Salon.com > Tribeca Film Festival http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Tribeca: Teen horniness — in Norway! http://www.salon.com/2011/04/27/tribeca_turn_me_on/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/27/tribeca_turn_me_on/#comments Wed, 27 Apr 2011 20:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2011/04/27/tribeca_turn_me_on A dry, sweet, dirty-minded tale set in a nowheresville Norwegian town, "Turn Me On, Goddammit" testifies to the continuing strength -- not to mention strangeness -- of Scandinavian cinema. Some American distributor will likely give this a whirl following its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, in hopes of an offbeat, "Let the Right One In"-scale hit. This yarn about an innocent-looking but desperately horny teenage girl might not have that much commercial upside, but its bittersweet, faintly depressed brand of Nordic humor is definitely enjoyable.

When we first meet Alma (Helene Bergsholm), an angelic blonde of 15 or 16, she's sprawled out on the kitchen floor with her hand down her pants, eagerly responding to the instructions of a phone-sex interlocutor called Stig. Sadly, that's as hot as things get for Alma in her sleepy fjord-side village (I'm not even going to try to spell it); she's got Stig on the horn and she's got elaborate nightly fantasies about Artur (Matias Myren), a sleepy-eyed local dreamboat who seems to like her, but not quite enough or not quite that way. If you're about to sniff that you can't imagine a teenage girl actually resorting to phone sex, that's not the point; despite the veneer of downscale European realism in "Turn Me On, Goddammit," writer-director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen is definitely leading us into the realm of farce.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/27/tribeca_turn_me_on/feed/ 4 Tribeca: The West Indian cricket revolution http://www.salon.com/2011/04/27/tribeca_babylon/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/27/tribeca_babylon/#comments Wed, 27 Apr 2011 18:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2011/04/27/tribeca_babylon If you haven't spent some of your life in a former British Empire nation -- I mean, one besides the United States -- then you probably don't know much about cricket, the Anglocentric sport that's cousin and/or ancestor to baseball. (I actually played both as a kid, enjoy both as a spectator, and resolutely refuse to take sides on this ancient and symbolic divide.) But Stevan Riley's documentary "Fire in Babylon" -- which had its North American premiere last weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival -- is so much fun that you don't really have to understand much about the nuances of cricketing to get the point.

Sure, "Fire in Babylon" is a sports movie, one of the best in Tribeca's ESPN-sponsored sports film festival, but also one that understands sport as an expression of culture and politics. Mixing file footage, contemporary interviews and exciting musical performances ranging from reggae to calypso, soca and Caribbean rap, Riley tells the story of how the West Indies cricket team of the late '70s and '80s transformed the sport, and became a lightning rod for black pride and the black-power movement around the world. Led by captain Clive Lloyd, superstar batsman Viv Richards -- who's something like the Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson of cricket, rolled into one -- and an intimidating quartet of "fast bowlers" (the equivalent of Randy Johnson-style fastball pitchers), that West Indies team recorded historic victories in England and Australia and went undefeated in top-level international competition for 15 years, a record unmatched by any team in any sport.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/27/tribeca_babylon/feed/ 11 Tribeca: Return of a moviemaking madman http://www.salon.com/2011/04/26/tribeca_detachment/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/26/tribeca_detachment/#comments Tue, 26 Apr 2011 21:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2011/04/26/tribeca_detachment The turning point in Tony Kaye's new movie, "Detachment" -- which, despite many nameable flaws, is a wrenching and powerful achievement -- comes when Lucy Liu, playing a high school guidance counselor, suffers a major breakdown in front of a student. It's easy to be callous, she shrieks at the bored and bewildered girl in front of her, easy not to give a shit. What takes courage is actually caring about yourself and the world. Sure, you can call that a hackneyed sentiment, and some people won't get past the fact that "Detachment" is delivering a familiar message in a familiar setting. But two things redeem the scene, at least for me: 1) What Liu says is absolutely true, and it is one of the central problems in contemporary life, and 2) she's not saying it from some position of cool, removed wisdom; she's pissed off, filled with rage, and completely losing her shit at a girl whose only crime was announcing that she doesn't care about school and wants to be a model.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/26/tribeca_detachment/feed/ 8 Tribeca: The Israeli horror-comedy you’ve been waiting for! http://www.salon.com/2011/04/26/tribeca_rabies/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/26/tribeca_rabies/#comments Tue, 26 Apr 2011 01:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2011/04/25/tribeca_rabies If you polled Israelis about what their country needs most, I'm guessing "horror movies" might rank pretty low on the list, somewhere down below "a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian question" and "Appletinis." But all boundaries were made to be broken, and any observer of Israel's inventive and intelligent cinema scene would agree that when the Jewish state finally got around to making a horror flick, it'd be a pisser. And so we have "Rabies," the debut of writing-directing duo Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, which takes the standard stupid-kids-in-the-woods formula and inverts it to delicious, hilarious and extremely mean effect. It premiered this past weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival, and looks like a prospective indie-horror hit if I've ever seen one.

