Anchored by an impressively modulated, admirably restrained performance from Mads Mikkelsen (best known for his work with Nicolas Winding Refn), The Hunt is otherwise an indecisive, weak-kneed film. The story of a man (Mikkelsen) ostracized and persecuted by his small-town Danish community owing to allegations of child abuse never clicks into place, mostly because director Thomas Vinterberg can't draw a bead on how to approach his hot-button material. (Truth be told, this kind of thing has been done so often, the material's really more lukewarm.) Half the time, in scenes where suspicion spreads like a contagion and folks begin to act in increasingly inexplicable ways, Vinterberg seems to think he’s filming Franz Kafka's The Trial. Other times, The Hunt feels grounded in a specifically Scandinavian mode of realism derived from Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Failing to reconcile these tonally disparate modes, Vinterberg's film flounders. Continue Reading »
George V. Higgins wrote downbeat Nixon-era crime novels like The Friends of Eddie Coyle (turned by director Peter Yates into a bleakly brilliant vehicle for an aging Robert Mitchum), pulp fictions full of toothy, profane dialogue and petty-criminal patois, with all the pitch-perfect accuracy of a court stenographer. Though its publication predated Watergate by several years, there's something especially resonant for the times in its sad saga of busted dreams and quisling betrayals. Updating Higgins's Cogan's Trade for the new millennium, Andrew Dominik sets Killing Them Softly against the onset of the economic meltdown and the run-up to the 2008 election, a thread of radio reports and TV spots running through the film like a leitmotif, all the better to establish Killing Them Softly's thematic core: "America isn't a country, it's a business." Whether the cash gushes forth from subprime mortgages or high-stakes poker games, disruption to the status quo can't be abided, and necessary measures will be taken to reestablish its steady flow. Continue Reading »
February House, the new musical currently playing downtown at the Public Theater, marks composer-lyricist Gabriel Kahane and book writer Seth Bockley's first venture into musical theater. The two men, both 30, pursued independent career paths since they first met as students at Brown University: Kahane as a singer-songwriter and composer of concert works and Bockley as a playwright and director. For their first musical together, Kahane and Bockley drew inspiration from the historical confluence of an extraordinary group of artists who made a home for themselves in a dilapidated house in Brooklyn Heights during the early years of WWII.
The curious experiment in communal living was instigated by 34-year-old George Davis, who at the time was fiction editor for Harper's Bazaar. Davis persuaded a talented, eclectic bunch to move into the house at number 7 Middagh Street, among them English writer W. H. Auden, already an established poet of distinction, who moved in with his young boyfriend, aspiring poet Chester Kallman; up-and-coming British composer Benjamin Britten, who moved in with Peter Pears, the English tenor who remained his lifelong companion; Southern novelist Carson McCullers, who had recently achieved major success with her debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; and, most intriguingly, burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee, who wrote a bestselling crime novel, The G-String Murders, during her stay at the house in Brooklyn. The artists were in their 20s and 30s at the time, with McCullers, the youngest at 23 and Auden the eldest at 33.
The saga of this volatile mix of young artistic sensibilities, all at crucial points in their careers, is documented in a nonfiction work by Sherill Tippins, titled February House, the name given to the dwelling by writer Anaïs Nin because many of the residents had birthdays in February. We recently caught up with Kahane and Bockley to chat about February House, a musical based on Tippins's book. Continue Reading »
One of the most interesting offerings in this year's Migrating Forms festival didn't always feel like a film at all. Roughly half of Naeem Mohaiemen's The Young Man Was (Part 1: United Red Army) was sound, with the text projected on a black screen. With red, green, and white subtitles to help the audience identify the different voices of the speakers, the overall effect was like listening in on a private conversation or wiretap.
The images, when they did appear, didn't create a narrative as much as a time capsule. The limited archival footage seemed to play on a loop, but if Mohaiemen did in fact encounter a scarcity of archival material to draw on, he's turned it to his advantage; he has frozen time, making the few images last and permeate our imaginations with a power that's hard to experience nowadays, in the 24-hour news cycle that constantly feeds us new visuals. Continue Reading »
Ice Choir, "Teletrips." In no way an adversarial offshoot of the Justin Vernon/Collections of Colonies of Bees collaboration Volcano Choir, Ice Choir pays tribute to Kurt Feldman's longtime infatuation with the mostly mellow, agreeably radio-ready new-wave bands of the '80s and early '90s. "Teletrips" is culled from the band's forthcoming album, Afar, and it sounds as if someone crammed Tears for Fears, Talk Talk, Simple Minds, and the like into a blender and sprinkled in generous dashes of chillwave. The result is all shimmery and excessively veneered, with soothing synths and Feldman's soft-spoken, nostalgia-inducing vocals rendering the track a successful exercise in symphonizing popular genres of the past and present. Mike LeChevallier
[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a House feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]
Ed Howard: It isn't very fashionable to be a moralist in art these days. Films that deal with moral issues in a direct way are often tagged, rightly or not, as preachy and didactic. So in a way Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke is an anomaly, a director who unapologetically has a definite moral agenda that he's been exploring for over 20 years now, closer to 40 if one considers the TV work he made in the '70s and '80s before embarking on his feature film career in 1989. Not that Haneke himself would probably consider himself a moralist—he's consistently said that he wants his films to ask questions but not necessarily answer them—but whether his films are polemical or simply explore these issues in more ambiguous ways, there is a undoubtedly a core of forceful moral ideas about politics, media, and human relationships that runs through his entire oeuvre.
