Helen Mirren, Anne-Marie Duff, Paul Giamatti in The Last Station
AFI FEST 2009, Sat., Nov. 7 at the Santa Monica Laemmle Theater 4 on 2nd Street in Santa Monica.
AFI FEST 2009 comes to a close with the following screenings:
- Michael Hoffman's The Last Station, which is set near the end of Leo Tolstoy's life, has been getting lots of Oscar buzz for its stars: James McAvoy as Tolstoy's assistant; Helen Mirren as Tolstoy's wife; and Christopher Plummer as the verbose author of the never-ending War and Peace.
- Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash's Sweetgrass offers a look at sheepherding in Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth mountain range. Apart from the sheep and the high peaks, there's no connection to Brokeback Mountain.
- Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar's stop-motion A Town Called Panic features the three stars of a popular Belgian TV show: Cowboy, Indian, and Horse.
- After.Life sounds pretty interesting, what with Liam Neeson in a Vincent Priceish role as an undertaker who claims he can talk to the dead. Christina Ricci and Justin Long aren't quite sure if they should believe him. Agnieska Wojtowicz-Vosloo directed.
Schedule and synopsis below from the AFI FEST website:
A Town Called Panic – 11:00 a.m.
This wacky, wonderful, and thoroughly absurdist feature-length film continues the misadventures of Cowboy, Indian and Horse, stars of Belgium’s cult favorite TV show of the same title. The three stop-motion heroes have their regular bouts of personal drama (done with hilarious effect by the talented voices of the show and film’s creators, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar), but these petty skirmishes and debacles are ratcheted up a notch for the big screen with the accidental purchasing by Indian of 50 million bricks. A few fumbles later, Horse’s house is destroyed and must be rebuilt. This proves no easy task, especially after a gang of mischievous, underage water monsters get involved! Amidst all the silliness, it’s impossible not to notice that A TOWN CALLED PANIC revolves around an impressively inventive plot. Deftly, beautifully animated, the film achieves a rare thing: humor wildly appealing to audiences of all ages. –Beth Hanna
Sweetgrass – 1:00 p.m.
Stunning in its cinematic and observational power, SWEETGRASS is a new kind of pastoral, a visual poem of cultural and historical shifts. Lucien Castaing-Taylor, who teaches at Harvard’s Visual Anthropology department, and Ilisa Barbash, of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, describe themselves as “recordists” rather than filmmakers as they capture a family and their animals in their final season herding sheep in Montana’s spectacular Absaroka-Beartooth mountain range. The herders work like cowboys out of the old West, but unlike cattle, sheep can be hilarious to watch. From the cockeyed sight of a massive sheep drive down a small town’s empty main drag to a herder pouring his heart out on a cell phone at the top of a monumental vista, Castaing-Taylor and Barbash sharpen their sense of humor as well as their all-embracing lens to create an unforgettable cinematic experience. –Robert Koehler
The Last Station – 3:00 p.m.
In this thrilling comic-dramatic account of Leo Tolstoy’s final months, our Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer, in a magnificent performance) has renounced writing fiction, built a school for peasants and started a movement whose guiding principles are pacifism, sexual chastity and the abolishment of private property. His new secretary (James McAvoy) becomes the comic man-in-the-middle between two formidable opponents scheming for control of the authors manuscripts and money: the rigid Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) who wants to spread Tolstoyan doctrines around the world and Sofya (Helen Mirren), Tolstoy’s wife of 48 years and the mother of his 13 children, who proves her dedication by copying War and Peace six times… by hand. -Larry Gross
After.Life – 5:00 p.m.
When are the dead in fact dead? In its pleasure at simultaneously embracing and sending up horror genre conventions, AFTER.LIFE suggests that the line between the living and the dead is thin indeed. Christina Ricci and Justin Long (fast earning a reputation as the busiest man in American movies) play a sophisticated couple on the emotional razor’s edge: Paul wants to tie the knot, while Anna is hardly ready for the leap. What neither count on is the sudden presence in their lives of Liam Neeson’s undertaker, Eliot, who claims to have a gift of talking with the dead. The truth of the matter is something that first-time feature director Agnieska Wojtowicz-Vosloo—fresh off her acclaimed short, PATE—enjoys toying with. But the most fun is watching Neeson discovering fresh variations on a ghoulish role of the kind that was once the province of Vincent Price. –Robert Koehler