The mere existence of a movie like "Rabies" might give rise to various not-funny jokes (like the one I made some years back about "The Last Man," a quite interesting movie about a serial killer on the loose in Beirut: How is anybody supposed to tell?), or sober-sided reflections about the fact that Israel's founding generation probably lacked much appetite for violent entertainment. Keshales and Papushado aren't giving in to any of that: They've got horny guys in tennis whites, girls in short skirts, a pair of easily distracted and/or sadistic cops and a psycho with a whole bunch of scary hardware, and they're determined to make you jump.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/26/tribeca_rabies/feed/ 16 Tribeca: “Koran by Heart” — Islamic slapdown! http://www.salon.com/2011/04/25/koran_tribeca/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/25/koran_tribeca/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 21:15:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2011/04/25/koran_tribeca Here's the only thing I need to say about Greg Barker's documentary "Koran by Heart," which premiered this past weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival, at least after I tell you the title: It's a movie about the International Holy Quran Competition, held every year in Cairo, where students from all over the Muslim world show up to demonstrate their total recall of Islam's gospel, all 600 pages of it. It's "Spellbound" plus a poetry slam. Plus Islamic fundamentalism. Exactly: OMG. (I'm sorry about the variant spellings, by the way, but there's no consistent standard for transliterating Arabic into English. The movie uses "Koran" and Salon uses Associated Press style, which is "Quran." At least it's not as bad as Gadhafi/Gaddafi/Qaddafi/Khadafy etc.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/25/koran_tribeca/feed/ 33 Tribeca: “Roadie” escapes Blue Oyster Cult http://www.salon.com/2011/04/25/roadie_tribeca/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/25/roadie_tribeca/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 01:25:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2011/04/24/roadie_tribeca Fans of Michael Cuesta's 2001 indie classic "L.I.E.," which features Brian Cox as the only semi-sympathetic pedophile character in the history of popular media (at least post-Humbert Humbert) -- it's time to celebrate, kind of. And by celebrate I mean have a beer at 10 o'clock in the morning and wear the same clothes four days in a row. If you thought the portrait of downscale, dysfunctional Long Island suburbia in "L.I.E." was depressing, wait till you see Ron Eldard as the eponymous hero of "Roadie," playing a 40something guy who gets fired by Blue Öyster Cult (!) after 26 years of shlepping their gear (!!), and winds up back home in Queens doing way too much coke with a couple he knew a long time ago.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/25/roadie_tribeca/feed/ 15 Tribeca: Steve Coogan makes fun of his American failure http://www.salon.com/2011/04/24/trip_tribeca/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/24/trip_tribeca/#comments Sun, 24 Apr 2011 18:04:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2011/04/24/trip_tribeca Steve Coogan is the one-man apotheosis of British comedy's translation problem. A household name in the United Kingdom, thanks largely to his TV persona as the intolerably dense and pompous talk-show host Alan Partridge, Coogan could most likely stroll through any American shopping mall in total anonymity. Sure, he played Octavius in the "Night at the Museum" comedies and Hades, god of the underworld, in "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" -- but therein lies the problem, or one of them anyway. Russell Brand and Ricky Gervais have their own problems translating themselves into the American idiom, but at least they're offering rough approximations of their existing shtick. Coogan is a superstar in British TV and a supporting player in sub-mediocre Hollywood kids' movies. (My short answer: Americans don't mind being made fun of, exactly -- see also Simpson, Homer -- but the instability and multiple layers of Coogan-style mockery and self-mockery remain unfamiliar to most Yanks.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/24/trip_tribeca/feed/ 16 “The Bang Bang Club”: A haunting lesson in war-zone journalism http://www.salon.com/2011/04/23/bang_bang_club/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/23/bang_bang_club/#comments Sat, 23 Apr 2011 21:45:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/04/23/bang_bang_club There's no way to know how photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Tim Hetherington, who was killed last week covering the civil war in Libya (along with photojournalist Chris Hondros), would have responded to Steven Silver’s "The Bang Bang Club," a drama about the emergence -- and near self-destruction -- of a group of hotshot photographers in a different war zone, early 1990s South Africa. But the coincidence is too grim and too obvious to let pass.

