October 31, 2008
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/31.
"In its secular, commercialized form, Halloween is an entirely playful holiday, and [Valerie and Her Week of Wonders], one of the most rapturous and peculiar artifacts of late-60s/early-70s Czech cinema, is also one of the most bouyantly playful of all fantastic films," writes Glenn Kenny in the Auteurs' Notebook.
"Thing is, when it comes to scary movies, everybody's an expert - and curiously enough, the experts all seem to agree." So Salon's Andrew O'Hehir sees the need for two lists: "My first list is a kind of Halloween-horrorbot consensus, drawn from agglomerating numerous lists for points of agreement.... Then there's the second list, which although it's got several popular choices, is a bit more personal, a bit more arty, a bit more adorably idiosyncratic, a bit more Beyond the Multiplex, a bit more Sarah-winkin'-atcha."
"The Movie Morlocks Pick Their Favorite Scary Movies." And part 2.
"Nearly every week, DVD labels like The Weinstein Company and Lionsgate flood the market with horror movies, some of which had short theatrical runs, some of which played festivals, some of which aired on cable, and some of which are strictly straight-to-DVD." Noel Murray introduces the AV Club's extensive guide, "From Asylums to Zombies: In Search of a New Horror Classic." Lots of clips, plus they've "discovered at least two movies - one American, one Italian - that should be at the top of every horror fan's 'to watch' list."
Not Coming to a Theater Near You wraps its "31 Days of Horror."
Jonathan Lapper presents his "Kill Fest Finale."
James Van Maanen has more "news from NYC's Anthology Film Archives: Its Halloween program will be a special midnight screening of Ken Russell's The Devils, with Big Ken himself present to answer your questions about this - and a lot else, we hope - his most revered (and loathed) movie."
"The Playlist Gives It Up For The Best Horror Films Of All Time."
At the Film Experience, JA lists five favorite "Monsters of the Aughts."
Adam Ross lists the "10 Best 'Treehouses of Horror' Tales."
"The good news about the recession is that we can look forward to some great horror movies," writes Anne Billson. "The fright genre has traditionally flourished in straitened times. Weimar Germany, the Great Depression and the 1970s oil crisis all coincided, not so coincidentally, with new waves of innovative, inventive nightmare visions that hold up a mirror to their eras just as much as the po-faced social-realist dramas of the day."
Also in the Guardian:
Robert Horton:
Psycho takes you down to the depths (everything ultimately ends up in a fetid swamp, including the last shot of the film); although the film has rightly been called a black comedy of sorts, it seems less amusing with each viewing. Its horror comes unsoftened by period-piece artifice or gothic traditions or vampire conventions. Instead we see ordinary people in the flatlands of American nothingness (the art of Edward Hopper inspired both the Bates house and Anthony Perkins's performance), taking up the everyday business of extramarital sex, stealing, incest, voyeurism, lying... dreary hobbies to fill the empty time. Bernard Herrmann's brilliant score provides no lush orchestral accompaniment, but harrowing strings-only arrangements; it's music for an asylum. Psycho exists at a kind of ground zero, where even the storytelling form itself is savage, where a protagonist might be untimely ripped from centerstage 40 minutes into the running time.
Related: Arbogast's 31st scream comes from Janet Leigh.
Josef Braun on Carnival of Souls and Don't Look Now: "I don't want to over-emphasize the links between these two films, but I do like the fact that in more or less randomly revisiting them in the days leading up to Halloween they revealed these very curious connection point."
Nick Schager: "Let the Right One In has a gloomy poeticism wrought from arresting supernatural imagery - none more potent than an underwater shot during the public pool finale - as well as striking close-ups that give empathetic consideration to forlorn Oskar and Eli, two kids desperate for a warm, compassionate embrace in an environment frozen to the bone."
"The closing film of the 2008 Toronto After Dark Film Festival was also a North American premiere and the 4th sellout of the week," recalls Bob Turnbull. "In only its second public showing, Glenn McQuaid's I Sell the Dead was a fun way to close down the festival."
Fear(s) of the Dark is "[e]asily the smartest, most elegant creep-show of the year," writes Brendan Kiley in the Stranger. More from Reyhan Harmanci (San Francisco Chronicle) and Robert Horton (Herald).
At the Siffblog, Amie Simon rounds up Halloweenish goings on in Seattle.
Online snickering tip. From Mike Russell, the "Mr Do and Mr Don't Halloween Special."
Online shuddering tip. James Urbaniak's found a true nightmare scenario.
Online listening tip. Scott Marks has a great tale to tell - and some recommendations, too.
Online viewing tips. "This year I found it extremely difficult to get into the holiday spirit," writes Kimberly Lindbergs, and I couldn't empathize more. She explains, I agree, and: "In the meantime, here's a couple of great French pop songs about monsters and their makers from Serge Gainsbourg..."
Posted by dwhudson at 4:17 PM
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Shorts, 10/31.
"A work of obvious affection, even adoration, what might surprise readers most is how Scorsese By Ebert emerges as a work of profound identification," writes S James Snyder for Time. "Long before they ever met each other, these two were kindred spirits. Scorsese's films spoke with a tone that Ebert had never heard before, and Ebert was Scorsese's champion well before the director became a household name." And Ebert's running an excerpt on The Last Temptation of Christ.
"As if faintly anxious about requiring extra justification, both Marina Zenovich's recent documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, and Christopher Sandford's new book, Polanski: A Biography, flash their credentials early and often," writes Jonathan Kiefer in the New Haven Review. "As it turns out, Sandford's formerly sealed court transcripts aren't any more revelatory than Zenovich's familiar ones are cinematic. Yet neither of these new journalistic endeavors seems superfluous, and we're left to decide whether in the final analysis that's to Polanski's credit or our shame."
Films in Review runs William K Everson's 1990 appreciation of Michael Powell.
The Guardian's running Simon Callow's fine forward to Out at the Movies A History of Gay Cinema in which he explains why Four Weddings and a Funeral features "[p]erhaps the most important moment in the film from a gay perspective." Related: Kamera's Antonio Pasolini talks with author Steven Paul Davies.
Also:
"Revenge is a dish best served cold. Which, along with mean and lean, is how Daniel Craig plays 007 in Marc Forster's slightly disappointing, furiously-paced, hi-tech, slash-and-burn sequel to the more leisurely, luxurious first 'reboot,' Casino Royale." Wally Hammond reviews Quantum of Solace for Time Out. More from Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Richard Corliss (Time), Wendy Ide (London Times), Derek Malcolm (Evening Standard), Anthony Quinn (Independent) and Tim Robey (Telegraph).
Acquarello: "Like Shohei Imamura's A Man Vanishes and Nagisa Oshima's The Man Who Left His Will on Film, Yoshishige Yoshida's dense and self-reflexive Eros Plus Massacre explores the murky, often turbulent intersection between reality and fiction, history and memory, angst and revolution - the implication of what Yoshida prefaces as the viewer's 'ambivalent participation' - in the wake of the collapsed left movement."
"Comprising the best of the zine's first twelve issues, along with a surfeit of new stuff, Cinema Sewer is about as disreputable a movie book as they come." And Rob Gonsalves seems to have had a pretty good time reviewing it for Hollywood Bitchslap.
"Mike Nichols is set to direct a remake of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low for Miramax Films," reports Anne Thompson. "Written by David Mamet and produced by Scott Rudin, the film hasn't started casting. Martin Scorsese originally commissioned Mamet to write the screenplay back in 1999; it took two years for Rudin to pull the rights together. Scorsese likely will executive produce." Also: "An editor friend sent me an email from the first long-lead screening of Revolutionary Road."
And also in Variety, Archie Thomas reports that "Feel-good tuner Mamma Mia! has become the biggest grossing Brit pic of all time at the UK box office" and Michael Jones notes that Janus Films has picked up North American rights to Goetz Spielmann's Revanche for a theatrical release in March, following screenings at AFI Fest. Criterion, naturally, will then handle the DVD release.
Film Movement will be releasing Fernando Eimbcke's award-winning Lake Tahoe in the US next year.
"Sir Ian McKellen is to tread the boards next year with X-Men co-star Patrick Stewart in a new staging of Samuel Beckett's 1955 play Waiting for Godot." The BBC reports.
"It was one of the most iconic boxing matches of all time, and the culmination of an intense rivalry between the fight legends Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier." Kevin Maher in the London Times: "Yet the so-called Thriller in Manila, as argued in a new documentary of the same name, was marred by the racist antics and erratic behaviour of Ali, whose relentless abuse of Frazier became strangely obsessional and ultimately revealed the dark heart of a beloved sporting hero. Here, in an exclusive interview with the Times, Frazier reveals his true feelings about Ali, the myth and the man, and the verbal abuse he received at his hands."
In the New York Times:
"Two new DVD releases - Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (Universal) and Vincente Minnelli's Gigi (Warner Brothers) - revive the controversial movie year 1958," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "It was a year that divided movie lovers from cinephiles, the Motion Picture Academy from critics, scholars from audiences. Those old arguments stretch to the present, compelling us to re-learn movie history and re-examine aesthetics that are handed down or that we construct for our own betterment."
"Last night I had the pleasure of screening BFI's new high-definition import disc of Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert [Il deserto rosso, 1964] and came away with the unusual feeling that I had finally seen a beautiful woman captured in the Blu-ray format," writes Tim Lucas.
"[W]hat really sets the Peanuts specials apart is their sadness," writes Dana Stevens in Slate. "Even digitally remastered, with the background colors restored to their original vivid crispness, the Peanuts holiday specials have a faded quality, like artifacts from a lost civilization. As Linus observes of the wan, drooping pine sprig Charlie Brown eventually rescues from a huge lot of pink aluminum Christmas trees, 'This doesn't seem to fit the modern spirit.'"
The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Rounders.
"The Other End of the Line wants to show how people from different corners of the globe can make a connection, but in reality, the US-obsessed [Shriya] Priya must defy her cultural mores and empty her measly bank account to be with the man of her dreams, while all Granger[Jesse Metcalfe] has to do is learn to tolerate spicy Indian food," writes Tim Grierson in the Voice.
"There's not many places I know of where you can sit down deliberately early in front of the box office, break out a couple of sandwiches, and within minutes find yourself in a conversation with a well-known and remembered Hollywood character actor," writes Dennis Cozzalio. "But that's just how I started off my evening at the New Beverly this past Sunday waiting to see the double feature tribute to actress Wendie Jo Sperber, I Wanna Hold Your Hand and 1941. I was the first in line and only about five minutes after I settled in and starting mowing on my homemade dinner I was joined by renowned actor and garrulous New Beverly fixture Clu Gulager."
"The do-it-yourself movement has transformed music, home improvement, political action and even comic book publishing. Now the DIY cause is starting to upend movie distribution, and is no longer a scarlet letter that filmmakers labored to hide." John Horn reports for the Los Angeles Times.
Well, rats: "After a year of carefully selecting clips and writing heart-felt, usually accurate captions, Intense Guys is calling it a day."
Online listening tip #1. On the latest edition of Back By Midnight, Aaron Aradillas talks with production designer Jack Fisk about his work with Terrence Malick, Brian De Palma, Roger Corman and David Lynch - and with Matt Zoller Seitz about the extended cut of The New World. For more on that recent release, see Brandon Harris at Hammer to Nail.
Online listening tip #2. Ryland Walker Knight and Mark Haslam, "Burning Through Coen Country."
Online listening tip #3. Nathan Lee talks with Asia Argento.
Online listening tip #4. Ed Champion talks with Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Online viewing tip #1. "V2 Cinema presents the short feature What Are You Looking For?, starring American composer Philip Glass. Directed by Camila Gonzatto, the movie combines documentary, musical and surreal imagery."
Online viewing tip #2. The Hidden Cost of War at Good. Via Coudal Partners.
Posted by dwhudson at 3:28 PM
Studs Terkel, 1912 - 2008.
Author-radio host-actor-activist and Chicago symbol Louis "Studs" Terkel died today at his Chicago home at age 96. At his bedside was a copy of his latest book, P.S. Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening, scheduled for a November release....
It is hard to imagine a fuller life. A television institution for years, a radio staple for decades, a literary lion since 1967, when he wrote his first best-selling book at the age of 55, Louis Terkel was born in New York City on May 16, 1912. "I came up the year the Titanic went down," he would often say.
Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune.
Updated through 11/6.
Updates, 11/1: "In his oral histories, which he called guerrilla journalism, Mr Terkel relied on his enthusiastic but gentle interviewing style to elicit, in rich detail, the experiences and thoughts of his fellow citizens," writes William Grimes in the New York Times. "Over the decades, he developed a continuous narrative of great historic moments sounded by an American chorus in the native vernacular."
A big salute from Time Out Chicago.
"[A]s a suburban Chicagoan growing up in what was still a very working class metropolitan area, I could very well have learned and retained the narrower horizons that many of my relatives and neighbors had," writes Marilyn Ferdinand. "Studs gave me the kind of civic, social, and cultural education I probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere else, and he may be responsible for my highly eclectic and ecumenical tastes. I got that education over nearly four decades listening to The Studs Terkel Show, a talk radio show broadcast live at 10 a.m. (and rebroadcast at 10 p.m.) for an hour or thereabouts (Studs never watched the clock, nor was he made to by station owners Bernie and Rita Jacobs) on WFMT-FM, Chicago's Classical/Fine Arts station."
Updates, 11/3: [W]ithout Mr Terkel's radio program, which was broadcast daily between 1952 and 1997, and without his books of oral history - including one that won him the Pulitzer Prize - it is difficult to imagine that National Public Radio would have evolved in the way it did, or that Ken Burns could have made oral history into a cinematic tradition," writes Edward Rothstein in the NYT. "Just dip into some of the imposing volumes of oral history, in which Mr Terkel took on the social world of the 20th century - Hard Times, The Good War or Working - and you are amazed at the range of people who spoke with him about the Depression, the Second World War or the world of the workplace: the bookmaker and the stockbroker, the carpenter and the washroom attendant, the mayor and the supermarket cashier. Mr Terkel anticipated the academic movement of recent decades to tell history from below - not from the perspective of the makers of history but from the perspective of those who have been shaped by it."
AJ Schnack passes along thoughts from documentary filmmaker Steven Bognar: "Before NPR or This American Life, Studs Terkel innovated the long-form, in-depth interview with non-famous people.... He was among the first of us, and the best of us."
Online viewing tip. "Studs was a friend of Facets for over 30 years," writes Phil Morehart. "An avid lover of cinema, he often presented and discussed his favorite films at Facets Cinematheque, including classics Body and Soul, The Blue Angel and The Grapes of Wrath (watch Studs and critic Michael Wilmington discuss The Grapes of Wrath at Facets here).
And another online viewing tip, this one from Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog: Studs Terkel talks about his participation in Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool.
At Movie Morlocks, suzidoll recalls working at Facets and watching Terkel and Wilmington introduce the films in their series. Then:
Studs's appreciation and love of the performing arts comes through in The Spectator. Terkel himself is "the spectator" of the title - a person who appreciates watching movies and plays and thinking about what they have to offer. He was utterly remarkable in the depth of his personal knowledge on almost any given subject; he not only talked with an actor or writer about their careers, but he often asked them about something nonrelated. The person being interviewed would offer his opinion or insight on this unrelated subject, which was both informative about the topic and revealing of the celebrity himself. At other times, the conversational tone in the interview made it easy for the interviewee to open up and tell a little-known story about himself or recall a painful memory. Terkel's interviews were exactly how you imagine conversations should be among people of great intellect or talent.
Updates, 11/6: For the NYT, David Gonzalez takes a look at Terkel's legacy in the Bronx.
Esquire runs Cal Fussman's talk with Terkel.
Posted by dwhudson at 3:06 PM
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Fests and events, 10/31.
Sidney Gilliat, "who died in 1994, is one of the unsung heroes of British cinema, an extraordinarily versatile figure who wrote and directed riproaring thrillers, satirical comedies and home-front social dramas," writes Geoffrey Macnab, prepping Guardian readers for the season at BFI Southbank opening tomorrow and running through December 11.
Steven Henry Madoff for Artforum: "Evidence of the ineffable in the particular form of fellow feeling is everywhere present in the curiosity and affection that Rirkrit Tiravanija displays in Chew the Fat (2008), his loosely constructed film memoir of the working lives of his close circle of friends—a group of artists who rose to critical attention in the 1990s: Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, Elizabeth Peyton and Andrea Zittel." Screens as part of theanyspacewhatever, on view at the Guggenheim through January 7.
"The Rome International Film Festival (RIFF) is drawing to a close," and Boyd van Hoeij hits the highlights for indieWIRE.
"So Many Festivals It's Almost Scary." Brian Darr rounds up Bay Area goings on.
The Chicago Underground Film Festival "continues Friday through Sunday, October 31 through November 2, with screenings and - as part of its new partnership with the Independent Feature Project Chicago - workshops and panel discussions for indie filmmakers," writes JR Jones in his overview for the Reader, which is also tracking the Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema (site; through Monday) and the Chicago International Children's Film Festival (site; through Sunday).
David Fear in Time Out New York on Hell Drivers (1957), screening at MoMA from tomorrow through November 7: "[Cy] Endfield's tale of tough guys under pressure isn't top-tier, though it is unjustly neglected; like its antiheroes, the film moves at a full-throttle pace and hugs the curves remarkably tightly."
Online listening tip. On the Leonard Lopate Show, "Film preservationist and accompanist Serge Bromberg tells us about some rediscovered silent films, being screened in Treasures from a Chest, a curated program celebrating 100 years of animation. Bromberg provides live piano accompaniment and commentary." Tonight and tomorrow.
Online viewing tip. Like Craig Keller yesterday, Ronald Bergan is mighty impressed with Godard's trailer for the Viennale.
Posted by dwhudson at 1:53 PM
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father.
"Kurt Kuenne's Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father is the most shattering documentary since Capturing the Friedmans," writes Marshall Fine. "Kuenne takes an intensely personal topic and pulls the audience in, until they are as emotionally invested as he is in the story he is telling."
"For sheer technical prowess alone, Dear Zachary is one of the best works of sheer film editing since Oliver Stone seemingly broke the mold in JFK," writes Erik Childress at Hollywood Bitchslap. "Like that film, Dear Zachary unfolds like a masterful thriller that still nevertheless loses respect for the wake its tragedies have left.... Dear Zachary is one of the best documentaries you will see and it may actually be the best that I've ever seen."
Updated.
"[I]t's extraordinary to finally see a film worthy of comparison to Errol Morris's seminal The Thin Blue Line arriving two decades later," writes Martin Tsai in the Voice. "[I]t easily trumps any thriller Hollywood has to offer this year."
"I can safely say that in all my years of cinematic escapism, this is the first time a movie has made me want to commit an act of murder," writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "I wish I were exaggerating, but I'm not."
"Not merely a tribute to a by-all-accounts great guy, the epistolary Dear Zachary doubles as an engaging news piece; it triples as a cutting critique of the Canadian justice system’s bail procedures, extradition laws and child-custody practices," writes Henry Stewart in the L Magazine. "In an era surfeited with cheaply produced DV-and-iMovie documentaries, Dear Zachary stands out as the work of a true filmmaker."
"At once a personal documentary about the murder of his best friend and a polemical rant against the Canadian justice system for coddling a dangerous sociopath, it wants to provoke outrage," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times.
"Though the movie has been shown at Slamdance in Utah and other festivals in the US, the target audience for Dear Zachary, says Kuenne, is the Canadian voting public, which he hopes will change the bail and extradition laws in Canada after seeing the movie," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times.
For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Kuenne "about his emotional journey while making the film, the importance of laughter, and how his film saved a 15-year-old's life."
At the SpoutBlog, Brandon Harris talks with Kuenne about his "Media Diet."
Noah Forrest talks with Kuenne for Movie City News.
And indieWIRE interviews Kuenne, too.
Updates: "The common refrain when describing Kurt Kuenne's documentary Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father is that you shouldn't - that the shocking events that occur over the course of the film should blindside audiences as much as they blindside the filmmaker and his subjects." Alison Willmore at IFC: "But you wouldn't be watching Dear Zachary if it were merely the film Kuenne first set out to make."
"Personal documentaries rarely operate under the aesthetic and narrative rules of horror films, incorporating shocking Shyamalan-esque twist endings, but Dear Zachary: A letter to a son about his father does, so it's fitting that Oscilloscope are beginning its roll out on Halloween," writes Karina Longworth. "In its title and initial structure, Dear Zachary sets up a foundation which it knows it's going to pull out from under us, and that makes it every bit as emotionally manipulative as a studio film."
New York's David Edelstein is pretty rattled. If you're touchy about spoilers, he's got a few right up front, not only for Dear Zachary but for other films as well. You could, though, slip in around the middle, leading to: "A scant five minutes after the film ended, I emailed Kuenne: 'What at present is the status of Justice Gale Welsh? Has she commented on the case? If there is someone still alive who ought to be "brought to justice" on the occasion of the film's release, it is her.' I considered writing a letter ('Dear Canada...'), then decided to save my fury for this review. Dr Doucette got his comeuppance, but Welsh endures. I want her disbarred, disgraced. I want her... There, you see? This is the immensity of the feelings this movie evokes, lynch-mob feelings, because there is no end to the grief, no way of filling the hole."
Posted by dwhudson at 10:15 AM
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Splinter.
"Exactly what a B-movie should be, Toby Wilkins's resourceful Splinter uses its limited means to its advantage, the film so focused on keeping terror at a fever pitch that it has scant time for needless exposition or elaborate narrative complications," writes Nick Schager in Slant.
"Buoyed by solid ensemble work, some yuckily effective special effects, and a script that subverts genre convention by having its characters do smart things instead of stupid ones (mostly), Splinter earns our respect while delivering 82 minutes of lean, mean fun," writes Chuck Wilson in the Voice.
"The situation is fairly basic and doesn't have the psychological or sociological nuance that distinguishes similar scenarios in George Romero's Living Dead movies," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "But even though the characters conform to every expected stereotype, the acting is reasonably convincing. And the monsters travel light, unburdened by allegorical baggage. What are they supposed to be? I don't know. Just really gross and scary, I think."
"Must it mean anything?" asks Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "Not especially, but it would help.... If the minimart hadn't been so well pressurized by last year's The Mist, this indie would seem a touch more creative. Instead, it's a pesky hangnail, easily removed with tweezers."
"[I]ts creature design and visual effects are both convincing and sparingly employed, and the mostly single-location setting is admirably resourceful," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club But the film lacks that spark of originality or humor or thematic resonance that might have elevated it from forgettable genre time-passer to something more lasting."
Posted by dwhudson at 10:08 AM
One Day You'll Understand.
"Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai doesn't seem to have a career so much these days as a mission," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "It would be difficult for this ambassador of his nation's cinema to break away from Capital-t Topics at this point, but his lugubriousness as a filmmaker indicates that he believes in his own cause as much as his admirers do.... And this one-man film warrior has finally, with his latest, One Day You'll Understand, made his first explicit fictional work of Holocaust remembrance. While its intimacy occasionally brings out some memorable pocket-sized moments, the film is still burdened with Gitai's dry art-cinema tactics and narrative didacticism."
Updated through 11/2.
"Jeanne Moreau's remarkable face has been carrying movies both great and not so much for the past 60 years," writes Adam Nayman in the Voice. "Amos Gitai's latest falls into the second category, though the blame can hardly be placed on its octogenarian star."
"In under 20 minutes of screen time, Jeanne Moreau supplies One Day You'll Understand with an otherwise absent emotional weight of reconciliation to the anguished history of WWII France," writes Bill Weber in Slant.
"One Day You'll Understand contains no great revelations or surprises, but rather is suffused with a quiet glow of sympathy and enlightenment," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Its narrow scope and calm demeanor are signs of its seriousness and integrity."
"As with 2000's Kippur, Gitai invigorates the narrative drawn from Jérôme Clément's autobiographical novel with a tactility that extends to location-shoot barriers (interior walls become featured players) and revelatory ambient sounds," writes Mark Holcomb in Time Out New York. "The effect beautifully underscores the film's thesis that memory is physical in basis and limited as moral compass."
"Compared to Claude Miller's stirring A Secret (Un Secret) last year, Mr Gitai's film is a minimalist treatment of the deadly French collaborationist and anti-Semitic frenzies during the German occupation from 1940 to 1944," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "The casting of 80-year-old Jeanne Moreau, that eternally winsome temptress of cinema, in the role of Rivka, provides much of the raison d'être for the project. It is only the latest manifestation of the deep respect the French cinema has always shown for its aging actresses and actors."
"One Day You'll Understand is as slow-paced as Gitai's films usually are, and the characters are as typically one-dimensional, existing primarily to embody a problem or a point of view," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "But the film is also steeped in deep sorrow, and when Moreau breaks down crying on Yom Kippur while trying to explain herself to her grandkids, One Day reaches an emotional level well above Gitai's typical remove."
Update, 11/2: "I don't think One Day You'll Understand is by any stretch Gitai's best work - if you haven't seen his Israeli masterpieces Kadosh and Kippur, start there - but no living filmmaker has his extraordinary formal command of the medium, and he produces half a dozen scenes here that are among the best I've seen in any motion picture all year," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon.
Posted by dwhudson at 10:04 AM
My Name is Bruce.
"Most Bruce Campbell performances come equipped with campy self-awareness, so My Name is Bruce - a film in which Campbell (directing as well as starring) sends up himself, his crummy oeuvre and monster movies in general - immediately seems redundant," writes Nick Schager in Slant.
Aaron Hillis in the Voice: "With a high-camp villain that seems to have escaped from Bubba Ho-tep, slapstick scares à la Evil Dead, and Ted Raimi playing three different roles, the only things missing from this unfunny Campbell love fest are a passable script, Sam Raimi's inventiveness, and a level of sophistication beyond nose-picking and ass grabs."
