Pedro Almodóvar's Volver will hit U.S. screens later this year on the crest of a wave of good will—what else is new? Every Cannes plaudit and Variety huzzah only reinforces Almodóvar's seeming dominance over foreign-film import. Once considered "spicy" and "outré," Almodóvar's films segued into somethiing more controlled, elegant, and accessible at the turn of the millennium with the lovely All About My Mother, though all of the baubles and fetishes were still firmly in place. HIs follow up, Talk to Her, was for me possibly his greatest film, an aesthetic and aural immersion into the psychoses played for laughs and shocks in his earlier films, now revealed as consequential. Talk to Her's focus on male grief and loneliness seemed a stunning departure; but this was only enhanced with the gay noir Bad Education, which emerged as one of the director's great conceptual sleights of hand, yet was somewhat done in by expectation: so utterly unified had Almodóvar's cinematography and music (Alberto Iglesias's scores have perhaps helped to usher in this new era of Almodóvar) become that we could only accept a masterpiece and nothing less. That Bad Education peaked halfway through, with its loopy constructed narratives within flashbacks, only to suffocate somewhat in a limp third act, perhaps helped in bringing Almodóvar down off of his pedestal. Long enough, at least, to enjoy Volver as the low-key pleasure that it is. Devoid of the previous three films' grandiose gestures, Volver moves along at a surprisingly leisurely clip—though if this same script had been made earlier in his career, it might have easily been played through with more full-throttle pizzazz. After all, this is a script prominently featuring wisecracking ghosts and bloody murder. Seemingly gone are the days when Almodóvar would end his films with a man embracing his dead tighty-whitied lover while the apartment erupts in flames around them (go and find the dazzling and very hot Law of Desire): here, he opts for a gradual, contemplative fade-out of an elderly woman mounting a staircase. Wonderfully accomplished, yet perhaps more conceptually sound than dramatically satisfying, Volver furthers its director's efforts to create universes in which strong, diverse communities of women can converge and create empathetic, nurturing utopias. It's admirable and touching, but perhaps a little long on exposition and a tad too pat narratively. Nevertheless, Volver will certainly invite a second viewing, as in my experience, all of Almodóvar's films only become more emotionally vibrant the more I see them.

My future's so bright...

Can someone please explain this length thing to me? Because now that I know, I'll be spending my Fourth of July weekend manning the BBQ, relaxing in the sun, visiting with loved ones, re-reading Gravity's Rainbow or doing a double of Click and Garfield instead.

Further, could someone please explain why Caryn James hasn't done some follow-up work to her uber-brilliant piece on Malick from last Winter where she deduced that all the big serious dramatic pictures of the season were overburdened with idiotic contrivances like plot and characters leaving them all 20 minutes too long? Is someone afraid of missing out on the next big Warner Brothers junket invite?

Thx. Best,

Clarence

P.S. I suppose if Bela Tarr had directed Superman Returns instead of Hackforce One, I'd probably shut up and buy a ticket...

Why Phyllis Diller? Because she’s cute, and because she remembers the first electric car. Sadly, most of us don’t even recall the recalled last electric car. Pushed aside, ignored, then finally rounded up and impounded, and seriously fucked out of our collective conscience, the electric car is getting a poignant, entertaining big-screen revival this week. Check out this week’s Reverse Shot round-up on indieWIRE, on Chris Paine’s Who Killed the Electric Car? for further information….and in case it makes you want to go out and buy one….well, you’re shit out of luck.

After repeated exposure to a cropped version of the above image during my subways waiting periods, the inevitable question arose: "What is Little Man about?" A visit to the official website would easily enough clear everything up, but I prefer to try to extrapolate from the poster.

What do we have to go on? A slightly befuddled Shawn Wayans, full-sized, carries Marlon Wayans, infant-proportioned, but with the face of a thirtysomething man, in one of those Park-Slope-dad-style slings. Further confusing matters: Marlon's forearm prominently bears (if memory serves, I can't make it out in this image) a USMC tattoo, and his baby bottle is wrapped in a brown paper bag, which generally implies a concealed alcoholic beverage.

So. What is Little Man about? I have the following theories:

A) Shawn and Marlon are top secret government agents, sent deep undercover to blow open some sort of drug smuggling ring/ money laundering ring/ terrorist sleeper cell/ child pornography production studio who're using a day care center as their front. In order to "get a man inside," new, space-age technology is employed to shrink regular-size Marlon into the pint-sized Marlon seen in the poster image. Shawn poses as his dad; a speedboat chase can hardly fail to ensue, as well as at least one scene of mortifying sexual grotesquerie.

