[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 »
[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.]
Jason Bellamy: Alexander Payne films don't have the distinct visual styles of movies by Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson, to name two other filmmakers of his generation, but they are quickly recognizable just the same. Payne's five feature films are quasi-tragic comedies with hopeful but not fully redemptive conclusions about people struggling with significant life changes. Protagonists in Payne's movies are always flawed. Relationships are usually difficult, distant, damaging, or all of the above. And deception is commonplace. On the face of that description, Payne's movies mustn't seem distinct at all. In fact, I think I just described every crappy romantic comedy from the past decade or more. But what sets Payne apart is the way he applies these themes—unflinchingly exposing his characters' worst tendencies before ultimately regarding them with great sympathy—and, even more so, who he applies them to. If Payne's films are known for anything, it's for being about average Americans, emphasis on the "average."
Of course, at the movies, where Jimmy Stewart can be considered an "everyman" and Kathrine Heigl can be cast as the proverbial "girl next door," "average" is never ordinary, which is precisely why Payne's characters generate so much attention, because they're often ruthlessly unexceptional. Ruth in Citizen Ruth (1996) is a promiscuous glue-huffer who becomes a pawn in an abortion debate. Jim in Election (1999) is an awarded high school teacher who can't outsmart his students or pull off an extramarital affair. Warren in About Schmidt (2002) is a retiree with no interests or usefulness. Miles in Sideways (2004) is a writer who can't get published, a wine snob who can't control his drinking and an introverted romantic who can't move on from his divorce. Matt in The Descendants (2011) is a husband who doesn't know his wife and a father who doesn't know his kids. And those are just the main characters.
Because Payne's characters tend to live modest lives (some of them in modest Middle America), and because Payne is so fearless in his examination of their faults, and often uses his characters' shortcomings as mechanisms for humor, his films have often been attacked as condescending. In this conversation we'll go into each of the five films mentioned above, as well as Payne's memorable vignette from 2006's Paris, Je T'Aime, which does little to deflect the accusations of condescension. But let's start by addressing the elephant in the room. Ed, does Alexander Payne look down his nose at his characters, or ask us to mock his characters, for being unremarkable? Is his humor mean-spirited and class-conscious? In short, is he condescending? Continue Reading »
[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.]
[Additional note: Barry Lyndon will screen as part of the Museum of the Moving Image's "See it Big!" series on December 30th and January 1st. Click the links for more information and mark your calendars.]
Jason Bellamy: Both in chronology and in tone, Barry Lyndon is Stanley Kubrick's cinematic middle child. Sandwiched between more provocative films like Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Barry Lyndon is comparatively subdued, straightforward and introverted. Overlooked, too. Released in 1975 to less than breathtaking box office figures and only slightly more enthusiastic reviews, the film has since gained a considerable amount of praise and respect, yet it remains somewhat underground. Part of Barry Lyndon's relative anonymity is due to its surroundings: one mountain amongst a mighty range, all too easily ignored in the vast panorama of Kubrick's achievements. Part is attributable to the self-perpetuating cycle of anonymity (I suspect Barry Lyndon might be the most unseen of the Kubrick films I mentioned above, making it difficult to attain grassroots popularity). Part might even be attributable to the film's unsexy poster, which became its unsexy VHS/DVD cover. (Back in the day when folks used to browse Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, which cover do you think popped off the shelf: this one or this one?) But I suspect the biggest reason Barry Lyndon is overlooked is because of its slow, deliberate, drawn-out pace and, this is crucial, its lack of a signature moment.
