Call it performance art, savage prank behavior or audacious social satire. Call it whatever you want, but there's no question Sacha Baron Cohen is at it again. As Erik reported back in March, the Borat star began surfacing as his Bruno alter-ego in a variety of absurd situations likely intended for the movie starring the effeminate European character. Wearing chains at a Kansas church? Check. Weirding out Ben Affleck? Check. Airport dancing? Yep. Now, bizarre reports of a cage match in Arkansas, where attendees paid for admission expecting to watch a fight and instead witnessed two men get naked and lock lips, suggests Cohen is still at it, more than three months down the line. Not only that, but he appears to have pulled the stunt twice: First on June 5 at the Four States Fair Grounds in Texarkana, then again at Fort Smith's convention center, where a character named "Straight Dave" apparently selected a planted audience member to challenge him.

Whether or not you agree with Cohen's brash style -- he claims to take inspiration from Michael Moore's stunts --
the actor definitely constructs his gags with very specific ideas in mind. Borat took a stab at American stereotypes of foreign cultures, but Bruno looks like it's geared more towards attacking homophobia -- specifically as it manifests in middle America. However, it's hard to say whether or not such excessive spectacles will manage to correct misinformed perspectives or reinforce them.

School may be out for the summer, but documentaries about teens may become a hot topic anyway. Nanette Burstein's American Teen, focusing on seniors at a small town in Indiana, was a smash at Sundance and will hit theaters on July 25. Caroline Suh's Frontrunners, about four teens running for elective office at a prestigious high school in New York City, had its world premiere at South by Southwest and has just been picked up for distribution by Oscilloscope Pictures, according to indieWIRE.

Distributor Paramount Vantage has been promoting American Teen like crazy over the past couple of months, so marketing Frontrunners as something different and worthwhile will be the challenge for Oscilloscope, which is the distribution arm of Oscilloscope Laboratories. The company was founded by Adam Yauch, who's best known as one of the Beastie Boys. Frontrunners will be just their third release (after Gunning For That #1 Spot and Flow); Yauch said in a statement: "I was taken by its Rushmore meets Spellbound meets Election quality."

Frontrunners will open at New York's Film Forum on October 15, well-timed to capitalize on election fever, followed by a national theatrical release before hitting DVD next year. Kim Voynar saw the film at SXSW and compared it unfavorably with American Teen, though she says she enjoyed the film overall despite her frustrations. We'll see how audiences react in three months. Until then, the official site has a trailer and more information.

From global warming to toasting a presidential candidate? Davis Guggenheim, who won an Academy Award for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, is reportedly working on a film about Senator Barack Obama that will be shown during the Democratic National Convention in late August, according to The Huffington Post.

Guggenheim was seen accompanying Obama during his visit to Butte, Montana, on Friday afternoon. Guggenheim said only that he was traveling with his son and doing some interviews, though a tipster told a reporter the film shoot was on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and the convention. An Obama staff member later told the New York Post that "elements of what [Guggenheim] is shooting may be used," but declined to be more specific.

The Huff Post article says that Davis Guggenheim's father, Charles Guggenheim, chronicled John F. Kennedy, though IMDb shows that Charles Guggenheim won an Academy Award for Robert Kennedy: Remembered, a live action short subject that was compiled from footage that Guggenheim had shot over the years.

An Inconvenient Truth didn't move me as it did many others, but it would be interesting to see if Guggenheim could make something that would liven up the convention broadcast. No word on whether Senator John McCain has recruited any Academy Award-winning documentary filmmakers, though Variety described him as "a major movie freak" back in January 2007; he picked John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate as his favorite political film.

Hmm, I don't remember any of this week's noteworthy indie DVD releases playing at theaters in my area, so why don't we catch up together and decide what to rent? Listed (roughly) in order of critical favor:

Chop Shop (pictured). Second feature by Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart) is a coming of age story set in a New York junkyard. Cinematical review (entirely positive): Kim Voynar. DVD features: audio commentary with director and actors, rehearsal footage, and trailer.

The Tracey Fragments. Ellen Page stars in Bruce McDonald's harrowing drama. Cinematical reviews (both positive): Erik Davis; James Rocchi. DVD features: behind the scenes footage and interviews with McDonald and Page, entries from the "Tracey: Re-fragmented" contest, a selection of images by photographer Matt Sullivan, and trailer.

Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. Julien Temple's doc on the influential Clash musician. Cinematical reviews (both frustrated): Kevin Kelly; Jeffrey M. Anderson. DVD features: audio commentary with Temple, 100 minutes of additional interview footage, and trailer.

American Zombie. Grace Lee's horror comedy depicts the ordinary, day to day challenges of life as one of the undead. Cinematical review (disappointed): Jette Kernion. DVD features: audio commentaries, behind the scenes footage, deleted scenes, and trailers.

Sleepwalking. Family drama about a young girl dealing with life after her mother abandons her; with Nick Stahl, AnnaSophia Robb, Charlize Theron, Woody Harrelson, and Dennis Hopper. Cinematical reviews (both negative): James Rocchi; Jeffrey M. Anderson. DVD features: "making of," and trailer.

What's the formula for success? Teens, drugs, Ben Kingsley kisses and 90s nostalgia, evidently. Jonathan Levine's The Wackness scored the best per-screen average of the weekend -- $24,166 -- at six theaters in New York and Los Angeles, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo.

On the other hand, French thriller Tell No One packed them in without any of those elements, earning $20,120 per-screen at eight theaters, according to Leonard Klady's estimates at Movie City News. As somebody once said: C'est la vie.

At the one theater in Los Angeles where it opened, the box office went Kabluey for the film with the same name ($7,900 in receipts) while Alex Gibney's entertaining, if schematic, doc, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, made $7,307 per screen at 26 theaters celebrating independence across the nation.

Not as many were interested in Holding Trevor ($3,400 per-screen at 2 theaters) and audiences declined interest in Diminished Capacity ($2,830 per-screen at 4 theaters). You can read more about all these releases in Indie Spotlight, the new column by Eric D. Snider.

Notable holdovers include Trumbo ($4,233 per-screen average, 6 theaters, 2nd week of release); Mongol ($3,490 per-screen, 253 theaters, 5th week); Brick Lane ($3,451 per-screen, 31 theaters, 3rd week); Roman de Gare ($2,400 per-screen, 37 theaters, 11th week), and The Visitor ($2,017 per-screen, 176 theaters, 13th week).

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl broke into the overall top 10, expanding to more than 1,800 theaters and drawing $1,953 per screen -- but that's a very disappointing figure after the gangbusters box office of its very limited first two weeks of release. The film has grossed more than $6.1 million so far.

If you still haven't watched any of the million documentaries about the Iraq War because you're still not quite ready for that kind of subject matter, you might want to check out Full Battle Rattle. It is a documentary, and it is related to the Iraq War, but you may consider it more like a simulation of a documentary about the Iraq War than an actual example. Think of it as like a practice piece until you can handle the real deal.

How is Full Battle Rattle different from the rest, you ask? Well, it's not set in Iraq or even in the Middle East. It takes place in America, in California's Mojave Desert, to be exact. It's there that the U.S. military has built a bunch of fake Iraqi towns, complete with fake Iraqi people, some of whom are played by actual Iraqi immigrants, others of whom are played by soldiers preparing for combat before being deployed overseas.

And then there are the other thousands of soldiers who basically play themselves on the unscripted side of partially scripted training exercises designed to simulate possible scenarios that they'll be faced with once they're shipped out to Iraq. In a way, watching the simulations documented in the film is like watching Civil War reenactments, except that in this case it's more like pre-enactments.

They say truth is stranger than fiction. To that I say "you obviously haven't seen Naked Lunch," but reality is certainly a fertile ground for film makers and today we've got five trailers for films based, to varying degrees, on real events.

The Perfect Game
I've never enjoyed watching sports so baseball movies usually leave me cold, but this one has a couple of things going for it: a true tale of a bunch of kids rising up from poverty to become world champions, and former drug culture icon Cheech Marin playing a priest. Based on true events, a former coach for the St. Louis Cardinals (Clifton Collins Jr.) takes a group of poor Mexican kids under his wing and teaches them the fine art of baseball, which ultimately leads them to the 1957 Little League World Series. There are the usual sports metaphors: "Love ain't like baseball," says Collins' character. "Yes it is," replies one of his bright eyed proteges. I'm teetering between cute and cringe-inducing on that one, but this kind of rags to riches story is pretty appealing and the period setting is pretty cool. The Perfect Game hits theaters on August 8.

