Parallax View

The only links page that matters… except for all the others.

Videodrome

“I’ve seen some creepy things in the movie business.” Accompanying their Cronenberg retrospective, the Museum of the Moving Image’s websiteis hosting some fine writing on the director’s career, including Tom McCormack’s look at how Videodrome‘s prophecies have played out, and a salute to his straightforward examination of the sexual other from Miriam Bale (who must have gotten in early to snag the article title “They Came From Within”). Cronenberg’s onstage interview at the event, with its revelation that he’s working on a novel, is covered by The Playlist’s Jen Vineyard. Over at Alt Screen Nathan Lee frets a bit much about what critical apparatus he need employ, but comes up with some good observations on recent Cronenberg, and its relation to the older films. And the director himself lets his latest horror story act as backdrop to domestic comforts, in a brief, charming salute to Sigmund Freud’s chair. Credit the bulk of these links to David Hudson.

“Time and again, when a lesser filmmaker would’ve traveled, dollied or zoomed in to re-frame an emotional moment on the audience’s behalf, Lumet keeps his distance.” The Irish film journal Experimental Conversations has posted their new issue; a clear highlight is Fergus Daly’s argument for Sidney Lumet’s honorable pragmatism overshadowing the daring of his fusion of classical and experimental temperaments, a point made nearly as well by Daly’s judiciously chosen illustrations as by his words. One of many fine links (also don’t miss Miranda July’s congressional testimony) passed along by Girish Shambu.

“If Michel Hazanavicius wins, she wants him to take that list of silent-movie inspirations he did for Indiewire, name-check them all and cause Wikipedia to crash from all the people looking up “King Vidor” at the same time.” Up to here with the groans of this year’s award season being somehow insufferably “cinema-obsessed” for recognizing such nods to movie history as The Artist and Hugo, the Self-Styled Siren dreams up the Oscar telecast she knows will never happen.

1,925. As of January 16th, that’s how many movies A. D. Jameson has seen over the past 15 years. His thoughts on the total, and the limiting nature of most “movies-you-must-see” lists, in a link noted by Andrew Sullivan.

Mubi’s annual Fantasy Double Features poll—where their writers pair one film from the past year with an older feature—yields some strained or pretentious efforts, but just as many inspired delights. And whatever hesitations I have about Jesse Cataldo’s matching of I Saw the Devil with Underworld U.S.A., the pictures he chose sealed the deal.

“Always the same joy, the same astonishment at the fresh significance of an image whose place I have just changed.” Also at Mubi, Daniel Kasman highlights a pair of curious, disorienting edits from Au hasard Balthazar and Une femme douce. An interesting discussion develops in the comments as to Bresson’s possible intention.

“You’re a sissy drinker.” “Well, maybe I can improve.” Helen Chandler’s sad final years can’t dim Dan Callahan’s admiration for her sparkling vitality, especially in The Last Flight—even as her “playing in the dark” hinted to how she’d end.

The Tailor of 'Tinker'

“Over the past 15 years the photographic basis of the medium has been eroded by digital image making, the traditional delivery system is changing, not just for cinema but for criticism, the audience is dwarfed by the audience for video games, and yet great things continue to be made.” J. Hoberman looks back (at the Voice) and forward, in conversation with the Times’s Dargis and Scott.

While at Criterion’s site, Hoberman offers a typically rich, allusive reading of Godzilla, yoking it to Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear (its “art-house twin”), King Kong, and contemporaneous Japanese debates about US nuclear armaments, among others.

Praising the excellent work of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy‘s Jacqueline Durran, Guy Lodge passes along a short interview with the costume designer conducted by style blog Kempt.

Parsing that luminous moment in Vivre sa vie when Karina encounters Falconetti, Roland-François Lack tries out some of Godard’s original plans for other films to play and hunts down the two theaters used as locations, unearthing a Godardian gag that’s probably been lost on most non-Parisian audiences for 50 years.

“[W]e’re DEFINITELY going to run out of booze. Charlize & Tilda just pulled up in a stolen police car.” And the Best Response to Not Being Nominated goes to… Patton Oswalt’s Twitter feed, via S.T. Van Airsdale at Movieline.

Nicol Williamson in 'Excalibur'

Obituary

Stage and screen actor Nicol Williamson, most well-known to audiences as the enigmatic Merlin in John Boorman’s earthy Excalibur, died of esophageal cancer at the age of 73 this week. More from Michael Coveney at The Guardian, and Playbill surveys his stage career and personal demons. More remembrances at Mubi.

Theo Angelopolous, the great Greek filmmaker, died after being struck by a motorcycle. He was on location near Athens, apparently preparing for his next film, and died in the hospital. He was 76. Scott Foundas considers his career and his cinema for the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Again, more links collected by David Hudson at Mubi.

Artist and designer Eiko Ishioka, who won an Oscar for her costume designs for Francis Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula and a special Jury Award at Cannes for the production design of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, died at age 73. Margalit Fox recalls her legacy (and it is impressive) for The New York Times.

Bingham Ray, one of the defining figures of modern American independent cinema, died earlier this week while at the Sundance Film Festival. The remembrances and tributes have been pouring in all week. He was a friend to cinema, to be sure, but also a friend to many in the cinema community. Here’s the announcement from the San Francisco Film Society, where he had just taken over as Executive Director in late 2011. Mubi collects the obituaries, remembrances and personal recollections here.

