The Cine File

Crazy Horse and More

2012-01-19T06:50:00.000-08:00

Of the three films I reviewed this week, by far the most significant is Crazy Horse, Frederick Wiseman's strong, if problematic (but what Wiseman film can't be described as "problematic") latest. If it doesn't rank among the director's finest, it does nothing to diminish a body of work that is richer than that of any other living American filmmaker.

Crazy Horse (Slant)
Watching TV witht the Red Chinese (Slant)
The City Dark (Time Out New York)

Recent Work: Slant, Variety, The L Magazine

2012-01-12T06:49:00.000-08:00

My latest published pieces consist of reviews of two very bad films, Beneath the Darkness and Albatross, for Slant, a profile of promising young director Benh Zeitlin for Variety (accessible if you can get past the site's paywall) and my contributions to a final best-of-2011 poll, The L Magazine's fine survey, for which I penned blurbs for films number 12 and 19.

The Ten Worst Movies of 2011 (in alphabetical order):

2012-01-07T04:19:00.000-08:00

The Artist

Burning Palms

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The most shameless milking of tragedy for unearned tears in many a year, Stephen Daldry's 9/11 weepie makes this season's other atrocity pics, In the Land of Blood and Honey, Flowers of War, and (from slightly earlier in the year) Sarah's Key look restrained and vital by comparison. Joining such dreck as United 93 and Rebirth on the September 11th shitlist, Extremely Loud focuses on a borderline Asperger's kid's search for a clue that will unlock the meaning of his father's death on "the worst day." Never mind that Thomas Horn's individual quirks are nearly impossible to stomach, it's the kid's sense of self-importance born of tragedy that's especially galling. Yes, he eventually realizes that other people have suffered too and he's not the only one that lost loved ones on 9/11, but for most of the movie he's allowed to roam free as if he's the only person that matters in the world. But Daldry's biggest offense is to include about 10 different emotional climaxes to make sure no opportunity for bathetic tear-jerking goes unrealized. And, yes, we do have to hear the kid's father's final answering machine message sent just before perishing in the towers, but what good that does for either Thomas or his audience is anyone's guess.

An Invisible Sign

The Iron Lady

An unholy mess of a biopic, Phyllida Lloyd's impressionistic portrait of Margaret Thatcher unfolds as a fever dream in the ex-Prime Minister's Alzheimer's riddled brain. The film cuts back and forth between present and numerous different pasts with such rapidity that it never settles down long enough to focus on any single incident in the woman's life (except for a relatively restrained sequence on the Falklands War). Awash in cheap-shit aesthetic touches (canted angles, wide angles, overhead angles) designed to, perhaps, mirror the disorientation of both present-day Maggie's forgetful brain and the experience of being a woman in male-oriented British politics, the film succesfully communicates neither. In fact, its focus on the latter theme attempts to turn Thatcher's life into something like a feminist parable, as if simply being a woman succeeding in politics were enough, never mind what she actually did once she became Prime Minister. I suppose there are those who still think that Maggie did a fine job as Britain's chief executive, and those people will find nothing to challenge that belief in Lloyd's film. But those people will be wrong; a more responsible biopic would at least touch on Thatcher's shameful legacy of strike-breaking and neo-liberal economics and portray the Falkland's incident as the desperate grasping at the last straws of imperialist control that it was - even if it chose to humanize its subject in the process. And as for Meryl Streep's much lauded lead performance, it's a fine act of mimicry, but in the aesthetic wash of Lloyd's incredibly unfocused film, she's given little chance to actually do any acting.

Life in a Day

Like Crazy

Drake Doremus's film is the one that offers viewers the least of any motion picture from the last year. Lazily shot and conceived, it's a tale of thwarted love between two pretty young things whose only problem seems to be that they live in different continents and, thanks to a visa snafu, can't live together. There's no sense of any wider understanding of the complexities of human relationships or international politics - it's simply the story of two people (or, really, two virtual abstractions) that love each other (a fact we have to take on faith) and are prevented from being together. Devoid of context or characterization, there's precious little to grab onto in Doremus's folly and the film's final notes of ambiguity fail to register as anything more than a desperate grasping after complexity because to that point the movie hasn't given us the slightest reason to care about what happens to its vacuous, if handsome, young leads.

A Love Affair of Sorts

Rebirth

Shame

Plenty of ink has already been spilled over Steve McQueen's portrait of New York richie/orgasm addict Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender), so there's little left to add to the already well-noted observations that everything about the film is a hopeless abstraction (whether it's Brandon's psychology or the city itself), that it asks us to take the personal sexual problems of a privileged individual as inherently important without giving us any reason to do so, and that it indulges in a rather shameless homophobia by showing its protag stooping to entering the den of inequity that is a gay club, so desperate is he for sexual release. So, I'll just add that the one moment in the picture that seems to me to be at all interesting - the semi-famous restaurant scene in which a nervous waiter adds some comic relief while Brandon takes out a comely co-worker for dinner - strikes me as a pretty specific comment on racial discomfort. Brandon's date is, of course, black, and not only does the waiter never look her in the eye, except for the briefest, most perfunctory glances, but he employs loaded terms such as "pink," obviously meant to signify race. But what the waiter's obvious uncomfortableness with biracial couples has to do with the rest of McQueen's misguided exercise in style is well beyond me.

A Year in Film

2011-12-28T04:48:00.001-08:00

Below is what I believe to be an accurate list of all the first-run films I've seen from 2011 along with links to my reviews where applicable. (Qualifying films must have made their theatrical debut in New York between January 1 and December 31, 2011 and must have had at least a week-long run.) My top 30 films are singled out for commendation with the top 10 ranked. Beyond that, films are listed alphabetically.

1. A Brighter Summer Day
2. To Die Like a Man
3. Mysteries of Lisbon
4. El Sicario, Room 164
5. Extraordinary Stories
6. Take Shelter
7. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
8. Beginners
9. Margaret
10. Le Havre

11-20
In the Family
The Interrupters
Kaboom
Love Exposure
Nostalgia for the Light
Of Gods and Men
Petition
Polytechnique
Terri
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

21-30
Caterpillar
Cold Fish
House of Pleasures
Poetry
The Princess of Montpensier
The Skin I Live In
The Sky Turns
Tabloid
The Time That Remains
Tuesday, After Christmas

The Rest
0s and 1s
3
3 Backyards
13 Assassins
50/50
Addiction Incorporated
The Adventures of Tintin
Agrarian Utopia
Albert Nobbs
All She Can
American: The Bill Hicks Story
The Arbor
Armadillo
The Artist
Attack the Block
Aurora
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
Bad Teacher
Bal
Battle for Brooklyn
Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest

The Beaver
Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
Bellflower
Benda Bilili!
Berlin 36
A Better Life
The Big Bang
The Big Fix
Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son
A Bird of the Air
Bombay Beach
Bride Flight
Bridesmaids
Buck
Buried Prayers
Burning Palms
Buttons
Carancho
Cargo
Carnage
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Cedar Rapids
Certified Copy
Chasing Madoff
Circumstance
City of Life and Death
Cold Weather
The Colors of the Mountain
The Conquest
Contagion
Coriolanus
Cougar Hunting
Cracks
Crazy, Stupid, Love.
Crime after Crime
A Dangerous Method
The Debt
The Descendants
Desert Flower
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
The Double
Drive
Dzi Croquettes
Elevate
Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
Even the Rain
Every Day
Exodus Fall
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Fading of the Cries
The Family Jams
The Family Tree
Fanny, Annie & Danny
Film Socialisme
The First Grader
The Flowers of War
Footprints
Foreign Parts
Forks Over Knives
Friends with Benefits
The Future
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Go Go Tales
God's Fiddler: Jascha Heifetz
God's Land
The Guard
Gun Hill Road
Hanna
Happythankyoumoreplease
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2
Harvest
Heartbeats
The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch
Hello Lonesome
The Help
Hesher
Higher Ground
Home
Hood to Coast
House of Boys
The Housemaid
How I Ended the Summer
How to Live Forever
Hugo
I Am
I Melt with You
I Saw the Devil
The Ides of March
If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle
I'm Dangerous with Love
Immigration Tango
Impolex
In the Land of Blood and Honey
Incendies
The Inheritors
Inside Out
Insidious
Into the Abyss
An Invisible Sign
Ip Man 2
The Iron Lady
J. Edgar
Jane Eyre
Jane's Journey
Jig
The Journals of Musan
Journey from Zanskar
Jumping the Broom
Just Go With It
Just Like Us
Laredoans Speak: Voices of a South Texas Border City
The Last Circus
The Last Mountain
Leap Year
Lebanon, PA
The Lie
Life in a Day
Like Crazy
London River
Lost Bohemia
Louder Than a Bomb
A Love Affair of Sorts
Love Crime
Margin Call
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Meek's Cutoff
Meet Monica Velour
Meeting Spencer
Melancholia
Midnight in Paris
Miral
Moneyball
Monogamy
The Mouth of the Wolf
Mozart's Sister
Mumbai Diaries
My Joy
My Kingdom
My Piece of the Pie
My Week with Marilyn
The Myth of the American Sleepover
The Names of Love
Now and Later
One Day
One Fall
One Hundred Mornings
Oranges and Sunshine
Our Idiot Brother
Outrage
The Over the Hill Band
Page One: Inside the New York Times
Pariah
Passione
Paul
The Pill
Pina
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
La Pivellina
Plastic Planet
Potiche
Prince of Swine
Project Nim
Psychohydrography
Putty Hill
Le Quattro Volte
Queen of the Sun
Queen to Play
R
Rage
Rampart
Rango
Raw Faith
Rebirth
Rejoice and Shout
Repo Chick
Rid of Me
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Road to Nowhere
The Robber
Romantics Anonymous
Rubber
The Rum Diary
Sarah's Key
Scream 4
Senna
A Separation
Septien
A Serbian Film
Seven Days in Utopia
Shame
Shaolin
Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
Silent Souls
Skateland
Sleeping Beauty
The Sleeping Beauty
Source Code
Submarine
Sucker Punch
Summer of Goliath
Super
Super 8
Surrogate Valentine
Sympathy for Delicious
Take Me Home Tonight
Tales from the Golden Age
Tanner Hall
There was Once...
Toast
Tomboy
The Tree
The Tree of Life
The Trip
Twelve Thirty
Two Gates of Sleep
Tyrannosaur
Under Fire: Journalists in Combat
Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story
United Red Army
A Useful Life
Vidal Sassoon: The Movie
Vito Bonafacci
War Horse
Warrior
The Way
We Are What We Are
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Weekend
When Harry Tries to Marry
White Wash
Win Win
Winnie the Pooh
Winter in Wartime
The Woman
Wretches and Jabberers
You All Are Captains
Young Adult
Young Goethe in Love

Year-End Poll Mania

2011-12-26T08:30:00.001-08:00

It must be that time of year. While the temperature plunges precariously close to freezing and tentpole releases work their way across movie theaters, best-of lists and polls begin to proliferate. This year I was asked to participate in several surveys of which three (Slant Magazine, the Village Voice and Indiewire) have recently been published. Below are links to both the polls themselves and to my individual ballots. For the Slant piece, I contributed capsules for films number 9 and 15.

Slant Magazine
poll
ballot (scroll down)

Village Voice
poll
ballot

Indiewire
poll
ballot (no direct link, scroll down to list of participating critics)

End of the Year Atrocities

2011-12-18T16:21:00.000-08:00

As December rolls around, we can be sure of one thing: movie theaters screening epic films dealing with historical atrocity. While the Holocaust has traditionally furnished filmmakers with sufficient award-season gravitas, this go-round finds directors beginning to branch out. While Angelina Jolie, working from her own screenplay, tackled the Bosnian War in her film In the Land of Blood and Honey, Zhang Yimou became the latest Chinese filmmaker to take on the Rape of Nanking with The Flowers of War. Both are covered in reviews linked below; neither is recommended.

