Like many countries, Chile has transitioned from dictatorship to democracy within the past 30 years, and as is often the case during transitional periods, not all of the population has supported the move. Although a 1988 referendum emphatically voted Augusto Pinochet out of office, he remained a nostalgic symbol for many until his death in 2006. Current Chilean President Sebastián Piñera voted against Pinochet in 1988, but publicly protested his arrest in London a decade later, saying that no one should be able to judge Chile's former leader except Chileans themselves.
And the Chilean film The Death of Pinochet passes judgment. It's an explicitly post-dictatorship film. This becomes clear in one of its first shots, a perfectly composed profile of a woman's face inside a ring of varicolored flowers. Our eyes move from pink, to red, to white, to green, to purple, before shifting to the center and to her thin smile. It's mid-December, 2006. Her world is so bright because the General has died. Continue Reading »
This year's Emmy Award nominations have been announced.
Rupert Murdoch is refusing to testify before the British Parliament about the alleged phone hacking among employees of his sprawling media conglomerate, News Corp.
Miriam Bale explains why Marilyn Monroe can't help it.
Amid stalemate, debt talks grow heated and...Obama makes a dramatic exit? Meanwhile in Castle Greyskull, Republicans back themselves into a corner.
Part of Silent Film Week on Fandor, a weeklong spotlight on silent cinema in conjunction with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (July 14 - 17), Kevin B. Lee shares with us his favorite silent films (part one and part two).
To quote a Vulture article ostensibly written by daughter Apple, when Gwyneth Paltrow gets sick, the whole world dies:
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.
Representative Anthony D. Weiner has told House leaders and friends that he plans to resign his seat after coming under growing pressure from his Democratic colleagues to leave the House, said a top Democratic official and two people told of Mr. Weiner's plans.
Madonna, whose upcoming W.E. was recently picked up by the Weinstein Company, is set to begin recording a new album in July.
For Alt Screen, Dan Callahan reviews Martin Scorsese's New York, New York.
We're less than a month away from one of the greatest musicians in the world, Brian Eno, releasing his new album, Drums Between the Bells. You can preview "Pour It Out" here and "Bless This Space" here.
Scott Tobias adds Steven Soderbergh's Schizopolis to the canon.
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 unqualified strength of Raising Renee is Beverly McIver. As they say, directing is 70% casting, and directors Jeanne Jordan and Steven Ascher could not have found a more fitting leading lady than the renowned painter and artist. For almost all of the documentary's 81 minutes (and more on that word "almost" in a bit), McIver is a pure, effervescent delight, a charmer and true sweetheart. Her friends and family knew this about her, of course, and despite her older sister Roni's claims that she was once the quiet, shy type, McIver clearly didn't need a crew of cameramen and directors to draw it out of her. Continue Reading »
Considering the frank, graphic sexuality and obviously semi-autobiographical portrayals of relationships in Joe Swanberg's movies, it feels slightly odd to say that Silver Bullets, a film missing most of the director's usual erections and ejaculations, ranks as his most intimate effort so far. Like his other films, it still centers on a relationship tempted with infidelity, but through this, and through a plot involving the production of two vastly different independent films, Swanberg ponders out loud the role of the filmmaking process in the lives of the creators, and whether or not the resulting films are worth the strain and possible damage the process can cause. Continue Reading »
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.
In his three-part biographical epic Carlos, Olivier Assayas seems to have approached his subject—Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the international terrorist known throughout the 1970s and '80s as Carlos the Jackal—in a manner similar to the way Steven Soderbergh approached another leftist-revolutionary icon, Che Guevara, in his two-part Che. Like Soderbergh, Assayas seems to have decided that the only honest way to approach his enigmatic central figure is to focus obsessively on historical verisimilitude, stand back, and allow us to draw our own conclusions.
The theory behind taking such an approach, it seems, is to avoid the kind of facile psychological oversimplifications that tends to reduce most Hollywood biopics; think, for instance, of the way Taylor Hackford's Ray turned Ray Charles's guilt over helplessly witnessing the drowning death of his younger brother into a letting-go-of-the-past homily that magically seems to cleanse him of all his demons at the end. It's an admirable goal, but, at least as it plays out in Carlos (and in Che, too), it also turns out to be something of a double-edged sword. Assayas doesn't always provide us with the safety net of a palpable directorial point of view; much of the time, we instead get the unmoored, one-thing-after-another feel of history passing us by. That's not meant as criticism; history, of course, rarely falls into easy three-act structures. But as a result of that strategy, there are sections of the 319-minute film that naturally are more immediately compelling than others. (Its third part especially flounders, though the aimlessness seems rather appropriate considering that it details the gradual loss of notoriety and revolutionary fervor into the kind of modest, petite-bourgeois existence Carlos had so vehemently railed against during his heyday.) A more pressing question, though, is whether there are any resulting revelations to justify its wholly intellectual gaze. Continue Reading »
Steven Soderbergh's And Everything Is Going Fine is an exhaustive tribute to the work and, by extension, the life of virtuoso monologist Spalding Gray. Impeccably researched and cut together, the film is almost exclusively built out of footage of Gray on stage or being interviewed. By "almost exclusively," read 99 percent, with the other one percent consisting of Gray's family photos. Not a single title or word of voiceover clutters the master's endlessly engaging delivery of a fearless autobiography lived out loud, an old-school decision that makes this one of the more ambitious and brave documentaries in recent memory.
