His project is deeply personal and intriguingly abstract, a bittersweet vision of a comedian’s mournful existence. Apatow’s central question is this: does an art built on antagonism towards humanity distort the souls of its practitioners? Apatow weaves his obsessions around this theme, including gender mis-communication, male insecurity, elaborate dick jokes, and the unique rhythms of comedy writing. He cast his wife, Leslie Mann, his children, Maude and Iris, and his former roommate, Adam Sandler, as the star. It feels like everything Apatow knows and loves appears in this movie, a testament to comedy and family. This intense engagement leads to an extended running time (over 140 minutes) and occasional longueurs, especially in the distended final act, but it is also what lends it such strength of feeling. Its imperfection is a virtue.

The film opens with an actual home movie from Sandler and Apatow’s days as roommates. Sandler is prank calling a local deli in the wobbly falsetto he made famous in his SNL days, harassing the owner about the gaseous implications of their roast beef sandwiches. Then Apatow fades to Sandler’s present day character, George Simmons, as he wakes up in his palatial estate. Simmons made his money with hugely successful family fare like Merman, My Best Friend is a Robot, and Re-do, where his head is CGI’d onto a baby. These brilliantly hokey concepts, seen briefly on posters and painfully funny video clips, intimate a career fraught with compromise.

Judd Apatow

There don’t seem to be any Punch Drunk Love‘s in his career, nor anything as sophomorically funny as Billy Madison or Happy Gilmore. It’s a caricatured version of the Sandler man-child persona, drained of menace, and he plays it with hangdog imperturbability. In a brief note on his New Yorker blog, Richard Brody notes that Sandler has “the solidity, the opacity of earlier generations of actors”, and I think that’s an acute observation. Sandler lets his jowls do most of the emoting, with his slightly hunched posture indicating his physical deterioration. He never telegraphs an emotion, waiting a few beats before tilting his head or exploding in short fits of anger. His sadness is overwhelming. And this is before he gets sick.

The hook, as given away in the trailer, is the news that he is afflicted with a rare form of leukemia, and that he has six months to live. This leads to the first stand-up set-piece, where he meets Seth Rogen’s character, Ira Wright, his soon to be shat upon assistant. Brooding and aimless, George books himself at the local improv club, bumping Ira to the slot after him. In a rambling monologue, George mumbles angrily about death and quietude, letting the room sit as silent as possible, challenging the audience to question his dominion.

Apatow and DP Janusz Kaminski set up these scenes in generous long shots that track back and forth, to establish the connection between audience and performer, and to avoid the airlessness of shooting inserts in the studio later. In an interview at the Museum of the Moving Image, Apatow said he stole this documentary aesthetic from Bruce Surtees’s work on Bob Fosse’s Lenny, the bio-pic about Lenny Bruce. These scenes are stylistically riveting, displaying the unique frisson between performer and rapt audience, the feel of working without a net. I generally prefer the locked-down camera style of Knocked Up and 40-Year-Old Virgin,  whereas Kaminski opts for constant motion, subtle tracks and push-ins that only distract from the rest of the action. But this is a minor quibble.

After Ira makes cracks about George’s impending suicide in the next set, he gets hired for his ballsiness to act as psychologist and mother to this disintegrating celebrity. Ira talks him to sleep, sets up play-dates with former friends and family (George seems closer to Andy Dick than to his sister), and writes material for his act. George is a low-key monster, incredibly needy and impulsive, whose rage drives his comedy and ruin his relationships, including one with Laura (Leslie Mann), the woman that got away. His ability to distract people from this self-centeredness with his volcanic, sophomoric wit comes to the fore in the fascinating scenes where George and Ira collaborate on constructing jokes, shooting ideas back and forth in looping arcs of absurdity. Apatow told Jake Tapper of ABC that he wrote hundreds of jokes for these scenes, and then Sandler and Rogen would riff off of them on their own, recreating the one-upsmanship at the heart of the process.