In this conversation, we'll be discussing most of Haneke's feature films, from his early "glaciation trilogy" (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance), made in his native Austria, to his brutal thriller deconstruction Funny Games, to the films he's made in France (Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and Caché) and his return to Austria for the harrowing parable The White Ribbon. It's a consistently provocative and challenging body of work, and consistently bleak as well, something that's only reenforced by revisiting all of the director's films in a condensed period of time. But what's not often acknowledged is the thread of hope that also runs through much of Haneke's work, because being a moralist means not only documenting the evils of the world but presenting at least a slim hopefulness that the conditions depicted in these films are not permanent. Continue Reading »
"Words must be spoken. We must say them all. And there are so many." Within the storyline of You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet, this sentiment refers to words of mourning, a eulogy spoken over lost love. (Indicating, at least in this regard, Alain Resnais's latest and reportedly last film makes for strange bedfellows alongside Michael Haneke's Amour.) Within the wider context of the film, these words might just as easily refer to the two Jean Anouilh plays on which it's based. More intriguing to consider after the fact than it's to actually sit through, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet is, at bottom, excessively wordy and a bit of a drag. Luckily, the film is enlivened somewhat by inventive mise-en- scène, as well as some lissome camerawork. The staging is so endlessly, even incestuously, self-referential as to earn the epithet mise-en-abyme, a term derived from what happens when you place two mirrors opposite each other, producing an infinite reflection, as in the famous hallway shot from Welles's Citizen Kane. Continue Reading »
Sylvain George is the modern era's poet of revolt. Judging from the recent double screening at the Migrating Forms festival at Anthology Film Archives, which featured George's L'Impossible and his latest, May They Rest in Revolt, he strikes a Byronic figure—none the least because his work is heavily literary. L'Impossible, for one, is organized into chapters and peppered with text. The quotes, from Dostoevsky to Walter Benjamin, could seem ponderous, had George not matched them with his passionate, yet at times startlingly precise, visuals.
George proclaims film as artifice from the start. Its quality is deliberately manipulated or even degraded: the screen goes white at times; the colors are bleached out or suddenly switch from blank and white to color, including splotches of red. The visuals signal discontinuity and disruption, rather than an attempt at a finished product. The same happens with sound: parts of the film are silent; others are marked by abrupt bleeps or snippets of words and music. On one hand, the film's brilliance lies in offering itself up as a document, a vivid slice of reality, and on the other calling our attention to it being a film, and so an artistic creation. Continue Reading »
Robin Gibb, one of the three singing brothers of the Bee Gees, the long-running Anglo-Australian pop group whose chirping falsettos and hook-laden hits like "Jive Talkin'" and "You Should Be Dancing" shot them to worldwide fame in the 1970s, died on Sunday in London.
About halfway through Michael Haneke's Amour, septuagenarian Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) describes the deteriorating health of his ailing wife, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), in terms that convey a bone-chilling, because universal, relevance: "Things will go downhill, then it'll all be over." Welcome to your future, everyone. What's most surprising of all, then, is that, despite its death-haunted demeanor and foregone conclusion (revealed in the very first scene), this is easily Haneke's most humane film. Grounded by heartbreakingly poignant performances from two of French cinema's most iconic actors, Amour contains none of the moralistic finger-wagging and gratuitous sadism that so many critics have found off-putting in the director's work. (Though I must admit that I am, by and large, an admirer of his films.) Confined almost entirely to Georges and Anne's apartment, Amour attends the escalating consequences when Anne suffers a stroke that paralyzes half her body. Haneke handles the material with his usual clinical detachment and precision, the camera (like Georges) observing dispassionately, but never exploitatively, while nurses bath Anne and change her diapers. The only tonal misstep, and it's a rather slight one at that, occurs with two scenes involving a pigeon that invades their apartment (shades of Reality's cricket!). These scenes objectify the film's themes of entrapment and release a trifle too handily. Continue Reading »
Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was a controlled descent into the inferno of illegal abortion and the network of bureaucratic corruption late in the Ceaușescu regime. Beyond the Hills's basic story carries these themes forward, yet represents a significant weakening of narrative focus. Stylistically, Mungiu's preference for long takes and rugged handheld camerawork remains intact, it's just that the slender facts in this particular case (since it's yet another film "based on true events") can't even begin to withstand the mammoth weight of a 150-minute running time. Continue Reading »
Lawless cements the mainstreaming of an original. Compare director John Hillcoat's latest to the standard set by The Proposition, an uncompromisingly bleak and ultraviolent outback western: Both films were written by musician Nick Cave, and both films tell a tale of one violent family pitted against the forces of institutional corruption as well as each other. In the balance, Lawless winds up feeling, well, toothless.
Based on true events that occurred in Franklin County, Virginia, in the 1930s, Lawless is a period crime film along the lines of Michael Mann's superior Public Enemies, a film that actually does tweak the legends it depicts, rather than just mealy mouth some random dialogue meant to give that impression. Moonshine bootleggers the Bondurant brothers have encouraged the legend that they are invincible. A war is brewing that will put that legend to the test—a war between a local politicians who wants to rationalize and organize the illegal distilleries of the region and the Bondurants, who want no part of it, rugged individualists to the bitter end that they are. Continue Reading »
February House, the new musical currently playing downtown at the Public Theater, marks composer-lyricist Gabriel Kahane and book writer Seth Bockley's first venture into musical theater. The two men, both 30, pursued independent career paths since they first met as students at Brown University: Kahane as a singer-songwriter and composer of concert works and Bockley as a playwright and director. For their first musical together, Kahane and Bockley drew inspiration from the historical confluence of an extraordinary group of artists who made a home for themselves in a dilapidated house in Brooklyn Heights during the early years of WWII.
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