Sorry to disappoint the eager faithful, but Mad Mel's long-awaited Apocalypto is by no means the grand folly we'd all hoped - which is not to say that it's any good. Indeed, for this viewer, who has thus far managed to avoid the Passion juggernaut, there's not enough fuel for outrage in Mel's jungle trek. There's some particularly bloody violence, sure - and some of it certainly gratuitous - but far from the expected psychopathological tour through the Mind of Mel, Apocalypto is notable mainly for its utter conventionality. Not every producer/director would have wanted to make a jungle epic with unknown foreign actors speaking an indigenous tongue, or been able to secure studio financing for it, but almost any reasonably competent director could have turned out what we see on the screen, and how we see it.

The easy barbs aside, Gibson's certainly not a bad director, in the technical sense. If he evinces no real personality of his own, he's learned well from his mentors, and has a particular knack for giving large crowd scenes some subtly dynamic visual interest, rather than just relying on teeming masses to supply the effect on their own (as captives are brought through a village, feathers fly through the air as village women pluck chickens en masse, and men whip wet sheets around to send arcing volleys of water through the frame). His chief failing is simply that he has learned to make movies in Hollywood, and Hollywood filmmaking techniques exert a homogenizing effect on all the story material they touch - even that which is supposed to plunge us into an entirely different, alien world.

Gibson's Mayans might have sticks through their nose and looped earlobes, but they walk, talk (even in dialect), pose, gesture, and are filmed like any actor in any other Hollywood movie. One of Malick's many accomplishments with The New World was to make his natives different without turning them into alien Others or objects of exoticism: these people walked, moved, acted differently from the whites they encountered (who, to Malick's equal credit, walk, move, and act differently than whites do today). Imagination has to function alongside any surface "authenticity" in order to fully immerse us in some strange and distant environment - Gibson's technique in Apocalypto, on the other hand, would be equally valid for Lethal Weapon 5 (God forbid).

Gibson's utterly conventional choices, while not "ruining" the movie, thus render it singularly uninvolving, even during its more clever and lively moments. Ultimately, the greatest entertainment comes from totting up the visual and narrative cliches that really gather steam in the last 45 minutes or so; my personal favourite being the single, fateful (and slow motion!) drop of blood that gives away the hero's hiding place to his pursuers (made all the better as the villains have been eviscerating people all morning, thus, one would think, rendering precise blood identification more problematic). So fulminators of moral outrage will unfortunately have to look elsewhere, as Mel even has the historical sense to identify, in the closing frames, the titular catastrophe with the arrival of the European conquerors - though according to The Fountain, the natives should really welcome them as liberators.

Filmed in the months following V-E Day, and nebulously set sometime in the year before it, Rome Open City was Roberto Rossellini’s first attempt to grapple with the lingering effects of World War II. It is one of the director’s great rubble symphonies, forming an ad-hoc trilogy with Paisán and Germany Year Zero, which taken together explore the downfall of the European Axis in all three phases, respectively: before, during, and after. Rome Open City also boasts one of cinema history’s great legends, surrounding the circumstances of its production. Story goes that Rossellini overcame the scarcity in postwar times—what precious little film stock produced during the conflict inevitably made its way into the hands of propaganda machines, and even in postbellum days, there was scarcely any left over for commercial production—cobbled the film together using whatever leftover scraps of film he could find. The scarcity story explains why many shots are improperly exposed, and the effect of blown-out or murky cinematography supposedly lends Rome Open City the weight of documentary realism (the reasoning being shabby=truth; pretty=artifice, which when truly interrogated, emerges just as arbitrary any other of cinema’s conventions). Problem is: the legend might not true. David Forgacs’ BFI monograph on the film supposedly implodes the hardscrabble production tale by suggesting the original camera negative consisted of a few specific film stocks, not a scattershot multitude; the visual imperfections are now thought to be the result of shoddy labwork when the negative was developed.

Still, even without the myth of Rossellini as visionary laboring against and ultimately transcending his material limitations, Rome Open City is a fine work in spite of its politics, showing flashes of the aesthetic and heart-rending humanism that would find fuller and more subtle expression in his next two films. I hate to keep hammering on it, but Rossellini’s postwar stance, more forcefully felt here than anywhere, is one of queasy and staunch collaboration denial. Rome is exclusively populated by earnest, hardworking folks, perhaps guilty of petty immoralities—really, who could indict the starving mob ransacking a profiteering bakery?—but on the whole sincere, ethical, religious, and intractably defiant of the occupying force. For their part, the Nazis are decadent, immoral, and indifferent, a band of rapacious, closeted homosexuals hell-bent on torturing the daylights out of the Partisans. Rossellini’s grappling with his country’s difficult and uncomfortable Fascist legacy, and so I’m inclined to understand his blunt polarities, especially in an era when rhetorical subtlety was scarce across the board; this is not to condone Rossellini’s approach, but rather to appreciate where it comes from. Rome Open City can be seen as a necessary myth to buoy the country out of a particularly fraught period of his history (though the film was relatively unsuccessful at home in its original run). However in such storytelling, he does chip away at this marbled block of morality not with a fine chisel, but with a brutal jackhammer. (“Do you think Americans exist?” asks one dejected Roman; “It seems so,” another replies, as the camera tilts up to an apartment building whose top floors have been obliterated by Allied bombs.)

