On DVD
"I'm Not There," "La Roue"
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 | 5:52 AM
Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There" (2007) is such a risky, ambitious, passionate conceptual big-brain freak of a movie that, whether you find yourself loving it or hating it or not knowing what in hell to make of it, you can sympathize and even agree with anyone who ends up with the opposite takeaway. Ambivalence is an appropriate response, and one Haynes probably intended, given his subject: Bob Dylan, or, rather, the elusive, chameleonic, deliberately free-associative nature of Dylan's public personality, and the idealized and sometimes ridiculous ways we've conceived it for ourselves, and hence the absurdity of pop culture celebrity in general. A lot of abstracted meat and potatoes for one film to tackle, and Haynes, easily the most theoretical and analytical indie filmmaker at work today, goes for the gusto, crafting a weave-movie made of strands that only occasionally cross each other's dreamscapes and more often launch out into the ether. He's not telling us anything about Dylan per se; he's building a kind of sculptural study of the very hectic shape of the icon's mythified story.
"Bamako," "The Films of Morris Engel"
Tuesday, May 6, 2008 | 7:44 AM
Malian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako may have made the one African film everybody needs to see — at least for its disarming fugue of frank political awareness and state-of-the-quotidian African life. In most other ways, though, "Bamako" (2006) is a challenge to orthodoxy, because it's not driven by its narrative, and hardly even provides an establishing context for itself. Before we know it, we're in a sun-dappled Mali courtyard (Sissako's family home, as it turns out), in which a kind of tribunal is going on, complete with black-robed jurists, waiting witnesses, anxious journalists and stacks of documentation. This is, we slowly realize, a fantasy trial in which the African people have taken civil proceedings against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and American-led global capitalism in general, for the crime of exploiting and loan-sharking the continent and its peoples. The testimony is not from actors, but from real African citizens, writers, activists, tribal leaders, etc.; the lawyers, European and African, on both sides are also genuine advocates.
"The Guatemalan Handshake," "Hypocrites"
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 | 7:12 AM
Todd Rohal's "The Guatemalan Handshake" is one of the most inventive, most poetic, most disarmingly authentic indies of the last few years — so, of course, you've never had a chance to see it. It's a movie that seems to have dropped out of the sky, inexplicably, like a satellite fragment landing on Main Street. Naturally, it's not a project constructed around a traditional idea of storytelling propulsion — Rohal has whipped his world from the weedy ground up into a fiery, relentless storm of quirk, but he's original enough in his cataract of details to keep us in a constant state of enchanted disorientation. Why was "Napoleon Dynamite," with its relatively stereotypical uber-misfit, a hit, while this 2006 daydream foundered out of sight?
Set in some Forgottentown, Pennsylvania, "The Guatemalan Handshake" encounters characters undramatically, and its narrative gradually coalesces around them: Donald the triangular-electric-car-driving nebbish (Will Oldham); his pregnant girlfriend and one of "dozens of sisters, each with a different mother" (Sheila Sculin); Turkeylegs, the willowy, surreal-minded 11-year-old free spirit (Katy Haywood) who narrates the film; Donald's elderly and obsessive father Mr. Turnupseed (Ken Byrnes); a manic Guatemalan bus driver; a lactose-intolerant skating rink worker who may be the most socially inappropriate man ever devised for an American film; a woman in search of her lost poodle (who we find out got electrocuted by a power station mishap early on, but who reconstitutes magically anyway), and so on. Early on, Donald disappears (literally, he just walks off-frame), and Turkeylegs endeavors to understand why and how, as her already dipsy community reaches several sorts of ridiculous yet dead serious crisis points at once.
