Link Round-Up: The End is Nigh

Besides some writing on Letterboxd and maybe a blog post, expect this to be the last work you'll see from me until late December—my thesis is due December 12th, and my PhD applications before that, so I'll be working on those day and night until then. You'll still get podcasts (I think), or at least they are in the pipeline, but for now...

Three more episodes of The Cinephiliacs went up in October: you had the final NYFF report with Tony Dayoub talking about big hitters like 12 Years a Slave, Blue is the Warmest Color, Her, The Immigrant, and more. Then there's an episode with Craig Simpson from the Indiana University archives talking about Welles, Pauline Kael, and Paris, Texas. Finally, there's a roundtable episode of the show on the occasion of what would have been Andrew Sarris's 85th Birthday. The roundtable includes past guests like Dan Sallitt, David Schwartz, and Godfrey Cheshire. So head on over and take a listen.

In terms of written work, I took another dive at Blue is the Warmest Color and reviewed it for In Review Online, and then my contribution to scary movies was a piece for The Film Stage on the release of two new Criterions: Lewis Allen's The Uninvited and Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte (the worst horror is marriage). 

On Letterboxd, my piece on The Counselor got some buzz, so much that Critcwire guru Sam Adams chose it along with a piece by Keith Uhlich on 12 Years a Slave to highlight. Thanks Sam! Otherwise: I also wrote about...A Girl In Every Port, The Big Sleep, Pulse, Club Sandwich, I No Longer Hear the Guitar, HaHaHa, The Chase, I Used to Be Darker, All is Lost, and La Chembre. 

NYFF: Assayas's Summer of Marx and Moon Landing Theories

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.

NYFF: Like Someone In A Panic Attack

While the above frame might suggest something creepy, there is nothing plot wise unsettling in the latest from Abbas Kiarostami, a Tokyo-set drama entitled Like Someone In Love. Since I've praised Certified Copy to the high heavens, I didn't like this as much, but found my visceral reaction to it (shaking, convulsing) to be one of the most unique reactions I've had in a movie all year.

Anyways, it's one of four movies discussed in this week's Cinephiliacs, along with Michael Haneke's Amour, Leos Carax's Holy Motors, and Olivier Assayas's Something in the Air. And I'm glad to take David Ehrlich from the Criterion Corner along for the ride to discuss them. Listen to that here.

Additionally, I wrote a piece for Criticwire discussing further thoughts on the Kiarostami film as well as Downpour, one of the Masterworks films and an early landmark piece of Iranian cinema from a director named Bahram Beyza’i. Beyza'i is one of those directors who everyone in Tehran knows really well, mainly for his theater work, but now I can't wait to see more of his films. Anyways, read that piece here.

NYFF: The Future of The Film Maudit

Over at the Film Society blog, I wrote about the new director's cut of Heaven's Gate, which will be out on Criterion Blu-Ray this November. I also used the opportunity to discuss how the new landscape of cinephilia has changed how we view the "film maudit," the cursed film so to say. Read it here.

NYFF: Cinephiliacs Slices A Piece of "Life of Pi"

On the latest episode of The Cinephiliacs, Jaime Christley comes on board to discuss a tigers, alligators, and minotaurs, as we dive into more from the New York Film Festival. This episode includes discussions on Life of Pi, Room 237, Tabu, Night Across the Street, Leviathan, and Caesar Must Die. You can listen to that here. 

NYFF: KidCritiz Writings

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).

NYFF: Alain Renais's You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!

Over at The Playlist, I review my favorite film of the New York Film Festival so far, Alain Resnais's You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! It's quite a delightful film, so I suggest checking it out, as well as reading my case for its extravagance. One correction—I suggest at one point that this was to be his final film, and found some reports back and forth discussing the matter, though now it seems that there will indeed be at least one more feature. I regret the error. 

Talking NYFF on The Cinephiliacs

Barbara, from Christian Petzold, is just one of seven films discussed on my NYFF-centric episode of The Cinephiliacs, one of three I'll be doing. Simon Abrams joins me to run through the great films we've seen so far. Check it out here. 

