Link Round-Up: New Views

I promise to get better at updating this quicker so anyone who wants to know what I'm doing will not be confused. So here we go.

I am now writing for Variety. Yes, *that* Variety. I am honored to join a team that includes Scott Foundas, Peter Debruge, and Justin Chang leading the charge, among many others. I'll have a few reviews in the month of February, but for now my first piece is on Freezer, a not so good movie about Dylan McDermott trapped in a freezer. Gotta start somewhere.

Were you looking for my Top 10 films of 2013? I talked about my choices with Keith Uhlich on The Cinephiliacs, which you can listen to both Part 1 and Part 2. My choices also come in a list-handy form on Letterboxd.

Thief came out on Blu-Ray via The Cirterion Collection, so I wrote about how Thief is still pretty awesome over at The Film Stage. I also edited this fantastic conversation on the film between Jordan Cronk and Nick Usen at To Be Cont'd.

Jean-Claude Van Damme re-teamed with Peter Hyams for Enemies Closer. Could have been better, but not the worst way to spend January at the movies. I reviewed over at In Review Online.

On The Cinephiliacs: Noah Isenberg, the author of the recent biography on Edgar Ulmer, and former Film Society of Lincoln Center slash New York Film Festival programmer Richard Pena. Both are excellent listens.

On Letterboxd...The Wolf of Wall Street, Dangerous Game, Chaplin's A Day's Pleasure, Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre, Howard Hawks's Red Line 7000 and The Big Sky, Cukor's The Women, Wellman's Lady of Burlesque, The Freshman starring Harold Lloyd, The Color Wheel, Shanghai Express, Hong Sang-Soo's In Another Country, Arthur Penn's The Chase, The Typhoon with Sessue Hayakawa, Aldrich's Emperor of the North, and Minnelli's Gigi.

I finished my graduate degree. More TK on what follows.

Image/Text: Jonathan Rosenbaum, Present and Les Miserables

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Present (Vishnevetsky, 2013)

Les Miserables (Hooper, 2012)

The image-text relation in film and theater is not a merely technical question, but a site of conflict, a nexus where political, institutional, and social antagonisms play themselves out in the materiality of representation…The real question to ask when confronted with these kind of image-text relations is not “What is the difference (or similarity) between the words and the images?” but “what difference do the differences (and similarities) make?” That is, why does it matter how words and images are juxtaposed, blended, or separated?

-W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation

I was briefly struck while watching Jonathan Rosenbaum, Present how much the main shot used to represent its ontological subject: a single light with a mostly out of focus background, the camera handheld, often attempting to re-frame its subject. Of course, it reminded me of Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables, which used a similar shot for the film’s apparently “big show stopping” moment of when Anne Hathaway[1] sings “I Dreamed a Dream.” At the time, I shouted at the screen (I was at home), “Holy [explicit]! Just keep the camera still.”

Jim Emerson nails exactly the problem with this, beyond the content of what she is singing: “On the most obvious level, the actors are playing to the balcony while the camera (and those wide-angle lenses) push their faces into ours. It's like ‘Full Metal Jacket: The Musical!’ with all the parts played by R. Lee Ermey.”

My Cinephiliac Moments

            “I think it’s a fun picture,” said Alfred Hitchcock of his film Psycho (#35), which is how I feel about the release of UK-based film journal Sight & Sounds decennial list of the “Greatest Films of All Time.” Some people are furious about it. Some people are dismissing it. I fall slightly in the middle. Oh yes this or that or whichever isn’t on the list, but it’s a list, and like Hitchcock thought of his film, it’s fun, and it’ll be fun to see a new generation of cinephiles discover Vertigo (and of course write think pieces about how it’s overrated).

            Sight & Sound “forgot” to mail me a ballot this year, though I’ve written sketches in the past of how my list may parse, and don’t see why I should just print that out again, because honestly there’s too much I still haven’t seen (six films from the 2012 list – Shoah , Journey to Italy, Panther Panchali, Gertrud, Historie(s) Du Cinema, and Ugestsu Monogatari), and what’s the point of “another” list? That list is great, and everyone should see those films.

            Instead, I’ve been thinking a lot about a blog post written by Girish Shambu about “the cinephiliac moment” (I’ve been reading Shambu’s blog for a while, but I found this one through some accidental Google searching related to a certain podcast). Shambu interprets from Christian Keathley’s Cinephilia and History, Or The Wind in the Trees that the cinephiliac moment being the moment in which cinema takes over, and tantalizes you. Shambu writes:

“The important thing to remember is that these are not moments carefully designed to exert great dramatic effect—not that there’s anything wrong with those—but instead they are fleeting "privileged" moments writ small that we find ourselves strongly attracted to, perhaps even disproportionately so given their scale and possible (lack of) intention.”

            I don’t know if my cinephiliac moments follow exactly Shambu’s reasoning – some of them after all are quite big moments in the films they came from, and certainly they aren’t “accidentals” as he states it. But these moments unlock my deepest moments of cinephilia, the point in which I realize why I keep going to the movies. I started at five, and then it soon became twenty five, and then narrowed it down to eleven. They are presented in no order.

Add your own in the comments, or link me to your piece and I’ll include a link here.

Interlude: Sight & Sound

Following the take from some friends...no commentary, just a list of films I can't live without. This list will be out of date in about five minutes.

