Ashton Kutcher to replace what's-his-name on Two and a Half Men.
Facebook has been busted in clumsy smear attempt on Google.
Next Sunday, UnionDocs will screen Abbas Kiarostami's ABC Africa, curated and presented by our own Keith Uhlich and Aaron Cutler. For more information, click here.
Björk has relaunched www.bjork.com as a brand new website to tie in with the start of her groundbreaking "Biophilia" campaign, her forthcoming exploration of music, nature, and technology.
Twenty-six horror director to createThe ABCs of Death for Magnet Releasing.
Confirmed: Lars Von Trier and Martin Scorsese are teaming up.
From Cannes, Manohla Dargis files her first dispatch.
Newt Gingrich was more supportive of individual mandates than Mitt Romney.
Back to Cannes, where Quentin Tarantino reveals he wants Lady Gaga for his new movie, which will come as a shock to no one who's seen the singer's "Telephone" video.
And here's a super cool video for Battles' "Ice Cream":
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.
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.
Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life now has an interactive website, and it asks us to choose our own adventure.
Korean director Bong Joon-ho to head the Camera d'Or jury at this year's Cannes.
Kartina Richardson saw Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy on a plane, and it gets her to think about the manipulation of perception.
Today show host Meredith Vieira unlikely to renew her contract this September.
The Grammys next year will have less categories. No word yet, though, if the Grammy program will completely do away with announcing category winners on air.
Below, the trailer for Lars Von Trier's Melancholia:
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.
For The Paris Review, Sigred Nunez on Susan Sontag.
Japanese nuclear plant worker discusses choice to sacrifice his life.
Things are looking a little upside down today: Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture is coming to the Criterion Collection, and Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy is not.
Get your profanity and gay sex in an uncensoredFrom Here to Eternity e-book.
For Nerve, Jesse Cataldo contributes a list of Five Albums You Should Be Listening to Right now.
Below, Seamus Murphy's video for PJ Harvey's "Hanging in the Wire":
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.
One of rap's most lauded male hook singers, Long Beach, California native Nate Dogg (born Nathaniel Hale) died Tuesday at the age of 41 after several years of health problems.
Check out Pitchfork's guide to SXSW's music portion, now in effect.
Sam Adams interviews Abbas Kiarostami for The A.V. Club.
Netflix has a new competitor, and it sounds like a drug for depression.
If Basset hounds had mirrors, would they stop running?
Seriously, pick on someone your own size, fucktard.
Some touching reunion videos after Japan disaster.
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.
A huge earthquake struck Japan on Friday, churning up a devastating tsunami that swept over cities and farmland along the northern part of the country and threatened coastal areas throughout the Pacific. (Click here for stunning video of the catastrophe from the BBC.)
Errol Morris tells B. Ruby Rich that Tabloid could be his last documentary.
This Sunday, check out the New York premiere of the director's cut of Alexander at the Museum of the Moving Image. Following the screening, Matt Zoller Seitz will moderate a conversation with Oliver Stone. For more information, click here. Below, the film's trailer:
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.
A few cine giants are lining up their next projects: Martin Scorsese will shoot the Jesuit drama Silence before The Wolf of Wall Street; Abbas Kiarostami to cast Aoi Miyazaki in new Japan-set film, The End; and Apichatpong Weerasethakul is reportedly following up Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives with Mekong Hotel, possibly starring Tilda Swinton.
The digital downloading of movies will not be the death of theatrical projection any more than home video has been.
Matt Zoller Seitz wants us to meet the worst new television show of 2011.
The lineup for this year's New Directors/New Films has been announced.
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 AFI FEST, running from November 4 - 11, has become the one opportunity for West Coast viewers to taste what the rest of the film world has been chewing on for the previous six months. The 2010 edition, especially noteworthy because David Lynch is the Guest Artistic Director, will screen many high profile buzz films (albeit only once each) from an impressive lineup of essential international filmmakers. While the Galas and Tribute section remains intrinsically mainstream, with the Oscar bait-y opening-night film Love and Other Drugs by AFI alum Edward Zwick, Darren Aronofsky's much anticipated Black Swan, and a host of other late-season award's contenders, the World Cinema and New Auteurs programs are flushed with enigmatic and challenging choices. Two stunning masterpieces, Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, will be at the front of many schedule wish lists, but if you're unable to nab tickets, both should be released sometime in 2011. Continue Reading »
"It's a surreal place, isn't it?" someone asked me about Abu Dhabi. The question made me think about my last night at the festival: Attending a gala, red-carpet, invite-only awards ceremony at the Emirates Palace, wondering what I was doing there, leaving 12 minutes in to catch another movie at the Abu Dhabi Theatre, falling asleep during it from too much sightseeing and partying, and waking up at the end to attend another party. I did these things rather than visit the labor camps about 20 minutes outside the city, where much of the working-class population lives. I told myself at the airport the next morning that I hadn't made the time.