Updated through 11/6.
"My Name is Bruce is filled with awful, recycled jokes like the sight of two rugged miners in Brokeback Mountain mode growling, 'I can't quit you,'" sighs Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "It ridicules Asians for confusing r's and l's. The fact that My Name Is Bruce knows what it's doing doesn't mean its funny."
Somewhat related, Todd Brown notes at Twitch that Don Coscarelli hopes to make his Bubba Ho-Tep prequel, Bubba Nosferatu, after all - but without Campbell. Ron Perlman may take the role of Elvis instead. And Todd points to Quint's interview with Paul Giamatti as the source of this tidbit.
Update, 11/2: Brent Simon talks with Campbell for the Vulture.
Updates, 11/4: "It was a relief to discover that My Name is Bruce is a bundle of good cheesy fun," writes Jette Kernion at Cinematical. "The gags tend to work, the storyline is eye-rollingly ridiculous but rarely dull, and Campbell is at his lovably jerky best." And she interviews Campbell.
And for IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Campbell "about awkward fans, harvesting his lavender, and why he thinks the Three Stooges are funnier than the Marx brothers."
Update, 11/6: Shaun Brady talks with Campbell for the Philadelphia City Paper.
Posted by dwhudson at 9:43 AM
Nosferatu the Vampyre.
The IFC Center in New York is reviving Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre through Tuesday.
"Between the hordes of stowaway rats that accompany Dracula's arrival, and a town-plaza dance of folly by doomed survivors (a Herzog addition), it's like being present at the birth of a medieval legend," writes Nicolas Rapold in the Voice. "Rather than a remake, Herzog saw Nosferatu as a reconnection with German culture, reaching past the Great War to an earlier age (scoring to Wagner, playing up the silent-era look of Isabelle Adjani as Lucy)."
"You can love this movie without having to admit it's merely an okay version of Dracula." Joshua Rothkopf explains in Time Out New York.
Posted by dwhudson at 7:50 AM
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October 30, 2008
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/30.
"It was 70 years ago today - October 30, 1938 - that Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre traumatised American radio listeners with their brilliant adaptation of The War of the Worlds," John Coulthart reminds us. He wrote about the program last year; this year, he revisits the closing passage of Howard Koch's 1970 book about the play, The Panic Broadcast. More from Scott Marks.
"Haunting is a form of un/knowing. The 7th issue of Forum engages with haunting and related concepts such as the uncanny, spectrality and the trace by looking at a variety of different texts and contexts." Via Catherine Grant.
"For those of you planning a Halloween viewing party, the staff of Filmmaker has compiled thoughts on seven films guaranteed to generate chills."
"The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time," Screengrab's latest list.
"Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess is an oddity, often maddening, frustrating, fascinating, riddled with both flaws and beauty, and bursting with revelations," writes Flickhead.
"Just a few years into the 21st century, Olivier Assayas wrote in the Village Voice: 'Cronenberg's visionary Videodrome is the most important film of this generation. Time has only reinforced its audacity.'" Sean Axmaker: "It's been 25 years since David Cronenberg's first masterpiece drilled its mutant images into the minds of unsuspecting audiences, and Videodrome is as contemporary and relevant as ever."
Lynda Pratt in the Times Literary Supplement:
As Marilyn Butler so acutely observed, Frankenstein is "famously reinterpretable. It can be a late version of the Faust myth, or an early version of the modern myth of the mad scientist; the id on the rampage, the proletariat running amok, or what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman."
Yet the very familiarity of Frankenstein means that its complex pre- and post-publication textual history is often overlooked, and the actual process of composition of a fiction so centrally concerned with creation ignored. The novel's textual instability is explored in the impressive introduction to Charles Robinson's new edition. His honorable aim is not to give us another text of the novel we know - or think we know - but to strip away nearly two centuries of revision and appropriation in order to return to what he describes as the "original" Frankenstein.
At Movie Morlocks, an appreciation from Moira Finnie: Dwight Frye's "extraordinarily indelible performances, blending the grotesque, the poignant and the funny in his characterizations in classic horror movies of the 30s have always fascinated and repelled me. He was particularly memorable as the benighted Renfield in Dracula (1931), and as Fritz, the pitiable hunchbacked dwarf in Frankenstein (1931) who retrieves a defective brain for the monster, and as Karl who assists Colin Clive and Ernest Thesiger in the highly amusing burlesque in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), all of which helped to make these now nearly 80 year old “entertainments” memorable and fresh to this day and each of which confirmed his typecasting. Perhaps Frye played such parts too well, for he never quite escaped them."
"As every horror fan knows, any successful idea merits a sequel," writes Shaun Brady in the Philadelphia City Paper. "So it should come as no surprise that last year's Exhumed Films 24-Hour Horror-Thon has, one year later, spawned the inevitable Part 2. Exhumed added a bigger-and-better gimmick: Straddling the switchover to daylight-saving time, the noon-to-noon event will this year be a 25-hour marathon." Saturday to Sunday.
For IFC, Stephen Saito has "asked some of the best in the [make-up] business to pick their favorite horror creations."
"You may have noticed that Halloween falls on a Friday this year, and you may also have noticed that this would be a way bigger deal if you were still in college." Assuming you're not going Trick or Treating - or to a party - but to a movie, Jesse Hassenger offers "a quick rundown of your spooking options" in the L Magazine.
"The best kinds of horror films aren't at a theater near you, leaving the horror buff with two options: Go the arthouse route or indulge in nostalgia, a manipulative but essential part of the horror fan's experience." Simon Abrams in the New York Press: "On the one hand, adventurous filmgoers determined to tough it out with (shudder) new films have some pretty good options, like Let the Right One In, an uncommonly good Swedish vampire teen romance and Splinter, a supernatural slasher pastiche. On the other hand, NYC filmgoers have a number of terrific older standards (depending on one's acquired tastes) at their disposal, from a week-long run of Rosemary's Baby at the Film Forum (Oct 31 - Nov 6) to two midnight showings of A Nightmare on Elm Street at the Landmark Sunshine (Oct 31 & Nov 1)."
"As a fishing and horror film fanatic (two separate endeavors, I assure you), I can't help but think during this Halloween season about films featuring sadistic anglers, horrific sharks, and torturous fishing trips," writes Chris Justice at PopMatters.
"[P]erhaps this is the year of the Television Great Pumpkin," suggests Reverse Shot's cnw, who then turns to an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Online scrolling tip. Not really film-related, but fun nonetheless: The Idolator's guide to horrorcore.
Online listening tip. "Tim Burton's cult stop-motion film [The Nightmare Before Christmas] turns 15 this year, and as previously reported a motley crew of indie and goth-pop acts have recorded covers for an updated soundtrack called Nightmare Revisited," notes Stereogum. Via the Playlist.
Online viewing tips. Trailers at Twitch: Die Schneider Krankheit and Pontypool.
Posted by dwhudson at 3:39 PM
Fests and events, 10/30.
Minnelli's Melodramas runs at the Harvard Film Archive through tomorrow. "Diverse as they are, the [Vincente] Minnelli melodramas share this common ground: their mise en scène of excess and release happens inside what looks like a blandly normal and conventional framework," writes Chris Fujiwara at Moving Image Source. "If their social criticism gets redirected to a relatively safe area, defined by plots that hinge on renunciation and retrenchment, the very obviousness of this displacement - the fact that it was felt to be needed at all - acts as a form of criticism."
"No director seems less likely to inspire consensus than the late Stanley Kubrick, who would have turned 80 this year.... Over the next six weeks, The Belcourt presents the entire Kubrick feature repertoire - including a free, likely never-to-be-repeated showing of his 1953 debut Fear and Desire, the film he hoped would stay hidden." Five writers for the Nashville Scene argue the case for one Kubrick each. Tomorrow through December 15.
"The London film festival comes to a close this evening with a showing of Danny Boyle's much-fancied new film Slumdog Millionaire," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "For me, this has been an accessible, stimulating festival, richly and inventively programmed.... I think it is the best I can remember for a while. And this is because I consciously set out to find and (where I could) blog about some left-field films. I hoped for serendipitous discoveries and, as it were, news-bulletins from creative minds around the world. El Cielo, la Tierra, y la Lluvia - or The Sky, the Earth and the Rain - by the 33-year-old Chilean filmmaker José Luis Torres Leiva is a case in point." More from Henry Barnes and Jack Arnott.
"Opening at the Roxie this Friday, Christmas on Mars extends a long, lately rising number of narrative features made by musicians," notes Dennis Harvey at SF360:
They've always run a gamut from the terrible (Bob Dylan - please stop making movies! Prince - please don't go back to making movies! Madonna - just leave cinema alone! It hates you!!!) to the inspirationally oddball (a wide range encompassing Neil Young, Yoko Ono, Sun Ra, Frank Zappa, Rob Zombie and R Kelly, to name just a few). Such crossovers should be encouraged, simply because filmmakers coming from other media (think Miranda July or Julian Schnabel) often bring fresher ideas to the table than your average film-schooled Hollywould-be who's been primarily shaped by movies, movies and more movies. As one might expect, the [Flaming Lips'] maiden contribution lands firmly on the quirky/pleasurable rather than pseudo-quirky/excruciating end of this scale.
Carole Zabar's Other Israel Film Festival, running Nov 6 to 13 at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan "is not to be confused with the 23rd Israel Film Festival, which... runs through Nov 13 at the Clearview Cinema, on Broadway at 62nd Street," notes Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times. "Ms Zabar's festival, in its second year, focuses specifically on the experience of Israeli Arabs, which makes it somewhat less mainstream and certainly more of a hard sell to its core audience, New York Jews."
Josh Rosenblatt preps Austin Chronicle readers for Avant Cinema 2.3: In Honor of Conner, a one-night-only retrospective of films by Bruce Conner. November 5.
Migrating Forms, which has grown out of the New York Underground Film Festival, has issued a call for entries. The deadline's December 1.
Marilyn Ferdinand wraps the Chicago International Film Festival, while, blogging for the Chicago Reader, Pat Graham looks back on the highlights.
Online viewing tip #1. Craig Keller offers a close reading of Godard's trailer for the Viennale.
Online viewing tip #2. "Wunderkind Nik Fackler's feature film Lovely, Still, premiered at this year's Toronto International Film Festival." FilmCatcher: "We gave Nik a Flip Camera and sent him out to document his business of going to parties, doing interviews, being celebrated and hanging out with the crème de la crème of the indie world."
Posted by dwhudson at 3:02 PM
Jean-Daniel Pollet.
"Although he is sometimes associated with the nouvelle vague (he was one of the six filmmakers Barbet Schroeder chose to produce for his 1965 omnibus film Paris Vu Par...), Jean-Daniel Pollet was both older and more independent from mainstream cinema than Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, et al." Philippe Garnier in the Voice on a filmmaker "who may be just as little known in his home country as he surely is abroad, despite the efforts by Jonathan Rosenbaum and others to herald his works. This makes the five programs offered by Anthology Film Archives' Unidentified Filmic Objects: The Films of Jean-Daniel Pollet all the more compelling."
Very much looking forward to this series: Daniel Kasman (Auteurs' Notebook) and James Van Maanen. Tomorrow through Wednesday.
Posted by dwhudson at 2:33 PM
Countdown to Nov 4.
"I'm David Bordwell and I approved this message." He's noticed that "the terminology of Big Theory in the humanities has trickled into journalism and politics" and "the term that has gotten the most play is 'narrative.'" Tear your eyes away from FiveThirtyEight or whatever else you've got open in that other window and spend some time with this entry.
Besides the candidates' books and a slew of other touchstones, David Bordwell eventually turns to American Stories, the infomercial the Obama campaign ran last night and "a gift to the film analyst." For more on that, see Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog and Heather Havrilesky in Salon.
Updated through 11/4.
"John McCain was featured prominently in my documentary film Why We Fight," writes Eugene Jarecki, beginning a story that explains why he feels "compelled to share a cautionary tale of my own firsthand experience with the Straight-Talk Express."
Also at the Huffington Post, Danny Elfman tells the story behind Our Greatest Fear.
For the LA CityBeat, Andy Klein reviews "The Presidential Election 55. Written and directed by Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Alan Greenspan. With Barack Obama, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Joe Biden and the electoral college. Opens Tuesday countrywide."
Having just launched People in the Middle for Obama, Errol Morris visits the Living Room Candidate to trace the history of "real-people political ads."
Also in the New York Times:
For the Observer's Review, seven novelists reflect on the "state of America after Bush": Tobias Wolff, Edmund White, Yiyun Li, Walter Mosley, Rick Moody, Siri Hustvedt, Aleksandar Hemon and Uzodinma Iweala.
"The idea for Jesus Politics, a road trip documentary spanning 4000 miles and 17 states in which director Ilan Ziv interviews the religious activist supporters of both Democratic and Republican candidates during the presidential primaries, came when Ziv noticed the prominent role religion was playing in the most recent campaigns." A review from Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door.
Online viewing tips. Phil Nugent lists the "20 Greatest Campaign Ads of All Time" at Nerve.
Update, 11/3: "My sudden eagerness to see W. - I hadn't had the slightest desire to see it before - must have something to do with my ever-less-tentative belief that the movie is a post-mortem, not a prediction," blogs Hendrik Hertzberg. "W. was far, far better than I expected it to be. One test of a movie like this one is this: ten or twenty years from now, would it give an intelligent fifteen-year-old a reasonably accurate overall summary of the people and events it depicts? If I remember right, Oliver Stone's other Presidential pictures, JFK and Nixon, failed this test. W. passes it."
For the Guardian, Lesley O'Toole talks with Thandie Newton about playing Condoleezza Rice in W. More from Sian Lewis in the Independent.
"The San Diego-based Museum of Hoaxes just named its top 20 satirical political candidates of all time, noting that comedians Will Rogers (1928), Gracie Allen (1940) and Pat Paulsen (1968) paved the way for this year's ill-fated bid by Stephen Colbert - and perhaps even Al Franken's serious bid for one of Minnesota's seats in the US Senate," notes Darren Garnick, introducing Slate's own "slide-show essay on history's greatest fictional presidential candidates."
David Barsamian talks with Gore Vidal for In These Times.
"The era of market idolatry is over," declares John Cusack in the Huffington Post.
Hammer to Nail presents its list of "our favorite politically-themed/motivated/charged movies when it comes to the ol' U S of A."
Online viewing tip #1. David Lowery has a PSA of sorts.
Online viewing tip #2. Ray Pride's got one by Dave Willis (Aqua Teen Hunger Force) and Scott Jacobson (The Daily Show).
Online viewing tip #3. "When I got my hands on a copy of the soundtrack to Benh Zeitlin's Glory at Sea earlier this spring, I made the joke that if Obama started using it as his campaign theme, the race would be over," writes Michael Tully. "Well, one day before one of the most historic days in this country's history, it looks like my dream has finally come true."
Online viewing tip #4. The New York Times's "Choosing a President," an overview of the last two years. Stick with it through to the end; the section on the voters, with comments from NYT photographers is particularly good.
Updates, 11/4: In Newsweek, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver offers an hour-by-hour guide to Election Night - what clues to watch for and how to read them.
"Daring to Dream of a Black President." At Alternet: "Some of America's leading black voices, including Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Tiger Woods share what it means to them."
"On the final day of campaigning, with charges still being traded on the stump and in adverts, Granta asked writers from America and around the world to offer their stories and opinions of the race. Read pieces by Daniel Alarcón, Ruth Franklin, Andrew Hussey, Hanan al-Shaykh, Akash Kapur, Lionel Shriver, Paul Kingsnorth, Ariel Leve and Dinaw Mengestu."
"Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died this morning in Hawaii after a long battle with cancer at the age of 86," wrote John Heilemann for New York yesterday evening. "[T]hat this woman - who was Obama's guardian for years while his mother lived in Indonesia, whom he fondly called Toot, and who referred to him as Bear - has succumbed now, a little more than 24 hours before her grandson will most likely be elected the first black president of the United States, is almost unspeakably sad.... It would be banal to point out the drama of this moment, the absurdly novelistic timing of it — yet another plot twist in this astonishing campaign that would be laughed out of a Hollywood pitch meeting for its sheer degree of incredibility."
Online listening tip. A discussion of Recount, Rendition, W. and DC 9/11: Time of Crisis on the Leonard Lopate Show.
"Political Memories" at n+1: AS Hamrah, Marco Roth, Alexander Chee and Emily Votruba.
Online viewing tip. At the Onion: "Voting Machines Elect One of Their Own as President."
Two lists at the SpoutBlog: Kevin Buist's "Election Returns of the Dead: Where do the candidates stand on the Apocalyptic issues?" and Kevin Kelly's "Presidential Election Movies to Get You Through Election Day."
Posted by dwhudson at 2:01 PM
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Auteurs. Rossellini.
"Like most directors associated with the post-war neo-realist film movement out of Italy, [Roberto] Rossellini - whose films Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1948) are canonical masterpieces of the era—is rarely popularly remembered for his films outside of the 1940s," writes Daniel Kasman, looking ahead to a season of potentially relevatory releases on DVD. "If anything, Rossellini's didactic works, including [The Taking of Power by Louis XIV] and other such masterpieces as Blaise Pascal (1972) and later works on Socrates, St Augustine and Descartes clarified that perhaps Roberto Rossellini was the only director working - or perhaps had ever worked - in neo-realism. These are films where realism did not mean use of non-professional actors, or social-realist narratives, or location shooting, or the many other textbook qualities commonly ascribed to the movement, but rather, in the words of New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, they were movies that attempted to present the world, unadorned."
Also in the Auteurs' Notebook, Zach Campbell on Dov'è la libertà...? (Where Is Freedom?, 1954) and Era notte a Roma (Blackout in Rome, 1960): "Dov'è la libertà works out the same basic problem that animated Rossellini's much more 'serious' Europa '51 (aka The Greatest Love) made just before - that is, what becomes those whose adherence to a commonly held good leads them, logically, to a destination with which society cannot make sense?... Though comedic, the film rummages through the moral and historical rubble of postwar Italy in a sense analogous to the literal rubble of Italian cities in neorealist cinema." And: "Though [Era notte a Roma] is in many ways a retread of earlier material, its camera style beckons ever-so-mildly to the films that Rossellini would start making a few years later - the late historical telefilms, four of which will come out on R1 DVD courtesy of Criterion/Eclipse very soon."
Posted by dwhudson at 8:30 AM
AFI Fest, week 1.
Tonight, "AFI Fest, now in its 22nd year, will open with the world premiere of Doubt, starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman," writes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times, but as Scott Foundas explains in the LA Weekly, just over a week ago, this was not the plan. The story behind the withdrawal of The Soloist from that opening night slot (the film's been bumped to March) is good fun, but "the real value of any festival is measured not by, but, rather, in-between opening and closing night.... And on that account, this year's AFI Fest can be deemed a triumph even before the first foot of film has been exposed to a projector's bulb."
Along with its "comprehensive guide to more than 40 AFI Fest titles," the LAW features:
Updated through 11/5.
Posted by dwhudson at 2:00 AM
October 29, 2008
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/29.
"Maybe you didn't realize it - I didn't until too late - but October 12, 2008 marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of [Michael J] Weldon's magnum opus The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film," writes Rob Gonsalves at Hollywood Bitchslap. "This monolith of cult, exploitation, classic, mondo, and just plain cool films became the gold standard by which all other such compilations would be judged - the schlock-cinema equivalent of The Trouser Press Record Guide, left atop coffee tables in slacker dens everywhere for friends to lose themselves in.... Weldon, with the help of Ballantine Books, legitimized the low, the weird, the obscure, the greasers and sluts and punks of celluloid."
"Horror buffs are probably already familiar with the name Stephen Romano. After all, he scripted the first segment ever for Showtime's Masters of Horror series (Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, directed by Don Coscarelli) and his short story collection The Riot Act drew lavish praise from the likes of John Skipp and Joe R Lansdale. Now Romano is poised to break out with Shock Festival, an illustrated fictional history of 101 exploitation movies, all of which were concocted by Romano himself." Pete Vonder Haar talks with him for Film Threat.
"Though undoubtedly intended to honor the film's iconic status as a classic chiller, Film Forum's decision to start its week-long revival of Rosemary's Baby on Halloween in some ways diminishes Roman Polanski's achievement," argues Tim Grierson. "Sure, it's one of the finest horror films ever made, but 40 years after its premiere, Rosemary's Baby (adapted from Ira Levin's 1967 novel) plays more like an unnerving commentary on our still-sexist society than it does a traditional scare flick." More from Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.
Back in the Voice, Nick Pinkerton finds Passengers to be "a kind of declawed, inside-out Final Destination - with none of the sense of showmanship, and all the looming malice of a mawkish condolence card." And Luke Y Thompson reviews Saw V: "The method to the madness of the traps turns out to be quite clever, but the rewriting of Saw mythology is the slasher equivalent of revising Star Wars so that Greedo fires at Han Solo first."
"On the grand scale of horror franchises which have progressively pillaged their brilliant origins, the Hellraiser series is right up there with Halloween and Saw," writes Ben Child. "A series of seven increasingly rushed sequels have followed the Clive Barker 1987 classic which introduced the world to the demon Pinhead. Yet studio Dimension have at least been taking their time over plans for a series reboot: they announced yesterday that French horror ingenue Pascal Laugier is to become the third director to take charge of the project."
Also in the Guardian: "I'd like to think that the stereotype of lots of boys in black zombie T-shirts is finally going away. They're not the majority any more." That's Adèle Hartley, founder of Edinburgh's Dead by Dawn horror film festival, in Wendy Roby's piece on "the female hunger for horror."
More "Great Pumpkins" at the Reverse Shot Blog: "Meet Me in St Louis, that big old slab of female-centric Americana, contains perhaps the century's greatest cinematic evocation of Halloween, outpacing even John Carpenter's sharp visualization of that most dreaded suburban twilight 34 years later," argues robbiefreeling, who's also got an entry on the Night Gallery episode, The Cemetery. Plus, Nathan Kosub on Pumpkinhead.
"Nature, Nurture and the Guilty Parent in Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935) and Young Frankenstein (Brooks, 1974)," an entry from Glenn Kenny in the Auteurs' Notebook.
"Mother of Tears is just good enough to hope that [Dario] Argento has another classic up his sleeve, but bad enough to realize what an unlikely bit of alchemy that would be," writes Andrew Bemis.
James Rocchi: "Susan Sontag told us about disease as metaphor; with The Fly, Cronenberg gave us an incredibly potent ultimate expression of that idea."
Robert Horton revives his 1984 "appreciation of a horror duo by Joe Dante and John Sayles," Piranha and The Howling.
At the SpoutBlog, Lauren Wissot argues that Daughters of Darkness is the "Sexiest Vampire Movie Ever."
Matt Singer carries on listing at IFC: "Puddy In Their Hands - Ten Old Movie Makeup Jobs That Hold Up, Part II."
"Halloween in the Time of Cholera," a photoset from Steve Chasmar via Coudal Partners.
Online viewing tip. Via Jerry Lentz, the trailer for The Mind Snatchers, starring Christopher Walken.
Posted by dwhudson at 4:13 PM
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Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback.
"A true tall tale that unfolds like the Great Unwritten Cold War Rock Novel, Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback traces how a beat-crazy combo formed by five bored US soldiers stationed in West Germany in 1964 evolved into an ambitious, time-sanctified art-punk project," writes Bill Weber in Slant.
"One of the featured points is that the band's two German, art-school-trained manager-conceptualists, Walther Niemann and Karl-H Remy (neither interviewed here), were primary in defining the group's grudging aesthetic and jingle-repetitive lyrics," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "Before being drilled into Bauhaus sternness by the brainy Teutons, the Monks were a good-but-one-in-a-thousand bar band called the Torquays - afterward, they were wearing tonsures and barking down the Vietnam War."
Updated through 10/31.
Opens at Anthology Film Archives on Friday; for more pullquotes and the trailer, see the site.
Update, 10/31: "Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback, an ambitious but unfocused documentary by the filmmakers Dietmar Post and Lucía Palacios, bids to immortalize this short-lived if influential group," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "The case is compelling - the Monks had an amazing sound that anticipated the avant-garde pop of the Velvet Underground - and a little hysterical: one of the band's admirers claims that the social upheavals of 1968 would have happened two years earlier if everyone had been listening to the band."
Posted by dwhudson at 11:06 AM
Teuvo Tulio, coast to coast.
"The Finns called him their Valentino, the 'Wild Bird' of the national cinema." J Hoberman in the Voice: "BAMcinématek is using the more prosaic Master of Melodrama. But to judge from the four-feature sampling that begins Monday, director-writer-producer-actor Teuvo Tulio (1912 - 2000) is a cinematic 'found object' as ferocious as South Korea's outlaw genre artist Kim Ki-young (subject of a recent Walter Reade retro) or the Mexican maestros of the cabaretera who may someday get their due."
Cullen Gallagher previews these "four masterpieces of melodrama, all made between 1938 and 1946," in the L Magazine: "Paradise and innocence lost are Tulio's preoccupations, and his characters are invariably naive girls who are turned wayward and wanton by corrupting men. But within this paradigm, Tulio expresses a sexual and moral sophistication that surpasses anything made in Production Code-era Hollywood."
The series runs through November 24, overlapping with Discovering Teuvo Tulio, running at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley from November 15 through December 4.
Related: "How did Theodor Tugai turn into Teuvo Tulio?" at the Finnish Embassy.
And a Finnish tribute.
Posted by dwhudson at 9:32 AM
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Milk premiere.
"The guests came to the Castro Theatre on Tuesday dressed in Levi's and designer dresses, '70s-chic velvet jackets and drag-queen heels and glitter," reports Steven Winn for the San Francisco Chronicle. "It looked like a glamorous early start on Halloween, but actually it was a Hollywood affair complete with a red carpet and a who's-who invitation list. And, it was all devoted to a sold-out, one-night-only, world-premiere benefit screening of Milk, the hotly anticipated new film about the life, times and tragic death of controversial San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk."
