There's rarely a moment in Son of Rambow that isn't polished or primped for prime demographic impact; a whirlwind for those who get nostalgic for British school-chum pictures, Sylvester Stallone actioners, early Eighties camcorders, and breakdance-era outre outfits, Garth Jennings's ingratiating lark would seem to court snorts of recognition more than active engagement. Yet this backward-looking pint-sized Ed Wood often sails by on the charms of its formula—it's an appealingly rambunctious boy's adventure in the guise of a paean to the artistic process (not the other way around). Along with Be Kind Rewind, Jennings's film may be on the crest of a wave of fondness for the days of videotape, although unlike Michel Gondry's film, which infantilized a community of urban dwellers by placing them in a cultural vacuum, Rambow uses the creation of taped home movies as a coming-of-age vessel. The children in Rambow, set around 1983 or thereabouts, might as well be wielding digital cameras or pocket-sized cell-phone cams (and in fact, the film might have been less self-consciously precious had it been set in the present).
Dude, Harold and Kumar are back in a new movie, but I gotta warn you: it’s a major buzzkill if you’re queer or a woman.
The action of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay picks up mere minutes after the end of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, but in that brief period of time all of the anarchic energy seems to have seeped out of the franchise, perhaps down the drain of the shower where Harold (John Cho) is trying—and failing—to fantasize about his fashion model neighbor, Maria (Paula Garces). But more about Harold’s failure to launch later, because it’s quickly interrupted by a noisy shit gag. Potty humor isn’t new to the H&K franchise, but it’s a dispiriting way to set things off for the sequel to a movie that showed that tasteless comedies don’t necessarily have to be brainless as well.
Though the first H&K installment broke new and provocative ground in 2004—another election year—by inviting minorities into raunchfest roles previously open only to slacker white kids, the sequel, though taking a more daring political stance in the title, loses much of that ground. If the comedic formula of the original was to set up a racial generalization, then bust it wide open, rinse and repeat (all the while slyly suggesting that people could simultaneously be true to some stereotypes while defying others), the sequel has a far more mechanical and unfortunate approach: Set up a stereotype, refute it, reaffirm it, and then throw in a gag at the expense of women or gays to distract from the discomfort of the reaffirmation. If H&K intimated a message of assimilation and inclusiveness for all in the first film, then the second film is a stern reminder that the invitation really only applies to heterosexual men.
Anyone who even casually frequents the current online hot spots for film discussion is well aware of the ongoing raging debate about the future of film criticism. The alarmism is so resounding it may be reverberating in our heads for some time to come; but ultimately all the hand-wringing over the death of print criticism as it slowly, inexorably moves to the web is not just attention-grabbing shortsightedness—it’s the wrong target. It’s not simply film writing that’s been democratized by the digital realm, but film itself, and perhaps we’re better off first focusing on the changes therein, rather than turning the spotlight on ourselves.
In recent years, film trade magazines, blogs, panels, and the like have devoted themselves ad nauseam to discussing the implications of the digital on our beloved art form. Most obviously cinematography, but also editing, special effects, and even performances have been dissected under this new technological microscope, as filmmakers have lined up on both sides of the digital divide. Movies are now regularly either shot, or more often edited, digitally; digital projectors are becoming more commonplace; and in many cases films are bypassing traditional avenues of physical distribution altogether, existing only on hard drives and digital streams instead of prints and tapes. In 2008, we're far from being able to talk about just George Lucas and a few isolated DIY others; it’s nearly impossible to find a filmmaker who hasn't succumbed in some form. So why has a journal born five years ago on the cusp of digital explosion, such as Reverse Shot, only treaded lightly here until now? Read the rest of the intro here, and then click here to start sorting through our 22nd symposium, The New World: Reverse Shot Goes Digital, featuring articles on Godard, Lynch, Mann, Malick, Bergman, Marker, and many more.
Reverse Shot's not just a place for film writing, it's a state of mind. Reverse Shot's not just a state of mind, it's a community. And as a reminder, It's time for our periodic round-up of a selection of articles to show what our prolific staff writers are up to elsewhere:
"Despite the nobility of his intentions, the turn toward the political marks a regression for the filmmaker. Forget the consensus: The Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure (which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival) are Morris's two worst movies. Ponderous where they should be penetrating, ambiguous where they should be clear, Morris's Iraq-era docs highlight the weaknesses of his aesthetic and give us the worst of two worlds: pretentious cinema and bad journalism." Elbert Ventura on Standard Operating Procedure in the New Republic
"Little known fact: Martin Scorsese likes the Rolling Stones. He’s even used their songs in a few of his films. And when he lazily slapped “Gimme Shelter” yet again on top of a montage sequence in The Departed, he all but officially certified them co-authors of his trademarked brand of rock-scored violence. But directing a concert movie of Mick, Keith, Ron and Charlie in sexagenarian action? The marriage might sound perfect on paper, but, lest we forget, both Scorsese and the Stones are well past their respective primes, and any such collaboration, no matter how thrilling at the level of inevitable consummation, should be warily and skeptically received." Michael Joshua Rowin on Shine a Light for Stop Smiling
"Pity the poor, unknown (and thus utterly pliable) young actors asked to put their mouths around George A. Romero’s impassioned but dead-obvious thematics. “In addition to telling the truth, I am trying to scare you,” intones Debra (Michelle Morgan), pulling double duty as the Final Girl and after-the-fact narrator. Hang on to your hats, kids, here comes some edu-tainment!" Adam Nayman on Diary of the Dead in Cinemascope (and in print, check out Andrew Tracy's feature on John Ford)