Stage and screen actor James Farentino died at age 73 after a lengthy illness. Bob Pool remembers his legacy for The Los Angeles Times.

In Seattle

Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan’s second films that was all but buried by Fox after a token release following two lawsuits and five years of conflicts between the filmmaker and the studio, finally gets a release in Seattle, beginning today (Friday, January 27) at SIFF Cinema Uptown. It’s a tough, messy, aggravating, touching and refreshingly honest drama and well worth your time. Showtimes and more information at siff.net.

NWFF’s 7^th Annual Children’s Film Festival Seattle plays through Sunday, February 5. Previewed by Sean Axmaker at Seattle Weekly. Complete schedule and details at NWFF.

Frank Borzage’s silent classic Street Angel plays Monday, January 30 at the Paramount as part of its “The First Oscars” series. Janet Gaynor picked up the first Academy Award for Best Actress; this was one of three films for which she was cited. The reason to see the film, however, is that it is simply one of the most beautiful and emotionally rapturous films ever made, sound or silent. Ticket information at Paramount website. NWFF offers a complete schedule of the silent series here.

Grand Illusion makes the case for Drive as “art house noir that was stuck in multiplexes,” and brings it back for a 35mm run in their little art house in the U-District. See it if you haven’t, and then you too can rage against the Academy’s snubbing of Albert Brooks. Showtimes at GI website here.

Francois Truffaut’s The Soft Skin, one of the director’s less well-known but thoroughly accomplished cool, unsettling thrillers, plays at SAM on Thursday as part of its series “Forever Young: The Films of François Truffaut.” Details at SAM here.

What our contributors are doing

Kathleen Murphy reviews Man on a Ledge at MSN Movies: “… fortified with sufficient popcorn and soda pop, killing time with this amiable mess isn’t the worst you could do at the multiplex.”

Andrew Wright reviews The Grey for Portland Mercury: “a brawny, often majestic survivalist saga that can’t quite work up the resolve to let its images drive the story.”

And for Art Zone, Andrew Wright reviews Margaret: “beautiful and frustrating and insightful and unfocused, sometimes all in the very same scene.”

Sean Axmaker previews the 7^th Annual Children’s Film Festival Seattle for Seattle Weekly: “Over 100 features and shorts represent almost every continent during an expanded 11-day schedule.”

Robert Horton keeps up his movie diary and collects links to his new reviews for the Everett Herald at his blog, The Crop Duster and reprints his reviews from the eighties at What a Feeling!

Sean Axmaker’s DVD column Videodrone continues at MSN here. You can find the roundup for and highlights of the January 24 DVD/Blu-ray releases here.

At the Seattle Times,

Tom Keogh takes a leap with Man on a Ledge: “it hasn’t a clue what to do with its own potential, quickly dissolving into absurd logic.”

John Hartl investigates the French bio-pic The Conquest: a “fast-paced, engaging new comedy drama…”

Tom Keogh reviews the Oregon-set drama How the Fire Fell: “one of those Northwest noir experiences of rain, madness and murder.”

Jeff Shannon engages the documentary Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts: “a regrettable excess of hero worship, but the effusive praise is arguably justified…”

Moira Macdonald surveys the options outside of the new film openings.

The weekly links page is compiled and curated by the editor of and contributors to Parallax View, with the invaluable assistance of Bruce Reid.

Sam Worthington and Elizabeth Banks

Asger Leth made his directorial bones with Ghosts of Cité Soleil, a hard-hitting documentary about the crime-ridden slums of Haiti’s Port-au-Prince, advertised as the most dangerous place on Earth. The multi-talented Leth also wrote, photographed and provided production design for “Ghosts,” which garnered good notices for visceral immediacy, as well as some critical cavils about its scattershot narrative. Sadly, Man on a Ledge, Leth’s first fiction film, fails, due to a convoluted plot that’s also stunningly improbable. That wouldn’t have to be a deal-breaker, if we were grabbed hard and held fast by a charismatic cast, and/or the film’s three or four lines of action and suspense were taut enough to keep our pulses racing. Still, fortified with sufficient popcorn and soda pop, killing time with this amiable mess isn’t the worst you could do at the multiplex.

Dude (Sam Worthington) comes up out of a New York subway and heads over to the Roosevelt Hotel where he’s reserved a room with a view. After dinner and Champagne, this mysterious gent dons his coat and crawls out the hotel window, to perch trembling on a ledge 21 floors above Fifth Avenue. Flashback to Sing Sing, where we learn that the ledge-clinger is Nick Cassidy, an ex-cop and escaped convict who several years ago stole a mega-diamond from a very nasty real-estate mogul (frighteningly emaciated Ed Harris). His getaway, orchestrated at his dad’s funeral, features a nifty car chase through a cemetery, climaxing in a satisfying car-train collision. The backstory comes courtesy of crisp, rapid cutting, suggesting that the movie knows where it’s going.

Continue reading at MSN Movies

Let’s pick through this year’s full-on melodrama at the Academy Award nominations and see what seems to stand out.  Is this deep, inside stuff you can take to the betting window or the office pool?  Good heavens no. I’m habitually awful at that game.  This is a bemused look around by someone a little off to one side, and just crazy enough to take it all in.

