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.

What Do YOU Think, Max Von Sydow?

If you are in New York the next few weeks, the wonderful people down at BAMcinematek have put together a retrospective of the Swedish superstar Max von Sydow. So over at The Playlist, I have a patented listicle of my favorite performances he gave. Not as many obscure choices as I'd like (a lot simply remains unseen in my book), but the ones I do have are all excellent. Also, BAM is showing them all in 35mm, so unless you hate movies, you better go support their endeavor. And read my article here!

Also returning is another installment of The Disc-Less. With Hitchcock ruining the legacy of the cinematic giant, and The White Shadow streaming, I listed five great British films you won't find on DVD, including films by Terrence Davies, Mike Leigh, Ken Russell, and the Boulting Brothers. So check that piece out over here.

NYFF Interview: Mike Leigh and Cast (Another Year)

Festival Director Richard Pena, Leslie Manville, Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen, Georgina Lowe, and Mike Leigh

Since 1988’s High Hopes came to American audiences, the British filmmaker Mike Leigh has been considered one of the most dynamic curiosities in contemporary cinema. Starting with a cast and no script, developing characters’ entries lives before beginning to write one word, and, as this interview shows, condescending to members of the general press, Mr. Leigh makes films that truly touch on the entirety of human emotion, whether in its darkness or exuberance. Another Year, his latest film, finds a bit of both, which stars Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen as a happy married couple that play a surrogate mother and father to the people that enter their homes, most notably the talkative boundless Mary, in a career-turning performance from Leslie Manville. At the NYFF press conference, Mr. Leigh sat down with both his cast and his producer Georgina Lowe to discuss the creation of his film, if also to deride some critics about writing about him.

Leslie, Jim, and Ruth—You’ve all worked with Mike over the years, in leading roles. On Vera Drake and Happy-Go-Lucky, you had people who hadn’t been in lead roles before with Imeldas Staunton and Sally Hawkins. What has changed over the years with the working method?

Leslie Manville: I don’t think it really has changed over the years. I suppose it’s more about the time you had to make a film as opposed to the early days when Mike was making films for the BBC and Channel 4. So there’s more time now. But really the way we work together and collaborate and create the film hasn’t really changed.

Jim Broadbent: Absolutely the basic structure remains very much the same. I’d say the real only change, having done it quite a few times before. The process isn’t as much as a voyage of discovery, as it kind of was in the early days. The actual working has been very consistent.

Ruth Sheen: I think the main thing is that we’re all older.

Broadbent: I’m not older!

Sheen: The process is the same.

Broadbent: I thought you were going to say older and wiser and more depth and life and spirit…As we’re older, the filling in the back story for the characters takes a lot longer. When we were first working with Mike, I was in my 20s, and the characters were in their 20s, so it didn’t take long to fill in the years. But when you get to 60, it can take quite a long time.

What was the germ of the film? Did you start with the relationship between Leslie’s character and Jim and Ruth’s, or was it broader than that?

Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh: The actual germ of the film is impossible, because I can never talk about “a germ” because these films, and this film is no exception, come out of ongoing occupations at times. Apart from anything else, as far as I’m concerned, having made Happy-Go-Lucky which is pretty much about young-ish people, I wanted to start from where we are. It’s about a lot of things, this film, and it’s hard to talk about it in a simple way from that. But it comes from a joy and pain of life I wanted to show. As to the actual mechanical second part of the question, as you know from the film, Mary’s relationship is something that’s happened much later in their history. In fact, the chronology is always logical. We actually started with Tom’s relationship with his brother Ronnie, and the first actor I started working with at all, is Ronnie [David Bradley] because he’s some years older than that. So it was the logic of their lives. Thus Gerry entered their lives quite a bit down the line. While that was all being developed, I was inventing this horrendous life with Mary.

In the film, Tom and Gerry’s home seems like a place of nurturing, very similar to their garden. Was this a theme you wanted to design?

Leigh: It’s not really a question. You’re pretty much defining one of the central things the film is about. It’s about nurturing, it’s about caring, it’s about those who need and those who are able, in various ways, give them what they want. And then there’s a moral dilemma of where you draw the line, where do you protect yourself from all of those. That’s what it’s all about. And of course the relationship between nurturing and people and their relationship with the Earth, with the environment and the planet is implicitly there, in a way their organic people. I had a notion that I wanted to deal with environmentalists but you can’t make a dramatic film about environmentalists. It’d be turgid.