"...the sharper lines can perk up scenes, especially when they flirt with absurdity. In one recurring gag, Angie is baffled by the automatic locks on Kate’s car and, generally, both comics show strong timing with their occasional sarcastic zingers. After all, Ms. Fey and Ms. Poehler (who is also a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe) honed their chops at ImprovOlympic in Chicago in the ’90s. On e gets the sense they could generate endlessly delightful tomfoolery, such as a sketch-like courtroom scene (don’t ask) in which Angie addresses the judge with 'Aye, aye, Captain.'"Nicolas Rapold on Baby Mama in the New York Sun
"Director Shane Meadows is of a rare breed, touching headline issues in his films without ever putting human interplay at the service of some message. His Somers Town details an inter-dialect friendship between an adolescent Midlands runaway (wizened Thomas Turgoose, who also starred in Meadows's This Is England) and a young Polish immigrant (Piotr Jagiello), a big, uneasy kid with an incongruously piping voice and photography hobby that makes him stand out amid the jostling biceps of his father's construction-worker buddies . . . Cinematographer Natasha Braier's ringing silver-and-black London is enough to refute the tenacious idea that visual articulacy somehow contradicts honesty." Nick Pinkerton on his picks from the Tribeca Film Festival (Baghead, Night Tide, and Somers Town) in the Village Voice ... Not to mention, Pinkerton's "turkeys" as well: (Seven Days Sunday and SqueezeBox)
"For the professionally outraged, a Too Soon! double feature this weekend poses a tough choice for fulminatin’: Errol Morris’s eerily beautiful reenactments of Abu Ghraib incidents vs. Harold and Kumar’s (five-minute) stay in “Guantanamo Bay” for a big-bubba prison-rape joke. In either case, you kind of know what you’re getting into. Morris’s customary interests in odd-hunting, unknowability and denial prove apropos yet frustrating when applied to the facts of Abu Ghraib, while Harold and Kumar’s second trip yields a bewildering mix of bathroom humor, supersized stereotypes and flashes of sharp satire." Nicolas Rapold on Standard Operating Procedure and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay in L
"It’s a pleasure to appreciate the efforts of re-creation undertaken here, and easy to assume that the overt shortcomings in comedy and characterization are the result of an inevitable deficit of TLC. But those elements — Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly’s Clooney-polished screenplay, Renee Zellweger’s pursed-lip spitfire reporter — have also been sweat out, and humor, unlike decorative detail, loses charm when it oversells." Justin Stewart on Leatherheads for Stop Smiling
"In Swaziland, one of Africa’s smallest countries and its sole remaining absolute monarchy, the prevalence of AIDS and starvation ensures an average life expectancy of 31 years. But Without the King, Michael Skolnik’s subtly perceptive documentary, avoids a tone of first-world outrage; leaning more toward understanding than blame, the film examines a country forced to choose between tradition and survival." Jeannette Catsoulis on Without the King for the New York Times
"In the context of David Mamet’s directorial career, Redbelt breaks no ground, signals no new direction, adds nothing to what he’s done at the typewriter and behind the camera thus far. In taking up where 2004’s largely ignored Spartan left off, Redbelt instead merely reconfirms the pros and cons of Mamet’s unique brand of tough-guy dramatics. " Michael Joshua Rowin on Redbelt in L
Sixties art-house standby Claude Lelouch is, as it turns out, alive and well and living in Paris. He's even directed a new film; the title, Roman de gare, incessantly punned with in the film, apparently refers to those cheap paperback thrillers available at train stations, tawdry stuff good for a vacation perusal. A glance at my unusually thick press kit shows an interviewed Lelouch defensive about his alleged status as a "popular" or "mass" director (everything is relative)—hence his adoption of X material.
Patricia Highsmith nods aside, Roman de gare is a uniformly cruddy-looking, asinine collection of best-seller tropes. Lelouch's approach is to let loose multiple ambiguous forebodings in the hopes that they will simultaneously overlay the film with suspense. The film opens with a bestselling mystery novelist (Fanny Ardant) being grilled by detectives in association with the death of her ghostwriter. Backtrack to a Dark and Stormy Night; the radio announces a pederast serial killer is on the loose, luring kiddies with magic tricks. Cut to: Pierre (Dominique Pinon) haunting a highway gas station, where he's trying to pick up Huguette (Audrey Dana), a devastated young woman who's just been ditched by her fiance while on the way home to meet her parents.
Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up received a lot of notice from certain circles for its depiction of its star’s vagina, in close-up, as a locus of terror, confusion, and disgust. It’s a climactic shock-cut to Katherine Heigl’s double’s crotch, where her baby is crowning, the sight of which sends one of her boyfriend’s pothead buddies, and presumably us, into screechy hysterics. Pair this with Superbad’s menstruation-on-the-pants centerpiece, and you’ve got a pretty fair analysis of Apatow and Co.’s gender-regulated comic agenda. Yet at the opposite end of the spectrum dangles the real star of these films, which has been put on increasingly prominent display: from Superbad’s book of elaborate diddle doodling to Walk Hard’s full frontal, and now to Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s opening break-up scene, in which shlumpy (natch) protagonist Peter (Jason Segel) refuses to get dressed while his longtime girlfriend, Sarah (Kristen Bell), breaks up with him, the penis has become the de facto protagonist.
Like a paring down to the genre’s purest essence, it was only a matter of time before the sex comedy—fueled by libido, the search for the perfect ejaculation, the sting of sexual humiliation, the inner and outer vulnerability of the male beast—was reduced to this. Click here to read all of Michael Koresky's review of Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Simple tasks don’t feature in either of Cristi Puiu's feature films, both of which turn what might be quick errands into mock-epic journeys. His 2005 festival favorite and Cannes "Un Certain Regard" honoree, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, dogged its title character's journey through a succession of Kafkaesque emergency rooms on his way to an unceremonious fate. Before that, his 2001 debut, Stuff and Dough, opening this week for the first time in the U.S., charted a day-trip drug run that's no more straightforward than Lazarescu's odyssey.
Stuff and Dough begins as Marcel Ivanov (Razvan Vasilescu), a local gangster, charges the fresh-faced Ovidiu (Alexandru Papadopol) with the apparently easy assignment of transporting "medical supplies" from the city of Constanta to Bucharest, a four-hour trip. Click here to read all of Leo Goldsmith's review of Stuff and Dough.
