J. Hoberman reports on the death of his friend and Bob Dylan muse Suze Rotolo.
Last night's intro to the Academy Awards, featuring Franco and Anne Hathaway:
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.
Thomas Harlan's Wundkanal indicates its seriousness through a bevy of distancing techniques: hideous industrial settings, suffocating framing, a washed out palette of blues and blacks, long interrogations that loop back on themselves. These are crucial touches, the first steps the director takes in approaching the mountain of reasons that might have stopped him from making this film. They act as both ritual of purification and a clear signal of what it will not be, flushing away any pretense of entertainment, narrative, explanation, or answers.
Harlan's father was the notorious Veit Harland, director of the repugnant Jud Suss and one of the creative forces behind the Nazi propaganda machine. It's a huge legacy to overcome, and rather than attempt to explain or confront it, Harlan explodes the entire situation in one virtuoso outburst. Wundkanal is a messy, ugly movie, but it's also an outstanding document, one of the few to approach the Holocaust with absolute deference to its enormity. Continue Reading »
The ascendance of the stuttering king and Oscar's perceived instantaneous regression into the mottled pastures of White Elephant Cinema (how quickly we forget The Reader) has rendered some of our most reliable barometers speechless. Suddenly, the movie no one wanted to pay attention to became the movie all your friends and relatives who see two movies a year have seen and just know is the best picture of the year. What can one say in the face of that? Even dependable crank Armond White, who had been working himself up a pretty good head of anti-Social Network steam leading up to an Ingracious Basterd-worthy final snit as MC of the New York Film Critics Circle awards, has been more or less reticent in the wake of The King's Speech's dozen proofs in support of the theory that dusty linens, not bloody tourniquets and certainly not hackers' grease-stained pizza boxes, are the fabric that holds Oscar together. And why shouldn't he remain mum? There's no one this year to disabuse of the notion that Oscars actually matter. Continue Reading »
Leave it to Andrew Lau, the director most famous for co-helming Infernal Affairs, to drown a staid, fool-proof setup for success in grandiose tragedy and pseudo-significance. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen takes the blind ra-ra nationalism and the star of the recent blockbusting Ip Man movies and produces nothing memorable beyond a few hyper action scenes that are sure to give you a rush of blood to the head. These scenes tease you with the promise of a unique spin on the formula that Ip Man and Once Upon a Time in China before that, and Fists of Fury before even that, originally laid down. Basically: A conservative local hero stands up for his community by leading them in beating up callous and wholly unwelcome foreigners. If anything, Lau's film only proves that that subgenre of wuxia films is here to stay and no amount of uninspired storytelling can kill it. Continue Reading »
Six. That's the number of times the DGA winner has failed to win the Oscar. Advantage: Tom Hooper. Two thousand and three. That's the last time the DGA winner didn't seize the Oscar, which went to Roman Polanski instead of another Harvey Weinstein-backed newcomer, Rob Marshall. Advantage: David Fincher? Not exactly. Fincher, even though he's never roofee'd a girl in Jack Nicholson's Jacuzzi, doesn't have sentiment on his side. (Note to the chilly auteur: It's okay for the awards process to make you uncomfortable, just ask Danny Boyle, but at least pretend to want to be in its spotlight.) One clear advantage for Fincher was securing the support of the stiff upper lips who make up BAFTA's directors branch, but by how many votes did he best Hooper? More or less than the number of votes Hooper beat Fincher by for the DGA prize? And how many of those Fincher-favoring BAFTA directors will also cast Oscar votes? Enough to null Hooper's advantage once you consider all those TV directors who voted for the DGA (which didn't, by the way, reward Hooper for John Adams) are taken out of the equation? In the end, you don't have to have the mind of John Nash to come up with a formula that factors all of those scenarios, along with the prevailing mood of Oscar's non-director branches (we know how their respective guilds went down), and doesn't end with Hooper taking this in a walk. We know the Oscars have agreed with critics more than usual this past decade, making very respectable choices for Best Picture since Crash won the top prize, but with more than one critic hailing the The King's Speech the best film of the last decade, it really is looking like it's going to be a Ron Howard sort of year.
Fan Mail: First, I want to thank "Biglil," who wrote in on US#68 to correct some factual errors in Pirate Radio. In today's world I'm all for getting one's facts straight, since there is so little of it going around.
Third, in today's bullets can't kill it category, "Samm" insisted in a comment on US#69 they (and I am not sure what "they'" he was talking about) are all Hero's Journey films. Sigh. Continue Reading »
by staff on February 24th, 2011 at 10:34 pm in Music
[Editor's Note: House Playlist is a series dedicated to highlighting our favorite new singles, leaked songs, and album tracks. Found something we should hear? Let us know!]
