In Quintessence

Day 5: September 12

2011-09-23T04:56:00.001-07:00

I’m afraid I don’t have much to say about Miss Bala, apparently Gerardo Naranjo’s breakout work, and to my mind, his weakest by a mile. Tentative boy-girl interplay infused the violence of Naranjo’s previous effort, I’m Gonna Explode, with gentle irony; here, Naranjo maintains an amorphous, all-encompassing dread. Virtuoso tracking shots, technically as remarkable as anything Naranjo has done, serve to reinforce identification with Laura’s (Stephanie Sigman) bitter endurance and bear witness to creative acts of violence. Little more than a receptacle for abuse, she appears saintly alongside a procession of brutal criminals and corrupt policemen. Naranjo is skilled, but Miss Bala is not what I’d hoped to win him mainstream recognition. D

The opening of Joseph Cedar’s Footnote recalls Certified Copy, as Uriel Shkolnik’s (Lior Ashkenazi) tribute to father Eleizer (Shlomo Bar-Aba) is set against a protracted scowl from the latter. Doubts of Uriel’s sincerity are quickly rewarded: his private account of Eleizer differs sharply from the public. That’s all the better for Cedar’s Cannes award-winning screenplay to remain mysterious about Uriel’s martyr-like commitment to his father, and refrain from resolving the big dilemmas it tackles.
But so much academic filibustering is a bad fit for Cedar’s TV-style direction and talking head setups, substituting broad strokes for much immediacy. It doesn’t help that Professor Grossman (Micah Lewensohn), Eleizer’s rival, is an irrational monster, making Uriel, vain from the outset, a hero whenever convenient for the movie’s game plan. C

If TIFF promises one constant, it is a plethora of unusable notes. During Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet, I’d scribbled on my notepad, somewhat embarrassingly, “Pure cinema—one can just as easily imagine a literary equivalent as a cinematic equivalent to Eliot or Joyce.” Which I’d have been prepared to stand by, prior to discovering that Planet adapts a short story by Tom Bissell, a young author originating from my hometown, Portland, Oregon. (According to Willamette Week’s current cover story, Bissell “[spends] his time on video games and bad movies.” I bristled before I grokked their meaning.) I haven’t read Bissell’s work, but Loktev’s film suggests inner turmoil like few films can or do: it spoils nothing to tell that much of the second half consists, essentially, of watching young engaged couple Nica (Hani Furstenberg) and Alex (Gael García Bernal) listen to the sound of their own voices. Their hike guide Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze), alternately sinister, incomprehensible and pathetic, is made to feel unwelcome in the subtlest of ways, especially by Nica, who initiates sex with Alex in their tent, with Dato presumably right outside. We’re fully prepared for Dato’s comeuppance, but under the tutelage of movies where sadistic jokes and a whiff of racism translate to villainy, could never guess how unexpectedly it arrives. But then Loktev’s understanding of the complex cycles through which people process guilt, love and fear is never less than acute or surprising. A-

Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene has ambition in spades, but I seem to be nearly alone in finding it squandered. The premise, which recalls my friend Dan Sallitt’s far superior All the Ships at Sea, hinges on the indoctrination process of a violent cult led by Patrick (John Hawkes) and its effects on Martha / Marcy May / etc. (Elizabeth Olsen). Martha’s post-cult behavior, which freely mixes trauma and social retardation, doesn’t sit well with Martha’s sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who loses it when Martha punctures their bubble of upper-middle-class respectability, or her boyfriend Ted (Hugh Dancy), totally resistant to Martha’s presence and inclined to lecture her being normal. The movie’s problems start with Lucy and Ted’s unmediated ostracism and continue with Patrick, whose formal manner, contrasted with his hangdog subjects, has a certain appeal, but is never properly emphasized: Durkin’s style, albeit sometimes low-key, betrays a preference for sensationalism and weirdness over character observation. C

Day 4: September 11

2011-09-23T04:42:00.001-07:00

In the opening scene of A Separation, Asghar Farhadi elucidates, in one long take of rapidfire dialogue, what some sources purport to be the entirety of the film’s plot. Simin (Leila Hatami), determined to send daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) to a good school, demands and is refused a separation from her husband Nader (Peyman Moaadi), who must tend to his ailing father. What follows, although staged with stunning clarity, is so complex I couldn’t spoil it if I tried: the intrusion of another, more financially vulnerable couple into Nader and Simin’s lives spurs a whirlwind of accusations, pushing Simin’s concerns to the sidelines. (A legal aide’s reference to Simin’s ambitions as a “small issue” is cruel, but the film proceeds to treat them exactly so so.) The film suffers slightly only for deferring Simin and Termeh’s roles for so long; still, the threads are interwoven brilliantly, as when a deftly staged showdown between Nader and Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), the volatile husband of the separating couple’s caretaker Razieh (Sareh Bayat), draws attention so fully to the men’s underhanded dealings that their seismic effects on both relationships are altogether eclipsed. Farhadi’s greatest achievement is a near-complete obfuscation of where his own feelings lie: I defy anyone to identify any of these characters, albeit deeply sympathetic, as aligned with the filmmaker. B+

Nixing his pet subjects of rape and pedophilia, Dark Horse has been touted as tame by Todd Solondz’s rather lax standards. But this freeform outpour of misanthropy is as bountifully negative as ever. Taken as a character study, it’s bold but unpersuasive. Richard (Justin Bartha) is simple-minded dork of the fanboy genus, cynical but skilled at appearing otherwise; when he proposes to artsy, depressive Miranda (Selma Blair), it’s his dreams vs. her self-respect. While Richard and Miranda are a blatantly bad fit, Richard’s therapist’s way of putting it is “She’s too good for you”; while Richard compulsively buys action figures at work, he prides himself on being not that nerdy. But Solondz somehow lacks the nuance required to make these contradictions important. He instead shunts Richard and Miranda’s sacrifices aside in favor of an oneiric tailspin into self-loathing, his anything-to-get-a-laugh side reigning supreme. C+

Karim Ainouz is in top form with The Silver Cliff before much of anything happens. Djalma (Otto Jr.) languidly hangs out in downtown, fucks wife Violeta (Alessandra Negrini), and performs mundane parental tasks; Ainouz has no default setup, utilizing a variety of visual approaches, but tends to shift emphasis or phase it out entirely in the course of a shot. Then something big happens, Violeta becomes the true protagonist, and Silver Cliff begins to resemble a Radu Muntean movie in focus if not style, especially Tuesday After Christmas. The middle section’s highlights are Violeta’s slyest forms of emotional masochism: prioritizing rechecking her cell over her dentistry job, allowing herself indifference following a gory bike accident, replaying a traumatic voicemail before hitting the club. There’s only so much the movie can do, however, after blanketing her misery in oblivion. When Violeta listens to a cabbie recite a comparable story and vaguely discloses bits of her own, the movie hits a mundane spot between openness and dissimulation. But things pick up a bit as she ambles with single dad Nassir (Thiago Martins), whose awkwardness has a true, lovely ring. B-

Previous entries in Alexander Sokurov’s “Tetralogy of Power” didn’t exactly locate what was human in Hitler, Hirohito and Lenin so much as behavior so eccentric that good and evil were no longer applicable. Faust proves Sokurov incapable of a conventional emotion, or, I fear, a fully comprehensible one. Much of the film juxtaposes Faust’s (Johannes Zeiler) despair and bad health with sexual and sadistic pleasure, like an ascetic philosopher making sense of a Fellini cavalcade. Sokurov assigns even minor characters a madness that makes direct communication impossible, rendering Faust riveting moment-to-moment and inert across any given scene. Throughout, Satan (Anton Adasinskiy), here embodying converse extremes of human ugliness, both lanky and dense with flab, pursues Faust, and Faust pursues Margarete (Isolde Dychauk), the pretty sister of a slain soldier who still allows herself pleasure in the wake of her brother’s death. In an extraordinary display of Sokurov’s control over the 4:3 frame, Margarete’s grieving, although effusive, comically pales next to her mother’s—a gesture that, like many in Faust, undoes its own meaning. B

Day 3: September 10

2011-09-13T13:19:00.001-07:00

Mr. Tree (Han Jie) W/O

Gave this rigor-free study of a misfit around 30 minutes, around which point
Shu (Baoqiang Wang) had waxed moody about his traumatic past, made violently awkward advances towards the cold mute Xiaomei (Zhuo Tan), fallen into reveries and roughed up kids, to our presumed mild chuckles and mild pity. I didn’t detect a through-line or coherent style, apart from approximating Shu’s mania and wooziness as innocuously as possible.

The Ides of March (George Clooney) B

If Clooney the director loses focus now and then, he still succeeds at giving Clooney the actor an opportunity to riff on moral contradictions—his Governor Morris's interview segment on the death penalty outdoes all of Into the Abyss as an audaciously liberal appeal—and, though he’s no Otto Preminger, and Ides no Advise and Consent, to call out idealistic campaigner Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling) on his every weakness. It’s a light, sharply written and acted movie, conceding to some conventions (Evan Rachel Wood is good in quieter moments and a distraction when called upon to provide tears) and disdaining others, particularly the expectation not to adopt double standards in a competitive realm. Morris and Myers are infused with a balanced dose of demagoguery and self-aware charm; other characters, like Philip Seymour Hoffman’s speechifying Paul Zara, present similarly. Anyone who’s watched a Clooney interview won’t marvel at the mixture: the film resonates as autocritique as much as satire.

This Side of Resurrection (Joaquim Sapinho) W/O

Opening titles, in which DV-shot sylvan and Christian imagery is scored to loud clanking, promise something like a Straub short hijacked by Gaspar Noe; I wasn’t frothing at the mouth. What follows includes listless amateur surfing footage, a well-written and acted breakup, general restraint from Sapinho and his actors, but all the shapeless ennui is so much noodling, and the characters are as sketchily defined as the interior scenes are underlit.

Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve) A

A number of split-second moments from Hansen-Løve’s masterpiece outclass entire films at this year’s TIFF: Camille (Lola Créton, so fine in Bluebeard but so much better here) dropping Sullivan’s hand when he renounces dependency as an excuse for not seeing her—a gesture that secures her guilty affection and denies her long-term power; Breillat-like, offhand deployment of everything from nudity (Camille pulling back her yanked sheets from Sullivan, in an early scene, has the filmmaker delicately keeping truth and exploitation in check) to tears (without a trace of mockery, their wetness is more prominent on Camille’s face than her emotions). Her autobiographical love story is like a kindhearted variation on Pialat’s We Won’t Grow Old Together, where sensitivity represents its author’s downfall. Camille’s goodness and intelligence make her romantic nature all the more intractable. But just as the film’s saddest images follow bliss, such as Camille’s shyly disconsolate spasm in Sullivan’s arms following a fine outing, hesitant steps towards intellectual discipline and mutual romantic fulfillment, and the reflection they provide, save Hansen-Løve from committing Camille to doom.

Last Winter (John Shank) W/O

With its Shank's camera following Jacques’s (Carlo Brandt) tedious existence, while spelling out the terms and lineage of his existence in voiceover, Last Winter immediately struck me as what might occur if Lisandro Alonso adapted a Per Patterson novel. Not unappealing, in my book. But as soon Johann began to righteously stand up for preserving local farming policy, its fair-minded but flavorless consideration of complicated issues started to resemble Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men, another well-intentioned, proficiently made movie I bailed on.

Free Men (Ismaël Ferrouki) C+

Ferroukhi’s Le grand voyage was an eccentric animal, dishing out dime-store homilies with one hand, incisively picking apart ideological excess and immaturity with the other. I approached Free Men, a bigger-budget project hewing to real-life heroism, with equal parts hope and trepidation, assuming that one side of Ferroukhi would fully emerge. But the new movie produces precisely the same unwieldy mix as the last one. Like Le grand voyage’s Reda, Younes (Tahar Rahim) is a lazy, childish protag capable of doing good, but frequently embarrassing himself. If anything, it’s awkward how little Ferroukhi’s men get away with on charm alone: the conventionally handsome Rahim seems miscast as a man-child. Though Younes’s transparent wretchedness is a little misplaced, without it the film would have little to work with, and it lends a certain ambiguous power to his heroic acts, which Rahim’s deer-in-headlights look effectively drains of righteousness. I can’t vouch passionately for Free Men or Le grand voyage, but I do fear Ferroukhi’s unusual virtues will be misunderstood. He’s a good director who happens to value pat moral lessons and visual anonymity; more power to anyone who can actually pull that off.

Day 2: September 9

2011-09-11T16:08:00.000-07:00

Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki) C-

Apparently ”pure pleasure” translates to utterly nonthreatening. Like a sitcom with the punchlines troweled over by unemphatic readings, except the gags are still predicated on characters’ bizarre lack of self-awareness. (Sample exchange: Marcel—“It’s good you’re thin; that way more people can fit into the car.” Marcel’s Wife (unironically)—“So you want more wives?”) Marcel may lack outright innocence, but bumbling good-heartedness does not complexity make. His is a redemption story with no weight, and as a result, obligatory crises like the Little Bob concert pop up, because, apparently, Kaurismäki likes him. (Why?) Monet’s moral trajectory, meanwhile, is telegraphed in his very first scene. Admittedly, I did enjoy Arletty’s hypersensitive, albeit low-key reaction to Marcel’s brief absence, a lovely, human moment that feels rather out of place here. An expertly paced and shot movie, Le Havre is punctuated by silences and spaces that, due to Kaurismäki’s insipid characterizations, express nothing. Slowness is there to distract us from how perfunctory everything is.

This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb) B

At times defiant, at others resigned, and for a long stretch the loosest kind of home movie, This Is Not a Film had yet to get to me until its final moments. The gorgeous last 20 seconds or so provide both Panahi with a singular jolt of the documentary immediacy he craves, and the viewer with a most powerful reminder of Panahi’s condition. That said, it’s interesting to hear about his project in development, a loose adaptation of Chekhov’s “A Girl’s Notes,” and relevant that the screenplay, about a suppressed young female artist, observes its protagonist renounce art for a relationship. From the scenes read, the story emotions clash profoundly with Panahi’s own struggles. But he seems as aware as we are of the inherent sadness in talking up an unfilmed screenplay for festivals, and in fact his frustration is so pronounced and sudden that it appears a put-on for the camera, in contrast to his usual relaxed manner. But it still lends the not-film some much-needed reflexivity.

Porfirio (Alejandro Landes) B

The abjectness of Porfirio Ramirez’s performance rivals Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, key difference being that the former is a real person. For much of the film, Landes doesn’t depict so much as assume Porfirio’s humiliation: he has a mistress, job, and faithful caretaker, so what’s the deal? The stunningly expressive camerawork has rightfully earned Bresson comparisons: Porfirio breaking and retreading china recalls the Balthazar party smashup. It also creates a delicate dialogue with the screenplay, avoiding, like Porfirio himself, looking at the dog he says is the “only one who hasn’t betrayed me,” fearing the truth of that statement may change. The very nature of Porfirio’s movement makes him out of sync with his lover, but the movie can also be fearlessly sexy. (And even borderline sexist, although this is a striking context for booty shots.) The jolt of an ending has unfortunately become a staple for this sort of movie, but the epilogue is nicely abstract, bringing us back to our hero’s quiet, marginalized pain.

Chicken With Plums (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud) B-

Walked out of Persepolis, and almost did the same here, until the film’s center emerged as deeply intelligent; it’s a shame the details are shrill and bland. I’d now like to read Satrapi and Paronnaud’s graphic novels: their cinematic style, altogether too omnivorous in its range of influences, may benefit from a medium where things like the tone and rhythm with which actors speak are less important. This much is moving about Chicken With Plums: its ability to both understand and hold proper contempt for an unforgiving nature. But while there is a smidgen of Coens-like, winking exaggeration in the directors’ manner of overstatement, sometimes it is simple redundancy. Case in point: the lunch introducing Faranguisse to Parvine, in which we can only see the back of Nasser’s head. As expressive as Von Stroheim’s in Grand Illusion, Amalric’s neck alone says “I don’t love her”; we don’t need to hear it. Nasser’s music guru may tell him, “It’s not about technique! It’s about art!”—but it’s also about technique, guys.

Day 1: September 8

2011-09-09T20:45:00.000-07:00

Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog) C+

Elevated only slightly above your average true crime doc, alternately, by Herzog’s fundamental respect for human life and his sly, blunt manner with interview subjects. The latter goes hand in hand with insensitivity: although his deadpan banter is sometimes hilarious (as when he winkingly suggests that killer Jason Burkett’s wife smuggled his sperm for purposes of artificial insemination) and sometimes penetrating (he declines to correct Burkett’s dad when he names 1941, instead of 2041, as his son’s parole date, apparently on the hunt for Freudian slips), it’s hard to commend on ethical grounds. Plus, this murder is banal stuff, and unlike, say, Timothy Treadwell, Burkett and Michael Perry are no match for Herzog’s own quirks: although we’re initially led to believe murder was an anomaly in the Conroe gated community, tragedy gradually seems so commonplace that audience members could be seen stifling befuddled laughter when victim Susan Stotler’s daughter mentioned in passing a preacher getting hit by a train.