You want depth, the internet now churns with writers whose depth of field in Oscar stats is stunning, although sometimes it seems that the Oscars are their only world.

For clarity, and a sense of proportion on the nominations (and all things Hollywood), I’d trust the New York Times team of Michael Cieply and Brooke Barnes who, among other challenges, make the virtually impenetrable Academy rule changes clear, and do it with a sheen of wit.  They’re non-geeky and nicely reliable.

As for me, it looks as though the Academy has tried to shake things up.  A little. So we have Demian Bichir on the Best Actors list for A Better Life, and Nick Nolte as a Best Supporting Actor in Warrior.  (Now to find those films!)  We have the fortitude of the Animation Committee who resisted The Adventures of Tin Tin in all its mirthlessness, and having been left off nearly every of those churning prognosticators’ lists, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy  came out of the cold.  Thrilled to see its 3 nominations, especially Gary Oldman’s first.

Continue reading on Critic Quality Feed

'The Artist' - 10 nominations for a silent film in black-and-white with two French stars

By sheer numbers, the 84th Annual Academy Award Nominations seems to belong to Hugo, with 11 nominations. But given those are largely in the technical / craft categories, the success story this year is The Artist, a modern silent movie, shot in black and white, with two French stars practically unknown in the United States. With ten nominations, it should be the surprise off the season, except for the fact that this is simply the last lap in its run as the unlikeliest picture to win the hearts of awards season voters.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences moved the nominations announcements to January a couple of years ago, effectively shortening the “awards season,” but the unintended consequences have been to push the rest of the pretenders to Oscar glory into a free for all, everyone trying to predict or influence or simply contrast eventual Academy Award nominees. As a result, there are few real surprises by the time the Oscars are announced. It’s the final party in an absurdly overcrowded season of awards proms and I’m about partied out.

Plus there’s that new Academy sliding scale of Best Picture nominees. Bumped up from five to ten spots last year (not out of altruism but because indie pictures kept knocking the big audience-pleasing Hollywood movies out of contention), the number is now determined by the number of “You like me, you really, really like me!” number one votes a film received on the Academy ballots. This year, it resulted in nine nominations: an odd number for an odd year.

And yet… it’s the Oscars. They still matter. A nomination is indeed an honor (certainly more of an honor than the Golden Globes) and a snub is still something to get worked up over. And so here is out annual scorecard on Oscar’s slights and oversights: they shoulda been a contender.

Picture

There are nine nominees this year, but is more really better when Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Hollywood’s inevitable and inadequate 9/11 drama) and The Help (this year’s answer to The Blind Side?) and War Horse (Spielberg sentiment run amok) fill out those extra slots? This year swings so far in the other direction of Big Films with Important Messages Hammered Home with Insistent Direction that the indie films that spurred the expansion are all but ignored.

Two of the most glaring slights: Meek’s Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt’s lost-in-the-desert frontier drama (did it play too early in 2011 for voters to remember its understated virtues?), and Take Shelter, a psychological drama about mental illness and end-of-the-world fears wrapped up in contemporary anxieties of economic survival.

Continue reading at MSN Movies

Marrow screens at Northwest Film Forum for two nights, on Tuesday, January 24 and Wednesday, January 25. See the NWFF website for showtimes and ticket information.

I’ve known filmmakers Matt Wilkins and Eliza Fox for almost eight years. I met them when their first film, Buffalo Bill’s Defunct, had its local premiere at SIFF in 2004, and would check in when we ran into one another at film events and receptions around town. But it had been a few years since I was able to really catch up, which made my interview with them in May 2011 doubly pleasurable. Their second feature, Marrow, was playing SIFF 2011 and I had the good fortune to profile the filmmakers for Seattle Weekly and cast a spotlight on Marrow, a personal, intimate, haunting film and a significant step forward for director Wilkins.

The conversation, which lasted well over an hour, took place at the Fort St. George Grill in the International District on May 7, 2011. Ryan Purcell, the film’s director of photography, joined us toward the end of the interview. We began by talking about what’s been happening since I last spoke with them in 2006.

Eliza Fox, Matt Wilkins, house

Matt Wilkins: I’ve been trying to get it for quite a while now. I don’t know how long it’s been, actually.

Sean Axmaker: Buffalo Bill’s Defunct was 2004.

MW: Sorta since then, yeah. (laughs)

Every ten years or so you get a feature out.

MW: It’s like the seven year itch. It was project that took a long time to put together. It started with, about thirteen months before we even shot Buffalo Bill’s Defunct, my dad was dying and the stuff he was telling me on his death bed was the beginning of the story. So really it’s been ten years in the making if you count all that thinking time.

Buffalo Bill is about family and the kids worrying about a father who seems to be losing his good sense as he’s getting older. Does that come from the same place?

MW: That’s more about my grandpa. He really did try to tear down the garage and it was really frickin’ dangerous and we were truing to convince him now to do it and were really worried about it. That happened in the late nineties and was the beginning of that story.

The wellspring of your films is your family.

MW: Yes, definitely.

And your stories are all about family.

MW: It’s all personal stuff. I try to take my own life experience, which has formed a specific world view, and turn it into art.

Read more »

Marrow, the second feature from Seattle filmmaker Matt Wilkins, screens at Northwest Film Forum for two nights, on Tuesday, January 24 and Wednesday, January 25, with director Wilkins in attendance. I wrote a profile of Wilkins and his film for the film’s local debut at SIFF 2011. I reprint the feature, originally published in Seattle Weekly on Wednesday, May 18, 2011, below.

