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

]]> It's difficult to argue the film as an artistic masterpiece; it seems to be influenced by the French New Wave films of the time, but also seems to have been put together in such loose-fitting fashion out of a sheer lack of resources. MacKenzie often repeats certain shots, and the audio doesn't always match the movement of the actors' lips. But the movie has an undeniable emotional punch and its historical place in cinema is indisputable; there's still nothing else quite like it. Shot in black-and-white, it begins with Edward Curtis photographs and introduces rock music by the Revels. We then follow seven American Indians over the course of a night. One man, Homer (Homer Nish), drops his pregnant wife Yvonne (Yvonne Williams) at a movie, while he and a buddy go off to play cards. Tommy (Tom Reynolds) and another pal pick up two women at a diner and go for a drive. Eventually, everyone ends up at the top of a hill for a late-night powwow, complete with drumming and chanting and incessant drinking—mainly Thunderbird wine.

The three protagonists occasionally narrate with observations, thoughts and dreams, which MacKenzie recorded beforehand and synced up to the images. The men admit that they're mostly looking for happiness, or at least a good time, while Yvonne longs for some kind of simple stability. Beyond her beautiful, babyish face, she is by far the most fascinating character; she simply hopes things will be better for her baby. As for herself, she seems heartbreakingly caught between naïve acceptance and vague dissatisfaction of her place in life. Most revealing is the movie she chooses to watch: a 1957 Sterling Hayden western called The Iron Sheriff that is filled with white faces—and from what we can tell—no Natives. Imagine how she might have felt if she could have been dropped off to see The Exiles instead.

Aside from the gorgeous new transfer, Milestone's two-disc DVD comes with a generous selection of extras. Author Sherman Alexie (Reservation Blues, screenwriter of Smoke Signals) and critic Sean Axmaker provide an illuminating commentary track. There are clips from Los Angeles Plays Itself, a theatrical trailer, stills gallery, and MacKenzie's student film Bunker Hill 1956, which inspired the feature. The second disc features three more MacKenzie short films—A Skill for Molina, Story of a Rodeo Cowboy, and Ivan and His Father—as well as three other shorts: Robert Kirste's Last Day of Angels Flight, Greg Kimble's Bunker Hill: A Tale of Urban Renewal, and the 1910 silent-era gem White Fawn's Devotion, considered to be the first American Indian film. There's even a selection of DVD-Rom bonus features, including the screenplay. Sadly, director MacKenzie died in 1980 and never saw his film get such a generous restoration.

]]> 7654@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Jeffrey M. Anderson

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

Continued reading DVD OF THE WEEK: The Exiles...

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

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

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

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

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

]]> 7653@http://daily.greencine.com/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> 7646@http://daily.greencine.com/ In director Wes Anderson's stop-motion animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox (read Vadim Rizov's "Film of the Week" review), 29-year-old actor Jason Schwartzman—who began his screen career working with Anderson as the overambitious teen hero of Rushmore, then co-starred in and co-wrote The Darjeeling Limited—lends his voice to the role of Ash. A runty young fox who longs for the attention and affection of his father Mr. Fox (George Clooney), Ash spends most of the story in a quiet jealous huff over his cousin Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson), who seems to be better than him in just about every sport—including the art of romance.

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

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

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

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

]]> Fantastic Mr. Fox shows meaningful change both technically and thematically in a way that should be hard to ignore: it's Anderson's first non-widescreen movie since Bottle Rocket, and his first fully functional, non-divorced family. There's a prototypically irresponsible, egotistical father, sure, but by film's end he's changed his ways. Punishing an irresponsible dad and integrating him back into contented domesticity is a convention of the family film—which Fantastic Mr. Fox, despite its totally adult dialogue, functions as, thanks to spangly stop-motion and zippy chases—but it's a possibility denied in Anderson's other films, and he seems to mean it. More importantly, Life Aquatic andDarjeeling had their moments of tedium, while Fantastic Mr. Fox does not. Working in stop-motion, with visuals pre-timed to sound, has forced compression upon Anderson, ironing out his pacing problems: this is vintage screwball-comedy speed with no repose. It may be too much for some people, but it's relentlessly inventive. The verbal wit only stops for physical gags (everyone should enjoy Willem Dafoe's "psychotic rat," a mix of finger-snapping West Side Story gang member and out-of-place Western gunslinger), and there's zero downtime. The movie is never not clever, and its verbal digressions and jokes are more moment-to-moment surface hilarious than any of Anderson's past work.

That does not, however, mean that the film "lacks the heart of the director's best work" or, as Sight & Sound's Ben Walters charges, that Anderson's failed "to address the tension between living as a wild animal and shouldering responsibility for others." It's hard to get any clearer than Mr. Fox saying, straight-up, that he sometimes is tempted to be a wild animal rather than a father and husband, but it's true that the total time of expressly signaled deep emotion is pretty brief. Anderson hasn't just compressed his narrative, but his signifiers as well: apparently realizing that, yes, his obsessions do repeat themselves, he trusts you to follow the slightly changed pattern. The inappropriately (and, more importantly, ineptly) expressed sexual urges of the past—Max Fisher's impossible crush on Miss Cross, Bill Murray's off-key flirting in The Life Aquatic, Jason Schwartzman's hilariously unsexy copulation skills in Darjeeling—are sublimated into an obsession with food (more tellingly, stealing it before ravaging the plate).

