The Chicago Filmmakers' screening of Len Lye's short films earlier this month (12/01/07) was a fantastic film experience, and if you were so unlucky as to miss the 16mm tour of his oeuvre, there are a handful of Lye's films available for a peek on YouTube. I've posted my favorite above, Free Radicals (1958/1979), which begins at about 3:30 on the counter, and you can read a full description of each film in the series in an earlier post over at Seen's sister site Scarlett Cinema.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Short Experimental Films: Len Lye
Saturday, December 1, 2007
The Chicago Filmmakers' screening of Len Lye's short films earlier this month (12/01/07) was a fantastic film experience, and if you were so unlucky as to miss the 16mm tour of his oeuvre, there are a handful of Lye's films available for a peek on YouTube. I've posted my favorite above, Free Radicals (1958/1979), which begins at about 3:30 on the counter, and you can read a full description of each film in the series in an earlier post over at Seen's sister site Scarlett Cinema.
The Chicago Filmmakers' screening of Len Lye's short films earlier this month (12/01/07) was a fantastic film experience, and if you were so unlucky as to miss the 16mm tour of his oeuvre, there are a handful of Lye's films available for a peek on YouTube. I've posted my favorite above, Free Radicals (1958/1979), which begins at about 3:30 on the counter, and you can read a full description of each film in the series in an earlier post over at Seen's sister site Scarlett Cinema.
The Films of Pedro Costa
The Gene Siskel Film Center concluded its retrospective on filmmaker Pedro Costa a few weeks ago, and it was awesome. Here's a quick breakdown of what I saw, and again, please mind my brevity, but with two days left of 2007 I am scrambling to review everything that's been released in the past month. But, suffice it to say, in short, that everything I saw from Costa last month (and earlier this month) was fantastic and constitutes some of the best cinema I've seen in 2007.Tuesday, November 27, 2007
With the release of Costa's Colossal Youth last year, his filmmaking has been at the fore of my mind, though not having seen any of his films before it was diffcult to gauge my expectations. Let me say now that the first Costa screening I attended in late November, Down To Earth (1994) was an aesthetic delight. The story follows a young nurse who travels back to her patient's rural hometown; he is in a coma, she seems in search of some meaning in her life. Surrounded by the mountainous landscape, littered with lava rocks and a scarce few trees, Costa's characters become abstract figures in disconnected space. His shot sequences lie somewhere in between the long takes of Bela Tarr that take on a life of their own, and the bouncy disconnect of Godard, a la Breathless, making us keenly aware of the technology that informs and mediates the actual landscape, at the same time showing us pure moments of beauty that mixes the live human being with the heavy force of nature. Friday, November 30, 2007
Where Lies Your Hidden Smile (2001) is a must for anyone interested in editing, language, and the semiotics of them both. Following filmmakers Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub as they strain to find the precise moment to cut their film, the story is as much a show of their labor as it is a labor of love for one another. The filmmakers painstakingly advance and rewind the reel of celluloid frame-by-frame, in one scene, to find the the spot where the root of a character's smile begins, a subtle expression overlooked by the untrained eye. The film is an exercise in seeing how a film is edited, and though it requires an almost tedious amount of concentration, it's an experience unparalleled in its drive to show us what it takes to get just the right frame of film onscreen.Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Colossal Youth was the big to-see film of 2006, and now that it has been released one year later I'm glad to say I finally saw it. Maybe it was the build-up of 365 days of rave reviews that made me slightly less than thrilled about the feature overall, but more likely, Colossal Youth simply fell to the shadow of the predecesors I was lucky enough to see before it, the aforementioned Down To Earth and Where Lies Your Hidden Smile. In retrospect, it actually seems like a familiar exercise for Costa who employs much of the same long-take/long shot aesthetic in Down To Earth (and undoubtedly others, which unfortunately I was unable to see), and, as illustrated in the image above, Costa's characters here too are contrasted against local buildings, structures, and other ubiquitous pieces of the landscape that really pull them out of space. Colossal Youth, for me, looked much like an urban version of Down To Earth. All of that being said, despite any repetition Costa exercised in this particular film it is still an individual masterpiece. The run-time is a bit longer than the others (and felt that way too), but you can think of this movie like you're taking an extended look at artwork on a museum wall; time is handled with a lot of texture that very much slows things down to make you notice everything you're seeing in the shot.
