It just looks like one of those astonishingly plentiful early-nineties sex thrillers, right? Something in the same carnal category as Basic Instinct, Sliver, Body of Evidence, Color of Night... I could go on. Or perhaps something loftier, like weird late-period Nicolas Roeg or Ken Russell: (squinting) is ... is that ... Theresa Russell? Nope, guess not. It even has that jagged smear coming out of that firetruck-red lipstick, creating the appearance of torn paper, a mainstay of erotic thriller posters since the heady heydays of Glenn Close's Jagged Edge and Fatal Attraction. But what is this little-known Traces of Red, not starring Close, or Russell, or Sharon Stone, or Madonna, or Jane March, or Ellen Barkin, or Michael Douglas? No, your eyes don't deceive you: that amorous couple, caught in a steamy black-and-white, lingerie-and-leg-lift tableau straight out of Red Shoe Diaries is . . . JAMES BELUSHI AND LORRAINE BRACCO?!?!

According to the tagline, "You think you'll know..." But I don't know. I have no idea what the hell they were thinking here. A black background with a knife sticking out of a table would be more appealing. Even at age twelve or so I recall being astonished that this wasn't a straight-to-video title, based on seeing the ad in the newspaper, and for all I know to this day the representative image could be horribly inappropriate for the actual content of the movie. But even if, at some point, a dyed-blonde Dr. Melfi appears in a black, lacey get-up and John Belushi's younger brother does give her so much passionate lovin' that her head tilts back is spastic sexual delight, I still doubt this is the proper way to sell these actors . . . I mean, does anyone want to see these two in any more of a state of undress than this? Coming soon: Ron Perlman and Stockard Channing in flagrante delicto? Well, no one is beyond suspicion . . .

Pierrot le fou (1965) is, unignorably, one of Jean-Luc Godard’s goofiest movies. Just as Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character’s name freely alternates between his real one, Ferdinand, and that of the film’s titular symbol of anarchy, Pierrot—the latter chosen by Anna Karina’s betraying lover Marianne, only to be repeatedly rejected by its intended recipient—so does the film freely bounce among subject matter serious and silly until the two are virtually indistinguishable. At its extremes Pierrot le fou offers some of the most gratuitous and wacky indulgences of Godard’s entire career: low-production musical numbers in half-finished apartments and shaded forests, mustachioed dwarfs squawking gibberish into walkie talkies, Belmondo eating an enormous cheese, a cameo by the exiled princess of Lebanon, a netted booby trap capturing a gangster-driven car, etc., etc. These are the logical results of the brand of free cinema Godard has always simultaneously preached and practiced (“One Should Put Everything Into a Film” declared his title to a short published statement, and, man, he sure put his money where he his mouth was), the movie equivalent of the notebook scribbles from Ferdinand/Pierrot’s journal that offer fragments, in-jokes, references, diversions, and off the cuff ideas alongside quintessential set-pieces.

But it’s Godard’s counterbalance of melancholic longing (Rimbaud, Céline, Renoir, the shimmering infinity of the natural world, "the sea gone with the sun") with cartoonish whimsy (the Nickel-Footed Gang, pulp fiction comic inserts, the Mondrian primaries of JLG's pop art-inspired color palette) that makes Pierrot so uniquely and indescribably haunting. This alchemy comes through in the fatalistic gloom pervading the couple’s carefree, liberating flight from the shackles of Ferdiand/Pierrot’s bourgeois respectability into crime thriller intrigue and then Mediterranean coastline refuge (and then back again in an almost completely incomprehensible plot), as in the magnificent scene—one of the most beautiful in the history of cinema, I’ll be so bold as to say—of the two lovers renewing their love in the darkness while a passing stream of multi-colored lights reflects off their car windshield, or when Ferdinand/Pierrot dolefully, unforgettably stares back at Marianne during a break in the wishy-washy ode she sings to him after they’ve completed their break with the outside world. Even in the film’s nihilistic conclusion hi-jinks (Marianne and Ferdinand/Pierrot are, after all, low-rent actors, hustling money by telling fanciful stories to café patrons and performing aggressive dumb shows of the Vietnam War for American tourists) mix with death—Ferdinand/Pierrot, ambivalent to the end, clumsily fails to stamp out the lit wick of the two rolls of dynamite strapped to his blue-painted head.