Ira’s character is especially ambitious because of his own roommates, Jason Schwartzman’s supercilious TV-sitcom star Mark Taylor Jackson, and Jonah Hill’s acerbic stand-up Leo. Their interactions display Apatow’s gift for musical vulgarity and parades of insecurity. Mark is defensive about his low-level celebrity and cringingly earnest show (“Do you guys know who the greatest rapper of all time is? William Shakespeare!”), Leo about his plateauing career, and Ira about his non-existent one. Ira is forced to cut meat at a local grocery store with RZA (in a delightfully dour performance), before George stumbles into the club and plucks him into Hollywood. It’s tempting to see the three worlds of the film (George’s, Ira’s, and Laura’s) as separate aspects of Apatow’s own life, the professional success, the striving youngster, and the family man. The film is a kind of simultaneous autobiography, all three periods of his life colliding at once in the midst of the narrative of comic self-destruction.

The final act is where these three worlds resolve themselves, in Laura’s home in Northern California. With George beginning to accept his mortality, accepting the judgments of his family and friends in order to savor a few more moments of intimacy, he learns that the experimental medicine he was prescribed is working. He will live. Slowly all of his neuroses start to creep back, all of them directed at regaining Laura’s love. In mock gallant mode, he places all of his hopes of happiness in this one ex-actress (Leslie Mann’s real acting reel acts as nostalgic flirtation fodder). Apatow does not fall for easy sentiment here, fully exposing the selfishness of George’s game. He expects happiness to follow him immediately upon his survival, as if it were due him, despite all the fuck ups of his previous life. Apologizing is akin to absolution in his mind, regardless if his actions remain the same. So this extended final act displays an epic meltdown, constructing his false hopes before tearing them down in the face of Laura’s preference for a stable relationship. It leads to her husband’s angry return, and Eric Bana plays the cuckolded Australian gent with outsized fervor.

This section is admittedly uneven, as Apatow is far more adept at sparring dialogue than elegant bedroom farce, but it abounds in grace notes. The brief montage of George testing (and failing) himself in a fatherly role, Apatow’s girls asking if their parents are divorcing (his real-life parents split when he was a child), and the sobering brutality of George’s ultimate comeuppance add up to a poison-pen portrait of celebrity immaturity. Their struggle to adapt themselves to the world is a work-in-progress, but their continual humbling, Apatow suggests, might one day suit them for more adult relationships. But if they do grow up, will they still be funny? If Apatow is any example, the answer is yes.

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Everything is cinema for co-curators Kevin McGarry and Nellie Killian, as they culled from film festivals, gallery shows, Biennials, MFA programs, and other alternative venues. This approach, pulling video art from cramped museum spaces and affording it the same theatrical presence as the work on the experimental film circuit, is long overdue and much appreciated. The festival adopted its name from James Fotopoulos’s 2000 feature, and it’s an apt description of the varied styles and attitudes on display.

The first bundle of celluloid I took in was a program entitled “Only You,” comprising films engaged with iconic imagery. Bradley Eros and Tim Geraghty’s Eros c’est L’amour (2008) is a delirious found footage homage to Dorothy Lamour, in the tradition of Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart and Jack Smith’s fascination with Maria Montez. Geraghty takes John Ford’s 1937 adventure-melodrama The Hurricane and fashions an erotic fantasia around Lamour’s soft-focus South Pacific ingénue. In a montage heavy on tumescence, the earth heaves up as the harried colonials (Mary Astor and Thomas Mitchell among them) pinball around their dining room. Lamour is graceful in various positions of repose as others gaze through phallic binoculars, catching a glimpse of their own hidden fantasies. Yma Sumac provides the soundtrack, ululating their innermost desires.

Another piece of tightly edited found footage delirium was Jim Finn’s Great Man and Cinema (2009), whose title comes from a propaganda booklet promoting the filmmaking chops of Kim Jong Il. Pulling together clips from DPRK films (including some Esther Williams inspired water acrobatics) and scored to a rousing Korean punk tune (“Fuck the USA!”), it’s a propulsive and very funny examination of the country’s well-oiled propaganda machine.

Women of the Sea

“Land and Sea” offered up a diptych of exploratory ethnography, where Barbara Hammer’s playful Diving Women of Jeju-Do (2007) is paired with Naomi Uman’s hypnotic Unnamed Film (from the Ukrainian Time Machine Project (2008). Jeju-Do documents the fading tradition of the haeyno, women who dive for shellfish and sell it to vendors on Jeju, the largest Korean island. With profits cratering and kids fleeing to the mainland, Hammer captures what is likely the last generation of these grizzled females, whose demeanors are as suspicious and salty as any factory worker in the US. Hammer sensitively explores the contours of their dying world.

