Nathan Gelgud's New York Film Review

Carnage: Go Inside and Play

I wrote about Roman Polanski's Carnage for the Independent Weekly. I talk about Polanski's use of interiors throughout his career, think out loud about which character's side he might be on, and compare Carnage to Exterminating Angel. The more I worked on this review, the more I really liked the movie. Read the full review here.

I did not mention that the last quarter or so of this short movie doesn't really hold up as well as the rest of it, mostly because as things get hectic (as you can see above), Polanski mostly abandons his formal framing. 

Melancholia's Prelude and Justine as Dorothy

There's an excellent shot-by-shot analysis of the prelude to Melancholia by Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

Road to the wedding

One of the things Dargis suggests is that some images and references in the prelude hint that Part II of the movie might all be in Justine's head, like Oz or something. Usually I think that this kind of thing is pointless, because the way movies get in our head is more important  than figuring out some cute puzzle about which character's head the action is taking place in, but Dargis is pretty convincing.

Yellow Brick Rd

The idea that the apocalypse is imagined by Justine gives some explanation to one visual detail in the movie. In shot #5 in the prelude (and I think we see it again in the second half of the movie), the number 19 is on the flag on the golf green, one more hole than golf courses have. And von Trier even makes a point of having Claire's husband mention later that they have 18 holes on their course. I was thinking that this was a little joke about the world of this movie taking place after the end, on the 19th hole, but maybe that's a bit literal.

 It's curious too that there are suggestions that Part II is a projection of Justine's consciousness, but it's the first part that's named after Justine, while the second is named for Claire.

This whole idea reminds me of when I saw Meshes of the Afternoon in college and attacked it in class for copping out by having the whole thing be a dream at the end.

On the road again

Lisbeth Salander vs. Jackie Brown (sort of)

 Girl with a Dragon Tattoo is a movie full of unintentional paradoxes. It’s based on a widely-read book that has already been adapted into a motion picture, but it’s surprisingly hung up on its own plot. It doesn’t want to pander by underlining anything for its audience, but it’s so packed with dialogue that it strains under the weight of its own exposition. Problematic or clunky storytelling are usually benign flaws, but in Dragon Tattoo it’s a grave shortcoming, as audiences are encouraged to whoop-whoop their way through a sickening scene intended to wipe the slate clean for the movie’s second half. 

A slick and meaningless opening title sequence (Bond credits outfitted in Goth leather) opens the film, providing commercial packaging for the movie’s negligent treatment of challenging sexual politics. In the first few scenes we meet Mikael Blomkvist, who we learn has suffered a professional scandal relayed via news broadcasts and his sullen reactions to them. Because of the disgrace, Blomkvist leaves town to take a job with rich mogul Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) who wants Blomkvist to investigate the disappearance of his niece, which happened 40 years ago. This takes a mighty long time to get to, and it’s even longer before Blomkvist enlists the help of hacker supreme and title girl Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara).

The scandal that drives Blomkvist out of town is given enough detail to give him motivation but not enough to be of much interest. At the end of the movie, after Blomkvist and Salander have solved the disappearance of the niece, this subplot returns, makes the movie 30 minutes longer, and pays zero dividends. There’s really no reason (aside from catering to the presumably large base of fans of the book) that the movie can’t start with Blomkvist showing up at Vanger’s as a reporter with a mysterious past. It’s exactly the kind of clumsiness that all of Dragon Tattoo suffers from: front-loading an element of the story, using it as a device to move the story forward, then resolving it to the satisfaction of no one who asks more of a movie than that its plot work itself out. There’s a going-through-the-motions quality to all of it, even through the kinetic bits that rush by with Fincher’s flair for movement and efficiency in action sequences.

Being finicky about the storytelling technique in a major Hollywood release is a little like going to a bullfight and complaining about animal cruelty, but in Dragon Tattoo a bigger problem is revealed by the treatment of plot. It’s a whodunit that puts a lot of emphasis on exactly who done exactly what, but the mystery at its center isn’t very surprising or exciting. It is, however, really icky. Dragon Tattoo has multiple rape scenes, and while the source material is reputed to be a schlocky feminist revenge fantasy, Fincher’s adaptation is unconvincing in this regard.

Salander is a ward of the state who depends on a public official for her allowance. The official asks that she come to his home to collect a check, where he brutally violates her. Fincher’s treatment of the scene isn’t really problematic in itself, but it’s just another gear-creaking front-loading of a plot element. It’s real horror, but it also has that going-through-the-motions slog that the rest of the plot does. Compare this to Fincher’s Zodiac, in which pieces don’t always fit together and the large canvas and ambling storytelling are part of the movie’s ideas about truth and order.

Dragon Tattoo has none of the self awareness that Zodiac does, and Salander’s rape exists only so that she can come back later for an even more grotesque scene that practically has an APPLAUSE sign flashing above it. The hooting and hollering that I heard at my screening in Times Square was disturbing, not because people were cheering violence, but because the audience felt washed clean of the earlier rape scene, excited to be rewarded for watching their dragon-tattooed girl suffer a tragedy so that  she may vindicate herself by inflicting worse pain on her tormentor later. The terror of what happened to Salander is mitigated by the forward movement of the plot. If you don’t think this is simplistic slate-clearing, ask yourself how it is that Salander, someone who’s suffered so horribly at the hands of men, slides so easily into bed with Blomkvist later.

This flippant treatment of meting out justice returns later, when Salander asks Blomkvist for permission to kill someone. The scene is troubling not only because of the brutish concept of justice it adopts but in the way it shows a woman granting this high moral authority to a male. All of this talk about women, violence, and revenge in movies brings Tarantino to mind, but can you imagine Jackie Brown, The Bride, or Shosanna asking for male permission to go do damage?

