Last Seat on the Right

My Sundance Film Festival '12 Coverage

2012-01-28T01:13:00.000-08:00

Here’s my collected Sundance Film Festival coverage for Slant Magazine:

Dispatch #1 (Simon Killer)
Dispatch #2 (For Ellen – The House I Live In)
Dispatch #3 (Bestiaire)
Dispatch #4 (Keep the Lights On)
Dispatch #5 (2 Days in New York – For a Good Time, Call…)
Dispatch #6 (Room 237)

An extra piece co-written for Fandor is here.

On J. Hoberman

2012-01-17T23:58:00.000-08:00

My piece on my experience of reading and translating J. Hoberman’s work is now available on Fandor (click here).

Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents

2012-01-08T13:33:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to announce that today I became one of Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents, thanks to a kind introduction by my former Fandor editor, Kevin B. Lee (the author, among other things, of the recent YouTube smash-hit video-essay "The Spielberg Face").

My first piece for Ebert's site is available here, and it's on Jerzy Skolimowski's terrific Deep End (1970).

"A Separation" wins "Kino" 2011 Poll

2012-01-05T06:18:00.001-08:00

I’m happy to report that the wonderful A Separation (2011) has been chosen as the best movie shown on Polish screens in 2011 by “Kino”, the oldest Polish film monthly. I had the pleasure of submitting a ballot, as well, and I keep my fingers crossed for the further successes of Asghar Farhadi’s terrific movie.

http://www.portalfilmowy.pl/wydarzenia,5,4260,1,1,Najlepsze-filmy-wedlug-Kina.html

3 Q&A's with American Filmmakers

2012-01-04T00:41:00.001-08:00

Thanks to my friend, the photographer and artist Joanna Konik, some of the Q&A’s I did for the American Film Festival in Wrocław are now available on-line. Here is a bunch of them:

I talk to Michael Di Jiacomo, director of Somewhere Tonight here.

I talk to Jaffe Zinn, the director of Magic Valley here.

I talk to Clay Jeter, the director of Jess + Moss, and to his star Sarah Hagan, here.

Keyframe's 2011 Hits

2011-12-28T10:08:00.001-08:00

My pieces on Pauline Kael ranked #7 on the 2011 list of Keyframe’s most popular articles. Thanks go to Kevin B. Lee, the editor of Keyframe! The full list is available here.

My Top 10 for 2011

2011-12-23T03:16:00.000-08:00

My Top 10 for 2011 is now available on Fandor (go here to see my line-up).

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Ramsay)

2011-12-09T06:13:00.000-08:00

My review of We Need to Talk About Kevin is now available on "The House Next Door".

Let's Talk Pauline Kael

2011-12-07T08:28:00.000-08:00

Here are three pieces I recently contributed to Fandor’s Keyframe, all related to Pauline Kael.

My review of Brian Kellow’s bio, A Life in the Dark is here…

…my Top 5 of Kael’s reviews is here…

…and my Bottom 5 of Kael’s reviews is here.

Enjoy!

Pan Tadeusz (1999, Wajda)

2011-11-27T05:17:00.000-08:00

My piece on Andrzej Wajda's Pan Tadeusz is now available on Fandor (click here).

My conversation with J. Hoberman & Jonathan Rosenbaum

2011-11-24T01:19:00.000-08:00

Here's a part of the conversation I did with J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum on the occasion of the Polish screening of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW in Wrocław; enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T92i8J6uLjc

Play (2011, Östlund)

2011-10-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

My review of Play is now available on Fandor. (Click here)

Melancholia (2011, Trier)

2011-10-04T05:13:00.000-07:00

My review of Melancholia is now available on Fandor (click here).

TIFF 2011

2011-09-20T02:01:00.000-07:00

Here’s the full Fandor day-to-day TIFF coverage, which I shared with Kevin B. Lee and Fernando F. Croce:

Memorable TIFF moments

My TIFF '11 list of movies watched, in descending order of preference.

My TIFF 2011

2011-09-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

Here’s my own TIFF 2011 line-up, arranged in a descending order of preference. Asterisks indicate that although the movie was screened this year in Toronto, I saw it on a different occasion. I saw 30 movies at TIFF, all of which are included below. I didn’t rate my two walk-outs, which were HELENO and HEADSHOT. Of the films I wanted to see but failed to do so, the most important ones are: THE KID WITH A BIKE, SHAME, THE ARTIST, DAMSELS IN DISTRESS and DRIVE.

Positions 1-7 represent film I would rate as PROs in CrixPix at CineMasters. It follows that positions 8-18 are *pros*, 19-27 are *mixed*, 28-33 are *cons* and 34-39 are *CONS*.

1. A SEPARATION* (Farhadi)

2. ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA* (Ceylan)

3. THE CARDBOARD VILLAGE (Olmi)

4. THE LONELIEST PLANET (Loktev)

5. DARK HORSE (Solondz)

6. TWILIGHT PORTRAIT (Nikonovna)

7. THE DEEP BLUE SEA (Davies)

8. FOOTNOTE (Cedar)

9. MELANCHOLIA* (von Trier)

10. GOD BLESS AMERICA (Goldthwait)

11. MICHAEL* (Schleinzer)

12. THE TURIN HORSE* (Tarr)

13. ELENA (Zvagintsev)

14. TWIXT (Coppola)

15. KEYHOLE (Maddin)

16. A DANGEROUS METHOD (Cronenberg)

17. MONEYBALL (Miller)

18. THE MOUNTAIN (Salhab)

19. YOUR SISTER’S SISTER (Shelton)

20. DREILEBEN – ONE MINUTE OF DARKNESS (Hochhäusler)

21. BARRYMORE (Canuel)

22. PINA* (Wenders)

23. OUTSIDE SATAN* (Dumont)

24. DREILEBEN – DON’T FOLLOW ME AROUND (Graf)

25. BURNING MAN (Teplitzky)

26. CHICKEN WITH PLUMS (Parronnaud/Satrapi)

27. THINK OF ME (Wizemann)

28. THE STUDENT (Mitre)

29. DREILEBEN – BEATS BEING DEAD (Petzold)

30. HABEMUS PAPAM* (Moretti)

31. LE HAVRE* (Kaurismäki)

32. ALOIS NEBEL (Lunák)

33. MICHAEL (Basgupta)

34. LIPSTIKKA (Sagall)

35. IN DARKNESS (Holland)

36. ELLES (Szumowska)

37. THE INDICENT (Courtès)

38. THE ORANGES (Farino)

39. ANONYMOUS (Emmerich)

Young Girls of Wilko (1979, Wajda)

2011-07-12T03:38:00.000-07:00

My piece on Wajda’s Young Girls of Wilko written for Fandor (click here).

Lawnswood Gardens (2011, Kuczyński)

2011-07-08T12:40:00.000-07:00

As accomplished as it is unadventurous, Lawnswood Gardens is the latest entry in what I’m tempted to nickname “Paweł Kuczyński’s Professor Series”. One of the most original (and least apprectiated in this country) independent Polish filmmakers managed (so far) to portray his own father, professor Janusz Kuczyński, in Philosopher’s Paradise (2004), as well as conceive a fictional persona of professor Feliks Lewiński that haunted both the sublime Nietzschean inquiry of Light Denied (2008) and the quiet trans-cultural-comedy gem, Phenomenology of Truth (2009).

Lawnswood Gardens focuses on the renowned Polish sociologist/philosopher, Zygmunt Bauman, and sets out to give an account of his life and work. Bauman is a seemingly easy subject: he’s affable and talkative, and yet there’s a sense his guard is up at all times. He’s not acting, obviously, but he’s remarkably composed and not once in the whole movie do we get the feeling that he reveals something he would mind other people to know about. Though brilliant, he doesn’t seem driven – you don’t get a sense of an all-encompassing compulsion to write and proselytize from him (as you did when watching Janusz Kuczyński, as well as “watching” Nietzsche’s ghost roaming through Light Denied). Bauman is the sanest, and possibly the happiest, in Kuczyński’s ongoing gallery of philosophers.