Bee Movie and Another 'B' Movie
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Late Marriage - 2001 - DVD
Late Marriage was a 2001 Israeli film that landed on my Netflix queue for reasons unknown. It won best everything from the Israeli Film Academy, but I found it just depressing. Though, before I begin to sound hateful of it, I'll stop; it wasn't the movie's fault I wasn't ready (or wanting) to watch it when it came, so I shall reserve criticisms for now.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Most underwhelming and overhyped movie of the year: Bee Movie. Okay, Transformers was hyped more than Jerry Seinfeld's Bee flick, but I think most of us trusted that Seinfeld would end up with the smarter of the two animated films. Though I haven't seen Transformers to know for sure, the independent polling I took among friends and acquaintances was that Michael Bay's summer blockbuster was surprisingly fun. On the other end of the spectrum, I imagined hilarious and endlessly entertaining consequences for Seinfeld's script, so believe my profound disappointment when the movie turned out to be about not much more than a few jokes of the Seinfeld sort sprinkled throughout a contrived kids' story. The only thing good about the film was Seinfeld himself (as the bee's voice anyway), and I'd rather have him in non-computer animated form on the stand-up stage instead. Bummer, I was excited about this one...
Late Marriage - 2001 - DVD
Late Marriage was a 2001 Israeli film that landed on my Netflix queue for reasons unknown. It won best everything from the Israeli Film Academy, but I found it just depressing. Though, before I begin to sound hateful of it, I'll stop; it wasn't the movie's fault I wasn't ready (or wanting) to watch it when it came, so I shall reserve criticisms for now.Monday, November 26, 2007
Most underwhelming and overhyped movie of the year: Bee Movie. Okay, Transformers was hyped more than Jerry Seinfeld's Bee flick, but I think most of us trusted that Seinfeld would end up with the smarter of the two animated films. Though I haven't seen Transformers to know for sure, the independent polling I took among friends and acquaintances was that Michael Bay's summer blockbuster was surprisingly fun. On the other end of the spectrum, I imagined hilarious and endlessly entertaining consequences for Seinfeld's script, so believe my profound disappointment when the movie turned out to be about not much more than a few jokes of the Seinfeld sort sprinkled throughout a contrived kids' story. The only thing good about the film was Seinfeld himself (as the bee's voice anyway), and I'd rather have him in non-computer animated form on the stand-up stage instead. Bummer, I was excited about this one...
A Few New Films in '07: Oswald's Ghost, I Think I Love My Wife, and The Darjeeling Limited
Friday, November 16, 2007
Oswald's Ghost was a short, and a shade sentimental documentary by Robert Stone on the Kennedy assassination's impact on U.S. society. As the title suggests, the film is centered on the role of Lee Harvey Oswald and the many subsequent conspiracy theories in the years after his murder. Though the film doesn't offer any new perspective on the history of the assassination, it does make use of long reels of news footage that are usually only seen in the length of a soundbite. Dan Rather is young, dewy-skinned freshman reporter, and the now gray and frazzled conspiracy theorists looked like young and frazzled conspiracy theorists; Jim Garrison is one in particular, the story of whom is the base of Oliver Stone's JFK (1991).
In all, what makes the movie compelling is not actually cinematic, but the result of the subject matter itself that's an inextricable part of the American political and social sphere. Looking at the Zapruder film up close and re-magnified is like living through that moment, now over forty years in our past, again for the first time (even for those of us who weren't alive to see it upon release.) The film mentioned a figure somewhere around the 70% range for the section of Americans that believe President Kennedy's death was conspired by our own government, using Oswald as he himself says on one famous newsreel, a "patsy." The film is kind of like an undergraduate level paper on the Kennedy assassination; interesting and genuinely curious and earnest in its questioning, but doesn't uncover anything new on the subject. That said, history buffs will delight (as I did) in the rekindling of facts it provides.
Friday, November 16, 2007
I Think I Love My Wife, Chris Rock's second directorial feature, was the most misogynist film of the year, gleefully congratulating itself with an internal monologue of cat calls from the film's lead character Richard Cooper (Chris Rock). Meanwhile back at home, his wife stakes her claim as a shrewish, demanding and humorless teacher/homemaker. Is Richard honestly shocked by their non-existent sex life when he is the only half of their so-called partnership that gets to have fun and make a joke or two?