Tarantino’s movies are flippant about violence and loose with their gender politics, but they’re also comical and self-aware in the extreme, while Fincher’s latest movie has a sleek, cold ignorance about what it’s up to. Dragon Tattoo is offensive, not necessarily because Fincher seems so unaware of the sexual politics in his own movie, but because he treats it so sloppily. His movie has no ideas, only plot arrangements. You can’t just move around pieces of a story like building blocks and be satisfied that the whole thing stands up. When the pervasive and horrific problems of misogyny and rape are put in the service of this simplistic block-building, you wind up with a problematic movie that has a sickening obliviousness about its own content.

Fred Wiseman Drawings

Gift for Robert Greene.

Dirty Movie: Deep End (1970)

“What were you doing to her, boy?” a cop asks young Michael in the offices of a porno theater. Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1970 movie Deep End revolves around the question of exactly what teenage Michael wants to do with his slightly older co-worker Susan. Standing in Michael’s way of exploring Susan and his own nascent sexuality are Susan’s fiancé, her older lover, the cops, and Michael’s generalized anxiety about all things sex.

Michael meets Susan when he gets a job at a public bathhouse. Susan shows him the ropes and teaches him how to clean a private room. After she’s done, nothing looks any cleaner, and the whole establishment is layered with such a permanent layer of filth that the routine of cleaning it seems like a sick joke.

The bathhouse’s clientele is made up of horny weirdos and derelicts moaning and groaning through the movie’s atonal dubbing, as well as gaggles of prepubescent girls being teased and fanny-slapped by their swimming instructor. As we watch virgin Mike’s tentative discovery of his sexual desire in the confines of this den of iniquity, the grime of the bathhouse comes to look seedy and perverted. In the background of one scene, a worker slaps bright red paint over a slime green wall without any primer: like Michael’s desire, the wall’s color is getting more intense but it remains muddy. When a fire extinguisher starts spraying unnecessarily (prematurely?), there’s no mistaking the double meaning of the white goop sprayed all over the floor, or Susan’s lament that she’s the one who will have to clean it up.

Michael feels himself maturing but unable to function in an adult world, and Deep End brilliantly captures this tension between youth and adulthood, grappling with aggressive feelings of carnality and being unsure if they’re dirty or not. If the feelings are dirty, but you can’t get rid of them, then maybe all bets are off. Maybe Michael has to turn off his conscience entirely. By the end of the movie, he will seem to have done just that.

Throughout Deep End, the light is dreary. Outside it’s a gray winter and in the bathhouse everything is sickly fluorescent. The camera is relentlessly intimate, often so close to the actors that it can’t keep up with simple movements, occasionally a beat behind the action. Things look a little more vibrant in the little red light district where Michael lurks looking for Susan, but the place he really wants to be is inaccessible. When he tries to find Susan in a club that she goes to with her boyfriend, he stands in the entryway talking to the girl at the door. He can’t get in unless he pays membership fees, and he doesn’t have enough. The whole movie is littered with talk about money: how much he and Susan are making in tips, how much Susan’s engagement ring cost, the price of the hot dogs Michael orders from a street vendor while he stalks Susan from the sidewalk. Susan makes plush stuffed pigs to earn “a few extra bob,” and will eventually take some kind of financial security in marriage, but what will Michael do?

Susan tells him that if he plays things right, he can earn a lot of tips, not only from female clients but some of the men, too. She holds back from being explicit, not because Deep End is being coy about its sex-charged subject matter, but because to spell out what she means she’d be admitting to herself that she does it (whatever it is), too. You don’t have to do anything, she tells Michael, just let the customers use their imaginations. It’s a murky border to navigate, the one between selling yourself as a sexual object and prostituting yourself outright. Later in the film, Susan will become a literal sexual object when Michael finds a topless wooden cutout of her outside a strip club and confronts her with it. He steals the image from the club and hides in a brothel where sex is readily available, but only so that he's only there so that he can hang onto the image of Susan. But even as Michael fights to possess the sexual image of Susan, he later demands that she be ashamed of it. He can want it, but she should hate it.

Michael’s sexual awakening is focused exclusively on Susan. Even when an ex-girlfriend turns up and offers herself to Michael, he turns her down, thinking that he’s graduated to someone older like Susan, even though she’s shown only a teasing interest in him. Because she’s the one who’s really turned him on for the first time, he demands that she let him have her, not only by confronting her with her own objectified, possessed image but by other, more severe means.

“What were you doing to her, boy?” Michael is asked. “I love her,” he stammers back. But the dirtiness he perceives in his own sexual drive won’t let him love her and desire her at once, so the object wins out. Michael swims with the nude cutout of Susan in the pool in a sexual fantasy, and when he’s able to bring that fantasy to life, it’s at Susan’s expense.

Deep End is playing at BAMcinematek starting today.

Young Adult: Cynicism with Low Dividends

I wrote about Young Adult for the Independent Weekly and said that it's so cold and close to empty that I wished it had a different kind of phoniness. Read it here.

 

Lars von Trier by way of Alvy Singer

You can read my review of Melancholia at the Independent website, in which I write that Lars von Trier expresses the same anxiety as the young Alvy Singer depressed about the end of the universe, but with Wagnerian grandiosity rather than Allen's comedic specificity.

Sinister Slovenliness

I get all over My Week with Marilyn's case, saying it's a lazy exercize in mythologizing the mythical and calling it "genuinely threatening to a healthy culture of art-making" in a review you can read in full here. I don't mention the egregious union-bashing scene (that is also dishonest, as it tries to say it's for unions, but not the bad bits) that would have negated any of the good qualities of My Week with Marilyn, had there been any.