At first I thought "The Bang Bang Club," which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday night before beginning a theatrical and VOD run, was entirely too slick and too much in love with its protagonists' bad-ass self-image. It stars Ryan Phillippe as the Pulitzer-winning photographer Greg Marinovich, one of the ringleaders of the so-called Bang Bang Club (a nickname they disliked). The label got hung on a group of four white photojournalists who repeatedly risked their lives to document the three-way conflict between the apartheid South African government, Nelson Mandela's African National Congress and the Zulu Inkatha movement. Besides Marinovich, the others were another Pulitzer winner, Kevin Carter (Taylor Kitsch), João Silva (Neels van Jarsveld), who went on to a career with the New York Times, and Ken Oosterbroek (Frank Rautenbach).

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/23/bang_bang_club/feed/ 9 Zach Braff’s beard is “The High Cost of Living” http://www.salon.com/2011/04/22/high_cost_of_living/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/22/high_cost_of_living/#comments Fri, 22 Apr 2011 17:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2011/04/22/high_cost_of_living  The other day I was just sitting at home, watching my Criterion Collection Blu-ray of "Garden State" and wondering, "Why can't there be more movies like this?"

Not like: "Why can't there be more movies that are indie and twee, with themes resembling that of 2004's hipster classic?" That would be ridiculous. I want to know why someone can't come up with a film that is exactly like "Garden State." Except instead of a manic pixie Natalie Portman with epilepsy, maybe there could be a depressed woman whom Zach Braff runs over with his car.

The thing is, I would want the soundtrack to remain essentially the same.

I really hope "The High Cost of Living" has the tag line: "For the child inside of each of us ... who wonders what Zach Braff would look like with a beard."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/22/high_cost_of_living/feed/ 9 “The Killer Inside Me”: Much ado about misogyny http://www.salon.com/2010/06/17/killer_inside_me/ http://www.salon.com/2010/06/17/killer_inside_me/#comments Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/06/17/killer_inside_me As was already clear when I wrote about the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of "The Killer Inside Me" two months ago, Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's legendary 1950s crime novel is likely to provoke a strong, and strongly divided, response. "The Killer Inside Me" tells the story of Lou Ford (played by Casey Affleck), who presents as an all-American deputy sheriff in small-town Texas but gradually slides into psychotic, misogynistic violence.

Since Lou narrates the Thompson novel, and film is by its nature a more detached and objective medium than fiction, there are limits to how well Winterbottom and screenwriter John Curran can capture the book's eerie, haunting power, or Lou's willful lack of self-knowledge. But the novel's most notorious scene, in which Lou calmly pulls on a pair of black gloves and sets about beating his hooker girlfriend to death, all the while apologizing to her and telling her he loves her, is rendered in explosive and terrifying detail. It serves as a rupture in the film's narrative of reality, one almost as dramatic as the moment when the film appears to break in the projector during Bergman's "Persona."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/06/17/killer_inside_me/feed/ 53 Best of Tribeca: Killing for a “Dream Home” http://www.salon.com/2010/05/04/tff_dream_home/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/04/tff_dream_home/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 20:45:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/05/04/tff_dream_home There are many horror stories and many comic fables to be found in the world of real estate, but perhaps none as hilarious, outrageously stylish and thoroughly disgusting as Hong Kong director Pang Ho-cheung's "Dream Home." Leave all concerns about morality and good taste at the door for this saga of upwardly mobile Li-sheung (Josie Ho), who vowed in childhood that one day she would live in a luxury flat with a harbor view, and will stop at nothing to fulfill her dream. In case I haven't made that totally clear, "Dream Home's" not for the squeamish, but if you relish gruesome-comic Asian-movie mayhem at its finest, this will be a memorable experience.