In this spirit of persecution, Rome Open City ripples with unease, as a resistance leader is rousted out of bed by a pre-dawn SS patrol. Manfredi finds his way into the refuge of his underground friends, and the story deflects slightly, onto a widowed pregnant mother on the eve of her wedding and a benevolent, rotund priest who becomes a particularly effective errand-boy for the Partisans because he’s naturally above suspicion. In absolute terms the stances each takes are verboten—particularly the out-of-wedlock kid thing—but the film is about the war’s exigent moral relativism and probing its acceptable limits. Amidst all the despair, poverty and hunger, which Rossellini depicts with relentless exactitude, petty jealousies arise, mostly in the form of Manfredi’s lover Marina who can’t get past the idea that the resistance could relegate her charms to the second tier. She exacts some shocking—yet immediately regretted—revenge, and it occurs to me that though Rome Open City is hailed as the father of neorealism (nonprofessional actors, location shooting, etc. being among its most readily assimilated traits), the emotional excesses and machinations of its characters make the film play more like melodrama. It all ends badly of course, during which Rossellini unleashes a handful of breathless sub-human atrocities made all the more potent by their simple execution. Show me someone who isn’t shattered by a Nazi moll stripping the overcoat off a prostrate Mariana overcome with grief, or a cadre of kids marching downhill to face another day of Rome strewn with ruins, and you’ll find someone who’s insensible to sunlight, air, puppy dogs, and ice cream.

All right, so it's easy to mock the idiocies of The Fountain - and oh my, should they ever be mocked - but this will only provoke the predictable rearguard action: your folly is my masterpiece, sayeth the deluded. So instead of the easily mockable surface idiocies, let's burrow down to the deep and offensive idiocies at its core. To whit:

Oppressed by the forces of the Grand Inquisitor, Weisz's Queen sends out Jackman's conquistador to the New World to find the Tree of Life and thus "end tyranny and bring liberty to the entire world." That's right, folks. The Spanish Conquest was all about ending tyranny.

Now, we don't exactly want a history lesson when we go to see a movie about Wolverine making out with arboreals in a giant snow globe. But for any and all who talk about Aronofsky's ambition or passion or profundity or whatever, his blithe passing over of one of the more cataclysmic reigns of mass death the world has ever known for the benefit of a little exotic decor (that Spanish armour sure looks neat) should instantly put the lie to any claim that he's seriously considering those niggling mysteries o' death. Who cares if a director puts the sum total of his "thoughts and feelings" into a film if those thoughts and feelings are wholly ignorant and banal?

And need we even mention the capper to this gospel according to Aronofsky: the native priest reverently bowing down before the Great White God and offering up his throat for the cutting. I'd analyze at length, but I think the conclusions are there to be drawn.

BTW, did I mention the fucking snow globe?

BEST DOCUMENTARY (Award given to the director)

"A Lion in the House"
Directors: Steven Bognar & Julia Reichert

"My Country, My Country"
Director: Laura Poitras

"The Road to Guantanamo"
Directors: Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross

"The Trials of Darryl Hunt"
Directors: Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern

"You're Gonna Miss Me"
Director: Keven McAlester

We couldn't be more excited for you.

The news of the death of another essential American film artist got somewhat washed away by all the tears for Robert Altman: Betty Comden, who along with Adolph Green (who died in 2002), formed the dynamic duo that penned a series of Broadway shows and then MGM musicals (as well as such songs as “Make Someone Happy” and “Just in Time”), died on Thanksgiving, in New York City, at age 89. In addition to the exemplary wit and timing the duo displayed in their writing for such Freed Unit films as The Band Wagon and On the Town, Comden and Green contributed what might be the best comic screenplay of the Fifties to, of course, Singin’ in the Rain. When the list of those responsible for Singin’’s sheer genius unspools, often their contributions are named somewhere below Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, Donald O’ Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen, and even Cyd Charisse. Yet where their other musicals of the era, such as Band Wagon and It’s Always Fair Weather, may have displayed similarly impressive acrobatics and devil-may-care, almost anti-authoritarian flouncing of strict cause-and-effect genre rules, Singin’ remains the most tightly focused, quickest, and slyest of all.

For each of the moments often, and legitimately, sighted as the film’s highlights (O’ Connor’s rubber-faced, spaghetti-limbed “Make ‘Em Laugh” routine, the showstopper of all time; Kelly and Charisse’s gravity-defying dream ballet; Jean Hagen’s nasally obnoxious brilliance in, well, every scene she’s in) there is another, equally dazzling passage, direct from the screenplay: the ingenious opening ten minutes at the red carpet premiere (“Dignity, always dignity”), a textbook example of brilliant narrational irony, in which all of pompous star Don Lockwood’s self-aggrandizements are countered onscreen by the more truthful flashbacks; Don and Cathy Selden’s first, fortuitous, drop-in meeting, a rapid-fire exchange of wits so full of hidden flirtation and ego deflation it puts to shame most of Hepburn and Tracy’s shtick; any of Hagen’s self-centered, idiotic rants (“Well, I can’t make love to a bush!”), as delightfully deluded as any of Jennifer Coolidge’s elaborate dum-dum routines in the Christopher Guest films. Yes, Singin’ in the Rain is unthinkable without its actors’ exuberance, its nonstop Technicolor eye candy, and its roster of standard tunes, but the film remains so much more than a gleeful toe-tapper to this day because of its bullet-paced, forthright plunge into the grandiose, egomaniacal zeal of Hollywood. I’ll take Comden and Green’s bedazzling cynicism over any concurrent Billy Wilder frolic any day of the week.

