The Sopranos, Season Six, Episode 16: “Chasing It”

That pervasive sense of dread and foreboding hanging over The Sopranos seems to be getting stronger as the end nears. Last week, Tony said he was waiting for the other shoe to drop; in this week’s episode, “Chasing It”, Carmela says that she feels like there’s a piano hanging on a rope overhead. As the metaphoric stakes have gotten bigger, the literal stakes have grown as well: this episode saw Tony (played to brilliant, implosive perfection by James Gandolfini) gambling away increasingly vast sums of money in a futile attempt to recover from some stumbles, in pursuit of a fortune he’s already losing. Listening to Tony describe his compulsive behavior, he sounded eerily like the Tony Soprano from the pilot episode – chasing a dream that’s already in the past.

Like the first three episodes of the season, “Chasing It” is all dark and broody atmospherics, more doom and gloom than explosive fireworks, but the oppressiveness is more palpable here, as though the series is inching its way towards something decisive. Note director Tim Van Patten’s shaky handhelds and awkwardly-framed close-ups, which give the episode an uncharacteristically jittery look and uncomfortable feel.

If we need further evidence that things are reaching a boiling point, we also get one nasty fight between Carmela and Tony (and how great it still is, after all these years, to see these two remarkable actors play off of each other). Tony and Carmela know how to hurt each other better than anyone else: she’s the only person who can really call Tony on his selfishness; meanwhile, he sees the hypocrisy in her minor pangs of conscience, well aware that she cares enough to lose sleep over the shoddy construction of her spec house, but not so much that she’d be willing to forego her financial windfall from selling the house (to family, no less). The writers get every nuance of this relationship, and it comes through in nearly every line: Tony and Carmela hate each other because they need each other, because they understand each other so completely, and because they’re so much alike, complicit in their destructiveness, greed, and complacency.

Tony’s increasing alienation manifests itself most acutely in his argument with Carmela, but it pervades the episode. Early on, Tony confides to Hesh (Jerry Adler, also great here) that he can’t trust Christopher, Paulie, and Bobby, because they are all “murderers”, though Tony knows full well he bears primary responsibility for turning Christopher and Bobby into killers. Later, he proceeds to lash out at Hesh with a nasty, racist tirade for his very reasonable request for payment or interest on the $200,000 loan he gave Tony.

Despite his obvious culpability, Tony refuses to take responsibility for creating his current situation. Like Carmela, he’s built his house with rotten wood, and it’s set to cave in – taking others down with it – and all he can do is hope it doesn’t rain. Tony is too weak, selfish, and lazy to do things right (even to take his own therapy seriously). Hence, the gambling and the temptation to stiff Hesh on his money. Towards the end of the episode, Tony reflects on his luck and decides that, money notwithstanding, he’s “still up.” Later, after Hesh’s girlfriend dies suddenly, Tony returns Hesh’s money with condolences: “I’m sorry for your loss,” Tony offers. Forget the money, though. By the end of “Chasing It”, everyone’s on a losing streak.

“Chasing It” may be the most intricately plotted episode of the new half-season so far, and I have neglected a few major subplots for lack of time and space (Blanca and A.J., Vito Jr. and poop in the shower). I hope Brother and Robbie, along with anyone else who’s been reading (Eve, Matthew, etc.), that you will give these matters the attention they deserve. Bonus points for anyone who’s willing to tackle the terrorism thing. I thought this was a first-rate episode, and I’m anxious to hear from everyone.

I fully expected the anticipation that built up for five long years to negatively affect my perceptions of the new film by Ray Lawrence; the chances of the director equaling the perfectly calibrated critical success of his last film, Lantana, seemed slim. But if Jindabyne doesn’t quite coalesce like its taut predecessor, it comes close enough; its unevenness is made up for by its ambitious wanderings through trickier, thought-provoking terrain, and, although it goes slack occasionally, clocking in at just over two hours, the film resonates with rhythmic momentum.

Expanding upon Raymond Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home” (the same upon which one of the strands in Robert Altman’s Carver compendium Short Cuts is based) but relocated to the movie’s titular Ozzie town, Jindabyne opens with expertly rendered atmosphere. Lawrence cross-cuts between a beautiful Aborigine girl (Tatea Reilly) blithely singing as she drives along an open road, and a man (Chris Haywood) watching her through binoculars, backed up by the threatening thrum of his truck’s waiting engine (paired with Grindhouse, it would seem that vehicular terrorizing is the serial killer’s preferred shtick of the moment). Like Lantana, this latest is positioned as a thriller (see its by-the-numbers trailer), but Jindabyne similarly eschews typical potboiler tendencies involving plot twists and physical action and focuses instead on emotional trajectories. The mysteries lie in the intricacies of interaction amongst, in this case, a quartet of close couples, and Lawrence’s concentration on conjuring a quieter realism results in an unexpectedly stimulating exploration.

Click here to read the rest of Kristi Mitsuda's review of Jindabyne.

courtesy RS correspondent "The NB"

Poison Friends revives a rare pleasure of moviegoing: articulacy. Ten years ago Phillip Lopate diagnosed a "Dumbing Down of American Movies," and the disproportionate praise given to reactionary "realism" in recent indies suggests that, as expectations shrivel, things have gotten stupider across the board. But Poison Friends, written by frequent Arnaud Desplechin scenarists Emmanuel Bordieu and Marcia Romano, defies the tendency, investing the same raucous humanity into the world of ideas that marked the academic milieu of Desplechin's My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument.

From a packed University lecture hall on the first day of class, three students are winnowed out; two are newcomers, Eloi (Malik Zidi), son of a successful authoress, and slight, wincing Alexandre (Alexandre Steiger); they arrive late, disrupt the professor, can't find a seat. The last, Andre (Thibault Vincon), is already in his element; he has an established rapport with the teacher, and is relaxed before his peers when speaking forbiddingly on the function of the critic, quoting the Viennese writer Karl Kraus: "Why do some people write? Because they are too weak not to." Eloi and Alexandre are immediately smitten in that certain homosocial academic manner, starting on their way to becoming acolytes in Andre's cult of personality (the movie is dead-on whenever dealing with the insecurities of young people fumbling at creation for the first time, and their hunger for approbation).

Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of Poison Friends.

In gentler times, a film that sets out to seriously tackle taboo zoophilia might have elicited a bump on the cause celebre Richter scale, but in these post-everything days, when images and ideas far more controversial and chilling are readily available to any who care to look for them, there's little space to spark real ire about a work like Zoo. This is a shame, but not because Robinson Devor's third film warrants a trip through the rightwing noise machine, but because it's generally terrific, and deserves to find an audience, by whatever means.

Devor succeeds because he's created a film depicting a lifestyle scandalous and controversial to the mainstream that's completely disinterested in fomenting scandal and controversy. It's obvious that he's wise to the macabre curiosity that surrounds zoophilia - the way it's furnished hours of late night gross-out enjoyment in freshman dorms nationwide. But Zoo's more The New World than Jackass; Devor's taken a productive risk in that he has indeed made a movie about men who have and desire intercourse with horses, but anyone who enters looking for a dirty and salacious experience will be sorely disappointed. Zoo may be the "horse-fucking movie," but it certainly doesn't deliver on that most basic premise.

Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert's review of Zoo.

