One of the most promising-looking movies that you probably won’t get to see in theaters this fall is the indie dramedy Humboldt County, the feature debut of writing/directing duo Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs.

I checked out the trailer (here it is over at Apple.com) knowing little about the film, and was very impressed with what I saw – everything from the cinematography to the performances look to be pretty spot-on in this small-scale but seemingly heartfelt tale of a mentally burned-out med student (Jeremy Strong) who winds up in an off-the-grid California community of tightly-knit medicinal marijuana growers. Director Peter Bogdanovich, a guy I always love to see in front of the camera, plays Strong’s hard-nosed doctor father; the talented but not exactly name-brand supporting cast also includes Fairuza Balk, Frances Fisher, and Brad Dourif.

According to the directors’ blog, the film is slated for a select-cities release on September 26 that will probably bypass our area entirely, although it will be available to HDNet subscribers in “exclusive airings” starting on September 1.

Yes, Humboldt County does seem to have a familiar, Garden State-ish ring to it, but something about this movie – and, no, it’s not the pot-related plot – seems pretty special, and I hope it makes its way to our corner of the world before too long.

Here’s a low-res look at the trailer, though the HD version at Apple does the film’s gorgeous visuals a lot more justice:

Well, now... I wrote this column last week before leaving for vacation, back when there was still some hope that Babylon A.D. would turn out to be a halfway decent slice of sci-fi cinema. Looking at the early reviews, apparently this is not the case -- even director Mathieu Kassovitz has gone on record saying the film is a piece of crap. It seems that once again the talented French filmmaker has been disrespected and pushed around by an American production company (if you believe his version of the story), and although I honestly believe he's got a lot more great movies in him, at this point I highly doubt they'll be made here in the U.S. It's our loss.

The flashy sci-fi pic Babylon A.D. may end up being little more than Children of Men for the Transformers set, but I’m holding out hope that the film is more ambitious than its underwhelming trailers have made it out to be.
That isn’t because I’ve been clamoring for Vin Diesel’s return to the big screen – though I did sort of enjoy his wisecracking mobster act in the surprisingly good Find Me Guilty – but rather because the film gives director Mathieu Kassovitz a chance to redeem himself after fumbling the ball somewhat with his Hollywood debut. Kassovitz is a great filmmaker who, like far too many young, talented world cinema whiz kids before him, made a splash in his home country (in his case, France) before departing for our shores only to lose some of his mojo in the American studio system. In 1995, he wowed the world with the gritty, black-and-white French youth gang drama La Haine; seven years later, he sat in the director’s chair for the unsuccessful, critically panned (but, still, not entirely terrible) Halle Berry horror flick Gothika.
Kassovitz hasn’t directed another film since (although he’s had some notable acting roles in projects like Spielberg’s Munich), and while I can think of better ways to re-invigorate a directorial career than by hitching your wagon to Vin Diesel’s star, I have a feeling that he might find some Stateside success yet, even if Babylon doesn’t connect. I say this because Kassovitz has basically already proven that he can make a slam-bang Hollywood movie, even if the film in question wasn’t made in Hollywood at all.
2000’s The Crimson Rivers, Kassovitz’s final film before his U.S. career reboot, is a tense, intriguing, extremely well-directed thriller cut from the same cloth as Se7en and the Hannibal Lector franchise. About as far removed from the insulting stereotypes regarding French cinema – boring, pretentious, plot-less, etc. – as a French film can get, Rivers holds its own against its American counterparts in the often tired serial-killer genre and proves without a doubt that Kassovitz has just as solid a handle on mainstream entertainment as he does on more radical filmmaking.
The film opens with two seemingly unrelated police investigations, one extremely gruesome and the other just slightly out of the ordinary. The former finds brooding veteran detective Pierre Niemans (played by the great Jean Reno) called to a creepily quiet university town high in the French Alps to investigate the ritualistic torture/murder of a college librarian; in a small town not far away, meanwhile, young and impulsive police lieutenant Kerkerian (Vincent Cassel) begins digging into a mundane-looking graveyard vandalism case involving some local skinheads that quickly turns into something far more disturbing. By the time these two very different cops’ paths have crossed – later in the film than you might expect – they’ve both begun to piece together a horrifying, decades-old conspiracy involving a little girl’s death, sinister genetics experiments, and an educational institution that’s gone a few steps too far in the pursuit of excellence.
Getting an awful lot of mileage out of his two highly capable stars and some stunning-looking snowbound locations, Kassovitz keeps the tension high and the scenes cranking along even as Rivers’ plot becomes impenetrably murky toward the end. A shade or two lighter in tone than, say, Se7en, the film nevertheless pulls off some truly skin-crawling setpieces – Kassovitz has a way with revealing dead bodies – and effectively maintains an atmosphere of pervasive, intangible evil throughout. The highly energetic, David Fincher-esque camerawork is a major asset, as are co-star Nadia Fares (who kind of reminds me of a French Rachel Weisz) the surprisingly plentiful chase scenes and an out-of-place but very lively fight sequence between Cassel and a couple of punks.
The film smacks of Hollywood, but not at all in a negative sense – it’s an unabashed crowd-pleaser with superior technical craftsmanship, a plot that doesn’t leave you hanging, and lots of action. I’m not at all surprised that American studio execs saw dollar signs all over it, and figured that Kassovitz could do well for himself here in the U.S. They certainly had the right idea – now all they need to do is throw him a project worthy of his talent.