I did not offer up a take on Michelle Williams' performance, because it's irrelevant. In a movie that wants to do nothing but emphasize what we already figured we knew about an icon of questionable importance, the best Williams can do is imitate our pre-existing ideas about the role she's playing. Had she wanted to do anything adventurous, it would have been squashed by the team behind this movie, I'm sure. Also, I think it's healthy for writers to ignore performances in movies that are made exclusively to show off a conventional style of acting and hold them accountable for the rest of thing things at play.

Writing about this movie brought up something I think about a lot while reviewing small movies. When I think a movie is especially lazy or meaningless, and I'm writing about it for the Independent, I think it's important not to get worked up about it unless it's a movie that's getting a lot of misguided attention, or that will have some kind of impact on the culture. I'm reviewing movies in a small market and these so-called art house films play at theaters that are constantly struggling to keep the lights on. Providing a thoughtful take (rather than an incensed rant) about a movie I don't care for is better for everyone involved.

So it's always with hesitation that I give such a forcefully negative review to a small, unimportant movie playing at small theaters in a small market. I've often written first drafts that I've rethought and rewritten after realizing that I'm not really serving my function as a minor movie critic with such negative reviews of small pictures. My job is to get people thinking and talking about movies, and hopefully to get them excited about continuing to go to the movies. Bashing modest movies does none of those things.

I've glanced at some reviews of Marilyn since writing about it, and I'm very surprised at what positive reception it's receiving. David Denby called My Week with Marilyn "intentionally minor," which may have been his way of apologizing for also calling it "expertly made." There's nothing wrong with being minor on purpose: it's a great path to subversion. If Altman had announced ahead of time that he had such wacky intentions for how to shoot M*A*S*H, that movie wouldn't exist. But Marilyn is the opposite: it's an intentionally minor movie that takes no advantages of its potential to go rogue off the radar. It plays by all the rules even though it probably doesn't even have to. That's the worst kind of towing the line.

Marilyn deserves bad-mouthing because its shimmery brand of meaninglessness is menacing. It's dishonest, masquerading as shimmery fun when in fact it exists in order to make us feel better about our lazy presumptions. It's a stupid movie that wants us to be stupid. I guess most crappy narratives do this, but when offhand acceptance of convention meets with iconic subject matter it becomes more dangerous. It has more potential to get into the drinking water. 

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Martha Marcy May Marlene is seductive in all the wrong ways. Its low-key rhythms lull us into complacency, tricking us into playing along with its contrived dot-connecting and muted masquerade of profundity. A superficially attractive cast has soft allure that makes the occasional flashes of violence feel jolting, when in fact they are unimaginative, turning up nothing upon reflection. Manipulating an audience by any means available is, in a way, what a movie is supposed to do. While Martha Marcy works is good at getting under the skin, it does so to the exclusion of all else. It’s creepy and emotionally effective, but it has no substance or resonance. It has no ideas.

The movie is about a young woman named Martha (Mary Olsen) who escapes from a cult in upstate New York to crash at the lake house of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson). Actually, “escapes” might be the wrong word; while the movie makes the audience feel as if Martha might be pursued by her cultmates, there’s every indication in the beginning that she’s essentially free to go. (She’s found by the leader’s right-hand man at a nearby diner, and he does nothing to stop her from fleeing.) Martha makes a half-hearted and difficult attempt to get into the rhythms of her square sister’s life, and the movie cuts back and forth between scenes at the lake house and scenes of life in the cult.

 Writer-director Sean Durkin makes connections between the life that Paula and her laughably uptight husband want Martha to lead and the life she had upstate with a gaggle of brainwashed, gauze-draped foxes and scraggly dudes. She may have traded torn denim shorts for waspy summer dresses, but nothing much has changed. The restrictions of an upper class existence, you see, are potentially just as confining as those of an off-the-grid family of young people led by a creep named Patrick (John Hawkes) who systematically rapes all the women.

 There’s nothing too problematic or offensive about this suggestion. What’s offensive is Durkin’s insistence that we wouldn’t pick up on it unless he kept underlining it. New members of the cult are drugged into complacency; rich people pound beers on their boats. The women in the cult impose the rules on each other so that Patrick doesn’t have to play the bad guy; Martha’s sister’s materialism is internalized so she doesn’t realize what an unexamined life she leads. In cult life, Martha has to wait until the men have finished eating to sneak as much as a morsel; her sister’s husband freaks out (hilariously) if he has to call the ladies more than once when dinner’s ready. In one “attention audience!” moment, we see a new member of the cult being fed a drugged green concoction before her initiation rape, after which—in the present day at the lake house—Martha turns down a kale smoothie that her sister got for her.

 This all might not be such a pain to watch if the idea was more surprising or subversive, or if Durkin wasn’t cutting back and forth between time periods in order to hit his points so bluntly. But the decision to represent the everyday world with an upper class lake house inhabited by two high-strung stereotypes obliterates that potential. Durkin parallels the scary predicament of a microscopic sliver of the population (people in cults) with the stilted existence of a slightly larger sliver of the population (the wealthy). He’s often able to put the camera in the right place for maximum chilliness, at one point revealing not one but two surprises with simple cuts and blocking for a moment that ran shivers up my back for days afterwards. Unfortunately, it’s to no effect. Martha Marcy May Marlene screams at you that it’s an idea movie, and the impact it has at first will make you want to locate the themes or concepts behind the ickiness. But you will come up empty. Martha Marcy wastes not only the time you spent in the theater, but the time you spend trying to sorting it out.

Quick Thoughts on Tree of Life

I just responded to a friend's email asking me what I thought of Tree of Life. Here's what I wrote:

I had a minimal response to Tree of Life. I decided afterwards to be down with it even though I didn't much enjoy myself watching it. It captures some stuff about youth, about running around with your pals and doing bad shit, getting into trouble for no reason even though you're not a bad kid. There's that moment where the kid takes that ladies' undergarment or something to the creek and I had a visceral response to the image of the water, after having seen dinosaurs walk through what might be the same body of water earlier in the film. It was a "whoa man" kind of feeling, and i don't know how much substance there is to that, but it was an enjoyable feeling.

