Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
You are currently browsing the archive for the Film category.
A couple of questions from William Friedkin’s new Ask Me Anything on Reddit about the differences between filmmaking in the ’60s and ’70s and today:
IAmWilliamFriedkin: Really, for all filmmakers. The limited scope of the kind of films that can be made.
Tags: William Friedkin
From 1981’s My Dinner with Andre, a debate about technology, the comfort and numbness it brings, and how it subtly changes who we are:
Wally:
Last summer Debbie and I were given an electric blanket. I can tell you it is just such a marvelous advance over our old way of life. And it’s just great. But it is quite different from not having an electric blanket. And I sometimes sort of wonder, What is it doing to me? And I mean, I sort of feel that I’m not sleeping quite in the same way.
Andre:
No, you wouldn’t be.
Wally:
And I mean, uh…my dreams are sort of different. And I feel a little bit different when I get up in the morning.
Andre:
I wouldn’t put an electric blanket on for anything. First, I might be worried that I’d get electrocuted. No, I don’t trust technology. But I mean the main thing Wally is that I think that that kind of comfort just separates you from reality in a very direct way.
Wally:
You mean…
Andre:
I mean if you don’t have that electric blanket, and you’re apartment is cold, and you need to put on another blanket or go into the closet and pile up coats on top of the blanket you have, well then you know it’s cold, and that sets up a link of things. You have compassion for the person–well, is the person next to you cold? Are there other people in the world cold? What a cold night! I like the cold, my god, I never realized. I don’t want a blanket. It’s fun being cold. I can snuggle up against you even more because it’s cold–all sorts of things occur to you. Turn on that electric blanket and it’s like taking a tranquilizer, it’s like being lobotomized by watching television. I think you enter the dream world again. What does it do to us, Wally, living in an environment where something as massive as the seasons or winter or cold don’t in any way effect us? I mean, we’re animals, after all. I mean, what does that mean? I think that means that instead of living under the sun and the moon and the sky and the stars, we’re living in a fantasy world of our own making.”•
Shame
Steve McQueen’s brilliant 2011 drama is upsetting, unpleasant and even revolting, but it’s also subtly hopeful. It imagines a Western world in which not every antisocial behavior is meant to be celebrated, commodified, exploited, packaged, marketed and sold. Perhaps that’s still possible..
Brandon (Michael Fassbender) is a successful suit in New York City whose fancy clothes can’t cover, at least not for long, the damaged sexuality within. Prostitutes, one-night stands, Internet porn and disposable income allow Brandon to live out his every fantasy, but he’s not having any fun. He feels no satisfaction–just desperation. His computers are filled with viruses and his head with guilt.
Complicating matters is the presence of his sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), a cabaret singer who’s similarly fucked up, who has unexpectedly come to live with him having nowhere else to go. It’s not so much that she drinks nonstop or sleeps with his creepy, married boss that bothers him, but that he is forced to stare into the mirror image of himself. And perhaps that she has greater understanding of who they are. “We’re not bad people,” she tells him. “We just came from a bad place.” Brandon knows she’s right but is helpless to change course, his spree growing ever worse.
Doesn’t it seem sometimes that Monica Lewinsky was the last American to have shame? Didn’t it hurt more than help her? Haven’t celebutantes with sex tapes profited handsomely from boldface indiscretions ever since? There must be some middle ground between people being fitted with scarlet letters and rewarded for blue films. In the world view of McQueen and co-writer Abi Morgan, there is still room for the moderating forces of emotion, a possibility that we can use bad feelings to make ourselves better. Watch trailer.
•••••••••••
My Perestroika
Robin Hessman’s uncommonly perceptive film documents the experience of a group of Russian schoolmates who came of age at the outset of Perestroika and Glasnost, that stunning period between Brezhnev’s folly and Putin’s sham, when the former Soviet Union was suddenly a cultural and political void to be filled by the will of its citizens.
It was a heady time, but the shift left these now-middle-aged Muscovites on the other side of an odd historical chasm, having had all of the “truths” of their childhood carried away in a tidal wave of reform. Their past has been disappeared and they are forever strangers in their own home.
One of the principals, now a schoolteacher who knows the disconnect deeply, explains how difficult it is to explain collectivism and other remnants of the past to modern students with cell phones and other swag. “One of the hardest things,” she says, “is how to explain Soviet history to children.”
