Another near the end of year massive link round-up, covering everything I wrote (sans the book) since September.
I made my debut in Sight & Sound Magazine in November with a piece on Steven Soderbergh's TV series The Knick, which may not be the best series to grace the non-theatrical medium, but damn it—Soderbergh proves all my stray observations about how just because it's television doesn't mean aesthetics should come second.
In lieu of New York Film Festival, Los Angeles provides us with the bigger, perhaps a bit more eclectic AFI Festival. Since most of the major titles were already at Cannes, I wrote about Joel Potrykus's recession-bro comedy Buzzard, the modestly quirky coming-of-age meanderer Tu Dors Nicole, the latest WTF from Takashi Miike Over Your Dead Body, and JP Snaidecki's The Iron Ministry. Plus I spoke about Lav Diaz's From What Is Before on a recent podcast.
Another recent film festival visit—New Orleans! I graciously served as a juror for the Louisiana Shorts section of the 25th Annual New Orleans Film Festival, and also wrote about the wonderful experience at RogerEbert.Com.
Wrote about some movie called Interstellar. You may have heard of it. And also this other thing called Gone Girl.
Also wrote about two other new movies of relative merit: Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip (which is of great proportion) and Damien Chazelle's Whiplash (which deserves at least some consideration).
In the canonical masterpiece territory, on John Ford's My Darling Clementine, and finding a postwar poet of cinema.
And on The Cinephiliacs, New Orleans local Angela Catalano on starring a popup cinema and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, director Alex Ross Perry on his idiosyncratic approach to independent cinema and Husbands and Wives, and Kim Morgan on Marilyn Monroe and Something Wild.
And on Letterboxd...
Hitchcock: Suspicion, Foreign Correspondent, Vertigo
Expressive Esoterica: Dark Passage (Daves), Cure (K. Kurosawa), The Blue Gardenia (Lang), Chicago Calling (Reinhardt), Notes on the Circus (Mekas), Whirlpool (Preminger)
Far Side of Paradise: Papillon (Schafner), The Country Girl (Seaton), Baby Doll (Kazan)
Contemporary Stuff: Abuse of Weakness (Brelliat)
Marxism: Class Relations (Straub/Huillet)
Much more over with the good folks at Variety, including the pretty funny Kevin Hart comedy About Last Night, the not particularly good but whatever horror film Haunt with Jacki Weaver in a small role, the deplorably stupid Down and Dangerous, and the deplorably moralistic and simply pointless Lucky Bastard. These kind of reviews are fun to write!
Over at To Be (Cont'd), the March discussion is between Abbey Bender and myself on the idea of timeless films, dated-ness, and the historical spectator. I wrote the fist post here. It also has gotten some great response over at The Dissolve through Noel Murray's excellent "Feedback" column.
Over at The Film Stage, I tried to find the Soderbergh side to his not-so recognizably Soderbergh film King of the Hill, which is now out on Criterion Blu (and has his 1995 feature The Underneath as a bonus feature).
Over at In Review Online, I dug further into Vulgar Auteurism with Paul WS Anderson's Pompeii, a pointedly disappointing work from the man. Never go without Milla again, good sir.
If you haven't heard Kent Jones on The Cinephiliacs, then something is very wrong with you.
On Letterboxd, by auteur:
George Cukor: The Philadelphia Story, A Woman's Face, Born Yesterday, The Marrying Kind, and A Star is Born.
Delmer Daves: The Hanging Tree
Johnnie To: Sparrow and Running on Karma
Hong Sang-Soo: Oki's Movie and The Day He Arrives
Teinosuke Kinugasa: Crossroads and A Page of Madness
Edgar Ulmer: The Light Ahead, Murder is My Beat, and Beyond the Time Barrier.
Silent Stuff: Chaplin's The Kid and DeMille's The Cheat
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.
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.
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.
Two quick links to one recent post...and one not so recent (apologies apologies). The first is my first piece for The Film Stage, and it's an examination of Stories We Tell, the documentary from Sarah Polley. It's a spoiler-filled piece, and I found it quite problematic, much more than most people, and I've had some really fascinating conversations come out of it. So take a read, why don't you.
Since I spent most of the spring teaching and gradskooling, I didn't have many updates outside this blog. But I did write a review of Amy Seimetz's Sun Don't Shine, a Florida set noir thriller that is a quite neat little work. Not perfect for reasons I get into, but certainly worth your time (and probably has the best final shot/line of the year to date). That's over at InReview Online.