In the Land of Blood and Honey (Slant)
The Flowers of War (Slant)
The Pill (Village Voice)
Addiction Incorporated (Time Out New York)

Tinker, Tailor, Sight and Sound

2011-12-07T07:02:00.000-08:00

This severely belated set of linkthroughs comes well amidst December awards season, when the Oscar-baitiest films start to hit theaters and critics cram to see all the major releases before submitting their year-end lists and their contributions to best-of polls. While I'm rarely particularly impressed by the Hollywood December crop, this year my admiration does extend to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Tomas Alfredson's perfectly modulated, exquisitely rendered adaptation of John LeCarré's classic spy novel. As for lists and polls, there will be plenty more to come, but the British film magazine Sight and Sound has already posted their year-end survey, featuring, for the first time, a contribution from yours truly.

New Releases
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Slant)
My Piece of the Pie (Slant)
London River (Slant)
Romantics Anonymous (Slant)
Franny, Annie & Danny (Village Voice)
The Big Fix (Time Out New York)

Polls
Sight and Sound ballot

All the Reviews That're Fit to Link...

2011-11-17T08:13:00.000-08:00

...or at least all the reviews I published this week. The only film of note covered below, however, is Raphael Alvarez and Tatiana Issa's documentary Dzi Croquettes, an affectionate look back at the eponymous cabaret/performance art dance troupe that emerged from Brazil in the 1970s.

The Lie (Slant)
Rid of Me (Slant)
The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch (Slant)
Buried Prayers (Slant)
Laredoans Speak (Village Voice)
Dzi Croquettes (Time Out New York)

Belated Linkthrough

2011-11-09T06:33:00.000-08:00

It's been far too long since I collected links to my latest reviews, so here's a belated round-up of my work for the last two weeks. Although it's probably too late now to catch up with it, by far the best of the below-mentioned films is Patrick Wang's In the Family, which sneaked in for a short run at New York's Quad Cinema and deserves far wider recognition.

Young Goethe in Love (Slant)
The Conquest (Slant)
Under Fire (Slant)
In the Family (Village Voice)
God's Fiddler: Jascha Heifetz (Village Voice)

Take Shelter and More

2011-10-27T08:02:00.000-07:00

Though not exactly a "new" release, Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter, the subject of my recently posted "webtakes" review for Cineaste Magazine, is one of the year's finest - and may still be playing at a theater near you. At any rate it's far preferable to The Rum Diary, Bruce Robinson's unsatisfying attempt to further mine the Hunter S. Thompson legacy for cinematic fun and profit.

Take Shelter (Cineaste)
The Rum Diary (Slant)
God's Land (Slant)
The Double (Village Voice)

We All Are Captains...

2011-10-19T05:55:00.000-07:00

...in the exciting world of film criticism, but some are more so, thanks to the weight of institutional authority. Such is the case with one of the most embarrassing movie reviews I've ever read, David DeWitt's inane take on Oliver Laxe's You All Are Captains for the New York Times, which, among its other sins, seems not to understand the work in question one jot.

I can say this because I've actually seen the film - which plays for one week at New York's invaluable Anthology Film Archives - and contributed my own modest take for Slant Magazine, one of five reviews I published this week.

New Releases
You All Are Captains (Slant)
Being Elmo (Slant)
Oranges and Sunshine (Slant)
Cargo (Village Voice)
Elevate (Time Out New York)

New York Film Festival Addendum

2011-10-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

Although my previous post seemed to announce an end to my New York Film Festival coverage, a pair of last minute assignments for The L Magazine means I get to weigh in on two more items, Alexander Payne's surprisingly decent The Descendants and the dreadful silent film pastiche The Artist.

The Descendants (The L Magazine)
The Artist (The L Magazine)

Wrapping NYFF

2011-10-12T10:42:00.000-07:00

As this year's New York Film Festival nears its close, my last batch of reviews has been posted. While not covering any masterpieces such as The Turin Horse (see previous entry), this set of pieces spotlights at least one very worthwhile film.

New York Film Festival
Sleeping Sickness (Slant)
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Slant)
Footnote (Slant)

New Releases
The Way (Slant)

New York Film Festival and More

2011-09-29T15:05:00.001-07:00

This year's New York Film Festival kicks off tomorrow, opening with a screening of Roman Polanski's Carnage. While the latest offering from the Chinatown director is not among those films I covered in my first set of reviews, several of the fest's finest entries are, most notably Béla Tarr's latest masterpiece, The Turin Horse. Also, as usual, I wrote the introduction for Slant Magazine's comprehensive coverage of the event.

New York Film Festival
Introduction (Slant)
The Turin Horse (Slant)
The Loneliest Planet (Slant)
Le Havre (The L Magazine)

New Releases
Benda Bilili! (Slant)
Surrogate Valentine (Slant)

Busy-with-New-York-Film-Festival Linkthrough

2011-09-21T04:59:00.001-07:00

As I've been attending as many press screenings as possible for the upcoming New York Film Festival, I will have to keep this introduction short. So let's just get to the goods (by which I mean the links.) Look for NYFF coverage soon.

First Run Films:
Toast (Slant)
White Wash (Slant)
A Bird of the Air (Slant)
There Was Once... (Slant)
Journey from Zanskar (Village Voice)

DVDs:
Les Cousins (Slant)

All in a Week's Work

2011-09-14T04:39:00.000-07:00

Five new film reviews this week, though, despite the occasional pleasures offered up by a few of the movies (most notably, Tom Tykwer's 3), none is really worth seeking out. Twas ever thus...

In other, non-film related, doings, I contributed my first ever music piece, a review of the Mekons' solid new offering.

Film
3 (Slant)
Berlin 36 (Slant)
Prince of Swine (Slant)
Jane's Journey (Time Out New York)
One Fall (Time Out New York)

Music
The Mekons: Ancient and Modern (Slant)

It's Martial Arts Mania!

2011-09-07T05:43:00.001-07:00

Or so it would seem from my selection of reviews this week which includes two titles featuring Chinese-style hand-to-hand combat. While Shaolin's monks practice something called "martial Zen", the stars of My Kingdom are "opera warriors" fighting onstage amidst ornate costumes and makeup, making the latter film the (marginally) more appealing of the two.

Shaolin (Slant)
My Kingdom (Slant)
Tanner Hall (Slant)
Inside Out (Time Out New York)

Cineaste and More

2011-08-30T14:57:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Cineaste is ready to hit stands and included among its pages is my take on the very good, though necessarily problematic, documentary The Interrupters. (The piece is not available online.) My other reviews for the week, linked below, are of lesser degrees of interest.

Love Crime (Slant)
Buttons (Village Voice)
Rebirth (Time Out New York)
Seven Days in Utopia (Time Out New York)

An Idiotic Week...

2011-08-24T06:51:00.001-07:00

...isn't such a bad thing when the idiot in question is Paul Rudd's character in the new Jesse Peretz film entitled, appropriately enough, Our Idiot Brother. Idiotic in its typical, less positive connotations may not quite describe the rest of the movies I reviewed this week, but it's safe to say that none provide anything close to the pleasure of the Peretz.

Our Idiot Brother (Slant)
Tales from the Golden Age (Slant)
Chasing Madoff (Village Voice)
The Family Tree (Time Out New York)

Help, It's Milton Moses Ginsberg

2011-08-17T04:15:00.000-07:00

My latest batch of reviews covers not only the dreadful feel-good racial quagmire The Help, but a piece on two intriguing films (screening next week at BAM) by cult director Milton Moses Ginsberg as well as a pair of not entirely unsuccessful new releases.

Sex Games, Werewolves and Nixon: Two by Milton Moses Ginsberg (The L Magazine)
The Help (Slant)
One Day (Slant)
Mozart's Sister (Slant)

Blood and Guts on the Cinema Screen

2011-08-03T06:56:00.001-07:00

There's plenty of blood and guts to be found in the two films I reviewed this week, both substances (literally) in Cold Fish, Shion Sono's gruesome portrait of thwarted masculinity, the second of the two (metaphorically) in Gun Hill Road, Rashaad Ernesto Green's look at growing up transgenedered in a patriarchal Bronx family.

Gun Hill Road (Slant)
Cold Fish (The L Magazine)

Crazy, Stupid, Week.

2011-07-27T06:19:00.000-07:00

Not too many of the films I reviewed this week have more than their incidental share of merits, but it has to be said of the high-profile release Crazy, Stupid, Love. that it's far from the worst thing to hit screens this Friday. In better news, New Yorkers have the chance to take in the fine new film by Steve (Hoop Dreams) James, The Interrupters. My take on that picture will appear in the upcoming Fall issue of Cineaste Magazine.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (Slant)
The Future (Slant)
Life in a Day (Slant)
All She Can (Village Voice)
House of Boys (Village Voice)

Fuck Buddies and the Holocaust

2011-07-21T08:04:00.000-07:00

An unlikely pairing, the above named items are the subjects of the two films I reviewed for Slant Magazine this week. What do both have in common? Their use of questionable strategies in support of conventional aims: in Friends with Benefits, a "critique" of rom-com conventions which it then proceeds to employ with abandon, in Sarah's Key, the use of the Shoah to milk easy sentiment.

Friends with Benefits (Slant)
Sarah's Key (Slant)

Errol Being Errol

2011-07-13T04:48:00.000-07:00

While Tabloid, Mr. Morris' latest, finds the Gates of Heaven auteur exploring familiar ground, he does so with a panache, curiosity and sense of play that are most appealing. The same can't be said for the other two films I reviewed this week.

Tabloid (Slant)
The Tree (Slant)
Hood to Coast (Village Voice)

Chimps, Rhymes and L'Chayim

2011-07-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

A trio of docs, all of interest and all reviewed by me in the (metaphorical) pages of Slant Magazine, open this week in New York. While James Marsh's Project Nim, detailing the post-celeb afterlife of mid-'70s ape sensation Nim Chimsky, disappoints and Michael Rappaport's Beats, Rhymes and Life, a portrait of legendary hip-hoppers A Tribe Called Quest, is a mixed bag (as I detail in my review reposted from this year's Tribeca Film Festival), Joseph Dorman's Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, is comprehensive, intelligent and fully satisfying.

Project Nim (Slant)
Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness (Slant)
Fading of the Cries (Village Voice)

A Sunday Outing, Legal Injustice and Jewish Identity...

2011-06-28T14:13:00.000-07:00

...are the subejcts of the films I consider this week, highlighted by my review of Criterion's new release of Edgar G. Ulmer/Robert Siodmak/Billy Wilder/Fred Zinneman's 1930 "before they were stars" outing People on Sunday. Also, opening this week is Cristi Puiu's challenging Aurora which I tackled last year at the New York Film Festival.

Crime After Crime (Slant)
People on Sunday (DVD) (Slant)
Between Two Worlds (Village Voice)

New Releases: Passione, A Love Affair of Sorts and The Names of Love

2011-06-20T06:13:00.000-07:00

While John Turturro's fourth directorial effort, Passione, an ode to the music of Naples Italy, and The Names of Love, Michel Leclerc's heady romantic comedy, are not without their merits, there's little of worth to be found in A Love Affair of Sorts, the latest how-technology-affects-young-vacant-lives monstrosity.

Passione (Slant)
A Love Affair of Sorts (Slant)
The Names of Love (Slant)

Buck, etc, etc.