Uman’s film is also concerned with fading traditions, specifically those found in the rural communities of Eastern Europe, where all eight of her grandparents were raised. Wanting to experience the life of her ancestors, she moved to the small village of Legedzine (population: 1,000) in the Ukraine, where there are 30 deaths for every birth. Unnamed Film is one of a series of 16mm documentary works shot in the village, which Uman then exhibited wherever they were allowed to set up around the country. It is an intensely intimate, often overwhelmingly tactile viewing experience.

Unnamed Film

Uman captures everyday life in lingering close-ups, images of unmediated beauty illuminated by the region’s dusky light. Using non-synchronous sound, and opting against subtitling, the focus is entirely on the image (explanatory inter-titles aside).  The aging population’s lined hands and faces, whether tending the fields or downing an after-work vodka, are lent a hieratic grace by Uman’s patient camera. Details pop out of the frame, like the radio with one dial (there was only one station during Communist times), or the exacting pickling process that provides food through the winter. Uman and her subjects, the engagingly polite and shy villagers, manage to turn the banal into the sublime, and for that it’s a major achievement.

The other major work on display at this year’s festival was Pat O’Neill’s Horizontal Boundaries (2008), which he’s been tinkering with since it first screened in 2003. In its latest iteration, Carl Stone has provided a dense musique concrete score to go along with a sparkling new 35mm print. The title refers to the boundaries between the film frames, and O’Neill displays his astonishing technical virtuosity with optical printing techniques to exploit this dividing line in a landscape portrait of southern California (the landscape of the film encountering the landscape of the state). Stone arranges everyday sounds (dog barks, sirens, insects, helicopters, applause) into a rhythmic backbeat to the throbbing of O’Neill’s landscape imagery (beaches, factory silos, mountain ranges).

Soon Stone incorporates shards of noir dialogue and a western swing tune into his dense mix as O’Neill bumps these images up and down, the frame line constantly rising into view, unveiling the physicality of the montage, and delimiting the image in space. The voice-over dialogue hints at a domestic narrative: “Your home, your family, and your life” and “find a job yet?” are repeated ad infinitum as the images slowly degrade, eventually reduced to pure flicker, just the black and white of the frame line and the exposed film—California replaced with film stock. The hard-boiled baritone seems to question the basis of his existence as Stone orchestrates a symphony of door slamming. It’s tough to parse the density of O’Neill’s montage without multiple viewings, but at first blush the film is a visceral thrill, a dizzying meta city-symphony that deconstructs itself before our eyes.
Other highlights include Robert Todd’s sinuous Riverbed, Michael Robinson’s All Through the Night, Phil Collins’s spare and devastating Why I Don’t Speak Serbian (Collins currently has a show at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in NYC) and Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s feature that explores the villages effected by the Dakar Rally race, 7915 KM. All are well worth seeking out if they make it to a festival or museum near you.
The features at Migrating Forms missed more than they hit, but with such treasures in the shorts program it’s quite hard to complain, especially considering the sad state of the Tribeca Film Festival (the Tribeca After Party Festival would be more apt). With a clear mission and a wide range of material to choose from, Migrating Forms should be a prime destination for avant-garde cinema-seekers, slated right alongside the New York Film Festival’s smaller “Views from the Avant-Garde” sidebar. Here’s hoping for more of the same next year.

7915KM

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“The majority of the film is realistic and the ending is more surrealistic, but for me surrealism is realism too. It’s just not as common. It’s as real as the other part of the film. The point is that what we shoot is as real as reality.”

In El Árbol,  first-time director Carlos Serrano Azcona withholds the backstory of his enigmatic lead, Santiago. He’s a well-dressed, roughly handsome loner who has chosen the life of a vagrant, circling central Madrid in endless loops, sleeping on park benches when he tires; over time the smallest slips in his routine take on the force of revelation. Receiving its world premiere at the recently concluded Rotterdam Film Festival, El Árbol is a rigorous, 70-minute tour of self-destruction. Interested more in Santiago’s everyday trials than what led him there, the film employs deft handheld camerawork to follow him around his own circles of hell:  his trysts with lonely tourists, a pickup soccer game with some teens, and awkward interactions with the shadows of his former life. With an assist from producer Carlos Reygadas and cameraman David Valdeperez, Azcona has lensed a thoroughly convincing portrait of middle-aged malaise that ends in a surreal burst of divine intervention. I talked with him in Rotterdam about his work with actors, his favored hash delivery methods, and the influence of the Dardennes Brothers.

