Opening with "vintage" black-and-white footage of women from the Fifties huffing and puffing through antiquated exercise routines, set to Bruce Channel's "Hey, Baby," the ostensible investigative documentary America the Beautiful establishes its de-facto glibness within seconds. Throughout the course of the film, further video montages will be set to such ferociously on-topic chestnuts as Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy," Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People," and Letters to Cleo's "I Wanna Be a Supermodel," ironically backing images of primped, preening girls or magazine model cut-outs. Director Darryl Roberts's mode of address is so hackneyed and juvenile, and the editing strategies and muddy non-aesthetic so predictable, that one has to try and look beyond the surface of things to find any value here; after all, that's what Roberts himself has attempted to do in making it.
Narrated, rather awkwardly, by its maker and occasional leading man and "truth"-seeker, America the Beautiful is fashioned as a vaguely Michael Moore-esque diary film, in which Roberts's average Joe goes out into Big Bad America to document its (gasp) fascination with beauty. The results of his search are as wide-ranging as his cursory topic, and so wildly unfocused that the film seems to suffer from some form of ADD—in the odd moment that Roberts will train his camera on a somewhat compelling subject or reveal a nugget of almost worthwhile data, he's already jumped to a new train of thought. There's quite an overhaul of cultural diagnosis going on here, unfortunately little of it is depicted or expanded upon in any revelatory way: the effects of unattainable beauty imagery on young girls, teenage bulimia, media image manipulation, cosmetic surgery malpractice, the dangers of FDA-approved beauty products, etc. By the time Roberts visits the webmasters of the online dating service beautifulpeople.net, framed as a fascistically exclusive club, one's eyes may begin to cross, wondering how and if any of these strands will meaningfully dovetail, and whether anything will be uncovered other than that (surprise!) it's all about the bottom line: Beauty sells. Really?!
From Sunset Boulevard to Mulholland Drive and beyond, most movies revolving around Hollywood hopefuls portray the greater Los Angeles area as a soulless cesspool into which the hordes can't help but sink. But in his Tinseltown-set feature In Search of a Midnight Kiss, Alex Holdridge reimagines L.A. as a place of renewal and unsung beauty: Skyline shots inclusive of freeway traffic, graphic compositions incorporating the city's variegated architecture, and even the Hollywood sign shrouded by smoggy haze are lovingly lensed in stark black-and-white in obvious homage to Woody Allen's Manhattan (though this hipster kid on the block scores his images to the indie rock of Shearwater rather than Gershwin).
This appreciative perspective is filtered through the eyes of two recent arrivals, both by way of Texas— Wilson (Scoot McNairy) and Vivian (Sara Simmonds), an aspiring screenwriter and actor, respectively— who meet for the first time on New Year's Eve day after the former posts a near-eleventh hour ad on Craigslist. After a quick cup of coffee that plays more like an audition, with Vivian in the catbird seat and a flustered Wilson just trying to keep up (she decides to give him until sunset to figure out whether she likes him or not in a possible nod to Richard Linklater's Before Sunset), the seemingly mismatched pair catch the subway and end up wandering around the ghost town that is downtown L.A. -- activities of which almost no local would willingly partake, but narratively excused by their newcomer status.
At first you wonder why Wilson even bothers. Vivian exhibits the nicotine-twitchy noxiousness of a starlet waiting to be born, and his sensitivity sits uncomfortably next to her apparent philistinism. Click here to read the rest of Kristi Mitsuda's review of In Search of a Midnight Kiss.
There is a certain class of British film—for which John Boorman's Hope and Glory is perhaps the prototype—which follows an adolescent boy's coming of age during a notable or sentimentality-laced period of twentieth-century English history. Invariably in such films, there is a female object of incipient pubescent desire; a belligerent older brother who usurps most of the family's attention; and a redemptive father figure through whom the protagonist learns to stiffen his upper lip and be an Englishman. More often than not, the garden shed is a focal point of action.
All of these apply to Paul Weiland's autobiographical film Sixty-Six, which takes place during the throes of 1966 World Cup mayhem, which culminated in England's (somewhat unlikely) championship on their home turf. But then many, if not all of these traits of the English-boy bildungsroman subgenre also apply to a host of other recent films, including Shane Meadows's appreciably more complex This Is England and Hammer & Tong's nimbler Son of Rambow, which mine their nostalgia from the late Seventies and mid Eighties, respectively.
LOL/Quote of the Week/One More Reason to Dislike THE DARK KNIGHT?
Are you wearing what I think you're wearing?
"There seems to me no question that the Batman film The Dark Knight, currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past."
Too many, with not much to say, and increasingly less diversity in the modes of telling—why would people go to docs when the recipe so often boils down to little more than: Hot Button Issue + Sketchy “Cultural Impact” of Said Issue + How Issue Affects My Family, Man + Gotcha! Exposé Moment –Attempts at Aesthetic Unity = Film. Thank goodness then for the bracing eye and refreshing candor of Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths, which purports to do nothing more than document the ongoing oddities of Mobile, Alabama’s Mardi Gras festivities, but ends up subtly and cleanly unpacking our country’s uneasy history of racial tension.
In 2007, Brown, responsible for the lilting, if insubstantial Townes Van Zandt doc Be Here to Love Me, and a terrifically meta video for Okkervil River’s “Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe” went back to her hometown of Mobile, the birthplace of Mardi Gras in this country, to document the festivities. Carnival in Mobile is a special animal: sixty-seven years ago, black members of the community, tired of exclusion by the white “Mystic” societies from a central place in the celebration, established their own parallel Mardi Gras, with similar events, a separate royal court and different parade route. Brown’s film builds itself off of interviews with the “royalty” chosen by both the Mobile Area Carnival Association (MACA—the white organization) and Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association (MAMGA—the black group) and supporting figures coupled with nicely lensed verité footage of the preparations and festival itself. The elements are simple, but the cumulative effect of her editorial inclusions and juxtapositions is overwhelming.