So many of Godard’s heroes and heroines die tragically, but with Ferdinand/Pierrot’s demise comes the poignant sense that something had come to an end at this stage of Godard’s career. Pierrot is a culmination in the sense that it references all his previous movies, but he was still a relative ways away—three years, five films—from entering his militant Maoist phase, while the “playful” strain of his sensibility would always be evident even when severely muted. Yet things would never be quite the same after Pierrot. Godard dubbed Marianne and Ferdinand/Pierrot “the last romantic couple”; Pierrot would be Godard’s last romantic movie. Its follow-up, Masculin féminin, includes these immortal words: “We’d often go to the movies. We’d shiver as the screen lit up. But more often, Madeline and I would be disappointed . . . . It wasn’t the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make . . . and secretly wanted to live.” This was Godard’s first admittance of disillusion with cinema, his holy shrine. No coincidence, then, that in Pierrot—where cinema was still, to quote Samuel Fuller’s drop-by monologue, “a battleground”—love goeth before the Fall.

“You speak to me in words, and I look at you with feelings,” Marianne explains to Ferdinand/Pierrot of their communication breakdown. Godard’s rift between the genders is patently personal and just the slightest bit sexist (men think abstractly, read literature, are content in nature; women want sensations, listen to pop music, dream of cities like Las Vegas and Monte Carlo), but the search for an existential purpose amidst the ruins of romance—Pierrot is often cited as an autobiographical rendering of Godard and Karina’s break-up—assumes greater significance. Fittingly, Godard goes all the way back to Jean Seberg for advice, Belmondo watching her across time through the transportation device that is the movie theater: “We were looking carefully for the moment when we had abandoned the fictional character to return to the real one, if it ever existed,” she says on the screen within the screen, camera in hand. If Pierrot is Godard's most frayed dividing line between cinema and real life it’s because the film becomes real life in the daring exhortation to its audience—through the delirious enactment of Ferdinand/Pierrot’s frenzy to be—that there isn’t any difference. It’s making cinema to live to make cinema to live . . . the way out of the maze is only provided by a way deeper into it. If such a strategy didn’t salvage romance for Godard, and if cinema itself would be the next to prove disloyal to his demands on truth and beauty, then it surely rescues life, allowing it to be truly free, in gravitas and goof. And that’s where we should begin in answering Pierrot’s call, by way of Rimabud, that “Love" -- and, therefore, cinema -- "must be reinvented.”

Two takes this week on Nick Broomfield's fictionalized Iraq film Battle for Haditha:

First up, Michael Joshua Rowin:
During the sixteen years of the Vietnam War few films, and certainly no significant ones, depicted the conflict, while in the five years of the Iraq War (nearly seven in the “war against terror”) a veritable glut of movies, most of them unhesitatingly against the American occupation, have dealt directly with the catastrophic events taking place in the Middle East. What accounts for this disproportion? Certainly the changed landscape of film production has played a role: whereas it took a massive production and the supervision of the United States military to get John Wayne’s reviled The Green Berets onto screens in 1968, films like Redacted, Stop-Loss, and now Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha are being made on relatively modest budgets by small film divisions or outside the majors altogether. Also gone are the days of elaborately orchestrated antiwar epics like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket—refusing ex post facto reflection, both Hollywood and the independents are churning out economical dramas not of glossy, backward-looking historical import, but raw, nearly up-to-the-minute topicality. Click here to read the rest.

Then, Leo Goldsmith at indieWIRE:
"What do you wanna know?" A young Marine casually utters this question at the outset of Battle for Haditha, and it's a fitting epigraph to Nick Broomfield's blistering, ambitious film. The query prefaces the PFC's offhand account of his service and the conditions of his barracks in Haditha, Iraq, but it could easily be Broomfield's own inquiry to his audience: In a singularly brutal and cloudy episode of the war, a group of Marines is attacked by insurgents and retaliates by unleashing their notion of justice on a small residential enclave, killing some twenty-four people. What do you want to know about these events, and what means do you have to figure them out?

Of course, behind this is the issue of Broomfield's presentation. In his documentary work, like Kurt & Courtney and Biggie and Tupac, he aggressively implicates himself in the narratives, and this Broomfield's fictional Battle for Haditha is similarly bold. Click here to read the rest.