Meanwhile, the ever-present fear of aging and death receives its own shorthand. Mortality tends to enter Anderson movies with the sudden unexpected use of contemporary songs rather than the usual '60s mixtape fare: Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay" in Tenenbaums, Sigur Rós in Aquatic. Here, Anderson switches off the Beach Boys and leans on Alexandre Desplat's score as Mr. Fox—after winning all the important battles of the plot—sees his biggest fear, a wolf, and makes his peace with it. It's essentially the same as Murray seeing the Jaguar Shark in Life Aquatic—a man staring at the deadly thing he fears and implicitly coming to terms with death—but expressed in a far more compacted manner that's all the more affective for how little time you're given to take it in.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is as exhaustively, cinematically cross-indexed as any of Anderson's past work, complete with other people's repurposed soundtracks (there's quite a few Georges Delerue bits from Truffaut films here), which suggests the usual charges that Anderson's essentially a sterile cinephile rather than an original thinker; it's also tempting to suggest that Anderson's movies—with their deceptively bright palettes and emotionally stunted characters—have always been a bit child-like, so him making a kids' movie is the logical end-point.

And sure, I sympathize: I can get frustrated with Anderson's too-easy insistence on signifying fun with old songs and serious moments with new music, with the intense emphasis on fashion for even the most minor character, and with what's been lost from his first two films (the possibility of raw awkwardness and need). But Fantastic Mr. Fox isn't just his most fully realized movie in a decade; it's the logical progression of his consistently misunderstood maudits, with man-children reconciling themselves to maturity sooner rather than later and childhood traumas resolved rather than festering permanently. It's also his funniest, most exuberantly inventive movie. It is, in fact, a Wes Anderson movie, which now means exactly what it did a decade ago: a major American comedy.

]]> 7647@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Vadim Rizov

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

Continued reading FILM OF THE WEEK: Fantastic Mr. Fox...

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

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

]]> Playing both into and against type, Kutcher is surprisingly quite compelling as chiseled stud Nikki, a former Midwesterner-turned-L.A. scenester with no home or job, except for his well-honed ability to bed rich single women in exchange for a free ride. He meets them at parties, woos 'em quickly, moves in a few days later, and suddenly has unrestricted access to their posh pads and platinum cards. It's less American Gigolo than it is American Psycho (and other plastic-wasteland tales by Bret Easton Ellis), complete with Kutcher's guttural, Christian Bale-like voiceover smugly and indifferently detailing his misogynistic hustler tricks: Make an ass of yourself to put women at ease. Flash a sleepy smile to be able to stay much longer than the morning after. Don't fuck them too well the first night.

The first half of the film presents an Entourage-like fantasy of casual sex and materialist binging: there's more gratuitous boinking here than Screwballs, and the City of Angels itself is appropriately shot like a luxury accessory, its neon glow and slick edges emphasized. Couched in all that, however, Spread eventually reveals a gloomy raincloud of a moral meditation about unhealthy lifestyles and self-delusion. Having already worked over sexy '40s-ish lawyer Samantha (Anne Heche) and finding himself the kept boy-toy in her $5-million hilltop home (it used to belong to Peter Bogdanovich, she sighs), Nikki predictably remains insatiable. When Samantha leaves on a business trip, he throws an enormous party to impress his friends and score more pussy, yet still takes his meal ticket for granted after Samantha comes home early, catches him with some bimbo, and decides to let him stay anyway.

Nikki may be a predator, but he justifies to himself that he's being used right back, and it's that small hint of buried integrity (blink and you'll miss it) that illustrates he still has further to fall. Some have complained that the movie goes off the rails with the late entrance of Heather (Margarita Levieva), a pretty young thing with Nikki's same manipulative veneer—she, too, makes her living by conning lovers. Playing the part of the cold fish from their very first exchange at a coffee shop, Heather reluctantly warms to Nikki's goofy, confident charm. After practically yawning his way through a string of conquests, here is a girl that he can finally "be real" with, whatever that could possibly mean to him. A rather last minute subplot to the film (though most descriptions suggest otherwise), Nikki chases and sort of catches Heather while she keeps him wrapped around her diamond-digging finger, but he's neither smart enough nor emotionally prepared to realize she's a craftier grifter than him.

Spread is not actually about a shallow manipulator gaining profundity through humility; it's something more aloof, modern and depressing than that old chestnut. The film is told through Nikki's narrow point of view, so the sneaky final punchline may have been lost on some audiences wondering why Heather's character hasn't been more fully fleshed out beyond her lusty, scheming temperament: Here is a movie about a narcissist getting distraught after falling in love with himself.

]]> 7645@http://daily.greencine.com/

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

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

Continued reading DVD OF THE WEEK: Spread...

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(James van Maanen on Nov 12, 2009 7:48 PM) My goodness, Aaron. What were we toking while watching THIS little bomb? A failure on every level, the movie just keeps on sucking. This must have been work-for-hire for a director who's only done better stuff -- and will again, I hope. A sorrier bunch of ciphers have rarely been seen on screen, and the ersatz sentimentality the movie laboriously manufactures so that we'll feel something for the Kutcher character once he's become "human" is embarrassing. It's not even "pruriently entertaining" (given what else is out there these days), which would at least have provided something. Well, the frog is fun (and dare I suggest symbolic) during the end credits. I sometimes disagree with you, but I'm utterly befuddled by this post.

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

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

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

]]> 7640@http://daily.greencine.com/ In celebration of Criterion's deluxe double-DVD and Blu-ray treatment of Wings of Desire, my Benten Films partner-in-crime Andrew Grant and I rewatched Wim Wenders' 1987 masterpiece (and pored over the bonus features) to discuss the film's elusive magic and why a work so specific to East-West German tensions has aged so gracefully. Andrew reminisces about spending time in Berlin around the era of the production, with other topics of conversation including They Might Be Giants, Nick Cave's inner thoughts, Peter Falk's unconscious plot hole, a rather unfortunate sequel, and how Wings of Desire almost ended with an pie fight. If you haven't already absorbed its pleasures (or, god forbid, you only know its atrocious H'wood remake, City of Angels), here's the Criterion synopsis:

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

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

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

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(David Hudson on Nov 10, 2009 12:06 PM) Finally got a chance to listen to the podcast this evening. Excellent job, gentlemen! If anyone reading this is wondering whether or not they should spare the 17 minutes - do!