Seen at the scene: "Vote No on Prop 8" signs, Mayor Gavin Newsom, Supervisor Tom Ammiano, Sean Penn, who plays Milk, and his wife, Robin Wright Penn, Josh Brolin, who plays assassin Dan White and director Gus Van Sant. Not seen: the inside-baseball-level controversy over Focus Features' release strategy.
Updated through 10/31.
Yesterday, CEO James Schamus responded to the Hollywood Reporter article and blog entry speculating up a couple of reasons why Focus may be "hiding" the film. In a letter indieWIRE editor Eugene Hernandez posts in full at his blog, Schamus shoots back to the Reporter, "That's a pretty serious charge, especially made by a reporter who did not call us to get his facts, so to speak, straight." In short, the film hasn't screened at festivals yet because it hasn't been ready in time. What's more, "We determined early on that the only appropriate place for the world premiere of Milk was San Francisco."
Nathan Lee, blogging for WNYC, notes that he "saw it twice in order to write a feature story in the upcoming issue of Film Comment, and was politely asked not to publish, post, or otherwise publicly broadcast my critical take on the movie. But so what? That strikes me as a perfectly professional agreement to make, given that I saw the film for a particular assignment. And the notion that there's anything worrisome about Milk not premiering at a big awards-season player like the Toronto Film Festival is both silly and small-minded." And he's still not reviewing it; but he does add that "it's impossible to watch Milk and not see the Obama narrative reflected in ways that are both stirring and unnerving. Were Milk already in theaters and chewed over by the media, it would have been sucked into the election discourse like everything else - and likely raised the subject of political assassination in ways that no one much wants to contemplate."
Updates: "In a private comment, a young gay writer appropriately labeled the film "our Malcolm X" following a recent screening of the film," writes Eugene Hernandez. "Indeed, at times Milk evokes early Spike Lee more than the recent work of Gus Van Sant. The emotional tug of the movie is impossible to resist, especially for queer viewers challenged to openly embrace their history. By the end of the film, when a staged candelight vigil seamlessly blends into footage of the actual silent march in memory of Milk, many in the theater were crying. Extended applause followed as the credits rolled and the lights came up at the Castro."
"Sean Penn gives an Oscar lock performance of power and subtlety that ranks with the best of his career," writes David Poland.
"[T]onally and aesthetically the film falls somwhere between [Good Will Hunting and [My Own Private Idaho]," suggests the Playlist. "Yes, it's certainly Gus Van Sant's most classical and straight-forward work since the aforementioned Boston prodigy drama, but Milk is executed without sacrificing his signature stamp - there's subtle and little flourishes of his creative filmmaking touches that we haven't seen since his Drugstore Cowboy and Idaho days."
Claudia Eller reports on the premiere for the Los Angeles Times.
Kristi Turnquist was there, too, for the Oregonian.
Updates, 10/31: Producer William Horberg has notes and photos from the premiere. Via Movie City News.
From Guy Adams's report for the Independent: "The new film features a scene in which Penn enjoys a long French kiss with his co-star, James Franco. In a recent interview, Franco revealed that shortly after the scene was shot, Penn text-messaged his former wife Madonna saying: 'I just popped my cherry kissing a guy. I thought of you, I don't know why.' The singer texted back: 'Congratulations!'"
Posted by dwhudson at 7:49 AM
British Independent Film Awards. Nominations.
"Hunger, the debut film by artist Steve McQueen about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, has been nominated for seven British Independent Film Awards. Turner Prize-winner McQueen's film has more nominations than The Duchess, starring Keira Knightley, and Happy-Go-Lucky, the latest movie from Mike Leigh." Sherna Noah has the full list in the Independent.
Posted by dwhudson at 2:59 AM
October 28, 2008
Shorts, 10/28.
Gus Van Sant's Milk premieres tonight at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. The Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik thinks Focus Features is "hiding it" and lays out a few possible reasons. Meanwhile, Shawn Levy points to Borys Kit's story in the Hollywood Reporter on Fox Searchlight picking up Van Sant and Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black's next project, an adaptation of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Related online viewing. Black has directed two Web ads for Republicans Against 8 and Ted Johnson's got them.
Ray Pride's having a hard time taking Belá Tarr's plans for his next project seriously.
"The International Documentary Association announced their nominees for their annual awards today," notes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "The five features to get the nod are Kassim the Dream, Stranded, Man on Wire, Young@Heart and Waltz With Bashir."
Catherine Grant presents an extensive roundup - text, audio, video - on Atom Egoyan's Adoration.
Scott Macaulay's latest entry at Filmmaker is full of sorely needed levity: "Zizek and Henri-Levy on Kusturica."
"Before standardizing the topography of noir with Murder My Sweet, Edward Dmytryk made the nervy little "coming home from the war" film Til the End of Time," writes Erich Kuersten at Bright Lights After Dark. "A lower budgeted cousin to William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives, Dmytryk's film walks and whispers where Wyler's marches and sings."
"How Will Recession Affect the Entertainment Biz?" asks Rebecca Winters Keegan in Time.
Lots of online listening today, for whatever reason:
Posted by dwhudson at 2:54 PM
DVDs, 10/28.
Terrence Malick "has been trying to forge a new way to express concepts other films don't dare approach," writes Bilge Ebiri. "Sometimes these attempts come off as clichéd, but that may also be because he is, in effect, portraying a failed human attempt to give voice to something that cannot be named or spoken." Then, echoing Malick's own comments on Heidegger, "if Malick resorts to his own peculiar language, it is because ordinary cinema does not meet his purposes; and it does not because he has new and different purposes."
Also at Moving Image Source, Michael Atkinson relates the "possibly apocryphal tale" of a slightly, somewhat, maybe even vastly different version of The Thin Red Line that no one except Malick has ever seen: "How much does authorial intention matter? Does it make a difference that perhaps the film's current form isn't what Malick finally wanted? Does the possibility of Malick crafting the film as almost a defiant nose-thumbing, after he'd wanted to make a more traditional movie, affect how we see the film? If a director's cut ever surfaces (there's an online petition for its release, with over a thousand names), will it be less Malickian? Or more so? Would it be a better film, or less distinctive, less poetic? Which one would be the 'real' film?"
Related offline reading: The Thin Red Line, a volume in Routledge's Philosophers on Film series.
More Michael Atkinson, here reviewing Flight of the Red Balloon for IFC: "Let's begin by dumping the unhelpful category 'minimalism' - Hou [Hsiao-hsien] films, as with Ozu's and Tsai Ming-liang's and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's and Abbas Kiarostami's and Carlos Reygadas's, can hardly be summed up as having relative dearth of material within them; usually, they are spectacularly rich and sometimes inexhaustible. As viewers in this rigorous corner of film culture - the cinema of real time and actual space and mysterious unseen forces - we help drive the bus, we are not merely passengers. (As J Hoberman wrote about Flight of the Red Balloon, the new Hou film 'encourages the spectator to rummage.') Hou is very much the paradigm's Renoir, its master of lyrical sympathy."
There's also a new 20th Anniversary Edition of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Atkinson finds the whole project to be "both a sophomoric trifle, an official codification of amateur real-life couch potato heckling and a bottomlessly fascinating avant-garde process by which forgotten films are repurposed and reinvented, given a new layer of text and mocked in their helpless void."
In the Eclipse set Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women, "All of his major creative phases are covered," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times: "the romantic, Expressionist-tinged work of the silent and early sound periods; the politically engaged work of the postwar period, influenced by Italian neo-realism; and the final creative surge of the 1950s, in which a distanced, contemplative tone conveys an infinite solicitude for human suffering, balanced by a sense of its insignificance in the cosmic order."
Josef Braun reviews Aki Kaurismäki's Proletariat Trilogy, which "wasn't originally intended as such, and indeed, their themes, like the ubiquitous rock and roll performances, always happening somewhere in Helsinki's bars, can be found in many other Kaurismäki movies. But they do share certain remarkable similarities that reward consecutive viewing: their quiet tributes to the haggard dignity and, in two out of three cases, redeeming solidarity of the working class; their endlessly playful interweaving of old Hollywood genre conventions, homages to Sirk, Ray and Hawks, into what would seem an ill-fitting aesthetic; and the use of starkly lyrical opening sequences constructed from images of hard work, sequences that instantly beguile and set the tone every time out."
Cullen Gallagher, writing at Hammer to Nail, finds an antidote to Juno in Billy the Kid.
John McElwee revisits both versions of The Killers.
Looney Tunes: Golden Collection, Volume 6, features "an entire DVD devoted largely to "patriotic" cartoons from the World War II era in which, among other things, Bugs Bunny impersonates Joseph Stalin, viewers are encouraged to buy bonds and an animated Adolf Hitler invariably gets whacked on the head with a mallet," notes Jen Chaney in the Washington Post. More from Glenn Kenny.
For the Wall Street Journal, David Propson celebrates the "Lubitsch Touch" in To Be or Not to Be. Via Movie City News.
Paul Matwychuk enjoys Bright Lights, Big City "for its time capsule qualities."
Online viewing tip #1. From the cinetrix: "Warhol's screentests are being released on DVD in early '09 with a Dean and Britta score."
Online viewing tip #2. Via Fimoculous, the trailer for the Justice doc A Cross the Universe, coming out on DVD on November 24.
DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker ("Halloween 2008 edition"), Monika Bartyzel (Cinematical), Paul Clark at Screengrab, John DeFore (Austin Movie Blog), Ambrose Heron, Noel Murray (Los Angeles Times) and James Van Maanen ("Two Wheat, Two Chaff").
And of course, as always, the Guru.
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Fests and events, 10/28.
The L Magazine's Mark Asch: "Far from Vietnam is a movie from 1967 that's screened, watched, discussed, far less than you'd think it would be given that it's directed by Jean-Luc Godard (at the height of his formalist Marxist influence), the poetic documentarian Joris Ivens, the livejournalist of the French New Wave Agnes Varda, the American-in-Paris photographer William Klein, the modernist-chic time traveler Alain Resnais, the New Wave also-ran Claude Lelouch (there were always a bunch of second-tier directors attached to these kinds of projects), and the mercurial international man of semiotic mystery Chris Marker." Tonight at Light Industry.
"When It Was Blue, Jennifer Reeves's new 16-mm film performance with live musical accompaniment, will be presented at the Kitchen in New York this week, marking the culmination of a work that took more than four years for the artist to create." Ed Halter for Artforum.
"A big shout out to the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art and Australian Cinematheque for programming five George A Romero zombie films for this forthcoming Halloween weekend." Ben Goldsmith also notes that GoMA's Out of the Shadows: German Expressionism and Beyond rolls on through November 30.
"Where there has been much focus on the formal qualities of film production and the evolving nature of film criticism, in my opinion not enough attention has been paid to reception studies and the sociocultural dimensions of global cinema as reflected through film festival culture, in contrast - let's say - to the sociocultural dimension of online discourse about film studies, which lately has begun to remind me of a high school popularity contest," writes Michael Guillén. "With transnational aplomb, the current issue of Film International (Vol 6, Issue 4) is a specially-themed issue on 'Genre Films & Festival Communities' that seeks to redress that oversight. This issue has been indispensable in helping me articulate my continuing position within this cine-phenomenon."
"Never a stranger to the silly side of rock 'n' roll, the Sound Unseen Music and Film Festival will wrap up its ninth year on Thursday night with Anvil!, a documentary portrait of the titular Toronto headbangers that's almost too funny - too Spinal Tappin' - to be true," writes Rob Nelson.
"Simply crafted but powerful and involving, veteran Burkina Faso director S Pierre Yameogo's new Delwende, which opens this Friday on the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki, shows an isolated society still vulnerable to superstition," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360.
Peter Nellhaus takes a first glance at the lineup for this year's Denver International Film Festival, running November 13 through 23.
Online viewing tips. "The Portable Film Festival is excited to announce the launch of its showcase of the extraordinary work of British video maverick, Woof Wan-Bau. Beginning Monday October 27th, www.portablefilmfestival.com will feature five of this London based director's innovative music videos and short films."
Posted by dwhudson at 1:34 PM
October 27, 2008
Shorts, 10/27.
"The desire for escapism that accompanies rough financial times is real, but boom times are also followed by painful and protracted cultural hangovers, and cultural hangovers are all about artistic reckoning." Carina Chocano: "When good times give way suddenly to bad (or, in this case, when bad times give way suddenly to worse), fashion, materialism and excess suddenly become suspect. The arts revert temporarily (until there's money to be made again) to the starving, the angry and the ugly. There's something cathartic about this - the nihilism of film noir, punk rock, the 'pathetic aesthetic' of the early 90s constitute a jubilant 11th hour yawp against unreflective hedonism in boom times."
You almost have to wonder if Chocano knew this piece would be one of the last, if not the last she'd write for the Los Angeles Times. As Anne Thompson notes, the paper cut 75 jobs in Editorial today, and Chocano's is one of them.
"'Cinema' is, or I should say was, a thing of the 20th century." Via Movie City News, director George Sluizer (The Vanishing), delivering the Variety Cinema Militans Lecture in Utrecht last month: "The film d'auteur died recently with the death of Bergman and Antonioni.... Should we be nostalgic about the avant-garde filmmakers and essayists of the 20th century? No. Their way of filmmaking is now past history: very seldom today can we see films that remind us of the craft of 'direct visual storytelling,' cinema that produces images that in principle need no explanation with words. Cinema is ruled by other media: television, DVDs and the Internet, and whatever is invented next."
"On the Subject of Regrettable Searching - Body to Body, the Filmed Body," by Nicole Brenez, via Mubarak Ali's entry on films by Ben Russell.
"[U]sually, I see over 125 movies a year. In 2008, I've seen 14. And with the exception of one (Tell No One), they have all been less than stellar." Gabriel Shanks sympathizes with Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast, who's watching much more television these days than movies.
"[W]hen we speak about the impact of influential works in art cinema, whether it's Citizen Kane or the original Breathless, we're speaking more about the quality of the response than about the quantity of respondents," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum. "However personal some of its origins might be, David Holzman's Diary is in fact a great work of synthesis summarizing the very notions of the film director as subject (and therefore as superstar) and the camera as tool of self-scrutiny that the 60s film explosion inspired. And its ambiguities about the various crossovers between documentary and fiction remain as up to date as the films of Kiarostami."
In the Cinema Echo Chamber, Evan Louison talks with Celia Maysles about Wild Blue Yonder, which documents her struggle to learn more about her father, David Maysles.
"It was one of the most controversial films of the 70s: an English-language biopic of the prophet Muhammad that was bankrolled by Gadafy and went on to trigger a fatal siege ahead of its US premiere. Now The Message could be set for a grand return to the fray courtesy of a 21st-century Hollywood remake." Xan Brooks reports in the Guardian, where Sarah Dempster offers a guide to the British costume drama. Plus, a birthday gallery riffing on Teddy Roosevelt, "the first real movie president."
For the Independent, Jonathan Romney talks with Terence Davies on the eve of what turns out to be the wonderfully successful premiere of Of Time and the City in the city itself: Liverpool. Anthony Quinn talks with him, too.
For the London Times, Tom Charity talks with Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy, the director and writer of Slumdog Millionaire.
Emily Nussbaum meets "the dread paparazzo of his era - not the only one, but certainly the most famous, the most dogged": "Our culture has a wishful habit of turning every punk maniac who lives long enough into a wise old man, all the danger leached away by nostalgia: Norman Mailer, Iggy Pop, Roman Polanski. Ron Galella isn't like that. He looks like an Italian grandpa, but his eyes are cagey. He's proud. He's blunt. He's a little bit frightening."
Also in the Observer, Stephanie Merritt talks with Toby Jones and Philip French glances back over the career of Robert Mitchum.
Dina Iordanova reviews the Romanian film, The Outlaws, "a great example of the adventure-cum-history films that were produced in Eastern Europe in the 1960s."
"1234 is perhaps the nicest film I've seen for years, a gentle, modest, airy Brit flick centering on a budding musician," writes James Dennis at Twitch.
At AICN, Capone talks with Mike Leigh about Happy-Go-Lucky. So does Paul Matwychuk; and he reviews the film, too.
For the Los Angeles Times, Geoff Boucher asks Christopher Nolan about the success of The Dark Knight (it's nearing the $1 billion mark worldwide) and the various political readings of the film. Related: Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes report that, "After years of giving plenty of running room to independent film companies or studio art house divisions that set the pace with critic-friendly but limited-audience films like last year's No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, this year the major studios are pushing some of their biggest crowd-pleasers into the thick of the awards race." Including, of course, The Dark Knight.
Also in the New York Times: "Steven Spielberg actually stammered a bit in trying to explain his erstwhile business partner's departure," reports Michael Cieply in the NYT. "No, Mr Spielberg said, he really did not know why [David] Geffen was parting ways with DreamWorks after 14 years."
Via MCN, Bilge Ebiri reports in New York that the Two Boots Pioneer Theater "will most likely close at the end of the month." Ray Privett, who programmed the theater's offerings from June 04 through March 08, comments.
"A measure of how well Disney succeeds at reclaiming its heritage and how the two animation cultures [of Disney and Pixar] coexist will be tested when Bolt opens in theaters Nov 21," report Claudia Eller and Dawn Chmielewski in the Los Angeles Times. "Disney's new computer-animated film is the first entirely overseen by Pixar's creative guru, John Lasseter, and tech whiz Ed Catmull, who took charge of Disney Animation after the acquisition." Meanwhile, for Time, Carla Power explains "How High School Musical Conquered the World."
Today's "Mad Men Mondays" column at the House Next Door is written by Matt Zoller Seitz and is "dedicated to the memory of House contributor, Time Out New York editor and regular Mad Men recapper Andrew Johnston, who passed away Sunday, Oct 26 at age 40, following a long battle with cancer."
"Milton Katselas, director, writer, painter and noted acting teacher at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, has died," writes Scott Marks. "He was 74. During his twenty-plus year tenure at the Playhouse, Katselas's pupils included George Clooney, Alec Baldwin, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jenna Elfman, Jeffrey Tambor, Giovanni Ribisi, Doris Roberts, Tom Selleck and many others."
Gerard Rocco Damiano died this weekend at the age of 80. Richard Corliss for Time: "With Deep Throat and his second film, Devil in Miss Jones, Damiano launched the 1970s movie craze of porno chic.... Because of Deep Throat, the hardcore movie became a must-see item for the glamorati, a topic for serious debate in newspapers and magazines (including Time; see the 1973 article 'Wonder Woman') and a fun date for ordinary couples who'd never seen a sex movie."
Online viewing tip. The Guardian's Xan Brooks talks with Nanni Moretti.
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Fests and events, 10/27.
"As in Venice last month, the program of the Rome International Film Festival (RIFF) is heavy on locally produced films and lacks international star power," writes Boyd van Hoeij at indieWIRE. "Though Venice blamed the writers' strike and the fact that many films simply weren't ready in time, Rome had already indicated that it wanted to focus more on local films after new director Gianluigi Rondi took over from Goffredo Bettini as the head of the festival earlier this year."
Also in Rome is Gabriele Barcaro, who reports in Cineuropa on When a Man Comes Home (trailer), "a rather autobiographical title for the new film by Thomas Vinterberg." And Timothy M Gray, writing for Variety's Circuit: "You gotta love any fest that schedules The Baader Meinhof Complex, High School Musical 3 and Michael Cimino lecturing about dance sequences in movies."
"The San Francisco Film Society and Pacific Film Archive - both in collaboration with the Instituto Italiano di Cultura - are bringing Italy to the Bay Area via the 12th edition of New Italian Cinema running mid-November at Landmark's San Francisco Embarcadero Center Cinema and PFA's Moments of Truth: Italian Cinema Classics [runs] late November through December." A preview from Michael Guillén.
"Celebrating the powerful visuals of wide-gauge film, next year's Berlin Intl Film Festival's Retrospective sidebar will screen nearly two dozen works shot in 70 mm film, including rarely seen classics from the Soviet Union and East Germany as well as Hollywood epics such as David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, William Wyler's Ben-Hur and Joseph L Mankiewicz's Cleopatra." Ed Meza has details in Variety; for more, turn to the release.
Richard Linklater and Todd Haynes will speak at SXSW in March, reports Michael Jones. Also speaking: IMDb founder and VP Col Needham and Stanley Kubrick producer Jan Harlan.
Jette Kernion wraps up the Austin Film Festival for Cinematical.
For those who read German, today Film Zeit gathers reports from the just-wrapped Hofer Filmtage and a preview of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, opening today and running through Sunday.
Posted by dwhudson at 1:08 PM
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/27.
Robert Horton on Rosemary's Baby: "The weird denizens of the Bramford and the unforgettable Dr Sapirstein are all played by Hollywood characters whose heyday was the 1930s and 40s: Elisha Cook, Jr, Sydney Blackmer, Ruth Gordon, Patsy Kelly and Ralph Bellamy.... Their identifiability as golden-age movie folk lends a touch of the fantastic, as though they constituted a movie colony looking for a pair of actors to play the leading parts in their (literally) diabolical plot."
Hollywood Bitchslap: "As a group with a wide range of tastes, coupled with not a little knowledge of the horror genre, our staff would like to share a few of our more eclectic horror favorites that might not make the cut of a 'classic,' but nevertheless have found appreciation amongst our legion of reviewers, any of which we would easily recommend you exhume for a happy Halloween."
Mark Kermode in the Observer on The Mist: "If Frank Darabont's sleeper prison favourite The Shawshank Redemption was a film about hope, then this similarly Stephen King-derived monster movie is its (equal and) opposite - a film about utter hopelessness."
A list at the AV Club: "I vant to suck your broccoli: 23 unusual vampire variations."
"I've decided to approach The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which has been written to death, from the angle of the documentary that was made about it in 1988 (and later remastered onto dvd in 2000) called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait - Revisited," writes keelsetter at Movie Morlocks. "My reasoning for this is simple enough, I think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is genuinely horrifying, in part, because of authenticity, and [Edwin] Neal (and his Chain Saw faimly) talk about this in the Family Portrait doc."
For Newsweek, Sharon Begley looks into why about 90 percent of Americans believe, to some extent or other, in the paranormal.
Still charged with the general spirit of Toronto After Dark, Bob Turnbull lets Kevin Tenney's Brain Dead off the hook.
Twitch is still posting reviews from the festival as well.
Also catching up: At Hollywood Bitchslap, William Goss looks back to Fantastic Fest.
Online listening tip. Matt Singer and Alison Willmore: "For this Halloween week IFC News podcast, we look at the various professions and day jobs movie killers have before and during their turn to murder - everything from doctor to carnival clown - before celebrating our 100th episode, Jackie Chan-style, with violent outtakes from podcasts past."
Online viewing tip. Thrill the World, Austin: On Saturday, 881 people broke a world record by doing that zombie dance in sync to Michael Jackson's Thriller.
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Gondrys, 10/27.
"Michel Gondry Filming Top Secret Project In Williamsburg," reports Caroline Stanley at the new blog on the block, Flavorwire. Gondry's also got a relatively new site, which'll be selling a new DVD collection of videos ("not in stores!") and a new book coming out from PictureBox this weekend, You'll Like This Film Because You're In It: The Be Kind Rewind Protocol.
Online viewing tip. MoCCA '08 With Michel and Paul Gondry, documenting the father and son's appearance at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, where they presented their comic works, We Lost the War but Not the Battle (Michel) and Crazy Town (Paul).
Update, 10/29: Michel Gondry's page at the dangerously distracting MTV Music.
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PopMatters. Night of the Living Dead @ 40.
"Recognizing the everlasting importance of Night of the Living Dead to popular culture, PopMatters is proud to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of [George] Romero's landmark film with this very special, and very frightful, special feature."
There are to be 30 articles in all from "some of the most eminent and distinguished horror film scholars" and the series launches today with a brief (and humble) introduction by Romero himself and another by series editor Marco Lanzagorta: "Romero's film revolutionized the horror genre with its depiction of gruesome violence combined with incisive social commentary that reflected the turbulent cultural and political climate of America during the late 1960s."
Updated through 10/31.
"Like the reputations of many horror films before and since, Night of the Living Dead became a celebrated object on the basis of the controversy that surrounded its release," argues Mark Jancovich.
"Every film in the horror genre leading up to Night of the Living Dead offers some kind of release, a resolution to the terror, and this catharsis is what adds the element of delight to our experience of them," writes Kelly Roberts. "Romero had his influences, like every artist, but his great innovation was to rip away this delight, this false hope, and replace it with an even deeper terror. The radical politics that he says 'crept in through the back door' of his debut heightens the discomfort and the realism, but for me what makes it so scary is fundamentally personal: It's that the people you know, the people you love the most, might turn against you in the most inhuman manner imaginable—by becoming inhuman; and that you might suffer the same fate; and that, even if you somehow escape this living death, you might become a beast through fear of becoming a beast."
"Romero's interpretation of the zombie myth created an archetype perfectly modeled for the modern world," argues Tim Mitchell: "a threat to both individuals and society that grows out of an inexorable need to consume. While Romero's second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead (1978), is most often thought of as his commentary on consumerism, the narrative logic of his zombies that began in Night of the Living Dead make it the first horror film to portray mass consumption as an unstoppable plague."
"More than just a cult favorite, George A Romero's debut, Night of the Living Dead, dovetails right with American film history," writes Matthew Sorrento. "The film showed up just after the benchmark year, 1967, when the mainstream success of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate urged Hollywood to revolt against its own established myths."
