Link Round-Up: Va-Va-Boom!

Many, many updates follow. I promise to be better at doing this more than once a month.

My Masters Thesis for Columbia University is being updated, revised, and expanded for a book! Coming in October from The Critical Press, you'll be able to purchase Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in American Film. The book will cover my theories on film noir and its connection to American melodrama and various atomic, religious, and technological apocalyptic narratives. You can read an expanded note on what will be covered here.

Another thing worth picking up: Little White Lies's May issue, which is dedicated to Richard Linklater. There are fantastic pieces by Jordan Cronk, Gabe Klinger, Vadim Rizov, and editor David Jenkins. My own piece covers Linklater's films set outside of his homeland of Austin, Texas, which covers the Before films, School of Rock, and Me And Orson Welles, you can pre-order the issue here.

The Criterion Collection continues to be busy. I reviewed a number of new discs for The Film Stage, including Dreyer's 1925 silent curiosity, Master of the House, Akira Kurosawa's "this is so much more than Star Wars" epic The Hidden Fortress, and three newly restored shorts by Harold Lloyd, which can be found on the new Blu-Ray for The Freshman. 

My conversation on "dated films" with Abbey Bender wrapped up on To Be (Cont'd). You can read the first, second, third, and fourth posts here respectively. Then check out the April conversation between Glenn Heath Jr. and Tim Grierson on the work of Jonathan Glazer. I gave my own brief on his new film, Under the Skin, over here.

If you aren't following The Cinephiliacs, you've missed conversations with Dana Stevens talking about Portuguese poetry and Max Ophuls, Mark Harris on his fantastic new book Five Came Back and the Hollywood directors who went to war, and Matt Lynch on America's largest independent video store and the morality of John Woo.

Over at Letterboxd, I've written some posts on
New Films! Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, Juame-Collet Serra's Non-Stop, Albert Serra's Story of My Death, Hong Sang-Soo's Our Sunhi, and The LEGO Movie.
Canonical Works! Stranger Than Paradise, An American In Paris.
Really good things off the radar! Powell and Pressburger's Oh...Rosalinda!, Richard Fliecher's Violent Saturday and Barabbas, Claire Denis's No Fear, No Die, Jacques Rivette's Secret Defense, Robert Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight, and Sweetgrass from Harvard SEL.

Finally, I'm proud to announce that in the fall, I'll be switching coasts and beginning my PhD in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California. The move is somewhat terrifying, but I hope to continue to keep trying to provide fantastic writing on film and more.

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. 

Link Round-Up: NYFFing It Up

These people are having way more fun than most of my first dates do.

The New York Film Film Festival ends this weekend, but my coverage is only about halfway complete, starting with this piece (my first) for Reverse Shot on the latest Romanian comedy, Corneliu Porumboiu's When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism. It's a strange little work that tries to articulate a number of concerns related to art and theory, and I hope the piece (made palatable by Reverse Shot's tremendous editor, Michael Koresky) is worth your time, especially if you've seen it.

On podcast duties, there are two for you - first up, how about some experimental cinema? Views From the Avant-Garde featured over 200 films this year, and somehow fellow Columbia alum and now OSU PhD candidate James Hansen joined me to work through films by Luther Price, Nathaniel Dorsky, Jodie Mack, Stephanie Barber, and a few more. Back in something a little more mainstream (though not by much), Boston's darling Monica Castillo talks about the latest from the Coens, Tsai Ming-Liang, Phillipe Garrell, and Joanna Hogg from the festival.

To Be (Cont'd) continues this month with a discussion on Francis Ford Coppola's Twixt between Bill Ryan and Keith Uhlich. Ryan gets the ball rolling here.

On Letterboxd: Russian Ark, Il Grido, The Rapture, Written on the Wind, Trent's Last Case, and Paid To Love.

Link Round-Up: Something Is Coming

Lots of stuff to catch up on...

Next week, Andrew Welch and I will launch To Be Contd, a film site dedicated to longform dialogues about film, inspired by many sources that believe that slow is better. Andrew and I have been writing and editing each other's posts for the first "issue" for quite some time now, and I'll be very happy to announce the topic when it launches next week (the photo above gives a good hint though), and I'm very excited about some of the writers who will be writing in the future. Do us a favor and follow the social media glitz for now: Twitter and Facebook.

