This past weekend Director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max Landis (son of filmmaker John Landis), put a fresh, invigorating spin on the superhero origin story, with Chronicle (read my review). The son of the legendary director has a few screenplays in various stages of production and if they are as good as Chronicle, Sam Landis has a very bright future ahead (listen to our review from episode 307 of the Sound On Sight podcast).

Before Chronicle, Landis created another superhero related film of sorts. Recently his short film The Death and Return of Superman spread like wildfire across the internet when discovered on YouTube. Described as “an educational parody,” the short tells the literal, insider version what happened in 1992 when DC Comics decided to kill, and then quickly resurrect, Superman. The 1992 comic book storyline completed a multi-issue story arc in which Superman engages in battle with a seemingly unstoppable killing machine named Doomsday. The storyline met with enormous success and the Superman titles gained international exposure, reaching to the top of the comics sales charts and selling out overnight.

Check out the the short below which just so happen to feature an all-star cast including Elijah Wood, Mandy Moore, Ron Howard, Chris Hardwick, Simon Pegg and more.

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Via /Film

Hajducy Kapitana Angela – original Polish film poster

Designer: Mieczyslaw Wasilewski

Chlopiec Z Burzy (Storm Boy) – original Polish film poster

Designer: Eryk Lipinski

Motodrama – original Polish film poster

Designer: Jakub Erol

Siedem Piegow – original Polish film poster

Szal

Designer: Jan Mlodozeniec

Gehenna – original Polish film poster

Designer: Erol Jakub

Na Torze Czeka Morderca – original Polish film poster

Ludzie Przeciwko Sobie – original Polish film poster

Designer: Maciej Hibner

Chuck Review, Season 5, Episode 13, “Chuck Versus the Goodbye”
Written by Chris Fedak
Directed by Robert Duncan McNeill
Airs Fridays at 8pm (ET) on NBC

After five seasons and 90 episodes, Chuck has finally reached its closing act, and the show’s primary relationship is still up in the air. Chuck Bartowski and Sarah Walker have encountered many ups and downs over the years, and their ultimate happiness is well-deserved. It’s too bad that it’s not that simple. Sarah’s still trying to recover her memories, which include the feelings that grew for Chuck. This emotional undercurrent of her search drives the finale, even when their last mission (the third one!) gets rolling. Chuck convinces Sarah to let him tag along with her to find the evil Nicolas Quinn (Angus Macfayden), but her approach is cold and clinical. A happy ending should be inevitable for the couple, but the spy world again interferes to keep them apart.

Before discussing the end, there are plenty of other great moments to spotlight while the entire team tries to stop Quinn. With Morgan helping out from the van, Chuck and Sarah track Quinn’s attempts to buy “The Key” to unlocking the Intersect. It’s a wonderful touch to have the duo keep arriving at locations that hearken back to their early seasons. A Mexican restaurant resembles the site of their first date, and they even arrive at a German franchise of Wienerlicious, where Sarah first worked in California. Chuck’s reactions to all these coincidences are priceless, and Zachary Levi plays the comedy just right. The clever move of having Sarah rearrange the cups at the Wienerlicious is also a nice touch. The stakes for this mission are extremely high, but it still gives Chuck and Sarah an opportunity to relive their romance.

Co-creator Chris Fedak’s script provides a clear reminder of why fans have adored Chuck during the past five years. All the main characters get their moment to shine, and past baddies like the Ring and Fulcrum even get a mention. The showdown with Quinn culminates at a concert hall, which sets up one of the episode’s most inspired comic moments. One word: Jeffster. Their performance of “Take on Me” saves the day and works so well because the band hadn’t appeared much lately. Involving Jeff and Lester has felt like a stretch at times, but Scott Krinsky and Vik Sahay shine during their last time on stage. It’s a ridiculous moment but again reveals the goofball charm that’s driven the show since the beginning.

Another callback to the first season is Chuck’s bumbling attempts to help the real spies catch the bad guy. This different Sarah doesn’t respect his abilities, especially when he refuses to fire his weapon. While trying to do the right thing, Chuck ends up stalling the mission in the grandest fashion imaginable. Beyond the comedy, this scene gives Levi another great opportunity to show his emotional range. Each subsequent example slowly wears down Sarah’s defenses, which feels like a sped-up version of the opening year. Yvonne Strahovski has the tricky role of reverting back to a nearly emotionless Sarah, and she never hits a wrong note. Her character hasn’t received as much to do this season, but the past few episodes have gone a long way to fixing that issue. They remind us that Chuck is truly about Chuck AND Sarah (plus Casey, Morgan, Ellie, and the others), and her final destination is just as important.