Often when it comes to Errol Morris, the more you see, the less you know. Some documentarians aim to answer and resolve, but Morris is almost too content to leave us adrift in ambiguity, regardless of the political, moral, and epistemological repercussions. After a New York Film Festival screening of his last film, the Oscar-winning The Fog of War, the woman seated next to me was angry -- violently, vocally angry -- at what she perceived to be the film's sympathetic treatment of Robert McNamara (or should I say, its failure to unequivocally indict him?). I wondered then: why the vitriol? Was it because she disagreed with the film, or because it challenged something she had previously thought she knew to be true? Uncertainty can be an upsetting thing.
Morris's new film, Standard Operating Procedure, opens with a photograph of a sunset. Many photographs follow -- of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib humiliated, abused, and dead. What could be more certain, more concrete, than a photograph? In Standard Operating Procedure, Morris relentlessly presents photograph after photograph, some of them graphic -- a few pornographic -- most of them nauseating. I am not sure, ethically, how I feel about Morris displaying these photographs of people humiliated and tortured for our edification, and I can certainly admit this was the least pleasant filmgoing experience I have had in some time, yet the movie feels vital. Click here to read the rest of Chris Wisniewski's review of Standard Operating Procedure.
Nobody’s perfect, but how we managed to sleep on Alexandra, the new film from Aleksandr Sokurov that’s currently playing at the Film Forum following last fall's hometown premiere at the New York Film Festival is a true mystery. Sokurov certainly has his detractors (Kazakh filmmaker Darezhan Omirbaev famously mocked him in his 1992 film Kairat), but last count found them few and far between here at RS. The man’s prolific, which makes his ever-widening oeuvre somewhat hard to get a handle on, especially when many of his crucial works are largely unavailable (2005’s The Sun being a notable example). His nineties especially saw a veritable stream of long-format docs, narrative features, and television commissions, most of which haven’t seen the light of day in the States, making it all the more difficult to place this restlessly idiosyncratic filmmaker.
If not for the more abstract, elliptical Father and Son, the trajectory from Russian Ark through The Sun and now onto the most “conventional” of his films I’ve seen, Alexandra, is one of furthering coherence and eschewal of the kinds of narrative games that made earlier works like Stone and Whispering Pages dauntingly impenetrable (if hugely seductive) experiences. Conventional, but Alexandra is definitely Sokurov from end to end. Most of the attention paid his aesthetic spends a great deal of time discussing the lushness of the director’s images, which are generally crafted with an eye towards achieving an overall look and feel via a cadre of handmade lenses, post-processing, and warped shooting angles. Alexandra’s burnished sepia photography feels as though it's constantly struggling for air against a malignant oppressive darkness—an apt metaphor for the film’s look at life during wartime. Less noted is his use of sound: hushed dialogue disconnected from the images, the constant interruptions of super-crisp foley work pushed right to the front of the mix, and familiar classical pieces buried off on the background somewhere all prove effective in conveying the constant nervous disorientation of an isolated base camp. Sokourov’s crafted a body of work that embodies a very specific visual and aural sensibility unique in contemporary cinema, and when one examines the interplay between his documentary and fiction films, unique from his oft-cited predecessor Tarkovsky as well.
But it’s only in recent years, and perhaps only truly with his last two films, that he’s built characters as fully formed as his aesthetic. Issei Ogata’s Hirohito in The Sun was a notably marked improvement over Leonid Mozgovoy’s Hitler in Moloch (more a fault of the film than the actor), because Sokurov’s stepped his, at times, overbearing technique back a bit and entered into a seemingly more collaborative relationship with his performers. Existing in that ever-fascinating genre of speculative war fiction (in which the terrain is unnamed and the enemy unknown and unseen) with Bruno Dumont’s similarly worried Flandres, Alexandra feels almost as though Sokurov decided to venture back to the territory of his terrific epic documentary Spiritual Voices to re-interrogate the life of a solider on more narrative terms by inserting an avatar, here in the form of indomitable Russin babushka Galina Vishnevskaya in the titular role. Vishnevskaya’s performance covers all the shades of dour determination (many more than you’d imagine) as she stalks her grandson’s compound during a brief visit. It’s tempting to make Alexandra out as some sort of allegory for a “Mother Russia” lost amidst the masculine drone of constant warfare, but the portrait of this loving grandmother is altogether smaller and more expansive than that kind of simple reading. Giving what's sure to be one of the great performances of the year that will go wholly unnoticed (pesky subtitles), Vishnevskaya’s a wonder to behold.
Alexandra only has two days left in New York, but check the website of upstart distributor Cinema Guild for upcoming dates in their fairly aggressive nationwide release…
Now when most critics/jerks talk of guilty pleasures, they're usually just patting themselves on the back for their oh so outré taste, lack of middlebrow kowtowing, and their astonishing, unprecedented ability to watch films like Earthquake, Nuns on the Run, or the oeuvre of Pia Zadora with above-it-all condescension. When forced to trot out the term "guilty pleasure," as I have been on occasion, I'm actually so mortified by my own number-one choice that to even admit it would make my head explode with guilt. Would I lose friends? Am I falling just one smidge too far into a gay stereotype? Can I safely lay the blame at the feet of my parents, both Jewish, both musical theater followers, both baby boomers, and therefore both unapologetic Barbra Streisand fans? Yes, it's with all due shame that I admit (and my Region 2 DVD, safely tucked away behind my Criterion and Woody Allen DVDs, can attest) that Yentl brings me extraordinarily guilty pleasure. (Second horrific admittance of the day: Someone make Miss Saigon: the Movie....seriously.)