Over at In Review Online, I had a couple of posts. First, I wrote about Wong Kar-Wai's debut feature As Tears Go By for a directrospective on the Hong Kong filmmaker. I tried to get into the nuance of how to examine the film in terms of the industry Wong had been working in for 10 years. Read that over here. I also offered some preliminary thoughts on The Grandmaster over on Letterboxd. 

My other review was for the tiresome Ain't Them Bodies Saints, one of my larger disappointments of the year in terms of what could have been a really unique deconstruction of the "lovers on the run" genre. Take a gander to understand my frustrations.

New Cinephiliacs have gone up. Doc expert Robert Greene joined me for a conversation on his two fantastic features - Kati With An I and Fake It So Real (thoughts on each respectively on Lboxd) - as well as Peter Watkins's enormously complex film, Edvard Munch. Then acting expert Sheila O'Malley came on to talk about her work as an actor and blogger, plus John Cassavetes's Opening Night. On the "Thank You" side, the equally fantastic blogger Brian Doan wrote about the podcast here.

Some Letterboxd reviews...

From the "current cinema:" The Heat, The Canyons, This Is Martin Bonner, Touchy Feely, and my revisit to Moonrise Kingdom.

From the past: Intolerance, 3 Women, The Hunger, Good Morning, Taipei, Love Streams, A Woman is a Woman, and Ashes of Time.

Link Round-Up: Straight Talk

I would hardly call myself a David Lynch auteurist or defender or what have you - I think Mulholland Drive is an absolute masterpiece, and Blue Velvet is canon, but most of the other works are I could probably leave behind. However, I do quite like The Straight Story, which in the latest episode of Josh Spiegel's Mousterpiece Cinema, I argue is perhaps his most Lynchian movie. I was joined by the much more intelligent Jake Cole as well, so give that a listen for some insights into this strange work in Lynch's canon, plus me defending The Lone Ranger despite derisive laughter that follows (which I also defend over here)

Blue Jasmine is the latest Woody Allen film, and like all Woody Allen films, it's quite enjoyable or at least palettable. I reviewed it for In Review Online, though I probably should have spent a few more words on how good Andrew Dice Clay is. Read that over here.

Traveling Light is an a new contender for my favorite film of 2013, an experimental work that follows a train ride from New York to Pittsburgh. I'll write it longform some time, but its filmmaker Gina Telaroli joined me on The Cinephiliacs to talk about her films, her Allan Dwan and William Wellman dossiers, unconscious cinema, and a very magical film: Vincente Minnelli's Brigadoon. Give that a listen over here. 

New on the Boxd: Laughton's masterwork Night of the Hunter, Johnnie To's fantastic Drug War, Godard's romp-like A Woman is a Woman, Brian De Palma's ecstatic The Fury, Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail, and two films by documentarian Robert Greene: Kati With An I and Fake It So Real. More here if you scroll down.

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).

Link Round-Up: Christ Almighty!

"The power of Criterion compels you!"

Oh Jesus! The Christian savoir appears in both of my latest writings on cinema. Firstly, I indulge in a little Hollywood blockbuster shaming with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, which is an arduously silly event (thanks Christopher Nolan!). Read the piece over at In Review Online.

Of a bit more interest is the Criterion release of Marketa Lazarová, the Czech epic from František Vláčil. It’s not exactly the easiest film to indulge, as I get into the piece, which is basically a primer of how to watch such an insanely difficult film. That’s over at The Film Stage, so take a few minutes to read it.

A new Cinephiliacs features Andreas Stoehr on The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. Also, my list of Letterboxd reviews has been updated.

Link Round-Up: Stories We Tell and Sun Don't Shine

Two quick links to one recent post...and one not so recent (apologies apologies). The first is my first piece for The Film Stage, and it's an examination of Stories We Tell, the documentary from Sarah Polley. It's a spoiler-filled piece, and I found it quite problematic, much more than most people, and I've had some really fascinating conversations come out of it. So take a read, why don't you. 

