With the deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman coming on the same day, the sense of an era of film forcefully, violently coming to a close (if it hadn’t already ended) is only heightened. No discussion about the “Golden Age” of art cinema, and especially art cinema in this country, is complete without mentioning Antonioni, one of the foremost directors of that much-idealized moment which found Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa jostling for screen space. Not nearly as prolific as Bergman, but equally as important in his efforts to tie the images employed in narrative filmmaking to a new symbolic order, Antonioni remains perhaps the most stubbornly “difficult” of the bunch, or at least the one whose films consistently defy the satisfaction of successful interpretation; one can imagine the firestorm of dinner conversation sparked by the mimed tennis match that closed Blow-Up. That sequence may now be considered somewhat passé, even pretentious, but when was the last time a film has sparked widespread debate about “meaning”? (Debating the identity of Kaiser Soze doesn’t count.)
His major works, almost willfully obtuse and given to frustrating narrative lapses, detours into dead space, and flirtations with the overtly surreal probably had about as much impact on me as those of Bergman did on my compatriot Michael. Red Desert seemed a transmission from another planet, full of unfamiliar languages and vistas; L’avventura was unmistakably earthbound, yet proffered a vision of our world gone musty with rot. I first caught glimpses of Zabriskie Point via a highlight reel which accompanied the presentation of his lifetime achievement Academy Award and was immediately curious as to what turn of events might prompt its famous hillside explosion. I couldn’t have been more surprised to discover that the film made answers to this query far from obvious, and that the same vision also held room for hundreds of naked bodies writhing in desert sand. (Most surprising of all may have been finding the echoes of a filmmaker so unfashionable today fully enmeshed in enfant terrible Bruno Dumont’s terrific Twentynine Palms.)
Antonioni’s cinema remained a doggedly pessimistic animal almost throughout. The only glimpses of positivity around human interaction in his films that I can readily recall comes in the mushy, wistful, late-period, Beyond the Clouds--Sophie Marceau fresh from bedding John Malkovich(!), shares a smile with herself as she walks back from the window where her mysterious lover recently bade her adieu. More typical was the architectural apocalypse of L’eclisse, which inexorably ground its characters into minority positions in forbidding landscapes until the film’s closing montage found humanity eradicated entirely.
Michelangelo Antonioni began his career as a documentary filmmaker in the aftermath of World War II, producing short commissioned works about the mundane—street cleaning in Rome, superstitions held among rural folk in Southern Italy. Who knows how much of this material survives, or if it will ever be made readily available, but it’d be fascinating to dissect in search of elements of his mature style. For all the ellipses in his narratives and baroque play with colors, his camera always seemed interested in catching events as they unfolded, by The Passenger’s landmark final shot providing direct documentary evidence of the filmmaker’s intensely choreographed cinematography. And there may be no filmmaker more attuned to the complexities of architectural space, except, perhaps, Tati who exhibited a similar, if more whimsical nervousness in the face of the explosion of modernist structures in the post-War period. Antonioni’s sixties films exist as a virtual catalogue of the physical changes Italy underwent as it repaired wartime destruction.
Unlike some of his compatriots of sixties art cinema, Antonioni turned his success in Italy into a ticket abroad, spending the decade following Red Desert making films, probably his wildest, most controversial, and most problematic outside of Italy. The idea of a filmmaker like Antonioni being pitched as a globetrotting “hot” filmmaking property seems almost quaint these days, but in 1970 no one probably batted an eyelash when MGM signed on for Zabriskie and stepped up again five years later for The Passenger. The trajectory from The Story of a Love Affair and The Lady Without Camellias to these later films isn’t direct, but even in his more “neo-realist” early films, there’s still a strangeness, a distance between the camera and his actors, that interest in plumbing grand landscapes. The turning point would be Il Grido, and after that, his famous trilogy fully staked out his focus on playing with narrative so as to obliquely capture the state of humanity, relationships, and Italy.