In any case, rather than delve into the whys and hows, and instead of detailing the ludicrousness of the plot (after her father dies, Streisand's Yentl dresses herself as a boy in 19th century Eastern Europe so that she can study Jewish theology, her one true passion), the shimmering gorgeousness of Michel Legrand's songs (I have no guilt about that), and the insanely self-flattering, self-promotional, self-satisfying nature of Babs' project, let's keep things on the surface, shall we? Since Streisand is notoriously in control of every aspect of every corner of every fragment of her productions, there's no doubt that for this, her 1983 directorial debut, she had final say about this poster design. And what do we see, when we look deep into the abstract recesses of this difficult to ascertain work? Oh yes, that's right: it's Barbra Streisand's enormous head gravely staring up, taking over the entire frame, her famously exaggerated features ("hello gorgeous...well....kinda....well, not really") and prominent cheekbones poking out of the shadows like some mythic gorgon. "Nothing's impossible," it reads in capped letters at the top; and indeed, it's true, especially if you're Barbra Streisand.
Of course, below this death mask is the most telling point of all: "A film with music." By God, not a musical, in case you were thinking that...no, this was more than a decade into the post-Star!, post-Paint Your Wagon demise of the musical, so the parsing of words here is pretty transparent. Though, truthfully, this is no traditional musical: all forty-eight-or-so songs featured in the movie are sung, in soliloquy, either as elaborate internal voice over or as sheltered, hushed alone time, by Streisand; even though she cast Broadway belter Mandy Patinkin as her bushy-bearded love interest, she refused to allow him a single musical peep. You've come for the Streisand, and you get the Streisand. Truth in advertising.
Side note: Is there a Yentl resurgence going on? Just last night, during a preview screening of the upcoming Sundance-celebrated Son of Rambow, I noticed in the film a theater marquee (not proudly) displaying the title of Streisand's film. I think it was meant as some sort of a punch line, as the theater had previously been showing the slightly more testosteroned First Blood. Regardless, I'll take Streisand's brave journey into boyhood over Stallone's jungle warfare any day of the week; and trust me, Babs has got a far more piercing, infinitely more sustained scream, at the end of Yentl. She doesn't need a machine gun to amplify it.
Diana and Maureen are in the girls' room, gossiping about boys and bio between classes, when shots ring out. It's the sound of an assault rifle wielded by Michael Patrick, the school nerd, on a violent, Columbine-like rampage. How do we know? "Yesterday in trig he told me he was going to bring a gun to school!" Diana explains, just as Michael Patrick bursts through the door. The two girls are cornered, and the lanky gunman, taking some time to reload a weapon that's bigger than he is, gives the girls a choice: Which one should he kill?
This scene is the catalyst for the events of Vadim Perelman's adaptation of Laura Kasischke's novel The Life Before Her Eyes—which seems a little odd, as the rest of the film has ostensibly nothing to do with suburban high school rampages. What it offers instead is a reasonably well made, if hopelessly overblown melodrama, which oversteps its mark with pretensions of narrative complexity and social currency. But exploitative though The Life Before Her Eyes clearly is, it's something of a blessing that its treatment of this event is so glib and cursory—an entire film from Perelman on this subject would be unbearable.
“While the film’s got many laughs – and, beware, full-frontal male nudity! – the finale’s a letdown.”
This comes to us from Thelma Adams, longtime US Weekly critic, on the latest addition to the Apatow family, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which opens Friday. Am I the only one who finds it a little odd to find a warning about a penis shot occupying any space at all in a capsule review lasting about 80 words (7.5% of the review for those counting)? The cautionary note seems especially strange coming from a publication that self-describes as offering “Celebrity news, gossip, and photos, information on fashion and beauty”—what’s better and more worthy of chitchat than a celeb’s unhinged dong writ large on the big screen? Our MPAA may be puritanical, but I think audiences are generally less afraid, especially when genitalia is played for a laugh (see: Ben Stiller’s contorted balls in There’s Something About Mary, or Malin Akerman’s untamed, pierced bush in The Heartbreak Kid).
Still, a critic looking at a collection of films that, as a whole, is terribly, terribly afraid of all those icky, floppy, weird parts we all carry around in our crotches (the “money” shot of Knocked Up was a horrible reminder of the ills that stem from boy bits touching girl bits) might find a stray dick worthy of some notice. I’m not sure whose wiener Forgetting Sarah Marshall will treat us to, but I’d expect to see Jason Segal hastily exiting an uncomfortable situation in the buff before the movie’s finished. (please not Jonah Hil….please not Jonah Hill….)
Not that the film's insistent ubiquitous marketing campaign is going to leave any potential audience member unsnared anway, but Thelma, even though you’ve phrased it as a warning, I think we all know that your clever insertion of an oh-so-subtly phallic exclamation point suggests you want your readers to be aware (rrr...) rather than beware.
With her slightly askew beauty and her compelling but unorthodox mix of neuroses and earthy sexiness, Teri Garr was always destined for underappreciation. Usually relegated to small parts and cast more often as screechy second bananas than leading love interests, Garr nevertheless always manages to cast off tremendous light from whatever corner she's been put into, whether she's vacuously rolling in the hay (Young Frankenstein) or staving off the salacious come-ons of Martin Mull (Mr. Mom); and in more serious-minded supporting roles, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Michael Apted's unfairly forgotten Firstborn, she's played conflicted, angry wives and mothers without the slightest hint of trying to ingratiate herself to the audience. In the few cases where she's been cast in the starring role (One from the Heart), something hasn't exactly clicked, as though she'd rather be waiting in the wings so she can swoop in and steal a scene rather than have to carry an entire film on her slender shoulders.
This is why Garr's simultaneously hefty and vulnerable work in Tootsie still might be her career pinnacle, and it's worth noting that she stands out even in a cast positively brimming with stellar supporting actors (Charles Durning, Jessica Lange, Dabney Coleman, George Gaines, Sydney Pollack), each of whom abscond with at least two scenes. She's so perfectly cast in the role of an unemployed, self-loathing New York stage actress with TV soap aspirations that it makes you wonder how Woody Allen could have possibly overlooked her in this period, a decidedly fecund one for both. In a sense, Garr has the most thankless role in the film, as the sweet, desperate Sandy, jilted and toyed with by Dustin Hoffman's cross-dressing ladies' man Michael Dorsey for nearly the entirety of the film; yet Garr refuses to victimize Sandy, even though Sandy loves to play the victim. There's so much nuance and energy to Garr's scenes that it's easy to forget that she has much less screen time than designated love interest Lange. Lange is complex, maternal, warm, sexually mature, but Garr is having more fun: in a brief cutaway during an early surprise-party sequence, she busts herself out of a locked bathroom door with a plunger in hand, aggravatingly exclaims, "What kind of a party is this?" only two seconds later to ask a fellow reveler, with a smile, if he's having a good time. It's that sort of quick turnaround that marks Sandy, who can morph from ball-buster to puddle of tears in a matter of seconds, and vice versa. Never to be pitied, Sandy is always ready with a quick retort or an ear-piercing scream (most memorably at the film's hilarious wig-removing climax, but also when Michael tells her he's in love with another woman and not, as she had obviously hoped, with another man).