"Even without zombies, the farmhouse's vast, lonely exterior connotes dread, so the inside should suggest the opposite, amplifying the importance of the interior's potential as a safe haven." Chris Justice: "When the inside only compounds the horror, Romero's farmhouse shatters the illusion of our most trusted institution: the American home is as dangerous as the evil outside its walls."
While it's not part of the series, PopMatters is also running George Reisch's piece from The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless: "Romero's zombies have fortified the shopping mall they took over in 1978's Dawn of the Dead and are making quick inroads to politics and global economics."
Update: Robert Horton (no relation to PopMatters, as far as I know) presents a "on the least appreciated Romero zombie picture," Day of the Dead.
Updates, 10/28: "On our second day celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Night of the Living Dead, PopMatters offers six articles that explore some of these theoretical frameworks," writes Marco Lanzagorta. "These essays attempt to give a rationale as to why, after so long, Night of the Living Dead continues to provide a frightful and nightmarish viewing experience."
Online viewing tip. The New York Times' AO Scott revisits the film, too, finding it's got "one of the great opening sequences of all time."
Updates, 10/29: Marco Lanzagorta introduces today's batch of "six articles that discuss issues related to race conflict and phallic control."
"The genius of Night of the Living Dead is that it doesn't stop at merely making you fearful of dead people who want to eat you... it wants you to doubt eveything." Richard Harland Smith at Movie Morlocks: "It makes you cynical, but rather than hardening you into slate it reduces you to jelly, makes you useless like the character Barbra (played by Judith O'Dea), who sinks into a kind of catatonia by the half-hour mark. Like Barbra, we can do nothing but look on as 'this incredible story becomes more ghastly with each report' and the world falls apart around us."
Updates, 10/30: Day 4: "In 'Victim or Vigilante, the Case of the Two Barbras,' Prof Cynthia Freeland discusses Night of the Living Dead in relation to its 1990 remake.... Prof Linnie Blake compares Night of the Living Dead to its latest official sequel, Diary of the Dead.... In 'We're coming to get you, Barbra,' Ian Chant argues that the real villains in Night of the Living Dead are not the zombies, but the selfish people trapped by a situation they cannot comprehend.... In 'Decade of the Dead,' Michael Curtis Nelson provides a detailed analysis of the zombie nightmares created in the new millennium.... On the same pessimist note, in '1968 is Undead' Timothy Gabriele carefully explores the juxtaposition of 1968 vs 2008 through Night of the Living Dead.... Finally, in 'I See Dead People' Marco Lanzagorta argues that the influence of Night of the Living Dead goes far beyond the horror genre."
"Is there really a connection between zombie movies and social unrest?" asks Annalee Newitz at io9. "We decided to do some research and find out. The result? We've got a line graph showing the number of zombie movies coming out in the West each year since 1910 - and there are definite spikes during certain years, which always seem to happen eerily close to historical events involving war or social upheaval." Via Movie City News.
Update, 10/31: Marco Lanzagorta introduces the final round: "In strong contrast to the previous installments of this collection, these articles offer a more personal perspective of the everlasting influence of Night of the Living Dead."
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Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
"Kevin Smith's movies may not have a lot of artistry - to update an old review of Chasing Amy, he's now directed eight feature films without ever losing his amateur status - but they do have tremendous faith in art," writes Paul Matwychuk. "The most appealing aspect of Smith's career has always been the way this overweight minimum-wage slave from New Jersey, without any Hollywood connections, managed to film his way out of poverty and obscurity on the strength of nothing but gumption, self-confidence, and a tremendous flair for dick jokes. It's tempting, then, to look at Smith's latest comedy, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, as a kind of disguised autobiography."
Smith's "predicament is just one part of a larger problem facing many filmmakers in the field of R-rated comedy," writes Dave Itzkoff in the New York Times: "It is nearly impossible for them to make their pot-smoking, breast-baring (but heartfelt!) movies without in some way encroaching on the raunchy (yet tender!) turf that [Judd] Apatow already owns."
Updated through 11/2.
"[H]ats off to him for being savvy enough to go for a piece of the Apatow action!" David Edelstein in New York: "Too bad he doesn't rise to the occasion."
"Zack and Miri Make a Porno doesn't offend as much it disappoints, revealing yet again in Smith a distinctive voice with little to say and, even worse, one willing to sacrifice rarer talents (a feeling for emotive wavelengths) in favor of the ones (pothead in-jokery, hipster hostility) that pad the walls of fanboy cultism." Fernando F Croce in Slant: "The characters may be able to get off on camera, but viewers hoping for an expansive collision between the sensibilities of director and star will end up with blue balls."
"Reached by phone on the set of the Judd Apatow-directed dramedy Funny People..., Seth Rogen sounded pretty much exactly like the potty-mouthed, pop culture-spouting slacker he plays on film: dropping f-bombs, talking pornography and Star Wars in equal measure and admitting his willingness to do full-frontal nudity in Kevin Smith's latest movie, Zack and Miri Make a Porno," reports Chris Lee for the Los Angeles Times. That scene didn't happen, by the way. As for The Green Hornet, to be directed by Stephen Chow, "We're rewriting it right now with a lot of Stephen's notes and ideas. We wanted a director to come on and bring his own sensibilities to it."
Interviews with Smith: Jason Guerrasio (Filmmaker) and Peter Sobczynski (Hollywood Bitchslap).
Earlier: Reviews from Toronto and Austin.
Update: The Playlist finds that the "soundtrack has some decent tunes on it. Sort of."
Update, 10/28: Alonso Duralde retraces the careers of Smith and Apatow at MSNBC.
Updates, 10/29: "Amiable and engaging in person and a filmmaker for whom comic and movie nerds so desperately want to root, Smith makes two kinds of movies," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice: "romantic comedies and bromantic comedies, with Chasing Amy - his one legitimately great movie - the crossover hybrid hit. They're all decidedly conventional affairs, save for the detours into gross-out juvenilia that, the older Smith gets, seem less sincere and feel more like pandering to the audience that goes to his movies solely to walk out with a couple of lines they can quote to each other on the ride home."
"Smith's reliance on the same old reference-heavy raunch is a classic case of overcompensating; he's a Jersey loser-jock embarrassed by his sentimental streak," writes Henry Stewart in the L Magazine.
"[I]t's a lovely, naughty little movie that allows writer-director Kevin Smith to indulge his twin penchants for scatological sex talk and heartfelt slacker romance" and "a laugh-packed and tenderhearted tale that explores the accidental crossing of the line between having sex and making love," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC.
"[I]t's hard to imagine this film succeeding on any level without Mr Rogen and Ms Banks as the leads," writes Sara Vilkomerson in the New York Observer. "The two of them share a natural chemistry, and while the film has some clunky moments and a couple of beats-off jokes leading up to the, um, climax of the film, when Zack and Miri inevitably get together (in quite an unusual fashion), the movie takes a surprising turn from the somewhat crass to heartwarming."
More interviews with Smith: Erik Davis (Cinematical) and Sean O'Neal (AV Club).
Updates, 10/31: "'I don't know bleep about directing,' Smith once confided to me. 'But I'm a bleeping good writer.'" Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: "He is."
"The movie wants to insist that pornography is a jolly, innocuous pursuit, but also to take refuge in a sincere, romantic traditionalism that is antithetical to the cynical, often playful sexual ethos of pornography," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "The 'porno' remains unfinished, and so does Zack and Miri, having - like most pornography, interestingly enough - thrown away an imaginative premise to get down to predictable, mechanical business. It's as if Mr Smith were a plumber who knocked at your door and then, against all reasonable expectations, insisted on fixing the sink."
"Think of it as When Harry Fucked Sally," suggests Hank Sartin in Time Out New York.
"The fact that Smith is just about my age, has a sense of humor that's oddly in touch with mine, and has a background that's eerily similar to my own means I'm always rooting for the guy to succeed," concedes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "And I think his latest comedy is about to help him succeed big-time."
"I'm afraid there's no one to blame but writer-director Kevin Smith if viewers walk out of Zack and Miri never wanting to have sex again," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "A cult figure among the Adult Swim crowd, Smith has always been better at the foulmouthed and frankly sophomoric (Clerks, Mallrats) than the wistful and sincere (Chasing Amy, Jersey Girl). This movie ups the ante in both categories; it wants its audience to guffaw at dick jokes and swoon over the perfect kiss. That combination of raunch and heart isn't impossible to achieve - at his best, Apatow can pull it off - but it requires a nimbler pen and a sweeter soul than Kevin Smith brings to this movie."
For Noel Murray, writing at the AV Club, "it's nice to be able to break from the ritual of Smith-bashing for a change and say that his latest movie, Zack And Miri Make A Porno, is honestly enjoyable."
"At 38, the grand old man of raunch talk has figured out how to make a movie that's sweet, funny and (a little) sexy," writes Richard Corliss in Time.
"Zack and Miri isn't a movie about making a porno; it's a movie about making movies," writes Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly. "Smith sees an extension of himself in Zack, whose slovenly existence springs to life only once he discovers his passion for filmmaking." Oh, and: "One person saves Zack and Miri Make a Porno: Elizabeth Banks."
"For all the potty-mouthed dialogue, gross-out gags, general licentiousness and rampant supporting role nudity gleefully strewn throughout Zack and Miri Make a Porno, this finally feels like a blithely puritanical tale, limpid, shackled to tired convention and extolling an emotionally juvenile foundation for love," argues the Vue Weekly.
"It's too bad the movie doesn't have the balls to back up its risqué concept with any new insight into love or relationships," sighs Paul Constant in the Stranger.
"I found potty-mouth fatigue setting in pretty quickly," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "The actors, game in every way, at least try to give the appearance of being casual and spontaneous: Banks, in particular, is always fun to watch - her eyes have that great, demented gleam. And Rogen is simply Rogen: At some point he's going to have to play something other than the schleppy, average guy who lands the gorgeous babe, but his comic timing is certainly adequate for this kind of material."
"Both High School Musical 3 and Zack and Miri Make a Porno set out to corrupt our youth," warns Armond White in the New York Press. "The Disney film, second sequel to the 2006 cable TV and CD blockbuster, aims capitalist tripe at unsuspecting teenagers, while Kevin Smith's extended sex skit trashes whatever is left of adult romantic innocence."
More interviews with Smith: Chris Lee (Los Angeles Times) and Marc Savlov (Austin Chronicle).
Update, 11/2: "How does a man who has no idea how to frame or light a shot, or structure a screenplay, or write a convincing conversation, or direct actors continue to be a mainstay of indie cinema?" asks Elbert Ventura in Reverse Shot. "Perhaps the charge is unfair, as I haven't been his most diligent follower. After 1999's Dogma, an ugly, lame, and utterly stupid movie inexplicably hailed by some, I gave up on Smith, the goodwill left over from 1994's Clerks - a revelation for this teenage New Jerseyan new to film geekdom - all exhausted. But if Zack and Miri Make a Porno is anything to go by, I've missed nothing."
Posted by dwhudson at 1:48 AM
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The Universe of Keith Haring.
"Christina Clausen's The Universe of Keith Haring will please those who are familiar with the artist and moderately enlighten those who wonder who painted the mural that temporarily stands on Houston and Bowery," writes Nick McCarthy in the L Magazine. "It's a nicely packaged, if not completely inspired, hagiography of 80s East Village artist-turned-tragic international art-star Keith Haring."
"Like Andy Warhol, whom he revered and later befriended, Haring was the visual artist as social phenomenon, connecting the gay scene to hip-hop, Madonna to museum culture, the democratic street to the rarefied art world." Nathan Lee in the New York Times: "If his story is only marginal to the history of art, it looms large in the cultural history of our time, which Haring (who died of AIDS in 1990, at 31) saw far too little of."
Updated through 10/31.
"[T]he film looks to Haring as an artistic role model for his preternatural talent, of course, but also for his infectious lust for life that had him as committed to social activism and teaching children as to his latest painting," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "What made Haring a visionary was not his marketing savvy (though that was a bonus gift picked up from the 'King' himself, Andy Warhol), but his work's demonstration that art could be daring, fun, and accessible, all at once. Which makes it all the more tragic that Haring died of AIDS at the age of 31 in 1990. There's not a lot of drama in Universe, but when the end comes it's devastating, leaving only the memory and muse of Haring to keep alive the monumental body of work that was only just begun."
"I lived in Manhattan during those years, and his youthful energy surely made the city a better place," writes Brian Miller in the Voice. "Today, his art holds up less well on museum walls than as cheerful hospital murals - instruments of healing, Haring believed. Maybe that's ironic, or maybe we just live in unhealthier times."
At Slant, Aaron Cutler argues that Universe "is content to slide on hagiography and shortchange cultural critique.... Though the film does a decent job of conveying Haring's Manhattan lifestyle, a scene dominated by young, bohemian queers and bisexuals, and one in which he hung out with figures like Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol and Madonna, it turns grating when the filmmaking style tries to compete with its content."
"Christina Clausen offers a profile as quickly and easily consumed as any of the bright, plastic merchandise at the Pop Shop," writes Melissa Anderson in Time Out New York. "Haring's art may be simple, but an homage to him needn't be."
Update, 10/28: Mary Lyn Maiscott talks with Clausen for VF Daily.
Update, 10/31: "Recent documentaries about New York avant-garde artists Andy Warhol, Ray Johnson and Jack Smith have emphasized their otherness, and how they struggled to find a social niche even in a city as nurturing to weirdoes as NYC," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "But Warhol and company were in many ways products of the 50s and 60s; The Universe Of Keith Haring looks at one of the quintessential 80s artists, and how the scene changed by the time he emerged. Unlike his forerunners, Haring was fully engaged with the world around him."
Posted by dwhudson at 1:47 AM
Slingshot.
"It's tempting to deem Slingshot's petty crimes on sweltering shantytown backdrops a Filipino version of City of God," writes Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. "But where Fernando Meirelles charted the power dynamics within Rio's favela-bound community of drug dealers and thieves, Brillante Mendoza devotes equal time to the larger forces keeping the populace on the run."
"If anything, Slingshot is a political film that doesn't really care for politics," writes Simon Abrams in the New York Press. "Mendoza worms his camera through the church doors and around corrupt politicians as they fail to bribe Quiapo's residents—but only for the sake of touching a raw nerve that he strips right before the viewer's eyes. With its gritty but gorgeous visual style, Slingshot confirms Mendoza's status as a provocateur with talent and ambition to burn."
"Someone appears to be running, crying, stealing, getting beaten up or delivering the blows in every scene, while the cameras seemingly operate themselves," writes Melissa Anderson in Time Out New York. "Yet Tirador isn't a gratuitous tour of the abject: Mendoza lightens the tumult with funny bits, including a lost set of dentures and an unfortunate incident with a zipper, and expresses a nonpatronizing admiration for the film's hustlers and thieves.... Mendoza's talents and instincts are unassailable but are most evident when he tempers his tempests."
"Can't-stop-won't-stop Filipino director Brillante Mendoza lets his voluminous storytelling urges run amok in this abject slum roundelay, an ADD cousin to his bustling-with-family but warmer Serbis," writes Nicolas Rapold in the Voice.
Posted by dwhudson at 1:45 AM
Ben X.
Ben X: "The best movie I've seen about teen angst since Donnie Darko comes from Belgium?" wonders Brian Miller in the Voice. "It's also the best film about a bullied teen with Asperger's Syndrome that I've seen from any country, and its blurred life-into-vidgame fantasy sequences makes it seem doubly topical."
Director Nic Balthazar's "aesthetic is ugly, aloof, maddeningly literal and unimaginative," finds Slant's Ed Gonzalez, "but at least the visual excess of the film is on par with the histrionic bullying Ben is subjected to and the hilarious revenge he gets at the end - a corny guilt trip unsurprisingly scored to Sigur Rós."
"Trapped behind a ceaseless, urgent monologue and wildly darting eyes, Ben is a symphony of agonized alienation," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "Yet however representative of the chaos in his head, the film's relentlessly paranoid aesthetics come off more as a formal exercise in social dissonance than an empathetic study of human suffering."
Online viewing tip. FilmCatcher talks with Balthazar.
Posted by dwhudson at 1:43 AM
October 26, 2008
Fests and events, 10/26.
"Sergey Dvortsevoy's Tulpan was awarded the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix at today's conclusion of the 21st Tokyo International Film Festival."
Jason Gray has a full report at Screen Daily and lists a few more highlights of the festival at his blog.
The Chicago International Film Festival rolls on through Wednesday, but the award-winners have been announced; Ray Pride's got 'em. Meanwhile, at Hollywood Bitchslap, Peter Sobczynski presents his "Brief and Not-Entirely-Complete Guide" to Week 2. And again, follow the festival via Chicagoist, Cine-File, Marilyn Ferdinand and the Reader.
Meanwhile, Mike Everleth has the lineup for the Chicago Underground Film Festival, running Wednesday through Sunday.
Posted by dwhudson at 1:03 PM
Filmmaker. Fall 08.
Let's open this entry pointing to the new issue of Filmmaker by noting that a good chunk of a conversation editor Scott Macaulay led in August regarding the current state and immediate future of independent film is online (the full text is, of course, in the print issue). The participants: Josh Braun, Matt Dentler, Ira Deutchman, Ted Hope, Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy.
"With this year's release of Steven Soderbergh's double feature Che, the long-awaited Red One camera proved itself in the field, but the device presented new challenges to the director and the team at Technicolor in postproduction." Brian Chirls outlines the ways those challenges were met before turning to a second case: "This summer, director Arin Crumley took a different approach, leading a crew of 25 into the Nevada desert with three Red cameras to shoot As the Dust Settles, an 'auto-documentary' covering the experiences of a dozen filmmakers at the Burning Man festival."
Updated through 10/27.
Travis Crawford has seen parts of The Road, John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel and "it actually does look really, legitimately good - as in, great.... The Road is an undeniably harrowing work (in both mediums), yet it's far from gratuitous in that its darkness has a mirror of emotional light: a love story between father and son, as Hillcoat describes it. 'The material doesn't shy away from the worst aspects of humanity, yet what's unusual about it is that it also has a sentimental love story at the heart of it, in a world that's dark and brutal although believable.'"
The title of Jon Reiss's piece: "My Adventure in Theatrical Self-Distribution, Part 1; Or, how I 'invented' the two-month window and spent six months wanting to kill myself every day."
Scott Macaulay talks with Scott Kirsner about his new book, Inventing the Movies: Hollywood's Epic Battle Between Innovation and the Status Quo, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs.
"It speaks to Charlie Kaufman's influence as a screenwriter that his name functions as its own genre. Like Robert Altman, Woody Allen or Quentin Tarantino - other filmmakers whose last names are commonly used as adjectives - the term Kaufmanesque conjures narratives that reconfigure the way we perceive time, consequence and even reality." James Ponsoldt talks with him about Synecdoche, New York.
"If you are talking about a filmmaker who tackles sociopolitical topics and taboos in a sensationalistic style with good ol' gay sex, then you might be speaking of Bruce LaBruce," writes Mike Plante, introducing his interview. "With roots in zines, photography and every film format ever created, LaBruce has established a style that is slick yet defiantly lo-fi. In LaBruce's sixth feature film Otto; or Up with Dead People, Otto is a disaffected gay teenager who gets bit by a zombie. A wanna-be revolutionary casts him in her politically laced zombie film, only to start a documentary about Otto. LaBruce attaches the zombie genre to today's MySpace reality-TV world, obsessed with documenting moments instead of experiencing them; except with enough sex, gore and humor to make you sit up in your seat. Strand Releasing opens the film in November."
Jason Guerrasio spoke with Kevin Smith "before he premiered [Zack and Miri Make a Porno] at the Toronto International Film Festival about courting [Seth] Rogen, his latest tussle with the MPAA and his first foray into horror."
Heather Chaplin: "A little game called Braid caused nearly as much sensation in the gaming world this year as Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV and Will Wright's Spore - and this considering that Braid was made by one man on one man's savings with no original thought of mass distribution. People were so excited about Braid before the game even launched that one games journalist called the year before 'the pre-Braid era.'"
And Filmmaker's got a DVD roundup, too.
Update, 10/27: Jason Guerrasio announces a new digital edition of the magazine and points to a sample.
Posted by dwhudson at 11:57 AM
Vancouver Dispatch. 2.
Sean Axmaker looks back one more time to the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Yes, VIFF ended two weeks ago, and yes, I'm late, but I owe it to the festival to get in one last piece so I can cover just a few of the North American premieres in Vancouver's indispensable Dragons and Tigers line-up of Asian cinema. What I appreciate about the selection is that it's focused on capturing early works and films that engage the state of their local cultures. They aren't necessarily the greatest works coming out of the country, but they are a snapshot of the film culture and an early look into the work of directors who very likely grow into major filmmakers.
Of the 50 programs (feature films, documentaries and programs of shorts), plus bonus short films playing in front of films, well over half were shot and/or presented in some video format, many of them on what appears to be consumer or pro-sumer formats. Just like the micro-budget boom in the US, it's opened up filmmaking to a lot more filmmakers, and just like in the US, the results vary by ambition and talent. Format is no measure of quality.
Case in point: Tropical Manila, a shot-on-video production set and shot in the Philippines from South Korean director Lee Sang-Woo. In the realm of dysfunctional families, this is perhaps the most disturbingly screwed up. The Korean father, counting down the days before he can return home, treats his Filipino wife like a hooker at best and livestock at worst. The mixed race son hates his father and identifies himself only as Filipino; with such a role model for Korean identity, it's no wonder. It's a brutal film and the filmmaking is equally brutal, explicit in some scenes (Lee is not shy about chronicling degrading sexual experiences or private bodily functions with point-blank directness) and circumspect in others (the father is a former gangster running out the calendar on the statute of limitations in Manila, a fact that local Korean audiences may pick up from clues but is nowhere explained for the rest of us). It's also very exacting in its imagery and its editing, which is jarring and brutal in its own right. Lee foregrounds the emotional brutality that the father exercises on his wife and his son and churns up the humiliation and anger that simmers under the grim expression of the increasingly defiant son. After all these years I still haven't warmed to the look of video productions, but here it adds a stark, naked quality to the imagery.
Less effective is Blink, a Philippines production set in the slums of the Quiapo district of Manila. It opens with a promising mix of "documentary" footage of people on the streets and the narrative drama of Ambet, the hustler and small-time petty thief and go-between who looks after his little sister and lives in an abandoned building. Director Ronaldo Bertubin drives through Ambet's petty scams and his increasingly dangerous turn as guide to a freelance videographer with a headlong momentum and a restless camera that seems unsure exactly where it should be (an acquaintance chalks it up to a director who doesn't know how to frame a shot, and the haphazard compositions tend to support the observation). But for all the details of the street level petty crimes and scams, it's elementary storytelling in the tradition of the overheated Filipino slum melodrama, with thin characters sketched in broad brushstrokes wandering through an increasingly generic crime story. The smeary video images, with blown out whites and oversaturated colors, doesn't lend any realism to the melodrama.
Ying Liang's Good Cats is a slackly directed chronicle of an educated young man in Sichuan, China, content to play flunky to a building developer who operates a lot like a gangster. It's kind of cool when, at certain points in the film, a portion of the screen lights up to reveal a rock band that launches in to a song, and there's a genuinely startling moment when we fleetingly see what looks like a body fall past a window in a high-rise stairwell. The way the camera holds on that otherwise vacant stairwell, the window hauntingly looking out onto an empty blue sky, creates a tension out of our need to know exactly what we saw. But otherwise it loses the tension in lazily constructed and shot scenes and the fuzzy visuals of consumer video equipment. The most interesting aspect of the familiar story of a young man working in the cracks of legitimate entrepreneurship is the portrait of a boom economy collapsing as foreclosures rise and credit dries up. Now that sounds familiar.
With Yin Lichuan's Knitting, we move out of the scrappy video production into the realm of films made on film, but remain in the culture of young folks leaving rural villages and scrambling to find their place in the burst of capitalist entrepreneurship in the urban centers of China. Knitting focuses on an uneasy romantic triangle sustained as much by opportunity and necessity as by emotion, maybe even more. It's not like we see any real chemistry between Chen Jin, a guy hustling any job he can get, and his girlfriend Li, a small town girl in vision and ambition. When Chen's old girlfriend, Zhang, comes swaggering into their cheap apartment and into their lives and makes Chen a partner in her mercenary schemes, Li's back is up and Chen is utterly oblivious. Or he simply doesn't care. The film rambles on but it is an interesting look at particular subculture of the poor trying to carve a living out of the city: rural young trying to make their mark in the urban world, Northerners looked down upon by the Southern city folk, outsiders who band together for comfort and support even if they don't really like each other.
From South Korea, Kim Tae-Kyun's Crossing is a much bigger film, in scope, in ambition and in budget. This is ostensibly a social drama about the poverty and deprivation and political repression of North Korea and the horrors that happen when a man tries to cross into China to get medicine for his pregnant wife, dying of tuberculosis caused by malnutrition. His plight is turned into political theater and the family left back home suffers for it, not that Kim is any less manipulative in his storytelling. This is politics as melodrama and Kim wrings every last emotional drop with lingering shots on suffering faces and weepy music played on audience heartstrings. There's no denying his skill as he plays every setback for emotional impact, but for all his efforts to show the human condition as a victim of political posturing on both sides of the border, it ultimately comes off as a different kind of propaganda.
