Link Round-Up: Stuff I've Been Writing

Much more over with the good folks at Variety, including the pretty funny Kevin Hart comedy About Last Night, the not particularly good but whatever horror film Haunt with Jacki Weaver in a small role, the deplorably stupid Down and Dangerous, and the deplorably moralistic and simply pointless Lucky Bastard. These kind of reviews are fun to write!

Over at To Be (Cont'd), the March discussion is between Abbey Bender and myself on the idea of timeless films, dated-ness, and the historical spectator. I wrote the fist post here. It also has gotten some great response over at The Dissolve through Noel Murray's excellent "Feedback" column.

Over at The Film Stage, I tried to find the Soderbergh side to his not-so recognizably Soderbergh film King of the Hill, which is now out on Criterion Blu (and has his 1995 feature The Underneath as a bonus feature).

Over at In Review Online, I dug further into Vulgar Auteurism with Paul WS Anderson's Pompeii, a pointedly disappointing work from the man. Never go without Milla again, good sir.

If you haven't heard Kent Jones on The Cinephiliacs, then something is very wrong with you.

On Letterboxd, by auteur:
George Cukor: The Philadelphia Story, A Woman's Face, Born Yesterday, The Marrying Kind, and A Star is Born.
Delmer Daves: The Hanging Tree
Johnnie To: Sparrow and Running on Karma
Hong Sang-Soo: Oki's Movie and The Day He Arrives
Teinosuke Kinugasa: Crossroads and A Page of Madness
Edgar Ulmer: The Light Ahead, Murder is My Beat, and Beyond the Time Barrier.
Silent Stuff: Chaplin's The Kid and DeMille's The Cheat

Unique Film Writing in 2013

“95% of film writing is shit.” This is what a fellow critic reminded of me during one of my podcasts this year. The more I thought about it, I knew he was right.

But there was good film writing this year, if from a small selection of people. Most of what passes for serious film criticism is hardly serious, more than it seems what passes for good films. So this is a small selection of writing I liked this year. It’s not everything, but when I opened a Word document and remembered what pieces stayed in my mind for whatever reason, these were the ones that popped immediately into my head. There are a number of writers whom I adore not on the list simply because my mind is flawed, and there are some writers I thought of more than one piece, but I thought one should do—my friend Carson Lund has more. There is no order, but the first two are my favorites.

Kent Jones, "Intolerance," Film Comment, May 3, 2013. (Or: We cannot remain outside the sphere of our art)

It’s curious that American culture and history are still so commonly viewed through a New Left prism, by means of which 1964 or thereabouts has become a Year Zero of political enlightenment; as a consequence, the preferred stance remains that of the outsider looking in, or in this case back, at a supposedly gullible and delusional pre-Sixties America. It’s certainly preferable to right-wing orthodoxy, but that’s hardly a compliment. The New Left is now very old but its rhetoric lives on, many times removed from its original context, and that rhetoric seems to have found a welcome home in film criticism.

David Bordwell, "Mixing business with pleasure: Johnnie To’s DRUG WAR," Observations on Film Art, July 8, 2013 (Or: How a movie tells you everything you need to know)

The Milkyway writing team often treats story points in this peremptory way. If the Hollywood rule is “Tell the audience every major point three times,” To and Wai often assume that one mention is enough, and even that can come before we’re in a position to appreciate it.

Kurosawa, Cinephilia, and Seven Samurai

Kurosawa is part of a contentious tradition now with Bergman and early Fellini in cinephilia for not making "open" movies. The main claim would be that their perfectly executed, pictorial frames do not allow for interpretation beyond what they present. These films do not require explanation in the way that their counterparts - Mizoguchi, Rosselini (only the latter works) and Antonioni respectively – make films that are only legible to those who have truly engaged with cinema. While I could point to Andrew Tracy’s piece in Cinema Scope at the time of the AK100 Criterion set (“prompts the question of why his presence among the most active and engaged sectors of present-day cinephilia feels so pallid,” a sentence that certainly doesn’t engage in any sort of exclusion process) or even David Bordwell’s defeatist attitude (“I still find most of his official classics overbearing, and the last films seem to me flabby exercises”), this would be falsely presumptuous to lay the blame on contemporary shoulders.

Instead, we can go all the way back to Cahiers Du Cinema to find the origins of such debate. Luc Moullet on Drunken Angel: “Its aesthetic pretensions…surpass in their grotesqueness anything even the European Cinema has produced,” and Ikiru: “As for the ending with the swing, confronted by such a piece of idiocy and affectation the audience is left speechless.” Jacques Rivette too, who notes “those ‘picturesqure qualities that made for the facile success of The Seven Samurai, of which we may now rightly ask whether it was especially aimed at the export market.” And Godard’s famous comment, “merely a more elegant Ralph Habib.”  Bazin was more cautious, noting his own (and I’d admit my own) preference for Mizoguchi, while writing “I wonder whether, instead of considering Kurrosawa’s cosmopolitanism as a commercial compromise, albeit of superior quality, we should not rather see it from now on as a dialectical progression pointing the way forward for the Japanese cinema.”*

Link-Round Up: Looking Forward - Traveling Back

My favorite event of the year, the New York Film Festival, begins today with the world premiere of Captain Phillips. That one is a little wonky (more TK maybe Update: here on Letterboxd), but many of the other selections are not - in fact they're masterful. So for another year, I'll be covering them for The Cinephiliacs as well as a couple other places as well. Check out the first episode of these with In Review Online correspondent Carson Lund, as we discuss new films from Jia Zhangke, Lav Diaz, Hayao Miyazaki, Hong Sang-Soo (my first!), and the Harvard SEL! 

Also, over at The Film Stage, I get philosophical in discussing film history in relation to a fantastic new DVD from the National Film Preservation Foundation, a collection of New Zealand silent film treasures, including Graham Cutt's The White Shadow (written by Alfred Hitchcock) and John Ford's Upstream. There's also an ostrich carriage, which I sadly forgot to mention in the piece. You can read that here.

Some recent Letterboxd stuff is limited to some Howard Hawks silents: Fig Leaves, The Cradle Snatchers, and Fazil.

Link Round Up: Quotable Lions

Firstly, a little self-indulgence. Anyone following my Twitter rants knows the amount I am obsessed with Jazmin Lopez's Leones, which I wrote about during New Directors/New Films and discussed on The Cinephiliacs. While the film still does not have distribution, they did cut a trailer for international publicity, and felt kind enough to include one of my heartfelt phrases. Watch the trailer here; I'll keep everyone up to date on if/when it returns to the States.

Also a cause for celebration is the other Argentinean marvel of the year, Viola from Matías Piñeiro. I liked the film when I also saw it at ND/NF, but have grown quite amorous with it since then as well as Piñeiro's other three films, which I wrote about at The Film Stage. I'll later be posting something about his previous film, Rosalinda, but read my primer on approaching his work here.

My Criterion pieces for The Film Stage also continues this week with a look at Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu. I use the opportunity to talk melodrama and bodies, with a little film theory as well, but mostly to talk about why you don't need a close-up to make great emotional movie. It also links to my favorite discovery of the week: Kent Jones's phenomenal piece "Do Movies Think?"

Finally, The Muriels have returned! This summer, we are counting down some of our favorite films from before 1962, and I was assigned to write about a little film called Vertigo.

On Letterboxd, my final posts on Allan Dwan and  If...