What I mean by the latter is that Barry Lyndon, so far as I can tell, has no iconic image or quote or scene or plot twist. Based on the 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, and adapted for the screen by Kubrick himself, Barry Lyndon tells the story of a man who thirsts for love and loses it, thirsts for wealth and finds it, thirsts for status and nearly attains it, and then loses it all. It's the story of a man who engages in duels, war, cons and affairs. And yet despite all that action, despite all that conflict, Barry Lyndon unfolds with astonishing evenness. I wouldn't say it's an emotional flatline, because that would imply lifelessness, but it's certainly an atypically level film. Almost monotonously so. While Howard Hawks said that a good film is three good scenes and no bad ones, Barry Lyndon might be described as a long film with no great scenes and no bad ones. If that sounds like an insult, I don't mean it to. Rather, it's an attempt to capture the feeling of watching this film. As Martin Scorsese said of Barry Lyndon, "People didn't get it when it came out. Many still don't. Basically, in one exquisitely beautiful image after another, you're watching the progress of a man as he moves from the purest innocence to the coldest sophistication, ending in absolute bitterness—and it's all a matter of simple, elemental survival." In many ways, Barry Lyndon is a simple, elemental film, too, is it not? Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly 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: The sudden resolution at the end of Steven Spielberg's Jaws is one of those great, absurd movie moments that makes me really giddy, that never fails to put a grin on my face. It's a (literally) explosive climax to a film that, despite its reputation as a nonstop fright-fest, isn't liberal with these kinds of grand, cathartic gestures. I realize that's maybe an odd thing to say about a movie that's credited with being one of the very first summer blockbusters. In 1975, buoyed by a massive national marketing campaign and one of the earliest applications of the "wide release" distribution strategy, Jaws quickly achieved unprecedented commercial success, becoming the highest grossing film of all time. Although Jaws' record was surpassed just two years later by George Lucas' Star Wars, another harbinger of a changing Hollywood, the success of Spielberg's film was a big factor in shifting movie distribution from slow release patterns and word-of-mouth hype to huge marketing pushes and national saturation.
In retrospect, Jaws the film (as opposed to its marketing) is an unlikely candidate for such an important place in movie history. It is a thrilling, scary, often darkly funny movie, a great and entertaining movie, but its sensational content aside, it doesn't have a whole lot in common with what we now think of as summer blockbusters: grandiose effects spectacles with massive budgets, amped up as loud and fast as possible. In comparison, Jaws feels like a very classical film, a taut thriller where the first half is a succession of build-and-release suspense/horror sequences, and the second half is exclusively about three men in a boat, alternately bullshitting in the cabin and chasing a killer shark. The special effects are rough, the shark is often unconvincing, and indeed Spielberg and his crew were plagued with problems involving the mechanical sharks. The effects limitations led to what turned out to be a brilliant aesthetic as well as practical decision: the shark is often not shown, especially in the first half, where the briefest glimpses of a fin or a tooth-filled maw, coupled with indirect evidence of the beast's viciousness and tremendous size, are sufficient to induce dizzying terror.
This is a long way from Transformers: technologically of course, but also in spirit. Although Jaws wound up ushering in an era where bloody, explosive spectacles dominate the summer moviegoing season, Spielberg's film is clearly working on a much smaller scale. The film is rooted in Hollywood classicism, populated with idiosyncratic characters who have plenty of room to speak and interact in between the action/horror set pieces. About the closest the film comes to modern blockbuster territory is the improbable mayhem of the climax, but by that point a moment of excess after two hours of simmering tension and restraint feels more than earned. That climax can still make me giddy, over thirty-five years after the film debuted, because it's a true catharsis, a product of an era before blockbuster filmmakers strove to make every moment seem cathartic and overpowering. Unlike successors that pummel viewers with nonstop "thrills" for two hours or more, Jaws modulates its violence and action with Hitchcockian suspense and quiet character moments, and as a result its bigger notes (like that irresistibly grin-inducing final showdown) hit that much harder. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly 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.]
Jason Bellamy: Terrence Malick's fifth film hadn't crawled beyond Cannes, New York or Los Angeles before speculation intensified about the director's future projects. It's a natural reaction, I suppose, given that Malick once went 20 years between pictures; as important as it is to have Malick in our present, his fans also want reassurance that he'll be back again—eventually if not immediately, later if not soon enough. According to reports, Malick's fans can rest easy: leftover footage from this film is planned for a documentary, and principal photography has wrapped on what is now being referred to as a Ben Affleck-Rachel McAdams project, even though Malick's tendencies in the editing room could reduce those headliners to bit players by the time the film premieres. Malick will turn 68 this November, but barring any health problems it seems safe to assume we haven't seen the last of him. And yet The Tree of Life feels like a swansong.
It's epic, daring and almost painfully heartfelt. It's ambiguous and overt. It deals in spirituality and science. It either alludes to Malick's previous films or liberally borrows from them: tokens buried underground as in Badlands; a snake illustration straight out of Days of Heaven; a woman on a swing as in The Thin Red Line; a (street) lamp shining against the midnight blue sky as in The New World; and so on. It's the summation of all that Malick seemed to be and a doorway to something beyond that. It's an unmistakably personal film—a conclusion I reached long before I learned that it's quasi-autobiographical, too. It's the kind of film you might expect from a director who worries that he might never make another one—a pull-out-all-the-stops, bounce-the-check-to-the-undertaker, this-time-for-sure purging of the soul. It's as if to die in peace Malick needed to get The Tree of Life off his chest.