Visit the NWFF website for showtimes and ticket information.

Frances Hearn in 'Marrow'

Matt Wilkins has no illusions about independent filmmaking. It’s no way to get rich or famous. “I’d venture to guess that 90 percent of low-budget independents do not make money,” he says. “Some people would even say that percentage is higher. So I’ve been freelancing all these years, working on Web promos, municipal videos, legal depositions, city council meetings, and now reality TV.”

But not just any TV show: Wilkins is currently a producer and story editor for the creepily addictive A&E hit Hoarders, produced by Seattle’s Screaming Flea Productions. His job covers everything from setting up the location shoots to interviews to editing stories from the raw video. “It’s about crazy people, and I’m good at that,” he laughs.

Between freelance gigs, Wilkins is driven to make movies: personal, intimate, unsettling films about the stresses and strains of family. Marrow, his second feature, explores the fragility—physical and emotional—of kin, similar to his first feature (Buffalo Bill’s Defunct, seen at SIFF ’04), but with greater cinematic confidence and dramatic intensity.

Read more »

Have not awakened from deep Streep mode over here. Partly because the Weinstein Company has been working her like a dog to see that The Iron Lady gets a decent lift-off. Thus her Kennedy Center Honors now, a Vogue cover, a Newsweek cover, plus an appearance – and an unsurprising win — at the otherwise crushingly dull Golden Globes. (Well, she and Idris Elba. That was nice.)

Then it’s the Oscars, February 26^th (nominations January 28^th.) I have less than no faith in that august body, which moves like lemmings with a strong startle reaction. Think back to that clip from Julie & Julia during the Kennedy Center night, when Stanley Tucci’s Paul Child asks his wife Julia what she likes to do best, and, brimming with enthusiasm and a mouth full of divine French food, she says, “Eat!” Consider the pure joy of that performance.

Then remember: that year, Academy voters preferred Sandra Bullock.

It makes me worry that they’ll let her towering work as Margaret Thatcher go unacknowledged while they dither over its “propriety” or “historical inaccuracy” or, heaven help us, its “anti-feminism.”  Really!

So, at this house it’s been one or another of her 46 features, each night, with or without friends, just to warm up the gods.  We’ve had The River Wild, which she said she made to prove to her girls that she was brave, and A Cry in the Dark and Sophie’s Choice, which proved it to the world. Next is One True Thing, her open-hearted evocation of the kind of small town Americans she grew up around.

I also dug out hindsight from the file, to prove that my appreciation isn’t a sometimes thing.  This was from the late 80s, an attempt to sum up her decade of extraordinary portraits.

“With Sophie’s Choice the disappearance of Meryl Streep into the persona of a well-born Polish Catholic survivor of the Nazi death camps approaches the eerie. Whether she is speaking excellent German or halting or fluent English, Sophie must convince us that her mother tongue is Polish. At one time or another, she must be “utterly, fatally glamourous,” grey-green with malnutrition, giddily flirtatious, besotted with love or romantically melancholic.  All the while, at the deepest level, she is carrying a secret horrendous enough to char the edges of anyone’s soul.

Continue reading at Critic Quality Feed, the new blog from Sheila Benson

On Monday, January 23, Turner Classic Movies is showing all four films made by Max Ophuls, the great German director, during his brief tenure in America (when he dropped the “h” and signed his films “Max Opuls”).

The Reckless Moment

The evening of “Max Ophuls in Hollywood” is followed by two of his greatest French films, La Ronde (1950) and The Earrings of Madame de… (1954), but while they are well represented in superb DVD editions stateside, the four American films showing Monday night—Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), The Reckless Moment (1949), Caught (1949) and the rarity The Exile (1947), his Hollywood debut—have still not been released on DVD in the U.S.

The films of Ophuls haunt the space between the idealism of unconditional love and the reality of social barriers and fickle lovers. Yet his greatest films are anything but cynical; ironic certainly, but also melancholy, sad and wistful, and always respectful of the dignity of those who love well if not too wisely. His fluid, elegantly choreographed camerawork and intimate yet observant directorial presence have resulted in some of the most delicate and beautiful films made on either side of the Atlantic, but his American films have never been as celebrated as his more overtly stylized and seductively romantic French films (Ophuls left Germany in the early 1930s for the same reason so many fellow artists did).

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. stars in The Exile, a lightweight adventure film that looks to Fairbanks Sr. for inspiration. The film, about a king in exile, lacks the showstopping stunts and show-off acrobatics of Sr.’s silent classics, but the old fashioned love story and simplicity of adventure is pleasantly retro. Even for 1948. Fairbanks does his best impression of his father ever, with a tiny mustache and a big smile and a leaping energy, even going as far as writing the scenario and producing the independent feature. And while Ophuls is no action director, he has nothing to apologize for in this rousing little film. His camera glides through some lovely scenes and while Fairbanks lunges and leaps, Ophuls choreographs the crowd scenes to give the film a scope the belies the budget and a grace lacking in most such adventure films.

