Screen Rush is the blog of film critic and journalist Eric Kohn, whose work regularly appears in indieWIRE, New York Press, Filmmaker, Moviemaker, Heeb Magazine and a half dozen other outlets. A true twenty-first century movie buff, his writing centers around the impact of new media on the moving image, the changing face of film criticism, and the tempestuous relationship between pop culture and independent artistry. This site includes links to his recently published work and allows for additional thoughts on cinema's modern state. E-mail Eric at erichkohn(at)gmail(dot)com.
While recently sitting through the desolate world of The Road, I couldn’t help thinking of another recent exploration of isolation and dismay in the middle of nowhere: Asiel Norton‘s Redland, a visually fascinating portrait of families struggling along in the wilderness of Great Depression-era rural America. It’s unquestionably one of the more fascinating cinematic visions of life amidst nature that I’ve seen in years. (Think Terrence Malick meets There Will Be Blood.) Here’s the trailer:
My Cannes review of InglouriousBasterds, which appeared for a second time in IndieWIRE this week, brought back memories of a busy week. I reviewed around two dozen movies at Cannes this year, leading to the sort of hectic deadlines that a newsroom usually only reaches in the wake of a national catastrophe. Information moves fast these days, particularly in the ever-transient world of the festival circuit, where a big movie on one day becomes history by the next. I tapped out my late morning reaction to Basterds shortly after the 8:30 a.m. press screening, finishing it up while Tarantino and Brad Pitt still had a few minutes to go in the press conference a few feet away.
Writing these sort of instant reactions provides a unique experience each time. I won’t deny that there’s a sheer thrill involved in capturing critical ephemera in the precise moment they come together, but I don’t want to discredit the value of taking time to deliberate over one’s feelings to deliver a thoughtful analysis. As it happens, upon returning to my Basterdsreaction on Tuesday, I found little about my opinion that I would change, although I could have used some extra time to refine a few of the ideas. I do think the movie relies too heavily on dialogue that’s rarely as clever as Tarantino intends for it to be, and that the espionage plot drags near the middle (even in the post-Cannes cut, which I saw a few days ago). It may have been a good idea to answer some of the questions I posed in the final graf: Why does Tarantino do this or that? Well, because he wants to. As an auteur, Tarantino embodies the “want to” tendencies, truly becoming a kid in the candy store of cinema pastiche. Generally, that’s been enough for me. Here, I’m mixed.
I think the first third of Basterds moves quite efficiently, and I even found the documentary tangents and the Western soundtrack a lot more entertaining on my second viewing. I should have focused more clearly on the strength of Christoph Waltz’s performance, as he’s probably the only believable persona in the whole movie, even when he chooses to go over the top. But nothing in Basterds matches the genuine flow of Pulp Fiction or near-perfect blend of homage and new age spectacle that Tarantino accomplished with the Kill Bill movies. Basterds has some strong moments, but it’s real accomplishment has less to do with its cinematic merits than the implications of its radical climax. (See my cover story in the current issue of Heeb if you want to know more.) Of course, since I’m not a major Basterds defender, you’ll have to look elsewhere for a deeper analysis of the film. As the not-so-subtly-disguised commenter “jeffreichert9” points out on the page where my review has been posted, this essay offers some interesting thoughts.
I brought my whirlwind of recent festival travels to a close this weekend with a relaxing quasi-vacation at the Nantucket Film Festival. Be sure to check out my dispatch for a run-down of the highlights.
Additionally, here’s some Vulturenews from Saturday’s all-star comedy roundtable.
I was encouraged to attend this year by my friend Livia Bloom, Nantucket’s new programmer, who did a great job. I thank her, Artistic Director Mystelle Brabbee and Executive Director Colin Stanfield for making my time there a pleasant one. My graciousness also goes out to Fatdot publicist Brandon Rohwer for his help with various logistical things and my college buddy Jack Knorps for letting me and my significant other/partner-in-crime crash at his parents’ vacation house.
In my dispatch for indieWIRE, I emphasized the intimate vibe of the festival. That’s no exaggeration. Having barely exited the plane from CineVegas, a very fun but also extremely tiring ordeal, I will attest that Nantucket offers a packed but immensely relaxing environment for filmmakers and audiences alike.
