400 Screens, 400 Blows »
400 Screens, 400 Blows - 'Orlando' in Bloom
Filed under: Sony Classics, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
This week I saw the new print of Sally Potter's Orlando, which Sony Pictures Classics is releasing for its... 18th anniversary? Never mind. It doesn't matter. It's always a good time to re-evaluate a good movie. It was first shown in 1992 and released in the United States in the summer of 1993. I remember the night I saw it, but my memory of the movie itself is rather hazy. I remember my assessment was that it was beautifully shot, but rather cold.
Even though I have had 18 years to read the 1928 Virginia Woolf novel upon which the movie is based, I still haven't gotten around to it. But I was nonetheless better able to appreciate the movie this time. The movie has definitely aged well, but also I think I'm personally better able to appreciate it now than I was back then.
Tilda Swinton plays the title character, a young nobleman -- with a slightly androgynous look -- who becomes the favorite of the queen (Quentin Crisp in drag). She orders him to never grow old, and so he does just that. He lives through the next 400 years without aging a day. Instead, at one point, he unexpectedly changes into a woman.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - 'Winnebago Man' is no 'Crumb'
Filed under: Documentary, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
The new documentary Winnebago Man (2 screens) may seem like a lightweight entertainment, based on an accidental viral video phenomenon, but in a way it has more potential than many heavier documentaries. Any documentary about a single, living subject has the best advantage. First, you have the actual person to interview for the camera, rather than his friends and family, or "experts" on his life. Secondly, you have an entire film to devote to this one person, rather than dividing up the running time among many participants in a story. The greatest documentary ever made, Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, managed to plumb the depths of its subject's soul for an astonishingly "complete" portrait, all in just under two hours. Of course, Crumb interviewed some other family members, but they only served to underline and compliment the big picture.
It also helps when the filmmaker has a personality that compliments that of the subject. Another great example is Errol Morris' The Fog of War, which spent 95 minutes grilling former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara about Vietnam; the purpose of this film was not to solve anything, but to establish that even a direct question-and-answer period with one knowledgeable person does not come close to solving the problem of war. Morris' used his unique interviewing and camera techniques to emphasize the slippery, elusive nature of the subject.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Whatever Happened to 'Splice'?
Filed under: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
When Vincenzo Natali's Splice (140 screens) opened in early June, we had already had a bunch of summer duds, including Robin Hood, Just Wright, Letters to Juliet, MacGruber, Shrek Forever After, Prince of Persia, Sex and the City 2, Killers, and Marmaduke, as well as Iron Man 2, which I loved, but which seemed to disappoint many viewers. I had seen Splice prior to all this, as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, and in the screening room, there was a general happy buzz as it ended. Here, by gum, was a terrific, fun, and perhaps even brave, summer entertainment! And it was an original screenplay! It looked as if it was going to be a counter-programming smash, something that would generate strong word of mouth and continue to draw crowds as all the behemoth Hollywood junk fell away like toppled Godzillas.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Heart of 'Grass'
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
The 88 year-old French filmmaker Alain Resnais has returned to cinemas with his latest film Wild Grass. It's a fascinating, and baffling movie. In some scenes it moves like a thriller, suggesting simmering violence that will erupt later, spiced with a few dashes of obsession. In other scenes, it plays like a goofy comedy (as when a man's zipper gets stuck just before a crucial moment). And in still other scenes, it deliberately goes off the track and becomes all of these things, and none of them.
In Wild Grass, a red-headed woman (Sabine Azéma), who is a dentist and a pilot, loses her purse, and a fifty-something man (André Dussollier) -- who may have some kind of violent past -- finds it. Their first few connections go terribly wrong, and when a connection is finally made, it feels... weird. The last scene is a total baffler, dropping in on two brand-new characters with a truly peculiar final line of dialogue. Cahiers du Cinema selected it as the best film of 2009 in France.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Math, Art & Zombies
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
There's a difference between a genuine artist and a filmmaker who cares about what people think of him, and prime examples of both are currently playing. First we have Alejandro Amenabar's Agora (7 screens); it's his first release after he won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. This new one is about the search for knowledge during the rise of Christianity in 4th Century Egypt. Then we have George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead (8 screens), the sixth in his ongoing series of zombie movies, which has received mainly bad reviews. So which of these two directors is the genuine artist? Wrong!
Amenabar started out with three very good genre films, Tesis (1996), Open Your Eyes (1997), and The Others (2001). They all contained some really interesting horror and sci-fi ideas and they were enough to get genre fans excited about him, marking him as a director to watch. But instead of following up with another horror or sci-fi film, he made The Sea Inside (2004), which is essentially a "disease-of-the-week" film, the kind of film that usually gets called "brave" and "powerful," but that nobody really wants to see. It told the story of a quadriplegic who wants to die despite the fact that he has just published a book of poetry, and has beautiful women fawning over him at every moment. It's basically an issue movie about the right to die, and doesn't much care about characters or ideas; it won an Oscar.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - "Liberty" Balance
Filed under: Documentary, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
I have seen a few pretty good documentaries this year, including October Country and Big River Man, but 9500 Liberty is something else. This could be the future of documentaries. I have been looking for ways that documentaries could break out of their tired formats, using talking heads and clips, or else that old pompous, preachy, "this is good for you" tone, and this movie by Eric Byler and Annabel Park has done it. It follows the progress of an anti-immigration law in Virginia. With everyone fighting and taking sides, the filmmakers discover that they are in possession of the most complete and accurate information, and so they begin to take part in their own story. In addition, they posted bits and pieces of the film on YouTube, further changing the direction of their coverage. It's a living, breathing film.
