Change isn't something that comes easily to Harlan County. Through Justified's first two seasons, we certainly discovered new facets of Harlan's seedy underbelly, but we haven't seen much about Raylan Givens's (Timothy Olyphant) hometown actually change. It's an insular place filled with a lot of ignorant people and a lot of guns. Its ways of doing things are firmly established.
This likely serves to constantly frustrate Raylan, a man who would rather forget his formative years in Harlan altogether. He leaves town for most of his adult life, but when he returns, the place is still populated by the same folks kicking around the same stories. Life in Harlan doesn't remind Raylan of his past; it is his past. And the version of Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) we see in this week's episode might argue that this is exactly the way it should be. Continue Reading »
The story of Boca do Lixo filmmaking began a few years before any of its movies. In 1962, The Given Word, the story of a man who becomes a local hero for demanding entry into a church despite authority's refusal, became the first Brazilian film to win the Palme D'Or at Cannes. The film insightfully analyzed Brazilian social inequalities of religion, gender, class, and race, but also humanized its characters well enough to give the film mass appeal. In a way similar to how Rashomon's top prize at Venice a decade earlier created a profile for Japanese cinema in the West, The Given Word's prize alerted European cultural elites to Brazilian film. Continue Reading »
by staff on January 31st, 2012 at 1:27 pm in Music
Wild Nothing, "Nowhere." While "Nowhere" features Jack Tatum's distinct vocals, the tracks' production and overall instrumentation are obviously upgraded from the likes of the echo-y Golden Haze EP, the last batch of songs Tatum released under his Wild Nothing moniker. Surprisingly, "Nowhere" is downright jangle-pop, with a twangy, lighthearted tone that's miles away from the C86-inspired jams of Tatum's past work. With a hint of twee sentimentality, a dash of accordion chic, and a little help from Twin Sister's dainty-voiced Andrea Estella, "Nowhere" calls for constant reminders that it's not a Tatum side project, simply Wild Nothing heading in a new, conceivably wonderful direction. Mike LeChevallier
Author Damien Bona, who I met some 15 years ago right out of NYU and humbled me not long after by thanking me in the pages of Inside Oscar 2, passed away yesterday at the age of 57. He will be missed for his wit, sensitivity, and bringing sanity to the yearly Oscar chatter.
As modest and self-explanatory as its lower-case title suggests, small roads is James Benning's latest contemplation of American landscape as an awesome man-made sculpture. In contrast to RR, which was focused on moving railway vehicles, small roads examines the ways in which paths—firmly asserted in asphalt and only occasionally traversed—shape the visible world.
Shot with digital camera over the course of two years (even as Benning was working on other projects), the movie arrives barely annotated, so that you need the director himself to point out its underlying geographical journey—starting in California and headed first to the South, then to the Midwest. What we see are 47 immobile shots of roads in a roughly organized order that follows the succession of the seasons. At first, the structuring principle seems to be that each shot has one moving car in it before the image peters out. It comes as a minor shock, then, when shot number eight ends with no vehicle appearance whatsoever. From then on, all bets are off—in a manner of speaking. Continue Reading »
Gus: What do I know, Ace? All four of his legs reach the ground.
That exchange, between two of the leads on the new HBO series Luck, concerns Pint of Plain, the race horse that Chester "Ace" Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) owns by way of his driver and bodyguard Gus Demetriou (Dennis Farina). Gus is fronting for Ace, who's recently been released from prison and can't legally own a horse until he's off parole. But he knows as much about horse racing as most viewers probably do—which is to say, not much. Those expecting to get a primer on the sport will be disappointed by Luck's first episode, written by creator David Milch (Deadwood) and directed by his co-executive producer, Michael Mann. But that's not a criticism; what Milch and Mann have always been most effective at is getting to the substance of a specific subculture through stylistic means. Continue Reading »
Sharon Bar-Ziv's debut feature, shot over the course of five days after an intense period of rehearsals, strives for a handheld immediacy and raw emotional power that it only intermittently achieves. More than anything else, Room 514 plays like a stripped-down, if not downright impoverished, version of A Few Good Men, in which an army newcomer's zeal is pitted against the unwritten, near-atavistic code of old timers and their ruthlessly programmed minions.
