Microreview Roundup #26

By fol.lowfoc.usThu, 01/21/2010 - 17:10


THIRST [Park/2009] Works best in the beginning, when exploring religion/sex/vampirism. The shift to Park-approved chaos sacrifices clarity. (TN)

H. G. CLOUZOT'S INFERNO [Blomberg, Medrea/2009] Lost film's mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic images make doc worth watching; Romy is incandescent. (DG)

SIN NOMBRE [Fukunaga/2009] A subtle but brilliant lead drives a gritty road movie with an abbreviated destination. (TN)

TWO LOVERS [Gray/2008] Somewhat hackneyed story generates surprising emotional intensity, thanks to Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow. (KS)

AN EDUCATION [Scherfig/2009] An entertaining evocation of '60s, pre-Beatles London with Carey Mulligan in a great, star-making performance. (KS)

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Movie of the Week: MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE

By Tony NigroFri, 12/18/2009 - 14:01

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done [2009]

Werner Herzog does David Lynch. Or maybe Lynch does Herzog. Either way, they're in bed together for MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE, the other half of Herzog's crazy coin after the recent BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS. Very loosely based on a real murder case in the late 1970s involving a deranged actor, a saber, his mother, and Sophocles' ELECTRA, MY SON has been described by Herzog as "a horror film without the blood, chainsaws and gore, but with a strange, anonymous fear creeping up in you."

Discussion among film nerds of course includes the Lynch factor. Who influenced whom? How much of it is Lynch? Does Herzog make knowing nods to Lynch because he's a producer or are the dwarf, eerie suburb, and Grace Zabriskie coincidental, organic parts of the project? And who really cares? To the play the auteurist card is one thing, but to wrap blanket statements around the film is to smother it before it has a chance to breathe.

Herzog is no more a stranger to surreal imagery than Lynch -- a boat in a tree in a AGUIRRE, the end of STROSZEK, the entirety of EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL, etc. But whereas Lynch's strangeness is more about mood and consciousness, Herzog often employs such imagery as a juxtaposition to a realistic context, imbuing it with an emotion or baroque meaning that might only be explained in Herzog's obtuse way. MY SON's meeting of the minds is less about who influenced what, but how each talent's bizzaro sensibility might be handled.

That said, so far MY SON, MY SON has been received coolly. The timing of BAD LIEUTENANT and inevitable comparisons may have something to do with that, but mixed reviews can also be a boon when headscratchers like Herzog and Lynch are involved. At the very least, it's a decent alternative to the season's holiday fluff and Oscar bait.

WHAT: MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE

WHEN: Friday, December 18, various times

WHERE: Downtown Independent, 251 S. Main Street, Los Angeles, CA

and IFC Center, 323 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY


A lot of specialized venues are closing for the holidays, but some interesting fare is still in order in Los Angeles:

  • The Egyptian Theatre is ripe with holiday films, including a double feature of DIE HARD 1 and 2 on December 20
  • On December 29, the Aero Theatre will screen LAWRENCE OF ARABIA in 70mm
  • December 22 at Cinefamily, cartoon historian Jerry Beck will present a night of the best and most bizarre holiday themed cartoons
  • On December 27, the Egyptian will screen VERTIGO in 70mm

    • Movie of the Week: HOLIDAY [1938]

    By Amy RobinsonSat, 12/12/2009 - 12:22

    HOLIDAY [1938]

    George Cukor's 1938 rendition of HOLIDAY is both a delightful banter-filled screwball comedy that glows with affection for its collection of willing outsiders and a lovely romantic tribute to the importance of finding one's rightful place and purpose. The recurring use of play as a means of learning about and coping with the world is both childlike and sophisticated. The foolish, starry-eyed immaturity of Cary Grant's scene-setting courtship of proud little rich girl Doris Nolan while on his first-ever holiday contrasts with his perhaps equally foolish and starry-eyed plans for second, a pause from a long arduous climb up from poverty to learn what the climb is for and where he wants it to take him. Grant describes Nolan as the "perfect playmate" before discovering that she is, in fact, all business, but their ill-advised fling does have its rewards, in the discovery of a charmingly playful Katharine Hepburn.

    Slightly stagebound and perhaps not as well-known and well-regarded as other Cukor efforts, other Hepburn-Grant vehicles, HOLIDAY remains a glittering expression of the idea that only the man who says no is free.