Equally difficult is for some of the children of Gorbachev and Coca-Cola to comprehend how their brethren can rewire themselves from communism to capitalism without missing a beat. As one explains: “What’s in their heads? I mean, how did it work in their brains that they were able to shift like that? For me, that’s a mystery.” Watch trailer.
••••••••••
Thoughts about other recent films now on home video:
Tags: Abi Morgan, Steve McQueen
A Dangerous Method
David Cronenberg’s telling of the uneasy birth of psychoanalysis is remarkably restrained, almost disappointingly so initially, with none of the physical manifestations of the monsters within us that are his trademark. What better opportunity for his insane visions than material about repressed feelings waiting to burst free? But the director knows best, allowing his actors and the Christopher Hampton screenplay to simmer and boil in a naturalistic way.
The film focuses on fin de siècle Europe as Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) is becoming nearly as famous as his elder, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). The two have a respectful father-and-son relationship, even though they get on each other’s nerves. At this point in his life, Freud doesn’t believe that a cigar is ever just a cigar, seeing sex as the motivation for everything, which irks his colleague. Jung has a weakness for telepathy and other such humbug, which Freud cannot fathom. But they remain on good terms, with Freud hopeful that his work will continue through Jung.
Into their lives comes Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), an aspiring doctor and a patient of Jung’s who has been driven completely mad by her obsession with being humiliated. Jung helps her become functional again, but the married doctor crosses ethical boundaries by entering into a sado-masochistic sexual relationship with his patient. A controlling father, a rebellious son, a brilliant madwoman, an illicit relationship–as any analyst could tell you, things are bound to go horribly wrong.
On a voyage to America, Freud dryly remarks to his shipmate Jung that they are bringing “the plague” with them. But what they are doing, of course, is trying to end to a mass sickness–one of silence, secrecy and repression. But such a process is bound to be messy, not only for the film’s three principals but for all of mankind. Nothing is more dangerous than a repressed society, but you can’t expect to open one up without doing some damage. Watch trailer.
••••••••••
General Orders No. 9
Robert Persons and crew borrow the halting voiceovers of Ross McElwee and majestic cinematography of Terrence Malick for this jaw-dropping, paranoid piece of anti-urban propaganda. Against a series of gorgeous images of rustic Georgia, narrator William Davidson reads a harebrained and almost threatening script that imagines everything natural as beautiful and everything developed as evil. Phrases like “the city is terminus…it’s the absence of idea, of order” and “the focus of the city became something aberrant” spill forth with sincerity and frequency, seemingly aimed at survivalists and militia members. The experimental doc seems assured that there is no poison made by nature, no beauty made by humans. There are a few scenes of urban centers, but they are unsurprisingly shot to look as ugly as can be. The whole thing’s so over the top that I would almost think it a parody of some odd sort, but, no, it’s genuine and borderline sinister. “The city is not a place…it’s a thing,” the film disgustedly tells us. Yes, the greatest thing mankind has ever invented. Watch trailer.
••••••••••
Some recent films I liked now on home video:
Michelangelo Antonioni, in 1982, thinking about a “future with no end,” knowing that film–and everything else–would soon change greatly. The rise of the machines and the fall of communism altered the landscape, as movies became more non-verbal for a truly global, multilingual market.
Tags: Michelangelo Antonioni
Given enough time–and it doesn’t take long–the desert always wins. From The Passenger, 1975.
Tags: Jack Nicholson
Roger Ebert has amended his list from 2002 of the best films ever. From his new choices, only Space Odyssey and Citizen Kane would definitely be on my list. I like 8½ better than La Dolce Vita and prefer Goodfellas to Raging Bull.
2002
Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
Dekalog (Kieslowski)
La Dolce Vita (Fellini)
The General (Keaton)
Raging Bull (Scorsese)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
Tokyo Story (Ozu)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)
2012
Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
La Dolce Vita (Fellini)
The General (Keaton)
Raging Bull (Scorsese)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
Tokyo Story (Ozu)
The Tree of Life (Malick)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)
Tags: Roger Ebert
Did Sun Ra really film this in 1974? Maybe it was all a dream.
Tags: Sun Ra
As DVDs become an increasingly marginal product in this age of streaming, will Netflix too be shunted aside by the lower entry costs of businesses that deal purely in digital data? From Nicholas Thompson’s post, “Is Netflix Doomed?” on the New Yorker’s Culture blog:
“It’s a bad time, too, for Netflix to have declining subscriber loyalty. The company believes that the mail-order-DVD business is finished, and that our DVD players are following our VCRs to the junkyard. So it is killing off that part of its business. Unfortunately, though, that’s the part with the high barriers to entry. It’s not easy for a startup to build massive warehouses and systems for mailing discs. It is easy, however, to get into the streaming business. Yesterday, for example, we learned of a startup called NimbleTV, which plans to let you watch all the channels you subscribe to through your cable provider on your phone or your tablet. If you had that, would you want Netflix, too?”