Play (Ruben Östlund) B

Ruben Ostlund is no more or less than Michael Haneke armed with a Psychology textbook and a book of matches, but is that a bad thing? In Involuntary, a teacher recreates Asch’s conformity experiments, only to fall victim to ostracism herself; his new film examines both the strength and futility of Sherif’s Robber’s Cave, by subjecting two opposing groups to shared pressure, then dismantling it. (Witness the phenomenal pushups scene, in which the participant and audience members alike have exactly the same chances of human warmth as they do falling prey to manipulation.) The result is often stomach-churning discomfort, sometimes perplexity: okay, I get the cradle, but the Native American band? And the closing dance number? What? Östlund’s films are worthy of serious consideration—this, his previous feature and Incident by a Bank are essential viewing—but I have to give his latest my Uncle Boonmee Award for unsatisfying brilliance.

TIFF '11 Schedule

2011-08-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

Looks like it's time to boot this up again.

Until less than 10 days ago, I was sure I'd be missing TIFF for the second consecutive year. In fact, by the time I sat down to order a pass, they were sold out; luckily, I'd previously attempted to order when low on cash, and when that order was declined, my place in line remained intact. So I happily owe this year's trip to a technical blunder.

As for reneging on my vow to stop going, this year's lineup was simply too good--on paper, in any case--to pass up. And as several fellow attendees have already remarked, the difficulty of narrowing a schedule down to 50 titles was as vexing as the program was enticing. Here's what I'm counting on seeing:

Sep 8 Thu
Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog) C+
Play (Ruben Ostlund) B

Sep 9 Fri
Le Havre (Aki Kaurismaki) C-
This Is Not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi) B
Porfirio (Alejandro Landes) B
Chicken With Plums (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud) B-

Sep 10 Sat
Mr. Tree (Han Jie) W/O
The Ides of March (George Clooney) B
This Side of Resurrection (Joaquim Sapinho) W/O
Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Love) A
Last Winter (John Shank) W/O
Free Men (Ismael Ferroukhi) C+

Sep 11 Sun
A Separation (Asghar Farhadi) B+
Dark Horse (Todd Solondz) C+
The Silver Cliff (Karim Ainouz) B-
Faust (Alexander Sokurov) B

Sep 12 Mon
Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo) D
Footnote (Joseph Cedar) C
The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev) A-
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin) C

Sep 13 Tue
Almayer’s Folly (Chantal Akerman) C
Back to Stay (Milagros Mumenthaler) B-
The Kid With the Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) B
ALPS (Yorgos Lanthimos) C

Sep 14 Wed
Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman) C
Cafe de flore (Jean-Marc Valée) B-
The Invader (Nicolas Provost) W/O
Swirl (Helvecio Marins Jr. and Clarissa Campolina) D+
Michael (Markus Schleinzer) D
Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh) C+
Lovely Molly (Eduardo Sánchez) W/O

Sep 15 Thu
That Summer (Philippe Garrel) C-
Breathing (Karl Markovics) C-
Generation P (Victor Ginzburg) C+
Mushrooms (Vimukthi Jayasundara) C

Sep 16 Fri
Outside Satan (Bruno Dumont) B-
Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols) B-
Twilight Portrait (Angelina Nikonova) B+
The Other Side of Sleep (Rebecca Daly) DNF

Sep 17 Sat
The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar) B-
Amy George (Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas) W/O
Moneyball (Bennett Miller) C-
The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies) B+
Killer Joe (William Friedkin) C

Sep 18 Sun
Page Eight (David Hare) B
Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier) B
Elena (Andrey Zvyaginstev) B
A Mysterious World (Rodrigo Moreno) B

Post-Festival
Invasion (Hugo Santiago) DNF
Crane World (Pablo Trapero)

Well, that didn't work out so well.

2009-10-07T02:28:00.000-07:00

After a lifetime of trying, I guess I've figured out that film festivals and I weren't meant for each other. The problem isn't just that there's a relatively scarce amount of films I actually like, but that even those films are seen under less-than-ideal conditions. If I'm going to devote myself to making films as well as I can, attending festivals (at least ones that don't include my own work) no longer seems like part of the equation.

In other news, I'm about to finish putting together a cut of my movie. Feature? More like 34 minutes. I guess the downgrade should bum me out, but given that it calls for cheaper festival submission fees and that I'd very much like to forget about the excised footage, I'm happy with how things are going.

Day 4

2009-09-13T12:39:00.001-07:00

pro:

Le Pere de mes enfants (Mia Hansen-Love)

W/O:

The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov)

Day 3

2009-09-13T12:00:00.001-07:00

PRO:

At the End of Daybreak (Ho Yuhang)

mixed:

Melody for a Street Organ (Kira Muratova)

Only in a Muratova film do characters lie peacefully while screaming, grieve while hiccuping, console with peculiar hollowness. Ostensibly about two ghostlike, chubby kids struggling to find their father, her latest brims with a fetish for loud personalities and the deeply nasty irony that scarcely shows itself yet seems omnipresent. While this is not per se an engaging film, Muratova has a rich, indefatiguable sense of counterpoint: despicable gluttony and exuberant joy of gambling in the same shot; the film takes care to distinguish that a homeless woman’s singing is well-liked and her stench despised. And yet this is all reductive: Muratova’s purely musical direction of actors demands to be experienced, exhausting as it is.

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe)

con:

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)

I walked out 15 minutes early to get to the Ho Yuhang, although Haneke’s latest contains just a few actively bad moments: the doctor scolding his wife, for example, feels like Bergman at his worst, a painful display of cruelty revealing nothing about character. Mostly it’s solemn—sometimes to good effect, when sadism is downplayed—but I don’t think Haneke’s aversion to humor does him any favors. Stilted attempts to show social awkwardness show the director’s clumsy hand with actors, with arbitrary pauses in conversation standing in for rhythm and nuance.

W/O:

All Fall Down (Philip Hoffman)

Hoffman’s home movie-cum-video essay demands its audience’s acceptance of its author’s twisted ethics early on, aligning us with himself against the Man early on by appropriating his own footage after missing out on royalties. I couldn’t take it, and hurried out after about 20 minutes, following the second title displaying the amount of money for which Hoffman just compensated himself by putting his own images onscreen. The guy’s like a disgruntled Jonas Mekas; can't wait for the sequel, As I Was Moving Ahead, I Occasionally Encountered Investors Who Totally Ripped Me Off.

Days 1 and 2

2009-09-11T22:34:00.000-07:00

pro:

La Pivellina (Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel)

Plays admirably loosely with latent tension for most of its running time, then ends, astonishingly, on exactly the right note. Covi and Frimmel (apparently their own 2-person crew) get one of the most amazingly natural and dynamic child performances I've seen, along with several adult ones to rival it. The "invisible" Dardennes-esque handheld camerawork, never in the wrong place, cements the team as naturals. I'm slightly unsure whether the various character threads pay off structurally, but the feeling upon exit was that they did.

Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo)

Starting to feel as if Hong, as of late, is caring less and less about structure and more about good scenes. Which is fine--much of the first half of his latest is, for this Hong aficionado, hilarious, deriving considerable laughs from awkward sycophantic encounters, and the dream sequence here is his finest yet--but I left with the vague feeling that I wouldn't have trouble indicting Hong for self-plagiarism, and much of the inventiveness of his early/mid-00's work stemmed from the experience of stepping back and looking at the big picture, which is all but non-existent here. Also, what is with the ever-so-slight zooms? For what little they add in precision, is Hong ignorant of or merely indifferent to their strangeness?

Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)

Best scene of the festival and perhaps all year is the bar conversation between Yassine and Celine, which is as low-key as it is intensely moving. Few works of art so evocatively straddle the thin line between spiritual and carnal love. However, the Nassir material is nearly all either clumsy or deeply flawed, tainting a rigorous Bresson imitation like a, well, chatty pedagogue. Why does Dumont go out of his way to make Celine appear relatively normal and socialized only to well... y'know? I'm also uncertain that Dumont was wise to begin treating his lead actress like Maria Falconetti. Nevertheless, this picture is front- and back-loaded with beautiful stuff, and speaking of intensely moving, it's nice to see the oft-maligned Dumont be applauded at a TIFF screening for (perhaps) the first time ever.

mixed:

Face (Tsai Ming-Liang)

Most of the pleasure I took away from this movie involves imagining the phone call Tsai gave Mathieu Amalric, explaining the nature of the latter's "cameo," itself a self-contained Warholian short. Otherwise, WTFOMGBBQ.

con:

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Inscrutably pretentious, or pretentiously inscrutable. Either way, forced touches like jump-cutting non-diegetic music, deliberately obscure dialogue, and deliberately obscure camerawork a la Lucrecia Martel add flame to the fire. Can't figure out whether the film's defenders find it absurdly funny or incisive: the humor seemed to me akin to the joke in Period Film X when Character Y remarks that Real Life Event Z would never actually happen, and as far as taking the movie seriously, I found the actors so mysteriously mannered that the audience must either A) invent an unseen Big Brother type or B) diagnose every character as severely autistic in order to grant performance tone meaning.

CON:

Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)

Almodovar appears to have replaced any productive irony or distance from melodrama with irritating, tongue-in-cheek asides. The maturity of his late style has apparently molded into smugness. Will he find his way again? I’m tempted not to find out…

L'enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea)

The psychedelic screen tests surely merit a “huh,”; but I’d follow that with a prompt “let’s move on,” which Clouzot fanboy Bromberg heartily delays. As someone who’s just wrapped his first feature, it’s insulting to be fed anecdotes of the director’s borderline-incompetence—Clouzot appeared nervous and evasive, retook and reshot scenes endlessly—along with the implication that these qualities are somehow beneficial. If they are, prove it, rather than relying on the facile notion that madness = genius. The footage we see here, albeit out of context, is certainly less than phenomenal; a single YouTube clip of Josef von Sternberg’s unfinished I, Claudius struck me as more promising than anything here. Attempts to recreate the original L’enfer also ring hollow because Claude Chabrol, whom many cinephiles, including myself, consider superior to Clouzot, has already made it in full.

TIFF '09 Schedule

2009-08-28T02:43:00.000-07:00

Hey all. An update on the movie: I'm a few days away from being wrapped. It's alternately been exhausting, exciting, and maddening, but nothing matters per se until I'm in front of an editing program, putting together the pieces.

That said, my first stop after the shoot will be, as usual, this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Who knows how many of these screenings I'll land, but this is the ticket order I sent:

Thu 10

L'enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea)
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)

Fri 11

Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo)
Face (Tsai Ming-liang)
La Pivellina (Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel)
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Sat 12

Antichrist (Lars von Trier)
Melody for a Street Organ (Kira Muratova)
Irene (Alain Cavalier)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
Kelin (Ermek Tursunov)
Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe)

Sun 13

[La Pere de mes enfants (Mia Hansen-Løve)]
The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov)
At the End of Daybreak (Ho Yuhang)
Independencia (Raya Martin)
Should I Really Do It? (Ismail Necmi)
Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)

Mon 14

A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen)
Survival of the Dead (George A. Romero)
Karaoke (Chris Chong Chan Fui)
Mall Girls (Katarzyna Roslaniec)
The Front Line (Renato De Maria)

Tue 15

Wild Grass (Alain Resnais)
Soul Kitchen (Fatih Akin)
Lebanon (Samuel Maoz)
Between Two Worlds (Vimukthi Jayasundara)
Tales From the Golden Age (Cristian Mungiu et al.)

Wed 16

Partir (Catherine Corsini) [Plan to swap for Leslie My Lame Is Evil (Reginald Harkema)]
Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story (Yousry Nasrallah)
Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz)
Every Day Is a Holiday (Dima El-Horr)
A Brand New Life (Ounie Lecomte)

Thu 17

Ajami (Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani)
Jaffa (Keren Yedaya)
La Donation (Bernard Emond)
The Search (Wan Ma Cai Dan)
The Happiest Girl in the World (Radu Jude)

Fri 18

Vincere (Marco Bellocchio)
Men on the Bridge (Asli Özge)
Huacho (Alejandro Fernández Almendras)
I Killed My Mother (Xavier Dolan)
Spring Fever (Lou Ye)
Nymph (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang)

Sat 19

Adrift (Bui Thac Chuyen)
White Material (Claire Denis)
Eyes Wide Open (Haim Tabakman)
Mother (Bong Joon-ho)
Happy End (Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu)

Some notes, and a possible hiatus.

2009-05-25T23:19:00.000-07:00

Hey all. Remember that feature I mentioned in the last post? Well, things have changed in the past week and a half and I just might be shooting it in July. Since I'm going to be spending the next month(s) prepping for it, in addition to summer coursework and an internship, there's no feasible way I can regularly manage this thing, but considering how infrequently updated it has been anyway, maybe things won't especially change. I don't know. I probably won't have time to watch much except perhaps, say, the occasional first-tier Rohmer, because I can't think of a better way to flex my filmmaking intuition. I'm approaching the busiest summer of my life, no doubt, and it'd be nice to just get everything I've written recently out there.

PRO:

La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, 1967)

The Champ (King Vidor, 1931)
I’m beginning to get the hang of Vidor’s various good points: pulling the camera back from a group or even having a character turn away from the camera when things get emotional; flat delivery of dialogue written to indicate trust, used here to create one of cinema’s most ambiguous father-son relationships; a character (Linda here, Dora in The Wedding Night) whose affection is undesirable only so far as it’s out of sync with the beloved’s conflicted nature.

The Threepenny Opera (G.W. Pabst, 1931)
One envies the rich set design and array of extras, which allow Pabst to delicately emphasize shadowy peripheral business over the menace of the story. There’s heavily wrought satire about, rendered in really interesting ways: witness, for instance, how Polly sounds most sinister when she talks about transcending petty crime, or when she’s being victimized by her family.

pro:

Gift From Above (Dover Koshashvili, 2003)
An ensemble piece, steeped in cultural traditions I don’t entirely understand, but vibrant, funny and fearless enough to rival Late Marriage. Actually, Koshashvili’s implementation of nudity can feel borderline gratuitous: there’s no special reason, for example, to show budding perv Zaza’s genitalia sightings. But the film is blessedly casual about it.

The Scout’s Exploit (Boris Barnet, 1947)

Platinum Blonde (Frank Capra, 1931)
See entry on The Wedding Night: this device sticks out like a sore thumb when you’re exposed to it multiple times within the course of a week. Romance with Gallagher goes from tenderly repressed to tediously obvious; same with disdain for rich lifestyle. Stew’s self-aggrandizing speech foretells of a later, less restrained Capra. But the elite, armed with both dignity and snappy one-liners, occasionally show Stew up for the cruelty of his wit.

Kameradschaft (G.W. Pabst, 1931)
This looks like propaganda in retrospect, but without turning a blind eye to the dangerous appeal of sentiment. A precursor to today’s correctives (cf. Lost) to war-time xenophobia: Germans come off worse, unduly resenting the French, who are either beautiful or pitiable, and at worst sentimental. Ideologically tedious but very well constructed, often enough that the construction interferes with the tedium.

Bountiful Summer (Boris Barnet, 1950)
Not major Barnet, but never less than pleasant, this musical comedy offers ample drama without once straying from its socialist leanings.

Girls About Town (George Cukor, 1931)
Joel McCrea’s Jim skirts the line between complexity and having it both ways: he’s boring and shy, but also clever and charming. Somehow, although the film never beats you over the head with one quality or the other, the mixture is more muddled than penetrating. Likewise, the Wanda-Marie friendship bears some liking to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—materialism vs. romance = codependence—but in execution, it’s a tad blandly agreeable.

mixed:

Boat People (Ann Hui, 1982)
Utterly conventional, except that Akutagawa is a brutal, sleazy hero, and Hui (just barely) gets some mileage out of emphasizing this when the script doesn’t exactly call for it. The To Minh subplot, on the other hand, is hopeless sensationalism.

Literature:

pro:

The Last Post (Ford Madox Ford, 1928)
Sheer collapse, of Tietjen’s propriety, Sylvia’s mania, Mark’s arrogance. Everyone must concede to Fate. But things feel anything but thematically blunt. Why does Ford turn his back on the core of the series? Audacious but puzzling. It’s hard not to genuflect before Ford’s erudite, tightly woven prose, even when it puzzles me.

Divisadero (Michael Ondaatje, 2007)

No One Belongs Here More Than You (Miranda July, 2007)

The Zen Master

2009-05-16T20:03:00.000-07:00

I shot and edited this short video yesterday. Couldn't have done it without the help of my former roommate Frank Agrama, an accomplished filmmaker in his own right, whose camera was used. (Frank also plays the drummer.) With the project so fresh in my mind, any kind of distance on my part is pretty much impossible, but I basically consider this a quick warm-up before I start to think seriously about making a feature. So, with that in mind, here it is:

Wish fulfilled, I suppose.