Yang Ya-Che's Orz Boys from Taiwan belongs to another genre, the fantasies of boys who get into trouble as a way of escaping lives of emotional abandonment. The inseparable schoolboys are nicknamed Liar No. 1 and Lair No. 2 by an exasperated principal and the names stick so firmly that even family takes to calling them No. 1 and No. 2 from that point on. As of the film's screening at VIFF, Orz Boys (the title refers to a particular emoticon of surprise or wonder - you might translate the title as "Wonder Boys") was a rare Taiwanese-born film hit in Taiwan. It's easy to see why. While it's bright and funny and full of personality, it also has poignancy that is only seen in the details and never directly addressed in speech or moral. No. 2 has been left by his father in the care of a single grandmother, who is none too happy to be playing parent once again, while the older No. 1 is practically orphaned. His father is mentally incapacitated, a wandering crazy-man who is harmless and utterly incapable of caring for his son, and his mother living and working abroad, or so the boy says and we take it on faith. Maybe because the alternative is harder to deal with. But Yang never wallows in their hardship and never stops to make a social cause speech. He focuses on the humor of their survival skills - pranks, cons, games, flights of fantasy - where they have, for however long, fleeting control of lives without an anchor. For all their bad behavior (which is, at is worst, thoughtless rather than malevolent), I was won over by them, because of their loyalty and their imagination and that spark of being kids that is so alive in them. The story takes some sad turns, but the film itself is always keyed into their energy and what they do to persevere.
One last note: VIFF's festival trailers are traditionally among the best and most clever in North America. The festival website has links to all of them if you'd like to check them out or revisit favorites. They're spot on and have terrific comic timing, but more than that, they are obviously the work of film lovers and festival veterans who manage to both spoof and celebrate excesses, the frustrations and the rarified personality of film festival culture. And the trailers can still be seen here.
The VIFF 2008 award winners can be found here.
- Sean Axmaker
Posted by dwhudson at 4:42 AM
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October 25, 2008
Shorts, 10/25.
John Patterson comes close to making the argument I've been haranguing friends with for months now: Since the Iowa caucuses at the very latest, this marathon presidential campaign has been, hands down, the movie of the year: "[T]he campaign is so filled with U-turns, red herrings, cliffhangers and serial climaxes that one barely needs go near the multiplex for white-knuckle entertainment. Just keeping up with Palin's alter egos - the French populist Pierre Poujade and Australia's Pauline Hanson in politics; Tracy Flick, Marge Gunderson, Peggy Hill (and Tina Fey's spoof) in fiction - is enough to set your mind reeling. And movie references are ever near at hand."
Also in the Guardian, Jon Savage:
By the late 70s, deepening recession and spiralling unemployment had pitched Britain into uncharted waters. There was the threat of fascism, the rise of the new right, a pervasive mood of decay and riot. Youth bore the brunt of these conditions: the first to be sacked, the last to find jobs, exploited and/or victimised by adults and government. Music and pop culture was one of their only sources of hope and inspiration, and it was pursued with a fanatic determination. So within a three-year period, [[films such as Franco Rosso's Babylon, Jubilee, The Music Machine, Quadrophenia, Rude Boy, The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, Breaking Glass and Take It or Leave It] were able to explore punk, disco, the mod revival, reggae and dub, synth pop, and 2 Tone. At the same time, they were mostly shot on location, mapping a capital city of dark corners, queasy neons and blasted bombsites.
And:
"Call + Response gives us a whirlwind tour of abhorrent practices that many of us would rather ignore," writes Jeffrey Overstreet. "Sex slavery is thriving around the world, even in the US, and the average age of the victim is getting younger. In their eagerness to buy sex slaves that are disease-free, customers are buying younger and younger slaves... children right on to to seven, five, even three years old. Last year, slave traders made more money than all of the profits of Google, Nike and Starbucks put together. It's not just sex slavery... it's also about the exploitation of children in military endeavors, as young boys are trained to use AK-47s in African civil wars."
"We've been getting more than a few interesting responses to the notion that Ben Stiller could direct The Trial of the Chicago 7, the DreamWorks passion project that's had big names like Spielberg and Greengrass associated with it over the past six months," notes the Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik.
Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay has been listening to Max Richter's 24 Postcards in Full Colour and it's inspired thoughts on "the issue of movie form and content in the internet age."
"Film Threat," a poem by Richard Deming in the Nation.
Catherine Grant points to more "excellent online resources."
Kristin Thompson elaborates on the differentiation between perceptual and mental subjectivity made in the third chapter of Film Art: An Introduction.
Cineuropa's new "Film Focus": Ursula Meier's Home, starring Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet.
In the Voice:
"Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku made two of my favorite films of 1968," writes Kimberly Lindbergs. "Blackmail is My Life (aka Kyokatsu koso Waga Jinsei) and Black Lizard (aka Kurotokage)." As for the latter, "I thought it was time to finally share some of my thoughts about this fascinating and extremely entertaining movie that always manages to find its way onto any list of 'Favorite Films' that I compile."
Max Färberböck's A Woman in Berlin, starring Nina Hoss, "is likely to shock the nation, stir resentment against the Russians and provoke a debate about morality in war," predicts Roger Boyes in the London Times.
Gina Lollobrigida "has reached the stage of lifetime achievement awards: the National Italian American Foundation honored her in Washington this month, and the Rome International Film Festival is expected to fete her on Wednesday." Rachel Donadio meets her: "With a full-figured beauty that communicated innocence and experience, La Lollo was the incarnation of an Italy that leapt after the Second World War from dire poverty to the glamour of the Dolce Vita years. 'La Lollo was a personality that outshone her work in the cinema; she was simply one of the most beautiful women in the world,' said Peter Bondanella, the author of Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. She represents 'something iconic, more important than the actual talent she often displayed in her work as an actress.'"
Also in the New York Times:
Gaynor Flynn talks with Debra Winger for the Independent, where Rob Sharp tells the story behind Anvil! The Story of Anvil.
Dennis Lim talks with Madonna about Filth and Wisdom for the Los Angeles Times.
The Guardian has Mark Ravenhill introduce a YouTube competition: "I've written a piece called 'Old School People.' Your task, if you choose to accept it, is to respond to it in a five-minute film. The winner's prize is a once in a lifetime chance to work for a major broadcaster with Channel 4 executive Stuart Cosgrove as your mentor."
Online listening tip. "Not Quite Hollywood is a new documentary exploring the world of Australian exploitation cinema that began in the early 1970s." Ambrose Heron talks with director Mark Hartley.
Online viewing tips. Ray Pride's director pix and Wassup! 2008.
Posted by dwhudson at 12:24 PM
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/25.
"One of the downsides of being a horror movie fan for over 40 years is that, by this point, I've pretty much seen it all," writes Richard Harland Smith. "I cut my teeth on the Universal monster movies, grew up with the Hammer horrors, schooled myself with the Corman Poes and paid my dues with the Italian gialli and the American slashers before branching out to the terrors of Asia, Indonesia and India.... And then life throws you a curveball. Such is the case with Dr Renault's Secret (1942)."
Also at Movie Morlocks, morlockjeff: "While it obviously borrows elements from Tod Browning's The Devil Doll (1936) and Dead of Night (1945) and even throws in a ratty-looking zombie for good measure, Curse of the Doll People also looks ahead to such scary-for-their-time chillers like the made-for-TV Trilogy of Terror (1975) with Karen Black being stalked by a Zuni warrior fetish doll. But the thing that places this South of the border horror in nightmare territory are the dolls themselves."
"Hammer has arisen from its cinematic crypt and after a 30-year absence once again stalks the land, intent on thrilling and terrifying a new generation." David McKittrick reports in the Independent.
Robert Horton opens a week-long Halloween series by telling the story behind the making of Tod Browning's Freaks - and it's reception over the years. "The blend of melodrama, MGM gloss, medical grotesquerie, and early-sound ambiance is uncanny. Even its technical flaws add to the effect: the tinny soundtrack, the sometimes creaky line readings..., the dream-like lapses in continuity: just before one tense sequence fades to black, there's a frightening, shivery shot of Randian lurking under a wagon, which logically must be from the climax but is inserted at this earlier moment. It's absolutely eerie, and it absolutely works. Take from Freaks what you will, but no movie has ever crept like this one.
"Usually at this time of the year, we launch our annual 'Great Pumpkins' Halloween-week series with something like a state-of-the-art assessment of the horror film," blogs Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling. "For 2008 we're hard-pressed to find anything worthwhile to say.... This year, for my first pumpkin, I rewatched an old chestnut, and I'll be damned if it didn't reveal nearly everything that's missing in horror today. John Landis's An American Werewolf in London has a reputation as a horror-comedy, a dubious category that would soon be replaced by the broader Ghostbusters template (chuckles more important than scares) and which now has been taken over by the cheap sub-Hot Shots drek in the Scary Movie franchise. Yet while Landis's film is certainly noticeably tongue-in-cheek, its occasional laughs are not intended to deflate or detract from the horror. Miraculously, the chuckles and the shocks stand side by side proudly."
"Italian horror did not begin and end with giallo, but it certainly put the genre on the map and influenced the direction of Italian horror (as well as, among others, Spanish and French horror) for decades." At the Parallax View, Sean Axmaker presents an annotated list: "Thirteen Landmarks of Italian Horror; or, There's Always Room for Giallo."
John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick "is best known today through the garish distortions of the Hollywood adaptation - a pity since it's one of Updike's most ambitious works, a brilliant counterstatement to his masterpiece, the Rabbit Angstrom cycle, our age's one great serial epic, with its intertwined themes of adultery, death, family strife and social discord." Sam Tanenhaus finds the sequel, The Widows of Eastwick, "predictably ingenious... At 76, he still wrings more from a sentence than almost anyone else. His sorcery is startlingly fresh, page upon page." More from Elaine Showalter, who notes in the Washington Post that throughout the history of American letters "literary witches have represented our culture's attraction to, and fear of, female sexuality, empowerment and creativity," and from Christopher Taylor in the Guardian.
Back in the New York Times:
Patrick Ness reviews The Graveyard Book: "We are deep in Neil Gaiman territory here, and it's hard to think of a more delightful and scary place to spend 300 pages." Also in the Guardian, PD Smith, briefly, on Lars Svendsen's A Philosophy of Fear.
Steve Garden in the Lumière Reader on the Masters of Cinema release of Vampyr: "There are two commentaries on the MOC disc: one by film scholar/critic Tony Rayns, and the other by director Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth). Both are interesting: Rayns mostly discusses the formal aspects of the film, while Del Toro offers a personal reading of the metaphysical meaning of the work, attempting to get to the heart of Vampyr's compelling fascination."
"Corpse Mania isn't a remake of Bava's Blood and Black Lace, but Kwei Chih-Hung must have written some copious notes before executing his own screenplay," notes Peter Nellhaus.
"Matthew Crick's documentary Creature Feature: 50 Years of the Gill-Man chronicles the makings of the [Creature from the Black Lagoon] trilogy and its lasting effects on fanboys, among them Benicio Del Toro (who here supplies a celebrity testimonial," writes Martin Tsai in the Voice. "For the uninitiated, Creature Feature would better serve as a special feature on a DVD set."
"Great ghost or haunting movies come out at a far lower rate than slasher, vampire or zombie movies and half the time they're not even real." Jonathan Lapper explains.
Posted by dwhudson at 9:30 AM
Fests and events, 10/25.
"Two domestic terrorist dramas from Germany are part of the line-up at the Rome International Film Festival," notes Boyd van Hoeij at Cineuropa: "the big-budget action drama The Baader Meinhof Complex and the intimate Long Shadows. Both look at the Red Army Faction (RAF), though the latter is more concerned with the consequences of the RAF."
"On October 29th, the new Temporäre Kunsthalle will open in Berlin, making the city even more of an international art mecca," notes Marisa Olson at Rhizome. "Their inaugural exhibition features four ambitious multi-channel video installations by Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz."
With the exhibition Gainsbourg 2008 on view at the Musée de Musique in Paris through March 1, the Independent's John Lichfield tracks the rediscovery of Serge Gainsbourg "by young people in his home country as one of the few truly original musicians that France produced in the classic years of pop and rock."
Jason Gray posts another roundup from the Tokyo International Film Festival, which wraps tomorrow.
Steve Dollar hits the highlights of the Sitges Film Festival for Paste - and goes into more detail at his 24xps.
"It's hard to believe that it's already three years since Susan Oxtoby came down from Canada to join the Pacific Film Archive as senior curator," writes Michael Fox, introducing his interview for SF360. "As the director of programming at Toronto's Cinematheque Ontario since 1997, and a curator before that, Oxtoby organized a veritable flood of filmmaker retrospectives from GW Pabst to Rithy Panh, national cinema overviews, thematic series (such as Film and Architecture, Dante and the Cinema and The Sound of Silent Cinema) and special events."
"Why is MirageMan, with its rather minimal plot and ultra low budget, possibly my favourite film of Toronto After Dark?" wonders Bob Turnbull.
Posted by dwhudson at 8:44 AM
October 24, 2008
Undercurrent. 4.
"In his analysis, [Robin] Wood compared Cruising to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and Richard Brooks's Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977), and this corpus was founded on a gnawing ambiguity: was the incoherence of these texts, their dynamic contradictions, voluntary or involuntary, crafted or merely symptomatic?" Adrian Martin in the new issue of Undercurrent: "The cinema of William Friedkin presents, in fact, a richly ambiguous borderline case within contemporary American cinema. Rather than evoking Scorsese and Brooks, one might place Friedkin's work within a certain cinema of hysteria that includes auteurs like Oliver Stone, Mike Figgis, Adrian Lyne, Tony Scott and Zalman King - or, further back, Ken Russell."
By the time Manny Farber died, he "had become a writer no one didn't like, a figure of American culture like Johnny Cash or Philip Guston who all thinking people agreed was excellent, unmatched, etc." Now that a summer of mourning has turned to a new season, AS Hamrah argues that we might do well to look at some of Farber's "quirks." For example, "He loves the extra adjective: 'Every Hitchcock-style director should study this picture if he wants to see really stealthy, queer-looking, odd-acting, foreboding people.' And as for his great distinction between dreaded 'white elephant art' and admirable 'termite art,' has anyone noticed how close his definition of white elephant art is to his definition of a 'minimal underground classic'?" Even so, "Despite his assessment of it, he speaks to us from a great period in film history, roughly the Raoul-Walsh-and-Wavelength era, a time he captured like no one else. He stopped writing about two seconds before Star Wars came out, a real shame but understandable. Only his students know what he thought of films made the last 30 years."
Spur der Filme: Zeitzeugen über die DEFA "offers extracts from some 400 hours of interviews conducted with the most prominent personalities of the East German cinema world, and, in healthy contrast, also with those who did not reach East German movie prominence or lost this status because they fell into political disgrace," writes Oskar Holl. "The book is therefore a perfect almanac for anyone who wants to look behind the scenes of the unique art and politics of filmmaking in the GDR. Spur der Filme (Traces of Films) is exemplary in the manner in which it points out how closely linked the realms of culture and politics were, and continue to be, in this part of the world."
"Time in [Peter] Watkins's films is like the time that Walter Benjamin, in the 14th of his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History,' qualified as 'not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.'" Chris Fujiwara: " In Section XVI of the same essay, Benjamin argues for the necessity of 'the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.' A perfect description of Watkins's procedure in La Commune, and a perfect description of the goals of the members of the Union des femmes shown in the film, who seek to break their identification with their work and liberate time for themselves. In Edvard Munch, The 70s People and Evening Land, time explodes... he ambiguity that Watkins cultivates from his earliest films achieves its fullest form in The Freethinker and La Commune."
Also: "Is The Dark Knight, as it might appear, a right-wing film in favor of unbridled State power, or does it view the issues it raises more ambivalently?"
"To my mind, much of Warhol's art is as daring and beautiful as it is witty and, yes, original," writes David Sterritt. "But one of its most appealing strengths is its capacity to open up thought and debate on an enormous variety of fronts, from the merits of particular works to the theoretical import of terms like 'style' and 'content' and 'originality' itself. Warhol's best achievements, from the early Coke bottles to the stunning self-portraits and monumental Mao pictures of his late career, are forever oscillating among multiple levels of meaning and interest, rewarding both the casual gaze in the gallery and the deeper ideas prompted after you leave. As an art dealer interviewed in [Ric] Burns's [Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film] says of the 'simple' soup cans, 'They're complicated in their implications.'"
Fergus Daly on Nicole Brenez's Abel Ferrara: "Fundamentally for Brenez, it is the twin forces of anger and love that drive Ferrara's films. They are 'symbolic bombs that dynamite the shadows in an effort to hollow out a space for love.' In short, anyone looking for an answer to the question "how are we to understand the present?" might well find they are more moved by this book than by any other in a very long time."
Adrian Martin finds it "a pleasure to read and re-read this relatively short (114 page) book about acting in cinema. Published in Wallflower's admirable 'Short Cuts' series, [Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation] lives up to the aims of the list: it provides a clear, economical introduction to an aspect of cinema which, in this case, is everywhere evident (and, indeed, celebrated), but so rarely discussed in rigorous, analytical terms. But Andrew Klevan, a gifted writer, does still more than this: although fairly quiet on the polemical front, his book offers itself as an example of a new kind of criticism, descriptively rich and poetically suggestive."
In response, Klevan takes "the opportunity to reflect upon the age-old matters of text/context - and related matters of intention - as I have experienced them in my own work, and to explain the reasoning behind a form of philosophical criticism."
Posted by dwhudson at 10:32 AM
Das Kapital: The Movie?
"'He's back,' the Times warned its readers on Tuesday over a portrait of Karl Marx. Not only are sales of his masterwork Das Kapital booming, but the virus of the newly fashionable revolutionary has, it seems, spread to the heart of the capitalist camp: the French president Nicolas Sarkozy has had himself photographed leafing through its pages while Marx's analysis of capitalism has been hailed by everyone from the German finance minister to the Pope." But for Daily readers, Seumas Milne skimmed over the newsiest item in the Times scare-piece: "And - are you ready? - director Alexander Kluge is making a movie out of Das Kapital."
Actually, that film has already been made, has screened in Vienna and will be out on DVD next month.
Updated through 10/28.
In Die Welt, Eckhard Fuhr, noting that Kluge is picking up on Sergei Eisenstein's never-realized plans, has a few details on the project: "We can expect a robust montage of conversations with the likes of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Peter Sloterdijk, Dietmar Dath or Sophie Rois, clips of everyday life, reenactments starring Helge Schneider and much more."
Eisenstein und Marx im gleichen Haus (Eisenstein and Marx in the Same House) is the first of three parts of Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike (News from Ideological Antiquity), which premiered at the Stadtkino Wien on October 10 and will be released by Surkamp as a set of three DVDs with an essay by Kluge on November 17. All in all, an intriguing prospect, even if nowhere near as sensational as the Times would have its readers believe.
Update, 10/28:
Posted by dwhudson at 6:19 AM
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October 23, 2008
Shorts, 10/23.
"One of the most spectacular episodes in the early lives of the writers who went on to become the novelists and poets of the Beat Generation is coming to the screen," notes Shawn Levy, who's very much looking forward to the Christine Vachon-produced Kill Your Darlings, which tells that story.
Next week, Criterion releases the collection 10 Years of Rialto Pictures, so Glenn Kenny "recently spoke with Bruce Goldstein, the repertory programmer for New York's Film Forum and a co-founder of Rialto, about the company's beginnings, high points, and why the box contains the titles it does."
"Are there filmmakers, scattered around the world, who nevertheless seem to share certain close affinities?" asks Girish. "One example might be the trio of Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki and Wim Wenders."
Michael Guillén talks with Albert Serra and Mark Peranson about Birdsong.
"Rare is the film that embodies a certain hysterical style while dealing with hysteria as its actual subject," writes Dennis Cozzalio. "But in the late 70s, a trio of movies written by the young screenwriting team of Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale did just that - I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) and Used Cars (1980), directed by Zemeckis, and 1941 (1979), directed by Steven Spielberg, are among the best comedies of their generation, serving up a classically framed, goosed-up examination of American obsession, desire and panic."
Gomorrah, you'll remember, is based on the book by Roberto Saviano. In openDemocracy, Geoff Andrews lays out five ways in which the book is "groundbreaking."
The life of Jacques Mesrine, "Parisian super-criminal is to be retold in an epic two-part biopic, the first tranche of which opened in French cinemas yesterday to widespread critical acclaim and not a little controversy." Lizzy Davies reports on Jean-François Richet's Mesrine: L'instinct de mort.
Also in the Guardian:
Fernando F Croce at Slant on Eclipse's Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women: "While majestic, late-career period pieces like Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff posit a sense of spiritual transcendence to alleviate the characters' plight, the earlier social exposés offer little relief from a society erected on female oppression and its ensuing double standards and loveless relationships. Far from romanticizing the figure of the suffering woman, these are radical works that cry for nothing less than revolution."
"Dreamy images are very much a part of [Lee Myung-Se's] later films, sometimes seemingly replacing any hint of a connecting narrative," writes Adam Hartzell at Koreanfilm.org. "Although Gagman [1989] is nowhere as visually appealing as those films since production values of South Korean cinema in the 1980s weren't up to the level they are now, you can see the seeds of Lee Myung-se's later realized vision in this debut."
"The Four Feathers [1939] is so entertainingly phony, so gloriously fake, in fact, that it transcends the history it depicts, turning bloody battles and murderous routs into bloodless spectacle and narrow escapes," writes James Rocchi. "It's fake, and either culturally insensitive or purely racist, but it's also spectacular, stirring and enthralling."
Those matinees that allow parents to buy cheap tickets and bring their babies, who, of course, get in free? David Bordwell does the math and figures they actually pay off.
In the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab considers the Moon in movies.
Sam Adams has a DVD roundup in the Philadelphia City Paper.
"The Missouri Review invites all writers and writers/producers to participate in our second ever Audio & Video Competition."
Online gazing tip. Gabe Klinger presents a "visual essay on Steve McQueen's Hunger."
Online listening tip. Aaron Aradillas and Glenn Kenny discuss Jean-Pierre Melville.
Online viewing tip #1. Via Darren Hughes, the "Palin Song."
Online viewing tip #2. Ray Pride asks Ballast director Lance Hammer why he's optimistic about independent film.
Online viewing tips. The Guardian's Kate Stables goes for an "autumnal" theme.
Posted by dwhudson at 2:57 PM
Fests and events, 10/23.
"Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a 90-minute piece by the video artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, tracks the great French-Algerian soccer player Zinedine Zidane during the course of a single match," writes J Hoberman. "Gordon's previous work - the famous 24 Hour Psycho installation, which slowed Hitchcock's thriller to a glacial crawl; his superimposition of The Song of Bernadette over The Exorcist - served to monumentalize ephemeral moments. Zidane does the same, to lesser effect." More from Cullen Gallagher (L Magazine), Michael Tully (Hammer to Nail) and Bill Weber (Slant). At BAM from Friday through October 30.
Back in the Voice: "News From Home/News From House is the 2006 installment in Amos Gitai's documentary series that also includes House (1980) and A House in Jerusalem (1998)," writes Martin Tsai. "Revolving around property that once belonged to a Palestinian family and was later taken over by Israelis, the films juxtapose the Israeli and Palestinian diasporas by tracking the original owner's descendants, the construction workers, and the current occupants over the years." Screens at MoMA as part of Amos Gitai: Non-Fiction, running Friday through November 2.
Mitchell Leisen "displays rare versatility as a director, moving fluidly from melodrama to screwball, pastoral to noir, often within the same film," writes David Cairns at Moving Image Source. "With retrospectives at San Sebastian in 2000, Edinburgh in 2006, and now at the Cinematheque Française, Leisen's renaissance may finally be upon us, long overdue but still timely." Through November 2.
"XYZ are proud to present A Lecture by John Bock. The Lecture will take place on board a city bus that will travel through the streets of downtown Athens, on Wednesday, October 29th 2008.... The Lecture by John Bock will be followed by a Retrospective of films by the artist, from October 30th to November 5th 2008, at Mikrokosmos Cinema."
Susan King in the Los Angeles Times: "It's getting to the point where there is such a plethora of film festivals in Los Angeles that if you miss one, another will be on the horizon in a nanosecond. And this week is no exception."
James C Taylor in the LA Weekly: Frederick Wiseman's "evenhandedness combined with his eye for unforgettable vérité scenes - a young female physician trying to get an elderly immigrant to discuss his urinary problems, patients singing 'Santa Maria' in the hospital's chapel - is what makes Hospital still relevant and engrossing today, and should keep it that way, regardless of the future of health care in America." At REDCAT tonight at 8.
For SF360, Robert Avila reviews "Robb Moss and Peter Galison's deliberative, atmospheric and engrossing documentary, Secrecy, receiving its theatrical premiere this week as part of a new San Francisco Film Society initiative, SFFS Focus: Investigative Documentary."
The Queens International Film Festival takes place from November 6 through 9.
"Al Pacino has been given a lifetime achievement award at the Rome Film Festival." The BBC reports; and the AP has the latest on David Cronenberg's novel.
"Earlier this week I spent a long and, in every sense of the word, sober lunch in a trattoria in Turin with fellow jury members at the world's longest running environmental film festival, Cinemambiente, now in its 11th year. Each of us had dutifully watched the 10 shortlisted films, but how do you even begin to choose between films about, say, the societal and environmental influence of the new market economy in Mongolia, the imperialistic excesses of western gold miners in Guinea or the men who break up ships by hand on the oil-stained beaches of Bangladesh for a dollar a day?" In the Guardian, Leo Hickman explains why they settled on Justin Pemberton's The Nuclear Comeback and considers the question, "What makes a good environmental film?"
"This year's Puchon Fantastic Film Festival continued on last year's orientation of 'playing it safe' plus 'regaining its foothold as Korea's major conduit for genre cinema.'" A report from Kyu Hyun Kim at Koreanfilm.org.
The Conversation, a gathering of "pioneers at the forefront of change in cinema, video, games, media and technology," happened last weekend and Scott Kirsner points to video, photos and notes at the event's blog before listing "some things that made such an impression on me that I had to jot them down."
Kevin Lee lists "TIFF and NYFF screenings, from best to worst."
At Hollywood Bitchslap, Jason Whyte picks the "Best Films of the 2008 Vancouver International Film Festival."
