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.

Take Shelter: A Coming Storm From Within the American Psyche

Take Shelter

Written and Directed By: Jeff Nichols

Starring: Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain, and Tova Stewart

Director of Photography: Adam Stone, Editor: Parke Gregg, Production Designer: Chad Keith, Original Music: David Wingo

Rated: R for some foul language

            The wind blows in a strong direction across the plains of Ohio in Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter. Set among the ominous clouds, the landscapes of Mr. Nichols’s film seem to recall both the lost past of an untamed era, but also the possible future of a return to a land of restless violence. It only makes sense that the protagonist of Take Shelter, the good natured but easily corrupted Curtis, sees the visions of the end not in terms of fire and brimstone, but a storm of incontrollable magnitude. The past of both his own life, as well as that of the world he knows, is seemingly crawling back into his skin.

            And thus sets the stage for another great American drama with an independent and unique vision. I missed Mr. Nichols’s first film, Shotgun Stories, which also starred Michael Shannon, but it’s an immediate catch for me now, as Take Shelter gives us an intimate look at one man’s battle with his own personal demons in a setting of Americana. Bathed with gorgeous visuals on this harsh plain, and supported by electrifying performances, Mr. Nichols had made a film that speaks volumes about our American psyche but through a truly personal story.

New York Film Festival: Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again

We Can’t Go Home Again (1972/2011)

A Film By Nicholas Ray

United States

            If you know Nicholas Ray, it’s probably because you’ve viewed his quintessential teen angst film, Rebel Without a Cause. Perhaps if you’re a cinephile, you’ve dug into In a Lonely Place or They Live By Night, noirs that helped define the genre. You might know Mr. Ray as a director of men that fall against inescapable forces, anguished by their own destinies that trap them. But what happened to Mr. Ray? Where exactly does a man with such sound and fury disappear?

            The answer, finally after forty years, is We Can’t Go Home Again, an experimental feature from 1972 that was Mr. Ray’s last narrative film. Thanks to his wife Susan Ray, We Can’t Go Home Again has been vividly brought to life in all, well, its mystique and confusion. Shot with students in Binghamton’s Harper College in upstate New York, We Can’t Go Home Again premiered to middling reviews and not much buzz in Cannes in 1973. Mr. Ray kept shooting footage and editing it until his death in 1979, and thanks to Mrs. Ray, we now can explore a filmmaker who instead of continued the traditions that defined his career, ended with something quite different.

New York Film Festival: Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet

The Loneliest Planet

A Film By Julia Loktev

United States and Germany

            The moment that changes everything for the two characters in The Loneliest Planet is so brief that you need to make sure you are keeping your eyes on the screen. I almost missed it writing something in my notes. A lot of people could easily subscribe this film as one of those subtle works that requires copious amounts of attention for a sly and only relatively satisfactory payoff.  However, Julia Loktev’s second narrative film is a unique look at communication that does require more thinking than the average film, but the reward after considering the film’s actions only deepens with time.

            Shot in the gorgeous landscapes of the Georgian mountains, Ms. Loktev never sets up exactly what type of story we will be watching. We begin by seeing the young Nica (Hani Furstenberg) jumping nude up and down on a wooden plank that crashes against our eardrums. Is she captive? No, she’s just waiting for her boyfriend Alex, played by Gael García Bernal, to bring in the hot water so she can finish her shower. The two are on a backpacking adventure across Georgia. In early scenes, we see them interact with local culture through gestures and movements. These two are experienced in the world, we can tell, not just tourists trying to go the insider route.

