An accurate description of my life right now. Just kidding.
December is a very bad time to be in both school and a film critic. For one, I've written about 75 pages of historical, theoretical, and critical analysis. I'll actually be sharing some of that with you, dear readers, soon enough. I also have been trying to finish off the year of 2012 in film, which has been a truly exciting year of both contemporary and classic discoveries. That means, as you can see, I haven't blogged anything in over a month. But here's some link throughs to stuff I've done:
1) I was a very sad camper with Django Unchained. A quite frustrating experience in a lot of ways.
2) I've been quite addicted to Letterboxd as a new place to diary films. For the most part, I'm just doing my "tweet review" (Sounds dumb, but I make 140 characters count damn it). But I've also posted some longer thoughts on Death By Hanging, Gimme Shelter, as well as 2012 releases It's Such A Beautiful Day and The Imposter.
3) For the first time, I was invited to participate in quite a few end year polls. You can now see my Indiewire ballot here by clicking through the various boxes at the bottom (not a particularly easy-to-use system that they plan on improving). I'll have much more to say on my favorite films of 2012 as the year continues to count down.
4) Every week I have been answering Matt Singer's Criticwire survey, and would just point to this one from earlier this week, in which I named my favorite pieces of film criticism of the year.
5) Speaking of Matt, he was on The Cinephiliacs in November for a fun episode, and the truly wonderful Godfrey Cheshire joined me to talk about the heydays of the New York Press and Iranian Cinema. And Katey Rich from CinemaBlend just appeared this week to talk about Take This Waltz. I also reviewed Kathryn Bigelow's tremendous new film Zero Dark Thirty at the beginning of the episode.
Look for more content coming up over the holidays!
While NYFF is over, I've got a couple pieces left to file, including this one on Olivier Assayas's Something in the Air, which was my favorite of the festival. I look at the film as a spiritual sequel to Carlos, his 5.5 hour epic from 2010. The piece is pretty good, but I actually had a couple more notes I should have included after chatting with Adam Kempenaar from Filmspotting the other night. Here's what I wrote to him:
"[Assayas] kind of was this remedy for the French New Wave in a lot of ways that decided to foreground emotion in every frame. I think those dolly shots rising up into the air are totally subjective in a lot of ways ("Don't watch me leave" and the camera totally does), and so the fire during that sequence in the middle is like the emotions are so angry and so furious that instead of appearing via people screaming at each other, they conjure themselves visually as physical elements such as fire. And I love that element to this film."
So you can read that piece here.
UPDATE: Here's my final piece from NYFF, a consideration of Room 237, in which I try and parse through some of the criticisms remarked by two legendary critics, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Girish Shambu. Their pieces are better (and are linked in there), so read those, as well as mine here.
The above pictured Victoria Guerra ("wtifu...") was more than enough to keep my attention during Lines of Wellington, the semi-spiritual sequel to Mysteries of Lisbon that would have been the next film by Raul Ruiz before his passing last year. Over at the Film Society blog, I write about Wellington and Ruiz's final film, Night Across the Street, as well as the filmmaker's legacy. Check that out here.
Over at Criticwire, I explore three films that use digital imagery in unique ways, including Passion, Holy Motors, and You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! Check that out here.
Both these posts are in conjunction with Indiewire's KidCriticz Academy (more on that here).
Some self-promotion of my own accomplishments I guess is in order, but really more of an explanation of my lack of New York Film Festival coverage so far (I've seen six films but simply haven't had time to write about them, and I've started a piece on Carax's Holy Motors about five times now). In continuing the program they launched in Locarno, Indiewire and Film Society of Lincoln Center teamed up to host their first ever NYFF "Critics Academy" to highlight new talent in film criticism, and yours truly was chosen among the bunch. I'm looking forward to working with the wonderful Eric Kohn and Eugene Hernandez, who have a lot of great panels and discussions planned for us, as well as writing stuff for Criticwire, Film Society's website, and The Playlist. I'll also be doing episodes of The Cinephiliacs every Friday with a different guest, so look forward to those as well. And I may post a few things here regarding other various films if I have the chance.
