The House Next Door

Archive: September, 2009

NYFF 2009: A Room and a Half

by on September 30th, 2009 at 10:00 pm in Festivals, Film

By Steven Boone

As I watched Andrey Khrzhanovsky's A Room and a Half at this year's New York Film Festival, a woman sitting next to me couldn't stop crying. The film was putting her through some stuff. It was sort of putting me through some stuff, too. At one pivotal moment, a transatlantic phone call between characters long separated by exile, I felt myself ready to let loose with the waterworks, but I gritted my teeth, clenched the armrests to hold them off. Then came the Russian folk songs. The crying lady started singing along quietly, unobtrusively but passionately with the characters onscreen. Their nostalgia was her nostalgia was mine. I bit my tongue off to keep from joining in. When the lights went up, I searched in vain for a tissue to give her, but turned to her and said, "You're Russian." She said, "Yesyesyes," and spent the next half hour excitedly telling me everything I wanted to know about the movie's subject, the Nobel Laureate poet Joseph Brodsky; about the beauty of his hometown, St. Petersburg ("the airfare is so low these days—you must go!"); about Brodsky's unique stature as a hero for poor self-taught artists ("When you grow up the way Brodsky did, you don't need to go to a school to learn what poetry is. Life gives it to you.") Continue Reading »




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Link for the Day (October 1st, 2009): Shameless Self-Promotion, Humble Intentions

by on September 30th, 2009 at 9:01 pm in Festivals, Film, Links for the Day

Hope you all will tolerate a bit of self-promotion. Today's link takes you to my Time Out New York capsule review of African director Souleymane Cissé's Min Ye..., which is playing the New York Film Festival on October 5th and 6th. I want to advocate for the movie, which hasn't inspired that much excitement among the preview audience members I've talked to. For me, this was a highlight of NYFF 2009, a discomfiting, yet always involving relationship drama with shades of Bergman and Cassavetes, though Cissé's perspective (here, a kind of DV poetic naturalism that generously observes and probes the film's middle class milieu) is entirely his own. It also features a magnificent central performance by African television personality Sokona Gakou—definitely one for the personal pantheon.

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.




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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Rage (via Halloween II)

by on September 29th, 2009 at 9:30 pm in Film

By Jeremiah Kipp

There's a more adept portrayal of human suffering in Rob Zombie's Halloween II than in all the lollygagging throughout John Krasinski's timid adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Sally Potter's iPhone-destined, fashion world monologue-a-thon Rage. Throughout Zombie's slasher yarn, there's inevitably a close-up, as the killer comes crashing down upon his prey, where the victims' eyes drift heavenward and a brief, unspoken plea for mercy passes between them and monster. As they meet their doom, Zombie dwells on the mayhem in real time, each brutal pulverizing blow given resonance. You would think this example of pulpy shock cinema couldn't hope to compare with the more supposedly contemplative American independent cinema, much less surpass the emotional, cinematic, and humanistic impact of a world where academic characters and fashion moguls gaze into the heart of darkness within their navels. Continue Reading »




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Link for the Day (September 30th, 2009): What do I do?

by on September 29th, 2009 at 9:01 pm in Links for the Day

House commenter and contributor Brendon Bouzard speaks from the heart about the Roman Polanski situation. An excerpt:

"As I saw from an e-mail this morning, and I see in this post on Jezebel, a bevy of major international and Hollywood filmmakers have signed various petitions in support of Roman Polanski, asking for the Swiss government to release him. The argument this petition seems to make is that Polanski is a great artist, and how dare they use his lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival to arrest him, and so and so forth.

"Many of the filmmakers who have signed this petition are people whose work I've greatly admired over the years—people like David Lynch, the Dardenne Brothers, Pedro Almodovar. It's so difficult for me to reconcile the Lynch who made Mulholland Drive, a cinematic criticism of the way that Hollywood and the film industry mistreats and abuses women with the Lynch that would sign a petition like this. Or the Almodovar who made Volver, a film about the strength of women in the aftermath of sexual molestation. Or the Dardennes who have made such strongly moral films about crime and the need for absolution and repentance."

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.




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"We Weren't Just Screwing Around For A Decade": An Interview with Chris Fuller about Loren Cass

by on September 28th, 2009 at 9:30 pm in Film, Interviews

By Zachary Wigon

[Loren Cass is now making it's way around the country. Click here for theater playdates. The film will be released on DVD November 24th, 2009. Click here to pre-order.]