San Francisco Jewish Film Festival has announced it's developing a new online resource for Jewish film.
Online viewing tips. In conjunction with the Werkleitz Festival's Amerika (don't be offended; that simply how you spell it in German), a virtual film program.
Posted by dwhudson at 2:00 PM
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/23.
Kathleen Murphy presents an "Alternative Horror Movies Consumer Guide" at MSN; also via MCN, Tom Lynch in Newcity: "Has the abundance of visual gore harmed the genre?... It's shocking, the lack of memorable horror films made since 2000; I've seen my share, and scanning a list of each one that hit theaters, I'm amazed how many of which I completely forgot existed."
For Vue Weekly, David Berry previews this weekend's Deadmonton Horror Film Festival.
"The Gay Bed & Breakfast of Terror delivers on its title, with less subtlety," writes Vadim Rizov in the Voice.
"On the one hand, Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman is the everyday portrait of a woman living her life, watching wedding videos, going to the pool, meeting a lover, driving her young niece around, washing her hands, picking up flowers, and so on," writes David Phelps. "On the other, it's a horror-noir straddling two rival strands of the genres: the nice anti-hero with the dark secret buried in the past that threatens to be unearthed (Out of the Past; so many of Hitchcock's double entendres that the speaker means one way, and the guilty hears another); and, in a more supernatural vein, the paranoid anti-hero perceiving visions and intimations nobody else believes in, yet which will vindicate her when it's too late (Invasion of the Body Snatchers; The Exorcist; any number of Twilight Zone episodes, etc)." Also in the Auteurs' Notebook: Daniel Kasman and David Phelps's first question for Martel is, "Is your film a horror movie?"
In the Philadelphia City Paper, Shaun Brady talks with Edward Pettit about the upcoming local screenings of The Pit and the Pendulum and Tales of Terror.
"Ramzi Abed's The Devil's Muse, the thriller about an aspiring actress obsessed with the Black Dahlia and the serial killer who wants to mutilate and cut her in half, is having a week-long run in Los Angeles at the Engine Theater from Oct 23 - 29 as part of Halo 8's Films That Kill festival," notes Mike Everleth.
"There are plenty of opportunities to Get Your Cinematic Ghost On here in Chicago," and Dan Mucha rounds 'em up at Facets Features.
A list from Kevin Kelly at the SpoutBlog: "Teen Screams: High School Horror Stories."
At the Parallax View, Robert C Cumbow presents a "list of 13 movie scores that stand out as landmarks in the honorable tradition of writing music designed to scare the pants off the movie viewer."
"Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead?" asks Jesse Bering in Scientific American. "Shouldn't it be obvious that the mind is dead, too? And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won't feel like anything—and therein lies the problem."
Online gazing tip. At Twitch, Swarez points to a new poster for Death Takes a Holiday.
Online browsing tip. "Vintage Japanese movie-monster anatomical illustrations," via Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow.
Online viewing tip. Fred Ambroisine talks with producer Michele Yeh about Taiwan's first slasher movie, Invitation Only. Via Todd Brown at Twitch.
Posted by dwhudson at 12:24 PM
Let the Right One In.
"For Swedish director Tomas Alfredson, the eyes have it - that scary quality just right for horror," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. "So when Alfredson set out to make the eerie film Let the Right One In, about the friendship that develops between two adolescents - one of whom happens to be a vampire - he didn't watch any horror movies for inspiration. Instead, he studied paintings to see how they used 'eye-to-eye contact,' he says. 'I studied Renaissance painters; one, called Hans Holbein, has a very strange way of dealing with eyes.' Alfredson was especially taken with Holbein's 1538 painting Edward VI as a Child. The prince, Alfredson says, 'is looking outside the frame and under it. It's very strange and very scary.'"
Updated through 10/29.
"The coming-of-age story and the vampire tale may seem like an odd pairing, but Alfredson draws the film's sustaining tension out of the inverse relationship between the intractable power of vampirism and the impotent sufferings of youth," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant.
"From the opening moments, in which the screen is overtaken by silent, softly falling snowflakes that, with their lovely morbidity, might as well be leftover sprinkles from the closing lines of James Joyce's The Dead, to an underwater climax as gory as it is hushed and idyllic, Let the Right One In means to push the contemporary vampire film into an ambitiously poetic realm," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Alfredson mostly fulfills his charge, even if many of his techniques are borrowed from a trendily wan art-house aesthetic that relies too heavily on tight framing and oppressive close-ups (why are so many directors today scared of a good old-fashioned medium shot?) and a moodily melodramatic score that could have come straight from the plunked piano of Thomas Newman (American Beauty, The Shawshank Redemption). Yet for every cliched move, there is an abundance of memorable images in this drab fairy tale of tween vampire love."
"Though many of the traditional paraphernalia of the bloodsucking genre are present and accounted for in Tomas Alfredson's movie - teeth sink into necks, windows must be boarded lest the vampire expire in the light of day - this is a vampire movie like no other," writes Newsweek's David Ansen. "Horror is not the objective."
"Aside from a few gory, sticky scenes that were maybe meant to satisfy the vampires among us, the horror of Let the Right One In isn't horrible at all," writes Genevieve Yue in Reverse Shot. "Instead it fades to the background, surprisingly calm and even, in a sense, dully ordinary. Alfredson sets his film in what he calls 'a country that keeps going despite everything,' and it's here that we might understand the story as a metaphor after all, a vision of contemporary life driving inexorably forward, not without memory but without time to reflect."
"Let The Right One In has won numerous awards at various festivals and has received a great deal of press - many describing it as among the best vampire films ever made," notes Bob Turnbull. "Thing is, it isn't really a vampire film... It's much more the story of a young 12 year old boy learning how to relate to the people around him (his mother who smothers him, his father who wants to be buddies, the bullies at school, etc) and in particular his new neighbour Eli who is also 12 and a girl. Well, on the outside anyway..."
"The title refers to the lore that vampires won't cross your threshold unbidden, but Let the Right One In picks and chooses codes from the myth without getting hung up," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "And what's most surprising, perhaps, is how easy Alfredson makes it all seem, at a time when few seem capable of a fresh take on horror."
"[T]he audacious sound design - the silence of snow broken by faint sounds of a child breathing or eyelashes fluttering; the dense, vividly impressionistic noises of the vampire feeding - and wise performances from [Kare] Hedebrant and (especially) [Lina] Leandersson infuse the film with a low-key naturalism that allows for maximum believability," writes Elena Oumano in the Voice.
Updates, 10/24: "[W]hile Mr Alfredson takes a darkly amused attitude toward the little world he has fashioned with such care, he also takes the morbid unhappiness of his young characters seriously," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Both are achingly alone, and it is the ordinary fact of their loneliness rather than their extraordinary circumstances that makes the film more than the sum of its chills and estimable technique."
"Let the Right One In has been described as a beautiful love story, and it's true the movie is something to look at," writes Carina Chocano in the LAT. "Alfredson has an uncommon gift for composition that, rendered through Hoyte Van Hoytema's limpid cinematography, is reminiscent of Flemish painting. This is what it would look like if Vermeer had ever decided to make a bloody horror movie. While the beauty is undeniable, the love part is dubious."
"Once Alfredson reveals that yes, there's a monstrosity in our midst, the director proves that he can yield poetry from the grammar of fright flicks," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "Sequences we've seen dozens of times before - jugular snacking, gravity-defying scurrying, nocturnal raids on snoozing bloodsuckers - are rendered with macabre wit and superlative dread."
Steve Dollar talks with Alfredson for Paste; Kristin McCraken for Tribeca.
"About once a year, a filmmaker succeeds at creating truly idiosyncratic genre fare, employing all the tropes of a standard stock of classics (such as giant monsters in Bong Joon-ho's The Host) and working with them to create a stirring, original vision," writes Michael Lerman at Hammer to Nail. "This year, the well-deserved prize goes to Tomas Alfredson for his gentle depiction of child vampires in Let the Right One In."
Update, 10/27: "Some genre buffs may be disturbed by the fact that the 'rules' of vampire existence in this universe are never fully explained, and neither is Eli's back story," notes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Where is she from? How and when did she become a vampire?... We learn about Eli exactly as Oskar does, and perhaps instinctively he knows enough to leave certain questions alone. She can fly, she has amazing and horrifying powers, she isn't exactly a boy or a girl, she can't come inside unless she's invited (hence the title) and she loves him. That's enough."
Update, 10/29: For IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Alfredson "about child actors, how technology has crushed the Swedish film industry, and what makes him feel especially naked."
Posted by dwhudson at 12:05 PM
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Pride and Glory.
"Every movie faces a few obstacles on its journey to the screen. But Pride and Glory has been beset by almost every plague imaginable short of locusts: The Sept 11 terrorist attacks, a rival police movie that knocked it off the schedule, Nick Nolte's bum knee, the collapse of a movie studio, the indifference of another, three release dates and even a fight over a studio executive's actor brother." John Horn tells the story in the Los Angeles Times.
"That generic title won't help in a few months when you're staring at the DVD and trying to place it, wondering when this movie came out and whether you saw it at the time and thought it any good–or instead determined, correctly, to save it for a rental," notes Jonathan Kiefer.
Updated through 10/29.
At Slant, Nick Schager finds it "serviceable but clichéd..., fixated as it is on the attempt of an NYPD detective, Ray Tierney (Edward Norton), to maintain allegiance to both his personal and professional families, which - given that his father (Jon Voight), brother Francis (Noah Emmerich) and brother-in-law Jimmy (Colin Farrell) are all fellow officers - amount to the same thing.... Pride and Glory's commentary on law enforcement vice and decency - as well as its positioning of women as the arbiters of, and impetuses for, moral clarity - is far less immediate and realistic than its gritty aesthetic and tone would have one believe."
"[B]y the end of the film's first 10 minutes, the audience knows precisely who's who and who's up to what and how this is gonna end," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "Which leaves 120 more minutes to fill - or three weeks, whichever comes first. How ironic that a movie filled with police officers should end up feeling like a hostage situation."
"Superbly modulated and thrilling in its subtle intensity, Pride and Glory admittedly doesn't break any new ground," writes Peter Martin at Twitch. "Perhaps I've seen one too many disappointing theatrical releases lately, but Pride and Glory strikes me as one of the finest dramatic films of the year."
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"Director-writer and co-writer Gavin and Greg O'Connor (sons of an NYPD cop) present an Irish clan whose men in blue either tacitly accept or actively indulge moral corruption and greed," writes Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. "[T]he O'Connors take their criticism incredibly far - something only possible under cover of crime genre conventions - before the predictably recuperative conclusion."
"Pride and Glory, with smashing direction and fine performances, says nothing we don't already know, or think we know, from years of feasting on TV and movie cop dramas," writes Malcolm Azania in Vue Weekly.
For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Gavin O'Connor "about growing up in a policeman's family, his personal approach to filmmaking, and drinking raw eggs after seeing Rocky."
Sara Carduce talks with Emmerich for New York.
Updates, 10/24: "Pride and Glory, which sat on the New Line Cinema shelves for a few years, is not especially good, but there is enough rough artistry in Mr O'Connor's direction to make you wish the film were better," writes AO Scott in teh New York Times. "He has a good sense of the city's wearying, exhilarating energy and an impressive ability to pull off arresting visual compositions in close quarters. Many of the indoor scenes have a raw, dangerous intimacy that keeps your attention even when the dialogue tumbles toward cliché."
"If the cop-assigned-to-probe-his-family premise doesn't give away pretty much everything that comes next, the great, gushing torrents of exposition emanating from the characters' mouths should do it," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "A plodding, formulaic police drama bathed in bluish light, Pride and Glory displays very little of either."
"A hackneyed, clichéd muddle about a good cop torn between his responsibilities to his family and his duty to uphold the law no matter the consequences, Pride and Glory would have felt second-hand and overly familiar even if it were greenlit in 1937 as a vehicle for Humphrey Bogart and Edward G Robinson," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.
"Redemptively, the actors throw themselves into some daringly ugly moments, particularly Farrell, who threatens a drug dealer's infant with a hissing steam iron," notes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "Your crowd will gasp, as it might when Voight uncorks a beautifully boozy Christmas toast, a reminder of the brash intimacy this movie could have used more of."
Update, 10/25: "Although the acting is top-notch and much of the narrative carries a gritty resonance, the movie feels so retro at times, so pre-1980s, that you half-expect Popeye Doyle to come swaggering across the screen, still wearing his porkpie hat, still looking for The French Connection," writes Dan Barry in the NYT. "For all its occasional scandals and never-ending internal strife, the department. remains one of the finest law-enforcement agencies in the world, and those officers in the passing patrol cars are black and white, Hispanic and Asian. Still, these familiar story lines, especially about the Irish and about loyalty-protected corruption, endure."
Update, 10/29: Peter Sobczynski talks with Gavin O'Conner for Hollywood Bitchslap.
Posted by dwhudson at 11:56 AM
I've Loved You So Long.
"Once settled into the [I've Loved You So Long's] tone, I swung three-for-three on my plot twist predictions," writes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE. "You shouldn't be able to do this at a movie you didn't write yourself." Agreed. Even so, I've been mildly startled to come across a couple of reviews in which those twists are evidently assumed to be so predictable that there's no reason to avoid spoiling them. I've snipped around those passages, but, for what it's worth, consider yourself warned.
"The 'tradition of quality,' EU edition," continues Nick Pinkerton: "a 'literary' plot kept on a tight leash, flashes of cultural credentials, congratulatory humanism, and anesthesiac inserts of people looking grim on public transit. Still, [Kristin] Scott Thomas's translucent portrait of a lady is good enough to make you believe she's rummaging through mislaid feelings in real time - seeing her dazed and ruffled after her afternoon fling with a cafe drageur, I half believed I was watching a Masterpiece."
Updated through 10/29.
"I've Loved You So Long is a modestly satisfying tale of sisterly love weighed down by a history of family betrayal and mendacity," finds Ella Taylor in the Voice. Novelist, teacher and first-time director Philippe Claudel "seems bent on making I've Loved You So Long as softly inoffensive as the beloved French lullaby from which it takes its title."
"For a first film, Mr Claudel's I've Loved You So Long is an unusually mature piece of work with none of the usual indulgences of the novice director," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "He has made a grown-up film for our troubled time, and created a beautiful rapport between two gifted actresses."
Laura Winters profiles Claudel for the New York Times.
Michelle Orange talks with Scott Thomas for IFC.
Online viewing tip. FilmCatcher interviews Claudel.
Updates, 10/24: "The film, in the end, turns away from the Dostoyevskian implications of Juliette's crime and its expiation," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "A revelation comes near the end that is both tremendously moving and a bit disappointing, in the way that the solutions to great mysteries frequently are. This turn does not diminish the accomplishment of Ms Scott Thomas's deep, subtle and altogether stunning performance, but it does alter the scale of the movie, turning it into a more manageable, less existentially unsettling drama. Which is a relief, I suppose, but also a bit of a letdown."
"Much like the recent Rachel Getting Married, Claudel's film grapples perceptively with the depth of family ties, which have the power to withstand obstacles that would—and perhaps should—tear any other relationship asunder," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.
"[I]t is Scott Thomas's work on which the success of the picture depends and she does not fail it," writes Richard Schickel in Time. "Indeed, she gives a truly great performance. It's never easy for an actor to sustain our sympathy when a role is grounded in radical passivity."
"Her role nearly screams 'awards bait,' but Scott Thomas is a deft enough performer not to outact [Elsa] Zylberstein," notes Melissa Anderson in Time Out New York.
"I was a fan back in her luminous romantic lead days, with mid-90s films like Four Weddings and a Funeral and The English Patient, but here the 48-year-old actress goes deeper than she has ever before, letting her cheeks sag, her bright eyes fade and her lips pout," writes Aaron Cutler in Slant. "I've Loved You So Long will be overrated, but because of Thomas it's a gift nonetheless."
"I've Loved You So Long is the kind of film America's moviemakers have all but given up on," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "An example of the French tradition of high-quality adult melodrama, conventional in technique but not story, this thoughtful, provocative film is slow developing because it's all about character, about the tricky, fragile relationships that make us human; about, if you really want to get down to it, the reclamation of a soul."
Brent Simon talks with Scott Thomas for Vulture.
Erica Abeel talks with Claudel for indieWIRE.
Update, 10/27: David Edelstein in New York: "The film is a tease, with a cheat of a final disclosure, but Philippe Claudel's direction is both probing and delicate, and Scott Thomas's face, even immobile, keeps you watching, searching for hints of her character's past, unable to blink for fear of missing something vital."
Update, 10/29: Peter Sobczynski talks with Claudel for Hollywood Bitchslap.
Posted by dwhudson at 11:50 AM
Presidents, 10/23.
"Harrison Ford, who played a US president fighting airplane hijackers in 1997's Air Force One topped a list of fictional movie presidents people would most like to lead the US, according to a poll released on Thursday by AOL's Moviefone.com Web site." Jill Serjeant reports for Reuters. #2 (and she's got the full list): Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact.
Via Joe Leydon, Daniel Craig: "Obama would be the better Bond because - if he's true to his word - he'd be willing to quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe-to-toe with them. McCain, because of his long service and experience, would probably be a better M... There is, come to think of it, a kind of Judi Dench quality to McCain."
"It's not often that you can get t-shirts designed by major figures of world cinema," notes Doug Cummings, "and even less often for a better cause: Chris Marker invokes his trademark character, Guillaume-en-egypte, for Barack Obama at Wexner Center for the Arts."
"Obama tugs at the imagination in such a way as to make other storylines seem plastic," writes Max Goldberg. "Four years ago the left was rallied more by a movie (Fahrenheit 9/11) than an actual candidate; now people just seem baffled by another cinematic recitation of GW's sins. Oliver Stone's frenzied style of psycho-historiography may be well-suited to #43, but his countermyth isn't this season's top ticket. One political film that has been humming in my mind watching Obama's campaign is John Gianvito's Profit motive and the whispering wind."
"[W]ith W., Stone has accomplished something I would've thought impossible: He made me feel sorry for this miserable son of a bitch." Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. More from Nathan Gelgud (Independent Weekly), Andrew Schenker and David Walsh (WSWS).
"I can't take much more of this," writes Larry David at the Huffington Post. "Two weeks to go, and I'm at the end of my rope."
John Rogers follows up a couple of recent entries with "Hollywood Conservatives: The Thoughtful Post."
"The latest issue of Tales From the Crypt (inspired by the 1950s EC Comic of the same name) features Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin wielding a hockey stick at the Crypt's storytelling inhabitants," notes C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark.
Online viewing tip. Ted Johnson has Ron Howard's (and Andy Griffith's and Henry Winkler's) Obama endorsement for Funny or Die.
Online viewing tips. From Coudal Partners: "Talked about this morning and now in the queue to see again soon: the trailer for Bob Roberts. And here's one of his campaign commercials." Also: Radar's collection of current campaign ads from across the country.
Posted by dwhudson at 10:49 AM
Austin Chronicle. Shock + AFF.
Marc Savlov talks with "Austin author, artist, and screenwriter Stephen Romano" about Shock Festival: One Hundred and One of the Strangest, Sleaziest, Most Outrageous Movies You've Never Seen, an "homage to movies such as The Undertaker and His Pals and a surrealistic masterpiece of alternate-universe journalism that's so detailed and so full of heart (good, bad, black, or bleeding - take your pick) that you may think it's real. But it's not. It's a book. A big book, 350-plus pages of sideswiped faux-cinema history, that tells the sordid story of a forgotten group of fringe-dwelling filmmakers - 'forgotten' chiefly because they're totally fictional - whose unrepentant bad taste and surprising genius are comparable to and indeed based on such real-world mavericks as American International Pictures' Roger Corman, Samuel Z Arkoff and James H Nicholson; Full Moon Pictures' Charles Band; and Italy's Luigi Cozzi."
And another conversation in the Austin Chronicle: "Plenty of artists and graphic designers had a hand in helping Stephen Romano bring Shock Festival to life, but none was more important to the project than the book's art director, Tim Bradstreet, an Eisner Award-nominated artist whose cover work for Marvel's The Punisher, Vertigo/DC's Hellblazer, and, yes, even the cover of Iron Maiden's A Matter of Life and Death has made him one of the most respected and prolific artists in his field. He's also the co-founder (with actor Thomas Jane) and creative director of Raw Entertainment."
Meanwhile, the Austin Film Festival wraps today and the Chronicle's got the jury award winners, snappy quotes from filmmakers and capsule reviews:
Posted by dwhudson at 6:42 AM
October 22, 2008
Interview. Charlie Kaufman.
"It was my only job for the last five years and I need to have a job! I need to pay my mortgage and the economy is falling apart! What's the world going to be like in two years when I'm done with my next script? Is anyone going to want it? Is anyone going to buy it? Do I even want to put it out there because people have been so mean? A million stupid things are paralyzing me from writing. But it's what I like to do! I like to put something in the world that I feel is honest from my vantage point. That's the kind of decent thing to do in the world. To give people what you think is honest because, otherwise, you might as well be selling soap. In fact, you are selling soap! I don't want to do that. I'm not in that business. I've got to just jump into something and make it about what I'm interested in again. But there's pause. There's always pause at this point."
Yes, that would be Charlie Kaufman. In conversation with Jonathan Marlow. And so, this'll also be an entry on Synecdoche, New York, and it'll pick up where this one leaves off.
"If you traveled the length of John Malkovich's medulla oblongata, hung a sharp left at the desk where Beckett's Krapp recorded his last tape, and walked through the adjoining door of the interstellar hotel room at the end of 2001, you might end up somewhere in the vicinity of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York - a two-hour, loop-de-loop thrill ride so deep into the eternal gloom of its writer and (first-time) director's spotted mind that the Kaufman-scripted Adaptation seems, by comparison, a sun-drenched landscape epic." Scott Foundas in the Voice: "Like that film, Synecdoche is a partly confessional, partly satirical investigation into the creative process - and the notion (or the absurdity thereof) that art can lead to understanding."
"There is little precedent, cinematic or otherwise, for Synecdoche, New York," writes Michael Joshua Rowin. "Sure, early on in his directorial debut, maestro screenwriter Charlie Kaufman namechecks Kafka to prepare us for the increasingly claustrophobic surrealism that engulfs author-surrogate Caden Cotard (a phenomenal Philip Seymour Hoffman), while the character's psychotic, Borgesian obsession with artistic fidelity to real life is approached with the same matter-of-fact bemusement as Buñuel - this isn't entirely unfamiliar territory, at least to begin with. But as it becomes more and more frustrated in its attempt to reconcile personal entropy with creative perfection, Synecdoche proves that even from the ingenious, hilarious and, clearly, tortured mind of the man who might be this country's greatest current contributor to the art of storytelling, it is like nothing else we've quite seen." Also in the L Magazine: Nicolas Rapold talks with Kaufman.
For IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Hoffman "over espresso and cigarettes about his neuroses, the future of theater and the doppelgängers he's met."
"If a seasoned filmmaker created a work as funny, moving, perplexing, thought-provoking, poignant and powerful as Synecdoche, New York, that alone would be reason for exultation," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "The fact that this little gem - both intimate and epic, cerebral and emotional - marks the directorial debut of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman makes the achievement all the more worthy of celebration."
The Montalbán Gallery in Los Angeles presents Small Miracles: The Paintings of Adele Lack through Sunday, notes Michael Jones. Adele Lack is played in Synecdoche by Catherine Keener.
Updates: "To describe any of the performances in Synecdoche, New York as deadpan presumes comedic intent that may exist on the page - and in effect - but every line is delivered sincerely, and every scene plays out as life or death," writes Eric Hynes at indieWIRE. "As director, Kaufman doesn't have the whimsical or ironic touch of [Michel] Gondry or [Spike] Jonze, making Synecdoche, New York a much heavier affair. Wherever they stand in the funhouse, regardless of absurd dress or situation, Kaufman's actors sell the truth of each particular moment. As a result, and seemingly against all reason, Synecdoche, New York has a crashing emotional power."
"William Horberg, exec producer of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, has a blog, and in today's post he compares his first reading of Kaufman's script - in one of those annoying 'you have to read this in two hours and then hand back immediately to a bonded messenger' sittings - to his first assignment at script coverage back in 1986." And Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay responds with a recollection of his own before segueing into a paragraph from an upcoming interview with Kaufman.
Updates, 10/23: "The directing debut of Charlie Kaufman, our most celebrated screenwriter since Quentin Tarantino, is a reliably Kaufman-esque experience," writes Elbert Ventura in Reverse Shot: "incurably neurotic, relentlessly clever, extravagantly weird. But it is also his most morose, most obsessive, and, with the exception of 2001's Human Nature, least fun work. A diffident invitation to crawl into its maker's addled psyche, Synecdoche, New York is a downer that resonates as much as it repels."
The film "is impeccably acted, inventively designed, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and often devastatingly sad," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It was also still such a mystery to me after two viewings that I found it hard to trust my own vocabulary to describe what the experience of watching it is actually like. But [in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert] Burton, rambling on 400 years before the fact, seems to nail it, or at least part of it: a life where the madness of creativity and the madness of love/lust are constantly exchanged for one another, to the point where [pleasure] from either is unattainable. But it's also about the fear of death, the impossibility of romance in the absence of longing, the instinct to project our desires on to others and to seek answers about ourselves in mirror images. In other words, as theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) says of his own life's work, 'It's about everything.'"
"An exhilarating authorial confession of loneliness, regret, misery, fear of death and illness, self-doubt, time, space and all other concerns under the moon and stars, it's the story of man wracked by external pustules and internal maladies," writes Nick Schager. "Limited its aims most certainly are not, a sad-sack fictionalized profile that takes a leap down the rabbit hole and morphs - like all of Kaufman's scripts, a point articulated by Caden's early, knowing question, 'Why do I always make it so complicated?' - into a morosely self-aware funhouse of foibles, hang-ups and the (potentially futile) search for comprehension of one's inherently twisted, contradictory nature through artistic invention."