2011-06-14T16:21:00.000-07:00

Not to take an anti-populist stance, but as a general rule of thumb, if a film wins an audience award at Sundance, well, chances are it's one to skip. Such is certainly the case with Cindy Meehl's Buck, a documentary profile of real-life "horse whisperer" Buck Brannaman.

Buck (Slant)
Battle for Brooklyn (Slant)
R (Village Voice)
Jig (Village Voice)

Late Spring Roundup

2011-06-08T04:19:00.000-07:00

While it already feels like the dog days here in New York, summer has yet to officially kick in. But just as the heat has already made its presence felt, so the seasonal blockbusters have started to hit theaters. Not that I've reviewed any of them this week; the closest thing to a hit I've covered is Michael Winterbottom's The Trip which is actually a re-post of my Tribeca review. Still, at least one of the films below - rather the opposite of a summer blockbuster - is worth a careful look.

Bride Flight (Slant)
Agrarian Utopia (Village Voice)
Just Like Us (Village Voice)
Queen of the Sun (Time Out New York)

Cineaste: Left of Hollywood Reviewed

2011-06-06T11:47:00.001-07:00

Though not available online, my review of Chris Robé's book Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism and the Emergence of US Radical Film Culture can be found in the latest issue of Cineaste Magazine, on newsstands now.

The Tree of Life

2011-05-30T08:27:00.000-07:00

If The Tree of Life is to be taken as the personal statement that it seems to want to aspire to (and that everyone writing about it seems to take it as) then we can probably conclude that Terrence Malick’s childhood in Texas in the ‘40s and ‘50s was a wholly unremarkable affair that evoked nothing so much as those shopworn images that have come to signify “growing-up-in-the-heartland” as filtered through a half-decade’s worth of films and television. The crux of Malick’s latest film is an hour-and-a-half stream of glimpses of this coming-of-age, focusing on the oldest of three young brothers in Waco and his relationship with his disciplinarian Navy-man father and earthy, saintly mother. Moving his camera up close to his characters, relying on wide-angle lenses to supplement his off-kilter compositions and replacing dialogue with a soundtrack that ranges from ambient drones to opera, Malick attempts to make strange the “archetypal” images of childhood. Those who swear by the director will no doubt claim that by showing us the familiar through a deliberately estranging aesthetic, Malick makes the quotidian unfamiliar and thus, given his obviously spiritual orientation, sacred. Those less inclined to be generous might note that the central section of Tree is a mass of clichés: a baby being born to adoring parents mesmerized by his tiny foot, kids roughhousing in the front yard, a long-suffering mother long suffering, but Malick’s aestheticizing and the fact that all these scenes are depicted in small impressionistic glimpses simply cover up for the fact that what the director’s really given us is a gallery of shopworn images that aim to universalize the particular, in this case one white boy’s by-the-book boyhood in the middle of the last century.

But holiness is the theme here, as frequent invocations to God and family – all breathed in a pseudo-profound whisper – make clear, and out of nowhere the eldest boy, now grown up into a successful architect, recites an invocation to his boyhood, which leads to Malick employing a cosmic display of the earth’s origins as an introduction to that kid’s childhood and following it up with a glimpse of his adult self being transported from a glass skyscraper in Dallas to what feels like a mental defective’s view of some mythic spiritual plane where he’s reunited with his family. It’s a regressive vision to say the least: in Malick’s world, a man can only be fulfilled by convening cosmically with his not particularly happy past, but our director is ever the nostalgist, so long as that nostalgia isn’t troubled by the pesky demands of particularizing details. In his takedown of the film, Robert Koehler smartly remarked that Malick “has fatally forgotten the wisdom that in the specific lies the universal.” Instead the filmmaker takes a top-down approach to spirituality that results in a generic set of circumstances being worked into an underimagined framework. We know nothing about this family or their Waco surroundings – except that they travel to the black part of town to buy brisket – and we don’t really need to know more. Bringing up questionable dichotomies between grace and nature via voice-over helps little. These people are simply clichéd props to deliver Malick’s increasingly out-of-touch vision of dubious spiritualism.

*****

My reviews of two documentaries, Rejoice and Shout and The Last Mountain have been posted at Slant Magazine.

New Releases: United Red Army and Hello Lonesome

2011-05-25T04:38:00.000-07:00

Without question one of the two major new releases this week (the other being Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life), Kôji Wakamatsu's United Red Army is both a major statement from the legendary filmmaker and a remarkably inconsistent piece of work. It's far preferable, though, to Adam Reid's dreary Hello Lonesome.

United Red Army (Slant)
Hello Lonesome (Time Out New York)

Pirates and Poets

2011-05-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

If your weekend plans involve choosing between the latest Pirates of the Caribbean flick and Louder than a Bomb, Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel's rousing documentary about teens competing in a slam poetry contest, might I humbly suggest the latter?

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Slant)
Louder than a Bomb (Slant)

A Quartet of Stinkers

2011-05-11T04:54:00.000-07:00

Well, the title of this post just about says it all. Steer clear of the following four films at all costs:

The Big Bang (Slant)
The First Grader (Slant)
Skateland (Slant)
How to Live Forever (Time Out New York)

An Extraordinary Week

2011-05-03T15:25:00.001-07:00

Eight new reviews this week, but the one to look out for is Mariano Llinás' sui generis four-hour masterwork, Extraordinary Stories, playing for just one week at the Museum of Modern Art.

Extraordinary Stories (Slant)
Caterpillar (Slant)
Jumping the Broom (Slant)
An Invisible Sign (Slant)
Harvest (Village Voice)
Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story (Village Voice)
Vito Bonafacci (Village Voice)
Forks Over Knives (Time Out New York)

Mark Ruffalo Directs, "Planned Parenting" Helps Teen in a Bind

2011-04-26T16:31:00.000-07:00

Not too much of interest in my recent non-Tribeca reviews, unless you count Mark Ruffalo's misguided directorial debut, Sympathy for Delicious or the pro-choice drama Lebanon, PA in which Planned Parenthood - here known as "Planned Parenting" - comes to the heroic rescue of a pregnant teen living in rural Pennsylvania.

Sympathy for Delicious (Slant)
Exodus Fall (Slant)
Lebanon, PA (Village Voice)
When Harry Tries to Marry (Time Out New York)

Tribeca 2011

2011-04-22T12:36:00.001-07:00

This year's Tribeca Film Festival is underway. Slant Magazine's huge and ever-growing coverage is, as usual, the definitive guide to a confusingly vast and generally inconsistent event. Among the six films I reviewed, my faves are definitely The Miners' Hymns and the bizarro Underwater Love, but unlike in past years, I haven't found that one great movie (Still Life, Still Walking, The White Meadows) that makes the fest. I also wrote Slant's intro.

Introduction (Slant)
Beats, Rhymes and Life (Slant)
Bombay Beach (Slant)
Flowers of Evil (Slant)
The Miners' Hymns (Slant)
The Trip (Slant)
Underwater Love (Slant)

New Releases: The Princess of Montpensier, Armadillo and Footprints

2011-04-12T05:29:00.000-07:00

Below are links to my reviews of three of this week's releases - the obvious keeper being Bertrand Tavernier's The Princess of Montpensier. View the other two titles at your own risk (although, to be fair, neither is without its merits).

The Princess of Montpensier (Slant)
Armadillo (Slant)
Footprints (Slant)

To Die Like a Man, Silent Naruse and Much More

2011-04-08T04:21:00.000-07:00

Two of the more significant cinematic events of the past week are the theatrical release of João Pedro Rodrigues' outstanding To Die Like a Man, last seen in these parts way back at the 2009 New York Film Festival, and Criterion/Eclipse's release of the box set Silent Naruse, containing all five extant silents from the Japanese Master.

To Die Like a Man (Artforum)
Meet Monica Velour (Slant)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse (DVD) (Slant)
American: The Bill Hicks Story (Village Voice)
The Family Jams (Village Voice)
Meeting Spencer (Time Out New York)

Between ND/NF and Tribeca...

2011-03-30T10:52:00.001-07:00

...comes the void. Or at least a temporary lull in New York film festival/series activity. Which gave me a chance to catch up with some new releases of varying degrees of quality (mostly low). In addition to the links below, Slant has reposted my review of Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quatro Volte from last year's New York Film Festival which makes its theatrical debut this week.

Queen to Play (Slant)
Two Gates of Sleep (Village Voice)
Wretches and Jabberers (Time Out New York)

New Directors/New Films Part Two

2011-03-26T04:58:00.000-07:00

With New Directors/New Films firmly underway, Slant Magazine's coverage (both on the main site and on the blog, The House Next Door) has been fully posted. Among the gems reviewed in my second - and final - batch of ND/NF reviews are Curling and Winter Vacation. Do see these two if at all possible.

Curling (The House Next Door)
Incendies (Slant)
Majority (Slant)
Winter Vacation (Slant)

Bal and One Hundred Mornings

2011-03-23T13:55:00.001-07:00

With all eyes on MoMA tonight as New Directors/New Films kicks off its 2011 incarnation, it's easy to forget there are other good films opening this week in New York, including two small gems which I had the opportunity to review.

Bal (Slant)
One Hundred Mornings (Village Voice)

New Directors/New Films Part One

2011-03-23T03:39:00.000-07:00

Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art's 40th annual New Directors/New Films festival opens today and Slant's coverage has gone live. So far three of my reviews have been posted, including my take on arguably the series' best film, Attenberg. I also contributed the introduction. Check back later as Slant's ND/NF page is updated with more pieces from yours truly.

ND/NF Intro (Slant)
6, 7, 8 (Slant)
Attenberg (Slant)
Gromozeka (Slant)

Late Winter Link Roundup

2011-03-16T04:13:00.000-07:00

The films I reviewed this week seem positively brilliant compared to last week's selection but, as usual, they're a mixed bag. Still, as promised, New Directors/New Films reviews will be posted shortly, with coverage of several movies very much worth seeing. And just in time for spring!

Cracks (Slant)
Winter in Wartime (Slant)
0s and 1s (Village Voice)
Desert Flower (Time Out New York)

Not Recommended

2011-03-07T14:49:00.000-08:00

Though neither quite approach the wretchedness of last week's Happythankyoumoreplease, the films covered in my latest Slant Magazine reviews, I Am and Monogamy, comprise a pretty sorry pair. Things continue to look pretty bleak for low-budget cinema with the upcoming release of Skateland, but some much needed vitality promises to be injected into the scene with the 4oth anniversary edition of MOMA/Lincoln Center's New Directors/New Films festival looming. Look for ND/NF reviews starting next week.

Take Me Home Tonight and HappyThankYouMorePlease

2011-03-02T09:19:00.000-08:00

Just two reviews this week, both from Slant Magazine. First up is Michael Dowse's intermittently amusing, ultimately dull-minded '80s-set coming of age comedy, Take Me Home Tonight. For all its shortcomings, though, the film is infinitely superior to some unholy thing known as HappyThankYouMorePlease.

Film Comment Selects Continues

2011-02-23T11:03:00.000-08:00

As Lincoln Center's Film Comment Selects series picks up steam, my last two reviews from the mini-fest have been posted at the House Next Door, covering Gianfranco Rosi's fascinating El Sicario, Room 164 and Lu Chuan's misguided The City of Life and Death. In regular release Xavier Beauvois' excellent Of Gods and Men begins its theatrical run this week with Slant Magazine reposting my review from last year's New York Film Festival, while my brief take on the forgettable The Over the Hill Band can be found in the Village Voice.