"Hannah Takes the Stairs," "The World According to Shorts"
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 | 7:02 AM
Though it may seem unfair at first, let's pick up Joe Swanberg's "Hannah Takes the Stairs," heft it in our grips for a moment, and then use it to beat this thing called "mumblecore" to a pulp. Implicitly a kind of low-budge, ultra-spontaneous, all-HDV answer to the glossy fatuousness of current American film, mumblecore has a number of inherent problems (the least of which is its inherited moniker; using "-core" as a suffix in this way has no meaning). The fad's general strategy — naturally lit shaky-cam coverage of semi-inarticulate twentysomethings with bedhead speaking entirely in casual small talk and having or ruining relationships — is easy to peg as narcissistic and lazy, if you're not finely attuned to the genre's nonchalant sense of cool. But more than that, mumblecore movies strive for an interpersonal intimacy they never achieve, because intimacy requires skill, real acting and visual wisdom, not merely amateurishness. In the pursuit of realism, mumblecore characters spend enormous amounts of time amusing themselves in variously immature ways, the upshot of which is less realistic than, well, immature. No one is actually witty, sex isn't on anyone's mind, and everyone, even when they're being goofy, is tediously earnest.
"Lars and the Real Girl," "The Dragon Painter"
Tuesday, April 15, 2008 | 8:11 AM
One of 2007's breakout indie hits, "Lars and the Real Girl" was just high-profile enough, profitable enough, acted-by-Ryan-Gosling- within-an-inch-of-its-life enough and conspicuously life-affirming enough to, in the end, warrant a substantial backlash. But a backlash descends every year on overpumped movies as naturally as autumn comes to summer, inevitably, and we need to keep in mind that backlash is as irrelevant to the movie in question as is the hype and popularity that spawned it. In an ideal world, we'd see movies in a vacuum unpoisoned by publicity plague dogs and self-aggrandizing bloggers and clueless critics. Instead, we're inundated with cant that is predominantly interested in itself and its opponents, not in the movie as it would be seen, by itself, a year or ten down the road. We need to remember, for instance, that while "Juno" didn't deserve any sort of Oscar, and was far too irritatingly snarky in its dialogue, and bordered on racism in its conservative narrative set-up, the film was still witty and sharply acted and made even Jennifer Garner seem like an actress.
"The Night of the Shooting Stars," "Diva Dolorosa"
Tuesday, April 8, 2008 | 10:29 AM
A distinctive force in European cinema for over 35 years, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani achieved from their first films an eloquent stylistic bridge between Rossellinian stringency and Fellinian braggadocio. Their movies are often framed like friezes, but the chaos of human whim always muddies the compositions. Appropriately, the Tavianis began as political barnburners, fashioning absurdist parables and sometimes cosmic commedia from Italy's lunatic flirtations with extreme movements. No European filmmaker has ever been as dedicated to their nation's peasant legacy, and no one on the continent since the '70s has made such potent and revealing use of their native landscape. Still, if the Tavianis' penchant for old-fashioned narrative folkiness has grown tedious over the last decade or two, there's still 1982's "The Night of the Shooting Stars," their premier achievement, and arguably the best Italian film of the '80s.
"The Ice Storm," "Mélo"
Tuesday, April 1, 2008 | 9:45 AM
On its surface, Ang Lee's career has been distinguished by a seemingly aimless ricochet between nations and milieus (Taiwan, New York, Wyoming, Devon, Shanghai, Connecticut, etc.), and between adapted disparate source materials (Jane Austen, Rick Moody, Annie Proulx, Wang Du Lu, Stan Lee) — and from both perspectives, you can find something to carp about. Indeed, Lee is rarely considered in serious debates about contemporary heavyweights, and his cultural rootlessness (read: opportunism) and dependence on literature may well be the reasons. We commonly like our auteurs to come packaged as purebred cultural expressors, and as artists largely independent of old narrative voices. But Lee's case can also demonstrate, movie by movie, the irrelevance of location, and the depth-finding force of deft adaptation.
"Moolaadé," "Daisy Kenyon"
Monday, March 24, 2008 | 9:43 AM
The seminal will behind everything that matters about sub-Saharan African cinema, and at the same time the world's most guileless filmmaker, Ousmane Sembene was virtually a one-man continental film culture for 40 years, establishing the cinematic syntax and priorities for an entire section of mankind, and its relationship with movies. From the first mini-feature, "Borom Sarret" (1964) to the last, vibrant, polemical film "Moolaadé" (2004), Sembene's work aches with sociopolitical austerity — as an artist, he's virtually style-free, almost unprofessional, but possessed of a voice as clear and uncomplicated as sunlight. Primal, unsophisticated experiences, the films are simple but never simplistic, lowbrow but unsensational, fastidiously realistic and yet unconcerned with sustaining illusion. His filmography is more or less divided between cool, undramatic autopsies on post-colonial norms and folly (1966's "Black Girl," 1968's "Mandabi," 1974's "Xala") and demi-epics of colonial horror (1971's Emitai, 1977's "Ceddo," 1987's "Camp de Thiaroye"). The slow burn, burial day battleground essay "Guelwaar" (1992) is a precariously balanced admixture of both, while "Moolaadé" targets the most galling and controversial aspect of an African society straining under independence, Islam and reactionary tribalism: female genital mutilation.
