Recent Link Round-Up

New writing from November 2014 to April 2015

For RogerEbert.Com, a report on the 6th Annual Turner Class Movie Film Festival

A new essay on historical thinking, "Race and The American Movie"

For Filmmaker Magazine, Thom Andersen's The Thoughts That Once We Had.

2014 Best Of Writing
-Top 10 for The Film Stage
-Submission to the Village Voice Poll
-Capsules of The Grand Budapest Hotel and Two Days, One Night for In Review Online
-Episodes of The Cinephiliacs with Keith Uhlich, counting down #10-6 and #5-1.

Wrote capsules for The Film Stage's Top 50 of the Decade on Certified Copy, Mysteries of Libson, Cosmopolis, and Moonrise Kingdom.

On L'Avventura and Clouds of Sils Maria

Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason and Ornette: Made in America

On Criterion's Box Set of the Documentaries of Les Blank

Jean Renoir's A Day in The Country

Lucercia Martel's La Cienaga

Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant

On Godard's Every Man For Himself and Truffaut's The Soft Skin

Robert Montgomery's Ride the Pink Horse

Reviews of new films: Paul Schrader's Dying of the Light, Gina Telaroli's Here's To The Future!, and Paul Harril's Something, Anything.

Episodes of The Cinephiliacs: Mike D'Angelo on Buffalo '66, Tina Hassania on You've Got Mail, Matías Piñeiro on Duelle, Doug Dillaman on My Neighbor Totoro, Kris Tapley on JFK, Jan-Christopher Horak on Her Sister's Secret, Calum Marsh on The Last Days of Disco, and Kiva Reardon on Leave Her To Heaven.

Capsules from Letterboxd:
Contemporary: Run All Night, Jupiter Ascending, A Most Violent Year, The Congress, Beloved Sisters, Eden, Nightcrawler
Works from India: The Cloud-Capped Star, Gangs of Wasseypur, Jewel Thief, Awaara, 
Expressive Esoterica: Gone in 60 Seconds, The Avenging Eagle, Junior Bonner, Now I'll Tell, The Son's Return, Bed Time, Mr. Majestyk, 
Bullshit: Shame

Link Round-Up: Va-Va-Boom!

Many, many updates follow. I promise to be better at doing this more than once a month.

My Masters Thesis for Columbia University is being updated, revised, and expanded for a book! Coming in October from The Critical Press, you'll be able to purchase Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in American Film. The book will cover my theories on film noir and its connection to American melodrama and various atomic, religious, and technological apocalyptic narratives. You can read an expanded note on what will be covered here.

Another thing worth picking up: Little White Lies's May issue, which is dedicated to Richard Linklater. There are fantastic pieces by Jordan Cronk, Gabe Klinger, Vadim Rizov, and editor David Jenkins. My own piece covers Linklater's films set outside of his homeland of Austin, Texas, which covers the Before films, School of Rock, and Me And Orson Welles, you can pre-order the issue here.

The Criterion Collection continues to be busy. I reviewed a number of new discs for The Film Stage, including Dreyer's 1925 silent curiosity, Master of the House, Akira Kurosawa's "this is so much more than Star Wars" epic The Hidden Fortress, and three newly restored shorts by Harold Lloyd, which can be found on the new Blu-Ray for The Freshman. 

My conversation on "dated films" with Abbey Bender wrapped up on To Be (Cont'd). You can read the first, second, third, and fourth posts here respectively. Then check out the April conversation between Glenn Heath Jr. and Tim Grierson on the work of Jonathan Glazer. I gave my own brief on his new film, Under the Skin, over here.

If you aren't following The Cinephiliacs, you've missed conversations with Dana Stevens talking about Portuguese poetry and Max Ophuls, Mark Harris on his fantastic new book Five Came Back and the Hollywood directors who went to war, and Matt Lynch on America's largest independent video store and the morality of John Woo.

Over at Letterboxd, I've written some posts on
New Films! Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, Juame-Collet Serra's Non-Stop, Albert Serra's Story of My Death, Hong Sang-Soo's Our Sunhi, and The LEGO Movie.
Canonical Works! Stranger Than Paradise, An American In Paris.
Really good things off the radar! Powell and Pressburger's Oh...Rosalinda!, Richard Fliecher's Violent Saturday and Barabbas, Claire Denis's No Fear, No Die, Jacques Rivette's Secret Defense, Robert Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight, and Sweetgrass from Harvard SEL.