••••••••••
“The incredible new world of DVD,” 1997:
Tags: Nicholas Thompson
David Cronenberg discussing casting porn star Marilyn Chambers in Rabid, 1979.
Tags: David Cronenberg, Marilyn Chambers
Hollywood is certainly moving ass-backwards through our technological revolution, but it seems a stretch to say that it will be undone by crowdsourcing. Decentralized by more people having better filmmaking tools, sure, but not toppled by the defeat of personal vision. Jimmy Wales disagrees, however. From Wired:
“Jimmy Wales has a message for Hollywood: You’re doomed, it won’t be piracy that kills you, and nobody will care.
The Wikipedia founder, delivering a keynote address at the Internet Society’s INET convention in Geneva, predicted that Hollywood will likely share the same fate as Encyclopedia Britannica, which shut down its print operation this year after selling just 3,000 copies last year.
‘Hollywood will be destroyed and no one will notice,’ Wales said. But it won’t be Wikipedia (or Encarta) that kills the moviemaking industry: ‘Collaborative storytelling and filmmaking will do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica,‘ he said.”
Tags: Jimmy Wales
There’s a full version online of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968/72 collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock. Filmed originally as 1 A.M. (as in “One American Movie”), it was planned as Godard’s understanding of U.S. culture during the Vietnam age. (Though perhaps “misunderstanding” would be the more accurate term.) The project went uncompleted, was shelved and later reedited by Pennebaker into 1 P.M. (as in “One Parallel Movie”). A fascinating failure, the film features Rip Torn, Jefferson Airplane, Eldridge Cleaver and Tom Hayden, among others. (Thanks Dangerous Minds.)
Trailer for the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. Far better than the actual movie.
Tags: Malcolm McLaren, Sex Pistols
The race car driver as philosophical hero, realizing the mission at hand, though repetitive, is essential. Steve McQueen, Le Mans, 1971.
Tags: Steve McQueen
Young Adult
The new technologies haven’t just connected us to one another but also to the past. We’ve always been emotionally attached to what was, of course, but now we are practically as well. Every day is a high school reunion, a scrapbook stuffed with memories that look inviting from a distance. It’s comforting, sure, but is that how things should be? Is a revolving door between now and then our healthiest option? Should the past be something in our appointment schedules or largely in our minds?
The second Jason Reitman-Diablo Cody collaboration centers on a former teen queen who’s now a soused writer of young-adult fiction (Charlize Theron). The YA series is in decline, as is the author, who returns to her stifling Minnesota hometown seeking consolation from a former high-school flame who is now married with children. “He knew me when I was at my best,” she says, confusing a time of lesser self-knowledge for one of greater happiness. Things soon get messy. Even if you have Google Maps on that shiny screen in your pocket, you still can’t go home again. Watch trailer.
••••••••••
Shut Up, Little Man!: An Audio Misadventure
In Matthew Bate’s telling documentary, two Midwest punks, Mitchell Deprey and Eddie Lee Sausage, moved to a dumpy San Fran apartment building during the 1980s, unaware that their new neighbors were a loud, drunk, violent Odd Couple–an embittered redneck homophobe, Raymond Huffman, and his gay, surly roommate, Peter Haskett. When one punk confronts Ray about the noise, the “Cro-Magnon looking man with the neck muscles of a newborn” tells him to shove it. The punks moved on to plan B: popping a cassette into a boom box and recording the insane arguments. The mixtapes were shared with friends and gradually became an underground sensation, with playwrights, comic-book artists and filmmakers appropriating the very raw material to turn it into art (and profit). It was an analog precursor to our viral digital culture.
Questions abound in regards to intellectual property law and the nature of art, but perhaps the most revealing moment occurs during one of the “recording sessions,” when the punks snake a microphone outside Ray and Peter’s window to get better sound. The frenemies notice the device. “Oh, the neighbors are recording us,” one says, taking a brief break from swears and punches. But they quickly return to their brawl, disregarding the intrusion on their privacy. A couple decades later, their lack of inhibiton has become the norm. Watch trailer.