Since I spent most of the spring teaching and gradskooling, I didn't have many updates outside this blog. But I did write a review of Amy Seimetz's Sun Don't Shine, a Florida set noir thriller that is a quite neat little work. Not perfect for reasons I get into, but certainly worth your time (and probably has the best final shot/line of the year to date). That's over at InReview Online.

If you haven't been keeping up with The Cinephiliacs, we have Ben Model on Modern Times, Vadim Rizov on Le Cercle Rouge, Ignaitvy Vishnevetsky on The Moderns, and a special round table on Roger Ebert with a whole cast of characters. So take a listen to them all on the site or on iTunes. (There's also this handy Letterboxd list to keep track of the films discussed). 

An Act You Really Must See

The Unspeakable Act played at BamCinemaFest last summer, which I declared "Rapturous" at the time. I meant to write something long about the film, but sadly my notebook was stolen and I lost everything I had planned. Still, I can vividly recall much of the film, and it remains an early candidate for my favorite film of 2013.

Since then, I've gotten to known its director, Dan Sallitt, through our various paths in the NY repertory scene, and I've thoroughly investigated his writing and his other films. The result is the latest episode of The Cinephiliacs, timed with the release of The Unspeakable Act at Anthology Film Archives in New York, along with a retro of Dan's other films. If you are in New York and don't go to it, I seriously question your dedication to our cause.

On the episode, Dan brought in Alan Clarke's Christine, which tops my list of February filmic discoveries. Make sure to listen to the conversation over here. And here's the list below:

1. Christine (Alan Clarke, UK, 1987) - Streaming Via YouTube
2. Life and Nothing More... (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1992) — 35mm projection, Film Society of Lincoln Center
3. Two for the Road (Stanley Donen, USA, 1967) — 35,, projection, Anthology Film Archive
4. I Wanna Hold Your Hand (Robert Zemeckis, USA, 1977) — 35mm projection, Film Society of Lincoln Center
5. Where is the Friend's Home? (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1987) — 35mm projection, Film Society of Lincoln Center
6. The Night of Counting the Years (Shadi Abdel Salam, Egypt, 1969) — DVD
7. Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, USA, 1981) — 35mm projection, Anthology Film Archives
8. The River's Edge (Alan Dwan, USA, 1957) — 35mm projection, Anthology Film Archives
9. Man's Castle (Frank Borzage, USA, 1933) — 35mm projection, Film Forum
10. All the Ships At Sea (Dan Sallitt, USA, 2004) — DVD

Also Notable: The Mayor of Hell Town (Edward Mayo, USA, 1933), , Used Cars (Robert Zemeckis, USA, 1980), Some Call It Loving (James B. Harris, USA, 1973), Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, USA, 1994, Moonstruck (Norman Jewison, USA, 1987)

Updates from the Beyond

I was honored to be invited by Paul Clark and Steve Carlson to participate in this year's Muriel Awards. A sort of alternative to the mostly boring Critics Circle Awards (as well as the certainly not boring Skandies), the Muriels includes a number of cinephiles voting in categories of 2012 film that range from the simple (acting, writing, editing) to the esoteric (Best film of 1987, Body of Work, Scene). I'll be writing about two of the winners, so look for that soon, and follow the awards here!

If you check out the latest issue of Film Matters, I review the very strange and wonderful book on John Carpenter's They Live by Jonathan Lethem. It's good!

I also have a couple of reviews out there: a longer piece on Like Someone in Love and a new piece on Night Across the Street. Read those at their respective locations here and here.

If you haven't been following The Cinephiliacs, check out episodes with Keith Phipps, Kevin B. Lee, and C. Mason Wells.

I have a long piece on Soderbergh's Side Effects and his relationship with Scott Z. Burns that I really hope to have published soon, but it currently sits in editing limbo.

You can follow my haikus on Letterboxd, which is now open to the public.

