clarencecarter: so, Everything is Illuminated. wow. I really loved it
robbiefreeling: liar
clarencecarter: Liev is a major new talent
robbiefreeling: it's like The Garden State of Ukraine
clarencecarter: impressive, you really saw right through me on that
robbiefreeling: because I saw it too, clarence
robbiefreeling: it's garbage
robbiefreeling: and there's no way around it
clarencecarter: amen

Because there hasn’t been nearly enough controversy in the last few hours, I thought I’d weigh in briefly on Manderlay, and await the inevitable shitstorm.

Manderlay is ultimately a less interesting film than Dogville because its underlying allegory is so overwhelmingly transparent. An outsider liberating an unwilling (and unprepared) plantation and teaching them the ins and outs of democracy—sound familiar? Yet it’s still an extraordinary film, every bit as worthy as its predecessor. Obvious schema and politics aside, Trier does render some acute, ideologically neutral observations on democracy, economic systems, gender, racism, anthropology, humanitarian intervention and the pratfalls of dilettante liberalism (okay, so maybe not always so neutral).

Let me forestall the inevitable criticism: if Trier’s pandering to the left, there’s little value in preaching to the choir; and if slamming the right, his arguments will fall on deaf patrons. As always, he’s didactic, but I’m tired of fiction films being so apolitical; I believe it’s far better to have irate, engaged (if self-aggrandizing) filmmakers shouting into the wind. But If you can for a minute give Trier the benefit of the doubt and forgive his former showy pretensions, there’s less hucksterism on display in Manderlay. And he does something that I had been yearning for in Dogville. Trier actually addresses the drama’s Brechtian performativity—and in so doing, renders his homily much more potent.

Granted, Bryce Dallas Howard is no Nicole Kidman—she can’t conjure the bruised, steely fuck you that Nic bequeathed at the end of Dogville, and for a moment I swear she resembled Molly Ringwald. Kidman’s presence added an emotional punch that subdued the awkwardness of overt political declarations. Howard is not charismatic enough to do the same (though to be fair, I get the feeling that the opening act’s exposition is deliberately clunky).

Manderlay is by far the most idea-rich film I’ve seen this year, one that definitely warrants a second (or third) viewing. Anyone got an extra ticket?

I haven't seen History of Violence yet, but if this nugget is true...I have new favorite filmmaker.

Apparently Yuppies haven't been skewered enough on film, because Noah Baumbach feels compelled to do so in The Squid and the Whale. Baumbach, who already shares the dubious distinction of co-writing The Life Aquatic, also is now guilty of openly stealing from his partner Wes Anderson. Squid feels like vérité Tenenbaums lite, mining the same terrain sans similar visual élan—and populated with folks who are even more vacuous and disagreable. Jeff Daniels is Bernard, a morass of Brooklyn upper-middle-class, faux-intelligentsia bourgeois liberalism, trapped in a viciously defended cul-de-sac of his own self-righteous language. Coping (badly, mind you) with the public's waning interest in his novels, he adopts a wearily predictable obsession with reading the "right books" and seeing "interesting films"—while disdaining those who don't as "Philistines." His wife Joan (Laura Linney) is an up-and-coming author; a barely registered screen presence whose worst offences are surreptitiously screwing said "Philistines" and becoming more critically acclaimed than her hubby. And then the parents pass on their neuroses to their sons. The elder spews Dad's haughty middle-brow wisdom at school to pick up naive chicks while the younger copes with his parents' separation and abandonment—first figurative, then literal—by chugging cans of beer, or by jerking off at school and spreading his spooge on lockers and library books. Ugh. Sometimes the jokes write themselves.

At Squid's NYFF press conference, Baumbach confessed to a high degree of autobiographical detail. He lived in the same Park Slope neighbourhood, experienced a similarly messy divorce, even played tennis in the very same arena. So you'd be forgiven for expecting his characters to be a mite sympathetic. The kids, maybe: they absorb their parents' anxieties by osmosis and can't help themselves. But Bernard is positively hateful. I'm supposed to care about a guy who is more in love with books and inflicting emotional damage on his ex ("I feel banished" is but one memorable line spat at Joan as she kicks Bernard out of her house) than his kids? I can take him as farce, but if that's the case, making a straw man out of a despairing failed author facing a mid-life crisis is facile for a director-screenwriter of such obvious intelligence and verbal dexterity.

My vitriol was tempered today by Eshman, who said (and correct me if I'm wrong), there was a certain comfort in watching The Squid and the Whale, because he's old enough to have remembered that era of the mid-80s, and all its ambient artefacts—clothing, trinkets, and especially the soundtrack. And maybe I'm about 6 years too young to share the same feeling, which is one reason why it doesn't speak to me. But warm and fuzzy nostalgia is a neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to proclaim a film "great."

Robbiefreeling rightly pointed out that I’ve been negligent in sending missives on the NYFF, and so, considerably chastened by his tongue lashing, here goes (with apologies to Eshman):

Perhaps it’s because I’m still disappointed by a year of substantially unrevealing biographies, but there was a quite a bit to like about Capote. Contrasted with The Aviator, which only really divulged that Howard Hughes was crazy, liked to fly airplanes, and. . .was crazy, or Ray, which justified Charles’ nastier personality traits in light of his talents (he cheated on his wife, fathered a kid with his mistress, and all but abandoned his family, but it’s okay! He was a genius!) Bennett Miller’s outing quietly illuminates and refused to apologize for its protagonist. The script makes plain Truman’s considerable facility with cocktail party witticisms, but also takes great care to show how his ability to lie with equal poise. It’s immediately clear that both are defence mechanisms to protect the great author’s rather underdeveloped ego; under Hoffman’s layered performance, we get veiled glimpses of Capote’s desperate desire to be loved as well as his fear of disappointing others. There’s also a shameless honesty in Hoffman’s delivery as he intimates the depth of his sympathy for the In Cold Blood murderers—and the limits of it too. He cares about their attempts at death row commutation, but without a full confession detailing the brutal act in question, compassion cedes to business consideration and the need to finish his story. It’s not the first biopic to show blemishes and all, but the way Miller does it, by by oblique hints and deft structuring, puts it among the better ones I’ve seen. Capote was also shown a day after Good Night, And Good Luck, which is why I like it probably better than I otherwise would. Set a scant few years after Clooney’s portrait of righteous indignation, Capote subtly observes Truman in a manner that approaches naturalism, and refuses to fetishize its own aesthetic.