••••••••••
More recent films I liked now on home video:
Tags: Charlize Theron, Diablo Cody, Eddie Lee Sausage, Jason Reitman, Matthew Bate, Mitchell Deprey, Peter Haskett, Raymond Huffman
Dick Cavett interviewing Ingmar Bergman in 1971, before the filmmaker put himself on an island, literally and figuratively. Bibi Andersson joins the latter half of the discussion.
Tags: Bibi Andersson, Dick Cavett, ingmar Bergman
Thom Andersen analyzing Hollywood’s puzzling penchant for equating Los Angeles’ glorious Modernist architecture with villainy.
Tags: Thom Andersen
Photographer and locomotion pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, who miraculously made still photographs dance and gallop, was born on April 9th 182 years ago. He’s celebrated by a Google Doodle.
From Thom Andersen’s 1975 documentary, Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer:
In 1874, Muybridge shot and killed his wife’s lover, Harry Larkyns, in a crime of passion. He was acquitted and his wife succumbed to a stroke soon thereafter. The baby born of the extramarital affair was raised in an orphanage. From Stanford Magazine: “THE OPERATIC EPISODE began on October 17, 1874, when Muybridge discovered his wife’s adultery. In 1872, he had married a 21-year-old divorcée named Flora Stone. When she bore a son in the spring of 1874, Muybridge believed that the child, Floredo Helios Muybridge, was his own–until he came across letters exchanged between Flora and a drama critic named Harry Larkyns. The most damning evidence was a photo of Floredo enclosed with one of the letters: Flora had captioned it ‘Little Harry.’
Convinced he’d been cuckolded, Muybridge collapsed, wept and wailed, according to a nurse who was present. That night, he tracked Larkyns to a house near Calistoga and shot him through the heart.
At his murder trial in 1875, the jury rejected an insanity plea but accepted the defense of justifiable homicide, finding Muybridge not guilty of murder. After the acquittal, Muybridge sailed for Central America and spent the next year in ‘working exile.’“
Michael Parkinson interviews Orson Welles in the wake of Watergate, 1974.
Tags: Michael Parkinson, Orson Welles
Orson Welles, sometimes drunk and shaky and sometimes sober and brilliant, in his 1978 documentary, Filming Othello.
Tags: Orson Welles
My favorite era of film runs from Easy Rider to The Man Who Fell To Earth, nearly a decade when auteurs were preeminent in Hollywood. So, my least favorite movies (though I recognize they aren’t bad movies) are Jaws and Star Wars, the blockbusters that marginalized personal films, that made the auteur the exception as opposed to the rule, that led to the dumbing down of not only mass movies but B films as well. For every Tarantino or Coen brother now, there are many Michael Bays. Not that Bay isn’t an auteur in his own way, but his vision is global and post-literate, democratic, yes, but only insofar as he seeks to titillate large audiences long enough to pick their pockets. His crass vision is particular to him not because of some great talent but because he’s the one who currently has control over the special-effects crews. It’s spectacle without a soul.
At Grantland, Andy Greenwald makes a compelling case that TV, which exploited the yawning opening in the auteur market, giving us brilliant, visionary shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Louie, among others, during a relatively short span, has likewise made a fatal shift toward the blockbuster. An excerpt:
“In a conversation last summer, Shawn Ryan, himself the creator of one of the Golden Age’s finer scriptures, The Shield, pegged the end of the era to the fall 2010 premiere of The Walking Dead. Not as any referendum on the zombie show’s quality but more of what it signified: by tripling the potential audience for a cable show and by doing so with genre spectacle, The Walking Dead was television’s Jaws moment. Like the flowering of American film in the ’70s, TV’s Golden Age was the product of new companies (or, in this case, channels) empowering creators because they didn’t know what else to do. The blockbuster success of The Walking Dead — along with Game of Thrones and True Blood — provided a way out, or at least around, the complicated power dynamic of the omnipotent showrunner. Vampires and dragons are, after all, far more dependable draws than David Simon’s cantankerous take on the social safety net. (To my mind, the Golden Age was also sunk by the rise of prestige simulacra, hollow shows like The Killing and Hell on Wheels that ganked the ponderous pacing and adult themes of contemporary critical darlings without any of the singular wit or perspective.)”
Tags: Andy Greenwald
Martha Marcy May Marlene
In the early scenes of Sean Durkin’s excellent character study, troubled Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) flees the acreage of an upstate New York polyamory cult with a Manson-ish penchant for home invasion. She makes a halting, reluctant call to her estranged sister and soon she’s ensconced in a secure, well-appointed Connecticut home. But there is no safety for Martha now. What she’s running from is no scarier than what she’s internalized, as the past and present bleed together in her mind, constantly battling for dominion over her.