,


What do these two images—from Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread and Nicolas Hytner’s The History Boys—have in common? Well, in addition to the fact that they both show pigs lined up for the slaughter, they’re also two of the latest films up for review at indieWIRE from RS. In fact, Geyrhalter’s expansive, mostly wordless treatise on the increasing impersonability and future shock of the international food industry might be a nice respite after the coddled hermeticism of Hytner’s smug, leaden film adaptation of Alan Bennett’s scattered Tony winner. Meanwhile, we’ve also got good news from down under, in the form of Peter Cattaneo’s Opal Dream. Welcome back from Thanksgiving, everyone!

Robert Altman has died today at age 81, and it’s hit me hard. Having heard him speak just a few months ago at the Museum of the Moving Image after a special screening of Kansas City and to promote the imminent opening of his wonderful A Prairie Home Companion , I can say that Altman seemed vibrant: perhaps frailer or slower moving than in the past, but sharp, wonderfully targeted as ever to the day’s hypocrisies, wise about his career, the industry, his own legacy, and always, always, always the modest man and artist. Even if he wouldn’t have it, we would call him something of a genius: his genius lay in his ability to let his cast riff, sparkle, shine, and flutter, and in his own refreshing inability see how exacting his camera was in allowing them to accomplish this.

How fitting that his wonderful Prairie Home was his unintended swan song—as he said, gloriously, touchingly, back in May, about the film: “Everybody dies. But they sing. And they’re happy.” Even without Altman’s sudden death, that’s a statement I would never have been able to shake. Altman’s passing, which was hopefully as simple and resigned as his final film, does not simply signify the passing of an earlier generation of filmmaking: were it that easy. The fact is, irrefutably, A Prairie Home Companion is one of the very finest, freshest, most pragmatically emotional films of this year, a jewel in a particularly muddy sea, putting to shame the works of whatever trendy indie filmmakers or foreign film darlings put forth recently—we’re not just losing one of the all-time greats; we’re losing one of the best working contemporary artists.

“The death of an old man is not a tragedy,” says the lovely, ethereal angel of death Virginia Madsen in Prairie Home. That’s a tough idea to swallow today, but maybe we can all take comfort in the fact that it was one of Altman’s last statements. I feel it’s too soon to expound on his entire, worthy career, so I’ll just leave us with some images from my very favorite films of his.

3 Women

California Split

Short Cuts

And here’s a link to Reverse Shot’s final interview with Altman, back in June.

Certainly, many people will try and distance themselves from the luxe sensory experience of Perfume, Tom Tykwer’s ambitious, more than a tad ridiculous, often exhilarating, wildly textured adaptation of Patrick Süskind’s cult classic novel. An intriguingly self-sufficient, heavily metaphorical slab of expressionistic romantic-horror that by virtue of its highly descriptive style, reportedly became both the biggest selling German novel since Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front as well as a mainstay in creative writing courses worldwide, Süskind's book never seemed particularly filmable, as it’s predicated almost entirely on describing 18th-century France via its smells: from the fetid to the flowering. Tykwer’s task, then, is monumental, and while the approach may not be novel (lots of close-ups, rhythmic cutting, evocative photography, John Hurt, natch, providing storybook voiceover, and of course, shots of nostrils flaring…), the affect is nearly swoony: long passages without dialogue or narration, drinking in the nape of a neck, the turn of an arm…The film feels so stripped down to the bare essentials that when it gets to its final half-hour, wall to wall with sensory flights of fancy, it doesn’t seem remotely alienating. If anything, Tykwer’s great with consistency of tone, and Perfume, a dastardly difficult project that flirts with the risible in its Goya-esque mixing of the grotesque and the gorgeous, benefits from his steadfast cinematic gaze.

So, what is it? More on the film later when it opens, but it’s basically the story of a serial killer, born into stench, with heightened olfactory senses, spurred on to murder young women so that he can claim, own, and perhaps literally bottle their allure. The young man’s mysterious nature (he seems to both grovel beneath and float above humanity) make him both devil and angel (fittingly, actor Ben Whishaw is alternately pin-up cute and toad-like repellent, based on how he’s shot); as a cipher, he’s terrifying on the page, yet on screen (one of the film’s inherent drawbacks) perhaps more penetrable, magnetic, and less of the unknown being he needs to be.

It’s a film that seems destined to please those who hold the novel close to their hearts (though I don’t know if the book would today live up to its outsized reputation; appropriately, the book wafts across my memory like a faint scent from childhood). Every scene reimagines Süskind’s key ingredients for the screen with exacting lushness, and even the sizable missteps (Dustin Hoffman camping it up as the grand master perfume maker Baldini…go ahead, laugh, I think it’s okay…) add to the entire project’s ever-growing unease. There’s even a whiff of Hammer horror and a splash of Nosferatu in this film, which is even odder on screen than in novel form. Rather than bring Süskind’s creepy fable to the mainstream, Tykwer’s film will probably become as much of a cult item as its source material. Mission accomplished, then, I say.

