Day 5: September 12

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

pro:

Le Pere de mes enfants (Mia Hansen-Love)

W/O:

The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov)

Day 3

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.