It may come as something of a shock to most that in Mobile, Alabama, a culturally sanctified segregation still exists. And documentary filmmaker Margaret Brown must be relying on that shock from viewers of her exacting new film The Order of Myths, even if it resolutely avoids sensationalism or polemics from the top down. On the face of it, Brown's document of Mobile's annual Mardi Gras celebration, a centuries-old tradition that predates even the establishment of New Orleans and which still maintains separate events for black and white residents, is an energetic, if unsettling, tribute to the strange persistence of tradition; yet like gently lifting a decaying flagstone with a twig, Brown has managed, in a fleet 75 minutes, to uncover quite a lot about (obviously) America's entrenched racism and (perhaps not so obviously) why our presumably modern sensibilities allow for its continuity.
What The Order of Myths goes a long way in proving is that racism may simply be an offshoot of the pleasures of cultural exclusivity, from gestures grand (landownership) to the seemingly small (party invitations; club memberships). Separate but not equal, the all-white Mobile Carnival Association (MCA) and the African-American Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association (MAMGA) follow similar templates in the days running up to the spirited pre-Lent celebration: each chooses its own king and queen.
The past looms forebodingly throughout Boy A, threatening to capsize its protagonist’s fragile vessel of a life. It’s a lovely surprise, then, that the grace notes found within this artful character study have their roots in the pleasures and perils of the here-and-now. Directed with a fine eye for spatial detail by John Crowley and featuring a heartrending performance by newcomer Andrew Garfield, the film captures the minute fluctuations in intimacy and temperament, the hope and hesitancy, which define the opening pages of a new life chapter. If the possibility of exposure and rejection for bygone transgressions hums queasily under even the most blissful moments, such danger only intensifies Boy A’s clear-eyed pathos: the potential for devastation all the more reason to embrace momentary happiness. Click here to read the rest of Matt Connolly's review of Boy A.
A blow-by-blow account of how, in 1974, the impish French performance artist, and ludicrously appropriately named Philippe Petit achieved (and survived) the seemingly otherworldly when he walked on a tightrope situated 1350 feet in the air, anchored between the World Trade Center's twin towers, James Marsh's documentary Man on Wire is a fleet, engagingly narrated, and [insert "taut" here] suspense narrative. Like the events it's based on, Man on Wire is the kind of film that's more inspiring to witness than it is to later think (or write) about, but let it be said that Marsh's adeptness at mounting his tale is undeniable, and what the film lacks in any sort of subtextual richness it more than makes up in narrative functionality and the clarity with which it reconstructs Petit's mission impossible.
Bolstered by quick cutaways to impressionistic black-and-white reenactments in the Errol Morris mold (some so brief and gauzy they appear out of the mist as though Guy Maddin baubles), and, more impressively, beautifully restored archival color footage of a youthful Petit, looking a lot like the athletic young Malcolm McDowell, showing off his lithe and lovely physique as he trains for his fateful trip to New York, Man on Wire jumps back and forth between years-long preparation and the final moments before his gorgeous feat of derring-do.
Marsh also employs talking-head interviews with the accomplices who helped Petit realize his vision, and who had either gamely seen the job through to the end or who had backed out due to their own understandable fear (Marsh never bestows judgment on the latter, instead casting everyone as essential pieces in the puzzle). Add in some obvious but well-employed soundtrack cues, from Michael Nyman's The Piano and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover scores to, of course, a bit of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedies" to etherealize Petit's fully achieved air dance, and you've got a conventionally told but well mounted work of nonfiction action filmmaking, more fixated on the how than the why, and one which will undoubtedly receive plaudits on the basis of its subject matter alone.
A catch-22: Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight demands, in a mean, raspy voice, to be taken more seriously than your average comic book movie. But when one endeavors to do just that—to analyze its loudly explicated themes of duality and ethical impasse; to parse the implications of having its villain be referred to and self-identify as a “terrorist;” to consider the use of invasive surveillance technology as a post–Patriot Act plot point—one is reprimanded for bullying a defenseless Pop object. Hey, guys, why so serious?
It’s a frustrating double standard, and while it shouldn’t preclude an examination of what’s wrong with The Dark Knight, it does give a critic pause—and so does the astounding volume of angry correspondence generated by the film’s fans on message boards and website comment threads. Those critics who didn’t see fit to acclaim the film a masterpiece, or at least a genre high water mark, find themselves perched precariously above an angry horde calling for their heads (or worse), much like —SPOILER ALERT! —Batman at the end of The Dark Knight. For the eight people reading this who didn’t see the film on its record-breaking opening weekend, the film’s final moments find Batman manfully taking the rap for the crimes of the deceased Two-Face/Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) so as to make the latter a martyr for good in the eyes of a populace reeling from the brutal crimes perpetrated by the Joker (Heath Ledger).
Talking faux-seriously about juvenilia has become a marvelous way to avoid talking seriously about the serious. The slew of hyperbolic, overheated critical rhetoric that follows in the wake—hell, in advance of—the latest high concept blockbuster is enough to make one gag. In these cases, critical investigation has by and large become a matter of repeating verbatim the films’ stridently announced surface-level themes with some linguistic curlicues and intellectual tumbling tossed in. As it has so often, commercial calculation finds a willing handmaiden in critical laziness, even (or perhaps especially) that evinced by those more intelligent and discerning writers who devote their efforts and talents towards designing elaborate intellectual justifications for films that neither require nor deserve them.
What’s most obscene about this pop-cultural mythmaking is that it works so resolutely against expanding taste or knowledge about movies. By focusing so obsessively and voluminously on the most readily, tyrannically available items, critical discussion is not simply reflecting the commercial film distribution situation in North America, but actively contributing to it. By elevating the latest pop detritus to the level of godhead, by implicitly declaring the centrality of pop moviemaking (most often bad pop moviemaking) above all else, it only further occludes those films that don’t have the advantage of being relentlessly drilled into our consciousness by the marketing machine. Why bother wrestling in print with films that are challenging, strange, obscure, or entertaining in different and novel ways when The Truth is playing in 2500 theatres?