That's Abu Dhabi for you—a city that paints a big smile for tourists, and one that exists where and as you care to see it. Wherever I went, though, I heard a voice screaming inside my head. At the Emirates Palace you can buy gold coins from a vending machine—and the voice went, but that's not reality! Next to the Abu Dhabi Theatre lies the Heritage Village, where you can see a wooden house built for your pleasure, a museum with myriad undated axes, fishing nets, and Korans, and a row of postcard-selling huts—and the voice cried, but that's not reality! A short bus ride, and you catch the Grand Mosque, a towering white dome that women must don abayat to enter, where a digital clock reads the six daily prayer times, and where seven enormous bejeweled chandeliers loom overhead. Large groups of people stream in and out to pray. Is this reality? Continue Reading »
The room was abuzz for an Abbas Kiarostami entrance. I sat terrified, hoping, but knowing what others didn't—that he was sick, and might not come. Festival head Peter Scarlet finally strode to the front and broke the bad news. But Kiarostami had left three short films for us, so "Have a good screening." I stood up, feeling broken, and began to walk out, then turned and retook my seat. A new film by Kiarostami, even if it's only a few minutes long, is always worth watching.
Not that Rain, the first short, is new, per se. It's made up of a series of photographs that were previously presented at a Pompidou Centre exhibition. "I would drive in the rain with one hand on the wheel, and take pictures with the other," he has explained. The film shows images of trees melting and waving, water covering the window. And that's it.
Yet the film is also more than its images. After a series of complex, multi-character masterpieces like Close-Up and The Wind Will Carry Us, Kiarostami spent much of the past decade as a minimalist filmmaker, ignoring editing and camera movement to simply focus on the images in front of him. The many people who complained that he had lost his gifts as a filmmaker ignored how he had returned to his original gifts as a photographer and poet. Kiarostami's poems, usually no more than three to four lines each, continue just long enough to capture the poet's wonder at an image—the intricacy of a spider's web, or the whiteness of falling snow. His willingness to simply look was in fact one of the things that then made him a great filmmaker. Most movies don't linger on falling leaves or rolling spray cans, let alone on conversation. From the beginning Kiarostami's movies refreshed the world by encouraging the viewer to look at it. Continue Reading »
[Writer's note: Certified Copy is best seen cold. However, discussion of it requires spoiling elements. If you have not seen it yet, do not read this piece. Just know that the film is incredible.]
If I remind him of that walk along the Via Nazionale he says he remembers it, but I know he is lying and that he remembers nothing; and I sometimes ask myself if it was us, these two people, almost twenty years ago on the Via Nazionale, two people who conversed so politely, so urbanely, as the sun was setting; who chatted a little about everything perhaps and about nothing; two friends talking, two young intellectuals out for a walk; so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another forever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street.—Natalia Ginzburg, He and I
A man and a woman stop in a café. They're perfect strangers or just-acquaintances, and having a perfectly good time. Then the man tells a joke that the woman doesn't enjoy. She starts crying, and the man conveniently gets up to take a phone call outside. A waitress asks the woman what's wrong, and the woman describes the problems that arise once you've been married for 15 years. When the man comes back inside, we no longer know the nature of their relationship. They laugh at the absurdity of the thought of being married, only to argue eventually over whether he's neglected her and the kid.
