On Movies: Philadelphia CineFest featuring 'Exporting Raymond,' 'Catechism Cataclysm,' 'Ceremony'

Philadelphia CineFest starts Thursday with not one but two opening-night films - the culture-shock comedy doc Exporting Raymond, about the efforts to launch a Russian version of the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, and The Catechism Cataclysm, a lunatic road movie (well, camping-trip movie) starring Eastbound and Down's Steve Little. CineFest's artistic director, Josh Goldbloom, promises that Little, costar Robert Longstreet, and director Todd Rohal will attend the premiere. Likewise, Phil Rosenthal, creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, is expected for his festival debut.

Matt Spicer, producer and cowriter of another CineFest entry, Ceremony, may not be here for its Saturday night Ritz East bow, but he promises to show up - with his entire family - when the screwball romantic comedy begins its theatrical run April 22. Spicer hails from Hatboro, went to Upper Moreland High, and now calls Los Angeles home. He and writing partner - and Ceremony director - Max Winkler met in a University of Southern California screenwriting class a few years back. They've been collaborating ever since. Projects include one with Up in the Air director Jason Reitman, and another they're writing for Jackass dude Johnny Knoxville, called First Man.

Ceremony stars Uma Thurman and Michael Angarano, and takes place during the festivities for a wedding - a wedding in which Thurman's character, Zoe, is the bride. Angarano plays a guy from her past who unexpectedly makes an appearance. Things get complicated.

"I was genuinely terrified of meeting Uma," confesses Spicer, on the phone from the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, where Ceremony screened. "She's intimidating. She's super-tall . . . and incredibly beautiful and supersmart. And I went in to introduce myself, and I'm stammering about how I've never been a producer before, and I literally thought I was going to turn into a puddle. And she couldn't have been nicer and more professional, and she brought so many good ideas to the table. She's a genuinely hilarious person, genuinely funny and a great sense of humor. She's one of those people where you think: How did you get all these qualities? It's not fair - I can see women really hating her. . . .

"And she saved our movie, too."

That's because Thurman wasn't the original choice to play Zoe. And Angarano wasn't the main guy, Sam, either. Ceremony was to have starred Elizabeth Banks and Jesse Eisenberg, but that lineup fell apart when Banks went off to make The Next Three Days with Russell Crowe and Eisenberg was offered a part - the part - in some movie about Facebook.

"We lost both of our leads literally six weeks before we were supposed to start shooting," Spicer recounts. "Max and I were running around in this desperate state . . . and Uma read the script, and Max met with her that day or the next day, and she said, 'Yeah, let's do it.' "

Spicer understands completely that "the Oscar-nominated actor who now everybody knows" ankled Ceremony to make The Social Network.

"Jesse showed us the script, and it was amazing. . . . And Elizabeth, obviously, that was a huge opportunity. So there were no hard feelings, but at the same time, we were like, 'What the hell are we going to do?'

"But it's a case where the worst thing ends up being the best. We ended up with Uma, and I can't picture anyone else in it but her now, and Michael, who was originally supposed to play the best-friend character opposite Jesse. And Michael is awesome."

For info on the Ceremony screening and other CineFest ticketing and programming, go to www.phillycinefest.org or call 267-765-9800.

"Certified" enigma. Fans of Oscar-winning French actress Juliette Binoche and Cannes-winning Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami will have plenty to talk about after seeing Certified Copy, a collaboration that is at once a showcase for Binoche - the part was written for her - and a vehicle for Kiarostami to explore some essential issues. The film, which opened Friday at the Ritz Five, is set in sun-burnished Tuscany, where Binoche is an antiques dealer and William Shimell, an opera singer making his acting debut, plays an art historian with a provocative new book about the aesthetic value of fakes and forgeries.

At a certain point, Kiarostami raises the question about what is real and what is fake in the relationship between Binoche's and Shimell's characters. But the answer is left for us to debate.

"There are two ways of looking at the story of this couple," says the director, on the phone from Tehran and speaking via a translator in Paris. "One way is to consider it in a very down-to-earth, literal way. . . .

"The other way is to enter a game . . . which has an advantage and a disadvantage. The disadvantage is that it can become confusing, and maybe it takes you away from the reality of the couple - you wonder what is actually going on between these two people. But the advantage is that it makes the story much more attractive, and it makes the audience much more vigilant to the mystery of the relationship - which is not so mysterious, after all. It's the story of a man and a woman.

"We are not telling the story, or watching the story, of one specific couple. What matters here is not the reality of that couple. We are looking at one man and one woman and what's going on between them. And what's going on in . . . two phases of a relationship - the very beginning of a relationship, the moment of the encounter. And then the kind of experience that you go through when you've known each other for many years. And taking it as a game, it makes us have an insight of what goes on between men and women, in general. It's a game that makes us look at people as archetypes, and no more as an anecdotal, realistic couple."

That said, Binoche plays her character, Elle, very much as if she is a real person, not an archetype. Which makes Certified Copy all the more rewarding.

"It's true," says Kiarostami. "It's her character that's at stake here."

"Insidious" duo. The team behind Insidious, director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell, made their mark in 2004 with the release of the grisly torture porn number Saw. Made for less than $1 million, it earned more than $100 million in global box office and spawned five sequels.

But Wan and Whannell, friends from film school in Melbourne, Australia, wanted to prove they had other, more refined moves. To wit, Insidious, a riff on the haunted-house genre that tries to get its scares without pouring buckets of blood, guts, and gristle onto the screen. The film, which stars Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne as a couple who think their house is overrun by menacing spirits, opened Friday.

"I don't think it was a deliberate attempt on our part to distance ourselves from Saw," says Wan, "so much as it was us saying, 'You know what? The scariest version of horror is the stuff that doesn't rely on gore.' Gore gets a visceral response out of you, and it can be fun - you know, if you're watching The Evil Dead it's lots of fun - but the stuff that truly gets under your skin, the stuff that I can't watch myself, still, at night, like The Shining, Poltergeist, The Others, that stuff doesn't require a lot of blood. So we were keen to show that we could do a film in that style - and the film is PG-13!"

Whannell, who also acted in Saw and plays a ghost-busting techie nerd in Insidious, seconds that emotion.

"People see us as the Saw guys," he says, "but I do hope that people go to this film and see that there's more to us than that."