B) Same as above on the government agents/ day care thing, except Shawn is a super-genius computer hacker born without a lower half. Through elaborate costuming and prosthetic puppetry, he is affixed, backpack-style, to a tough-as-nails ex-marine, played by Marlon; together, they form some kind of crazy-efficient Master-Blaster mega-agent. Ditto on the speedboat and sexual grotesquerie.

C) Marlon is just like a midget or something. LOLs aplenty there.

What's your guess? The best answer wins a date with a Reverse Shot staffer, followed by a screening of Little Man, cocktails at Jackie's Fifth Amendment, and sex (optional). Go to!

Reverse Shot staff writers have always been divided over Michael Winterbottom and his career trajectory: hard to pinpoint, yet to some easy to dismiss, while to others provocatively diverse. In fact, rarely has a director better exemplified the wide-ranging, plurality-of-voice ethos we strive for at Reverse Shot. From The Claim to In This World to 9 Songs to Tristram Shandy, recently mentioned in our Mid-Year 2006 2006 Round-Up, Winterbottom has certainly prvoked passionately differing responses. Check out our latest indieWIRE review, of The Road to Gunatanamo from RS staffers Nick Pinkerton, Kristi Mitsuda, and Lauren Kaminsky, in which the question Winterbottom (and in this case, his blurring of documentary and narrative modes) is wrestled with yet again.

Okay, Jared Hess, I let it go the first time. But, what’s the deal with you and Mexicans? Sympathetic yet cretinous, charming yet freakish…whichever, they certainly are fodder for your dumb-ass culturally superior chuckles. In the awful Napoleon Dynamite, Pedro and LaFawnduh (!) get the cheapest laughs, i.e., the locus of their characters’ hilarity relates solely to their cultural oddities, or “deficiencies,” rather….say what you want about Napoleon and his uncle, et al, being the butt of as many jokes, but Hess gives them their own humanist flavor and idiosyncrasies. Pedro, on the other hand, is funny because, well, his name is Pedro, and he looks all adorably illegal immigrant-ish. We won’t even touch LaFawnduh’s “bling.”

So, now, the Mormon who never met a south-of-the-border type he didn't find inherently hysterical has a movie called….Nacho Libre. Hopefully, the free pass many afforded to his big-time breakthrough won't apply to this sophomore slime. Jokes about garbanzo beans, perchance? As Ty Burr states in his Boston Globe review “He films the lumpy, cross-eyed Oaxacan peasants head on, like found objects at a roadside tourist stand, and he revels in the scrawny physique and jelly-lipped grin of Nacho's tag-team partner, Esqueleto (Hector Jimenez).” Next to this, Cheech Marin’s Born in East L.A. seems downright progressive…well, the poster at least, which is all I've ever seen. Up next for Hess: Speedy Gonzalez: the Movie.

AFI Cuts It Up
Thursday, June 16, 2021, 4:00 PM ET

Last night, the American Film Institute unveiled its 34th list, choosing the one-hundred greatest movies ever made featuring genital mutilation. Never ones to be picky, the members of the AFI deemed both male and female parts fair game when it unveiled its 300 nominees earlier in the year, only to be whittled down to a nubbly one-hundred winners by further voting by the society’s extensive membership of actors, directors, screenwriters, mohels, critics, historians, and others. The list was assembled for, and broadcast on, the three-hour CBS special, AFI'S 100 Years...100 Slices, which opened the voting, for the first time, to international films. Says AFI president and former convicted child molester Victor Salva (Powder, Jeepers Creepers), “We just didn’t want to limit ourselves to films from the U.S. this year…there have simply been so many fine, fine films made from other corners of the planet featuring penises and vaginas being cut and hacked, how could we ignore them?”

