Link Round-Up: Post Cannes, Pre-Apocalypse

I gotta get a better system of making sure I update this...

My first book, Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in American Film, is still due out in October. Here is the list of films I'll be tackling in it: Kiss Me Deadly, The Lady from Shanghai, The Big Heat, The Rapture, God Told Me To, Days of Heaven, Strange Days, The Terminator, They Live, and Southland Tales. There is also extended talk of Out of the Past, In A Lonely Place, In The Mouth of Madness, and The World's End.

I went to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time, and it was a truly spectacular experience. You can see my Top films of the festival here (and a complete ranking on Letterboxd), and a special Cinephiliacs episode recorded at the Palais. There were a few films I never got around to writing about (Techine, Lapid, and Ostlund in particular), but I did manage to write about the following films...
-Winter Sleep (Ceylan, Turkey) - Competition, Palm D'Or Winner
-Foxcatcher (Miller, USA) - Competition, Best Director
-Mr. Turner (Leigh, UK) - Competition, Best Actor Award (Timothy Spall)
-Maps To The Stars (Cronenberg, USA/Canada) - Competition, Best Actress Award (Julianne Moore)
-Goodbye To Language (Godard, Switzerland) - Competition, Jury Prize
-Mommy (Dolan, Canada) - Competition, Jury Prize
-Leviathan (Zvyagintsev, Russia) - Competition, Screenwriting Award
-Grace of Monaco (Dahan, France/USA) - Opening Night
-Timbuktu (Sissako, Mali) - Competition
-The Captive (Egoyan, Canada) - Competition
-The Homesman (Jones, USA) - Competition
-Welcome To New York (Ferrara, USA/France) - Marketplace
-National Gallery (Wiseman, UK) - Director's Fortnight
-Saint Laurent (Bonello, France) - Competition
-Amour Fou (Hausner, Austria) - Un Certain Regard
-Jauja (Alonso, Argentina) - Un Certain Regard
-Two Days, One Night (Dardennes, Belgium/France) - Competition
-Lost River (Gosling, USA) - Un Certain Regard
-The Search (Hazanavicius, USA/France) - Competition
-Hard To Be A God (German, Russia) - Marketplace
-The Tale of Princess Kayuga (Takahata, Japan) - Director's Fortnight
-Clouds of Sils Maria (Assayas, France) - Competition

Catching up with Cinephiliacs episodes, I've got two episodes from Philadelphia with Carrie Rickey on Clueless and Sam Adams on The Long Goodbye, and then Philip Loppate talking Charulata and Reverse Shot's Michael Koresky on The Seventh Victim.

And then there's my Criterion reviews! I've got looks at Riot In Cell Block 11, an investigation into the two different cuts of Red River, and a look at an essential bonus feature on the Blu of All That Heaven Allows - Mark Rappaport's Rock Hudson's Home Movies.

Two more Masters of Cinema Blus are on the way with booklets edited and compiled by yours truly: Elia Kazan's Boomerang! and John Cassavetes's Too Late Blues. More information on those at a later date.

Some stuff on Letterboxd: 
-New Stuff: Godzilla, The Amazing Spider-Man, Riddick
-Old Stuff: White Threads of the Waterfall, Utamaro and His Five Women, The Little Foxes, Melo, In Harm's Way

The Filmic Discoveries of 2012 (Part I)

            I saw over 300 films in the span of 2012, starting with a rewatch of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge and as of last night, my second viewing of Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed. Of those, less than a third were from the year of 2012. While there were certainly plenty of great works of cinematic art that are worth your time, I retreated from the multiplex and even the art house to the hollowed grounds of repertory cinema instead.

No one has a perfect knowledge of the history of cinema, and any film critic has his or her own “blind spots.” I don’t see that as a bad thing though. Why would anyone want to have seen every movie? I’d rather have new discoveries to be made every year that open up new terrain to be explored. The 100 (yes—100!) films I’ve highlighted in this list fascinated me in so many different ways. And even better, most I saw on 35mm, a practice I have argued for again and again (though really something you can do in a handful of cities).

While some of my choices for films I saw the first time in 2012 are damningly obvious, there’s a reason they are obvious, canonical works. If my 2013 year of cinematic viewing (get ready for the Kiarostami Koker trilogy on February 10^th at Film Society everyone!) can come even half as good as the year of film 2012 ended up for me, I’ll be a very happy camper indeed. Thus, I present the bottom 25 below, with the top 25 to come later this week. UPDATE: Follow here for the Top 25.

Cosmopolis: Day of the Rat

Cosmopolis

Directed By: David Cronenberg

Written By: David Cronenberg, based on the novel by Don DeLillo

Starring: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon, Mathieu Amalric, Jay Baruschel, Samantha Morton, and Paul Giamatti.

Director of Photography: Peter Suschitzky, Editor: Roland Sanders, Production Designer: Arvinder Grewal, Original Music: Howard Shore and Metric

Correction: The article has been updated to reflect a correction in the protagonist's name. It is Eric Packer, not Parker.