Well, apparently not everyone is hip to the forming cult of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Overheard immediately following a Saturday night IFC Center screening of Syndromes and a Century, a film made up of sweet tentative romances, lovely pop lullabye interludes, drifting clouds, swaying trees, a tranquil solar eclipse, and hushed, elegantly filmed long takes of modernist architecture:

Forty-something woman, to a quiet ticket-taker:
"That was awful. I mean AWFUL! I've never seen anything so horrible. What was it? What was it? Have people been complaining?"

Quiet ticket-taker:
"No. I think people probably go in expecting something a little weird."

Woman:
"No, I need to talk to the manager. Horrible!"

DOWNSTAIRS, A FEW MOMENTS LATER, TO THE MANAGER:

Woman:
"I want my money back. That was bad. Just plain bad. And I watch art films. I come here all the time, and I know art films. But that was the worst movie I've ever seen. Just bad filmmaking. Just bad! Has no one else complained?"

Manager, exasperated:
"No."

Woman:
"No one has complained? Well, they must be too shy!"

Manager:
"This is the first I'm hearing any complaints."

Woman:
(voice rising)
"So you're not going to give me my money back? It was bad. I mean, bad!"

Manager:
"We don't do that."

Woman:
"I can't believe this. I come here all the time."

Woman's meek, bearded BF:
"It was...pretty bad."

Manager:
"I'm sorry." [leaves]

Angrily, the woman barrels out of the lobby, and charges down the mean streets of New York City on her way home, perhaps to stab a kitty cat or watch Bad Boys II.

The Sopranos, Season Six Episode 15: “Remember When”

The last image in “Remember When” is of Junior Soprano (Dominic Chianese) slumped meekly in a lawn chair outside his treatment center, absently petting a snaggle pussed cat. His tight-lipped expression bespeaks frustration at his plight, but also the fact that for the first time since the sixth season premiere “Members Only” – in Friends parlance, The One where Junior Shoots Tony – he’s without his dentures. A few scenes earlier, he’d been assaulted by a fellow patient who gave him a good sock to his fragile jaw. What we’re seeing then, is a tableaux of toothlessness at once literal and figurative – the old fox defanged.

It seems as good a place as any to leave Junior, arguably the least empathetic of The Sopranos’ major characters (seasonal bogeymen like Richie Aprille and Ralph Ciffaretto notwithstanding) and seemingly a forgotten man as far as the writers were concerned. The slow erosion of Corrado Soprano’s former sharpness has been a familiar motif over the past few years, but (pace its nostalgic title) “Remember When” charts just how far he’s slipped by introducing an old photograph of Junior and his brother Johnny, slouched casually against a Cadillac in front of Satriale’s.

As a portrait of old-style wise guy cool, it’s just about perfect. The pair’s expressions hover somewhere between avuncular and homicidal. Flipping through old photos during a South Beach sojourn with Paulie, Tony gives the picture a quick glance and seems eager to move on. He’s equally uninterested in the vintage snapshot of Paulie (a real and arresting image of Tony Sirico, all biceps and slicked-backed attitude), exclaiming a few seconds later – after Paulie has commandeered the conversation with another long-winded remembrance of malfeasance past -- that “‘remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.’”

It’s understandable that Tony doesn’t really want to dredge up the past; after all, the little bit of past that’s been dredged up in a Jersey basement – the corpse of a bookie who was apparently Tony’s first-ever kill – is what has him fled to Florida, dining chez Beansie (now moving about in an expensive-looking wheelchair) and wondering which of his many regrettable yesterdays will finally undo him in the present tense. And Tony looks very much like a guy who’s coming undone: he seems paunchier and sallower than usual, and a furtive phone call to Hesh suggests he may he having money problems. (200 K is no small loan).

The week’s major revelation, courtesy of bigmouth Paulie, is that Tony murdered the bookie at his father’s insistence. No wonder Tony is reticent to reminisce. The Sopranos has always been a show marked by hauntings, but this episode was a veritable echo chamber, referencing important moments in the show’s past.Junior being pelted by paper balls by his former charge mirrored Meadow’s drunken behavior in the season three finale; the tense scenes between Tony and Paulie on a rented boat loudly (and some might say over-deliberately) evoked Big Pussy’s murder.

Despite its abundance of carefully wrought resonances, “Remember When” feels a bit like a holding pattern, another attenuated standstill to mark time as the plot slowly kicks into gear (though we did see another bloody step Phil Leotardo’s NYC takeover bid). There wasn’t much, f’rinstance, to substantiate (or refute) Robbiefreeling’s superb postulation from last week about Christopher’s possible extra-cirricular activities. (And I watched Imperioli during his one scene like a hawk). There’s more to be said, of course, and rather than try to unravel it myself, I’ll just give you both some talking points that I’m not articulate enough to jump on. Why the sudden and frankly unprecedented glimpse into Paulie’s interior life? What do you make of Junior addressing his treatment centre protégé/assailant as “Anthony?” Does the tomato plant count as another Godfather reference? Help me out here.

Playing tomorrow, Monday, April 23, at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater is certainly one of the best Spanish films of its era, Cria cuervos (1976). And, considering last year's revelatory new Janus print of Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive down at Film Forum, Cria, which also stars young Ana Torrent, in her follow-up performance to Beehive, deserved a similar extended chance for rediscovery. Instead, it played once last fall as part of Janus's 50th anniversary series, and now again for a Carlos Saura retrospective, at a hard-to-attend weekday screening. If you can possibly make it up there, by all means, go.

I recently viewed Saura's film for the first time and fell in love, totally enveloped by its rhythms and its elegantly unsettling structure. More straightforward in its psychologies than Erice's film, yet similarly oblique in the way it deals with childhood trauma and national political repression, and localizes it in the domestic sphere, Cria gives the little dark-eyed beauty Torrent another opportunity to hone her soulful blank-slate stare. Here, instead of haunted by the specter of Franco-stein, Ana's learning to cope after her beloved mother's loss to cancer, and subsequently her father's sudden death. Living with her older and younger sister, her chilly aunt, and earthy housekeeper, Ana is ensconced in a world of women, and Saura's vision is strikingly maternal, presided over by the ghost of Geraldine Chaplin's mother--in one memorable scene she passes by Ana's bedroom door over and over again in solemn repetition, her nightgown draped around her like a shroud.

The (necessary) absence of the father is meant to be representative of the end of General Franco's rule, as the dictator was on his death bed when the film was in production, and gone by the time the film was released. Thus, the film's vision is one of a nation of women just coming out of the shadows after years of invisibility--the ghosts of the living emerging into the light. Added bonus: catchy pop tune "Porque te vas," by Jeannette, which becomes the film's presiding theme. You won't be able to get it, or Ana's haunted stare, out of your head for days...

Hot Fuzz is the fulfillment of most any movie-glutted provincial adolescent's study-hall daydreams — basically, to turn their town into the set of an action movie smash-up. Filming in his hometown hamlet, Somerset, Wells, director Edgar Wright must be realizing set pieces that he mentally storyboarded at age 14; a climax where two characters enact a life-and-death grapple over a scale model of the cityscape, destructively wading through real estate like Toho rubber monsters, reinforces the air of preteen fantasy — Bill Watterson's illustrations of Calvin stomping through the Cleveland suburbs show a kindred sentiment.

Nick Angel (Simon Pegg, Wright's longtime collaborator and cowriter), a tightly wound cop working London's toughest beat, shames the rest of the department with his exemplary arrest record, so he's shipped off to parochial "Sandford," a perennial competitor for "Village of the Year," where the police force is generally more interested in their dessert menu than upholding the letter of the law (the set-up is basically On Dangerous Ground played as farce). Teamed with oafish local officer Danny Butterman (Nick Frost, another Wright regular), Angel doesn't find much excuse for his frontier-style brand of law enforcement, but as he begins to unravel a local conspiracy, the call to bring Michael Bay action to this Agatha Christie backdrop becomes obvious.

Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton’s review of Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz.

So, if you’re reading this site, you probably have at the very least a passing interest in the art of film. Then WHAT ARE YOU DOING READING THIS SITE WHEN YOU SHOULD BE IN THE THEATER WATCHING SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY?!?

That’s right, the movie that’s sweeping the nation [‘s intelligent lovers of cinema and all things human] is finally playing. Opened yesterday at New York’s IFC Center, and probably soon coming to a Netflix queue near you, Syndromes and a Century, directed by eminently huggable genius-auteur-of-the-moment Apichatpong Weerasethakul solidifies the almost extraterrestrial brilliance of this Thai filmmaker. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: With Apichatpong, Tsai Ming-liang, and the Dardenne Brothers consistently working, the cinema will remain as vital and thrilling as all of us who have dedicated our passions to it have dreamed.

Hyperbole? YES, GODAMMIT!

So go now and ensconce yourselves in Apichatpong’s latest gorgeous world. If his earlier films are a valuable reference point for you, then Syndromes has the digressive anecdotal surprises of Mysterious Object at Noon, the lovely, nature idyll of Blissfully Yours, and the bisected narrative daring of Tropical Malady. Don’t try to “figure it out”; you wouldn’t do that to David Lynch, would you? Just sit back, climb in its trees, wander its hallways, enter its open doors and gaping pipe-holes, sing along, drift away, and dance to the closing credits.

What, you need more?

Well, our staff writers have a lot to say about it:
Jeff Reichert:
“Syndromes may well be the filmmaker’s most assured, complex, and rewarding film to date. I hate to praise a director I love with such milquetoast terms of approval as “gentle” and “lulling” (“visionary” and “bold” are certainly much sexier), but Weerasethakul’s films approach a level of calm hugely unfashionable in a culture attuned to the hyperactivity of Park Chan-wook. A whisper in the ear when audiences respond more readily to a punch in the face, Weerasethakul has been able to work surprisingly regularly since his debut feature, Mysterious Object at Noon, becoming a fixture in international cinema in only a few short years. Somehow his brand of warm, honest humanism straddles a fine line—never really in fashion, while never quite going out of style for the discerning. A majority of film students might steal from the likes of more overtly cinematic directors like Martin Scorsese or Sam Peckinpah, but the ones to watch out for—the real talents—are going to be those expert in early Renoir."
Click here to read the rest.

Michael Koresky:
"How does a good, upstanding critic, wary from years of singing the praises of films that he convinced only his lover, grandma, and some random dude in Wyoming to go see, persuade his readers to get out of the grindhouse and into the rhythms of Apichatpong?

Well, one could dote upon the calming pacing and visuals, but then the film's not reducible to its mood and atmosphere—Syndromes and a Century is truly sublime, a bridging of the gap between avant-garde and narrative forms made by the sure, steady hand of an artist. Syndromes is funny. Syndromes is pure--to the extent that I don't believe that there's a wasted moment, extraneous visual, or unharmonious cut, and that everything you see comes from the genuine expression of a painter and philosopher who just happens to use film as his medium."

Click here to read the rest.

Michael Joshua Rowin in L Magazine:

"As foreign film audiences veer toward the middle of the road, choosing in greater numbers Pan’s Labyrinth over challenging fare like Regular Lovers (even while once controversial classics like Antonioni sell out at BAM due to their canonical infallibility), forward-thinking innovators like Weerasethakul become more and more the ignored picks of selective critics. Understandably: Weerasethakul’s sensibility encompasses several of the experimental tenets of modern narrative filmmaking, making his movies manna to the art house hardcore and head-scratchers to most other audiences. Like Tsai Ming-Liang (The Wayward Cloud) and Hou Hsaio-Hsien (Three Times), Weerasethakul deemphasizes plot momentum, shooting action — often punctuated by awkward moments of dead time — in extended long takes and creating serene moving portraits that heighten the senses by making each movement, sound, and change in light a miraculous occurrence. Weerasethakul doesn’t just slow things down, he literally takes his sweet time — not for nothing do the opening credits of his films appear, to one’s shock and discomfort, one or two reels in."

Click here to read the rest.

And, if you need more reading on Apichatpong (there’s never enough), here’s our interview with the man himself upon the release of Tropical Malady.

From a recent stop on the "Straight Talk Express" tour:

Another man — wondering if an attack on Iran is in the works — wanted to know when America is going to “send an air mail message to Tehran.”

McCain began his answer by changing the words to a popular Beach Boys song. “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” he sang to the tune of Barbara Ann. “Iran is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. That alone should concern us but now they are trying for nuclear capabilities. I totally support the President when he says we will not allow Iran to destroy Israel.”

Sweet. To wash that down with some hearty liberal LOLs (while we still can), check out the Fox News Kurt Vonnegut obituary that's been circulating the interwebs for a few days. There's more levels of irony in this short video than easily counted.

“Bracketed by stunning long shots taken from the front of a moving freight train, Wang Bing’s epic, three-part documentary, Tie Xi Qu: West of Tracks, is an astonishingly intimate record of China’s painful transition from state-run industry to a free market. Filming between 1999 and 2001, Mr. Wang and his sound engineer, Lin Xudong, painstakingly document the death throes of the Tie Xi industrial district in the city of Shenyang, in northeast China, a once-vibrant symbol of a thriving socialist economy. As factories close and workers lose not only their jobs but also their homes and social networks, the filmmakers patiently observe the end of an era and the fortitude of those left floundering in its wake.”

Click here to read the rest of Jeannette Catsoulis’s New York Times review of Wang Bing’s Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, which is getting released for the first time in the U.S. starting today, in a rare one-week engagement at downtown Manhattan’s Anthology Film Archives (natch). For a complete schedule of when you can see all three parts, click here.

Thanks for bearing with us. It’s been longer than usual since our last symposium, although we’re thrilled that we’ve managed to drastically increase the amount of new content in our recurring sections (interviews, reviews, retrospectives) over the last few months. Having decided to forgo our annual year-end “issue” in favor of a more streamlined retrospective of the endlessly bountiful movie slop trough of 2006 via our best-of-the-year poll, our always controversial 11 Offenses article, and our annual But What About column, we bounded over winter and headed right for spring. So, sorry for the delay, but we’re now proud to present Reverse Shot: On Demand, featuring a little self-examination—this new symposium represents an attempt figure out what it means to watch movies through our very particular lens. Assuming of course, that “our lens” bears any weight at all.

Click here to read more.

