The representation of Cuba in cinema is exceptionally difficult to separate from its political context. Whenever the island is invoked in the movies, narratives turn into statements, if not full-blown mystery plays, designed for the exorcism of geopolitical demons. It's something that can be seen all the way from Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's landmark interrogation of his post-revolution society in Memories of Underdevelopment to the imperialist bombast of Bad Boys II and its "Let's invade Cuba, and do it right this time" finale.
Along with the premiere of the architectural documentary Unfinished Spaces, this year's Los Angeles Film Festival shone an international spotlight on Cuba, screening a quartet of films from and about the island nation. The films run a gamut of genres from reflective documentary to romantic comedy, but they are all unified by the ease in which one can read them simultaneously as small-scale reflections of life in Cuba and as footnotes in the political conversation. Continue Reading »
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To celebrate the New York Asian Film Festival's 10th anniversary, the Subway Cinema gang (Daniel Craft, Paul Kazee, Grady Hendrix, Goran Topalovic, and Marc Walkow) has programmed one of their most consistent and exciting lineups to date. The festival has always been fueled by kinetic and highly idiosyncratic pop cinema from across Asia, and though there are no films that achieve the level of gonzo excellence of former NYAFF titles like The Taste of Tea, Ping Pong, Running on Karma, or Survive Style 5+ do, even the most mediocre-looking films at this year's fest are worth watching. Continue Reading »
Unnatural Acts, a new play at the Classic Stage Company, takes us back to period of intolerance that is hopefully unthinkable today. It focuses on events from nearly a century ago, when, in 1920, a panel of administrators at Harvard University embarked on campus-wide investigation aimed at exposing and then expelling homosexuals in the student body. Triggered by the suicide of a student off-campus, the inquiry resulted in another's on campus a few weeks later, and 14 convictions. All evidence of the so-called "Secret Court" was subsequently covered up and it was not until 80 years later that the transcripts of the unprecedented proceedings came to light when Amit Paley, a student reporter for The Harvard Crimson, stumbled upon a reference to it in the university archives. He gained access to some 500 pages of documents in the buried files and broke the story in 2002. Since then, the story of the gay witch hunt at the Ivy League institution has become the subject of a 2005 book-length study by William Bright, a 2009 movie, Perkins 28, in which Harvard undergraduates reenact the student testimonies, and Veritas, a play by Stan Richardson presented at last year's New York International Fringe Festival. Unnatural Acts, which compellingly portrays the young men whose lives were deeply affected by investigations, is collectively written by members of a new ensemble company Plastic Theatre. Associate artistic director at the CSC, Tony Speciale, who conceived and directed this project, spoke recently with the House about the production. Continue Reading »
A hearty welcome to indieWIRE's new blog, the Matt Zoller Seitz-curated Press Play, which is built around original video essays and critical, personal writing about movies, TV, music, comics and whatever else interests its contributors.
The Ohio House of Representatives on Tuesday voted to ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detectable, which can be as early as six weeks.
For Filmmaker, Lauren Wissot covers this year's Edinburgh Film Festival.
Seriously, get off our fucking lawn: Glenn Beck and family encounter hostility in NYC.
And this is why…
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.
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, co-presented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United!Labyrinth was released in theaters on June 27th, 1986.]
Ludo is my favorite character in Labyrinth, but hold that thought for a moment. I identified with Jennifer Connelly's protagonist, Sarah, and not just because we're both drop dead gorgeous. Connelly is saddled with babysitting her younger sibling, putting a damper on her adolescence. In retaliation, she does something I did numerous times growing up: She wishes for someone to come take her brother away. Unlike my desperate pleas, her call is answered by the Goblin King, Jareth (David Bowie). What David Bowie wants with a toddler is too scary to fathom, and the dark side of Jim Henson knows this. Note the scene where Bowie tosses the boy high in the air, then walks away as he plummets to the ground. (Don't worry, a goblin Muppet catches him.) Hell, listen to the chorus of "Magic Dance," one of the catchy, memorably superb songs Bowie performs in the film. No good can come of this kidnapping. Continue Reading »
Bombay Bicycle Club, "Shuffle." On London quartet Bombay Bicycle Club's sprightly and infectious new single, "Shuffle," the keys of some secondhand piano are hammered frantically, an obscure vocal sample adds intensity to the bridges and refrains, while Ed Nash's work on the bass is surely his funkiest to date. And though Jack Steadman's vocals are, for the most part, modest and reserved, his falsetto harmonies as "Shuffle" reaches its blissful crescendo are a delight. The single rekindles the dynamism that was somewhat absent from last year's Flaws, but it also retains that album's intimacy and proves Bombay Bicycle Band doesn't have to go acoustic to bare their softer side. Huw Jones
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.
