By Ed Howard

[You, the Living is now playing at Manhattan's Film Forum. Click here for screening information.]

You, the Living is Roy Andersson's follow-up to his remarkable 2000 film Songs From the Second Floor. Like its predecessor, You, the Living is a loose collection of absurdist vignettes set in a dull, gray city full of odd, depressive, quirky people. The film has no central narrative, it's simply a set of scenes, with characters whose lives occasionally overlap but still never really add up to a larger story. Instead, the stories are linked thematically, by Andersson's concern for the condition of people's lives in the modern era. His characters are beaten down, often terminally unhappy, trapped in dull routines and useless jobs. Andersson's vision is unsettling—dreary, absurd, shot through with dark, satirical humor—and yet not entirely bleak nor entirely hopeless. What this film is about, more than anything, is the possibility of finding some happiness in this life, some joy amidst all the ugliness, some pleasure to go with the pain. The film's central idea is the importance of living for the present, of enjoying oneself when death lingers unseen just around the bend, ready to strike at any moment. Andersson's characters are acutely aware of death and misery, and perhaps this primes them to also recognize the little moments of pleasure they are able to find at intervals.

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To read the rest of the article at Only the Cinema, click here.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

South Korean director Park Chan-wook has demonstrated a knack for depicting extremes of human behavior—dentistry by hammer (Oldboy), underwater surgery on a character's Achilles tendon (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), truly disturbing images of terrorized children and revenge-obsessed parents (Lady Vengeance). His latest feature, Thirst, shows that even without the vendetta obsessions, he's far from mellowed out. Concerning an affair between a priest (Song Kang-ho) who receives a transfusion of infected blood and the meek married woman (Kim Ok-vin) who, thanks to the cleric, becomes a fellow creature of the night, this vampire romance is as bloody as his previous excursions into the dark side of humanity, and just as richly imagined. Very loosely based on Émile Zola's 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin, it's an exploration of lost faith, as well as an oddly funny, sexually intense tale of two loners who find each other, evolve together, then grow apart: Annie Hall with fangs.

"I didn't set out to make a vampire film," Park says somewhat sheepishly, sitting in an uptown hotel suite with a translator in tow. "As a boy, I disliked horror films; they were too scary. Thirst isn't really a monster movie; it's a story about a hero falling into the most serious of dilemmas, where he's doubting God and his own beliefs. Because he had no choice in becoming what he becomes, you have to wonder, Should what he's doing be considered a sin?"

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To read the rest of the Time Out New York interview, click here.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

In the nearly two decades that I've been writing film reviews, I can't recall another week that saw the release of three movies that are guaranteed to wind up on my year-end Ten Best list. The movies are vampire love story Thirst and the documentaries The Cove, about an aquatic conservationist's attempts to stop the slaughter of dolphins, and Severe Clear, an autobiographical account of one Marine's experiences in Iraq. Beyond their dramatic merits, all three demonstrate a front-and-center mastery of technique. They use image and sound not just for the usual, so-called "classical" purposes (to define the characters and advance the story) but to encourage the audience to think about filmmaking's ability to express states of mind.

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The founder of The House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz is the guest critic for IFC.com this month. To read the rest of the article, click here.

By Keith Uhlich

There's been a hole in the blogosphere for the past few weeks, though judging from a good number of the reactions at the IFC Daily (the second incarnation of the invaluable GreenCine Daily), not many people were aware that Daily curator David Hudson had continued publishing his link-collating passion project. So I've been told, most just thought that GreenCine (now a features, interviews and reviews site under the stewardship of Aaron Hillis) had changed its mission statement, and when they finally found out (too late) about Hudson's all-too-brief tenure at IFC, they were understandably distressed. Where else could cinephiles go to find out what was worth reading on an overcrowded World Wide Web? We have our answer today, and Hudson prepared us for it, dropping some hints in the final IFC Daily post about "dreaming up a new format and, if all goes according to plan,...rolling [it] out slowly in two phases at an entity that'll be named when that entity's good and ready." And now it's ready.

The venue is The Auteurs, specifically the Notebook section overseen by Daniel Kasman. Hudson's first entry is up in which he explains the new lay of the land. So head on over there and bookmark the hell out of it. Let's help make this third version a permanent Daily fixture. To David: Great to have you back, sir, and best of luck!

By Andrew Schenker

[Lorna's Silence opens tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles. Check local listings.]

By now the departures of Lorna's Silence from the Dardennes Brothers template have been well-documented: The partial abandonment of the filmmakers' trademark following shots, the switch from super-16 to 35mm film, the reliance on crime-drama plotting, even the introduction of a few seconds of extradiegetic music. Since its debut at Cannes last year, the Dardennes' latest has seemed to get it from both sides, damned simultaneously both for the above-mentioned changes—particularly the heavier reliance on narrative, seen in some quarters as a move towards the middle—and for being yet another closely observed, tension-riven drama about a working-class character stuck in a set of precisely defined social circumstances and seeking some sort of redemption—in other words, another Dardennes Brothers film. Continue Reading »

By Vadim Rizov

[A retrospective of Ulrich Seidl's work begins today at Anthology Film Archives.]