This is the point during Certified Copy when a lot of viewers check out, the spot where it shifts from a funny, sunny jaunt through Italy to a rom-com version of Persona. But Abbas Kiarostami's new movie has been preparing us for this moment all along. The two people are simultaneously playing the new couple and the old one, plus the actors playing them. The dissolution of personal identity is merely the last goal of Kiarostami's overall project in this film, which is to dissolve the line between copy and original altogether. Continue Reading »
A sample from a recent conversation with a friend about the New York Film Festival, beginning at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall next Friday:
Critic: It's an incredible lineup this year. You've got great movies from France, Russia, South Korea, great documentaries, you've got the new Clint Eastwood movie— Friend (eyes lighting up): Yeah, now you're talking!
Now, Eastwood deserves credit—he is a talented auteur making personal art-house films on commercial budgets, at a time when most studio films look assembled by ships of fools. But Eastwood's Hereafter—a Matt Damon-starring ghost story whose trailers suggest to be a deeply felt, emotionally sincere, bombastic mess—is the last film showing in the festival this year (October 10), and if you restrict yourself to it, then you'll cheat yourself of all the wonders beforehand. Continue Reading »
The Cannes Film Festival ended with its longest competition title, and it wasn't even a complete film. Nikita Mikhalkov Exodus: Burnt by the Sun 2 should, in fact, be called Exodus: Burnt by the Sun 2: Part 1, since what was screened was just one half of the final project. Exodus is essentially two and a half hours of Colonel Kotov (Mikhalkov) trudging through WWII battle zones to reunite with his daughter Nadya (Nadezhda Mikhalkova, the director's real-life offspring) without making very much progress at all. (Yes, I know a title card at the end of Burnt by the Sun says that Kotov and his entire family were executed. The film deals with that by announcing that it was, basically, a filing error.)
When Nazis attack the prison camp in which Kotov is held, he escapes, eventually joining up with other Russian soldiers to trek across the country while avoiding being killed. Meanwhile, his daughter does, well, pretty much the exact same thing, except she flees from a Soviet school. Mikhalkov, being a larger-than-life nationalist psychopath, doesn't half-ass anything. The entire movie is nonstop bombast, with huge battles, epic widescreen vistas, silent-film performances, and one of the most absolutely ridiculous scores I've ever heard in a movie. It can be very funny (largely because Mikhalkov clearly doesn't mean any of it as comedy), but it's mostly just exhausting, especially once the movie ends with Kotov and his daughter just as far apart as they were to begin with, and you realize that nothing you just watched mattered at all. I'm sure it will all be resolved in Exodus: Burnt by the Sun 2: Part 2, but I can't exactly say I'm counting down the days to find out. Continue Reading »
And I thought Another Year was grim. Biutiful, Alejandro González Iñárritu's first film since winning Cannes's Best Director prize for Babel in 2006, makes Leigh's film seem downright cuddly in comparison. Working for the first time in years without screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, Biutiful thankfully sheds the showy fragmented narratives and we-are-all-connected thematic nonsense that Arriaga brought to 21 Grams and Babel. Unfortunately, González Iñárritu has not lost his proclivity for outrageously deterministic melodrama. Biutiful is a relentless, unrevealing battery of unmodulated miserabilism, a pointlessly dour slog willing to do anything it takes to cynically manipulate its audience.
Javier Bardem—frontrunner for the fest's Best Actor prize by default, though he is quite excellent—stars as Uxbal, a man with the ability to tap into the afterlife and communicate with the recently deceased. At the beginning of the film, he is diagnosed with a terminal case of what appears to be late-stage prostate cancer. Given just months to live, he tries to hide the bad news from his two children. To provide for them, he earns pocket change performing budget séances for grieving families, supplementing that meager income by providing immigrant labor to a Chinese sweatshop. Continue Reading »
The Cannes Film Festival ended with its longest competition title, and it wasn't even a complete film. Nikita Mikhalkov Exodus: Burnt by the Sun 2 should, in fact, be called Exodus: Burnt by the Sun 2: Part 1, since what was screened was just one half of the final project. Exodus is essentially two and a half hours of Colonel Kotov (Mikhalkov) trudging through WWII battle zones to reunite with his daughter Nadya (Nadezhda Mikhalkova, the director's real-life offspring) without making very much progress at all. (Yes, I know a title card at the end of Burnt by the Sun says that Kotov and his entire family were executed. The film deals with that by announcing that it was, basically, a filing error.)
And I thought Another Year was grim. Biutiful, Alejandro González Iñárritu's first film since winning Cannes's Best Director prize for 
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