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Part Coen brothers and part James L. Brooks, Alexander Payne makes comedies about serious stuff like abortion and midlife crises. His characters may verge on caricature and his scripts on contrivance, but nuanced acting and lingering close-ups make their emotions feel vividly, even painfully real.
His best film since Election, aside from the segment he directed for Paris Je T'aime, The Descendants is based on a novel written by a young woman, Kaui Hart Hemmings, which may explain why the two girls in the story feel so well-rounded. But then, Payne has always gravitated toward interestingly prickly female characters, from the glue-sniffing title character of Citizen Ruth to Election's endlessly ambitious Tracy Flick and the impetuous biker played by Sandra Oh in Sideways.
The main women in this story are Matt King's (George Clooney) wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), and the couple's two daughters, 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and 17-year-old Alex (Shailene Woodley), both of whom are acting out like crazy as the story begins. Elizabeth never speaks a word (we see her first as a gigantic face filling the screen with delight as she rides in a speeding motorboat, then as a comatose husk of a body in a hospital bed), but we get a pretty good sense of her through the things other people say about her—and to her as she lies there, a pale slate for other people to scrawl their emotions on. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alexander Payne, Amara Miller, Citizen Ruth, Election, Ethan Coen, George Clooney, James L. Brooks, Joel Coen, Kaui Hart Hemmings, New York Film Festival, Paris Je T'aime, Patricia Hastie, Robert Forster, Sandra Oh, Shailene Woodley, Sideways, The Descendants
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With The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius stretches a feather-light gimmick to feature-length. The writer-director's tribute to silent movies begins with a movie buff's tongue-in-cheek premise: What if we made a silent movie about the silent film era, where the stars all act the same way in their real lives as they do in their film-within-a-film movies?
It all begins at the end of Hollywood's silent film era, as star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and aspiring starlet Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) meet cute and fall for each other. The rest of the movie chronicles their long journey to a happy ending while their careers careen in opposite directions as he laughs off the talkies as a fad, fading into impoverished obscurity, while she embraces the new technology and becomes one of its biggest stars.
The two mug like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, exaggerating the already extreme expressions and gestures employed by most of the stars of that era. George flashes his blindingly white grin on the red carpet like Dudley Do-Right, and Peppy's signature move—on screen and off—is a two-fingered whistle followed by a blown kiss. But then everyone in this world overacts, even the studio head (John Goodman) who bellows things like "the public is never wrong!" and the audience members who radiate oversized emotion at a screening, some clapping their hands to their cheeks in amazement. Continue Reading »
Tags: Bérénice Bejo, Buster Keaton, Don Juan, Douglas Fairbanks, Esther Dale, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Gloria Swanson, James Cromwell, Jean Dujardin, John Barrymore, John Gilbert, John Goodman, Ken Davitian, Michel Hazanavicius, New York Film Festival, Penelope Ann Miller, Singin' in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard, The Artist
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At the Q&A following the press screening of My Week with Marilyn, director Simon Curtis said he fell in love with the two Colin Clark memoirs the script is based on because of the insights they provided into Marilyn Monroe. A funny thing must have happened on the way to Film Forum though. Either those insights just didn't make it into the screenplay or else Curtis knows a lot less about Hollywood's Lady of Perpetual Sorrow than I had thought was possible for any reasonably well-educated citizen of the developed world.
Michelle Williams's Marilyn is a thinking, feeling human being, but My Week with Marilyn's script is so banal ("I'm not a goddess. I just want to be loved like a regular girl," the poor girl has to say) that she relies almost entirely on body language and facial expressions to convey Monroe's essence. Viewed from a distance or with dark glasses on, she looks remarkable like her, especially when she recreates the funny little dance Monroe's character performs to amuse herself when she's left alone for a bit in The Prince and the Showgirl, the god-awful romantic comedy Monroe was filming under the direction of her co-star, Laurence Olivier (brayed by Kenneth Branagh), during the week of the movie's title. Continue Reading »
Tags: Colin Clark, Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson, Film Forum, Judi Dench, Julia Ormond, Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe, Michelle Williams, Miriam Bale, Mubi, My Week with Marilyn, New York Film Festival, Simon Curtis, Sybil Thorndike, The Prince and the Showgirl, Vivien Leigh
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Iranian director Jafar Panahi made his ironically titled This Is Not a Film with the help of a good friend, documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, after being sentenced to six years in prison for the crime of "preparing an anti-government film." (Mirtahmasb has since been arrested as well.) Alternately funny, sad, and infuriating, the film is a shiv smuggled out of a prison and driven deep into our hearts.
