The Unspeakable Act (2012, Sallitt)

My review of Dan Sallitt's excellent new movie, The Unspeakable Act, in available on Roger Ebert's website (click here).

My "Sight & Sound" Poll Entry

I feel honored to take part in the upcoming Sight & Sound Greatest Film Poll. Here is my ballot:

1. Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)

Superbly crafted allegory of watching and following that touches upon our primal voyeuristic drives. By the end of the screening, the film seems to be looking back at us with an amused little smirk. Hitchcock defines the movies; Rear Window defines Hitchcock.

2. The Long Day Closes (1992, Terence Davies)

Cinema is both a retreat and a prison in Davies’ memoir of childhood bliss slowly turning into scary gay desire that the protagonist doesn’t know how to handle. A love song that is also a dirge, it’s a profoundly sad work of immense beauty.

3. The Thin Red Line (1998, Terrence Malick)

Malick’s Whitman-by-way-of-Emerson poem of grace intertwined with death is as boundless as it is instantly accessible (not to mention totally immersive). Edited in accordance with the world’s hidden heartbeat that Malick seems completely attuned to, it never fails to intoxicate me, no matter how often I see it.

4. City Lights (1931, Charlie Chaplin)

No one merged emotional mush with slapstick brilliance in quite this way – you can be angry at the movie for tugging at your heart strings, but you stand no chance of resisting its pull.

5. WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971, Dušan Makavejev)

The only movie that managed to accommodate and satirize all the Cold War chasms at once, and do so in a happy-collage way that’s as ingenious as it is brilliant.

6. Partie de campagne (1936, Jean Renoir)

“Unfinished” only in the most crude of senses, this is a work that overflows with emotion to the point of drugging the viewer into an uncontrolled reverie. A masterpiece of sensual seduction that feels both like a breeze and a barely suppressed sob of sympathy for all human dreams and desires.

7. L’Atalante (1934, Jean Vigo)

Cinema as a diaphanous waft of half-dreamed desire; the most beautiful erotic dream ever put on film.

8. Man with a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov)

In some YouTube visual dictionary of tomorrow, a full video of this movie may as well serve as the most comprehensive definition we have yet of „modernity” itself.

9. Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Howard Hawks)

Unyielding in its reproach of sentimentality, this is a work of true feeling and deep compassion that asks for nothing and gives you everything.

10. Topsy-Turvy (1999, Mike Leigh)

The most Dickensian movie ever made is as rich as a finest novel and accommodates everything from gaiety to sadness to grief to song.

My Cannes 2012 Coverage

My 10-part "Hammer to Nail" coverage of the Cannes Film Festival is available here (navigate the list of my favorites to get to specific reviews).

Cannes: Mud (2012, Nichols)

Stand by Mud

Less a spectacular train wreck than a sad disappointment, Jeff Nichols’ Mud is a movie of great earnestness and little imagination: a surprisingly trite and simplistic coming-of-age story in which predictability trumps everything else, including much-needed sentiment. Just like the director’s previous effort (the sublimely filmed, if ultimately shallow, angst-fest Take Shelter), Mud is also concerned with a possible break-up of a marriage as filtered by the mind of a susceptible member of a family. Whereas Michael Shannon’s Curtis projected his fear of marital separation into a series of apocalyptic visions, the new movie’s protagonist – a feisty fourteen-year-old Alabama boy named Ellis (Tye Sheridan) – escapes into a much more welcoming fantasy.

The boy, rightly sensing some tension between his parents, latches onto a newly-found adult pal in the person of Mud (Matthew McConaughey), hiding in a boat surreally left atop of a tree after a recent flood. Mud escapes justice after having killed his infidelity-prone girlfriend’s latest lover, and she’s waiting for him in a dingy motel so that they can elope together. For Ellis, Mud’s situation has a tremendous appeal – a pint-sized romantic that he is, he imagines Mud’s devotion to be the true love so acutely absent between his folks. He does all he can to help out his new idol in making the boat usable again (by hook as well as by crook), and finds an additional incentive when he meets Mud’s girlfriend, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), who seems to him an embodiment of fragile innocence under pressure (crush ensues).

Mud is all about letting go of illusions and assuming responsibility. Unfortunately, Ellis’ gradual disenchantment is portrayed in a painstakingly obvious manner. Nichols takes his time and hedges his bets, too: virtually nothing is left unsaid, and the crucial plot points are so heavily underlined that they all but become parodies of themselves. Some of the crucial scenes of disillusionment are stretched out beyond measure until they lost their impact, others embarrass with completely superfluous dialogue.

The film – while way too long at its current 130 minutes – certainly doesn’t lack for acting talent and overall technical competence. Too cerebral to feel heartfelt, too earnest to seem inspired, Mud comes dangerously close to being a watered-down faux-John Sayles movie, in which intentions replace actual experience. Nichols is too smart to aim for genuine, heart-tugging mush of the Stand By Me variety, and yet not detached enough to bathe his movie in a sense of true strangeness. It’s a shame to see that gifted filmmaker succumb to generic weaknesses (that were only latent in Take Shelter) and deliver a movie that doesn’t lack for ambition but ends up merely passable.

EbertFest Panels on Video

All the panels that happened at EbertFest are now available on video, including the Far-Flung Corespondents one that I had the honor of participating in. You can watch them all here.

Babak Geranfar on the Movies

My good friend from Iran, Babak Geranfar, has just made his debut as a writer of notes on MUBI. Don't miss them, he's a great guy and a faithful follower of Stanley Cavell, alias THE MAN. His notes are to be found here.

My thoughts on Ebertfest

My EbertFest report is now available here - click and learn what I loved best about it!.