Playwright John Guare must have had Indian director Tarsem Singh (or as he's often simply known, Tarsem) in mind when he wrote about the increasing exteriorization of the term "imaginative": "Why has 'imagination' become a synonym for style?" Singh makes films that inspire a bevy of similarly misused adjectives: "sumptuous," "surreal," "eye-popping," "hallucinatory." He specializes in audacious compositions, shoots in exotic locales, fits his actors in unique costumes that appear simultaneously futuristic and old-fashioned, and in only two features, including the new and fifteen years in the making The Fall, has shown a predilection for stories about, yes, "the power of the imagination."

Unfortunately, lacking the ability to fashion cohesive tales driven by engaging characters, Singh overcompensates with his trademark visual palette and loses a hold on both in the process, a fatal flaw that can be traced back to his only other non-advertising work, the poetically vacuous video for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" and the Silence of the Lambs-as-Dali-toss-off The Cell. His is a classic case of a natural-born cinematographer playing at being a filmmaker. Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin's review of The Fall.

Nostalgic, deeply felt, and refreshingly astute, Fugitive Pieces is something of a rare bird these days—a big-budget, transnational historical drama that actually justifies its scope and subject matter with more than visual opulence. On the surface, it looks like the kind of mainstream art-house fare that marries historical romance with a superficial exoticism; with its meandering sense of space and time and its rich sensual engagement, Anne Michaels's novel has drawn comparisons to Ondaatje's The English Patient, and similarly Podeswa's adaptation will draw comparisons to Minghella's film. But what might have been an overly sentimental romance for uptown crowds is saved by its clear intelligence and its readiness to tackle the history and representation of the Holocaust in ways that are not at all facile.

Click here to read all of Leo Goldsmith's review of Fugitive Pieces

Harmony Korine has returned, and the people whose solemn weekly duty it is to fill magazine column space could not be happier.

This tidbit opened a recent New York magazine profile: “It’s hard to imagine this today, but Harmony Korine was once considered a threat to something besides himself.” Not really—unless playing Groucho to Janet Maslin’s Margaret Dumont at the Times passes for subversive (the article also contains this nostalgic chestnut from Professional Art Personality Ryan McGinley: “Being bad with Harm back then was like shooting dope with Burroughs”—the mind boggles).

Harmony Korine’s masterpiece, to date, has been the creation and maintenance of his own niche celebrity brand, which depends on that bogus “threat.” He entered public life with Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), springing full-formed from a publicist’s wet dreams: “22-Year-Old Skate Rat-cum-Screenwriter Tells Tough Truth About Youth of Today!” It was a hook that had worked before (Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour tristesse) and which has been resorted to since (Nikki Reed’s Thirteen). The public persona he developed is inextricable from his films—it’s difficult to know what’s promoting what—and I’ll not attempt the separation. Click here to read Nick Pinkerton's review of Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely.

What does Godard mean to us in 2008? It's a question that's surely been asked, or could have been asked, in any given year since 1960, but it's one worth asking again now, certainly on the occasion of Film Forum's extensive retrospective, Godard's 60s, starting today and running through the beginning of June. And with Richard Brody's already acclaimed biography, Everything Is Cinema, hitting bookshelves the week after next, and the fact that we're currently "celebrating" (always an emotionally contradictory task) the events of May '68, now on their fortieth anniversary, it's obvious that Jean-Luc Godard is on a lot of people's minds these days (not that he's ever really gone). Yet when we talk of Godard, certainly in terms of post-68 France, we're talking about a cinema not just politically engaged but transformed into a medium for political confrontation: filmic missives that refuse to cloak their agenda in tangential details like narrative or character.

Godard's first film, then, was to always remain unlike any of those that followed; political only as it related to genre representation and the decimation of his beloved art form in the hopes of rebuilding something new in its place, Breathess was both a new beginning and a full stop. Even in his subsequent New Wave genre plays, like Alphaville and Band of Outsiders (whose "lightness" betrayed an increasing discomfort with their own rules and built-in hegemonies), he had already moved past Breathless, with its deceptively simple subversions that still relied on emotional interplay and cause-and-effect narrative strategies. The effortless casualness of Breathless (which by all accounts had been worked out to the minutest detail by Godard beforehand, despite the film's appearance of slapdash ingenuity) was to be so swiftly replaced by a harsher, more rigorous formalism that the film promptly became something of an orphan. Immediately following its buzzy Cannes premiere, in a May 1960 television interview, "Reflets de Cannes," Godard said, "I feel like I love cinema less than I did a year ago, simply because I made a popular film. I hope that people hate my second film so that I can enjoy making movies again. Audiences trust me now. I hope I disappoint them so they don't trust me anymore." Though Godard has changed his interrogatory political and aesthetic approach countless times over the years, this last statement still rings true to Godard's intentions—and if he ever begins to let audiences trust him, then his exhilaratingly confounding career would be as good as defeated.

