Archive: Festivals
Billed by one audience member as "our generation's La Dolce Vita," Rick Alverson's The Comedy isn't quite as beautifully elegant as the Federico Fellini classic. But it's depiction of disaffection, fraught with punishing close-ups and squirm-inducing behavior, is a convincing picture of a generation in crisis, with a group of artists disconnected from both feeling and their art. All this from a movie that opens with tubby men in briefs spraying beer on each other in slow motion.
Swanson (Tim Heidecker) is a different breed of man-child, one whose immaturity exhibits itself in a kind of half-joking cruelty toward everyone, including his circle of like-minded friends. Straddled with a dying father and a considerable estate, he hides from his problems inside a floating metaphor (his yacht, bobbing along in the East River) anesthetized to most elements of everyday experience, encased in a protective shell of irony and sarcasm. This shell is represented both sartorially (ever-present blue sunglasses, jokey combinations of cut-off shorts and too-small button-downs) and in Swanson's friends, which include Tim and Eric collaborator Eric Wareheim and a host of familiar musicians, from James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem to Richard Swift and Will Sheff. Continue Reading »
Tags: Eric Wareheim, Federico Fellini, James Murphy, La Dolce Vita, LCD Soundsystem, Los Chidos, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Richard Swift, Rick Alverson, SXSW, The Comedy, The Mars Volta, Tim Heidecker, Will Sheff
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In tackling the harsh realities of the international modeling industry, Girl Model, David Redmon and A. Sabin's documentary about a specific corner of the modeling industry, forgoes the expected activist-exposé approach and trains a more intimate eye on a handful of players in order to open up a window into the layers of complexity and self-delusion that make this world turn. Two people figure most prominently in the film: Nadya, a 13-year-old model from Siberia who goes to Tokyo to try to begin a modeling career, and Ashley, an American former model turned scout who discovers Nadya in the first place.
Nadya's understanding of her financial obligation to her family in embarking on this modeling career doesn't wipe away the feelings of homesickness and dislocation she feels intensely once she's in Japan; a tearful phone call she makes to a seemingly uncomprehending mother is heartbreaking to witness. Ashley is, in many ways, the more compelling subject, however. She's been working within the modeling industry for 15 years now, even though when she was starting out as a model herself she vowed she wouldn't stay in the industry for this long. Even now, as trapped in the modeling world as she still is, she admits to the filmmakers that she feels no particular passion for it, but that she's too afraid of trying out a new field to even think about doing something else for a living. Continue Reading »
Tags: 45365, A. Sabin, August: Osage County, Bill Ross, David Redmon, Frederick Wiseman, Girl Model, Killer Joe, Matthew McConaughey, SXSW, Tchoupitoulas, Tracy Letts, Turner Ross, William Friedkin, William Zanders
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Descended from a long line of small-parcel farmers, Andrew Beck Grace embarks on the project behind Eating Alabama in an attempt to get back to the land, only to find that the lifestyle he yearns for no longer exists. Accompanied by his wife Rashmi, the couple returns to their home state and takes on a trendy challenge: eating only locally sourced foods for an entire year. This proves more difficult than they'd imagined—a problem Grace uses as the impetus for a 62-minute exploration into food provenance and farm culture.