The Sopranos, Season Six, Episode 14: “Stage 5”

An utterly unnerving night with the Sopranos, if you ask me: one of those expert straddlings of the line between the broad and the sober that’s been the show’s stock in trade for quite a few years now. Even as the episode opened on a seemingly fairly innocuous note, with hyper-gory footage from Christopher’s indie horror-crap “Cleaver” encompassing the screen as it’s being digitally tweaked in the editing room, “Stage 5” moved on to deeper reflections, climaxing with what might have been the series’ most fully realized evocation of its “sympathy for the devil” leanings. But, first, to the get the “Cleaver” stuff out of the way (which is exactly what David Chase, brilliantly, did): How refreshing (and what a relief) that Christopher’s long-gestating mob-horror hybrid (Goodfellas meets Saw, natch) finally premiered and rather than provide either climax or catharsis, it was merely a plot device to both deepen the festering rot of Tony and Christopher’s father-son bond, as well as create new reservoirs of anger and resentment between Carmela and Christopher. The “Cleaver” screening itself was a predictable chuckle-fest, reminiscent of nothing less than the meta madness of The Muppet Movie (Steven Van Zandt looked especially Dr. Teeth-like as he chortled and nodded with approval) or, as when Paulie loudly answers his cell mid-movie, one of those pre-show movie theater politeness ads. But then a quick, expertly timed glance from Rosalie Aprile to Carmela when “Cleaver”’s mob boss (clearly modeled after Tony, and played by Daniel Baldwin with prime Baldwin doofiness) seduces his protégé’s fiancée, and the floodgates of recognition open.

Later on, not only does Carmela further turn her husband against Christopher by emphasizing the similarities between him and his onscreen version, she confronts the little rat-face herself at her home, memorably with his newborn baby in her arms. As with all essential Sopranos exchanges, the conversation was brief, yet cutting; blink and miss the portending wrath to come. Segueing from concerns over “Cleaver”’s proximity to her husband’s extramarital dalliances, she moves into darker territory—quick and without warning. Carmela first speaking of Adriana directly to Christopher, and voicing her concerns that she might be dead (!), seemed like a true breakthrough; furthermore she insinuates that she was better off without him. Christopher’s relationship with Tony already shaky, he certainly doesn’t need Carmela to turn against him, too.

And something is terribly amiss with Christopher: he’s too sober. After last season’s (or the first half of the season, depending on how you want to look at it) downward spiral into addiction (again), everything seems too rosy: wife, house, baby. And what was that business with the feds outside the diner, laughed off as if old school chums? And what of Christopher’s final look of hollowed (dare I say “Pussy-like”?) guilt at his baby’s baptism, the end of the episode and already the second Godfather reference just two weeks into the season?

If my suspicions of Christopher come true, then it would be in perfectly keeping with David Chase’s horrific sense of irony. Paralleling all this meaty family intrigue was the further humiliation of Johnny Sack, not only facing the daily grind of prison life but also discovering that he’s in the final stages of lung cancer (just another of what will be many of this season’s “chicken’s home to roost” nuggets: Johnny was rarely seen without an elegantly curling waft of cigarette smoke by his side). Perhaps by virtue of his soothing control and comparatively gentlemanlike manner, Vincent Curatola’s Johnny Sack always came across as one of the series’ most valuable, even likable players, eminently measured, as much a murderous scoundrel as anyone else yet so utterly convincing in his self-assurance and unwavering in his own ethical standards that he made for an appealing counterpoint to Tony. Johnny’s slow death, mouth agape, with his beloved wife and daughter at his side, leaves something of a gaping hole in the morally relative Sopranos world.

Picking up where Hal Holbrook brilliantly left off in last season’s “The Fleshy Part of the Thigh,” Sydney Pollack was on hand to deliver one of his best performances, and one surprisingly free of the harried neuroses of his greatest onscreen roles, as a convicted wife-killing doctor, working in the prison hospital and giving Johnny some hope in his dying days. Never sentimentalized, their relationship remains as no-nonsense and unerringly masculine as any in the show’s history. Unlike Holbrook’s hospital companion to Tony, Pollack isn’t here to give spiritual advice or philosophical wisdom, rather to provide Johnny with (ultimately futile) hope; thus the paralleling between Tony and Johnny was reinforced—and put to sleep. Tony’s second chance at life versus Johnny’s hopeless fade; Tony’s been aided along the way by road markers, beacons, and guardians, while Johnny had everything taken away from him piece by mortifying piece. In the show’s reliance on binaries, the Tony/Johnny trajectory may be the second most heartbreaking behind Carmela and Rosalie Aprile (who’s already lost everything that Carmela holds dear); and it’s doubtful that Tony and Carmela will remain so comparatively untouched for much longer.

I set off on Saturday morning, a few friends in tow, to scale what Andrew Sarris had claimed to be “the Mount Everest of modern cinema.” Though it was a crisp, sunny spring afternoon, perfect for a stroll in the park, I braced myself for the first seven and a half hours of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 1/2-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz at the Museum of Modern Art. It was inevitable that I would one day see it, after all, and how better to do so than to push through it and, honestly, to get it out of the way and thereby graduate to the cinephilic equivalent of Webelos?

So lesson learned, and woe to the critic who goes around talking about movies as mountains. “It is one of those hybrid cinematic works that demand immersion and endurance,” writes A.O. Scott of the film in the New York Times, “an element of punishment to sweeten the pleasure.” Except that Berlin Alexanderplatz isn’t a “hybrid cinematic work”, and whatever punishment there is in watching Berlin Alexanderplatz in two nearly eight-hour installments is pretty much self-inflicted. The grainy quality of the projected image, blown up to a (beautiful) 35mm print from a 16mm negative, offers constant reminder that, whatever its pedigree, Berlin Alexanderplatz was meant to be seen on television, as a miniseries, in installments, and I worry a bit about an art-movie culture that fetishizes “endurance” over an authentic viewing experience, likening monumental works to landscapes, waiting to be traversed by those strong, courageous, and dedicated enough to give themselves to the task.

While episodes one to seven, with a few exceptions, didn’t resonate with me as strongly as other Fassbinder films I’ve seen, I liked quite a bit of the first half of Berlin Alexanderplatz. But it certainly suffered by the method of presentation: around the sixth hour, the music became maddening; by episode three, the narrative jumps and repetitions began unnerving me; and throughout, the episodic quality of it wore me down as I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, mentally segmenting the screenings into episodes, the episodes into minutes, counting down until my liberation. So my friends and I decided, some more quickly than others, to forego day two of Alexanderplatz and to catch up with it in installments in our respective living rooms. When I’m through with all 15 hours, I may well think the whole thing a masterpiece, though it’s just as likely that I’ll pronounce it “very good.” Regardless, I’ve learned to take my punishment and pleasure in small doses and to content myself with watching Berlin Alexanderplatz as it was intended to be seen, whatever other critics who climb mountains in their seats and toss down gauntlets with their pens (or keyboards) have to say about it – and I’m sure my ass, spared a second day of Titus 1, will thank me.

Two paths cross in British director Andrea Arnold's debut feature Red Road-- not in the story, but in the story mechanics. There's a tale of a woman, Jackie (Kate Dickie), confronted with the appearance of a harbinger of destruction from her past, Clyde (Tony Curran). And there's the manner in which this potentially combustive situation unfolds: Jackie is a CCTV security operator who spots Clyde on her monitors and then proceeds to spy on him with the advantage of the technology at her disposal. At once universal and unmistakably modern, Red Road combines elements of both no-nonsense realism and Foucaultian paranoia to produce a unique, not soon forgettable drama.

Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Andrea Arnold's long-anticipated Red Road.

And after you're all caught up, don't forget to check out Rowin's interview with Andrea Arnold at Reverse Shot's main site:

Recently there have been several high-profile films like Caché and A Scanner Darkly involving surveillance recording. Is Red Road’s primary concern with surveillance in regard to one person’s voyeurism, or are Jackie’s job and her inquiries suggestive of something more menacing in modern technology?