,,

Surprise, surprise…there’s a whole boatload of stuff opening this weekend that gets the (much sought after, I’m sure) Reverse Shot stamp of approval. In fact, it’s nearly enough to make one emerge from the cinephilic doldrums that has been keeping us enervated for so long. No, you don’t have to see Borat for the fifth time for a good belly laugh: just hop on to the latest vehicle for the Christopher Guest Community Players, the deliciously depressing For Your Consideration; you don’t need to mourn the dearth of semi-polemical debate stirrers either, now that Linklater’s decidedly un deliciously depressing Fast Food Nation, which Linklater eases down your throat like a hot toddy full of castor oil, is out—two takes: here and here; and by Jove, there’s even a really good frickin’ James Bond movie playing!

Additionally, with Two or Three Things I Know About Her back on the big screen in a new print, and the Jacques Rivette and Rossellini retrospectives (read more right here on this blog) ongoing, there’s simply no excuse to remain a slave to the Netflix queue.

If Paisan is a balm to soothe the pains of war, then Germany Year Zero (1947) is its verso: the festering scab that refuses to heal. Indeed, all of Berlin is one great open wound, with most buildings and recognizable landmarks reduced to rubble by the Allied forces’ nightly bombing campaigns; the few left standing are charred skeletons barely hospitable for human habitations. This is un-monumental Berlin captured unlaquered at its very nadir, a post-WWII ground zero before the term took on its American connotation, a country starting from square one (or year zero) after Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich fell 988 years short of its murderous proclamations. Humanity leaks out from gaps in the rubble, where folks eke out a ration-book bolstered existence, with five families routinely squeezed into an apartment that can comfortably hold just one. With a sickly father unable to work and a brother afraid register for fear of reprisal (his regiment fighting to the last as the city fell, Karl-Heinz must have done some seriously gruesome shit), the breadwinning falls to twelve-year-old Edmund. Wandering the hardscrabble streets, Edmund becomes privy to all the petty black-market stratagems deployed by the packs of apparently children wandering about like wild dogs and sleeping out-of-doors. He also learns (but does he fully understand the ideology?) that der Fuhrer’s ethos still thrives in the city’s alleyways and blind corners. In one of the film’s creepiest interactions, a schoolteacher and sometime Hitler Youth-recruiter trying to pawn off vinyl recordings of Hitler’s speeches on the black market, with kids serving as go-betweens. While weaselling into his business proposition, the teacher sits Edmund on his lap, and begins stroking his face and neck like a covetous pederast. Literally, and figuratively the moral order has crashed down with the city’s edifices, and clearly, there are things worse than hunger and despair still lurking in Berlin.

Playing the speech on a portable gramophone for a pair of interested soldiers, the sound emanates louder than it ought to be. We cut away to broken streets as Hitler proudly trumpets the inevitability of his victory, his words rebounding emptily off bare walls. Though Rossellini claims a desire to observe only, and not to indict, with the unrelentingly bleak spectacle he presents, it’s hard not to rage and storm against the German military. But they’re not the only ones guilty of some pretty ugly transgressions. American soldiers tour the site where Hitler and von Braun immolated themselves as if it were just another photo-op, and the French—Tommies, as they are derisively known—indulge in Cognac and cigarettes when most have barely enough to eat. Wealthy Germans too swindle their own kind; Edmund is taken by portly a man in a town car, who trades the scale Edmund’s trying to hawk for two tins of meat. (Noticeably absent is the Italian presence; if there’s one disturbing element to this and Paisan, it’s Rossellini’s refusal to satisfactorily interrogate his country’s own complicity and Fascist legacy.) Against all this, there’s the morbid mathematics of food supply and the elderly on their deathbeds—that awful calculus between saving one life versus the many. It leads to an impossible, absolutely devastating decision and not one, but two deaths—a murder and a suicide—which could be taken as sinking into a nihilistic morass, or reaching some kind of sorrowful transcendence. (I’m inclined to align with the former; after Edmund plainly and simply jumps to his death, which just ripped my heart out again, as it did when I first saw it at college, the camera tilts up to capture a tram trundling by, an avatar of a world that keeps on spinning, heedless of peoples’ pain.)

Rossellini’s act of filmmaking, unfettered and in the streets, is nearly unimaginable in a modern controlled-media context where caskets of fallen soldiers coming back from Iraq are the great black hole, the one slice of morbid pageantry censored from the public eye; it’s nothing short of revolution (or at least, it should have been taken that way) given the epoch-shaking schism that the war was for Europe and its citizenry. Representing the physical, awful fact of being in a world rent asunder and giving no quarter, irrespective of the cries of “Too soon! Too soon!” is just an astonishing process. The film is also remarkable for its awareness of history transpiring at this very moment. As Edmund’s father decries how he once soldiered on as part of the Nazi war machine, the camera fixes its gaze on Edmund the entire time, making manifest who will bear the eventual and lasting brunt of his transgressions. So Rossellini doesn’t let Germany off the hook, but he’s magnanimous enough to understand that real people were (and are) suffering real torment in the war’s aftermath, irrespective of nationality, ideology, or any of the other roadblocks thrown in the way of people connecting with each other. For that reason, Germany Year Zero is the most sublimely empathic vision ever committed to the screen.