(Aaron Hillis on Nov 10, 2009 6:57 PM) Wow, thanks David. That means a lot coming from a Berliner like you. (Wait a minute, did I just call you a doughnut?)

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

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

]]> Martin Scorsese:
"I first saw it when I was eight, and it stayed with me over the years. Even when it was shown on television in black-and-white every Christmas, we still had the magic of the film. Over the years, I began to realize it had more to do with wanting to create something artistically, and that drive. That's the thing that really carried me through the years, meaning, that's why I never get tired of the film. Then, of course, you add to that the beautiful way it was made. It's a pleasure to watch."

Thelma Schoonmaker:
"Marty's daughter is going to be 10 [this month] so he had been waiting, waiting, waiting for her to get old enough to show it to her. And you know, Woody Allen brought his daughter, and she's 11."

[On the aesthetic challenges of reaching a relative state of perfection:] "That was very carefully watched. We didn't want it to look like video which sometimes these things do, so we worked very, very carefully. It's about controlling highlights and contrasts and all kinds of things. We just had such a phenomenal team. Everybody who was in it loved it, and was giving much more than they should. The main thing was to make it look like film, and film of the period—not pump it up and do all the things they do with bad transfers these days. I've seen some horrendous transfers that just make me want to kill. [laughs] I saw one of a film David Lean made right after the war, and it looks like some modern movie. They just completely ruined it! We kept watching prints and making sure we didn't make a mistake."

[On the future of film restoration:] One of the problems is that digital is not stable. I hope you've got that point. You would have to take this restoration and migrate it to either another drive or another system that's come along. Who's going to be there to make sure it's done right if I'm dead or Marty's dead? That's the thing that's so frightening. The digital thing is wonderful, but it is not stable."

[On the film's personal value to her within Michael Powell's oeuvre:] "This one is so important because it's about the world I live in, the world of entertainment. It is so honest in showing the jealousies and ego clashes and all the things that go into working in the world of art. It vividly lays it down in such an honest way. It's so wonderful how you're always backstage. You're not seeing things from sitting out front, but you're in it. You understand the incredible love of it, and yet the sacrifices you have to make when you're in it, and we all do. Our personal lives suffer very badly, and this movie just nails it, doesn't it? It's also about being willing to die for our art, which my husband did. With Peeping Tom, his career was ruined. He died for that film. This happens to many, many great artists. It's such a beautiful symbolism of that. It's so real, and ballet dancers to this day still think it's the best portrayal of [that world], even though the dancing has gotten much better."

James Toback:
"I see it every couple of years. It's always emotionally powerful. There are stretches of the movie that kind of flatten out, and then it has that jolt of tragedy at the end that never fails to get to me. It is very beautiful, the restoration. Love and death, music and high style are among my favorite phenomena in life and they're all on display. I think it's clearly the inspiration for Visconti in style—this sort of unembarrassed high emotion and operatic inflation without any self-consciousness. No one would do that today, and yet it works with great power."

[Related podcast: Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones speak to GreenCine Daily from Cannes '09.]

]]> 7638@http://daily.greencine.com/

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

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

Continued reading The Red Shoes: Relaced and Restored...

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(randi applebaum on Nov 7, 2009 5:37 AM) will the restored Red Shoes eventually be playing at other theaters nationwide? How about DVD???

(pamela Adams on Nov 20, 2009 9:46 AM) when will The Red Shoes (restored version) be available on DVD and how can I get it?

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

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

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

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

[The House of the Devil is now playing in select theaters and is available on VOD through Magnolia Pictures.]]]> 7634@http://daily.greencine.com/ Among other things, Tom Noonan is a musician, playwright, and writer-director of two acclaimed films (What Happened Was, The Wife), but most will sooner recognize this tall, reserved but eerily intense gentleman as a memorable character actor from films as diverse as Manhunter, Mystery Train, and Synecdoche New York. His latest chance to effortlessly steal scenes arrives in Ti West's wonderfully slow-burning, retro-horror flick, The House of the Devil:

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

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

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

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

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

Comments (1)

Comments on this Entry:

(Maian on Nov 4, 2009 11:50 AM) One of my favorite podcasts! You guys have a really natural repoire. His rant on Michael Cimino is hilarious.

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

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

]]> Wolfinsohn's follow-up to his shaggily charming 2002 doc Friends Forever (about young rockers who perform and tour, smoke machine and all, out of their van) technically lies in one of the laziest and most overplayed subgenres, the mockumentary, but the writer-director's instincts are pretty sharp. Making a record of their senior year in both senses of the word, cameraman/guitarist Nicholas (Nicholas Gitomer) and boom operator/drummer Susan (Susan Estrada) are the novice documentarians "behind" the camera (Wolfinsohn shot the film), capturing their classmates in vulnerably candid moments while occasionally rocking out in welcome interludes. (The two perform under the name My Little Red Toe, and share the soundtrack with hipster faves like Dan Deacon, Jad Fair, and No Age—more on the latter later.) Their naïve filmmaking decisions play into the atmosphere seamlessly and sparingly, as they deliberate over whether they should film a couple having sex in the science room, or if Susan should run after a student who has been escorted from class by a police officer. Unlike most mock-docs, there thankfully isn't that oppressive detachment when characters self-awarely mug to the camera, the most ghastly mistake made by narratives meant to look like non-fiction. (Seriously, haven't they got enough footage on The Office yet?) And the grainy, lo-fi digital look serves the subject matter both aesthetically (it's meant to be a DIY project) and thematically (how better to express daily humiliation than with a shaky cam?), without that too-polished, fake-amateur shooting that made Cloverfield so phony-looking.

