Jurgen & Marcy's Independent Film Blog March 2006 Archive

Hard-boiled gumshoes, drug kingpins, dames in red dresses--but nobody is old enough to buy a drink. In first-time director Rian Johnson's thriller, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a teenage detective trying to ... Read More

Most film fans can't make it to Sundance. Usually, that's a bearable reality. Movies with stars and established directors get distribution anyway; they play in movie theaters soon enough. But ... Read More

For their anarcho-cubist concert film, the Beastie Boys handed 50 cameras to fans and let them loose inside Madison Square Garden. The hyperkinetic result is as groundbreaking as it is ... Read More

Sure, Peter Jackson's King Kong is the most talked-about release of the day. But if you want love and heartbreak that goes beyond the mind of a big ape, don't ... Read More

Casey Affleck, younger brother to Ben, shuffles. He's handsome in a low- key kind of way, portraying a quintessential dime-a-dozen slacker in Steve Buscemi's third feature Lonesome Jim. The wonderful ... Read More

"Do you know where these beads come from?" filmmaker David Redmon asks drunken Bourbon Street revellers. Somehow, they're all too wasted to give him the obvious answer: they're made in ... Read More

The death of Brian Jones "by misadventure" in the summer of 1969, drowned in his swimming pool, was one of the first major rock n' roll casualties. In his directorial ... Read More

In 1924, years before Metropolis and M, director Fritz Lang created a silent epic based on the quintessential German legend: Die Nibelungen, the ancient folk tale of heroism and revenge ... Read More

Aki Kaurismaki, last seen directing The Man Without a Past, is about to ... Read More

Hany Abu-Assad's controversial, Oscar-nominated drama Paradise Now is an eye-opening exploration of the minds and hearts of two aimable slackers who turn into suicide bombers. The film is out this ... Read More

An aging loner sets out to make contact with the lost women in his life and discovers children he knew nothing about. Sounds like Broken Flowers? Well, no. In their ... Read More

"Michael Jordan plays ball. Charlie Mason kills people. I talk." Meet Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), the top spokesperson for the tobacco industry and questionable hero of Jason Reitman's adaptation of ... Read More

Burdened with a craft that's essentially uncinematic, writers in the movies are perennially blocked, broke, and insane, simultaneously romanticized and ridiculed for their excesses--from the wise-cracking drunks of Mrs. Parker ... Read More

George Clooney is riding high: an Academy Award for his performance in Syriana, exuberant pride in being a liberal, and the well-timed DVD release of his Oscar-nominated film Good Night, ... Read More

"It is nothing less than a generation-defining event.... It is this era’s 2001: A Space Odyssey." Even as the second, shorter cut of Terrence Malick's Pocahontas epic is slinking out ... Read More

Fernando Eimcke's debut film about fourteen-year-old best friends Flamo and Moko on a Sunday afternoon has an inviting, universal quality. Produced by Alfonso Cuaron, the suprisingly rich story has been ... Read More

This week's top DVDs releases include two from the master of anime Hayao Miyazaki: the Oscar-nominated Howl's Moving Castle and a two-disc rerelease of one of his greatest films, My ... Read More

The South African gangster drama Tsotsi won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film at the 78th Academy Awards tonight. The award is well-deserved, but we're disappointed with the ... Read More

Israeli parents who have lost children to suicide bombings have petitioned the Academy to drop the film Paradise Now from Sunday's awards competition. Hany Abu-Assad's drama, nominated for Best Foreign ... Read More