Rock's adaptation is based on Eric Rohmer's Chloe in the Afternoon (1972), but is written for a much wider base; likely Rock's target audience is a far cry from those who sit down for the high concept ideas of Rohmer. The modern version of the film then becomes more of an exercise on bashing the low points of marriage, which are summed up from the male perspective only, thus pinning the roots of that anxiety on the boring, humorless wife. If only she were more fun, more spontaneous, then maybe he wouldn't be so tempted to undress every attractive woman with his eyes.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Besides Rushmore (1998), The Darjeeling Limited might be the best Wes Anderson flick yet. I think the main criticism I've read about the film is its redundancy in terms of style, that it looks like every other W. Anderson film. His signature is surely there onscreen, but I adored it anyway. Everything from Bill Murray's opening cameo, to Jason Schwartzman's pepper spray scene was a lot of fun, and most of it was done with so little dialogue that it gave us a good chance to just watch a solely visual story. The fact that the three American brothers are deserted in a country where their language isn't understood in the first place, is a good premise for the muted scenes. Most notable are the shots of simple human movement: watching the brothers walk or run with old-school designer suitcases in tow, regular mundane exercises become elegant.
Oswald's Ghost was a short, and a shade sentimental documentary by Robert Stone on the Kennedy assassination's impact on U.S. society. As the title suggests, the film is centered on the role of Lee Harvey Oswald and the many subsequent conspiracy theories in the years after his murder. Though the film doesn't offer any new perspective on the history of the assassination, it does make use of long reels of news footage that are usually only seen in the length of a soundbite. Dan Rather is young, dewy-skinned freshman reporter, and the now gray and frazzled conspiracy theorists looked like young and frazzled conspiracy theorists; Jim Garrison is one in particular, the story of whom is the base of Oliver Stone's JFK (1991). In all, what makes the movie compelling is not actually cinematic, but the result of the subject matter itself that's an inextricable part of the American political and social sphere. Looking at the Zapruder film up close and re-magnified is like living through that moment, now over forty years in our past, again for the first time (even for those of us who weren't alive to see it upon release.) The film mentioned a figure somewhere around the 70% range for the section of Americans that believe President Kennedy's death was conspired by our own government, using Oswald as he himself says on one famous newsreel, a "patsy." The film is kind of like an undergraduate level paper on the Kennedy assassination; interesting and genuinely curious and earnest in its questioning, but doesn't uncover anything new on the subject. That said, history buffs will delight (as I did) in the rekindling of facts it provides.
Friday, November 16, 2007
I Think I Love My Wife, Chris Rock's second directorial feature, was the most misogynist film of the year, gleefully congratulating itself with an internal monologue of cat calls from the film's lead character Richard Cooper (Chris Rock). Meanwhile back at home, his wife stakes her claim as a shrewish, demanding and humorless teacher/homemaker. Is Richard honestly shocked by their non-existent sex life when he is the only half of their so-called partnership that gets to have fun and make a joke or two? Rock's adaptation is based on Eric Rohmer's Chloe in the Afternoon (1972), but is written for a much wider base; likely Rock's target audience is a far cry from those who sit down for the high concept ideas of Rohmer. The modern version of the film then becomes more of an exercise on bashing the low points of marriage, which are summed up from the male perspective only, thus pinning the roots of that anxiety on the boring, humorless wife. If only she were more fun, more spontaneous, then maybe he wouldn't be so tempted to undress every attractive woman with his eyes.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Besides Rushmore (1998), The Darjeeling Limited might be the best Wes Anderson flick yet. I think the main criticism I've read about the film is its redundancy in terms of style, that it looks like every other W. Anderson film. His signature is surely there onscreen, but I adored it anyway. Everything from Bill Murray's opening cameo, to Jason Schwartzman's pepper spray scene was a lot of fun, and most of it was done with so little dialogue that it gave us a good chance to just watch a solely visual story. The fact that the three American brothers are deserted in a country where their language isn't understood in the first place, is a good premise for the muted scenes. Most notable are the shots of simple human movement: watching the brothers walk or run with old-school designer suitcases in tow, regular mundane exercises become elegant.