Thing is, Li-sheung's deal for her dream apartment is falling apart at the last minute, and she needs to find a way to make the sellers reconsider, right in the middle of Hong Kong's late-2000s real estate boom. Hmm -- how about inflicting a horrific killing spree on the neighbors, sending a variety of drugged-out losers, trashed hookers, blasé bourgeoisie, intrusive cops and innocent bystanders to their deaths in imaginative, splatterific fashion?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/04/tff_dream_home/feed/ 0 Best of Tribeca: “My Trip to Al-Qaeda” http://www.salon.com/2010/05/04/tff_al_qaeda/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/04/tff_al_qaeda/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 16:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/05/04/tff_al_qaeda Counting his unfinished film about disgraced ex-New York governor Eliot Spitzer and his section of the anthology documentary "Freakonomics," Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney ("Taxi to the Dark Side," "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room") has four films en route to public consumption. "My Trip to Al-Qaeda," a screen adaptation of author, screenwriter and journalist Lawrence Wright's one-man play about his search for the roots of Islamic terrorism, might be the least showy of all, but it's a spellbinding connect-the-dots tour through some little-understood recent history. (Wright's 2007 Pulitzer winner, "The Looming Tower," has been acclaimed as one of the best studies of the cultural climate that led to Islamic terrorism and the 9/11 attacks.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/04/tff_al_qaeda/feed/ 5 Best of Tribeca: Vietnamese action flick “Clash” http://www.salon.com/2010/05/04/tff_clash/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/04/tff_clash/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 14:40:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/05/04/tff_clash I may be poaching on my colleague Bob Calhoun's Straight to DVD franchise with this one, but I can't resist. For one thing, while I've spent a lot of my life watching movies from disparate corners of the globe, "Clash" was my very first exposure to the Vietnamese action boom of the last few years. It's a high-octane martial-arts ass-kicker built around an overly complicated criminal scheme, a leggy heroine who looks great in a ball gown and chops down French musclemen with her awesome kickboxing moves, and a soundtrack fueled by slammin' Vietnamese hip-hop. Yeah -- I actually said "Vietnamese hip-hop."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/04/tff_clash/feed/ 1 Best of Tribeca: “Soul Kitchen” http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_soul_kitchen/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_soul_kitchen/#comments Mon, 03 May 2010 21:45:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/05/03/tff_soul_kitchen Better known for serious-minded explorations of the new, multicultural Europe, like his 2007 international award-winner "The Edge of Heaven," Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin tunes his instrument to a higher, more farcical pitch here. "Soul Kitchen" is the title of the movie (in German as well as English) and the name of the ragtag restaurant in a scruffy neighborhood of Hamburg whose anguished proprietor, Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos), can't decide whether to stay and fight for his business or chase his wayward girlfriend to Shanghai. His ne'er-do-well brother, Illias (the terrific German actor Moritz Bleibtreu) -- a mess of tics, gangster mannerisms and failed schemes -- is just out of prison, and Zinos' temperamental, haute-cuisine chef seems poorly matched to the customer base.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_soul_kitchen/feed/ 0 Best of Tribeca: “Metropia” http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_metropia/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_metropia/#comments Mon, 03 May 2010 19:03:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/05/03/tff_metropia A mumbling, dystopian dream-state animated film largely set within a vast subway system that links all of Europe's major cities, circa 2024, Swedish director Tarik Saleh's "Metropia" feels like a mash-up of scenes, ideas and metaphors from all over the sci-fi universe. It's a little bit "Matrix," a little bit "Blade Runner," a little bit "Robocop," a little bit, I don't know, "Soylent Green." Except in this case the green stuff is shampoo, a ubiquitious dandruff remedy that, as everyguy protagonist Roger (voiced by Vincent Gallo), gradually learns, is also the vector for some kind of corporate mind-control experiment.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_metropia/feed/ 0 Best of Tribeca: “The Lottery” http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_lottery/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_lottery/#comments Mon, 03 May 2010 16:59:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/05/03/tff_lottery Charter schools have become flavor of the month among advocates of educational reform, and while it doesn't provide a comprehensive overview of the issue, Madeleine Sackler's documentary "The Lottery" explains much of their appeal and should spark vigorous debate. Focusing on the heart-rending stories of four tough-luck families who enter the admissions lottery for Manhattan's Harlem Success Academy -- perhaps the nation's most famous charter school -- "The Lottery" pretty well demolishes the argument that charters are an elitist tool used to gentrify inner-city neighborhoods. Figuring out exactly why rigorously structured charters like HSA outperform ordinary zoned schools in Harlem and elsewhere (and they don't always) is more complicated.