Die-hard film buffs may recognize Eric Byler's name. He has made three feature films to date, all very strong romantic character studies with a melodramatic touch. Charlotte Sometimes (2003) drew some hostile fire for its matter-of-fact portrayal of mixed-race characters without commenting upon the situation. (Byler himself is of mixed race.) Roger Ebert defended it, and so did I in my San Francisco Examiner review. Byler contacted me and we became friends (as he did with Ebert). I championed his next film, Americanese (2006), starring Joan Chen and Kelly Hu, here on Cinematical (as did Kim Voynar); IFC picked up the film for distribution and has been sitting on it ever since. Then came Tre (2008), which attracted barely any attention at all, but continued to show how gifted Byler was at portraying groups of characters, emotional relationships, and their visual representations.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Breathless Trolls
Filed under: Classics, Documentary, Foreign Language, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
Director Jean-Luc Godard had nothing to do with the 50th anniversary restoration of his debut feature, Breathless (a.k.a. À bout de souffle) (4 screens), which just goes to show how badass he is. He made one of the most astonishing, groundbreaking, game-changing debuts in movie history, but he has moved on. To go back and pat himself on the back for this old achievement would be in direct opposition to everything he stands for. Instead, the cinematographer Raoul Coutard has supervised the restoration, and the quality is supposed to be so awesome that even the most hardened critics are gibbering and going nuts. I haven't seen the new print yet, but I have seen the film many times, and it very much deserves any kind of accolades it gets.
Everyone has heard by now that Breathless "invented" the jump-cut and that MTV used all of its innovations and ran them into the ground. The truth is that it's still as much a cool movie as it is a "great" movie, perhaps the equivalent of something like On the Road in literature. It still works. It still stands up to everything that's craven and ordinary about movies. It's dedicated to Monogram Pictures, an ultra low-budget studio best known for the Charlie Chan films, the Bowery Boys films, and the Cisco Kid films. It plays a bit like a "B" movie, with Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) on the run from the cops and bringing a girlfriend, Patricia (Jean Seberg) into his troubles. But at the same time, Godard is not in the least interested in things like suspense, plot, character development or redemption. Thank goodness.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Ivory's Tower
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
Director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala have a new movie out, The City of Your Final Destination (10 screens), and, no that's not another sequel in the Final Destination horror series. It's about a young professor who is trying to write a biography of a dead author and must travel to Uruguay to get permission from the dead author's wife, brother and mistress. Like almost all the other Ivory films, it's based on a novel. That's just the first of many reasons I have been fighting against Ivory for years.
Ivory and Jhabvala and producer Ismail Merchant, who died in 2005, first teamed up on The Householder (1963), and their partnership continued until The White Countess (2005); the only difference was that The Householder had been based on Jhabvala's own novel, rather than someone else's. At some point in the 1980s, the trio's films came into fashion, coinciding with the first years of the blockbuster era. The Bostonians (1984) earned a couple of Oscar nominations, and then A Room with a View (1986), Maurice (1987), Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990); Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993) all had critics, art house audiences and Oscar voters salivating. Ivory received three Best Director nominations, Merchant landed three Best Picture nominations, and Jhabvala won two Oscars for her screenwriting. There were a few acting nominations and wins, and a whole bunch of nominations for Best Costume Design.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - 'Mother' Love
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
I've seen three and a half Bong Joon-ho films now -- counting his segment of Tokyo! -- and I'm increasingly impressed. Memories of Murder (2003) was a superior police procedural, and The Host (2006) was an absolutely amazing monster movie, that -- like the best 1950s monster movies -- had a little something to say about humans as well. Watching Bong's newest film, Mother (13 screens), I began to appreciate his method of constantly juggling two ideas, sometimes opposing ideas, sometimes in the same shot.
In one scene, mother (Kim Hye-ja) feeds her son, a twenty-something, possibly developmentally disabled man, Do-jun (Weon Bin) a bowl of broth. She does this while he's urinating against a concrete wall. Essentially, one liquid goes in at the top, and another liquid comes out the bottom. This mother can feed her son everything, food, energy, wisdom, and she has absolutely no control over where it goes or how it comes out. It's a pretty startling image.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Killer Bs in 2010
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
The most important thing I look for in movies is a personality, or some evidence that a human being made it. It's all the better if it's a recognizable personality, with some kind of visual or tonal mood that carries over from film to film; in that way, it's like re-visiting with an old friend. If that's not available, I'd at least like a good idea in a movie. If it looks stamped out of a machine, or molded out of someone else's recycled ideas, then it's not as interesting to me. Failing all this, what I appreciate in a movie is good fun, and that usually relegates the movie in question to "B" status. Hardly anything that's "important" is also "fun." These films are usually associated with bodily responses (suspense, titillation, laughter, etc.), rather than intellectual responses, and so it's automatically assumed that they're not "smart" or "good." (Iron Man 2 is a case in point.)
Fortunately, there are several pretty good "B" movies out right now. Atom Egoyan's Chloe (53 screens) is a fun example of a "sex" film. They used to be called "nudies" (often set in nudist camps) until Russ Meyer took over the genre in the 1960s, and made the films oversized and outrageous. In later years, after the rise of HIV and AIDS in the 1980s, eroticism was often combined with suspense, as if anyone who enjoyed sex was automatically either a killer or a target. Such is the case with Chloe; unfortunately, Egoyan's fans expected something a bit more intellectual than this, but I like the movie's combination of brainy and ridiculous, not to mention that Egoyan usually doesn't shy away from anything steamy (see Exotica and Where the Truth Lies).
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