Over the next six days I’m down for at least nine films at the Los Angeles Film Festival, including Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies (which showed to a crowd last night in Manhattan) next Tuesday evening, Cyrus Nowrasteh‘s Iran-set The Stoning of Soraya M., Davis Guggenheim‘s It Might Get Loud and Robert Siegel‘s Big Fan.
The day before Public Enemies there’s a Hurt Locker all-media, which I’ll be attending for reasons of pure enjoyment (jolt cola cinema gets me every time) and because I want a friend to see it.
Nobody I’ve spoken to has seen or heard much about Michele Mulroney and Kieran Mulroney‘s Paper Man, the opening-nighter that starts at 7:30 pm (i.e., twelve hours from now). Costarring Jeff Daniels, Ryan Reynolds, Emma Stone, Kieran Culkin, Hunter Parrish and Lisa Kudrow, and described as a coming-of-middle-age story concerning Daniel’s character, a married writer who nurtures a suoperhero fantasy. “Coming” of middle age? Daniels, no offense, is well into that.
I’ve missed opportunity after opportunity to catch screenings of the The Stoning of Soraya M. (Mpower, 6.26) in Manhattan. But it’ll be showing here on Saturday so I’ve caught a break.
I’m vaguely interested in catching the world premiere of Brent Meeske‘s Branson, a doc about aspiring country-music performers. The challenge, of course, will be to suppress my feelings about red-staters. I respect the social verite inspirations behind country music, but so much of it is about breakups and broken hearts, boredom and booze, ignorance and rodeos and so on. Robert Altman‘s Nashville didn’t present this problem because he made roundabout fun of the country music scene and the locals through it.
There’s also Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s October Country, a doc about blue-collar angst in upper New York State’s Mohawk Valley.