Film Comment Selects Begins

2011-02-18T09:50:00.000-08:00

While this week's batch of first-run reviews contains the usual underwhelming mix, there's good news for film fans. That's because Lincoln Center's annual Film Comment Selects series starts today, kicking off with at least two worthwhile entries, both of which I covered for The House Next Door.

First Run Films
Even the Rain (Slant)
Putty Hill (The L Magazine)
Immigration Tango (Time Out New York)
Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son (Time Out New York)

Film Comment Selects
I Wish I Knew (The House Next Door)
Bas-Fonds (The House Next Door)

Sandler, Aniston and More

2011-02-10T08:24:00.000-08:00

Of the films covered in my latest batch of reviews the most high profile is undoubtedly Just Go with It, the new Adam Sandler/Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy. The best is likely The Sky Turns, Mercedes Álvarez's 2004 meditation on history, memory, time and technological progress, getting a belated release starting Friday at the Anthology Film Archives. Both reviews are from the Village Voice.

Vidal Sassoon: The Movie (Slant)
Home (Village Voice)
Just Go with It (Village Voice)
The Sky Turns (Village Voice)

New Releases: Rage and Ip Man 2

2011-01-26T04:53:00.000-08:00

Two lesser items for review this week, but not without their pleasures. Admittedly those gratifications are more to be found in Wilson Yip's kung fu sequel Ip Man 2 which alternates splendid action sequences with less splendid good vs. evil anti-imperalist drama than in Sebastían Cordero's rather tired immigrant love story.

Rage (Slant)
Ip Man 2 (Time Out New York)

Sex in Fetters

2011-01-25T07:55:00.000-08:00

One of the odder entries in the Museum of Modern Art’s current, massive retrospective of Weimar Cinema, a series that certainly doesn’t lack for its share of lesser-known, outré offerings, Wilhelm Dieterle’s 1928 Sex in Fetters presents itself as a social problem film about prison reform. Best known for his émigré Hollywood work (signed as “William” Dieterle and achieving its highest visibility in the series of high-toned biopics he directed with Paul Muni for Warners in the ‘30s), the Life of Émile Zola director charts a considerably less glamorous milieu in this psychological melodrama posing as a message movie. Set among both the struggling inter-war middle class and the jailhouse crowd, Sex in Fetters suggests the fluidity of the two sets, where impoverished ex-bourgeois often end up imprisoned after being driven by economic or social circumstance into desperate activity.

One such middle-class convict is Franz Sommer (Dieterle), who in the film’s opening act, which establishes the economic morass of Weimar Germany, suffers the tripartite humiliations of having to accept a part-time job as a door-to-door salesman, to countenance his wife’s taking a gig as a cigarette girl and to lie to his snobbish father-in-law about his job situation. When he visits his spouse Helene (Mary Johnson) at the café where she works and finds her being harassed by an aggressive suitor, the sexual affront seems to crystallize the previous assaults on his manhood and he silences the man’s advances with a quick punch to the face which results in his falling down a landing, banging his head and eventually succumbing to his injuries.

But if Sommer’s de-manning had already looked pretty grim, it only gets much worse, for it's the film’s contention that the true evil done by the penal system is its denial of prisoners a proper sexual outlet. As far as jails go, the one that Sommer is sentenced to for three years on a manslaughter charge hardly seems excessively punitive, but Franz and his three cell mates are in a constant state of acute misery because of the brain-warping denial of possibilities for heterosexual release. One prisoner builds a small model woman (with exaggeratedly pointy breasts) out of smushed up pieces of bread, while another, astonishingly, attempts to “unman” himself (the word given by the film’s English translator) with a rock. But other denials of hetero notions of manhood rapidly follow as Sommer gives in to the subtly articulated advances of an effeminate fellow prisoner, while his increasingly crazed wife runs, half-mad, into the arms of her protector, Steinau (Gunnar Tolanæs), an ex-cell mate of Sommer’s who promised to look after her upon his release and who is himself a strong advocate of prison reform. For Steinau, who despite his questionable role in seducing Helene, stands as something like the film’s mouthpiece, denying prisoners conjugal visits can only lead to “evil”, which in the context of the quotation is easy enough to take as meaning homosexual intercourse. Thus in the film’s orientation, Sommer is twice unmanned, first by resorting to an inter-prison affair and then by being cuckolded by his wife.

Dieterle’s film is often at its strongest in making palpable the agony of unfulfilled sexual tension. In one prisonhouse visit between husband and wife, the couple hug, before Sommer drops to his knees and, sinks his head into Helene’s vaginal region in a subtly miming of cunnilingus. The director then cuts in for a close-up of the character’s head, his features largely hidden, while prominent beads of sweat lace his forehead. Earlier, during a stint in solitary, Sommer sketches his wife's face on the wall with a piece of dirt, then, visualizing it coming to life (an imaginative gesture literalized by Dieterle) kisses the cold, filthy surface. Similarly, the secrecy of jailyard hookups is expertly staged in a scene where Sommer’s lover passes him a note with their two names scrawled atop one another while attending a chapel sermon. Dieterle cuts from close-ups of hands and faces to a long shot of the endless rows of prisoners, separated by partitions and made anonymous by their uniformity. It takes the viewer a few seconds to pick out the lovers amidst the crowd, where they sit at the frame’s middle-right, their impending rendezvous granted invisibility to fellow prisoners and (briefly) film audiences alike amidst the apparently homogeneous mass of prisoners.

But for all the filmmaker’s skill at evoking the agonies of involuntary sexual repression that trigger the film’s inquiry into jailhouse reform, its treatment of the central social question can only register as jarringly odd, at least to the contemporary viewer. To alleviate his miseries, one inmate takes his case to the prison doctor and asks him how to avoid going insane without sex, to which the physician replies “simulation”, presumably an inducement to masturbate. But oddly, no one seems to take up the doctor’s rather self-evident advice. Granted, the film already treads what was obviously taboo territory, so it’s no surprise that the screenwriters didn’t want to further push boundaries by adding onanism to the mix, but the highly didactic script presumably addresses what was perceived as a real-life problem. Certainly, no one would suggest that masturbation is a full-fledged substitute for intercourse, but leaving aside the film’s problematic treatment of homosexual relations, certainly a steady diet of auto-eroticism would be enough to prevent a man serving a three-year sentence from going insane.

And yet by not addressing that possibility, except in a brief, largely ignored, coded suggestion, the film essentially negates its own argument that the biggest failing of the penal system is its ban on conjugal visits. As a social message movie, the film fails to convince, but since despite its didactic orientation, it unfolds largely as engaging melodrama, there’s no reason to confine the work to the margins of historical curiosity. Not when the movie ends on a remarkably (and given the nature of the subject matter, inevitably) subtle scene of spousal reunion in which the now estranged pair don’t so much confess their failings as each guess the other’s supposed transgression through lightly proffered hints. Having understood the necessity of compromise and the futility of sexual possession, the couple is now free to resume their relationship on a higher, presumably more enlightened plane.

New Releases: The Housemaid and Mumbai Diaries

2011-01-19T07:40:00.000-08:00

Under review this week are Im Sang-soo's engaging remake of the 1960 Korean classic The Housemaid and Mumbai Diaries, Kiran Rao's ultimately mediocre, if thematically intriguing multi-character piece. Also up, a re-post of my take on Peter Weir's The Way Back, which I reviewed for Slant Magazine during the film's brief December Oscar-qualifying run and which now opens in earnest.

The Housemaid (Artforum)
Mumbai Diaries (Slant)

Bringing in the New Year (Belatedly)

2011-01-12T04:22:00.000-08:00

My first six reviews of the New Year (all published this week) run a predictable gamut from the excellent (Zhao Liang's distressing exosé Petition) to the utterly vile (Burning Palms). Other links of note, the L Magazine's year-end poll in whose voting I participated as well as writing the blurb for Lourdes (#12) and my newly established critcWIRE page. Check back with the latter for my rapid-fire (letter grade) takes on contemporary movies, plus links to reviews.

Plastic Planet (Slant)
Burning Palms (Slant)
Petition (The L Magazine)
Twelve Thirty (Village Voice)
Every Day (Time Out New York)
I'm Dangerous with Love (Time Out New York)

New Year's Wrap Up

2010-12-27T12:49:00.000-08:00

My last reviews of 2010 cover a mixed bag of films, from the solid (The Red Chapel) to the mediocre (everything else). Better off checking out The Strange Case of Angelica which I reviewed for Slant during this year's New York Film Festival and which now begins a short run at the IFC Center or Derek Cianfrance's excellent Blue Valentine, also opening this week.

The Way Back (Slant)
Biutiful (The L Magazine)
The Red Chapel (The L Magazine)
The Sound of Insects (Village Voice)

Village Voice Film Poll

2010-12-22T04:31:00.001-08:00

For the second year in a row, I was asked to participate in the Village Voice's annual film poll. I was gratified to see the support among fellow critics for my favorite film of the year Our Beloved Month of August. Click here to see my ballot.

Somewhere and Some Reflections on "Personal" Cinema

2010-12-20T05:14:00.001-08:00

While Somewhere’s obvious film-opening symbolism of a car driving in endless circles or a later image of the film’s aging movie star protagonist Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) relaxing on a float in a hotel pool, straying aimlessly offscreen, is meant to suggest the repetitive driftlessness of that character’s booze-, drug- and sex-fueled lifestyle, they speak just as eloquently to the impasse of director Sofia Coppola’s career. Her fourth feature, and fourth to deal with the isolating nature of celebrity – from the local (The Virgin Suicides) to the world-historical (Marie Antoinette) level - this is the one where the trail has officially run cold. Anyone with a reasonably good eye and Harris Savides as her cinematographer can frame a decent image, and, whether taking in an amateurish double stripper pole dance performed for Johnny’s purported pleasure (mostly he just looks bored) or the aforementioned car looping its way around a private race track, Coppola’s largely fixed takes are certainly handsome enough. Similarly, the director occasionally nails the absurdity of the rituals of celebrity, particularly in an amusingly offhand press junket and photo shoot that gain their disorienting power from the fact that they’re just one more non-emphatic event in Johnny’s life. Things change slightly when his young daughter (Elle Fanning) comes to stay with him at his L.A. hotel. At least he has to pass on most of the sexual opportunities that present themselves with credulity-straining frequency, perhaps because, as Miriam Bale suggests, he learns to see women as women through the lens of his female offspring, but also, undoubtedly, because of sheer logistical difficulty. Still, by the time the actor’s whining out the film’s thesis “I’m not even a human being” and wandering off down the road to nowhere in a film-ending gambit that last worked forty years ago in Five Easy Pieces, the limits of not only Johnny’s lifestyle, but Coppola’s trademark themes have most definitely been reached.

A problem with so much of recent American cinema is an insistence on that old Creative Writing 101 saw, “Write about what you know.” Whether it’s the insular mumblings of filmmakers like Joe Swanberg, the privileged wallow of Lena Dunham’s overpraised Tiny Furniture that makes a virtue of its deliberately narrow world-view or the wave of look-at-me-and-my-family first-person docs, our national independent filmmaking has become practically synonymous with what often feels like a round of glorified vanity projects. Critical responses to such self-reflective films have ranged from ambivalent pieces like Dan Callahan’s consideration of Coppola and Dunham’s efforts (he finds the latter promising, while disliking the former) appropriately titled “On Rich Girl Cinema” to Richard Brody’s ample praise of a strain of filmmaking that allows sheltered youth the privilege of self-expression, a position most clearly articulated in his consideration of the recent book of essays What Was the Hipster?. Taking to task the book’s chief contributor Mark Greif for chiding middle-class whites who focus on “their struggles for their own pleasures and luxuries… rather than asking what makes their sort of people entitled to them”, Brody counters by praising the art being made by “young people” that “depicts themselves and the specifics of their own lives,” including “their economic circumstances, the places in which they live, the assumptions on which their choices are based.” Brody’s own assumption seems to be that all subject matters are uniformly valid, and that Greif’s prescription is essentially anti-democratic.