Less angry and strident than recent issues documentaries like Food Inc., the film operates on a personal ground level, opening with the couple's first grocery run, which devolves into a two-hour, 800-mile journey. Combing the local landscape for like-minded food providers, they discover that such suppliers are disconcertingly rare. Unlike the mythical agricultural South inhabited by people like his grandfather, who eventually left the farm to settle in the suburbs, the current food landscape is now largely under corporate control, with food giants like Monsanto exerting tight control over the industry. Facing this harsh reality, as well as the truth that the past he romanticizes may not have been as rosy as he imagines, Grace resorts to combing through the weeds, finding the small farmers who remain and examining their stories. Continue Reading »
Tags: Andrew Beck Grace, Eating Alabama, Food Inc., La Camioneta, Mark Kendall, Monsanto, Rashmi Grace, SXSW
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Horror cinema subversiveness need not preclude actual horror, a fact that's unfortunately lost on The Cabin in the Woods, a brainchild of writer turned director Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, Lost) and co-writer Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) that sets aside actual scares for what's-going-on suspense and diminishing-returns cleverness. Genre aficionados both, Goddard and Whedon are interested in playing with convention in slyly self-conscious ways throughout this collaboration, embracing clichés while reconfiguring them in ways that are both surprising and, more fundamentally, speak to the relationship between horror filmmaker and viewer. It's a potentially exciting endeavor that reaps initially intriguing rewards, as the early sight of apparent government agents Steve (Richard Jenkins) and Richard (Bradley Whitford) discussing mundane everyday stuff while prepping for work in a steel subterranean facility immediately implies—especially thanks to the abrupt, jarring full-screen title credit that ends the scene—that the forthcoming material will be more than it initially appears. What that might be, however, remains shrouded in mystery once attention turns to college student Dana (Kristen Connolly), her suddenly blonde BFF Jules (Anna Hutchison), her studly boyfriend Curt (Chris Hemsworth), his nerdy-hunky friend Holden (Jesse William), and stoner Marty (Fran Kranz)—typical horndog types travelling out to Curt's cousin's remote cabin for a weekend of secluded drinking and sex. Continue Reading »
Tags: Anna Hutchison, Bradley Whitford, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Chris Hemsworth, Cloverfield, Drew Goddard, Fran Kranz, Jesse William, Joss Whedon, Kristen Connolly, Lost, Richard Jenkins, SXSW, The Cabin in the Woods
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Sara Driver's Sleepwalk ends at a curious impasse: Two key characters pass like ships in the night before settling into separate, oppositely composed shots, one defiantly asleep beneath the Brooklyn bridge, the other blindfolded beneath the Manhattan. It's a strange conclusion, but the perfect one for this loopy 78-minute reverie, which feasts alternately on the picture-postcard New York skyline and twinkling glimmers of downtown idiosyncrasy. Set in a mostly nocturnal lower Manhattan, the film is both a lucid evocation of place and a fantastical freeform trance, connected by an escalating series of bizarre incidents.
Most visibly, Sleepwalk is a story of inter-textual synchronicity, of ideas and gestures bleeding from one medium to another, from book to film, from film to life, and then back again. This synchronicity, and the ensuing mood it evokes, is the film's real focus, which leaves the modern-Chinese fairy-tale trappings it initially teases at developing as a dangling thread, a mystical dim sum platter that ends up getting cold on the table. The plot seems to exist only for Driver to summarily dispose of it, more concerned with the textural details of chance peculiarities: a bloody finger, a faulty elevator, the smell of almonds wafting in from somewhere. These anecdotal moments are loosely plotted, like points on a graph, and definite pride is taken in not connecting them. Continue Reading »
Tags: After Hours, André Breton, Film Comment Selects, Jacques Rivette, Jim Jarmusch, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Martin Scorsese, Nadja, Sara Driver, Sleepwalk, Two-Lane Blacktop
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French filmmaker Eric Atlan's black-and-white Mortem has been billed as a "metaphysical thriller" inspired by David Lynch and Ingmar Bergman. The more obvious comparison, however, would have been to French film noir. Mortem's opening scenes, in which two young women arrive by nightfall at an empty hotel, bring to mind Georges Franju's haunted Eyes Without a Face, based on Jean Redon's novel that also inspired Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In. In all three movies, bizarre experimentation, psychic or physical, and plot reversals ensue. Continue Reading »
Tags: A Pure Formality, Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet, David Lynch, Eric Atlan, Eyes Without a Face, Film Comment Selects, Gérard Depardieu, Giuseppe Tornatore, Images, Ingmar Bergman, Jean Redon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Last Year at Marienbad, Mortem, No Exit, Panchenko Daria, Pedro Almodóvar, Persona, Robert Altman, Roman Polanski, Stany Coppet, The Seventh Seal, The Skin I Live In
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The basic premise of Transfer immediately intrigues: An elderly couple, Anna and Hermann Goldbeck (Ingrid Andree and Hans-Michael Rehberg), decides to try out an experimental operation that will allow them to extend their lives by mentally inhabiting the younger bodies of Apolain (B.J. Britt) and Sarah (Regine Nehy). As Anna is suffering from a terminal illness, both she and Hermann feel an especially urgent need to give this procedure a try. But Damir Lukacevic, the writer and director of this sci-fi drama, isn't willing to rest on that premise alone to generate interest; he has bigger game in mind.