A lady recently called up Photofest, the company that licenses film stills, to ask for photos of Marilyn Monroe, and the rep asked this lady if she wanted photos of Monroe from any particular movie. "Oh?" the lady replied. "She made movies?"
The rep was shocked, but if Marilyn Monroe is better known today than classic movie stars like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck, it's not because everybody is revisiting her films. Still photos of Marilyn have become iconic fixtures of dorm-room walls, retro-diner displays and chintzy t-shirts. Last week I was walking by a framed-photo table on 42nd Street in Manhattan and noticed a grotesque hologram drawing of Monroe set up in such a way that her clothes magically disappeared as you passed. She posed for nude photos herself to pay the rent in the late '40s, of course, and adoring Hugh Hefner has even bought the plot next to Monroe's grave, but I doubt Monroe would have wanted to spend all eternity next to the founder of Playboy magazine. Wouldn't she have preferred some sweet, bespectacled intellectual or scientific genius? Surely such geniuses might be found, for everybody seems to have a thing for Marilyn Monroe. The urge to sentimentalize her has become chronic.
According to IMDb, there are 69 print biographies available on Monroe, which sounds like a dirty Billy Wilder joke meant to test the inflexibility of her comic obliviousness. Anyone with any interest in Monroe has dipped into some of these books, which go from the most salacious gossip compendiums like Marilyn Monroe Confidential to such self-consciously literary meditations as Norman Mailer's Marilyn and Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde, and I have to say that almost every one of these bios that I've encountered manages to insult Monroe in a way that kindles protective urges. I'm not a particular Monroe fan, but even I wanted to take that peek-a-boo hologram on 42nd street and hide it somewhere, or get a Joe DiMaggio type to come smash it up. In her films, Monroe sometimes seems like a toddler who has grown into a lascivious dirty-drawing body, and our continuing national obsession with her says a lot about America's vexed relationship to sex and to the idea of eternal childhood. Telling YouTube comment from "someguynamedaaron," below a clip of Monroe from The Seven Year Itch (1955): "she seems so innocent which makes her so FUCKING HOTT!"
To read the rest of the article at Alt Screen, click here.
Get Spike Jonze's "Scenes from the Suburbs" while its hot.
Matt Zoller Seitz has problems with Treme's impatient rythms.
The TSA tries to keep it real
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.