Maybe the more pertinent question then, if Godard's debut remains such an anomaly, is what does Breathless mean to us in 2008? Naturally, the film is the opening weekend feature of the Godard's 60s series, and it's the spark that's meant to set off the rest of the month's fireworks. It's a deflating cliché to call something "remarkably fresh after all these years," but, yes, Breathless does stand as an exciting and fitting opener: it's so packed with seemingly off-the-cuff moments and little flickers of spontaneity that no matter how many times you've seen it, there's always something you either hadn't noticed or had forgotten was there. Upon this last viewing I was struck and moved when Jean-Paul Belmondo's macho tomfoolery, while waving goodbye to Jean Seberg as she's on her way to that robustly irritating airport interview with Jean-Pierre Melville, is interrupted by an extra exiting a door and walking right into him; Belmondo's little grimace of surprise is the perfect response, and further grants the film the sense that Godard's experiment was to capture those interstitial moments that would never make it into the final cut of other "gangster films." Likewise, there's endless joy in watching Belmondo and, specifically, Seberg, who's constantly reckoning with both her character and her own movie persona—so rudely had she been thrust into the limelight and then cast aside after Saint Joan and Bonjour tristesse that she seems both exhilarated and fearful of the freedom the camera afforded her in Breathless. When she's on-screen, her exquisitely symmetrical features providing necessary contrast to his pugilist's mug, she fitfully becomes the protagonist: she's the one who must make the moral choices, after all.

Breathless was a one-off, but never arbitrary. And unlike those other monolithic, epochal films that changed the face of narrative cinema (Citizen Kane, 2001, Pulp Fiction), Godard's film still feels slippery, and so self-consciously clever that we feel like we may never fully grasp its intentions. It's fun, but never easy, even if it seems like Godard's most accessible. All filmmakers should strive for such simultaneous clarity and obfuscation. So maybe that's why we should still care about Breathless—not as a designated Classic, preserved in amber and placed on the shelf, but as a call to arms for filmmakers, not to repeat what they've seen but to use current technologies to reject narrative formulas and properly confound audiences and themselves. There will be plenty of more visually mesmerizing or intellectually stimulating films on display this month during the Godard's 60s series, but none of them as sprung from youthful zeal to overturn the status quo.

“Where Michael Bay has mastered a kind of sensory-assaulting pop art, Favreau is a born storyteller, who engages the audience’s imaginations rather than crushing them in a tsunami of digital noise.” – Scott Foundas, LA Weekly

Without having seen Iron Man, I can’t agree or disagree with Foundas’s assessment of Favreau’s storytelling abilities (I also haven’t seen Favreau’s previous forays into directing, which he praises), and I’m not highlighting this little bit because he’s taken some kind of oppositional, principled outré stand—reviews thus far have been largely positive.

However, this brief comment—“Favreau is a born storyteller”—somehow got my mind racing about the triangular relationship between critics, audiences, and distributors. If this film were, say, the new work from an acclaimed young Romanian filmmaker, I could imagine Foundas’s quote plastered at the top of ads from coast-to-coast—he’s a legitimate critic, for my money one of the few truly thoughtful writers left amongst the rotating stable his syndicate employs, though whether or not readers are attuned to his specific voice, or just his attribution is an open question.

Does Iron Man need a Scott Foundas quote or review to succeed? Surely not. And given that the big movie machine works as hard as possible to erase the individual effects of non-brand directors (i.e. Spielberg) from their films, surely not if that quote attests to the director’s storytelling abilities instead of the special effects work or thrill-ride escapades. But yet here it is, snuck lightly into the last paragraph of a fine, well-considered piece of writing—it’s pretty much sold me on a ticket, but not that the studio really needs me either. Does the studio need any reviews at all to make this thing succeed? Probably not to cross the threshold into profits via ancillaries, but a gaggle of good reviews for big movies still holds sway, I think, for a certain group of folks who generally worry about leaving these sort of films assaulted and insulted (i.e. Michael Bay). Foundas's writing for them, for me—certainly not for the studio here.

