by Budd Wilkins on May 19th, 2012 at 12:30 pm in Film
Lawless cements the mainstreaming of an original. Compare director John Hillcoat's latest to the standard set by The Proposition, an uncompromisingly bleak and ultraviolent outback western: Both films were written by musician Nick Cave, and both films tell a tale of one violent family pitted against the forces of institutional corruption as well as each other. In the balance, Lawless winds up feeling, well, toothless.
Based on true events that occurred in Franklin County, Virginia, in the 1930s, Lawless is a period crime film along the lines of Michael Mann's superior Public Enemies, a film that actually does tweak the legends it depicts, rather than just mealy mouth some random dialogue meant to give that impression. Moonshine bootleggers the Bondurant brothers have encouraged the legend that they are invincible. A war is brewing that will put that legend to the test—a war between a local politicians who wants to rationalize and organize the illegal distilleries of the region and the Bondurants, who want no part of it, rugged individualists to the bitter end that they are. Continue Reading »
Tags: A History of Violence, Benoit Delhomme, Cannes Film Festival, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, john hillcoat, lawless, Michael Mann, Nick Cave, O Brother Where Are Thou?, Public Enemies, Ralph Stanley, Shia LaBoeuf, The Proposition, The Velvet Underground, Tom Hardy, White Light/White Heat
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by Budd Wilkins on May 19th, 2012 at 9:30 am in Film
Matteo Garrone follows up the visually compelling, structurally scattered Gomorrah with a more contained treatise on surveillance as transcendence and entertainment. Opening with an incredible god's-eye view of a hazy, lazy Naples, which the camera slowly moves across until it finally peers down on an incongruous sight: a gold-encrusted, horse-drawn carriage clopping along the congested city streets (a nod to Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach?). Extended, vertiginously choreographed tracking shots—employing Steadicam and bravura crane shots alike—define Garrone's visual style on this one. Servants in 18th-century livery open massive wrought-iron gates for the carriage at its destination, a wonderland wedding hosted by recent Big Brother winner Enzo (Raffaele Ferrante), a reptilian smooth operator whose insipid mantra, "Never give up!," will inspire some truly unintended consequences when Neapolitian fishmonger Luciano (Aniello Arena) adopts it a trifle too literally. Continue Reading »
Tags: 1984, Aniello Arena, Big Brother, Cannes Film Festival, George Orwell, Gomorrah, Matteo Garrone, Nando Paone, Raffaele Ferrante, Reality
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by Ted Pigeon on May 18th, 2012 at 1:02 pm in Film
For 10 years, comic-book superheroes have permeated popular movies. After the mega-success of Spider-Man in 2002, costumed white fellas saving the world became multiplex staples. Once all the iconic heroes were accounted for, studios found continued success with second-tier characters, from the previously obscure (Iron Man) to the uncomfortably jingoistic (Captain America: The First Avenger). The circuit escalated into the late 2000s, spawning remakes, reboots, sequels, and prequels with a frequency that only the most ardent fans could keep up with. A few X-Men spinoffs, a Superman hybrid, and two Hulk films later, we now arrive at a moment of superhero saturation, wherein each new release affirms the general consensus that these films represent a creatively dry enterprise. Continue Reading »
Tags: 9/11, Aliens, Batman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Captain America: The First Avenger, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Christopher Nolan, Firefly, Iron Man, James Cameron, Jeremy Renner, Jon Favreau, Joss Whedon, Mark Ruffalo, Marvel, Michael Bay, Robert Downey Jr., Rotten Tomatoes, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Spider-Man, Steven Spielberg, the avengers, The Dark Knight, thor, Tom Hiddleston, X-Men
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Ridley Scott's Blade Runner sequel becomes official.
Related, and a bit belated: Scott breaks his silence on his complex 3D space odyssey Prometheus.
Facebook IPO rises 11% at open.
Chloë Sevigny cried every day she had to wear a fake penis.
The music industry remembers the Queen of Disco.