It's his most challenging film, and perhaps his messiest, too. And for those reasons in particular it took a second viewing for me to fully appreciate its scope, its intimacy and its intricacies—which isn't to say I've figured it all out or come to peace with a sequence that might be the most disappointing in Malick's career. But when I watch The Tree of Life I'm overwhelmed by the sense that I'm witnessing the work of a filmmaker who feels he has run out of time for holding back. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly 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.]
Jason Bellamy: "When did everything start to have an expiration date?" That's a question posed by a lovelorn cop in Wong Kar-Wai's 1994 film Chungking Express, and in a sense that line is a snapshot of what Wong's films are all about. In the 20 years and change that Wong has been directing, he's developed several signature flourishes that make his films instantly recognizable—from his striking use of deep, rich colors, to his affinity for repetitive musical sequences, to his judicious use of slow motion for emotional effect, and many more—but at the core of Wong's filmography is an acute awareness of passing time and a palpable yearning for things just out of reach. In the line above, the cop in Chungking Express is ostensibly referring to the expiration dates on cans of pineapple, which he's using to mark the days since his girlfriend dumped him, but in actuality he's referring to that failed relationship, to his (somewhat) fleeting youth (he's approaching his 25th birthday) and to the deadline he has created for his girlfriend to reconsider and take him back. In the cop's mind, at least, whether they will be together has as much to do with when as with why. Or put more simply: if timing isn't everything, it's a lot of it.
That theme pops up again and again in Wong's films. Roger Ebert zeroed in on it in his 2001 review of Wong's In the Mood for Love when he observed of the two lead characters, "They are in the mood for love, but not in the time or place for it." While that's particularly true of Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan, it could readily be applied to almost all of Wong's lead characters. In this conversation we're going to discuss Days of Being Wild (1990), Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love (2000), 2046 (2004) and My Blueberry Nights (2007), and over and over again we'll see characters united by emotion but kept apart by timing. So I'd like to open by asking you the following: Do the recurring themes of Wong's body of work strengthen the potency and poetry of the individual films or water them down? Put another way, are Days of Being Wild and Chungking Express enhanced by In the Mood for Love and 2046 or obliterated by them, or are they not significantly affected one way or the other? Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly 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: The opening titles of Bernardo Bertolucci's infamous 1972 film Last Tango in Paris lay out, in an especially naked way, the themes and aesthetics of the film to come. The titles sequence is backed by two paintings by Francis Bacon, whose work inspired Bertolucci during the filming of Last Tango in Paris: first, on the left half of the screen, an image of a man in a white t-shirt reclining on a red couch, his body contorted and grotesque in contrast to the seeming languor of his posture; then, on the right half of the screen, a woman sitting primly in a wooden chair, her legs awkwardly crossed and her face, like that of the man, a jumble of distorted features. Only at the end of the credits are the two images placed side by side, and the film's whole story is encompassed by that single gesture: two tortured, haunted, isolated figures placed together as a study of separate lives, separate pains briefly united. The psychological torment suggested by Bacon's figures—which seem to be writhing, contorting, straining at the stasis of the paintings, all of their internal ugliness written into their bodies and faces—carries over into the rest of the film.
The man in this diptych is Paul (Marlon Brando), an American abroad in Paris, dealing—rather badly—with the very recent suicide of his French wife. The woman in the diptych is Jeanne (Maria Schneider), a French girl who Paul meets in a rotting, trashed apartment where he pulls her into a violent sexual entanglement, an escalating game of debasement and sex-as-conflict. The simple device of preceding the film proper with Bacon's ugly/provocative figures, with their fleshy pink tones and sprawling ruin, suggests how we should read these characters, and if it wasn't clear enough already, the film opens with Paul practically in mid-scream, a howl of unrestrained anguish that's hardly drowned out even by the roaring train passing overhead. It's tempting to think that Last Tango in Paris is about sex, for obvious reasons, but it's not really. It's about pain. The characters—and Bertolucci—simply use sex as a tool to express things that actually have very little to do with sex itself.