Soderbergh loosely follows the Bubble/The Girlfriend Experience line of his filmmaking to define yet another odd corner of cinematic experimentation. The film opens with Gray doing his thing. A breathless 89 minutes later, it ends with Gray having done his thing, the speaker's thoughts dominating the viewer's conscious in one grand, new, Soderbergh-created monologue about Gray's turns in the theater, his discovery of the monologue form, and his struggles to cope with success and typecasting toward the end of his life. This rich examination of performance and creative nonfiction will become an essential academic document for any future Gray scholar. Continue Reading »
"I was working at this Japanese restaurant. I was really miserable. These Korean guys kept staring at my tits."
"So I told her, what if you added Jewish non-fiction?"
"Working at a Japanese restaurant sounds really good to me right now."
[Gas station clerk]: "Have a good night."
[Man buying cigarettes and Trojan Sensitives]: "Oh, I will."
"Dude, Drew's about to get a tattoo right now. Do you wanna come? If you give me $100, you can tell me what initials I'm getting on my chest. WE'RE GOING NOW."
[Guy bouncing over to me]: "I made you a sandwich today!" [Name: Jackie.]
[275 lb. man with a Bud Light six-pack and another he was drinking at the Hampton desk at 1:15 when I arrived, not to mention the 10-gallon Stetson and unaffected Larry The Cable Guy accent]: "I'm not going to lie. She is so hot. I would love to fuck her. Does that cab have a cigarette lighter so I can charge my phone?"
"I used to live on Metropolitan and Grand with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They told me they were in a band, but I didn't care. Then I went to Boston to visit the guy I was dating and he said 'You have to hear these guys before they get too popular and you can't listen to them.' And it was them!"
[Me]: "Did he literally say that? Was he kidding at all?" "Yeah. He was a philosophy grad student."
"I had this friend in high school who was obsessed with Rod Stewart. He had a whole wall covered with him."Continue Reading »
Amy Taubin's Times article, "One Singular Auteur, Through Another," is all about Steven Soderbergh's upcoming documentary on Spalding Gray, a must-see for those fans (myself included) of the duo's 1996 collaboration, Gray's Anatomy.
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 keith@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. This is the second half of a two-part conversation; the first part can be found here. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]
ED HOWARD: You selected Steven Soderbergh's Solaris as the film from the last few years you believe to be unfairly overlooked, and it's not hard to see why you chose it. There are few types of films that are more often overlooked and forgotten, en masse, than the amorphous category of the "remake." Fairly or unfairly, critics tend to be inherently skeptical of remake projects, even if audiences flock to genre remakes like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the "reboots" of franchises like Friday the 13th and Halloween. In Soderbergh's case, his film couldn't even be called a commercial success; it was more or less a flop whose memory has almost completely faded from the popular imagination in just a few short years. When Soderbergh's film came out in 2002, I skipped over it for the same reason that I suspect a lot of other people did: by all appearances, it was yet another Hollywood "updating" of a classic film from years before, a film that if you ask me didn't really need to be revisited. Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 Solaris is a classic of the science fiction genre, as well-loved and admired among art-cinema fans as Stanley Kubrick's more popularly known 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which Tarkovsky was directly responding in making his own film. Moreover, the 1961 novel of the same name by Stanislaw Lem is also a classic, one of the greatest works of sci-fi literature (and a personal favorite of mine). Soderbergh was stepping into tremendous shoes by attempting to tell this story, and I'm sure he realized that this film would inevitably be compared to its predecessors, making it difficult to evaluate on its own terms.
The question then becomes: on its own terms, what is Soderbergh's Solaris? What was his rationale for revisiting a classic story? What does he bring to the film to make it his own? Does this new Solaris deserve its current obscurity or should it be remembered simultaneously with its predecessors (or even elevated above them)? I have my own opinions on these questions, but for now I'm interested to know what you think. Does what I've described gibe with your own reasons for picking this film? And why do you think Soderbergh's Solaris deserves a second look? Continue Reading »
The most engaging parts of Che are the two animated maps (of Cuba and South America, respectively) that open each section of director Steven Soderbergh and star/producer Benicio Del Toro's four-hour-plus biopic of oft-appropriated revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. It's funny that, in what frequently feels like a droning historical lecture, it's the doodles at the margins that inspire (something about the somber, dog-tired drudge of Alberto Iglesias' music wedded to these color-coded illustrations speaks to the multifaceted ways—literal and otherwise—in which countries and continents divide themselves).
I gather that a good part of the film's appeal comes from its mostly steadfast refusal to glorify Guevara in the way of many a dorm room knick-knack, but Soderbergh already took his shot against the 'Che'erleaders in a pointed and hilarious image from The Limey (his last great movie) where Terence Stamp, cigarette dangling, silently contemplates a Che T-Shirt-sporting Luis Guzman. ______________________________________ To read the rest of the review at UnderGroundOnline (UGO), click here.
Steven Soderbergh's And Everything Is Going Fine is an exhaustive tribute to the work and, by extension, the life of virtuoso monologist Spalding Gray. Impeccably researched and cut together, the film is almost exclusively built out of footage of Gray on stage or being interviewed. By "almost exclusively," read 99 percent, with the other one percent consisting of Gray's family photos. Not a single title or word of voiceover clutters the master's endlessly engaging delivery of a fearless autobiography lived out loud, an old-school decision that makes this one of the more ambitious and brave documentaries in recent memory.
Recent Comments:
Ranking Oscar's 2012 Nominees
by tangodiva
Understanding Screenwriting #89: Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, The Descendants, My Week with Marilyn, & More
by outsidedog
Ranking Oscar's 2012 Nominees
by Ryland Walker Knight
Oscar 2012 Winner Predictions: Actor
by R. Kurt Osenlund
Whitney Houston (1963 – 2012)
by Andrew Chan