By making Apolain and Sarah African refugees who feel a desperate need to assent to this operation just so they can support their families back home, Lukacevic adds a level of social commentary to an already fairly heady mix. Anna and Hermann are wealthy white people who are so driven to extend their lives with each other that they, at least initially, don't think much about the troubling moral implications underlying the mere idea of inhabiting someone else's (younger, stronger) flesh. The fact that the two bodies they decide to inhabit are black suggests an attempt on Lukacevic's part to address thorny issues of racism and post-colonial exploitation. Hermann, for instance, briefly voices discomfort at the idea of taking on these bodies ("Aren't they too black?" he asks in an early scene); Apolain, in a later scene halfway through the film, expresses a palpable class resentment toward their "masters," accusing them of using their bodies entirely for their own personal gain. Continue Reading »
Tags: Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, Ayn Rand, B.J. Britt, BBC, Damir Lukacevic, Film Comment Selects, George R. Price, Hans-Michael Rehberg, Ingrid Andree, John Frankenheimer, Regine Nehy, Richard Brautigan, Richard Dawkins, Seconds, The Power of Nightmares, Transfer, William Hamilton
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I'll say this much about Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti's latest film, We Have a Pope: It doesn't goes where one might expect it to go based on its first act. When a newly elected pope, Melville (Michel Piccoli), develops cold feet over his daunting new position, his public-relations spokesman (Jerzy Stuhr) brings in a psychoanalyst, Bruzzi (Moretti), to try to help calm his nerves. One might expect this to turn into a cutesy comedy about a pope and his shrink, with occasional digs at the Vatican's sheltered existence to add some variety. But that's not what transpires in We Have a Pope—not in the slightest. Instead, during a sequence in which the spokesman sneaks Melville out to see the psychoanalyst's estranged wife (Margherita Buy), Melville escapes and ends up wandering the streets in an existential fog, leaving the spokesman to try to alleviate the worries of the other cardinals—as well as the virtually imprisoned psychoanalyst—by constructing elaborate ruses to convince them that Melville is, in fact, still hanging around in his room. Continue Reading »
Tags: Anton Chekhov, Film Comment Selects, Franco Piersanti, Jerzy Stuhr, Margherita Buy, Michel Piccoli, Nanni Moretti, The Seagull, We Have a Pope
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After a few initial disappointments in Berlinale's main competition, things gradually began to pick up; even the weather improved, or rather, it was less freezing. Apart from the sensuous Meteora, with its unique blend of fiction, documentary, and animation penetrating the heart of the Greek Orthodox church, many of the entries were beholden to seen-it-all-before narratives. No matter how well done on its own terms, Billy Bob Thornton's Jayne Mansfield's Car was content to follow the well-worn pattern of the dysfunctional-family drama, though it was experimental compared to Hans-Christian Schmid's Home for The Weekend, an extremely familiar exploration of middle-class angst. The key sequences take place during a gathering at Christmas—don't all these family melodramas take place at Christmas?—when the mother tells her publisher husband, and her two sons, one a dentist, the other a divorced writer, that she's decided to stop taking her anti-depression pills. A short while later she disappears, and a search for her is carried out, faintly reminiscent of the futile searches in L'Avventura or About Elly. But there the comparison ends. I found it insupportable. Continue Reading »
Tags: About Elly, Apart Together, Bence Fliegauf, Berlinale, Bert Haanstra, Billy Bob Thornton, Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, Comme un Chef, Daniel Cohen, Edwin, Edwin Piscator, F.W. Murnau, Hans Eisler, Hans-Christian Schmid, Home for the Weekend, Horizon, Jayne Mansfield's Car, Just the Wind, L'Avventura, Lev Kuleshov, Manoel de Oliveira, Meteora, Miguel Gomes, Our Beloved Month of August, Postcards from the Zoo, Raúl Ruiz, Revolt of the Fishermen, Tabu, The Artist, The Red Dream Factory, Tuya's Marriage, Wang Quan'an, White Deer Plain, Zoo
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While his work with children remains as impeccable as always, Hirokazu Kore-eda proves considerably less successful in dealing with the adult characters in his latest film, I Wish. Which is to say that it isn't Still Walking, the director's masterful 2008 offering in which each situation was filled with essential detail, each character handled with genuine understanding. But while the focus of the Japanese filmmaker's latest remains on its pair of pre-teen protags—brothers living in different cities after their parents' separation—and their friends, it too often tries to flesh out its canvas with quick-sketch portraits of the older generation that feel too underthought to really register. Continue Reading »
Tags: Film Comment Selects, Hirokazu Kore-eda, I Wish, Nobody Knows, Still Walking
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Inching progressively further down the rabbit hole of degradation, Michael Glawogger's Whores' Glory offers a revealing, troubling look into a trio of environments of prostitution. Moving from the veneer of classiness that characterizes a meat-market-style Bangkok brothel through the narrow hallways and economic desperation of the Dhaka, Bangladesh pleasure quarters to a rural Mexican open-air market, Glawogger's documentary triptych posits a fixed world of the basest economic exchange, where the filmmaker's camera locks down the characters in shots whose frequent rigidity mirrors the lack of social (or physical) mobility of the prostitutes he profiles.