Harold Ramis received the festival’s screenwriting award on Saturday. You can find an excerpt from his speech below, which came on the heels of host Brian Williams’s surprisingly hilarious delivery. Ramis gets cut off at the end of the video (so you’ll never know what happens with that rabbi) and the camera work looks worse than an early Joe Swanberg movie, but try to understand: Earlier in the evening, a guy was going around serving a green “ectoplasm” drink that mixed vodka and Mountain Dew. Couple that with the free Stella associated with nearly every film festival these days, and I did the best I could, OK?
I covered the Cannes Film Festival this year for several outlets, giving me the opportunity to record my thoughts on pretty much everything I encountered there. Here’s the second in a series of posts recapping my experience.
After the festival tenderly began with Pixar’s Up, things quickly started to get a little crazier, a littler sexier, a little bloodier.
By the end of the second day, I was reporting for The Wrap on two features “with explicit and controversial subject matter”:
“Spring Fever,” a romantic drama from daring Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye, focuses on a woman who hires a private investigator to follow her husband as he engages in an affair with a man. The movie contains multiple scenes of explicit gay sex, not to mention a dense, hardly decipherable plot and monotonous performances…The other provocative offering that has unspooled here at the beginning of the festival, Park Chan-wook’s “Thirst,” offers a lot more to write home about. The director of such bloody modern cult classics as “Oldboy” makes an altogether twistedly satisfying contribution to the vampire genre with his latest work.
A few days later, I caught Brillante Mendoza’s divisive Kinatay, which hardly any journalists liked. In Moving Pictures, I expressed appreciation for Mendoza’s skill, but questioned his motives:
To be fair, there’s a lot more going on in the movie than sheer exploitation; in fact, it’s a class act as far as temporal experiences go, with elaborate sequences unfolding over lengthy periods where little happens other than that a fully formed environment emerges on the screen…But this conceptual extraction only becomes apparent once the credits roll. There’s a lot of stomach-churning involved in getting there, and at whose expense? Intellectual revelations notwithstanding, Kinatay is principally an ambitious form of cinematic masturbation.
Eventually, it became clear that Cannes 2009 was a year marked by cinematic violence. But who’s the goriest filmmaker at the fest? I explored that question for The Wrap, and concluded that it’s Park. “When it comes to gore, it is not in there because of some impulsive decision,” he told me in an interview. “It has been predetermined. If it has any adverse effects at the end of the day, I don’t have any excuses.” Read more here.
I covered the Cannes Film Festival this year for several outlets, giving me the opportunity to record my thoughts on pretty much everything I encountered there. Here’s the first in a series of posts recapping my experience.
The 3-D glasses handed out for viewing ‘Up’ at Cannes.
Cannes’s opening night film, Up, predictably left no one dissatisfied. As opening night films go, this one was a rare crowd-pleaser. I reviewed it for Moving Pictures:
Complex by way of simplicity, the latest narrative marvel from the immaculate factory of Pixar Animation Studios is the ideal choice to open the Cannes Film Festival. Considering its palatial façade as a beacon to cinema in all its capacities, Cannes can easily rely on Up to illustrate the range of pleasures associated with the art form (unlike previous opening night offenders such as Blindness and The Da Vinci Code). Guided by an insightful screenplay co-written by director Peter Docter (Monsters, Inc.), the movie wraps a sensational magic realism around authentic characters. That remarkable duality has long served as the Pixar touch. While hardly perfect, Up remains utterly satisfying on the level of the smart entertainment expected of its creators.
The next day, I caught Francis Ford Coppola’s latest independent effort, Tetro, which wound up as the opening film of the festival’s Directors Fortnight sidebar. While not blown away by it, I do think there’s plenty admire about this expressive, quasi-autobiographic family drama.
From my indieWIRE review:
Neither complete misfire nor triumphant return to form, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Tetro” works as a competent family drama right up until the messy final act. If a first-time filmmaker had directed this stylish black-and-white-and-sometimes-color melodrama, it might gain some notice for suggesting great things to come. Instead, on its own terms, the movie is only a mildly interesting entry in Coppola’s thirty-plus years of work.
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