Continue Reading »
Tags: 3D, Arby's, Blade Runner, Chloë Sevigny, Donna Summer, Facebook, Google Maps, Iran, J. Hoberman, Kristen Wiig, Morrisey, NME, Prometheus, Rebekah Brooks, Ridley Scott, The Dictator
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by Budd Wilkins on May 18th, 2012 at 11:06 am in Film
"Love has no limits." Considering the source, a Kenyan "beach boy" (native love object) who's milking his European sugar mama for all she's worth, that's a rather specious claim. In Paradise: Love, the first film in a projected trilogy by Austrian provocateur Ulrich Seidl, love is bounded on all sides by greed, lust, and dissimulation. Only with Seidl, exploitation is a two-way street. Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) is a middle-aged hausfrau on holiday in sun-drenched Africa. Ostensibly resort-bound, Teresa has come to Kenya with more in mind than palm wine and tuk-tuk rides. During the bus ride to their accommodations, a native guide drills vacationers on the necessary vocabulary: "Jambo!" the rows of pasty tourists dutifully repeat. "Hakuna matata means 'no problem.' Here Africa, no problem!" You can't help but imagine the insistent recurrence of this mantra was intended by Seidl as a thumb in the eye to Disney's The Lion King and its pandering cultural politics. Continue Reading »
Tags: Cannes Film Festival, Ed Lachman, Margarethe Tiesel, Paradise: Love, Peter Kuzunga, Ulrich Seidl, Werner Herzog, Wolfgang Thaler
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The deaths of celebrities don't usually knock the wind out of my sails. Sure, Michael Jackson's untimely passing felt so much a natural piece of his Greek tragedy of a life that it took my breath away, but when I learned of Donna Summer's death at 63 to cancer yesterday, the sinking feeling that accompanied the news exceeded any similar experience I've had since Robert Altman passed away. While I can't say I ever took Altman's work for granted, especially given the remarkable 11th-hour upswing his career took with his last string of films, Summer's death instantly forced me to consider just how much I've underrated the place her music has had in my life. Continue Reading »
Tags: Barry Manilow, Could It Be Magic, Crayons, disco, Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, I Remember Yesterday, I'm a Fire, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Love to Love You Baby, Once Upon a Time, Pete Bellotte, State of Independence, The Hostage, This Time I Know It's for Real
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by Budd Wilkins on May 18th, 2012 at 8:26 am in Film
Darezhan Omirbaev's Student attempts to do for Crime and Punishment what his earlier film Chouga did for Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, transposing Dostoyevsky's novel about a philosophically motivated murderer to modern-day Kazakhstan and keying in on the tale's unforgiving economic backdrop. The film opens in meta mode on a film set with the image of a clapperboard and an off-screen voice calling scene and take, but self-reflexivity isn't a technique Omirbaev will use again until the film's final shot of a minor character staring accusatorily out at the audience, which feels little more than cheap and rather obvious. And it's only there at the onset because the director wants to shoehorn in a conversation about the use value of modern cinema. Since Omirbaev favors irony of the heaviest-handed kind, he has the film-within-the-film's director argue for cinema's validity as mere entertainment, a stance clearly at loggerheads with what Omirbaev really wants to argue. Continue Reading »
Tags: Anna Karenina, Cannes Film Festival, Chouga, Crime and Punishment, Darezhan Omirbaev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Paul Schrader, Pickpocket, Robert Bresson, Student
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The Queen of Disco is dead.
Richard Corliss updates TIME's All-TIME 100 list of the greatest films made since 1923...the beginning of TIME. (Click here for Corliss's largely cringe-worthy selections for the 10 greatest movies of the millennium, thus far.)
Matt Zoller Seitz on the substance of Wes Anderson's style.
Marion Cottilard knows how to pick them.
It's official: whites account for under half of births in U.S.
Sam Adams interviews Eva Marie Saint.
Fez delights in difficulty.
Continue Reading »
Tags: Aaron Cutler, Asghar Farhadi, Bollywood, Caroline Martel, Clear Channel, Donna Summer, Eva Marie Saint, F.W. Murnau, Fez, Industry/Cinema, Marion Cottilard, Matt Zoller Seitz, Richard Brody, Richard Corliss. TIME, Sam Adams, Sunrise, Wes Anderson
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by Budd Wilkins on May 16th, 2012 at 10:59 am in Film
Moonrise Kingdom's opening scenes are vintage Wes Anderson. A series of pans and lateral tracks explores the Bishop household in studied tableaux, each isolated member of the family captured in their native habitat, while on a 45rpm record a disembodied voice guides listeners through the works of Benjamin Britten. Likewise, there's a narrator (Bob Balaban) to guide us through Anderson's film, in just one of many recursively referential—and, at times, painfully self-aware—touches. Examples could be further multiplied, but let's stick with the Britten: Not only does his music recur in the epilogue that effectively bookends the film, but Britten's opera Noye's Fludde, itself based on a medieval mystery play (see the Chinese puzzle box pattern emerge?), serves as an objective correlative for the acts of God or nature that dominate the second half. As the recorded voice intones late in the film, "Britten has taken the orchestra apart and now puts it back together again." Much the same could be said for Anderson's direction and script work with co-writer Roman Coppola. Continue Reading »
Tags: Benjamin Britten, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Bruce Willis, Cannes Film Festival, Cold Cold Heart, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, Hank Williams, Harvey Keitel, Jared Gilman, Jason Schwartzman, Kara Hayward, Kaw-Liga, Moonrise Kingdom, Noye's Fludde, Robert Yeoman, Roman Coppola, Tilda Swinton, Wes Anderson
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With Cannes underway, reactions to opening selection Moonrise Kingdom are trickling in. Time Out London also has an interview with Wes Anderson.
Will Smith supports President Obama's "bravery."
Check out this toxic Kansas town and its last remaining residents.
Nick Stahl is missing.
Isabelle Huppert joins the cast of David Gordon Green's Suspiria remake.
Is Internet Doomsday real?