AA: I’d been looking at doing something about CCTV because in Britain we have 20% of the world’s cameras on our tiny island—that’s a lot of cameras, and they’ve been increasing gradually over the years. I often looked at the cameras and wondered who’s behind them, who’s watching, what does it mean. Is it Big Brother, are our daily lives going to be constantly watched? And I’d also been wondering why Britain has so many cameras. When I was given this project and the character description of Jackie—because it was an unusual way of starting—it was described that she was cool and aloof and that she had this terrible thing happen in her past, and I had this idea that she was separated from life, she was watching life but not taking part. And I thought she could be a CCTV operator.

Now that Quentin Tarantino and that other guy's Weinstein experiment has been pummelled into pencil shavings at the box office by the likes of Are We Done Yet?, it seems an appropriate time for a little Shot/Reverse Shot from a couple of RS staff writers. Don't let anyone ever say we're behind the ball: We're just ahead of the trends....yeah.

First up on the main site is Jeannette Catsoulis:
"Tarantino loves women as only a nerd can, which is to say he’s also a little afraid of them (see also: castration). He’s a stalker of prey he was never allowed to touch, and words are his camouflage. (In his movies, the violence serves mainly as an excuse for the talking.) Death Proof may climax in a gut-churning car chase, but the movie’s heart remains firmly in its mouth; most of the time, the girls just gab, long, rambling conversations about sex and cars that sound as natural as Stallone and Willis nattering about macramé and silverware."
Click here to read Catsoulis's review in its entirety.

Then, over at Stop Smiling Online, courtesy of our own Nick Pinkerton:
"As to if the sum total of Tarantino’s effect on American film was for better or for worse is almost a moot argument now (though those of us who lived through the neo-noir glut of Destiny Turns on the Radio, Two Days in the Valley and Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, or the mercifully brief popularity of Urge Overkill, can all agree we wouldn’t want to do it again). It happened, we’re living with it, and new frauds leap up every day to make Quentin’s postmodern hully gully seem positively innocuous. Would film culture be richer, smarter, or more soulful if James Gray, Hal Hartley, Nick Gomez, Jim Jarmusch, or Whit Stillman had moved $100 million in tickets? Almost definitely yes, but then worrying about the disproportionate relation between artistry and popular approbation is a bit like fretting over the earth turning."
Click here for Pinkerton's review, top to bottom.

Is Terrence Davies the greatest living director that no one talks about? There, got your attention. This past weekend, demurely tucked away amidst the current pre-Alexanderplatz Fassbinder hoopla and the post-Imamura blow out of New York film culture, was one of the finest films of the past twenty (or whatever arbitrary number you care to add…thirty? forty?) years, Davies’s The Long Day Closes. A continuation of sorts of Davies’s acclaimed, and still non-DVD’d, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1987), which recounted the director’s traumatic remembrances of his abusive father as a period songbook of sorts, The Long Day Closes focuses exclusively on the relationship between mother and son, not quite dramatized as a series of images and whispers.

Just when you thought you’d seen all this stuff before (dramas of working-class postwar Liverpool, concerning little boys who escape from reality to the cathedral-like confines of the cinema…), Davies transforms rote movie-honed pathos into something that nearly bursts with invention and integrity. Nostalgia, undeniably. Family, cinema, music, holidays, snowfalls, school bullies? For sure. Yet it isn’t some simple “trip into the past”—it may be closer in tone to Woody Allen’s Radio Days than something like Cinema Paradiso, yet it’s more liminal and less distanced than either. The Long Day Closes is immersive, a plunge into the lingering terrors of prepubescent sexuality and the mysterious ways in which memory is concerned more with indefinable rushes of feeling than events. Threadbare as the narrative seems, Davies packs more experience in this film’s short 90 minutes than most directors do with epics of belt-widening girth.

There are seemingly no traditional transitions in the film; from scene to scene, using elegant dissolves or gorgeously distilled graphic matches, it flows from one moment to the next with intuitive nonchalance. There are no scenes, just perceptions; traces and moods rather than defining happenstance. Psychological makeup isn’t established, it’s already a given: at the film’s outset the director’s young surrogate (Leigh McCormack) is seen curiously scoping out a bit of shirtless male musculature from his window with a mix of shame and wonder, the same two emotions he will feel when sneaking peeks at those other mysteries of childhood—cinema, the church. Davies brilliantly uses McCormack as his vessel: he’s not “pensive,” not a passive observer of his family and friends so much as a slowly forming moral being; the child’s pursed lips and eagle stare don’t convey “innocence” (as in other, thuddingly banal portraits of children escaping into dreams, such as, I have to say it, Pan’s Labyrinth) but rather an actual absorbent intellect. Imagine that: kids with the capability of judgment! Davies lets his actor’s face convey this, relegating his dialogue to simple asides and repetitions, like his occasionally asking his mum for movie money.

And such lovingly infrequent dialogue—the most memorable in the film being lines from other films draped across the soundtrack, as they echo in the boy’s mind, the most exquisitely rendered being a snatch of exchange between Judy Garland and Tom Drake from Meet Me in St. Louis, played while he spies his older brother romantically commingling with a girlfriend in glass silhouette behind the front door. (There’s also some Magnificent Ambersons thrown in there, with Orson Welles’s honey-acid narration incongruously telling us of George’s comeuppance—another example of a classical family narrative providing counterpoint.) Even more beguiling are the moments in which Davies abstracts the solitude of childhood to minute drifts across patterned rugs or wallpaper, watching and waiting for the light cast by a window to change with the passing of a cloud, or, in the memorably foreboding opening, an extended glide (heavenly but resolutely earthbound) across a rain-swept street and into an alleyway, bereft of people but pregnant with time and memory.

Anyone who’s seen Davies’s The House of Mirth knows that his dreamlike and ethereal approach to memory is simply a mask for the stuff of true flesh and blood. Ultimately, when Mirth’s Lily Bart succumbs to the oppressive realities of the falsely genteel New York social codes that she had previously floated upon without care or consequence, the effect is devastating, as if a hole had opened up in the earth and swallowed her. Similarly, young McCormack is completely enveloped in darkness by film’s end (an escape? Not so fast, Guillermo Del Toro….), though the future here is undefined. Like many a David Lynch character, he wanders into an open doorway and disappears into a vapor, doomed (blessed?) to become a witness to his own memories played up on a silver screen, whose sun is slowly, slowly fading out.

Season Six, Episode 13: "Soprano Home Movies"

“Soprano Home Movies,” the first episode of The Sopranos to air in the better part of a year, actually begins with an old scene from the end of the fifth season’s finale (“All Due Respect”), dating back to 2004: Johnny Sack, the boss of New York, was arrested in the backyard of his home, and Tony fled through the snow, tossing his gun. Tony’s casual mistake—tossing the firearm in plain view of a spectator—comes back to haunt him when he’s arrested on a gun charge in the present day. David Chase and his writers seem to be setting up a major story arc around Tony’s precarious relationship with the legal powers-that-be, but until that’s played out, that potential plot advancement may be the least interesting thing about the use of that footage from “All Due Respect.”