But are all subjects equal? Just because you’re white, middle- (or upper-) class and apolitical does that make your story any less valid than those of less privileged people? (Certainly if a film’s focus on working-class life consists of an unholy mix of sentimental heroics and class contempt like David O. Russell’s The Fighter, it doesn’t). But whether dealing with Coppola’s filthy-rich movie star, Dunham’s wealthy recent college grad or the aimless twenty-somethings of Joe Swanberg's and Kentucker Audley’s films (presumably the latter two examples are what Brody has in mind), I would say that the answer is that these films' subjects are simply not terribly interesting objects of study. Not everybody’s life is.

As a young, white, middle-class (by lifestyle if not income), though hardly apolitical person, I wouldn’t think of turning my life into a film; it would probably be the dullest thing ever committed to celluloid. But at least I can say this: Unlike the protagonists (and directors) of most American independent films, my interests extend beyond my own daily existence. In reading my Tiny Furniture review one can take me to task for putting my set of cultural references above Lena Dunham’s and asserting my superiority to the filmmaker and her character. My response would be that my interests aren’t more valid because they’re more highbrow, but because they don’t begin and end with the specifics of my personal existence. As someone interested in the cinema (like Dunham’s character), I don’t try to limit myself by declaring a blanket dislike of “foreign films”, but try to engage with all forms of movies. And rather than assert that my social life is more important than the larger issues facing the world (impending climate catastrophe, growing wealth inequality, endless wars abroad - or the politics of sexual inequality that play out daily in less dramatic theaters), I freely admit my personal insignificance. In the final analysis, what’s ultimately lacking from the vast majority of independent American films being released to groundswells of critical acclaim is any kind of political awareness.

Slant Magazine's Best of 2010: Film

2010-12-15T06:49:00.001-08:00

Slant Magazine's year-end film feature, highlighting the top 25 movies of 2010 as selected by seven staff critics (myself included), has gone live. Check out my capsule reviews for the films that ranked 22nd, 21st and 7th. Then click here to see my personal top 10 (along with honorable mentions).

Casino Jack and Alien Girl

2010-12-13T07:59:00.000-08:00

My latest reviews, both for Slant Magazine, cover Casino Jack, the late George Hickenlooper's docudrama about the downfall of Jack Abramoff, which as I argue, is considerably less effective than Alex Gibney's recent documentary treatment of the same material, and Russian director Anton Bormatov's scuzzy gangster picture Alien Girl.

The Company Men and The Temptation of St. Tony

2010-12-07T04:19:00.000-08:00

The Company Men

This year’s Up in the Air, but bleaker, without the leavening humor. Also, (see the title) more male-centric. In theory, there’s no subject unfit for cinematic treatment, but the chastening and redemption of an obnoxious corporate player forced to adjust to a less gilded lifestyle (George Clooney’s professional downsizer in the Jason Reitman picture; Ben Affleck’s sales exec in John Wells’ current feature) puts that theory rather severely to the test. Unlike Clooney’s charmer, Affleck’s Bobby Walker is pretty much all asshole, defining himself by the luxury life (Porsches, Patriots season tix) that he can barely afford on his middle-class salary. When he gets the axe in a round of corporate downsizing, he can’t pay his mortgage, suffers a crisis of class-sliding dread and is finally forced to take a job hanging drywall for his contractor brother-in-law. Ennobled by his brief contact with the working class, he’s (spoilers ahead) free to rejoin the white collar world, netting a more ethically responsible position, albeit at half his old salary. As if there was any question of Affleck’s character ending up a full-time laborer.

Semi-upbeat ending aside, this is a world of corporate double-crosses, humiliating employment agency exercises, suicides and small businesses that can’t break even, where anyone above the age of 30 is seemingly unemployable, a state of affairs that emerges through the stories of the other “company men” of various levels of seniority also terminated from Walker’s company. Bloated CEO pay and outsourcing are the culprits according to the film’s endlessly reiterated talking points, but for all its attempts to speak to our moment and address the larger picture of economic failure, this is one more redemption-of-corporate-man melodrama, in this case effecting the ethical deliverance via a dubious embrace of the purity of working class labor, a “lower” world which it eventually discards as beneath its white collar characters.

The Temptation of St. Tony

A mourner at a funeral reflects that everything in the world is evil. A priest denies a feeling of any connection with God. A sinister figure of occult power mocks notions of goodness and laughs at protestations of love. And they all live in a bleak Estonian landscape of rocky expanses dotted with the occasional ultra-modernist structure (the incongruity of post-Soviet capitalism). Against such a backdrop, the semi-ironically nicknamed “Saint” Tony (Taavi Eelmaa), a factory manager with a cheating wife, a recently deceased father and a pitying love of dogs, searches for something like redemption (or at least some alternative to the void). The priest, a man blessed with superhuman omniscience, tells Tony the only thing he believes in is individual accountability, a lesson not lost on the industrial manager. But no matter if he’s reporting the discovery of a pair of severed hands to a provincial policeman only to narrowly escape ill treatment from that petty bureaucrat or trying to save a comely factory worker’s daughter from a sinister network of sex slavery for which he nearly suffers far greater punishment, Tony proves a perennially impotent figure. Whether or not one is inclined to take all this as allegory (at one point a nearly naked Tony wraps himself in the Estonian flag and runs across a snowy field), Veiko Õunpuu’s stunningly photographed second feature (shot in tactile black-and-white by Mart Taniel) presents a sardonically bleak picture of man’s existential, and Eastern European man’s political, state (though not untempered by ample doses of black humor). If the film works best in individual moments, there are few in the recent cinema as memorable as a posh dinner party where the guests go from discussing swinging to dancing drunkenly in various male-female-female combinations or, better, the climactic Eyes Wide Shut-inspired set-piece which takes the notion of the hidden sinister farther than even Kubrick (or Arthur Schnitzler) could have imagined.

Two Up, Two Down

2010-12-04T04:10:00.000-08:00

This week's reviews cover two films very much worth seeing and two that are best avoided. Which are which? Click below to find out.

Rabbit à la Berlin (Slant)
All Good Things (Slant)
Queen of the Lot (Slant)
Bhutto (Time Out New York)

Track of the Cat

2010-11-29T05:42:00.000-08:00

The opening credits of William Wellman’s Track of the Cat unfold above a series of overhead shots of two horsemen wending their way across a snow-drenched valley, dotted only with the occasional tree or shrub and given a sense of endless expanse by the Cinemascope framing. There’s no mistaking Wellman’s meaning as the pair of puny figures are all but swallowed up by the vast landscape, but the director’s 1954 western-set drama is at least as much about the debilitating cruelties and constricting power struggles of the nuclear family as they are the expansive, age old theme of man versus nature. Cutting back and forth between the isolated homestead and the primal wilderness, Wellman treats the scenes set in the former as part high psychological drama and part parody, those situated in the latter as allegorical journey, a decaying domestic set-up vying with (and being symbolically linked to) brutal blizzards and wild cats as sites of libidinal menace.

Everything in Wellman’s film is seen at its terminal stage: the family, the frontier, history itself. Set at the earliest in 1896 (the date of an inscription glimpsed in a book of Keats poems), at least three years after Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the western limit of American expansion achieved, Track of the Cat focuses on an extended clan that plays like a grotesque parody of familial values. While Bible-spouting Mom (Beulah Bondi), along with her favorite son, the domineering Curt (a well-bearded Robert Mitchum), solidifies her power over her offspring, her husband (Philip Tonge) comically stumbles around in a perpetual drunken stupor, endlessly searching out the bottles of whisky he’s hidden in any number of spots throughout the house. Rounding out the picture are Curt’s siblings, the mystically-inclined Arthur (William Hopper), the deeply unhappy Grace (Teresa Wright) and the cowering, ineffectual youngest brother Harold (Tab Hunter), constantly ridiculed by Curt in front of his intended bride Gwen (Diana Lynn), the latter the recipient of filthy-sounding innuendos from her future brother-in-law.

While this clan’s passions either get repressed or simmer hotly in their isolated home which, for all Curt’s claims as to having built up the surrounding valley, seems situated at something like the end of history if not the world itself, a specter comes to haunt the land that may itself be a reminder of that now-conquered past. A panther has been attacking the local cattle and, after Arthur is killed by the animal, Curt embarks mid-snowstorm on a perilous journey to bring in this beast. Writing about Wellman’s later films, critic Richard Combs notes that the director’s style becomes “more introverted… his subjects tilted more interestingly toward allegory.” But Combs goes on to dismiss Track of the Cat as a “very thin abstraction,” complaining that the “cat of the title” is reduced “to a wholly unseen, metaphorical threat.” While it’s true that the “painter” (as he’s referred to in the characters' western-speak) is never glimpsed on screen and serves a largely symbolic purpose, the exact nature of that purpose is by no means a simple question. Like the white whale of Moby Dick (or the gold doubloon which Ahab offers to the man who first spots that leviathan), the cat has a different meaning for each character.

For the family’s Native American servant Joe Sam (Carl Switzer) who, after having most of his family wiped out by U.S. soldiers, suffered the loss of his wife and child at the hand of the panther, the beast represents something like pure evil or, according to Arthur, the only member of the family with whom the he speaks freely, it “stands for the whole business of being run out by the whites.” Thus having lost the battle to save his land, the American Indian is reduced to working for his vanquisher while transferring the weight of his past onto the shoulders of a semi-mystical creature. For Curt, the stakes are not so simple, but pursuing the beast single-handedly with dogged purpose, it’s clear it’s tied up with claims of patriarchal authority, a reading enforced both by a discussion with his mother about mounting the beast on the wall (where it would serve as a symbol of his masculine power) and his continued taunting of his brother’s intended Gwen about making the pelt into a blanket for her wedding bed, thus asserting his sexual privilege over the young woman and linking domestic control with dominance over primal nature.

If history – along with that bedrock of “civilized” society, the family – is at an end, then Curt would seem to be its winner while Joe Sam, reduced to spouting mystical nonsense, is its obvious loser. But for all his arrogance and his bragging about having tamed the valley, nature is not finished with Curt. Introduced wearing a blood red poncho cut through with a bold horizontal line of black, Curt trades his top for a less assertive black and white-spotted outfit that mirrors the monotone of both the wilderness and the family’s home. In making the switch, Curt seals his doom by forgetting to transfer the food from the pocket of the old garment to the new. As the days go by and his older brother inches closer to death, Harold begins to assert himself as the only viable male figure left in the household. That this assertion consists of telling his fiancée what to do rather than demurring to her wishes and then setting out on Curt’s path to kill the panther himself suggests that instead of overturning his brother’s cruel authoritarianism, he might well develop a similar bearing in order to stabilize an increasingly degenerative household.

Although it’s Harold and not Curt who ultimately shoots the panther (the action hidden by a well-placed tree) and thus asserts his right to both his familial and sexual inheritance, the victor lacks his brother’s arrogance and promises to be a more benign patriarch as he prepares to take control of the household from his increasingly impotent (and remorseful) mother. Still, at film’s end, the last symbolic vestige of threatening wilderness has been killed, the frontier has been definitively closed and the stage is set for the increasingly revisionist western of the mid-1950s to give way to the final apocalypse that brought the genre to a close in the next two decades. The wild land may be tamed, but the wilderness at the heart of man – represented via the rottenness of his deteriorating organizational modes, the family and the larger society – is primed to take center stage.

