Recent Link Round-Up

New writing from November 2014 to April 2015

For RogerEbert.Com, a report on the 6th Annual Turner Class Movie Film Festival

A new essay on historical thinking, "Race and The American Movie"

For Filmmaker Magazine, Thom Andersen's The Thoughts That Once We Had.

2014 Best Of Writing
-Top 10 for The Film Stage
-Submission to the Village Voice Poll
-Capsules of The Grand Budapest Hotel and Two Days, One Night for In Review Online
-Episodes of The Cinephiliacs with Keith Uhlich, counting down #10-6 and #5-1.

Wrote capsules for The Film Stage's Top 50 of the Decade on Certified Copy, Mysteries of Libson, Cosmopolis, and Moonrise Kingdom.

On L'Avventura and Clouds of Sils Maria

Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason and Ornette: Made in America

On Criterion's Box Set of the Documentaries of Les Blank

Jean Renoir's A Day in The Country

Lucercia Martel's La Cienaga

Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant

On Godard's Every Man For Himself and Truffaut's The Soft Skin

Robert Montgomery's Ride the Pink Horse

Reviews of new films: Paul Schrader's Dying of the Light, Gina Telaroli's Here's To The Future!, and Paul Harril's Something, Anything.

Episodes of The Cinephiliacs: Mike D'Angelo on Buffalo '66, Tina Hassania on You've Got Mail, Matías Piñeiro on Duelle, Doug Dillaman on My Neighbor Totoro, Kris Tapley on JFK, Jan-Christopher Horak on Her Sister's Secret, Calum Marsh on The Last Days of Disco, and Kiva Reardon on Leave Her To Heaven.

Capsules from Letterboxd:
Contemporary: Run All Night, Jupiter Ascending, A Most Violent Year, The Congress, Beloved Sisters, Eden, Nightcrawler
Works from India: The Cloud-Capped Star, Gangs of Wasseypur, Jewel Thief, Awaara, 
Expressive Esoterica: Gone in 60 Seconds, The Avenging Eagle, Junior Bonner, Now I'll Tell, The Son's Return, Bed Time, Mr. Majestyk, 
Bullshit: Shame

Link Round-Up: Summer Blues

If you look to the left, you can see the cover of my book. And soon enough, you can buy it! Neato!

My friend Kevin B. Lee, who came on the podcast in January of last year, has released his most ambitious video essay yet, entitled Transformers: The Premake. I discussed this work at The Film Stage. 

I also reviewed two more Blu-Rays for The Film Stage and tried to put them in conversation with each other: Antonioni's L'Eclisse and Kiarostami's Like Someone In Love. Both are wonderful and the transfers look fantastic.

A surprisingly decent transfer would also be the new DCP of Eric Rohmer's A Summer's Tale, which is finally receiving a theatrical release in the United States. It's my favorite movie of the year, and I explain why over here. I also review a so-called "new release" movie, Clint Eastwood's beguiling and somewhat wondrous Jersey Boys.

On The Cinephiliacs, Adam Nayman joins the show to talk about his book about Showgirls entitled It Doesn't Suck, and we also discuss Mia Hansen-Love's debut feature, All Is Forgiven. He also tears Jason Reitman to shreds. 

Over on Letterboxd...
New films! Nadiv Lapid's Policeman and Lord and Miller's 22 Jump Street
War documentaries! William Wyler's Memphis Belle and John Huston's San Pietro
From Asia! King Hu's A Touch of Zen and Kenji Mizoguchi's Women of the Night
Big Auteurs! Alain Resnais's Melo and James Cameron's The Abyss

Link Round-Up: The End is Nigh

Besides some writing on Letterboxd and maybe a blog post, expect this to be the last work you'll see from me until late December—my thesis is due December 12th, and my PhD applications before that, so I'll be working on those day and night until then. You'll still get podcasts (I think), or at least they are in the pipeline, but for now...

Three more episodes of The Cinephiliacs went up in October: you had the final NYFF report with Tony Dayoub talking about big hitters like 12 Years a Slave, Blue is the Warmest Color, Her, The Immigrant, and more. Then there's an episode with Craig Simpson from the Indiana University archives talking about Welles, Pauline Kael, and Paris, Texas. Finally, there's a roundtable episode of the show on the occasion of what would have been Andrew Sarris's 85th Birthday. The roundtable includes past guests like Dan Sallitt, David Schwartz, and Godfrey Cheshire. So head on over and take a listen.

In terms of written work, I took another dive at Blue is the Warmest Color and reviewed it for In Review Online, and then my contribution to scary movies was a piece for The Film Stage on the release of two new Criterions: Lewis Allen's The Uninvited and Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte (the worst horror is marriage). 

On Letterboxd, my piece on The Counselor got some buzz, so much that Critcwire guru Sam Adams chose it along with a piece by Keith Uhlich on 12 Years a Slave to highlight. Thanks Sam! Otherwise: I also wrote about...A Girl In Every Port, The Big Sleep, Pulse, Club Sandwich, I No Longer Hear the Guitar, HaHaHa, The Chase, I Used to Be Darker, All is Lost, and La Chembre. 

July Screening Log

Color coded via Dan Sallitt's method (Current or upcoming releases not included). Click on the titles to writing when applicable.