The recycled scene sets the tone for this elegant and surprisingly stripped-down episode, which is loaded with echoes of the past. Carmela waxes sentimental about that house on the shore she and Tony nearly bought before she threw him out of the house in “Whitecaps” (the finale of season four). Tony tries to insulate himself by using a family member, his brother-in-law Bobby, as a buffer, then later asserts his authority by coaxing Bobby into killing a man, as he did with Christopher in “For All Debts Public and Private” (the season four premiere). Tony tries pinning Bobby to the wall in a balls-out fight that looks an awful lot like the scuffle that cost Ralph Cifaretto his life in “Whoever Did This.” Janice tells Carmela about the boyfriend who once hit her (dearly departed Richie Aprile), neglecting to tell Carm that she responded by shooting him dead in “Knight in White Satin Armor,” way back in season two. There’s just no escaping the past, it seems; these characters are doomed to remember and relive past mistakes, indiscretions, and half-baked schemes. And while we could speculate what this means for the eight remaining episodes, it’s enough for now to take it as an apt enough distillation of “Soprano Home Movies,” an episode that, to a surprising degree, privileged family melodrama above mob drama.

By my watch, over 30 minutes of the episode’s running time were devoted to Tony and Carm’s trip up to the Adirondacks to celebrate Tony’s birthday with Bobby and Janice. In slow, quiet scenes, Tony makes real headway in his relationship with his sister and brother-in-law, and Janice even tries to compliment him, to tell him he’s changed since being shot last year. Tony takes offense at what he sees as a thinly veiled attack, and what starts as validation of Tony’s “every day is a gift” transformation from a year ago actually sets off the quick slide back to the default hostility between Tony and his sister, culminating brilliantly in an explosive and violent game of Monopoly. At the end of the episode, Tony watches the home movies from his childhood that Janice has had transferred to DVD. Little Janice sprays little Tony with a hose, and he chases after her. It’s as though they were doomed to this vicious cycle of aggression and resentment from the time they were half-formed.

Providing the psychological templates for both brother and sister are, of course, Tony’s mother and father, who loom large over the episode, and though Tony and Janice fancy themselves more like the latter, they each have plenty of Livia Soprano within themselves to inspire each other’s (self) loathing—Tony in his insatiable need for his sister’s gratitude for the things he has done for her, Janice in her erratic parenting skills. The point is simple and profound, subtly rendered but crystal clear: Our families are larger than ourselves, and one way or another, they make us who we are. To return to something I wrote last week about the previous episodes of Season Six, this takes the show back to this thorny issue of whether or not people are capable of real change, whether it’s possible to escape the things that have formed us. To The Sopranos’ credit, though, however close the show comes to implying that everyone is caught inescapably within institutions and relationships that make them who they are, that never means they get a free pass morally. Tony, Janice, and Bobby all come out of their boozy, brutal weekend together worse for the wear, a little more compromised and further away from realizing whatever hopes they have for redemption. As for Carmela, well, she may get off the easiest this week, but her passivity, on full display here, has always been her greatest sin. In “Soprano Home Movies,” she is more chorus than anything to else—in this case literally, in one glorious moment of drunken karaoke, singing “Love Hurts.” If she meant the love of family, well, I’ll drink to that.

From Cnw:

On April 8, HBO’s landmark original series The Sopranos begins a stretch of nine final original episodes, officially the second half of the series’ much-maligned sixth season. For some of us at Reverse Shot, the end of The Sopranos is a pretty big deal. How better to tackle the end of the series and to pay tribute to a masterpiece of American popular culture than with a bit of ongoing dialogue, Reverse Shot style? So I’m happy to inaugurate an ongoing discussion on Reverse Blog about The Sopranos, Season Six, Part Two. Of course, we’re not the only game in town, and I do encourage anyone and everyone to check out the Sopranos coverage from our friends at the House Next Door. But with a text (film, television series, or otherwise) this rich, there’s plenty more to be said, and a multiplicity of voices is always a good thing. So, without further ado…

When last we saw Tony and friends, New York and New Jersey were on the verge of war (again); Christopher was fighting a drug habit and pining for a career in the movies (again); and Carmela was selling her soul for a sweet real estate venture (again). The series sixth and final season began with a shattering event. Tony was shot by his Uncle Junior and slipped into a coma, barely clinging to life. He escaped purgatory (quite literally) to find he had a new lease on life; he would treat each day as a gift. This setup established the central theme of the season: how much can we really change, and can we will ourselves to be different than—or better than—whatever it is we’ve become? At least four major character arcs in the season came back repeatedly to this theme: Tony’s last shot at redemption, Christopher’s repeated slide into addiction, Carmela’s perennial abdication of moral responsibility for material comfort, and, most prominently, Vito’s ill-fated attempt to flee New Jersey and the mob and to live as a gay man. The results were predictably bleak. If the season seems to have asked if redemption is possible for any of these characters, it’s fair to say that David Chase and his writers came down with a hard negative assessment. So season six set up a serious of false starts and dead ends, leaving everyone, in the end, pretty much where it found them, and pissing off fickle Sopranos fans across the country (let’s just be honest, if you watch Sopranos for climax—and you probably shouldn’t—David Chase is an incredibly big tease). While it may not have been conventionally satisfying in a straightforward (read: boring) way, though, there was something incendiary and brilliant about how Chase and his writers set up such clear moral tests for each of these characters and then let them all fail at them systematically and nearly without exception.

This all came to a non-climax in the midseason finale, an episode called “Kaisha.” The title refers to a lie Christopher tells Tony about the woman he’s seeing: she’s black, he says, and so he can’t bring her around; in fact, her name isn’t Kaisha—it’s Julianna—and he can’t bring her around because she had an aborted fling with Tony. So Kaisha is really a non-person, an absence, the lie we tell to make everything seem okay. There are plenty of these lies to go around. As the episode ends, the Soprano family gathers for Christmas, and Tony and Carmela’s daughter Meadow calls home from California. “Everybody’s here”, they tell her, which is a lie. Meadow’s not there, for one, but also, the camera lingers on Christopher’s new wife and we realize that Christopher’s dead fiancé Adriana, murdered by Silvio with Tony and Christopher’s blessing, is also the hidden lack, her absence concealed by a lie that no one believes, a lie that explains her away without expunging her from memory.

These characters are ill equipped to deal with relationships; they’re constantly lying to themselves and to one another. “Kaisha” ends chillingly, as A.J.’s new girlfriend tells Carmela, “You have a beautiful home.” Carmela smiles, “Yes, we do.” There you have it, one sad moment of truth, as Carmela, perhaps the show’s last best hope at redemption, takes pathetic joy in her stuff, pretending that everything is okay, and that having a beautiful home is the same thing as having a beautiful family. These people have all chosen things above people; they don’t even know how to do otherwise and can’t do otherwise, even when they try. I have no thoughts about where these final episodes are headed, and I don’t care to speculate about the finale that the series is or isn’t building to, but I am sure that Chase and his writers will come back to these themes, and I fear that the outlook for these characters is bleak. And still, I’m so excited to see what they do that I can hardly stand it…

From robbiefreeling:

And it’s funny how in the months proceeding, when I recalled the title of the final episode, I always just assumed that it referred to the character of A.J.’s new girlfriend. Rewatching it, I was taken aback by my presumptions, racist or otherwise. In a sense, this episode reminded me very much of the fifth season’s “Unidentified Black Males,” in which the show prominently took itself to task for all of its intentionally race-baiting subplots in the past, climaxing with the revelation that Tony had not, in fact, been assaulted by random black guys on his way to meet his doomed cousin Tony B (Steve Buscemi) on that failed mission that got Tony B put in jail for years, but that he had an embarrassing fainting spell brought on by (what else?) mother troubles. So then, Kaisha is an Unidentified Black Female, another, as you put it, “absence” and a “lie.” Sopranos has always trafficked in the ways in which ethnicity is wielded as both a scapegoat and self-definition, yet this was perhaps its most subtle use. And most telling: A.J.’s Puerto Rican (“Maybe Dominican,” Tony reasons…hopefully?) girlfriend, named, actually, Blanca, is suddenly part of the family; almost welcome, even, at their Christmas gathering.