"Glory be," I thought to myself as I sat in the Cinema Village a few weeks ago. "Finally, a next-to-nothing budget American movie that actually looks like something. And is about something, too!" (There isn't exactly a boatload of super-cheap indies these days getting theatrical distribution, let alone ones made by guys who own a tripod.) My wonderment was achieved despite the fact that I'd gone into the film, Loren Cass, with extremely high expectations: Nathan Lee referred to it as "overtly, ingeniously experimental in form," a "tour de force of mood and milieu."

Yet seeing the film was still shocking. In the wake of mumblecore—the most widely discussed young, independent filmmakers' movement since that of the early '90s (Hal Hartley, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, Allison Anders, etc.)—watching Loren Cass is a little bit like getting punched in the face. In the pre-Recession aughts, there was something pleasant (and perhaps downright sedating) about the twee characters populating mumblecore films and the trivial problems that filled their lives. As young, privileged white Americans have been jolted back into something like a serious world, those films have lost their significance, appearing more like embalmed relics of a time when a whole lot less was at stake.

Loren Cass stands in marked contrast. Continue Reading »




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Link for the Day (September 29th, 2009):

by on September 28th, 2009 at 9:01 pm in Links for the Day

House contributor Jason Bellamy sends in today's link. It's to Plain Dealer journalist Connie Schultz's column about anonymous posting on the Internet—a ripe topic for discussion. Here's an excerpt:

"Anonymity on the Web offends most journalists I know, and not just because their own names go on everything they write. It breaks every rule newspapers have enforced for decades in letters to the editor, which require not only a name and a city of residence, but contact information to confirm authorship.

"Anonymous comments also alienate many thoughtful readers, who are the majority of people who read newspapers. When readers complain to me about ugly comments, I urge them to weigh in, but most balk. It's like trying to persuade your friends to visit a great tavern in a bad neighborhood: They want nothing to do with that side of town."

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.




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New York Film Festival Podcast, Ep. 2: "The Ghost Town podcast"

by , and on September 28th, 2009 at 2:40 pm in Festivals, Film

[Originally posted on Current Movies, September 26th, 2009.]

INTRODUCTION

Hello Brooklyn!

Our second podcast looks at a film that has its international premiere at the New York Film Festival: Zhao Dayong's Ghost Town.

Split into three parts ("Voices;" "Recollection;" "Innocence") this doc explores culture and experiences of Zhiziluo, a town nestled among the mountains in Southern China. Yet you won't find a formal structure with narrator droning on about the town life.

Instead, Ghost Town begins with a stationary shot on a street. As one villager passes by, "Why are you filming this? This is boring."

There is something inherently fascinating about this structured, yet entirely unstructured glimpse of a culture and people who seem unsure whether they want to leave behind their way of life for the big cities, or simply deteriorate with their village.

Joining me is Vadim Rizov (IFC's "Indie Eye") and Kevin B. Lee (Also Like Life and Vice President of Programming and Education for DGenerateFilms.)

DISCLOSURE: Kevin has been on our House Next Door podcast in previous episodes and still hosts the original audio files. (JL)

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PODCAST

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Kevin B. Lee wears many hats.

John Lichman is the great and much-missed.

Vadim Rizov recently GreenCine'd.




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NYFF 2009: Lebanon

by on September 28th, 2009 at 12:00 am in Festivals, Film

By Steven Boone

[Lebanon screens on 10/01/2009 at 9:30pm and on 10/02/2009 at 3pm. Click date/time links for ticket information.]

Samuel Maoz's Lebanon is a good old-fashioned Sam Fuller war picture, all capital letters and tight close-ups. There is not one narrative surprise in it, and it doesn't need any. Maoz is drawing on his experiences as an Israeli tank gunner during the first Lebanon war just as Fuller raided his World War II combat memories for the epic The Big Red One. But Lebanon is more on the scale of Fuller's Korean War cheapie The Steel Helmet, filling the screen mostly with soldiers' sweaty, greasy, bug-eyed faces in the moments before and after decisive violence. Maoz pushes for the ultimate in subjectivity, never letting his camera leave the tank interior. We are stuck in there, just like the shell-shocked crew whose superiors force them into hostile, bombed-out territory without a clear objective or sufficient support. Continue Reading »




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NYFF 2009: Police, Adjective

by on September 27th, 2009 at 9:10 pm in Festivals, Film

By Simon Abrams

[Police, Adjective screens 09/28/2009 at 9:15pm and 09/29/2009 at 6pm. Click date/time links for ticket information.]