Movies like Tree of Life (are there movies like Tree of Life?) get us to acknowledge the troubling sameness of most movies. There's really no reason why we shouldn't be seeing movies that cover modern life as well as life before humans, or that have major stars with unclear roles just mumbling disconnected voiceovers, or movies that spend significant time just playing with light while telling elliptical stories. The fact that we seem to feel obligated to justify or understand those things means we're paying attention to the wrong things. We're asking ourselves "Why is this movie like this?" instead of "What do i make of this right now in the context of my life, my experiences, my feelings?" We should be asking ourselves what a movie does to us and what it makes us think about, not necessarily whether every image is justified by its context in the rest of the film.

Recent Film Writing, Part I

In the years since I started writing regularly for the Independent Weekly, I've been neglecting this blog. I hope to start blogging more about movies again soon, in addition to writing for the Independent, but more about that later. In the meantime, I'm posting some snippets. Click on the film title for the link to the complete review.

City Island, a low-key (and low-laugh) comedy:  Juliana Margulies looks terrific! Maybe it's the way she's grown into her 40s without trying to hide it, or maybe it's the bangs (she's never had bangs before, has she?) or that Bronx dame eyeliner she's rocking, but there's something sexy and fascinating about the close-ups she gets in City Island. But that's about all there is to see here. As decent as Margulies' performance as Joyce is, the fact that she's aging so gracefully shouldn't take up so much of a viewer's attention.

Kurosawa's High and Low (part of a longer multi-author article): And there at the window is the iconic Toshiro Mifune, about to literally throw all the money he has ever had out the window. The scene is captivating, dense with action and visual information. It's funny and incredibly sharp in its observations of quotidian life, of the detective as working man.

Ken Loach's Looking for Eric: The movie begins behind the wheel of a car going the wrong way down a one-way street. Cars swerve around the driver until finally a collision has the screen go black. Somehow, veteran director Ken Loach has made this feel incredibly limp and not the least bit dangerous.

Holofcener's Please Give: As the lives of the two families intersect, Holofcener is able to make a few minutes of throwaway small talk into a witty examination of the nature of guilt, what it means to be honest or the complexities of charity.

The Joan Rivers documentary A Piece of Work:  I was afraid Piece of Work would be a fawning attempt to set the record straight or a bland collection of talking heads testifying to how great Rivers is, or used to be.  In fact, the film is largely a verité-style portrait of Rivers with plenty of momentum—due in large part to the way its quick-witted, light-on-her feet subject keeps the action and the camera moving.

The Duplass Bros' Cyrus: Something about the Duplasses on-the-fly approach lends itself to suspense, maybe because it's reminiscent of sloppy, early Wes Craven. In The Puffy Chair, in which nothing suspenseful happens with the plot, there is an ominous feeling behind doors and around corners.

A Godard double feature, Two Or Three Things I Know About Her & Made in USA: In Two or Three Things you are seeing Godard at his most lucid; he has made exactly the film he wanted to make. In Made in U.S.A., he is unrestricted, feral with puns, a precocious child at play.

Greenberg Bugs Me

I have always really liked Noah Baumbach's movies, and credit quoting Kicking and Screaming with being the foundation of at least one great friendship. So maybe I took it a little personally when he finally let me down. Check it out here.

Sex and Fascism

I wrote about Marco Bellocchio's new movie here. I think this piece has some rhythm problems but it straightens out by the last graf.

Claire Denis Continues to Bat a Thousand

Read what I wrote about 35 Shots of Rum here.

War on Widescreen

I don't exactly decide that widescreen is inherently fascist, but I could have. Read my review of German mountain-climbing drama at the Independent Weekly site here.

These pictures aren't as wide as the film itself, but they give you an idea.

There's nothing wrong (or spectacular) about this:

 

This, however, makes no sense at all:

What are you looking at? Impossible to tell. With a square frame? Maybe.

Shooting in an old academy aspect-ratio wouldn't fix the movie, but it might fix the mountain scenes.  

Related reading (review of Naked Spur praising its use of the 1:1.33 frame) here.

No One Does it to You Like RoPo

Ghost Writer is the first great film of the year. That I've seen. Read all about it here. Along with Shutter Island, you could get into some serious old-school conversations about the director manipulating, almost betraying, the content in order to make a much better film than the script seems to have supplied a blueprint for. Good work, guys.

Know who's awesome in Ghost Writer? Kim Cattrall, that's who!
 

Platonic Film

Wrote about Broken Embraces. Read it here. Hope you like effusive hyperbole.

Top Ten of the Zeroes

If you want to read about my favorite movies of the decade, you can do so here.

Top 10 Films of 2009

 

1. Tetro
2. Fantastic Mr. Fox
3. Two Lovers
4. 35 Shots of Rum
5. Frontier of Dawn
6. Gran Torino
7. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
8. Baader Meinhof Complex
9. Public Enemies
10. Inglourious Basterds

James Cameron's Blacklight Fantasy

Theres' some fun stuff about Avatar, but it's tough to get behind a movie that looks like it jumped off a stoner's dorm room wall. Read the review here.

Small Change Poster by Nathan Gelgud

 

The interests and occupations expressed by my two blogs have converged! Witness! The poster I drew for the Film Desk re-release of Truffaut's Small Change. Go to IFC Center to buy it, or check the Film Desk site soon. Or just let me know and I'll figure out how you can buy one. And if you're thinking "What other blog? Where can I see more of Nathan's drawings?" you can go here.
 

Fox and His Friends

Love this. Read the rave here.

