We were as stunned as everybody else to find out that Matt Zoller Seitz's wife has passed away this weekend at the absurdly young age of 35. The shock to the movie blogosphere has been palpable...just check out the amount of responses and condolences over at Matt's wonderful blog, THe House Next Door. Just as sad times make one realize the number of friends they have, the inspiring response shown by the online film world makes one notice what a community this is; locked together in endeavor and passion but also in emotional solidarity.

Some who read Reverseblog may know that we have lobbed one or two glass-house shattering stones Matt's way over the past year. However, you might not know that in doing so, thanks to Matt's good will, we have fostered a friendship with him. We wouldn't engage with or criticize acontemporary that we didn't truly respect; and Matt is a critical force to be reckoned with, one of the more truth-seeking film critics working today. Just this week, Seitz has again moved away from the flock, publishing directly prior to his own tragedy, a no-bullshit account of Paul Greengrass's flavor-of-the-month :

"United 93 is dismaying precisely because it is so outwardly safe and neutral in its politics and so discreetly circumscribed in its timeline (about two hours of real time). It is the Oscar-baiting blockbuster as blunt instrument, as cleanly designed as a claw hammer. Its emotional force is a blow to the skull that temporarily makes you forget any present-tense opinion you might harbor about the political and moral state of America and the post-9/11 world."

It's writing like this that keeps Matt as one of the most vital voices in film criticism today, which has been proven time and again by his eloquent defenses of The New World and Spielberg. Even when we disagree, Matt makes us see things from a completely different perspective. Elegantly straight-forward. Intimidatingly no-nonsense. And a hell of a nice guy. We hope that Seitz's voice--in the New York Press as well as the Star Ledger, and his hugely successful journey into the blog world-- is here to stay. He has our admiration as much as, this sad day, he has our sympathy.

But for now, all we can do is say that at Reverse Shot, our prayers and thoughts are with him.

Hooray!

Vomit!

A big thank you and a fuck you to Tartan Films today. Thank you for bringing to general art-house audiences Cristi Puiu’s compelling, devastating, unforgettable The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Fuck you for being a Park Chanwook enabler, however, dumping his utterly distasteful steaming pile of drek Lady Vengeance, on the same day, and possibly stealing Puiu’s thunder. One gnaws, with fury and awe, at the everyday fabric of life as it’s just about to be ripped away; the other settles for lies, platitudes, clichés, facile notions of the “shades between good and evil, right and wrong.” With The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Puiu emerges as a bold new voice in international cinema, while Park finally exposes himself as nothing more than the Korean David Fincher, stuffing the mouths of his slack-jawed audiences with gobs of what they think they want. Yet Park’s cinema isn’t simply just empty flash…like Fincher’s ornate nihilsm, it’s propped up with bombastic self-importance and turgid social “commentary.”

Doubtless, Lady Vengeance’s florid narrative ingenuity is stunning to behold (the script folds and layers back on itself like ribbon candy), yet when it finally reveals its intentions (involving some of the most exploitative violence against children I’ve ever seen in a film), only the most amoral, cynical, desensitized viewer won’t protest at the sheer hypocrisy. Run screaming from the theater…and into Lazarescu, which, rather than take the fanboy approach to the “consequences of death” (Park’s two hours of mindless mayhem followed by a single disingenuous tear—meant to make us leave the theater in contemplation—is fatuous enough to make Kill Bill Volume Two look like King Lear), looks at the final hours of a solitary man’s life as a web of societal delusions, bureaucracies, and sheerly absurd trials. In many ways, it’s a vision of hell, a descent into disconnection and, finally, possibly, grace. In other words, Puiu has a vision. Park simply has found a trend.