It's also refreshing to see a film about high-school characters that not only aren't stereotypes, but aren't so calculated in their fringe qualities to consciously subvert said stereotypes. Lovably irksome as he tries too hard to fit in, the most uncomfortable player has to be Caleb, played by Dean Allen Spunt—real-life drummer of the noise-rock duo No Age. (Adding street cred à la Rock 'n' Roll High School or Suburbia, many of the actors are musicians from the downtown L.A. scene based around The Smell.) Caleb desperately wants to be edgy-cool, and might've been the class clown if he weren't such a self-serious goon. He misreads a joke and puts epoxy in his hair because he thinks the London kids are doing it, tries to shave a "planetary ring" into his head but gets called a "doughnut-hawk" instead, and looks ill at ease wearing aluminum foil shorts to class. ("Is your dad the Tin Man, or some shit?" mocks a classmate.) Caleb occasionally dates and gets abused by horny swim-team frump Sabrina (Jenna Thornhill, of the catchy post-punk band Mika Miko), who is best friends with impulsive rich chick Erin (Jennifer Clavin, also of Mika Miko), who is seeing swaggering rebel-weirdo Eddie (Bobby Sandoval—yes, another musician). Their sparkly pixie teacher (Becky Stark, frontwoman of wistful indie popsters Lavender Diamond) is obsessed with comedy and good cheer, distressingly so, but when it comes out later that she moonlights as a gifted musician both Eddie and his father respect, she can't just be written off as the hippie-dippie kook.

All but forgotten after Sundance and SXSW 2005, High School Record is decidedly a little movie with minor-key goals, but it's damn funny and has a surprising immediacy, just like every waking moment amongst one's peers at that tender age. Thanks to the good folks at Factory 25, a new music-oriented DVD label that was quasi-born of the ashes from Plexifilm (founder Matt Grady was their director of production, and worked on such films as Helvetica and Style Wars), Wolfinsohn's vivid classroom squiggle—or should I say chalkboard sketch, in reference to the film's best scene—has another chance to be uncovered. Also of note, being released today by Factory 25 are You Weren't There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977-84 and All the Way From Michigan Not Mars, a tone-poetic doc about Rosie Thomas, with Sufjan Stevens and Damien Jurado.

]]> 7627@http://daily.greencine.com/

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

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

Continued reading DVD OF THE WEEK: High School Record...

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

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

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

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

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

]]> 7624@http://daily.greencine.com/

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

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

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

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

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

Comments (2)

Comments on this Entry:

(Anonymous on Oct 24, 2009 7:20 PM) Ha ha ... I guess I have some strange desire to see Vince Vaughn's nuts get clobbered for making all those lame rom-coms.

(Maian on Nov 4, 2009 11:52 AM) Steve's quote (it's like "Couples Retreat" for art school masochists) made me lol.

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

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

]]> Most of the film takes place in a boy's nightmare, but even the bookending "real world" sequences are radically disorienting. Bart Collins (Tommy Rettig) lives with his mother Heloise Collins (Mary Healy), who forces him to take piano lessons he has no interest in from the downright fascistic Doctor Terwilliger (Hans Conried). Young Bart's only ally is the town's best plumber, August Zabladowski (Peter Lind Hayes). In the super cursory opening, Rowland shoots and cuts like an accidental Kenneth Anger, privileging lurid color, screen-filling close-ups of self-consciously mannered performances and a subtly deranged, artificial narrative flow. This suburbia is Sirk for kids; all is clearly not well. In most of the film, though, Bart is in his nightmare world, processing his fears through a bizarre scenario where Dr. T's simultaneously enslaving little boys to his ultimate practice piano while hypnotizing Heloise into marrying him.

As an expression of childhood fears, Dr. T is simultaneously amazingly direct and utterly bizarre. In Bart's dreamscape, he's got a mother he loves—but who forces him to do things he doesn't like—and two competing father figures; the Oedipal complexes are too obvious to need explication. Here, Bart and Zabladowski bond; in a really unnerving sequence, their replacement-father/son bonding takes the form of an unnerving two-person close-up, each staring at the other dead-on, that makes it look as if it's about to turn into a pornographic NAMBLA ad. This isn't just me being unnecessarily perverse: Dr. T is thrumming with weird, inappropriate sexual energies.

Bart's familial paranoia is hardly the only point of view, however: he disappears for whole reels given over to musical numbers and adult drama. Zabladowski cracks wise about preferring to think of himself as an "independent contractor" and whines about overtime pay; Terwilliger's egomania is clearly based off much more than animosity towards Bart, as opposed to the usual kidpic villains. This is a film in which childhood is as much about scrambled receptions of the adult world as the experience of "childhood." By the time both Joseph McCarthy and the atomic bomb have been invoked, we're in a world that's equal parts Freudian confusion, genuine childhood, and '50s Cold War zeitgeist. By not privileging Bart's viewpoint exclusively, it suggests larger worldviews and fears that can't quite be articulated but are clearly felt; to the extent I remember my childhood at all, that seems about right.

That's way truer to the idea of "childhood" than Where the Wild Things Are. In the world cooked up by Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze, who we are as children is the same as what we grow up to be: fearful, incapable of processing our inappropriate emotions in any way other than the bluntest and most unsophisticated way. For too long, the argument goes, we've repressed our naïve, truthful reactions and true emotional selves. Talking about needing a "sadness shield" is the new sophistication. I'm not being hyperbolic; this is a movie whose trailer is scored with The Arcade Fire. Simplest thought = truest. And so on and so on. It drives me up the wall.

The first 20 minutes of Where the Wild Things Are have been nearly universally praised, and I can see why: young Max's loneliness, need for attention from his mother and sister, and inexplicable fits of rage cut pretty close to the bone. Jonze's frequent insistence on roughhewn handheld camera has never seemed so right; we're as untethered and volatile as Max is. Yet, the trouble is once you see Maurice Pialat's 1968 L'Enfance Nue, you can't unsee it. That film depicts from outside what it's like to be around a troubled child, and the answer is sheer, unending abrasion: you can feel bad for the kid and still want nothing to do with him. That's because the movie has adults in it who act like adults; in Jonze and Eggers' world, though, childhood is more relatable than any putative form of adulthood.