All of which is a grand lead-up to the comparatively puny declaration that Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy II is a lousy piece of moviemaking and a lousier work of imagination, its thunderous acclamation aside. Click here to read all of Andrew Tracy's review of Hellboy II: The Golden Showers.
A refreshingly high-concept low-budget outing, the Duplass Brothers' Baghead is an immensely likeable and surprisingly well-executed genre hybrid. The difficulty one finds in trying to categorize it is part of its charm, and this is not just whether one sees it as horror, comedy, or relationship roundelay but also how one defines and compartmentalizes its aesthetic: Baghead's makers and at least one of its stars may have crawled out from under the "mumble"-corps, but its adherence to a somewhat conventional narrative framework successfully contorts and expands the boundaries of what that short-lived almost-collective of filmmakers were after. And furthermore, and of greater significance, it smartly proves that it only takes the slightest, smartest tweaks to temporarily revitalize an entire genre.
In the Absence of Serious American Drama, A New Movie About Batman Captures the Heart of a Nation
AP, Sunday, 12:32 a.m.
Christopher Nolan's new movie about Batman and Big Themes, like Duality, The Dark Knight took the nation's movie houses and film critics by storm this weekend. Words like "operatic" and "Shakespearean" were bandied about by moviegoers and online film writers whose background in opera and Shakespeare is limited at best, but who prefer their "classical, serious" films with a dose of cool gadgets. When asked about the success of the latest film in the franchise which transformed him from a mediocre, strictly technical indie actor to a mediocre, strictly technical Hollywood star, reclusive Christian Bale responded in a gruff, gravely, very masculine voice not unlike that of the muppet Dr. Teeth, "I think moviegoers were just really hungry for something that would challenge their preconceived notions of good and evil, right and wrong, all that stuff; but they prefer to have that message delivered by a comic book superhero that they've admired since they were children." Cinema-lovers have responded in droves, especially males, who have already helped catapult Nolan's sequel to the much coveted number one spot of all-time movies on the IMDb top 250 films list—not bad for a film that has been in general release for only three days. Especially pleased with the success of the film are all those adult Americans who have never seen a film made outside of this country and who have never attended the theater. When asked the source of the film's magic, superfan Jim Cherrystone, of Somerville, MA, responded, "I think people are just relieved that there's still serious films being made. I haven't been this excited about true art since reading about Harry Potter and his little witch friends casting spells. With JK Rowling's last Potter installment, books may be over, but it looks like movies got a stay of execution." Film critics were just as jazzed as the film's makers and its boyish fans, even proud to consider themselves part of the film's creation, in a way. "I think it's the critic's duty to tell people how awesome this movie is," said Insert-Pullquote Pete, of the Toulane Tribune. "Thank God there's finally a movie that audiences and critics can agree on, cause it makes our job so much easier."
In L magazine Mark Asch already beat me to the punch, but it’s still worth noting right off the bat critic David Shipman’s claim that Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition (1959-1961), his three-film, ten-hour epic chronicling of a young idealist’s disintegration at the hands of Japan’s fascist regime during World War II, is “the finest achievement yet made by cinema” and “unquestionably the greatest film ever made.” That’s an interesting statement if for no other reason than that among Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game, Bicycle Thieves, The Searchers, Rashomon and the other usual suspects voted or ranked as the “greatest film ever,” The Human Condition is ordinarily never in the running—heck, it fails to even receive a mention in The Oxford History of World Cinema. Judging the “greatest film ever” is always a pretty silly exercise, yet Shipman’s hyperbolic pronouncement would nevertheless be best used as an occasion to point the spotlight at this relatively obscure “greatest” in order to determine its true value and importance. Ambitious cinema of The Human Condition’s scope and magnitude is rare, and the mere dimensions of its canvas invite our undivided attention.
And once one gets through Kobayashi’s film, its value and importance become clear: The Human Condition, based on the novel by Jumpei Gornikawa, might be the last great humanistic films in the tradition of Jean Renoir, as well as a haunting swan song for the humanistic project in its own right.
. . . Lou Reed is not an artist who needs much legacy building, although throughout his career he has often required a bit of reputation rehab. Since his epochal 1989 spleen, New York, Reed has released a live album, a couple of retrospectives, a meditation soundscape, and a handful of good, but largely ignored albums, at least one of which (The Raven) drew much head-scratching and derision. But regardless of any recent output, he remains to many something like New York's poet laureate (if not a minor deity), a fact that obscures the history of Reed as a "troubled artist," one who, with every other record, nearly ended his career, if not his life. In 2006, Reed looked back—in anger, disgust, and heartbreak— at one of these “other records,” Berlin, revisiting it with a 35-piece band, unexpected precision, and Julian Schnabel as set-designer and documentarian.
Following his endearingly bitchy, glam-rock cocktail Transformer by a year, Reed's third solo album is grim, tender, icy, and even—I dare say—a mite socially conscious. A critical disaster (Rolling Stone's review ended, "Goodbye, Lou"), it remains one of the many grand fuck-yous of Reed's career, a work of serious, even perverse introspection that's absurdly overblown in every way . . . Click here to read Leo Goldsmith's review of Lou Reed's Berlin in its entirety.
Befitting a film concerned with hand-to-hand combat, two opposing (if not necessarily opposite) forces jockey for dominance within Ric Roman Waugh’s Felon. In this corner: a forceful, unflinching expose of prison brutality and dehumanization, scrupulously detailed and shot with an eye for down-and-dirty, handheld authenticity. But look out, because here comes the challenger: a ripe melodrama charting the travails of an upstanding family man sent to jail for a crime of defense, determined to preserve his hard-fought domestic stability while simultaneously fighting the endemic improbity within his detention center. The system is both insurmountable and beatable; the individual at once a powerless victim of systemic indifference and an agent of proactive change. Any filmmaker attempting to both satisfy the norms of classical cinematic narrative (where agency resides with an individuated, goal-driven protagonist) and anatomize the ills of impersonal, amorphous social structures runs up against this thorny dialectic. The best of them recognize this irreconcilability and makes it the beating, tortured heart of their project.