I've missed one or two of the shorts, and there are still three to go, but with the exception of Cary Fukunaga's Victoria Para Chino, which tells a full and fully horrifying story of a deadly migrant border crossing - its economy by no means compromising its intensity or importance - I've found nothing of note. Which is a nice way of putting it. Seems the primary qualification for acceptance was high production values: shot on film, shot to look "professional" for future employers, and well-funded (and often shepherded by influential academics at influential academic institutions). Furthermore, most are "topical" or flatly localized in an early nineties issue-oriented way that also bears academic fingerprints. Is this about poor selection by the NYFF committee, or about a thoroughly professionalized film school food chain? Probably both, perhaps more the latter (for film isn't the only art form getting declawed by academia - witness the way writing and fine art making have become degree-only fields, for example), but I find it hard to believe that no one's making brilliantly self-contained or deliriously odd-ball or rigorously experimental short films and sending them the NYFF's way - whether or not they were graded or workshopped well or submitted with a glowing recommendation from an advisor. Why not throw a curveball the Good Night, And Good Luck audience's way, and advocate something unique and alive, something respectful of and turned on by the short form?

Excerpts from a conversation half/mis-remembered between two Reverse Shotters at the Toronto Film Festival:

Clarencecarter: I think Abel Ferrara's Mary and Chereau's Gabrielle were probably the best things I saw here.

Brotherfromanother: L'enfant for me. We didn't talk about the Chereau last night—you really liked it?

CC: Yeah, I feel like making one of these sort of stylistically hyper-modern period pieces was a really interesting step for him to take after Son frère, which I thought was fantastic. In a lot of ways the formal play in Gabrielle reminds of Desplechin.

BFA: But Desplechin is never quite that silly.

CC: You don't think so? I feel like he's pretty silly.

BFA: And I'm not sure if I really believe the central premise: that the upper middle class hurts too.

CC: But isn't that sort of endemic to the kind of Ibsen-esque examination he's undertaking? It didn't bother me so much, but you can't really knock Pascal Greggory and Isabelle Huppert's performances. Greggory is one of those actors I never really noticed until that creepy little movie Raja which I saw here a few years ago.

BFA: Sure they're terrific, but don't you get the sense that they never really become characters—that they're more puppets in this formal experiment Chereau's created?

CC: Exactly. That's one of the reasons I like it: it's an artificial, cold movie.

BFA: About hot passions.

CC: At least I think we can both agree that one of the real finds here has to be Jason Reitman's Thank You For Smoking.

BFA: Absolutely, long live sub-American Beauty middlebrow stabs at skewering the politically correct!

CC: Especially when made by the douchebag scion of a filmmaking family that should have been sterilized ages ago.

BFA: Could it be any other way?

(Brotherfromanother, feel free to correct the record.)

Judging from the hosannas offered George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck at Wednesday's press screening, we're in for months and months of hype and supposed buzz and "preliminary Oscar talk" and general disconnection with whatever this modest film has to offer.

GN&GL, which opens the New York Film Festival this Friday, is a very slim affair, but effective at meeting its socio-political objectives. That, for a frustrated, Bush-beaten population of New York liberals (of which the packed press screening is somewhat representative), is all that's required for instant, rapturous genuflection (and having a dashingly good-looking director/writer/actor who's on our side doesn't hurt). As polemic, GN&GL is understated, responsible and focused, taking a counterpath of sorts from last year's Fahrenheit 9/11. And the path is made clear for Edward R. Murrow's editorials, which well function as unforced prophesies of these wintry media times. All else is smoke-filled staccato buildups and smoke-filled back-slapping releases, always looking good and always feeling slim. Which really isn't a problem except for that prolonged overpraise we're in for.

It reminds me of Quiz Show, another wildly overpraised examination of fifties television directed by an A-list movie star. Good Night, and Good Luck might be a better and ultimately more politically useful film, but it'll likely be as inessential ten years from now as that Rob Morrow vehicle. But today all I've got to report is a thin little watchable argument for the need for an adversarial American press, well shot and well acted in ways that any American moviegoer can latch onto and report to friends, "the acting was great - the cinematography was great too," and wholly undeserving of the pavlovian, publicly professed praise it received from pre-eminent film scholars and critics at the ensuing press conference. A particular Columbia University Professor/Author/ubiquitous DVD Commentator lept from her seat to thank Clooney for "one of the best films of the year." Wow. Well, you know, it's only September. And, well, I haven't seen her at any other NYFF screening. Death of Mr. Lazarescu? L'Enfant? Sure, she and we and I should all be forgiven our spontaneous excitement, and we all want a tougher press corps, and there's something intriguing about this ex-TV actor turned international star directing movies about faded TV personalities, and we all think more movies should be shot in black and white, but how much do we really care about film if this slim picture with the big names gets all our love?

But for real, who's responsible for programming NYC's prominent Midnight Movie line-ups at the Landmark Sunshine and the IFC Center's sacreligiously-titled Waverly Midnights?