NYFF: Leos Carax's Holy Motors

Holy Motors

A Film By Leos Carax

France

            The first shot in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, besides the brief images of motion studies by Étienne-Jules Marey that pre-date cinema’s existence, is of an audience. They are mute, silent, perhaps asleep, perhaps dead, as a film unfolds before them. It’s hard not to read such as a provocative image as a comment about the state of cinema, especially as Carax himself awakes behind the theater in a small room, staring out toward the frame of reality, the window, ignoring the digital one, the computer, before peering at the audience below from the balcony. The easy suggestion would follow then that the film that follows is going to be one that wakes the audience, and thus saves cinema. But he doesn’t believe he can awake this audience—this is a film as much more about “Fin de Cinema” than it is about how to save them, less a love letter than a “fuck you” to it.

            Holy Motors was the runaway success of the Cannes Film Festival, receiving no awards but certainly one of the most praised, most talked about films. The first feature film by Carax since 1999’s Pola X, it’s a film about many things, mostly Carax’s own contradictory relationship to cinema. It’s filled with wild, bizarre imagery meant to shock into laughter, sometimes delight. But its depressive attitude toward cinema, even among its “wild and crazy” sequences, seems juvenile at best, and its schematic structure never makes the imaginative leap. Every time Carax might reach for something transcendent, he feels content, no, compelled to undercut himself and hold us back. Some of that is certainly by design, but it makes the film feel false. The more I knew what Holy Motors was, the less I found myself enjoying it.

NYFF KidCriticz

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. 

Nuri Bilge Ceylan on "Anatolia:" Filmmaker's Parable of Life

A staple on the art house and festival scene, the Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has become an international sensation since the release of his 2006 film, Climates. His latest work, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (reviewed here), follows a group of policemen in a cold and distant land as they search for the body of a dead man, of which the two criminals cannot remember where he has been buried. Less procedural than meandering and existential, and certainly in no rush to subscribe to anything resembling a classical narrative structure, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia won the Grand Prix and has been chosen as the official submission by Turkey for the Foreign Language Film Oscar. When the film premiered at the New York Film Festival in October, Mr. Ceylan spoke about some of the influences and choices he makes in this philosophical epic. (One note: Mr. Ceylan spoke in English, and some of his sentences did not make complete sense. I eliminated some of his answers, and tried my best to interpret some of his words to the best of my understanding. I apologize for any inaccuracy).

On the genesis of the film

Actually, everything started from a real story. One of the scriptwriters followed this story in Anatolia in the 80s, when he was doing his social service, right in the same place; in this town. They searched for the body till the morning, and that interested me a lot. We decided we could make a film out of it. Of course, we changed a lot. We just kept the [premise] of the story. All the characters are created [by us].

The film’s title suggests a fairy tale like narrative…

I actually wanted it to be as realistic as possible, and as historic to today. But we wanted to make the present as the past of the picture. In this way, we tried to create a kind of pointless feeling. 

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: The (Unofficial) Awards!

With tonight’s screening of The Descendants, the New York Film Festival wraps up its 49^th year, and one of its most ambitious years in terms of its expanded programming and excellent selection. Of course, NYFF now turns toward the future, with a year-long retrospective of works from the previous years in gearing up for the golden anniversary, including screenings of works by Marco Bellocchio and Carlos Saura in the coming weeks.

But one thing that the Film Society at Lincoln Center never does are awards. The 27 Main Selection films are all worth your time equally. Of course, this is America, and there are winners and losers.  Since people can only spend so much time at the movies this fall, one would like to know what is for sure worth checking out. So here are my awards. The top prize, “The Golden Bull,” named after our now infamous Wall Street symbol in the city.