2009-05-08T23:17:00.000-07:00

PRO:

Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo (Sadao Yamanaka, 1934)
Yamanaka’s genius is in presenting the comedy and pathos of this story in the same contemplative vein. Without seeing it, I can easily imagine a remake stripping Tange’s struggle to tell Yasu his father has died of dark humor, for example, or overplaying the hilarity of Genzaburo’s deal made with Tange during a raucous swordfight. In fact, sans its few sops to convention—e.g. Tange refusing to walk an archer home, followed by—screen wipe—Tange walking him home—this would be every bit the masterpiece that Humanity and Paper Balloons is.

The Last 15 (Antonio Campos, 2007)
In a crappy mood prior to viewing, which never bodes well for filmmakers whose work I’m unfamiliar with; claustrophobic compositions cloying; sound design overemphatic. Somehow I loved it anyway: tonally and conceptually, Campos is a stunner, deriving a great deal of restraint from subtly varying acting styles, and totally willing to let material trickle in that undermines big ideas. Now I’m excited to see Afterschool.

The Wedding Night (King Vidor, 1935)
I don’t know if the device of characters using fiction to talk about real life can ever work for me. I suspect it’s because I was weaned on sit-coms, which use the “subtext” of the device as free reign for blunt exaggeration. Nevertheless, Helen Vinson, the actress assigned to do it, is amazing as a woman forced to talk about her own impending devastation from the distance of an outsider. And the ending of the film is amazing, suggesting that Vidor’s intelligence is visual above all else.

pro:

Reckless (Victor Fleming, 1935)
Good—never jaw-droppingly distinctive but Fleming certainly grasps the better material here. (Which feels a bit weird, like a screwball comedy that’s been hijacked by a self-loathing philosopher. And indeed, a character stops telling a joke to say, “I’m just philosophizing…”) William Powell’s confession scene is memorable, as is his restrained portrait of heartbreak.

Okuni to Gohei (Mikio Naruse, 1952)
Somewhere between very good and exceptional in the Naruse canon, with two appealingly subdued lead performances. (It’s hard to imagine any other sort, given the material, which requires that Okuni and Gohei be indebted and opposed to each other in a bevy of ways.) I was sort of put off by Tomonojo’s creepy persistence at first, but it makes sense considering Okuni is never quite on the level with the men in her life.

Better Things (Duane Hopkins, 2008)
Lots of people dislike this film, and I guess I can see why. Its visuals—mostly up-close, with a barrage of angles—are both elegant and kind of indefensible. Hopkins aestheticizes its dead and dying subjects, but he isn’t abrasive about it. I was tempted to call his sensibility Bresson meets Seidl before realizing those directors’ devout might scowl at a style so lacking in rigor. But Hopkins’s actors feel Bressonian to me, and the range of human interest smacks of Seidl. I’m almost certain Hopkins would have garnered more attention from the auteurist crowd if he had trimmed his shot list by about two-thirds, which is a shame, because it’s a pretty good film anyway. Whether looking at beautiful people with ugly parts or ugly people doing beautiful things, at least Hopkins is consistent.

Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino, 2008)
I thought of Hunger a bit, here: not only because, as abrasive stylists, Sorrentino and Steve McQueen are anomalies in the art-film world, but also because they both take care to settle the hell down, mid-film, for an extended pro-Bazin moment. I didn’t care for McQueen’s movie at all, including that moment: the loud material begs for a quiet eye, and the Bobby-priest scene reveals a director to whom actors are little more than monotonously impassioned mouthpieces. But frenetic as Sorrentino is, he’s also sensitive to personality. I don’t know whether to attribute the success of Il Divo to Sorrentino or Toni Servillo, whose performance—pathetic yet dignified, mannered in the most effective way—deflates Hunger-esque problems because it renders Andreotti’s convictions inextricable from his weirdness.

Gross Misconduct (Atom Egoyan, 1993)
One of the ultimate examples of direction-over-writing, Egoyan’s biopic succeeds almost fully neither on performances, which are wooden, nor on dialogue, which is often hopelessly bad, but by emphases created by editing and camera movements. Egoyan’s camera is like the more consumer-friendly version of Zhang’s (see below), punctuating a dramatic moment by lingering on vast planes of empty space or a violent outburst with a quizzical pause.

mixed:

Desert Dream (Zhang Lu, 2007)
“Tough sit” characterized much of my first Zhang experience, even though individual shots were very striking. My fave: the one in which a mother heads coolly into a tent to remove her child, exits with the reluctant child, who begs the environmentalist tent-owner to let him stay, which causes the mother to sullenly head back into the tent. I also liked when the slave-owner asked the environmentalist to buy the mother and child, after which the environmentalist’s response actually appears harsh. If only this kind of marvelously complex power play were present into the majority of other takes, many of which are stunted in their alignment with the action for no apparent reason.

Nô (Robert Lepage, 1998)
Lepage is the sort of director one treasures for emphasizing things nobody else would bother with: the way the Patricia forces a smile and lowers her voice at the same time, for example, when she tries to convince Sophie she liked her play. And then there’s the lovely final take, in which Lepage is momentarily possessed by the spirit of Rohmer. But the visuals are generally too haphazard and the throughline too vague to make much of an impact.

Iri (Zhang Lu, 2008)
Based on the gorgeously nuanced opening, in which the significance of the Iri explosion is denied and confirmed in the same breath, I thought I’d have an easier time with this than Desert Dream. Alas, aside from several post-Dumont outbursts of sexual violence waiting in the wings, there’s little to imbue Zhang’s compositions—which often feel like a subdued version of Tsai—with substance. One commonality, I suppose, between this and the earlier film, is that Zhang wants us to carefully regard not only the connections between shots A and B but between, say, shots A and R. It’s easy to notice the camera sitting in the same corner of the same restaurant during different scenes placed an hour apart, and perhaps harder to divine why its placement is so important… to which I can merely shrug and admit I’d rather not watch films as if I’m preparing for a research paper.

Literature:

PRO:

No More Parades (Ford Madox Ford, 1925)
While Some Do Not… is written in a precisely observational mode reminiscent of the stoic way the series’ hero Tietjens presents himself—thus making Tietjens’s inner life, as well as the effects of his perverse discipline, tantalizingly enigmatic—the second novel in the series gets progressively manic, mirroring Tietjens’s war-time anxieties. But Ford has perfected the art of turning neurotic meandering into a game, deriving the most possible pleasure from thoughts bordering on indistinct. It also offers more supporting material than the first novel—thank god, if you happen to be saddled with a Vietnam-vet professor who identifies with the character and clings to his sentiments—to refute readings of Tietjens as the last honorable man in a corrupt world, e.g., during the long conversation with the general in which Tietjens’s practicality is directly and articulately challenged.

A Man Could Stand Up – (Ford Madox Ford, 1926)
Weird stuff going on: deadpan wit used to lionize a serious man; Valentine becoming, via the delirious loneliness of war, Tietjens’s great love, a sentimental refuge more than a person; Tietjens writing a sonnet in the midst of battle, and the soldier who loses an eye for him appreciating it. These novels elude shape, or perhaps I can’t grasp it.

pro:

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Haruki Murakami, 2006)
I actually find Murakami more troublesome in short story form than in novels, because one of the great pleasures of the latter is the way incidents pile inexorably on one another, perplexing reader and characters alike. His tone is much more impressive than his worldview—often deliberately reductive—but the right tone goes a long way.

I really need to update this more often.

2009-04-28T15:36:00.000-07:00

PRO:

The Girl With the Golden Eyes (Jean-Gabriel Albicocco, 1961)
Remember My Name (Alan Rudolph, 1978)
The Class (Laurent Cantet, 2008)

pro:

Mes petites amoureuses (Jean Eustache, 1974)
Somehow I connect entirely with the emotions Eustache communicates—few filmmakers employ the dissolve as persuasively—but not his episodic structure: as the ending makes clear, Daniel barely progresses in any discernible way, and any lessons that clumsy amorous encounters teach him remain rather obscure. And yet, reading what I’ve just written, I’m not sure what the problem is, because youth doesn’t necessarily wear minute advances on its sleeve. I suspect if the film were spliced into several shorts, I’d prefer almost all of them to the feature. The narration—sometimes redundant, sometimes unnecessary—could use some work, but maybe I should just stop mentally comparing it to Diary of a Country Priest. (God help those using latter-day Malick as a standard.)

Beeswax (Andrew Bujalski, 2009)
Charly (Isild Le Besco, 2007)

Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu, 1990)
Ozu directs a Gilmore Girls episode. I’m not sure why the mother-daughter trials and tribulations feel so banal here—Naruse mined similar territory for great effect in Lightning. Setsuko Hara’s resolute solitude, as opposed to mysterious, seems kinda random.

Welcome to L.A. (Alan Rudolph, 1976)

mixed:

Green Fish (Lee Chang-Dong, 1997)
What Is She To You? (Alden Thompson Burgess, 2009)

con:

A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)
A great play (see below) semi-destroyed by a bunch of overly literal performances and a disengaged one (Brando).

CON:

The Cinema of Ozu According to Kiju Yoshida (Kiju Yoshida, 1994)
Yoshida’s Ozu theses range from acceptably accurate, to rather pretentious, to shockingly feeble. (Most egregious is his claim that Ozu’s direction of actors was such that no two lines were delivered the same way, whereas Ozu’s directorial presence is all about flattening drama with a calm, contented manner that in fact is quite repetitive.) Then again, I’m pretty sure if a piece of my own criticism was laboriously extended to feature-length and righteously intoned over some of my favorite moments in cinema, no sane person would want to view the result. Somehow I sense that, given rumors of Ozu-Yoshida enmity, Yoshida made this film to prove to himself he still liked the man first, and make a meaningful contribution to film history second.

Literature:

PRO:

The End of the Affair (Graham Greene, 1951)
Aside from a brief foray into smug lit-crit bashing, this is a fascinating crack at 1st-person for Greene that, unlike FMF’s The Good Soldier (apparently a big inspiration), resists tapping insecurity as a source for comedy, and instead dives into the workings of jealousy with Musilian fervor.

The Violent Bear It Away (Flannery O’Connor, 1960)
A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole, 1980)
A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennessee Williams, 1951)

pro:

Outer Dark (Cormac McCarthy, 1968)
Cheating at Canasta (William Trevor, 2007)

con:

Flaubert’s Parrot (Julian Barnes, 1984)
An anti-novel whose status as an anti-novel is almost completely superfluous. Maybe the problem here is that Barnes himself is too contemptuous to achieve any distance from his contemptuous narrator, whom I suspect he means to criticize or something.

DNF:

Rushing to Paradise (J.G. Ballard, 1994)
Good when Ballard’s activist characters are relative innocents, and he subtly mines their crusades for smugness and hypocrisy; bad when they descend into dystopia, and his simplistic grasp of psychology shines through.

Half of February and Most of March

2009-03-22T14:09:00.000-07:00

PRO:

Day of the Outlaw (Andre de Toth, 1959)
Edouard et Caroline (Jacques Becker, 1950)
Return of the Living Dead (Dan O’Bannon, 1985)
The Crying Woman (Jacques Doillon, 1978)
Choose Me (Alan Rudolph, 1984)
Lightning (Mikio Naruse, 1952)
Dottie Gets Spanked (Todd Haynes, 1993)
La Chienne (Jean Renoir, 1931)

Duplicity (Tony Gilroy, 2009)
One adjusts to Gilroy’s visual anonymity, save bits like the final shot, which is every bit as good as Michael Clayton’s. Can’t say I cared for the beloved opening credits sequence. I did, however, enjoy the Ray-Claire repartee without fail, Roberts especially striking the right note of dignified coldness again and again.

Catastrophe (David Mamet, 2000)

Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)
I yearned for a movie more expressive of Leonard’s bipolar disorder–here intrusive, there a non-issue, and the two sides distributed without particular attention to emphasis. The unusualness of feeling suicidal one hour and laughing at work the next doesn’t seem like part of this movie’s game plan, but I eventually reconciled myself with it anyway. Michelle and Vinessa are like a more strictly dichotomous Mother and the Whore, and well-balanced, and pieces like the encounter with Michelle’s lover are mercifully throwaway.

Rendezvous at Bray (Andre Delvaux, 1971)
The Days (Wang Xiaoshuai, 1993)

Wesh Wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passé? (Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche, 2001)
RAZ’s first movie has rocky production values, but the nuances of his later work are fully intact: he never lacks an eye for the transparency of his characters’ resolutions: the way a vow to quit dealing drugs easily collapses, for example, or how his own character’s brutal, unsympathetic nature reflects a sensible desire for papers of residence, in the middle of a fairly anti-government (and anti-cop) movie.

pro:

Wee Willie Winkie (John Ford, 1937)
Graham Greene’s essay about this movie, and the sexualization of Shirley Temple, surely has a point regarding her bizarrely intense relationship with Victor McLaglen’s character, who goes as far as asking to see her at his deathbed. Her friendship with coolly unapologetic villain Khoda Khan, however, is striking because she has such naïve, simple affection for an unrepentant savage, not for any libidinous undertones.

The Tuner (Kira Muratova, 2004)
Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, 1974)
Who’ll Stop the Rain (Karel Reisz, 1978)
Contact (Alan Clarke, 1985)

mixed:

Dillinger Is Dead (Marco Ferreri, 1969)
Whisky Galore (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949)

Iles flottantes (Nanouk Leopold, 2001)
A routine art movie with some really subversive bits—a pointedly blasé ambivalence towards domestic violence—that suggest why Leopold is an art movie director in the first place. Interesting career trajectory: the arty tropes were always there, but she gets a lot more unabashedly chilly, as well as more interesting, once Guernsey comes along.

con:

Vodka Lemon (Hiner Saleem, 2003)
I feel weird saying this about such an ostensibly remote filmmaker, but Saleem’s problem might actually be an excess of heart. He’ll precisely outline the contradictions of a woman’s pride in one scene, and yet fully relents to sentiment and slapstick by the film’s end.

Literature:

PRO:
Some Do Not… (Ford Madox Ford, 1924)

pro:
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers, 1940)

mixed:

Delta Wedding (Eudora Welty, 1946)
Somehow reductive in its omnivorous brand of texture-over-content, apparently finding a world of interest in every raindrop, like a lesser Hou Hsiao-Hsien film. Also, sometimes ravishing, like a lesser Hou Hsiao-hsien film.

February, Pt. 1

2009-02-15T12:52:00.000-08:00

PRO:

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933)
Best opening scene ever?

An Unforgettable Summer (Lucian Pintilie, 1994)
The first 40 minutes or so would have you believe Pintilie is the unsung cinematic heir to Tolstoy, with a Levin-esque husband whose self-defeating instincts drive him to say stupid crap like “Don’t regret marrying me,” as his wife wittily rejects the advances of another man and changes the subject when he gets insecure. But Pintilie considers the politics of compassion with a reserved cynicism all his own. On the one hand, politics are motivated by petty squabbles at home; on the other, these squabbles have a touch of the humanitarian otherwise alien to wartime tactics. Love the moment when Scott Thomas lovingly tells a servant, “don’t cry,” before screaming the same.

They Were Expendable (John Ford, 1945)
Ford had been using Wayne the same way from the beginning: here he represents an outlet for frustration brewing amidst the whole company, but his toughness e.g. almost leads him to an amputation. But then he weirdly adjusts his petulance to accommodate the romantic subplot, demanding that a conference between generals end so he can chat with his lady. Other interesting bits: Ford cuts to a stoic Asian woman as the Pearl Harbor is announced; the stupid jokes of young up-and-comers are met with convincingly awkward laughter; exchanges on the paucity of supplies, simmering with indignation underneath, are played with civility. I have to admit that Ford’s battle scenes, which prioritize special integrity over much human interest, tend to bore me.

pro:

The Hitchhiker (Ida Lupino, 1953)

The Wrestler and the Clown (Boris Barnet, 1959)

Good Dick (Marianna Palka, 2008)
Everything kind of works here, although not in a tight or connected way. Lots of contradictions abound—Ritter is a well-adjusted stalker, Palka gets off to porn but objects to use of the word “cock”—but they don’t seem interrogated so much as poked at. Ritter should’ve been more Leaud-in-Mother and the Whore, following through on his grand acts rather than proving such an obvious non-match for the heroine. Palka glosses over disbelief-suspending turns like her growing tolerance for the dude with a dead, placid slickness. Her character is kind of vital in some ways: the way acts of genuine sympathy repulse her rings distantly true. But I can’t get over the impression that this woman represents a fantastically stunted, primal version of herself.