Still, there's no doubt that the sex got—and continues to get—most of the attention. Pauline Kael, in an ecstatic (I'm tempted to say orgasmic) review, praised Bertolucci for bringing eroticism to the movies. (She goes on to make more nuanced arguments, which I'm sure we'll get to later; I can't think of another movie that seems as linked to a single critic's response as this film is with Kael.) Norman Mailer, responding to Kael, said the film would have been better if it'd been more extreme, more sexually explicit, more real: "Brando's real cock up Schneider's real vagina would have brought the history of film one huge march closer to the ultimate experience it has promised since its inception." But that's missing the point, no? Did Bertolucci bring sex to the cinema with Last Tango in Paris, or is all that sex just a red herring for the film's real concerns? Continue Reading »
Filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas recalls the making of Empire with Andy Warhol—sneaking in, sandwiches, and screenings.
"Some shows are literally too good for network TV" according to Matt Zoller Seitz, and one of them is surviving—and thriving—on TNT.
For The New York Times Review of Books, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana converse about the confusions and occasional pleasures of the annual Hollywood awards season.
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.
[The Conversations is a monthly 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: The idea of the modern western as an art of deconstruction has become so engrained in today's film culture that it's disconcerting when a new western comes along that doesn't take a revisionist stance on the once-beloved Hollywood genre. Westerns don't get made very much these days, but when they are we expect them to be in the lineage of Peckinpah or Leone rather than the old Hollywood craftsmen who made the genre so ubiquitous in the 1940s and '50s. You see where I'm going with this, I'm sure. Although most film fans would expect a Coen brothers western to be a sardonic, revisionist take on the genre, True Grit, Joel and Ethan Coen's first proper stab at a genre that has often haunted their work in spirit, is a good old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness western in the classical tradition.
This actually shouldn't be surprising. There are markers of western style in many other Coen films, notably O Brother Where Art Thou? and No Country for Old Men: the love of landscapes, the gruffly poetic language, the stark morality, even the fascination with hats that runs through Miller's Crossing, for in what other genre besides the western do hats mean so much? True Grit might be the Coens' first actual western, but it's such a natural fit for them because they've always kind of seemed like western filmmakers in a deeper sense. This is why the Old West milieu, sparsely populated as it is with oddballs and degenerates and criminals, feels like an extension of the Mexican border towns of No Country for Old Men, or the wasted Northwestern wilds of Fargo, or even the backwards suburban absurdity of Raising Arizona.
True Grit is an adaptation of a 1968 novel by Charles Portis, which was already made into a film in 1969 by director Henry Hathaway, starring John Wayne in the role that won him his only Oscar. Though the Coens' film differs from Hathaway's in several important ways and numerous smaller ones—apparently because the Coens follow the novel, which I haven't read, more faithfully than Hathaway did—the two films also share a good amount of common ground. What's ultimately most striking about the Coens' film is how traditional it is, how unshowy and subtle. It balances humor and darkness and action, and it does so within a wholly classical context. First and foremost, it's just a great story and a great western, and its humble artifice is very refreshing. Continue Reading »
[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. This is Part II of a discussion of Darren Aronofsky. Part I, covering his first four films, can be found here. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]
Ed Howard: Jason, you ended the first half of our conversation about Darren Aronofsky by wondering both where the director would go next after his first four films and which Aronofsky would be represented in Black Swan, his fifth feature. Throughout that exchange, we mostly divided Aronofsky's career in half, considering Pi and Requiem for a Dream as blunt, bleak rehearsals for the more fully realized explorations of thematically similar territory in The Fountain and The Wrestler. So I suppose it's appropriate that for the first half of Black Swan, I found myself thinking I was watching another Requiem for a Dream, while the second half ventured into the richer, deeper territory of Aronofsky's more recent career. It's appropriate, too, that the film itself is so concerned with halving and doubling, with mirrors and doppelgangers, built as it is around a production of the ballet Swan Lake in which the dancer Nina (Natalie Portman) is asked to play the dual role of the Swan Queen and her dark rival, the titular Black Swan.
It's a fascinating film, and especially so in the context of Aronofsky's career, because it feels like such a consolidation of everything he's been exploring and dealing with in his other work. I haven't read any reviews of Black Swan yet, but I feel pretty confident predicting that at least a few of them will call it "The Wrestler in ballet slippers," or something similar, and they will be more or less accurate. As in The Wrestler and his other films, Aronofsky is exploring his protagonist's singleminded pursuit of her obsession, in this case Nina's pursuit of dancing perfection. As in The Wrestler, Aronofsky is recycling familiar cinematic clichés, drawing on the backstage movie's tropes of domineering mothers, neurotic stars, ambitious rivals, aging hasbeens, and predatory/sexual relationships between male directors and female performers. In working with these clichés, however, Aronofsky reinvests them with vitality and freshness through the raw intensity of his filmmaking.