Judging by the digital footage we see here, which was shot while Panahi waited for the results of an ultimately unsuccessful appeal, the prospect of prison was nothing compared to the sense of nerve-shot entrapment brought on by the other half of his sentence. Panahi's real tragedy is that he has been silenced as an artist in the prime of his creative life, forbidden to make films, write screenplays, leave the country, or give interviews for 20 years.
The pain of that gag order is half of the subject of This Is Not a Film. Its conjoined twin is the exhilarating creativity that allowed Panahi to find one last way around his gag rule, creating this remarkable movie and somehow getting it smuggled out of the country on a USB drive baked into a cake. Continue Reading »
Tags: Jafar Panahi, Jeanne Dielman, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, New York Film Festival, This Is Not a Film
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Like a Spanish Woody Allen, Pedro Almodóvar has directed a movie every year or two since 1978, and if not every one is great, almost all are worth seeing. And like a latter-day Douglas Sirk, Almodóvar loves stories about gorgeous, creamily photographed people who commit soap-operatic acts in picturesque settings. His subversive sense of humor and convoluted plots, which often circle back through time, keep his films from being merely melodramatic, but at their worst they can seem frenetic, all color-saturated surface and no substance.
The Skin I Live In lacks the fire and emotional depth of his best work, which includes the brilliant four-film streak that started with All About My Mother in 1999 and ended with Volver in 2006. But it digs deep into the aging wunderkind's bag of tricks to keep us entertained while slipping in a few pointed observations about how our bodies define us and what people—particularly women—will endure to survive. Continue Reading »
Tags: All About My Mother, Antonio Banderas, Douglas Sirk, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, New York Film Festival, Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In, Volver, Woody Allen
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A Separation seems to invent itself as it goes along. It doesn't mirror or mock or play minor variations on some timeworn genre or theme. It just pulls you in, instantly and inexorably, to its perfectly life-sized world. If it feels familiar, it's because it's as poignant, precarious, and endlessly complicated as life itself.
We first meet Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi) in what appears to be a divorce-court hearing. The camera assumes the unseen judge's point of view, so the couple talks directly to it, making their impassioned arguments to each other or to us. Meanwhile, the judge's disembodied pronouncements provide the first of several male voices of authority, embodying Iran's paternalistic, often repressive social structure and its justice system. Continue Reading »
Tags: A Separation, Ali-Asghar Shahbazi, Asghar Farhadi, Dancing in the Dust, Leila Hatami, New York Film Festival, Peyman Moaadi, Sareh Bayat, Sarina Farhadi
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Moving pictures do so many things so well. They teach us empathy for other perspectives. They invent new worlds or show us the old one in a whole new way. They give us the catharsis of a good laugh or cry. They show us the worse that nature—human or otherwise—is capable of, and inspire us to do better. And because they can capture and preserve whole shards of life, they're better than any other art form at evoking the texture of daily life and the passage of time.
So I'm always disappointed by movies that only want to tell us how we should think or feel about a social or political issue. I wouldn't go as far as Capra did ("If you want to send a message, try Western Union"), but why not take advantage of the medium's versatility? Directors need to stage-manage reality, but don't they also need to remain open to the surprises that help infuse life into a film? Not everyone has to be Terrence Malick, getting his cinematographer to stop what he was doing to focus on the butterfly that wound up touching down on Jessica Chastain's arm in The Tree of Life, but I suspect the filmmakers whose work feels most alive make movies partly to learn about what they're filming and to find out what happens when they start the camera rolling, while the ones whose work feels stillborn go in knowing just what they want to show or tell. Continue Reading »
Tags: Allan Stratton, Dennis Foon, Diary, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Jessica Chastain, Keaobaka Makanyane, Khomotso Manyaka, Lerato Mvelase, Life Above All, Magali Charrier, No Boundaries, Oliver Schmitz, Pamela Yates, Restrepo, Rigoberta Menchú, Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life, Tim Hetherington, When Mountains Tremble, When the Mountains Tremble, YouTube
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[Editor's Note: This is the first entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, copresented 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! My Beautiful Laundrette was released in New York on March 7th, 1986 and played throughout the summer at various venues.]
Nineteen eighty-six never seemed as far away as it did when I rewatched My Beautiful Laundrette. What I remembered most fondly about Stephen Frears' film is the sexual relationship between Omar (Gordon Warnecke) and Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), the former school chum Omar hires to do his dirty work after his uncle gives him a laundromat to manage. The film's straight-ahead treatment of that relationship, which is neither pathologized nor played for titillation but simply shown as a fact of both boys' lives, was a boundary that still needed busting in those days. It made Laundrette an instant classic for me, one of those movies that validates your life experience and worldview at a point when it needs validating, making you feel as if you are not just seeing but being seen as you watch it. Seen now, without that brave-new-world charge, the sex scenes seem a little stagey and the chemistry between Omar and Johnny feels lame—especially in the final scene where the two splash water on each other's bare chests, as self-conscious as bad actors in a porno.
Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, like Omar, is a native Englishman with an Indian father and an English mother, and his insider's perspective on the pain of assimilation was also pretty new—and much needed—when the movie came out. I remember absorbing what his screenplay had to say about the xenophobia and cultural dislocation endured by Indian immigrants in Maggie Thatcher's England almost as if I were watching a Frontline documentary. Now that that perspective is no longer so rare in our media universe, what stands out for me is the didacticism of the script's expository dialogue. Omar's Indian relatives are forever making declamatory statements like: "In this damn country, which we hate and love, you can get anything you want. It's all spread out and available. … You have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system." Even one of Johnny's ignorant, Paki-bashing friends gets into the act, warning him: "Don't cut yourself off from your own people…everyone needs to belong." Continue Reading »
Tags: A Room with a View, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gordon Warnecke, Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette, Oliver Stapleton, Roshan Seth, Saeed Jaffrey, Shirley Anne Field, Stephen Frears, Summer of '86
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A frothy fantasy dressed up as a quirky character study, Copacabana is a mishmash of mismatched parts that left me feeling a little queasy. Isabelle Huppert stars as Babou, the kind of boho free spirit who coasts as far as she can on sheer charm and sex appeal. She's still childlike in middle age, not just because Huppert gives her the wide-eyed, unbroken gaze of a curious toddler, but because she operates on impulse, never stopping to consider the consequences of her actions. As a result, her daughter Esme acts more like her mother, working at a restaurant to pay the rent the job-allergic Babou can't be relied on to scrape together. But when Esme (Huppert's real-life daughter, Lolita Chammah) announces that she's getting married and doesn't want her mother at the wedding to embarrass her, Babou decides it's time to get a job and show her daughter that she can be responsible. Continue Reading »
Tags: Auntie Mame, Aure Atika, Copacabana, Isabelle Huppert, Kate Winslet, Lolita Chammah, Marc Fitoussi, New Directors/New Films
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On paper, Microphone sounds remarkably like Nobody Knows About Persian Cats, another documentary-style feature about a vibrant but endangered underground music scene. Both are set in Muslim countries with repressive governments, and both showcase young people who are trying to change an ancient city and culture. But Microphone, the second feature by director-writer Ahmad Abdalla, is to Persian Cats as the kiddie pool is to the deep end. Continue Reading »
Tags: Ahmad Abdalla, Egypt, Khaled Abol Naga, Microphone, New Directors/New Films, Nobody Knows About Persian Cats, Tah
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"A film about violence without violence," as the production notes put it, El Velador is deliberate, repetitive, and deceptively peaceful. Watching it feels at first as if you're eavesdropping on someone else's daydream, as director/producer/DP/editor Natalia Almada captures the rhythms of daily and nightly life in a Sinaloa cemetery in a quiet flow of images that gains power with surprising speed, breaching the seawall of our preconceived notions to impress upon us the horror of the war being waged on civil society in Mexico by a handful of drug cartels.
Lining the central road through the cemetery and extending several rows back are a forest of elaborate mausoleums that look like high-end haciendas in miniature. A construction crew comes in every day to build more and Almada is there to document their work, her lingering close-ups of bare feet and deteriorating shoes clinging to precarious perches personifying the grace and resilience that are characteristic of Mexico's campesinos. Continue Reading »
Tags: El Velador, Natalia Almada, New Directors/New Films
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When she and writer-director Dee Rees were trying to turn their short film into a feature, says producer Nekisa Cooper in Pariah's production notes, potential funders kept saying it was "a bit too 'small and specific.'" Specific? Sure. But there's nothing small about this deeply felt coming-of–age story.
Pariah's Alike (pronounced Ah-lee-kay and played with grave sensitivity by Adepero Oduye) is a Fort Greene teen who's learning to trust her instincts and find her place in the world. Shy and often unsure of herself, but rock-solid at her core, Oduye's Alike is a 17-year-old searcher you can believe in. Her story is a classic adolescent quest, complicated by the fact that she's gay in a world where a lot of people, including her tightly wound mother, think homosexuality is an abomination. Continue Reading »
Tags: Adepero Oduye, Bradford Young, Dee Rees, Kim Wayans, Nekisa Cooper, New Directors/New Films, Pariah, Paula Patton, Pernell Walker, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
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When people ask whether the Allies could have done more to save Europe's Jews from Hitler during WWII, the conversation usually turns to who knew what when, or why some military maneuver would not have been possible. The Karski Report casts that question in a whole new light.