When Anna (Asia Neifeld), a Russian-born Israeli soldier serving as an MP, starts to interrogate members of an elite "Samaria Wolves" battalion about an alleged incident of excessive anti-Palestinian violence, she opens a can of worms quite impossible to handle. A young woman standing up to her supposed peers, she has to deal with a torrent of verbal abuse, ranging from sexist remarks ("You cunt") to political allegations ("You leftie") to ethnic slurs ("You little Russian"). Her dignity undermined but her resolve undaunted, Anna grows steadier in her sense of purpose after one of the soldiers decides to cooperate. But then things take a unexpectedly tragic turn. Continue Reading »
In the 1960s, a branch of Brazilian cinema emerged so daring, thrilling, and varied that in hindsight people disagreed even over what to call it. For critic-filmmaker Jairo Ferreira, who chronicled the movement, its unconventional narratives and formal audacity made it the "cinema of invention"; for filmmaker-critic Glauber Rocha, briefly a member but chiefly part of the rival Cinema Novo movement, its films were "udigrudi," a Brazilian spin on the American underground. The consensus term, finally, was Cinema Marginal, and though many of the movement's titles were censored by Brazil's military dictatorship, it meant marginal and not marginalized. To be marginalized implies a passive victimization; to be marginal can—and often did—suggest a proud self-definition. Continue Reading »
As a Southern-gothic fairy tale about post-Katrina New Orleans, Beasts of the Southern Wild could have easily turned out to be a crass and unwittingly exploitative work. Co-writer/director Ben Zeitlin's fanciful approach to his understandably touchy subject matter theoretically seems glib. Thankfully, every time Zeitlin and co-writer Lucy Alibar threaten to oversimplify their story with mawkishly twee sentimentality, they steer the film's elemental narrative in another direction. The hopefulness that viewers take away from the film, the most buzzed-about title at this year's Sundance, feels earned thanks to Zeitlin and Alibar's focus on their characters' fears of imminent abandonment and annihilation. As a film about the seductive and essential power of hope, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a warm, accomplished, and fitting tribute to the fighting spirit of New Orleans.
This is the film you might get if Terry Gilliam conflated David Gordon Green's George Washington with Alice in Wonderland. We follow Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a six-year-old girl that lives with her single father, Wink (Dwight Henry), in a remote region of New Orleans only referred to as "The Bathtub." Since Hushpuppy spends much of her time by herself, all of her fears are filtered through a convoluted system of icons and symbols. This proves that she's a product of her environment. She listens to animals and people's hearts because her father has a heart condition, fears cannibalism after a Bathtub resident teaches her that all living things are "meat," and even fantasizes about wild rampaging boars because Wink has a big fat black hog on his farm. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: Poster Lab is your weekly dose of movie poster dissection, wherein the House examines the pluses, minuses, and in-betweens of the poster design(s) for a buzzworthy film.]
Bradley Cooper is an actor in a fairly common predicament. He's blessed with movie-star looks, yet he still needs to play characters with non-movie-star occupations. For Cooper, this is especially problematic, since it's tough to imagine him doing much of anything besides looking handsome, staying handsome, and watching televised sports. So right off the bat, there's an element of unintended comedy to the poster for The Words, which etches Cooper's face out of printing-press type because his character's a writer.
Something is up in Hollywood. This is the second movie in two years to cast Cooper as a working author (the other was the gonzo, pro-drug "drama" Limitless). What is it about Cooper that makes him seem, to filmmakers, like a plausible wordsmith? The slightly-boho shaggy hair? The serious arch of his pointed nose? That he was the small dash of brains in The Hangover's Wolfpack? The synopsis for The Words describes Cooper's character as "a writer at the peak of his literary success." At the risk of looking at things in stone-cold, stereotypical terms, that's not unlike casting Tara Reid to play an archaeologist. Continue Reading »
Shut Up and Play the Hits, Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern's documentary about the emotional toll that LCD Soundsytem's final live show had on frontman James Murphy, dances around the fact that the band was essentially a solo act. (Though Murphy performed all of the instruments on LCD Soundsystem's self-titled debut, a number of people, Nancy Whang and Pat Honey among them, became an integral part of the band's sound after Murphy took the album on the road.) This is presumably the reason why Murphy is the only person associated with LCD Soundsystem who's interviewed in the film and therefore gets to tell us what the end of the band signifies.