Otto Preminger Visits Chicago (and my living room)
Sunday, November 25, 2007
I've been watching a bit of Preminger lately, mostly due to a retrospective that ran at the Music Box Theatre. The screenings were once-a-week matinée shows on weekends; the first of which I saw was a gem from 1950, Where the Sidewalk Ends, starring Dana Andrews as a jaggedy-edged cop covering up a murder he didn't mean to commit.
Preminger cuts to the chase. From the start of the credit sequence we're already into the action, punctuated by the film's characters interacting directly with the title cards as they walk over the big, chalked letters on the sidewalk beneath them. City sounds abound: car horns honking, people chattering, it's an overall bustling buzz that hints more at a reality than style. Though that gritty reality is in and of itself a style.
Sgt. Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) is a disturbed by something internally (is it the war? at this late date I can't recall if his character is war veteran), which he takes out rather aggressively on the rough-necks he picks up. He's warned by his superiors (one Lt. Thomas, played by Karl Malden) to cool it or he'll be suspended or demoted, or maybe worse; so when he pushes his last suspect, a war hero, a bit too hard, he knows his goose is cooked; he covers up the murder, and on down his cover-up spirals that eventually involves an innocent cabbie, the father of Dix's love interest, Morgan, played by the stunning Gene Tierney.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Fallen Angel (1945) graced my DVD player the next day and brought more of the same Preminger grittiness, though this time with a female lead who is much less graceful and pretty than Gene Tierney: Stella (Linda Darnell), the femme fatale who hooks con artist Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews) and inevitably trips him up in a no-win love affair. Stanton sweeps into town and courts the more wholesome hometown girl, June Mills (Alice Faye) who is heir to a small fortune following her parents' deaths, and which is not-so-coincidentally her most attractive feature to the swindling Stanton.
Darnell, who is the town's prostitute (though never overtly referred to as such in the film), is such a transient soul--both physically when she runs away and returns time after time, and emotionally, in her loosely defined love with Stanton--is Eric Stanton's center of gravity. But when she falls out of his life, he loses track of it himself. He's caught in a love triangle with a woman's money (and with a woman who loves him unconditionally) and with the woman who has stolen his heart, the cruel and corrupt Stella. Add in with the mix a murder for which Stanton is being framed, and what you have, once again, is a post-war, post-traumatic stress picture that disseminates Stanton's self-confidence in one quick blink.
Eric Stanton is a drinker in the movie (yet another escape from his unbearable being), and after learning recently that Dana Andrews was an alcoholic, I can't think of a more perfect actor to maintain the portrait of Stanton's male fragility. There's a double-layer to the character in Fallen Angel, kind of a transparency of Andrews's self that brings that extra edge of roughness to the film, and moreover, adds that harshness of reality that seems to sum up the signature of Preminger.
I've been watching a bit of Preminger lately, mostly due to a retrospective that ran at the Music Box Theatre. The screenings were once-a-week matinée shows on weekends; the first of which I saw was a gem from 1950, Where the Sidewalk Ends, starring Dana Andrews as a jaggedy-edged cop covering up a murder he didn't mean to commit. Preminger cuts to the chase. From the start of the credit sequence we're already into the action, punctuated by the film's characters interacting directly with the title cards as they walk over the big, chalked letters on the sidewalk beneath them. City sounds abound: car horns honking, people chattering, it's an overall bustling buzz that hints more at a reality than style. Though that gritty reality is in and of itself a style.
Sgt. Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) is a disturbed by something internally (is it the war? at this late date I can't recall if his character is war veteran), which he takes out rather aggressively on the rough-necks he picks up. He's warned by his superiors (one Lt. Thomas, played by Karl Malden) to cool it or he'll be suspended or demoted, or maybe worse; so when he pushes his last suspect, a war hero, a bit too hard, he knows his goose is cooked; he covers up the murder, and on down his cover-up spirals that eventually involves an innocent cabbie, the father of Dix's love interest, Morgan, played by the stunning Gene Tierney.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Fallen Angel (1945) graced my DVD player the next day and brought more of the same Preminger grittiness, though this time with a female lead who is much less graceful and pretty than Gene Tierney: Stella (Linda Darnell), the femme fatale who hooks con artist Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews) and inevitably trips him up in a no-win love affair. Stanton sweeps into town and courts the more wholesome hometown girl, June Mills (Alice Faye) who is heir to a small fortune following her parents' deaths, and which is not-so-coincidentally her most attractive feature to the swindling Stanton. Darnell, who is the town's prostitute (though never overtly referred to as such in the film), is such a transient soul--both physically when she runs away and returns time after time, and emotionally, in her loosely defined love with Stanton--is Eric Stanton's center of gravity. But when she falls out of his life, he loses track of it himself. He's caught in a love triangle with a woman's money (and with a woman who loves him unconditionally) and with the woman who has stolen his heart, the cruel and corrupt Stella. Add in with the mix a murder for which Stanton is being framed, and what you have, once again, is a post-war, post-traumatic stress picture that disseminates Stanton's self-confidence in one quick blink.
