DVD OF THE WEEK: The Exiles

by Jeffrey M. Anderson

The Exiles
directed by Kent MacKenzie
1961, 72 minutes, USA
Milestone Films

Most people have probably never heard of Kent MacKenzie's historically and culturally essential film The Exiles (1961). Some clips of it surfaced in Thom Andersen's exceptional 2004 cine-essay Los Angeles Plays Itself—about the The City of Angels as depicted in movies—but unfortunately, most people have never heard of that film either. Andersen included it prominently because it managed to find vivid corners of the city that didn't actually look like set dressing. Now, thanks to Milestone Films (who also gave us the 2007 re-release and 2008 DVD of Charles Burnett's extraordinary Killer of Sheep), The Exiles has been released uncut on an outstanding two-disc set—presented by Burnett himself.

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PODCAST: Werner Herzog

From the official website of valiant filmmaker Werner Herzog's delightfully bonkers new feature, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which should not be called a remake of Abel Ferrara's grimy 1992 cult classic:

Nicolas Cage plays a rogue detective who is as devoted to his job as he is at scoring drugs—while playing fast and loose with the law. He wields his badge as often as he wields his gun in order to get his way. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina he becomes a high-functioning addict who is a deeply intuitive, fearless detective reigning over the beautiful ruins of New Orleans with authority and abandon. Complicating his tumultuous life is the prostitute he loves (Eva Mendes). Together they descend into their own world marked by desire, compulsion, and conscience. The result is a singular masterpiece of filmmaking: equally sad and manically humorous.

In my third annual chat with Herzog, we sat down to discuss the importance of self-irony, playing homage to Klaus Kinski, what he's looking for in applicants of his first-ever Rogue Film School seminar, and why he has yet to bring his distinctive voice to an audiobook version of his filmmaking diary Conquest of the Useless.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (18:31)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Nicolas Cage, "Love Me Tender (from Wild at Heart)"
OUTRO: Schoolly D, "Signifying Rapper"

PODCAST: Jason Schwartzman

In director Wes Anderson's stop-motion animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox (read Vadim Rizov's "Film of the Week" review), 29-year-old actor Jason Schwartzman—who began his screen career working with Anderson as the overambitious teen hero of Rushmore, then co-starred in and co-wrote The Darjeeling Limited—lends his voice to the role of Ash. A runty young fox who longs for the attention and affection of his father Mr. Fox (George Clooney), Ash spends most of the story in a quiet jealous huff over his cousin Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson), who seems to be better than him in just about every sport—including the art of romance.

Sitting down with Schwartzman before Fantastic Mr. Fox's limited release, we discussed the film, familial competition, his hilarious new HBO series Bored to Death, his band Coconut Records (did we mention he was a musician before he was a thespian?), and a somewhat unusual vice.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (15:30)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Georges Delerue, "Une petite île"
OUTRO: Coconut Records, "Saint Jerome"

FILM OF THE WEEK: Fantastic Mr. Fox

by Vadim Rizov

Fantastic Mr. Fox is Wes Anderson's sixth feature and third to be pre-judged as a "Wes Anderson" film—a calcified pejorative often bearing little relation to what the movies are actually like. A "Wes Anderson movie," we're given to understand, is a series of candy-colored rectangular sets and frames boxing in little more than statically quirky characters. It's true that Anderson's thematic concerns have been consistent: dysfunctional families, absent/negligent paterfamiliases, '60s pop and rock songs, hermetically detailed mise-en-scène. But there are also meaningful differences between each one, rarely noted in negative reviews convinced Anderson has outstayed his welcome. After The Royal Tenenbaums—in which Rushmore's occasional cuteness thickened into an emotional mausoleum, with only Luke Wilson's suicide attempt breaking through—Anderson made two transitional films entering new terrain. Anderson's detractors didn't notice: two movies about bad fathers and tragic sons with suicidal impulses were two too many. Yet as Michael Sicinski simply noted of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, "Anderson moves the camera"; that is, in fact, a meaningful progression for the former king of tableaux and elaborate tracking shots. There are more narrative longueurs in Life Aquatic than any of Anderson's other movies—it's practically inert—but Anderson couldn't take his stand-up cardboard picture-book-shots any further and began looking for a way out. Even more woefully misunderstood was The Darjeeling Limited, largely jeered at as quirk embalmed within quirk unwisely backdropped by a fantasy India—even though the 15-minute double-funeral sequence in the middle was straight-up tragedy, the most emotionally direct and devastating thing he'd ever tried.