Garr brings so much to the table; it's a performance full of little tics and gestures, yet rather than steal from the Diane Keaton playbook, she makes it her own. I especially love the little inquisitive glance she gives herself, peeking under a bedsheet down at her chest, after mistakenly having sex with longtime friend Michael: "Sex changes things," she says with desolate matter-of-factness, referring to the fact that she thinks she'll never see him again, yet with her naval (and breast) gaze, she gives the line an odd double-meaning, as always bringing it all back to her own neurotic self. Consider also that hilarious little nod-and-shrug of imagined shared empathy Garr's beehived bar waitress gives to Griffin Dunne's hapless downtown wanderer in Scorsese's After Hours after passing him (a total stranger) a tab with the note "HELP! I HATE THIS JOB!" Once again, Garr makes chronic dissatisfaction adorable.
Garr's turned up here and there in recent years, most memorably as "fucking monster" Maxine, Enid's dreaded future stepmom in Ghost World. (She has but one scene in the film, as I can recall, but she reads her lines with sting and sympathy, creating an entire past for her character, providing antagonism, but also refusing to demonize, and making the viewer see the understandable mutual hatred between her and the teenager. ) It's somewhat fitting that Garr lost a supporting actress Oscar to Lange, also for Tootsie, in 1982, as it illustrates that she was even somewhat forgotten in her own best role. Sandy wouldn't have had it any other way.
Woo hoo! Scanning the week's box office results, I realized I 've officially seen one—yes one—movie out of the top ten currently playing at multi-craps all around the country. I won't say which. All our devoted readers need to know is that we really have our (big, orange) finger on the pulse of the moviegoing public.
1- Prom Night, not starring Jamie Lee Curtis, not screened for critics, not watched by me
2- Street Kings, from the director of Harsh Times
3- 21: watching people play cards isn't fun (remember Celebrity Poker Showdown?); plus you have to look at Kevin Spacey
4- Nim's Island, not co-starring Jodie Foster's "beautiful Sydney"; instead we get Little Miss Sunshine and the asshole from 300
5- Leatherheads: Note to George: fast-talking, self-consciously witty, Howard Hawks-esque banter now seems ossified, not spontaneous; America doesn't want it. Stop...trying...to...make....it.
6- Horton Hears a Who!: I'm supposed to want to see it because it's not as bad as Cat in the Hat?
7- Smart People: too soon, Ellen Page, too soon!! Come back in 16-18 months, and preferably not in a movie with a title that reminds me of how the makers of your last movie (wrongly) thought of themselves
8- The Ruins: Little Shop of Horrors....much....much.....much.....much better.
9- Superhero Movie: really? they made this? Wasn't Meet the Spartans, like, three weeks ago?
10- Drillbit Taylor: From the DUDES that brought you all those DUDE movies about DUDES acting like cool but self-protectively dorky DUDES and pretending to be all DUDERIFIC with their straight male DUDE friends and open and comfortable about their DUDE sexuality but who never ever have gay friends, comes another movie about sad, wan Owen Wilson. Awesome.
With the controversial Beijing Olympics just around the corner, the eyes of the world continue to attentively watch the rapid and profound changes taking place in the social, cultural, and environmental life of China, currently staking a claim as the global market's most powerful economy. Young & Restless in China, a documentary in the vein of the ongoing Up series, examines how these radical transformations are affecting the latest Chinese citizens to enter the workforce, a dislocated and confused generation of young people awkwardly caught in the move from, as director Sue Williams puts forth, "idealism to materialism." It's a shift directly influenced by the political and economic reforms that have turned strict, repressive communism into destabilizing, still repressive quasi-capitalism, and Williams gets close to a wide range of subjects who illumine the challenges now facing this generation and the future of China. Click here to read all of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Young and Restless in China.
Fans of the cinematographer Darius Khondji are having a bit of a busy week, with the opening of two new, albeit distinct, films captured through his masterful lens. Wong Kar-wai's sickly sweet tourist film, My Blueberry Nights, and Carter Smith's sick-inducing film about tourists, The Ruins, are each the work of the erstwhile cameraman of choice for Fincher and Jeunet-Caro, though one can scarcely imagine two more divergent films. Of course, world-class DP aside, there's not much that unites them: the former is a loose collection of episodes about lovelorn twentysomethings in search of America, while the latter is a one-note survivalist horror film about horny college kids in search of the way back home. Indeed, at first glance, these two would hardly even seem the work of the same cameraman: Wong's film is shot with the restrained palette of a Texas whorehouse, while The Ruins looks as gray as a skeleton baking in the Mexican desert sun. The only common theme to be derived from the two films is one that's obvious and fashionable everywhere these days: a vaguely condescending attitude toward Americans. But at least in Smith's film the culturally insensitive gringos get the chance to redeem their more selfish habits, while Wong's itinerant Yanks only have their insatiable Western appetites for drinking, gambling, and pie-eating rewarded with a gooey Hollywood ending.