Rumpus: How did you end up casting Mexican painter Bosco Sodi in the lead role?

Azcona: Just by chance. Carlos Reygadas invited me to the premiere of Battle in Heaven  in Cannes, and at the after-party I met [Sodi]. I wasn’t thinking that he would play the role. He was very easygoing, very cool. Two years after this, in 2006, I thought of him in regards to the film. I asked Carlos about him, and got his number. I phoned him, he came to Madrid, and he agreed. He had never acted before. None of the people in the film are actors, just friends.

Rumpus: What attracted you to this figure, of someone living outside of society?

Azcona: The story talks about someone who is self-destructive, which is very common today. I wanted to have an idea of someone who’s going through all this pain, but also something spiritual about him. It’s very painful, but opens the possibility of an awakening.

Rumpus: The film has very controlled handheld camerawork, were all of Bosco’s wanderings plotted out?

Azcona: Everything was controlled, but there was also room to be easygoing.  We improvised a little bit. A lot of the movements were free. The cameraman David Valdeperez, we discussed this a lot. He’s brilliant and very intuitive.

Rumpus: The film’s narrative withholds a lot of information about the character. There’s an aspect of mystery to the screenplay.

Azcona: I tried to make the film open to interpretation. It’s not so important  how Santiago got into his situation. We worked the structure of the film in the editing, because there is not a complicated plot. He’s a very isolated character, so we cut away from most of his personal interactions.  There’s no intimacy anymore. I tried to create a claustrophobic atmosphere.

Rumpus: How did you work with Bosco?

Azcona: He was very professional. We didn’t know each other, really. I didn’t give him a script, none of the actors had one, but I told him the main outline of the story.  The way we did it was go to the set, and I would tell him do this, say this. In a mechanical way, like how Bresson  used his actors as “models.” But Bosco was very intuitive, he’s an artist, and very sensitive. He imparted a lot to the film. I gave people very little instruction. Some of the jokes in the film, which people don’t laugh at, were improvised.

Rumpus: Could you talk about the influence of The Dardennes Brothers on your work?

Azcona: I’m a big fan, for me it was a very important reference. Just by chance, I was reading a book written by one of the brothers [Luc Dardennes' "Au dos de nos images"] and it gave me a lot of clues to their work that I used in my film. Before filming I was watching the Dardennes’ and Antonioni: La Notte, L’eclisse, and also Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. Amazing sound design in that one.

Rumpus: What did you learn from the book?

Azcona: Many things. For example, this idea of not showing things. To make the audience work. I had already decided to make the film this way before reading the book, following the character from behind, and showing his neck. While reading the book by a Dardennes, I don’t know which one, he was saying that the back of the neck is the weakest, most vulnerable part of the body. I wanted to follow him from the back, the idea that he is running away, straight ahead. Away and ahead, not knowing where he’s going.

Rumpus: Where did you film it?

Azcona: In the center of Madrid, in a neighborhood called Malasaña. It’s very well known there, the center of the art movement. After Franco died, this was the neighborhood where all the new directors and musicians and painters were creating and living. It’s called the brilliant explosion, people like Almodovar started there.

Rumpus: I also like how relentlessly the camera stays on Bosco, there‘s rarely any shots from his point-of-view. He‘s almost always on screen…

Azcona: When I was filming I shot more of these point-of-views, because I wanted to cover myself, being a first-time filmmaker and all. I was a bit insecure, wondering how it would work. But in the editing, I really forced myself not to use them. For example, up on the hill with his dope dealer, I filmed it from different points-of-view, and some of them were much more beautiful than what I used.  But I forced myself to keep this long shot from the back, because I think it’s more appropriate for the tone of the film. Even Carlos Reygadas, who was helping me with the editing, made very clever changes to it, was wondering  if I should insert the more beautiful shots. But I said no, I wanted to have unity to the film, and this would break it up.

Rumpus: The conversation with the dealer is really funny too, I think, the most heartfelt connection Santiago forms…

Azcona: Yeah, there’s one little joke there that’s pretty disgusting. He says that the dope smells bad. Many smugglers go to Morocco, and bring hash back in their ass. So it smells like shit. I thought it was funny, but it’s also indicative of Santiago’s lifestyle.