The Golden Bull: A Separation, a film by Asghar Farhadi

The Silver Bull: Martha Marcy May Marlene, a film by Sean Durkin

Best Director: Bela Tarr, The Turin Horse

Best Actor: Michael Fassbender, Shame

Best Supporting Actor: Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Le Havre

Best Actress: Kirstin Dunst, Melancholia

Best Supporting Actress: Berenice Bejo, The Artist

Best Screenplay: Le Havre

Best Cinematography: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

New York Film Festival: Alexander Payne's The Descendants (Closing Night Selection)

The Descendants (Closing Night Selection)

A Film By Alexander Payne

United States

            Clouds always seem to hang over the sky in The Descendants, the first feature length film from Alexander Payne since his wine-country comedy Sideways. The film, set in Hawaii, is full of gorgeous sun-soaked beaches and tropical landscapes, but those clouds always seem to hang a shadow in the land. It seems apt then that our protagonist, Matt King, calls out the absurdity of the island as a place only of happiness. “Paradise can go fuck itself,” he exclaims in a voiceover.

           The Descendants is a reserved and fascinating maturation for the director of usually much more bizarre comedies like About Schmidt and Election. The film, which stars George Clooney among a cast of character actors and breakout unknowns, is a much more nuanced work with melancholic tones as a man has to come to terms with his identity as a father and a husband. On the surface, and through the way that Mr. Payne adapts the narrative from the novel by Kuai Hart Hemmings, it feels like Mr. Payne is treading on easy territory. But the film is all in the details, and especially Mr. Payne’s direction of the film, as it presents a slow transition of forgiveness through a portrait of an American family, coming to learn what that word really means.

New York Film Festival: Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene

Martha Marcy May Marlene

A Film By Sean Durkin

USA

            If you go see the independent thriller, Martha Marcy May Marlene, which you most definitely should, I want you to sit as close to the screen as possible. Not because I want you to hurt your neck (in that case, go a few rows back), but I want you to be engulfed by this film full of intense close-ups that will put you in the most uncomfortable position possible. I want you to really feel each loud sound that disrupts this  film full of silences. I want you to feel as paranoid as its main character, feeling that any moment of calm can be instantly destroyed by unknown forces creeping just outside the frame.

            Martha Marcy May Marlene is the latest in a series of independent features from the United States that appear to be ushering in a new wave of smartly composed films that reject the DIY mumblecore genre in favor of a cinema of haunting compositions and dynamic narratives, but still at the independent level. Although the film is directed by newcomer Sean Durkin, some of the other names in the credits show the evolving filmmaking collective: a producer of the film is Antonio Campos, who shot the haunting surveillance thriller Afterschool, and that film’s director of photography Jody Lee Lipes also create haunting work here (as well as in the coming-of-age comedy Tiny Furniture). But here it is Mr. Durkin, as well as his impressive cast led by Elizabeth Olsen, that leads what is an intensely intimate character study in the guise of a mystery that does less conventional scares and more spine-tingling chills.

New York Film Festival: Jafar Panahi's This Is Not A Film

This Is Not A Film

An Experiment by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb

Iran

            When the 2009 protests across Tehran failed to overthrow the political dictatorship that had dominated Iran for over 40 years, there were of course repercussions to be made, especially in the liberal filmmaking community. Abbas Kiarostami has all but fled his native country, now making films outside of his state. Mohsen Makhmalbaf abandoned filmmaking to become a full time revolutionary. And Jafar Panahi, perhaps the most political filmmaker of the country, was banned from being a filmmaker for 20 years.

            And thus, Mr. Panahi, along with a conspirator, the documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, have made a fascinating experiment in what they consider non-cinema. Or is it? That’s the point of This Is Not A Film, a direct allegory of cinema as political statement. Its mere existence might lead to Mr. Panahi’s immediate arrest, but it is a bold work that questions not only the absurdity of the politics of Iran, but the nature of what defines film.

New York Film Festival: Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (Gala Selection)

The Skin I Live In (Gala Selection)

A Film By Pedro Almodóvar

Spain

            The colors of the world have never felt deader than in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In, a bizarre and kinky melodrama from the Spanish director. Although the home of doctor Robert Ledgard is full of excessive paintings and bright colors, it has an all-too orderly feeling about. And of course below the home is the lab, a sterile world of metallic shades and vials of dark red blood. Something has horribly gone wrong in the usually magical world that has defined Spain’s national cinematic treasure, where what once was so comforting now creates fear.