Speaks for itself. So instead I'll tell you about this delicious grilled-cheese sandwich I had yesterday. I was generously treated to a lunch at a new restaurant with a Belgian bent on 29th street and Lexington Avenue called Resto. Though resolutely non-vegetarian (even the tables I think were whittled from some kind of pork flank), Resto was an upbeat, sunny, unpretentious place with friendly staff. One of its "small plates" was the grilled cheese sandwich: with its mix of cheddar, gruyere, and pork belly (now turn that frown upside-down, it was just a flat, crispy variation on bacon), and thick, substantial slabs of buttery bread, this was one of the most delightful sandwiches I've eaten in some time (second place, an innocuous-seeming little Chinese fusion place on 16th and 3rd or so, called Chinos; the offensiveness of its retro font is commendably countered by its delicious Mahi-Mahi sandwich, served with pickled onions, I think, and cilantro on a puffy, slippery bun, with light dijon mayo).
Many Americans have never heard about the Stalag fiction phenomenon; Ari Libsker's short but valuable documentary, simply titled Stalags, makes for a troubling, though thoughtful, introduction. Stalags constituted a genre of cheap exploitation novels that briefly thrived in Israel in the early Sixties during the period of the Adolf Eichmann trial, when the atrocities of the Holocaust were initially and tentatively broached in the public sphere. Stalags usually stuck to the same tried and true formula, pawning themselves off as translations of memoirs by American or British soldiers who had been imprisoned during World War II by the Nazis and subjected to sexual humiliation and violence by SS she-devils. In the end the soldier gets to turn the tables by raping and killing his inhuman torturers.
With only minor variations on this theme, and nestled beneath lurid, kitschy covers illustrating highlights of stories with titles like "I Was Colonel Schultz's Private Bitch"—to name the most notorious, extreme example of the genre—Stalags formed a collective fantasy narrative that struck a nerve with young adults, many the children of Holocaust survivors. Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Stalags.
Dark Matter begins with a shot of Meryl Streep practicing tai chi, and therein lies a precise encapsulation of the film's attitude toward the intersection of Eastern and Western cultures. In its 90-minute duration, the film grapples with a number of weighty themes: the origins of the universe, the importing of Chinese scholarly talent by American universities, even the deep causes of incidents of campus violence, like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech. But ultimately, the film's approach to these issues is as suspect as an American movie star going through the motions, however gracefully, of the thirteen postures.
Based loosely on the story of Gang Lu, a physics graduate student at the University of Iowa who killed five people and paralyzed a sixth in 1991 out of academic jealousy, Dark Matter follows Liu Xing, a cute but furtive student from Beijing who arrives at an unnamed American university to work under his hero, cosmology theorist Jacob Reiser. As played by Aidan Quinn, Reiser is a self-absorbed celebrity-academic, less concerned with the higher aims of scholarship than with furthering his own research by milking data from his hard-working Chinese students.
Busily running programs for Reiser while trying to adjust to this new environment, Liu Xing is at first green and unaccustomed to the ups and downs of the American Dream, but with the help of a welcoming committee headed by Streep's Joanna Silver, a wealthy "patron of the arts" and devout orientalist, he soon develops a taste for Westerns, "blonde-haired, blue-eyed American girls," and Nobel Prize ambitions. But when these ambitions run afoul of Reiser's own ideas, the American advisor seeks out—for some reason—to crush his students' ambitions of fame and fortune, thus instigating violent consequences.
There are practically no adults in Water Lilies. None of any importance, anyway. Even its characters' locus of activity and competition, the indoor public pool where they congregate for synchronized swimming rehearsals and performances, is rarely shown patrolled by anyone over the age of sixteen. Yet this isn’t like Peanuts' off-screen cameos, in which intimidating adults spout uniformly indecipherable squawks. Films from the vantage point of young people typically depict parents and teachers' crucial presence in their lives, but Water Lilies instead subtly fashions a world where girls navigate sites of personal exploration unhindered by adult supervision. In her debut French director Céline Sciamma lets her adolescent creations figure out their sexuality all by themselves. She more than pulls off the conceit and in the process manages to portray same-sex experimentation originally and without an iota of titillating lasciviousness.
This will likely make Water Lilies a hard sell for American audiences mostly impressed by wisecracking teenagers insulated by precious irony (Juno), movie-of-the-week parenting nightmares (thirteen), or losers suffering condescendingly dispatched hells of humiliation and embarrassment (the films of Todd Solondz). The film’s rhythms are patient and lolling, its characters awkward and conflicted, its sense of scale telescoped to that of a young person’s heightened alertness and bold unpredictability, and it ultimately dares to take adolescent girls seriously rather than consider them in terms of freakish pathologies.
Tom McCarthy's surprise indie hit The Station Agent was something of a minor miracle. A touching, big-hearted character study propelled by three vibrant performances, The Station Agent distinguished itself with its sensitivity and grace, qualities sorely lacking in an independent film culture that too often prizes the clever, the glib, the cute, and the smug. With his sophomore effort as a writer-director, The Visitor, McCarthy once again proves himself to be refreshingly out-of-step with the indie mainstream, taking an improbable set-up and patiently observing as his damaged but likeable characters work their way through it. Despite its contrivances, the film is a work of quiet, restrained empathy.
Now, for this week's edition of "Let me talk, ASSHOLE!"
"They do ordinary things! That's not why we go to the movies!"
With so many mainstream print critics losing their jobs, the question remains: Why can't the cretinous, film culture–killing TV critics join them? Here's old pro, and by all accounts worthless asshole Jeffrey Lyons (once, the "rational one" when paired with conservative hack Michael Medved back in the 90s) "reviewing," retching, whining, obnoxiously talking over his by-association genius co-host, and pitying himself for having to watch Flight of the Red Balloon. Incisive stuff here.
Can rock music and colostomy bags mix? (Insert your own hilarious Shine a Light joke here.) The subject of Stephen Walker's new documentary is Farmingham, Massachusetts' "Young @ Heart" chorus, a 24-member group with several international tours under its belt. The singers' median age, we're informed, is 80.
Since 1982 the choir has been directed by one Bob Cilman, who undertakes the Sisyphean task of trying to transmit songs to an audience via the leaky vessels of geriatric minds, many of whose active enjoyment of contemporary pop largely ended at USO dance halls and Lawrence Welk. During a nine-week rehearsal process to prepare the group's new revue, Cilman introduces his assisted-living singers to a new program of tunes by the likes of James Brown, Sonic Youth, and Alain Toussaint. The show's title, "Alive and Well," becomes increasingly ironic as the rehearsals move along and health problems intervene—viscerally emotional plot devices that Walker gladly hooks onto.