Time of Favor (Joseph Cedar, 2000)
The love triangle stuff is good, sometimes better than good: only a serious-intentioned director would cut from a heartbroken man fainting to casually reassessing heartbreak as an intellectual challenge. Michal is an extraordinarily unsympathetic, albeit independent-minded love interest, whose cruelty mars her without dimming her attractiveness. The film totally skids out of control when the focus is shifted to the explosives subplot.

mixed:

The Secret Agent (Christopher Hampton, 1996)
Not bad, with a moment or two of beauty, and an opening fraught with hushed performances and well-considered compositions. Things get one-note towards the extended Winnie-Verloc confrontation and never quite recover. It struck me that, although Hitchcock’s adaptation is fine and this one is serviceable, the ideal director for this material might have been Alan Clarke, whose Beloved Enemy traffics in long, elegant conversations between powerful men, with latent unease all but swept under the carpet.

CON:

The Merchant of Venice (Michael Radford, 2004) [second viewing]

DNF:

Time Between Dog and Wolf (Jeon Soo-il, 2006)
As beautifully shot as any Hong movie; shame about the thin wisp of a narrative. Jeon likes to make everyone passive-aggressive towards his protag, which usually has a chillier and less nuanced effect than he’d probably like given the art-film posturing.

Hard, Fast and Beautiful (Ida Lupino, 1951)

Four Nights With Anna (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2008)

Literature:

PRO:

Howard’s End (E.M. Forster, 1910)
Forster comes dangerously close to idealizing Margaret, even though her near-perfect inner nature is sometimes misinterpreted as passivity. All she really has is an awareness of how thornily incompatible the worlds around her are, but Forster does relatively little to downplay the lovability of this worldview. Nevertheless, the Wilcoxes’ class condescension has its virtues—indeed, sometimes the Wilcox ideology and Forster’s narrating voice get almost offensively intermingled. I guess Forster needs a character like Margaret to defend himself against the lower classes, whom he has serious trouble identifying with.

As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner, 1930) [second reading]

Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare, 1598-9)
These comedies just progressively get better, in my opinion. The Beatrice-Benedick sparring is like an apology for the extremes of Katharina and Petruchio; Don John may be Shakespeare’s least charismatic villain and is all the more fascinating for it.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (William Shakespeare, 1594-6)
Great means are taken to preserve psychological plausibility in the midst of transformations even more sudden than e.g. Katherina’s. The silliness of Demetrius’s newfound love for Helena is interpreted in a bevy of ways.

The Secret Agent (Joseph Conrad, 1907)
There’s an emotional directness one has to deal with in Conrad’s exploration of madness. Reading Heart of Darkness, I couldn’t: abstraction seemed to err towards exaggeration. But my reaction to this novel was so different I’m tempted to give that one another look. The inner depths of a singular personality still concern Conrad more than, say, physical gestures. But something about the rhythm of this really worked for me: oftentimes a seemingly weighty exploration of internal turmoil will be matched by quiet, inadequate expression. (E.g., Winnie’s incoherent grief, or the Professor’s small, miserable stature.)

pro:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)

The Merchant of Venice (William Shakespeare, 1596-8)
Dunno if Shylock’s commingling of rousing series of rhetorical questions, itself a wrench in the play’s prescribed anti-Semitism, is enough to defuse the pleasure Christian couples unabashedly take in his downfall.

Better late than never.

2009-01-30T14:27:00.000-08:00

A month after the close of 2008, I feel at least vaguely qualified to do top tens for two media. Before the task gets any more embarrassingly belated, here they are.

Films:

1. Lorna’s Silence (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
2. Ballast (Lance Hammer)
3. Revanche (Gotz Spielmann)
4. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
5. Sarabande (Nathaniel Dorsky)
6. Boogie (Radu Muntean)
7. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)
8. Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen)
9. Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)
10. Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim)

Songs (I'm afraid my album list looks too sorry):

1. Broadfield Marchers – “When Cowards Stall” (The Inevitable Continuing)
2. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin – “Think I Wanna Die” (Pershing)
3. The Mommyheads – “Stupid Guy” (You’re Not a Dream)
4. Broadfield Marchers – “Mondo From Growth” (The Inevitable Continuing)
5. In Elvis Garage – “Residue” (Winning By Cheating)
6. Winterpills – “Burning Hearts” (Central Chambers)
7. Broadfield Marchers – “Sailing Fortune” (The Inevitable Continuing)
8. Bob Mould – “Who Needs to Dream?” (District Line)
9. Times New Viking – “Drop-Out” (Rip It Off)
10. Robert Forster – “Demon Days” (The Evangelist)

January: Second Half

2009-01-28T23:52:00.000-08:00

PRO:

The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque (Eric Rohmer, 1993)
Maybe Rohmer’s most formally laid-back movie, with the possible exception of his documentaries: no way in hell such awkward zooms would have made their way into, for example, My Night at Maud’s. Typically, Rohmer builds the dispute over the mediatheque, clearly resolves it—the winner is Fabrice Luchini, pissed-off environmentalist schoolteacher—but hands the baton of cool satisfaction over to Pascal Greggory’s mayor, to whom it just really doesn’t matter all that much. Bonus points for making Greggory two-faced, forming sinister hypotheses with his girlfriend and presenting himself as open to discussion with the teacher’s daughter, and yet so stupefied he’s impossible to dislike.

Boogie (Radu Muntean, 2008)
“Couldn’t be farther from Lazarescu, 12:08 and 4 Months,” multiple reviews note, referring to this film’s fairly breezy account of a night on the town with some high school buds, and its vaguely insidious effect on one’s marriage. But Muntean’s latest is, no doubt, a stylistic cousin to those forebearers, with takes verging on 10 minutes and subtle insinuations of a creeping class and physical divide between the eponymous hero and his pals. Muntean ingeniously tricks us, I think, into precisely sharing Boogie’s virtues and vices: the hangout sessions, although mired in condescension and wasted dreams, are dynamic and enjoyable, and the wife, although smart and loving, seems dreary. Here we have both a searing critique of the basic principles on which friendship is often founded, and the devastating conclusion that those dubious friendships still give more pleasure than traditional ego-boosters like fatherhood.

pro:

Crashing (Gary Walkow, 2007)
Finally: a writer’s movie that revels in complex, accurate self-criticisms rather than crass distinctions. Few works of art so cunningly mirror the artistic process. The downward spiral of self-loathing and fantasizing gets a bit heavy, but the film is sustained by funny, deconstructive energy.

Ask Any Girl (Charles Walters, 1959)
Unlike, say, Sturges, who flirts with crudity but always slaps his own signature on the execution thereof, Walters lapses into rather anonymous schtick. But again and again, he lends the ridiculous story serious consideration: I’m thinking of the chubby woman’s melancholy attitude of resignation towards marriage, or Niven’s reserved, cynical detachment that masks attraction.

mixed:

How to Become Myself (Jun Ichikawa, 2007)
Ichikawa’s stylistic excesses—using split-screen with the same perverse casualness with which Ashby used dissolves in The Last Detail; bold, “cinematic” means of portraying technological communication—are actually kind of interesting and expressive, if distracting. Few directors would dare to emphasize such blah, insignificant details with such sentimental bravura. I like the contrast, but the sentimentality gets a bit much to bear as the film goes on: the film more or less lets the protagonist give herself an hour-long hug.

DNF:

State Legislature (Frederick Wiseman, 2007)
Alas, there’s only so much inner life simmering beneath a meeting on branding cattle to identify diseased cows. No doubt state legislators themselves would share my fidgety idleness.

Sparrow (Johnnie To, 2008)
Slick is the word: this exudes overdeliberate coolness that smothers any meaningful tension. I sort of enjoyed the Election movies, but I don’t think I know what to do with To anymore.

Afternoon (Angela Schanelec, 2007)
Sort of like if Lucretia Martel did a Bergman script. Too languorously shot and behaviorally blunt to do much of anything for me.

Literature:

PRO:

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)
Wrote something I liked about this for class but won’t post it here for fear of dubious self-plagiarism charges. Basically, as in Jude, seemingly worthwhile intellectual development is crushed by its inapplicability to relationships. I don’t quite know what to do with Alec D’Urberville, doubtless an agent of evil by the book’s end. Quite good, but my least favorite Hardy novel so far.

“Barn Burning” (William Faulkner, 1938)
Faulkner, to me, exemplifies holding oneself to a standard of intense emotional subjectivity while resisting the lugubriousness that can often imply, and this story is no exception. Sometimes I wish the dense thickets of language weren’t so forbidding.

“A&P” (John Updike, 1961)
Wasn’t sure if I was going for this at first, but I ended up really liking it: the honor and disgrace brought upon the naïve, horny protag are perfectly balanced.

More short stories from my fiction writing class: I liked something by Joyce Carol Oates, mildly appreciated Charlotte Perkins Gilman, met Rick Moody with groaning indifference, and loathed Kate Chopin and Katherine Anne Porter.

pro:

Motherless Brooklyn (Jonathan Lethem, 1999)
Given Lethem’s liking for Dostoevsky and Rohmer I’d expected something a little more austere, but this is fun for all of its jazzy aloofness. The convoluted plot mechanics do little the unsentimental interplay between the protag’s OCD and awareness that, for better and worse, others are functioning in a profoundly different way.

mixed:

The Taming of the Shrew (William Shakespeare, 1594)
The extreme, comic transformation of Katherine seems to me hard to put to good artistic use, and it’s no wonder that the Zeffirelli film, which a bit of was screened in class, is so head-scratchingly awful, Zeffirelli’s obviousness highlighting everything crass and nothing subtle about the play. That’s not to say a good version couldn’t be done, my idea of which would probably try to account for the misery and embarrassment of the personality change. In the text itself, this seems like a relatively marginal goal.

Music:

The Beckies – The Beckies (1976)
Left Banke, Montage and Stories material accounted for, this is Michael Brown’s best work: there’s not a bad song to be found. Download it here.

Times New Viking – “Drop-Out” (Rip It Off, 2008)
Most of this album is bland Indie 101 to me, but this is a nice imitation of a good GBV throwaway.

Plush – “I’ve Changed My Number” (Fed, 2002)
There’s a spirit of innovative craftsmanship coursing through this album, but to my liking it only really comes together on this track.

The Beautiful South – “Don’t Marry Her” (Blue Is the Color, 1996)
How the hell did it take me 13 years to hear this?

The Beat – “Different Kind of Girl” (The Beat, 1979)
This is a masterpiece; “You Won’t Be Happy” is very good, and very Flamin' Groovies-esque; “I Don’t Fit In” is interesting.

Sloan – “Coax Me”
The version off the A-Sides Win compilation from 2005: it lives and dies by a brilliantly tense riff, and the performances I found on YouTube killed the magic by subtly altering it. The Wrens c. Secaucus would be proud.

Bleu – “Snow Day” (1999)
I feel very dorky for loving this song, but I do. The chords in the verses course along with a lot of pleasurable variation, skirting and triumphing over archetypal pop-punk.

Theater:

Uncle Vanya (Austin Pendleton, 2009)
My first encounter with Chekhov, staged with expressive use of the Classic Stage Company’s theater-in-the-round: emphasis is distributed evenly throughout the space. Aside from occasionally delving into complex use of simultaneous action, Pendleton’s major motif seems to be giving most every actor (with the notable exception of Mamie Gummer’s Sonya) an ironic, nervous laugh to accompany despairing monologues. This isn’t a bad device, really, but Denis O’Hare overuses it. Extra-artistic Pleasures Dept.: I’d never really been on the Maggie-Gyllenhaal-is-hot bandwagon prior to this, but having sat a few feet away from her, I change my story.

January: Halfway Post

2009-01-15T18:04:00.000-08:00

PRO:

Counterparts (Jan Bonny, 2007)
The inexplicable recipient of middling reception at Cannes 2007 (sample review quote: “Absence of music also reinforces the small-screen feel”; amazingly, it seems I have watched much more TV than Variety’s Derek Elley), this feature debut employs Dardennes-style camerawork and editing to glorious effect. The scenario, a domestic-abuse relationship with the roles reversed, is played blessedly free of sensationalism: Bonny has a fine-tuned and unusual sense, for example, of the “triggers” afflicting the abuser, such as overdeliberate attempts at reconciliation on the part of the abused. Is she horrific, or is he merely sentimental? On and on it goes…

Falbalas (Jacques Becker, 1945)
This Becker masterpiece is a miracle of acting style trumping shot duration: visuals fly by at a rapid clip, all charged with latent emotion. I’ll be thinking of Becker’s terse dissolves on suggestive facial expressions when polishing my own screenplay. Patience does not necessarily equal wisdom.

pro:

The Wackness (Jonathan Levine, 2008)
From the likes of this and the less impressive All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (not written by Levine), Levine is working out a preoccupation with a social middle ground of sorts, and in this case an ambivalence about youthful abandon. We’re not talking about a Stillman-esque take on the pros and cons of a modern social class system so much as an illustration of an attempt to live life as if that system doesn’t exist, ultimately semi-conceding to it. My biggest quibble is what seems to me a rather mild depiction of benzodiazepine withdrawal, which is a hell I wouldn’t wish on Hitler.

Beauty #2 (Andy Warhol, 1965)
Long stretches of boredom, as usual, permeate this one-take opus, but it steadily develops into an indelibly reflexive take on voyeurism: the position of the camera makes the unwanted observer newly tantalizing.

Slumming (Michael Glawogger, 2006)
Seems to be about revenge, then redemption, and finally eviscerates any kind of straightforward moral oomph. The point, going off the observations of the spoiled Austrian kids, and later on, the Filipino drinking buddies, is that it’s fun, but probably wrong, to try to guess what’s really going on with someone. Admirable, but bizarre.

Guernsey (Nanouk Leopold, 2005)
Both this and Wolfsbergen are detached and elliptical in the manner of Haneke—shots are filmed at about twice the distance they need to be, although Leopold occasionally varies from master-shot mode—particularly Code Unknown. All we need to know, apparently, is that the protagonist travels, has become used to it, willingly trusts most people but operates underneath a constant veil of coldness. Performances are typically muted, but occasionally quite interesting. Sample moment: protag’ll ask a question—“do you think of her now and then?”—and then turn away in the same beat, suddenly meek. Style is at times weirdly showy—one will slowly track out as the characters talk before just lying there—and maybe they’d seem less weird if not for the lack of score, acting style etc.

Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)
Ending is very Night and Fog, but as far as stringently ethical treatments of real-life atrocity go, this is for the most part laid-back, to its benefit. (Because why should Folman deny that, despite the undercurrent of sadness in his discussions of the massacre, he trades and enjoys stupid barbs like “It’s a blast,” with his old buddies, as most would?) Most battle scenes, as a general rule, tend to bore me, either because a filmmaker strives to approximate the chaos of war and loses narrative coherence in the process, or in the reverse case, where we’re pinned down to a single perspective, drowns in monotony; both options are satisfyingly plausible and usually dull. That said, I was rarely bored during this film: encounters of otherworldly tension are situated in retroactive melancholy.

America, America (Elia Kazan, 1963)

mixed:

Days and Nights in the Forest (Satyajit Ray, 1970)
Favorite bit: the memory game, perhaps because Ray is so adept at the language of melodrama that when he veers from it entirely, the effect is kind of magical. Not a very imposing movie, but not a particularly expressive one, either.

No Smoking (Alain Resnais, 1993)
Nobody seems to be able to account for Resnais’ infatuation with Alan Ayckbourn, least of all Ayckbourn himself. Mostly too mannered for my taste, and the formal gamesmanship isn’t anywhere near as deliberate or complex as in Private Fears in Public Places. Resnais does lend light, poetic consideration to crass characterizations, particularly in the way scenes close.

Ponyo on the Cliffs by the Sea (Hayao Miyazaki, 2008)
Sometimes I don’t know whether to enjoy the “subversive” quality of Miyazaki’s all-out warmth for his supernatural characters, which counteracts the banality of cackling cartoon villains, or to feel that it’s tediously cozy.

Literature:

PRO:

Diary of a Bad Year (J.M. Coetzee, 2007)
I’ve liked everything I’ve read by Coetzee, but this is my favorite, a conceptually gimmicky novel whose three-pronged design, to my mind, anticipates and negotiates with just about every conceivable intelligent criticism it invites. It’s not hard to imagine a potentially great writer who loves Dostoevsky, longs to approximate his greatness, feels vaguely insecure about his own storytelling abilities, not to mention conquered by lust, but it’s somehow inspiring that that skeletal, somewhat pathetic profile has been transformed into a masterpiece.

Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1877)
When Tolstoy attempts to write anything conclusive about human nature, he often ends up chasing his own tail (e.g., much of War and Peace)—which is what makes this novel, in which he observes Levin doing the same and becoming conscious of it in a productive way, superior to that one.

pro:

After Dark (Haruki Murakami, 2004)
Murakami constructs stories of delicate intricacy for the sole purpose of leaving them hanging and watching them flutter in the wind, as usual. This feat is so impressive that the worldview tying it all together, a vaguely mystical summation of Japanese urban life, feels like an afterthought.

Theater:

pro:

Speed-the-Plow (Neil Pepe, 2009)
Seen with William H. Macy in the central role, who seems more suited to the apparently aging, insecure Bobby Gould than thermometer manqué Jeremy Piven anyway. The chief hook—Bobby is wisely stupid, Karen is stupidly wise—bristles with intelligence, even when it’s smothered by cleverness.