            It’s also what makes The Skin I Live In one of Mr. Almodóvar’s most pleasurable works in some time. While it is certainly in the director’s wheel house, it has the excitement of a young filmmaker throwing every trick he has in the book on the screen. 2008’s Broken Embraces, while meticulously crafted and gorgeously shot, had the feeling of déjà vu for Mr. Almodóvar, retreading on the same thematic and emotional ground covered in his masterful works since the 1980s. But reuniting with Antonio Banderas and bringing in newcomer Elena Anaya, Mr. Almodóvar has made a truly insane film about gender, control, and yes cinema.

New York Film Festival: Steve McQueen's Shame

Shame

A Film By Steve McQueen

United Kingdom/United States

            Shame, the second feature from British artist Steve McQueen, opens on a shot from top down on its main character, Brandon, sprawled along his bed. But he only takes up half the frame, the other half highlighting his empty grayish blue sheets. The painterly quality of this image is of course no surprise to those who know Mr. McQueen, a conceptual artists that has only recently moved into filmmaking. But it also highlights the emptiness that surrounds Brandon, who, in a world where he can have anything, still finds himself longing for something, anything, to fill the void of his life.

            Mr. McQueen’s first film, Hunger, was an audaciously bold and formalistically polarizing debut that followed the British IRA hunger strikes in the late 1970s. Mr. McQueen, uninterested in politics, focused on the control and degradation of the body, and the mental power to command such an organism. It was also the first film to introduce us to Michael Fassbender, who went on to starring roles in Fish Tank, Jane Eyre, and A Dangerous Method, who plays Brandon in Shame. And if Hunger was about the complete control of the body, Shame is about a body that constantly feeds in order to keep the mental state from absolute disaster.

New York Film Festival: Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse

The Turin Horse

A Film By Béla Tarr

Hungary

            When the “plebeians” below us think about art cinema, they may imagine long tracking shots where nothing happens, filmed in black and white without dialogue, on subjects that seem moronic and too mundane to ever demand the attention of cameras. Of course, those men and women are certainly entitled to their opinion (as well as their Transformers), but they may be missing out on something that even most filmmakers would refuse to do: stare into the abyss of life with much disdain and fear as it stares back into us.

            And thus comes the final film from Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse, a two and a half hour masterpiece that is brutal truth at 24 frames per second. This deeply disturbing work borderlines on parody of art cinema, mainly because Mr. Tarr is a relentless filmmaker who never compromises in his portraiture of a life void of hope and the impossibility to fight against the idea of a progressive world. I had somehow missed Mr. Tarr’s previous features—most notably the 450 minute Sátántangó—but knew to be prepared. A mutual friend of mine and Mr. Tarr’s suggested to let the film “wash over me.” And bathe in despair I did.

New York Film Festival: Simon Curtis's My Week With Marilyn (Centerpiece Selection)

My Week With Marilyn (Centerpiece Selection)

A Film By Simon Curtis

United Kingdom

            My Week With Marilyn, a messy comedy of sorts that’s more enamored at its star than it needs to be, opens with a recreation of a song and dance number from There’s No Business Like Show Business. There’s Marilyn Monroe, all jazzed up, singing “Heat Wave.” We then break out of it and into the cinema onto the face of the young Colin Clark. He looks up in awe in the way that us plebeians always glorify our stars, and if you don’t understand his love, then you can’t understand Ms. Monroe.

            That’s not to put down the great star who made splashes whether on screen or off, becoming one of the most recognizable names and faces of her era. Like Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, My Week With Marilyn attempts to view a giant star through the eyes of a small man who can only see the genius. The similarities end there, despite a tonal disposition to direct everything with a light foot and a skip in the wind. Some of this comes from issues with the script by Adrian Hodges, based on a pair of memoirs by Mr. Clark (yes two whole memoirs for one summer with a star!) and director Simon Curtis, who isn’t exactly sure how to handle the more serious moments. But much of the issue is the perspective of the film itself, which tries to throw Ms. Monroe from such a limited point of view, instead of giving us real access to the person behind the face.