    "Despite some very funny barbed dialogue, mostly centering on two clashing couples among the engagement party guests (one liberal, the other proto-Fascist), the film is less a satire on the rich than an acknowledgment that privilege has its drawbacks; its key scene, accordingly, takes place in the nursery playroom, a place redolent of childhood hopes and dreams, which Hepburn and her unhappily alcoholic brother (Ayres) unconsciously use as a retreat from their unwelcome social obligations. Often underrated by comparison with The Philadelphia Story (both are based on plays by Philip Barry), but even better because its glitteringly polished surface is undermined by veins of real feeling, it is one of Cukor's best films."
    -- TIME OUT FILM GUIDE

    "George Cukor's masterful 1938 film of Philip Barry's play about a society girl (Katharine Hepburn) who falls for her sister's charming, eccentric fiance (Cary Grant). The light comedy achieves perfection, but beneath it lies Cukor's serious concern for the ways in which we choose to live our lives. There are a thousand nonconformist comedies, but only one Holiday."
    -- Dave Kehr, THE CHICAGO READER

    What: HOLIDAY, screening as part of "Madcap Manhattan" on a double bill with THE AWFUL TRUTH [McCarey/1937]

    When: Saturday, December 12 at 1:00, 4:40 and 8:20 PM

    Where: Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street

    Also of interest this week:

    Movie of the Week: FILM IST. A GIRL & A GUN

    By Donald GraySun, 12/06/2009 - 14:21


    That oft-cited equation for popular cinema’s essentials -- sometimes attributed to Jean-Luc Godard, sometimes to D.W. Griffith -- is the animating notion behind the latest found-footage essay from Austrian director Gustav Deutsch: “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.”

    Deutsch’s third installment in his fascinating FILM IST. series compiles widely varied snippets, culled from archives around the world, to create a challenging, conceptual narrative liable to keep most viewers spellbound. Beguiling images from the earliest days of fiction cinema stand alongside fragments of newsreels, scientific films, propaganda, and even rarely seen hardcore-sex clips that Deutsch unearthed at America’s Kinsey Institute.

    The prudish, or easily offended, probably shouldn’t bother with this one. It’s a potent mix, not always successful, but it quite clearly demonstrates the formidable sway that sex and violence have held over the movies since their very inception.

    “If the narrative that Mr. Deutsch has created is rather less thrilling than his mostly silent and often glorious images, this is nonetheless a story well worth considering, and watching.” -- Manohla Dargis, THE NEW YORK TIMES

    “...Deutsch raises the art of found footage assembly to stunning heights. The soundscape, ranging from bouncy electronica to throat singing, is a masterpiece in its own right.” -- Richard Kuipers, VARIETY

    “In the grand tradition of epic poetry, [FILM IST. A GIRL & A GUN] fuses found footage from cinema's past and ancient Greek text, by the likes of Sappho, Hesiod and Plato, into 24 frames-per-second of kinetic ecstasy.” -- Cullen Gallagher, THE L MAGAZINE

    “...[T]he director creates a stunning vision of the natural and mythological order of the universe, love between the sexes, and weapons of mass destruction.” -- Jon Gartenberg, TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL

    What: FILM IST. A GIRL & A GUN

    When: Sunday-Tuesday, December 6-8, 7:00 & 9:00 PM

    Where: Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, New York, NY

    Microreview Roundup #25

    By fol.lowfoc.usSat, 12/05/2009 - 23:57


    BRIGHT STAR [Campion/2009] Translates the Romanticism of Keats's poetry into images of pure lyricism; Abbie Cornish pulsates as his beloved. (KS)

    OCTOBER COUNTRY [Palmieri, Mosher/2009] Sensitive portrait of articulate dead-enders settles for comfortable confidences, avoids intimacy. (AR)

    FANTASTIC MR. FOX [Anderson/2009] Animation fits Anderson's shtick better than expected -- maybe even better than live action. (TN)

    WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE [Jonze/2009] Teetering on childlike and childish, captures the spirit of the book but muddies the morality play. (TN)

    RED RIDING: 1983 [Tucker 2009] Trilogy stumbles at finish with excess of flashbacks, failure to create narrative arc with faux redemption. (AR)

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    Movie of the Week: BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE

    By Tony NigroThu, 11/19/2009 - 13:12

    Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice [1969]

    BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE [Paul Mazursky/1969] trades its situational comedy on the touchy-feeliness of group therapy and the striving for openness and free love that came with the era. Although a bit of a time capsule now, it moves beyond the beads and good vibes to maintain a comedy of relationship manners that rings true.

    After a cathartic therapy retreat, Bob (Robert Culp) and Carol (Natalie Wood) focus on exploring a new openness in their relationship. This ranges from speaking openly and honestly to testing the waters with other partners, including friends Ted (Elliott Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon). All the while, there's a prevailing notion that love will keep the couples together. Mazursky, however, also seems to predict Joy Division's adage that love can tear them apart.