I can forgive Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective for its didacticism because it feels well-earned. Beginning as the Romanian answer to 24—a police procedural presented in "real-time," for the most part through long takes and even longer scenes—Porumboiu's film is very much an argument, but it's not, as one character suggests, a dialectical one. That would require a sustained, coherent position to counter the film's prevailing utilitarian statement, which is revealed in a protracted climax involving a sneering superior and a Romanian dictionary. (Resolved: When a judgment of one's own conscience comes into conflict with a judgment that maintains the status quo, the status quo wins.) It sounds as much fun as being hit continuously upside the head for 115 minutes by a rolled-up newspaper and then, to help you understand what it's all for, being whacked in the face several times by a rock-hard icepack. Continue Reading »




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Link for the Day (September 28th, 2009): "Most of my friends call me 'Big Phil'"

by on September 27th, 2009 at 9:01 pm in Links for the Day

My thanks to John Lichman and Faisal-Azam Qureshi for this one:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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Link for the Day (September 27th, 2009): Is now a bad time for a Polanski "pianist" joke?

by on September 27th, 2009 at 6:30 am in Links for the Day

You tell me...

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"Link for the Day": Each day the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.




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A Revolution on Screen, Pt 1: Movies for the masses—and the smuggling of art

by on September 26th, 2009 at 6:58 am in Festivals, Film

By Kevin B. Lee

[Posted September 24th, 2009 on Moving Image Source. Click here for a transcript.]

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"A Revolution on Screen" is a two-part video essay coinciding with the 2009 New York Film Festival Masterworks series "(Re)Inventing China: A New Cinema for a New Society, 1949–1966." This series is the first major U.S. retrospective of the films made during the "Seventeen Years" period between the establishment of the People's Republic of China and the Cultural Revolution. Part 2 will be published next week.




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Pandorum

by on September 25th, 2009 at 6:00 am in Film

By Justine Elias

Magnificent desolation—Buzz Aldrin's lyrical description of the moonscape, as seen from its lonesome surface—has inspired poets and artists. But to science-fiction filmmakers and writers, the phrase usually inspires terror. Travel to Mars, the stars, and beyond often risks a killer case of space madness. So it goes, screamingly, in Pandorum,' a highly effective sci-fi thriller set during a 2174 mission to colonize a far-off, newly discovered Earth-like planet.

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To read the rest of the review at Boston.com, click here.




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Rock 'n' roll High School: Freaks and Geeks

by on September 25th, 2009 at 5:46 am in Television

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Florescent lights. Combination locks. Clueless parents. Clueless teachers. Clueless friends. Paranoia. Alienation. Hormones. Zits.

These are but a few selling points of the NBC series Freaks and Geeks, which debuted September 25, 1999. Set at a white suburban high school circa 1981 and devised by men who knew the territory, creator Paul Feig and executive producer Judd Apatow, it was hailed by critics as one of that season's freshest new series. It lingered in the basement of the Nielsen ratings for 18 episodes, less than a full season, until the network, which never really knew what to do with it, finally pulled the plug.

In retrospect, it seems a minor miracle that the series lasted as long as it did, since its stock in trade was honesty. And when the subject is adolescence, a period that grows rosy in the memory but sucks ass when you're actually living through it, honesty isn't much of a selling point. Mass audiences are only interested in reliving high school if it's sentimentalized. The chance to revisit something remotely in the ballpark of the real thing is as appetizing as cafeteria food—and Freaks and Geeks was a weekly feast of teen awkwardness.

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To view the video essay on The L Magazine's website, click here. To read a transcript of the narration, click here.




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Link for the Day (September 25th, 2009): Goldentusk Catch-Up

by on September 24th, 2009 at 9:01 pm in Links for the Day

You see, here's the curse of abandoning Links for the Day. We miss the most recent Theme Song video from Goldentusk. Well, better four months late than never. Take it, John Connor:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.




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