SIDE NOTE:
Dear Tartan Films:

I know it’s difficult to find a way to market a film such as The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and hats off to you for even trying. But your trailer, which astonishingly transforms this languidly paced descent into blackness as a wacky Eastern European comedy, is both one of the most misleading and most condescending marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen. This ”Shining”-level near parody of a trailer turns the sad old man’s final hours into a bumbling series of kooky hospital encounters, adorable kitty cat reaction shots, and (!) pratfalls, all backed by Emir Kusturica-worthy circus music. To be fair, there is a delicately absurdist strain in the film, yet a head-slapping, belching farce this most definitely is not. Treat the film with the respect it deserves. Ugly.

With all the great films opening in New York this weekend, the last thing one needs is yet another recommendation, but I wanted to take a second to put in a good word for a lovely, quiet, and poetic American Indie that's getting a week at the Anthology film archives starting today: Police Beat. Certainly I couldn't argue that its as accomplished as Three Times, and it doesn't come bearing the profile of the new Assayas, or Mr. Lazarescu--it's a whiff of a little movie, and intentionally so, and ends up all the more striking for its overall restraint. Built around the interior monologue of a Senegalese bike cop working in Seattle, the film paints a terrific picture of lovesickness, and the kind of enveloping obsession it can engender. By all means, see the three aforementioned films, but if you can, try and make it over to Anthology as well.

PARTY PICS!!! Reverse Shot Presents at Makor!

Reverse Shot Presents is still going strong until this Sunday, 4/30. For the remaining schedule and tickets click here.

RS writers and supervillains

Dawn of the Dead and Devil's Rejects's Ken Foree in the middle.

Foree is impressed with Danielle's razor-sharp flesh-tearing incisors

Reverse Shot - the Red Period

Landesman and Hynes reminisce about breadlines

Silver spurs!

"When I first saw this movie, my arm was in a sling..."

Junebug director Phil Morrison (r) yakkin' it up with Michael Koresky.

ALL PHOTOS BY David LaSpina

“Art snobs” and “pandering hipsters” unite! The latest incarnation of our sloberring mediocrity and displaced sense of moral and aesthetic appreciation opens today at the IFC Center in New York, and hopefully, in a lot of other places. Don’t listen to idiocy like this, with its condescending cast-off phrases with nothing to back them up but the same old fogey whipper-snapper argument. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times is one of the most dazzling, and, yes, Armond, morally acute films to actually get a release in this country for quite some time. Critics, including Hoberman, have made two major mistakes in their myopic reviews thus far:

a) They assume that everyone has seen every Hou film, and therefore, this one can be tossed off with a limpid wave of the arm. “Been there, done that.” Truth is, regardless what you think of the film’s ultimate success, that’s an uninsightful, and fucking cowardly move. It’s the second Hou film with distribution of any kind in the U.S., so to call it “minor Hou” or “middling Hou” doesn’t just do a disservice to the genius of the filmmaker, and those viewers out there who might by chance take in a screening, it also gives the critics carte blanche to not dig too deeply into what Hou might actually be saying here.

b) They have treated each of the film’s three “times” as discrete and self-contained, as opposed to actually looking at how each one, and its sociopolitical era, might be informing the next. The final, seemingly most derided segment, as divorced as it is from the Wong Kar-wai-esque pop platitudes of the first chapter, is perhaps the most radical, and most layered, a sidelong glance at a love affair that, though it exists at a time when we feel “free” to pursue who we want romantically, remains as constricted by moral and social codes as, say, 1966 and 1911. Instead, ants-in-their-pants critics, getting their movie-boners awaiting that upcoming United 93 screening, have chosen to focus on the easiest aspects: technological dissociation, etc. But it’s about so much more.

I urge everyone to go and see this remarkable work of art. Reverse Shot will continue championing it, as we already have for months. When a Hou film hits screens, you drop everything and go. No questions asked. If you risk being called a hipster (whatever the fuck that really means), then it’s a tough burden you’ll have to carry.