Waugh is no such filmmaker, and Felon is a confused movie hobbled by its unwillingness to either fully engage its fundamental conflict or pick a side and stay there. If the results can prove unwieldy at best and disingenuous at worst, the film’s frantic vacillations between clear-eyed docudrama and potboiler thrills at least provide moments where unstable isotopes of visual and ideological information collide and spark in intriguing configurations. Mirroring the aforementioned bouts of violence at its center, Felon emits the freneticism of physical conflict, as well as the hollow letdown that accompanies its consummation. Click here to read the rest of Matt Connolly's review of Felon
In many ways, the debut feature from Bangkok-born, American-educated Aditya Assarat, Wonderful Town, has all the hallmarks of a workshopped Sundance indie: an eminently tasteful romance between two ingratiatingly sweet people burgeoning against a backdrop of recent tragedy, buoyed by delicate guitar score, bracketed by self-consciously lovely landscape shots. A detailing of the emotionally and physically ravaged coastal area of Takua Pa following the December 2004 tsunami that cost it more than 8,000 local lives, Wonderful Town means to use the event's aftereffects to evoke its characters' personal displacement. There's no doubt that Assarat has talent for situating people within gracefully framed environments, but in an overly studied manner that leaves no room for the sort of spontaneity in performance and composition that the film's subject matter warrants.
The intentions may be noble, but look at the work of a filmmaker like Jia Zhangke for the sort of complex representation of the interplay between man and constantly changing environment that Assarat means to capture. In Jia's Still Life, two people searching for missing loved ones and themselves, wander among a formerly populated district that's about to be submerged in water to make way for a major dam project, and he incorporates his actors into this already demolished real environment in a wholly unobtrusive way; his aesthetics are a byproduct of the chosen location. Assarat, on the other hand, approaches his environment as an aesthetic object unto itself: Takua Pa, whose coal-grey skies and green, green grasses are photographed with the utmost care, becomes the opportunistic background for a reserved pas de deux.
It's time for (what should be a weekly but always turns out to be something like a bi-annual) roundup of some great reads by Reverse Shot staff writers from other publications. More evidence of Reverse Shot's iinfiltration of the [online....cinephile.....?] world, whether you like it or not.
"An oeuvre made up of fragments naturally spawns fragmentation in its wake, but the erratic and haphazard appearance of Chris Marker’s films on DVD is less a distortion of his work than a peculiarly apt form of presentation. The least proprietary of filmmakers, Marker nevertheless seems immune to misrepresentation. Regardless of his assorted pseudonyms, effacements, and evasions, Marker has managed to exert a remarkable degree of control over his work by the sheer distinctiveness of his textual method. The enshrinement of Sans soleil (19821) and La jetée (1962) on Criterion does not isolate them from the rest of his career (“that despicable word,” he writes)—elegant constructions both, the sensibility from which they issue so clearly travels beyond their borders that they serve as gateways into, rather than summations of, Marker’s work." Click here to read the rest of Andrew Tracy's Cinemascope feature "Out of Time: Notes on Marker." (Also, in the issue, on some newsstands now, Adam Nayman on The Happening.) And then read more from Andrew on Marker in our last symposium, The New World: Reverse Shot Goes Digital.
"Has David Gordon Green gone pop? The question hovers over BAMCinématek's retrospective, which culminates in a preview of Pineapple Express, a 'stoner-action-comedy' from the Apatow family, and the first script Green's directed that he didn't write.
More accurately, Green's gone pragmatic: 'The passion projects, they're necessary for me to make, regardless of if anyone wants to show up at the box office or get behind them and market them,' he says. '[But] there's an actual business, an industry that needs to be respected if not catered to.' Recall that the film that broke a then-25-year-old Green, 2000's George Washington, was the antithesis of a careerist calling card, shooed from Sundance's doorstep. From the filament of a young-adult-fiction plot device shines a racially mixed cast of nonprofessionals, mostly children. Their voiceovers and monologues, in which the kids yearn toward true love and civics-class ideals, give the compartmentalized scenes a melic unity." Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's Village Voice feature "David Gordon Green Moves to the Mainstream?"
"For over forty years, with a career comprising more than thirty-five films, Frederick Wiseman has been insinuating his camera into seemingly every facet of modern life, from the Bridgewater State Prison for the Criminally Insane in 1967’s Titicut Follies to the State Legislature of Idaho in his 2006 film. In between, his remarkably consistent body of work has been busily chronicling dozens of such places in the United States and abroad. Places, as Wiseman likes to say, are the stars of his films: a primate research center, the Neiman-Marcus store in Dallas, a shelter for victims of domestic violence, an Army training center in Kentucky, La Comédie-Française in Paris, two high schools, and the town of Belfast, Maine. And Wiseman’s interest in these sites and institutions, and the structure of everyday life around them, shows no sign of depletion.
"At the end of Batman Begins, the Wayne mansion lies in charred ruins, torched by high-minded crusaders aiming to wipe the slate clean in decadent Gotham. In a summer that also saw War of the Worlds, Begins was, upon reflection, a potent crypto-terrorism tale laced with post-9/11 echoes: Scarecrow’s 'weaponized' drug literally producing mass terror, Bruce Wayne’s attraction-repulsion to vengeance as justice, even a CIA-esque strange-bedfellows tie through Wayne’s past association with his future enemy.