To be clear: what I'm not asking for is some kind of '50s world where men are buttoned-up and keep their emotions to themselves. Maturity takes many forms, and sometimes it's the healthiest thing to let it all out. The trouble starts when that mode of perception is never challenged or shaken — when tweeness becomes the ultimate wisdom and everything else is cynicism. That's what bugs me about Wild Things: it's not so much about childhood as about perpetual regression, and an endorsement of it no less. Work, relationships outside the family, culture, nuclear fears, everyday snark: everything Dr. T. shoehorns into the story of an equally lost and sad kid has been stripped away. Jonze and Eggers aren't really privileging kids; they're privileging their view of what childhood is, which is preparing for a world of emotional woes whose essence never changes. Making the wild things neurotic adults who grumble about their fears on the same maturity level as Max is a funny joke, but it also isn't a joke: Jonze and Eggers really seem to believe that's true.

Myths about childhood change all the time: the very idea of it as a privileged time that deserves special care is itself pretty recent. One of the new big bugaboos is that parents from the '90s and onward have been too controlling and fearful, trying to shelter their kids from all harm while denying them the opportunity to express themselves. I see that Michael Chabon is the latest to parrot this mantra. "The sandlots and creek beds," he says, "the alleys and woodlands have been abandoned in favor of a system of reservations—Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked Staff Only." All of which is kind of true—but it's a manifestation of exactly the same kind of thinking as Eggers'. Childhood should be a rumpus, childhood is special, childhood should be scary because life is, childhood is where the imagination should flourish before adulthood kills it and all that remains is the sadness. It's of a piece with Wild Things' basic parenting philosophy—take your kid to a mosh pit and let them get it all out—and it's just as monolithic and prescriptive a viewpoint as keeping your kids locked up in the house all the time. So: Dr. Seuss vs. Maurice Sendak? Seuss wins. The true wild things are where the adults are.

]]> 7622@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Vadim Rizov

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

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

Continued reading Weirder and Wilder Things...

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1996's Bad Moon was the last film helmed by cult genre filmmaker Eric Red (director of Body Parts and Cohen and Tate, screenwriter of Near Dark and The Hitcher) before most had heard about the strange and tragic troubles he encountered earlier this decade. Premiering last year on the SyFy channel, 100 Feet marks Red's return to the screen:

"Her Husband's Dead, and He's Taking the News Badly" reads the irresistible tagline of Eric Red's first film in 12 years, in which abused wife Marnie (Famke Janssen) learns that stabbing her sadistic spouse three times is not enough to keep him away. After serving some time for murder, she's placed under house arrest in her spacious Brooklyn brownstone, fitted with an electronic anklet, and is soon haunted by hubby's vengeful spirit (a creepy Michael Paré, looking more like Michael Myers). Hand-wringingly tense, 100 Feet provides the chills expected from the writer of the wonderfully deranged Near Dark and The Hitcher.

As part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Scary Movies 3 series (now through October 22), both 100 Feet and The Hitcher will screen on Tuesday, October 20th—the same day that 100 Feet lands on DVD. Ominously calling just before midnight on the 13th of this month, I spoke with Eric Red about both films, the unfortunate remake of The Hitcher, how he feels about a notorious review by Roger Ebert, and what scares him today.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (14:58)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Mark Isham, "Headlights (Main Theme to The Hitcher)"
OUTRO: Mark Isham, "Dust and Gasoline"

]]> 7619@http://daily.greencine.com/

1996's Bad Moon was the last film helmed by cult genre filmmaker Eric Red (director of Body Parts and Cohen and Tate, screenwriter of Near Dark and The Hitcher) before most had heard about the strange and tragic troubles he encountered earlier this decade. Premiering last year on the SyFy channel, 100 Feet marks Red's return to the screen:

"Her Husband's Dead, and He's Taking the News Badly" reads the irresistible tagline of Eric Red's first film in 12 years, in which abused wife Marnie (Famke Janssen) learns that stabbing her sadistic spouse three times is not enough to keep him away. After serving some time for murder, she's placed under house arrest in her spacious Brooklyn brownstone, fitted with an electronic anklet, and is soon haunted by hubby's vengeful spirit (a creepy Michael Paré, looking more like Michael Myers). Hand-wringingly tense, 100 Feet provides the chills expected from the writer of the wonderfully deranged Near Dark and The Hitcher.

As part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Scary Movies 3 series (now through October 22), both 100 Feet and The Hitcher will screen on Tuesday, October 20th—the same day that 100 Feet lands on DVD. Ominously calling just before midnight on the 13th of this month, I spoke with Eric Red about both films, the unfortunate remake of The Hitcher, how he feels about a notorious review by Roger Ebert, and what scares him today.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (14:58)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Mark Isham, "Headlights (Main Theme to The Hitcher)"
OUTRO: Mark Isham, "Dust and Gasoline"

Comments (2)

Comments on this Entry:

(creejay on Oct 19, 2009 8:28 AM) He didn't really get much of an opportunity to talk about 100 Feet :S

(Wostry Ferenc on Oct 19, 2009 1:05 PM) 100 Feet is pretty good until the overblown finale. I'm always looking forward to Red's new films because he has a great feel for horror.

Like swallows to Capistrano, the zombies return to the Catalonian seaside resort of Sitges every October—at least they have since 1967—and their number keeps growing. The 42nd edition of the Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic was a breeding pool for all things undead or otherwise beyond mortal kin or consciousness. Yet, Hollywood entertainments like Zombieland or increasingly blah cult auteur franchises, like George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead, were merely early Halloween window-dressing for this kaleidoscopic Cannes of cinematic extremism.

