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: To the Sky and Under the Sea

I am not attending the Toronto International Film Festival this year, because I am a working man with responsibilities and undergrads to teach. However, I was able to do a couple pre-festival reviews, starting with what might be my favorite release of the year: Manakamana, the follow-up to Leviathan from the Ethnography Lab at Harvard. It's quite awesome and the kind of humanist poem I adore, especially considering how much Leviathan is an (deliberately) alienating experience. I reviewed it for The Film Stage, so follow the action there.

Also new is To Be (Cont'd) is here, and the first post is by yours truly considering the state of blockbuster filmmaking. The first post is mostly about dispelling the old myths in order to frame the conversation, as well as considering the how and why of the emergence of blockbusters, as well as a reading of Nashville and Jaws, the two "event movies" of 1975. Take a read here, add to the comments, and get ready for next week's response.

My work with The Criterion Collection continues with half the capsules for the new Eclipse set celebrating the early films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I wrote the introduction and the capsules for Love is Colder than Death ("What a title!") and The American Soldier. Thanks to Danny King for helping me out with the others.

On the Boxd - some spoiler considerations of Edgar Wright's The World's End, and Roger Corman's It Conqured the World, which I compare to Griffith of all things.

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: Shorts and Longs

When I saw the running time for Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways, my tolerance meter started ticking, as the film runs just shy of three hours. And seeing how Heartbeats already felt a tad too long at under 90, I was a bit concerned. However, Dolan is a strong filmmaker, and I was surprised by the nuance and emotion he brought to this latest film. I review it over at In Review Online.

On the shorter side of things, the new and wonderful Criterion Blu-Ray of Safety Last! has three newly restored shorts by silent clown Harold Lloyd. You can read about them over at The Film Stage. 

Over at Letterboxd, I have been going through the filmographies of Yasujiro Ozu and Alan Dwan. #Dwanmentum.

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.

Letterboxd Collection

I've become obsessed with Letterboxd with good reason. It's an addictive way for cinephiles to track their movie watching and compare/contrast their thoughts and ratings with other cinephile friends. If you're seeing a lack of content on this blog, that's because a good deal of it can be seen only on Letterboxd. So here's a collection of films I've written about exclusively at the site. This isn't everything that I see, but anything that I've done more than a haiku on. Will be updated regularly. You can follow all my activity here.

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).