An Interview by Kristi MItsuda


I discovered Nicole Holofcener late one night while channel surfing, fortuitously landing on her first feature, Walking and Talking, just as the opening credits rolled. Initially looking only to be mildly amused on this particular lazy, lonely night, as it concluded—on one of the most perfectly simple and lovely of final shots—it was with a sense of revelation that I realized what I had just beheld: female characters untainted by affected indie quirk and light years away from the poised and pore-less goddesses of mainstream cinema. Portraying women not as archetypes but as alternately endearing and irritating as people you’d know in real life, neither did her exploration of female friendship bear any resemblance to the current insultingly glib crop (i.e., Moonlight and Valentino, Waiting to Exhale . . .).

Her detailed description of the painful but inevitable evolution of a close friendship in the face of an intersecting romantic one gets to the center of inelegant emotions most of us would rather relegate to the back recesses of our minds than bring to consciousness. She would go even further in eloquently confronting messy truths with Lovely and Amazing, incisively targeting those issues stemming from female body image and self-esteem. With her latest, Friends with Money, the writer-director explores yet another pervasive yet untouched theme (the title says it all) through gloriously inhabited and individuated characters. Though her work has generated numerous positive notices (listening closely to the critical kudos, you can often hear the damning of faint praise which puts her up just a couple of notches above the “chick flick”), to my mind, she isn’t sufficiently appreciated: One of the few directors to portray women as live human beings, to allow us insecurities and hang-ups, not to mention greasy hair, sweat pants, and wrinkles, Holofcener is utterly unique within modern American cinema. Now if only we could get her to shorten the interminably long gap between films. . .

Reverse Shot: It’s been about ten years since Walking and Talking, and about five since Lovely and Amazing. Why such a long wait between films?

Nicole Holofcener: It takes me a long time to figure out what I want to do next. It’s not that I’ve been pounding the pavement or trying to get work and can’t. I work directing TV shows and doing rewrite jobs, and I sort of just wait until the right idea comes and then write it. And actually, this time it didn’t take that long to get it off the ground. Directing is hard; I only wanna do it if it’s something I really believe in and love.

RS: You mentioned television shows, and a lot of the ones you’ve directed have been personal favorites, like “Sex and the City” and “Six Feet Under.” How much of an adjustment is it for you to go from being the creative originator of a project to being beholden to somebody else’s vision?

David Thomson once wrote, “Movement on a TV set is like a fish moving across a tank, whereas movement on a real screen is that of a great fish passing us in the water.” It may seem a rather blatant defense of cinema as it’s “meant to be seen,” but watching Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven this week on the (relatively) big screen at New York’s Film Forum evoked Thomson’s quote quite literally. There comes a moment late in the film, much lauded, in which Richard Gere drops a wine glass into the river; Malick cuts away in one of his many ruminative gestures of natural contemplation to a magnificent close-up of the glass lying delicately, deep down, on the river’s bed. Seaweed sparkles and floats ethereally all around it. And yes, a fish moves across…no, a great fish passes us in the water.

Coming so soon after the triumph of The New World, Days of Heaven, gloriously large and baffling as ever, is a welcome sight in theaters. A reissue of an important film is never merely just another chance to see a favorite; rather it’s a chance to let your age, maturity, and consideration play catch-up. Whatever misgivings I have had in the past about the film, while perhaps not eradicated, were put into a proper context, both in an auteurist and emotional way. The narrative ellipses and forthright disengagement that once so troubled me now seemed like calculated strengths: that I didn’t feel a connection to the central melodrama seemed less important than the intensity that it nevertheless manages to convey. Yet what’s most spectacular is the sense of discovery that the film is able to maintain from first frame to last, that the magic-hour landscape will always stand in unforgiving opposition to the foibles of those who inhabit it; thus destruction may always be right around the corner. On video, it never seemed clear to me (though that probably has more to do with my viewing habits that the limitations of a smaller screen width), that Days of Heaven a surpassingly frightening film; in which beauty surrounds us but cannot save us.

So, we hear there's some other New York-based film festival kicking off shortly but who needs 'em with Reverse Shot Presents at Makor running 4/22-30?