Day Before Thanksgiving Link Round-Up

2010-11-24T03:18:00.001-08:00

Enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday, while hopefully giving wide berth to the three films to which I've linked reviews below.

Undertow (Slant)
The Legend of Pale Male (Slant)
Open Five (Village Voice)

Made in Cinema Hell

2010-11-17T04:03:00.001-08:00

What could be more inspiring than a film about a successful wildcat strike staged in the name of equal pay for women? If it's Made in Dagenham, Nigel Cole's silly amalgam of inspirational speeches and embarrassing sentimentality, then just about anything, actually.

Made in Dagenham (Slant)
Today's Special (Slant)
Family Affair (Village Voice)

Marxism Goes to the Movies: On Pioneering Activist Film Critic Harry Alan Potamkin

2010-11-16T04:29:00.000-08:00

It would probably be an exaggeration to call Harry Alan Potamkin America's first great movie critic. The country would have to wait for the advent of the mature Many Farber in 1949 for sustained, idiosyncratic greatness. (I intentionally bypass Otis Ferguson and, for all the pleasure his prose affords, James Agee). Read nearly any of Potamkin's reviews or articles and his distinguishing faults become immediately apparent: the abstract terminology ("visual motor-graph," "social idea"), his now-naïve faith in the Soviet Union as the most promising hope for civilization, the occasional clumsiness of his prose, his ultra-stringent criteria for a film's accomplishments that left a personal canon of only about half a dozen films that were deemed worthy of inclusion. But for all that, Potamkin remains America's first critic who produced a body of work of lasting value, the first to understand film's role as a social medium that wasn't either passive entertainment or isolated work of art, but one that played an active role in shaping the society that produced it.

To read the rest of this article, please continue to Bright Lights Film Journal.

Tiny Furniture and The Practice of the Wild

2010-11-10T05:18:00.000-08:00

Just two reviews this week, covering Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture, the latest barely watchable "hit" to emerge from Austin's famous/infamous South by Southwest festival, and The Practice of the Wild, an agreeably modest profile of poet Gary Snyder. Links are to Slant Magazine and the Village Voice respectively.

Elliot Spitzer and More

2010-11-05T09:58:00.000-07:00

As we prepare to welcome our new budget-balancing, union-hating governor to Albany, it's a good time to reflect back on what might have been had Eliot Spitzer not been outed as a prostitute user - or run afoul of Joe Bruno and other conservative opponents at the capital. A reasonable place to start might be Alex Gibney's Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, a provocative, if problematic piece of work that posits the investigation that brought down the former governor as a right-wing hit job.

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (Slant)
Outside the Law (Slant)
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (Artforum)
Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story (Time Out New York)
A Marine Story (Time Out New York)

A Gloomy Week at the Picture Show

2010-10-28T04:22:00.000-07:00

As a three day gloom hangs over New York City's skies, little relief from the fall doldrums can be expected at the local cinemas. Of the four films I reviewed this week, two are positively awful, while two are middling at best. Better luck next week...

Welcome to the Rileys (Slant)
A Small Act (Slant)
Walkaway (Village Voice)
Jolene (Time Out New York)

New Releases: Samson and Delilah and The Portuguese Nun

2010-10-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

Just two reviews this week, Australian director Warwick Thornton's impressive debut feature Samson and Delilah (for the Voice) and Eugène Green's intriguing, but ultimately unsuccessful formalist redemption tale The Portuguese Nun (for Slant). Note that the last line of the Voice review refers specifically to Delilah's act of symbolically washing away Samson's psychic wounds (as she literally washes away his physical ones) and not to a generalized "spirituality" that runs throughout the film.

Zoo

2010-10-11T01:47:00.000-07:00

Frederick Wiseman’s 1993 film Zoo begins with a succession of brief shots depicting the splendor and diversity of the Miami Metrozoo’s animal population: Elephants, giraffes, white tigers and chimpanzees all get their close-ups. Placing us in the position of ideal spectator, Wiseman implicates the viewer in what might be termed, with a nod to Laura Mulvey, the human gaze. Flipping around his camera, the filmmaker then takes in the zoo’s visitors, as they crudely snap pictures, beat their chests in mocking imitation of a gorilla and generally seem to enjoy themselves at the animals’ expense. Wiseman wastes no time establishing the fact that the zoo’s mission is largely a distasteful enterprise – epitomized in an early sequence in which elephants perform a series of “tricks” for an appreciative audience who seem to have no idea how vulgar the whole thing appears – but in what relation the organization’s staff, the film’s viewer and the filmmaker himself stand in relation to this operation is a point that the project leaves perpetually open to question.

It’s no coincidence that Zoo contains the most on-screen video and still photograph cameras of any of the director’s 15 films I’ve had the pleasure of screening – clear stand-ins for the directorial presence even if they function in a largely different manner from Wiseman’s own apparatus – as well as the most disturbing series of surgeries and naked carnivorism. (The filmmaker’s animal-themed films tend to be the bloodiest). In an early sequence, an on-screen camera tracks along with a group of lions as they move across their zoological enclosure, while one crew member holds up a piece of flora in front of the lens, manipulating the image into suggesting that the shoot took place in the animals’ native habitat, as opposed to a “fake” setting of captivity. By showing us the falsehood inherent in this act of image-creation, Wiseman calls upon the viewer to question the director’s own choice of material. While his approach obviously aims for a less altered view of “reality”, it’s clear that any endeavor that strives toward a sense of the objective is no less shaped by a selective process and by authorial prejudices, even if Wiseman’s subjects never call attention to the camera’s presence. (This last fact always strikes me as vaguely unsettling when watching his films.)

In one sense, Wiseman’s 16mm camera operates in similar fashion to the various film crews and tourist photo shoots that he captures on screen. But what separates his method is the access he allows to far more privileged moments of the organization's inner workings, offering a larger context for his images and, with it, a definite authorial perspective. This point of view places the audience in an uncomfortable position in relation to the animals (which it’s likely to regard with the same voyeuristic urge as the zoo’s visitors), the visitors themselves (who tend to come off somewhat less than flatteringly) and the behind-the-scenes activities performed by the zoo’s staff. Though clearly enamored of the animals they tend to, these workers nonetheless engage in acts that to the viewer unaccustomed to such operations can only register as unnecessarily brutal.

These squirm inducing sequences comprise a good portion of the film’s running time: In one heartwrenching scene, a rhino gives birth to a still-born child, the mother registering a look of sad resignation (in so far as it’s possible to project human emotion onto an animal’s face) as she regards her deceased offspring. Later, that dead animal is chopped up into pieces, some to be sent to scientific research centers, the rest discarded in an incinerator. A lizard is fed a meal of dead birds; when he’s finished, a speck of plumage clings cruelly to the corner of his mouth. A wolf is castrated while the doctors deadpan lines like “out they come”. After a tour guide explains to visitors that most offspring at the zoo are raised by the mothers, we watch workers steal a crocodile’s newly hatched eggs for observation.

While part of this brutality is inherent in the feeding process, it seems all the more pitiless for being performed in an artificial manner necessitated by the animals’ removal from their native environments. Some of the other acts can be justified as furthering the aims of science (the egg removal) or, more dubiously, as being in the general interest of “education”, a vague term that a tour guide vaguely throws around. It’s clear, however, that the real purpose of the zoo is to indulge the voyeurism of its paying customers, a voyeurism in which Wiseman implicates both himself and the viewer by showing us shots of animals that are undeniably striking, even if he later undercuts our visual pleasure by exposing the bluntly executed processes behind the operation.

Two late sequences give us some of the wider context of that operation, starting with a board meeting in which the zoo’s administrators discuss the negotiations involved in obtaining komodo dragons for their menagerie. Since they have to deal with the Indonesian government (then run by the U.S.-supported military dictator and genocidist Suharto), discussions lead to tricky economic, as well as moral, questions. This sole look at the administrative process of the institution (less than we’ve come to expect from such near contemporaneous Wiseman films as Near Death and Central Park), is particularly telling: After our immersion in day-to-day process, we’re finally granted a glimpse at the wider decision-making that allows for the zoo’s continued operation. The price of that continued operation is further emphasized in the film’s final sequence, a gala benefit, crudely entitled “Feast with the Beasts”. Under a full moon, VIPS dressed in black-tie cavort with elephants and dine on cooked meat that in the dim light reminds one of the flesh burning in the incinerator that reappears like a bad conscience throughout the course of the film. While the chefs at the feast cook up fancy steaks, the daily workers perform a far less glamorous act of flesh-frying. These two acts – fund-raising and disposal of the dead – represent the twin poles of activities necessary to the maintenance of the institution. But whether or not that institution deserves this upkeep is a question that Wiseman’s film continually, fascinatingly leaves open to interrogation.

New York Film Festival, Part Three

2010-10-09T01:21:00.001-07:00

The festival comes to a close this Sunday with one of its best films, Raul Ruiz's sly, endlessly rewarding 4 1/2 period piece, The Mysteries of Lisbon and arguably its worst, Clint Eastwood's thoroughly silly Hereafter. Neither was reviewed by me, though, as my last two pieces for Slant's fest coverage take on considerably more mediocre fare.

New York Film Festival
Old Cats (Slant)
Revolución (Slant)

Other Film Reviews
Letters to Father Jacob (Slant)
Make Yourself at Home (Time Out New York)

New York Film Festival, Part Two

2010-09-30T07:29:00.001-07:00

My second set of reviews from what's turning out to be a pretty good New York Film Festival has been posted - along with some briefer considerations of theatrical releases. The highlight of the bunch is probably 101-year old Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira's deceptively simple fable, The Strange Case of Angelica.

New York Film Festival
Aurora (Slant)
The Strange Case of Angelica (Slant)
Boxing Gym (Slant)

Other Film Reviews
Leaving (Slant)
Nine Nation Animation (Village Voice)
Speed-Dating (Time Out New York)

New York Film Festival, Part One

2010-09-25T04:41:00.000-07:00

With yesterday's opening night screening of The Social Network - David Fincher's slick-as-hell account of the founding of Facebook, lined with non-stop faux-clever dialogue and played at a pace commensurate with the spread of information via virtual technology, a film appropriately (given its subject) both entertaining in the moment and completely disposable - the 48th New York Film Festival is officially underway. There's a lot of good stuff in this year's edition, though, including the subject of one of my first two reviews which, along with some of my other work from the past week, is linked below.

New York Film Festival
Festival Introduction (Slant)
Of Gods and Men (Slant)
Le Quattro Volte (Slant)

Other Film Reviews
A Mother's Courage (Village Voice)
Tibet in Song (Time Out New York)

Book Review
Philip Roth's Nemesis (The House Next Door)

End of Summer Link Round-Up

2010-09-15T05:29:00.000-07:00

As summer reaches its end and New York Film Festival excitement mounts, the studios continue to turn out their usual mediocre product, whether it's Mark Romanek's uninspired adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's celebrated novel Never Let Me Go or Philip Seymour Hoffman's dud of a directorial debut, Jack Goes Boating. Better off staying at home and taking in Kino's new first-rate release of Louis Feuillade's 1913-1914 serial Fantômas.

Jack Goes Boating (Slant)
Catfish (Slant)
The Freebie (Slant)
Fantômas: The Complete Saga (DVD) (Slant)
Music Makes a City (Time Out New York)

Latinbeat, Heartbreaker and more

2010-09-08T13:21:00.000-07:00

With the New York Film Festival looming just around the corner, it's easy to overlook Lincoln Center's Latinbeat fest, an admittedly uneven sampling of the work of lesser-known Latin American directors, which runs from September 8 to 18. At the Village Voice, I highlight five of the festival's 16 films all of which are better than the (semi) high-profile French rom-com Heartbreaker, also new in theaters this week.