With a sparkly new symposium on the books, Oscar-bait movies starting to stir and quake their creaky limbs, and Rivette looming out in Queens, something had to spill over from the RS main site. It’s no small news that the Museum of Modern Art is putting up this season’s other great retrospective of an ill-seen European master, proffering up as much Roberto Rossellini as can be comfortably stomached through to the end of the December. The hope is that I’ll post here about Rossellini over the coming weeks, subject to the vagaries of slobbering Gotham film obsession (I was, for instance, shut out of MoMA’s opening night Rome Open City because of schlubs willing to line up for tickets at 10am. Something about the world’s hottest 54 year old. Perhaps Isabella.) As such, this journal will not unfold chronologically, but in the order I see the films.

I’d rather not recycle the established wisdom on Rossellini and then pass it off as my own, so head on over to the Times, where Manohla Dargis has written an elegant introduction to the director (registration required). As cnw mused, it’s a fine piece, not merely because she’s surveyed the biographical-sociological-aesthetic currents of Rossellini’s work in a way that doesn’t feel reductive. If I may add something to Dargis, it’s from a more modern context: though he may have fallen out of favour, without Rossellini, we simply wouldn’t have many of the cinema’s current realist traditions, from Mike Leigh through to the brothers Dardennes. So put that alongside the other thoughts of life caught unawares, exigencies of reality, etc. etc. With that in mind, on with the more subjective thoughts.

Paisan (1946) was Rossellini’s postwar omnibus project, an amalgam of six vignettes directed by Rossellini, for which he solicited scenarios from the likes of Sergio Amidei, Klauss Mann, and most notably, Frederico Fellini (though the credits are so poorly laid out, I could not tell who was responsible for each). It’s a military travelogue through, following Allied (mainly American) soldiers during six particularly notable stops along the 1943 invasion of Italy as they eventually wrested the country from Fascist control. Moving from Sicily to Naples to Rome, then onto Florence, and the north, the characters have nothing to connect one another save for the inexorable tide of liberating troops marching across the landscape. After the pessimism of Rome Open City is a film primarily of healing, an expression of regeneration and hope now that the long nightmare has come to an end—yet tempered by the legacy of rampant material and social destruction. Rossellini and cinematographer deploy a familiar trope of discreet, respectful observation to capture life unvarnished, and also in media res, with scenes usually ending as abruptly as they began, with closure as frequently as without. Romantic entanglements are left dangling because of military duty, and characters are left dangling, trying to cope with the weight of what they’ve just seen.

Each vignette is prefaced by a Voice of God narration talking over a map showing the advancing tide of invasion, which then frequently stock war footage of rolling American tanks, and troops liberating various cities. Lending a note not just of realism, and of documentary veracity (though we should always be wary of asserting propaganda footage as truth), Rossellini deploys these traditions against his dramatic scenes also to suggest their inadequacies. The preface footage may be accurate in its delineation of times, and places, but they are ill-equipped to convey the depth of the fractured zeitgeist, which is the director’s project.

In the first few sketches, we get the expected repertoire of devices (I’d seen both Rome Open City and Germany Year Zero a few years back)—rubble, aimless children, poverty, etc.—which in Rome, are oddly filtered, through a sense of optimism: life may have been bad before, but seems to be getting better now in the rosy glow of Fascism newly-banished. It’s momentarily unsettling in light of the dourness of the two works that bookend Paisan. Six months later however, those feelings are banished: one sketch addresses the disenfranchisement that happens with the passage of time, highlighting the divide between initial concord with the Americans and half a year removed when old, petty jealousies once put aside begin to resurface, because complacency can allow them to. Beautifully-executed revelations abound: an American MP in Naples, bristling when he finally catches the kid that stole his boots one drunken evening, suddenly softens once he learns that the kid lives, along with countless other families, in a mossy catacomb; a nurse and her friend running trying to cross into occupied Florence, run though the Uffizi, whose treasures are packed in crates; a Catholic military chaplain, treasures the generosity and open-mindedness of the monks offering him shelter up, until they (the monks) go into an tizzy over the “fallen souls” of his Protestant and Jewish compatriots, and try, subtly, to evangelize them. The dawning of social responsibility, personal peril, and cultural differences, respectively, resound with heft and warmth. The last tale is a nightmare of swamp-dwelling partisans (the Italian underground/soldiers working with the Allies against the Axis) brutally massacred near the northern border, and brings a crashing sobriety to the affair. It begins with a dead Partisan stuck through a life saver, floating in the river with a placard scrawling out his crime. Mid-story, the poor man is buried, with the placard serving as his tombstone: Rossellini is fiercely proud of these men who courted certain death to fight an absolute evil. Once can appreciate that pride, but Rossellini doesn’t attend well to a more unpleasant side of the equation: he doesn’t explore the uncomfortable fact of Fascist sympathizers, which is rather like leaving out slave-owners in a tale of the Underground Railroad. The Fascist sympathizers are a structuring absence, their presence experienced mainly through gunshots and puffs of smoke in a Florence street standoff—and only two are ever seen in closeup.