1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, USA, 1958)

2. Raging Bull (Scorsese, USA, 1980)

3. Do The Right Thing (Lee, USA, 1989)

4. High and Low (Kurosawa, Japan, 1962)

5. Rio Bravo (Hawks, USA, 1959)

6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, UK, 1968)

7. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, France, 1928)

8. Sunset Blvd. (Wilder, USA, 1950)

9. Days of Heaven (Malick, USA, 1978)

10. The Searchers (Ford, USA, 1956)

Not included: Psycho, The Godfather, Close-Up, Pulp Fiction, Chinatown, Annie Hall, The Apartment, Sweet Smell of Success, Chungking Express, The Godfather: Part II, and a whole lot more...

Hugo: The Past, Present and Future of Cinema, All Collided Into One

Hugo

Directed By: Martin Scorsese

Written By: John Logan, based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

Starring: Asa Butterfield, Chloe Grace Mortez, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Kingsley, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Christopher Lee, Helen McCrory, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Jude Law

Director of Photographer: Robert Richardson, Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker, Production Designer: Dante Ferretti, Original Music: Howard Shore

Rated: PG           

            In 1989, film history Tom Gunning wrote a highly influential essay entitled “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Mr. Gunning examined how film historians had written about the early yore of silent cinema and its push toward narrative cinema. But he proposed that the attraction of the works of Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers was not based on seeing stories, but seeing things move. The cinema itself, the spectacle of movement, was its primary attraction. Stories came later; cinema was born out of this attraction of the possibilities of cinema could show or do anything we could think up.

            It is this love of spectacle that has obviously drawn Martin Scorsese to make one of his most ambitious, pictures of his career and one of his most self-conscious films. Hugo, an adaptation of a young adult novel by Brian Selznick looks like a strange departure for a director as it follows a story of a child in somewhat of a fairy tale. But Hugo is much more than that, a bold, genre-crossing picture that is both narrative and spectacle, and ultimately a film essay on the importance of the origins of cinema, and the need to preserve classic film as well.

Bernard Hermann: Trivia for A Century Old Music Master

Bernard Hermann with Alfred Hitchcock

          Today launches the Bernard Herrmann centennial at Film Forum in New York City, a retrospective of the famed composer. Herrmann’s influence on film score is undoubtedly obvious. Before him, the idea of music was to never be more memorable than the film itself. Now just listening to his music conjures up the images of the films he composed for. And the list of auteurs he worked with: Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Robert Wise, Brian De Palma, is like looking at a timeline of American cinema. 

            Of course, none was greater than his collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock. Instead of going on and on about the greatness of this collaboration, which has been written by others with a lot of zest and enthusiasm, I’m instead going to share a really cool bit of trivia I learned. All credit for this connection goes to David Sterritt, Chairman for the National Society of Film Critics, author of numerous publications on cinema, and my former thesis advisor.

            This relates to one of Hermann’s most famous scores, Psycho. Now when we think of Psycho and the music, we of course think about the shrieking violins that accompany the shower sequence, or the opening titles score that creates fear through such an innocent set of instruments that are known for their beauty (this is where the film academic points to the obvious connection).

Margaret: Now No Matter Child, The Name, Sorrow's Springs Are The Same

Margaret

Written and Directed By: Kenneth Lonergan

Starring: Anna Paquin, J. Smith-Cameron, Jeannie Berlin, Jean Reno, Allison Janey, Kieran Culkin, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, John Gallagher Jr., Rosemarie DeWitt, Matthew Broderick, Hina Abdullah, Kenneth Lonergan, Michael Ealy, and Krystin Ritter.

Director of Photography: Ryszard Lenczewski, Editor: Anne McCabe, Production Designer: Dan Leigh, Original Music: Nico Muhly

Rated: R for language, sex, drugs, and a bit of violence.

            The key scene in Margaret, an epic yet personal drama of trauma and grief in New York City, involves a class discussion of a poignant line from Shakespeare’s King Lear. The teacher (Matthew Broderick) asks for an interpretation of the line “As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods.” A couple of students give the usual interpretation: our lives might seem important to us, but perhaps in a greater scheme of things, we are nothing. But one student disagrees. If we are nothing to the gods, then why do they give us so much attention? Perhaps we are more, he demands. But the teacher won’t have it, “A number of scholars,” he decrees, “Have confirmed this interpretation.” “But why?” the student fights back, as if he’s fighting for his life. Why must our lives be so small and so feeble in the large scheme of things?

            It’s one of a dozen bravura scenes in the second feature by Kenneth Lonergan, who made a splash in 2000 with his drama You Can Count On Me. You may note the 11 year gap, and if you see Margaret (which Fox Searchlight has quietly shoved into theaters as quickly and quietly as possible), you may notice how young stars like Anna Paquin and Matt Damon look. Mr. Lonergan shot this messy drama back in 2005, with a contractual obligation to bring the film in at two and a half hours. For years, he struggled to find the right cut, and things got messy with two lawsuits, and even Martin Scorsese coming in to help him find that perfect cut. After years of battle, Mr. Lonergan has finally, unsatisfactory, found a cut that runs in the legal running time, though perhaps not his final vision. And it’s a shame, because as messy and disjointed as Margaret is, it’s a fascinating deeply confused film about the loss of innocence and the transformation of guilt.