Another season, another round of Brit transfers, and the newest Broadway offerings from across the pond will truly test your theater taste buds; this fall has a messy but delectable sticky bun (Brief Encounter) and a minutely satisfying yet rote cucumber sandwich (The Pitmen Painters). Some may crave the tidy, bite-sized appeal of the latter, but it's the hearty naught of having the former that results in the more edifying choice.
Actually, you can witness both foodstuffs at Brief Encounter (they even feed you the cucumber treats post-curtain call), and nibbles or not, the production more than justifies the gimmicks. Kneehigh Theatre's acclaimed multimedia version of David Lean's 1946 heartbreaker has its share of nagging winks to the audience, and perhaps there's a tangential ditty too many. But director Emma Rice, working with an excellent cast of hardworking troupers, has enveloped the evening with that inimitable let's-throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks theatricality seemingly deep-rooted in scrappy U.K. upstart theater companies, and occasionally said tactic results in a shrug, but at least it's always an honest-to-God, fervent embrace of the theatrical for theater's sake. Continue Reading »
They used to die in threes. In the past week, cinephiles and music lovers have lost Eddie Fisher, Gloria Stuart (Nathaniel Rogers remembers her immaculate blondeness), Sally Menke (from severe heat according to the Los Angeles Times), Arthur Penn (Dave Kehr looks back at the man's life and work in The New York Times), Joe Mantell, and Tony Curtis (see Chris Anthony Diaz's "Tribute to Tony Curtis" from 12/20/08).
Despite evidence to the contrary, both here and on our main site, you may be forgiven for thinking the folks at the Film Society of Lincoln Center are the only ones throwing a film festival right now. The Woodstock Film Festival kicked off yesterday and ends on Monday with a screening of John Curran's Stone, and the Hamptons International Film Festival premieres shortly thereafter (notable films this year include 127 Hours and the U.S. premiere of Julian Schnabel's Miral). And for anyone Europe-bound this November, stop by gorgeous Valencia for some paella, maybe even check out La Cabina, a small but passionate international festival programmed by my buddy Carlos.
Esteemed New York City-based publicist Jeff Hill will hang up his skates at the end of the year after the release of Mike Leigh's Another Year. Good luck, Jeff.
Amateur photographers of the world unite: PLANET Magazine is, until October 31, taking submissions for its annual Global Travel Photo Contest. Two grand prize winners will get $1500. Anyone can enter, but if Roger Deakins submitted a still, will they call him a cheater? Below: a trailer for Deakins's latest feat of cinematographic wonder, Joel and Ethan Coen's True Grit:
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 ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
When Alex Timbers was 12 years old, he and an elementary school buddy had their own public access cable show in Manhattan. "It was sketch comedy, very irreverent and strange," Timbers reports. His favorite segment was called "Pyro Time." "We'd buy fireworks and explosives in Chinatown and blow things up—like a giant cod. We'd explode it and then play it back several times in slow motion and play 'Carmina Burana' [on the soundtrack]." Timbers explains that at the time he was going to a straight-laced "coat-and-tie" all-boys school, and the cable show was a way of letting off steam. "So there was an anarchic side waiting to get out." Now at age 32, Timbers is letting some of his anarchy loose on Broadway. He's making his debut on the Great White Way directing two productions you wouldn't think of as typical Broadway fare: Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, a rock musical he co-wrote with composer Michael Friedman, which opens at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on October 13, and The Pee-wee Herman Show, a new version of an early 1980s comedy show created by and starring Paul Ruebens, which begins performances at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on October 26. Continue Reading »
If there is a thread running through some of this year's New York Film Festival selections, it is the acceptance of the enigmatic in human beings. Andrei Ujicâ's documentary The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu, for instance, used extensive footage of the notorious Romanian leader not to probe into the man's inner life, but to subversively present an extended version of his brand of public pageantry over the course of his decades of political prominence. In exploring the international terrorist who took the title's nom de guerre, Olivier Assayas, in Carlos, focused more on the vast disconnect between the man himself and the rock-star image he cultivated than in necessarily painting a detailed psychological portrait. And on the fiction front, Cristi Puiu, in Aurora, fastidiously observed his main character's increasingly irrational behavior in a perhaps deliberately failed attempt to get inside the head of a seemingly normal individual who commits four acts of homicide. In each of these films, there is a marked absence of psychological or emotional connection, the implication being that human beings are so complex and multifaceted that the more honest approach to these characters/real-life figures would be to simply recreate a milieu as immaculately as possible, invite the audience to look on and draw its own conclusions. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: Take Two is an occasional series about remakes, reboots, relaunches, ripoffs, and do-overs in every cinematic genre.]