It’s the only qualification I can muster in a film that seeks to represent the variety of experience—military, civilian, medical, religious, rebel, etc.—near the end of World War II, and does it wonderfully.

Or something...you, uh, want some bread?

Opening up tomorrow for a limited engagement at the Pioneer Theatre is a little movie called Dance Party, USA that’s fresh off a run that’s taken it to a bunch of festivals including SXSW and Woodstock. Barely feature-length, and, at times, barely a movie, Aaron Katz’s DV-shot debut somehow manages to hang onto itself across its 66 minutes—when it was over I was nearly in shock that a movie made for something on the order of $5 and with a splintery narrative built around a few very long scenes felt like it had a definitive beginning, middle, and end.

Mostly composed of dead air and awkward post-party exchanges, Dance Party, USA definitely treads Bujalski turf, though may actually trump the Funny Ha Ha director in a run for studied inarticulacy. It’s also a bit darker—as it relates the coupling off of teenaged ladies’ man Gus (Cole Pennsinger) and malcontent Jessica (Ann Kavin), it takes a fairly odd left turn that illuminates a kind of weary malaise that runs through the loose group in the film. Though the stylistic similarities to Bujalski are there to be discussed (Katz does break off from his characters on occasion to catch a little bit of lovely Portland unawares), his final moments recall Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love albeit in miniature. From this description, you’ll probably know immediately if this is for you, so here goes:

Dance Party, USA
Opens Wednesday November, 15th at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater
Located in the East Village at 155 East 3rd Street (Between Ave. A & B)
Plays at 9pm Nightly Through the 21st
Additional Shows at 7:15pm on the 22nd, 24th, 26th, & 27th
Q&As Will Follow All Shows

A whole hoard of reviews of new releases from Reverse Shot are up and ready to read over at indieWIRE…so if you’re trying to figure out whether to go see Nicole Kidman giving Robert Downey Jr. a full body shave or Ashley Judd pulling herself up by her Southern bootstraps (hint: just go see Iraq in Fragments, instead), check ‘em out. And there’s more to come this week, on The Aura, Fast Food Nation, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes and For Your Consideration.

“…of course characters reference mutual acquaintances who never actually show up in the movie (preferably with funny nicknames—the gold standard is still Menace II Society's Willie Lump-Lump). Toss in a calm-before-the-storm, south-of-the-border idyll a la Peckinpah—Ayer currently has a remake of The Wild Bunch in production—and you have Harsh Times: a movie for guys who like movies (that feel exactly like other movies).”

Nick Pinkerton on Harsh Times

“Though it's at once distant, almost artless in its documentary-style directness, it retains an intimacy in its loving attention to detail.”

Kristi Mitsuda on The Cave of the Yellow Dog

“As with many other actor-turned-directors, Joey Lauren Adams focuses on performance rather than the visual capacities of the medium. Come Early Morning is neither a cinematic achievement nor is it highly original; but if you look closely, it's less middling and more provocative than it first appears.”

Kristi Mitsuda on Come Early Morning

“The details surrounding Diane's marriage are smeared to imply that our heroine's creative soul's been carapaced by the expectations of Fifties domesticity—and already uneducated reviewers are buying this reductive story wholesale…”

Nick Pinkerton on Fur

“Despite its flaws, Iraq in Fragments marks an important turning point in the still short history of the Iraq War documentary. No longer content to simply portray the American side of the conflict, filmmakers are finally showing what things look like from various Iraqi perspectives.”

Michael Joshua Rowin on Iraq in Fragments

Attention all future filmmakers!

The Independent Film Channel (IFC) is running a short movie contest, "Shorts Down Under," now until November 23. It's a nice gig, because you get immediate publicity from the web world who votes on your movie, and, if you win, you get a trip to Australia and your winning movie screened nationally on IFC. Go to the IFC Shorts Down Under website for more details. Or go to www.ifc.com.

Well, we almost didn't do it...but there it sits anyway, our new, extensive Brian De Palma symposium, Junk Art. We won't go into much detail here, because God knows we SURE AS HELL DO ON THE MAIN SITE...so just dig in and enjoy. We have to go rest now....

Thanks to all who contributed to this great issue; we couldn't be more pleased with it.

-Sincerely, Reverse Shot

And the award for "Most Stomach-Turning Extended Metaphor of the Week" goes to...

Our friend at Movie City News, David Poland. Are we at Reverse Shot too hard on Poland? Perhaps, but please keep in mind this man actually makes a living as a writer. So without further ado...

The foreplay started four or five months ago, in most cases, with the object of lust even being in the room. The foreplay would heat and cool as the weeks passed. In Toronto, we found out which films were premature ejaculators, while others got super heated… but still no satisfaction, only more rubbing.

The man is talking about Oscars here. No, really.

Finally, Clint Eastwood was ready to lower the boom and let everyone have their ecstatic release. Come on, Clint… you manly man. You can do it. Bring out those canons and invade that beach and everyone will be able to roll over and get some sleep, assured that we all know that we don't really have to keep up all the courting for months on end. Sure, we would go out on dates and eat their stuffed mushroom caps and indulge in the delights of dining with incredibly talented celebrities who had no chance of winning anything. But we would happily come home, knowing that Big Daddy Clint made the bed with one-million count Egyptian cotton sheets, fluffed up the pillow, and left an Oscar shaped chocolate for us to enjoy before we rested.

