

IN THEATERS NOW.

Blue Is the Warmest Color (or, La Vie d'Adele: Chapitres 1 et 2, as it is known in France) is one of the most beautiful, realistic love stories I've seen in ages. I loved it to death. The movie, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and is loosely based on a graphic novel by Julie Maroh, has become known as the "3 hour long NC-17 rated French lesbian romance." The fact that the lovers are lesbians has nothing to do with it. It's not trying to make a statement on gay rights/marriage. This is just a movie about love, and it gorgeously shows how the love between gay people is just as real as the love between a man and a woman. Usually action/adventure epics are 3 hours long, but Blue Is the Warmest Color is simply a detailed examination of a fictitious woman's life. We never see movies like these, ones that spend so much time observing every waking minute of an anonymous person's life. Abdellatif Kechiche's experiment works, thanks to its outstanding performances and and its truthful outlooks on love, passion, lust, and heartbreak. Get ready for one hell of a romantic epic.

Newcomer Adele Exarchopoulos is PHENOMENAL in the leading role. She plays her own name, Adele, a beautiful but pouty-looking high school student living in France. She has a group of friends but doesn't seem to have any fun with them. She even feels distant from her parents, shown in a scene where they silently eat dinner and watch TV. One day a cute classmate, Thomas (Jeremie Laheurte, real-life boyfriend of Exarchopoulos), flirts with Adele on the bus home. He's a nice guy, but Adele isn't quite satisfied with him. She's distant when they make love for the first time, fully aware that she's not enjoying the moment. While her friends pressure her to stay with him Adele confides in her gay buddy, Valentin (Sandor Funtek), that there's something missing in her life. The days pass until one day where she crosses the street and makes eye contact with a blue-haired girl walking past. She's instantly drawn to her. Out of all the people on the road, these two souls are making a connection.

You might be thinking this is a schmaltzy "love at first sight" moment where romantic music plays and the two walk past each other in slow motion. It isn't. AT ALL. Everything is natural. Kechiche only relies on the actors' expressions and it works. It shows how every one of us has those rare experiences where we stare at a stranger without knowing why. One night Valentin takes Adele to a gay bar in town where (what do you know?!) the blue-haired woman is there! She introduces herself as Emma, a fourth year college student studying Fine Arts and an out and proud lesbian. Adele can't hide her desire for Emma, which (in a powerful scene) angers her friends who hear rumors she went to a gay bar. Adele and Emma meet up some more, and after the first kiss they fall madly in love with each other. The rest of the movie follows their relationship up till their adulthood, where Adele becomes a teacher and Emma an artist. The 3 hours consist of long but absorbing conversations Adele has with the people in her life, from Thomas to Emma's caring parents (Anne Loiret and Benoit Pilot) to Samir (Salim Kechiouche), a chatty friend she meets at a house party. Exarchopoulos, a woman we can't ever take our eyes off, is in EVERY frame.

So yes, there are a lot of LONG "graphic" sex scenes in Blue Is the Warmest Color. So, of course, the MPAA has given it an NC-17 because they have a thing against realistically simulated sex (especially if it's between gay people) and never have a problem with onscreen violence. Weird, huh? These scenes are long, and Adele and Emma get in every position lesbians can get into while having sex, but I don't think they're dirty. They're soft and beautiful, a truthful depiction of how two people who are in love feel when they're pleasuring one another. America just isn't used to seeing passion as real as this. Seydoux and Exarchopoulos are completely fearless in these scenes and even in interviews they've stated numerous times that they didn't have a problem shooting them. They understand that these scenes are meant to be about love and Adele's awakening sexuality. The harder scene for them, believe it or not, was when Seydoux had to slap her costar across the face.