Georges Méliès, "Khadak"
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 | 10:30 AM
Perhaps, with the cataract of DVD'd Méliès mania besetting us — the new comprehensive Flicker Alley box "George Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913)," the new, more modest and affordable Kino sampler "The Magic of Méliès," both piling atop Facets' standard "Méliès the Magician" disc — we can begin to consider the French pioneer as something other than a film history staple and an oddity for scholars. It'd be a brand new tact to take for films that, being over a century old, reach right back to the form's infancy, movies' equivalent of cave painting and hieroglyph carving. But there's something effervescent and seductive there, a spirit of high innocence and ceaseless invention that has made several of Méliès's elaborate images — most obviously, the man in the moon with the ship-bullet in his eye, from "A Trip to the Moon" (1902) — undying cultural icons, familiar to the masses who aren't particularly aware of or even interested in the fact that the movies were being made during the McKinley administration.
"Her Name Is Sabine," "Terror's Advocate"
Tuesday, March 11, 2008 | 8:57 AM
It is surely a first — an international movie star (Sandrine Bonnaire) making a patient, respectful, thoroughly unnarcissistic documentary about her own handicapped sister, and stumping for policy change as she considers painful mysteries about family and the passage of time in the process. "Her Name Is Sabine" (2007) is a simple, unpretentious piece of work — Bonnaire spends an enormous amount of time simply observing the managed-care home where Sabine, nearing 40, lives now with a handful of other adults with varying modes and manifestations of autism. Slowly, Sabine's history is dripped in — as a child, teen and young adult, she was different, "off," but lucid, literate, energetic and capable of playing Chopin. She went without diagnosis for decades. As her siblings — ten of them — grew up one by one and left home, Sabine, robbed of stimulus, began to deteriorate; a series of hospital stays and hired nurses followed, and then a five-year long institutional stay in which Sabine grew violent and was tamped down by straitjackets and antipsychotic drugs. The filmmaker glosses over it, but Sabine, perhaps now permanently debilitated, was eventually rescued to a new facility that her famous sister had to raise money for herself, using her fame as an actress and celebrity.
"Kilometre Zero," "Lubitsch Musicals"
Tuesday, March 4, 2008 | 7:00 AM
The idea of a "national" cinema, expressive of a particular and coherent cultural esprit, is a standard of most cinematic intercourse — until you confront the real map, in which Kosovar cinema is now primed to forge an identity of its own (as the Serbs and Slovenians have done), the ex-Soviet nations of the Silk Road are struggling to differentiate themselves from Russian film and the nationless movies of the Basque, the Romany and the Palestinians still hunt for footing and voice. Add to this gray zone the films of Kurdistan, a non-country standing nevertheless with its own army, government and debatable borders, and a nascent cinema rising with the ascent of the Iranian new wave and from the crater of the American occupation. Even within this context, Hiner Saleem is filmmaker on the roam — an Iraqi Kurd long expatriated to France, Saleem has made seven features, two in France, two in Armenia and three, since the fall of Saddam Hussein, in Iraqi Kurdistan. But he's a Kurd first and only, and if Saleem and compatriot Bahman Ghobadi are any indication, Kurdish films exude a distinctive sort of mordant comedy, a rueful folky toughness and ardor for luckless absurdity born out of centuries of persecution and only a few years of reasonable hope for legit nationhood.