The problem, says Polish resistance hero Jan Karski, is that the Allied leaders were incapable of grasping the nature and extent of the horror of the Holocaust when it was unfolding, since nothing remotely like it had ever happened. "Healthy humanity, rational humanity who did not see it with their own eyes, they could not handle it," he says. In fact, adds Karski, in a 1978 interview Claude Lanzmann conducted for his nine-and-a-half-hour masterwork Shoah, even he can no longer "handle" the thought of what he saw, after 35 years in the U.S. Continue Reading »
Tags: Claude Lanzmann, Felix Frankfurter, Film Comment Selects, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jan Karski, Shoah, SobiborSobibor October 14 1943 4 P.M., The Karski Report, Un Vivant Qui Passe
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An appealing little oddball of a movie, Septien is ironic yet genuinely sweet. Writer-director Michael Tully's hipster Southern gothic starts slow, its long takes giving us plenty of time to adjust to the laconic rhythms of a family farm that's home to two brothers who get paid by the government not to work the land. Amos (Onur Tukel) spends most of his time in the barn, making cartoonish paintings that serve up an American goulash of football, sex, and violent death. Wilbur (Jim Willingham), the brothers' sweet but slow former farmhand, lives outside in a tractor tire and spends his days like Of Mice and Men's Lennie, stroking his kitty or digging up buried treasures. Ezra (Robert Longstreet) plays mom, cooking, cleaning, and clucking over the others. Continue Reading »
Tags: I'm Still Here, Jim Willingham, Joaquin Phoenix, Michael Tully, Of Mice and Men, Onur Tukel, Robert Longstreet, Septien, Sundance Film Festival
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Aaron Cutler, Kenji Fujishima, and Elise Nakhnikian, who covered this year's New York Film Festival for The House Next Door, shared some thoughts via email about the event as a whole and its highlights after the last press screening (Clint Eastwood's Hereafter).
The House Next Door: What trends did you notice among this year's festival films?
Aaron Cutler: First, the old guys came to play this year. Clint did a surprisingly lazy job on Hereafter, but otherwise the filmmakers over 70—Abbas Kiarostami, Jean-Luc Godard, Frederick Wiseman, Jean-Marie Straub, Raúl Ruiz, and the 101-year-old Manoel de Oliveira—produced not just several of the festival's best movies, but also the most inventive and formally daring. I kept thinking about how Buñuel locked in after he turned 60, producing the slyest and wisest movies of his career. A truly great artist, as all these people are, can stay great over time—by practicing, by reading and watching more, and by understanding better how the world works. Kiarostami and Godard's films say more about how people interact with technology now than any current Hollywood film does.
Speaking of the globe, the festival offered a nice glimpse of what's happening in world cinema. Romania blazed past every other country's collective output, with the masterpiece The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauseşcu, the fantastic Aurora, and the really good Tuesday, After Christmas showing why the Romanian New Wave is still the best national movement. The French films—Of Gods and Men, Carlos (problematic calling it French, I know), Black Venus, and even Film Socialism—felt too abstractly intellectual, and the Russian duo of My Joy and Silent Souls conveyed strong emotion without strong structure. Though the American studio films—The Social Network, The Tempest, and Hereafter—reminded me why I rarely go to multiplexes, this year's independent and documentary choices (Meek's Cutoff, Boxing Gym, several of the American pre-main slate shorts and selections in the Views from the Avant-Garde programs) were quite strong. Continue Reading »
Tags: Another Year, Aurora, Black Venus, Boxing Gym, Certified Copy, Film Socialism, Hereafter, Meek's Cutoff, New York Film Festival, Poetry, Revolución, The Social Network, The Tempest, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
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Film Comment Selects 2011: The Karski Report
by Elise Nakhnikian on February 21st, 2011 at 11:00 am in Festivals, Film
When people ask whether the Allies could have done more to save Europe's Jews from Hitler during WWII, the conversation usually turns to who knew what when, or why some military maneuver would not have been possible. The Karski Report casts that question in a whole new light.
The problem, says Polish resistance hero Jan Karski, is that the Allied leaders were incapable of grasping the nature and extent of the horror of the Holocaust when it was unfolding, since nothing remotely like it had ever happened. "Healthy humanity, rational humanity who did not see it with their own eyes, they could not handle it," he says. In fact, adds Karski, in a 1978 interview Claude Lanzmann conducted for his nine-and-a-half-hour masterwork Shoah, even he can no longer "handle" the thought of what he saw, after 35 years in the U.S. Continue Reading »
Tags: Claude Lanzmann, Felix Frankfurter, Film Comment Selects, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jan Karski, Shoah, SobiborSobibor October 14 1943 4 P.M., The Karski Report, Un Vivant Qui Passe
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