James Blake, "Love What Happened Here." James Blake's well-received debut foregrounds silence and process, repetition and accumulation, but "Love What Happened Here," a non-album cut that premiered on British radio last week, proves that the 22-year-old likes making twitching club tracks just as much as headphone masterpieces. After opening with stabs of brassy synths, "Love What Happened Here" brims over with fidgety, pitch-shifted vocal chirps that culminate in a ringing organ sample that Blake jubilantly cuts apart. The business here makes it a piece with his Bells Sketch EP, hinting that it may have been dusted off to satiate the growing demand for his music. Either way, it's more evidence that everyone had best believe the hype. Ross Scarano
"What would we do without drama?," asks a highly educated city worker (Louis Cancelmi) in the first segment of Adam Rapp's The Hallway Trilogy, an energizing, delightfully anarchic kick in the pants to a rather sleepy theater season—and you wonder if Rapp included such a line so that he was able to answer it himself through this triptych of plays, each seemingly from a slightly different hemisphere in his whirling psyche. Examining a Lower East Side apartment floor through the years 1953, 2003, and eventually 2053, and how social mores and deviant behavior modify their way through the decades, it's likely to become Rapp's crowning achievement, not simply in how beautifully his already-patented vision weaves with his blessedly talented new collaborators, but in how you can see his push-pull feelings of love and discontentment with societal tides of change immersing themselves in the enticingly confining spaces of the Rattlestick, which has been stunningly reconfigured into a large rectangular tenement floor. Continue Reading »
Even before it delves headlong into a maelstrom of severed appendages and demon-id masculinity, Cold Fish makes it readily apparent that the center (a.k.a. middle-class normalcy) cannot hold. We open on a young woman, Taeko (Megumi Kagurazaka), as she grabs packages of microwave rice and soup from a fluorescent-drab grocery store. Writer-director Sion Sono injects these moments with frenzied portent, slicing up her shopping into assaultive fragments of suburban mundanity. Unnamed anxieties continue to hum beneath the surface once Taeko returns home and prepares a terse meal for older husband Shamoto (Mitsuru Fukikoshi) and Mitsuko (Hikari Kajiwara), her resentful stepdaughter from Shamoto's previous marriage. Mitsuko's quick exit from the dinner table and Shamoto's subsequent failed seduction of Taeko points to the everyday dysfunction churning within the family. Just how deep the rot goes, however, initially comes in flashes, as when Shamoto briefly recalls Mitsuko kicking a prostrate Taeko in the stomach and screaming at her for daring to replace her deceased mother—a scene that Sono shoots and edits with the same frenzied queasiness as the opening. Continue Reading »
While maybe not quite as tight as this category was in 2007, at which time we guessed correctly that Tilda Swinton would take the trophy from the likes of Cate Blanchett, Amy Ryan, and Ruby Dee practically by default, once again Best Supporting Actress is giving Oscar prognosticators everywhere the fear of—gasp!—getting one category wrong. The only candidate everyone feels pretty safe writing off without a qualm is Jacki Weaver, whose performance as Animal Kingdom's quasi-incestuous Ma Barker picked up a citation from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, but whose slow-burning presence in the film doesn't really start to accrue merit points until long after some voters could be expected to hit eject. Continue Reading »
Back to Seitz, who explains how FX's struggling TV western Justified has redeemed itself.
Included in the Criterion Collection's release of Fish Tank is an essay on the Andrea Arnold by Ian Christie, which is now available online.
Oscar talk with Leonard Maltin and Mike Tyson:
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.
It would be hard to believe that Gus Van Sant hadn't seen The Velvet Underground and Nico, Andy Warhol's landmark recording of an hour-long performance by the band, before he made Last Days. Like Van Sant's movie, one scene of which shows its listless characters rocking out to the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs," Warhol's film is in absolute lockstep with the textures of its soundtrack. The bandmates jam in a windowless room of Warhol's Factory, the camera frenetically panning and zooming over the faces of Lou Reed (pale and zombie-like, but also badass in sunglasses that seem pasted on his face), Nico (who does no actual singing here, though she does manage to attack her guitar strings with a knife), and Nico's toddler son, a blond boy who slaps at a tambourine from underneath his mother's feet, looking like he's either immersed in this world or completely confused by it. Continue Reading »
Perhaps the most significant thing about City of Life and Death is that American viewers will finally get the chance to see it. A box office hit in its native China, Lu Chuan's divisive epic about the Nanking massacre courted enormous controversy almost from the start. Pulled from Chinese theaters over an uproar about, among other things, the movie's positive treatment of a central Japanese character, the picture was similarly yanked just weeks before its scheduled New York debut at Film Forum following stalled negotiations between the film's then-U.S. distributor, National Geographic Entertainment, and the Chinese Film Board. Newly acquired by Kino International, City of Life and Death is now set for a May 2011 release following its New York debut at Film Comment Selects.
But is the film worth all the hassle? Clearly the depiction of a perennially touchy historical event remains a sore spot for a Chinese nation seeking to reinvent itself as a world power, but for the American viewer, it unfolds as one more mediocre historical epic, combining black-and-white Scope photography, half-drawn character sketches that edge toward the sentimental, and enough acts of brutality to insist on the significance of its own content. And while certainly no one would deny the significance of a brutal occupation that resulted in the murders of up to 300,000 people and the rape of tens of thousands of women, Lu's film, unlike other recent movies dealing with the same events (even the forgettable John Rabe was far more intellectually curious), is stubbornly uninterested in historical analysis, only in dramatization. Continue Reading »
Film Comment Selects 2011: Wundkanal
by Jesse Cataldo on February 28th, 2011 at 10:00 am in Festivals, Film
Thomas Harlan's Wundkanal indicates its seriousness through a bevy of distancing techniques: hideous industrial settings, suffocating framing, a washed out palette of blues and blacks, long interrogations that loop back on themselves. These are crucial touches, the first steps the director takes in approaching the mountain of reasons that might have stopped him from making this film. They act as both ritual of purification and a clear signal of what it will not be, flushing away any pretense of entertainment, narrative, explanation, or answers.
Harlan's father was the notorious Veit Harland, director of the repugnant Jud Suss and one of the creative forces behind the Nazi propaganda machine. It's a huge legacy to overcome, and rather than attempt to explain or confront it, Harlan explodes the entire situation in one virtuoso outburst. Wundkanal is a messy, ugly movie, but it's also an outstanding document, one of the few to approach the Holocaust with absolute deference to its enormity. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alfred Filbert, Film Comment Selects, Jud Suss, Our Nazi, Robert Kramer, Thomas Harlan, Veit Harland, Wundkanal
No Comments »