Since we know Murphy isn't retiring from making music, why are we seriously mourning the death of what was originally a one-man band? The answer is we're not really mourning, because Murphy isn't completely serious about burying the band. The doc starts with a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek epitaph: "If it's a funeral, let's have the best funeral ever." Still, there's genuine sentiment behind that opening intertitle. This is shown in footage of Murphy dazedly walking around after the band's final performance and later during a lunchtime interview conducted by Chuck Klosterman. He also tells the crowd at Madison Square Garden that he wears his father's watch while performing for good luck, which suggests he's sentimental about the prospect of ditching the band. But isn't it enough that Murphy will just move on to his next project? Continue Reading »
The London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony will reflect "people's Games," and hundreds of children will be pulled from ghettos all over the world for the production, says Danny Boyle.
[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a House feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]
Ed Howard: If there's anything that can excite an impassioned debate among film fans, it's the topic of 3D. The technology has been around for a long time in one form or another—the first 3D films were released in the 1950s—but its popularity tends to wax and wane, sometimes reaching peaks where it's a huge fad and a box office draw, while at other times the technology falls into disfavor and disuse. We are currently, without a doubt, in the middle of one of 3D's peak periods, and there are even those, like James Cameron, who argue that 3D is the future of film. It's pretty rare these days for any big animated film or summer blockbuster to get released to theaters without being in 3D, and older hits from the Star Wars series to Titanic are being refitted and re-released with 3D effects grafted on.
Our entry point for this conversation is provided by the release of two 3D family/adventure flicks made by esteemed directors working in the 3D format for the first time. Martin Scorsese's Hugo and Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin are very different movies, both in their own right and in how they use 3D. Scorsese's latest work is a deeply personal (but also, paradoxically, uncharacteristic) ode to the early cinema, a formalist celebration of the joys of movies. Spielberg's film, an adaptation of the beloved comics by Belgian artist Hergé, is arguably less of a personal work, a propulsive, often funny, action movie that hardly ever pauses for breath. Though both films share a certain witty European sensibility and both are family-friendly crowd-pleasers, it's hard to imagine two more different movies in terms of tone: the breathless, wide-eyed wonder of Hugo and the kinetic, nearly slapstick violence and adventure of Tintin.
Precisely because these films are so different, and because they're the product of two highly respected American directors rather than just two more disposable holiday-season spectacles, they provide a perfect opportunity to discuss the merits of 3D, to consider whether this technology really is, as filmmakers like Cameron seem to think, the future of film and a valuable aesthetic tool, or if it's simply a faddy gimmick that's cycled back into popularity before people get tired of it again. These films provide an interesting case study for these questions. One curiosity is that the brasher, louder Tintin arguably uses 3D effects much more subtly and minimally than the comparatively low-key Hugo, which suggests that 3D can easily be separated from the other elements of a film's style and tone. I wonder if that disconnect between 3D and the rest of a film's elements provides some proof for the viewpoint that 3D is an unnecessary gimmick rather than a truly vital means of expression. Continue Reading »
Hitting theaters this week is Man on a Ledge, a rather unsubtly titled thriller that stars Sam Worthington as a guy whose nowhere-left-to-turn predicament has him doing the old wave-down-at-the-masses bit. This isn't the first time Worthington has flirted with dizzying precipices (his motion-captured doppelgänger braved the floating mountains of Pandora), and it certainly isn't the first time Hollywood has tormented acrophobics. Movies have long been living on the edge, ever intent on serving up vicarious vertigo. For proof, here's a list of 15 memorable movie ledges, from cliffs to rooftops to ominous subway platforms. Safety nets not included. Continue Reading »
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