I usually tend to post my favorite "filmic discoveries" of each month on Twitter. I totally forgot to do January, so I'm listing them here in order (excluding 2013 releases):
1. Hi, Mom! (De Palma, USA, 1970)
2. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Mizoguchi, Japan, 1939)
3. The Ceremony (Oshima, Japan, 1970)
4. Sunday Too Far Away (Hannam, Australia, 1975)
5. Petulia (Lester, USA, 1968)
6. Blast of Silence (Baron, USA, 1961)
7. King Lear (Godard, France/Switzerland, 1987)
8. Face/Off (Woo, USA, 1997)
9. They're a Weird Mob (Powell, Australia, 1966)
10. Three on a Match (LeRoy, USA, 1932)

Also of note: Cairo Station (Chahine, Egypt, 1959), Greetings (De Palma, USA, 1968), The Tarnished Angels (Sirk, USA, 1957), In the Shadows (Arlsan, Germany, 2010), Slacker (Linklater, USA, 1991), and The Moderns (Rudolph, USA, 1988).

Wrapping Up 2012

This is the end, my friends. Oh wait that was two weeks ago. (HAHAHAHAHAHA wasn't that a knee slapper?).

Anyways, head on over to The Cinephiliacs to hear my choices for my Top 10 films of the year. I was joined by the ever so lovely Keith Uhlich and had too much fun that we went for over two hours, but got into some intense and honest debates about some of our favorite films. Listen now!

Also, for In Review Online, I was asked to blurb about two favorites, Cosmopolis and Lincoln, so check that out over there.

And finally, my list of honorable mentions that didn't make my Top 10, with links when appropriate. Presented in order from 11 to 25: This Is Not A Film (Panahi, Iran), It's Such A Beautiful Day (Hertzfeldt, US), Goodbye, First Love (Hansen-Love, France), The Loneliest Planet (Loktev, US/Russia), Red Hook Summer (Lee, US), The Imposter (Layton, US), Killer Joe (Friedkin, US), Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, US), Bernie (Linklater, US), Damsels in Distress (Stillman, US), Almayer's Folly (Akerman, France), Alps (Lanthimos, Greece), A Man Vanishes (Imamura, Japan), Neighboring Sounds (Filho, Brazil), Tabu (Gomes, Portugal).

To more movies in 2013!

Cinephiliacs: Holy Bedroom Motors

The absolutely drop dead gorgeous Nicole Calfan is the object of desire for Monsieur Pierre Etaix in Le Grand Amour, which is a top candidate for favorite films I've watched for the first time this year. I review the film, which is touring via Janus, as part of the latest episode of The Cinephiliacs with Ali Arikan. Ali is an excellent guest, and we talk about the cult comedy Withnail and I. And if you didn't catch my episode with the absolutely lovely Farran Nehme-Smith, make sure to listen to that as well. She's a great insight on classic Hollywood cinema, and we talk about the little seen noir Three Strangers, which has Peter Lorre in an awesome romantic lead role.

NYFF: Cinephiliacs Slices A Piece of "Life of Pi"

On the latest episode of The Cinephiliacs, Jaime Christley comes on board to discuss a tigers, alligators, and minotaurs, as we dive into more from the New York Film Festival. This episode includes discussions on Life of Pi, Room 237, Tabu, Night Across the Street, Leviathan, and Caesar Must Die. You can listen to that here. 

Talking NYFF on The Cinephiliacs

Barbara, from Christian Petzold, is just one of seven films discussed on my NYFF-centric episode of The Cinephiliacs, one of three I'll be doing. Simon Abrams joins me to run through the great films we've seen so far. Check it out here. 

Screening Log: Emotional Overload Edition

            Another week, and not much new to report except there’s another new episode of The Cinephiliacs with my friend Kenji Fujishima. We had a great chat and I really loved talking about Fallen Angels, a Wong Kar-Wai film I’ve never really loved, but definitely appreciate more after deconstructing it with him.

-Railroaded!, 1947. Directed by Anthony Mann. Streamed via Netflix Instant.

-Fallen Angels, 1995. Directed by Wong Kar-Wai. Streamed via Netflix Instant.

-Lonesome, 1928. Directed by Paul Fejos. 35mm projection at Film Forum.

-Don’t Look Now, 1973. Directed by Nicholas Roeg. 35mm projection at 92Y Tribeca.

-Mikey and Nicky, 1975. Directed by Elaine May. 35mm projection at the Museum of Modern Art.

-Three Strangers, 1946. Directed by Jean Negulesco. DVD.

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).

Announcing The Cinephiliacs!

I've started a new podcast! Check out all the details over at it's new home.