The final 10 minutes of “Chuck Versus the Goodbye” send off each character on just the right note. Ellie and Awesome are off to Chicago with Clara, and even Linda Hamilton’s Mary Bartowski gets one last appearance. Morgan and Alex are taking the next step and moving in together, and Jeffster is poised for stardom in Germany. Even the long-running endorser Subway gets one last plug from Big Mike as they’re set to purchase the Buy More. The emotional impact of each final scene shows how lovably effective this entire group has been during the five-year run. Adam Baldwin is so good as Casey, and leaving him will be just as tough as Chuck and Sarah. Fedak and co-creator Josh Schwartz realize that the characters drive this show, and the devoted fans deserve one last exit for each one.

This brings us to the final scene on the beach, where Chuck tells Sarah the story of the entire series. Played over a tear-inducing montage, this sequence offers the perfect reminder of the great times from the past five seasons. Viewing the series as one big story told by Chuck to his lost love is a stroke of genius. It’s possible some fans won’t enjoy the slightly ambiguous ending, which fails to reveal if Sarah regains her memories. This doesn’t really matter in the end. Having Sarah utter the final lines “Chuck? Kiss me” and pulling away from their moment is just perfect. Regardless of whether Sarah remembers the past or starts over, this couple has found happiness. It’s a surprising move to leave it open-ended, but it works much better than a more obvious ending. The emotions are just right and wonderfully send Chuck and Sarah into a bright future.

Dan Heaton

Switching Worlds

Courtesy of the YoungCuts Film Festival

www.YoungCuts.com

What’s It Called?  Switching Worlds

Who Made It?  Written and Directed by Francesca Abbondanza-Bergeron

Where Is It From?   Canada (Quebec)

How Old Is the Director?  19

Who Is the Director?  Francesca Abbondanza-Bergeron is a new filmmaker and scriptwriter. She just graduated from John Abbott College’s Creative Arts, Literature and Languages (Media Arts) program. Interested in using her films to question the boundaries between reality and fiction, she explores the human’s understanding of his own imagination. Her latest film, Switching Worlds, follows the story of a young man obsessed with women depicted in mangas and animes (Japanese cartoons). However, he gets more than he bargains for when one of his own sketches comes to life. Recently, Abbondanza-Bergeron has worked as an assistant editor for the making of Parabola Films’ À St-Henri, le 26 août. She will be pursuing her studies in the field at Concordia University next Fall.

What Is It?  Live Action with Animation

How Long Is It?  4:59

What Is It About? A young otaku gets more than he bargained for when one of his sketches comes to life.

When Did YoungCuts Play It?  2011

Why Did YoungCuts Play It? YoungCuts started in 2001 as the Toronto International Teen Film Festival and while we changed our name and expanded our age limits to 25 and under in 2005, we have kept a place for teen filmmakers in our Festival.

It is sometimes a little bit harder to find a gem amongst the pile of Teen films, but when you do find one like Switching Worlds…

WOW!

The best teen filmmakers have absolutely no fear and accomplish the impossible because no one told them that it couldn’t be done.

Take Francesca. Her story combines animation with live action with deceptive ease. Her story is told with economy and grace.

Our only minor quibble is evidence of her skill: the entire film has maybe five words of dialogue. Francesca came within an unnecessary sentence from telling her story purely visually.

And from what we can tell, most of the work was completed before she turned 19. No one tell her that she is not supposed to be this good this young.

What Awards Did It Win?  Top 100 Short Films YoungCuts Film Festival

YoungCuts Statement  As a quick follow-up, we should maybe explain how we ended up finding Switching Worlds. The Festival Director Michael Ryan was invited to lead a discussion about Best Practices for Festival Submissions during the Concordia Film Festival on the Thursday afternoon that the festival started. This lead to an invitation to take part in a panel early that Saturday morning during the festival about the future of short film. One of the other panellists was Daniel Schorr who teaches animation at CEGEP John Abbott. He invited Michael to attend their end-of-year screening that was taking place at Cinema du Parc that Sunday evening.

