Twenty Cigarettes: After pushing digital for its durational benefits in the extended shots of Ruhr, James Benning returns in HD to the theoretical ground of RR and modulates it to great effect: Where his examination of trains worked from a triangular relationship between object, time, and camera placement, Twenty Cigarettes shifts the framework by conflating the spatial and temporal elements; it's no longer a question of length of train versus distance of camera, but of length of cigarette, which, because of the added variable of a human subject, is both a spatial and temporal measure. The effect of this mingling is a setup that, for all the feigned passivity of its production (Benning set the camera up, handed the subject a cigarette, hit record, and walked away), strikes a unique balance of agency between the camera and what's in front of it, one which brings into questions the limits of control of both. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: Our coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival is cross-posted at Parallax View.]
The white meadows of Mohammad Rasoulof's The White Meadows (Iran), a stunning and startling odyssey through the salt marshes of Iran's Lake Urmia, are the desert islands where almost medieval cultures exist in isolated pockets on otherwise dead lands. The salt that coats every beach white has left this place bereft of vegetation, giving it an almost alien, otherworldly atmosphere: a visit to a small planet. And just as the salt chokes the life out of the land and water (there are no birds and precious little marine life), so does it starve the respective cultures, cut off from the rest of the world but for a boatman, Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi), the only outsider welcome in these lands. He's the "tear collector," who comes to hear their woes and take away their sorrows by collecting their tears in a glass vial. 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 »
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.
Air Doll. A sex-toy Pinocchio? Offenbach's Olympia as an inflatable courtesan? If only. Hirokazu Kore-eda squanders a perfectly good smutty-joke setup in this off-key fable, which, despite a recurring appearance by the eponymous heroine's detachable rubber cooch, arguably boasts the festival's highest quotient of saccharine. The liminal states of the filmmaker's earlier works—death and memory in After Life, dissolving childhood in Nobody Knows—here become fairy-tale tinsel as a blowup doll miraculously goes from middle-aged bachelor's sexual receptacle to moony pixie (Bae Du-na). Decked out in a French maid outfit, she pokes around Tokyo, delighting in the beauty that forlorn humans have apparently become blind to, learning about referencing other movies at a video store, and realizing that "having a heart was heartbreaking." A true surrealist might have located the perverse comedy in the literal airhead's Amélie beaming and her plastic docility as she's pounded by horny louts, but Kore-eda goes for earnest pathos and the faux-feminist preciosity coagulates horribly. A rare witty moment finds the heroine deflating from a pricked finger, with a co-worker reviving her by blowing into the nozzle in her navel. Mostly, however, the leaky balloon is the film itself. Continue Reading »
Mohammad Rasoulof's recent arrest in his native Iran alongside collaborator Jafar Panahi (Rasoulof was released; Panahi remains behind bars) raises issues cannily reflected by the Iron Island director's latest, The White Meadows. A gorgeously wrought fable trading in subtle, if nonetheless unmistakable, social commentary, Rasoulof's film employs indigenous folklore for a poignant critique of oppression and the sorrow it spawns, following middle-aged Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi) as he travels to remote islands collecting the tears of the grief-stricken. Each of Rahmat's destinations are inhospitable places intrinsically related to the misery of their inhabitants, as the waterworks collected by Rahmat in a small glass pitcher bear the same brand of pungent saline found in these landscapes' expansive white salt flats. Rasoulof presents a world awash in briny sadness, save for Rahmat, whose duty is carried out with a quiet, nonjudgmental dignity. Yet no mere silent witness to unhappiness, Rahmat—who, during the course of his odyssey, is joined by a young boy and a blind man—seemingly views his task as a therapeutic calling, amassing his countrymen's tears in a glass bottle as a means of providing absolution for the dead, as well as a small measure of healing for the mournful. Continue Reading »
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 keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.
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 
Air Doll. A sex-toy Pinocchio? Offenbach's Olympia as an inflatable courtesan? If only. Hirokazu Kore-eda squanders a perfectly good smutty-joke setup in this off-key fable, which, despite a recurring appearance by the eponymous heroine's detachable rubber cooch, arguably boasts the festival's highest quotient of saccharine. The liminal states of the filmmaker's earlier works—death and memory in After Life, dissolving childhood in 
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