From revolution across the Arab world to Japan's nuclear disaster, from the euro zone crisis to a phone hacking scandal, from Osama bin Laden to Wills and Kate, 2011 was a remarkable year.
Iranian documentary filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, who worked with the still-imprisoned Jafar Panahi on This Is Not a Film, has been released from Evin Prison after three months in jail.
Under house arrest and awaiting a verdict on his appeal from Iran's supreme court, filmmaker Jafar Panahi spends much of This Is Not a Film remaking, rethinking, and reconstructing his Tehran apartment as a sandbox of cinema. Despite his isolation and self-doubt, every frame becomes a wondrous opportunity for expression, each corner of Panahi's posh prison cell a mental trap door from his stifling physical entrapment. Panahi's equipment is expectantly bare boned, consisting of only a PD-150 digital video camera, a smart phone, and some gaffer's tape used to create spatial designs on the floor. Walls of natural light flood in from the world outside, often illuminating the empty spaces of Panahi's rooms with a certain unexpected grace. Throughout the film's tight 75-minute running time, Panahi perfectly captures the haunting illusion of time, how moments of reflection and fear can seamlessly overlap with the mundane, moment-to-moment process of waiting for one's fate. Continue Reading »
Many wonderful photographers that work with a moving camera use it to make movement seem light and graceful, as though the characters are dancing (Agnès Godard comes immediately to mind); the great Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu, by contrast, makes movement seem bulky and blocky. In films like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and My Joy, his herks and jerks call attention to the weight of the camera as his subjects stumble, doubly emphasizing the difficulty of moving forward. He's a good satirist of post-Communist societies, in other words; he's also very gifted at working with 35mm, whose texture often makes the objects register with more detail than digital video does. This is especially true for Mutu's preferred color palette, a mix of nighttime blacks and muddy browns that wrestle each other for light.
Photographed by Mutu, Aleksandr Mindadze's Innocent Saturday, set in 1986, shows a young man running, then playing music and drinking, in order to avoid looking at the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. Many shots show him racing across the city; others show him fighting other men, the camera focusing on flailing hands and arms. Yet it ultimately adds up to a lot of nasty hysteria; it sprinkles the Chernobyl disaster in around the young man's encounters with his friends and girlfriend as if to try to thrill the viewer with the spectacle of real-life disaster. Continue Reading »
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 »
Restless: "Been to any good funerals lately?" Youth, beauty, and death have long been Gus Van Sant's recurring motifs, but in this terminally whimsical tale of romance between morbid cuties, the elements don't so much flow together into a stirring whole as coagulate into fatuous prettiness. A dreamy orphan (Henry Hopper, channeling Papa Dennis's brooding '50s period) and an ailing gamine (Mia Wasikowska, taking the obligatory spin in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl carousel) are the teens flirting with the Reaper, meeting cute at a funeral and cementing their love by visiting morgues, drawing critters at the cemetery, and laying down on chalk outlines. Along for the ride is the affable ghost of a WWII Japanese kamikaze pilot (Ryo Kase), always ready to drop earnest bromides ("Death is easy. Love is hard") while on the soundtrack Danny Elfman unloads music box after music box of goo. Working with a warm if pasteurized visual palette, Van Sant gives free rein to his Romantic side, lending the characters an anachronistically intense yearning that hints that they're in limbo not just between spiritual states, but between centuries. The results are not without drifting specks of poetry, but mostly suggest a fuzzy remake of Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer starring the cast of Twilight. Continue Reading »
Famous auteurs occasionally cruise through material so smoothly we misjudge potentially complex efforts as minor. I fear Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes new film, The Kid with a Bike, will be seen as such a film and get overlooked due to its short running time, concisely linear storyline, and almost perfectly aligned mosaic of fatherly failures. Like their masterpiece The Son, the Dardennes insist on destroying stereotypes regarding familial relationships. Yet in The Kid with a Bike they craft an entire film around one young boy's relentless pursuit of home and protection, packing each frame with a sense of unlimited persistence. Still, the child's search for identity can be easily manipulated, and the film's most cutting moments come when adult indifference preys on the gullibility of youth for selfish ends.
An enduring drive propels 11-year-old Cyril (Thomas Dorset) to ignore the writing on the wall that his young father, Guy (Jeremie Renier), has indefinitely left him to the care of a state-run facility. The opening sequence introduces Cyril's durability and directionality, as the boy escapes and heads toward his now abandoned apartment looking for his father and beloved bike. This trend of catch and release continues throughout The Kid with a Bike—Cyril running or riding away from places he hates for those that might represent home. His struggle is consistent, with every scene dedicated to Cyril outmaneuvering adults and roaming from one father figure to the next. Continue Reading »
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.