This is a stunning turnabout not only because of the fact that A.J. has suddenly become something bordering on responsible (not adult yet, I dare say) but also because his sister Meadow was certainly not allowed the “privilege” of an interracial romance back in season three, when her Jewish/African-American paramour seemed lucky to have escaped the Soprano home with his life (and pretentious rectitude) intact. So what does this mean? Is Tony “evolving”? Did his near-death experience truly force him to turn over a new leaf and cherish every day as if it was his last? Doubtful if David Chase has anything to say about it, but it was a remarkably subdued ending to an emotionally volatile season (just one week prior, we saw Vito get the Joe Pesci-in-Casino treatment, that guy Fat Dom get sliced up like raw fish, and, most disturbingly, Adriana come back in a possibly prophetic dream Carmela had during her Paris sojourn), and pointed towards so many explosions they would be impossible to numerate and a fool’s errand to predict.

But since I am a bit of a fool, I will make a prediction about the Final 9: that Carmela’s growing suspicions about Adriana’s disappearance will be further investigated (spec house distractions be damned) and her discoveries will explode into a full-fledged moral meltdown (which, paralleling Tony’s psychiatric self-evaluation, has been simmering since season one’s “College”). Tony and Carmela’s relationship is the center here, everything else just satellites orbiting them; as Season Four’s “Whitecaps” proved, the dissolution of their marriage could carry a dramatic sting far greater than any baseball bat knock to the head.

From Brotherfromanother:

Robbie, I don’t think you’re a fool. Adriana’s ghost hovered over season six in more ways than one, and cnw’s description of her as a kind of structuring absence in the brilliant final scene of “Kaisha” is right on the money. I also saw her in the character of Julianna—curly hair, big chest, dark features, and prone to lounging around in a stupor with Chrissy. Surely you both caught the musical cue when the pair went out to the movies: Bernard Herrmann’s swooning Vertigo theme.

More to the point: Adriana is the only major character whose murder was not shown to us. Yes, we saw Sil stalking after her in the woods (very Miller’s Crossing) and heard the fatal shots. I am not suggesting that Ade is still alive, and that the big revelation this season will be that Sil is a treasonous softie. But after the clinical depictions of Tony & Co.’s “waste management” skills re: Richie Aprile, Ralphie Ciffaretto, and Big Pussy, it’s unlikely that the writers simply neglected to show us Ade’s corpse being hacked and packed out of squeamishness. Yes, we saw Ade’s car being checked into “long term parking” (also the episode’s retroactively affecting title) and yes, Chris threw some suitcases into the tall grass, but my feeling is that if Carm calls the private investigator, and if Adriana’s body is found, it’s going to be because of ineptitude/laziness on Sil’s part.

One of my constant Sopranos companions (full disclosure: my mum, the loudest member of our six-strong weekly viewing party) has suggested that if Carmela discovers what happened to Ade, the Big Lie of the series—the uneasy complicity of the female characters in their partners’ boys-will-be-boys misadventures—would be exposed. Not because Carmela is a paragon of virtue—she’s made her king-size bed and lies in it fine—but because this particular can of worms is plenty deep. Consider the ramifications of Meadow finding out what “really happened” to Jackie Jr: for all her bleeding-heart hypocrisy (which the writers, mostly in the voice of Finn, have routinely called her on), this revelation might be too much for her to bear. People have been wondering in print for the better part of a decade about what would be an appropriate fate for Tony, and I think this could be it: estranged from the person he loves most unequivocally. AJ, being a boy, is a different story—i.e. Tony lets him bring a Puerto Rican girl home. (At least she’s Catholic.) And I think AJ is a dead issue at this point: the old-world traditions of idealizing daughters and then objectifying/abusing them if they belong to someone else are what Chase is after here.

So I’m moved to think of the one female character who, even more than Ade, stands in as the series most innocent (and unmourned) victim: Tracee, the stripper unceremoniously beaten to death by Ralphie in Season Three. The not-unsubtle graphic matches between her and Meadow in that fateful episode hinted that Tony saw them existing on the same continuum. When he mauled Ralphie, screaming, “She was a beautiful creature! She never hurt anybody!” I don’t really think he meant his horse. His cries also foreshadow Adriana’s demise—another innocent, beautiful creature, empathetic to the point that she admired the drug dealer who committed a murder in her nightclub because he sent money home to his family. Adriana, Tracee, and the thrice-burned shell that is Rosalie Aprile, whose unimaginable suffering is once again contrasted with Carmela’s relatively smooth ride during their tetchy trip to Paris (during which Carm may have literally and figuratively seen the light —a beacon atop the Eiffel tower that perfectly mirrored the portentous blip glimpsed by Tony during his near-death stint as Kevin Finnerty (infinity?) are the real victims of the “things” that Tony and his colleagues do.

Whatever “direction” the series is heading, I can’t imagine that a reckoning around these issues isn’t on the horizon. Especially considering that Tony’s teetering psychological architecture—the focus of the series—owes its rotten construction in large part to the I-married-a-mobster coping mechanisms of a very important lady. Recall the amazing house-of-the-dead dream sequence in last season’s second and best episode, and the shadow in the doorway whose mere presence convinced Tony it was best to retreat to the land of the living. Given your Poltergeist-derived moniker, Robbie, you’ll appreciate this: she’s (sort of) ba-ack…

I had high hopes last night that I’d be able to spend this morning penning a thoroughly laudatory entry on Herzog’s Cobra Verde, which hasn’t received nearly the amount of ink as that other obscurity playing at New York’s IFC Center, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. But whether my underwhelming impression resulted from walking straight out of Sheep (yes, of course it’s great) and into Cobra, the end of a long day, or, most likely, the film’s borderline incoherence, there it is: Cobra Verde isn’t nearly as exhilarating as one would hope from the final, turbulent Herzog/Kinski collaboration.

This isn’t to say that it doesn’t have moments of the raw cinematic vitality evinced by Aguirre or Nosferatu, but where those films thrived on that held-breath feeling of sustained near-calamity (both within the films’ narratives and in the sense of their construction), Cobra Verde is more often just diffuse. This may, after all, have been the only way for this pair to wind up—it wasn’t likely that cinema would be lucky enough to catch Kinski spontaneously combusting into a pile of ash on camera, or that a calculator like Herzog would film himself committing homicide (though My Best Fiend comes tantalizingly close). Appropriate or no, the film’s flashes of intensity succumb in the end to overly elliptical plotting that may be the result of a conscious shift towards a more ethnographic mode of filmmaking, but it’s somewhat hard to be sure. Cobra as a whole exists in a similar vein to Where the Green Ants Dream, but I almost miss that earlier film’s attempts to shoehorn in story elements, hokey as they might have been.

Check it out for the battle sequences and Kinski’s lingering death (almost worth the price of admission in itself), though if you had to pick between this and, say, Killer of Sheep, the choice should be obvious. Even so, the print’s lovely, and will probably tour around (keep in mind that Cobra’s been available for a while in DVD form), thus continuing that 25-years-too-late Werner Herzog party that started around the release of Grizzly Man. The attention’s welcome, but perhaps a bit misplaced—how about a new print of Stroszek, Nosferatu, or Heart of Glass?