The director seems to have reacted to that trait in his subject’s personality and that reaction is visible in the film’s tone and style. Kuczyński’s signature irony is all but missing from Lawnswood Gardens, which takes a while to get used to, but is by no means a defect. The director is conspicuously absent from the frame, which stands in direct contrast to Light Denied and Philosopher’s Paradise. This is largely Bauman’s show, and he turns out to be a seductive, if not downright spellbinding, talker. He speaks in fluent, fully organized passages that sound like ready-made paragraphs and yet seem to be coined right before our eyes. There are no instances of Bauman getting lost in a sentence or losing his grasp of things (which was the case in the great supermarket sequence in Philosopher’s Paradise, in which Kuczyński, Sr. was near-desperate in his quest to locate the dairy section). It’s fair to say that Lawnswood Gardens – instead of challenging its subject – follows him closely and reverently (which is true even on a literal level: we get many tracking shots showing Bauman’s back as he moves through spaces by car and on foot, or simply stares into an open field – which serves as the film’s poster, too).

If I’m not mistaken, Kuczyński can be seen in one shot holding a boom mic, and is heard a couple of times on the soundtrack (once, we see him positioning the microphone before the interview starts). Still, it’s highly characteristic of the movie’s overall tone that in one of those exchanges between him and Bauman we hear the professor ask: “Yes?”, to which Kuczyński responds with a definite: “Yes!”. The goal of Lawnswood Gardens is less to discuss Bauman’s ideas than to present them (hence multiple shots of listening students), and the movie does it in a very eloquent, gripping manner.

The most significant stylistic flourish comes in the form of re-enactments of Janina Bauman’s account of her WW2 experiences. Kuczyński employs couple of memorable devices, blatantly staging a fully-costumed reenactment in the midst of contemporary blocks of flats, as well as distancing the viewer in an almost Bressonian manner when he doubles the words spoken by the actors witha a word-for-word repetition in the voice-over (this particular scene made me think of the first section of Andrzej Munk’s Passenger [1961-63] – the one that follows the prologue – but I’m not quite sure why).

All in all, the movie is by no means old-fashioned (and I loved the idea of the star-of-David-crowned tram travelling through the whole film), but it seems like a much safer effort than Kuczyński’s earlier work. I applaud it, but I hope the streak of daredevil experimentation and downright folly will reappear in the director’s future projects. I always await them with pleasure.

Google Me (2007, Killeen)

2011-07-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

Rating: **1/2

Every truism has at least the potential of setting our mouths ajar to utter a mindless “wow”, before we come to our senses and rightly dismiss it as drivel. “We are all connected” is only one of the bunch, and yet Jim Killeen managed (doggedly and sometimes strenuously) to build a documentary around it. Google Me opens with a simple premise of Jim googling himself and setting out to connect with his namesakes around the world. Who are they? Are they like himself? Are they – yes – “connected” by something more than mere name…?

As it turns out (surprise, surprise), the Jims are not at all alike. There’s a priest, a swinger, a couple of others (an all-white crowd, by the way). Killeen hops around the globe asking his fellow Killeens a question about “a man’s purpose”.

With his James Gandolfini-like smirk and generally affable presence (not to mention a blatant self-dramatization resembling Brian Herzlinger’s narcissistic turn in My Date with Drew [2004]), Killeen makes for a tolerable subject, but there is an element lacking – both in him and the movie at large – that has something to do with want of responsiveness. For all the differences between various Jims, the central one reacts almost identically to every one of his namesakes – that is with an open smile and a perfunctory curiosity. He meets plenty of people; yet you hardly feel he encountered anyone by the movie’s end.

Google Me is a skin-deep odyssey in search of the meaning of life, which stops short of a becoming a true journey of self-discovery. Instead, it’s a series of mostly boring interviews, with some shamelessly touristy inserts, all stressing various cultural differences (Jim’s squirming over a Vegimite sandwich is a visual equivalent of an entry in a “Xenophobe’s Guide to Australia”).

Part of the movie’s charm – if “charm” is the right word for sufficiently inoffensive naïveté – lies in its touching formal semi-flourishes. First-time filmmaker Killeen can’t help himself but insert his own reaction shots into the interviews (some of the double takes seem painstakingly re-enacted and don’t gel with the interviewees’ expressions). However, as is the case with most silly follies, there are bits that seem almost inspired, some having to do with Killeen dramatization of his hilariously pat mid-life crisis at the very beginning of the movie.

Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky (2009, Trakovsky)

2011-05-11T06:32:00.000-07:00

Quiet and understated as it is, Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky is a highly personal attempt at summoning a seemingly dead cinematic spirit. Dmitry Trakovsky’s quest to locate Andrei Tarkovsky in the immediate present goes far beyond a simple search for his “influence” or “following”. What Trakovsky sets out to achieve is to find out the ways in which Tarkovsky is still alive, and that’s why the movie’s single act of formal daring may be its beautiful, if misleading title. Instead of “searching” or “remembering” Tarkovsky, this new documentary hints boldly at his persistent, real, and this-wordly presence. The latter may manifest itself in memories others have of Tarkovsky, but it also finds a material dimension in his son Andrei Andreevich. Finally, and most poignantly, the filmmaker points to numerous people whose life choices were forever altered by encountering Tarkovsky’s films. As we’re watching the serious, unsmiling and yet serene face of a young Orthodox monk, as he’s declaring Tarkovsky’s work as the single most decisive factor in his choice of becoming a man of cloth, it’s hard not to think of Tarkovsky as still living through the existence of this man.

Structurally, the movie is conceived a series of encounters rather than as a multi-voiced narrative created in the editing room. In effect, we’re dealing with specific people rather than with floating clusters of themes – each interview has its own dynamic and we never come back to a person once they’re finished telling their story. This simple device allows us to feel the vocal rhythms of particular interviewees, and makes for a rather contemplative and strongly immersive viewing experience, especially considering how little in terms of flashy camerawork or overtly self-conscious technique Dmitry Trakovsky uses here.

Depending on the viewer’s sensibilities, different accounts will sink deeper than others (although my guess is that the flamboyantly moralistic, blatantly self-aggrandizing huckster delivery by Krzysztof Zanussi will be no one’s favorite). Overall, this wonderful documentary circles around its subject hesitantly and respectfully, and yet does not flinch at revealing his less appealing sides (namely his way of treating women as “B-class people” pointed out by the still-ravishing Nostalghia [1983] star, Domiziana Giordano).

To someone like me, who grew first to love Tarkovsky’s work and then to object to it, Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky is indeed like meeting an old mentor; someone once revered, then rebelled against, and yet never quite exiled from one’s head. At this point in my life, I mostly resent Tarkovsky’s disdain for secular order of things and for earthly concerns. It strikes me more and more that his elaborate search for spirituality was almost a way of avoiding the question of happiness and branding it a selfish pursuit at best. Still, I may come to love Tarkovsky once more some day, and Meeting… certainly made sure that I don’t ever want to forget him.

[Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky can be purchased here.]

Midnight Movies in Wrocław

2011-03-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

Hi guys,

this July, I'm curating a series devoted to midnight movies for the Era New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw.

As an accompanying event, my translation of "Midnight Movies" by J.Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum will be published, and both authors confirmed that that they will appear at the festival.

Here's the full program, as well the introductory essay I wrote (in English, which was then translated into Polish):

http://www.enh.pl/artykul.do?lang=en&id=940

For some reason, I can't link directly to the English site, so if you get redirected to the Polish one, just click the "English" button at the top left corner of the screen.

Hope some of you can make it to Poland this July!

Another Year (2010, Leigh)

2011-02-18T06:22:00.000-08:00

Rating: ***

Another Year is so familiar it feels rigged. It’s a superbly crafted and deeply affecting movie, and I advise everyone to see it, yet there’s something in it that I object to, and the following remarks are an attempt at defining this troubling element.

For a director so often (and justly) praised for his all-encompassing humanitarian approach, Leigh seems strongly drawn to the notion of duality: behavioral, structural and even visual. His most memorable images are two-shots, like that famed long take of Cynthia and Hortense in Secrets & Lies (1996), having their long exchange at an empty café, or the magnificent closing shot of two nursing mothers in Four Days in July (1984). What I find troubling in Leigh (whom I consider to be one of the greatest directors in world cinema), and what significantly taints Another Year in my view, is his habit of pitting characters against each other while giving them biased treatment – not in terms of empathy, which is spread rather evenly in each film (save Who’s Who [1979]), but in terms of applying frank and unflinching insight.