The festival, which ran from Oct. 1-12 this year, celebrated the 30th anniversary of Alien and gave a career achievement award to Malcolm McDowell, likewise honoring Walter Hill, Ivan Reitman and the alarmingly vital octogenarian splatter king Herschell Gordon Lewis. (These may not always be so coveted. Last year, Abel Ferrara handed his trophy, a scale model of the Time Machine, to a hotel bartender to settle a tab). Everyone from Park Chan-wook to Viggo Mortensen to that spooky little girl from Orphan made appearances. [editor's viewing tip: click for Steve Dollar's reaction to an Orphan mask.] And if you turned around in the theater to see who was kicking the back of your seat, it was that Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé, likely getting payback for sneaking ahead of him in line for breakfast buffet French fries.

]]> Duncan Jones's lovely, sad, charming Moon won a bunch of prizes. Too bad its star, Sam Rockwell, was unable to dispatch a clone for the fest's afterhours "karaoke apocalypse." Instead, it was "one of those kids from the new Twilight thing," as New Moon heartthrob Jamie Campbell Bower was generally known to the non-screaming-teen-female crowd of international industry types, bloggers, critics, and juror/troublemakers like Tim League, who apparently teleported directly to Sitges from his own Fantastic Fest.

It's reflective of the festival's range that some of its most startling entries transcended genre slots, even as they jostled familiar concepts into uncanny new forms. Amer, from French-born, Belgium-based filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, grabs you from the dynamic opening credits, set to an intriguing acoustic guitar melody and a menacing gurgle of weird ‘60s electronica that turns out to be from a vintage Bruno Nicolai soundtrack. Soon, we're inside a young girl's head, inside a creaky old house, where eyeballs peep through keyholes and the bodies of dead grandparents lay in state, ready to reanimate in a hallucinatory blink.

Constructed out of more than 900 separate shots, about one every six seconds, the film is nearly as keyed to optical reflex as a 1960s structural experiment. Its three half-hour segments trace the experience of the girl, Ana, from childhood to adolescence and into adulthood, advancing from a magical innocence (ripe with gothic tingles and primal scenery) to budding sensuality to, well... the film is a valentine to the giallo creep-outs of Argento, Bava, and Fulci. So a sexy, gap-toothed Euro Teen sashay for the benefit of a cliffside biker gang gives way to nocturnal stalking, black leather gloves brandishing a straight razor, and a dramatic return to forbidding corridors.

With maybe 15 lines of dialogue, though, Amer is more iconic poetry than explicit narrative, not a giallo but an evocation of its tropes, conjured in a disorienting rush of susurrations and extreme close-ups of bellybuttons and parted lips. "Giallo is the perfect genre in which to talk about desire, about sexuality, about fear and desire," Cattet told me, sharing a post-screening interview with Forzani, who is both her creative partner and boyfriend. It's the first feature for the young couple, who have previously made experimental shorts. "When you are with someone you love, in a couple," Forzani added, "you see them always up close."

Going this engaging pair one or two better as an eye-popping freakout is Enter the Void, the irascible Noé's first film since 2002's Irreversible (fondly remembered by one of this year's jurors as "an unending assault on the audience.") The film's stylistic gambits include, among other things, a protagonist shot exclusively from behind the back of his head, endless overhead "eye of God" tracking shots that swoop low into swirling dissolves, mushroom-trip strobe effects and a sex scene that resolves with an ejaculation shot from inside a vagina. Now that's an extreme close-up.

The effort most likely to be denounced by critics in attendance as "a piece of crap"—besides Paranormal Activity, that is—Void was screened in a 160-minute cut that was even longer than those prints shown at Cannes and Toronto. Those inclined to enjoy the void probably did so because of Noé’s extensive post-production work with a digital effects studio to create a psychedelic meditation on the meaning of life (and afterlife). The film is better appreciated as metaphysics, more akin to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, as the sudden death of a young American drug dealer in Tokyo cuts his soul free to witness the aftershocks of his killing. The dialogue is largely flat and functional, and the camera's wandering amid the scuzzball depths of Tokyo's sex-and-drug dens offers nothing new for fans of the director's most transgressive impulses (well, okay, actress/model and former Jack Nicholson consort Paz de la Huerta doing naked pole tricks).

"It's supposed to reproduce a DMT trip," Noé said. "When I went to see parts of the movie today, it was weird because by moments the strobing effects, as you try to refocus [your eyes] produces a double image. And I know there's no double image."

Noé expressed his admiration for work by avant-garde filmmakers like Jordan Bellson and Tony Conrad. "I have them all," he said. "People say, 'Oh, you was pretending to do a movie like Kubrick. But at the end, it ended up looking more like a copy of Buñuel or Kenneth Anger.' I say, yeah, when you see Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, it's a lot closer to that than 2001. Another reference for the movie was Tron. I told [the effects supervisor] that I wanted Tokyo to look like Tron."

And as for the, um, climactic money shot near the end of the film? What sort of technology allowed him to frame that? "Very special technology." He laughed. "It was fun to have that cum shot on a big screen in Cannes."

Arriving with no pedigree for outrage, Dogtooth proved to be as seriously disturbing in its way as, say, Eraserhead. Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos's film is, superficially, a domestic comedy about a middle-aged, middle-class couple with three grown kids living at home. Only, their son and two daughters are afflicted with a strange case of arrested development. They've never even left the family compound, where their parents have home-schooled them in détourned vocabulary and treat them like 7-year-olds. Shot in a flat, static manner that allows the weirdness to slowly warp the viewer's mind, the film suggests the inner world of a religious cult where incest is encouraged, role play is used as mind control, and the father is a God improvising an alternative universe. The perils of this hermetic order are evident soon enough, but Lanthimos strikes a nimble balance between the grotesque and the beatific.

Fears that Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans would be a joke were happily unfounded. Werner Herzog's gun-for-hire un-remake of the classic Ferrara title is, indeed, Nicolas Cage's best whacked-out performance in years. Finally, the beast awakes! Post-Katrina New Orleans makes a suitably hellish landscape, feeding Herzog's love of the catastrophic, and Cage's riffing as a drug-addicted renegade cop flares into many a deliriously purple moment. Other than that, I offer only two words: Iguana Cam.