            Cosmopolis, the latest and perhaps best film in over twenty years from Canadian director David Cronenberg, begins with an epigraph from a Zbigniew Herbert poem: “a rat became the unit of currency." Herbert’s poem “Report from a Besieged City,” is a strange report from an apocalyptic nightmare. His lines are short and curt in presentation but extremely visual. Are we reaching these apocalyptic times? Perhaps, but not in ways we might be able to see, which is why Cosmopolis, adapted from the Don DeLillo novel, may be the most essential film of the year: an absurdist parable about the influence of technology on capitalism and its effect of the human psyche and body, all which ascribes meaning to the meaninglessness.

            Cosmopolis is a pure intellectual work with perhaps intense philosophical tenants at its core, but its also intensely funny, thrilling, and hypnotizing that it’s a film that can truly be enjoyed as a thrill ride. I was somewhat wary of the film going in—my only experience with DeLillo was his highly acclaimed novel White Noise, where I found his prose more grating and self-satisfactory than anything else. But perhaps removed from my own voice and into the highly controlled voices of Cronenberg’s actors, DeLillo’s words leap from the screen, his complete control of language aware at every moment, making for many laugh out loud moments. Cronenberg’s keen sensibility creates a world full of artifice, one that themes and ideas of his film (his first screenplay in over a decade) and truly expands and builds them on ways that create his own space. To an average viewer, Cosmopolis might look shlocky and almost lazy, but to me, I found every step to be a fascinating commentary on what is surely a film that will shock a select group to their core.

Under the Skin: David Cronenberg and Michael Fassbender on "A Dangerous Method"

            Since early masterpieces like Videodrome and The Fly to more recent hits like A History of Violence, director David Cronenberg has been getting under people’s skin through his psychologically disturbing works of cinema. His latest film, A Dangerous Method, takes the subject of the psychological and the physical body directly, as it follows the story of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson) and their early work, as well as patient of Jung’s, a hysterical Russian named Sabina Spielrein (Kiera Knightly). Although it seems like a departure for the director—a period piece that’s more talking and without any disturbing violence—A Dangerous Method is dealing with many of his favorite subjects. During the New York Film Festival, Mr. Cronenberg sat down with screenwriter Christopher Hamption (Atonement) and Mr. Fassbender to discuss the bold new project.

The gestation of the project and its different forms

Christopher Hampton: It was first written in the mid to late 90s, as a screenplay called Sabina for 20^th Century Fox and Julia Roberts’s company. It floundered in the way screenplays usually do, but it seemed too good of material to not take further. I turned it into a stage play called The Talking Cure, which we did in London and the National Theater with Ralph Fiennes. About a year or so later, I had a call from Mr. Cronenbeg, who said “I think it might make a film.”

On the material changing from the original script to the final version

CH: To start with, the film was called Sabina because it was mostly focused on Sabina Spielrein. But in between the original screenplay and the stage play, it dawned on me that it couldn’t be Sabina, but had to be Jung. So there was quite a shift on emphasis. The work that I did with [Cronenberg] had to do with refining it and sharpening it and honing it.

On working on another film about sexual perversion of the body

David Cronenberg: That doesn’t sound like me—I think I’ve made a lot of comedies actually (laughs). I don’t really think about my other movies at all, frankly. I don’t think about what I’ve done at all. When I decide to do something I’m passionate about it, I’m only interested in realizing that particular thing. I don’t think about if it fits in with anything or if I’ve done it or not. 

I think when I read Christopher’s play—I’ve never seen it performed—in retrospect, I’ve always wanted to do something about Freud and the birth of psychoanalysis. But to say that isn’t to say anything really because it’s such vast topic full of incredible characters that surrounded the birth of psychoanalysis, all of them really eccentric and wonderful. What I saw in Christopher’s play was this really fantastic structure that distilled the essence of the era and the psychoanalytic movement into primarily five characters. That was a structure that could allow me to play with that topic. I also have to point out that the first movie I ever made, Transfer, was about a psychiatrist and a patient.

New York Film Festival: David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method

A Dangerous Method (Gala Presentation)

A Film By David Cronenberg

United Kingdom/Canada/Germany

            Cinema and psychoanalysis have a long history together, as the new technology and the striking new school of thought both began and evolved during the turn of the 20^th century. And since the 1970s, psychoanalysis has been used in film theory to explore films in new light, where characters once thought to be crazy are instead explored within their Freudian terms of wanting to return the womb or whatnot (Classic Hollywood seems ripe with metaphors for sex looking back).

            So what psychoanalysis can we read on the makers of psychoanalysis? That certainly sounds like an interesting question for David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, a stately and occasionally involving piece on the history of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, as well as the woman that changed everything. On first appearances, Mr. Cronenberg, known for his more graphically violent films from Videodrome, to Crash, to A History of Violence, might seem like the wrong choice for this stately work from screenwriter Christopher Hampton (adapting his own play The Talking Cure, that adapted from the book A Most Dangerous Method by John Kerr). But thematically, this is a work through and through by Mr. Cronenberg, exploring how an idea can transform, disfigure, and infect the body.