I know as a sociological phenomenon the whole Midnight Movies affair has tapered off to a thin echo of it's 70's heyday, but if we're going to do a thing, let's at least get it half-right...

From the Sunrise line-up:

-The Godfather
-Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
-Real Genius (the disposable Eighties piece of shit with Val Kilmer)
-The Nightmare Before Christmas (the disposable Nineties piece of shit with some puppets)
-Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
-Teen Witch

There are more than a handful of defensibly outre picks, to be sure, includingly the scortchingly unpleasant grinder Cannibal Holocaust, modern-day Alexandro Jodorowsky Matthew Barney's celebration of decadent pretense, Cremaster 3, and archetypal Midnighter Performance, but splitting the bill with a bunch of goofy shit pitched to moronic Twentysomethings playing up faux-nostalgia for the half-remembered Eighties seems an awfully grim compromise--the Midnight Movie is supposed to be for drug-addled freakouts tripping on the outer limits of cinema curiousities, not "OMG look at their leg-warmers LOL!" gigglefest field trips and screenings of the AFI canon. It's most unusual, as Sunrise's screenings are billed as presentations of the Village Voice, whose Senior Critic literally wrote the fucking book on Midnight Movies... Damn, where's Antonio Das Mortes, J.?

The less said of IFC Center's program the better: Party Monster? Cinemania? Eighties nadir-of-genre slasher Maniac? Dark Days? Again; Cinemania? Fuck you guys and your fucking slick "looks like somewhere visited on an episode of Blind Date" bar and your Miranda July. You dudes make going to the movies feel about as adventurous as eating at Chipotle.

I concur. I'm going to fill this space with some pointless blather about film just to push the photo a little further down. Do we all now see the problem with setting up a democratic film society here, where everyone gets to slap their latest fetishes up there on the screen for all to see.

So, let me give you my thoughts on CORPSE BRIDE, which I saw on Friday night with a shockingly rowdy (or was it appreciative and sensation-starved?) audience. What the film lacks in any sort of propulsive narrative it more than makes up for in its sheer idiosyncratic nature. Though it's not my wish to bandy about a word like "idiosyncratic," so overused when applied to Burton, whose output in recent years has mostly been pandering and coasting on his outdated self-proclaimed "otherness," there's a real sense here that only Burton could have gotten a bizarre little tchotchke like this made at a studio...a very demure little Russian folklore adaptation filmed in (CGI enhanced in spots) outmoded stop motion animation; short on plot, long on glistening inky blue surfaces and elongated figurines, Corpse Bride is a surprisingly minor affair, but is all the more impressive for being so. I remember being inspired by its simple fade-out, which comes just at the moment where the plot ends, no grandiose flair, no final moments of shocking revelation; there's not much brouhaha to accompany Burton's film, just a sweet approximation of curling up by the fireside and listening to a familiar bedtime story. Despite its increasingly antiquated format, it's not an event, just a reminder that can still charm...it just needs to seem this effortless.

We like movies. At least most of the time.

And that photo of Christian Slater is freaking me out so I'm trying to get it off the top of the blog. Anyone care to help out?

Phew! We can all finally breathe a sigh of relief: Slater's grope charge is shelved

Close one. Now Christian can get back to making all those great movies we can't stop raving about.

And just for the record, robbiefreeling has been "forcibly touching" me for years.

Six months?

After some sidebar screenings last week (shorts, experimentals, and recent restorations), The New York Film Festival's press screenings started in earnest today. I'll burst Steven Soderbergh's Bubble at a later time, preserving this space for whatever lovestruck superlatives I can ineloquently muster on behalf of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. I'm sure the film will be described with stock terms such as "virtuosic", "tour de force", "brutally realistic", "a masterpiece", etc., etc., and while it'll all be applicable, I fear that our familiar and limited vocabulary won't do this singular work of art justice.

How's this: Cristi Puiu's film is one of the finest achievements in the history of cinema. I'll equivocate some other time. What I saw this morning - and what I'm still living within half a day later - was so agonizingly empathetic, and so thoroughly, vigorously representational of all that human behavior allows, that I'm liable to hold every other "realist" or "natural" or "socially insightful" film made by anyone other than the Dardennes to an impossible standard. Puiu doesn't make his achievement look quite as easy as the Dardennes do L'Enfant, but he comes close - and he's using an even bigger net. In what feels like real time, the ailing Mr. Lazarescu goes from somber solitude to the depths of public degradation and - in a sense - back again, all during the course of a single evening, encountering dozens of doctors and nurses and drivers and neighbors and strangers along the way. Mr. Lazarescu's condition is always of concern, but the camera lingers just long enough to enliven everyone else with independent priorities and motivations. Overarching themes arise, such as man's inescapable isolation, the mortality of human flesh, the subjectivity and insecurity of medical diagnosis, and the brutal but essential systems and regulations that citizens subject themselves to for the sake of society, but never at the expense of a single person on screen or the verisimilitude of a single location or shot. Now I remember why I love film so much.

Not exactly topical, but it's important that we add words to the film lexicon. I suggest:

Braffmouth

Surprisingly durable and applicable, use Braffmouth to describe or insult, or to identify a medical condition of the lips and mouth that swells, secretes, or froths just so.

In any event, this much is certainly true: dude's got Braffmouth.