In Another Year, Tom and Gerri, the central married couple played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen (who’s a God’s riff on Shelley Duvall), seem to have attained the Holy Grail of modernity (or at least of a successful therapy): they’re balanced without being rigid. Leigh’s distribution of anxiety is brazenly uneven – it’s Mary, played by Lesley Manville, who embodies it in the world of this movie. Mary keeps “popping in” to visit her friends, her nerves perpetually frayed and hands all aflutter (she’s a neurotic twin to Brenda Blethyn’s chirping Gloria in Grown-Ups [1980]). She’s a lush; a walking mess in constant need of validation who takes hostage anyone foolish enough to grant her their full attention. Each time Tom and Gerri are with her, they can’t help but mildly (and understandably) condescend to her.

What I mind about this film is, ultimately, that Leigh goes soft on Tom, Gerri and their son. Happy chatter is a way of life for them, and nothing seems capable of breaking their constant merriment. It may even be that nothing truly touches them, thanks to the armor provided by Leigh, who feels more protective of them than of a character like Mary, who gets straightforwardly admonished at the end for her selfish ways. It is the same admonishment one witnessed in All or Nothing (and again, it was the Lesley Manville character who had to undergo it), and in Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), in which Leigh went as far as branding the Eddie Marsan character unredeemable (even his teeth were rotten).

The last shot of Another Year is masterly: Mary’s face gets alive for a second, and then – as soon as she’s no longer the center of attention – she goes blank, recoils, and even the soundtrack goes silent as she fails yet again to weave herself into the lives of others. Leigh is capable of this amazing insight, and yet guilty of carefree idealization of Tom and Gerri, who are so quaint they’re sugarcoated. Jim Broadbent’s old codger and Ruth Sheen’s mother-earth-fancy-a-cuppa are presented as beacons of sanity, whereas they’re not even fleshed out enough to require sanity in the first place. They don’t seem to have contradictory forces in them to balance out, so how can we learn from them; much less believe in them…?

It may be that Tom and Gerri’s mysterious contentment is so much up Leigh’s alley that he exempts them from satirical incision, only to apply it forcefully to Mary. Much like the central married couple, he’s a gardener in a greenhouse of his rich creation. Some flowers he tends to, and reverently – some, he can’t help but nip.

GasLand (2010, Fox)

2011-02-15T12:33:00.000-08:00

Rating: ***1/2

Civic concern rarely produces great art, but if it results in a lean, conscientious piece of filmmaking, you can’t help but welcome the results. Josh Fox’s GasLand, a muckraking investigative documentary on the unacknowledged side effects of natural gas drilling across the U.S., makes one angry without stooping to rabble-rousing tricks.

Josh Fox has a non-actorish, yet concrete and affable on-screen presence, which saves GasLand from joining the Michael Moore school of agit-prop romps. Moore, to an unprecedented extent, combined the role of a clown with that of a reporter – by turning himself into a star of his movies, he got closer to the legacy of Robert Benchley than to that of Robert Flaherty. The most troubling thing about Moore’s approach was that he blurred the line between muckraking and self-aggrandizing (something Fox avoids altogether).

That is not to say that he lacks wit as a filmmaker. He’s perfectly capable of pointing out funny details he stumbles upon in his quest: the highlights include “the most comfortable couch in the United States”, as enormous as it’s furry (it even sports a tail), which Fox finds in one of the visited homes. Still, there are no knowing winks that would condescend to the interviewees (or to us).

Fox’s touch does falter, but so scarcely that it’s hardly worth mentioning (he’s a bit too zoom-happy when one of his subjects is on a brink of tears, and he lingers too long on the frozen critters killed by one of the leaks).

The movie’s steady refusal of falling into genre patterns borrowed from fiction moviemaking is what makes it fresh and affecting. You can praise The Cove (2009) all you want, but there was something cheap and demeaning in that movie’s eager tapping of spy-thriller devices, with the music pounding and with the editing trying to bend the (already horrific) reality, so that it meets the audience's hunger for thrills.

Fox’s near-deadpan tone of voice, along with his restraint from employing hip flourishes make his sole flight of performing fancy (a banjo concert in a gas-mask, played against a backdrop of land covered with porcupine-like field of gas derricks) come off as very poignant. When, at the very end, he addresses the audience and requires its political participation, you don’t feel manipulated, but alerted to something that matters – and you may acutually breathe a sigh of relief at being treated like an adult.

Pink Flamingos (1972, Waters)

2011-02-11T02:03:00.000-08:00

In John Waters’ movies, filth is bliss, and Divine (“every homophobe’s nightmare”, per Piotr Mirski) makes a great slob Marlene to grace his Sternberg-like tribute. The first color feature they made together, Pink Flamingos not only proved an instant box-office sensation, but revealed a tender streak in Waters that no one (even him) can deny – or resist. The story is one of savage rivalry between Divine’s multi-generational trailer-trash family and a couple engaged in grotesque sex trafficking: the prize they all crave is the title of “the filthiest people alive” (and Waters does them all one better by making his movie, of course).

Assorted atrocities include grossly ravished chickens and eagerly gorged dog’s feces, so that the film seems to condone Divine’s on-camera capsule of her political beliefs: “Kill everyone now”. Still, Pink Flamingos depicts a family unit that – however wacky – is not exactly dysfunctional, and there’s no denying that the sinister couple played by David Lochary and Mink Stole is in such a perfect sexual sync, and so devoted to one another, that you can’t help yourself but want to be like them when you grow up.

Loving (1970, Kershner)

2011-02-01T08:56:00.000-08:00

Rating: ****

Everyday tensions build up beautifully in Loving (1970). And yet the way they flow, one doesn’t feel pushed to overstate their significance. There’s no grotesque overflow of mishaps in the life of Brooks Wilson, the philandering New York graphic designer played by George Segal. His middle-age crisis doesn’t usher a cosmic rupture of the sort Charlie Kaufman will convey in Synecdoche, New York (2008), a movie that Loving somewhat resembles.

Since we learn early on that Brooks has promised his mistress to inform his wife about his affair, he’s like a walking time bomb for us. There’s not scene where Segal wouldn’t hint at his character’s back-burner operating full-tilt. He watches his wife (Eva Marie Saint, in a performance to match Segal’s), his kids and his house, and all the time one can hear him asking: is it worth to jeopardize all this…?

Brooks’ sexual longing (suggested, in the movie’s single instance of literal-mindedness, by “imaginary” inserts of him having sex with his lover) is palpable throughout. The force pulling him towards adultery is sweetly, yet painfully insistent. At the same time he starts to see his family as an imperiled unit – everyday bickering and mess are annoying, but not annoying enough for Brooks to make the incision it would take to move on to something new.

The way Segal plays Brooks, he’s both meek, mean, level-headed and volatile. This may be one of the towering (yet still virtually unsung) male performances in American movies. Brooks’ final act of adultery, made into cruelly insensitive sexual slapstick by a device I won’t reveal here, is the high-point of the film. Segal gives in to temptation from the inside of his character: he’s not telegraphing anything.

Irving Kershner’s sense of textural richness seems all-encompassing. There’s not a scene in the movie that could be called perfunctory, or one that would give the impression of being too glib or hasty (and yet Loving clocks in at a neat 89 minutes!). Gordon Willis’ cinematography gives a charge to sets that would otherwise feel commonplace (although I felt that there were a couple of shots in which he overdid his Hey-look-I’m-Rembrandt shadowy self).

This is by far the best movie I’ve seen in a long time. The only director working nowadays that shows a talent similar to Kershner’s is, to my mind, James Gray. I can’t wait to see some more of Kershner’s early stuff – too bad there’s so little of it available on DVD…

TRON: Legacy (2010, Kosinski)

2010-12-29T11:31:00.000-08:00

Rating: **

As noisy, disjointed and tone-deaf as it is, TRON: Legacy is at least enjoyable as a footnote of sorts to this year’s most celebrated movie, The Social Network (2010). Should the Joseph Kosinski’s 3-D behemoth be called TRON: The Grid, the connection would have been even more pronounced.

Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is obsessed with creating a democratic cyber-Utopia, with the word “sharing” for a constitution and the “users” for a self-guarding army. And since there’s no business like share business these days (case in point: Mark Zuckerberg), small wonder that his innocuous impulse ends up as a huge corporation, Encom (case in point: Facebook etc.).

Early on in the movie the executive board of Encom is shown and – in an amusing and perceptive touch – 99% of its members are not a day over 25 (they wear morbid-chic Twilight attire). Youth without youth is avenged by… you guessed it: youth. Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), Kevin’s admirably sane heir, is the main shareholder in Encom, but he’s cool enough to sabotage his own company (in a Peter Parker-like opening stunt).

The movie is mostly gibberish: rarely entertaining, always numbing and inconsistent throughout. Its absolute nadir comes with the appearance of Michael Sheen as Castor, the sub-Joel Grey M.C. of the surprisingly commonplace cyber-joint “The End of the Line” (a nod to Gaspar Noé’s “Rectum”, as depicted in Irreversible [2004], perhaps…?). Sheen is desperately camping things up: all giggly, he prances around, brandishing a stupid neon-cane (with top hat inexplicably missing), and finally belting out what might have been the movie’s wishful motto: “This is going to be quite a ride!”.

(It’s an embarrassing performance, but it doesn’t top some of the lines others were given to chew on. Sam, when asked to convey what sun is like, comes up with this nugget of B-movie descriptive flair: “Warm. Radiant. Beautiful”).

The movie not only eschews the visual elegance of its 1982 predecessor (which I happen to like), but is not above devouring Stanley Kubrick’s white Beyond-Infinity-Chamber from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In Kosinski, the dish being served in this venerable setting is a roasted pig and the wine (?) is toxic-waste-green. Classy.

Just like Avatar (2009) a year ago, TRON: Legacy delivers a metaphor for our own experience of viewing it. There’s a sequence midway through that shows “The Games”: a gladiator-like struggle suspended in mid-air, performed for the roaring crowds down below. The roaring multitudes, though heard in head-splitting outbursts, are nowhere in sight: they’re bathed in shadows. They’re us: all “users”, relevant only for the sake of having “logged in”, but not for the sake of being there or feeling anything at all.

Worlds Apart: The Best Movies of 2010

2010-12-21T00:05:00.000-08:00

Whatever you make of it, the fact is that the best movies of 2010 focused on tiny, private and/or completely artificially constructed worlds that can be examined but are not easily ruptured. Be it the wacko-fundamentalist family unit in Dogtooth, its ultra-loose opposite in Daddy Longlegs, the enormous Catholic sanctuary in Lourdes, or the beach house in About Elly – not to mention the total confinement of one’s own computer screen in The Social Network – 201o was fascinated with insularity. (I haven't seen Tron: Legacy yet, but I'm guessing it would make another case in point.) Only one movie on the list that follows has a true epic scale and employs an international setting, thus not only defying fragmentation itself, but reaffirming the functional unity of our world as such. That the hero of the movie is a terrorist (Carlos), is another matter.

Here’s my Top 10 for the year 2010:

1. Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos)

Lanthimos’ small-scale homey prison-camp family fable is not only the most stunningly executed movie I’ve seen this year; it’s also the wittiest and most horrific variation on the perils of insularity since Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence (2004). Emulating a number of seemingly contradictory influences – ranging from Pasolini to Rocky (1976) – Lanthimos created a haunting vision of human culture as a psychotic parlor game erupting in violence, that is both difficult to match and impossible to shrug off. (See my full review here).

2. About Elly (Asghar Farhadi)

Read my review here.

3. Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean)

Read my review here.

4. Carlos (Olivier Assayas)

A movie that needs to be seen in its 330-minute version or not at all, Assayas’ mammoth yet slick actioner goes down like a shot of vodka (OK, a series of shots). In its multilingual and geographical grandeur, the movie achieves something that should be flaunted in the ads as Globe-O-Vision. In its intermittent employment of action movie kicks and analytical recoil, Assayas’s film offers an unparalleled glimpse into modern history without a hair of sermonizing, and with a good deal of excitement (and horror).

5. Greenberg (Noah Baumbach)

It wasn’t until the second viewing that I appreciated Baumbach’s quietly accomplished feat of throwing an über-jerk onto us and then pairing him with the most happily autistic screen presence this side of Seinfeld’s Patrick Warburton (courtesy of the indelible Greta Gerwig).

6. Lourdes (Jessica Hausner)

Read my review here.

7. Eyes Wide Open (Haim Tabakman)

Everything was set for a commonplace doomed-love story. By virtue of his precise (sometimes scarily so) direction, Tabakman eschewed the limitations of the material and gave us the most devastating account of desire warring with culture that hit the screen in 2010. I’d choose the scene in which a passing bus is suddenly revealing the crowd of hostile on-lookers as the single most potent shot I’ve seen this year.

8. The Social Network (David Fincher)

A virtual steamroller of energy and verbal zest, The Social Network has the distinction of surpassing its own perilous topicality and adding a great new character to the venerable lineage of American folk heroes, without stooping to making him cute or even likable.

9. Prodigal Sons (Kimberly Reed)

Read my review here.

10. Daddy Longlegs (Ben & Josh Safdie)

Read my review here.

Runners-up: Exit through the Gift Shop (Banksy); Amer (Cattet, Forzani); Boxing Gym (Wiseman); Father of My Children (Hansen-Løve); Let it Rain (Jaoui); Bluebeard (Breillat); Enter the Void (Noe).

Plus my annual personal awards:

Best Director: Olivier Assayas (Carlos)

Best Actor: Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network)

Best Actress: Mirela Oprisor (Tuesday, After Christmas)

Worst movie of the year: The A-Team (Joe Carnahan)

Undertow (2009, Fuentes-León)

2010-12-18T09:12:00.000-08:00

Rating: ***1/2

*MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW*

Brokeback Mountain (2005) meets Ghost (1990)…? While Javier Fuentes-León’s Undertow is prone to such shorthand (and even gently mocking) descriptions, in fact it’s a wonderfully accomplished love story that flirts with despair as often as it does with cuteness.

The story centers on Miguel (Cristian Mercado), a Peruvian worker from a tiny fishing village. About to become a father, he is seen in the very first scene affectionately kissing his wife’s pregnant belly. A couple of scenes later, an equal – if not greater – affection is showered by Miguel on his male lover, Santiago (Manolo Cardona), and the film’s seemingly commonplace dramatic conflict is set in motion.

The kicker comes some 20 minutes in: after Santiago is killed in a swimming accident, his (very carnal and sexually quite active) ghost keeps paying visits to Miguel and will continue until his body is not found and properly buried in the sea. What follows could turn into a savage satirical farce, and yet Fuentes-León resists the temptation, opting for a gentle (almost fey) sense of humor and a genuine heartbreak of a relationship made impossible less by death than by social convention.

There’s a remarkable moment mid-way through the movie: anxious Miguel is persuaded by the ghost of Santiago to walk hand in hand down a village street. Miguel – gay, yet homophobic to the point of self-denial – never even admitted his identity to himself, much less flaunted it in front of other people. And yet, in an instance, he gives his hand to Santiago and the two stroll together, in perfect bliss made possible only because of the ghost’s invisibility to everyone but Miguel. It’s a lovely movie-Utopia of a scene, made poignant and painful by the fact that it fulfils itself solely on a fantasy level.

The movie has its shortcomings: the economic conditions of Miguel’s life seem fake, all sex is prettified, and the movie pussyfoots around the question of Miguel’s lack of sexual feeling for his wife (the movie suggests he’s gay, not bisexual – and yet it doesn’t confront the question of unsatisfying straight sex Miguel is forced to be having; it merely shrugs it off by suggesting that he “thinks of Santiago” each time).

Still, Undertow is a beautifully executed, socially relevant and emotionally compelling gay fable, in which love defies death, but society defies the individual, in turn.