 

Adam Shame

I wrote about the latest Coen Bros movie earlier this month, in case you wanna check it out here.

See Adam Arkin in the background there? He was my favorite thing about this movie. He wasn't in it much.
 

Wild Things Should Have Been a Silent Movie

Read all about it here.

Reviews From the Past Few Months

Here's a link to the archive at Independent Weekly, in case you want to catch up with what I've been writing about. Films include Paper Heart, (500) Days of Summer, Funny People, Brothers Bloom, Bruno, Sugar, and Whatever Works.

 

Among those, Whatever Works and Sugar were the only ones I liked.

92 in the Shade at Cinema Nolita this Saturday

Alert! Chris at Cinema Nolita just told me they're showing the rare and wonderful 92 In the Shade there this Saturday around 11:00. You've got your Warren Oates, your Henry Fonda, your Harry Dean Stanton, your Margot Kidder ... come on, how could you lose?

I've seen one movie there (Alex Perry's Impolex, which I liked) and they've got a surprisingly good set-up for watching a movie. This one's not on DVD, kids, so go to 178 Mulberry Street between Broome and Kenmare to check it out. It's $3.

There Should Be a Rating That Means "Sure, Why Not?"

State of Play is (marginally) about the rivalry between print media and on-line news, the romantic notions of the former versus the inevitable shift to the latter. The movie cops out in every conceivable way and Russell Crowe is--as usual--an indignant meathead, but there are things to like about this movie, even in the way it shamelessly shoehorns itself in alongside All the President's Men on the journalism-conspiracy reel rack. Here's what I wrote about it.

 

The best thing about watching State of Play was coming around (a little) on Rachel McAdams, who I've never liked. She should have played it a little nerdier, but was still a nice foil for Crowe. Have I mentioned I think he's a meathead?

Explaining a Movie About Inexplicability

One Day You'll Understand is the first Amos Gitai movie I've ever seen, and I'm glad I did. Read all about it. I especially like the relationship between image and sound in the first scenes, as one character is listening to the same public trial that her son's assistant is listening to on the radio at work.

 

Emmanuelle Devos AND Hippolyte Girardot? Sold!

Ready and Williams

I got to say what everybody's already said: "Hooray for Wendy and Lucy!" I think there's some unique stuff in my review though.

 

 

Half the Hype

Che in its entirety is the hype. Che Part I by itself is still pretty hype. Read the review here. It's not exactly what I promised, a big think piece, but it'll do. BTW, does anyone want more of this stuff? (Also, can saying "bee tee dubz" replace "by the way"?)

Two Lovers

Check out my review of Two Lovers in The Independent.

 

This is one of the most cringe-inducing scenes from this terrific movie. The waiter asks Joaquin if he wants a straw.

Bashir's Split Personalities

Here's the review of Waltz With Bashir.

 

There's a lot of stuff like the above image in Waltz. Weird, metaphoric, disturbing, like that Ralph Bakshi-type stuff.

 

But there's a lot of stuff like this image, too. People sitting at bars or in their kitchens, or even in front of generic backdrops, just talking. The talking heads convention is bad enough in documentaries that don't have the outlet of the animation arsenal of freakout machinery that Waltz does.

A movie this arresting and original in some places has no excuse to be so boring and conventional in others.

The New Ben Affleck Jennifer Aniston Scarlett Johansson Drew Barrymore Jennifer Connelly Kris Kristofferson Movie

I did not dread seeing this. In fact I looked forward to it. Sometimes I feel like there's no such thing as a truly bad romantic comedy. Then ...

 

Sweet v-neck, man.

I still say there might be no such thing as a truly unwatchable romantic comedy, because this movie doesn't really try to be funny. I don't really know what it's trying to do.

I found a couple--well, one--nice thing to say about it here.

Surprise! This Edward Zwick Movie Stinks.

I have hardly seen any Edward Zwick movies (although I did watch a few too many episodes of that quarterlife thing). The only other motion picture of his that I've seen is Glory, which I don't have any desire to revisit, but it did offer up one of the first indelible movie images of my childhood: someone's head getting blown clean off in battle. I think this image had something to do with making me almost entirely anti-war. So, something good came of a Zwick movie. Credit where it is due. Unfortunately, there's no credit to dole out for Defiance, which I reviewed here.

I really can't believe how tempered the criticism of this offensive movie has been.

I don't know if it matters, but here is what Daniel Craig looks like ...

 

...and here's what the guy he portrays, Tuvia Bielski, looked like:

 

Just sayin.

Che Placeholder

I know, I know. You want me to write a big essay about Che. Maybe. Soon. I hope so. For now you'll have to settle for the doodles I did when I saw it at the Ziegfeld.

 

P.S. Like this? You'll love this. 

GreenCine Gratitude

Someone over at GreenCine has noticed my reviews of Yes Man and Christmas Tale and put up some quotes. It's great to be recognized by this astute, highly-trafficked blog. I wonder who it was? Is some faithful NYFR reader a GreenCine contributor? If you're out there, thanks a million.

Year-End Stuff

I wrote about criminally overlooked and underloved films for the Independent, laid down a few sentences about the worst movie (goll-E, was it overrated) of the year, and threw out a Top 10.

Here's the Top 10. Hopefully I'll add some commentary, justification, and criteria soon. You could help me get started by throwing some comments down. Thanks.

1. Christmas Tale

2. Cassandra's Dream

3. Che

4. Paranoid Park

5. Boarding Gate

6. Happy-Go-Lucky

7. Mister Lonely

8. Wild Combination

9. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

10. Synecdoche, New York

 
P.S. If anyone can rig me up a Photoshopped thing of Asia Argento or Benecio Del Toro pointing a gun at WALL-E, hook it up.