December in Review

2008-12-28T21:38:00.000-08:00

PRO:

The Strange M. Victor (Jean Gremillon, 1938)
My first Gremillon, and an amazing movie. He’s a first-class filmmaker: even extra-narrative shots contain remarkable background-foreground tension. He’s also a dramatist to rival the Dardennes, with daring and effective narrative ellipses, and a central character whose burden lies suspended between benevolence and guilt.
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944)
The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)
Blood Relatives (Claude Chabrol, 1978)
8 Million Ways to Die (Hal Ashby, 1986)
Stands out like a sore thumb from Ashby’s filmography, but he’s a natural at the redemptive thriller: his trademark self-deprecating, hedonistic sense of humor inflects a rather sincere representation of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Andy Garcia’s laid-back, wise-cracking drug lord (“The white stuff? Isn’t that a movie about… astronauts, or something?”) is a perfect villain.
99 River St. (Phil Karlson, 1953)
Prelude (Michael Snow, 2000)
Fascinating: perplexing, yet graceful. Snow’s films are like a very skilled ongoing argument with Bazin, and this short is no exception.
Sex Is Comedy (Catherine Breillat, 2002)
A Life of Her Own (George Cukor, 1950)

pro:

Sarabande + Winter + Alaya (Nathaniel Dorsky, 1976-1987)
I mused during this screening that there’s perhaps no other director, avant-garde or no, so readily identifiable by looking at a single shot as Dorsky. (Tsai?) His intuitive method is constant and aggressive, especially in the later works: give the viewer complex visual information indicative of some connective relationship, but obscure just what that relationship is. I asked Dorsky if he considered this process unique, and he name-dropped The French Connection (!!), Shoah, Joseph Cornell, Warren Sonbert, Bruce Conner, the poems of John Ashbery, and perhaps most emphatically, Dziga Vertov, which made me wince, although Dorsky himself acknowledged that Vertov’s politics were unsatisfying. (Dorsky is generally a pretty brilliant speaker, by the way, and I think the real answer to my question, albeit unstated, is “Yes, I do.”) Anyhow, as much as I enjoy his films—and these ones are just about as gorgeous as Song and Solitude—I enjoy them so much on the basis of each individual shot that any kind of meaningful editing scheme tends to elude my comprehension.
Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975)
Diane (Alan Clarke, 1975)
Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008)
After the somewhat vague, arty aloofness of Paranoid Park, I was surprised by the precise, unresolved tension between private and public spheres Van Sant derives from Milk’s campaigning methods, particularly his imploring for others to come out. Although GVS’s allegiances are clear, a surprising amount of energy is expended giving homophobes dignity and our hero crassness.
Night Train (Yinan Diao, 2007)
Beloved Enemy (Alan Clarke, 1981)
The most audaciously prosaic movie I've ever seen.
Age of Consent (Michael Powell, 1969)
Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier, 1963)
A good movie that I can’t quite revere, and one of the more commercial exponents of the French New Wave, with a jazz-laden soundtrack and cross-cutting that uneasily treads the line (or perhaps intends to bridge the gap) between broad, comic effect and contemplation.
Sirens (John Duigan, 1994)
Moloch (Alexander Sokurov, 1999)
The Night of Truth (Fanta Regina Nacro, 2004)
Hotel Imperial (Mauritz Stiller, 1924)
Adua and Her Friends (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960)
Allonsanfan (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1973)

mixed:

A Tree in Tanjung Malim (Tan Chui Mui, 2005)
Tan is a pretty good director: she usually puts the camera in the right place, and clearly enjoys long takes in service of her material. A few scenes are promising: the iffy way characters express themselves is Bujalski-esque. Unfortunately, she occasionally breaks concentration on mode of expression, apparently trying to enter into some direct, Joe-esque communion with the audience. (E.g., the sing-off.)
The Seagull’s Laughter (Ágúst Guðmundsson, 2001)
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
Martel’s compositional obliquity is omnipresent, as is an inscrutable relationship between narrative and performance. Some will say it’s beguiling and mysterious; I say that with a few faint exceptions, it’s unrewarding and deliberately unobservant.
The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945)

con:

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
Ledger is the sole point of interest here; Nolan is pretty much a non-entity in terms of directing actors, emphasizing action in an interesting way, etc.
Changeling (Clint Eastwood, 2008)
Did the 1920s-era LAPD kill Clint’s cat or something? A promising movie in the first reel: perhaps a better director could have made a bit more out of making Jolie unsympathetically emotional, and the police surprisingly rational.

CON:

The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)
Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005)

DNF:

Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008) [0:40]
As if I’d ever have finished this. That said, not as painful as I’d suspected—Luhrmann is many things, but pompous is not one of them, and while as far as tonally jarring goes he’s no Bong c. Memories of Murder, at least this doesn’t quite fit the traditional mold for these sort of projects.
Birdsong (Albert Serra, 2008) [0:10]
The beauty of Serra’s compositions is a hushed, abstracted, plastic thing that doesn’t seem worth trying to penetrate. On the bright side, I’m now more comfortable knowing that Serra is an asshole in person.
Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008) [0:10]
The Quarterly Balance (Krzysztof Zanussi, 1975) [0:45]
Baal (Alan Clarke, 1982) [0:40]
Clarke’s most overtly distanced movie, understandably suited to the Brecht material but lacking the vigor of his better work. Bowie’s deliberately bland “songs” are in keeping with a sense of muffled creativity in service of the play.
Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (George Landow [Owen Land], 1966) [0:02]
This is something like 5 minutes long, and still I could not finish it. Some kind of imperceptible shift in hue seems to occur along the filmstrip, which wasn’t quite pleasurable enough for me, I suppose. I may revisit Landow, as I’ve heard his other works are more dynamic. (Why is it that I have such an easy time with some a-g artists, e.g. Dorsky or Kyle Canterbury or Bruce Baillie, and such an impossible time with guys like Landow or Michael Robinson or Bruce Conner or, much of the time, Brakhage? Perhaps I’ll have to write my own history of avant-garde cinema one day…)

And as for literature...

PRO:

Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy, 1895) [2nd reading]
The Eternal Husband (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1873)
The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal, 1839)
Far From the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy, 1874)
The Wings of the Dove (Henry James, 1902)
Late James, for me, is the literary equivalent of Akerman: rough going, and at times outright dislikeable, but astonishing anyway. One unfortunate extreme of James’s personality is blind adoration of social tact (i.e. unironically time and time again labeling composure "wonderful"), and the other is inconsistently employed narrative obscurity, in which the reader is called upon to dig through pronouns for clues. On the other hand, he’s totally adept at reshaping the reader’s moral perspective.

pro:

Joseph Andrews (Henry Fielding, 1742)

Scattered Notes on 2006/2008 Catch-Up, + Various Auteurist Excursions

2008-12-01T19:28:00.000-08:00

Bled Number One (Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche, 2006)
Outsider from France adopts an attitude of casual resistance—“Do you not know how to pray?” “No, I don’t know how to pray,” he answers—but ultimately cracks yet again under the pressures of living in his homeland. Depiction of religious violence is electrifying: Ameur-Zaimeche doesn’t downplay threat or even victimization, but transforms the surrounding terror into a cacophony of conflicting impulses, rendering disunity monstrous. Le Dernier Maquis was so uninflected I couldn’t catch on, but then I was spectacularly disengaged during that screening—perhaps more on that someday.

Lucy (Henner Winckler, 2006)
My first encounter with Winckler, who seems assured and certainly immune to cheap pathos, even if this film leaves a rather vague, bland, slice-of-life taste. Maggy’s slight recessiveness is almost always interesting, and Winckler is good at blending cross-currents of conflict ((a), Maggy’s attempts to balance motherhood with a social life and (b) Gordon’s apparent maturity that ultimately leaves one wanting). Sometimes he seems content to turn the burner off entirely on one when another is at a boil—it’s hard to accept the idyllic phase of her relationship with Gordon, for example, and sure enough Winckler doesn’t seem to buy it himself.

Two Friends (Jane Campion, 1986)
Like Sweetie, curiously muted and strikingly composed, but I like this one more—the sharp structure lends import to a withholding style. Somewhat hindered by a (likely autobiographical) impulse to include borderline-meaningless anecdotes, though. I also watched and enjoyed her shorts Peel and A Girl’s Own Story.

Love Affair (Leo McCarey, 1939)
So similar to McCarey’s 1957 remake that it barely registers as a distinct film.

Ni d’Eve Ni d’Adam (Jean-Paul Civeyrac, 1996) [DNF]
Not at all like Civeyrac’s last two films. Along with the short Life According to Luke, his early work strives to poeticize the lives of irredeemable whores and thieves… and to my mind, fails, as Civeyrac’s definition of “poeticize” amounts to a brief moment of introspection sandwiched in between scores of juvenile theatrics. There is, however, a documentary looseness here that occasionally works to his advantage, and my not finishing the film might merely speak to my impatience w/r/t sifting through an undeveloped sensibility for good bits.

Don’t Worry, I’m Fine (Philippe Lioret, 2006)
A cleverly structured melodrama whose sense of loss and stasis is at odds with its almost Mamet-like plotting.

The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short (Andre Delvaux, 1965)
In retrospect, Delvaux uses a strong undercurrent of infatuation in order to dissolve it, but you wouldn’t guess that by watching, oh, the first 85 minutes. Lead performance = tic-laden, but it’s interesting how sometimes he seems to have a neurotic aversion to grandiosity surrounding him and other times lifts it. (He’s of mediocre, unassertive intelligence, but this weirdly works to his advantage and perhaps results in Fran’s unexpectedly sympathetic reaction.)

A High Wind in Jamaica (Alexander MacKendrick, 1965)
The secret of this “kids” film is to make the wonder of children both innocent and unseemly, e.g. the boy who retorts, “really? Wish I’d seen!” upon hearing that the schoolmaster on board has nearly been burnt to death. Bumbling Villain Anthony Quinn, meanwhile, is curiously noble, at his worst when the kids seem to be making fun of religion. The Ladykillers (1955) is less visually impressive, but pulls off the curious trick of deriving suspense predicated on the remaining intelligence of a woman well on her way into dementia.

The Savage Innocents (Nicholas Ray, 1959)
Badly staged at times, but Ray redeems it by pitting Our Morality in such direct opposition to Theirs. Dance sequence at the trading post is lots of fun.

How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941) [DNF]
I tried, but kept putting on Prefab Sprout instead, “When Love Breaks Down” vaguely synching up with Ford’s unusually direct mood, other songs not so much. I’d be curious to watch a version without the score, which is quite bad and intrusive. But there’s lots of misjudged emphasis here: even when the doe-eyed protagonist might have worked to the film’s advantage—as when he looks dolefully on as his sadistic teacher is given a pounding—Ford overwhelms this subtle moral development with low comedy. Also watched (and finished) The Last Hurrah (1958) and The Horse Soldiers (1959): the former polemicizes but keeps its cool, and the latter is prime Ford: Wayne’s “humanizing”-moment-as-drunken-rant is a highlight.

Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2008)
I sometimes find the Coens’ sense of humor kind of repulsive, sometimes too ready to mythologize, e.g. just about anything said about Chigurh in No Country, and also ready to shunt minor characters in a rather blasé way, like Richard Jenkins’s loser in this film. It seems their best moments occur when caricatures clash together, e.g. Clooney’s encounter with Pitt, in which the former’s alarm is just as comically inflated as the latter’s grinning, gee-wiz adieu.

My Brother Is An Only Child (Daniele Luchetti, 2007)
The “other side” of (decent) Italian cinema opposite Garrone, where catharsis isn’t deliberately obscured by a harsh artistic persona so much as distended into a confused aria of emotion. Could have been really insufferable if the fraternal shenanigans and political oppositions weren’t so interwoven.

Poor Boy’s Game (Clement Virgo, 2007)
I can easily imagine Virgo making a bad film, given this one’s occasional sops to easy sentiment. It’s redeemed by a powerfully muted performance by Rossif Sutherland, which takes the Ed-Norton-in-American-History-X character to the inevitable conclusion that reformed racists endure genuine shame from all sides, rendering redemption a hazy concept.

The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
Homages to Hawks abound: a character says “easy, easy” to a dog; MacReady (get it?) is posited as a model of unfeeling but necessary efficiency. And yet Carpenter’s horror-film impulses are in many ways the reverse of Hawks’s original, decidedly focused on amplifying disunity, panic, and unease among the crew, and removing the love interest that gave Hawks’s otherwise manly protagonist an inferred soft side. I vastly prefer the Hawks, and it seems those who love the Carpenter seem to be expressing a preference for disunity over unity, when Hawks forges a dialectic between the two.

Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1874)
A staggering masterpiece, which I don’t have much to say about besides finding it fascinating that some find Dorothea hypercritical and pretentious, and others a triumphant feminist heroine. (She’s both, of course.)

The Lower Depths (Jean Renoir, 1936)
If this is weaker than other ‘30s Renoirs—well, it is—it’s because Renoir encourages us to take pleasure in the melancholy contemplation of characters, rather than letting us do the contemplating ourselves.

Lemming (Dominik Moll, 2005)
Shame that Gainsbourg’s characterization, impressive and nuanced in the film’s first half, pretty much gets annihilated for gamesmanship’s sake.

Still hate Heavenly Creatures and Whale Rider.

Here's More Random Stuff; Or, I Suck at Titling Blog Posts

2008-11-17T04:36:00.000-08:00

Windows on Monday (Ulrich Kohler, 2006)
Decidedly desultory, and sometimes vaguely quirky to the point of evoking Tati more than Hong, but no matter: it continues to grow in the memory, and contains the single most inspired take I’ve seen all year, a sort of inversion of The Wayward Cloud’s bittersweet reconciliation that is hilariously audacious in its blunt, albeit measured pessimism. I initially found star Isabelle Menke (pictured above, on the left) a bit of a blank, but Kohler unleashes her when necessary, and I can’t think of another movie character whose personality so closely mirrors my ex’s.

Light is Waiting (Michael Robinson, 2007)
Good for a laugh, but so is this. Being engaged with a text and being able to fashion grotesque abstraction out of it are not the same thing, and Robinson doesn’t even strike me as particularly aware of the little that Full House has going for it formally.

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
The poster gives away the best bit, in which Fonda and Stanwyck, huddled closely together, flirt in a way that suggests the possibility of genuine aversion. I guess I buy Stanwyck’s series of internal transformations, but there’s a big contradiction between that degree of internal conflict and her extroverted personality that isn’t quite fully explored, in my view.

Haut les coeurs! (Solveig Anspach, 1999)
Anspach is obviously a born filmmaker, utterly committed to concision, contrast, and structure, and an unerring sense of where to put the camera and how to end a scene. Characterizations are almost too intelligently drawn: one doctor is admirable without being nice, another nice without appearing adequately sensitive. More impressive is Anspach’s control of atmosphere, which gives the impression of a world that is basically ideal—contented, yet sensitive—but oppressive to her protagonist anyway.

A Cry in the Dark (Fred Schepisi, 1988)
I will never forgive my Australian Cinema class for choosing to watch this instead of Sirens, but concede that they may never forgive me for giggling at Streep’s misery.

High Heels (Pedro Almodovar, 1991)
Barely remember anything about this a mere few days later—the melodrama is more theoretically “subversive” than finely tuned, a recurring problem with Almodovar—although Letal’s initial seduction of Rebecca is unassuming sexual confusion at its finest.

The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton, 1905)
Impressionistic in a way that doesn’t intensify emotion so much as particularize it, which works for me. Wharton’s worldview is like Austen + malice, tortured rather than bothered by a learned preoccupation with luxury. That said, her mastery is to never fully embrace contempt: character descriptions bordering on hateful are tempered by behavior anything but.

Nick Drake – Bryter Layter (1970)
I had trouble consistently enjoying Drake when I first started listening to his work, but in retrospect the problem was one of distinguishing between the Five Leaves Left period and this album, which now seems to represent a big leap forward in songwriting. I read somewhere that legendarily shy Drake was in awe of John Cale’s work on his records, which baffles me, since I hold Drake in much higher esteem than Cale. I would, however, be curious to have seen what Drake’s face looked like upon watching Richard Thompson play guitar on “Hazy Jane II.”

The week (well, past few days) in review.

2008-11-09T18:49:00.000-08:00

U.S. Go Home (Claire Denis, 1994)
I’m not a huge Denis fan, but this might be my favorite of hers. She likes diffuse tangents, not for contemplation of drama so much as willful disengagement from it. In other words, every once in a while, her inner Warhol takes over. This can have a really satisfying effect: when Gregoire Colin rocks out for three solid minutes to (The Animals’ (?)) “Chevrolet,” for example (pictured above), is the otherwise constricted character’s necessary moment of private glory. And there’s lots of well-considered character stuff here: in this supposedly autobiographical work, Denis ruminates on her own passivity and the sorrow of men she let down, whether handsome and rakish or decent-looking and spirited. Her own (i.e. protagonist Martine’s) sorrow is expressed in a half-laugh, half-cry, and an attraction to Vincent Gallo at his most whiny. Not all of it works for me, but I’m glad I saw it.