Beginners: Coming to Terms With Dad's Coming Out

Beginners

Written and Directed By: Mike Mills

Starring: Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Melanie Laurent, Goran Vinsijc, and Mary Page Keller

Director of Photography: Kasper Tuxen, Editor: Oliver Bugge Coutte, Production Designer: Shane Valentino, Music: Roger Neill, David Palmer, and Brian Reitzell

Rated: R for a little language and some situations only adults will enjoy

            Beginners, a new film from Mike Mills and starring Ewan McGregor, is in no rush to get anywhere, while jumping all over the place at the time. The film’s narrative zooms back and forth in time, from childhood, to middle age, to a slightly older middle age of its protagonist, the sad but lovable Oliver, but does so in a casual business. This is the same way that Mr. Mills approaches the quirk side to his film—a series of Wes Anderson-styled cutout shots, a dog that talks through subtitles, and a manic pixie dream girl played by Melanie Laurent—but without calling attention to itself.

            What separates Mr. Mills, whose last film Thumbsucker was a bottle of quirk mixed in with teenage angst that came out as a mess, from other quirk directors is the melancholy he brings to Beginners. With its autobiographical touches, the film reaches out with a slight hand to grab you into its narrative, but it never forces you into a world of farce. It instead soothes you into its story of a man essentially trying to find himself and connect to others in the process.

The Tree of Life: Growing Pains, Both Personal and Eternal

The Tree of Life

Written and Directed By: Terrence Malick

Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, and Hunter McCracken

Director of Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki, Editors: Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber, Mark Yoshikawa, Production Designer: Jack Fisk, Original Music: Alexandre Desplat

Rated: PG-13 for thematic material

The following is the first part in a three part series examining Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Part II will examine some of the critical writings on the film since its première at the Cannes film festival, while Part III will explore the film more in depth after a second viewing, exploring some of the cinematic techniques and narrative strategies Malick employs through the film. This first part should be considered a “first impressions” review, and not the final word.

            The Tree of Life is the fifth film from Terrence Malick, the reclusive and always brilliant filmmaker that has been long sought to be copied in his approach to filmmaking that seems so fluid and natural but impossible to recreate. Malick’s qualities as a director often bring the most pretentious and philosophical theories to writings about cienma, as critics have attempted to unravel his unquestionably difficult dichotomies in his films, whether in the focus of the camera, his use of narration, or simply his almost distanced and impassive tone. But his films are also pure joy as well, as he enraptures us in nature and the greater sense of the universe, creating what many call poetic cinema.

            In many ways, The Tree of Life feels like a culmination of Malick’s concerns as a filmmaker, from the biblical and apocalyptic to the personal and existential. The film, set through three different passages that weave through and around each other, is at times Malick’s most personal film, as well as his most universal. Exploring what may be some autobiographical sketches of his own childhood, Malick attempts to unravel the nature of man and his demons, but in doing so, unlock the mysteries of the universe as well. No film could answer such questions fully, and the film only scratches the surface of our own existence, but Malick seems to be shooting for the stars in order to understand both himself and the world around him.

Paul: He Not Only Comes In Peace, His Weed is Great Too!

Paul

Directed By: Greg Motolla

Written By: Simon Pegg and Nick Frost

Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, the voice of Seth Rogen, Kristin Wigg, Jason Bateman, Bill Hader, Blythe Danner, and a slew of cameos worth the surprise

Director of Photography: Lawrence Sher, Editor: Chris Dickens, Production Designer: Jefferson Sage, Original Music: David Arnold

            Creating alien beings for films has made for some of the most unique and glorious creatures in our culture. The double-mouthed, gigantic and sleek black monster of Alien, the cute and cuddly brown midget of E.T., and the hairy beast that will always beat all other hairy beasts—Chewbacca. And then there’s the titular character of Paul. Gray-color skinned, with a large head, and fashioning slacker shorts and sandals, Paul is perhaps the strangest character of the bunch, especially when you consider he is voiced by Seth Rogen. But a stoner, pop culture obsessed alien fits perfects in the world of Paul, which is more or less a stoner road trip movie.

            What makes Paul different from the world of Superbad (Directed by Paul’s helmer Greg Motolla) or the like is that it has a sci-fi element, and its extremely nostalgic toward some of the classics of the genre, including but not limited to Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Predator. And what makes Paul a decently enjoyable, if not perfect ride, is the nostalgia and heart at the center of this comedy.