Two takes this week on Paul Verhoeven’s WWII spectacle Black Book:

Nick Pinkerton:
The real value of Paul Verhoeven's career, above the lubricity of his craftsmanship, comes in the director's total committal to bug-up-the-ass ambivalence. In moving from Holland to Hollywood in the Eighties, and subsequently commanding massive budgets, he retained a distinctly "art-house" reticence to inject moral clarity into his work. Unkind reviews revealed a none-too-subtle elitism from writers who might have no trouble endorsing similar opacity safely fenced off in the subtitle ghetto, but who didn't trust the multiplex patron to navigate ambiguity. As such, he's never enjoyed the unanimous praise that's greeted far lesser artists—on either end of the highbrow-lowbrow spectrum—whose themes have overlapped his work (the Wachowskis, Michael Haneke), though I can't imagine Verhoeven crying much over it.
Click here to read Nick Pinkerton’s “Crass Course” at indieWIRE.

Nicolas Rapold:
The apprehension among Verhoeven skeptics that greets his “doing” World War II has a familiar ring to it, and not just because Black Book retreads some of the same territory as the director’s 1977 Dutch Resistance thriller, Soldier of Orange. The reception cliché “Pop Master of Spectacle Goes Serious” is still grounded, in its modern form, in Schindler’s List; Black Book, Verhoeven’s post-Hollow Man rebirth after six years of silence, comes as a forceful career punctuation mark, even if it’s not quite the post-blockbuster penance of Spielberg’s Holocaust drama. Surface similarity springs out between two pop modernists pilloried for low-art sins: Spielberg’s sentimentality and Verhoeven’s vulgarity, both puppet masters of conscience-consuming spectacles.

Click here to read Nicolas Rapold’s “Waste-Deep” at Reverse Shot.

Say it ain't so!

From this week’s “What, They’re Finally Releasing That?” file comes Lisandro Alonso’s eminently quiet, supremely disquieting lazy drift upstream Los muertos. I caught this at, I believe, a 2005 Film Comment Selects series (though my mind hazy, it could have easily been the 2004 edition…), so forgive me if I’m suddenly taken slightly aback to see that it’s getting a minor debut this Friday at downtown Manhattan’s Anthology Film Archives (with The Wayward Cloud, On the Bowery, and many other else-forgotten gems visiting its screens this spring, Anthology’s been a veritable bounty of movie orphans lately). The Argentinean Los muertos (its title, which needs no translation, forbodes greatly over the film’s brief entirety) is Alonso’s sophomore feature (after the NYFF–selected La libertad [2001]) and was much gabbed about some years back by those who engorge on international festival coverage and who like a healthy slab of art-house minimalism as much as a good roll in the hay—or both, as in the case of Apichatpong’s similarly languorous but ultimately less jarring Blissfully Yours….ah, Apichatpong…wait, what was I saying, focus, man, focus . . .


Alonso’s film has the sway of a daydream but the forward motion of a nightmare: a middle-aged convicted murderer, recently released from prison, wanders silently through the jungle, his mission (if there is one) vague to us. He has a daughter with whom he may reunite, and he has a letter he must deliver to fulfill a promise made to a fellow inmate. With these faint traces of plot, Alonso simply follows him as he goes ever deeper into the forests and rivers that will take him to his destiny. Joseph Conrad might approve, but there’s more sunlight than darkness here. To call it atmospheric would be an understatement: all we have here is environment and how this man, outside of time and law, functions within it. The closest thing to a narrative marker is his slaughter of a goat, shown in uncut real time.


Of course, I barely remember most of the film now, but every so often I think of it and wonder how it’s doing, like an old friend who blows into NYC once every couple of years, meets you for coffee, and is gone, leaving just a trace of an impression. Glad to see it’s visiting the city for a few days, and I would encourage anyone to drag themselves to 2nd and 2nd to take it in. My ad-blurb pull quote: “Awesome long takes! Hauntingly unstructured! It’s like drifting through someone else’s subconscious for 78 minutes! If you prefer the way light dances off of a dirt ground to narrative closure, don’t miss Los muertos”

Last day of the NYUFF, and boy are there some treats for the hardcore. Beyond repeats of Frank and Cindy and Celluloid #1 there are also repeats of short programs "Poems and Problems" and "Head Rush." The former contains serious documentaries: Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, the Law, and Poetry by Paul Chan interviews the apparently unjustly disbarred and 30-year sentence-facing title lawyer, charged as part of aJohn Ashcroft's anti-terrorist sweep with smuggling messages out of jail from an Islamic client. Her recitations of the poetry she loves -- Ashberry, Blake, and Brecht -- are stirring appeals for liberty and constitutional sanity. The Mendi by Steve Reinke is a much more wry, biting (literally) undermining of ethnographic film -- in this case from the CBC's '70s television series Man Alive. The voiceover of the director, who worked as a teenage assistant to the show, over footage of the titular African tribe is a hilariously upsetting wrench in the works that points to the gap between the known and unknowable of other cultures. The Professor is a return to earnest documentary. Director Jason Price follows and interviews David D. Kpormakpor, former Supreme Court Justice and Interim President of Liberia. Exiled to Staten Island after serving during that country's civil war, Kpormakpor tragically lives out his elderly years in regret and loneliness. Price's treatment of his subject is both sympathic and unflinching, a depiction of a lost man and the current community he can never truly join.

Found footage is the dominant element in the shorts of "Head Rush." There's an Arnold Schwarzenneger "mandala" in which the chaos of Terminator 2 and Total Recall is superimposed and kaleidescopically manipulated to thrilling, beatific effect in Jimmy Joe Roche's Ultimate Reality. Through These Trackless Tears is less post-modern and more classical, using industrial and educational films a la Bruce Conner to warn us of our spiritual and material hubris. The program standout might be Slow Jamz, a decelerated highlight reel of Michael Jordan's Slam Dunk Contest feats that builds in uncanniness and pathos to a "screwed" version of a Kanye West track. Slow Jamz creator Karthik Pandian mainpulates the innate nostalgic effect of antique video to manufacture a new kind of emotion: MJ becomes more than an icon, achieving the burden of eternal myth, etched in analogue feed as our desperate emblem of althetic commerce. I could be like Mike -- if he existed.

The inevitability of artistic compromise in the face of bottom-line chasing execs isn't exactly unmined satiric territory, but that doesn't stop Jake Kasdan from throwing himself whole-hog into another retread of The Player, albeit one that benefits from its appropriately TV-style small scale. Kasdan's reasons for devoting his time to such a bitter pill are undoubtedly his own past experiences in dealing with chowder-headed network bigwigs and having to watch projects close to his heart go through the gristmill so as to appeal to an increasingly infantilized TV audience. For sure, the usual parade of sharp-tuned comic actors and a healthy dose of insidery sniping help make The TV Set's fleet eighty-something minutes flash by in a wink (or is it a wince?), but as with most Hollywood-based cautionary tales of selling out, this doesn't seem to be much of a battle between true art and commerce; it's hard to believe that the Ed-like series pilot being pitched and shuttled into pre- and post-production by David Duchovny's harried, hairy writer Mike Klein originated as some sort of groundbreaking gem. Without a real sense of the show within the show, anonymously titled "The Wexler Chronicles" (starring the puppetoon-ish white-guy mugging of lead actor Zach Harper, played by the skillfully unwatchable Fran Kranz), The TV Set glides along like a particularly superficial yet adept episode of The Larry Sanders Show.

Click here to continue reading Michael Koresky's review of Jake Kasdan's The TV Set.