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Tags: Alfred Hitchcock, Barack Obama, Cannes Film Festival, Chris Christie, David Gordon Green, gay marriage, Isabelle Huppert, Lady Gaga, lifeboat, Michel Gondry, Moonrise Kingdom, nick stahl, Self-Styled Siren, Suspiria, The Guardian, the we and the i, Time Out London, Wes Anderson, Will Smith
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In its fourth year, the Migrating Forms film festival at Anthology Film Archives continues to present ambitious films of unclassifiable nature. In their past interview for The Brooklyn Rail, the festival co-directors Nellie Killian and Kevin McGarry stressed their interest in works that move "in and out of different viewing contexts," and for which it may be hard to find "an ideal audience."
Abendland, by Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, meets these criteria by being mostly a meditative documentary in which images do all the talking. Considering that no poetic voiceover ties the loose ends, the film's eloquence is pretty remarkable. Is Abendland a metaphor for contemporary Europe? Following glum economic news, some critics have espied in its title an allusion to decay and decline. Perhaps, but watching the nocturnal going-ons in factories and in hospital wards, in whorehouses or at an anti-nuclear protest, I wasn't so sure the film delivered one particular message. This is partly because Geyrhalter, whose background is in photography, has a patient and a discerning eye when it comes to capturing the prose of life and rendering it strange. In one early scene, a nurse feeds a tiny human infant attached to a tangled network of tubes. Her soft patter and the baby's cherry-red skin seem almost menaced by the life-saving machines. By the time the infant is back in the incubator, and the lights go off, leaving it to its precarious breathing, you may find yourself holding your breath as well. From the start, then, this movie is more broadly about "the human factor" in an increasingly mechanized world. Continue Reading »
Tags: Abendland, Kevin McGarry, Migrating Forms, Nellie Killian, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, The Brooklyn Rail
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Salman Rushdie on censorship.
Obama calls for repeal of Defense of Marriage Act.
François Hollande assumes the presidency in France.
Joan Rivers really hates Tom Cruise.
Rebekah Brooks to be prosecuted in hacking case.
Terrence Malick's latest gets a title and rating.
Continue Reading »
Tags: Barack Obama, Defense of Marriage Act, Ellen DeGeneres, France, Francois Hollande, Howard Stern, Indonesia, Joan Rivers, John Irving, Lady Gaga, LMFAO, Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, Michael Fassbender, Noah Guthrie, Rebekah Brooks, Salman Rushdie, Terrence Malick, To the Wonder, Tom Cruise
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Over the course of Desperate Housewives's eight-year run, the behind-the-scenes drama has often threatened to overshadow the series itself. I'm not referring to Nicolette Sheridan's pending lawsuit, or the rumored rivalries among the show's co-stars. Rather, it often seemed that the writers' room was where the real theatrics took place. Each time a new, convoluted cliffhanger was introduced, the question I was compelled to ask had less to do with the fate of the characters and more to do with how the writers could possibly dig themselves out of their own mess. For eight years, they've been digging. And the results, while not always neat, have been perversely fascinating. Continue Reading »
Tags: ABC, Andrew Bowen, Brenda Strong, Desperate Housewives, Doug Savant, Eva Longoria, Felicity Huffman, Finishing the Hat, Give Me the Blame, Marc Cherry, Marcia Cross, Nicolette Sheridan, Teri Hatcher, Vanessa Williams
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How is Julie Delpy still making movies?
David Phelps previews this year's Migrating Forms.
Dennis Lim interviews Wes Anderson.
A complete guide to the 2012-13 television season for the five broadcast networks, including which shows will return and which ones are dead—and what's coming up.
Is Obama the "first gay president" as Newsweek proclaims?
Diego Sulic on video games and identity.
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Tags: Andrei Tarkovsky, Barack Obama, David Phelps, Dennis Lim, Diego Sulic, gay marriage, Julie Delpy, Migrating Forms, Patrice O'Neal, SNL, Television, Video Games, Wes Anderson
1 Comment »
[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.]
You never know what you're going to get with a Woody Allen poster. Sometimes, it's a great beauty like the one-sheet for Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which slices its lead trio's faces in half, leaving each with an eye that's free to wander. Sometimes, as with the poster for Midnight in Paris, it's an inspired merger of film still and relevant masterpiece. Other times, it's a hasty design without a plan, as has been the case with both posters for Allen's latest, To Rome with Love.
Continuing the director's love affair with European hotspots, this cryptically described romantic jaunt has all the signs of an Allen misfire, seemingly tossed together from casting to marketing. The initial poster was an odd mix of cells, swoony backdrops, and awkward clipping paths, which allowed the title to be flanked by clownish cutouts of Roberto Benigni and Allen himself, back on screen for the first time since Scoop. The second poster can't even earn points for tasteful minimalism, so lazy and generic is its whitewashed approach. Both ads don't just imply that no one knows how to sell this thing, but that no one particularly cares about putting in the effort. Continue Reading »
Tags: Midnight in Paris, Penélope Cruz, Poster Lab, Posters, Roberto Benigni, scoop, To Rome with Love, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
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