His last filmed work was his entry in the omnibus erotic film Eros, and it, for a brief few moments, conjures up the sense of mystery that marked his best films. He was hobbled by a paralyzing stroke in 1985, and it’s simply amazing he was able to keep working at all, much less produce a feature and a few shorts. Quibble with Beyond the Clouds all you like, but I’m as grateful for its existence as I am for all of Antonioni’s films. Perhaps more than any other, he’s the filmmaker who taught me not to fear the unknown in my viewing, demanding (successfully in my case), that expectations be left beyond the bounds of the frame, and that satisfaction be found not in conclusions or answers, but via ever-compounding and multiplying questions and ambiguities.
Being a part-time blogger in the maddeningly fast-paced world of contemporary film criticism, in which instant responses are not only encouraged but now expected, I naturally scrambled early this morning to put together my thoughts regarding the death of Ingmar Bergman. He's always been such a mainstay in my film education (a.k.a., my life) that his passing strikes me as profoundly sad, even if the man himself reportedly had stated many times that he was more than ready for it. The thought of assembling a quick tribute to a man so integral to my thought processes as a film watcher is daunting to say the least, so when indieWIRE contacted me to ask if I would like to write an appreciation, the answer was a momentarily reluctant, then emphatically positive yes. All I truly want to is shout from the rafters my love for Bergman, so coherent sentences seem a tall order. Nevertheless here goes.
The Start of a Journey: An Appreciation of Ingmar Bergman
I firmly believe that I can credit Ingmar Bergman with my understanding and appreciation of cinema as an art form. Looking back on my life, there have been distinct stages to my growing awareness of film as something more than entertainment, more than narrative, more than itself--in childhood, Fantasia clued me in to the essentials: sound plus image; in preadolescence, 2001: A Space Odyssey forced me to acknowledge that storytelling needn't be cinema's ultimate goal, and that the unknown is far more pleasurable than what's understood; and in adolescence, when I began to crave even stronger stuff, there was Ingmar Bergman, whose provocatively titled, in-every-way foreign films lined the shelves of my local public library. Growing up suburban, I had no choice but to first witness all classic films in full-framed videotape, with resolutely unrestored transfer and sound, yet this hardly demystified the experience of discovering these new forms of cinema (that were sometimes as "new" as forty years old). Askew images stared back from the boxes, and in the case of The Seventh Seal's death figure, literally beckoned me.
The Mistress & the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer: "Maidstone" and "Tough Guys Don't Dance"
Clash of the Titans
If there's one film in the Mistress & the Muse series that should convince you that Norman Mailer's foray into filmmaking was not in vain, it is Maidstone. Nay, more than that, I'll go so far as to say that Maidstone is an extraordinary film, maybe even a masterpiece, the sort of passion- and ambition-fueled endeavor that through the madness of unguided improvisation arrives at truths movies infinitely more seamless and desperate for importance fail to even touch.
The background: in 1968, the same year as two previous film failures and a a week removed from the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Mailer started shooting Maidstone on several Hamptons estates with a circus of friends, drinking buddies, fellow pugilists, and even one or two professional actors. The scenario: Mailer himself plays Kingsley, an art director/pornographer running for the President of the United States. His motley crew of models and various hangers-on is called the Cashbox, which the nefarious Prevention of Assassination Experiments, Control is trying to infiltrate to off the subversive candidate. Maidstone departs from Wild 90 and Beyond the Law in not only containing actual coherence, but in sliding between multiple realities, from representing the chaotic politics of the time, where liberals and revolutionaries war over strategy, to satirizing the controversial public figure that was Mailer, who here plays a blustery, egotistical sexist who prides himself on being "not spiritual, but diabolical." Indeed, there's Mephisto magic in Mailer's political fantasyland -- in one section of the twelve-part film Maidstone transforms into a dream montage that rearranges the madness all over again into new concoctions and epiphanies. But the best is saved for last where, in succession, Mailer assembles his soldiers (he compares the film to a military operation, "an attack on the nature of reality") to talk about the making of the "spooky experience" of making a film. And then comes one of the most infamous scenes in underground film history, where the one and only (and I mean only) Rip Torn, playing Mailer/Kingsley's half-brother, "assassinates" him using a blunt hammer. For real. Check out the clip above -- it's a brilliant, harrowing moment, made all the more so because of Mailer's wife's overreaction. We are watching the inevitable conclusion to a film that's so flagrantly disobeyed the line between being and acting, and Mailer and Torn's post-fight taunts (Torn: "Fraud!" Mailer: "Cocksucker!") end the film at a fever pitch of late 60s disillusionment.
Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987) is an entirely different beast, a glossy studio picture half-intentionally bad soapy neo-noir that does little justice to Mailer's 1984 novel of the same name. Made after Mailer's falling out with Jean-Luc Godard over King Lear and coming seventeen years after Mailer abandoned his late 60s cinematic ventures, Tough Guys fails to fully translate the macabre black humor and metaphysical musings of Mailer's writing, but there's a special quality to this misunderstood oddity that is best captured in the wild performances by Wings Hauser as a psychotic detective and Debra Sandlund as Ryan O'Neal's white trash wife (and if you don't appreciate the extremities of ridiculousness this film reaches, you're probably a humorless writer for the Village Voice). It's about a thousand miles away from Maidstone, but not from the wide-ranging universe of Mailer, who even when he fails is more interesting than when most people succeed.
The release of Laurent Tirard's Molière, in close proximity to the U.S. arrival of Christophe Honore's Dans Paris, should provide further proof that the inexplicably in-demand Romain Duris is one of the most smug, unresourceful, unsurprising, and thoroughly infuriating actors to emerge in recent memory. Dans Paris is one brand of prestigiously awful screen acting: precious, grandiose brooding, with attendant beard and dark-rimmed eyes to give the proper impression of seriousness. Molière. a flouncy 17th-century costume comedy, would seem on the surface more properly suited to Duris's showy, sharply accented performance style—he gets to don a flowing musketeer mane and moustache, and wryly dissemble his way through a bevy of ostensibly comic misunderstandings. But comic or dramatic, crestfallen or roguish, he's a fussy, preening screen presence who wheedles and ingratiates himself to the camera wherever the tiniest fillip of a gesture might suffice.
The film fits into the speculative biographical fiction genre—a la Shakespeare in Love, as virtually no critic has failed to observe—taking place within a gray area in Molière's actual biography, imagining the 22-year-old playwright's misadventures while running amok in 1640s Paris. Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of Molière.
The Mistress & the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer: "Wild 90" and "Beyond the Law"
& the Man
Let's get this cruel fact out of the way to make room for more substantial inquiries: Wild 90 and Beyond the Law -- the first two of legendary novelist/journalist/raconteur/would-be mayor Norman Mailer's four directorial efforts -- aren't good films. In fact, due to their technical limitations (their recorded sound is atrocious), both 1968 films might be fairly labelled disasters. Andrew Sarris once said Wild 90 wasn't the worst film he had ever seen but the worst he had ever sat all the way through. I wouldn't go as far as that (a piece of self-satisfied comformity like Eagle vs. Shark is far worse an insult to the senses), but I also wouldn't evaluate the Walter Reade, Anthology Film Archives, and the Paley Center for Media's film retrospective of all things Mailer based exclusively on quality. That's because Mailer's films are fascinating documents of a brilliant writer's uncontainable ambition to at one time become King of All Media not just through shock and irreverence, but through a serious, albeit underground and therefore marginalized, challenge to the conventions and norms of filmmaking itself.
Wild 90 and Beyond the Law combine the cinema verite of D.A. Pennebaker (who shot each of Mailer's first three films) and the improvised performances of Cassavetes while going further than both of those better filmmakers -- further because Mailer stirs up storms in front of the camera himself and further because he doesn't allow a script to provide shelter lest things run completely amok.
Wild 90 features Mailer and two friends trading insults, grunts, punches, and jokes in a Brooklyn loft while planning a heist. Beyond the Law also features Mailer as a police chief presiding over a long night of charged and sadistic interrogations. In them Mailer gives up his precise, hallucinatory prose for the unknowable contingencies of the filmmaking process in pursuit of an existential (that is, lived in the moment) exploration of the limits of human behavior. There are scenes -- and yes, they must be patiently awaited -- amidst the chaos where these films create combustive situations from which the delirious truth of a person or a character emerges. Maidstone, showing tomorrow night, is much more of an accomplishment in this sense (and a brilliant film in its own right), but in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law the seeds are planted for Mailer's goal to discover "the moment when a fantasy, which is to say a psychological reality in the mind, transcends itself and becomes a fact."