Ahh, baseball! The invigorating thrill of freshly cut grass, the sweet pop of leather and oak on a summer day! A lyrical little game, with a literary pace worthy of Updike, Angell, Malamud, Roth, Lardner, and Coover! A game of simple food, endless statistics, fathers and sons, and mustaches. America's pastime.
Which is all to say: Satirizing American culture by satirizing baseball is almost too easy. There are moments during The Bad News Bears and its nearly shot-for-shot 2005 remake where the story seems like it's telling itself, and not in the good way. The plot is as hackneyed an underdog tale as you'll ever find, and really the only joke in either film is, "Look at this louse, listen to this profanity! Aren't they so incongruous with this ostensibly wholesome sport!" From the moment that washed up ex-pro Morris Buttermaker parks his puke-green convertible and pours beer onto the gravel parking lot in the films' opening scenes, we know exactly where the movies are going and how they'll get there.
In 1976, Buttermaker was Walter Matthau—over the hill, perpetually stubbled, and bleary-eyed at all hours. In 2005, he was Billy Bob Thornton, wearing a stupidly slick handlebar-soul patch combination and a series of improbably crisp polo shirts along with his lecherous fake smile. And that's essentially the difference between the two films. The original, directed by Michael Ritchie, has a slack charm in its editing and construction that fits the story and characters. But somehow Richard Linklater—the director, fer chrissake, of a film called Slacker—never gels with this story. His version, as expected, is beautifully constructed, full of languid long shots and rhythmic editing. But for a director who routinely elicits career-best performances from his actors, Linklater's cast (with the exception of Greg Kinnear, who's always best when playing an asshole) all seem afloat and mismatched to the material. And while the script bubbles with the obligatory salty language, the set design and music are altogether too clean and polished to fit a movie about lovable slobs. Continue Reading »
It's official, say critics: Hong Sang-soo's repeating himself. Here comes another movie where the protagonist's a stifled filmmaker, where the men get drunk and embarrass themselves in public, and where a younger man and his mentor duke it out for a girl. The director of the gorgeously melancholy romance Woman on the Beach and spiky comedy Like You Know It All isn't just reproducing tones—he's mixing them. His new film, Oki's Movie, is at once abrasive and sweet.
The movie is actually made up of four short films, each introduced with the same garish blue background and "Pomp and Circumstance" blaring on the soundtrack. The hero of the first short is a student filmmaker who can't live up to his mentor. Adam Hartzell has written that Hong's heroes "are not antiheroes as much as they are exercises in humiliation," and this proves true when our man shows up drunk to a screening of his film. An audience member asks why he dumped her friend, he says he doesn't remember (and besides, what business is it of hers?), and the handheld camera stays on them, moving back and forth between accusations. Writers often compare Hong's films to Eric Rohmer's, with the way they focus on a relationship's changing dynamics by highlighting small, precise, delicate movements, but the spiky, nasty, very-funny scene here lies much closer to Albert Brooks. Continue Reading »
A couple of times over the course of this season of Mad Men I claimed that Don Draper (Jon Hamm) didn't have much at stake anymore in continuing to conceal his true identity. Turns out I was wrong. Well, at least half wrong. In my defense, in a key scene of this week's episode, "Hands and Knees" (written by Jonathan Abrahams and Matthew Weiner, and directed by Lynn Shelton), Don confesses his identity switch to Faye (Cara Buono) with very little in the way of repercussions. Don confesses as if speaking into a void, like he's not even cognizant of another person being in the room with him; he's simply saying the words because he can, because he needs to say them, and perhaps the most shocking part of his confession is how easily the words pass from Don to Faye. Faye even seems pleased that Don trusts her with the information, and tries to play the role of caretaker, reassuring Don that everything will be alright. At one point even Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) expresses sentiments similar to Faye's, telling Don that his past isn't really all that scandalous, and that they could ride things out should the truth be revealed. Continue Reading »
[Author's Note: Looking for more of AMC's Emmy and Golden Globe®-winning original drama Mad Men? The wait is over! Each week, The House Next Door is your home for exclusive "previews" of upcoming Mad Men episodes, from Season 4 and beyond!]