Especially given that we're bringing in this man:

tomorrow night to discuss his work in The Devil's Rejects, Dawn of the Dead, and many other horror classics.

Also, Phil Morrison of Junebug (RS Top Ten 2005) fame stops in on Tuesday 4/25 to chat about his feature debut and Kent Jones will grace us with his presence on 4/27 to provide introductory notes to Claire Denis's awesome L'Intrus (also RS Top Ten 2005). 4/30 sees the first New York screening of the acclaimed epic documentary A Lion in the House, and we're showing Hou Hsiao-hsien, Rodrigo Garcia, Neil Jordan--what more does one need?

For the full schedule and tickets click here.

There's big, exciting stuff afoot at Reverse Shot, and this series is just the tip of the iceberg, so please stay tuned...

I’m not sure if Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud will ever get distribution in this country, but since bootlegs of everything save the missing footage of The Magnificent Ambersons seems to be readily available all over the web and choice streets in downtown Manhattan, I will still put forth my two cents. It’s no revelation that at Reverse Shot, we’re big fans of Tsai Ming-liang, so whenever one of his films makes its way to New York, we consider it a pilgrimage. Thanks to the Village Voice’s Best of 2005 film fest, Cloud had a cozy little day-long run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. If you were to wander in to Wayward Cloud as your first Tsai film, you might think he’s simply another ASIAN EXTREEEEME cinema provocateur, mixing the studied pacing of Hou with the gross-out extravagance of Takashi Miike, and then perhaps a touch of Jacques Demy thrown in for good measure. Then again, if you’ve seen every Tsai film other than The Wayward Cloud, then what you just read sound like the words of a nincompoop. True, the new film has elements of The Hole (water shortage in Taipei), Vive L’amour (watermelon bowling here becomes watermelon balling…), and What Time Is It There (there are hints that the two principal characters are the same as those from that earlier masterwork), yet it still pushes Tsai into new realms of both visual flourish and slapdash experimentation. The Wayward Cloud feels like Tsai’s least perfect film…and also his boldest.

With his trademark precise, static, yet inexplicably energizing mise-en-scene, Tsai unfolds Wayward through an otherworldly, almost dreamlike logic. The opening sequences, of Lee Kang-sheng finger-fucking a halved watermelon compressed between a naked woman’s legs, its juices splashing all over the bed in merciless red puddles, prepare the audience for a queasy trip, and Tsai doesn’t disappoint. Tsai has said that he intended to make a film that was very explicitly about pornography, and the porn industry in Taiwan: Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai’s stoic eternal muse, therefore plays a porn actor this time, living in the same building as Chen Shiang-chyi ‘s introvert. The film flirts with a delicate romantic comedy structure: we kind of hope these lost souls will find each other, and Tsai even ups the ante by homaging, of all things, Annie Hall, when the two deal with a case of runaway crabs in the kitchen. Interspersed with the nasty sex, masturbation, and watermelon engorging (water is short yet melons are apparently bountiful), are a series of increasingly absurd lip-synched musical sequences, the first involving Lee Kang-sheng transforming into a melancholy mer-man caterwauling at the moon; the final outfitting Lee with with a huge penis hat. Obviously, it’s hit or miss, but how can this balls-to-the-wall stuff work any other way?

The balance of the gorgeous and the grotesque is best expressed when Yi Ching-Lu, another Tsai mainstay, gets splooge sprayed across her face by Lee (who, ickily, usually plays her son in Tsai’s previous films). Suddenly, we cut to her musical mindscape, a sultry, evocatively lit Kander & Ebb-esque Spider Woman number, entrancingly set in a garage; following her is a cobwebby bunch of male dancers in black unitards, leashed and under her spell. German expressionist, Fosse-esque…whatever you want to call it, it’s a dazzler and a creative apex for Tsai.