Rather than move swiftly through all nine of this generous and lovely, ambitious yet quiet film’s separate-yet-interconnected sequences (each shot in a single take, a technique awkwardly shoehorned into a few the narratives, often times so gracefully handled it’s nearly unnoticeable), I would like to just mention the second chapter of the film, which stars Robin Wright Penn, who has been taken for granted for so long as second fiddle to Sean and as the third or fourth tier star of her films that no one seems to have noticed the subtle character shadings and stunning depths she brings to each role (White Oleander, Unbreakable, She’s So Lovely, The Pledge, each and every part she plays strikingly different and memorable). Hopefully, although she is again part of an ensemble, audiences won’t overlook her elegant work in the upcoming Nine Lives, as a pregnant wife slowly pushing her shopping cart through a supermarket, spotting who seems to be an old flame (Jason Isaacs), trying to avoid him, then conceding to him, conversing for a while, wistfulness turns to regrets turns to pain. We soon realize it was no fling they once shared, but the relationship that probably defined their youths. The gamut of emotions that spill across Wright Penn’s face as she makes her way through this physical and emotional labyrinth, surrounded by the symbols of her current domestic dependency yet faced with her independent past, is simply remarkable. If the sequence ultimately goes a little slack with melodrama, Rodrigo Garcia’s shooting style and Robin Wright Penn’s effortless all-or-nothing performance elevate it to a wonderfully poignant emotional plane.

Of course, this is not to detract from the overall film, which is surprisingly touching even in its most forced moments. Especially memorable are Sissy Spacek (no shock there) and Holly Hunter (in the film’s most oblique sequence). Completely worthwhile, the film could get lost in the fall shuffle to the more robust male-centric types like /i>Jarhead, Syriana, and Good Night and Good Luck, which draw more mainstream excitement. Yet don’t write it off as glorified Lifetime; there’s some real tough stuff to chew on here.

Since ranking the quality of art with numbers is fun and rewarding, here's a selection of ratings for a few films I've seen at this year's Toronto Film Festival:

Brothers of the Head: 1.0
Citizen Dog: 6.0
Duelist: 4.5
Drawing Restraint 9 (first half): 5.0
Gabrielle: 8.7
Giant Buddhas: 7.4
Harsh Times: 4.3
Les Saignantes (first 30 minutes): 9.7
Little Fish (first 30): 3.4
Mary: 9.0
River Queen: 7.9
Sketches of Frank Gehry: 7.4
Thank You For Smoking: 5.2
The Willow Tree: 5.7
Un Couple Parfait: 6.7
Vers Le Sud: 7.1

Who need analysis when we have the power of numbers?

I would like to introduce a new category to the Reverseblog: People Who Would've Made Great Filmmakers and Had Great Hair

In anticipation of Liv Ullman's film based on A Doll's House, starring Kate Winslet, John Cusack, Tim Roth and Stellan Skarsgard, I offer: Henrik Ibsen.

Factoid: A Doll's House has been filmed 12 times between the years of 1911 and 1993. Here's to number 13.

From ibsen.net: "Theatre critic Erik Pierstoff put it in somewhat more general terms...:'Ibsen could well have been a film man (...). He was of course also a man of great talent when it comes to the visual element ... Obviously Ibsen as a film man is a hypothetical construct, but it cannot be denied that a great deal in his texts - or, to put it more precisely, the thematics of his later plays - calls out, as it were, for visualisation. And that makes it tempting to wonder how he might perhaps have worked as a film-maker.'"

One also has to wonder how he might perhaps have worked as a hairstylist. To wit: the same passage with a few tweaks.

"Ibsen could well have been a hairstylist(...). He was of course also a man of great talent when it comes to the visual element ... Obviously Ibsen as a hair man is a hypothetical construct, but it cannot be denied that a great deal in his haircuts - or, to put it more precisely, the thematics of his later hairstyles - calls out, as it were, for visualisation. And that makes it tempting to wonder how he might perhaps have worked as a hairstylist."

David Thomson has been invoked over the past few years in the film community as a source of derision as much as a grizzled old cinephile standby, his ridiculous, opaque grandstanding claims as equal to his moments of stunning lucidity.

But honestly, David....what the fuck is this supposed to be? Maybe it's time to hang up your hat, cowpoke?

If the link doesn't go directly to it, scroll down to the auspiciously titled "Who are you calling Butch?"

Dear Cameron Crowe,

We've been hearing all the bad buzz coming out of the Toronto lion's den about your upcoming latest sure-to-be masterwork, Elizabethtown, and we just wanted to let you know: hang in there, buddy, we're with you every step of the way. We'll be first in line to see your 138-minute rom-com opus on opening night, sucking in our breath to catch a glimpse of everyone's least favorite current heartthrob, Or(b)lando Bloom, taking a stab at playing a Zach Braffable dead-eyed American loner learning about life, death, and love en route to his father's funeral; waiting to hear every last bon mot as it drips right from your ballpoint pen onto the page and registers in our ears with a ring of "Eureka! That's screenwriting! Human nature is so funny sometimes!�" We can't wait to see how you'll pump and inflate every last page of your overstuffed screenplay with inspirational monologues masquerading as snatches of off-the-cuff cool; how you'll try to cram, crease, and fold Kirsten Dunst's talents into yet another gloriously "spontaneous" free-spirit stand-by-her-man female second lead part; how you'll reduce Susan Sarandon to spouting some wonderfully irreverent cool-mom motivational speechifying (Sarandon in Brad Silberling's unforgettable Moonlight Mile: "You've given us all a real truth enema.")

Don't let anyone tell you different: the answer to Film Comment's Fall 2000 cover query: "Is Almost Famous the greatest rock and roll movie ever made?� is a resounding "Yes!" Not only did that career-definer redefine contemporary cinema, it made the titles Last Waltz, This Is Spinal Tap, Gimme Shelter, heck even Georgia, fade into the deepest recesses of memory. I admired how Almost Famous was not in the least self-aggrandizing, that it barely made narrative sense, and that you tricked seemingly everyone by coating your bullshit mythologizing of your own past with a thin, distancing layer of geek chic. Kudos also to your near-plane crash scene, which tidily allowed all your characters to blurt out their unexpressed feelings (I really like the dude who finally spoke for the first time and said: "I'm gay!" and then never spoke again); there's your much-deserved Oscar right there.