As if sports weren't inherently dramatic enough, the language we use when discussing them is often bloody with consequence. Teams facing elimination from the playoffs are said to be in "do or die" situations. NFL games that are tied after four quarters go into "sudden death" overtime. And fans who allow their happiness be dictated by the success of their favorite team are said to be "diehards." It's all overstatement, provided that no one has made a bet they can't afford to lose, but it's harmless. (Working in the NFL when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, I was puzzled by the insistence of some writers that it was now inappropriate to refer to a team's draft-day strategy room as the "war room." Were these people similarly uncomfortable with the football terms "blitz" and "gunner"? And, in our post-9/11 climate, where was the objection to the baseball terms "sacrifice fly" and "suicide squeeze"? But I digress.) Poetic enhancement is a sports tradition. Still, every now and then something comes along and reminds us of just how foolish these inflated terms really are, and of just how dramatic sports can be on their own. Into the Wind is that kind of reality check.
The first must-see entry in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" documentary series since The Two Escobars debuted in June, Into the Windtells the story of Terry Fox, who in 1980 set out to do the unthinkable: run all the way across his native Canada at a rate of approximately 26 miles (one marathon) each day. A formidable task in its own right, Fox's expedition was made all the more challenging because he was without the better part of his right leg, which had been amputated six inches above the knee three years earlier, after Fox had been diagnosed with bone cancer. Fox's goal wasn't just to cover the distance but to raise money for cancer research and to raise the spirits of cancer patients at the same time. He called his run the "Marathon of Hope," and in doing so he not only grossly undersold the length of his journey but also the emotions it would stir in those who witnessed it. Directed by NBA guard (and fellow Canadian) Steve Nash and Ezra Holland, Into the Wind gracefully combines modern interviews, archival footage and narrated excerpts from Fox's journal to bring to life the heroic quest of a 21-year-old man who in the true spirit of sports wanted to test himself, and who in the true spirit of life wanted to do before he died.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here.
I was around six when my parents began divorcing, a two-year bickering lurch of which I most remember hiding under a bed. I was old enough to understand what was happening, but too young to get that it wasn't my fault. Worst of all, I had no images with which to identify. I struggled to find a model for how divorced couples and their kids behaved, but came up empty. It seemed a subject that people not only didn't discuss, but avoided.
The gift my parents' breakup gave me was that it made me a moviegoer. The VCR became a way to deal with my troubles. I gravitated in particular toward stories about couples, with love lost and found: the church reunion in Sunrise, the spaghetti dinner and card game at the heart of The Apartment. Nights of Cabiria showed a woman who kept getting hurt in relationships, and I watched it over and over to try to understand how my parents had hurt each other. Continue Reading »
When a national cinema produces a great director, it isn't always a good thing. The country's film industry can get typecast in the minds of American audiences, who have few reference points. Foreign film distribution in the United States is such that countries end up relying on one filmmaker (Andrzej Wajda for Poland) or on one film (City of God for Brazil) to represent them. While watching the Chinese film Perfect Life earlier this year, I found myself thinking repeatedly about the work of the great filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke; and though the film has many similarities to Jia's work, and though Jia indeed served as an executive producer, I also kept mentally referring to him because he's the only current Chinese filmmaker with whom I'm especially familiar.
The problem's at least 30 years old for Russian filmmakers, many of whom struggle to escape Andrei Tarkovsky's shadow (ironic, considering that Tarkovsky made his last two films in exile). The director's films like Andrei Rublev, Solaris, and Stalker cast a meditative spell over the theater by pulling you into quiet moments of astounding beauty. They remain so ingrained for Western cinephiles that even the best subsequent Soviet directors, like Aleksandr Sokurov (The Sun), can't avoid the comparison. Continue Reading »
As someone who was left less than overwhelmed by Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu's highly praised 2005 film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, I was surprised to find myself thinking more fondly of it after seeing his sophomore feature, Aurora.