If the method to all this madness seems a little hard to decipher, then the final twenty minutes are a terrifying crystallization. The mild courting between Lee and Chen finally intersects with the pervasive sexual exploitation going on upstairs. Yet Tsai’s final, truly shocking images are not bolstered by casual moralizing; rather, we realize we’ve been watching the literal deterioration of a civilization. Nearly dystopic in its portrait of decline, Wayward Cloud shows Tsai giving up a little restraint. It may be slightly out of control, but the mess suits Tsai well.

While watching James Marsh’s forthcoming The King, I felt a stinging familiarity, if not in direct narrative, then in tone and milieu, a naggingly common sense of self-importance mixed with a ponderous regionalism. A Grand Guignol incest and murder melodrama directed with a delicacy that’s just pompus in its inability to cite its own overheated goofiness. But, no, this is the stuff of Faulkner, Marsh seems to tell us with every hush and whisper. Thus, I wasn’t surprised to learn, after watching it, that it was co-written by none other than Milo Addica, who’s increasingly becoming, dare I say, prime suspect number one in the denigration of modern movie drama into a series of pompous literary or religious references and totems.

Co-writer of (excuse me while I swallow back my own vomit) Monster’s Ball, and (chuckle) Birth, Addica now puts forth The King, which presents Gael Garcia Bernal, sporting, I think, an American accent, as an intense young ex-Navy recruit who, atfer discharge, tracks down his father (William Hurt), an evangelist preacher in Corpus Christi who had discarded him years before. Of course, this being a Southern Gothic that means to dissect religious hypocrisy by regurgitating Christian iconography for its own twisted insight, Bernal’s character, named Elvis, is not a human being, but an insidious representation of all the snarling rage that his father has repressed. Hurt’s new family, well played by Laura Harring, Pell James, and Paul Dano, are the ones who pay for Hurt’s past transgressions, and Bernal, basically a manifestation of a long-ago abortion, doesn’t react, act, or behave as much as act out metaphor as the script sees fit. Despite its twists and turns, it’s all very mechanical and laborious.

In fact, one look at Addica’s oeuvre thus far clues you in to his rather shallow literary conceits: Monster’s Ball was a pathetic racist juvenilia in the guise of a “progressive” race relations drama, like something Paul Haggis would come up with after reading Carson McCullers; that Kubrick cumshot Birth is one of the decade’s most risible art-house bamboozles thus far, a blank slate onto which one can project any number of hypotheses about “faith” and “reality” but actually might be about…well, nothing whatsoever; The King at least doesn’t settle for easy ambiguity, but it suffocates in its own self-consciously literary aspirations. It’s the kind of film that serious actors sign up for because of the meaty dramatics they get to act out, and the dearth of anything coming from the studios that isn’t geared at the tween set. Yet the content in The King might as well come out of a teen fiction, with an illustration of tall grass and/or a heart-shaped locket on the cover.

Just a gentle reminder that the second annual Reverse Shot Presents at Makor is right around the corner. Tickets are available now through Makor's website and a few programs are close to capacity already. Full schedule for those that missed it the first time:

APRIL 22 – 30

Reverse Shot Presents…at Makor
Tickets + Information:
www.makor.org | 212.601.1000
Makor box office @ 35 W. 67th St.

SCHEDULE AT-A-GLANCE

A ROB ZOMBIE DOUBLE FEATURE
POST-SCREENING DISCUSSION WITH ACTOR KEN FOREE
Sat Apr 22 / 8 PM / $20 (includes discussion)
HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES (2003) / THE DEVIL’S REJECTS (2005)
Heavy metal rocker turned genre auteur Rob Zombie has become America’s most skilled neo-exploitation filmmaker. With tongue firmly in cheek, Zombie offers this gruesome twosome: a diabolical avant-haunted-house-slasher flick and an unexpectedly gonzo, Peckinpah-ish vengeance western, featuring the same characters in two very different American film genres. Bring a strong stomach and an open mind and settle in for a night of magnificent mayhem.

