Interview

"It's a robot love story for all you romantics," said Spike Jonze, introducing his latest short film, I'm Here at the Tribeca Grand last night. Sure, the concept of robot love might strike as paradoxical, but after watching the film's protagonist, a melancholy mechanical man named Sheldon with a head fashioned out of a vintage PC, fall hard-drive over heels for a haphazard, fun-loving she-bot, it becomes abundantly clear that, in Spike's world, robots are as fragile as the rest of us.

Maybe it was their doe-eyed,impressively CGI-animated faces, or their endearing English accents, but we couldn't help but feel for the well-wired pair. Set in an LA suburb, I'm Here is tinted with the sweet, painful nostalgia that marks each of Jonze's films. The unlikely robot duo dances in parking lots, snuggles during a picture-perfect sunset and even hosts a raging apartment party at which an intriguing robot-human relationship is revealed. "That really spoke to me because I kind of questioned it," said co-host, Opening Ceremony's Humberto Leon while OC's Olivia Kim speculated that "the humans want to be robots just as much as the robots want to be human!" Spike nodded in approval of her hypothesis.

Both Johan Lindeberg and LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy properly pegged the film as "emotional" and "exceptionally beautiful." And although Spike's parents left the screening just before the crowd began dancing to the DJ set by Sophomore designer Chrissie Miller and her boyfriend, actor Leo Fitzpatrick, there was no question that they'd set a romantic example.

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In Anders Anderson's Stolen, Josh Lucas and Jon Hamm each play a father struggling to deal with the disappearance of a son. Though their losses are separated by half a century, their stories converge when Hamm's character, a detective, devotes himself to solving a case that had long gone cold. We spoke to Lucas, who also acted as a producer, about the film:

INTERVIEW: What drew you to this project?

JOSH LUCAS: I particularly responded to the character that I played, partly because my grandfather was–not a migrant construction worker–but to an extent, he was a man who lived during that period of time, and worked, and raised a family without any money, and I felt a real connection to him, and a connection to my grandfather through him, and so I immediately responded to the script.

INTERVIEW: What was filming like?

LUCAS: We proceeded with, you know, a tiny, tiny budget. It kind of doesn't get a lot harder in terms of independent film, but I think we made the most of it in many ways, particularly considering it was definitely a very difficult shoot. I mean we had a lot of things go down. There were the fires in Los Angeles that burned down some of our locations–all the different things that can happen on a low-budget shoot that make a movie more difficult kind of happened and, in the end, I still think there's a really lovely, gentle, interesting story there.

INTERVIEW: You're in one scene with Jon briefly, but you guys don't really appear much on camera together.

LUCAS: No we didn't at all–we were really just passing ships in the night. Part of it is that, when you're an actor or producer, sometimes it's the best-case scenario to stay away from the other section of the movie, where there's another actor in that position. So, I really wanted to let him and the director do their thing, when it came to what they were doing, but we did have a couple little scenes together here and there, and we've obviously run into each other over the years.

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In Cyrus, John C. Reilly plays John, a dejected, idle, middle-aged divorcee on the verge of withdrawing completely from the world. Still strangely close to his ex-wife (Catherine Keener), love for him is a belated, bad joke. Invited to a party that initially offers little relief from his miserable life, he quickly drinks, over shares, and becomes exceedingly vulnerable with women. Through the powers of spirited desperation and The Human League's "Don't You Want Me," he meets Molly (Marisa Tomei), with whom he has an immediate, punch-drunk connection. But, just as things appear to be making sense, Cyrus (Jonah Hill), Molly's twenty-one-year-old son, upsets the harmony with his unyielding manner and troubling, sometimes threatening sense of humor. Under the direction of Mark and Jay Duplass (The Puffy Chair, Humpday), the sparring and riotously paranoid Cold War that erupts between John and Cyrus blends comedy and candor. Varying in pitch and largely intuitive, Cyrus revels in the genuine breakdown and wonder of new relationships. I spoke with stars John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill after the film's SxSW premiere:

DURGA CHEW-BOSE: Cyrus was very well received last night at the Paramount, how did that feel?

JOHN C. REILLY: It felt great! And you know, the movie plays really well and I think it's surprising people with its honesty. The dialogue in the movie is very much like the way real people talk, which turns out to be kind of revolutionary compared to a lot of movies. But also Austin, like Sundance was, is a real movie lover town. No matter what kind of movie it is, Austin audiences go crazy for it! Plus Mark and Jay are local heroes, so there was a lot of love there for that reason.

CHEW-BOSE: You've expressed an interest in spreading the "Duplassian" method of shedding the storyboard way of filmmaking. Can you elaborate on how that worked on set for you both as actors?

JONAH HILL: My background from Judd Apatow and friends like Greg Mottola–great filmmakers who I love and have worked with–were pretty good about letting us open up and try and find something new and different. But it was never to this degree, on this film. Mark and Jay created a beautiful platform and we just had to walk on it without falling off. That's why their films are unique because something so bizarre and tone shifting can happen and no one knows it's going to happen...

REILLY: Including them you know...

HILL: And you can see them getting excited about it and us being shocked, or John saying something that I am completely unaware is going to happen. I appreciate Mark and Jay for embracing that.

CHEW-BOSE: In the movie, Marisa Tomei is a very convincing...

REILLY:...dysfunctional hippie mom?

CHEW-BOSE: Yes!

HILL: Yeah.

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SOLARIS

This weekend, Anthology Film Archives will show three of director Andrei Tarkovsky's masterworks—films of epic intimacy, that distinctly probe the nature of Art, Love, Family and Memory. With Tarkovsky the capital letters are intentional; his films possess an unquestionable, unwavering gravity. As a director he's the picture of how heavy and how formal mid-century European fiimmaking got—and to great popular success. Watching a Tarkovsky film is like mixing Bergman's souls in despairs with Antonioni's gut-wrenching social decay and Resnais' labyrinth of memory, but through a slow and physical lens, one, focused on lingering and waiting, and finding places to breathe.

Tarkovsky skipped through time and space, although his films maintain a sense of the universe that's distinctly Soviet. Whether portraying his contemporary Soviet Russia (Mirror, 1975), the  Russian Steppes of the 15th Century (Andrei Rublev, 1966), or a future Outer Space (Solaris, 1972), Tarkovsky has a uniform seriousness towards his characters and the spaces they inhabit; a murky-close proximity that pierces into the soul of the organism. And while there is a bit of sly humor in the films—he made an entire character to embody humor, the Jester in Andrei Rublev—the fun fades to propose difficult questions about the possibility for real creativity in the face of unending official suppression. You know, your run of the mill.

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