At Anthology Film Archives tonight, July 28, and July 29.
Even as "The Camden 28" documents from multiple perspectives and in minute detail a crucial, if somewhat lesser known, moment in the storied Vietnam antiwar movement, it's hard not to feel that director Anthony Giacchino's aim isn't merely historical recordkeeping. Created amidst an ongoing war that has been widely compared to the nation-devouring Vietnamese conflagration (and is arguably lacking that conflict's broad activist counterforce), the film exudes a certain sense of awe at the actions of the Camden 28, coupled with some (very) mild finger-wagging, almost as if to say to the current antiwar crowd: "Look what these folks were doing." An epilogue featuring contemporary footage of aged Camden 28 members marching peaceably against the Iraq war only drives the point home, bluntly. Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert's review of The Camden 28.
It's 1983, in the interminably gray council estates of the Midlands, and runty 12-year Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) is in a dire spot. His father won't be coming back from the Falklands War; at school, everyone else has adopted the uniforms of their respective clans—goths, mods, New Romantics—while he stands alone in raggedy bellbottoms. The only suggestion of respite from his outcast status comes on the last day of school, when he runs afoul of a local gang of skinheads, led by the perceptive and charismatic Woody (Joe Gilgun)—in short order, Shaun's scalp is shorn and he's outfitted in boots and braces, a part of something at last.
The skinhead culture that Shaun is initiated into will be utterly foreign to viewers reared on Geraldo Rivera special—though the movement's since become synonymous with racist thuggery, Woody's crew is multiethnic, with no political agenda beyond getting blazed and listening to Toots and the Maytalls. Period specificities aside, the film illustrates an aspect of adolescence I've rarely seen better explored: how subculture membership can foster a sense of belonging in young people unsuited to the school-sponsored avenues of self-identification, or can get a kid laid who'd otherwise be hopeless.
Any respectable slab of sci-fi pop needs a good hook, and Sunshine, the third collaboration between director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, is almost instantly hummable. It's the year 2057, and a crew of hottie astronauts (including Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, and Michelle Yeoh) are sent to reignite our dying sun with a massive nuclear payload. How exactly the situation got so dire, and why these particular men and women were selected for the voyage that will ostensibly save the human race, are details that matter less than questions such as: how in the hell are they going to complete their seemingly impossible suicide mission, especially with an increasingly limited oxygen supply and a crew given to dismaying fits of incompetence (read: human foible)? Reigniting the sun: it's a science-fiction proposal that's naturally grandiose and metaphorical in concept (yes, the spacecraft is called Icarus II) and promising in terms of narrative stakes, yet Boyle and Garland wisely throw a bunch of curve balls at the audience. The fun in watching Sunshine relies on entering knowing the concept and not much more; Garland piles so many divergences, catastrophes, and moral dilemmas on top of one another with such accelerating swiftness that it grows impossible to look away. Things might get overwrought, silly even, but it's immensely pleasurable plunging headfirst into the fiery mess-even (or especially?) when it turns into an interstellar slasher film.
Reverse Shot's Take One symposium (RS #17) last year inaugurated a new series focused on examining the fundamentals of film form. We gave our writers a challenge: pick a single, memorable shot and use it as a springboard for reconsidering a film, filmmaker, or even cinema itself. We didn’t in any way expect that the moratorium on entire films would prove to be a limiting factor, but we may also have underestimated the ingenuity of our writers—everyone brought their best to bear, making Take One a success that far exceeded our wildest expectations. Exciting, but maybe we went a little easy on them. This time around, we upped the ante.
Goya's Ghosts is half what one expects from Milos Forman. As in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and Man on the Moon, its protagonist is a daring iconoclast who stands intrepid against the uncomprehending conventionalists of his time. But it significantly departs from those earlier films by making its hero more an observer than an instigator. In fact, the film travels a surprising route, moving from the controversial nature of Francisco Goya's art to the repressive tactics of the Spanish Inquisition in its waning days in the late eighteenth century to the hypocrisy of the Napoleonic invasion and occupation of Spain. By film's end, Goya is deaf, still able to paint the madness around him, yet impotent to help those who need him.