Before Foundas was syndicated locally, the only chance I had to read him was via the internet. There’s been a lot of typing expended on the effects of the www.world on the critical voice and it seems like there’s a general lack of consensus out there, aside from inside the thick skull of Armond White, who seems to view all us blog philistines as the imminent death of film culture. But is it possible that the movement of film criticism away from print might allow readers a more intimate connection with their cultural critics, one that I’d say has been largely severed over the last twenty or so odd years of media consolidation and saturation? Can we now seek out and find those voices like Foundas (or, modestly, Reverse Shot, for that matter) that speak to us? And what do we lose in terms of geographic specificity—that great hometown critic who knows his or her audience because they have been sprung from them? The age of the monolithic critical voice may have already closed—critics can still make and break certain films at the box office, but is that a role they necessarily should have or aspire to? Being able to influence readers is important, but what of dominating them?

We haven’t really taken a detailed plunge into this question at Reverse Shot yet, and this certainly isn’t it—we’re more concerned with diagnosing the changes in the medium at present. But I think we’ll get there. In the meantime, thanks to Scott Foundas for his review.

Though it's as sullen and damp-grey as its morose 15-year-old protagonist, Argentinean filmmaker Lucia Puenzo's directorial debut XXY doesn't really get inside the mind of young Alex as much as watch her with an awkward combination of fascination and empathy. It's both a success and a failing on the new filmmaker's part; her intention in making XXY, to humanely depict a character who might in other films or literature be relegated to oddball supporting status, is undoubtedly noble. Yet by focusing almost exclusively on Alex's differences (she was born with both female and male genitalia), rather than offering other facets of her life for consideration, the film slightly shortchanges what could have been a beautifully full portrait of a teenager going through radical inner and outer turmoil.

Too often Alex feels more like a literary conceit than a person, a succinct embodiment of the confusion of adolescence, the terror of burgeoning sexuality adroitly made external. Puenzo doesn't do Alex (played by Ines Efron) any favors by pointedly placing her family and friends in heavily symbolic roles, all of which underscore rather than dilute her abnormality: her father, Kraken (Ricardo Darin), is a marine biologist given to puzzling over the sex of washed-up turtles; her mother's friend (German Palacios), whom she invites for a weekend at their home at the Uruguayan sea shore, is a plastic surgeon; the surgeon's son, Alvaro (Martin Piroyansky), is also going through frightening stages of sexual maturation and bafflement. Rather than tread lightly around all of this delicate material, Puenzo directs with a frank humorlessness that borders on ponderous.

Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of XXY.

Everyone, please: a moment of mourning now for the death of the serious studio women's weepie. Now take another moment to mourn the dearth of leading roles for the animated, three-dimensionally high-strung likes of Marsha Mason (and though this goes without saying, those nattering, self-consciously drippy-neurotic Neil Simon scripts that made them possible). Finally, let us now weep for the passing of this genre's signature poster style, with its cursive, feminine scrawl, diary and photo album–aping imagery, and portraits of empowering togetherness. So gone is this era that films of this ilk (see also The Turning Point, Six Weeks, Resurrection, Terms of Endearment) now seem as alien as ethnographic exploitation like Mondo Cane (maybe they deserve their own Flaherty seminar?).

So unafraid of ornate text is the poster for the never-released-on-DVD (despite three Oscar nods way back in 1981) Only When I Laugh, that a quick glance to its top half demonstrates that you don't need imdb synopses to get...all...your....plot . . . tidbits: "Kristy McNichol's a daughter who never had a childhood . . . Marsha Mason is a mother who never grew up. For 16 years, they've been practically strangers. And when they get together, they're the most mismatched roommates since 'The Goodbye Girl'" . . . "It'll make you laugh . . . 'til you cry." Whew, I'm bushed, both from the excess of narrative information and the amount of weird grammatical choices. Haven't seen the film, but apparently rich supporting turns from James Coco (known here as an aging sadsack self-loathing gay actor; known in Muppets Take Manhattan as the upscale pet-shop customer who affectionately calls his dog "lumpy dum-dums") and Joan Hackett (who would only live, sadly, for two more years) make it worthwhile....though judging from the poster, Marsha's snazzy jacket crest would probably be worth the price of the rental.