Tangled (2010, Greno, Howard)

2010-11-28T15:32:00.000-08:00

Rating: **1/2

Tangled is a very strange title for any animated feature, not least for the 50^th animated feature coming from the Walt Disney studios (it seems more like something out of early Fassbinder – or late Julia Roberts). The movie, though enjoyable, has a rather dull look to it – all honeyed golds and pinks, like those Barbie (or My Little Pony) straight-to-DVD movies that you don’t want your kid to watch. What’s more troubling, though, is that there’s little sense of wonder in the whole production. The script sits rather uneasily between a straight retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale, and the morbidly Shrekian notion of destroying all faith in fairy tales as such. Once the off-screen narration begins and you hear the compulsive, self-conscious (and borderline apologetic) qualifiers in the first couple of sentences, it’s easy to get apprehensive – and for a reason.

The movie doesn’t really believe in the elation of romance, or rather – it believes in it and it doesn’t, by turns. You won’t find anything in Tangled that would match the silly energy and giddy flow of the “Whole New World” flying-carpet sequence from Alladin (1992) – here, when Rapunzel leaves her tower for the first time, she becomes so anxious and guilt-ridden that her brief shrieks of joy are interwoven with violent sobbing and therapy-session banter between her and the Flynn Ryder character. It works as a joke, but undercuts the inner workings of the story and makes the final pay-off matter less.

I liked most of the film, but it lacks a sustained tone as a whole. I’d much prefer the filmmakers to take sides more forcefully: either they’re into the whole ironic deconstruction thing, or they tell an engaging, energetic tale of magic, romance and adventure. It was the unity of tone made The Princess and the Frog (2009) so successful and it's the lack of it that makes Tangled, well, flawed.

Breathless (1983, McBride)

2010-11-22T01:11:00.000-08:00

Rating: ***1/2

Jim McBride’s Breathless (1983) is in many ways even more radical an aesthetic statement than Godard’s celebrated 1959 version. By switching the nationalities of the main couple, as well as by trading Paris for gaudy California, McBride shifted the meanings of the original material, and yet managed to preserve its core. The main theme here (as it was in Godard) is the displacement of an individual in democratic (i.e. Americanized) culture. McBride’s protagonist is even more steeped in pulp references and there’s more glee in his infatuation with the Silver Surfer comic-strip character than there was in Belmondo’s emulating Bogart’s cool.

McBride’s forceful visual style, and his stunning use of expertly choreographed long takes (my favorite is the long, teasing sex scene involving imaginative use of an answering machine and a plate-glass shower curtain), owes more to classical Hollywood storytelling than to Godard’s jump cuts. Thus this Breathless may seem less distanced from the popular culture intoxication that it both mocks and embraces. The scene with the couple making love in front of a movie screen on which Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950) is playing, is both tacky in its shameless TV-ad-like gloss and stunning in how literal-minded and arresting its central metaphor is.

Unstoppable (2010, T.Scott)

2010-11-11T08:57:00.000-08:00

Rating: ***

More of a fun ride than a movie proper, Tony Scott’s Unstoppable makes no claims to subtlety, and is in many ways an even more radical disembowelment of the modern action flick genre than Scott’s jittery Taking of Pelham One Two Three (2009) remake – with which it shares a star, a style and (though this remains to be seen) probably a box office pull.

The premise of having one million tons worth of steel blindly speeding down the railroads of industrial Pennsylvania has an dumb impact of its own. Having cast Chris Pine – for whom the earthly mph must be something of a trifle after having experienced the warp speed in last year’s Star Trek (2009) – and Denzel Washington as the two barely-delineated but amiable buddy-leads doesn’t hurt either.

Unlike in Jan de Bont’s Speed (1994), the menace here is the speed itself, and not just any stock-psycho (be it Hopper, be it Travolta) spurting demands and/or prophecies into his phone (thus transforming the hair-raising action sequences into moral struggles between good and evil).

Now, a stray unmanned train speeding toward doom isn’t exactly tough to politicize, either. One can clearly see Scott sympathies lying with the blue-collar workers whose guts, hunch and experience save the day in spite of the big bosses’ failed attempts to act. (This working-class optimism is so clear-eyed and populist that we are never pushed too far to acknowledge the obvious guilt of Ethan Suplee’s slob-mechanic, whose very negligence triggered the whole event and resulted in a death of one person).

Still, the movie is so unashamedly mechanical and its mode such a willful assault of our senses, that after 100 minutes of Scott’s signature firecracker-zooming, compulsive fast cutting and non-stop flow of Harry Gregson-William’s throbbing score, one can end up too exhausted to fully partake in the closing on-screen elation of a feat spectacularly accomplished.

Due Date (2010, Phillips)

2010-11-06T15:42:00.000-07:00

Rating: ***

With all its lazy sitcom writing and its grating overload of dog reaction shots, Due Date strikes me as this year’s most rousing comedy, thanks to a happy pairing of two extremely odd and brilliant comic actors. The volatile straight man Robert Downey, and the hirsute nutball Zach Galifianakis make a great team together.

Todd Phillips doesn’t have the scale (or sensitivity) of, say, Jonathan Demme: his mix of abrupt action sequences and run-of-the-mill character comedy is purely mechanical, and never does it account for a genuine shift in tone. The shocking jolts (car crash, gunshot, etc.) keep coming and never truly disrupt the characters’ comic rapport with the audience. Still, it’s due to Phillips’ remarkable timing that those jolts aren’t just slapstick effects devoid of consequences. There’s a dark, surrealistic streak in Phillips that came to light a year ago in The Hangover (2009), and is on display in Due Date, as well.

The new movie is more dutiful in hanging onto generic rewards offered by the buddy movie, but the oddity of particular choices made by Downey and Galifianakis defy all conventions. (The scene in which Downey spits in the little mutt’s muzzle in ager has a raw energy that’s both scary and convulsively funny.)

Kaboom (2010, Araki)

2010-10-23T00:08:00.000-07:00

Rating: **1/2

Garishly tinted, wilfully sophomoric (and only intermittently funny), Greg Araki’s Kaboom wears its credentials on its sleeve, being its father’s baby through and through. This broad rehash of Donnie Darko-style prescient dread, served as a sex-and-gore farce, relies so much on its characters’ involvement in their absurd predicaments, that it risks missing out on an audience not trained in Araki’s ways.

Nothing less than an Apocalypse-update (the world indeed goes ka-boom in the end), the movie is a story of multiple awakenings and recurring nightmares, building up and canceling each other out at the same time. The main character’s visions of baleful figures wearing animal masks go hand in hand with his bisexual flings, and it’s to the movie’s credit that for most part these two strands are equally engaging.

It’s only towards the end that the cluttered narrative wears one down, and when the whimsical dénouement finally arrives, it’s a cop-out of sorts. The movie seems to be saying that its own democratic vision of an orgasm-chasing, politically inane humanity is not enough to sustain the story – or the world, for that matter. In that sense Araki (as usual) makes a half-desperate, half-prankish gesture towards the void, telling us that we can’t afford anything but a self-destructive joke (and its slow petering out before our eyes may be integral part of his vision).

Polish Film Series in Dublin

2010-10-08T15:37:00.000-07:00

On 16th and 17th October it will be my pleasure to host a Polish film series at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin. I programmed the series so that the overall theme of the presented movies deals with “Civility in Crisis”. There will be four features in the series: The Treasure (1948), How to Live (1977), O-bi, O-ba: The End of Civilization (1984) and Zero (2009).

(Click on a title to see the exact times for each screening and a short program note I wrote).

Each screening will be preceded by a short introduction.

Hope to see you in Dublin!

Lucky Life (2010, Chung)

2010-10-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

Rating: ***

In Lucky Life (2010), Lee Isaac Chung’s quietly accomplished second feature, the camera often abandons the characters to ponder their surroundings in a free-flowing (yet somber) manner that seems to owe a lot to the work of Terrence Malick. Shifting freely between tightly structured dialogue and seemingly improvised scenes of friendly badinage, the movie is quite formidable in asserting it slow pace and making the viewer respect its rhythms – as well as respond to them.

A story of a loss as much as it is a chronicle of a budding commitment, Lucky Life takes an unflinching look at the process of forgetting, or rather replacing memories with fresh perceptions. The death of a friend is interwoven into the whole structure in a recurrent fashion, so that is seems less a singular event, and more a dream that will remain dormant for years, only to seep into one’s thoughts years later.