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DVD OF THE WEEK: Spread

Spread
directed by David Mackenzie
2009, 97 minutes, USA
Anchor Bay Films

Maybe it's a misnomer to hail an Ashton Kutcher indie vehicle the week's highest recommendation (the case certainly won't be made here that it's more or less worthwhile viewing than Up, Lake Tahoe or Ballast), but Scottish director David Mackenzie and writer Jason Dean Hall's clever, pruriently entertaining satire about a sociopathic hipster grifter deserves a better shot at exposure—no pun intended—after the damning reviews it's had since Sundance. It's a film that's easy to misread and dismiss as superficial pap simply because its characters are prone to repulsively opportunistic behavior.

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DVD OF THE WEEK & PODCAST: Wings of Desire

In celebration of Criterion's deluxe double-DVD and Blu-ray treatment of Wings of Desire, my Benten Films partner-in-crime Andrew Grant and I rewatched Wim Wenders' 1987 masterpiece (and pored over the bonus features) to discuss the film's elusive magic and why a work so specific to East-West German tensions has aged so gracefully. Andrew reminisces about spending time in Berlin around the era of the production, with other topics of conversation including They Might Be Giants, Nick Cave's inner thoughts, Peter Falk's unconscious plot hole, a rather unfortunate sequel, and how Wings of Desire almost ended with an pie fight. If you haven't already absorbed its pleasures (or, god forbid, you only know its atrocious H'wood remake, City of Angels), here's the Criterion synopsis:

Wings of Desire is one of cinema's loveliest city symphonies. Bruno Ganz is Damiel, an angel perched atop buildings high over Berlin who can hear the thoughts—fears, hopes, dreams—of all the people living below. But when he falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), he is willing to give up his immortality and come back to earth to be with her. Made not long before the fall of the Berlin wall, this stunning tapestry of sounds and images, shot in black-and-white and color by the legendary Henri Alékan, is movie poetry. And it forever made the name Wim Wenders synonymous with film art.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (17:09)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "From Her to Eternity"
OUTRO: They Might Be Giants, "Road Movie to Berlin"

The Red Shoes: Relaced and Restored

Even in this age of Blu-ray and appreciation for all things high-def, many take for granted how complicated but vital a great film restoration can be. Buzzed about at this year's Cannes Film Festival as one of the most miraculous to date is the UCLA Film & Television Archive's restoration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes, starring Moira Shearer as a gifted young ballerina forced to choose between her love for composer Marius Goring and a career as lead dancer and muse to ballet company impresario Anton Walbrook. In association with the BFI, The Film Foundation, ITV Global Entertainment Ltd., and Janus Films, the restored 35mm print—which Film Foundation founder Martin Scorsese has praised as one of his all-time faves and the most extraordinary use of the three-strip Technicolor process—dazzled a packed house at the DGA Theater last night. (The Red Shoes screens at NYC's Film Forum from November 6 – 19.)

Thelma Schoonmaker—Scorsese's three-time Oscar winning editor, and widow of Michael Powell—introduced the screening with a test sample showing a practical comparison of what had been done to correct for mold damage, shrinkage and surging color. Suffice to say, no superlatives can do justice to what was easily the most impressively eye-popping revitalization these eyes have yet popped for. Following the screening was a swanky afterparty at nearby Nobu 57, where I had a chance to speak briefly with Mr. Scorsese, Ms. Schoonmaker, and filmmaker (and fellow guest) James Toback about the event:

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PODCAST: Tom Noonan (The House of the Devil)

Among other things, Tom Noonan is a musician, playwright, and writer-director of two acclaimed films (What Happened Was, The Wife), but most will sooner recognize this tall, reserved but eerily intense gentleman as a memorable character actor from films as diverse as Manhunter, Mystery Train, and Synecdoche New York. His latest chance to effortlessly steal scenes arrives in Ti West's wonderfully slow-burning, retro-horror flick, The House of the Devil:

Sam (Jocelin Donahue) is a pretty college sophomore, so desperate to earn some cash for a deposit on an apartment that she accepts a babysitting job even after she finds out there is no baby. Mr. and Mrs. Ulman (cult actors Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov) are the older couple who lure Sam out to their creeky Victorian mansion deep in the woods, just in time for a total lunar eclipse. Megan (Greta Gerwig) is Sam's best friend, who gives her a ride out to the house, and reluctantly leaves her there despite suspecting that something is amiss. Victor (AJ Bowen) at first seems like just a creepy guy lurking around the house, but quickly makes it clear that Sam will end this night in a bloody fight for her life...