Following the film is a discussion with actor Ken Foree, who portrays Charlie Altamont in THE DEVIL'S REJECTS. Ever since his breakout leading role as Peter Washington in George A. Romero’s indelible Dawn of the Dead, Foree has been something of a cult phenomenon. His subsequent appearances in Romero’s Knightriders and Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond, have solidified him as a veritable horror movie icon.

[Director: Rob Zombie. Runtimes: 88 min + 109 min. HORROR]

Mon Apr 24 / 7:30PM / $9
NINE LIVES (2005)
In nine precise and rhythmic sliver-of-life segments, Rodrigo García, with the lyrical power of a short fiction writer, tells the stories of nine interconnected women, played dazzlingly by an all star cast including Sissy Spacek, Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, and a brilliant Robin Wright Penn. Garcia renders each woman as if she were the most interesting individual to ever walk the earth. These women are breathtaking, lived-in, flawed; in other words, exhilaratingly human.

[Director: Rodrigo Garcia. Runtime: 115 min. DRAMA]

Tue Apr 25 / 7:30 PM / $15 (includes Q&A)
JUNEBUG (2005)
A moving tribute to family in all its idiosyncrasies and a pitch-perfect evocation of Southern customs, Phil Morrison’s JUNEBUG was the great American film debut of 2005. When Madeleine, a sophisticated art gallery owner (Embeth Davidtz), travels to the South to meet her new husband’s family, it becomes much more than a fish-out-of-water tale. Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nominee Amy Adams is a standout as Madeleine’s pregnant sister.
Features Q&A with director Phil Morrison following the screening.

[Director: Phil Morrison. Runtime: 107 min. DRAMA]

Wed Apr 26 / 7:30 PM / $9
MILLENNIUM MAMBO (2001)
Still underscreened and underappreciated in his body of work, MILLENNIUM MAMBO is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s daring 21st-century update of the pleasure culture examined in his masterwork Flowers of Shanghai. Powered by a gurgling techno beat and a luminescent performance by Shu Qi - whose glow far outshines the masses of red, blue and green neons surrounding her - MILLENNIUM MAMBO is arguably the filmmaker’s most lushly romantic film. See it on the big screen where it belongs.

[Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien. Runtime: 119 min. DRAMA]

Thu Apr 27/ 7:30 PM / $9
THE INTRUDER (2005) (intro by Kent Jones)
In adapting Jean-Louis Nancy's autobiographical text about his own heart transplant, the great French director Claire Denis has crafted a film of crystalline beauty and startling ambition. The story - about an aged soldier of fortune (Michel Subor) journeying from Jura to Pusan to Tahiti in an elaborate gesture of reconciliation towards his estranged son - is related to us as a waking dream. Elliptical, gorgeous, and unforgettable.

The film will be introduced by Kent Jones, editor at large of Film Comment, Associate Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and a member of the New York Film Festival selection committee.

[Director: Claire Denis. Runtime: 130 min. DRAMA]

A NEIL JORDAN DOUBLE FEATURE
Sat Apr 29 / 8 PM / $15
BREAKFAST ON PLUTO (2005) / THE BUTCHER BOY (1997)
Neil Jordan’s collaborations with Irish novelist Patrick McCabe resulted in two of his richest works. BREAKFAST ON PLUTO is a candy-colored Dickensian picaresque about a boy named Patrick “Kitten” Brady, who should have been born a girl. THE BUTCHER BOY is a darker yet rocket-paced surrealist narrative about Francie Brady, a deeply troubled preteen growing up amid terrible social and parental circumstances. These films show the triumphs and tragedies of forthright individualism.

[Director: Neil Jordan. Runtimes: 135 min and 109 min. DRAMAS]

PREMIERE
Sun Apr 30 / 5:30 PM / $9
A LION IN THE HOUSE (2006)
Offering a sense of scope comparable to Hoop Dreams, A LION IN THE HOUSE is an unforgettable journey that offers an unprecedented look at struggles of five young people and their families over a six-year period. Award-winning filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert bring audiences face to face with the uncertainty of the entire cancer experience and its rippling effects on family, community and professional caregivers. At the core of A Lion in the House is the resilience, courage and wisdom of five extraordinary young people. Features a post-screening discussion with guest speakers TBA.

