Of Bouncing Cats and a lot of other fun stuff

There are many things that make the Atlanta Film Festival 365 a thoroughly fun experience, but its international offerings each year may be the very best one.

This year, the focus has been on Africa (with other movies from all around the world, too), and after the engrossing documentary "An African Election," I followed that up last night with "Bouncing Cats," a genuinely unique movie experience.

The flick's title comes from the words that Ugandan kids use to make a beat when they have no music to dance to (try it, "bouncing cats, bou-bouncing cats"), and it chronicles the work of Breakdance Project Uganda. And though it never shies away from depicting how tough life is in the war-torn country, it's truly uplifting to see the joy these kids get from simply dancing (and they're really good, too.)

The hero here is Abramz Tekya, who started the group and travels the country spreading his b-boy gospel. As the movie begins, he brings breakdancer extraordinaire Richard "Crazy Legs" Colon of the Rock Steady Crew to tour the country and teach the kids some new steps. Along the way, you meet several of them and hear their stories, and its often as moving as it is simply infectiously fun.

My only real beef was the sometimes blatant product placement (the movie was financed at least in part by Red Bull, something I've never had the need to try), but director Nabil Elderkin's movie nonetheless pulses with the beat that drives these kids (and as a plus, it also features great African music by K'naan, Amadou and Miriam, and others), and even manages to capture a few genuine moments of grace in a land that sorely needs some. Highly recommended if you can ever find this at a film festival or surely soon on DVD. Enjoy the trailer, and then stick around for what else caught my eye this morning in movie news.

Bouncing Cats Trailer from Bouncing Cats on Vimeo.

OK, now on to what I found on the interwebs this morning, starting with the fact that it's good to be either lucky or good, but best of all both. "The Hurt Locker" director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal had already been at work on a movie about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden before, well, we all know what happened last Sunday.

So, with that rather fortuitous development, they're of course going to change the ending, and Australian actor Joel Edgerton has just signed on to play one of the special ops soldiers who carried out the operation. The only downside to all this (well, there could be several, but let's just stay positive here), is what is apparently the working title: "Kill Bin Laden."

Really? Sheesh. I suppose "Slay the Bastard" must have been taken.

And in better news, as a fan of stop-motion animation and an even bigger one of Aardman's version of it, this news about the studio rising, quite literally, from the ashes is just all-around excellent.

The company's Bristol, England, main studio was destroyed by fire in 2005, but now, with help from Sony Pictures Animation, company co-founder Peter Lord (co-director of "Chicken Run," too) is going to direct a stop-motion flick titled "The Pirates! Band of Misfits," set for release in March 2012.

So, what's it about? Here goes, per Aardman.

Hugh Grant provides the voice of Pirate Captain – a boundlessly enthusiastic, if somewhat less-than-successful, terror of the High Seas. With a rag-tag crew at his side (Martin Freeman, Brendan Gleeson, Russell Tovey and Ashley Jensen), and seemingly blind to the impossible odds stacked against him, the Captain has one dream: to beat his bitter rivals Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven) and Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek) to the much coveted Pirate Of The Year Award. It’s a quest that takes our heroes from the shores of exotic Blood Island to the foggy streets of Victorian London. Along the way they battle a diabolical queen (Imelda Staunton) and team up with a haplessly smitten young scientist (David Tennant), but never lose sight of what a pirate loves best: adventure!

Sounds incredibly silly, but hopefully really fun, too, and any news about the studio that created Wallace and Gromit coming back to life in grand form is just nothing but great to hear.

OK, I had some more planned today, but I'm gonna try and catch "Thor" this morning (yes, it's great to be on vacation), so I'll just close with a couple of videos. First up comes a trailer of sorts for "X-Men: First Class" which shows us some more about Hank McCoy/Beast, being played by Nicholas Hoult of the UK "Skins" fame. And yes, it also features Jennifer Lawrence as Raven Darkholme/Mystique, and as anyone who's been here before knows, I never consider that a bad thing. Enjoy, and of course, keep an eye out for Matthew Vaughn's flick June 3.

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

And finally, in a definite case of saving the very best for last, this is the first trailer I know of for "The Trip," a new flick from Michael Winterbottom starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as, well, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon being, as usual, very funny. The movie, being released in at least a few theaters by IFC on June 10 and then quickly to VOD on June 22, pretty much just follows the two of them on a tour of posh eateries as they discuss their careers, impersonate just about every actor they can think of, and just generally just give each other a lot of good-natured hell. Sounds like exactly my kind of thing. Enjoy the trailer, keep an eye out for this if you can find it, and have a great weekend. Peace out..