But whether the film benefits from placing Goya (Stellan Skarsgard) on the sidelines is hard to say. It's certainly refreshing to see Forman, who wrote the film with legendary screenwriter and Bunuel partner-in-crime Jean-Claude Carriere, forgo his usual tendency of beating viewers over the head in order to convince them of the immaculate saintliness of his outsider heroes.
The latest incoming shipment in the modest import business of innocuously predictable French screen farces, Patrice Leconte's My Best Friend caters to that conservative audience who seek shelter under the implicit sophistication of subtitles, and who are still not acclimated to the blithe transgression that's become the standard in American screen comedy. But Leconte's inconsequential distraction is another sort of offense, displaying a total dearth of invention, relying only on its air of toothless benevolence. If you take your comedy seriously, the stateside arrival of My Best Friend is news every bit as devastating as the eleventh-hour renewal of According to Jim.
Daniel Auteuil, of course, stars as Francois Coste, a crabbed, self-centered antique dealer so universally disliked that his business partner feels confident in daring him to produce evidence of having a single friend within ten days' time—this, the film's already incredulous setup, comes during a bizarre dinner scene in which a full table of professional acquaintances abruptly gang up on our protagonist, publicly eviscerating him for his faulty personality. Here My Best Friend establishes a precedent of overstepping the bounds of credible character and situation without offering any comic payoff to excuse the transgression; the scene is utterly unbelievable, but the hyperbole isn't sufficiently accented to invite laughter, and such bullying invites easy audience sympathy for Francois, rather than requiring that he earns it. Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of My Best Friend.
Those who know that Steve Buscemi's new film, Interview is a remake of a 2003 film of the same name by Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, who was brutally murdered in 2004 by a militant Islamist for his outspoken condemnation of Muslim treatment of women, may be surprised by how commonplace the film is. A psychological pas de deux between a reporter and a starlet, Interview, transplanted to a cavernous downtown Manhattan loft, resembles nothing so much as a proficient, glib off-Broadway piece, purporting to examine preconceived notions about celebrity and journalism but more often interested in actorly histrionics.
But while Van Gogh's legacy as a controversial, anti-establishment, anticlerical thinker could be better benefited than from this puff piece in disguise, Interview does provide director/leading man Buscemi and Sienna Miller with a dirty little playground on which to cavort and chew scenery.
Damn, why can't I be as funny as those Superbad guys? All I gots is this stupid All Spark.
As I sat down for Transformers last week, I, perhaps naively, retained some slight hope that the long-gestating film adaptation of my second largest material childhood obsession (trumped only by Star Wars) might not be a total wash. The possibility that some executive production help from Steven Spielberg could temper all of Michael Bay’s worst instincts, or lack of talent, seemed a plausible (if not altogether likely) outcome—perhaps Transformers might attain, if not pop transcendence a la the best of Steve, a state of mild watchability for its entire 144 minutes.
Somewhat surprisingly, it does brush by something like the latter, but don’t let that get you thinking for even a brief second that there is anything close to being “good” about Transformers. In fact, by all objective measures, it’s pretty lousy. That said, and this is an awfully perverse view that will be shared by none, Michael Bay’s cinema has gotten so machine-tooled in its utter anonymous badness that watching him try to piece together things like characters, narrative, or coherence only to fail miserably and constantly resort to diet fascist footage that feels cribbed directly from National Guard recruitment video, almost--almost--creates its own kind of pleasure.
Of course, the real attraction of Transformers isn’t really watching Bay play hide-and-seek with the filmmaking process, but rather the promise that huge robots will fight, break things, break each other, and nearly miss breaking our fragile human heroes. This is, admittedly, a somewhat elemental (i.e. idiotic) attraction, but one that summertime has largely failed to deliver consistently in recent years. Bay, always ready to answer the call (though having failed utterly with The Island), sets out to deliver us from blockbuster malaise, but only makes it halfway, and is ironically hobbled mainly by his star attractions. The Transformers themselves, rendered with all the minimal weight CGI can muster, remain nearly illegible blurs of angular steel occasionally punctuated by a glowing eye or gaping maw making most of the action sequences inchoate. If Bay was pushing for the mechanized abstract, then maybe I give him less credit than he deserves—it’s often lovely to watch even in its utter disconnect from narrative or intentionality. But somehow, this all seems unlikely.