[Directors: Steven Bognar + Julia Reichert. Runtime: 225 min. DOCUMENTARY]

Tickets + Information:
www.makor.org | 212.601.1000
Makor box office @ 35 W. 67th St.

Further to the previous post, my source received this in the e-mail last night:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Stephen *********
Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2006 9:15 PM
To: Neal Block
Subject: RE: Worlds Fastest Indian "With My Address"

Neal, Hi I'll agree with one catch. If I get grossed out and can't continue to watch it, I will write you back and tell you why. My wife said she would like to see it but didn't want to go without me. I have nothing against gay people I just do not want to see that sort of thing if you know what I mean. I am sure my wife will tell you what she thinks of it. I am sure I will not be able to live this down, But I keep my word.

Also thank you for the info on "The Fastest Indian" I will go and see it.

I am not sure what happened to this e-mail I sent it weeks ago. I was having DSL problems maybe that's why.

Steve ******

*****,Ohio

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Word is that a DVD of Brokeback will be winging its way to Stevo shortly. Score one for independent film.

Below, find some real correspondence with an honest-to-goodness filmgoer in Akron which has leaked to the Reverse Blog. Names have been changed to protect the innocent:

________________________________________
From: Stephen ******]
Sent: Monday, April 10, 2006 8:45 PM
To: booking
Cc: publicity
Subject: Worlds Fastest Indian

Hi I have been waiting to see this movie since I’ve seen then add for it on TV . What is the deal, will it be shown in the Akron ,Ohio Area? I check the on line theaters and not one within 15miles or more is showing this movie. I have even called theaters. They tell me it is a limited release what is that? Everyone is showing the Gay cowboy movie which I would not go to see if you paid me. It looks good to me from what I can see of it. If it is not going to be shown in this area why is it on TV? IF it will not be in this area, I will stop looking for it. Please advise if you would.

Thanks

Stephen G. ******

________________________________________
From: Neal Block
Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2006 6:08 PM
To: Stephen *****
Cc: Publicity, Booking
Subject: RE: Worlds Fastest Indian

Hi Stephen,

You wouldn’t see BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN if someone paid you? What if Magnolia Pictures sent you a free DVD? Would you watch it and write us back what you thought of it if we sent it to you totally for free? We’ll even tape a one dollar bill onto the case, so we actually would be paying you to see the movie. Let us know.

Also, THE WORLD’S FASTEST INDIAN is playing RIGHT NOW at the Regal Montrose 12 in Akron.

Best,
Neal Block

Mark, just show my fucking movie..."

Ok, so this isn't another post about the Caveh/Cuban debate. And that isn't Zahedi wrapped in bandages in the photo. It is, however, Tatsuya Nakudai starring in Hiroshi Teshigahara's terrific The Face of Another which is now screening on a beautiful new print as part of a mini-retro put together by the fine folks at Criterion. Currently touring with planned stops in Huntington, Vancouver, and Pittsburgh in the Spring, and more to come for the Summer, the retro also showcases his first feeature Pitfall, his most well-known film Woman in the Dunes, and his unique documentary Antonio Gaudí. It's a small series, but with Teshigahara's limited output (he took a lengthy break throughout the 80s to devote himself to flower arrangement), it’s only a few features and shorts shy of complete. And given that all three of the fiction features are based on the writings of Kobo Abe and all four films are augmented by Tôru Takemitsu scores, it’s a terrific opportunity to witness an evolving collaboration.

By all means, if you can only see one film, try Woman in the Dunes. Universally lauded with good reason, Teshigahara’s second adaptation of Abe marks perhaps the highpoint of accessibility for both artists. The allegory of humankind built around an amateur entomologist who becomes trapped at the bottom of a sandpit with a lonely widow may seem stale 40 years on, but what’s truly miraculous is how Teshigahara navigates the close confines of the sandpit, always finding new angles through which to view his intricate pas de deux. It’s claustrophobic, but somehow never limited.