Jürgen Fauth finds it "an overambitious meta-narrative about a director producing an overambitious meta-narrative. From the punny title to the bitter end, Synecdoche, New York is driven by its creator and main character's desperate attempts to address the grand themes - art, love, life, and death. The one self-referential twist that Kaufman didn't intend: both the play-within-the-movie and the movie itself are disastrous failures."
Being John Malkovich." And so on. Armond White in the New York Press.
More interviews with Kaufman: Michael Guillén, Liz Ohanesian (LA Weekly) and Brent Simon (Vulture). "'Oh, God almighty,' said Hope Davis when asked to describe the film..." Michael Ordoña meets her for the Los Angeles Times. Updates, 10/24: "To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now." But the New York Times' Manohla Dargis doesn't; she backs up and starts again and eventually makes her way here: "It's extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now, which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing, embracing bodies pressed against other bodies. To be here now, alive in the world as it is rather than as we imagine it to be, seems a terribly simple idea, yet it's also the only idea worth the fuss, the anxiety of influence and all the messy rest, a lesson hard won for Caden. Life is a dream, but only for sleepers." The film " recalls the Jorge Luis Borges story in which the imperial cartographers make a map of the empire so detailed and true-to-life that it takes on the exact dimensions of the territory and ends up covering it entirely," notes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times (as does Manohla Dargis, by the way). "Jean Baudrillard famously inverted the story to illustrate his idea about the 'precession of simulacra,' a postmodern condition in which the representation of something comes before the thing it represents, breaking down the distinction between representation and reality completely. No doubt Kaufman... had both in mind when he outlined the contours of his sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad movie, which might have just as well have been called Being Charlie Kaufman or, better yet, Being Anybody." "Synecdoche, New York is a very sad movie for two reasons," writes Dana Stevens in Slate. "First off, the story, about a theater director who's sucked into the vortex of his own impossible artistic ambitions, is unremittingly bleak, making for one of the most depressing nondocumentary films you're likely to see, well, ever. But secondly - and in the long run, more movingly - Synecdoche is sad because it's a constant reminder, a ghostly double, of the great movie it could have been." "The obvious inspiration is Federico Fellini's 8½, in which Guido, a moviemaker with director's block, is beset by memories and fantasies as he dodges all the women in his life, from mother to wife to whore to mistress to muse," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "Kaufman has constructed a most devious puzzle, a labyrinth of an endangered mind. Yet it's one that - thanks in large part to a superb cast, led by Hoffman's unsparing, sympathetic, towering performance - should delight viewers who both work the movie out and surrender to its spell." At the AV Club, Scott Tobias talks with Kaufman and then writes, "For this master of mindfuckery, Synecdoche, New York probably qualifies as a magnum opus, since it essentially multiplies Adaptation by an exponential factor and thus grows into a snarling, ungainly beast of self-reflexive absurdities. It's a movie that doesn't just benefit from repeat viewings but practically requires them, though Kaufman, for all his brilliance, fails to make the prospect as inviting as it should be." "A note is struck in Synecdoche, New York - perhaps the one that commences Jon Brion and Deanna Storey's smoky-'n'-sad after-hours ballad 'Little Person,' which closes writer/director Charlie Kaufman's latest dive into the gaping, unforgiving maw of existence." Keith Uhlich at UGO: "The tone, always in a morose minor key, remains unvaried for a good two hours until Brion and Storey grant the proceedings (over a blessed fade-to-white) some retrospective resonance. Not to say that the previous 120 minutes of poseur artistry (begetting 4 minutes of genuine invention) is improved so much as given a finish (an elating flourish) it doesn't deserve." Chris Barsanti at PopMatters: "It's performance art as civilization-annihilating Godzilla, the play that ate Manhattan, a theater of life that makes theater of the absurd seem like little more than art school fun and games." "Kaufman's latest (which he also directs, haltingly) has its tenterhooks planted in the warm, fuzzy heart of comic neuroticism," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "[I]'s all essentially a picture of buzzy, NPR-listening domesticity." "If ever there were a movie to make a critic throw up his hands and mutter, 'It is what it is,' this is it (what it is)," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "There are some notable differences between his approach and those of his previous directors, differences which also make it a tougher film to experience." Via Movie City News, Rex Reed, the John McCain of movie critics: "I have hated every incomprehensible bucket of pretentious, idiot swill ever written by this cinematic drawbridge troll. But nothing that has belched forth from his word processor so far prepared me for a bottom feeder like this." Online listening tip. Kaufman's a guest on Fresh Air. Online listening and/or reading tip. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir talks with Kaufman. Steve Dollar talks with Kaufman for Paste: "It's been said that he enjoys doing interviews as much as a cat enjoys a bath, but once he gets going, he responds at passionate length, his straightforward replies gradually becoming more anecdotal—even though he guards against inquiries into his private life. 'I try consistently to test the water further each time I write something. I felt like I was doing that this time. There is decidedly nothing cute in this movie. No cute contrivance or reveal that makes it OK, that allows you as an audience to escape and get out, to say, "Oh, look how clever it is." This movie doesn't do that. It doesn't give you that. It leaves you there at the end where it leaves you.'" "One of the most interesting aspects of Synecdoche, New York is the way that it so thoroughly displays Kaufman's signatures (meta-narrative, dark humor, fumbling relationships, deadpan weirdness, melancholy, the conviction that being married to Catherine Keener would be kind of miserable) without employing his usual killer hooks, like an eight-minute pop song without a chorus," writes Jesse Hassenger for the L Magazine. Howard Feinstein talks with Kaufman for indieWIRE. Online viewing tip. Ted Zee has Kaufman and Hoffman on Charlie Rose. Update, 10/25: Via Movie City News, ST VanAirsdale at Defamer: "Charlie Kaufman's directing debut Synecdoche, New York is the most inaccessible, challenging, infuriating, stupefying, heartbreaking film of 2008. It's also the best American movie we've seen this year, and as noted here this morning, it's required viewing this weekend for anyone who wants to be on our good side. Or history's good side, for that matter - and here are five reasons why." "Charlie Kaufman's new picture is either his 2001, or his Lady in the Water," writes Justin Stewart for Stop Smiling. "Several days after seeing it, I'm still not sure where on that epic measuring stick it notches. It has the pleasures and pitfalls of any far-reaching movie/album/book that goes 'all the way,' its maker through wearing 'kid's gloves' and ready to give it 'everything he's got.' A risk of great pretension is inevitable in the gambit, and the resultant work typically encourages overrating by its admirers and shrill underrating by detractors. A stubborn wallowing in excessive morose self-pity, the staleness of some of the visual gags, and an incoherent, draggy last third ensure Synecdoche, New York as no Finnegans Wake, but its undeniable heady crackle and persistent curiosity leave no doubt that it's something more than his Use Your Illusion." For Scott Von Doviak, this is "the most ambitious, challenging, frustrating and thrilling American movie since I'm Not There... maybe even since Mulholland Drive. Those two films are good points of reference, actually; if you hated them both, Synecdoche probably isn't a movie for you." Updates, 10/26: Rachel Abramowitz talks with Kaufman for the Los Angeles Times. Online listening tip. "It's safe to say that you are an idea man. So I must ask you: to what degree do you worry about an idea?" Ed Champion talks with Kaufman, too. James Ponsoldt talks with Kaufman for Filmmaker. Updates, 10/27: "With so much screen time being allotted to Caden's bad marriage and pustular health problems, his majestic production doesn't get going properly until the second half of the film, and by then we don't care enough (worse still, we don't know enough, such is the vagueness of its guiding rubric) to mind whether it triumphs or flops," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "Compare Dennis Potter's great mini-series of the 1980s, The Singing Detective, and you will see much the same setup - a wry leading man with a skin disease, inspired by a furious creative itch - rendered with unstinting vigor.... If you want to show a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, go right ahead, but give that hour all the life you can." "It's a film full of ideas so ambitious and astounding, that the final product could certainly never meet its full potential (much like the film's characters themselves)," writes Matt Dentler. "That said, it comes closer than it should, and ultimately succeeds as a powerful and resonant near-masterpiece." Online listening and viewing tip. At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth has video of Kaufman being overrun by dogs as Kurt Anderson interviews him for Studio 360. Updates, 10/28: Ben Walters for the Guardian: "[S]ynonymous with both ambition and indifference, novelty and decadence, the Big Apple has always tempted dreamers to bite off more than they can chew. If I can make it there, the song goes, I'll make it anywhere, and it's a deliciously Kaufman-esque leap to have Caden resolve literally to make it there - to make a New York within New York. It's neither surprising nor unsatisfying that his project proves too much to bear; and yet, being inexhaustible, irreducible and ultimately unattainable, it does justice to its subject all the same." Walter Chaw talks with Kaufman for Film Freak Central. Updates, 10/29: "How to describe the films of Charlie Kaufman... Ingmar Bergman with laughs?" C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark: "Close, but that makes Kaufman sound too much like Woody Allen, a useful comparison maybe, but one that deemphasizes an essential aspect of Kaufman, his fascination with time and memory. And Kaufman is far more tied to Surrealism/Theater of the Absurd than Woody ever was. I'd prefer to say Kaufman is Woody Allen filtered through Alain Resnais." Andrew Sarris, writing in the New York Observer, understands "that some viewers will consider the film the worst they have ever seen, while others will judge it to be one of the best of the current crop of attractions. I find myself somewhere in the middle, impressed by its originality, but depressed by its lack of coherence and narrative flow." "Re-reading what I wrote about other films written by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), I see that I've compared his work to origami pieces, and I still think that's apt." Bryant Frazer: "You can lose yourself in their multifarious layers and folds - and sometimes, when imprecise fingers and thumbs finish modeling the creature, the thing doesn't really match what you saw on the instruction page."
Posted by dwhudson at 8:05 AM
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Fear(s) of the Dark.
"A collection of superbly wrought black-and-white animated vignettes, Fear(s) of the Dark trades in disturbing youthful memories and ghastly tactility," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "Produced by six exceptional French graphic artists, this concise, creepy compilation isn't truly terrifying, its aim being not to deliver jolt scares but, rather, to generate a mood of ominous unease."
One of the contributors, Charles Burns, is also "one of the most solid pillars of the domestic graphic novel world," notes Chris Barsanti at Film.com. His is "the most plot-driven of the film's stories..., a Twilight Zone-esque account of a lonely young student's infatuation first with bugs and then with the flirtatious woman in the library. The two prove not to mix well in a body-invasion scenario straight out of the Cronenberg playbook. Burns's lush black-and-white artwork has a dramatic starkness that gives it the feel of a lost 1950s B-movie, all mashed up with the adolescent alienation and violent sexuality that's permeated his graphic novels like Black Hole." James Van Maanen chats with him.
Updated through 10/24.
"While Burns works in high-contrast monochrome, Richard McGuire and Michel Pirus utilize it even more beautifully in their inescapable haunted-house tale, a chestnut rendered lyrical and abstract through wordless storytelling and a white-on-black canvas," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice. "Samurai ghosts, 18th-century demon dogs, and a childhood remembrance also figure into the film, each entertaining if not particularly scary, while the single sore thumb - a recurring bit in which contorting polygons dance to a woman's monologue of her sociopolitical fears—plays like an innocuous Agnès Varda parody."
"Shot in luminous whites, pulsing blacks and gorgeous grays, the stories explore sexual insecurity, rural superstition and sociopolitical anxieties with an inventiveness that's seldom scary but never less than mesmerizing," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times.
"As in any episodic movie, the quality varies from moment to moment," writes Chicagoist Rob Christopher. "But stylish pictorials and evocative sound design impressed us throughout."
Online viewing tip. Erik Davis has clips at Cinematical.
Updates: In the L Magazine, Henry Stewart finds Fear(s) to be "the sort of Gorey- and Addams-esque creepery that Tim Burton pastiches for a living. Animated by an impressive list of international illustrators, the film, like Persepolis (also French), has the look of a Barnes and Noble Graphic Novels section set into black-and-white motion."
"Traditional horror fans may find few hair-raising moments in Fear(s) of the Dark, and even comics enthusiasts may consider it a mixed bag," writes Nicole Rudick for Artforum. "But if mundanity makes your skin crawl, don't watch this before bedtime."
"Though it seems that in animation it's easier to convey an 'idea' of fear to an audience than impart in the viewer fear itself, the film nevertheless pleasantly lodges in the brain," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Like the famed 60s compilation Spirits of the Dead, which wisely saved Fellini's astonishing Toby Dammit for its just-desserts course, Fear(s) of the Dark sends us out on a high, low note."
"As a whole, Fear(s) has the experimental feel of people trying things out in somebody else's laboratory and hoping that the results will mesh," writes Phil Nugent at Screengrab. "A minor work that draws on some major talents, it seldom achieves anything like the obsessive charge that some of these artists have been able to generate with their work on the printed page."
Update, 10/23: "As a holistic experience, Fear(s) of the Dark feels at odds with itself, torn between highlighting its contributors' distinct voices and enforcing an artificial unity," writes Simon Abrams. Also in the New York Press, Brian Heater talks with Burns.
Update, 10/24: "These stories are frightening, but they contain few shocks or flinches; they're deeper and more psychological, more about adult anxiety than pure terror," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club. "They're more likely to impress animation buffs than scare horror fans, but around Halloween time, adults are likely to appreciate scary entertainment with more on its mind than a simple, shallow 'Boo!'"
Posted by dwhudson at 6:17 AM
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Stranded: I've Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains.
"Because the story has already been told in Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, the 1974 best seller by Piers Paul Read, and retold in its 1993 screen adaptation starring Ethan Hawke, why again?" asks Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "The short answer is that in Stranded, all 16 of the survivors, now middle-aged, tell the story in their own words. Since many of those words are eloquent, the assumption must be that their thoughts and impressions are the distillate of years of contemplation."
"The film is an awkward amalgam of talking head interviews, recreations, and original footage of the survivors' reunion with their families at the site of the tragedy, and while certain moments are memorable in their poignancy and mysteriousness, Stranded mostly achieves a flat, dull, and too-conventional depiction of its fascinating subject," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "Stranded proves that even the most epic, otherworldly survival story can be made boring."
Updated through 10/25.
Director Gonzalo Arijón "hardly glosses over the cannibalism, but his focus is instead on the spiritual fortitude and feelings of holy communion that allowed these Catholics to carry on for ten weeks under the most despairing of circumstances," notes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine. "At its best, Stranded embraces the contradictions that make this story about the will to live both a tragedy and a triumph."
"Stranded is the rare movie less complex and interesting than its press kit," writes Vadim Rizov in the Voice.
Updates: "Mr Arijon is a respectful chronicler and tastefully stays away from the sensational aspects of the story; he concentrates on the survivors' feelings of guilt and on their current families (many of whom traveled to the crash site, too)." Sara Vilkomerson in the New York Observer: "By the time the film gets to the inevitable eating of the bodies of the crash and avalanche victims, all of the 16 struggle to put into words their feelings, and in the grand scope of the horrors they endured, this small piece of the retelling is much less important than their struggle to understand why they survived when others didn't."
"The film's care in telling the story... produces a real sense of condemnation for the invasiveness of the media after the survivors return," notes Micah Towery in Slant. "It highlights the abnormal intrusion of it all, that reporters would act as a social police who also thrive on the giddiness of sensationalizing the survivors' plight."
"[W]hat these men recount is nothing less than a Herzog-worthy Rescue Dawn-esque journey - just when you think you’re saved the next circle of hell opens," writes Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door.
Update, 10/23: "[I]ntimate, terrifying and positively riveting," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "One way of explaining Stranded is that Arijón's after not just the objective facts of what happened and when, which are dramatic enough, but also the subjective reality, the psychological and physiological desolation of the experience."
Update, 10/24: This is "the definitive version" of the tale, argues Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Stranded pays the proper respect to those who didn't make it, by focusing on the generations spawned by those who did."
Update, 10/25: Online viewing tip. FilmCatcher talks with Arijon.
Posted by dwhudson at 6:15 AM
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Changeling.
Angelina Jolie "doesn't perform in Changeling; she resolutely presents herself to the audience for admiration," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "The main attraction in [Clint] Eastwood's two-fisted snake-pit weepie is the spectacle of Jolie's steely self-possessed suffering. As she lost her husband to Islamic terrorists in A Mighty Heart, Our Lady of Humanitarian Narcissism here endures another dreadful fate: losing her child to a mob of knaves, know-nothings, and psychos, even as she's persecuted by the entire state institutional apparatus of California."
"Its ingredients are the stuff of gothic nightmares: a kidnapped child, a sane woman incarcerated in a mental institution, a serial killer who slaughters young boys," writes David Ansen in Newsweek. "The sensationalistic aspects of Changeling are not, however, what really interest Eastwood. Though the true, shocking story it's based on has enough melodrama to sustain a season of soap operas, Eastwood's classical repose lifts this lurid tale to a different level."
Updated through 10/24.
"As a piece of filmmaking, Changeling is both impressive and monotonous," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "The trouble with period movies made by talented craftsmen who are serious about authenticity and consistency is that no one wants to mess up the shots.... I wish that Eastwood and the writer, J Michael Straczynski, had pushed deeper into the perverse strangeness of their story."
"Audiences will be forgiven for reaching for their coats and then putting them down again over and over," observes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC; "everytime you think this tune is done, there's another 38 bottles of beer on the wall. Part of the skill of telling a true story is knowing what parts to leave out, but Straczynski and Eastwood apparently figured we'd all find every last jot and tittle of this tale as fascinating as they did."
"A print afterword to the film tells us that the leadership of the Los Angeles Police Department was removed in the aftermath of the Christine Collins scandal, and reforms were enacted to protect citizens' rights," notes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "Yet, a few years later on the Los Angeles calendar, Roman Polanski and Robert Towne's Chinatown (1974) shows us an LAPD as corrupt as ever. Still, Chinatown now stands out as one of the great American films, whereas Changeling doesn't and probably never will."
David Edelstein in New York: "The way Eastwood shoves Jolie's suffering in our face is like a threat to the Academy: 'And the Oscar will go to...' She's a great actress. She doesn't need his domineering chivalry."
"Eastwood is more at home with less passionate stuff," writes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine; "in the background there's John Malkovich as a crusading pastor, and it's fun to watch his unsmiling righteousness, once pitted against Clint in 1993's In the Line of Fire, flipped into a force for good. Even better are the procedural sequences without Jolie, detailing the ins and outs of this strange case with Eastwood's unfussy confidence."
Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and New York.
Updates, 10/23: "The primal horror of this premise - a stranger is suddenly delivered to your home with the bland assurance that he's a member of your family - could have made for a movie as frightening as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and as psychologically astute as Gaslight, the 1944 film in which Charles Boyer slowly convinces a perfectly sane Ingrid Bergman that she's going mad," writes Dana Stevens in Slate. Instead, Changeling settles for middlebrow uplift and handsomely conventional melodrama."
"By some unaccountable phenomena, Clint Eastwood's Changeling resembles a Spike Lee movie," suggests Armond White in the New York Press.
"With Changeling (2008) poised for her Oscar consideration, I've found myself on an Angelina Jolie jag lately," writes Flickhead. "She was once compared to Brando for her remarkable capacity as eye magnet and changeling, and you could take her visceral performance in Gia (1998) as proof. Before that she was in Foxfire (1996), where her tough drifter could be seen as a young incarnation of the fallen manipulator she'd later play in Girl, Interrupted (1999)."
Online viewing tip. FilmCatcher interviews Jason Butler Harner.
"[T]his bustling, complex picture is hobbled by something neither an Academy Award-winning director nor a seductive star can overcome: miscasting," argues Richard Corliss in Time. "With flaring red lipstick on a face that hasn't seen much time in the California sun, and with a grieving matched in severity only by her will to learn the truth, Jolie is supposed to be a regular working mom who rises to meet the challenge of dreadful events. The actress is capable of many things, but being ordinary isn't one of them."
Online listening tip. Eastwood's a guest on Fresh Air.
Updates, 10/24: "To watch [Jolie] trace Christine's harrowing emotional passage - a series of flights from anxiety to terror, from grief to rage, pausing occasionally at calm defiance or tremulous hope - is to witness an undeniable tour de force of screen acting," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "It insists on being regarded as a great performance and may, indeed, be mistaken for one."
"This is, to put it mildly, a fantastical story, the kind of dark, absurdist allegory that we might have expected to ooze from the pen of Kafka," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "It is also, remarkably, a true (or at least trueish) story, as the film announces in its opening moments. But it is not enough to declare such improbable material historically accurate and leave it at that. It is Eastwood's burden to make it feel true, to overcome our skepticism at its innate outlandishness, and in this, Changeling is a singular failure. Scene after scene, twist after twist - and this is a film of many twists - rings false. I have been a fan (and defender) of Eastwood for as long as I can remember, but Changeling is a genuine stinker."
"Eastwood's film works best as a thorough - and sadly timely - depiction of what happens when a government institution decides that adhering to an official narrative is more important than discovering the truth," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.
"[F]or a director who knows how to balance histrionics with a lack of sentimentality (see Mystic River), Eastwood is unable to modulate tone or performances here," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "No one's perfect, not even our last totem of tough-yet-tender American cinema classicism. But that doesn't excuse such erratic storytelling."
"Eastwood's telling of this story isn't structured as a thriller, but as an uncoiling of outrage," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "It is clear that the leaders of the LAPD serve and protect one thing: its own tarnished reputation."
Eastwood's "five-film, five-year run, from Mystic River in 2003 to this film today, has been the most consistently powerful and affecting force on the American movie scene," argues Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "To see this film is to understand both how fragile and how essential our hopes for decency and truth are in a world that must be made to care about either one."
"As for Changeling's classicism, well, if portentous shots of menacing hatchets and crumbling cigarette ashes and characters being startled by the rap of a judge's gavel are what pass for no-nonsense cinematic storytelling today, fine," writes Jonathan Kiefer. "Why not then just go all the way with yet another of Eastwood's own soporific, melodically benumbing piano-tinkle scores to top it all off? Oh, right, he did."
Posted by dwhudson at 6:13 AM
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October 21, 2008
Shorts, fests, etc, 10/21.
"Chuck Palahniuk is fast becoming Hollywood's favorite author," notes Ben Child. "The Fight Club writer's novel Haunted looks set to become his fifth book to be adapted for the big screen.... Belgian filmmaker Koen Mortier, who made his directing debut on last year's unorthodox comedy Ex-Drummer, will take charge of the cameras and write the screenplay for Haunted." Twitch's Todd Brown most definitely approves this matchup. Related: Hiram Lee at the WSWS on Choke.
Also in the Guardian, Ben Walters: "Plenty of movies divide opinion, but few provoke punch-ups. Abrasion and awkwardness, however, are the stock in trade of Frownland, a micro-budget 16mm endeavour that took more than five years to bring to the screen."
Looking for a good book? Catherine Grant's found several. And they're online. And free.
FilmInFocus runs an extract from Brian De Palma and Quentin Tarantino's 1994 conversation about violence in the movies.
"There's nothing overtly strange about [Arthur Russell's] music, except it's ethereal without entering the more recognizable realms of psychedelia or new age (and intimate without qualifying as conventional singer/songwriter fare)," writes Kathy Fennessey at the Siffblog. "It's accessible, in other words, but not commercial. And there you have it: the kiss of death. You also have the makings of a cult artist, and that's where Wild Combination begins..."
"Melancholia is most probably [Lav] Diaz's most difficult film for the lone reason that Diaz affords little or no comfort to his viewers," writes Francis Cruz. "There is very little humor to the film and the story, grounded by philosophies and ideas that might be too personal or hard to grasp, branches into different and sometimes convoluted directions. However, as with most of Diaz's films, the reward of completing one is not in the pleasure of sitting through eight hours of his trademark black and white aesthetics and seemingly endless ramblings and conversations, but in the lingering and often valid points that Diaz would have you digesting and exploring for a far longer period of time."
Cullen Gallagher, writing at Hammer to Nail, finds Erik Poppe's Troubled Water to be "an arresting probe into morality and forgiveness that leaves one stunned not only by its emotionally stark performances, but also by the film's complex, musical structure that quietly underlies the narrative and binds everything together."
"In his acclaimed film Why We Fight, documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki takes a hard look at the militarization of modern America and what it says about our priorities as a nation. His new book, The American Way of War, continues this line of investigation in greater depth, tracing the rise of the military-industrial complex from its origins under FDR, Truman and Eisenhower all the way to its disproportionate influence over contemporary politics and policy, culminating with the Bush administration." Christopher Bateman talks with him for VF Daily.
I've dropped this in the latest W. entry, but it should be noted here, too: "This week, Slate is featuring a conversation about George Bush's presidency, prompted by Oliver Stone's film W. Participants are Oliver Stone; Bob Woodward, author of The War Within; Ron Suskind, author of The Way of the World; and Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush Tragedy."
John Rogers's "Not-So-Gentle Post" on Hollywood conservatives follows the "Gentle" one.
The Dallas Video Festival has been around for 21 years, but for the first time, this year's edition, slated for November 6 through 9, will be coming at you via iTunes as well.
More fests and events:
Dennis Cozzalio talks with Peet Gelderblom about his comic strip, Directorama.
Vince Keenan defends Body of Lies.
"Suddenly, across Hollywood, the stock market is not such a sexy subject anymore," reports Brooks Barnes. "As they have watched their 401(k)'s shrivel in recent weeks, entertainment executives have started to grapple with how best to reflect the global economic crisis in movie and television story lines, or whether to bring the topic up at all." Also: "Universal is looking to sell Rogue Pictures, an indie unit that makes about four films a year in the horror and teen comedy genres." The Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein comments.
