http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/ REVERSEBLOG: the reverse shot blog en Copyright 2009 2009-07-03T14:59:30+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/anne_fontaines_the_girl_from_monaco/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/anne_fontaines_the_girl_from_monaco/ French romantic comedies are the art-house import equivalent of pimped-out Hollywood blockbusters. Both appeal to a wide and diffuse target audience — moderately cultured bourgeois and pop thrill seekers — and both are basically critic-proof. Where Michael Bay obliterates scrutiny with fireballs and shiny screeching machinery, French comedies gently neutralize through learned banter, exotic settings, and scantily clad gamines. The machine works something like this: an older gentleman clicks into place across from a fresh face, situational laughter is achieved while clothes teasingly peel away, a titillating trailer cuts itself, Denby reviews for the New Yorker, and decent money is… 2009-07-03T14:59:30+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/california_dreaming_talking_to_agnes_varda/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/california_dreaming_talking_to_agnes_varda/ On the occasion of her 80th birthday, Agnès Varda, the woman sometimes referred to as the “grandmother of the French New Wave,” decided to turn the camera back on herself. The Beaches of Agnès was the result: sprawling, spry, and ever curious, like the filmmaker herself, it revisits a life that, for over 50 years, has been inextricably linked to the cinema that shaped it. In addition to making groundbreaking films like Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) and Vagabond (1985), Varda has also sustained an impressive career as a photographer and more recently as an installation artist. In 1962… Interviews 2009-07-02T15:44:24+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/only_disconnect_manns_public_enemies/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/only_disconnect_manns_public_enemies/ It is at best naïve, at worst wholly disingenuous, to evaluate the work of a commercial artist without weighing the commerce in equal proportion to the art. Thanks to the formalist bent in film criticism, the exemplary visual dexterity of certain mainstream-schooled American filmmakers has been oft highlighted, but frequently at the expense of acknowledging their films’ pecuniary provenance. Ironically, it is the nakedly cash-driven nature of so many of these enterprises that allows that divorce to be made, almost as if these directors have burrowed so deeply into their marketplace mentality that they have emerged, purified, on the other… Reviews 2009-07-01T15:28:25+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/wave_goodbye_the_beaches_of_agnes/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/wave_goodbye_the_beaches_of_agnes/ Is the 81-year-old Agnes Varda a tireless self-promoter or self-eulogizer? After watching her lyrical, free-associative autobiography “The Beaches of Agnes” it might seem silly to even bother creating a distinction. In the past decade or so, this oft-named “grandmother of the French New Wave,” who has been for over fifty years creating a diverse, challenging (and admittedly inconsistent) body of work, from narrative cinema to documentary to photography and installation pieces, has more often than not turned the camera on herself. Thus the septuagenarian incarnation of Varda, in such personal works as The Gleaners and I (2000) and Cinevardaphoto (2004),… Reviews 2009-06-30T15:07:02+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/quiet_ch/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/quiet_ch/ The trouble with Quiet Chaos is that there’s too much quiet and not enough chaos. The emotional turmoil spoken about by the film’s characters rarely punctures its tranquil, sleepy surface. Floating along with middle-aged businessman and recent widower Pietro (Nanni Moretti, who also co-adapted the screenplay from Sandro Veronesi’s novel) on his shambling journey of self-discovery and personal reconfiguration, we enjoy his company but rarely feel or understand his pain, leaving this slight, sentimental movie to coast on innocuous charm and little more. Having saved two drowning women with brother Carlo (Alessandro Gassman) while at the ocean, Pietro returns to… Reviews 2009-06-29T14:16:50+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/miles_of_bad_road_jennifer_lynchs_surveillance/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/miles_of_bad_road_jennifer_lynchs_surveillance/ In one of the most spectacular flameouts of recent American film, Jennifer Lynch went from hot-shit prodigy to laughingstock with one wacko, lazily maligned movie: 1993’s Razzie-approved Boxing Helena. It’s taken David’s daughter 16 years to revive her career, but judging from her follow-up, Surveillance, time has stood still. Closely following a mid-Nineties playbook of third-hand genre affectations, grab-bag Americana, serial killer chic, deserted highways at magic hour, cameos by marginal celebrities pantomiming against type, and general bad faith, Surveillance is an unwelcome blast from late nights of premium cable’s past. Lynch’s film shows marginally bigger ambitions and production values… Reviews 2009-06-26T17:13:32+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/coming_of_age_frearss_cheri/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/coming_of_age_frearss_cheri/ Stephen Frears’s version of Colette’s novel Chéri, adapted by Christopher Hampton, is ostensibly an examination of an aging Michelle Pfeiffer. A retired, past-her-prime courtesan in belle epoque Paris, Pfeiffer’s Lea de Lonval still wears her beauty well, yet the lines on her washed-out visage are difficult to ignore. There’s no doubt that Pfeiffer is brilliantly cast as this worn-down yet still vital woman, as her face, despite some unignorable tightness about the cheekbones, is beginning to show its age; her impeccable, carved beauty remains, yet in a stricter, more severe, perhaps even more divine tone. In Chéri, Pfeiffer, as always,… Reviews 2009-06-25T14:47:06+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/war_is_swell_bigelows_the_hurt_locker/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/war_is_swell_bigelows_the_hurt_locker/ The opening of The Hurt Locker is a textbook example of how to use images not only to impart information but to brand it on the brain. The scene has words, too—quite a lot of them—but none as clarifying as the sight of an Army bomb disposal expert (Guy Pearce), encased in a bulky protective suit, crouching before an active incendiary device on a sweltering Baghdad street. What happens next should be seen, not divulged; but from those first, horrifying minutes of expertly choreographed visual provocation we learn at least two things. First, that in the world of director Kathryn… Reviews 2009-06-24T14:47:54+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/rebirth_of_a_nation/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/rebirth_of_a_nation/ I first encountered DJ Spooky’s multimedia project Rebirth of a Nation four years ago, when I was still a student at the University of North Carolina. Back then this radical revision of D.W. Griffith’s masterpiece was still making its rounds as a live performance, and the idea of it alone was enough to make it an ultra-hip, must-see event. Condensed from three hours to a little under two, the film was sliced up and projected on a triptych of large screens, allowing for a surprising juxtaposition of storylines, and giving off the sense that this monolith in cinema history was… Repertory 2009-06-23T13:25:08+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/where_the_boys_are/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/where_the_boys_are/ We like Up. We really do. But it really got some of us here thinking about the complete lack of female protagonists in the entirety of Pixar’s impressive decade-plus output. Perhaps Up magnified this fact because a) it’s the most explicitly stated “Boy’s Adventure” film they’ve done so far, with its father-grandson bonding and its boy-scout sidekick, and b) because it foregrounds so literally the divide between the space of male-action and female-domesticity, even as it fights against it by making its major female character, Ellie, the more adventurous tomboy. Undoubtedly the end of the film is exquisitely tearjerking, with… random commentary 2009-06-22T18:47:55+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/poster_of_the_week281/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/poster_of_the_week281/ What?! Spanish auteur Bigas Luna’s Anguish, starring Zelda Rubenstein and Michael Lerner?! From 1987? In which Poltergeist‘s own Tangina apparently collects the eyeballs of her fellow city-dwellers and glues them to her wall like a uniform key-rack? Yes, apparently before making those Spanish-language faves Ham, Ham and The Tit and the Moon, Luna roped the oft-exploited Ms. Rubenstein for this ghastly bit of business, and to add insult to injury, made her wear a ratty old shawl that in this poster takes on the weight of football shoulder padding. Unlike many of our woebegone posters of the week, this one… Poster of the Week 2009-06-19T17:34:34+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/that_old_cracked_magic_woody_allens_whatever_works/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/that_old_cracked_magic_woody_allens_whatever_works/ Yes, Woody Allen’s fortieth feature, Whatever Works, is Just Like All the Rest. So what? That should take a critic of average intelligence about thirty seconds to ascertain, or less if you want to start with the white-on-black credit typography; there’s still a whole movie left. Of course, willingness to wrestle with the latest Woody Allen release on its own terms is contingent on the given critic’s level of chumminess with the filmmaker. For the current generation of twenty- and thirty-something film writers, Allen is either crucial or a constant pest, a director as important to the landscape of contemporary… Reviews 2009-06-17T20:37:09+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/small_change_tatia/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/small_change_tatia/ Animated cinema geared specifically for adults is an elusive proposition.  Even if Pixar’s recent films (especially Up and last year’s Wall*E) and Nick Park’s Aardman entertainments have truly embodied that slippery archetype “fun for the whole family,” the mainstream of animation remains fart jokes, anthropomorphic jungle critters with googly eyes, and familiar voices spouting shoehorned-in lowbrow pop-culture references (toss in the latest from Smashmouth over the end credits for good measure).  Even animation of the more transgressive variety merely R-rates those same tropes to gain inclusion in the latest edition of Spike and Mike’s. Why can’t animation be employed to… Reviews 2009-06-16T14:31:29+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/hang_me/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/hang_me/ If box-office numbers and imdb message boards are to be believed, no one likes a poor little PC pussy coming in to rain on the parade. Well, sorry to break up the high-fiving, ass-slapping, “get over it, dude, it’s only a comedy” raunch-party taking this country by “surprise” storm called The Hangover, but it can only be some sort of sick joke on Warner Bros’ part that it got released, and has become the hot-ticket item, during Gay Pride month. Only four weeks till Brüno, but we have enough questionably homophobic comedy here to tide us over. So how does… this world blows 2009-06-15T13:59:39+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/moon/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/moon/ Science-fiction filmmaking built from brains rather than balls is an increasing rarity; finding it hitting screens deep into June is a near impossibility. Duncan Jones’s directorial debut, Moon, a cleverly low-fi one-man-show for Sam Rockwell tinged with philosophical overtones, may well ride its singularity to a level of praise its overall modesty and cheeky aesthetics don’t really aim for, but that’s not really the movie’s fault.  We could use more speculations like Moon—as the expiration dates on our genre landmarks pass by without fulfilling their fictive promises (2001’s come and gone; Blade Runner’s 2014 is fast approaching and replicants, save… Reviews 2009-06-12T16:28:51+00:00