Pitfall, based on a satirical Abe short story shows Teshigahara’s sensibility firmly established from the start even if his command of the same may not be fully in place—it's tonally off from time to time, and his narrative ellipses aren't quite perfectly pitched. But it’s The Face of Another, built around Nakudai’s sensational performance (it may be one of the best to see screens this year) that is the true find. Questions of identity and morality swirl as Nakudai’s horribly disfigured character assumes a lifelike mask and sets out to re-enter society and seduce his wife. Woman, Pitfall and Face all feature moments of startling, visceral carnality that are as crucial to defining Teshigahara’s cinema as his paranoid worldview that seems often unbound by typical cinematic rules and restraints—spaces and identities constantly shatter, and its always at question whether its his characters who are caught in all the allegorical questioning, or his audience. These movies are even more bizarre than most Imamura (that’s saying a lot) and approach the heights of narrative schizophrenia established by Oshima (perhaps saying even more).

The odd duck of the series, Antonio Gaudí, is, as its title would suggest a work about the architect. But instead of presenting a standard biopic, Teshigahara plows through the fantastic shapes and spaces of Gaudí’s buildings, which are like nothing on Earth, while Takemitsu’s score plinks away in the background. I’ll admit that I haven’t seen it in nearly 4 years, so can’t quite remember it fully, but I do know that I caught it after an early morning matinee of Tarsem’s The Cell (starring J-lo) and it shouldn’t be hard to guess which one was the more mind-expanding.

If this isn't on the schedule at your local rep house, lobby for it.

How does this relate to our humble little film blog, you ask?

Well, the article holds the seeds of hope that we might be able to go back one day and prevent this dire occurrence from happening:

I suppose we could also try and fix this Caveh Zahedi thing which I'm already tired of reading about. Though I guess people talking about release patterns is a hair more interesting than people talking about grosses.

The funny thing about The Sopranos: during the increasingly long breaks between seasons, it becomes all too easy to forget just how good it is (and it remains impossible, I suppose, to communicate the extent of its greatness to the uninitiated). Now that we're four episodes into the sixth and final season, it's fair to say that the show is as masterfully constructed and utterly unmissable as ever. The Sopranos has always been a richly detailed morality study, a meditation on the nature of good and evil, personal responsibility and collective guilt, that has easily transcended, while brilliantly sending up, its mobster genre trappings. This new season has used the unexpected near-death-experience of TS himself to clarify and deepen the issues at stake. Perched over Tony's hospital-room bedside is an index card containing an Ojibwe saying, "Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky." This sentiment encapsulates the central philosophical question that has so far dominated the season, namely: Who makes us who we are, and if we are made, in part, by our surroundings, are we responsible for the good and evil deeds that we commit? Carmela blames herself and her husband for making their children complicit in their evil at the same time that she accepts, for the first time, her own responsibility in leading the life she leads. Silvio steps into his role as boss, as his wife assures him, "The times make the man, not the other way around." A day later, he suffers a debilitating asthma attack, crippled by the pressure of his new power. Tony, meanwhile, imagines a life without his legacy of crime, a life in which he is literally forced to take responsibility for the negligence of a man he's never met. All the while, he wonders, "Who am I? Where am I going?" To say that these moral quandries, so subtly approached and so delicately unraveled, exceed the level of engagement we typically expect of American popular culture is an understatement. To say that the writing remains sharper, funnier, and more sophisticated than anything else on television is obvious. And to praise the acting (there are no words to describe the utter brilliance of Edie Falco and James Gandolfini) and the filmmaking (which in last night's episode, had me even comparing one cut to Mizoguchi in the way it moved through time and space) is easy. But someone needs to do it, because if you're missing this, you need someone to tell you immediately: catch up now, before it's too late.