Even the weirder artists of the twentieth century have been attracted to the allure of Hollywood filmmaking, and Salvador Dali was no exception. In the fall of 1941, the surrealist painter hosted a masquerade party at Pebble Beach during one of his regular visits to the town. Called "Surrealism Night in An Enchanted Forest," the fundraising event, intended to assist European refugee artists, brought out a number of stars, including Bob Hope and Ginger Rogers. It was here, the story goes, that Dali became attached to a major studio production called Moontide. The great German emigre Fritz Lang was hired to direct the movie, and asked Dali to create a three-minute nightmare sequence for the film. Unfortunately, after the incident at Pearl Harbor later that year, Twentieth Century Fox deemed the project too bleak. Lang was replaced, and Dali's nightmare sequence went with him.

Although inspired by the movies, Dali didn't always have the easiest time making them. He would get another chance to inject his hallucinatory vision into American cinema with the hypnosis scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, but it's his unrealized projects that truly indicate the scope of the painter's ambition. So many ideas, such little time. Dali: Painting and Film, a breathtakingly unique exhibit currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, surveys Dali's completed cinematic works in addition to tidbits from the ones that never came to fruition. Marvelously structured to show how his paintings were intentionally cinematic, the exhibit contains all the obvious highlights from Dali's movie career alongside lesser-known productions. The importance in film history of his collaborations with Luis Bunuel remain uncontested; two large screens in separate rooms showing Un Chien Andalou (where the opening eye splicing retains its original gross-out impact) and L'Age D'Or attest to that. Fewer visitors, however, might know about Dali's collaboration with the Marx Brothers on a deliriously strange movie that sounded too good to be true.

Drug consumer par excellence, Hunter Thompson's legendary hallucinogenic and boozy escapades have by now been sufficiently documented, not to mention brought to pitch-perfect cinematic life by Terry Gilliam's 1998 adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Less well known, however, is his lifelong political conscientiousness, which receives the lion's share of attention in Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Alex Gibney's (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) loving yet even-handed non-fiction bio of the notorious father of Gonzo journalism. Narrated by Johnny Depp (Gilliam's Fear and Loathing star), and overflowing with archival footage and interviews with friends and enemies, the film lays out the vital details of its subject's life, from his outcast adolescence in Louisville, Kentucky to his suicide in 2005. Comprehensiveness, however, isn't necessarily the goal, and thus while most prime topics are tackled, the greatest focus is paid to Thompson's failed attempt to run for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado on a legalize-drugs platform, and his coverage of the 1972 presidential election, which resulted in the classic Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.

Ride 'em, cowboy! My pick of the week, Marquette Williams' Buckle Brothers, is not like any other Western you've seen. For one thing, it's a documentary. For another, it's about four young people from the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles and Compton, California, trying to make it on the modern-day Bill Pickett Rodeo circuit. They're an engaging, tenacious group, determined to rise above their surroundings and achieve something on their own -- and they love horses like nobody's business. The doc is compassionate but unflinching in showing the young bull riders' triumphs and failures. It's the antithesis of slick filmmaking.

The DVD is available from Indican Pictures. The film's official site has a gallery, trailer, and details on the featured riders: Lil Ron, Yah-Ya, Jazz and Mike. Director Williams and producer Marcus Franklin made the doc while working day jobs; the doc is truly a labor of love. The two filmmakers recently completed the thriller Unspeakable.

"Writer-director Jeff Nichols's Shotgun Stories is a tale of the South -- the flat fields and summer heat of Arkansas, where people struggle with the past every day," wrote James Rocchi in his review. "At heart, [it's] a film about people who discover what they have to let go of, and who confront the terrifying possibility of hope."

Jeffrey M. Anderson was slightly less enamored, but still quite complimentary of this tale of two families (with the same recently-deceased father) who come into conflict. Liberation Entertainment's DVD includes an audio commentary with Nichols, an audio track containing the isolated score by the band Lucero, production stills, and trailers. The film's official site has a trailer, stills, cast and crew information, and more.

After the jump: a family drama, and a John Sayles classic finally emerges.

Despite dropping more than 50% in its second week of release, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (Picturehouse) outdrew all other specialty releases over the weekend, earning $21,200 per screen at five theaters, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo.

Directed by Canadian indie veteran Patricia Rozema (I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, When Night is Falling), Kit Kittredge has clearly benefited from a devoted fan base that convinced thousands of their parental units to fork over $20 per ticket -- which, to be fair, includes a limited-edition t-shirt -- to see the movie in advance of its wide release tomorrow. That's a very good performance when you consider its main competition was not, actually, a French-language flick that skewed very adult, but actually a heavily-advertised animated film.

Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress (IFC Films), starring Asia Argento, took in $17,600 per screen at two locations, which probably owes as much, if not more, to the name recognition of Argento as that of the often-confounding Breillat.

Operating out of a small space on Fairfax, the nightclub Largo quickly became more a legend than a venue. Intimate and loose, part of the appeal of Largo is that you literally never knew (I only use the past tense as the club has moved from its Fairfax location to a larger venue on La Cienega in the past month) what, or who might turn up. Largo's where Jack Black and Kyle Gass did some of their earliest work as Tenacious D; Jackson Browne's dropped in to sing a few songs. John C. Reilly has hosted casual, extemporaneous chat shows there; composer Jon Brion (best known for his work on Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love) has held shows where he alternates constructing songs out of intricately arranged loops of instrumental figures he records live and composes and conducts on-stage with spirited cover versions of requests shouted out from the audience.

Co-directed by Largo manager and co-owner Mark Flanagan and Andrew van Baal, Largo recreates the Largo experience; loose, smart, random and unique. Mixing concert musical performances with snippets of comedy, the final film makes you feel like you've been to Largo, even as the more elegant notes in the black-and-white composition and the vignettes of the club's rhythm and tempo between the acts make it abundantly clear you're watching a film that was constructed and not just a tape that was turned on.

One of my favorite documentaries last year was Crazy Love, about a New York couple named Burt and Linda who have been together off and on for 50 years despite some serious setbacks, e.g., the time Burt hired a man to throw lye in Linda's face and blind her. These are people who should hate each other -- she for the way he physically harmed her, he for the way she nags and pesters him now -- and yet they are in love. And yet I, a normal person, remain single. Life is bizarre and unfair, that's the message I got from the film.

Crazy Love did well enough for a doc, but of course a non-doc would reach wider audiences. So now Variety reports that the doc's director, Dan Klores, will make his narrative debut writing and directing a fictionalized version of the story for HBO Films. There's no announcement yet on whether it will premiere on HBO or open theatrically, but either one is a possibility. Crazy Love premiered at Sundance, as have many other HBO Films productions, and sometimes the level of success on the festival circuit determines whether it goes to theaters or straight to cable from there.

You know what I call 18 consecutive days of horror, sci-fi, action foreign, indie, obscure, and generally weird movies? Well obviously I call it heaven, but most normal people refer to it as Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival, which runs every July and throws a couple hundred features and shorts to a very ravenous crowd of genre freaks. And with folks like Mitch Davis, Tony Timpone, and Todd Brown (among others) on the programming end, you could probably just book a flight to Montreal without even checking the official Fantasia website.

I'm still not sure if I can make the trek up north next month, but I have been invited and (based mainly on the recently-released full lineup of flicks) I can pretty much guarantee that the current registrants are in for one hell of a good time. Among their selected titles, I can very strongly recommend All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Dance of the Dead, Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, Let the Right One In, Mother of Tears, [REC], Stuck, and Timecrimes -- plus they're offering solid titles like Fear(s) of the Dark, The Objective, Red, Second Skin, and Spine Tingler. Among the stuff I'm still drooling to see: Babysitter Wanted, Dark Floors, Midnight Meat Train, Pig Hunt, Repo: The Genetic Opera, and (of course) a new Uwe Boll flick. Plus this festival seems to offer more "Asian weirdness" movies than you'll ever find in one place. At least a dozen that look and sound certifiably insane, unless you'd define Tokyo Gore Police and Negative Happy Chain as "mainstream."

For a complete schedule, lineup, trailer bank, and tons of geeky goodness (in your choice of English or French!), click here and then here. (Montreal's not all that far away...)

Cinematical has received this exclusive clip from Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a new documentary written and directed by a very talented friend of ours, Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room). The film, which premiered back at the Sundance Film Festival, chronicles, well, the life and times of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas); Gonzo journalist, author, psychedelic supporter and all-around nutty dude. James reviewed the film back at The Dance, and said: " ... Gibney's documentary captures Thompson's bizarre orbit though American letters and politics with extensive use of archival footage but also through recreations, animation and more." IMDb has it at a 9.2 rating out of 10, and Rotten Tomatoes is showing 82% so far for a film I know a lot of people are anticipating. If there's one man you'd want to see a documentary about, it's Thompson. I'm definitely looking forward to this one. You? (For more, also check out James' audio interview with Gibney.)

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson hits theaters on July 4th.