Eric Stanton is a drinker in the movie (yet another escape from his unbearable being), and after learning recently that Dana Andrews was an alcoholic, I can't think of a more perfect actor to maintain the portrait of Stanton's male fragility. There's a double-layer to the character in Fallen Angel, kind of a transparency of Andrews's self that brings that extra edge of roughness to the film, and moreover, adds that harshness of reality that seems to sum up the signature of Preminger.
50s Transition Films: Murder By Contract (1958) and The Big Sky (1952)
Once a week since the beginning of September Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has introduced films from the 1950s "transition" at the Gene Siskel Film Center. The movie plus a brief introduction and discussion following the film, comes in at a mere $4 (for Film Center Members), making it the best deal in Chicago for cinema. I made it out mid-way through November (finally) for two of the must-see movies on the schedule: Murder By Contract (1958) directed by Irving Lerner, a film said to have influenced Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch and others; and Howard Hawks' The Big Sky (1952). The last film of the year is coming up this Wednesday (12/12) and is sure to please, Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (1957). Actually, the print we will see is a UK version with twelve extra minutes of runtime, and officially titled, Curse of the Demon. No matter what you call it, it will be great; Tourneur is one of the finest horror and noir directors, the same man credited with Cat People (1942) and Out of the Past (1947).
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Ah, double rates for women, indeed! Claude (Vince Edwards) is a swaggering contract killer who is hired to take out a target, but it isn't a hulky man like he's used to; it's not the kind he can envision like an old enemy of war, this time he's hired to kill a woman. Don't let her slight figure and delicate piano playing fool you, the lady's got a mouth like a sailor, terrorizing her police escorts and body guards with degrading tongue lashings. She's one of a handful of women scripted in the story, and it is no wonder she strikes fear in his heart, she's the only one of them with authority and voice. If we are to draw noir characteristics into the analysis of Murder, pianist Billie Williams (Caprice Toriel) is clearly Claude's femme fatale. He brustles past his two male counterpart, veritable babysitters employed to keep Claude on schedule and at ease, hence outings to the beach and to other Los Angeles attractions. On a one-week deadline to complete his mission Claude relaxes most of his days away until it is finally revealed to him that Billie isn't a man. With only two days left he hastily demands $10,000 to complete the job (up from his original fee of $500, I believe); the rate is guaranteed to him without any mention of why his stock suddenly soars so high in the murder market. The poster illustrates just how close Claude comes to his target, and he fails out of unspoken insecurities with women in general. It might have been the singularly oddest post-war picture of maladjusted men, and is clearly a part of an anxiety-riddled theme in Lerner's other films from the 1950s, none of which I have seen, but whose titles speak volumes: Suicide Attack (1951), Man Crazy (1953), Edge of Fury (1958), and City of Fear (1959).