We mention this as a tip to student filmmakers and their teachers. If you are doing an end-of-year screening, invite film festivals like ours to come. If we can send someone to watch the films we will. And we will frequently tell young filmmakers on the spot what films we are interested in (and sometimes what films need more work.)

It does help to give us more than 24 hours notice though!

You can watch more videos HERE!

If you are a young filmmaker and would like to submit your short film to the 2012 YoungCuts Film Festival, HERE’S HOW!

Video of the day is brought to you in part by Canadian Heritage.

Cries and Whispers

Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Sweden, 1972

The inanity of Bergman’s canonisation has always baffled me: I have tended to endure his films as a bitter medicine – worthwhile but unenjoyable, classics that everybody wants to have watched but nobody wants to watch. Subjecting myself to Cries and Whispers on the merit of Bergman’s reputation (a reputation which must have originated from a claque of obsequious film critics and scholars who probably jumped on some incomprehensible-European-language-arthouse-must-be-praiseworthy-though-unwatchably-tedious bandwagon) with no background knowledge of the film, cemented my hitherto opinion of his oeuvre.

Multi-award nominated Cries and Whispers is a stolid, stodgy tableau of three upper-class, turn-of-the-nineteenth-century sisters in their family mansion. These strikingly winsome aristocratic Scandinavian beauties (most of the cast are part of Bergman’s habitual posse with two of the priapic director’s mistresses, Harriet Andersson and Liv Ullmann, as well as best pal Erland Josephson keeping things in the family) toy with various would-be dark and stifled ‘emotions’, existential and physiological pains, inasmuch as their desiccated Nordic disposition allows for the expression of a histrionic, fitful sensibility which is as close as the characters get to feeling.

One of the sisters, Agnes (Harriet Andersson) has terminal-stage cancer and the other two, Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin) have come to the mansion to ‘assist’ her in her final earthly moments. Instead of sisterly bonding, however, the gruesome agony of Agnes’s disease seems to suffuse them with disgust, uncorking tawdry sibling rivalry, old hatreds and various aristocratic-life traumatisms (unloving husbands and lovers, sibling indifference) all interspersed with some stale, vapid woman-on-woman kissing (hard to tell what went on in Bergman’s head directing his mistresses frolicking about, but apparently he was coming out of a painful romantic breakup…) The most ‘torrid’ scenes are between the martyred Agnes and her self-abnegating maid, Anna, whose analgesic methods include proffering the patient mouth-on-mouth kisses and a bare, udder-like, wet-nurse-kind of bosom.

All this to signify the motherly figure of the maid, a stout, low-class servant providing Agnes with the one real tenderness, while her trim, squeamish, self-absorbed sisters sort out their various psychologically complex, aristocracy-becoming issues (apparently marriages were mostly loveless in nineteenth-century Sweden…) The ‘mother’ issues hark back to Agnes’ adulation of her distant, cold, disarmingly beautiful mother, the antithesis of the homely Anna, a mother who apparently favoured the prettier Maria while neglecting Agnes. Whether or not this sibling predilection was actual or imagined by Agnes, the present-day result is the symbiotic relationship between patient and maid (who as it happens has lost her own daughter).

The bond between Agnes and Anna is not the sole instance of repulsive physicality (Agnes: “Do I smell very bad?”, Anna unbuttoning her bosom: “No”), a deformed proximity which accords with the stultified emotional register of the film: the histrionic dialogues are occasionally interspersed with animal-like howls; the camera lingers purposely over a perturbing kiss between the two surviving sisters who otherwise detest each other; the elder one resorts to genital self-mutilation presumably to ward off her husband’s advances, who in keeping with the rest of the secondary male characters is a sordid caricature of a man (his idea of a ‘tolerable funeral’ is no one weeping or growing hysterical). Ironically, the most endearing male part may be that of the glazed, buttoned-up, puritan-oozing Lutheran minister who delivers the supposedly profound but impassive last rite to Agnes.

A lot of the praise heaped on this film, as well as the cinematography Oscar, has gone to the use of colour and art direction. Indeed, the mise en scene relies heavily on a mosaic of red (blood), white (innocence) and black (mourning), conferring to the film a stagey, heavily artificial texture. Why the preponderance of red? Apparently, when Bergman was a child he imagined the human soul was red. Groundbreaking? If the biggest artistic innovation of Cries and Whispers is the saturated colour palette, then not much would be left on stripping off the colours but beautiful actresses wearing impenetrable, icily Scandinavian masks. Insofar as watching Cries and Whispers was a torturous, painfully endured viewing process, I empathised with Agnes’s deathbed agonies. I am not sure if that is the kind of empathy Bergman had in mind.