Some public school defenders will come out of "The Lottery" spitting mad, and they'll have a point. It depicts HSA's controversial founder Eva Moskowitz (now a New York councilwoman) as a hero, and paints local elected Democrats and teachers' union officials in an exceedingly unflattering light. Furthermore, the film never addresses some obvious questions: Aren't the parents who get their act together to apply to charter schools a self-selected, achievement-oriented group whose children are likely to do better wherever they go to school?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_lottery/feed/ 13 Best of Tribeca: “Sons of Perdition” http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_perdition/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_perdition/#comments Mon, 03 May 2010 14:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/05/03/tff_perdition What could have been a piece of oddball, marginal Americana -- the boys and men ejected by a breakaway Mormon polygamist sect -- instead becomes a moving, thrilling yarn of heartland life and masculinity. "Sons of Perdition" may be a small film in terms of its focus and resources, but its emotional impact and cultural significance are enormous. This wasn't just the best documentary I saw at Tribeca but the best one I've seen so far this year. (I'm not dissing Banksy's "Exit Through the Gift Shop," by the way; that belongs in its own category.)

For obvious reasons, a polygamous society needs lots and lots of females and far fewer males, and Warren Jeffs' Fundamental Latter-day Saints sect in Colorado City, Ariz. (known to its inhabitants as "the Crick"), is no exception. Over the years, hundreds if not thousands of boys and men have left Colorado City (or been told to leave) and descended on nearby St. George, Utah, with nowhere to stay, no education, no birth certificate and little or no understanding of the world outside Jeffs' self-appointed community of salvation. In many cases, they've never played a video game or watched a DVD, and haven't heard of Barack Obama or Adolf Hitler.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_perdition/feed/ 2 Best of Tribeca: “Gainsbourg, Je t’Aime” http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_gainsbourg/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_gainsbourg/#comments Mon, 03 May 2010 11:03:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/05/03/tff_gainsbourg Ugly, insecure and prodigiously talented at both making music and seducing women, French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg was a unique figure in 20th-century pop culture, a Parisian blend of Woody Allen, Sinatra and Jack Kerouac. Unforgettably played by Eric Elmosnino (and also by an enormous puppet who follows Elmosnino around) in this weird but tremendously fun biopic, Gainsbourg is a man of tremendous contradictions. He became the lover of pop stars and movie stars -- including Brigitte Bardot, Juliette Gréco and his wife, Jane Birkin (their daughter is actress Charlotte Gainsbourg) -- but could never shake the troubling after-effects of having been a Jewish kid in Nazi-occupied Paris.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/tff_gainsbourg/feed/ 2 Colin Farrell’s fairy tale ending http://www.salon.com/2010/05/02/farrell_jordan/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/02/farrell_jordan/#comments Sun, 02 May 2010 18:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/05/02/farrell_jordan Colin Farrell speaks in an Irish accent in the new film "Ondine," all right -- but it isn't his Irish accent. As part of what looks to be his ongoing mid-career self-renovation project, Farrell plays a divorced County Cork fisherman in writer-director Neil Jordan's new movie. This character, a recovering alcoholic named Syracuse (or Circus, to the local wags), speaks in the lilting, almost musical tones of Ireland's southwestern coast, an accent as distant from Farrell's native Dublin as New Orleans is from Boston.

When I suggest to Farrell that playing a Corkman might have been nearly as challenging as playing a Texan, as he did in his breakthrough American role in the 2000 film "Tigerland," he responds: "Probably more so. Dublin speech is closer, dialectically, to Texas than it is to Cork. And I grew up watching American films and programs on television."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/02/farrell_jordan/feed/ 11 The art of making “vagina movies” http://www.salon.com/2010/04/29/holofcener_2/ http://www.salon.com/2010/04/29/holofcener_2/#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:55:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/04/29/holofcener Nicole Holofcener's prickly new comedy "Please Give" opens with a montage of breasts. Serious breasts. Breasts, breasts, breasts. It's way more breasts than you're likely to see in a porn film, and to dramatically different effect. Old, young, large, small, conforming to conventional beauty standards or not. One of Holofcener's central quintet of characters, an awkward New York single woman named Rebecca (played by the English actress Rebecca Hall) works as a mammogram technician, which provides an ostensible reason for the panoply of flesh. But I think it's meant to be confrontational on a number of different levels.

Although I think Holofcener is among the finest dramatists working in American movies -- a crafter of comedies that get under your skin, after the fashion of Chekhov or Bergman or Eric Rohmer or mid-career Woody Allen -- she has the reputation of an upscale chick-flick director, a creator of "vagina movies" (in her phrase). This goes back to her 1996 debut feature "Walking and Talking" and its 2001 follow-up "Lovely & Amazing," both of which did indeed focus on female relationships. So the mammography montage is a double-edged metaphor. On one hand, it's shoving some female-centric cinema right in your face. On the other, it suggests a spirit of ruthless, uncomfortable, naked examination. (Never having had a mammogram, I have to go on reports that it isn't a pleasant experience.)

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