Paul Schrader.

Even as the awards season elephants stampede on and on, Adam Resurrected is still out there somewhere and, starting today, Film Forum is screening a new print of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which we'll get to in a moment.

But first, to Detroit, with FilmCatcher's Damon Smith: "Hearing about the Big Three's travails got me thinking about Paul Schrader's 1978 hard-hat drama Blue Collar, in which three Detroit assembly-line workers (Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto), disgruntled at management and feeling the pinch of economic down times, hatch a break-in plot at the office of their union local, whose president is a tin-eared bigwig in cahoots with the mafia. Disillusionment was rampant in the oil-poor, inflationary era of Jimmy Carter, and Schrader's directorial debut, co-written with his brother Leonard, is a sullen and cynical underdog film that seems to carry a single, univocal message to the American factory worker: You're fucked."

Updated through 12/20.

"Schrader identifies his 1985 Mishima as a thematic cousin to Taxi Driver, the screenplay he'd written a decade prior," notes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice: "Both works accomplice self-mythologizing isolationists who write as though sharpening knives. Schrader applied ultra-formalist technique to later biopics of the kidnapped Patty Hearst (captors in anonymous silhouette-play) and TV star Bob Crane (imperceptible erosion into handheld breakdown), but it's Mishima's diagrammatic structure that most perfectly suits its subject, defined by his will to harmony."

"Schrader holds his nerve and creates his most formally disciplined work, its textures made more shimmering by the Philip Glass score," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "A final, enraptured flourish from the age of the Hollywood auteur."

"The visual whimsy of the adapted fictions ultimately gives way to the harsh realism of Mishima's final act of protest: ritual suicide." Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine: "As Schrader heaps the character's layers one atop the other, though, this violent, shocking and meticulously plotted outcome begins to seem less an eccentric artist's great folly and more like a conflicted intellectual's poetic way out of a charged personal and political contradiction."

Earlier: the Adam Resurrected roundtable.

Update: "Mishima clocks in at exactly 120 minutes, and is presented, as the title tells us, in four chapters: 'Beauty,' 'Art,' 'Action' and 'Harmony of Pen and Sword.'" Evan Kindley at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "Each of these, with the exception of the last, is further subdivided into three sections which are intercut with one another: a straightforward narrative of Mishima's life from childhood up to maturity, a reenactment of the author's infamous final day, and compressed adaptations of three of his novels. This last device is Mishima's real innovation; while it seems like an obvious enough idea, I can't think of another biopic that makes such extensive and imaginative use of it."

Update, 12/18: Chuck Wilson introduces an interview for LA Weekly: "Opposites attract, which may explain why actor Jeff Goldblum, best known for playing outgoing, hyperkinetic brainiacs (The Fly, Jurassic Park), decided to make a film with master screenwriter-turned-filmmaker Paul Schrader, whose signature characters - Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, Raging Bull's Jake LaMotta - are brooding introverts (and not always the smartest guys in the room)." The film, of course, is Adam Resurrected.

Update, 12/20: "In a less competitive year, Jeff Goldblum would have had a shot at an Oscar nod for his performance in Adam Resurrected, in which he plays Adam Stein, a mental patient irrevocably haunted by his Holocaust survival," writes Gary Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. "This original drama is less glum than it might sound, thanks to Goldblum's spirited, go-for-broke portrayal and director Paul Schrader's distinctive translation of Noah Stollman's script (based on the controversial novel by Yoram Kaniuk)."

Posted by dwhudson at December 17, 2008 2:04 AM