Some people are mad that a man directed a female coming-of-age story (also because Kechiche was supposedly a nightmare to work with, making his cast work long hours and refusing to increase his crew's salaries). However he may be as a person, he's made an unforgettable epic. The fact that he's a man has nothing to do with it. If I was a girl I might feel differently, but as a man he's examined Adele's life with a magnifying glass. We see her world as if the movie's a documentary. When Adele and Thomas eat gyros, we see the food sliding out of their mouths. When Adele kisses Emma, we see the lust in her eyes. The dozens and dozens of close-up shots are a way for us to feel the naturalness of the story. Reading French dialogue for 3 hours may be too tiresome for people, and I'll admit that after 2 hours my eyes became a little sleepy. Yet hours after Blue Is the Warmest Color ended I still couldn't shake it off me. It's an extraordinary experiment in filmmaking, an audacious way to absorb us into a fictitious character that we may have never even cared for to begin with.

1 hour 59 minutes

Not Rated (but would get an R for language)

Directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon

Cast N/A

3.5 out of 4 stars

ON DEMAND NOW. IN PA THEATERS 11/14/12.

Racism will always be around. I'm not being a pessimist. I'm being a realist. Many people think that we've annihilated racism since Martin Luther King Jr. was around. Of course, black people have had tons more success since than (just look at Hollywood. How many black actors have won Oscars in the past two decades?) but racism is still a common part of life. Statistics show, for example, that schools are more segregated than they were in King's days. This isn't institutional discrimination where racism is socially accepted and lynching is a daily activity, but individual racism. White people see towns that are majority nonwhite and don't send their kids there. In the back of their minds they're threatened by blacks and other nonwhites. This can't be ignored. Historian/filmmaker Ken Burns, who made an extraordinary epic about the Civil War in 1990, has made a terrific documentary about the never-ending life of racism in The Central Park Five, a true story about a city's refusal to apology for arresting five teenage nonwhite boys for the rape of a white woman.

Co-directed by Ken's daughter Sarah and her husband David McMahon, The Central Park Five could have easily debuted on PBS or The History Channel, but that's not enough. People need to see this on the big screen to feel its impact. It has the usual archive footage and interviews with the incarcerators and their friends/relatives, but in a Ken Burns film the history lesson feels so much more passionate than the traditional programs on TV. The movie is about the Central Park Jogger case of 1989. On April 19th of that year a 29 year old woman named Trisha Meili decided to go jogging in New York's iconic park at night. At the same time an activity known as "wilding" was going on in and around the park. This is when gangs of young men (presumably all nonwhite) would get together and run around and assault/rob anyone they saw. Early morning the next day Trisha was found beaten to a pulp in the park. She was put in a coma. Doctors discovered that she had also been raped the night before.

Five teenagers, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, and Kharey Wise, were arrested and charged with the assault. There was no DNA evidence of the five on Trisha's clothing. The boys were only taken in because they had been out the night of the crime and had apparently participated in the "wilding." They tried to explain to the cops that they didn't attack the woman, but they didn't listen. Instead, they just yelled and interrogated them in the precinct, certain that the teenagers were guilty. The boys were each set aside and told to confess to the crime on camera. Each was told that if they did that then they'd be let go. Why would the boys agree to do this? Well, they didn't have a choice, their parents weren't allowed to help, and they were 14-16 years old. What else could they do? Even though there was no physical evidence that they'd done the crime their confessions were enough, and all five of them were sent to jail.

Then in 2002, Matias Reyes, an inmate known as the East Side Rapist, confessed to the crime. His DNA matched the prints on Trisha's clothing and the boys were let go. WOW. Five innocent boys sent to jail for a little over ten years for a horrible crime they didn't commit? This is a mistake that the New York Supreme Court continues to ignore to this day. This sounds like racism, if you ask me. Where was the evidence? Where was the freedom of speech? Why is it that five teenage black boys were not allowed to explain what happened? If the "rapists" were white, would they have not been allowed to speak the truth as well? There's an intriguing scene in the movie where Burns shows us that another rape had happened in the city at the time. A woman was raped and then thrown off the roof of a building and killed. Why wasn't this in the news? Because the rapist and the victim were both black. The Central Park Five stays with you long after it's finished. We may think that institutional discrimination is in the past, but it still pops up every now and then.