The DVD includes an interview with the two aging patriarchs, an arrogant Bergman in his eighties and his faithful wingman Josephson in his late seventies, from which we learn that the director was once fined for threatening a film critic who ‘pursued’ him for a long time in a Swedish newspaper. I think I know whose side I’d be on.

Zornitsa Staneva

A trailer for the independently-produced, feature-length zombie film, Osombie: The Axis of Evil Dead has been released, and as expected,  its packed with violence, mayhem, guns, blood and a ton of zombies. The low-budget thriller sees Osama Bin Laden coming back in zombie form, as a team of NATO Special Forces head out to stop him from kicking off a zombie apocalypse. Osombie is currently in post-production while the team seeks out additional funding to finish the sound and music. If you’d like to help, drop by Kickstarter and donate to the project. Of the $15,000 funding goal they have so far raised over $6000.

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Synopsis:

The story follows Dusty, a yoga instructor from Colorado, who is on a desperate rescue mission to save her crazy brother Derek, a conspiracy theorist who is convinced Osama Bin Laden is still alive, despite having been buried at sea. In Afghanistan, Dusty falls in with a team of NATO Special Forces on a secret assignment. Turns out Derek is not so crazy after all, and that Osama has returned from his watery grave and is making an army of zombie terrorists. When the group crashes headlong into the growing zombie apocalypse, Dusty and the troops must find and destroy the root of the zombie insurgency before it infests the rest of the world.

Frick Weber is back with another episode of Comic Book Storytellers, this time with tips and tricks from the PROs at Marvel, DC, and IDW. Interviews include, Mark Waid, Humberto Ramos, Jo Chen, Mike Mckone, Robert Atkins, Michael Golden, J G Jones, just to name a few. Comic Book Storytellers is presented by CLOUD9COMIX.com. Enjoy!

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Following last night’s sneak peek footage of The Amazing Spider-Man, a new trailer has now gone online playing up Spidey’s humour and wise-cracking antics – while teasing us with glimpses of the Lizard. Marc Webb says he’s interested in going for something different than that of Sam Raimi’s style, only the trailer says the opposite. I am still not quite sure why the film boasts the tagline line, “The Untold Story”, since we’ve already seen four Spidey movies; three directed by Raimi, and one God-awful mess from the 80′s. The new trailer fleshes out the character of Peter Parker a little, touching on his daddy issues, and shows the great chemistry between Andrew Garfied and Emma Stone. See for yourself.

Via Youtube

The film, which is now in production and is being shot entirely in 3D, will be released on July 3, 2012. The film stars Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Denis Leary, Martin Sheen, and Sally Field. The film is directed by Marc Webb from a screenplay by James Vanderbilt and Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves based on the Marvel Comic Book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Laura Ziskin, Avi Arad, and Matt Tolmach are producing the Marvel Entertainment production for Columbia Pictures.

For the inaugural episode of Sketchy, we discuss The Iron Giant. Directed by Brad Bird, the 1999 film follows the relationship between a boy and an alien robot that crash lands into the coast of his hometown in Maine. Hosts Ryan Clagg, Matt Newcomb and Richard Thornton review the film and get sidetracked as they remember stories surrounding the details of the film. Enjoy!

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If you have any interesting items that you think we should plug, please email us at admin@soundonsight.org

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Noam Murro directed quite a few Super Bowl ads including the Pepsi “King’s Court” spot which featured X Factor 2011 winner Melanie Amaro and Elton John, as well as the Chevy Sonic “Stunt Anthem” as and the Kia “A Dream Car. For Real Life” commercial.



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Finally, Murro also directed the Chevy Silverado “End of the World” spot.

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This is amazing – A London-based film PR company recently held a screening of Lady And The Tramp for dogs, to celebrate the release of the Blu-ray.

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Here is an awesome THX 1138 poster by Martin Ansin

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Craig Gillespie, director of Lars and the Real Girl directed the Acura “Transactions” spot featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno.