Finally, I'm proud to announce that in the fall, I'll be switching coasts and beginning my PhD in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California. The move is somewhat terrifying, but I hope to continue to keep trying to provide fantastic writing on film and more.

Moonrise Kingdom: Paradise Found

Moonrise Kingdom

Directed By: Wes Anderson

Written By: Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola

Starring: Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Jason Schwartzman, Harvey Keitel, Tilda Swinton, and Bob Balaban

Director of Photography: Robert Yeoman, Editor: Andrew Weisblum, Production Designer: Adam Stockhausen, Original Music: Alexandre Desplat

            Moonrise Kingdom, the seventh feature from love-him-or-hate-him director Wes Anderson, feels like in many ways, a culminating work, combining the best aspects from his previous movies. That, to many of Anderson’s angry critics, seems impossible: the man has simply made the same feature film over and over again (this criticism often coming from the same people who say Martin Scorsese should stop making projects like Shutter Island and Hugo, and go back to gangster films). Yes, Moonrise is very much in that Anderson vibe, one that I’ve always found fascinating, but never outright loved. But there’s something so assured, and so confident in Anderson’s storytelling here, that Moonrise Kingdom is a blast, one I fell in love with from the first image to the fighting-tears-from-my-eyes last image. 

            The story, set out by narrator Bob Balaban (playing island expert, weatherman, and possibly God), takes place on an island off the Northeast coast called New Panzance in 1965. In a series of elaborate tracking shots, we meet the Bishops, made up of two lazy and distant parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), three young identical boys, and a rebellious teenage daughter named Suzy, played by Kara Hayward. In each shot, Anderson reveals the next section of the perfectly aligned house, leading to Suzy, staring out her window with large binoculars. On the other side of the island, we meet the Khaki Scouts, led by Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), who declares himself a math teacher first and a scoutmaster second, before deciding to reverse the claim. When Ward and the scouts sit down for their breakfast, Ward notices Sam (Jared Gilman), the most unpopular of the boys, has disappeared. Sam and Suzy are in love, and nothing can stop them.

Screening Log: Post-Hiatus Catch Up

              Well that was longer than expected. I’ve come to the point where not writing about movies is worse than me than doing nothing, as films easily populate space in my mind instead of things I’d rather never have to think about. And during my long hiatus, I took in quite a few films (I hope to have reviews of Elena, Men in Black 3, and The Color Wheel up soon). I’m breaking up my usual style this time around, as I’ve annotated most of the films I’ve watched, though in much briefer notes. I also have a call for comments and discussion about thoughts on a few of these, so please respond below!

-The Tiger of Eschhnapur, 1959. Directed by Fritz Lang. 35mm projection at Anthology Film Archives.

-The Indian Tomb, 1959. Directed by Fritz Lang. 35mm projection at Anthology Film Archives.

-The Grand Illusion, 1937. Directed by Jean Renoir. 35mm projection at Film Forum.

-On Top of the Whale, 1982. Directed by Raúl Ruiz. 35mm projection at Anthology Film Archives.

-Mulholland Dr., 2001. Directed by David Lynch. DVD.

            Perhaps the closest that a “mainstream” American film has come to the avant-garde moment. What makes Lynch so accessible compared to other artists working in the same sort of vein is that Lynch’s starting points—glamor of Hollywood, film noir—are so familiar and accessible to cinephiles. Lynch relishes in these classic tropes and drowns us in their illusion. The other big thing I noted is that while the narrative is much more disjointed, I felt a much more tonal and thematic balance in this film when compared to Blue Velvet, that felt a bit unfocused when I last watched it (mainly in the latter Frank sequences). There’s more control and the feel of an assured director in Mulholland, so when it heads into the bizarre, I never flinch, but instead let it suck me into the world. “Silencio” becomes the ultimate metaphor for the film—the most beautiful performance you’ve ever seen with disturbing emotion, though it is of course, all an illusion.