Rumpus: I wanted to ask you about the ending, which breaks free from Dardennes style realism into something much more surreal.

Azcona: This idea was in the film from the beginning, and for me it’s very important, this idea of a mystical or spiritual journey. There are little drops of this in the film. Like when he’s walking through the street, I had this Hare Krishna music playing. And when the girls come and start singing, they have the orange color from Buddhism or Taoism, but the ending is more Christian. The majority of the film is realistic and the ending is more surrealistic, but for me surrealism is realism too. It’s just not as common. It’s as real as the other part of the film. The point is that what we shoot is as real as reality.

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“If tomorrow I have to quit filmmaking, I will. I’m not going to sell my house for a project, that’s for sure. If I have to go back and work on my family’s farm, fine. I don’t have any problem with it. But I would cry a lot.”

Argentine director Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool, one of the most strikingly original films of 2008, seems headed for relative obscurity. A hit on the festival circuit, from its premiere at Cannes to its final leg at Rotterdam, where I saw it last month, it has mesmerized and befuddled in equal measure. A slow-moving tale of a cargo-ship sailor who decamps onto Tierra del Fuego in search of his mother, it utilizes long takes, non-professional actors, and stunning landscape photography to evoke a luxurious, lonely regret. It’s a film where atmosphere trumps story, and plot details are elided rather than underlined– demanding an active, searching spectator–and it has been lingering in my cortex, refusing to reveal all of its mysteries. While unlikely to obtain stateside distribution, Liverpool will hopefully surface in museums and repertory theaters, where his similarly melancholic Los Muertos found life in 2004. I sat down with Alonso in Rotterdam to chat about his working methods, the life of a sailor, and the merits of Clint Eastwood.

Rumpus: What led you to Tierra del Fuego?

Alonso: I was home in Buenos Aires, and I was reading a magazine. I discovered wonderful pictures of a sawmill there, and I decided to go. I got in my car and drove for three days, and finally I saw the people from the photos. It’s a very isolated place, filled with people who are hiding from something or someone. And I like that. People who are escaping, watching through the window for ten years. They didn’t say too much, and I didn’t ask too much. If you’re lucky as a filmmaker, maybe you can uncover something. Or maybe not, but I imagine things that might be in their heads.

Rumpus: How did you find the lead actor, Juan Fernandez?

Alonso: He worked in a Caterpillar, clearing the snow from the street in Tierra del Fuego. I was looking for a location and I discovered him. I was traveling with a digital camera. He saw it and ran away. But I stayed inside for three or four hours because it was very cold outside, so he had to come back. After he returned I lied a little bit. I told him I was taking photos of everyone there when I was really focused on him. So after that day, we had some coffee, and I started to talk, not mentioning anything about the film. I asked him if he wanted to grab a beer together. Finally I told him for real what I’m doing there. He said, “What kind of film?” I told him he wouldn’t have to interpret Shakespeare or anything, that I would ask him to do what he would normally do in his life. He responded, “OK, how much?” I told him how much money I could give him, and that it would last two weeks. He’d have to stop working, but it wasn’t a problem. He works with the government, and they allowed him to take time off. He asked his wife, and she approved. I didn’t show him a script or anything.

Rumpus: Did you have a story already?

Alonso: I had around 20 pages. In this case I used the script as a guide to manage the film, just so I didn’t lose my way. But I didn’t care what I wrote. It’s more a frame for situations and places. When I get to a place I talk to the actors and the crew, decide if something is logical or not. That’s why I travel before doing the film, for weeks or months, trying to watch the everyday life of the people. When I’m with the crew it’s impossible to discover. The cargo ship that Juan’s character, Farrel, works on, I did the trip twice before shooting. It takes five days from Buenos Aires to Tierra del Fuego.

Rumpus: You stayed in the same room as Juan?

Alonso: Yes, the lowest level. You sleep a lot, there’s not a lot to do. You eat a lot. It’s not about the legend of the sailor. What’s not normal is their life out of the water. The ship is their real world. They don’t care about cars, telephones, traffic lights. Who cares about Obama? Their worries are tied to the ship. It is sad and hard. Once they go onto the land, they stay for a couple days, just for a drink and see some family. But they live on the water. It’s not very easy.