Overall, it’s a sustained piece of work that makes me look forward to Chung’s future projects.

[The film will be presented as a part of the American Film Festival in Wrocław]

A "Guys and Dolls" Tribute

2010-09-17T03:54:00.000-07:00

After Danny Kaye and Robert Preston, it’s Guys and Dolls’ turn! Enjoy... and forgive.

Lyrics | Bobbie, Walter - Guys and Dolls lyrics

Winter's Bone (2010, Granik)

2010-09-15T09:32:00.000-07:00

Rating: ***

Not necessarily the chunk of social realism most reviewers would lead you to expect, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010) is actually a hybrid of sorts. Part mythical quest, part neo-Ozark-noir, it’s as engaging as it is generic. The story concerns a 17-year-old Ree’s search for her no-good father in order to keep the house she shares with her ailing mother and underage siblings. Her determination, good sense and resourcefulness are what carries the movie. Like Sam Spade, she engages in a string of ominous conversations under a heavy sky, taking no cues from the weather gods signaling “Caution!”, as they’re always are in noir.

As well-structured and affecting as it is, there’s a sensationalist streak in Winter’s Bone that I found myself objecting to. When the horrific (and fairly gratuitous) dénouement finally arrives – complete with a nightly boat trip, chainsaw-wielding and severed limbs left and right (pun intended) – one may question the purity of filmmakers’ intent. The film is as eager to cash in on a Deliverance (1972)-like dread as it is determined to make a social statement. With its fair share of clumsy, soap-operatic dialogue (“Please, help me this one time!”, cries Dee to her spaced-out mom), Winter’s Bone steers dangerously close to being a comic strip.

The redeeming factor lies in Lawrence’s riveting performance as Ree (as well as some first-rate support she gets all around). Perky, taciturn, focused and clearheaded, she emulates Michelle Williams’ Wendy and Lucy (2008) coup so successfully I wouldn’t be surprised if she had received a call from the Dardennes after Winter’s Bone opened. She measures up against Rosetta beautifully.

[The movie will play as part of the American Film Festival in Wrocław]

All My Friends Are Funeral Singers (2010, Rutili)

2010-09-15T02:44:00.000-07:00

Rating: **

Paranormal activity is a matter of fact in All My Friends are Funeral Singers (2010) – to the extent that parts of it pose as a video shot by one of the ghosts (take that, Oren Peli). Tim Rutili’s whimsical first feature focuses on a psychic reader Zel (Angela Bettis), quietly plying her trade in a house she shares with a posse of spirits. All clad in white, they’re seen only by Zel and the audience. Occasionally rebellious against what they call imprisonment, the gang seems rather bored most of the time. They dabble in music, they shoot a video documentary, play trivia games, and discuss their post-mortem, though never shown, sex lives (and their earthly lives, as well). “I hung myself by my something blue”, says the corpse-bride in a deadpan voice, thus establishing the movie’s droll (but only partly amusing) tone.

Set in the homely purgatory presided over by the taciturn Zel – who, significantly, seals off her bedroom by sprinkling salt on the threshold, thus making at least her alcove ghost-free – the movie never really dwells on its protagonist’s feelings towards her situation or, for that matter, on that situation itself (it comes as a surprise that Zel has a boyfriend, who remains a cipher till the end).

The second half of the movie depicts the ghostly rebellion and divulges a rather unsettling secret that helps to make sense of the story – but it does so in spasms of superimposed, badly color-timed images and with virtually no attempt at building suspense. It’s a measure of the movie’s unimaginativeness that the only way the spirits mark their dissent is by making clamor with chains and sticks. The way they’re portrayed, even Rick Moranis wouldn’t have any trouble busting them for good.

Angela Bettis’ sensible performance – often hindered by awkward camera angles, as in the scene in which she channels her client’s dead husband’s voice – ultimately saves the movie. Her half-puzzled, half-purposeful demeanor, as well as her uncanny resemblance to Rachel Weisz, sustain our interest and help to swallow the final “lights-out” metaphor despite its trite, Castenada-fueled banality.

[The movie will be shown at the American Film Festival in Wrocław]

Step Up 3-D (2010, Chu)

2010-08-31T13:49:00.000-07:00

Rating: *1/2

You better learn how to duck if you’re planning to see Step Up 3-D in a theater, because there’s plenty of dodging ahead of you. Apart from the stock comin’-atcha effects that seem inevitable in a square and unimaginative 3-D movie like this one, you’re gonna have loads and loads of bullshit (or “B.S.”, to quote the MPAA-savvy baddie of the piece) thrown your way.

As a musical, the movie harkens back to the oldest, basest (and best) plot elements: it’s a crossover between the breakthrough-show-saved-in-the-last-minute populism of 42nd Street (1933) and the let’s-put-on-a-show-in-a-barn uplift of the Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney innocuous entertainment. These recognizable and cozy mechanisms don’t take off, though. For them to work, one would need characterizations, snappy dialogue and spirit, all sadly lacking from this staggering piece of glossy and brand-infested schlock.

The actors don’t act or even make turns; they simply get a supermodel-treatment while reciting the worse imaginable dialogue. The lines are laced with words like “truth”, “self” and “discovery”, and when the girl says to the boy, after seeing his sub-YouTube documentary: “You’re a filmmaker”, she unwittingly confuses a name of a profession with a profound compliment. Step Up 3-D is a filmmakers’ film (some of the effects are great and the long take of an old-fashioned dance number by the ice-cream stand is actually stunning), but it lacks a director, a personality, even a tone.

When Adam G. Sevani (a walking Carravaggio dream boy, if there ever was one) dances his updated Fred Astaire routine, it’s joyous enough, even though the choreography lacks shape. But nothing can really redeem a movie that goes in for its kill in a sequence of squirting CGI-soda up into the air on the top of a giant fan, all filmed in a TV-ad orgiastic frenzy of wild camera swirl.

As the characters would probably say to the director: “You’re not real, you’re not yourself, and you’re hurting me.”

Don't Cry (1972, Królikiewicz)

2010-08-18T03:10:00.000-07:00

Rating: ****

As a group of young men has some fun and then leaves for their basic training, the genders dilute, beads of sweat proliferate, violence and tenderness become one, all culminating in a delirious (and undoubtedly vodka-fueled) train station farewell.

Grzegorz Królikiewicz’s tense, enigmatic and voluptuous short masterpiece, Don’t Cry (1972), leaves one with an insatiable yearning for more, and yet it is perfectly self-contained. With its refusal to guide the viewer towards comprehension, and its blatantly confrontational musique concrète soundtrack, Królikiewicz pushes his documentary into the realm of abstraction so intense, it’s almost abusive. Right from the very first shot of free-floating, long-haired heads turning into visual blots, it’s the mere surface of things that cries out to be acknowledged and perceived in its nakedness.

To say that the movie is dream-like isn’t enough; Don’t Cry feels like a recurring dream.

Of all the directors of the so-called Polish New Wave (Skolimowski, Polański, Zanussi), it’s Królikiewicz who most painfully lacks exposure both in his native country and elsewhere. Soon, I’ll be posting some fragments of his feature-length masterpiece, Through and Through (1973). Meanwhile, here’s the full version of Don’t Cry:

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967, Swift)

2010-08-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

Rating: **

With his rabbit teeth and flat, helmet-like hair, Robert Morse looks like a tamer version of Jerry Lewis in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967). Indeed, the character he plays isn’t unlike the persona Jerry so often brought to life: more efficient, true – but for the most part as clueless and entirely dependent on external sources of authority (in this case, on the eponymous handbook). Morse’s character, J. Pierpont Finch, is part ruthless, part hapless – once set on the fast track of career-climbing, he sticks slavishly to whatever he reads in his little book, and it is the movie’s great unresolved puzzle what makes him so endearing to Rosemary (Michelle Lee). (Or rather, by what means does the initial endearment hold up, since J.’s actions reveal nothing but a single-minded drive to upgrading his professional status.)

Less an executive Candide than a sunny Julien Sorel, Finch has remarkably few tricks up his sleeve to buttress his way up, and thus the subsequent steps in his climb strike one as rather mechanical and dull. People Finch flatters have their defenses way down all the time, and cling automatically to mere hints of sympathy, common interests, or shared past that Finch throws at them.