The thread continues in a sequel that virtually plays out the FISA wiretapping dilemma, but, more important, the Dark Knight (Christian Bale) continues to stoke director Christopher Nolan into a frenzy. His work twists and turns with the anxiety that the cracks and fissures in fractured identities could let through unsavory impulses, which here tempt not only our hero but his traumatized town. Batman, who like most superheroes would not exist after rudimentary psychotherapy, stalks and growls through The Dark Knight, tormented by the fun-house mirror the Joker holds up to his conflicted rectitude and to Gothamites’ baseline morality. Click here to read the rest of Nicolas Rapold's review of The Dark Knight from L Magazine.
"Peter Lynch is the great wanderer of contemporary Canadian cinema, traversing wide swaths of physical and psychological terrain in search of what he calls the 'deeper myth.' It's an idea that's within easy walking distance of Werner Herzog's oft-cited 'ecstatic truth,' and comparisons to the German master are inevitable given both filmmakers' predilection for (and reputation as) obsessive, questing types. When Grizzly Man was released in 2005, Canadian critics couldn't help invoking Lynch's wildly successful debut, Project Grizzly (1996), a simultaneously wry and awed account of how inventor/nutcase Troy Hurtubise—shaken by an unexpected encounter with a grizzly bear—endeavors to construct an ursine-proof suit out of whatever materials he has at hand. (The finished product, which sustains collisions with trucks, trees, and even a group of drunken motorcycle enthusiasts, would make Tony Stark proud.)" Click here to read the rest of Adam Nayman's Moving Image Source feature on filmmaker Peter Lynch.
"The references throughout WALL-E to 2001: A Space Odyssey (the Strauss pieces on the soundtrack, the villainous autopilot computer with a single red eye — a dead ringer for Hal-9000) are more than throwaway in-jokes — they’re sign posts. A sci-fi adventure with philosophical resonance and minimal dialogue, the latest Pixar film may be a spiritual cousin to Kubrick’s movie (as well as those of Chaplin, Keaton, Tati, Spielberg, etc., ad infinitum). There is something audacious, maybe hubristic, in Pixar’s gamble to market a potential blockbuster — to families, no less — so out of step with the expectations of multiplex audiences weaned on a succession of Shreks with diminishing returns. But WALL-E dazzles, particularly in its magnificent first half-hour, a post-apocalyptic love-story in miniature that serves as a graceful introduction to the intergalactic journey that follows. Click here to read the rest of Chris Wisniewski's Stop Smiling review of WALL*E.
"'At last, the cult film where they first met!' boasts the cover of the new Cult Epics release of Pierre Grimblat’s 1969 Mod explosion, Slogan. The couple referred to is none other than the seemingly born-old Frenchman Serge Gainsbourg (checking two bags per eye on this flight) and the apparently ageless British model Jane Birkin, whose real-life romance together inspired many a song and film, as well as captivating international celebrity gawkers for 12 torrid years. A movie essentially about artifice, Slogan is heavy on style and light on substance in an almost subversive way. Gainsbourg plays Serge Fabergé, an award-winning ad man and photographer whose name rings like a slogan, and whose head is turned by every insubstantial slip of a girl who passes in front of his camera. Whilst on a Venetian escapade with his latest paramour, (his gorgeous and very understanding pregnant wife is at home), Serge’s gaze meets that of Evelyne (Birkin), and Cupid casts a mysterious spell prompting the two to strike up a Lolita-esque love affair." Click here to read the rest of Sarah Silver's Stop Smiling DVD review of Slogan.
"Despite feigning journalistic and sociological 'objectivity,' documentaries create heroes and villains just as often and prejudicially as their fiction film counterparts. In this sense Operation Filmmaker is a remarkable film not for dispensing with clear demarcations between the real people we’re meant to 'root' for and those we are not — this has been accomplished countless times before — but by unintentionally implicating the filmmaker among its ambiguously motivated cast of characters.
The main word here is 'unintentionally.' Any director with a guilty conscience can plan to call attention to the sizable distance between himself and the film’s subjects in order to excuse his privileged role on the controlling side of the camera — witness the lamentable Hurricane Katrina documentary The Axe in the Attic — but few actually learn about the problems of that privilege in the midst of shooting and then successfully display the painful process in the final result. This seems to have occurred in the making of Operation Filmmaker, Nina Davenport’s slow-building disaster of a documentary that began as a simple feel-good profile of Muthana Mohmed, a 25-year-old Iraqi with cinematic aspirations given the chance to intern on the set of an American movie production in the Czech Republic, and ended as a case of manipulation, exploitation, and bruised egos." Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin's Stop Smiling review of Operation Filmmaker.
Like Lee Chang-dong's 2007 Secret Sunshine, Charles Oliver's debut feature Take deals with the awkward moral quandaries of infanticide and the subsequent, touchy relations between a killer and his victim's mother. That Lee's film remains unreleased in this country is no doubt due in part to the fact that his film, unlike Oliver's, did not star Minnie Driver (although it did win an award at Cannes for its actress, Jeon Do-yeon). But in spite of this star pedigree, Oliver's film manages to grapple with some knotty questions about justice, even if it is not quite as bold or ironic as Lee's.
Driver stars as Ana, whom we eventually learn (after some chronological jerkiness) is the bereaved mother of Jesse, murdered some years earlier by Saul, played by Jeremy Renner (probably best known for his portrayal of another murderer, in 2002's Dahmer). Crosscutting between the stories of Ana and Saul, past and present, the film tracks the causes of Jesse's murder at length before we witness it, and in this way the film forces our identification with both characters -- victim and criminal -- simultaneously. Even as we follow Ana, in her pilgrimage to the state penitentiary to watch the "monster" Saul's execution, we also follow Saul down an endless series of death-row hallways, as he mulls over the dreary life and increasingly brutal set of circumstances that led him, somehow, to kill Ana's son.
Now, a brief tribute to a daily ritual: getting my morning laughs from the IMDb news section, a fount of awkwardly written headlines meant to blow up and sensationalize even the slightest comment from a random movie-star interview. Some are haikus.