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Mondo recently designed a poster for Ben Wheatley’s Kill List

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Chris Smith, director of the documentaries American Movie, Home Movie, The Yes Men and Collapse, directed H-E-B’s “Alien” spot:

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Amazing poster art for Fargo by Rich Fox

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One of my favorite cinematographers Lance Acord who worked on such films as Buffalo ’66, Being John Malkovich, Lost in Translation and Where the Wild Things Are, directed the Volkswagen’s ad titled “The Dog Strikes Back”

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Hereis a funky poster for #Drive by Russell Ford

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And finally here is my favorite fan-made poster of the week for The Help. Enjoy!

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If you have any interesting items that you think we should plug, please email us at admin@soundonsight.org

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Here’s a great poster for The Great Escape by artist Maxime Chilleml

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Check out this beautiful Alien poster by Midnight Marauder

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Here is the Super Bowl ad for Samsung Mobile by director Bobby Farrelly, who co-director Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Marry

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These new images of The Amazing #Spiderman might just be the most lame promotional stills for any comic book movie yet.

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Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit Posters by Jamesy Design

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Todd Phillips (Old School, The Hangover) directed Honda CR-V’s “Matthew’s Day Off” spot featuring Matthew Broderick rehashing is mos famous role from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

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Here is a poster for Drive by artist Ken Taylor

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Chuck Review, Season 5, Episode 12, “Chuck Versus Sarah”
Written by Rafe Jenkins and Lauren LeFranc
Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar
Airs Fridays at 8pm (ET) on NBC

As Chuck’s final season nears its conclusion, it’s been difficult not to compare the latest episodes with the wonderful highlights from earlier seasons. So much of the show’s success related to the burgeoning relationship between Chuck Bartowski and Sarah Walker. Their connection built an emotional core that combined perfectly with the silliness of the spy missions. There have been some great moments this season, but they felt a bit hollow because the characters were too static. Many of the conflicts felt minor compared to the hurdles overcome in previous stories. Chuck was still dealing with bad guys focused on the Intersect, and there were plenty of entertaining scenes. The missing element was major stakes.

This missing piece arrived with the jarring end of “Chuck Versus the Bullet Train” when Nicolas Quinn (Angus MacFayden) forcibly removed Sarah’s memories of her entire time with Chuck. This cruel move was nastier than any physical damage that he could possibly inflict. Altering her mind and sending her after Chuck for his own ends makes Quinn a different type of villain. He’s become a worthy foe because he’ll do anything to obtain the Intersect, even if it means destroying everything that Chuck holds dear. “Chuck Versus Sarah” brings the emotional stakes to a stunning pitch for a generally light series. It pushes its hero to the emotional brink and doesn’t give him an easy way to save the day. Sarah remains damaged possibly beyond repair, and even Chuck’s best efforts to find her heart might not be enough.

Easily the best episode of the season to this point, this story involves all the central characters in finding a way to save Sarah before it’s too late. The first half effectively builds up the tension as Sarah returns home and works behind her husband’s back to further Quinn’s plans. It’s clear this is not the same person who fell for Chuck. Yvonne Strahovski wonderfully channels Sarah’s personality from the start of the first season. She takes action with little thought of the consequences and is all about the mission. This connection all the way back to the pilot is refreshing and has been missing from much of this season. Strahovksi deftly underplays the small changes that only Chuck would recognize because he knows her so well.

The episode’s second half works superbly because the danger is so much more than avoiding death or injury. When Sarah threatens to kill Ellie, it’s a striking moment because they’d become as close as sisters over the past few years. Sarah Lancaster gets an excellent chance to shine in these moments and doesn’t waste her opportunity. Ellie’s rash decision to crash the car and save her brother is shocking and believable at the same time. She’s willing to sacrifice her own safety (and Sarah’s) to ensure that Chuck survives. The effect of this choice is stronger because the audience has spent five seasons with these characters. Ellie loves Sarah but realizes this is not the same person she knew. These scenes would be the highlight of most episodes, but they’re just the start of a series of classic moments.

Zachary Levi and Yvonne Strahovski might seem like an oddly matched couple, but their chemistry has been present from the start and only grown over the years. Chuck and Sarah’s back-and-forth feelings about getting out of the spy life and having a family have been tedious at times, but the actors never missed a beat. Having Chuck take Sarah to their dream home to try and save her soul makes those earlier moments feel less trivial. His tear-filled reminders to Sarah about their big moments are wonderful, even as they fall on deaf ears. Along with its defining role for the characters, this conversation reminds the audience how much they loved Chuck and Sarah. Seeing their first kiss and her first use of “I love you” is a master stroke and made the room a bit dusty for this reviewer.