In a controversial choice, first place went to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo: or the 120 Days of Sodom, in a surprise upset over charming underdog The Piano Teacher by Michael Haneke, which finished a shocking twelfth. Haneke’s recent death by self-asphyxiation may have played a part in his poor showing. “It certainly didn’t win him any admirers!” chuckles voter Kirstie Alley. In a bold move, Ron Howard’s Lemon Party was a second place finisher, right ahead of Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses. Rounding out the top five were Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers and Barbet Schroeder’s Maitresse. “We really can’t believe we were even able to come up with one-hundred,” laughs Tom Hanks. “It really took some digging…and some soul-searching.” The ratings were poor for 100 Years, 100 Slices, as it was walloped in the Nielsens by FOX's Let’s Stare at a Red Dot and TV Land reruns of Joey. Last year’s 100 Years…100 Movies with Fat People in a Supporting Role averaged a slightly better 2.1 rating. Does this mean they’ll stop making these specials? “Hell no!” claims Salva, “I mean, we still have yet to feature any films directed by African-Americans, so we better keep going till we get there…somehow.”

Dum-da-da-dum. Those ever creeping tinkling two notes, descending then falling back, on the piano keys….like the Jaws theme as played by a child on one finger. Over and over, rising and falling, just two notes apart. Then an octave higher, the same thing. Then lower, portending something truly awful. Ominous, compelling, infantile. Then just as you’re lulled…ping! A whole new octave: one note, repeated again and again, almost absent-mindedly, as if a dead, wizened hand were being dropped on the same high key, over and over, and at a maddeningly increasing clip. Until finally it rests, possibly dead, on the keys.

For anyone still haunted by that moodily childlike piano repetition from Eyes Wide Shut, it’s worth mentioning that its creator, the great Hungarian-Jewish composer György Ligeti, has died this week at age 83, in Vienna. The composer of a hoard of wildly harrowing, existentially terrifying a cappella pieces and cacophonous chamber music, Ligeti is perhaps best known in these circles for the triumvirate of Kubrick films that utilized his work, especially those mournful, mouth-agape musical wails in 2001: A Space Odyssey, taken from Ligeti’s longer orchestral work, “Atmosphères.” Similar pieces were used in The Shining to accompany dreadful images such as the slaughtered twin girls’ first appearance in the game room. Always small, insinuating, before growing to a deafening pitch, Ligeti’s themes have scored some of Kubrick’s most indelible, troubling images, and subsequently, many of my nightmares as well.

Truly, it's been difficult to muster the energy to go to the movies as of late...sometimes it's hard to remember a time when the multiplex wasn't dominated by CGI critters with the voices of various ex Cheers cast members escaping from zoos and munching on Nabisco wafers, sassily. So in honor of those sullen moments, here's a little something to rejuvenate springtime movie cynics. Great movies have been coming at a pretty steady clip since January, and if you've missed out on any, you still might have a chance to track them down in a theater.

And apologies to some of our other favorites of 2006, thus far: 4, A Prairie Home Companion, Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, Our Brand Is Crisis, Army of Shadows....you're still in our hearts and lists.

Click here to read Reverse Shot's Half-Time 2006, the best of 2006...so far. Did we miss anything?

R U Scared yet?


"Let's anthropomorphize something else!" one Pixar exec said a few years back, to which his associate responded...."Uh, how 'bout cars?" Thus, the latest latest sparklingly lazy Pixar picture was undoubtedly born. Add in some sassy sitcom voices and another heaping pile of gassy pop culture references and bad songs (instead of Shrek's "Please, kill me now" use of Smashmouth, here we get "Life Is a Highway," sung by....that fat blonde guy....Tom something?), and you've got another 80 million dollar opening.

Weekend pickins are slim, otherwise, too.....it may have opened on 6-6-06 (or as it's more commonly known, TERRIFYING TUESDAY!), but this is still officially The Omen's first weekend in release. A remake by the guy who directed Behind Enemy Lines of a tepid 1976 Richard Donner movie headlined by two of the cast members of Michael Almereyda's incredibly shitty Hamlet update? Color me excited. (But since I know some of us can't get enough of spooky kids, I have one recommendation to satiate all your horror needs. I just recently rewatched Alejandro Amenabar's 2001 The Others, and it remains one of the most truly haunting haunted house movies. No small feat in fact: Think of all the movies with creaky floorboards, things that go bump in the night, and cats pouncing out of dark, shadowy corners and consider how fresh Amenabar managed to make them seem again).

Things may seem grim this weekend at the multiplex, but thank God for Altman and one enticing Al Gore power-point presentation....

This portrait of an inexplicably lip-gnawing, fresh-faced, plasticine Ray Carney from the annals of Moviemaker Magazine... Really, what more can I say?