A Quick Word About Manohla Dargis

Patrick Goldstein at The L.A. Times posted a blog piece about Dargis called "The Critic as Moviekiller," which is strange to me because she has always captured my attention with her positive stuff (like her review of 16 Blocks, which concisely assessed the film in terms of its lineage). As Culture Vulture pointed out, she even (sort of) got behind The Happening. Here's an old interview with Dargis I liked. 

Movie of the Year

Yes! I got to write about Christmas Tale. Man, I loved this. I gushed! Gushed, I tell you: "Desplechin has the intelligence, energy and compassion to have become anything from a book club darling to a leftist revolutionary. Luckily for the cinema, he fancies filmmaking."

Chiara Mastroianni is my favorite of Desplechin's ladies.

(Thanks to Chris W. for always being down on the help-out.)

Bring It On! Wait, Put it Back.

I wrote about Yes Man and whined about how it's not as good as Bring It On. It's not even as good as The Break-Up. Yowch!

Van Sant Shoots Straight

 

I was a little tough on Milk, considering I cried a lot when I saw it, but I hold GVS to a high standard.

In the picture there you've got Sean Penn with Emile Hirsch. In the beginning of the movie, Penn has long hair and a beard and I thought it was Richard Edson.

I didn't say so in the review but man did I dislike Hirsch in this movie. That kid's got no chops. Allison Pill was awesome though--she looks cool with that curly hair.

High-Minded and Precious

If you'd like to read me saying "thanks but no thanks" to Let the Right One In click here.

What's up with vampires lately? They're everywhere!

JCVD vs. YouTube

Here's a personal review of JCVD in which I discuss the action icon, his new movie, my first R-rated movie, and YouTube. Did you like this movie? The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to, but I think it's a pretty lazy effort despite what could have been a good performance from Van Damme.

Above: Van Damme in Bloodsport. Here's a link to the clip mentioned in the article.

Synecdoche vs. Itself

Synecdoche, New York is so adept at achieving the goals it sets up for itself that it almost defies reviewing. It's too good, really, and that's the only problem.

Happy-Go-Lucky vs. Mike Leigh

Happy-Go-Lucky is a special movie, just like a lot of Mike Leigh's movies are. Have you been hearing that it's different from his other films? Why?

Contempt

My review of Contempt is up at the Independent site. Watching it again, I was surprised that it surpassed my high expectations. You can read it here. And if you missed it, last week was a review of Rachel Getting Married. Thanks for reading.

I Endorse W.

Check out the review of W. at The Independent's website here. It's tough to watch, but worth it.

 

The Truth About Charlie

The Independent Weekly is running my review of Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux. You can read it here. Verdoux opens on Friday (Oct 17). If you live in New York, you can catch it at Cinema Village. If you live in or around Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill/Cary, it's at Galaxy.

Interview With Michael Chaiken, curator

Michael Chaiken used to be the Program Director of Film at the International House of Philadelphia. Since coming to New York he’s contributed to Film Comment magazine and organized retrospectives of the work of Luc Moullet, Peter Whitehead and Norman Mailer. Tomorrow, Chaiken will screen a smattering of material from his personal collection at Anthology Film Archives. Earlier this week, he and I conversed via email about what’s important about programming and what he’s been watching lately.

The last thing I saw you do was show that movie based on a Norman Mailer book at BAM a few weeks ago. You'd never seen the film before. What did you think?

An American Dream. Awful. Before Bonnie and Clyde changed everything, Hollywood's idea of hip in 1966 was a movie based on a Norman Mailer novel by a guy who directed Slattery's People. Stuart Whitman as Rojack was all brawn and no nuance. George Takei was good. 

Speaking of [Bonnie and Clyde director] Arthur Penn, I just caught Mickey One a few weeks ago at MoMA. I thought a lot of the current press about that run didn't appreciate that movie, just described it as a curiosity. 

There isn't really anything like that film in American cinema. Despite Penn's feeling that it suffers from every kind of overindulgence, it still holds up. Beautiful and terrifyng. Beatty is God in that film. The screening I went to was packed and there were only a few walk-outs which for MoMA is rare. I just finished a book of interviews with Arthur with my friend Paul Cronin. Penn was so gracious and patient with us. We're just a couple of putzes and Penn humored us to no end. 

When's the book due out?

November, as part of the University Press of Mississippi Conversations With Directors series. 

Back to that American Dream screening at BAM—isn't it unusual to show something you've never seen before?

Sure. BAM programmer Jake Perlin wanted to show it and asked me to introduce it so I just stumbled my way through per usual. My fallback was that in his lifetime Norman Mailer never saw the film either. The psychology of the novel is totally New York--in the first ten pages Rojack throws his wife out of their penthouse window. To save money on the shoot, the producers moved the whole thing to L.A. There weren't that many high rises in L.A. in the mid-sixties. Mailer was dissuaded by friends from ever seeing it for fear that he'd become violent if he did. He made a mint selling the screenplay to Hollywood and from some of that money came his masterpiece of bottomless cinema. Wild 90. 

Can we just say that you're the authority on Norman Mailer, filmmaker?

If you insist. For years, critics would write dismissively about Norman's films as if they were among the worst ever made, so it would certainly please me if [I was the authority] since I think they are deserving of serious reconsideration and I like the romantic notion of fighting against the vig. More recently, J. Hoberman in The Dream Life, A.O. Scott in the New York Times and Patricia Bosworth for Vanity Fair have written favorably and perceptively about the films. When Lincoln Center and Anthology hosted the tribute to Mailer the summer before he died, Norman was excited by how well the films had been received--particularly by Scott in the Times. Here he had the one good Maidstone review he was hoping for. Albeit, 40 years after the fact.

What is it about Mailer's films that makes you so committed to getting them seen?