Keep It for Yourself (Claire Denis, 1991)
… which I can’t say for this one, in which self-effacing Denis either lets things get excessively vacant or lets Gallo shtick carry the day. Didn’t help that the print was burnt, and that the burn looked like a vibrating, Antonio Gaudi-designed UFO gracing the top of each frame, especially apparent against blacks and dark grays.

Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994)
I’m watching this again in a couple weeks. That’s right, I’m in two separate classes screening Heavenly Creatures. (Not to mention two separate classes featuring The Castle of Otranto.) Jackson’s overemphatic style is just as painful to take as it was a few years ago in the LOTR movies, and I don’t have much to say about him besides that I’m baffled he’s taken seriously in some circles.

Deep Crimson (Arturo Ripstein, 1996)
Not exactly riveting, but I sort of enjoyed this. Ripstein’s sequence shots, which might have some Ophuls or Sirk influence behind them, given the melodrama theme, actually feel less like either of those guys to me than Gaspar Noe on downers, roving miserably about rooms at random. The acting is too big for my taste, but there’s an inherent sense of mystery to the material. What remains unspoken—what the killers can’t say to the victim and Coral’s mistrust in Nicolas—blurs the traditional boundaries of killer/victim identification, particularly because the killers have a sorrowful, insecure streak and their victims, however doomed, get righteously vindictive.

Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949)
Lean and sometimes expressive, but I can’t help but feel that Lewis’s commitment to the dichotomy between nervous, trigger-happy Annie and sensitive Bart is limiting. He also lets genre conventions blunt characterizations: what, for instance, is up with the third act’s cheery amusement park montage, in which neither Peggy Cummins, screaming joyously in the same way an actor in a Six Flags commercial would, nor Lewis, editing smoothly and playing happy music, shows knowledge of the tormented, murderous Annie we know?

The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby [Howard Hawks], 1951) [third viewing]
Albeit anchored by an efficient, terse protagonist, I find this an exemplary Hawks lesson on how to use a crowd: everyone, even the effete, anxious scientist, is trying to contribute, which means engaging in the art of contradiction, and to observe them crowd the frame is to take in an overload of rational energy.

Waverly (Walter Scott, 1814)
Very enjoyable, even if I had a hard time keeping up with the background material. As historical novelists go, I think Tolstoy’s better at avoiding generalizations or phraseology, keeping things human and making drama stem organically from situations rather than ideas, but Scott is better at resisting the impulse to toot his own apolitical horn, and even goes to the point of ending on a note of near-embarrassing humility. He (Scott) is a bit like Edward Waverly himself, actually, who often makes strained attempts to express big emotions with tact.

Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser, 1900) [second reading]
This feels more like a masterpiece than it did the first time. Dreiser is an amazing writer of dialogue: his characters’ speech is wholly independent from their inner lives. Hurstwood, whose fall from grace leaves him a self-loathing, desperate fool, musters extraordinary strength in resisting alliance with strikers or policemen; Carrie, talented, modest, and kind, is avaricious in a way invisible to everyone but herself. Perhaps Dreiser explains too much of these contradictions away, but they’re also evidence of a sensibility forever fixed on the contrast between the workings of the mind and the body.

Adam Elk – Labello (1999)
Not as good as the two preceding Mommyheads albums, but few LPs are. First two tracks are terrific, as well as “Ripple Effect,” in which Cohen “runs away from the ripple effect” with a chord mimicking a sudden distance from natural progression.

Marshall Crenshaw – Downtown (1985)
Crenshaw is always at least a little interesting, and terrific about a quarter of the time. Highlights here are “Little Wild One (No. 5),” “Yvonne,” and “Lesson Number One.” “(We’re Gonna) Shake Up Their Minds” has a nice melody, but it’s also exactly the same one Crenshaw would use in the 1991 Kirsty MacColl song, “All I Ever Wanted,” which I prefer.

Jackie Greene – “About Cell Block #9” (Somewhere Sweet Bound, 2004)
This song is vivacious and dynamic and really pleasing, but all the other Greene stuff I’ve heard is pretty bad.

The dB’s – The Sound of Music (1987)
It’s no Stands for Decibels, but it’s still a masterpiece anyone interested in pop music should seek out immediately.

Graham Parker – “And It Shook Me” (Struck by Lightning, 1991)
A lot of later Parker suffers from smugness, so perhaps this song is an anomaly for making vague, residual pain its subject.

Sirk x 2; Sturges x 2; Praise; oh yeah, and Muriel's Wedding

2008-11-05T20:44:00.000-08:00

I'm watching a lot of films for school, hence repeat viewings that I'd otherwise put off, or, in the case of Muriel's Wedding, happily do away with altogether.

Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956) [2nd viewing]

Usually I'm not a screen-cap kinda guy, as I suspect were Andre Bazin to blog, neither would he be. But check out the above composition, expressive of everything that's great about Sirk: nostalgic pleasure (i.e. the etching), sorrowful defeat (i.e. Dorothy Malone hunched over), the evocative location (i.e. water), all quiet, all together, all simultaneous. Earlier on, we have Lauren Bacall's introduction to the suite: gaudy, lush production design fills the frame, swelling music fills the soundtrack, and Bacall looks downright nonplussed, at a standstill between the surrounding beauty and the knowledge that she's being duped. Even minor characterizations are really satisfying, like the bartender who persistently sides with Robert Stack in action, but never in emotion, suspended in dubious loyalty. The "happy" ending, a bit of a lift from Notorious in my opinion, significantly shifts emphasis away from the few who prevail back to Malone. A quibble: the camera ominously rests on Stack's dad's portrait, shortly before [SPOILER]. Sirk is too good for superfluous foreshadowing.

Muriel's Wedding (P.J. Hogan, 1994) [2nd viewing]

Just godawful, but it presented a challenge to my descriptive abilities when trying to slam it in a class discussion. (Yes, apparently this is more representative of quality Australian cinema than Praise or any film by John Duigan.) I was tempted to write: "Hogan reduces adult interaction to middle-school terms"--but s/he (sorry, too lazy) fails to even capture the social repercussions of the latter. Yes, the social persecution of Muriel is exaggerated. BUT, yes, Muriel is herself a pitifully inept outcast. That said, I'm not seeing any graceful attempt to juggle levels of heightened realism here, just a disengaged wash of cartoon and soap opera impulses.

Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959) [2nd viewing]

It's no Written on the Wind, but it has its pleasures. Liked how Annie is intrusive but well-meaning; liked how, a la the above image, Sirk gives us at least one striking composition in which latent ugliness underlies catharsis. (I'm referring to Annie's deathbed speech to Lora, in which Sarah Jane's smiling photograph is sandwiched in between the two. This drew audible laughter from my audience, and it is funny in the sense that no other director would dare draw such sharp attention to the thorny contradictions of melodrama, for fear of falling into camp.) Didn't like boyfriend's sudden, unnatural transition from lover to oppressor, which is inexplicable apart from giving the audience a cheap jolt; didn't like Sirk's deficient understanding of the typical ego of a teenage girl, or perhaps people in general. (E.g. Sarah Jane's earnest admission of "you've been wonderful" after humiliating her white friends.) I have subdued affection for this: Sirk's mastery is evident throughout, but he can't quite find a satisfying way into the material.

The Great McGinty (Preston Sturges, 1940)

Sturges's debut, but it seems he'd had everything figured out. There's a dialectic here between McGinty's laconic pragmatism and his wife's admiring intellectualization that nearly functions as an allegory for the relationship between early Hollywood auteurs and auteurists, even if the latter had yet to come along. McGinty has vague aspirations to greatness, but he also laughs incredulously when earnestly called decent. (Hawks, anyone?) Sturges derives a lot of humor from the way motivations are naturally obscured in real life: loved the way McGinty's future wife shyly disguises an earnest marriage proposal as a business transaction; also loved the way McGinty shamelessly glances at her legs and she weakly retorts with the barely credible, “What’s that got to do with it?” And I laughed very hard at the chauffeur's vague, boring, and rather endearing one-sided conversation.

The Great Moment (Preston Sturges, 1944)

Lesser Sturges, but a singularly dry biopic all the same. Token romance is played so casually it barely exists; Morton, the ennobled discoverer of ether as an anaesthetic, is also a belligerent psychopath who orders his patients to open their mouths and abruptly begins smashing glasses at a store. The crudity of 19th century dentistry, rather than merely representative of past blunders, is played for derisive comedy, and Sturges doesn't fail to temper exaggerated tributes demanded by friends (“every hospital should be named after him!”) with low-key ones made by others ("maybe one or two hospitals...") A lesser film might have portrayed Charles T. Jackson as a "sarcastic drunkard" and an incompetent failure alongside our hero Morton, who in Sturges's film merely looks humorless next to Jackson's funny, credible resignation. And then there's this film's equivalent of the chauffeur's platitudes: a hilariously mundane series of intertitles detailing every stop Morton makes while thumbing through a medical encyclopedia. Why? Why not! It seems the running theme I'm getting from this Sturges double-header is an analysis of the ways in which essentially noble men are dangerous and immature...

Praise (John Curran, 1998)

As embarrassed as I am to link here, I guess I just did.

Proof; Romper Stomper; Some Came Running; Stella Dallas; Wuthering Heights

2008-10-28T15:45:00.001-07:00

Proof (Jocelyn Moorhouse, 1991)

I was starting to like this for a bit when it became clear Martin was an off-putting, albeit disadvantaged guy, but it soon turns into a preposterous celebration of his pleasurable condescension, and gets worse with the introduction of a caregiver-client relationship absurd in countless ways.

Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992)

Repulsive, although Crowe has a credible moment or two. Questions of glorifying racism aside, how about the device of throwing in an epileptic fit to bring two coy lovers together? Somehow offense pales next to contrivance.

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

Shortly after the screening, a friend told me Minnelli had previously worked as a designer of window displays for upscale shops; a light bulb subsequently blazed directly above my head. I actually think Minnelli’s instinct to “frame” moments a certain way hurts him, resulting in theatrical gestures that bare vague relation to what’s going on dramatically. (E.g. Dave’s first kiss with Gwen, silhouetted to induce awe, or Dave cradling Ginnie at the end, which only serves to obscure the prior complications of their relationship.) I still enjoyed it, especially Sinatra’s dry, sarcastic portrait of resignation, sometimes funny and sometimes merely cranky.

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)

Really liked the interplay between Stella and Steve: she’s a hedonistic dreamer, he’s handsome but reserved. He gets in the way of her dreams, but in the process seems like a pretty reasonable guy. The “other man” is ugly but fun, establishing a weird, uneven dialectic. Once the film hits Stella’s later years, her daughter grows into a saintly, embarrassed but forgiving girl, and Vidor doesn’t manage to milk much from the mother-daughter stuff, aside from a wonderful ending that he might owe to the way Stanwyck anxiously bites her scarf.

Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte, 1847) [2nd reading]

The contrast between Cathy I / Heathcliff and Cathy II / Hareton forms a jagged structural shape in the mind, in which the only antidote to a curse of heartache is the joining of two souls opposed in nature, rather than aligned. Regarding the latter couple, it’s impossible to promote a healthy, symbiotic relationship between a condescending intellectual and a strong, humble idiot in any direct, sentimental way, only to suggest it works because each party receives something in the process of trying to rationalize his or her flawed position. So bad adaptations of the novel not only miss but inevitably distort the point.

Bronte isn’t unlike Pialat in her approach to hysteria as an idea-free vehicle for emotion—Cathy violently seeks out a second opinion while blindly asserting her own. Then there is Nelly, who voices an opposing pacifist sensibility that proves crude and cruel next to the material she struggles to conceptualize. In class I felt strangely defensive of the “weird” Bronte, anti-social by some accounts. Surely such a refined sensibility doesn’t discriminate entirely out of shyness, which casts doubt on the coolness of those giving the accounts.

Ten songs for the week…

Brendan Benson – "I’m Blessed" (One Mississippi)
Cardinal – "If You Believe in Christmas Trees" (Cardinal)
Jim Carroll Band – "Wicked Gravity" (Catholic Boy)
[Most of this album is affected and pretentiously intellectual (going she said that "everything is permitted" makes you picture Carroll manically congratulating himself for conflating Dostoevsky with VU), but it's a testament to his post-addiction sanity that this song exists.]
Catherine Wheel – "Delicious" (Adam and Eve)
Elvis Costello – "Blue Chair" (Blood and Chocolate)
[Aside from This Year's Model, there isn't a Costello album I consistently like. (Get Happy!! is a distant second.) Blood is no exception, but at least we get this song.]
Dire Straits – "Tunnel of Love" (Making Movies)
[The only case where Knopfler's supposedly R. Thompson-influenced playing seems to grasp the contrast of Thompson's work.]
Elastica – "Line Up" (Elastica)
[A bit of a Sleater-Kinney thing going on here: the straight punk songs don't work too well for me, but sometimes there's more contrast, more "duelling" in the guitar work, like in this.]
Brigitte Fontaine – "Le Noir c’est mieux chois" (Comme a la radio)
[I'd take Francoise Hardy over Fontaine any other day, but this is more nuanced than any Hardy song.]
Gladhands – "Kill ‘Em With Kindness" (La Di Da)
[Feels a lot like one of Jason Falkner's better songs from the same era.]
Squeeze – "Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)" (Argy Bargy)
[Amazing, as are several other songs from Argy Bargy and East Side Story.]

Melville; The Nerves; Renoir

2008-10-22T10:51:00.000-07:00

Moby-Dick (Herman Melville, 1851)

Good dialogue; pity about the whaling lore. And days later, a reference book’s worth of whale info has hardly made a dent. Sort of like a book on the Fourth of July in which numerous commercial fireworks are meticulously described, gently sarcastic attempts at profundity are made, and the big night itself is a mixture of subdued awe and anticlimax, which just goes to show how hard it is to differentiate the moral implications of slaying relatively inexpressive animals from blowing shit up. I had quite a mixed reaction to this, and am curious if I’d like Melville’s other work more, but it’s not encouraging that this is considered the masterpiece.

The Nerves (The Nerves, 1976)

For 12 minutes, Jack Lee was the greatest songwriter in the world. Each song here is a concise, devastating, 2-minute hall of mirrors in which individual parts and sections subtly contradict each other. His solo material, unfortunately, is mediocre aside from, well, rehashed material from this E.P., which is realized to perfection in its original form anyway.

The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir, 1953)

My favorite ‘50s Renoir film. In some ways it resembles Lola Montes, in which archetypal male lovers are given equal weight by a conflicted heroine, but I found Coach protag Camilla’s nasty, witty allure more palatable than Lola. Riccardo Rioli—what the hell happened to this dude?—is especially wonderful as a doggedly persistent bullfighter whose self-presentation is presented as more of a personal affront to Camilla than his own failing.

Campion; Roeg; slasher movies; Austen; Handel and Beethoven

2008-10-17T21:06:00.000-07:00

Sweetie (Jane Campion, 1989)

I’d seen this before, and vaguely remembered its stilted, poetic tone. It’s bizarre: whimsy bent on flagellating itself, Amelie gone depressive. It’s a mystery how Campion went from this, the edifying work of someone who finds herself unforgivably cold, to the pat, foregone Holy Smoke! in a mere ten years, one I plan to cease dwelling on as soon as I finish writing this sentence.

Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)

Meh. Liked certain behavioral bits, especially the lead girl's irritated impassivity in the face of trauma. But Roeg's editing, while vague in its intentions, is vague and not exactly subtle. Sometimes it appears that We Are Like Them; sometimes We Are Different From Each Other. Got it. But why limit yourself to that register, aside from pleasing symbolism-hungry film studies majors?

Friday the 13th Part 2 (Steve Miner, 1981)

Not good. But I’m beginning to appreciate experiencing these films as social rituals a la getting drunk. Not all appreciations are healthy—see also the way Laura Mulvey’s execrable ideas seep into my consciousness, not unlike an extended hangover, for a period of several days following forced repeated readings of her stupid fucking essay.

Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen, 1817)

Uh, forget what I assumed about Udolpho: this is a precise indictment of both Radcliffe’s faults and her detractors’ careless exaggerations. Can’t think of an equivalent to the Gothic novel that I naively embraced at age 17—I dunno, Mystic River?—but can relate to Austen’s impulse to explain, over the course of a standard, albeit brilliantly plotted and observed, comedy of manners, why her tastes evolved out of a need to bridge the perilous gap between art and life.