1. A Woman Under the Influence (Cassavetes, USA, 1974)

2. Traveling Light (Telaroli, USA, 2010)

3. Silver Lode (Dwan, USA, 1954)

4. The Fury (De Palma, USA, 1978)

5. Edvard Munch (Watkins, Norway, 1974)

6. Tennessee's Partner (Dwan, USA, 1955)

7. If... (Anderson, UK, 1968)

8. The Big Trail (Walsh, USA, 1930)
9. Love Streams (Cassavetes, USA, 1984)

10. Ashes of Time Redux (Wong, Hong Kong, 1994/2008)

Also Notable (No order besides color categorization): Fake It So Real (Greene, USA, 2012), Le Amiche (Antonioni, Italy, 1955), Brigadoon (Minnelli, USA, 1954), Kati With An I (Greene, USA, 2011), Slightly Scarlet (Dwan, USA, 1956), Escape to Burma (Dwan, USA, 1955), Gloria (Cassavetes, USA, 1980), Faces (Cassavetes, USA, 1968), A Child is Waiting (Cassavetes, USA, 1964).

Rewatches: L'Avventura (Antonioni, Italy, 1960), The Player (Altman, USA, 1992), Girl Walk // All Day (Krupnick, USA, 2012), The Straight Story (Lynch, USA, 1999), The Night of the Hunter (Laughton, USA, 1955)

Link Round Up: Do Podcasts Have Birthdays?

Happy Birthday? That's right, The Cinephiliacs made it one year into existence without missing an episode. To celebrate, I brought on the one, the only, the legendary New York Times chief film critic A.O. Scott. It's a very fun, wide-ranging episode, and includes a funny discussion of Robert Altman's The Player. Take a listen over here.

My other big experience of the week was finally revisiting L'Avventura, which I had written off at the young age of 17. This week, I murdered that young boy for being so wrong, and wrote an SEO-friendly piece comparing it to some of the major American works of this year. This includes my first published thoughts on films I had been avoiding writing about, including Spring Breakers, Upstream Color, and The Bling Ring (all of which I'm quite mixed on). But read about Antonioni's epic over at The Film Stage.

Over at the Boxd, I visit early Antonoioni, Le Amiche, and dive two Cassavetes: A Woman Under the Influence and A Child Is Waiting (Faces also forthcoming).

Digital Static: Returning To The Wonder

          To the Wonder, Terrence Malick’s sixth feature film, is both a reflective look back and a daring leap forward for the director. It very much extends the qualities that have come to define Malick’s work—a didactic editing style based around natural elements, an emphasis on movement and gestures to convey emotions, and a solemn, poetic voiceover. However, while some have seen the film as a minor b-side to The Tree of Life, it is very much a break, a reorganization of principles more than anything else. While his Texan set childhood nostalgia piece searched and celebrated a forgotten Promised Land of Americana, To The Wonder is emotionally bare and claustrophobic film, at times a psychological horror flick. The gestures of Malick’s previous films are repeated but they are closed in, made meaningless as the modern and suburban ennui overtake his protagonist, Marina. I find it to be an devastating work.

            I have already written at length on the film, but I returned to it again, and have even more to say about what I believe will be seen as a transitional piece in Malick’s filmography. I first want to address comments made by my friend Jason Bellamy on my original piece. Jason writes:

I'm especially skeptical of almost all criticism that tries to tie a director's work to his (or her) personal life. Doing so suggests that the narrative we know about the director's life is accurate (as if public figures unselfishly expose their true selves to us), that they don't have secrets, and that they're as two-dimensional as the narratives about them tend to be…I'm even more skeptical about attempts to tie autobiographical motivations to the work of Malick, a director everyone agrees we know very little about.…this review, while possibly accurate, has an uncomfortable number of "clearly" and "certainly" readings within it, as it relates to Malick's motivation. (Most notably: Aren't you going pretty far out on the limb to say that Malick is "clearly in a crisis"?)…Put another way, much of your analysis that this film is a masterpiece seems to hang on the belief that it's vividly revelatory about Malick. But what if it isn't?

As always, I appreciate Jason’s comments, and if you haven’t, you should read his own piece on the film. Having Jason’s comments in mind, I did try and separate myself from the “Authorial Intent Fallacy” while viewing the film a second time. But what I cannot separate myself from is certainly Malick’s other films, and how much this work stands in contrast to his other work. Many critics who have come out negatively against the film have stated that the gestures and twirls feel vague and without emotion—I would say its more the opposite. They no longer carry the magic once felt before, and that’s the central dichotomy at play. In Jason’s review, he writes, “I suspect that many of us who have Malick's movies printed on our heart will find it difficult to watch Kurylenko's Marina raising her hands to salute a storm without thinking about Q'orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas doing the same in The New World…What once felt specific, organic and true now feels random and offhand, which threatens to retroactively suffocate the charms of To the Wonder's predecessors.” I would instead argue is that Malick is searching for meaning to that gesture in this (very) new world, but unable to find the same resonance, and then must deal with the emotional consequences of it.

Cinephiliacs Continues

If you've been here and been under a rock, you may have missed my new podcast, The Cinephiliacs, in which I've interviewing the great cinephiles of our time. Check out episode one with Glenn Kenny (plus a discussion of Antonioni's Blow-Up), and just released, episode two with Matt Zoller Seitz (with his very convincing argument about the greatness of Born on the Fourth of July).