As for the good, old-fashioned horror flicks, Sitges was the land of a thousand jump scares. Sequels like [REC] 2 and The Descent 2 delivered the shocks without the element of dramatic surprise that drove the originals. The British lads-gone-bad comedy Doghouse offered a new twist, though, when a boy's weekend in the country goes terribly wrong: On the outs with their wives and girlfriends, the blokes find themselves in a village where all the women are man-eating zombies. Unlike The Hangover, which happily endorses misogyny and wasn't even funny, Jake West's male-bonding fest actually promotes emotional growth and critical self-examination! This, even as his boisterous crew of punters is gradually picked off and dismembered by a mutant army of female stereotypes.

Equally lethal is Australian actress Robin McLeavy in The Loved Ones. She's the high school good girl in Sean Byrne's mash-up of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie and The Breakfast Club. Or is she? Accompanied by Kasey Chambers's lilting “Am I Not Pretty Enough?,” McLeavy's Lola takes revenge when she gets rejected by pretty-boy Brent (Xavier Samuel) for the prom, aiming to add her crush to a collection of basement-dwelling would-be boyfriends she’s lobotomized. The blend of grindhouse horror, pop spoofery, and sincere teenage drama jells surprisingly well, even mustering a convincing argument for why being a "cutter" (the emotionally rattled Brent likes to slash up his arms) can come in handy when someone's about to drill a hole in your skull.

Such lessons are one of the gifts of Sitges, where the otherworldly really is a walk on the beach.

]]> 7616@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Steve Dollar

Like swallows to Capistrano, the zombies return to the Catalonian seaside resort of Sitges every October—at least they have since 1967—and their number keeps growing. The 42nd edition of the Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic was a breeding pool for all things undead or otherwise beyond mortal kin or consciousness. Yet, Hollywood entertainments like Zombieland or increasingly blah cult auteur franchises, like George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead, were merely early Halloween window-dressing for this kaleidoscopic Cannes of cinematic extremism.

The festival, which ran from Oct. 1-12 this year, celebrated the 30th anniversary of Alien and gave a career achievement award to Malcolm McDowell, likewise honoring Walter Hill, Ivan Reitman and the alarmingly vital octogenarian splatter king Herschell Gordon Lewis. (These may not always be so coveted. Last year, Abel Ferrara handed his trophy, a scale model of the Time Machine, to a hotel bartender to settle a tab). Everyone from Park Chan-wook to Viggo Mortensen to that spooky little girl from Orphan made appearances. [editor's viewing tip: click for Steve Dollar's reaction to an Orphan mask.] And if you turned around in the theater to see who was kicking the back of your seat, it was that Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé, likely getting payback for sneaking ahead of him in line for breakfast buffet French fries.

Continued reading SITGES '09: Film Fest of the Dead...

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Hardware
directed by Richard Stanley
1990, 93 minutes, UK
Severin Films

Falsely but understandably advertised as "The Terminator for the nineties" and loosely based on the 2000 A.D. comics (making it a precursor to Judge Dredd), South African-born auteur Richard Stanley's cult-beloved feature debut had only a fraction of the resources James Cameron did for his Ahnuld-pocalypse. But even in its meager limitations, Hardware is both more cynical and conscious of human indignities as a horrific cyberpunk vision of the future. In this ruddy post-apocalypse, lawlessness pervades the land and Big Brother is always watching via omnipresent closed-circuit cameras, but there's no anti-fascist revolution underway; we compliantly voted the bastards in, just as effortlessly as we decimated the environment so that only the fittest scavengers survive. Technically, the villain of Hardware (and here's where that original comparison gets made) is a murderous combat droid called the M.A.R.K. 13, which is capable of regenerating itself with any old electrical appliances. However, what makes Stanley's nightmare more disturbing in an age of environmental crisis and seemingly endless warring is that mankind is responsible for developing this mecha-monster (it's not a next-gen species like the T-800, but a "population lowering" device), and in this world, we're also responsible for destroying the resources that might allow us to defeat it.

]]> Dylan McDermott headlines as Moses "Hard Mo" Baxter, a former soldier who now scours the scorched-earth area called "The Zone" for post-war debris that he can hock for cash to a shady dwarf. After an extended venture into the field, Mo returns to the post-industrial cityscape (really, everything in this film is "post-"—this is the end, my only friend), and reunites with his fair-weather girlfriend, a reclusive metal sculptress named Jill (Stacey Travis). As a romantic gift that keeps on giving, Mo brings her the skull of a robot carcass that he bought from a radioactively glowing-eyed nomad (Fields of the Nephilim goth-rocker Carl McCoy), a trinket that just so happens to house the brain of the M.A.R.K. 13, uh-oh. As the droid soon switches on, everyone in its path is disposed of via hallucinogenic poison injection, phallic drilling, eye gouging, and other clever gore effects that should be praised for their low-budget ingenuity. This limitation also dictates that most of the survival horror takes place within the confines of Jill's dark, grimy, overly computerized and therefore locked-down apartment, which is being peeped into by an obese pervert (a sickeningly funny William Hootkins), just another debauched consequence of these end times. He'll get his, it's telegraphed, but nobody is innocent enough to be safe, or a hero. (In the original cut of the film, Mo's first scene has him walking by some kids beating up an old man, but then-Miramax honchos the Weinsteins feared it would make him too unsympathetic a character.)