Barrowman Has Gay Test
15 July 2008 5:08 AM, PDT
Moore Happy To Embarrass Kids
15 July 2008 5:08 AM, PDT
Mendes Carried A Knife
14 July 2008 12:08 PM, PDT
Gyllenhaal's Nude Scene Fears
13 July 2008 4:06 PM, PDT
Costner Had To Agree To Be A Daddy
15 July 2008 12:09 AM, PDT
Timberlake's Grandmother Dreams Of Biel Marriage
15 July 2008 12:09 AM, PDT
Ledger's Dad Gives Batman Movie The Thumbs Up
15 July 2008 12:09 AM, PDT
Fraser's Height Leaves Him Stooping
14 July 2008 6:27 PM, PDT
Milano Swears Off Baseball Players
14 July 2008 6:27 PM, PDT
Gay McKellan Received Death Threats
13 July 2008 4:06 PM, PDT
Hartnett Refused To Buy Phone
11 July 2008 11:53 AM, PDT
The catchwords for Before I Forget would seem to be direct, intimate, unsparing; yet, conversely, it also feels cavernous and, in its seeming brutal frankness, slippery and elusive. Either drenched in unyielding shadow or flooded with harsh light, Before I Forget follows the sixty-something Pierre (played by writer-director Jacques Nolot), a former hustler, HIV-positive for 24 years, living alone in a spacious Parisian apartment, who's unmoored after the death of his elder benefactor. The premise is simple, intensely character-driven, and the structure linear and compartmentalized -- we see Pierre's daily activities, which involve, in no discernible order, meeting with fellow gay former gigolo friends of the same age, having comparatively impersonal trysts with hustlers of a much younger age, visiting his psychiatrist, and generally putting around his flat -- but the result is enormously complex, a surveying of an entire life just past its midpoint via its practicalities and lost promises.
What makes Before I Forget especially compelling is that Nolot's character is genuinely articulate, even something of a base philosophizer; perhaps a lesser filmmaker would have let the silences speak for its central character, but Pierre, presumably often taking on the voice of the film's maker, expounds on what we see on screen with a fascinating mix of pragmatism and nihilism. He's a man who, like the actor-director himself, seems to conceal nothing, visually typified by his willingness to expose his sagging middle-aged flesh for the camera under the glare of luminescent kitchen lights, but whose self-consciously prim posturing and proclivity to bare his soul to anyone who wants to listen (disengaged prostitute studs, friends increasingly tired of his ramblings) probably masks even deeper reservoirs of anguished loneliness than he's ready to excavate.
It's safe to say that anyone who was regularly attending movies in the early Aughts probably remembers the One Night at McCool's trailer more than its poster. Nevertheless, since it's the awful-to-the-point-of-genius title of One Night at McCool's that warrants One Night at McCool's' attention most of all, it seemed appropriate for One Night at McCool's to get a Reverse Shot Poster of the Week designation. Just a quick glance at One Night at McCool's' poster is enough to unleash a fetid rush of late-Nineties nostalgia: the once ubiquitous John Goodman mustering manly cop seriousness; Matt Dillon, coming off his Wild Things success (which had nothing to do with his presence), daringly showing off his fully fanned ears and frighteningly close-together eyes by staring straight into the camera; a pre-Rings Liv Tyler still trying to tart it up in an effort to distance her looks from those of her classically hideous-featured father; and, of course, Paul Reiser, repeating the butt-sniffing pose from the cover of his best-seller Couplehood.
Forget that One Night at McCool's' plot evidently was some sort of comic variation on Rashomon set in a suburban dive bar—based on the low level of star wattage and the evident strain of gay panic and S&M/leather jokes from the trailer, its referent in my head will always be Neal Israel's "Police Academy Goes to Driving School" non-classic Moving Violations. P.S.: Michael Douglas is also in One Night at McCool's, as a hit man who looks alarmingly like that old Jewish granny from the Wonder Boys poster.
Anyone seen One Night at McCool's? Send your comments regarding the plot of One Night at McCool's to me at onenightatmccools@onenightatmccools.com and you'll be entered in a drawing to receive a free copy of Rashomon.
In its detailing of a couple's financial freefall after the loss of a job, Silvio Soldini's Days and Clouds -- recently featured in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual roundup of new Italian cinema -- couldn't ask for a more fittingly precipitous point in time for its American theatrical release than this disquieting summer of soaring gas prices, staycations, anxious awaiting of stimulus checks, and shuttering Starbucks.
Granted, Elsa (an elegant Margherita Buy) and Michele (Antonio Albanese) start off with means far above that of the average household; the opening scenes quickly establish the extravagant lifestyle to which the married, middle-aged couple are accustomed: To celebrate the recent completion of her art-history degree, Michele takes Elsa out for dinner, gifts an expensive-looking pair of earrings, throws a surprise party, and alludes to near-future plans for a trip to Cambodia. Though she appears momentarily overwhelmed by this display of largesse, Elsa isn't particularly discomfited. But the symbolic rude awakening -- she steps out of bed the next morning onto shards of the bedside lamp broken in happy, drunken oblivion the night before -- is made actual when Michele confesses that, not wanting to distract from her final exam studies, he didn't reveal sooner that two months prior his business partners pushed him out of the company he co-founded.
The majority of us can't relate to the Oliveris' former level of material comfort, but their alarmingly swift descent into dire straits, and attempts to scale back on expenses and lower expectations in the search for employment, strikes closer to home. Click here to read the rest of Kristi Mitsuda's review of Days and Clouds.
What is it about Los Angeles that makes it prone to multicharacter, excess-minded ensembles and devoted tributes to itself disguised as critiques? Well, as we learned from Paul Haggis's ethnography-as-racial-burlesque Crash, everyone in that city just sort of, well, crashes into each other--presumptively it's strictly a car thing, because I've had my share of sidewalk collisions while walking on New York's even more crowded streets. Perhaps the city's denizens are united by a certain, unspoken shared misery, eventually exacerbated or cleansed by some greater destructive force, as in Short Cuts and Magnolia. Or is it that everyone oozes an icky superficiality that doubles as a mighty adhesive, connecting disparate people stuck in ignoble circumstances, as in Happy Endings or Boogie Nights?