Many thanks to Grand Epic, a good friend to Reverse Shot, for bringing this ray of sunshine into my existence.

Fuck, that NOSE!?

What do these three films have in common? Besides possible guest appearances by Clint Howard? (I'd have to see them again to be sure...) They're all featured in the "Top 5 Movies of All Time List" in the New York Press's baffling The Film Issue, out this week. Of course, there's nothing wrong with the layman's approach to criticism (delineated in Jim Knipfel's largely pointless reminiscence about not being hired as a film critic for....the New York Press), and man-on-the-street "what's your favorite flick?" surveys can be fun, but in the days of imdb and Yahoo Movies et al., where we're all one click away from some drooling moron saying: "Vertigo is BORING! I liked the original...when it was called TWELVE MONKEYS!" or "Re: The New World? I want my money back!", why splash more Opinions from Guys Who Like Movies That Show Weekly on TNT all over a New York print alt-weekly? Or as Gary Indiana now famously called it to Armond White's face (oh wait, no, it was passive-aggressively, in an email slapfight): fishwrap.

In case you were wondering who these everydude movie junkies are, well, it seems to just be a list of the Press editors' buddies...or perhaps also-rans from the Press's annual 50 Most Loathesome New Yorkers spittle-fest (If we keep bashing you, Press, can WE get ON that list?). Hmmm...sculptor George Higham thinks that the 5 greatest movies of all time are Moulin Rouge, Die Hard, Seven, The City of Lost Children, and The Pirates of the Caribbean. Now, I'm not asking for Beau travail to top everyone's list, but a little bit of snottiness is in order when not only are your favorite films cribbed from the imdb top 100 (where is The Shawshank Redemption???!?!?!) but that the old-timey classic on your list is 1988's Die Hard....I remember seeing a REALLY good, but kinda faded, print of it at the Film Forum a couple years back...but ah, it's a distant memory now. "Comedian" Robert Kelly takes the time to sing the praises of The Crow and True Romance, while R&B singer Mario cites Wedding Crashers as his #1. (Troy and Harlem Nights also made the cut.)

Rounding out the Press's forehead-crinkling Film Issue are a bunch of summer retro recommendations in which everyone's favorite self-proclaimed non-critic urges you to get theeself to the Kubrick fest at Museum of the Moving Image. Of course he can't help but take a dig: How dare the Museum sully the purity of its Kubrick lovefest by allowing hacks like Ophuls and Spielberg into the mix?! FYI, in a rather inspired sidebar, the Museum is showing Max Ophuls's Schnitzler-based La Ronde and Spielberg's Kubrick epitaph A.I. Artificial Intelligence to accompany the usual Full Metal Jacket and Clockwork Orange offerings. Nevermind that La Ronde and A.I. are far better films than half of what Kubrick was able to make in his lifetime...But, I mean, as Knipfel points out himself, he knows nothing about film.

Are you ready for The Rapture?

Assembling a perfect portrait of any critical moment in film history is, quite frankly, impossible. Vagaries of distribution and reception will always leave some films under-screened, legally unavailable in certain territories, or worse, almost completely unknown. The overall state of film history’s preservation (thoroughly mediated by commerce) especially at the far corners of the globe makes a recent assertion by one of America’s most prominent filmmakers that there aren’t really any truly great lost films (paraphrasing slightly) seem more than a little absurd. Who really knows what’s out there, lurking in a vault or someone’s closet that could, if not bust up the canon (DaVinci Code-style!), bend it more than a little? Of course, film loving being the immensely personal, unquantifiable act that it is, it bears repeating how questionable the whole canonization process is as a way to view the medium.

An example: Seeing Luc Moullet’s first four features (Brigitte and Brigitte, The Smugglers, A Girl Is a Gun, and Anatomy of a Relationship) last week in succession at the Harvard Film Archive certainly expanded how I viewed the French New Wave, though I’m sure that plenty of folks were left unmoved, or even annoyed by their frenetic primitivism. Before Moullet, I’d never found a true comedian amongst the New Wavers: Godard is often very funny, but never separates his humorous moments from his theoretical engagement with the idea of the laugh; Rohmer’s usually more winsome and intellectually wistful than simply funny; Truffaut too earnest and lacking in that dash of sadism which underlies true hilarity; Rivette too psychologically intense. At times, all of these directors tackle “comedy” in their works but Moullet seems unique (Varda comes closes at times, but her works range across a wide, wide spectrum) in his investment in exploring absurdity and physical comedy.