If you haven't been keeping up with The Cinephiliacs, we have Ben Model on Modern Times, Vadim Rizov on Le Cercle Rouge, Ignaitvy Vishnevetsky on The Moderns, and a special round table on Roger Ebert with a whole cast of characters. So take a listen to them all on the site or on iTunes. (There's also this handy Letterboxd list to keep track of the films discussed).
This is the end, my friends. Oh wait that was two weeks ago. (HAHAHAHAHAHA wasn't that a knee slapper?).
Anyways, head on over to The Cinephiliacs to hear my choices for my Top 10 films of the year. I was joined by the ever so lovely Keith Uhlich and had too much fun that we went for over two hours, but got into some intense and honest debates about some of our favorite films. Listen now!
Also, for In Review Online, I was asked to blurb about two favorites, Cosmopolis and Lincoln, so check that out over there.
And finally, my list of honorable mentions that didn't make my Top 10, with links when appropriate. Presented in order from 11 to 25: This Is Not A Film (Panahi, Iran), It's Such A Beautiful Day (Hertzfeldt, US), Goodbye, First Love (Hansen-Love, France), The Loneliest Planet (Loktev, US/Russia), Red Hook Summer (Lee, US), The Imposter (Layton, US), Killer Joe (Friedkin, US), Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, US), Bernie (Linklater, US), Damsels in Distress (Stillman, US), Almayer's Folly (Akerman, France), Alps (Lanthimos, Greece), A Man Vanishes (Imamura, Japan), Neighboring Sounds (Filho, Brazil), Tabu (Gomes, Portugal).
To more movies in 2013!
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.
The apparently lovable Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence star in Silver Linings Playbook, a front runner for the "holy hell this movie is a train wreck of utter proportions" for 2012 award. I seem to be pretty alone in my absolute despise for this movie, but I have a lot of moral issues (as well as acting, script, and camera movement issues) that I think this film completely ignores. Scott Tobias tweeted something that everyone who either absolutely loves or pans this movie is taking it way too seriously, but that's perhaps one of my issues: it treats these huge psychological issues in American society as no less than quirks for a charming unpretentious film, reducing them to really offensive broad strokes. I'm not saying we can't have comedies with mental illness - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is quite funny - but for Christ's sake we can do better than this. Anyways, I wrote this one for InReviewOnline, the former house of Sam C. Mac (#SMacDown™) and the new home of (former Cinephiliacs guest) Kenji Fujishima.
Over at The Playlist, my second column of "The Disc-less" covers five disreputable American classics in search of DVD releases. Basing this around Heaven's Gate, I chose some awesome films like Ishtar, Greed, and The Last Movie. I ironically chose Elia Kazan's Wild River, which a) technically was available in that expensive Kazan box set Fox put out (bad research on my part), and b) was announced this morning for a Blu-Ray by Fox. But still, a worthy read.
The absolutely drop dead gorgeous Nicole Calfan is the object of desire for Monsieur Pierre Etaix in Le Grand Amour, which is a top candidate for favorite films I've watched for the first time this year. I review the film, which is touring via Janus, as part of the latest episode of The Cinephiliacs with Ali Arikan. Ali is an excellent guest, and we talk about the cult comedy Withnail and I. And if you didn't catch my episode with the absolutely lovely Farran Nehme-Smith, make sure to listen to that as well. She's a great insight on classic Hollywood cinema, and we talk about the little seen noir Three Strangers, which has Peter Lorre in an awesome romantic lead role.
I'm really excited to announce a new column I'll be writing at The Playlist, which will be called "The Disc-Less." Each column will highlight films you can't find on DVD in North America, with five films centered around a common theme. This week: scary movies! I write about films as different as The Keep and A Page of Madness. Check it out here.
Cool might be the defining word of Quentin Tarantino's career, and certainly his 1994 masterpiece Pulp Fiction, but what makes Tarantino's characters so cool? In a video essay made by Matt Zoller Seitz and myself, we explore how Pulp Fiction creates and deconstructs its own cool. Huge thanks to Kevin B. Lee and Max Winter for all their help on this, Dave Bunting Jr. for the terrific narration, and especially Matt for all his wonderful guidance and help on the project, which went through so many iterations I can't even count. Watch the labor of love here.
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.
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).
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.
