News from IFC

4 articles

27 August 2008 11:00 AM, PDT

By Aaron Hillis

38-year-old New York actor Ken Leung ("Rush Hour," "Saw," "The Squid and the Whale") may have only gigged on a single episode of "The Sopranos" (as Junior Soprano's violent protégé in a psychiatric hospital), but it was enough to inspire producers to write him into another TV pop phenomenon, "Lost." As brooding spiritualist Miles Straume, one of the elusive strangers to parachute onto the island, Leung brings to the role both quiet menace and caustic wisecracks.

Leung can also be seen in writer/director David Kaplan's rotoscope-animated indie "Year of the Fish," a contemporary retelling of the Cinderella fairytale set in a seedy massage parlor and the streets of Chinatown. Leung costars as Johnny, an accordion player who may also be the Prince Charming to disillusioned immigrant Ye Xian (An Nguyen). Notoriously shy, Leung graciously offered up a phone interview from Hawaii while preparing to shoot

Aaron Hillis

26 August 2008 6:40 AM, PDT

By Michael Atkinson

The new Chinese documentary "Please Vote for Me" (2007) has an irresistible arc: take a class of average middle class third-graders, give them the opportunity to vote for "class monitor;" tell the three candidates that they have to run campaigns, in order to net as many votes as they can; and let the political process run its course . that is, let it corrupt, humiliate and demoralize the children just as they were led to believe they were creating "democracy." Weijun Chen's film . which runs a mere 55 minutes . has an almost crystalline purity to its ironies. Three Wuhan children are "selected" by the teachers . two boys (one of whom is the incumbent monitor, and given to shoving his classmates around) and a girl, whose shy demeanor would seem to make her a dubious candidate. Right out of the gate, the campaigns become hilarious-yet-chilling mirror images of adult political

Michael Atkinson

25 August 2008 8:09 AM, PDT

By Neil Pedley

This week's new films include the Western going Eastern, a couple of exotic music docs, Cinderella stories for girls and for boys and Vin Diesel attempting to walk, chew gum and shoot people -- all at the same time.

"Babylon A.D."

Second chances all around in this stylish cyberpunk romp that sees "La Haine" director Mathieu Kassovitz take another bite at the mainstream cherry after stumbling with his last detour into Hollywood, the Halle Berry clunker "Gothika." Vin Diesel, who passed on "Hitman" for this, also gets another shot at a potential franchise after eliciting a collective yawn with his Neo-lite performance in "The Chronicles of Riddick." After a troubled shoot fraught with budget overruns and uncooperative weather, Diesel has the bigger challenge on his hands as Toorop, a mercenary charged with trying to save the world with a snowboard while escorting a genetically altered young woman

Neil Pedley

25 August 2008 8:06 AM, PDT

By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

In honor of the late critic Manny Farber's idea of termite art, and of the movie doldrums of late August, this week on the IFC News podcast we pay our respects to our favorite working leads in good-bad films. After all, great acting is one thing, but the ability to yell about getting revenge on the guy who killed your wife while flexing your abs and outrunning a fireball is quite another, and worthy of its own kind of appreciation.

Download now (MP3: 32:23 minutes, 29.6 Mb) Podcast feeds: [Xml] [iTunes]

[Photo: Jason Statham in "Death Race," Universal Pictures, 2008]

Alison Willmore

4 articles