Returning to the approach, at once observational and overly aestheticized, that characterized his celebrated 2005 doc Workingman's Death, Whores' Glory is as troubling and as troubled as it is devastating in its limpidity. The whole thing's a study in matching (or contrasting) form and content, a push-pull between distance and involvement. In the opening segment, taking place at the Bangkok brothel, irresistibly neon-lit overhead street shots alternate with scenes of the women lining up behind a glass partition while johns on the other side call them out by their assigned number. Glawogger's camera doesn't quite duplicate the gaze of the men making their selection (he turns his apparatus on the customers as frequently as he does the women), but there's still something vaguely queasy about the dumb proximity with which the director brings us in contact with the sordid transaction. Continue Reading »
Tags: Film Comment Selects, In Vanda's Room, Michael Glawogger, Whores' Glory, Workingman's Death
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Berlinale, the most smoothly run of all major festivals, is a pleasure for the Anglophone. Everybody speaks English and most of the non-English-language films have English subtitles rather than German. However, this Anglo-centricism seems to be creeping into several films here, among those from the Philippines, China and Switzerland, which suffer from the misguided idea that they would attract a wider audience, especially an American one.
English is the lingua franca of Brillante Mendoza's The Captive, which seems to have been directed by his younger brother, Mediocre Mendoza. Based on a true story of the kidnapping of a group of tourists and Christian missionaries by a group of armed men belonging to a militant Islamist group, it fails the first principal of a disaster movie: identification with the victims. Except for Isabelle Huppert, as one of the missionaries, they're an anonymous lot. Only toward the end of a long two hours, during which we are subjected to what can be called "wobblyscope"—jerky handheld camerawork intending to give the story the immediacy of a documentary, relieved only a few times by a crane shot or two—is there a feeble attempt to get Huppert to relate to one of her captors, a 15-year-old soldier. Mendoza seems to think that it's enough to present the hardships the victims suffered in the Philippine jungle at the hands of Islamist fanatics without any overarching viewpoint. Continue Reading »
Tags: A Woman a Gun and a Noodle Shop, Berlinale, Billy Bob Thornton, Blood Simple, Brillante Mendoza, Christian Bale, Ethan Coen, Flowers of War, Isabelle Huppert, Jayne Mansfield's Car, Joel Coen, John Hurt, Kacey Mottet Klein, Ken Loach, Kevin Bacon, Martin Compston, Meteora, Robert Duvall, Sister, Spiros Stathoulopoulos, Sweet Sixteen, Tamila Koulieva, The Captive, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Theo Alexander, Ursula Maier, Zhang Yimou
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The 40-odd festival titles I caught at Rotterdam this year offered consistent amazement. In addition to the Boca do Lixo series, highlights I saw projected (as opposed to on a screener or on a video monitor) included Bertrand Bonello's House of Tolerance, Nathaniel Dorsky's The Return, Raya Martin's Buenas Noches, España, Jean Painlevé's The Octopus, Mohammad Rasoulof's Goodbye, Ben Rivers's Two Years at Sea, and Raúl Ruiz's Ballet Aquatique. I'm going to discuss a few more in particular. While my beat consisted of older Brazilian films, the new Brazilian films I saw at Rotterdam were nearly as exciting. Three stood out, each of them, in different ways, addressing film history. Continue Reading »
Tags: Eden's Ark, harold lloyd, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Isabel Machado, Joan of Arc, Júlio Bressane, Killed His Family and Went to the Movies, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Marcelo Felix, Neighbouring Sounds, Rua Aperana 52
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"The natural is as false as the false. Only the arch false is really real. I'm talking about José Mojica Marins, filmmaker of excess and crime," wrote an 18-year-old critic named Rogério Sganzerla. His imagination had been seized by the first Brazilian horror movie, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, in 1964. Its director, a son of Spanish immigrants who'd spent much of his childhood in the backs of movie theaters, made the film based on a nightmare. Out of stray scraps of film reels dug out of the trash, Mojica filmed himself in a top hat and cape, pointing long fingernails at the screen and howling as a monstrous magician named Coffin Joe.