Whatever the reason, director Jason Freeland feels the need to try his hand at this subgenre, tackling, in only his second feature, a sprawling study of a pack of tangentially related young people trying to make it in Los Angeles, all either exploiters or the exploited. The trick of many of these movies it that their dovetailing narratives and multiple characters give off the impression that the director is ambitious, but more often they're anything but, haphazardly jamming together half-formed tidbits of stories like ill-fitting jigsaw pieces. This is not to say that fleeting moments cannot add up to satisfying narratives - each of the marvelous single-take segments of Rodrigo Garcia's Nine Lives, for instance, felt like fully achieved short fictions. In Freeland's case, one might wish he would venture at perfecting a single coherent narrative before trying to weave together several. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of Garden Party.
[EDITORS NOTE FROM INDIEWIRE: This is the first in a regular series of articles that will take a critical look at the state of contemporary queer cinema. In developing this column, indieWIRE turned to New York City based writers Michael Koresky and Chris Wisniewski, inviting them to take a sort of "he said, he said" approach to discussing queer films.]
Michael Koresky: Surveying the landscape of queer cinema has become increasingly difficult in recent years. Where there was once a thriving independent gay-lesbian film scene -- confident enough in itself to exist on film culture's fringes, populated with genuinely outcast movies that didn't have their sights set on wider audiences -- there seems to be an increasing disinterest among viewers in seeking out smaller films simply because of gay content.
Many would point to the outsized, mainstream success of Brokeback Mountain as the turning point (after which viewing gay cinema as cultural marginalia no longer seemed sufficient), yet to me the shift seems much greater than this, due more to changing attitudes at large than anything else, not to mention the ready availability of gay content on cable channels like Logo and Here!. If homosexuality has become something approaching mainstream, then why should gay movies still be relegated to those third-rate specialty houses that seem like porn-era holdovers? In some places, we're already allowed to get good and married, so why can't we get good movies as well?
For this, our first column about where queer cinema's at, and possibly where it's headed, we could think of no better place to start than the films selected for this month's slate of LGBT festivals (from San Francisco's recent Frameline and last month's NewFest in New York to Los Angeles's upcoming Outfest). If there's been any impression from the films we saw this year, it would be that reality has, with some exception, trumped fiction, but more significantly, the best films were those that dared, in this so-called "post-gay" climate, to remind us that all is not necessarily alright, whether in governmental policy (Ask Not), with the continued practice of safe sex (Sex Positive), or, most dramatically, under Islamic law (Be Like Others, A Jihad for Love) While I adored the festival's romantic, inspiring centerpiece Chris & Don: A Love Story, a documentary about the decades-long romance between Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood, currently in limited release, I most admired those filmmakers who weren't ready to hang up their activist hats just yet.
Chris Wisniewski: There certainly wasn't anything "post-gay" about the best nonfiction films of these festivals. "Ask Not," for example, reminded us that even though we may be poised to put the Bush-Clinton-Bush-era behind us, in some arenas we haven't come that far since 1992. But Ask Not isn't just a glorified PSA; director Johnny Symons smartly follows a core group of soldiers who put an appealing human face on the "don't ask, don't tell" problem (though they still may not be quite enough to fill the movie's full 73 minutes). "Don't ask, don't tell" isn't just a matter of policy for these people, it affects the lives of those who, for reasons deeply personal and political, have chosen a life of military service.
A few entries skewed too far towards the individual and the anecdotal side of things (Richard Gere's brother is sweet and all, and his kids are adorable, but it wasn't enough to hold my interest through all of Tom Keegan's Out in India). The biggest offender on this front was the formless, self-consciously "hip" Bi the Way, which purported to expose the changing attitudes towards sexual identity among today's under-30 set. Directors Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker simply assert that this sea change is taking place -- okay, with a little commentary from Dan Savage and Michael Musto -- but they seem more interested in their assemblage of bi interviewees, picked seemingly at random from various points around the continental U.S., than they do in asking serious questions about contemporary attitudes towards bisexuality. They devote easily more than ten minutes of screen time to Tarnation director Jonathan Caouette's ten-year-old son, because (I guess) he's told his parents that he might decide he's bisexual one day. It wasn't exactly edifying.
Tanaz Eshaghian's Be Like Others, on the other hand, wasn't simply edifying, it was heartbreaking. Eshaghian's film examines the lives of pre- and post-operative transsexuals in Iran. An interview with a doctor and cleric give us all of the political backstory we really need: sex changes are permitted under Islamic law, and are therefore legal in the Islamic Republic of Iran (the government will even change a person's gender on his or her birth certificate). Since homosexuality is not legal, an unspoken ambiguity lies at the heart of Be Like Others -- are the people who decide to change their sex transsexual, gay, or simply too effeminate to avoid constant persecution? This ambiguity hangs over every interview Eshaghian conducts and every medical check-up she observes. Shortly before his surgery, one of her subjects admits that he wouldn't be going through with it if he could be accepted as he was in Iranian society. The moment is devastating, and it suggests that Be Like Others, the strongest film I saw from these festivals, isn't "post-gay," but it may be "pre-gay."
Yes, yes, just as other critics have told you, the robot Wall*E is Chaplinesque: a tramp, rusted, scruffy and lovable, all wide eyes and pratfalls and unchecked sentiment. Every gesture is equally funny and heartbreakingly sad: his earnest mimickry of human behavior, learned from a treasured, studied VHS copy of a long forgotten bit of cultural detritus, Gene Kelly’s film adaptation of Hello, Dolly! Sitting on a bench, he earnestly swings his wheel-tracks and pats the space next to him trying to coax the comely iPod-reminiscent robot Eve (voice of Elissa Knight) to his side. He charmingly dances to “Put on Your Sunday Clothes,” using a trash lid as a porkpie hat. When frightened, he collapses into a little box like a turtle. He collects the most curious and ornamental remnants of human civilization, like the little mermaid Ariel before him. He is an immaculately executed character, a necessarily endearing emcee to what is at times the grimmest American comedy in years.