So to all those who doubt the subversive brilliance of The Crowe, let's not forget these moments, or those from the teenage girl-porn Say Anything, the grunge and Starbucks tribute Singles, the wonderfully un-moralizing and certainly not screechy Jerry Maguire, and of course, the existential sci-fi to beat them all, Vanilla Sky. Trust me, Elizabethtown will undoubtedly follow in their footsteps. Let's all raise glasses to our generation's Billy Wilder! When Elizabethtown fails, we'll be right there, cheering you on.

Yours truly,
Some guy at Reverse Shot

From my favorite working critic, NY1's Neil Rosen.

"...But the pacing is at times slow, it's a bit predictable, there is a lot of preaching going on here, and director Fernando Meirelles, who also made the acclaimed "City of God," seems more concerned at times with imparting a moral message than he is in making an entertaining thriller."

Neil Rosen's Big Apple Rating: Three apples

Thank you, Neil. Thank you for reminding us that an entertaining thriller need not bog itself down with moral message. Ok, people? Are you listening? Let's keep politics in the senate and good clean mindless frivolity in theaters. Giving Gardener three apples, to boot!?!? That only shows what a fine and generous soul you are when faced with sub-par filmmakers who are obviously just trying too hard (why not throw in a mercy half-apple here and there?). I mean, you only gave D.E.B.S. two and a half apples:

"...the movie has clever moments and overall it does manage to be funny and endearing. Now some people may find the film idiotic. But that's basically the whole point here. It's campy, silly fun and if you look at it on that level there is a good time to be had.

It's also real easy on the eyes to have four sexy school girls, who in reality are in their twenties, running around in plaid mini skirts fighting crime. And I do think, among other things, that was one of the clear intentions of the filmmakers. "

Re-reading your insightful comments here is both galvanizing (as an aspiring critic) and tough to swallow; I mean, Neil, when you can watch four sexy school girls fighting crime, why on earth would you sit through something like The Constant Gardener? There's not even that much gardening! I'm going to have to reverse-criticize your criticism on this one: I'd take that half-apple from Gardener and feed it to those hot little mama's from D.E.B.S.

But that's why I love your work, Mr. Rosen, you get me thinking. And sometimes, you get me thinking in terms of apples. And at the end of the day, this New Yorker wants it laid out straight: just tell me how many apples, and I'll go bobbing.

Just a little friendly mono e mono between critics, buddy. You'll always have four big apples in my mind.

p.s. Your pronunciation of Meirelles? Priceless. Fernando Mary-Ellis himself would appreciate that.

To quote a friend and fellow Reverse Shotter during a pre-screening conversation about L'Enfant, the question wasn't "can it top The Son?" (a difficult proposition, considering that film's unassailable perfection) but rather "where, exactly, do the Dardennes go next?" The answer: right back to the same well that's yielded what is hands down one of the strongest bodies of work in post-90s cinema.
So yeah, ho-hum, another masterpiece. L'Enfant (the title, like that of The Son, is eloquently misleading, and that's all I'll say about the story) is more of the same from everybody's favourite fraternal pair of Belgian neo-realists, and while you wouldn't mistake a frame of it for a work by anybody else, the characteristic rigor of their approach (long handheld takes, only diegetic sound, etc.) somehow results in a film that is utterly, startlingly spontaneous from start to finish. And about that finish: nobody -- nobody, nobody, nobody -- has mastered the final cut-to-black like the Dardennes, maybe ever. The film's final shot packs the kind of emotional wallop that leads to you dab your eyes in the dark during the end credits so the other critics don't see you teary-eyed upon exiting -- exhilarated and rightly elated -- into daylight.

"Mind if we diagnose your spiritual malaise, Middle America?"

DEVLOPING STORY

Inside sources on the ground at the Toronto Film Festival have just reported that Roger Ebert slept through nearly twenty minutes of Steve Martin's 104 minute Shopgirl which screened for press there today. Upon waking, Ebert left the theatre, and returned a few minutes later.

We smell "three star review." Stay tuned for updates.

The non-controversy surrounding Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan reached a gentle simmer today as Mullah Omar, new head of the MPAA, refused to lift the NC-17 smack-down put on his new film Where the Truth Lies. Egoyan went back and made several efforts to trim for a more teen-internet-porno-fanboy-friendly R-rating, but the board still wasn�t pleased by the amount of pokage shown in its central m�nage � trios featuring Kevin Bacon, Rachel Blanchard and (ew) Colin Firth.

"We just couldn't trim any more pubes without destroying the heart of the movie," Egoyan told the Hollywood Reporter Thursday. But all is not lost; distributor ThinkFilm has announced it will shun the censors and release the film UNRATED.

"The good news is the film will go out as it was originally intended, with little adverse consequence, and coast on a wave of free mainstream-media publicity it would never have received otherwise. Given the reviews thus far�we need all the help we can get." said Egoyan.

A senior ThinkFilm executive commented, "We look forward to capitalizing on this publicity stunt to bring the work of a world-class filmmaker like Atom Egoyan to audiences who thought Ararat just sounded too boring, or might have never heard of him at all."

The publishers of papers in Montana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma that refuse to accept advertising for films bearing the NC-17 rating, and are generally blamed for the adverse conditions under which NC-17 movies find release, are already planning a protest to coincide with the film�s opening in neighboring states.

We're certainly intrigued, and awful or awesome, if there's a film out with Egoyan's name on it, the Reverse Blog will be there.