Latinbeat Film Festival (Village Voice)
Who is Harry Nilsson? (Village Voice)
Heartbreaker (Slant)
Race to Nowhere (Time Out New York)

New Releases: Our Beloved Month of August and Prince of Broadway

2010-09-01T03:42:00.000-07:00

This week sees the (highly limited) release of probably my favorite film of the year, Miguel Gomes' Our Beloved Month of August, opening for a week-long run at New York's Anthology Film Archives and reviewed by me in the L Magazine. Also, very much worth seeing is Lixin Fan's doc Last Train Home about mass numbers of Chinese migrant workers making their annual return to their native villages. I reviewed the film back when it played at New Directors/New Films. Now, it gets a much deserved theatrical release. Considerably less essential is Sean Baker's Prince of Broadway, the subject of a short review in Time Out New York.

Forced Incest at Gunpoint, Necrophilia (Sort Of), and the Shallow Lives of the Haute Bourgeoisie...

2010-08-25T03:42:00.000-07:00

... plus regressive (and racist) nostalgia via Dan Pritzker's faux-silent Louis. To be sure, an off-putting group of subjects mark the films I reviewed this week, but there's one clear winner in the bunch. That would be the Deagol Brothers' teen zombie movie, Make-Out with Violence, a film infused with the tender yearning of youth (and hints of necrophilia). It opens this Friday at Brooklyn's new reRun Gastropub theater. Also, very much worth seeing is Claudia Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow which I reviewed last year during New Directors/New Films and which (finally) gets a theatrical release this week.

Change of Plans (Slant)
Louis (Slant)
Make-Out with Violence (Village Voice)
Daniel and Ana (Village Voice)

One Up, One Down

2010-08-17T10:43:00.000-07:00

In recent years, there's been no shortage of films exploring (or exploiting) the more brutal episodes of World War II and the trend shows no sign of letting up anytime soon. But as two films opening this week show, the results can differ dramatically: While A Film Unfinished offers a stunning analysis of the Nazi's often contradictory propaganda mission by offering a reading of a single German cinematic production, Robert Guédiguian's French resistance drama, Army of Crime, proves to be, as I conclude my Slant review, "more interested in sentimentalizing history than in analyzing it."

New Releases: Peepli Live and The People I've Slept With

2010-08-11T06:43:00.000-07:00

Two films among many will come to New York screens this week and then depart just as quickly, memorialized only by a handful of reviews such as mine below. Neither film is great, and neither is awful, just another pair of mediocre pictures getting a limited run at one of Manhattan's less visible venues.

Peepli Live (Slant)
The People I've Slept With (Time Out New York)

Twelve Times the Agony

2010-08-04T09:02:00.000-07:00

I covered seven films this week and only one (Last Letters from Monte Rosa) is at all worth seeing. But the real stinker of the lot is Joel Schumacher's unspeakable Twelve, arguably the worst film released so far this year. Consider yourself warned.

Twelve (Slant)
Cairo Time (Slant)
The Disappearance of Alice Creed (Slant)
Brotherhood (The L Magazine)
Last Letters from Monte Rosa (Village Voice)
The Kid: Chamaco (Village Voice)
Patrik, Age 1.5 (Time Out New York)

Khmer Rouge, Suicidal Depression, PTSD and Other Cheery Subjects

2010-07-28T04:11:00.000-07:00

Of this week's spate of releases, the clear winner is Enemies of the People, Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin's extraordinary and extraordinarily personal excavation of the brutal legacy of the Khmer Rouge. Other new films dealing with mental illness (Helen) and the after-effects of war (The Dry Land) seem shallow and obvious by comparison.

The Dry Land (Slant)
Who Killed Nancy? (Slant)
Enemies of the People (Village Voice)
Helen (Village Voice)
Smash His Camera (Time Out New York)

Tirador and Countdown to Zero

2010-07-22T04:08:00.001-07:00

Just two reviews this week, the belated release of Filipino director Brillante Mendoza's 2007 film Tirador which is worth a look and Lucy Walker's fear-mongering nuclear exposé Countdown to Zero which isn't.

Tirador (Village Voice)
Countdown to Zero (Slant)

Odds and Ends

2010-07-14T04:34:00.000-07:00

Lots of new links to get to and not all negative. For New York viewers, there's the chance to catch up with festival faves Alamar and Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno which each get a theatrical run this week and, while the results may not be revelatory, both are very much worth seeing. As is Racing Dreams, a sort of Hoop Dreams for the NASCAR set.

Alamar (Slant)
The Contenders (Slant)
Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu (DVD) (Slant)
Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (The L Magazine)
Racing Dreams (The Village Voice)
To Age or Not to Age (The Village Voice)

South of the Border

2010-07-03T04:06:00.000-07:00

Bias is a tricky concept when it comes to political reporting. It’s what the right always seems to accuse left-leaning (or even mainstream) channels of being dictated by. But surely every news broadcast is colored by some political ideology or adherence. Whether it’s the deliberate distortions (or outright lies) of networks like Fox News or the free pass center-left organs seem to give our desperate-for-consensus president, there’s no such thing as purely objective reportage.

Questions of bias and inaccuracy have long dogged such leftist filmmakers as Oliver Stone and Michael Moore and, while one can easily question the conspiracy theories unleashed by the former in films like JFK, it’s less easy to dismiss the slanted reportage of the latter. Yes, Moore engages in a selective arrangement of facts – as well as a gut-punching rhetoric that often seems like he isn’t playing fair – but no more than his counterparts on the right, and unlike them his presentation gets much nearer to the truth in its active engagement with progressive change that will benefit rather than harm the average citizen.

All of which is why I can’t agree with my colleague and good friend Keith Uhlich who considers Stone’s new work of Moore-style infotainment, a docu-profile of left-leaning South American presidents, “near worthless as reportage” in his Time Out New York review. South of the Border may be “as distorted and evasive as the Fox News footage it so often demonizes,” as Uhlich notes – though not quite: nothing’s as distorted as footage Stone includes of Fox News reporters calling democratically-elected presidents “dictators” when the real dictators are the ones that the United States installed in place of democratically-elected Latin American presidents throughout the twentieth century – but with a key difference. While the extreme right’s take demonizes these leaders for their understandable anti-American bias, Stone, despite his omissions and obvious untempered enthusiasm for each of his subjects, emphasizes the most important fact about the state of South American politics: that after a century of being in thrall to the interests of North American and European corporations who pilfered the countries’ most valuable resources while leaving the people in states of extreme poverty or subject to torture, they’re finally being run by nationalist-minded presidents who are turning the nation’s assets to the benefit of the people.

Any other concerns pale in comparison and while the viewer may surely want to follow up with some additional reading for a more rounded picture, Stone’s film succeeds in contrasting the reports of the American right-wing media with something that approaches a more essential, even if only partial, truth. Once the viewer accepts these conditions, it’s easy to enjoy watching Stone schmooze with best-bud Hugo Chavez as he talks over the failed (American-sanctioned) coup attempt on his presidency or chew cocoa leaves with Bolivian leader Evo Morales. Or at least it would be if the unctuous director didn’t insist on putting himself at the center of every scene. As presented by Stone, the presidents are a varied and sympathetic gallery of personalities, from the fiery Chavez to Paraguay’s soft-spoken leader (and ex-bishop) Fernando Lugo; it’s only the filmmaker himself whose presence grates. Asking leading questions and insisting on his privileged position with his subjects, Stone’s as unbearable a presence as ever. For the rest, his film’s an engaging and, yes, informative look at a new trend in global politics that anyone who takes the word “democracy” to mean something other than American hegemony ought not to dismiss as quickly as the shit-spinners from the so-called "fair and balanced" media.

Love Ranch and Great Directors

2010-06-29T07:40:00.000-07:00

My newest reviews cover Taylor Hackford's latest stinker Love Ranch and the mildly entertaining, if hardly revelatory, Great Directors, in which Angela Ismailos interviews ten of her favorite directors. Both pieces are from Slant Magazine. Also on that site, my dismissive review of Alain Resnais' Wild Grass which was originally posted when that movie - currently enjoying its New York theatrical run - screened at last year's New York Film Festival.

An Outpouring of Cinema

2010-06-17T12:04:00.000-07:00

A remarkable number of interesting films open this week in New York - of which the best may be the least heralded, Bill and Turner Ross' 45365, sneaking in for a week's run at the Anthology - and at one point or another I covered almost all of them. While new pieces for the Village Voice, Artforum, the L Magazine and Time Out New York bring me up to date, two older reviews - covering Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love and Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me - first ran when those film's played the local festival circuit, at New Directors/New Films and Tribeca respectively. Now they're getting theatrical releases and I'm re-running the reviews.

New Reviews:
Stonewall Uprising and 8: The Mormon Proposition (The L Magazine)
Let it Rain (Artforum)
The Nature of Existence (Village Voice)
45365 (Time Out New York)

Old Reviews:
I Am Love (Slant)
The Killer Inside Me (The House Next Door)

"A" as in Awful

2010-06-10T07:15:00.000-07:00

The new A-Team picture hits theaters tomorrow and, while I usually don't review such slam-bang action fare, I made an exception in the case of Joe Carnahan's aggressive re-think of the popular '80s TV show. A combination of nostalgia for the moral simplicity of boyhood and a steady stream of amped-up, near incoherent bursts of violence combine to make this one very bad picture indeed.

The A-Team (Slant)
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Slant)
Reel Injun (Village Voice)

New Releases: Double Take and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead

2010-06-01T07:43:00.000-07:00

Among this week's new releases are Double Take, Johan Grimonprez's overambitious mating of 1950's Folger's TV spots and clips from Alfred Hitchcock Presents with a Borges derived narrative about doppelgangers and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead, a joyless Hamlet-vampire movie which manages to kill all the potential fun implied in that set-up. Now in its second week of release is The Father of My Children, which I covered during this year's New Directors/New Films festival. All reviews are from Slant Magazine.

MacGruber and More

2010-05-21T07:39:00.000-07:00

Since this week's highest profile opening, MacGruber - actor Will Forte and director Jorma Taccone's big screen expansion of their Saturday Night Live sketch - didn't screen for the press until last night (the film opens worldwide today), my review of the film has just been posted at Slant Magazine. So how is it? Click below to find out - and to read reviews of a trio of other new films.

MacGruber (Slant)
John Rabe (Slant)
Holy Rollers (Village Voice)
After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United (Time Out New York)

New Releases: Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo and The Living Wake

2010-05-11T04:59:00.000-07:00

Just a pair of reviews this week, both from Slant Magazine, covering Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Jessica Oreck's intriguing if problematic look at the Japanese obsession with insects, "traditional" Japanese values versus contemporary urbanism and other relevant issues, and The Living Wake, Sol Tryon's trying and unfunny comedy of death which quickly gets swallowed up in its own brand of insufferable quirkiness.

New Releases: Mother and Child, Gravity was Everywhere Back Then and Floored

2010-05-05T04:16:00.000-07:00

For the second week in a row, it looks like I'm about the only one not taken in by a highly dubious art house offering, in this case Rodrigo Garcia's ideologically perverse ode to motherhood, Mother and Child, a film to be avoided at all costs.