Read more »

This coming Tuesday, Jan. 24, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce nominees for its 2011 awards. In at least one large-looming respect, the slate is by definition unpredictable. After two years of fielding ten nominations in the Best Picture category (as opposed to five every year between 1944 and 2008), the Academy has rejiggered the rules in a way that means we not only can’t predict what will be nominated—we can’t predict how many films will be nominated. Could be five, could be ten, could be anywhere in between. The elusiveness inheres in the new requirement that, in addition to accumulating a lot of points in the overall nomination voting, a film has to be the first-place choice of at least 250 of the Academy’s several thousand active members. We can be fairly confident of a few films that will qualify: the charming specialty number The Artist, a black-and-white silent movie about the era when talkies took over the medium; The Descendants, a warm but not at all sappy or gooey comedy-drama of a family in crisis, in paradisiacal Hawaii yet; and Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s first-ever movie for the family market, a 3-D tour de force and another picture hearkening back to the dawn of cinema. The outlook for critical faves such as The Tree of Life, Melancholia, and Drive is much more problematical, especially with such conventional Oscar bait as The Help and War Horse chomping noisily at the bit. I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of my own top film of 2011, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, showing up anywhere but perhaps the Best Actor category (all hail George Smiley, I mean Gary Oldman). Astoundingly, the actors’ guild failed to extend a Best Ensemble nomination to that film’s world-class cast—and the ensemble award is often predictive of what will take Best Picture on Oscar night.

And the winner: 'Melancholia,' by a nose

Meanwhile, I’ve recently pored over the tally sheets from the Jan. 7 awards voting by the National Society of Film Critics Awards, so I can fill in some gaps in the original report I posted. Nothing world-shaking. This wasn’t one of those years when a film scored by far the greatest number of points on the initial Best Picture ballot, only to lose much of its voting strength—and the award—on subsequent votes. (That happened to Saving Private Ryan, in both Picture and Director categories, in 1998.) See, NSFC rules hold that to win in any category, the candidate must achieve a plurality of points and appear on the ballots of a majority of the members voting. Since there’s no prior slate of nominees, and members are free to vote for any three candidates they choose among myriad possibilities, the arithmetic can get spread pretty thin and first-ballot victories tend to be rare.

In the latest contest for Best Picture, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life outpointed its closest competitor, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, 33 to 29 on the first ballot. With 48 members participating (remarkable: that’s only eight shy of the current membership total, 56), a film needed to have support from at least 25 voters (doesn’t matter whether it’s a first-, second-, or third-place vote). No film came close. Tree of Life got 18 votes; Melancholia, 13. At this stage of the voting, all proxy ballots—the votes of members not present at the voting site (nowadays, New York City landmark Sardi’s)—drop out. This year (as with Saving Private Ryan), apparently much of the constituency for Tree of Life must have been out-of-towners; its point score dropped to 28, on 11 voters’ ballots. Melancholia stood firm, scoring exactly the same number of points it had the first time, 29, on only one fewer ballot than before, 12. With the voting population drastically reduced on this second go-round, that was good enough to qualify as a majority. Melancholia by a nose; Tree of Life first runner-up.

Minutiae: 32 films got some kind of vote on the first ballot for Best Picture. On the second, there were only 15. Numbers three through eight on the first ballot were: Hugo (25/12), The Artist (24/11), the Iranian film A Separation (23/10), A Dangerous Method (22/11), The Descendants (18/9), and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (13/7). On the second and decisive ballot the order changed to A Separation (20/11), Hugo (17/11), The Artist (13/7), A Dangerous Method and the long-shelved Kenneth Lonergan picture Margaret (both 6/3), and The Descendants (5/3). Make of that what you will.

Continue reading on Straight Shooting

Cornel Wilde’s grim, fatalistic end-of-the-world thriller No Blade of Grass is a forgotten dystopian classic of its time. Gritty and brutal, built on fears of ecological devastation through pollution and overcrowding (with hints of genetic manipulation gone bad), this 1970 eco-apocalypse thriller seems to have gotten lost in the overcrowded apocalypse now science fiction cinema of the era.

Adapted from the novel The Death of Grass by John Christopher, it has vague resemblances to the nuclear holocaust thriller Panic in Year Zero in its basic premise of a man hardening to deal with the brutal new world order to save his family. But in place of nuclear war (the favored device of most apocalyptic films of the era) is ecological collapse: a virus poisons the world’s grass and cereal crops and causes a dire food shortage. As panic spreads across the globe, John Custance (Nigel Davenport), a former military officer and an affluent husband and father in London, makes plans to take his family north to his brother’s fortified compound, prepared for just such an emergency. But he puts off leaving until it is almost too late: mobs start looting, riots break out and London is put under martial law with roadblocks posted to prevent a flight from the city. To save his family, John becomes as hard and as ruthless as the looters, the rogue militias and the roving gangs preying upon the citizens fleeing the cities.

Cornel Wilde is not the most subtle of directors. Here he’s a provocateur, favoring primal images to make his points. A montage of scenes of nuclear tests, overcrowding, and pollution poured into the waters, pumped into the skies and spread over crops in the form of pesticide opens the film as Wilde’s narration sets the stage of environmental devastation. Early in the film, as John meets with his brother in a city pub, images of famine and starvation and long lines for food rations play on TV news while customers gorge on the lavish buffet spread out in the bar. Wilde hammers the point home in blunt terms until the irony and social commentary shifts from a statement decadence to the willful ignorance of a population that still believes it can hold out. Flashforwards hint at the horrors to come while flashbacks recall a time before such threats were even imaginable. It’s a rather clumsy and unwieldy tactic as executed by Wilde, and it tends to confuse the narrative until the audience gets used to his style, but it’s all part of his rabbit-punch assault on our sensibilities.