They are interesting films. Particularly Maidstone, which captures a certain apocalyptic spirit rampant in late sixties America better than other more celebrated films from the period.  I think they have profound things to say about fiction, reality and the negligible difference between the two. If you are a cinephile or a film programmer or whatever, there's also this desire, I think, to go beyond the accepted canon of great works. Not to demote or forget about the canon--just an attempt to expand it and make new connections by retrieving what's been forgotten or lost.

 

Do you feel that film programming in New York has enough of that spirit of what you call going beyond the canon and chasing after movies that are personal for the programmer? Do you perceive any problems in the curating climate?

When you are programming films for an institution, having to contend with a board of directors, limited budgets, and maintaining some semblance of an audience, it's difficult to remain completely tied to personal vision. You'd last two seconds if all you showed were films that made you cry. A film programmer, above all else, should be charitable--programming the well-known alongside the untried while working to cultivate an audience for both. In its scope, vision and longevity, I think the most successful articulation of this was Amos and Marcia Vogel's Cinema 16. But that was many years ago in New York and things are certainly much different today, culturally speaking. In the face of TV, internet, DVD, and the accessibility to virtually everything, I think programmers here do a great job and still take a lot of risks. The only problem I can see is the lack of cooperation and coordination among venues. They program things on top of one another, dividing audiences. It becomes a competition which I don't think is good for the long-term health of film culture in the city.

You certainly seem freed from a lot of those restrictions for your show at Anthology. Talk a little about what you're screening and what we should get excited about.

In keeping with the 'Personal Archives' tradition, the Anthology show is a random assemblage of stuff. Clips from films by Glauber Rocha and Carmelo Bene, tributes to John Derek, Uncle Floyd, Amos Vogel, Pussy Galore, Mailer. An evening of unalloyed self-indulgence that I hope might be somewhat entertaining if people show up. Perhaps the thing I’m most excited about is a film which Peter Whitehead  sent called Mia and Her Mouse that was shot in London in 1972 right about the time he was making Daddy with Niki de St Phalle. If you've seen that film you'll know what to expect. “Pungent and worrying” is how Peter describes it.

I have seen Daddy, but I can't say that it helps me anticipate what Mia and Her Mouse will be, but it totally peaks my interest. Taking a look at the list of stuff in this program, some of this has got to be protected by copyright. How are you getting away with this?

I might not get away with it so let’s try to be discreet. Fortunately, I have no assets to speak of so suing me wouldn't get anyone very far. Suing Anthology on the other hand. . .   I imagine some malevolent body could flip that place and convert it into eco-friendly condos.

I think in the Colin McCabe book on Godard he talks about how some of Godard's work (like maybe Histoire du Cinema) is hard to see because of copyright issues, because he uses images from other films. McCabe suggests that everyone blatantly break copyright laws until the trespasses become too numerous to penalize.

Hear, hear to that. The Anthology show is my humble contribution to the cause.

What do we have to look forward to from Michael Chaiken?

A couple of things in the fall--- a tribute to actor/filmmaker Pierre Clementi at Lincoln Center and Jean-Gabriel and Quinto Albicocco at The French Institute. Also, with the Harvard Film Archive, I'm working on a retrospective of the films of British documentarian Dick Fontaine which I hope will happen next year.

Seen anything good lately?

A Time to Stir (Paul Cronin), Dream Minimalist (Marie Losier), Der Fan (Eckhart Schmidt) 

Egg salad--yes or no?

Never. 

What's your favorite novel from before the 20th century?

The Confidence Man 

Anything else you want to talk about?

I think we've covered all the bases, no? Thanks, Nathan.

***

 

For details about tomorrow’s Anthology screening, go here.

Chaiken’s “evening of unalloyed self-indulgence” will include:

For Yon Teenagers: Glauber & Juliet 

Norman Mailer Survives Three Rounds with Jose Torres

The Last Emperor: Dennis Hopper 

Virtual Sex: Klaus Kinski

Amos Vogel & Jonas Mekas: Reunited!  

Pussy Galore Visits Uncle Floyd

The Celestial Ecstasies of William F. Buckley

D.A.F Tanz den Mussolini 

Godard Visits Dick Cavett

70s Stunt Men: Jerry Lewis and Robert Goulet 

Cinema Notre Temps: John Derek 

Interview with Marie Losier, Curator & Filmmaker

In April, the French Institute screened Maurice Pialat’s Naked Childhood back-to-back with Jean Eustache’s My Little Loves. They are rare films by masterful directors, not to mention two of the best movies I’ve ever seen next to each other. Starting tomorrow, they will be screening films featuring Yves Montand in a series made up of canonized stuff like tomorrow night’s Wages of Fear as well as plenty of films that are not available on DVD. Marie Losier, the Institute’s film curator, conversed with me (via email) about Montand, the pitfalls and philosophies of programming, as well as her own work as a filmmaker. You can learn more about Mlle Losier and her films at marielosier.net. I’ve edited our conversation for length and clarity.

  

Marie, I wish the idea to interview you had come to me last month when you did the series that you called Jean Eustache's Circle. Can you talk a little about the concept behind that series?
The Jean Eustache series was a series I wanted to do for a long time and thanks to [co-curator] Sam Di Iorio this dream came true. I first had just wanted to present Eustache films but Sam made it even more interesting by widening the series to Eustache’s circle of friends, inspirations, films he performed in, worked on…so the series became a sort of wider image of Eustache’s time and work. I feel Eustache is not well known outside of the usual one—The Mother and The Whore—which is an amazing film, but no one really knows the short films and their incredible richness, humor and visceral beauty. I was happy to be part of a Eustache trip because all the prints went from NY to Washington to many other cities to be shown all over the US, so more Eustache is in our eyes!

How much of the curatorial process for you is about filling in the gaps?