Towards the end, Rosemary’s sunny virtue triumphs over Finch’s sunny drive, with the embarrassingly literal “Brotherhood of Men” number to seal the deal. The movie, as crude and pasted together as it is, serves best as a showcase for Morse’s remarkable responsiveness and humor, both of which can be wasted away, but still shine beautifully.

Raging Bull Redux

2010-08-08T13:24:00.000-07:00

Here’s a video I shot & edited, featuring my university professor, Patrick Vaughan. Enjoy!

Tuesday, After Christmas (2010, Muntean)

2010-08-01T06:05:00.000-07:00

Rating: ****

Tuesday, After Christmas (2010) is cut so casually and paced so dutifully that its heavy reliance on extremely long takes doesn’t strike the viewer as extravagant or even exceptional. As the director Radu Muntean slowly dissects a love triangle involving a cheating husband, his wife and his gullible young lover, we expect violent outburst of emotion at any given moment. It doesn’t come, or at least it’s not served the way violent outbursts usually are. The film’s dramatic centerpiece – an eight-minute-long take showing husband’s confession and his wife’s response – traverses all possible emotions from irony to hysteria, and yet doesn’t feel manipulative or artificially condensed.

The film is as much about infidelity as it is about the day-to-day distribution of information that we perform at all times. Muntean deliberately starts off with a tender love scene, only to reveal through a casual cut that it was actually depicting an act of cheating. As we’re forced to figure out the exact geography of the husband’s lies, we are semi-complicit with him – nowhere is it more evident than in the long scene of the conversation between the (then unaware) wife and the high-strung lover, with the husband quietly soaking into the background, the way we already have when we decided to buy the ticket and take a seat.

Enter the Void (2009, Noé)

2010-07-22T14:54:00.000-07:00

Rating: ***

Dumbfounded, awe-struck and annoyed, the viewer of Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009) is constantly dared not to admire the film’s bold concept and stupefying ambition. The director most openly infatuated with the idea of turning the subliminal into the sublime, unleashes his stroboscope-throbbing ego to a degree that’s both embarrassing and commands respect. His interests never less than elemental, Noé didn’t have many stops left for pulling out after the father-daughter incest of I Stand Alone (1998) and the Irreversible (2002) rape scene. Enter the Void concludes his trilogy of culturally forbidden sex, adding a brother-sister semi-incestuous relationship to the collection.

The movie, quite hefty at its 154 minutes, is separated into a series of sequences that are fairly linear, with one clearly indicated big flashback and one dream sequence. It’s shot almost entirely from the point of view of the main character, and for the most part from the p.o.v. of his soul, floating around Tokyo after it escaped the killed body of the protagonist. That results in a whole lot of overhead shots that make the hotel scene from DePalma’s Snake Eyes (1998) look like TV hack job.

That compels the actors to deliver physically difficult performances, almost devoid of any chance for facial expressions caught in close-ups. After the sensual assault of the opening credits (which happen to be the end credits as well) is over, the film takes on a steady – if occasionally grueling – pace, sometimes broken by a violent visual or sonic slap, delivered mostly for visceral kicks.

It wasn’t until the famed shot of an erect penis thrusting at the camera and releasing a flow of CGI-semen (which quite literally brings our hero back to life), that some members of the Wrocławian audience walked out. In fact, this is the gentlest and most heartfelt scene in the movie. Earlier on, we see the woman character placing her positive pregnancy test on top of the cover of “The Tibetan Book of Dying”, which harkens back to Monica Bellucci’s joyous pee in the finale (?) of Irreversible, when the news of the baby coming was deemed ominous by the 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) poster hovering above her.

This post mortem odyssey – not entirely unlike The Lovely Bones (2009) in its premise – is as ridiculous and moving as the huge fluorescent “Love Hotel” in the final sequence: an establishment where the penises and vaginas glow in the dark and life itself is actually created: all caught in the relentless, insane swirl of Noé’s floating camera.

Kimberly Reed Interview

2010-07-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

Here’s my interview with the director of the great Prodigal Sons (2010), Kimberly Reed, conducted when she was visiting Cracow LBGT Film Festival earlier that year. Thanks to Keith Uhlich of "The House Next Door", it has now a chance to reach a wider readership.

Here’s my original post on the movie.

Dogtooth (2009, Lanthimos)

2010-07-20T09:08:00.000-07:00

Rating: ****

In its goals and methods, Doogtooth is not entirely unlike Haneke’s White Ribbon (2009) – the big difference being that Lanthimos doesn’t conceal the fact that the world he’s depicting is an entirely ingenious and self-contained artifact. The movie, which tells a story of a family run by an über-controlling father bent on redacting his kids’ reality so that it doesn’t include any unwanted “stimuli”, is so offhand in its ways that it’s quite astonishing how Lanthimos manages to deliver complex narrative feedback (in spades!), and yet never lose the tone of an entirely episodic, seemingly casual family chronicle.

Its biggest virtue is how it doesn’t succumb to a temptation of being merely a carbon-copy parable of a totalitarian state, but instead plunges into the flexed mindsets of all the players involved. A movie about the inner workings of a reality borne out of fantasy can easily become overtly metaphorical (the case of Saura’s The Garden of Delights [1970]), or generic (Shyamalan’s The Village [2004]). Instead, Lanthimos chooses the path of an investigative role-play, in which the audience is given bits and pieces of information, and has to glue them all together as the movie goes.

What cracks the father’s perfect family-unit-bubble asunder is precisely what he was fearing – that is, mass culture. (One terrific scene has him translating – and doctoring – Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” to the point of it becoming a family-values anthem). Video rentals of Rocky (1976) and Jaws (1975) suddenly widen the verbal scope of one of the kids to the point of a wild quasi-prophetic outburst, and nothing is ever the same again. That way, it’s the language itself that takes the form of the Terence Stamp-like sex-Massiah in this exquisite new take on Pasolini’s Teorema (1968).

A great movie, and a major talent to be heralded by all.

The Long Day Closes (1992, Davies)

2010-06-29T12:47:00.000-07:00

I don’t think my 2008 book on Terence Davies will get translated into English any time soon (as in: ever), so I decided to do this three-part audio commentary to some scenes from Davies’ masterpiece, The Long Day Closes (1992), to express some of the ideas I tried to propose in the book.

I hope you enjoy it!

*no copyright infringement intended*

Clip 1

Clip 2

Clip 3

Rushmore (1998, W. Anderson)

2010-06-19T04:48:00.000-07:00

Rating: ****

Max Fisher (Jason Schwartzman) is a character of multiple pursuits and a singular drive: he’s a dreamer, treating reality at hand not as a mere circumstance, but as an invitation to act.

The movie tells a story of Max letting go of one dream, and of realizing many smaller ones instead. The final scene has Max directing his new play, and dancing with a woman he knows won’t ever be his. What Rushmore really says, is that letting go of an unattainable dream doesn’t necessarily mean settling for less.

Double Take (2009, Gimonprez)

2010-05-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

Rating: ***

Less than revelatory, yet far from inconsequential, Johan Gimonprez’s Double Take (2009) is an exquisite mesh-up of Alfred Hitchcock, Cold War, hot coffee, and a (redundant) semblance of a sociological lecture. Equally skillful with found footage as he is with found metaphors, Gimonprez thus made his own Atomic Café (1982), mixing real and imagined dread and their respective media representations to an effect that’s not as focused as Atomic Café was, but still manages to hold interest.

After the brief and telling introduction – in which Sir Alfred’s real voice, consecutively mimicked (to perfection) by actor Mark Perry is heard discussing the nature of McGuffin – we are introduced to a meandering structure that mixes four basic levels: (1) Hitchcock’s own showmanship, as recorded in numerous TV and movie-trailer appearances, (2) the Cold War, unraveling via TV coverage of its main events from 1957 to 1963, (3) an interview with an Alfred Hitchcock lookalike, (4) and a contrived fictional narrative – developed from Tom McCarthy’s story – of the 1962-Hitchcock meeting his 1980-double in a hotel room.