In the buzzed-about comedy Hamlet 2, out in limited release this week, a frustrated drama teacher (played by Steve Coogan) motivates his students and shocks the censors by producing a politically incorrect musical “sequel” to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which Hillary Clinton and Jesus Christ are both supporting characters.
Of course, Shakespeare having lived and died long before copyright law was established, his works certainly can be freely adapted by anybody willing to take a crack at them – and while some folks, like Orson Welles and Kenneth Branagh, have taken pride in staying true to the Bard’s vision in their adaptations, plenty of others have dared to take some gutsy and occasionally dazzling liberties with the plays everybody knows and loves. In honor of Hamlet 2’s not-quite-reverent approach to the greatest tragedy of all time, here are a few films that really pushed the envelope in bringing Shakespeare to the screen – being something of a nonconformist himself, I think he would have enjoyed them a lot.

O (2001)

Shakespeare’s Othello revolves around jealousy, prejudice and back-stabbing, and where can one possibly find more of that stuff than in high school? Still, while transferring the story to a modern teenage setting might have been a no-brainer, Tim Blake Nelson’s O goes the extra step to be a compelling drama rather than just another gimmicky modernization.
Mekhi Phifer – in one of his best performances to date – stars as basketball phenom Odin James, the only black student at a prestigious private school who’s driven by duplicitous teammate Hugo (Josh Hartnett) into suspecting his girlfriend Desi (Julia Stiles) is cheating on him. Things, of course, get tragic and violent from there.
A powerful and surprisingly unsparing adaptation – it was shelved for several years after the Columbine tragedy – O is a terrific reminder of how relevant many of Shakespeare’s themes still are, and of how effectively they can be spun into contemporary narratives in the right hands.

Tromeo & Juliet (1996)
Leave it to the lovable sleazeballs at Troma Studios to turn the most famous romantic tragedy ever written into an orgy of blood, boobs, and body piercing that makes the Leo DiCaprio version look as tame as children’s theater.
That’s not to say that Tromeo & Juliet, one of Troma’s most ambitious and well-received low-budget productions, completely throws the text out the window – characters actually speak in verse, though it’s liberally sprinkled with cuss words – but somehow I doubt that the Globe Theatre ever featured mutated cow creatures or softcore lesbian action on its stage. Narrated by Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmeister (an awesome touch), Tromeo and Juliet finds its lovestruck title characters (played by Will Keenan and Jane Jensen) caught in the midst of a war between rival porn-producing families in an urban crap-hole setting, soundtracked by the likes of Wesley Willis and the Ass Ponys.
The film launched the career of its writer, James Gunn, who’d go on to script the surprisingly decent Dawn of the Dead remake and his later directorial debut, the underappreciated horror/comedy masterpiece Slither.

Macbeth (1971)

Unlike the 2001 Sundance favorite Scotland, Pa., which stages Macbeth in a 1970s-era fast-food restaurant, or the John Turturro cult item Men of Respect, which translates it into a mafia movie, Roman Polanski’s take on one of the Bard’s best-known tragedies is actually pretty faithful to the source material. It nevertheless makes this list by being so bloody, gritty and atmospheric that it plays more like an artsy, big-budget grindhouse flick than a stately Shakespearian drama.
Wild-eyed British actor Jon Finch plays the title role in this U.S./U.K. coproduction, which contains a memorably sympathetic portrayal of Lady Macbeth (Francesca Annis) and an exceedingly bleak tone that many critics saw as Polanski’s reaction to the murder of his wife Sharon Tate by the Manson family. As dark and cold as its rocky Welsh settings, the film is one of the most “realistic” screen versions of the story I’ve ever seen, though it also contains some decidedly trippy sequences – particularly those involving the story’s infamous coven of witches. The sound effect that accompanies Macbeth’s hallucinations in the famous “is this a dagger I see before me” scene is worth the price of admission alone.

Titus (1999)

Broadway director Julie Taymor made her feature film debut with this visually stunning adaptation of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first and most notorious play – a charming tale of rape, murder, and torture that seems more like the work of the Hills Have Eyes folks than it does the guy who penned A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Rather than going for a straight-up retelling or modernization of the sensationalistic story, however, Taymor opts for a wildly stylistic, almost avant-garde approach to the material, creating a jaw-dropping hybrid of past and present, fantasy and reality in which motorcycles coexist with chariots, flashbacks are presented in music video-like style, and toy soldiers transform into actual Roman warriors. Anthony Hopkins, playing the title role, heads a terrific cast that also includes Jessica Lange, Alan Cumming, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers; the ace production design, inspired by everything from ancient Rome to WWII Italy to Rat Pack-era Las Vegas, is handled by Fellini’s go-to guy Dante Ferretti.
This is a nearly three-hour movie, based on one of the most unpleasant stories ever written, but trust me – you won’t be able to take your eyes off of it for the duration.