At the very least, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, as overlong and one-note as it was, had a clear purpose underlying its deliberately repetitive and purposefully wearisome narrative structure. As an indictment of the ineffectualness of Romania's health care system, Puiu may have stacked the deck against its dying protagonist, but the film nevertheless carried a certain undeniable black-comic force. In Aurora, however, Puiu seems to have started with an idea—telling the story of a seemingly normal individual who, in the course of a day, kills his ex-wife's notary, an innocent female bystander, and his ex-wife's in-laws—but then discovered precious little in the way of actual substance with which to fill up his film. By the end, nothing much seems to have been revealed; whatever Puiu's intentions were in making his movie the way he did, either I was too numbed by the whole empty experience to be able to properly sort them out, or he hasn't successfully communicated it in any meaningful way in the finished film. Continue Reading »
"There were brought together under the Empire and in Paris, thirteen men all equally possessed by the same sentiment, all of them endowed with sufficient force to remain constant to one idea, sufficiently honorable not to betray one another, even when their individual interests conflicted, sufficiently politic to conceal the sacred ties which united them, sufficiently strong to maintain themselves above the law, courageous enough to undertake anything…"
—Honoré de Balzac, History of the ThirteenContinue Reading »
And the prize for most ironic title at the New York Film Festival goes to…My Joy, a wrist-slittingly morose Ukraine/German/Dutch coproduction set in Russia. An art-house variation on the post-apocalyptic road movies that are so popular these days (The Road, The Book of Eli, Children of Men), this relentlessly pessimistic parable gave me a new appreciation for its mainstream cousins' visual flair and narrative clarity. The city life Georgy (Viktor Nemets) leaves in order to deliver a truckload of flour to the boonies looks pretty bleak, but it's a paradise compared to the predatory world he blunders into, where the scars inflicted by WWII are still raw and there's barely a hint of kindness or love to be found. Georgy literally loses his way, then loses his innocence and all sense of hope as he is abused, misused, and left for dead by his glassy-eyed countrymen. Deliberately paced and full of weighty silences, the film lurches from scene to scene with the abrupt illogic of a nightmare. Dogs howl, goats bleat, sadistic traffic cops bludgeon citizens pulled over at random, and then it all repeats until we watch him plod from a pool of light into the murk of a deserted nighttime street, his figure eventually disappearing into darkness. In one of those coincidences that hit you when you watch a string of movies at a film festival, it's the same device that closes Of Gods and Men, whose doomed monks' fade into the white of a snowy hillside—and it feels equally heavyhanded in both films. By the time Georgy fades to black, I felt as hollowed out and stonyhearted as he looks.
The 48th New York Film festival runs from September 24 to October 10. For a complete schedule, including ticketing information, click here.
David Fincher's films coil around an invisible center. His protagonists chase after something that they don't know and can't see, sometimes spending years in the hunt. In his first several features (following a successful career as a music video director), the center held, and the characters uncovered the thing that they were looking for. Ridley zaps the alien; Pitt and Freeman catch the killer; Michael Douglas solves the game; Norton sniffs the masculine high of his inner Tyler Durden; Jodie Foster and daughter finally break out of the room.
But then something happened inside Fincher's movies, something roving and difficult to place. Five years passed after 2002's Panic Room, and when Fincher's next film, Zodiac, came out in March 2007, many audiences didn't know what to do with it. Like Se7en, it was a serial-killer movie, and Fincher used many of his standard techniques, which Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas discuss in a fine video essay: wide lenses, deep focus, swooping crane shots, low-angle tracking shots, crosscutting between events in different locations, shock cuts that punch us toward unexpected spots. A visual whirlwind took us on a search for the killer, but unlike in Se7en, where he's uncovered, Zodiac spends nearly 25 years without finding him. In Se7en, the murderer walks into the police station and cries, "Detectives! I think you're looking for me"; in Zodiac, the chief suspect looks directly into the camera and says, "I'm not the Zodiac. And even if I were, I certainly wouldn't tell you." Continue Reading »
When Alex Timbers was 12 years old, he and an elementary school buddy had their own public access cable show in Manhattan. "It was sketch comedy, very irreverent and strange," Timbers reports. His favorite segment was called "Pyro Time." "We'd buy fireworks and explosives in Chinatown and blow things up—like a giant cod. We'd explode it and then play it back several times in slow motion and play 'Carmina Burana' [on the soundtrack]." Timbers explains that at the time he was going to a straight-laced "coat-and-tie" all-boys school, and the cable show was a way of letting off steam. "So there was an anarchic side waiting to get out." Now at age 32, Timbers is letting some of his anarchy loose on Broadway. He's making his debut on the Great White Way directing two productions you wouldn't think of as typical Broadway fare: Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, a rock musical he co-wrote with composer Michael Friedman, which opens at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on October 13, and The Pee-wee Herman Show, a new version of an early 1980s comedy show created by and starring Paul Ruebens, which begins performances at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on October 26. 
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