Nina wants, desperately and obsessively, to be "perfect," though the film itself eschews this purity for grime, chaos and fragmentation, mocking Nina's desire to be perfect by running her through an increasingly harrowing gauntlet of real and imagined trials and terrors. Black Swan begins in methodical, observational realism and slowly morphs, like a woman becoming a swan, into a psychological horror film, a dizzying fever dream that haunts the audience and the central character alike. I'm still wrestling with this dense film, and I'm sure we'll delve more into its substance and its connections to Aronofsky's oeuvre throughout this conversation. But one thing I'm already sure of is that I can't forget this film; it's provocative and viscerally exciting and visually compelling. I haven't totally resolved my feelings about this film or its effect on me, but I'm already sure that it has affected me. Continue Reading »
[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.]
Jason Bellamy: I first learned of Darren Aronofsky in 1998 when I stumbled upon an episode of the CBS show 48 Hours, back before the series was obsessed with mysteries. The episode in question was called "Making It," and it chronicled the lives of various people who were, or seemed to be, on the cusp of losing their anonymity. Among those featured were author Nicholas Sparks, actor Vin Diesel and Aronofsky. Sparks, at that point, had already transitioned from modest pharmaceutical salesman to bestselling author with The Notebook, and Diesel, by the time of the show's airing, had already landed a role in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, which would become the most talked about film of that summer. Those men had, to one degree or another, "made it." But Darren Aronofsky's ascension seemed a little less certain. "Making It" documented Aronofsky's efforts to sell his debut feature film Pi, the creation of which had been financed through the donations of family and friends, at that year's Sundance Film Festival. And, sure enough, by the end of Sundance, and by the end of 48 Hours, Pi had a buyer. Aronofsky's film was a success. But, at least in my mind, Aronofsky hadn't quite made it. It's one thing to find a studio willing to write a check to distribute a film that's already in the can. It's another thing to get that check ahead of time, to become a contracted filmmaker.
I begin with that story because today, 12 years later, Aronofsky has certainly "made it," and yet he remains somewhat anonymous and/or indistinct. Perhaps his upcoming film, Black Swan, which we'll cover in the second part of this conversation, will change that. But at the moment I wonder if Aronofsky's name means anything to the average moviegoer, the kind of person who makes it to the theater about four times a year, perhaps to see a pair of blockbusters and a pair of Best Picture nominees. Between Pi and Black Swan, Aronofsky has directed just three films—Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Fountain (2006) and The Wrestler (2008)—so perhaps it's Aronofsky's modest output that keeps him somewhat overlooked. Or maybe Aronofsky's films, though far from inaccessible or alienating, aren't mainstream enough to make him a household name. (X-Men Origins: Wolverine 2 might change that.) But I suspect that the main reason Aronofsky isn't better known among average moviegoers is due to his lack of a specific reputation or legend among film buffs. Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain and The Wrestler are each, to some degree or another, controversial films, but Aronofsky himself isn't a polarizing figure. His name doesn't spark an immediate opinion among cinephiles in the fashion of Christopher Nolan, M. Night Shyamalan or Alfonso Cuaron, to name some filmmakers who have been releasing movies for roughly the same amount of time. Continue Reading »
The 50 Greatest Science-Fiction Movies of All Time according to Glenn Kenny.
House contributor Max Winter recently started a small press, Solid Objects, with the poet and translator Lisa Lubasch. Their first book, Jim Shepard's Gojira, King of the Monsters, tells—per Winter—"the story of Eiji Tsuburaya's life at the time he was conceptualizing the man-in-a-suit technique for Toho's predecessor to Godzilla in the 1950s." Earlier this month, Mike Harvkey reviewed the title for Publisher's Weekly.
Coming in February from the Criterion Collection: Senso, The Sweet Smell of Success, Amarcord, Fish Tank, Still Walking, and The Double Life of Véronique.