"A prominent Pakistani filmmaker and distributor, Satish Anand, has been kidnapped in Pakistan's biggest city of Karachi, a top police official said Tuesday." Reuters reports.
Online viewing tip #1. At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth's got "The End of America, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's non-fiction adaptation of Naomi Wolf's book and ensuing lecture tour, which debuted on SnagFilms today. This is the first film I've seen that seems ideally suited to be seen as a blog embed, and not just because a good deal of the footage within was pulled from web video sources. Essentially a Top Ten list followed by a How To, it's the first film I've seen that seems to have internalized the structure of the traffic-baiting blog post."
Online viewing tip #2. Ted Johnson has Rosario Dawson's La Pasion De La Decision: Episode 5. Note the special guest star.
Online viewing tips. Selections from the Rooftop Films 2008 Summer Series.
Posted by dwhudson at 2:21 PM
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NYFF. Junkets Dispatch. 2.
We're in luck: Vadim Rizov's got one more round for us. Here was the first.
Film: TulpanTime & Date: Tuesday, October 7, 2:55
Moderator: Scott Foundas.
Subject: Sergey Dvortsevoy, co-writer/director.
Attendance: Disheartening. Tone: Incredibly intense. Three-and-a-half minutes into the conference, after revealing the film took four years to shoot, Dvortsevoy announces, "I think only crazy people can make this type of film." This is the first of many statements that make me want to nominate him for Werner Herzog Jr status, along with stories about filming in dust storms and trying to avoid getting bitten by camels. It helps that Dvortsevoy's accented English isn't Russian-tinged, as you'd expect, but oddly Teutonic. Highlights: Much has been made of an incredible 10-minute shot of a sheep giving birth; Dvortsevoy confirmed that the actor in question had never given birth to a sheep before. (They had to try it twice: the sheep died the first time.) We learn that the name "Tulpan" means "tulip," which is helpful. Someone asks the standard question about how the film was received in its country of origin. But the country in question is Kazakhstan, which raises the specter of something no one wants to mention, but which is clearly not a joke for Dvortsevoy, given that he's made a film about poor, crude regional shepherds. "I've shown the film in Kazakhstan two times, one time in Astana, the capitol, in a Eurasian film festival, and then five days ago in Almaty. There was a special screening for people of power, some local chiefs, and also for audience. The first time we screened it, we showed it to 1,500 people and the reaction was very good. But people from power said, 'It's awful. It's even worse than Borat.'" This is not a joke, despite the eruption into laughter. "They said, 'Why do you show this poor life? Why do you present Kazakhstan like a poor country?... Why do you show this steppe? Please present Kazakhstan as a modern country. We have a lot of cities, we have a lot of buildings.'" Fortunately, the wife of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Sara Nazarbayev, loved it, saying, "It's like my childhood." So there's hope yet. Best Q&A Smackdown (non-Mike Leigh category): Someone asks about the potential symbolic import of the cucumbers carried around by one character, since they're ostensibly the only green thing in the film. Since Dvortsevoy has repeatedly talked about his semi-documentary, on-the-fly filming techniques and emphasized a literal-minded approach to everything, this is not a wise question. "Yes. And?" says Dvortsevoy. "But I think also the grass is green? With cucumbers, that was also improvisation, because once I met a guy who sold cucumbers there."
Film: Let It RainTime & Date: Wednesday, October 8, 11:55 am
Moderator: Kent Jones.
Subject: Agnes Jaoui, co-writer/director.
Attendance: Fairly hearty. Tone: A little lugubrious (just like the movie), because Jaoui insists on avoiding a translator's services and speaks in halting French instead. Highlights: Jaoui offhandedly reveals that this most leaden and stereotypically bourgeois of French dramas was originally conceived as a fairy tale, of all things. "At the beginning, Mimouna [Mimouna Hadji, playing the mother of Jamel Debouzze and the faithful servant of the family Jaoui's character belongs to] was dusting the house." And then somehow a genie would appear from the dust and grant wishes, which she compares to Aladdin. This seems even more ill-advised than what's on-screen. Otherwise, there's not much in the way of revelation: unsurprisingly, Jaoui works closely with her actors and is inspired by Woody Allen. Someone asks a long question about how "political" the film is (i.e., one character is a feminist who has her core beliefs shaken and Debouzze gets to deliver one monologue about racism). Jaoui takes it like a Gallic stereotype: "The family is a lot like society." She gets this close to saying "Everything is politics." She has an oddly interesting take on The West Wing, which she believes would be impossible to make in France because "we are so much more cynical about our leaders.... For me, it's the most interesting series to understand the difference between American and European politics." She goes on to complain that her generation started out as optimists and now wants to "make more money and have less problems," which makes her "afraid," which is especially resonant, since this conference is taking place during a huge recession. Most Fawning Question: "It's amazing to me how you put out what are definitely comedies of manners, but you do imbue them with cross-currents of political stuff. It's an incredibly subtle balance. How do you keep that balance? It must be difficult." Jaoui answers about trying not to be too demonstrative, but I'm not even sure how this qualifies as a question.
Film: Tokyo SonataTime & Date: Thursday, October 9, 3:20 pm
Moderator: Kent Jones.
Subject: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, co-writer/director.
Attendance: Underwhelming. Tone: Extremely polite on all sides. Regardless of his movies, Kurosawa is as mild-mannered and thoroughly precise in his attempts to answer questions as most Japanese directors. Highlights: Asked how the film's title relates to the structure of an actual piano sonata, Kurosawa is first flippant, then flips it around in an unexpectedly rewarding way. "The truth is that I didn't place a lot of weight on the concept of sonata. It's a movie that unfolds in Tokyo, and there's piano music at the end, and Tokyo Sonata has a super-nice ring to it. I'll try to think a little more deeply about that." Give Kurosawa credit for perfect comic timing: he stops for the translator to get that out, everyone chuckles, then lets fire the second part. "I did look up what sonata means, and I understand that it's three or four separate pieces of music that form one coherent whole. My film has four central characters, and each of them unfolds in the world independently, and then from time to time they come together to share a meal." Kurosawa doesn't think that his film is funny (it is, frequently), but has no problem with people who do, sort of: "I didn't set out to make a comedy in any way, but for those who find certain scenes funny, please feel free to laugh." However: "It really depends on the country and the screening, though. In Japan, practically no one laughed. For some reason at Cannes, people found it hilarious in places that were wildly inappropriate. I mostly prefer a sort of sweet chuckle." Kurosawa also revealed his frustration with distributors who would pigeonhole him as a genre guy: "I love horror films and I know I've made a lot of them, but I don't consider myself a horror specialist.... That's not how I'm perceived in Japan. I'm part of a group of several other directors who try our hands at many different kinds of film. It's not perceived as strange that I'm making a film that's not horror.... There have been some films in the past that I didn't make as a horror film, but the distributors decided to call it a horror film because it was going to be easier to sell. Frankly, that gives me pause because I didn't make it as a horror film." Example: "Doppelganger. If anything, I would call that a comedy action-movie. It had nothing to do with horror, but it was marketed as horror." This explains a lot; it may be time to re-evaluate all those lukewarm reviews. Kent Jones is curious: does this mean Pulse wasn't a horror film? "Unfortunately, Pulse was a total horror film." Stupidest Question: None! The great thing about a Kurosawa film, even one as relatively straightforward as this one, is that it's always so mystifying that there are no stupid questions. Everyone wins.
Posted by dwhudson at 1:04 PM
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DVDs, 10/21.
For IFC, Michael Atkinson reviews 1965's Paris vu par... (Six in Paris), a "New Wave experiment for producer Barbet Schroeder - six filmmakers, six arrondissements, cheap 16mm cameras, non-pro actors: go.... [T]he coalescent upshot of Paris vu par... is as both a fascinating time capsule (at a moment when, according to Rohmer in the DVD's liner notes, 'Paris is being destroyed') and a New Wave primer, prioritizing the fleeting textures of life over story, and making the real places in which characters find themselves epically vital." Also: Lewis Milestone's Arch of Triumph (1948), an unjustly neglected romantic epic of postwar Hollywood (from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque), set in a 1939 Paris awash with refugees of the rising Nazi machine. The film glowers and broods like a noir on barbiturates." Related: The Observer's Philip French on Ingrid Bergman.
"A chamber piece abetted by one of Ryuichi Sakamoto's loveliest scores as it gradually drifts from narrative into a labyrinthine reverie, Taboo distills a kind of troubled poetry that ultimately asks if beauty is tied to evil and if desire is connected to death," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum. "Yet far from imposing these and related hypotheses as if they were foregone conclusions, the film is content to ponder them from a careful distance, letting the cherry blossoms fall where they may."
The Parallax View runs a 2002 piece from Kathleen Murphy: "A friend once described [Max] Ophuls's elegant cinematic excursions as 'tracking eternity'; it is the director's famously long, complex, beautiful tracking shots - and the power of his lovers' emotions - that carry them (and the willing viewer) out of time. In The Earrings of Madame de..., Ophuls's masterpiece, that inexorable, voluptuous camera movement constitutes the film, a life, the transformation of a beautiful woman from ornament to essence. Madame de... 's pilgrimage ends in an empty cathedral, architecture which rises up to eternity."
For his "Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report" in the Auteurs' Notebook, Glenn Kenny watches the Masters of Cinema release of Georges Franju's Judex, which "plays beautifully... and is accompanied by the usual distinguished array of extras - not to mention a whole other feature film, Franju's minor but entertaining [Louis] Feuillade-inspired Shadowman."
Bob Westal on Rear Window: "Simultaneously a devilish entertainment and a big-hearted work of art, my personal all-time favorite film from one of the three or four best directors of all time is as funny as it is suspenseful to the point of being terrifying - while also managing to be sexy, romantic, and poignant."
"After some fellow fliers mocked Gus Grissom (Fred Ward) following his landing mishap, test pilot extraordinaire Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) silences them by saying, 'It takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially when it's on TV.'" Edward Copeland: "It takes a special kind of filmmaker to make a film as great as The Right Stuff, even if Philip Kaufman has never come close to equaling it again 25 years later."
Online viewing tip #1. Bryant Frazer takes a "look at the shopping-mall car chase from The Blues Brothers, including some of the recent history of the Dixie Square Shopping Mall."
Online viewing tip #2. The NYT's AO Scott on Sullivan's Travels.
DVD roundups: Paul Clark (Screengrab), DVD Talk, Ambrose Heron, Peter Martin (Cinematical), Noel Murray (Los Angeles Times), PopMatters and Slant.
Posted by dwhudson at 12:15 PM
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Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/21.
David Gordon Green's next project will be "a horror thriller based on a comic book miniseries," notes Eric D Snider at Cinematical. "It's called Freaks of the Heartland, and it's a six-part story published in 2004 by Dark Horse Comics (Portland represent!) about a boy in a small town who must protect his younger brother from people who view him as a monster. There's a good chance the townsfolk are right about the monster thing, however, and it apparently applies to some other local children, too."
"Andy Fickman has made a deal with Roseblood Movie Company and Twisted Pictures to godfather four remakes from RKO's horror heyday, including three that were produced by horrormeister Val Lewton," reports Michael Fleming in Variety. "The remake properties are the Jacques Tourneur-directed I Walked With a Zombie (1943); the Robert Wise-directed Bela Lugosi-Boris Karloff starrer The Body Snatcher (1945); the Mark Robson-directed Karloff starrer Bedlam (1946); and the John Farrow-directed Lucille Ball-John Carradine starrer Five Came Back (1939)." Via Merrick, who's got clips from the originals at AICN.
"Halloween usually brings a crimson tide of horror movies on DVD, and this year is no exception." Featured in Dave Kehr's roundup for the New York Times are Albert Lewin's 1945 adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, "a handsome, A-level production" and Terence Fisher's Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, "a 1961 revisionist version of Robert Louis Stevenson's tale." (For more, see Jeffrey M Anderson at Guru.) Then: "Though clearly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho, [Seth Holt's] Scream of Fear is closer to Orson Welles in its baroque visual design and delight in style for style's sake." And finally, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre "lacks the moral and philosophical dimensions of George Romero's no less notorious Night of the Living Dead of 1968: the curious genius of Chainsaw lies in its relentless superficiality and literalism. It speeds by in a blur of unsettling, sometimes sickening images, and does not come to a conclusion so much as suddenly spit out the spectator, bringing the awful ride to an end. Still actively imitated today (the Saw films are only its most obvious descendants), this little drive-in movie has won its place in American culture. Deal with it."
"Tim Lucas's excellent Studies in the Horror Film: Videodrome (2008, Consortium Book/Millipede Press) is at last in print, and it's essential reading for any and all devotees of David Cronenberg and/or Videodrome in particular," announces Steve Bissette. "This is a brilliant dissection of the collaborative creative process at work." Tim Lucas notes that Bissette "has some strong opinions on the subject of what he sees as my ratification of 'pejorative terminology' - in this case, my identification of Videodrome as a conceptual granddaddy of the subgenre we know today as 'torture porn' - and I'd like to take a moment to respond to this."
At WNYC, Nathan Lee recommends The Strangers, "a lean, mean little home invasion thriller" and a prime example of the "domestic siege subgenre": "It's the horror genre par excellence for troubled economic times, and it's given us a some superb recent examples."
Mike Everleth reviews a slew of shorts that screened at the recent Spooky Movie Film Festival.
"Suzzanna, the Queen of Indonesian Horror, died on October 15 at the age of 66," notes David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back.
Online viewing tip. Erik Davis: "Cinematical reader Kirby sent in this pretty hilarious video called MACs vs PCs, which takes the popular rivalry to the streets in a short film that's a mix between West Side Story and The Evil Dead."
Online viewing tips. "20 ghosts in varying shades of real" at DC's.
Posted by dwhudson at 11:57 AM
Rudy Ray Moore, 1937 - 2008.
Rudy Ray Moore, the self-proclaimed "Godfather of Rap" who influenced generations of rappers and comedians with his rhyming style, braggadocio and profanity-laced routines, has died. He was 81.... "People think of black comedy and think of Eddie Murphy," rap artist Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew told the Miami Herald in 1997. "They don't realize [Moore] was the first, the biggest underground comedian of them all. I listened to him and patterned myself after him."... The heyday of his fame was in the 1970s, with the release of Dolemite followed by The Human Tornado, Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-in-Law and Money Hustler.
Jocelyn Y Stewart, Los Angeles Times.
The world is a lesser place without Rudy Ray Moore. His passing reminds us that we have a duty to push harder and crazier in these stagnant times, and to realize that the craziest artists may be unexpectedly entertaining people just as hard as they are provoking them.
Ed Champion.
Frankly, all modern minority comics, as Spike Lee once said, can kiss Rudy's rather ample rump - two times!... One trip through his original oeuvre (not counting movies where he made cameos, or worked in a less than superstar capacity) provides glimpses into a guy whose personality was all about fun and fuckin' - hopefully both at the same time. He only got medieval when the man — or some other manufactured version of the cancer known as the Caucasian - came down on him. Then the prerequisite pull top can of Me Decade whoop ass was opened up on anyone who didn't see eye to eye with this sub-genre Superfly.
Bill Gibron, PopMatters, 2005.
See also: the site and the Wikipedia entry.
Posted by dwhudson at 7:15 AM
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October 20, 2008
Shorts, 10/20.
"Well, you know the bad news, and we are all left to wonder at how the last serious depression went on the worst part of 10 years and was only finally dispelled by a war," writes David Thomson. "Then there is the good news. The last time there was such a depression, the place once known as Hollywood produced I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Footlight Parade, My Man Godfrey, Man's Castle, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, The Grapes of Wrath, Dead End, Our Daily Bread and City Lights.... How will it be this time?... You only have to look at the films the US mainstream has made in this century so far to know that we lack the talent or experience that will count."
Also in the Guardian: "The life of the Chinese film director Xie Jin, who has died aged 84, would make an excellent movie in itself, reflecting the turbulent history of his country in the 20th century," writes Ronald Bergan. "He shone brightest among those contemporaries who emerged after the establishment of the people's republic in 1949 and was one of the few directors to continue to make films during and after the cultural revolution. It was not an easy ride."
"On a recent Sunday, members of an extended Jewish clan, most of them Brooklyn-born, gathered at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in lower Manhattan, to watch a movie about their family. The movie was not a compilation of old wedding films or aging, ketchup-tinted bar-mitzvah footage but a screening of Edward Zwick's new feature, Defiance, which opens in December." In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik relates the amazing story the film tells before returning to the descendants of the Bielski brothers, who spear-headed a series of encampments in the Belarusian woods which "included libraries, nurseries, and clinics" where nearly 1200 Jews remained out reach of the Nazis in WWII.
"Shooting gets underway today in the Dreux area on L'arbre et la forêt (The Tree and the Forest), the fifth feature by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau," reports Fabien Lemercier for Cineuropa. "The duo's latest work - TV drama Born in 68 [trailer] - will be shown on Friday, October 24 on Arte in its original version: two 100-minute episodes. The cast for L'arbre et la forêt includes seasoned actors Guy Marchand (Inside Paris [trailer]) and Françoise Fabian (5x2 [trailer]), alongside Belgium's Yannick Renier (Private Lessons [trailer]), Sabrina Seyvecou, François Négret, Catherine Mouchet, Jacques Bonnaffé and Sandrine Dumas."
From the earliest urban legends to the latest computer games, Americans have embraced fantasies of the city's destruction as 'a reaffirmation of New York's greatness,' said Max Page, a professor of history and architecture and the author of a new book called The City's End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears and Premonitions of New York's Destruction." Sam Roberts in the New York Times: "'We destroy New York on film and paper by telling stories of clear and present dangers, with causes and effects, villains and heroes, to make our world more comprehensible than it has become,' writes Professor Page, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst."
"Those who have spent the last three or four years following the parallel production nightmares of Fanboys and 5-25-77 would be excused for assuming that all films involving teenagers and early cuts of Star Wars films are cursed." At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth summarizes both nightmares before turning to the world premiere of the second, now called '77, at the Hamptons Film Festival: "But don't get too excited yet - it's still not finished."
Also: A transcription of a conversation among Jameel Jaffer, Alec Baldwin and Naomi Wolf that preceded a screening of The End of America.
"Me Cheeta is a truly terrible idea for a book," writes Carole Cadwalladr in the Observer: "the cover is lousy, the first chapter lame, the entire conceit of a memoir written by a chimpanzee - Cheeta from the Tarzan films and the oldest chimp alive - stomach-churningly cute. And, as it turns out, it's also the best celebrity memoir you'll read this year, and it's not even a memoir. Or only ostensibly: it's actually a rather joyous satire on Hollywood's Golden Age, with Cheeta its simian F Scott Fitzgerald."
Guy Savage has the Noir of the Week: "Directed by Reginald Le Borg, and based on the novel by crime author Max Catto, Bad Blonde throws Barbara Payton into Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye; she hadn't expected believable circumstances but in such an alien environment, she seems wildly out-of-place. She's the best thing in the picture: sensual, cruel, unprincipled and viciously trampy, she pulses with passion and lust amidst a motley assortment of males who don't know how to handle her."
For Newsweek, Ramin Setoodeh talks with Kevin Smith about Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
"The conditions of rural life you present in The Longwang Chronicles are quite harsh, quite brutal. Are they typical of China's countryside?" The WSWS's David Walsh talks with filmmaker Li Yifan.
"Mr Blackwell, the acerbic designer whose annual worst-dressed list skewered the fashion felonies of celebrities from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Britney Spears, has died," reports the AP's Bob Thomas. "He was 86."
Online listening tip #1. Nathaniel R talks with Boyd Van Hoeij about the race for the Best Foreign Film Oscar and with Joachim Trier about Reprise, "working with non-actors, writing as metaphor, Norway, and even a meeting with Jeanne Moreau."
Online listening tip #2. "Kim's Video, the venerable New York City store famous for its massive, esoteric and not always legal collection of movies as well as its judgmental staff, is shutting down its rental business." Matt Singer and Alison Willmore: "This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at the legend of Kim's, the decline of video stores in general, and, with it, the passing of the fabled video store clerk turned self-taught director."
Online listening tip #3. At the New Yorker: "In this week's issue, Kelefa Sanneh writes about the political parodies of Saturday Night Live, and David Denby writes about Oliver Stone's W. Together, they discuss the pleasures and perils of political impersonation."
Online viewing tip #1. At the DVblog: "Rather fetching art-work-over of Godard's great film Alphaville, by Kurt Ralske."
Online viewing tip #2. David Phelps has found Bruce Conner's Vivian.
Posted by dwhudson at 2:36 PM
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Fests and events, 10/20.
"In its third edition spread over four days from November 13 - 16, 2008 at Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinema, with special live events at the Apple Store and the Ninth Street Independent Film Center, the San Francisco Film Society presents the San Francisco International Animation Festival (SFIAF), which celebrates 'one of the most fertile, creative and productive forms of artistic, experimental, commercial and industrial media.'" A preview from Michael Guillén.
Noel Vera offers an overview of the 10th Cinemanila International Film Festival, running through October 29.
Catherine Bisley has an overview of New Zealand's traveling Italian Film Festival in the Lumière Reader.
All over the Austin Film Festival: the Austin Chronicle and the Austin Movie Blog, naturally.
"Documentaries and their cinema verité cousins were the strongest part of the Bangkok International Film Festival this year." A report from Nick Palevsky in the Auteurs' Notebook.
"Lance Hammer's Ballast led the 18th Annual Gotham Independent Film Award nominations, which were announced this morning by IFP." Peter Knegt reports for indieWIRE, where he also lists the winners of the Middle East International Film Festival's Black Pearls.
Also: "Norwegian director Erik Poppe's Troubled Water and Japanese director Megumi Sasaki's Herb and Dorothy won big at the Hamptons International Film Festival," reports Brian Brooks.
Mike Everleth has the award-winners from the Melbourne Underground Film Festival.
The WSWS's David Walsh files a third report from the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Posted by dwhudson at 1:03 PM
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/20.
"It's October again and time for accounting another year of horror film releases on DVD. The crop's been down, owing partly to diminished disc sales overall, and the fact of known quantity chillers being offered up in past seasons. We've pretty nearly dredged the lake." Nevertheless, John McElwee finds a few highlights for the season, thanks mostly to the little studio that could - "My policy dictates that whatever is good in Hammer mitigates all that isn't" - and an event honoring a very special face: his wife "says I ignore household matters but am vitally interested in what Boris Karloff might have said on some street corner back in August 1933, to which I reply, Well, what did he say?"
Speaking of whom. Observer film critic Philip French has chosen his five "scariest films" and at the top of the list is Frankenstein, whose director, James Whale, comes in for special praise from Jonathan Lapper, too: "Now that man could direct."
"FRANKENSTEIN Night! features clips, trailers, and scenes from celebrated (and un-celebrated) Frankenstein movies, stitching together a show of about three hours." Ray Privett has details. October 27.
And of course, it's a screening of Frankenstein that sparks Ana's imagination in Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive, "a strangely textured, hauntingly beautiful and seductively slippery film of seemingly always fading autumnal light, mirrored images and enveloping enigma," as Josef Braun puts it. "Not unlike The Curse of the Cat People, its insight into child psychology through the examination of traumas that adult eyes never fall upon bridges the magical thinking of early childhood and the melancholy observation of movies that look to the past for knowledge of the present. It's somehow a fairy tale, a tone poem and a political allegory all at once. In short, its unforgettable, and not to be missed by anyone with a tolerance, much less a desire, for the sublime that lays in the shadows of the inexplicable."
Also: "It is for me one of those genuinely inexhaustible movies, and, though its violence pierces me only more deeply as time goes by, I find myself returning to it more than any other. Psycho, newly released on a special edition two-disc set from Universal, with a beautiful new transfer and unusually good supplements, has that crystalline character of something that yields new or richer readings or sensations with every handling."
"Toby Dammit is a genuinely apocalyptic whirlwind of a movie," writes Steve Bissette. "As his name asserts, Dammit is damned and in search of repose, respite and rest - but there's none to be found in Fellini's dizzying metropolitan inferno, as nightmarish as any ever burned into celluloid. From the clutter of claustrophobic studio spaces which are either overlit or draped in chintz, to the spare, fogbound twilight realms of the fateful, seemingly aimless final journey, Fellini is a brilliant cartographer of civilization on the brink of utter collapse." Via Tim Lucas.
"I'm wondering if anyone has any superior horror films or recent discoveries they'd recommend?" Doug Cummings has a few suggestions himself, but he's looking for more.
Eric Campos presents Film Threat's thorough overview of this weekend's Hollywood Horror, Sci-Fi & Fantasy Film Festival.
At Twitch, Collin Armstong talks with Zack Parker about Quench.
Time Out lists "Ten friendly ghost movies."
Online browsing tips. Boing Boing's David Pescovitz points to Ray Villafane's "insanely intricate pumpkin carvings." Also: Chris Berens, artist at work.
Posted by dwhudson at 12:36 PM
London 08, week 2.
The London Film Festival opened last week and runs through to the end of the month. How's it been going so far? The Observer's Jason Solomons hits a few of the highlights, while the Guardian's Xan Brooks looks ahead, with recommendations for the second week: "Might I recommend Tony Manero...?"
Updated through 10/25.
James Dennis at Twitch on Mike Figgis's new film: "A one page treatment formed the basis of the shoot, the bare bones of a plot, allowing the dialogue to be improvised on location with the lead actors cast just two days prior to the off. On returning to London Figgis wasn't really sure what he had; a documentary, a love story, or something else completely. On watching Love Live Long, the answer is all of the above and much more." Related online viewing: Figgis talks about camera phones for the London Times.
Also in the Times, Igor Toronyi-Lalic talks with Sharon Maguire (Bridget Jones's Diary) about