Okay, so I 've been so busy singing the praises of the wonderful upcoming films like Breakfast on Pluto, Cache, and A History of Violence that I was going to let this one slide, insignificant and derivative and pointless as it is. But then I kept seeing those ads, and my blood started to boil...I just know that with all the hype surrounding the release of Mills's feature debut, there will be a treasure trove of smaller films that could get lost in the art-house shuffle (C?d'Azur, Keane, Nine Lives among them). Simply put, Thumbsucker is every single wretched suburban-malaise, whiny white-kid, isn't-it-oh-so-fucking-tough growing up movie you've ever seen, just slightly more lethargic and uninvolving. Save Tilda Swinton, whose dewy eyes convey a lifetime of experience, the cast is comprised of your usual preening indie stalwarts (Vincent D'Onofrio, who's quick becoming a low-rent Pruitt Taylor Vince, mannered eye-flickers and all) and your slumming big budge stars looking for some serious indie cred (Vince Vaughn and Keanu Reeves, who is awful, awful, awful, worse than usual, even in a slight breezy joke of a role...as a New Age-y orthodontist....heh). And then there's Berlin Best Actor-awarded Lou Pucci, who is, I suppose, okay and befuddled in the central role of the titular lost teen, even though if I had to look at his caricatured elfin face for five more minutes I was going to start pounding on the critics to either side of me. So, to refresh: Growing up is tough. Especially in the oddly sterile, slightly Mike Mills-esque music video-world of suburbia. You look for answers everywhere to those big existential questions. Try the debate team. Try sucking your thumb. Try pot. So where does this all lead to? How does one extricate himself from this small-minded stranglehold of Nowheresville, USA? Well, maybe there is one solution: Last shot (SPOILERS! SPOILERS!): The Thumbsucker runs in a slow motion dance of freedom across Times Square as the Polyphonic Spree plays on the soundtrack (for the eighth time it seems). Fade out. The End.

Noo Yawk City, skyscrapers and everythang!

Go see The Devil's Rejects at some five dollar theater instead, if you still can.

Oddly, I left the theater yesterday after seeing the new Cronenberg film A History of Violence on a bit of a giddy high. Strange for a film that's ostensibly, or let's face it, PRETENDS to be, wisely, "about" the "nature" of violence and blah blah. The truth is, Cronenberg is mischeviously disinterested in grandiose themes here...if History of Violence is "about" anything, it seems to be that everything is a form of mechanism, not least of all, its own narrative. It's being released wide on a Friday by New Line, and one can almost, just almost, see what the studio was thinking: Cronenberg's film can function as a conventional thriller, if you care to read it that way; and it seems like part of Cronenberg is asking you, even daring you, to do just that. And thus by buying into its incredibly disconcerting surface pleasures you become caught up in one of cinema's best recent acts of trickery.

It would be simply unfair to give away too much of what occurs on a basic, flat narrative level, because watching it play out, in its troublingly plasticine workmanlike manner, just doesn't feel like anything else...it doesn't feel right. Something's very off here, as if we're watching some form of eXistenZ's "game," yet we are never clued into why we're here or where we are. All we're left with are visual clues: Viggo Mortensen's alternately soulful and dead eyes peering out from behind a face that shifts between baby-innocent and skeleton-hollow; Maria Bello's form-fitting cheerleader outfit, held over from her teenage days for naughty sexcapades; a tastelessly prefab home steak dinner plate adorned with bright carrots and peas. Cronenberg isn't after the same old "dark side of suburbia" here; what he's done is far more delightfully insidious. The tone is precariously balanced; you often find yourself rooting for plot developments (the film is Cronenberg's most involving and fluid storytelling since The Fly) even while being distracted by the sheer artificiality of it all.

A nice complement to Haneke's Cache in its questioning of middle-class complacency, History of Violence deserves more consideration and more viewings to tease out its ambiguities than I can grant at this early stage. I can think of nothing more subversive in American film right now than this "product," which will be challenging the codes of film watching even as its mainstream audiences laugh along with it. Oh, did I mention it's really funny, too?

A baffling choice as closing night of the New York Film Festival -- but only because it's so damn good. One can only predict the quizzical snickers that will echo throughout the oversized Avery Fisher Hall on October 9 when the credits begin to silently roll. Even the most studious, intrigued viewer will initally wonder where the rest of the movie went....then it will slowly dawn on them not five minutes after shuffling out of the theater: It couldn't end any other way.

Not that I'll reveal. All I'll say is that Michael Haneke's new film, Cache� (or Hidden) hits like a lightning bolt, just never in ways one would expect. If he is a provocateur, as he's often called, he certainly manages to stir up and shock people in underhanded ways that may not immediately make themselves apparent. This new film is more insinuating than sideswiping: an upper middle class couple (Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil) find themselves under surveillance, yet they do not know the source--they keep discovering videotaped footage of their house's facade, sometimes recording their comings and goings, left at their doorstep. The attempt to discover the culprit would seem to establish a conventional "investigation" narrative, yet the search leads back to dark recesses of a guilt so intangible and tied up in political and social traumas that narrative resolution is all but hopeless. Not that Haneke doesn't find snakey ways of sending his narrative out in all directions.

Bookended by long static takes of momentous indeterminacy, Cach�e left me slightly agog. The final two single take, immobile compositions in the film might be studied and puzzled over for many years to come. Of course, it demands further viewings, but this might be Haneke's best film.