Continue reading on Turner Classic Movies

The only links page that matters… except for all the others.

“Are you being honest?” “In this precise moment I am. I hope to be honest.” Pasolini’s final interview, a roundtable conducted for Salò’s Swedish premiere just three days before his death, is presented in English for the first time at Mubi.

The 'Mister Roberts' Hand Jive

“All [Henry Fonda] had to do was wag his little finger and he could steal a scene from anybody.” Surveying some of his favorite hand gestures in movies, David Bordwell confirms Maureen O’Hara’s praise with a close reading of particularly fine handiwork from Mister Roberts.

Jean-Pierre Gorin’s three California documentaries receive a splendid introduction by Kent Jones, now posted at Criterion’s website.

Among her typically excellent roundup of links, the Cinetrix passes along a pair of interesting glimpses at the origins of cinema: David Kalat’s salute to inventor Louis LePrince, whose mysterious disappearance prompts the slightest of nods in Edison’s direction; and a delightful find by Matthew Battles, an 1898 article from the New York Times that mockingly rattles off the multiple names by which this new machine is known.

“This is not working. Start over. I want you guys to go back, come up with something new, different, out of the box, something that’s never been seen before. Call me back in 15 minutes.” Meanwhile the Film Doctor’s selection of links points to an amusing NPR article on the hard work involved in the art of the trailer. Related: the new Filmmaker magazine features an article from Kinetic’s Stephen Garrett on the nuts and bolts of the process.

Nicholas Ray's 'Rushmore'?

“You see, when the mind houses two personalities, there’s always a conflict, a battle. In Norman’s case, the battle is over, and the dominant personality has won.” Pat Kirkham traces the modernist influences and sensibilities of Saul Bass to lay out a defense for his version of how Psycho‘s shower scene came about. Link via Movie City News.

“For the first [shot], I remember the cameraman asking me how long the take needed to be…. As the camera rolled, I closed my eyes. I listened to the sounds being made by the actors. I could hear their breathing and their footsteps. When it sounded right I said, ‘Stop.’” If David Jenkins is right that Theo Angelopolous’s films bring time to a “glorious standstill,” it’s perhaps forgivable that I missed his interview with the director when Sight & Sound posted it in December. Also from the (old) new issue: Graham Fuller on Vigo’s unique L’Atalante, “kinder and more forgiving than the Surrealists…and less morbid than the poetic realists.”

Gallery: There’s plenty of charm to Peter Stults’s witty poster mock-ups recasting signature films of the past few decades as products of earlier Hollywood (and Berlin, in one example) eras, aided along by a terrific insight (of course Nick Ray would have directed 1961′s Rushmore) or two (yeah, that’s exactly who Ken Russell would have lined up for his Big Lebowski). Link via Adrian Martin.

Video:  Kristen Thompson’s video essay on Gance’s La Roue offers some perceptive insights on its strange mix of maudlin and avant-garde.

Video: Gregg Toland: Cinematographer, a seven-minute profile of the cinematographic genius and his work on Citizen Kane, illustrated with clips from RKO 271. Watch it below. Via Roger Ebert.

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First-time director Ralph Fiennes brings one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known tragic heroes to ferocious life in Coriolanus, played in modern dress but voiced in the bard’s eloquently corrosive language. Fiennes acted this anti-social über-soldier, based on a legendary Roman general, on the London stage in 2000 and came to believe that Coriolanus’ rise and fall might be better expressed on-screen: “I just felt it was a play about now.” And so it is, in spades.

Fiennes’ reading underscores the soul-killing compromises demanded of democratic leaders, especially during times of economic turmoil; the power of the media to yo-yo public opinion; and the eternal tension between exceptional citizen and democracy’s common men.

Deftly orchestrating bloody action sequences (Hurt Locker cinematographer Barry Ackroyd is on board), the dangerous dynamics of fickle crowds and scenes of lacerating intimacy, Fiennes drives Coriolanus with a strong directorial hand, his style as single-minded — and arguably, arrogant — as that of the character. The play’s been smartly streamlined by John Logan, and Fiennes’ cast speaks Shakespeare’s dialogue so naturally, the 17th-century poetry never jars with the “now” in which it’s spoken.

Like Jeremy Renner’s Hurt Locker character, Caius Martius is a war lover who can’t or won’t give up the heightened sense of self and clarity of action achieved in battle. In peacetime, Coriolanus is an unapologetic elitist, antithesis of political panderer. Ayn Rand would have loved this magnificent monster, incapable of bending or blurring who he is to suit the desires or expectations of others.

Continue reading at MSN Movies

Il Cappotto / The Overcoat (Raro)

Italian director Alberto Lattuada adapts and expands Nikolai Gogol’s short story about a mousy clerk who gets a newfound respect when he purchases a handsome new overcoat in this little-seen classic from 1952 Italy. Overshadowed by the neo-realist films of the day, the satirical, smartly-made “The Overcoat” is just as contemporary and relevant as those acclaimed street dramas.