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
If Hawks' Red River (1948) is homoerotic, The Big Sky is a confident acceptance of male companionship. Kirk Douglas and his much lesser-known co-star Dewey Martin play two comfortable companions on a fur trade expedition up the Missouri River with "Uncle Zeb" (Arthur Hunnicutt), another amiable character who is employed as the film's gentle voiceover narrator. When the story opens with Boone (Dewey Martin) knocking the lights out of Jim (Kirk Douglas) for no apparent reason, we think the movie will be demoted to a series of macho fights that declare superiority. To the contrary, Douglas's character is too calm mannered to care; he really is a guy resigned to the unwieldy western terrain, but he's rather thoughtfully at peace with that fact. And so, with the typical alpha-male tensions dissolved there's room for the characters to live and breathe together, and they are (as the introductory speaker mentioned; not Rosenbaum, who was out of town at a film festival) quite at ease in one another's company. The voiceover narration by Hunnicutt, in his unpretentious and wise country tone, frames the film with a sense of loyalty and male sentimentality rarely seen in a western.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Ah, double rates for women, indeed! Claude (Vince Edwards) is a swaggering contract killer who is hired to take out a target, but it isn't a hulky man like he's used to; it's not the kind he can envision like an old enemy of war, this time he's hired to kill a woman. Don't let her slight figure and delicate piano playing fool you, the lady's got a mouth like a sailor, terrorizing her police escorts and body guards with degrading tongue lashings. She's one of a handful of women scripted in the story, and it is no wonder she strikes fear in his heart, she's the only one of them with authority and voice. If we are to draw noir characteristics into the analysis of Murder, pianist Billie Williams (Caprice Toriel) is clearly Claude's femme fatale. He brustles past his two male counterpart, veritable babysitters employed to keep Claude on schedule and at ease, hence outings to the beach and to other Los Angeles attractions. On a one-week deadline to complete his mission Claude relaxes most of his days away until it is finally revealed to him that Billie isn't a man. With only two days left he hastily demands $10,000 to complete the job (up from his original fee of $500, I believe); the rate is guaranteed to him without any mention of why his stock suddenly soars so high in the murder market. The poster illustrates just how close Claude comes to his target, and he fails out of unspoken insecurities with women in general. It might have been the singularly oddest post-war picture of maladjusted men, and is clearly a part of an anxiety-riddled theme in Lerner's other films from the 1950s, none of which I have seen, but whose titles speak volumes: Suicide Attack (1951), Man Crazy (1953), Edge of Fury (1958), and City of Fear (1959).Wednesday, November 28, 2007
If Hawks' Red River (1948) is homoerotic, The Big Sky is a confident acceptance of male companionship. Kirk Douglas and his much lesser-known co-star Dewey Martin play two comfortable companions on a fur trade expedition up the Missouri River with "Uncle Zeb" (Arthur Hunnicutt), another amiable character who is employed as the film's gentle voiceover narrator. When the story opens with Boone (Dewey Martin) knocking the lights out of Jim (Kirk Douglas) for no apparent reason, we think the movie will be demoted to a series of macho fights that declare superiority. To the contrary, Douglas's character is too calm mannered to care; he really is a guy resigned to the unwieldy western terrain, but he's rather thoughtfully at peace with that fact. And so, with the typical alpha-male tensions dissolved there's room for the characters to live and breathe together, and they are (as the introductory speaker mentioned; not Rosenbaum, who was out of town at a film festival) quite at ease in one another's company. The voiceover narration by Hunnicutt, in his unpretentious and wise country tone, frames the film with a sense of loyalty and male sentimentality rarely seen in a western.
Movie Catch-Up: Eastern Promises, The Exorcist, Deep Red, Control, and Nights of Cabiria
The past two months have seen a tremendous influx in film viewing, and thusly, I am far too backlogged to give each and every film the proper analysis it deserves. That statement means doubly as much for the content of this post, chock-full of cinema geniuses young and old, from Cronenberg and Fellini, to Anton Corbijn, music video vet and director of 2007's Control. So bear with me in the next few updates that bring us right in to Top Ten season. Yes, the Top Ten Best Movies of 2007 are already being calculated and will be up and ready for debate by the end of this month.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
I'm a big David Cronenberg fan and Eastern Promises, the next feature film after his miraculous 2005 movie, A History of Violence, reassures that to the max. The crowing achievement in his new film must be the brutal and fleshy fight scene, in which actor Viggo Mortensen is stripped down to nothing and fights for his life against two large (and clothed) gangsters; not only for the way this scene makes the violence personal, but for the intimate camera of Cronenberg regular Peter Suschitzky, and the superb makeup from Stephan Dupuis (who won an Oscar in 1986 for another Cronenberg vehicle, The Fly), the movie becomes beautiful (yet bloody) in a personal way.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
The weekend before Halloween, a few friends and I met up for a "Horror Movie Marathon," (once one reaches their late twenties there will be no late-night celebrations on Wednesday workdays, apparently) involving cheap champagne, red vines and carrot cake. Combined with our gory double-feature that included Euro-Slasher classic Deep Red and Friedkin's 1973 terror, The Exorcist, naturally we felt sick by 2:00am when we wrapped up. If you haven't seen Italian director Dario Argento's Deep Red (Profondo rosso), please do; it'll give you a jump, and is more artful than exploitative than its horror counterparts. Ditto on The Exorcist, which somehow gets scarier every time you see it.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Control is the sort of fiction film that feels so real it could almost be a documentary. It's about Joy Division lead singer, Ian Curtis's rise to stardom before his suicide at age 23, and chronicles his aims at reaching adulthood prematurely: his wedding, the birth of his first child, and his extra-marital affairs. It is the quick rise and fall of a man too frustrated with his youthful identity to patiently grow beyond it, and find greatness. Shot entirely in black and white by Anton Corbijn, who is mostly known for his work in rock documentary and videos--One Night in Paris, not the movie you're probably thinking of, but rather a Depeche Mode concert--is one, and there are more that cover U2 and Metallica also. You can see the director's past genre influence on this film's style, and is a real tribute to Curtis's talent, and a quiet eulogy-in-retrospect on his death. The soundtrack is also phenomenal.