Placing these key moments in the penultimate episode is also an excellent choice. It clearly outlines the stakes before sending viewers into the final hour. Sarah is still looking to recover the life that Quinn stole from her, Casey is considering his next job, and Ellie and Awesome have a lucrative offer away from California. “Chuck Versus Sarah” sets up the last story perfectly and ranks among the show’s best episodes from its entire five-year run. It provides a special reward to fans who’ve stuck it out through the less stellar moments. After feeling resolved a few hours earlier, the story has plenty of steam left as it rolls towards the ultimate conclusion.

Dan Heaton

The twentieth year of Catherine Breillat’s directorial career marked a shift. While her thematic focus and bold vision remained true, her skills as a filmmaker and storyteller began showing strong signs of improvement beginning with 1996′s Perfect Love. It opens with a man explaining to the police how and why he killed his lover as well as her daughter’s account. Building toward such an extreme end, the actual story of the romance that the film flashes back to is surprisingly subtle. Too often this kind of disintegrating relationship story fails to build up the relationship and make you invest in it before tearing it down but on this note Perfect Love excels. Bonus points for excellent use of phallic symbolism.

Four of Breillat’s next five films share bonds that demand a break from a chronological structure. 1999′s Romance and 2004′s Anatomy of Hell share the presence of Italian porn actor Rocco Siffredi and an episodic and rather removed exploration of sexuality. In Romance, Caroline Ducey plays Marie, a character that seems to represent the Madonna-Whore complex. On one hand, her husband refuses to be intimate with her, promoting a certain purity, on the other hand she seeks out sexual fulfillment from others in a symbolic quest to discover her orgasm. A line is drawn between sexual fulfillment and emotional connection. There’s also an interesting conflict within Marie whether to find male objectification of her loathsome or thrilling. As a whole it is still a bit messy but the thematic concepts are certainly intriguing.

Much more successful is Anatomy of Hell. It takes aim at all those messy things about women’s bodies from body hair to periods, that society tries to keep quiet or battle against, lest men be discomforted from their ideas of the virginal (adolescent) purity and ownership of women. In this way it makes a rather interesting adult sex education video, operating at a level of frankness that is usually avoided. The film has been accused of homophobia with its vague implication that homosexuality is the result of male revulsion with the female body but having the male character be gay plays an important role in removing sexual desire from the interaction between the two characters. On a purely intellectual level, this may be Breillat’s greatest success.

Breillat’s most acclaimed film is probably 2001′s Fat Girl. Fat Girl follows two sisters as they hit different points in their sexual awakening. Elena is nearly 16 and is beautiful while Anais, 12, as the title indicates, is fat. The contrast between their approaches toward relationships is captivating. Elena, by virtue of her beauty, takes an idealistic view of waiting for someone special to have sex with while Anais is eager to just get it over with. Yet Anais is idealistic in her own way, arguing that sexual experience should be seen as a virtue in a woman and not a vice. The film also captures some interesting aspects of women as rivals. The way the sisters interact and the way a male character plays on female rivalry to get what he wants is incredibly incisive. Anais Reboux and Roxane Mesquida deliver excellent performances as the sisters but the film is burdened by a terribly out of tone ending that derails an otherwise splendid film.

2002′s Sex Is Comedy calls back to Fat Girl by having Roxane Mesquida play an actress in a film with a few scenes that are drawn almost directly from Fat Girl. Vaguely autobiographical, the actress cast as the director within the film, Anne Parillaud, actually has some basic resemblance to Breillat. The film explores how the director interacts with the lead actors as well as the crew in order to get the film done. As an insight into the filmmaking process it is engaging, but being a Breillat film, there’s a strong gender component. You see how she has to interact very differently with the actor and the actress. You see the various issues that come up in trying to get these two individuals who don’t particularly like each other to create intimate moments on camera. Most dramatically, you see how the type of raw sex scene that Breillat’s films often include comes together. A great film for anyone who is interested in how films are made, Sex Is Comedy is probably Breillat’s most complete film.

Erik Bondurant