Cult leader Patrick (John Hawkes) gives his acolytes a new name (or two or three) that’s similar to their old one, initially distancing them ever so slightly from their identities. It’s just the beginning of the process. In due time, Martha, now Marcy May, is drugged, sexually assaulted, trained to act deferential to men and made to participate in burglaries and the initiation of other new women. Her ego is broken down over the course of her neverending indoctrination and then rebuilt according to the needs of the cult.
What the cult often needs in addition to obedience is cash, hence the endless string of home break-ins. One such robbery goes awry and results in a brutal murder, an act which leads to Martha ultimately absconding from the commune, carrying with her all the shattered pieces of herself. But there’s little her sister or brother-in-law can do since she speaks of the cult to no one, isn’t even present enough to know that she needs to be deprogrammed.
After the murder that stunned Martha, she speaks of her battered conscience to another woman in the cult. Her fellow member, still a true believer, rationalizes what’s occurred, insisting that the murder of an innocent man wasn’t so heinous. “We’re never really dead or alive,” the woman says, “He’s still existing…it’s just in a parallel time.” The idea that chronology is fallacy is nonsense when applied this way, but it can be true of psychology.• Watch trailer.
••••••••••
Recent films I liked now on home video:
Tags: Elizabeth Olsen, John Hawkes, Sean Durkin
The Skin I Live In
Our largest organ is both home and prison, protecting and exposing us, even stretching and shaping identity and world view. Without a shred of gray matter, skin plays a central role in forming the way we think, as responses we get from others based on our outward appearance–attractiveness, color, gender–can train us to be someone we may not want to be. Two great films about the importance of skin and self, Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Face of Another, both focus on what’s above the neck. But Pedro Almodóvar, with his designer’s eye and philosopher’s mind, audaciously extends the odd and vital subgenre beneath the chin and below the belt.
Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is a brilliant plastic surgeon, pushing the boundaries of his field, but life has toyed with him. As we learn, both his wife and daughter have committed suicide after horrific incidents. Ledgard, haunted and gaunt, has felt too much pain and now can only possess, not love. Kept prisoner in a room in his sprawling estate is a mysterious petite woman (Elena Anaya) in a form-fitting body suit. When he isn’t grafting onto her body an indestructible, synthetic second skin he’s developed, the demented doctor watches her on a large-screen TV, plotting his next move.
But who is this woman and why has Ledgard chosen her for such heinous experimentation? Was she a very different person when the surgeries began? And who will she end up being, both inside and out, as the surgeon continues his incisions and sutures? Almodóvar answers some questions but not all in this probing, sinister study of the flesh, which not only covers us but sometimes smothers us.• Watch trailer.
••••••••••
Recent films I liked now on home video:
Tags: Pedro Almodóvar
Very cool clip. William F. Buckley, Jr. welcomes filmmaker Otto Preminger in 1967, for a discussion about censorship.
Tags: Otto Preminger, William F. Buckley
Project Nim
There was a time when it seemed a wise idea to raise a chimpanzee in a Manhattan brownstone, let it live exclusively among humans, get it press in glossy magazines and dress it in leisure suits. That era was called the 1970s.
In that disco-fabulous decade, in an age when many academics reflexively distrusted convention, New York City professor Herbert Terrace hatched an unorthodox experiment in which a newborn chimp named Nim was placed in the Upper West Side home of one of his students and treated like a human baby. And that was just the start of the Me Decade narcissism.
Nim was taught an exceptional amount of sign language in his unnatural setting–the study ostensibly centered on human-simian communication–but when the chimp reached age five and grew too aggressive for fun outfits and photo-ops, Terrace cut bait on the project and sent his subject back to his original owners to be warehoused with primates he could no longer assimilate with. The exiled chimp spent years shunted from handler to handler, some crueler than others, at the mercy of fate, enduring a heartbreaking journey à la Bresson’s Balthazar.
Having previously made Man on Wire, another film about life at an extreme, documentarian James Marsh is clearly the creative descendant of Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, though not yet as bold a visionary as either. His reserve is fine, however, as long as his topics are larger than life, like this one about a creature nurtured into a state neither man nor beast, just so that we could enjoy seeing yet another reflection of ourselves, though what stared back lacked all beauty. Watch trailer.
•••••••••••
More recent films I liked now on home video:
Tags: Herbert Terrace, James Marsh