Björk's been promoting her forthcoming Biophilia app/album/thing with the kind of dodgy auteur shenanigans that may not translate directly into hype (which, thanks to Twitter, is now more or less objectively quantifiable), but which do have the minimal advantage of preempting any kind of parody. Her website's been rejiggered into a trippy, interactive mobile, her upcoming concerts will apparently feature, among other Seussian contraptions, a "30-foot pendulum that harnesses the planet's gravitational pull to create musical patterns," and in recent interviews she's been throwing the word "app" around in a fashion equally suggestive of futurism and senility. Fine by me. Björk's most esoteric album to date, 2004's Medúlla, is also among her best, and so my policy is to indulge Mrs. Matthew Barney in all pretensions so long as the music works. Continue Reading »
There's been an incredible amount of snow in Los Angeles this week. It's coming in from Alaska, from Wisconsin, from Latvia; it's all up on screen, with a considerable number of movies set in bleak white snowscapes. Maybe there's nothing more exotic to Southern Californians than seeing people in heavy overcoats and riding snowmobiles. This sense of snow is most apparent in the trio of Québécois films, which all share distinct commonalities, screening at the festival. Besides being utterly blanketed in snow, these French Canadian films are all methodically paced and play with the passage of time. They dissect the functioning (or dysfunction) of the family unit, and are preoccupied with notions of personal isolation and mortality. While not necessarily bearing the markers of a distinct or organized film movement, these contemporary offerings from Quebec all spring from similar sensibilities. Continue Reading »
"We killed Jesus—we're proud of it!" a yarmulke-wearing teenager taunts a Christian peacemaker in Giulia Amati and Stephen Natanson's This Is My Land…Hebron, a startling glimpse into life at ground zero of the Israeli occupation. The doc begins with a pace-setting, arresting opening that swiftly crosscuts between images of daily life, from soldiers to street markets, while anonymous voiceovers stubbornly insist on the right of Jews to settle in Hebron. This contested territory is home to 160,000 resentful Palestinians, 600 hardcore Israelis who've plopped themselves down in the city center, and 2,000 Israeli soldiers, many not too keen on having to defend fellow Jews who order them around as if they were their own private security force. One Ha'aretz journalist says he hates going to Hebron above every other occupied city since it's the most brutal. Indeed, but even the physical violence pales in comparison to the psychological torture inflicted on the city's residents every day. The stones young Jewish kids throw at their Arab neighbors while their approving parents watch might not always make it through the wire fences the Palestinians are forced to live behind for their own safety, but the emotional blows delivered are as heavy as a boulder. Both sides live in a city in which hate is nurtured right along with the olive trees. Continue Reading »
From Steven Boone, a happy New York love story, other than the part about money.
Cute:
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.
Though Sonic the Hedgehog celebrated his 20th birthday yesterday, the spiky-haired Sega mascot's appeal has always come down to his enduring teenage spirit: He tears through every environment (be it side-scrolling 2D levels or his very iffy forays into 3D games) at a breakneck pace, he aloofly throws innumerable hand gestures at the player to put the accent on each victory, and he'll start impatiently tapping his feet and checking his nonexistent watch if you ignore him for longer than five seconds. Sonic had always served as the edgy antithesis to a certain squeaky-clean Italian plumber, the unruffled cool to offset the loveable buffoon, the Rolling Stones to Nintendo's genial and affable Beatles. And while bridges have since been built between the two, a collaborative effort between Sonic and Mario would have been unthinkable at the peak of the early-'90s console wars. To declare your childhood allegiance to Sonic over Mario spoke volumes, and hinted that your next 10 years might be spent listening to Beck and watching Tarantino films. Continue Reading »
Unnatural Acts, a new play at the Classic Stage Company, takes us back to period of intolerance that is hopefully unthinkable today. It focuses on events from nearly a century ago, when, in 1920, a panel of administrators at Harvard University embarked on campus-wide investigation aimed at exposing and then expelling homosexuals in the student body. Triggered by the suicide of a student off-campus, the inquiry resulted in another's on campus a few weeks later, and 14 convictions. All evidence of the so-called "Secret Court" was subsequently covered up and it was not until 80 years later that the transcripts of the unprecedented proceedings came to light when Amit Paley, a student reporter for The Harvard Crimson, stumbled upon a reference to it in the university archives. He gained access to some 500 pages of documents in the buried files and broke the story in 2002. Since then, the story of the gay witch hunt at the Ivy League institution has become the subject of a 2005 book-length study by William Bright, a 2009 movie, Perkins 28, in which Harvard undergraduates reenact the student testimonies, and Veritas, a play by Stan Richardson presented at last year's New York International Fringe Festival. Unnatural Acts, which compellingly portrays the young men whose lives were deeply affected by investigations, is collectively written by members of a new ensemble company Plastic Theatre. Associate artistic director at the CSC, Tony Speciale, who conceived and directed this project, spoke recently with the House about the production. 
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