    These are folks who are too young to be square and too old to be hip, and that's really a drag, man. So enters the comedy with the overzealous approach Bob and Carol take to their mission. The dinner scene in which Carol presses for "feelings" about her dress, and Bob presses Ted for "feelings" about his hair, is emblematic of Mazursky's own feelings. First, Ted says it himself ("It's patently absurd"), but when he buttons the scene by "opening up" about Bob footing the bill, the joke is clear. Bob and Carol's impulses might be in the right place, but their execution could use some work.

    The script plays out like a theatrical performance, all set pieces and dialogue. It's talky both as a point of story and to a fault, but the result is an actorly style that lets a natural charisma like Gould's and an overlooked range like Wood's shine. This becomes all the more evident as the spouse-swapping scenario takes off like a Neil Simon play gone awry. Whether or not anyone thinks the ending is a "cop out" is beside the point, as Mazursky and his ensemble seem absolutely sure of themselves, even while buried in the neuroses of sexual revolution.

    BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE closes out the Aero Theatre's Mazursky tribute this Friday with a double feature that includes HARRY AND TONTO [1974].

    WHAT: BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE

    WHEN: Friday, November 20, 7:30 PM

    WHERE: Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, CA


    Also of interest in Los Angeles this week:

    Exile on Hill Street

    By Tony NigroMon, 11/16/2009 - 20:34

    The Exiles (1961)

    Specters of the past and future loom large in Kent MacKenzie's 1961 film THE EXILES. The past in question involves the U.S. government's appropriation of Native American land, forming of reservations, and flight to big cities generations later -- in this case, Los Angeles. The future ghost is of the film's predominant setting of Bunker Hill, a once vibrant and colorful community that was deemed a slum and razed, destroying Victorian mansions and displacing thousands of people. The treatment of Native Americans remains one of the U.S.'s great blunders, and so Bunker Hill remains one of the City of Angels'.

    Straddling the arguable line between neo-realism and documentary, THE EXILES concerns one night in the life of the city's small Native American community. Drinking, gambling, dancing, fighting, and the ill treatment of women abound as a melancholic way of getting by, and voiceover interviews with the non-actors provide the film's emotional core. The characters seem to exist as immigrants in the city, and in a way they are, but the sad irony is that their people still predate the ruling majority. It all culminates in a gathering of traditional song and dance held atop a hill overlooking the city, a last grab at a culture the exiles can't leave behind. So while the past and future may haunt the film, like so much neo-realism its present is concerned with people simply making it through the day.

    As Mary, Homer, Claudine and the gang stroll the steps up the hill and under the Angels Flight funicular railway, it becomes apparent that MacKenzie's portrayal of Bunker Hill is as great an ethnographic contribution as is his portrayal of its residents. This is not the Bunker Hill of film noir fantasy. Nor is it the old neighborhood of nineteenth century money or the current mélange of skyscrapers and Frank Gehry's foil ball architecture. By the late 1950s when THE EXILES was shot, Bunker Hill was already left for dead and on the radar for "redevelopment," an ill-defined project that incidentally continues to this day. Surely MacKenzie knew what he was doing. Perhaps one of the old neighborhood's last occurrences on film, the luscious black and white is archival proof that, as Thom Andersen says in LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF, "there once was a city here," ignored then and missed now.

    Not released commercially at the time, THE EXILES now gets its due on Milestone's two-DVD package, which rightfully lifts the film into the pantheon of early American independent films like KILLER OF SHEEP and SHADOWS. Besides a gorgeous picture restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the set offers numerous extras, the highlights of which include multiple commentaries and interviews by author Sherman Alexie, KILLER OF SHEEP filmmaker Charles Burnett, and critic Sean Axmaker; "Bunker Hill 1956," MacKenzie's short, humanist look at the neighborhood; "Bunker Hill: A Tale of Urban Removal," Greg Kimble's informative (if a bit snarky) short about the neighborhood's undoing; and clips from LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF, which deserves some credit for generating interest in the restoration.

    Movie of the Week: THE LAND

    By Amy RobinsonFri, 11/13/2009 - 13:30


    THE LAND

    The late Youssef Chahine gets a mini-retrospective this weekend, courtesy of the the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The master filmmaker's career spanned nearly six decades, earning him both acclaim and censure in his role as the cinematic voice for the Arab world.

    Named the third-best Egyptian film ever by that country's top 20 critics, THE LAND [1969] chronicles the struggle between a small village of peasants and the their feudal landlord in the 1930s. The epic tale was eight years in the making and "powerfully illustrat(es) why political oppression doesn't necessarily lead to a sense of solidarity among the disenfranchised."