Sat down with a DVD of Avi Mograbi's NYFF entry last night and found it an extremely pleasant surprise. With no prior knowledge of the filmmaker, and only a brief synopsis to go on, I was expecting something rote and sturdy, where a mild polemic is shoehorned into an uninteresting documentary that’s barely competent formally. Instead, it’s loose and unforced in a way that the current bumper crop of documentaries makes no room for, resulting in a lulling, meandering, aesthetically complete work that gradually builds into a fascinating examination of the historical underpinnings of the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian struggle without ever overtly announcing itself as such or feeling pedantic. Its mode of address, so gentle and foreign given how roughly we’re often handled in contemporary documentary, called to mind Alan Clarke’s Contact in which British soldiers wander for an hour through the fields of North Ireland waiting to run into the IRA.

Its footage can be roughly broken down into three categories: (1) scenes of Israeli tour guides and educators indoctrinating youth into the sites and stories of Israeli legend (most especially the stories of Samson, from where the title is derived and the mass suicides at Masada), (2) sequences of young Israeli soldiers interacting, most often callously, with Palestinians and the filmmaker himself, (3) a lengthy phone conversation between the filmmaker and a Palestinian friend captured from a mounted camera directly facing Mograbi as he cradles the receiver. The first two feature terrific handheld camerawork and some truly astonishing imagery—in two sequences Mograbi captures the central divide in question more eloquently than I’ve seen. In both, Palestinians attempt to cross border checkpoints, and in both are rebuffed by Israeli solders lodged firmly behind walls; of a checkpoint tower in one, and an army jeep in the other. They speak to the Palestinians via megaphones, and in the way Mograbi insistently frames the tower and jeep, he animates the inanimate as stand-ins for the soldiers who won’t reveal themselves. If the events weren’t so deadly serious, the sheer absurdity of their unwillingness to interact with the Palestinians on a human level (and given these young soliders’ inability to do so effectively when out of their vehicles in other scenes it’s not surprising that they hide) calls to mind something Monty Python might have dreamt up.

But what’s perhaps most affecting for this Western viewer is witnessing how thoroughly the mythology of persecution is drummed into the minds of Israel’s young (interestingly enough, the Holocaust only enters into the film near the end). For those unfamiliar, you’ll be well-versed in the stories of the suicides at Masada and the legend of Samson by the end, as Mograbi continually returns to lengthy sequences of teachers and guides proselytizing to various degrees about how their duty as Israelis is to live up to their historical burdens (only one group finds the Masada incident less than heroic). The phone conversation enters in as an illuminating counterpoint: Mograbi’s friend declares “when the Palestinians decide that living isn’t really worth anything, then we will be in a bad place” (paraphrased slightly), and it’s obvious, by that time, that the filmmaker sees the antagonists in this struggle as merely the flipsides of the same coin. Both believe themselves the persecuted and have a weight of history to back up their assertions. Sometimes I feel like the U.S. (especially in its current governmental incarnation) is too young to truly grasp the implications of its actions, but what Avenge But One of My Two Eyes suggests is that the weight of too much history can paralyze the present and dash the future.

Definitely catch this one at the NYFF or other regional festivals—my guess is that the tone, structure, and controversial theses will keep this from widespread distribution.

Labor Day weekend is finally upon us. Who's going out with a garbage binge before getting serious for the Fall awards rush?

I think I might head for March of the Penguins....

Privileged to catch a screening of Bennet Miller's Capote the other night. I cannot remember the last time I was so disconcertingly enthralled, so self-consciously immersed in a film. I might not've made the trip uptown were it not for the recent announcement of the New York Film Festival lineup which includes the work. Philip Seymour Hoffman—storied indie lovable, perennially undervalued, underused, blah, blah, blah—plays the title role.

I am not an avid reader of Truman Capote's work, nor am I a student of literary history. Until that night, mention of In Cold Blood —title of the work around which the film revolves and the last book the author finished—elicited only vague renderings of literary criticism half-read. Bennett—first-time feature director (not-so-hot off the heels of the Timothy "Speed" Levitch doc The Cruise —if that isn't a shot out of left field�) has managed an acute, austere portrait of utter and harrowing poignancy. I hesitate to call anything poignant and hope not to for a very long time after this, but fuck it, I'm blogging.

The film, were it less than the success it is, could remain aloft through academy season solely on the power of its players alone. Catherine Keener, Chris Cooper, and Clifton Collins Jr. as inmate Perry Smith give performances worthy of any accolades that come their way. And Hoffman, ripe as he is for the perfect vehicle, has outdone himself. To my knowledge, that�s about as high a compliment as I could give. But to anyone reading this, praising Philip Seymour Hoffman for his acting chops is a waste of words.

Capote manages biopic with only a few years of a life; it felt like the finest qualities of exacting portraiture were recalled here. In comparison, Scorsese's fly guy seems bathed in fat and excess; somehow unwound on film. Bennett carves a small, harrowing monument to the artist as outsider through examination of Capote's process as he researches and writes about a pair of murderers and their oft-delayed but ultimately inexorable slide into the hands of capital punishment—the subject of Capote's "nonfiction novel." Hoffman, as the dandy, the drunkard, the journalist and eventual friend to one of the killers, crafts one of the most memorable of all beloved and doomed artists to grace silver screens in recent history.

I guess I'm moved enough to write this because I've no interest in the biopic as mere biography, loaded as that statement may seem. Call me some kind of romantic, borne of the Kane ethos. But this is great stuff. The potential, as they say.

This is also my goodbye to a summer of delightful treats that did just fine by me, and my hello to the best thing about the start of the fall: The New York Film Festival and some real heavy hitters.

Catch this one.