Renato Rascel, a comic actor and, according to Dave Kehr, a song and dance man, plays the meek scrivener Carmine De Carmine. He gives this mousy little clerk the hapless expression and submissive body language of the resigned patsy in a bleak human comedy, happy to toiling in the backrooms of city hall until he’s hauled out to record an official meeting. His naïveté is all too obvious when he obliviously delivers the officials a mish-mash of disconnected fragments that nonetheless captures the pompous arrogance and back-room deals of the office. It almost costs him his job, until he overhears the Mayor talking with his mistress (Yvonne Sanson, the statuesque sex symbol of Raffaello Matarazzo’s overheated melodramas). He never even realizes that the sudden “bonus” he uses to finally purchase his beloved coat is actually bribe money to keep him quiet. Not that it would even occur to Carmine, a well-meaning boob who takes pride in his calligraphic skills while the rest of the staff gossips and goofs the work day away, and attempts to champion citizen petitions ignored by the Mayor as he looks to cash in on an expensive archeological project with dubious merit.

The story ostensibly follows Carmine’s sudden rise in respect when he finally purchases his beautiful new coat but it takes some unexpected turns (don’t read the description on the back of the DVD case if you want the surprises preserved) and observes fragments of stories playing out in the periphery, all of which add both tender grace notes and wry satirical asides to the film. Moving the story from 19^th century Russia to a small town in post-war Italy gives the story a new context, placing the portrait of petty bureaucrats and blithely corrupt politicians in the same real-world backdrop as the famed neo-realist films of the time. The askew angle on the blithe corruption and petty despotism of rural politics in the period of post-war rebuilding, where working class poverty is taken for granted next to the self-aggrandizement and small-scale decadence of local government, gives the satire a bite. But behind the bouncy caricatures and deft satire is a quiet humanism that sneaks up on the story and haunts the final images quite literally. In this desperate existence, all Carmine and the citizens neglected by its government ask for is simply a little regard and respect.

This Raro Video DVD release is mastered from a restoration by the Turin National Film Museum and is clean and relatively sharp. It features commentary by film professor Flavio de Bernardinis and his colleague Gabrielle Lucantonio (in Italian with optional English subtitles) and a 13-minute interview with contemporary writer/director Angelo Pasquini on Italian cinema of the era, plus 25 minutes of silent rushes from the production (much of it used in the finished film). Also includes an illustrated 20-page booklet with new and archival notes, essay and reviews on the film and the director.

Dave Kehr writes a superb piece on the film in the New York Times here.

Mysteries of Lisbon (Music Box)

Raul Ruiz’s exquisite, elegant, nearly 4 ½-hour epic begins with an orphan boy in a Catholic boarding school searching for his identity. While his schoolmates have many names and titles, their rank becoming their identity, he is simply Joao, a boy with no background. But others have also recreated themselves, through marriage or money or status purchased with fortune and power, and the biggest mystery is the protective priest who watches over Joao. As the boy’s ancestry unfolds in a magnificent tapestry of flashbacks that slowly weave a portrait out of dozens of characters and stories, so does the story of the quietly driven Father Dinis (Adriano Luz), which is inextricably tied to the boy’s past.

Chilean-born Ruiz is a director whose love of storytelling and narrative play is often more engaging than the films themselves but with Mysteries of Lisbon, an epic based on a classic Portuguese novel (one yet untranslated into English), his engagement with the characters and their defining stories guides his direction, and his graceful camerawork and unerring eye for images both classical (like paintings in a cinematic frame) and fluid (his camera moves with purpose and grace) are in the service of the trajectories of the characters. This is a film of labyrinthine storytelling and cinematic weaves of character and narrative that stretch across countries and time itself, rewinding for elaborate flashbacks that redefine everything we know and understand, and of compassionate insight into human nature and the contradictions that define us.

Ruiz died just as the film made its American debut, having completed shooting one last film before passing. I look forward to his swan song, as well as looking back through the scores of earlier films yet to be released in the U.S. Until then, I can lose myself in this magnificent production, which I chose as the best film of 2011, and the beautifully mastered Blu-ray presentation of Ruiz’s elegant images.

In Portuguese and French with English subtitles. Music Box releases the film on DVD and Blu-ray, both of them in three-disc presentations. This is the theatrical cut of the film, which was presented in two parts and an intermission, and each part is given its own disc. The third disc is filled with supplements: a 40-minute video interview with Ruiz from the French TV program “CinéCinéma,” a five-minute video interview screenwriter Carlos Saboga, a 28-minute French radio interview with Ruiz conducted by esteemed critic Michel Ciment (with English subtitles over a still image), a roundtable discussion on the film conducted for French TV and a featurette on novelist Camilo Castelo Branco made for Portuguese television. There is also an American trailer and a 10-page booklet with an introduction by Ruiz and an essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

United Red Army (Kino)

Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army, an intense study of the extreme militant left movement in 1970s Japan, could be Japan’s answer to Carlos, a chronicle of how the militant United Red Army came out of the student protest movement of the 1960s and transformed into an ideologically-confused, slogan-spouting revolutionary band. It’s also historical drama as psychological thriller.