    "Chahine brings the epic to vivid, filmic life through the combination of rich detail and symbolic motif that is a staple of his cinema."
    -- James Quandt, CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO

    "In Al-Ard - adapted from a novel by Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi - the director brought to the screen the daily life of poor Egyptian farmers: their voices and clothes, their grinding work through sweltering days and tranquil nights, the smells of cows and chicken in their homes, their faint smiles, their dignity and poverty, their superstitiousness, and - above all, before all and after all - their almost sacred attachment to their land."
    -- Tarek Osman, "Youssef Chahine, the life-world of film," OPEN DEMOCRACY

    What: THE LAND [aka AL-ARD], screening as part of "Remembering Youssef Chahine, 1926-2008"

    When: Saturday, November 14 at 8:45 PM

    Where: Film Society of Lincoln Center at the Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street

    Also of interest this week:

    Microreview Roundup #24

    By fol.lowfoc.usTue, 11/10/2009 - 21:45

    Microreview Roundup 24

    RED RIDING: 1980 [Marsh/2009] Sturdy middle ep is shallow procedural laced with the personal woes of semi-insider stymied by the Blue Wall. (AR)

    RED RIDING: 1974 [Jarrold/2009] Effective, brutal noir on destruction of a naif newly returned from the South by corruption of the North. (AR)

    MOTHER [aka MAEDO/Bong/2009] Desperate devotion in face of cruelly indifferent world and strong lead drive this gripping, often comical thriller. (AR)

    AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN [aka 36 VUES DU PIC SAINT LOOP/Rivette/2009] Minor variations on favored theme; rough but affecting low-key drama on benefits of small fixes. (AR)

    TRICK 'R' TREAT [Dougherty/2008] Engaging bid to be a new Halloween perennial is twisted yet safe, a little less than the sum of its parts. (AR)

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    Movie of the Week: PAPER MOON

    By Kryssa SchemmerlingSat, 10/24/2009 - 13:27






    Watching Peter Bogdanovich's PAPER MOON [1973] again recently, after seeing it and loving it as a kid when it came out, was an interesting experience. I felt more acutely aware that I was watching a period piece that had itself become a period piece, than I am when I watch, say, CHINATOWN or THIEVES LIKE US. Maybe it's the fact that both its stars have been reduced to such sad tabloid caricatures that is hard to imagine a world where Ryan O'Neal was an A-list leading man and Tatum O'Neal was an Academy Award winner with a bright future ahead of her. Like THE WIZARD OF OZ, the PAPER MOON has acquired an added poignancy over the years now that we know the troubles that befell its child star. Certainly, it's hard to imagine an eight-year-old actress being allowed to smoke on screen as freely today as Tatum O'Neal does playing baby grifter Addie Loggins. This alone makes PAPER MOON feels like a relic of the more permissive '70s, which, depending on how you look at it, is either troubling, or part of its charm. Whether or not the movie (which garnered Tatum an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress) holds up as a whole, the deep focus black & white cinematography by legendary camera man László Kovács remains ravishing and a treat to savor on the big screen.

    “Peter Bogdanovich seems to have chosen John Ford's underrated Will Rogers vehicles of the 30s (JUDGE PRIEST, STEAMBOAT 'ROUND THE BEND) as the models for this 1973 Depression comedy; the images (by Laszlo Kovacs) have a lovely dusty openness -- a realistic view of the midwestern flatlands fading into a romantic memory.” -- Dave Kehr, THE CHICAGO READER

    “The two kinds of Depression-era movies we remember best are the ones that ignored the Depression altogether and the ones like THE GRAPES OF WRATH that took it as a subject. Peter Bogdanovich's PAPER MOON somehow manages to make these two approaches into one, so that a genre movie about a con man and a little girl is teamed up with the real poverty and desperation of Kansas and Missouri, circa 1936. You wouldn't think the two approaches would fit together, somehow, but, they do, and the movie comes off as more honest and affecting than if Bogdanovich had simply paid tribute to older styles.” -- Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

    “PAPER MOON...contains two first-class performances by O'Neal and his 9-year-old daughter. The actor moves easily between his roles as star and as straight-man for Tatum, a charming, tightlipped little girl who has — and this may well sound absurd—the quality of a teeny-weeny Joanne Woodward. I also very much liked Madeline Kahn's very broad characterization as a carnival kootch girl and Burton Gilliam's as a small-town lecher.” -- Vincent Canby, THE NEW YORK TIMES

    WHAT: PAPER MOON

    WHERE: BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn

    WHEN: Monday, Oct 26 at 6:50, 9:15pm