It doesn’t help that the screenplay by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (friends who, according to a recent puff piece, were driven to screenwriting by the classics of the Nouvelle Vague…) aren’t really interested in making the robots into characters, preferring instead a lengthy detour into the stunted sex life of a poorly played (can the Shia LeBeouf thing be over, please?) teen geek. This focus really isn’t what I paid eleven bucks for, and it probably goes without saying that the film is at its least interesting when Autobot Bumblebee exists merely, and interminably, as a beat-up Camaro.
So, instead of honest laughs, I sniggered and snorted derisively for a few hours and saw some things explode. And instead of truly Spielbergian beats, we have four-story robots hiding behind trees while our hero addresses his parents’ accusations that he’s been locked in his room masturbating (doodz, he was looking for grandpa's glasses which contain the geographic coordinates of the All Spark!). Yet, I’ll admit a certain amount of mollification in one of Optimus Prime’s brooding, baritone monologues about the freedom of sentient beings (usually framed against a vast expanse). As disagreeable as the whole thing may be aesthetically and politically, I can’t say that it’s the worst way to spend an afternoon, even if a major conjoining of plot strands does hinge, improbably, around eBay.
It's always such a treat to discover that, once in a while, consensus isn't dead wrong. Brad Bird's second Pixar outing, Ratatouille, may have been hyped as one of the summer's sure things, but it surely crept up on me most unassumingly. First because of the noxious stream of sewage the studios have been spewing forth since Memorial Day, most of which, thankfully, I'm judging sight unseen (no, I really haven't had 8-12 hours to waste on more pirates, 'toon-men slingshotting through digital cityscapes, and yogurt-like green blobs picking boogers and flinging pop culture detritus). Secondly, because even as Pixar's output in recent years has grown ever more gleaming, polished, and clever, it has increasingly seemed gleaming, polished, and clever in strictly machine-tooled ways. Even the gloriously designed The Incredibles, with its muddled messages of embracing and suppressing cultural and social differences, was a bit too enamored of itself. Often, when watching a Pixar film you feel that if you squint really hard you can see the animators themselves, patting themselves on the back and giggling at their own jokey precision--the punchlines come as smoothly and effortlessly as the sun reflecting off of a digital car's hood or the palpable textures of a boney anglerfish, and all the "cleverness" can feel oppressive.
That's why Ratatouille bucks all trends; in fact the film exists so fully outside of trends that nearly every second feels like a refresher course in storytelling. Closer in spirit to the knowing, sophisticated Fifties Disney animation like Lady and the Tramp than either the more recent hand-drawn last hurrah showtuners of the Nineties or the automatic CGI classics (like Toy Story or Finding Nemo), Ratatouille has an airy, good-natured, yet wise attitude, a perfectly constructed classical narrative, and a thoughtful design. The pacing is considered—never do you feel jerked around, or that Bird is desperately trying to entertain you; you are rewarded for your patience and your emotional investment. The main character, a rat with a refined palate named Remy who dreams of becoming a chef, is at once impossibly adorable and real-world pragmatic, and his adventures elicit awe, sympathy, and terror in equal doses, and always all at once.
Remy's size and movements allow the Pixar engineers to devise a handful of quick-witted, scurrying, rat's-eye set pieces that transform tunnels and kitchens into labyrinthine passageways, yet for the most part, character and story come first. Perhaps it's because of the dearth of watchable Hollywood product (and that includes those of the "indie" studio subdivisions), but there's something so supremely satisfying about experiencing Ratatouille's becalmed linearity. Bird's tale encompasses about seven or eight major characters, and each of them feels fully a part of the film's scope and intentions. Yet none of them reverberate as much (at least for me, and probably many other film reviewers and, hopefully, viewers of all stripes) as Peter O'Toole's brilliantly, humanely animated Anton Ego, the dire food critic whose ashen visage reminds one of the Addams Family and whose elongated body resembles a grasshopper in a suit. Set up as the film's villain, Ego ultimately turns out to be [spoilers] one of its heroes...which also allows Bird to make some wholly enchanting, trenchant commentary on the critic's importance in the artistic process. It might be a savvy, anti-Shyamalan appeal to the critics in the audience, but it was enough to make me well up. Ego's climactic dish of the titular recipe will undoubtedly remain one of the year's indelible movie images; something elegant made from something mundane. Much like what Bird has done.