In the early '60s, Pauline Kael—fed up with the newly-ordained cinematic holy trinity of Last Year At Marienbad, La Dolce Vita and La Notte, refusing to recognize them as part of any zeitgeist she'd find relevant—wrote an essay mocking what she dubbed the "Come-Dressed-As-The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties" genre. In Ulrich Seidl's Europe, the sick soul of the EU heads straight for the discotheque without bothering to get dressed up first. Antonioni said he focused on the rich simply because they had the most time and leisure to act out the problems he was interested in; for Seidl, it's the poor, dispossessed and unredeemable that have come to stand in for Europe, and the dance-floor is their commonest intersection point. 2001's Dog Days begins with a violent near-fight, as dumbass Mario (the appropriately named Rene Wanko) threatens to beat up anyone with the temerity to look at the stripper dance his girlfriend is performing; the eponymous subjects of 1999's Models spend most of their evenings writhing in the light, their faces captured in small spotlights, their pale eyes and faces as unnerving as any J-horror wraith; 2007's Import/Export has alienated thug Pauli (Paul Hofmann) catatonically dancing his ass off for no one in particular. Continue Reading »

By Matt Zoller Seitz

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This is the fifth and final installment in a series of Moving Image Source video essays on Michael Mann, whose new film, Public Enemies, opened July 1. To read a transcript of the video's narration, click here. For links to more episodes, click here. To read MZS's review of Public Enemies at IFC.com, click here.

By Dan Callahan

Madeline Kahn was as close as you come to a universally loved performer, a unique comic one-off, like Beatrice Lillie, and her early death in 1999 brought forth a lot of collective mourning, not only for what was lost, but for what might have been. After starting off strongly in several films for Peter Bogdanovich and Mel Brooks, Kahn faltered with a series of disasters that derailed what should have been a major career. These weren't any ordinary bad films, but notorious flops like Bogdanovich's you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it At Long Last Love (1975) and atrocities like Slapstick (Of Another Kind) (1982) with Jerry Lewis. As a little kid, I can remember sneaking downstairs past my bedtime to watch her television sitcom, Oh Madeline, which lasted only a season; I must have been drawn to it because I had seen her singing with Grover on Sesame Street. She never gave less than her best, but her roles got smaller in films as she got older. Kahn turns up very briefly, and delightfully, as Martha Mitchell in Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995), but her bad luck with larger roles remained consistent; what can anyone do with a film as abjectly awful as Nora Ephron's Mixed Nuts (1994)? Finally, before her death, she landed on a successful TV show with laidback Bill Cosby in which she played "the eccentric neighbor," as if she was just a thinner version of Edie McClurg. Continue Reading »

By Lauren Wissot

[Unraveling Michelle screens this evening at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington. Click here for more information.]

What thrilled me most about the documentary Unraveling Michelle, which follows the ups, downs and in-betweens of MTF transsexual Michelle Ann Farrell as she transitions into her new life as a physically female being, has nothing to do with gender issues. No, the most subversive part of Michelle isn't her tits, but her profession—indie filmmaker, her choice to turn the lens on herself merely an extension of her art form. Just as capable directing low-budget horror as she is reminding her cameraman to be sure to shoot wide during her surgery, Michelle's most powerful statement is simply, "I want to be a female filmmaker."

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To read the rest of the interview at Carnal San Francisco, click here.

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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Joseph Mankiewicz' wittily scripted, innovatively structured survey of distaff marital life at the brink of the Eisenhower era pits three middle class wives against an impossible feminine ideal. Addie Ross, the omniscient, goddess-like narrator who opens the film with withering remarks about the lives of the desperate housewives she calls friends, is as much of a structuring absence as Citizen Kane's Rosebud. She's never seen, only talked about as some otherworldly feminine ideal who inspires men and terrorizes women. It's her letter to the three wives, announcing that she's run off with one of their husbands, that sets off a chain of collective flashback introspection; the wives are so awestruck that their response is to ruminate in their domestic failures rather than kick some adulterous ass. She's a gimmick, but one that aptly grounds Mankiewicz's suburban landscape as a projection screen of insecurities. Even domestic sounds like a ferry horn or a dripping faucet set loose vexing thoughts about infidelity and emptiness among the three wives.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

What is cinema? André Bazin published a book of essays that tried to answer that question. But if somebody asked me for the short answer, I'd advise them to visit EternalMoonwalk.com. Seriously.

On first glance, the site seems little more than a poignant goof: a tribute to the late Michael Jackson that draws its inspiration from the John F. Kennedy memorial in Washington, D.C., with its eternal flame—but instead of a flame that never goes out, it's a video loop featuring variations on the Gloved One's signature move.

But it's more than that. In addition to being diabolically mesmerizing—between the array of clips and the faintly "Billie Jean"-like backbeat, one tends to lose track of time staring at the damned thing—Eternal Moonwalk is also an incidental tutorial in the basic properties of cinema. It returns motion pictures to their origin point, when the medium's core appeal was the chance to watch strangers performing, their bodies moving from Point A to Point B, their familiar or amusing actions serving as an emotional connection point, a reminder that we're members of the same species inhabiting the same small world.

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A Brooklyn-based filmmaker and the founder of The House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz is IFC.com's guest critic for the month of July. You can read the rest of this column by clicking here.