Sitting down with Mr. Ulman himself in what sounds halfway through our podcast as if it might actually be Satan's homestead, Noonan and I spoke about his dramatic workshops, being naturally creepy, why he never reads the whole script, and anecdotal remembrances of working with John Cassavetes, Michael Mann, and Michael Cimino—"just a terrible human being."

To listen to the podcast, click here. (18:33)

Podcast Music
INTRO: The Fixx, "One Thing Leads to Another"
OUTRO: The Fugs, "I Command the House of the Devil"

[The House of the Devil is now playing in select theaters and is available on VOD through Magnolia Pictures.]

DVD OF THE WEEK: High School Record

High School Record
directed by Ben Wolfinsohn
2005, 75 minutes, USA
Factory 25

Where the Wild Things Are tried to emulate the untamed insecurities of childhood via impressionist sun flares and the pageantry of imagination, but it was a blockbuster rumpus too overearnest and laboriously designed to evoke such emotional authenticity. Far more successful in exposing the raw-nerve anxieties of youth onscreen is an older, rougher, hipper kind of wild thing altogether, Ben Wolfinsohn's High School Record, which could still be about King Max if he grew up to be a confused, complicated teenager who finally discovered garage rock. Neither caricatured like Napoleon Dynamite and its whitewashed imitators with hand-drawn titles, nor played for teens-gone-wild shock value (Afterschool, Kids), Wolfinsohn's naturalistic, semi-improvised series of awkward comic vignettes at a performing arts school absolutely nails the liberating/frightening social moments of post-pubescence in all their riches of embarrassments. Having not seen the inside of a locker since the mid-'90s (which reminds me of some sample dialogue that ages me, between two girls who hooked up with the same dude: "You wanna be his girlfriend now? That's so '90s!"), I still recognized enough of my younger unsure self that I was occasionally and unexpectedly laughing aloud.

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PODCAST: Antichrist (Steve Dollar, Andrew Grant, Michael Tully)

Chaos... yeah, you know already! I haven't peeked at any reports other than from the IFC Center in NYC, where Thursday's late-night preview of Lars von Trier's Antichrist filled three auditoriums and turned yet more people away. The reviews have been wildly mixed, with the disgusted detractors often just as fiery as the film's champions, but you certainly can't argue that this is a Halloween-appropriate provocation that gets people talking:

A grieving couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) retreat to "Eden," their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse...

After a Skype video conference with von Trier following last month's NYFF press screening (for further reading, see my recent interview with the Danish auteur), I shared some post-game commentary about Antichrist with freelance critic (and regular GreenCine Daily contributor) Steve Dollar, my esteemed Benten Films cohort Andrew Grant, and Hammer to Nail's own Michael Tully—who really just wants to treat von Trier to a day at an American amusement park. Dollar keeps thinking about Couples Retreat (they both take place at remote getaways called "Eden"), and Grant addresses that frequent charge of misogyny thrown at the 53-year-old filmmaker's work.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (17:19)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Björk and Thom Yorke, "I've Seen It All"
OUTRO: Marilyn Manson, "Antichrist Superstar"

[Related: FlavorWire's Review: Mythological Revisionism or Misogynistic Schlock?]

Weirder and Wilder Things

by Vadim Rizov

Visiting a friend in Omaha this past weekend, I saw The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. at the lovely Film Streams theater. I'd never seen the one-and-only Dr. Seuss-scripted 1953 classic, and the spangly print certainly didn't disappoint. Mostly, though, it got me thinking about everything that's wrong with Where the Wild Things Are. Both are sui generis translations of maverick beloved children's authors to the screen in ways that could be "scary" or "inappropriate" for children. And there the similarities end.

Even among surreal, culty kid's films (Return to Oz is my favorite, but Babe: Pig in the City and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure come to mind as well), The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. is singular. A source of dismay for Dr. Seuss (who compared the reviews to an on-set accident where all the children vomited at once) and a financial calamity (losing over $1 million), this weirdest of all children's movies inevitably became a cult hit (yes, a musical version is on the way). Director Roy Rowland was a journeyman who began his career helming Robert Benchley shorts and acting as assistant to W.S. Van Dyke on the Tarzan movies, and ended up directing spaghetti Westerns. Among other things, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is a film in which the director is clearly as confused as any of the spectators; watching him trying to figure out the most efficient way to shoot something this unprecedented is one of the film's bracing qualities.

Continue reading "Weirder and Wilder Things"