Rumpus: But it’s their choice.

Alonso: Yes, but once you get into that life, and they are very well paid, it’s tough to run away. Maybe they can, but after five to ten years, they don’t know what to do, how to make money otherwise. It’s like everybody, once you know how to do something, you can’t change and say, “Now I want to be a tennis player.”

Rumpus: How did you work with Juan?

Alonso: I had to talk a lot with him. He watches a lot of TV, so he knows what you can do with the camera. I’d tell him to do things like light a cigarette, look out the window, watch your wallet. I instructed him all the time during a scene.

Rumpus: Did he ever act too much?

Alonso: No. I always tell my actors, don’t look into the camera and don’t express anything. Don’t try to be an actor. When they try to be an actor, the scene is fucked. He took it as work. When we finished a scene, he would go cook for everybody. He didn’t act like an artist. I learned not to treat anybody in a special way, not even the crew. We are only 10 – 15 people so it’s easy to work in that way.

Rumpus: Farrel leaves an hour into the film, and the narrative splits off and follows his family instead. What made you decide upon this unusual structure?

Alonso: For me, making films is an excuse to see different places and people. It’s not about the sailor, it’s more about the place he was born, how he grew up in this isolated place. I would like to see what happens when he goes back to see his wife or daughter. He actually knows that those women need him. His mom is almost dying, his daughter is mentally disabled. His decision is to run away again, because he can’t confront it. I want to see what will happen with these girls in this place. I like to work in these kinds of situations, where you don’t know what to imagine. It’s ambiguous. Your head, your education, the way you live, have to be put in his shoes, and you have to work as a spectator. I like that point of view. I have many questions, but I don’t have many answers. If I had the answers I wouldn’t want to make the movie.

Rumpus: Could you talk about your use of non-professional actors?

Alonso: I don’t have a system or anything. I trust them and they trust me. Maybe I’m lucky with the actors I’ve chosen. None of them said, “I’m going home” in the middle of shooting. For them they’re very curious, why me, why am I making a film? At that moment, maybe they’re imagining they’ll be in an action film. During the day they discover the work, and what their job is. Their work is physical, they don’t have to interpret anything. They just feel like part of the crew. They’re treated as an important piece of the film. Maybe in their life this doesn’t happen.

The main reason I make films is to take my friends and crew out of Buenos Aires and see something different, like the cargo ship or a sawmill in an isolated village. They are not easy films, but it’s important to see places people never see, in a situation different from what we know. I don’t want to discover how smart I am, or what a wonderful script I wrote.

Rumpus: Do you pay attention to more mainstream cinema?

Alonso: I know it exists. My father and brothers don’t give a shit about my films. I mean, they are proud of me because I am traveling and living off of the cinema. They just don’t enjoy them, they prefer Clint Eastwood films, which I like a lot too. But for me the diversity is good. Everything doesn’t have to be Hollywood. The only thing that is important is that I’m able to make the movies I want, but I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do it. Every day I have trouble raising money. I’ve been pretty lucky, I’ve made four films so far, but these foundations, they need the money back in some way. And mine, with no stars, it’s not easy to make it back. My cinema costs about 200 or 300 thousand dollars, but if they don’t see a big star they don’t see a film. If you can imagine the cost of a Hollywood film, about 50 million, try to separate how much it costs per minute. That one minute could fund my entire movie. I cannot compete. The people in the street don’t know my films exist.

If tomorrow I have to quit filmmaking, I will. I’m not going to sell my house for a project, that’s for sure. If I have to go back and work on my family’s farm, fine. I don’t have any problem with it. But I would cry a lot. I’m not just talking about me, I’m talking about many people who make this kind of cinema. It’s a shame it does not communicate to an audience in some way.

Rumpus: Would you ever make a film that would communicate more easily to an audience?

Alonso: No, that’s not the main reason behind my work, but I’m a human being and I can connect with people, but maybe not too many. I don’t care to talk to too many people. One hundred or two hundred is enough.

Rumpus: What’s your favorite Clint Eastwood movie?

Alonso: I really like the one he made with the boxing girl, Million Dollar Baby. I didn’t like the end, I really wanted her to get the million. It was just too bad.

Rumpus: Well, your movies aren’t so upbeat either…

Alonso: I was so down. He’s Clint Eastwood: he can make a happy film.

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