On Handel and Beethoven

I’ve been wondering lately, in the process of briefly checking out a bunch of classical composers and concluding that I only really dig Handel and Beethoven, a) if there are some equally great ones I’m missing out on, and b) how sorely isolated those two must have felt, considering the distance between them and seemingly everyone else. Beethoven’s fabled social ineptitude makes almost too much sense: aside from problems w/r/t hearing and women, genius can only be disgruntled by a glut of mediocrity. (Apparently, if randomly Googled sites are to be trusted, the latter was a big fan of the former.) I can’t imagine ever liking Bach, who I find so diffuse that any emotional continuity fizzles out every two or three measures. I have the opposite problem with Mozart: complexities feel telegraphed, big, obvious. I find Haydn and Mendelssohn more intriguing, but both are working in a mode of counterpoint that leaves me instinctively cold, as if I’m either supposed to be sitting back and coolly observing, or making a strained attempt to feel something. The beauty of H and especially B is roughly a gazillion times more natural and fluid to me. But I’ll update if I find someone else I like.

Radcliffe/Stahl/Wallace/NRBQ

2008-10-13T03:35:00.000-07:00

Sorry if this gets sparse on cinema-related stuff, which will remain in bold.

The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radcliffe, 1794) [DNF; got to ~200 pages]

Of interest because, on the basis of Northanger Abbey, we can assume Jane Austen was a fan—why, Jane? Radcliffe is surely coming from somewhere faintly intelligent, but the extent to which she wants you to know that is weird and hypocritical: she celebrates Modesty with a capital M (not unlike Jason Sudeikis’s Joe Biden impression), negating her own values in the process of assaulting the reader with descriptions of Beauty, never failing to remind us that Emily St. Aubert is Sensitive. I suspect I'm having more of a clash with Radcliffe in particular than sentimentalism in general.

Holy Matrimony (John M. Stahl, 1943)

I’d started thinking of Stahl as a precise visual stylist to rival Rohmer after seeing Leave Her to Heaven, but I didn’t get that vibe from this lively, nuanced farce. Gracie Fields gives my fave performance, a reliable, adoring wife who’s still at odds with her husband underneath the winks and smiles. Monty Woolley is louder and harder to enjoy, but props to Stahl for making his hero such a vehement prick.

“The Depressed Person” (David Foster Wallace, 1998)

Marginally liked it. Spot-on about the subjective particulars of depression (e.g. combo of need and anticipation of boredom in trying to explain away indescribable torture to contented friends, or the patient-therapist relationship being both ideal and patently false in its one-sidedness), although reading it is a bit like watching someone scrape away at quicksand. (Mimicking tact in the midst of severe depression takes heroic willpower, but I’ve seen it done.) Parts are perhaps unconsciously revealing, like the recurrent phrase “abstract guilt,” [of a non-depressed person] which can only imply opposition to the depressed person’s bottomless, visceral guilt.

“That’s Alright” (NRBQ, All Hopped Up, 1977)

From the NRBQ stuff I’ve sampled, I’m rather baffled—the vast majority of it is pretty by-the-numbers. And yet “That’s Alright,” a serene needle in their bloated haystack of a discography, is as perfectly constructed a song as I’ve heard, an ode to the ambivalence of rejection as propulsive as the Raspberries’ “Go All the Way” and as meticulous as Richard Thompson’s better work. (I also like “It Feels Good” from the same album and “It’s Not So Hard” from Scraps.)

Weir/Pakula/Von Trier/Hardin

2008-10-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

Films:

Gallipolli (Peter Weir, 1981)

Weir makes tripe, but a special kind of tripe that’s recognized by some as mysterious or distinctive. To me, the guy’s incapable of locating anything of interest in his material—I was thinking about looking up whether he had a hand in his screenplays, before realizing I didn’t give a shit. Hearing peers talk about the film’s portrayal of the depth of “mateship” was a particularly bitter laugh: it’s as if they actually believe Australians were born with some neurological mechanism that allows men to, y’know, just be closer with each other than we yanks could ever manage.

All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976)

A good rejoinder to any who claim that recreating reality results in dramatic inertia, and a tightrope act of dramatic tension, eschewing the lapses into convention of Klute for investigational rigor. The journalists are a little insecure, a little inarticulate, a little sadistic, but they’re also different: Redford is sincere (to a fault), and Hoffman is conniving (to a fault). One is never sure whether to want them to stop hounding witnesses, or root for something explosive: both ends are kept so hushed and omnipresent.

Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000)

Bipolar cinema. I’d seen this before, several times, so as I tried to explain my problems with it to a professor with an uber-placid facial expression, it was painful in an I’m-vicariously-disillusioning-my-14-year-old-self type of way. But I did enjoy the unenjoyability of the experience of watching it. (It’s complicated, but the sensation of boredom is actually kind of therapeutic at the moment.) Strangest of all to think that I once found Bjork attractive. Or did I? I probably did.

Song:

"It'll Never Happen Again" (Tim Hardin)

Wouldn't feel out of place on After the Gold Rush. And AtGR is one of my favorite albums--Hardin is no Young c. 1970, for me, but his best work is on that level. Other faves: "Reason to Believe," "Black Sheep Boy."

Recent viewings, meaning more recent than last month.

2008-10-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

In light of some recent personal troubles—in short, the title of my website came disturbingly close to having an unintended double meaning—I’m trying to write more, but the old 100-point system having become arbitrary to the point of meaninglessness, all I can bring myself to do is, y’know, write about the movies. I’m not trying particularly hard here—hell, I don’t have time to—but we’ll see if I can manage something verging on coherence.

Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970)

Mike is at once reasonable and freakishly immature in his attitudes towards sex. The high point is the initial encounter with a woman in the bathhouse, in which he flails like a maniac but obviously tries to keep his composure all the while, and the woman makes a subtle shift from trying to seduce him to not caring whether he enjoys the experience. Skolimowski is the rare comic director who explores the possibilities of a scene rather than relying on behavioral exaggeration: when he watches the policeman accept a drink from the porn theater operator, it’s less an indication that the operator is screwed or that the police force is corrupt than that even bad-guy cops like G&Ts.

Klute (Alan Pakula, 1971)

Like how Bree’s attitude—she’s okay, because the guys are nervous, and she isn’t—runs counter to the very conventions the film is built upon, viz. perverse killer gradually succumbs to preying on prostitutes. Also like how Sutherland’s nice guy is also a little weird and withdrawn. But I’m disappointed that that weirdness is divorced from his sexuality, which seems utterly conventional, but that’s a perhaps necessary sop to audiences expecting an ordinary romance. Worse as it goes along, collapsing under the weight of romance and thriller conventions, but even the final villain speech is a surprisingly low-key and contemplative rumination on mistakes made and mistakes to follow.

Lola Montes (Max Ophuls, 1955)

A contradiction: a garish, romantic study of utter emotional isolation. Lola seems as incapable of finding strength in the wisdom of an older man as she does in finding joy in the free spirit of a younger man–and even when she seems close to a psychic match, e.g. Liszt, there’s a constant sense of up-and-down. We’re there with her, wistfully observing the barriers of incompatibility and trying our best to break through them.

Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo, 2008)

For some reason this made me think of Candide—maybe in the protagonist’s persistent, delusional belief that he can suddenly overcome his faults. But Hong doesn’t exactly let it become a running gag: sometimes, the contrast between intention and follow-through is blatant enough to funny, and at other times his dissipation seems to mirror Hong’s. Inchoate and rambling alongside Hong’s features, but I’d like to see it again—maybe there’s more here.

Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008)

Liked it, esp. the way Garrone blunts a sense of resolution—the final scene is like if Rossellini took on a gangster movie, at least in terms of pacing. I’m with the detractors who are confused as to how the various storylines overlap—I’d imagine that reading the book would be helpful.

Going home early...

2008-09-10T12:12:00.000-07:00

Will try to write something substantive when I get back. Here were my faves:

1. Lorna's Silence
2. Happy-Go-Lucky
3. Revanche
4. Synecdoche, New York
5. Treeless Mountain
6. Acne
7. All Around Us
8. A Christmas Tale

Days 5-6

2008-09-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

pro

Synecdoche, New York

mixed

Suspension

con

When It Was Blue
Tokyo Sonata
Summer Hours

CON

Hunger

Day 4

2008-09-07T20:28:00.000-07:00

PRO:

Lorna's Silence (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

pro:

Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim)
All Around Us (Ryosuke Hashiguchi)

con:

Daytime Drinking (Noh Young-seok)

Days 1-3

2008-09-07T09:13:00.000-07:00

What I've made it to so far:

PRO:

Revanche (Gotz Spielmann) [I've heard Spielmann compared to Haneke and Seidl, but he's clearly more interested in thriller conventions than either. He's also an expert at undermining them.]

pro:

Acne (Federico Veiroj) [Light and nostalgic, but there's something willfully unconventional about the protag's coming of age, and Veiroj's approach to characterization.]

mixed:

It's Not Me, I Swear! (Philippe Falardeau) [Sort of "Hal Ashby does Home Alone," but not quite as subversive as one would like.]
Le Dernier Maquis (Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche) [I'm a bit baffled by this one.]

con:

Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater) [I'm a bit non-plussed by this one.]
Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt) [De Sica-esque. Some people will think that's a good thing.]
Delta (Kornel Mundruczo) [Mundruczo has a good eye, but is terminally adverse to humor.]

2008 Preliminary Schedule

2008-08-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

Here's how it's looking, with some wishful thinking:

4th
Acne

5th
Revanche
Delta
It’s Not Me, I Swear!
Wendy and Lucy

6th
Appaloosa
Dioses
Me and Orson Welles
Dernier Maquis
Pontypool

7th
Serbis
Treeless Mountain
All Around Us
Silence of Lorna
Daytime Drinking

8th
Hunger
New York, I Love You
Summer Hours
The Terence Davies Trilogy
When It Was Blue

9th
Voy a explotar
Two-Legged Horse
24 City
Tokyo Sonata
Synecdoche, New York

10th
Happy-Go-Lucky
Conte de noel
Four Nights With Anna
Je veux voir
Birdsong

11th
Gomorrah
Brothers Bloom
Barrage contre la pacifique
35 Rhums

12th
Che
Liverpool
Hooked
Sut

13th
Perfect Day
Adela
Under the Tree
Miracle at St. Anna

Day 10

2007-09-15T15:37:00.000-07:00

ALEXANDRA (Alexandr Sokurov) - 60
BEFORE I FORGET (Jacques Nolot) - 68
MUTUM (Sandra Kogut) - 71
AND ALONG CAME TOURISTS (Robert Thalmein) - 45
LOU REED'S BERLIN (Julian Schnabel) - 61

[I could have seen this blindfolded and it wouldn't have made a dent in the rating. Schnabel continues the sub-Brakhage noodlings here that he apparently began in DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, which I'm now more content than ever on skipping. At 65, Reed remains a nuanced player and a paragon of understatement in rock, which makes the inclusion of Antony, who is given the opportunity to butcher "Candy Says," all the more puzzling. The contrast is jarring: Reed speak-sings with a mixture of mumbles and big epiphanies, as if words are meant to die shortly after exiting his mouth, whereas Antony seems intent on giving those words a melodramatic eulogy. It's hard to see why the two men even respect each other after hearing them back-to-back.]

Day 9

2007-09-14T15:36:00.000-07:00

GLORY TO THE FILMMAKER! (Takeshi Kitano) - 54
I'M NOT THERE (Todd Haynes) - 36
I AM FROM TITOV VELES (Teona Strugar Mitevska) - 55
LES BONS DEBARRAS (Francis Mankiewicz) - 69

Day 8

2007-09-13T11:02:00.003-07:00

PARANOID PARK (Gus Van Sant) - 40
MARGOT AT THE WEDDING (Noah Baumbach) - 42
HELP ME EROS (Lee Kang-sheng) - 63
WOLFSBERGEN (Nanouk Leopold) - 59

Day 7

2007-09-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

CLEANER (Renny Harlin) - W/O

[Not a very Hawksian entry in Harlin's oeuvre, but at least we get to see Sam Jackson imitate Cary Grant. Renny says WKW inspired the visuals; I was thinking more CSI.]

ATONEMENT (Joe Wright) - 65

[Wright, much more flippant and neurotic than you'd expect based on his choices of source material, said something about "life-changing experiences in scuzzy London moviehouses" before this began; I'd wager a few were courtesy of Michael Powell (& Pressburger), judging from a busy comic tone where the "real" conflict is just barely allowed to register. Tries a bit hard near the end, but is moving precisely for dissecting Briony's own excessive guilt earlier on in depicting her fantasy of atonement--she's apologetic to the point of being irritating, while "Robbie" and "Cecilia" are annoyed to the point of being brutal, and each are easy to access in the low-key performances and intelligent editing choices on display.]

CORROBOREE (Ben Hackworth) - [rating withheld 'cuz I'm interning for Shoreline Entertainment]
THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS (Bruce McDonald) - [rating withheld 'cuz I'm interning for Shoreline Entertainment]

Day 6

2007-09-11T21:15:00.000-07:00

SOUS LES TOITS DE PARIS (Hiner Saleem) - 45

[My first encounter with Saleem, and I was usually either mildly amused or mildly puzzled. I imagine that's the reaction, what with the actively confusing compositions. (E.g. Marie Kremer and junkie boyfriend looming over ominously. Is it sex, or some kind of workout?) At other times, the Tati-esque formal gamesmanship lends the film a kind of balance. (If we get to see Kremer take a shower, we must also see Michel Piccoli do same...) Also, half the frame is often left empty, a la Tsai. Also, behavioral intelligence only really occurs when big opportunities for it to occur come along. (Piccoli, on the phone with son, says "It's not serious" when he's obviously quite stressed.) Unique, but not necessarily good.]

SUMMIT CIRCLE (Bernard Emond) - 64

[Nuanced isn't the right word for Emond's way with actors, so it's a bad idea to expect variation within a shot. (I did in LA NEUVAINE and was bored stiff.) Prolonged blank stares abound, actually, but the trick is that they're usually a replacement for something more conventional. When the heroine is on the job, for example, you couldn't intuit any sign of stress from her neutral, dignified way of dealing with customers, but as we can see from the insert recording the data of her work--her last call took 14.1 seconds, it reminds her--the stress is present; she's just good at dealing with it. And though SUMMIT CIRCLE is ostensibly a criticism of the callousness of big business, Emond deploys this sort of strategy across the board. (The protag's boss, announcing a load of lay-offs, is allowed to totally retain her dignity in the midst of jeers from those whose lives she's in the process of ruining.) Unfortunately, also like LA NEUVAINE, Emond also pointlessly mixes up the chronology--he and Guillermo Arriaga should have lunch. (Then breakfast, and then--oh shit!--dinner.) I had mixed feelings until the final scene, which pays off in a big way, though doesn't benefit from the aforementioned screenplay problems.]

WATER LILIES (Celine Sciamma) - 77

[Sciamma, who quite out-Breillat'd Breillat for me at TIFF '07, seems to have attempted a direct assault on every coming-of-age cliche known to man, and mostly succeeds. First in need of mentioning is Louise Blachere, who allows herself to look like an idiot and a sexual object in the name of a great performance: Anne, the chubby friend, is the opposite of benign, here obnoxiously gluttonous and there fetishized in contrast with her bony pal, Marie. Marie herself toes the line between guile and guilelessness, and Sciamma's intuition for letting the "lessons" she learns be both cruel and sensible is almost perfect. (What better motivation to win a new friend over than the loss of an old one?) Floriane is sluttiness under a microscope, a spot-on portrait of when it works and when it doesn't. The sole missteps are also the most feminist-friendly moments in the film. (Would Anne really have done what she did in response to her long-time crush coming clean with his feelings? Seems more like a cheap opportunity for Sciamma to celebrate Female Assertion.) Sure hope Sciamma ditches the girl power stuff and continues digging into thornier territory, because the latter is mighty rewarding.]

Days 4 & 5

2007-09-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

LUST, CAUTION (Ang Lee) - 25

[The sort of spy movie where the protag secretly talks to her comrades over the phone in hushed tones, making a serious face, and might as well have ordered a custom t-shirt reading "I Am a Spy, Restaurant Patrons." Not superficially rousing, exactly, but not art; with one or two exceptions amidst a 160-minute running time, A. Lee's second Golden Lion winner in three years is studiously conventional.]

LOVE SONGS (Christophe Honore) - 50

[Didn't even notice the structure lifted directly from Demy's classic, but I did notice that for the second film in a row, Honore planted a reference to a classic shot from BED AND BOARD involving Louis Garrel. Apparently he forgot to cross it off his to-do list, a hasty choice that falls in line well with the rest of this one-off musical, replete with simple 8-bar riffs and uninspiring production values. Not an unpleasant sit, though. Honore can direct a duet as sly exchange of desire, and at least Honore isn't just hung up on Nouvelle Vague: the most obvious bit of plagiarism involves shoehorning Ludivine Sagnier into Spike Lee's signature "floating" tracking shot. And though Garrel's transition into bi-curiosity is not entirely convincing, I admire Honore for not turning it into a statement about the character. I'm hoping Chabrol do to Ludivine what Honore does here, because she's a highlight, her dark crassness a good counterpoint to Garrel's innocent goofiness.]