After the shoddy-looking VHS version of the film that had been floating around (which is how I originally saw the film in the early '90s), Severin Films' remastered two-DVD set finally does justice to Stanley's fussy attention to detail and exaggerated stylization—you can tell he began his career as a music video director. The primary-colored gel filters throughout are straight from the Argento and Bava playbooks, and the monochrome blips and blinks of all the analog technology (which doesn't date the film given this is a devolved future) makes for more lucid imagery in widescreen. Hardware isn't a life-changing piece of genre filmmaking or even fresh storytelling, but its psychedelic unease, heavy-metal textures, nihilistic humor, DIY artistry and hold-your-breath-in-the-dark frights are still gloriously entertaining after two decades of special-effects advancements. Oh, and did I mention the special appearances from Iggy Pop as the voice of radio DJ "Angry Bob" and Lemmy from Motörhead as a surly water-taxi driver? Check out the video links below to see why this one's a truly rock n' roll cult classic...

- Iggy Pop on Hardware
- Lemmy on Hardware

]]> 7614@http://daily.greencine.com/

Hardware
directed by Richard Stanley
1990, 93 minutes, UK
Severin Films

Falsely but understandably advertised as "The Terminator for the nineties" and loosely based on the 2000 A.D. comics (making it a precursor to Judge Dredd), South African-born auteur Richard Stanley's cult-beloved feature debut had only a fraction of the resources James Cameron did for his Ahnuld-pocalypse. But even in its meager limitations, Hardware is both more cynical and conscious of human indignities as a horrific cyberpunk vision of the future. In this ruddy post-apocalypse, lawlessness pervades the land and Big Brother is always watching via omnipresent closed-circuit cameras, but there's no anti-fascist revolution underway; we compliantly voted the bastards in, just as effortlessly as we decimated the environment so that only the fittest scavengers survive. Technically, the villain of Hardware (and here's where that original comparison gets made) is a murderous combat droid called the M.A.R.K. 13, which is capable of regenerating itself with any old electrical appliances. However, what makes Stanley's nightmare more disturbing in an age of environmental crisis and seemingly endless warring is that mankind is responsible for developing this mecha-monster (it's not a next-gen species like the T-800, but a "population lowering" device), and in this world, we're also responsible for destroying the resources that might allow us to defeat it.

Continued reading DVD OF THE WEEK: Hardware...

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Todd Solondz starts his latest and finest film to date by introducing us to Joy (Shirley Henderson), whose husband Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams) is not quite cured of his peculiar "affliction." Joy's sister Trish (Allison Janney) is hoping to stabilize her family life by marrying the recently divorced Harvey (Michael Lerner), but her soon-to-be bar-mitzvahed son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) isn’t sure he wants another man in the house—especially as it seems his dead father, Bill (Ciarán Hinds), might not be dead after all. His portrait of these and several other major characters—beautifully rendered by Charlotte Rampling, Paul Reubens, Renee Taylor and Ally Sheedy—is tough, tender, at times startling, but never mean or condescending. For Solondz, "wartime" is not a historical period but a permanent condition: not only the constant battle between the sexes, but even more so the endless struggle between personal desires and the society set up to contain them.

In my final podcast from the 2009 New York Film Festival, I chat with Andrew Grant, along with New York Press chief film critic and New York Film Critics Circle chairman Armond White, about Life During Wartime. We discuss the aforementioned misanthropy question, forgiveness, Todd Haynes and Luis Buñuel, but the party officially gets started when NYFF mainstay Sylvia Miles crashes our conversation to talk about the film and her upcoming role reprisal in Oliver Stone's Wall Street sequel—which only Armond could link back to the Solondz picture.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (15:27)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime (live)"
OUTRO: Devendra Banhart, "Heard Somebody Say"

]]> 7612@http://daily.greencine.com/ Is Welcome to the Dollhouse auteur Todd Solondz a misanthrope, or a humanist whose characters just happen to engage in ugly, perverse, cruel behavior? For me, the answer has been made clear with Life During Wartime (screening Saturday, Oct. 10 at 9pm), Solondz's quasi-sequel to 1998's Happiness, in which all of the characters are now played by different actors:

Todd Solondz starts his latest and finest film to date by introducing us to Joy (Shirley Henderson), whose husband Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams) is not quite cured of his peculiar "affliction." Joy's sister Trish (Allison Janney) is hoping to stabilize her family life by marrying the recently divorced Harvey (Michael Lerner), but her soon-to-be bar-mitzvahed son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) isn’t sure he wants another man in the house—especially as it seems his dead father, Bill (Ciarán Hinds), might not be dead after all. His portrait of these and several other major characters—beautifully rendered by Charlotte Rampling, Paul Reubens, Renee Taylor and Ally Sheedy—is tough, tender, at times startling, but never mean or condescending. For Solondz, "wartime" is not a historical period but a permanent condition: not only the constant battle between the sexes, but even more so the endless struggle between personal desires and the society set up to contain them.

In my final podcast from the 2009 New York Film Festival, I chat with Andrew Grant, along with New York Press chief film critic and New York Film Critics Circle chairman Armond White, about Life During Wartime. We discuss the aforementioned misanthropy question, forgiveness, Todd Haynes and Luis Buñuel, but the party officially gets started when NYFF mainstay Sylvia Miles crashes our conversation to talk about the film and her upcoming role reprisal in Oliver Stone's Wall Street sequel—which only Armond could link back to the Solondz picture.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (15:27)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime (live)"
OUTRO: Devendra Banhart, "Heard Somebody Say"

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(Nick Ramsey on Oct 14, 2009 2:08 PM) Hi Aaron--Wish you could have done more of these podcasts this year as you have during previous NYFFs.

(Aaron Hillis on Oct 15, 2009 2:54 PM) Thanks, Nick. Schedules didn't always align this year, so I missed the opportunities to chat with Jonathan Demme after one of the NYFF screenings, and a work crisis prevented me from talking with A.O. Scott about Police, Adj. But hold tight: one more related podcast will be posted next week (Andrew Grant, Michael Tully, Steve Dollar and myself on ANTICHRIST), tied instead to the theatrical/VOD release. We'll get 'em next year!