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.