Close scrutiny of what J. Hoberman nicknamed the world’s dream life – as brought to life by TV coverage of news, which transformed politics into a cliffhanger-show, premiering each day on a screen near your couch – is what makes Gimonprez’s movie fun to watch. However versed may you be in Hitchcock, at some point or another you’re bound to mistake a clip from his movie for a piece of news coverage – or vice versa (it happened to me with the opening image of Topaz [1969], which is used here to illustrate growing tensions between US and Cuba).

For a work that’s as overtly obsessed with doubles and duality, the film is rather single-minded in its narrative arc (fragments of literal-minded commentary popping up on screen don’t help). Still, at its best, Double Take is a fascinating work, paying homage to the man who defined screen fantasy in all its ambiguous – and lethal – whole.

Adam & Paul (2004, Abrahamson)

2010-05-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

Rating: ***1/2

*SPOILERS*

Shared addiction breeds a special kind of fraternity. Perpetually centered on the ever-desired substance, drug-buddies seem to act in perfect sync with one another, almost as if they were reading each other’s minds. This symbiotic relationship makes a great material for comedy: hence Up in Smoke (1978) and Strange Brew (1983). But Lenny Abrahamson’s great Adam & Paul (2004) manages to see through the comedy and gets to show the devastating despair that fuels its characters. Abrahamson’s feat in this movie is, in a way, to see double: the comedy doesn’t serve as an intro for the drama, and the latter doesn’t serve as the “truth” undermining the former’s status. Comedy and despair coexist in this strange and beautiful movie – they don’t merely show up by turns.

Adam (Mark O’Halloran) and Paul (Tom Murphy), a pair of Dublin junkies, are on the hunt for some heroin. It’s exactly one month ago that their best friend O.D.’d, and by the end of the movie the eponymous team will shrink yet again, leaving but one name in the equation.

Abrahamson shows amazing formal restraint in suggesting the characters’ spaced-out state of mind. No hazy p.o.v.’s, no twitching fast-forwards, no succumbing the image to any pulsating rhythms, Arronofsky-style. Thanks to very rigorous framing and noticeable reluctance to surround the characters with inconsequential passers-by, Adam and Paul seem to be isolated from the society that enfolds them. In the director’s commentary – available on DVD – Abrahamson says that he was thinking of their actions as a kind of a strange ballet, and that quality of subtle artifice is there on the screen. (It’s also interesting to know that Abrahamson screened Bruno Dumont’s movies for his screenwriter and star, Mark O’Halloran – Dumont being one of the prime examples of deliberate artifice in portraying cryptic working-class characters.)

Adam and Paul seem hungry for an instant redemption that fantasy alone can provide – and then only temporarily. The beautiful, painfully transient sequence in which they’re both daydreaming about taking care of a baby, has all the sound drawn out and seems all the more unattainable for it.

Abrahamson is expert at withdrawing moral judgment and keeping us from sentimentalizing his “Laurel and Hardy on smack” (per DVD’s cover) pair of characters. And even though Paul – because of his wide-eyed, seemingly childish face – seems the “innocent” one, it’s him who perpetrates most of the film’s reprehensible acts, including the devastating final pillaging of a dead friend’s body.

Overall, I was surprised and humbled by the scale of talents revealed by this movie’s director, screenwriter and actors. I’m about to watch Abrahamson’s second feature, Garage (2007), and I can only hope it’ll be as good as this one.

The Next Voice You Hear... (1950, Wellman)

2010-04-26T15:13:00.000-07:00

RATING: ***

It’s tempting to take easy shots at The Next Voice You Hear… (1950), William A. Wellman’s literal-minded religious fantasy, in which God adapts to the realities of mass-culture era and broadcasts His message all over the world on the radio.

However, both the material and the way Wellman directed it, are far from banal. James Whitmore’s portrayal of a well-meaning workingman, weary of his daily routine and desperately seeking for comfort of any kind, is in fact very powerful. The source of his angst is his wife’s pregnancy – the dread of lurking labor and possible harm she can suffer is rendered very matter-of-factly. Whitmore’s irregular face is great at expressing confused emotions of his character.

The movie sags when God’s message is cut to a catchphrase-size of a homey “take it easy”. But most of scenes have both rhythm and substance, and there is remarkably little of the condescending tone that pushed the thematically close Red Planet Mars (1952) into the realm of camp, which The Next Voice You Hear… never enters. It’s hard to call this movie a heartfelt piece of work, since the main premise of injecting faith into the hearts of doubters is treated without zeal – but it’s a solid enough movie to keep the viewer from dismissing it as a mere exercise in manipulation.

TRON (1982, Lisberger)

2010-04-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

Rating: ***1/2

Widely dismissed at the time of its original release, TRON (1982) holds up amazingly well. I’d be hard-pressed to decide whether the effect it had on me was inherent to its design or was it merely contextual (resulting from the fact I watched it now, in 2010) – but it hardly matters. The wonder of TRON as it unravels before our CGI-weary eyes is that its artifice doesn’t seem quaint or campy. In fact, the movie may seem more high-concept today than it did at the time it was conceived. We grew so accustomed to the Spielbergian notion of lifelike CGI (set up in the 1993 Jurrasic Park and obeyed by everyone since, James Cameron included), that the overt artifice of TRON seems so much more refreshing. All lines crystal-clear, all contrasts wildly overstated, the visuals mesmerized me and seduced me beyond anything I saw at IMAX those last couple of years.

True, it gets dull every time the animation takes over completely and the fascinating interplay of human figures with the dreamed-up background is lost. But this is a slight deficiency. The movie is still a grand canvas, all covered in garish fluorescent-marker design. It never enters the cozy territories of the eco-friendly Pandora. The visuals in TRON are razor-sharp; we don’t get any of the cloying fuzziness that repeatedly contaminates our current CGI-driven extravaganzas (every figure in those swaying crowds CGI gives us sways the same way, did you notice…?).

Shot against this framework, the black-and-white, slightly flickering human faces are all the more impressive – an effect that Lars Von Trier or Wim Wenders wouldn’t be ashamed of.

Waking up this morning, I didn’t expect that this will become the day I fell in love with TRON, but there you go. I’m even shamed into admitting I’m curious about the remake. If done right, this may be the movie that opens a new frontier for CGI techniques. If done wrong, it can become another Alice in Wonderland (2010). Let’s wait and see.

Two Lovers (2009, Gray) [Audio Commentary]

2010-03-27T03:02:00.000-07:00

Here’s the first part of my audio commentary on James Gray’s Two Lovers (2009), a movie I love and admire. The second part is to be found here.

Schickel vs. Schickel

2010-03-23T01:36:00.000-07:00

The recent disparaging attack on the critical profession made by Richard Schickel was pretty astounding; even more so for those who (like me) still consider Schickel’s 1968 article one of the best and most clear-eyed manifestos of adventurous film criticism. Here’s the Schickel I prefer:

It seems to me that all criticism is an effort at self-integration, and while a plausible case could be made that such efforts are harder to bring off in our fragmented and alienation-prone times, it is difficult to believe that the movie critic is uniquely cursed. All of the arts are, and for some time have been, in a state of flux bordering on anarchy. Is it harder for the movie critic to leap from Andy Warhol to Ingmar Bergman than it is for the art critic to leap from Warhol do Willem De Kooning? I don’t think so. There are few absolutes left in life or in art, and for the critic this ought to be less a burden than a challenge. It makes his work more of an adventure, perhaps more of a creative experience than it may have been in more settled times, when a recourse to academic rules of artistic composition could settle more arguments then they now do.

It seems to me that the modern critic is, in fact, luckier than most of his contemporaries, for he is regularly forced to sit down in front of a blank sheet of paper and coherently organize his responses to a wide variety of stimuli. There is no better integrative experience available, and the critic's good fortune consists precisely in being obliged frequently to undergo it. If, at the outset, he finds it painful, he will soon develop his spiritual and intellectual muscles to the point where he can accomplish his particular yoga exercises with relative ease. Or he will cease to be a critic. Or he will be such a poor one that he will have little influence.

(Richard Schickel, Introduction [in:] Richard Schickel, John Simon (ed.), Film 67/68: An Anthology by the National Society of Film Critics, New York 1968, pp. 13–14.)