A first impression of the titular family in Cherie Nowlan's Introducing the Dwights (formerly known as "Clubland") has one imagining the film will be a sunny, Aussie-style quirkfest in the vanilla vein of many a Sundance flick. When his new girlfriend, Jill (Emma Booth), asks about meeting the parents, hesitant protagonist Tim (Khan Chittenden) warns: "They're entertainers." Brenda Blethyn, as the mum, holds down the household with a day job at a canteen and moonlights as a bawdy stand-up comic, while an estranged father (Frank Holden) clings to his former glory as a one-hit wonder and maintains a living as a security guard topped off by the occasional singing gig at bingo games. How much more self-consciously zany can the set-up get? Oh yeah, cheeky, developmentally disabled Mark (Richard Wilson) rounds out the family four.
Click here to read the rest of Kristi Mitsuda's review of Introducing the Dwights, and then be sure to read the comments from the asshole indiewire readers beneath, like "moviebuff," who attacks the writer for not understanding working-class values and never experiencing young love. LOL. Oh yeah, and for not getting the quirky brilliance of Australian cinema. Gag. Oh, and for not seeing that this film stands for everything Hollywood doesn't. Sure.
Five signs your preadolescent son may be “different,” from George Ratliff’s “Instruction Manual for Jittery New Parents”:
1) He has begun to exhibit an antipathy toward sports, devoting his extracurricular time to the decidedly less masculine hobby of playing piano; 2) He prefers the company of his swishy, “alternatively life-styled” uncle to his more fun-loving, jocular dad; 3) He constantly fusses with his appearance, i.e., the tidiness of his hair, the cut of his dandyish school uniform; 4) He begins to show a predilection for art, enjoys museums and history, and appreciates aesthetics at an early age; 5) He views himself as an outcast, asks if his parents view him as “weird,” and his thoughts often turn to death, and a loathing of the surrounding world.
Woe to the moms and dads who follows Ratliff’s guide to parenting—no sensitive coming-of-age drama, his Joshua is actually a histrionic horror film, opportunistically playing off of every single movie cliché about creepy kids in the service of some preposterously conceived, sloppily executed takedown of insular, privileged white family life. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of Joshua.
When I first read that Edward Yang, the Taiwanese director of Yi Yi (A One and a Two) and A Brighter Summer Day, had passed away this weekend at the age of 59, I was selfishly upset -- as a moviegoer, I was angry that an artist of Yang's talent and stature should die at such a young age, taking with him the many movies he had yet to make. Most of Yang's films are difficult to see in this country, and my one hope today is that his death will result in their wider availability. It's small solace that, though we won't get new films, there are still so many Yang films for most of us to discover beyond Yi Yi, the one Yang film available on DVD here (on a fantastic new Criterion disc).
Yi Yi became something of an international sensation earlier in the decade, winning Yang the best director prize at Cannes in 2000 and a best picture award from the National Society of Film Critics the following year, cementing Yang's status as one of the greatest and most important figures in world cinema. No one would have guessed that Yi Yi would end up being Yang's final film (he was working on an animated feature at the time of his death), but in hindsight, it's a fitting close to his career. A film of breathtaking intimacy and sweep, Yi Yi is a small family drama -- it opens with a wedding; it features a birth at its midpoint; it ends with a funeral -- that, in its quietly beautiful, unassuming way, seems to capture the essence of human life as it's lived: the wonder of childhood, the thrill of first love, the desperate loneliness of the city, the frustration of missed opportunity, the sting of lost love, the grace of old age. Almost every shot of the movie is like a work of art -- the astonishing loveliness of Yang's long-shot, long-take compositions can't be put into words. I can't write about Yi Yi without recourse to overused superlatives -- it is, indeed, sublime, a masterpiece in every sense of the word, one of three or four great masterworks of this decade. It's a film that moves me to tears. Warm and funny, enveloping and sad, Yi Yi is a film I'll always treasure, and for that, I'm incredibly grateful.