Loathe as I am to draw attention from my colleague robbiefreeling’s eloquent assessment of the imagistic impact of the horrors left in Katrina’s wake (please do read it below), tonight is the night we’d planned on launching a new, recurring column on the Reverse Blog that’s been long in the planning stages. Like most “real” film critics (I suppose we’re not quite real inasmuch as the majority of us derive our income from sources other than writing) many Reverse Shotters regularly attend that ubiquitous ritual of film criticism: the press screening, which allows us the chance to see new movies well before the general public. Given that, and Reverse Shot’s semi-quarterly nature, most articles dealing with recent releases featured there are the result of weeks, if not months in some cases, of thought and careful consideration of the work in question, not infrequently buttressed by a repeat viewing or two.

We like to think this perspective allows a more consistently considered response than the perilous task of reviewing weekly, and this may well be true, but on the flipside, since we’ve often taken time out to decry the ossification of opinion regularly found in the aftermath of a single shot afforded to wrangle with a movie, we thought we’d take further stabs at expanding, not so much the way we think about movies, but the situations in which we allow ourselves to write about them.

Thus we introduce “Sneak Previews,” a new section built around brief snapshots of immediate reactions to upcoming films, hopefully taken as soon after initially screened as possible and followed later by a more rigorous analysis on the main Reverse Shot site. As befitting our original conception of the blog (which we may, admittedly, have strayed from somewhat), entries should be diaristic, informal, and perhaps largely freeform. Ideally, this first piece of writing and the later article should enter into dialogue, illuminating the progressions and regressions of a particular writer’s thought process, and maybe, more practically, help give our readers some advance indication of upcoming films we find worthwhile.

Reverse Shot was started, and is maintained, by a groups of folks who believe that there are a host of different ways to write about film, many of which are often excluded from more traditional review/feature-based publications, regardless of their validity. (So, even though I did criticize the content of the NY Times’ Cannes blog, in retrospect, I admit I’m finding it more a work-in-progress worth pursuing.) Here’s our shot at trying to give one of them a little more ink.

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I caught Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times a little over a week ago, so I’ve had a little time with it, but I think it’s still fresh enough to fit the “Sneak Previews” bill. Seeing it only short time after 2046, and given the lovely swoon and 60s pop of its first chapter, I’d be tempted to think of this as something like Hou’s stab at Wong Kar-wai if not for the fact that it’s utterly, inimitably Hou, and feels almost like a summation given that so many of its tropes remind me of his earlier features.

Entitling each of his three sections “A Time for ________,” brings to mind A Time to Live and a Time to Die which I watched with a Taiwanese friend whose comment “I liked that they started out speaking Chinese, but as the characters went on they ended speaking Taiwanese” completely exploded my reading of the film, and helped explain more to me about Taiwanese history in a few words than years of news articles with two-sentence boilerplates on Taiwan 1940-present.

The first section, “A Time for Love” set in the 1960s, feels more than a bit like Dust in the Wind, only this time the star-crossed lovers end with a bit of happiness, if only for a moment. Containing the film’s most romantic shot—near unbelievably, of a railway timetable—it’s the section that most leaves the impression of Wong, but probably more due to it’s setting and music than anything else. And I don’t know if Wong would have the patience to create the opening shot, a true epic that follows Chang Chen as he plays snooker while Shu Qi watches.

Section two, “A Time for Freedom,” relocates to a brothel in 1911. Shu Qi re-appears as a courtesan frequently visited by Chang Chen’s young, liberal intellectual. The fades that end each shot recall the tactics of Flowers of Shanghai (one of my all-time ten best depending on the day), but Hou takes things even farther in his calculatedly half-assed attempt at duplicating silent film. So, we have intertitles, no dialogue, and a lush piano score, shot in color at normal speed with elaborately controlled camera movements, and potentially natural lighting. Terrific and ingenious without ever being clever.

“A Time for Youth” from 2005 closes, and hearkens back to the e-lectricity of Millennium Mambo. Shu’s now an epileptic who fronts a rock band, and Chang is a photographer with whom she’s having an affair. Their respective lovers have more of a role here and this smartly assists in connecting them to the peripheral played in the earlier segments. I’d call it the bleakest in outlook, if it didn’t suggest that in all this heartbreak and wanderlust there’s something essential, and necessary if it’s truly to be called a time for youth.

As an overall formal project Three Timescomes closest to Good Men, Good Women’s palimpsest nature. But somehow, in separating out his various strands and binding them through the use of the same actors creates a different kind of temporality—perhaps less forced, and certainly more legible. It’s the kind of thing that Todd Solondz might have made out of Palindromes with intelligence and some sense of scope. Just like The Fall, Hou’s vision of love and lovers is “Always the same, always different.” That he manages to trace more than a little of the history of Taiwan around the edges (maybe I’ll see this again and find that the whole point, but for now I’ll luxuriate in his romances) is just one more reason to love it.

Haven't had much enthusiasm for writing on any film in particular this week (even after recently seeing the astonishing new Michael Haneke and Neil Jordan films), as the only images that have burrowed their way into my brain with any lasting effect have been those videos hailing from New Orleans. Yes, the devastation is unimaginable, the portraits of desperation stinging and sobering, the thought that my roommate and close friend's family home is buried under all that death-contaminated water in the St. Bernard Parish is unimaginable.

Yet most distressing of all about the images on the nightly news, even more than that the rescue efforts seem to be doing only so much, leaving the citizens stranded in overgrowing, unwashed piles with overflowing toilets in the Superdome, is the unspoken class divide. New Orleans is a great percentage African-American, yet it seems as though almost everyone left behind is black. This picture is painting a thousand words: here are those who couldn't afford quick transportation out of the city to stay in family members' abodes elsewhere, who have been living below poverty level and are now left to scurry around their fallen city like rats on the hull of a sinking ship. I can think of no imagery in my lifetime that so naturally provides swift and ample evidence of the social indignities inherent in our American way of life, now exploding to the forefront due to natural intervention. Newspaper articles have been largely color blind, but the images cannot lie.