Because as much as Wall*E is Chaplinesque, he is also the Chaplin of the 1930s, the one who, awash in cultural and financial capital, decided to expend it on a pair of politically engaged problem films, Modern Times and The Great Dictator. How one feels about those two will likely correlate with how one appreciates Wall*E, which I don’t need to tell you is the latest film from computer-animation standard bearers Pixar, a sci-fi allegory of a future earth abandoned and ravaged by the excesses of late capitalism and a robot whose malfunctioned tendency toward human curiosity is the engine for a sea change in humanity’s regard for their home planet. Like its forebears, it is preachy, sanctimonious, and, coming from parent company Disney, more than a bit hypocritical in its targets: an overly consumptive and blithely complacent culture created by convenience technology and multinational corporations. It is nevertheless a blisteringly intelligent and necessary satire of American attitudes, a moving love story, and Pixar’s most unique film to date. As much as I would love to equivocate about the film’s reification of gender (yes, the robots have genders, even though the closest they desire to sexual contact is hand-holding) or its satirical barbs at the overstimulated, grotesquely obese humans who lazily populate the spaceship Axiom, a Guy Debord hell of flashing screens and corporate fascism, I find it hard to do so. Its successes are simply too overwhelming.
Hunter S. Thompson's prose was nervy and pugnacious, his judgments bullying and hyperbolic, his life as volatile as any in postwar American letters. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson couldn't be any more different in mien and spirit. A couple of passages aside, it is almost perversely straightforward in light of its unstable subject, a chronological march through the heavy '60s, the downer '70s and the post-Reagan blur with a dutiful assemblage of talking heads and archival footage. The historical and cultural insights are all textbook, the music choices Gump-esque (if I hear Jefferson Airplane playing over images of Summer of Love San Francisco one more time...). What saves the movie is the man himself.
As a documentary subject, Hunter S. Thompson is can't-miss, partly because he cultivated his persona for maximum shock and awe. Alex Gibney's film evinces palpable affection for the man and gives his words and visage plenty of screen time. The roster of interviewees is impressive: in addition to Thompson's two wives and only son, Tom Wolfe, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Pat Buchanan (!), Jimmy Buffett (!!), and Jann Wenner, among other luminaries, pay tribute to the self-styled creator of "gonzo journalism." Lest that motley cast suggest otherwise, the talking-head choices are actually apt (Thompson admired Buchanan as a writer; he was good friends with Buffett), as each brings a shard of truth from divergent perspectives.
"Hey girls, you know what I love? Back bacon, Sloan, draconian anti-pornography laws, and living in a welfare state! Go Habs!"
"Hollywood" shamelessly continues its tradition of outsourcing the American image, showing unprecedented gall in releasing the Abigail Breslin vehicle Kit Kittredge: An American Girl just in time for the July 4th holiday.
Kittredge follows the titular tween, a prepubescent would-be investigative reporter, who, faithfully accompanied by her loyal bassett hound (the newspaper ads would have me believe this pooch wears one of those Uncle Sam hats at some point), pursues adventures in Depression Era Cincinnati, Ohio.
Cincinnati, my hometown, The Queen City of the West, was once described by no less a personage than Sir Winston Churchill as "the most beautiful of America's inland cities." Built on seven hills (like Rome!), its broad vistas, distinct regional identity, and abundant specimens of vernacular architecture (the highest per capita representation of 19th century Italianate townhouses in North America holla!) could offer an endless array of pictorial possibilities to a receptive production team (while in town, cast and crew could've enjoyed visits to the American Sign Museum, the Taft collection, and Junker's Tavern)
So what do American Girl Brands/ Goldsmith-Thomas Productions/ HBO Films/ New Line Cinema/ Red Om Films go and do? They set up shop in fucking Toronto, all to save a few measly sheckles.
For shame. Job-loss issues aside, runaway film production does us--whatever side of whatever border we lie on--a gross disservice by routinely fobbing off the outskirts of Vancouver as Missouri, upstate New York, California, and God knows where else. In this, the tremendous diversity (of topography, of architecture, of flora, of personalities) of this great nation are entirely ignored or falsified. Will it take the unveiling of a built-to-scale Monument Valley in Manitoba for us to wake up to this crisis? I bear no animosity toward our neighbors in the North, but The Industry gets on the fightin' side of me when they put poutine in front of me and try to tell me it's a juicy hamburger. (It wasn't always this way: a certain immigrant from Minsk who became Louis B. Mayer was proud enough of his adopted country to falsify his birthday to July 4th.)
One could surmise the mediocrity of Diminished Capacity from reading the synopsis alone: Cooper (Matthew Broderick), a small-town-boy-made-good in the big city but lately suffering from the lasting effects of a serious concussion, heads back home to visit his fading Uncle Rollie (Alan Alda). As Cooper's mother explains of the latter's condition in a letter, "Dr. Hoyt calls it 'diminished capacity'; that's the legal term for a man who thinks that fish are typing poetry out on the end of his pier." Got that last bit? To clarify: Rollie connects fishing lines to each letter on his typewriter, the nibbling of which results in a jumble of words (Rollie edits).
That this precious and strangely empty conceit plays a structuring role in the narrative (inspiring the opening and closing images) is symptomatic of the movie's oblivious blandness; that a central character's dementia is used as an excuse for added quirk is just bad taste. As directed by actor Terry Kinney (of the Steppenwolf Theatre) and written by Sherwood Kiraly (based on his novel), Diminished Capacity suffers from a generalized aimlessness which might seem fitting given the subject matter except that it never takes purposeful shape.