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: 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:An Autumn Afternoon, the final film of Yasujiro Ozu, opens with an image that goes a long way towards establishing the film's distinctive tone and atmosphere. It is a patiently held shot of a factory with red-striped smokestacks spewing puffs of white smoke into the breeze, an image that is simultaneously industrial/modern and poetic/timeless. The sequence of images that follows—indicative of Ozu's characteristic "pillow shots" that establish setting and mood—traces the flowing smoke to a view through an open window, past which the smoke billows, and a hallway where the smoke casts a gently drifting shadow on the wall. Finally Ozu cuts to a shot of the film's central character, the aging businessman Hirayama (Chishu Ryu), with the smoke drifting by outside, glimpsed through the window next to his desk. This evocative, wordless introduction effortlessly glides from the macro to the individual, bringing the viewer into Ozu's unique world in the process.
By the end of his career, Yasujiro Ozu had developed a singular style and a set of themes and stories that were wholly his own. He was a director from 1927 to 1962, with World War II as an interruption dividing his early string of Hollywood-influenced comedies, melodramas and genre pictures from the mature style of his later years. An Autumn Afternoon is both representative of that style—quiet, carefully paced, built around static and strikingly framed shots—and a potent exemplar of the richness and emotional complexity of Ozu's work. Like all his post-war films, it is a domestic drama concerned with the tensions of post-war Japan, with the gap between generations in a rapidly changing society, with the dialectic of traditionalism and modernization, and especially with the ways in which these forces and ideas are reflected within the Japanese family.
An Autumn Afternoon, though it wasn't intended as Ozu's swan song, is fitting as a summation of his career, another of his subtle variations on his signature concerns. Like the voluminous steam clouds that eventually become a wisp of smoke in the background, An Autumn Afternoon is concerned with both the big picture changes affecting Ozu's society and the individuals living within that society. Continue Reading »
[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.]
Jason Bellamy: For one of my younger brothers, 2010 was the summer of music. Approaching his junior year at the University of Oregon, he spent the past few months attending about every concert that came his way in the Pacific Northwest. The criteria seemed to be this: If the concert was within driving distance and featured loud (preferably metal) bands that hadn't had a big hit since before he was born, he was going. And so he rocked to Iron Maiden, Cinderella, the Scorpions, Billy Idol, and more. He rocked at large arenas and relatively intimate county fairs, sneaking up to the front of the stage when he could to snap pictures that he would eventually file along with similar snapshots of bands like AC/DC and KISS.
My brother loves music—if he's partial to rock and metal, he's rather indiscriminate within that genre (if you couldn't tell). But I think the biggest reason my brother attends concerts is because he loves the energy of the live events, where he doesn't just hear the music but feels it, too. Even when you're pressed shoulder to shoulder with other attendees, and even when the musicians are so far away that you need to rely on the video screens to see the musicians' expressions, there's something very intimate and magically visceral about concerts. You can know every note and lyric of a band's work from listening to their albums, but somehow seeing them live makes us feel as if we know them better, or know them for the first time.
Maybe that phenomenon is what inspires filmmakers to make concert documentaries in the first place: the challenge of simulating the feeling of being there. There are numerous films about musical artists—from A Hard Day's Night (1964) to Elvis: That's the Way It Is (1970) to Bob Dylan: No Direction Home (2005) to This Is It (2009)—some of which go backstage, some of which play historian, some of which are hardly about music at all, and so there's no way we could have an all-encompassing discussion about that larger cinematic genre and its many sub-genres. Still, it's a genre worth tackling, and so in this discussion we're going to focus on five films—Woodstock (1970), Gimme Shelter (1970), Stop Making Sense (1984), Rattle and Hum (1988) and Instrument (2001)—that despite their incredible diversity have one thing in common: their chief aim seems to be to replicate the sensation of being there. And in the case of the first film, Woodstock, the music might be the least interesting part of that experience, am I right? Continue Reading »
Werner Herzog's latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is an exploration (in 3D!) of the Chauvet Caves, an area that Herzog identifies, romantically and poetically, as the place "where the modern human soul was awakened." It would seem like a typically Herzogian grandiose description, if not for its essential accuracy: These caves contain the oldest discovered pictorial depictions to emanate from the human hand. The caves are thus an obvious symbol for the birth of human creativity, for the development of the uniquely human urge to document one's world and to communicate about it. For an artist like Herzog, this is an irresistible conceit. At one point in this film, a scientist remarks that the difference between the Neanderthal and the more modern, more human successor, the Paleolithic man, was precisely this flowering of creativity in carved icons, cave paintings and even crude musical instruments, like a flute carved out of ivory. Herzog's film resulted from a rare opportunity to explore these caves, which are jealously protected and sealed off from casual inquiry; normally, only a select few scientists ever get to see the cave interior, and even then only in limited ways. Continue Reading »
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