His first two films Brigitte and Brigitte (1966) and The Smugglers (1967) are his most typically “New Wave”—B&W, location set, formally playful, and highly low-fi, so much so they almost feel like the art brut cousins to comparatively polished films like Breathless and The 400 Blows. I like the grungy ingenuity of both, especially the way the former plays with its completely artificial interior spaces (this thing could have almost been shot entirely in against one wall of one room with furniture changes marking the different locations) just as its follow-up, while ditching the city, still seems like a bunch of folks running around in costume through different parts of the same couple of hills. I also like his willingness to overtly tweak his audience: a character might order another to be quiet, and so Moullet cuts the sound, another digs around under a blanket for papers, exclaims “this is a dark tunnel” and the image cuts to black.

Good stuff, but it wasn’t until his third and fourth (I guess technically post-New Wave) films that I ended up stunned. Calling A Girl Is a Gun (1971) an acid western is to do a movie that finds Jean-Pierre Léaud alternately, playing gunslinger, raving with lovesickness, mad with dehydration, eating dirt and grass, attempting to hang himself with the stump of a noose, scalped, betrayed, and married to a young Native American girl who looked suspiciously French to these eyes, little justice. Keystone Cops+The Searchers+Zabriskie Point+Twentynine Palms--I’ll be damned if I know exactly what to call A Girl Is a Gun besides one of the most wickedly funny, willfully bizarre films I’ve seen in ages. It’s also dubbed poorly into English and features a totally disconcerting droney krautrock score. Both are compliments in this case. Moullet’s third film is most assuredly for aficionados of outré singularities like Rohmer’s Perceval and Malle’s Black Moon.

Anatomy of a Relationship (1976) is initially a more controlled, “typical” nervous comedy of a relationship dissolving under the weight of neuroses and sexual dysfunction, but it explodes itself about 80% of the way through becoming instead an examination of the filmmaker’s (sad-eyed and bearded Moullet stars himself) process of re-creating a real (maybe) relationship with an actress while the actual lover watches from behind the camera. As Moullet piles on the added registers of discourse, the effect is liberating—almost as if we’re being freed from the entire history of romantic drama and invited in to look at the mechanisms that make them work. In Anatomy and Girl Moullet most makes me think of Donald Barthelme, which is to say, one of those rare auteurs who can tell us story, simultaneous to offering an explanation of how it’s being told.

I have no idea how far and wide these battered prints will travel (this mini retro contains two more films and a short), but if they end up in a theatre near you, you won’t be sorry...

Director Victor Dashuk

Anyone interested in East European politics and/or history and/or great movies should check out the pair of docs at the Pioneer this week Long Knives Night and Reporting from a Rabbit Hutch, running today through Wednesday, June 7th. The director, Victor Dashuk, wanted to expose the realities of life in Belarus—a landlocked republic between Russia and Poland—under President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko. The quality isn't great (they were filmed on celluloid but had to be smuggled out of the country on tape) but they're quite powerful if highly subjective. A few scenes are tough to watch, and Dashuk's hatred for Lukashenko goes a bit overboard (he compares the guy to Satan). But lives were risked to make these films, and maybe the least we can do is head to East 3rd Street to see them. Read more about the films here from RS’s own Jeannette Catsoulis writing at the New York Times.

A Lion in the House opens today in Boston at the Brattle and Denver at the Starz Film Center for limited runs.

The reviews are terrific:

Ty Burr, Boston Globe:
"**** A heart - render and a hankie-drencher, it's a film of quiet, almost incalculable power."

Chealsea Bain, Boston Herald:
"A- Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s A Lion in the House runs four hours, but feels like it will resonate for a lifetime."

Bob, Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News:
"A- Almost everything I'm going to say about the film may sound more like a discouragement than an inducement to attend. But I'm recommending the movie because it must be regarded as an extraordinary expression of will, endurance and fortitude. "

Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post:
"***1/2 Here's a stray thought stirred by A Lion in the House: Heroism is too often defined in relation to warfare. This amazing collection of characters reminds us that being heroic is a struggle to do the right thing in the face of an untenable situation."

And don't forget, Steven Bognar will be appearing with the film at the Makor this Sunday. Screening starts at 5. After that, the film will screen twice more on 6/11+12. Don't miss it.