QUARTET (Nicky Hamlyn) - 28

[Bedroom rhymes, sans movement, like Jim Jennings with no apparent aspirations to formal intensity. Lie down on your bed with a camera, turn to a random angle, shoot for a few seconds, and repeat until you have something vaguely screenable.]

ERZAHLUNG (Hannes Schupbach) [s] - 18

[Comparisons to Nathaniel Dorsky are unearned, on the basis of Dorsky's SONG AND SOLITUDE: Dorsky configures every shot to reflect elements of reality and his own artificial constructions, whereas Schupbach appears to just be chilling out with a sculptor and his posse. Schupbach stated the beginning and end of a shot are important to him, but it doesn't show: while some have little movements (drilling, hosing, looking away), some are inanimate, and no discernible patterns develop.]

GONE (Karoe Goldt) [s] - 24

[R.I.P. Jeremy Blake; Goldt's color-scapes are a simpler variation on Blake's, set to badly recorded music.]

SILENT LIGHT (Carlos Reygadas) - 82

[Other than camerawork that boggles the mind, what resonates here from Reygadas' earlier films is a disconnect between physical beauty and the sexual or emotional pleasure we receive from it. (Sample dialogue exchange: "You left my kids with that fatso." "That fatso is a good man.") Not that Johann's mistress is per se ugly, but by conventional standards his wife is at least as attractive--it basically comes down to one's taste for big noses. The casting is crucial, since Reygadas attempts to stare down the great mystery of whether preference in love is sacred or a mere trick of the mind, an even greater mystery when Woman A and Woman B are apples and oranges. If Reygadas had shaved off 20 minutes from the running time, I might be about 10 points higher on the film; the childhood ennui has its moments, but next to the central storyline often feels like so much dead space. But Reygadas has finally conceived material majestic enough to do justice to his formal ambitions.]

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (Andrew Dominik) - 74

[Comparisons to Malick are misguided; Dominik's virtues are a precise control of performances and tone that only wavers when the film's superfluous narration butts in. (You'd think people would at least feel the difference between this film's Ken Burns-style recapitulations of the action and the naive ramblings of a dreamer present in Malick's.) Dominik probably likes dealing with such antagonistic characters to savor the moments in which their antagonism dissolves. Who could forget the moment when Wood and Dick stop fighting and simply look at each other, perhaps waiting for the tension to dissolve, or perhaps a chance to fire the first shot. (Most filmmakers would choose to signal one or the other, as a bluff to the viewer; Dominik's rendering of the moment is exhilarating in its neutrality.) This is the very sort of scene Dominik deserves to protract as long as he pleases--and yet I'm convinced he loses momentum towards the finish-line, as his thesis becomes clear, and Zooey offers too little presence, too late.]

SAD VACATION (Shinji Aoyama) - W/O

[Nice title song; otherwise, WTF? I can't remember a film with a more wildly inconsistent visual plan: elliptical editing here, master shots there, a quite ordinary rural drama for most of its running time. I actually saw about two hours of this, and retained about none of them.]

THE LAST MISTRESS (Catherine Breillat) - 68

[A film, I'm almost sad to report, seemingly created for Breillat to vicariously enjoy the Asia Argento persona. Argento can make impulsively knifing a man look natural because her default facial expression is bemused nastiness. Her Vellini lacks genuine convictions but always effectively replaces them with sadistic glee; she often takes the extra, seemingly unnecessary step, after sympathizing with Ryno, to nonetheless fire one last zinger at him. It makes profound, unspoken sense that she can only fully surrender to him when he's wounded: as atonement for her bitchiness. So why isn't this top-tier Breillat? It feels odd to be leveling this criticism at a filmmaker like Breillat, but the perspective of Vellini, for the most part, registers as too comic, laughing at her cruelty but not yet prepared to feel the weight of it.]

Day 3

2007-09-09T00:18:00.000-07:00

THE BANISHMENT (Andrei Zvyaginstev) - 62

[Cannes reception is inexcusable; minus the last half-hour, I'd be 70+. And that last half-hour isn't so much bad as profoundly superfluous, expanding something easily explained in 30 seconds to, well, 60 times that many. Zvyaginstev is still a master of intergenerational repression--the kids and adults each have vague evidence of each other's lives, and the way they interpret it is fascinating--and deserving Cannes prize-winner Konstantin Lavronenko still expertly limns patriarchy brimming with latent rage. He's genuinely unpredictable, all the moreso for having friends like brother Mark who give terrible, albeit sympathetic advice. Get a new editor, Andrei!]

MY KID COULD PAINT THAT (Amir Bar-lev) - 49

[Jared compared discovering Marla's paintings were the work of a fraud to discovering P.T. Anderson's films were ghost-directed by Guy Ritchie, and whether you like MY KID should, in my opinion, depend on whether that revelation would give you newfound respect for the auteur of SNATCH or an instinctive loathing of BOOGIE NIGHTS, Anderson's superiority to Ritchie being a given. To me it only seems natural to embrace the object, not the maker--since the object should redefine our impression of the maker--even when the maker is a 4-year-old girl, which makes the collectors of Marla's work strike me as nauseatingly naive, and certainly as eager for attention as the Olmsteads. ("Hey, you'll never guess the age of the painter who did that!") This would all be a very interesting subject for investigation, but Bar-lev shies away from it, instead saving all of his contempt for the family. One assumes this is because he doesn't have convictions about art himself, period; this sense damages the film, in that the sequences in which we're meant to analyze the dubiously varied styles of Marla's paintings reek wholly of investigative cynicism, devoid of the joy I instinctively search for in art. The footage of Marla's parents fares better, just because Bar-lev is able to temper his expectations of their honesty.]

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (Cristian Mungiu) - 60

[Mungiu sidesteps formal inventiveness in favor of long master takes, which is wise, because he fumbles most badly when deviating from this formula. (Why the sudden close-up on the abortionist in the hotel upon his searing reproach of the girls?) Mostly notable for a general aversion to sentimentality: Vlad Ivanov is actually quite fine as the abortionist so long as he keeps to matter-of-factly laying out the potential dangers of the operation. He overcomes an undercurrent of sinister motives through sheer intelligence. Laura Vasiliu's Gabita is similar, withholding sympathy for a woman in a bad situation by heightening her own nervous tension to a point where she can merely squeal instead of gesticulate. I'm a little more puzzled by the praise for Anamaria Marinca, a blanker slate of a character who mostly seems to play along with the audience response to the abortionist and Gabita. (She grows more sympathetic towards the former, and more irritated by the latter.) Lacks the dramatic precision of a Puiu, but there's enough here to keep me excited for more work from Mungiu.]

PLOY (Pen-ek Ratanaruang) - 47

[Pen-ek continues to suffuse serious topics with comic nihilism, taking a marriage in discord, effectively sucking any semblance of love from it ("marriage just expires," the husband casually observes), but continuing interest in husband, wife, and the title young girl with a trio of dream sequences. Interesting in theory and deadly to watch, as Pen-ek's signature dissonant synth score hardly makes interest out of mystifying sexual episodes and fights. Don't get why half the frame often looks straight out of a home-furnishing advertisement.]

HAPPINESS (Hur Jin-ho) - 67

[I'd like to have screened this for the protesters often surrounding the Scotiabank, for some end pissed about smoking in cinema. Here's a movie that modestly posits healthy living, and yet is realistic enough in its expectations to watch its cirrhosis-afflicted protagonist revert to booze without a blink. The late-breaking reversal is, I'm guessing, the protag's [SPOILER!] solemn admission to his beloved fellow invalid that he's happier with a carefree slut than her, at once gut-wrenchingly honest and despicable in its brutality. The title is unironic: Hur ruthlessly considers the nature of happiness. Are we better off with companions who perpetually remind us of our failings?]

DIARY OF THE DEAD (George A. Romero) - 73

[Many have made note of the formal restrictions Romero has chosen, and their relation to the YouTube age and New Media. Fair enough, but I was riveted by how a single roving video camera (later augmented to a few) at once gave credence to a bevy of perspectives on the horror conventions at play. Most incisive is the conflict between the project's callousness and its necessity: director Jason firmly believes in the latter, but subsides into neuroses; his tough, intelligent, rather Hawksian girlfriend is usually annoyed by the project but still offers reluctant concessions like "You make a good argument." But the movie has a lot of questions to explore, and answers them satisfactorily, e.g., Q: why do modern horror flicks feature fast zombies?; A: because it's more straightforwardly menacing and ergo easier for the filmmakers to think about. This is a movie that offers 1001 ways to feel guilty and/or exhilarated by mayhem, some of which don't catch on for intriguing reasons: my audience's refusal to applaud the catch-phrase "Don't mess with Texas" says a lot about where its convictions lie.]

Days 1 & 2

2007-09-07T14:06:00.001-07:00

Will get around to writing a bunch more the morning of the 9th.

EASTERN PROMISES (David Cronenberg) - 44

[The most distinctively Cronenbergian scene in this sub-par work, a set piece combining two taboos that have never quite been combined before, is still indicative of everything that's wrong with this film, and performance-wise not distinguishable from this in any significant way. His penchant for transgression can be used for subversive good or indulgent bad, and here the abrasive moments messily pile atop each other. The script is quite bad--clunky here's-the-subtext aphorisms abound e.g. "Sometimes birth and death go together"--and Cronenberg does little to salvage it. Performances range from incoherent--wherefore the vague homoerotic intimations, Viggo?--to disastrous. (Cassel needlessly amplifies his villainy before (sigh) weeping for a baby. Sure...)]

PERSEPOLIS (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi) - W/O

[Fantastic original score by Olivier Bernet, but that wasn't enough to keep my tired ass from bailing. I get the sense Satrapi has reasonable intelligence about how her various childhood epiphanies led her to become an embittered and somewhat indifferent woman, but she fails to trust her audience's, mostly laying out a standard template of nostalgic moments necessarily accessible to everyone. She deviates from this formula a little: I remember liking a moment in which, after learning the sufferings of a relative under the Shah's rule, little Marjane climbs into bed, gasping with half-formed, vicarious joy. But I was pretty sure that kind of nuance was atypical as soon as she and some veiled school buds swooned over random generic dudes, on account of apparently she underwent puberty devoid of even the slightest miscalculation or insecurity.]

LES AMOURS D'ASTREA ET DE CELADON - 75

[Why the 5th century? I'm tempted to think it's Rohmer's (evidently final) affront to the belief that the cinema need be modern or relevant, a widely held position probably responsible in part for his limited popularity. (No wonder I've spotted MASCULIN FEMININ posters at peers' apartments, but no, I dunno, MY NIGHT AT MAUD'S memorabilia.) Theme is reconciliation of the body and soul, exemplified by the fantastic argument scene between Hylus and Celadon's brother. Hylus argues for bodily love, Celadon's brother argues that it lies in the soul, and yet Rohmer makes it as much a competition between each method of persuasion--the former is loud and jolly, the latter quiet and contemptuous--and centered around the underlying sense that each man's nature inevitably gives way to pockets of doubt. Celadon, meanwhile, seems to be trying to reconcile the two within himself, seeing flashes of Astrea's beauty but attributing his love to a sense of obedience towards her. He's at his most romantic when he's also hilariously stubborn; in Rohmer's world, one impeccable virtue is not enough. (See: the druid, who gently encourages the development of many.) This is wonderful stuff, so long as you're attuned to Rohmer's exploration of Nature; obstinate fans of subtle screenwriting, beware.]

THE MOURNING FOREST (Naomi Kawase) - 80

["There are no formal rules," sez an assistant to Machiko, which serves to illustrate the mood Kawase is going for: the camera is everywhere, sometimes too briefly to make an impression, carefree even when it's cutting deep, but usually striking. SHARA didn't strike me as too expressive, but perhaps I responded so well to her latest because she's working with such a lean narrative this time around. Machiko and Shigeki's relationship has such potential to sink into trite cliche--young caretaker treks with senile geezer, only to learn from the experience--but Kawase keeps the film grounded in the experience of the characters: he's sensitive to inner yearnings, she to nature. This is why it's so moving when e.g. she freaks out while trying to talk him out of crossing a tempestuous river: her prudent nature, ostensibly a pragmatic force in calming Shigeki's madness, crosses over into the territory of unsympathetic hysteria.]

LE VOYAGE DE BALLON ROUGE (Hou Hsiao-hsien) - 57

[I blame critics like J-Ro for steering not only Kiarostami but Hou off the deep end: both directors seem more concerned with refining themes than the depth of their art. The opening footage of the balloon itself is the highlight, as Hou is the perfect director to deny it any magic from the get-go: it seems to concede to the whims of the boy but then floats free, like any of Hou's characters, only simply obeying the laws of physics rather than psychology. But the movie is plotless to a fault, contrasting Binoche's neuroses and attempts to reconnect to her childhood with deliberate laziness. Most disappointingly, the balloon transforms from simply being a balloon to a symbol of sorts, there to evoke innocence rather than rubber and helium. (I was especially bummed out because Hou had already so skilfully undermined any artifice in his use of the balloon by showing green-screen dude walking around with it.)

Final note: I assume the lecture given to the kids in the museum is a quasi-reenactment of Hou's own childhood introduction to aesthetics. (One kid observes of a painting, "It's a little happy and a little sad.") Fair enough, but just as often as kids can be unusually intelligent, they can be cruel or stupid. Hou's kindness makes the power of his art suffer.]

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN (Fatih Akin) - 61

[... and then we have Akin, who surely has even less trust in the kindness of strangers than yours truly. I was put off by the sensibility in HEAD-ON, but this is the rare film that confirms bristling with contempt is not necessarily a drawback. It may encourage dislike of the sleazy dad, but still thoroughly lets us feel how old, pathetic, etc. he is. I enjoyed the first two chapters more than the second, which seems to exist because Akin was ashamed of his previously unabashed fatalism. (Fassbinder never was, and it didn't hurt...) To say even more of Akin's general intelligence and less for his taste in CRASH-esque structures, the one overtly crude moment in the film that I can remember--cutting to a sleeping student in the middle of a lecture to indicate just how rough a professor has it--is justified only by plot, much later in the film.]

SECRET SUNSHINE (Lee Chang-dong) - 63

[What a sloppy, bold film, by turns maddening and invigorating. I kept being reminded of Rivette's THE NUN, where any criticism of the church is inextricable from the ecstasy the protagonist finds in it. Lee is never broadly contemptuous, but the religious characters are so open to ridicule I wish he would've worked overtime to avoid it. But for every scene that didn't quite work for me, there was another altogether jaw-dropping in its psychological insight. (The standout is the confession scene, in which a reaction is so unexpected yet plausible as to provoke utter bafflement and acceptance at the same time. Skandie points, anyone else?) I have a feeling Lee plants devices early on so he can deploy them in a big way late in the game, but is less rigorous about using them throughout. (E.g. Song Kang-ho's character, who works quite brilliantly in something like 5% of his screen time but is otherwise unneeded comic relief.)]

Final Schedule

2007-08-28T14:14:00.000-07:00

Biggest regret: no room for Rivette. + = tickets I'm planning to rush.

14th

Glory to the Filmmaker! (Takeshi Kitano)
I’m Not There (Todd Haynes)
I Am From Titov Veles (Teona Strugar Mitevska)
Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing)
Les Bons Debarras (Francis Mankiewicz)

15th

Alexandra (Alexandr Sokurov)
Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot)
L’Amour Cache (Alessandro Capone)
Mutum (Sandra Kogut)
The Sun Also Rises (Jiang Wen)
And Along Came Tourists (Robert Thalheim)

TIFF's Most Wanted

2007-08-21T20:31:00.000-07:00

Since my cinephilia has been slowing down as of late, TIFF functions this year as a catch-up session for me. I figure so long as I'm able, I should document it, so here's a hopefully soon-to-be-chock-full-of-writing blog. Out of films announced so far, here's what I'm interested in--way more than I'll actually be able to see--listed by priority:

Les Amours d’Astree et Celadon
Silent Light
Import/Export
Une Vieille Maitresse
I’m Not There
4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
The Mourning Forest
The Banishment
Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge
Diary of the Dead
Married Life
Forever Never Anywhere
Wolfsbergen
Naissance Des Pieuvres
Les Bons Debarras
The Edge of Heaven
Paranoid Park
Ne Touchez Pas La Hache
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Alexandra
Those Three
Corroboree
Contre Toute Esperance
The Sun Also Rises
The Last Lear
Poor Boy’s Game
The Band’s Visit
Help Me Eros
Atonement
Encarnacion
Me
Sous les Toits de Paris
Jellyfish
Before I Forget
I Am From Titov Veles
A Stray Girlfriend
To Love Someone
Starting Out in the Evening
Happiness
Mutum
Dans la ville de Sylvia
You, the Living
Ploy
And Along Came Tourists
The Savages
Cleaner
Iska’s Journey
Munyurangabo

Secret Sunshine
No Country for Old Men
Les Chansons d’Amour
Glory to the Filmmaker!
Redacted
Sad Vacation
Encounters at the End of the World
L’Amour Cache
Smiley Face
La fille coupee en deux
Useless