Mother and Child (Slant)
Gravity was Everywhere Back Then (Slant)
Floored (Village Voice)

The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

2010-04-30T04:55:00.000-07:00

To the list of bizarre and insalubrious objects that occupy our world, we must now add Tom Six’s The Human Centipede (First Sequence), which as you’ve probably heard involves a mad scientist experiment of unsurpassing zaniness. Grossness too. Following the modern exploitation template of callous Americans getting tortured abroad, Six’s film sets up a pair of nubile New Yorkers who catch a flat en route to a party in Germany as bait for a menacing ex-surgeon who imprisons the pair in his basement when they knock at his door for help. Along with a young (male) Japanese tourist, they’re subject to the sinister German’s pet project: sutured together into the eponymous creature, they’re transformed into a three-pronged entity, connected by conspicuously visible stitches, mouth to asshole, feeding on each other’s shit for sustenance.

Give Six credit for crafting a memorable central image. Even granting my rather severe ignorance of the state of the modern exploitation flick, I doubt there’s much out there to compare to the site of the trio crawling around on their knees, struggling to move in synch, while the horrible stitches in the mouth of the centipede’s “tail” ooze with puss. Or when the “head” confesses in subtitled Japanese which none of the other characters can understand that he’s sorry, but he’s gotta shit and we see the horrified face of the woman in the middle while their captor coos the word “feed” to his creature. Slicker and tauter than you’d expect, Six’s film is still nothing but cynical grindhouse nihilism. Deliberately unpleasant, as free of subtext as an Eli Roth gorefest, Human Centipede can’t be said to be entertaining, but it is compellingly watchable.

At least for fans of the next thing, the seekers of the extreme. The only difference is the film isn’t being tucked away in some grindhouse ghetto (well, actually these don’t seem to exist anymore), but touring the arthouse circuit thanks to a distribution deal from IFC films, so that it plays next to such innocuously genteel fare as Mercy. An interesting juxtaposition and one which has earned Six’s film more attention from the press than it would have received say, thirty years earlier, when it wouldn’t have been heard from outside the insular precincts of 42^nd street. And, despite my now adding to that press, more attention than it deserves, since such perverse creativity as Six possesses is a dubious object of celebration. And after giving cinematic birth to his six-legged monstrosity, the only possible way to bring his project to an end is in an orgy of nihilism, which is precisely what Six does, the final tell of a cynicism that delights in repulsion for its own sake.

Wrapping Tribeca

2010-04-28T15:16:00.000-07:00

My final two (or three depending on how you count) reviews from this year's Tribeca Film Festival are in the bag! While I cover Open House and Michael Winterbottom's disappointing The Killer Inside Me at the House Next Door, over at Slant, I take on Nicole Holofcener's vile Please Give which I'm covering in advance of its release this Friday, but which is premiering just before that release as part of (you guessed it) the Tribeca Film Festival. Since everyone else seems to love Holofcener's piece, seems I'm once again pretty much on my own with this one, but if you happen to see it and share my disgust for the film, drop a line in the comments section below. And once more, if you get a chance before the end of the fest, be sure to check out Mohammad Rasoulof's great The White Meadows.

Tribeca Film Festival

The Killer Inside Me (The House Next Door)
Open House (The House Next Door)

New Releases

Please Give (Slant)
The Good Heart (Slant)

Tribeca 2010: Dream Home and The White Meadows

2010-04-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

Since my latest Tribeca review for The House Next Door, covering Andrew Paquin's Open House, can only be classified, like my first two pieces for that publication, as an out-and-out pan, I wanted to take a little time to briefly discuss two films that I'm not covering for any other outlet, but which I liked considerably more than the films I've written about so far. Like any festival, Tribeca's a mixed-bag - especially when compared to that higher profile and much smaller (in terms of cinematic quantity) festival taking place uptown each fall at Lincoln Center. If Tribeca's still struggling, as the saying goes, to find its identity, it should be noted that in recent year's it's produced such masterpieces as Still Life, Still Walking and (this year) Mohammad Rasoulof's The White Meadows, which I discuss below. Which is all to say that Tribeca 2010 is anything but a lost cause and there are no doubt many more films than I was able to see that are well worth the ticket-buyer's attention.

Dream Home

While I can't label Pang Ho-Cheung's Dream Home an unqualified success, it makes for a productive comparison - and serves as an instructive counter-example - to Open House, one of the festival's weakest entries. Like Andrew Paquin's film, Dream Home is a gory slasher flick about (a) character(s) who commit(s) crimes in order to fulfill his/her otherwise unachievable real-estate dreams. (Note the "house"/"home" in both films' titles). But whereas Paquin's movie is a dull mixture of tensionless plot mechanics and unimaginative slayings that leaves the characters' sense of economic discontent unexplored in favor of a stale psycho-sexual dynamic, Pang's work fully embraces its relation to the world around it, particularly the difficult real estate climate and rapid urban development of its Hong Kong setting - as well as showing a bloodily vivid imagination light years beyond the Open House director's dim reckoning.

Starring Josie Ho as Chen Lai-sheung, a young woman lusting after the dream apartment of the title, a modern complex occupying the once-impoverished neighborhood where she grew up, Pang's film follows its hero as she works multiple jobs to save up for her new digs. Finding the apartment still out of reach, she begins brutally slaying the building's bourgie inhabitants, driving down the desirability (and price) of the location. While Nicole Holofcener's Please Give (another Tribeca 2010 entry) pats yuppies on the back and tells them not to feel guilty about how they acquire their wealth, Dream Home makes members of that same class the victims of hilariously brutal slayings, while painting its biggest real-estate obsessive as a psychotic mass murderer. While the film relies too heavily on elaborately art-directed killings for my taste, I found myself reluctantly admiring the cleverness of their staging (chuckling while one disemboweled man tried to take a last hit from his joint only to find it no longer lit), and, less reluctantly, the level of the critique with which they're charged.

The White Meadows

I suppose when living in a country like Iran, where citizens are subject to seemingly random punishments from a totalitarian government, it helps to have a well-established sense of the absurd. Arrested a month and a half before the Tribeca festival along with fellow director Jafar Panahi, Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof builds his latest film The White Meadows out of a catalogue of images of incomprehensible ritual and absurd acts of punishment. (As of this writing, Rasoulof has been released on bail, but is unallowed to leave the country; Panahi, who edited the film, remains imprisoned). When, late in Meadows, we see a shot of a painter trapped up to his neck in sand because he stubbornly claims that the sea is red and refuses to paint it any other color, it's impossible not to read the scene as a commentary on the Iranian government's treatment of "subversive" artists. But while The White Meadows is certainly a political film, it should not be taken as a basic allegory, a simple matter of easy correspondences.

At once too abstract and too richly expressive for reductive interpretation, Rasoulof's film follows an aging man who paddles his boat from island to island in a salt-filled Iranian sea, landing on tiny masses of land to extract tears from the islands' inhabitants which he then collects in a glass jar. The meaning of the ritual is never explained and it's always accompanied by a ceremony specific to each island. While some of these ceremonies (as one where the participants symbolically place their troubles in a cloth bag) seem designed for healing, most have sinister overtones. In an image composed in equal measure of beauty and horror (neither of which are in short supply in Rasoulof's film), the inhabitants of one island send a young girl adrift on the sea to which she is to be "married". Pushed off on atop a makeshift bed, she floats past countless pans of fire also drifting in the water, the smoke forming an irrepressible black smudge at the top of the screen. Later, our intractable painter is forced to climb a three-rung ladder suspended in the middle of the sea and stare into the sun, an absurdist image of impossible striving and forceable blinding that stands at the heart of a film in which ritual - with its potentially positive connotations of tradition and wholeness - gives way to the palpably ridiculous which, in Rasoulof's vision, becomes not only an apt approximation of life under an oppressive regime, but of life in general in a world not designed for our ready comprehension.

Tribeca and More!

2010-04-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

The Tribeca Film Festival kicks off in earnest today and my first two reviews are up at the House Next Door, covering a pair of rather disappointing films, including Brillante Mendoza's latest, Lola. My coverage of other new releases is spread across three outlets (surprisingly none of which are Slant Magazine): the Village Voice, the L Magazine and in my inaugural (and modest) contribution to the venue, Time Out New York.

Tribeca Film Festival

Lola (The House Next Door)
Travelogues (The House Next Door)

New Releases

Red Birds (Village Voice)
Behind the Burly Q (The L)
Oceans (Time Out New York)

Early Spring Link-O-Rama

2010-04-15T12:29:00.000-07:00

New Directors/New Films is over. Tribeca has yet to begin. And the theatrical pickings are as mixed as ever. For evidence, see below.

Death at a Funeral (Slant)
No One Knows About Persian Cats (Slant)
The City of Your Final Destination (Slant)
When You're Strange: A Film About the Doors (Slant)
La Mission (Slant)
NoBody's Perfect (Village Voice)

Egoyan, Costa and More

2010-03-31T04:40:00.000-07:00

While Hailie Gerima's Teza, a cinematic coming-to-terms with several decades of modern Ethiopian history, opening this week at New York's Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, is certainly worth a look, cinephiles might be better off staying home and taking in Criterion's excellent new Pedro Costa boxed set. I reviewed both this week as well as Atom Egoyan's sexy, but disappointing Chloe and the coming-to-terms-with-loss drama The Greatest.

Teza (Village Voice)
Chloe (Slant)
The Greatest (Slant)
Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa (DVD) (Slant)

New Directors/New Films Round 2

2010-03-23T04:45:00.000-07:00

My second and final round of reviews from this year's New Directors/New Films series is a lot like my first: it covers a handful of movies that it's hard to get particularly excited about along with one obvious highlight. In this case, the one to see is Laura Poitras' The Oath, a dense, complex documentary profiling Osama bin Laden's former bodyguard and (in absentia) his Guantanamo-detained ex-driver.

The Oath (Artforum)
The Father of My Children (Slant)
Down Terrace (Slant)
Every Day is a Holiday (Slant)
Northless (Slant)

New Releases: City Island, Kimjongilia and Shutterbug

2010-03-17T12:49:00.001-07:00

Amidst my ongoing coverage of the New Directors/New Films series, I found time to review a few first-run releases, none of too great interest. The best thing opening this week may be Marco Bellochio's Vincere, which I reviewed at last year's New York Film Festival and which Slant has reposted.

City Island (Slant)
Kimjongilia (Slant)
Shutterbug (Village Voice)

New Directors/New Films Round 1

2010-03-14T04:21:00.000-07:00

My first round of reviews from Lincoln Center/MOMA's annual New Directors/New Films series comes with one obvious highlight, Lixin Fan's Last Train Home. This doc deals with the world's "largest human migration," the annual return of China's 130 million migrant workers to their rural hometowns, telling its story by focusing on a single family. It may not be the country's next great documentary, but Lixin's film is forcefully revealing about the displacements engendered by fast-track modernization.

ND/NF introduction (Slant)
Last Train Home (Slant)
I Am Love (Slant)
How I Ended This Summer (Slant)
La Pivellina (Slant)

New Releases: Our Family Wedding, Severe Clear, Stolen and The Exploding Girl

2010-03-10T13:44:00.000-08:00

It seems like I was the only one even remotely impressed by Rick Famuyiwa's culture-clash comedy, Our Family Wedding - currently standing at 0 % approval on Rotten Tomatoes - but while the film's negatives probably outweighed the positives, I think it's a far more interesting work than others give it credit for, at least if you can get past all the ethnic stereotypes and Viagra-based humor. It's certainly better than Bradley Rust Grey's low-fi outerborough indie The Exploding Girl which is pretty well disastrous.

Our Family Wedding (Slant)
Severe Clear (Slant)
Stolen (Slant)
The Exploding Girl (The L Magazine)