Most of the film takes place in the group’s self-imposed exile in the mountains, where a training program becomes twisted by the megalomania of its leaders and their tyrannical cult-like domination. And just when you think you’ve slipped into a horror movie, Wakamatsu reminds us that, while this is a dramatization with fictionalized elements, it is based on history. The young zealots killed by their own comrades, and the would-be revolutionaries who fed into the cult of personality and enabled the abuse, were real people. Many of the survivors are still in prison. Though it runs over three hours long and is at times grueling, it is also utterly compelling and affecting. Japanese with English subtitles, no supplements. DVD only, with a weak image that suggests either poor mastering or an inferior bit rate. That’s a disappointment in a film that is otherwise so riveting.

Available on Amazon:
The Overcoat (Il Cappotto)
Mysteries of Lisbon
Mysteries of Lisbon [Blu-ray]
United Red Army

For more releases, see Videodrone’s Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs, Blu-rays and streaming video for January 17

[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976]

Lamont Johnson’s Lipstick is not as bad as it has been reported to be by many critics and reviewers, nor yet as good as it might have been. The ultimate failure of the film may be attributed to an insurmountable discrepancy of intention among writer, director, and studio. Yet it is precisely that discrepancy that makes Johnson’s directorial personality stand out so starkly in the film, and consequently makes Lipstick one of his most interesting efforts to date.

Lipstick has been promoted more heavily than any of Johnson’s previous films; and for that reason, as well as the ads’ exploitation of its potentially sensationalistic subject matter, it will probably make more money than any other Johnson film. I’m glad of that, because that kind of success may well give Johnson the reputation and freedom to make more and better movies.

Johnson, in my estimation, has the makings of not only a major American director but also an important auteur. A rough-edged but intensely personal style, a thematic and technical consistency, and recurring concern for certain key issues and situations have manifested themselves in virtually all of his work. A brief summation of some of the more important points about Johnson’s earlier films provides an illuminating basis on which to examine the director’s presence and approach in Lipstick.

Like many contemporary directors, Lamont Johnson has gone neither from television to film nor in the opposite direction, but has applied his talents ably in both media. His earliest work of note is a made-for-TV movie called Deadlock (1969). The film, which mayor may not owe a debt to Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool of the same year, focuses on a black district attorney in the process of becoming a Negro Politician in an important senatorial race. His image in the election campaign hinges upon his handling of the near-riot tensions in his city’s black district, brought on by overuse of the wrong kind of law enforcement action and underuse of sociopolitical recognition of the minority powers-that-be. In the course of the film, via a number of vignette-like encounters and a climactic barrage of sight-and-sound flashbacks, the D.A. recognizes he shares the guilt for the seething condition of the ghetto with a tough, bigoted police lieutenant whose personality has been too domineering for the D.A. to control.

The two-character confrontation and the racial issue recur in the following year’s My Sweet Charlie, also a television movie. The film is essentially a somewhat labored sermon on social and racial polarities, embodied in the changing relationship between a bigoted white unwed mother-to-be and an itinerant black civil rights worker who hole up simultaneously in the same abandoned lighthouse. In the film’s climax, the efficacy and integrity of law enforcement—and therefore of the prevailing social order—are effectively discredited, and personal needs and relationships are seen as superseding accepted convention.

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The only links page that matters… except for all the others.

Kent Jones and Jonathan Rosenbaum, concisely shepherded by Erik Kohn, conduct a pair of dense, thought-provoking discussions on Robert Bresson and Godard’s Film Socialisme. And if you must have Hollywood anecdotes, there’s the detail that Bresson sought Cukor’s help in trying to lure Burt Lancaster and Natalie Wood for Lancelot du Lac. Passed along by Glenn Kenny.

Florence Delay as Robert Bresson's Joan

“Bresson wanted his Joan to be more human, more unknowable, more defiant—and that she is. That and much more.” Thanks to the ongoing retrospective at Film Forum, good discussion of Bresson continues at Alt Screen, where Dan Callahan testifies for the director’s most inscrutable, and hence dismissed, film: The Trial of Joan of Arc.

David Bordwell’s examination of the digital revolution continues apace, with his latest installment looking back at the Chinese home video market in the ’90s for suggestions how Hollywood’s homogenizing mandates will play out in the real, underdeveloped world.

Not that American and Chinese moviegoers don’t have burdens in common. The high price of tickets, for one. Derek Thompson (in a link courtesy of Andrew Sullivan) wonders why mega-blockbusters and small, intimate indies are yoked under the same pricing structure. Meanwhile, Movie City News passes along the story that China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television is considering whatever meager means they have to “encourage” theaters to adopt lower prices.

Also spotted by Movie City News, Mike Kaplan’s recollection of how Stanley Kubrick’s perfectionism (and fondness for needling the suits), combined with the hard work of “a sweet lady from St. Albans,” led to the modern box-office report.

“But sometimes you look at it, your looking changes it. You can’t know the reality of what happened, or what would’ve happened if you hadn’t a stuck in your own goddamn schnozz.” Dennis Cozzalio and Bill Ryan are having a conversation about a mutual favorite, the Coens’ undervalued The Man Who Wasn’t There. Several nice points made, but even though it’s not yet finished it seems neither has twigged that Thornton is likely gay. Both sites feature the conversation: Cozzalio in three parts here, here and here, Ryan in two parts here and here.

Interviewed by Kristopher Tapley, Kenneth Lonergan contemplates the overwhelming sensation of boundaries collapsing and the equally overwhelming gratitude he has for the movement that gave Margaret its second life.

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