In case we haven't already persuaded you, this is this week's final little shove for all of our readers (at least those in the NYC area) to go out and see Flight of the Red Balloon this weekend. It's often been said in the past that the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien are an acquired taste...but you're sorely mistaken if you think that can get you out of your moviegoing duties. In this case, "acquired taste" can only mean "good taste." Hou Hsiao-hsien's film may not be a children's film in the traditional sense, but I haven't felt so transported back to a state of sublime innocence as I have here in quite some time.
Here are some thoughts from Reverse Shot staff writers:
Chris Wisniewski at indieWIRE: ". . . the level of craft on display (in her performance, in Hou's rigorous command of mise-en-scene and elegant camera movement, and in Mark Lee Ping Bing's exquisite cinematography) is staggering. Flight of the Red Balloon could be described as quiet or mundane—a camera pans across the floor of an apartment, cluttered with papers that have been pulled out of drawers in a fruitless attempt to locate a missing document; a boy scolds his mother after she inadvertently knocks a lamp; a woman takes a picture of her two children at play. Emotional undercurrents rise and linger just beneath the surface, and these small moments accumulate, laying bare an enveloping human drama at once unassuming and profound, serene and searing."
Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot: "A remarkably rich, rewarding, and restful experience, Hou’s latest is a film like no other—in the simplicity of its lines, colors, and framing, and in the complexity of how those elements compound and contextualize its emotional subject matter, Flight of the Red Balloon can, in my mind, be compared to the works of Matisse. Despite this elevation, the film, miraculously, doesn’t feel like an artist’s grand summation, but rather just another in a long line of purely wrought canvases."
Nicolas Rapold at the New York Sun: "If not as demanding as Mr. Hou's past history-weighted works, "Flight" rewards multiple viewings, like revisiting a painting. The movie, in fact, ends with a grade-school student at a museum responding to Félix Vallotton's 'Le Ballon,' which depicts a child running (gaily? frantically?) after a ball. It's an appropriate end to a film that was commissioned by the Musée d'Orsay; Mr. Hou's wonderful film is indeed a living, breathing work of art and life."
My Blueberry Nights, Wong Kar-wai's English-language debut, opens with a series of exterior shots of New York City, accompanied by swanky upright bass and the smooth adult-contemporary voice of Norah Jones. "I don’t know how to begin, ’cause the story has been told before," she coos, as Wong cuts to extreme close-ups of blueberries and crumbling crust inundated with thick cream. Jones’s words are true: the stories in My Blueberry Nights have been told before, variations on them popping up in nearly every Wong Kar-wai film to date.
Another loose, largely improvised story about people falling in and out of love while dealing with rejection and perpetual states of longing, Blueberry is unmistakably Wong. This time around, the director’s finely honed taste for a charming face has led him to cast Norah Jones as Lizzie, the movie’s central character, around whom all others orbit. It's not the first time he's taken his chances on a chanteuse to carry a large role: Faye Wong, utterly irresistible in Chungking Express and 2046, remains better known today as a pop artist than as an actor in Hong Kong.
A trenchcoated mystery man with a dagger; a pistol-packing, handpainted Chevy Chase dripping with butter-faced sarcasm; an adorable little schnauser/poodle/spaniel mutt perched on the side of a bathtub holding a magnifying glass up to an oblivious Jane Seymour's sudsy breasts. And all of this wrapped around a not-quite-to-scale Big Ben erected lasciviously in center frame. A prime example of a certain type of lost art form, and evidence that in the Lazy Eighties the paperback-style collage wasn't just strictly for action-adventures but also for "adult tails" such as this.
Just another in a long line of films that I can recall and situate in some sort of film-historic continuum but that I've never seen and can't envision seeing, Oh Heavenly Dog is probably best remembered as a title rather than as a movie. Though this film isn't quite an anomaly (there was no shortage of Chevy Chase vehicles or detective/doggy buddy pictures in the Eighties), it gives off a singular whiff of tragic miscalculation nevertheless. Benji may not actually have transformed from beloved children's icon to a dirty dawg hungry for human titties, as the poster indicates, but who would actually want to see the pooch, already a headlining star, made second fiddle to the star of Foul Play? Chase had yet to embody Fletch or Clark Griswold at this point; hence his infamous "bologna sandwich dance" wasn't yet part of the cultural vernacular....(or is that just my vernacular?).
In fact this whole period of Chevy Chase vehicles could make for an interesting Reverse Shot retrospective: I call Under the Rainbow (IMDB User Comment: "This is a great movie that satirizes Hollywood stereotypes in a fun filled slapstick romp. Sadly, many people miss the point of satire, and will only see the stereotypes. They will not enjoy the movie, but then why do people with no sense of humor even pick up a comedy??"). But who gets Modern Problems? ("Chevy Chase stars as Max Fiedler, a down on his luck air traffic controller who develops the power of telekinesis via nuclear waste. He uses said power to take vengeance on anyone that had wronged him. A mildly intriguing premise is undermined by loose, unfunny writing, horrid acting, and dated material.")
Hou Hsiao-hsien Drinks a Pepsi and Takes a Picture
A gift from Junebug director Phil Morrison on the occasion of the release of Flight of the Red Balloon. Says Morrison, "If that is not Mr. Hou drinking the Pepsi and taking the picture, then the guy sitting next to me was a liar or mistaken and you can put this thing in the fiction section."
Original music by Mac McCaughan; editing by David Traver; title by Emily Kowalczyk.
Two tributes this week to what most of us Reverse Shotters consider the best film of 2008 so far (if not, ultimately, then we'll be some seriously lucky moviegoers). Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Flight of the Red Balloon opens this Friday, in New York, at the IFC Center. Trust us, there's really nothing else you should be doing this weekend. And trust no one who dislikes it.