So we soldiered on…

Well, I can't speak for Big Daddy Clint, but sign me up for those stuffed mushroom caps, though I will pass on the virus (P.S. Note to Big Daddy: get well soon!)

Our look up The Queen's knickers started taking on more significance than it seemed to have early on. And Jack Nicholson through cocaine all over Hollywood's writhing behind.

I don't know about you, but I almost "through" up when I looked up the queen's knickers...(Too easy? Okay, I won't touch Hollywood's "writhing behind". But again, the man makes a living as a writer)

All that dating… all that rubbing… and it turned out everyone should have just stayed home and gotten off on the expected, not very challenging, too easy solution to their Oscar needs.

And even then, it just keeps going on, an entire industry desperate for some lube.

That's just about the most revolting thing I've ever read. So, thanks to David Poland, I am never having sex again. But at least there's still David Lynch and his pet cow, keeping the Oscar season real...

Dear Reverse Shot,

As a member of the NYFF selection committee, I can confirm that Nick Pinkerton's assessment of our criteria ("obligatory slot-filling by one of the 'Old Masters' of the Sixties art house") is absolutely correct.

Of course, we did have a Manoel de Olveira movie ready and waiting, despite the fact that his moment of glory didn't really arrive until the 70s, well after that special Golden Sixties Art House Glow (let's call it GSAHG for short) had faded. Nonetheless, we were worried: nothing from Godard, nothing from Rivette or Bergman, and much to our horror, Truffaut and Fellini were dead. Then, at the last minute, along came a new movie from the heavily subsidized and suitably complacent M. Resnais, with exactly the lack of urgency, the unexceptionable hominess, and the scanty charm we were looking for.

Of course, this slot is becoming increasingly difficult to fill, so difficult that I introduced a motion at our last meeting to ban all movies by Old Masters of the GSAHG variety. But as we puffed on our cigars and sipped a marvelous old port in the comfort of our club (exclusivity precludes me from divulging its name or whereabouts), my motion died away with the last rays of the brilliant autumn sunlight. At which point it was time to toddle home and catch up on "Newhart" reruns.

Who knows what next year will bring? Which old, self-satisfied, state-subsidized Old Master will come forth with another warm blanket of celluloid? My pulse races at the very prospect.

Sincerely,

Kent Jones

UPDATE:
Nick Pinkerton responds:

So, it’s official: The Republicans had their asses handed to them last night. (Judging from recent scandals, a little ass handing might be just what some of these folks secretly enjoy.) So while, the Grand Old Shortbus Party tucks its tail and staggers off into the sunset of their permanently 12-year majority, I think all of us who voted “D” deserve a little bit of celebration. And maybe some loutish gloating. It’ll be at least be a few months until “arch-liberal” Nancy Pelosi shows her true colors and ruins it all by arriving for her first day on the job with a shaved head, multiple nose piercings, legislation to enact National Sodomize Your Neighbor Day tucked under one arm, and a lunch box full of steamed fetuses with Tofu stuffed under the other. For now, those on the side of decency and reason should feel pretty fucking fantastic about what can only be described as an utter rout.

A special ReverseBlog thanks has to go to the two men chiefly responsible for the massive Democratic victory (remember, even in the “revolution” of 1994, the Republicans never set up a majority this big): Karl Rove and RNC chair Ken Mehlman. Guys, it takes special skill to turn a ton of money, fantastically in-your-favor district lines, a well-developed GOTV operation, and a bunch of entrenched incumbents into minorities in the House, Governor’s mansions, and soon to be the Senate. You were unable to take A SINGLE SEAT away from the Democrats in any of these categories, which, aside from the catastrophe of the Bush presidency will be your true political legacy—the complete repudiation of your ideology. You may have wrecked the conservative movement for years, if not more. So, thanks dudes.

And a more serious thanks to Chairman of the DNC, Howard Dean and his vaunted 50-state strategy for helping to put all sorts of weird Congressional races into play: Trauner in Wyoming (who may still win), Kleeb in Nebraska, Grant in Idaho, etc. Even if we didn’t take them all, we took a bunch of “red” districts that no one would have thought competitive in 2004. Kudos. As of today, the Democratic Party is the only truly national party in America.

There are obviously many other folks out there who deserve our thanks, so here it is. It’s hard to say how much better things will go for the U.S. with these new Democratic majorities (Bushie doesn’t do well when cornered), and some will certainly argue that we can’t expect anything but the status quo, but I for one, at least today, remain hugely optimistic.

But Virginia is....wafer thin!

"I haven't wiped my ass in days....it's true. Wanna smell?"

Surely if you’ve gone to see a non-talking-moose movie this year, you’ve been subjected to the trailer for Ridley Scott’s A Good Year. I just discovered that it’s actually being released next week…hell, that shit crept up on us like athlete’s foot. What this means for film culture, besides that another steaming pile of Ridley will be dropped on screens imminently, is that we will no longer be able to enjoy A Good Year’s three-minute Preview of Coming Attractions, which is so packed with every ludicrous cliché and hilariously streamlined textbook cut and musical cue that it becomes nearly self-reflexive in its predictable idiocy. There’s barely a difference between this and “Shining,” that masterpiece trailer parody that took the internet by storm last year by reconfiguring The Shining into a sappy Cameron Crowe-esque tale about “finding yourself…in the most unlikely of place.”