Leslie Manville, Jim Broadbent, and Ruth Sheen

There seems to be a similarity between Mary and Beverly from Abigail’s Party. Could you talk about that relationship?

Leigh: Well I think they are very different kinds of films actually. I don’t think there’s much worth discussing that relationship.

Manville: It’s not certainly something we would think of doing.

Leigh: We’ve never done that before.

Manville: No we haven’t…maybe we should. But it’s certainly something we hadn’t thought of replicating. It’s not the agenda. The agenda is to create a fresh new character obviously and she where she goes. But you saw similarities than that’s your prerogative.

Leigh: I apologize, but I feel a bit of a cul-de-sac question really. I can’t really see the connection, and it’s never occurred to us, and I should give it no more thought.

When did you develop the idea of the seasons to have these four very specific vignettes at these four very specific times?

Leigh: Well it’s integral in the conception of the film really. It’s hard to think of “when” it was. It seems like a logical thing to do really.

Click below to continue reading

NYFF Review: Another Year

Another Year

Directed By Mike Leigh

United Kingdom

            Mike Leigh has a way of capturing human emotions and gestures that few other directors ever have the nuance to reach. A certain pause, or a glance, or a pan of the camera, speak volumes in the British directors work. In the shocking opening scene of Naked, we aren’t sure if the woman in the beginning is enjoying her sexual encounter to begin with or it simply turns at some point; Mr. Leigh enjoys those ambiguous lines, and his characters are often not characters as much as they are living, breathing human beings.

            So chuck his latest, Another Year, up to the same category of his other greats, which include Vera Drake, Secrets & Lies, and his most recent work, Happy-Go-Lucky. The beautiful thing about Mr. Leigh is that while no film tackles the same ideas on class, gender, or existentialism, they are all presented through a clear and subtle way that no director can match. Part of that is Mr. Leigh’s highly-regarded process, in which he creates the characters entire lives with the actors before ever beginning to write down a script.

            You can definitely see that process all over Another Year, which is basically set over four day or two day long vignettes in four different seasons. All four revolve mainly around the home of the perfectly named Tom and Gerri, played by Leigh regulars Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen. Tom and Gerri are the perfect couple in their happiness—they garden together, eat together, and seem to have got everything they need in life. Yet while Tom and Gerri provide the atmosphere for the film, a somewhat light-hearted and nurturing environment for whoever stops by their door in the suburbs of London, the real spark of the film is Gerri’s co-worker Mary, played with an electric ferocity by Leslie Manville.

            When Mary first talks about her life to Gerri while sitting at a bar after work, she cannot stop talking about how happy her life is—everything seems to be going for her, if not quite perfectly, to a satisfactory point. The problem is that Mary talks a lot, and uses talk to hide from her truths, even from herself. Thus over the four seasons, we watch Mary go from bad to worse, and Ms. Manville transform herself ever so slowly, bringing almost a completely new woman to each world. Mr. Leigh’s camera shifts onto the human faces for the important reactions—none of it is showy, but all of it is necessary.

            Yet to say Mary, and Ms. Manville’s performance, is the highlight of the film is to obscure the wonders that make up Another Year. Mr. Leigh rarely provides context, or does it very slowly, for each of the four vignettes, and each is filled with new characters that could easily have there own stories. There’s Tom’s old friend Ken, who’s overweight sight is only the first of many issues he hides under. There’s the son Joe, who is quite happy where he is, although without a girlfriend, something Mary at one point feels set on changing. And there’s Ronnie, Tom’s older brother, who simply seems to silently mock the world around him. Mr. Leigh brings these people on not as plot devices, but as ranges of human empathy and emotion.

            If Happy-Go-Lucky was all about how we create our own happiness, Another Year is about how we foster happiness in others. The film could have easily put its perspective from Mary, but the majority of the film is about how Tom and Gerri respond to the accomplishments and suffering of others, and how to best foster those, just like their vegetable plants. Mr. Leigh, is interested in how people judge and be judged, even in a loving environment. And like the seasons, our views of both others and ourselves is always changing, always recurring, and always in need of the nurture of love.