Jodi Bieber's portrait of 18-year-old Bibi Aisha, whose husband sliced off her nose and ears in a case of Taliban-administered justice, has won the World Press Photo award for 2010.
On the 18th day of Egypt's uprising, the country's president refuses to step down.
Matt Zoller Seitz explains how Cormac McCarthy was turned into bad TV.
Matt also has a chat with Sheila O'Malley about Nancy Savoca's Dogfight.
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.
Gabrielle Giffords utters her first words since the assassination attempt on her life.
Show House contributor Miriam Bale some love this Saturday when she'll be screening Leo McCarey's Ruggles at Red Cap alongside the director's Let's Go Native (a "loosey-goosey, slightly softcore musical" according to Miriam) at the 92YTribeca Screening Room.
Couldn't have said it better than our own Matthew Cole: " Do you ever think that Mad Men would be a better show if it had more in the way of 'Sophoclean geometry'? In The New York Review of Books, classicist/memoirist/pop culturist Daniel Mendohlson throws himself in front of AMC's critical juggernaut."
Lars-Olav Beier and Martin Wolf, for Spiegel Online, on the victimization of Jafar Panahi by a paranoid regime.
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 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced its Foreign Language Film shortlist. We're guessing Dogtooth, still in the running, made the shortlist in phase two of the voting process by the grace of that face-saving executive committee.
The Columbia Journalism Reviewthinks we're omnivorous.
A colleague of Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasulov, filmmaker Rafi Pitts, who now lives in Paris, reacts to the harsh sentences handed to his friends.
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.
Amnesty International has gotten involved in protesting the 6-year prison sentence given to Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof.
Yahoo picks the best and worst movie posters of 2010. That Jackass 3D poster ain't bad, and the Inception one isn't that grand, but the rest of the designations are spot-on.
Over at The New York Times, Stanley Fish discusses narrative and the grace of God on the occasion of having seen Joel and Ethan Coen's fine True Grit.
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.
Future Oscar-winner Christian Bale to star in new Zhang Yimou.
And some TRON-related humor:
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.
Guess what film topped this year's Village Voice film poll?
More lists: TONY film critics David Fear, Joshua Rothkopf, and Keith Uhlich share their best and worst films of the year, and Sight & Soundgives us the dish on the year's best DVDs.
Larry David is feeling pretty, pretty good now that those Bush tax cuts have been extended.
David Bordwell on the sentencing of Jafar Panahi and the beauty of the director's films.
The montage-averse should steer away from this one. For The L Magazine, Matt Zoller Seitz compresses an entire year's worth of movies into 11 minutes.
Famous auteurs occasionally cruise through material so smoothly we misjudge potentially complex efforts as minor. I fear Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes new film, The Kid with a Bike, will be seen as such a film and get overlooked due to its short running time, concisely linear storyline, and almost perfectly aligned mosaic of fatherly failures. Like their masterpiece 
Links for the Day: Gabrielle Giffords Speaks, The Mad Men Account, Jafar Panahi Victimization, Roger Ebert on Internet Snipers, & More
by Ed Gonzalez on February 10th, 2011 at 9:13 am in Links for the Day
Gabrielle Giffords utters her first words since the assassination attempt on her life.
Show House contributor Miriam Bale some love this Saturday when she'll be screening Leo McCarey's Ruggles at Red Cap alongside the director's Let's Go Native (a "loosey-goosey, slightly softcore musical" according to Miriam) at the 92YTribeca Screening Room.
Couldn't have said it better than our own Matthew Cole: " Do you ever think that Mad Men would be a better show if it had more in the way of 'Sophoclean geometry'? In The New York Review of Books, classicist/memoirist/pop culturist Daniel Mendohlson throws himself in front of AMC's critical juggernaut."
Lars-Olav Beier and Martin Wolf, for Spiegel Online, on the victimization of Jafar Panahi by a paranoid regime.
Guitar Hero gets the ax.
Roger Ebert on the worthlessness of Internet snipers.
For Mirror: Motion Picture Commentary, Kartina Richardson studies Monica Vitti's use of blackface in L'Eclisse.
Richard Brody's DVD of the Week is A Letter to Three Wives:
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.
Tags: 92YTribeca, A Letter to Three Wives, Daniel Mendohlson, Gabrielle Giffords, Guitar Hero, Internet, Jafar Panahi, Kartina Richardson, L'Elisse, Lars-Olav Beier, Leo McCarey, Let's Go Native, Mad Men, Martin Wolf, Miriam Bale, Mirror: Motion Picture Commentary, Monica Vitti, Richard Brody, Roger Ebert, Ruggles at Red Cap, Spiegel Online, The New York Times Review of Books
1 Comment »