Steven Soderbergh's porn movie? Well, not quite ...

Am I really the only person who saw the news footage of folks "tea-bagging" yesterday and just thought how much funnier - and about as equally effective - it would have been using the John Waters definition? Just saying.

And in that spirit, in movie news that's not nearly as salacious as some might be thinking, the first trailer for Steven Soderbergh's movie starring porn star Sasha Grey as a rather high-priced call girl - "The Girlfriend Experience" - has hit, and it looks like it has been made with the clinical detachment that has marked even his best flicks. (And if you want to see some of her work, well, this is the Internet, so I suppose that wouldn't be too hard to accomplish. Since this is a family-friendly site, I've simply included her picture.)

For me, his style works when he's using it in the pursuit of cool, since "Out of Sight" and "The Limey" are just two nearly perfect little flicks. But it can also go way wrong when it has no leash. Witness "Che." Or, for your sake, take my advice and don't.

When I was in New York with my family at the end of last year, I somehow got it into my head that watching all five hours or so of "Che" parts one and two in one day would be entertaining, and somehow also duped my brother into going with me.

Man, was that painful to watch. It's a movie that's much easier to admire, for me, than it ever was to enjoy. For EXTREMELY long chunks, especially during the second part that takes place in Bolivia, it's essentially a training film in guerilla warfare, filmed in thorough detail with tons of precision but scant passion, even with the great Benicio del Toro in the titular role.

Oh well, I digress quite a bit. Here's the trailer for his new flick, which is set to have what I assume will be a rather limited release May 22:



Errol Morris goes narrative

And in surprising news about a director who never lacks passion for his subjects, documentary maker Errol Morris is jumping into narrative features with a tale about cryogenics, which would seem to be right up his alley.

He's perhaps best known for the Robert McNamara documentary "Fog of War," but my favorite Morris flicks are just studies in extreme oddity like the creepy "Mr. Death" and, even better, "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control." And what he comes up with for this dark comedy being written by Zach Helm should fit in with those characters just fine.

Inspired by both Robert F. Nelson's memoir "We Froze the First Man" and a story that aired on NPR's "This American Life" this week titled "You're as Cold as Ice," the true story centers on Nelson, a TV repairman who in the 1960s joined a group of enthusiasts who believed they could cheat death with a new technology: cryonics. But freezing dead people so scientists could reanimate them in the future turned out to be harder than Nelson thought.

If this all works out, it might just add up to the oddest thing from Errol Morris yet: A movie that might even reach theaters in my little corner of the world!

A glimpse of "The Hurt Locker"

Remember Kathryn Bigelow? She made a quick splash with the Keanu Reeves flick "Point Break" in 1991 and then, of course, tried to end the world with "End of Days," but instead just about ended her movie-directing career (to be fair, she did direct three episodes of easily one of my favorite TV shows, "Homicide," and even one of the short-lived and much-underappreciated "Out of Sight" TV version of sorts "Karen Sisco" with the always-welcome Carla Gugino.)

And now she's back with an Iraq war movie (another one?) that promises perhaps the same level of action of her early flicks on a much less grand scale.

Although I enjoyed "In the Valley of Elah" quite a bit and wanted to like Kimberly Pierce's "Stop-Loss" a lot more than I actually did, I don't think there's been an Iraq war movie yet that's managed to catch on with the moviegoing public. Bigelow's flick, however, just might be the first to break that mold, since "The Hurt Locker" seems to simply focus on the lives of the members of an elite Army bomb squad operating in Iraq and let you bring your own politics into the action.

Here's the trailer for the flick starring Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie, which is set to open in at least a few corners of the world at the end of June.



And in a quick thought about TV, I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the premiere episode of "Parks and Recreation," even if it does crib most of its style directly from "The Office." It just seems to be infused, at least so far, with the right mix of genuine spirit and just thoroughly mocking it, and I certainly liked Amy Poehler's character a whole lot more than any she's played since that crazy RA in "Undeclared."

Here's hoping the show just gets funnier, because I thought that, even with the double "Office" episodes last week, it was the best thing in NBC's Thursday night lineup. And here's about two-and-a-half minutes or so of what you'll see on tonight's episode, "Canvassing," and as a bonus, more footage of "The Office" crew playing soccer. Priceless. Peace out.