As with “Shining”’s Peter Gabriel cribbing, it’s the music that makes it: Moving from a Franz Ferdinand radio blaster (to back its montage of aggressive banker assholes buying! Selling! Crowe: “Today is greedy bugger day!” High-larious), to a sobering, Thomas Newman-inflected orchestration (when Russell Crowe’s hilariously named Max Skinner finds out his uncle, Albert Finney in tripple-chinned flashback, has died and left him his chateau and vineyard), and then finally to a heavily percussive, maybe Coldplay (?) piece of poperatic earnestness, the trailer for A Good Year is more capital-C crap than I can handle in such a brief period of time. So compressed is the idiocy that even the innocuously silly double meaning of the title seems throat-scorchingly nauseating in its finger-gingerly-touching-side-of-lip adorableness.

Of course, it’s everyone’s favorite human slop pile, Russell “I’m Just One of the Earthy Commoners (When I’m Not Hitting Hotel Clerks, Bus Boys, or Pages with Heavy Objects)” Crowe, who really puts this thing over the top: with a vaguely effete stab at brittle British upper-crust (though he really just sounds like himself mincing through his “Southern” accent in A Beautiful Mind: “There must be a mathematical explanation for how bad your tie is!” nyuk nyuk), Crowe once again reminds me of how much I’d like to see his smug face smeared in dog shit.

But ah, the memories: As Max SKINNER (I’m laughing right now, seriously) says, climactically, “They’re not good…they’re grand!” Undoubtedly this trailer will forever stain my memories of this (not so grand) movie season: The sheer audacity of the Good Year trailer’s dumb-dumb construction will certainly only be outdone by the actual film’s sure-to-be-LOLable depiction of the blessings of provincialism vs. the curses of industry, the need for the soulless corporate stooge to get back with the dusty real people (in this case, of course, a gorgeous Italian woman—a “villager,” perhaps—whose earthy sassiness is only outdone by her smart designer wear and perfectly coiffed exotically black hair). Add to that GPS jokes (“Oh, shut up!”), a plot point that seems to pivot on whether Crowe will sell the vineyards away from some locals (and their “last chance at eeeemortaliteee!”), and lots and lots of dialogue that reiterates that Crowe will grow a heart before the pic is through (“It is not this place that doesn’t suit your life, it is your life that doesn’t suit this place!” or my favorite, spoken by everyone’s favorite rat-faced sidekick, Tom Hollander: “Max Skinner doesn’t do weekends! Max Skinner makes money!”).

Grossest of all is that Crowe (unlike Scott, who’s probably too preoccupied with the mounds of coke he’s ingesting in preparation for, gulp, American Gangster—which will be in the imdb top 250 before it even comes out) in all likelihood thinks he’s making a statement of import. Get ready for the talk show circuit: “It felt really good to just make a nice, little personal character study.” Variety’s Todd McCarthy’s already labeled it a “divertissement,” and “a light rose from Ridley Scott compared to the hefty cabernets he usually turns out.” Gag. But…if the choice is between this and the latest director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven, four hours and counting…

In any case, consider A Good Year reviewed.

Done. Move on.

Get to it. Exercise your franchise.

If you want to do more than vote, find someplace like this.

Remember back in the Fall of '04 when Reverse Shot ran for president?

Move over Doogie Howser, the unattractive guy from Grey's Anatomy, and Fish Face from N'Sync, a new gay sex symbol has emerged. There's no reason we shouldn't believe Reverend Ted Haggard, head of the rabidly anti-gay Evangelical movement, and seen in the current art-house hit Jesus Camp scolding those with that terrible chromosome affliction, when he says that he DID NOT have sex with that gay hustler who he DID happen to buy crystal meth from. I mean, as Mark Foley recently proved, it's always better to come out as an alcoholic or other related drug addict, than to admit to smoking pole.

Of course, there's also no reason to not call a spade a spade: Reverend Haggard, despite your inflammatory, monstrously hypocritical, vilely self-abnegating stance towards all things queer, you're a pretty sweet piece of ass. That flaxen hair, shimmering with all the sun's rays, those flared nostrils, those angelically straight pearly white chompers, those luscious dew-drop eyes, pools of redemption that they are, those dapper suits barely concealing a tall, broad, lean frame....Instinct cover, here we come. You, sir, get the first ever Reverse Shot Hottie of the Week award.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_the_Giant

"When André was young, he could not fit on a normal school bus and had to be driven to school. As his parents were unable to afford a car of their own, his neighbor, famed playwright Samuel Beckett, drove him every day."

It's pretty obvious to anyone who's paying attention that each week brings far more movies to the screen than humanly possible to keep up with. In honor of the steady glut, we're working with indieWIRE to revamp and expand our weekly column. Now, instead of one review a week done by three writers, the Reverse Shot cabal and assorted friends and family will put out more traditional single reviews of up to 20 films a month. This all starts today with Jeff Reichert's review of Volver.

Enjoy.