First, Chris Wisniewski at indieWIRE:
"Like his 2004 film Cafe Lumière, Hou Hsiao-hsien's sublime new movie The Flight of the Red Balloon finds the director in a foreign country paying homage to another filmmaker. With Lumière, Yasujiro Ozu was Hou's reference point and Tokyo his canvas; here, Hou reimagines Albert Lamorisse's classic 1956 short The Red Balloon as a Parisian family melodrama. Hou's film, much like Lamorisse's, opens with the magnificent titular object hovering barely out of the reach of seven-year-old Simon (Simon Iteanu); as he gets on the Metro, it floats just above the station, drifting up into the trees. The balloon, and by proxy Lamorisse's film, serves as our point of departure—our way into Simon's world and our guide through the streets of Paris—but the delicate, charming, quietly heartbreaking portrait of childhood and family that follows is distinctively and unforgettably Hou. Read the rest . . .
Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot:
A remarkably rich, rewarding, and restful experience, Hou’s latest is a film like no other—in the simplicity of its lines, colors, and framing, and in the complexity of how those elements compound and contextualize its emotional subject matter, The Flight of the Red Balloon can, in my mind, be compared to the works of Matisse. Despite this elevation, the film, miraculously, doesn’t feel like an artist’s grand summation, but rather just another in a long line of purely wrought canvases; it never calls attention to its own technique or turns its endless flow of lovely, complicated compositions into recognizable set pieces, and instead allows its three principal characters to navigate its spaces with ease. The very elements that many feared might have tripped Hou Hsaio-hsien up (being out of his country and native language) here become strengths: a trust in his actors to inhabit their own, distinct daily lives without strict authorial pressure, and a view of Paris that’s just outsider-ish enough to be slightly awed but aestheticized enough to not become travelogue. Also, Hou’s feelings for the original Lamorisse film feel more like the warm regards of a distant admirer than the impassioned homage to a hallowed national treasure. Read the rest . . .
"Despite the nobility of his intentions, the turn toward the political marks a regression for the filmmaker. Forget the consensus: The Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure (which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival) are Morris's two worst movies. Ponderous where they should be penetrating, ambiguous where they should be clear, Morris's Iraq-era docs highlight the weaknesses of his aesthetic and give us the worst of two worlds: pretentious cinema and bad journalism."
"Little known fact: Martin Scorsese likes the Rolling Stones. He’s even used their songs in a few of his films. And when he lazily slapped “Gimme Shelter” yet again on top of a montage sequence in The Departed, he all but officially certified them co-authors of his trademarked brand of rock-scored violence. But directing a concert movie of Mick, Keith, Ron and Charlie in sexagenarian action? The marriage might sound perfect on paper, but, lest we forget, both Scorsese and the Stones are well past their respective primes, and any such collaboration, no matter how thrilling at the level of inevitable consummation, should be warily and skeptically received." 
"Pity the poor, unknown (and thus utterly pliable) young actors asked to put their mouths around George A. Romero’s impassioned but dead-obvious thematics. “In addition to telling the truth, I am trying to scare you,” intones Debra (Michelle Morgan), pulling double duty as the Final Girl and after-the-fact narrator. Hang on to your hats, kids, here comes some edu-tainment!" 
"...the sharper lines can perk up scenes, especially when they flirt with absurdity. In one recurring gag, Angie is baffled by the automatic locks on Kate’s car and, generally, both comics show strong timing with their occasional sarcastic zingers. After all, Ms. Fey and Ms. Poehler (who is also a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe) honed their chops at ImprovOlympic in Chicago in the ’90s. On e gets the sense they could generate endlessly delightful tomfoolery, such as a sketch-like courtroom scene (don’t ask) in which Angie addresses the judge with 'Aye, aye, Captain.'"
"Director Shane Meadows is of a rare breed, touching headline issues in his films without ever putting human interplay at the service of some message. His Somers Town details an inter-dialect friendship between an adolescent Midlands runaway (wizened Thomas Turgoose, who also starred in Meadows's This Is England) and a young Polish immigrant (Piotr Jagiello), a big, uneasy kid with an incongruously piping voice and photography hobby that makes him stand out amid the jostling biceps of his father's construction-worker buddies . . . Cinematographer Natasha Braier's ringing silver-and-black London is enough to refute the tenacious idea that visual articulacy somehow contradicts honesty." 
"For the professionally outraged, a Too Soon! double feature this weekend poses a tough choice for fulminatin’: Errol Morris’s eerily beautiful reenactments of Abu Ghraib incidents vs. Harold and Kumar’s (five-minute) stay in “Guantanamo Bay” for a big-bubba prison-rape joke. In either case, you kind of know what you’re getting into. Morris’s customary interests in odd-hunting, unknowability and denial prove apropos yet frustrating when applied to the facts of Abu Ghraib, while Harold and Kumar’s second trip yields a bewildering mix of bathroom humor, supersized stereotypes and flashes of sharp satire." 
"It’s a pleasure to appreciate the efforts of re-creation undertaken here, and easy to assume that the overt shortcomings in comedy and characterization are the result of an inevitable deficit of TLC. But those elements — Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly’s Clooney-polished screenplay, Renee Zellweger’s pursed-lip spitfire reporter — have also been sweat out, and humor, unlike decorative detail, loses charm when it oversells." 
"In Swaziland, one of Africa’s smallest countries and its sole remaining absolute monarchy, the prevalence of AIDS and starvation ensures an average life expectancy of 31 years. But Without the King, Michael Skolnik’s subtly perceptive documentary, avoids a tone of first-world outrage; leaning more toward understanding than blame, the film examines a country forced to choose between tradition and survival." 
"In the context of David Mamet’s directorial career, Redbelt breaks no ground, signals no new direction, adds nothing to what he’s done at the typewriter and behind the camera thus far. In taking up where 2004’s largely ignored Spartan left off, Redbelt instead merely reconfirms the pros and cons of Mamet’s unique brand of tough-guy dramatics. " 