Partly, [it’s about] filling the gap in the sense that you love deeply a filmmaker and his work and you want others to discover it where it is not known and enjoy and share your passion. So that is what I call filling the gap, but it is not always the case for the programming. You also [are restricted to] French films only for my programming, and they have to have 35mm prints subtitled in English….so it makes it sometimes very difficult in the programming process, narrow, and yet full of discoveries.

Are there any films that you've been dying to show but haven't been able to?

Oh yes plenty! All the time! For example I would love to show all of Jacques Rozier films, all of Jean-Gabriel Albicocco films, but for him all the copies are turning red vinegar, have no subtitles, and have to be restored in order for people to see them. I would dream to show all of George Franju and Vadim’s films which is very hard and the one we can see is God Created Woman but nothing more and my ultimate dream is to show all films with and by Serge Gainsbourg!! And that has to stay a dream, impossible to get prints and find them!

Do you feel that you and your fellow programmers have any influence over what films become available?

Yes I think programming does have an effect on restoration of prints and touring of programs. For example, the Eustache [series] was one of the programs that toured and made many prints available, subtitled, taken care of. I think it is the same with the Jacques Demy films that the Ministere is restoring with Agnes Varda so that the films can be shown all together at MoMA. Some are impossible, like the Franju films, because one person owns a couple prints and does not want to lend them unless we pay a million dollars to show them which makes it impossible for any cinemas, cultural centers...

Is there anything in the Yves Montand series that you would like to have shown?

I would have loved to find a print of [Claude Sautet’s] Vincent, François, Paul... et les autres (1974), [Sautet’s] César et Rosalie (1972), and [Costa-Gavras’] Compartiment tueurs (1965).

Have you ever taken a group of films that you want to screen and then concocted an excuse to show them, or do you always begin with a concept and then select the films?

I think the programming goes both ways, you see films you want to show and they have nothing to do with each other but you find a thread and make it a series, or you think of a theme or concept and then you find and choose the films. It really varies for me.

As a filmmaker, you are playful. You cast yourself in Elliott Gould's role in your shortened version of Bergman's The Touch. In Manuelle Labor, you build a movie about childbirth around a pun.

I love playfulness and that is how I enjoy life....making those films!

Your work also has an infatuation for the aesthetic of silent films.  What attracts you to the look and feel of silent movies?

Silent films are magic! They are totally free, free to be as humorous, playful, surreal and visually stunning and tricky as no other forms of cinema for me. Silent films are visually beautiful and for me nostalgic, close to painting. I used to be a painter so the tactile feel to these films always have attracted me. Also often they are so over theatrical which I adore, and have no dialogue which allows me to create any story without writing a dialogue and working with actors. I can just work with people—friends always, actually—that have incredible physical personality and physicality, way of walking, faces, gestures...That is what interests me most … I grew up on [silent films] in Paris and also I was crazy about screwball comedies of Lubitsch, Cuckor, Keaton, and also more serious like Murnau ... that is where my head floats always.
You’ve had work at the New York Underground Film Festival. You also used to show your work at the Invisible Film Series at Millennium Film Workshop, along with Reverend Jen, George and Mike Kuchar, and many others. NYUFF just had their last festival, and I think Invisible is extinct as well, right? Are non-commercial New York filmmakers in trouble?

Many places that showed experimental films are disappearing. Like I used to curate at Ocularis for years and Robert Beck Memorial cinema and both are gone.  But in some way new ones come up, like Light Industry in Brooklyn and also right now at the Stone where Andrew Lampert curated a whole month of those type of films and performances.  Also I feel that I am more involved in making films and my first feature film now so I have less time to curate these films and go to shows ...so it feels less of an issue for me and in some way. Also I’ve shown at Berlin Film Festival and Rotterdam, where there is a huge experimental crowd and makers and events.

Would you like to tell us about the feature you're working on?

Sure! It has been a long adventure for now 2 years ... a feature film on Genesis P-Orridge and her/his partner Lady Jaye and their band Psychic TV. It will take much longer because I have no budget and this is a big project so I go slowly, reel by reel! Genesis and Lady Jaye’s Pandrogyne project is their attempt to deconstruct their individual identities in order to create a third being, “Breyer-P-Orridge”, a deconstruction of the fictional SELF which would be free from the rules of society.

This "deconstruction of individual identities to create a third being," this is being done via surgery, correct?

Yes! Crazy but also [via] music, writing, performance....

Above: From Losier's short film "Flying Saucey!" To see Losier's films, click here.

 

Getting back to Montand ... What made you want to do this series?

Yves Montand is a part of a lot of Frenchies’ childhood, mine absolutely first as a singer when I was little, I adored and still do love his songs and his voice...which is so unique. And as an actor just amazing face, presence, voice, and husband of Simone Signoret, a legendary couple ... there is not more French than Yves Montand.

If someone only sees one of the Yves Montand movies at FIAF, which one should it be?

Chris Marker’s Loneliness of the Long Distance Singer. Also Elliot Stein, the journalist and film historian who was Montand’s English professor in Paris, will introduce Manon of the Spring July 15^th.

Is there a series that you are most proud of having curated?

Well, a couple: the one of Raoul Coutard was for me life changing because Raoul came over and we became friends which really changed a lot in my life, he was a sort of hero to me and I discovered a wonderfully hilarious man filled with stories, easy, gentle and full of character who just spoke about anecdotes about each film he shot with and without Godard in the most exciting and unknown way, he really made the series magical. That series was programmed with Jake Perlin. Another one was Michel Brault and his documentaries, his coming and meeting Albert Maysles...I discovered so much about his films and he is a delicate man with so much grace and secrecy. Series programmed again with Sam [Di Iorio]! Other series without the artist that I adored was the one on Cinema of the 70's that I programmed with Sam, and the one on Eustache.