Tuesday, November 8, 2007
Somebody out there that I went to graduate film school with is probably shocked to learn I had never seen Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria until early last month. For whomever that may be I refer you to the brief Onion Opinion headline, "Oh My God, You've Never Seen Every Movie Ever Made?" So now that that's out of my system, I should say how lovely Nights is, tender and heartbreaking, but the clownish Cabiria (Giulietta Masina) keeps up our spirits regardless. I doubt there is anyone more adorable in screen history, excepting the male version of herself, Charlie Chaplin. I really loved this movie.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
I'm a big David Cronenberg fan and Eastern Promises, the next feature film after his miraculous 2005 movie, A History of Violence, reassures that to the max. The crowing achievement in his new film must be the brutal and fleshy fight scene, in which actor Viggo Mortensen is stripped down to nothing and fights for his life against two large (and clothed) gangsters; not only for the way this scene makes the violence personal, but for the intimate camera of Cronenberg regular Peter Suschitzky, and the superb makeup from Stephan Dupuis (who won an Oscar in 1986 for another Cronenberg vehicle, The Fly), the movie becomes beautiful (yet bloody) in a personal way.Saturday, October 27, 2007
The weekend before Halloween, a few friends and I met up for a "Horror Movie Marathon," (once one reaches their late twenties there will be no late-night celebrations on Wednesday workdays, apparently) involving cheap champagne, red vines and carrot cake. Combined with our gory double-feature that included Euro-Slasher classic Deep Red and Friedkin's 1973 terror, The Exorcist, naturally we felt sick by 2:00am when we wrapped up. If you haven't seen Italian director Dario Argento's Deep Red (Profondo rosso), please do; it'll give you a jump, and is more artful than exploitative than its horror counterparts. Ditto on The Exorcist, which somehow gets scarier every time you see it.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Control is the sort of fiction film that feels so real it could almost be a documentary. It's about Joy Division lead singer, Ian Curtis's rise to stardom before his suicide at age 23, and chronicles his aims at reaching adulthood prematurely: his wedding, the birth of his first child, and his extra-marital affairs. It is the quick rise and fall of a man too frustrated with his youthful identity to patiently grow beyond it, and find greatness. Shot entirely in black and white by Anton Corbijn, who is mostly known for his work in rock documentary and videos--One Night in Paris, not the movie you're probably thinking of, but rather a Depeche Mode concert--is one, and there are more that cover U2 and Metallica also. You can see the director's past genre influence on this film's style, and is a real tribute to Curtis's talent, and a quiet eulogy-in-retrospect on his death. The soundtrack is also phenomenal.Tuesday, November 8, 2007
Somebody out there that I went to graduate film school with is probably shocked to learn I had never seen Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria until early last month. For whomever that may be I refer you to the brief Onion Opinion headline, "Oh My God, You've Never Seen Every Movie Ever Made?" So now that that's out of my system, I should say how lovely Nights is, tender and heartbreaking, but the clownish Cabiria (Giulietta Masina) keeps up our spirits regardless. I doubt there is anyone more adorable in screen history, excepting the male version of herself, Charlie Chaplin. I really loved this movie.
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