Those of us who get easily swept up in the tender, boundless empathy of Yi Yi may find it difficult to remember (or, due to the general lack of availability of Edward Yang’s other films, may not even realize) that much of this great Taiwanese director’s career sprang from his bitter sense of irony. While Yang’s final masterpiece suggested an artist beginning to make peace with an unjust world, his other major works were made in a spirit of indignant protest against a culture he felt was actively suppressing its own history and cheating its youth. Now that the World Cinema Foundation’s newly restored print of the 1991 epic A Brighter Summer Day is finally making its stateside debut as part of this year’s Film Comment Selects slate, Yang fans will get a stronger dose of the anger that only occasionally disrupted Yi Yi’s chastened world-weariness and Ozu-like tranquility. Where Yi Yi was dominated by brightly lit compositions contrasted with a handful of melancholy nighttime sequences, A Brighter Summer Day traps its audience in a permanently murky atmosphere—one that seems intended to precisely capture the political anxiety of its historical moment, but that also renders our relationship to time and space unstable. Read Andrew Chan’s review of A Brighter Summer Day.
Reverse Shot has announced a partnership that brings their curated video interview series to a global audience via Babelgum’s online platform and its free applications for Apple’s iPhone & iPod Touch and Google’s Android devices. Babelgum will be the new home of Reverse Shot’s “Talkies” and “Direct Address” videos, which feature candid, off-the-cuff interviews with celebrated and emergent figures in film. When we decided to branch out from printed criticism into video we wanted to set a new standard for web-based interview content. We couldn’t imagine a better home for the Talkies and Direct Address than Babelgum, which has proven itself a leader in publishing and promoting innovative online video content. So bookmark it now!
BABELGUM PARTNERS WITH REVERSE SHOT TO PRESENT EXCLUSIVE CONTENT ONLINE & VIA MOBILE
Reverse Shot Branded Channel Launches February 25th with exclusive interviews, including:
Acclaimed Actor Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds, Fish Tank)
and
Academy Award Nominee Christian Berger (The White Ribbon)
Said Karol Martesko-Fenster, SVP & General Manager of Babelgum’s Film Division, in the press release announcing this news, “We are thrilled to partner with Reverse Shot, one of the sharpest, most vital sites for online film reviews and now video, on developing and hosting this new series. As journalism increasingly moves from text to image, the Talkies and Direct Address formats raise the bar high, tapping into the specialty and indie creative talent pool with intelligence and professionalism, while retaining an unusual degree of creativity with respect to location, form, and conversational interest.”
In case you don’t know, Reverse Shot Talkies, previously featured on indieWIRE, is a series of unconventional, site-specific video interviews with filmmakers, actors, programmers, critics, and more. Informal, playful, and always revealing, Talkies are not just antidotes to the traditional Q&A format but also unique, self-contained short films. Past Talkies installments have featured internationally renowned filmmakers such as Pedro Almodóvar, Cedric Klapisch, Richard Linklater, and Atom Egoyan, as well as emerging indie auteurs like Andrew Bujalski, So Yong Kim, and Bradley Rust Gray. The latest episodes feature conversations with Academy Award winner James Marsh (Man on Wire, Red Riding), Academy Award–nominated cinematographer Christian Berger (The White Ribbon), and actor Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds, Fish Tank). Earlier segments were featured by indieWIRE. Future segments will feature Claire Denis and Mathieu Amalric.
Reverse Shot’s Direct Address series, on the other hand, gives the viewer up-close access to some of international cinema’s most fascinating figures. Direct Address challenges interviewees to address the camera in tight close-up; these intimate videos expose subtle flickers of expression and reveal remarkable minds at work. Past episodes have featured Sally Potter (Rage) and Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon), and in-depth interviews with Catherine Breillat (Bluebeard) and Bruno Dumont (Hadewijch) are forthcoming.
We needed another delicate, comedy-tinged American independent drama about a socially awkward, emotionally stunted creative guy who has a hard time communicating with girls like a hole in the head. At the very least, what immediately sets the new film Easier with Practice apart from many recent installments in this ever-ready subgenre is that first-time director Kyle Patrick Alvarez knows where to point a camera. As overly self-aware and photo-album-ready as much of the film’s shots are, especially in its opening moments, it’s clear that we’re in the hands of a genuine moviemaker. Unfortunately it takes a little digging to get past the received indie mannerisms (disaffected people in frozen tableaux of American nowheresville) to find approximations of recognizable human behavior in the film, an adaptation of a fact-based short story about a passive young writer, Davey (Brian Geraghty), who begins a phone-sex relationship with a woman who one night randomly calls his motel room while he’s on a book-reading tour of the American Southwest. Read Michael Koresky’s review of Easier with Practice.
One of the first things viewers will inevitably remember from A Prophet is an early sequence in which the film’s young hero, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) murders a fellow prison inmate, by extracting a concealed razor blade from inside his mouth with his tongue, and slicing open the unsuspecting victim’s throat. Notwithstanding the stygian brutality of this scene (from which a residual dread is likely to remain with the viewer throughout the film), A Prophet is ultimately as memorable for the responsibility it assumes, as it is for the savagery it depicts. At a time where an entire sub-genre of popular cinema exists only to invent more repulsive and cruel forms of torture, not once during A Prophet does the horror on the screen feel any less real than that of the chaotic world it succeeds in depicting with moral precision and intellectual honesty. Few will quibble against the consensus since Cannes ’09 that A Prophet is a gripping and exceptionally well-crafted crime film, but whether it represents a substantial step up for its director is more debatable. Read the rest of Julien Allen’s review of A Prophet.
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