The film performed well at the box office, inspiring a sequel three years later, This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse. Its storyline was similar to At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul's: Coffin Joe descends on a small town, murdering the menfolk and seeking the woman who will give him an immortal child. He curses human morality, over and over. But can Coffin Joe beat the forces of God? Continue Reading »
Tags: A Street Called Triumph, Anselmo Duarte, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, Carlos Reichenbach, Cinema of Invention, Citizen Kane, Inácio Araújo, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Jairo Ferreira, João Callegaro, Joåo Silvério Trevisan, José Mojica Marins, Oh! Rebuceteio, Orgy or: the Man Who Gave Birth, Ozualdo Candeias, Party at the Boca, Rogério Sganzerla, Snuff Victims of Pleasure, The Awakening of the Beast, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, The Given Word, The Insig Nificant, The Pornographer, The Vampire of the Cinematheque, This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse
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Walter Hugo Khouri is an undervalued master. I had seen two of his films before watching a third in the Boca do Lixo series. Both 1964's Eros and 1968's The Amorous Ones are strangely disquieting films about casanovas facing mortality. In both films men use and abuse women to compete with each other, and then, upon realizing that the women are human beings, get slapped with their own desperation. The films' tones shift from light to dark while the characters keep consistent. Men end alone, lost in nature, their charm wound up.
One could say many of the same things about 1980's Invitation to Pleasure, which played at Rotterdam. Its two male leads are a middle-aged dentist and his businessman friend who set up a bachelor's loft to have sex with young women together, each man glancing at the other as they go. In time, one wife finds out; the other's known all along. And just as the men are trapped inside their desires, the women are trapped inside a social condition. "Don't fool yourself into thinking it's better out there," the younger wife hears, and fears she's heard right; the older has long since decided not to give up the big house and nice clothes. These women's minds are dying. Is their place better than that of the screaming girls in the loft? Continue Reading »
Tags: Antonio Polo Galante, Carlos Reichenbach, Cláudio Cunha, Empire of Desire, Eros, Fuk Fuk Brazilian Style, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Invitation to Pleasure, Norma Bengell, Oh! Rebuceteio, Os Cafajestes, Profession: Woman, Ruy Guerra, Sit on Mine and I Will Enter Yours, Snuff Victims of Pleasure, The Amorous Ones, Walter Hugo Khouri
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Film Comment Selects 2012: Sleepwalk
by Jesse Cataldo on March 2nd, 2012 at 11:01 am in Festivals, Film
Sara Driver's Sleepwalk ends at a curious impasse: Two key characters pass like ships in the night before settling into separate, oppositely composed shots, one defiantly asleep beneath the Brooklyn bridge, the other blindfolded beneath the Manhattan. It's a strange conclusion, but the perfect one for this loopy 78-minute reverie, which feasts alternately on the picture-postcard New York skyline and twinkling glimmers of downtown idiosyncrasy. Set in a mostly nocturnal lower Manhattan, the film is both a lucid evocation of place and a fantastical freeform trance, connected by an escalating series of bizarre incidents.
Most visibly, Sleepwalk is a story of inter-textual synchronicity, of ideas and gestures bleeding from one medium to another, from book to film, from film to life, and then back again. This synchronicity, and the ensuing mood it evokes, is the film's real focus, which leaves the modern-Chinese fairy-tale trappings it initially teases at developing as a dangling thread, a mystical dim sum platter that ends up getting cold on the table. The plot seems to exist only for Driver to summarily dispose of it, more concerned with the textural details of chance peculiarities: a bloody finger, a faulty elevator, the smell of almonds wafting in from somewhere. These anecdotal moments are loosely plotted, like points on a graph, and definite pride is taken in not connecting them. Continue Reading »
Tags: After Hours, André Breton, Film Comment Selects, Jacques Rivette, Jim Jarmusch, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Martin Scorsese, Nadja, Sara Driver, Sleepwalk, Two-Lane Blacktop
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