"Walker," "The Draughtsman's Contract"
Tuesday, February 26, 2008 | 4:00 AM
British cinema would've been a far more dire prospect in the Reagan-Thatcher years if it hadn't been for Alex Cox and Peter Greenaway, two wildly disparate but brilliantly rebellious and, you could say, slightly insane independents — insofar as you could categorize them as filmmakers working in some kind of English tradition. Mostly, you couldn't — Cox, for his part, always considered himself more of a punk without a country than a British voice; only his second film, the magisterial "Sid & Nancy" (1986), is set in the U.K. His quick arc after the tireless indie success of "Repo Man" (1984) is a study in the punk-artist paradigm — first, drop your pants at the establishment, then get brought into the system, then quickly reveal yourself to be an ungovernable brat, and get dumped like a sizzling isotope. Cox's moment of truth was "Walker" (1987), one of most viciously prankish and politically outrageous fireballs ever to hurl out of Hollywood. It was only Cox's fourth feature and it summarily ended his ascension in even semi-mainstream cinema. (In interviews, Cox remembers being astonished that he didn't receive a single call or offer after the film was released.) Needless to say, it's a movie that demands our respect and reverence.
"Pierrot le Fou," "Hélas pour Moi"
Tuesday, February 19, 2008 | 9:33 AM
Let us belt the battle cry of Godard, cinema's own Robespierre and Whitman and Dylan all rolled into one transfiguring powerhouse, reinventing film from Day One and never letting the rest of the world quite catch up. We're lucky to have had him, and to have him still. There should be no question that Godard has been to his medium what Joyce, Stravinsky, Eliot and Picasso were to theirs -- utterly unique, rule-rewriting colossi after whom human expression would never be quite the same. Quentin Tarantino may be the most famous public genuflector before Godard's legacy, but Martin Scorsese, Abbas Kiarostami, Gus Van Sant, Spike Lee, Lars von Trier, Jim Jarmusch, Raul Ruiz, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Richard Linklater and Wong Kar-Wai, among innumerable others, all owe him a debt they could never pay out. Wrestling in any capacity with movies as art means facing his body of work and taking a deep breath. Workaday reviewers still quake in dread at the prospect of having to elucidate the complicated reality of a Godard film to their readers. Somehow, though, the seductive energy of this most elusive filmmaker maintains its grip on each successive generation of moviehead, and now, years after graduating to video-making himself, Godard's oeuvre is finding itself properly feted on DVD.
"The Films of Sergei Paradjanov," "El Cid"
Monday, February 11, 2008 | 12:00 AM
A summoning of pagan energies if ever there were any in the era of television, the major features of Sergei Paradjanov have maintained a flabbergasting constancy in the Western filmhead cosmos -- these prehistoric, narratively congealed Central Asian mutants have never been out of circulation in this country, as retro-able prints or video editions, and are now all available on DVD from Kino in newly restored versions, including, for the first time, his epochal international debut, "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" (1964). It's intensely odd, because Paradjanov is one of the most hermetic, arcane and completely original artists in cinema history, and his films do not resemble those made anywhere else, by anyone. Perhaps their sui generis freakiness is their saving grace -- and thus a sign of hope for the survival of adventurous film culture in this country. It's not too much to say that no effort at understanding the outer reaches of filmic sorcery can be complete without a confrontation with Paradjanov's world -- a timeless meta-past of living icons, bristling fairy tale tableaux, stylistic extremities and culture shock.
"Rocket Science," "Right At Your Door"
Monday, February 4, 2008 | 12:00 AM
By Michael Atkinson
Though it's never been acknowledged, the teen comedy has evolved substantially from the odiously primitive ape it used to be, and today stands as a fiercely intelligent, unpredictable, insightful higher class of creature. The chasm is huge between the idiotic froth and exploitation crudities we saw in the 1950s through to the 1980s, and the eccentric, inspired, brave and crazy films we've seen come out of the indie scene ever since "Heathers" broke the mold for good in 1989: "Dazed and Confused," "Welcome to the Dollhouse," "Rushmore," "Napoleon Dynamite," "Loser," "Can't Hardly Wait," "10 Things I Hate About You," "Ghost World," "Juno" and even lowbrow hooey like "American Pie" and "Road Trip." Jeffrey Blitz's "Rocket Science" takes its seat comfortably on the dais. Seethingly articulate yet lyrically at a loss, the film chronicles a very particular high school tribulation, and yet it's so finely and generously observed that it feels universal. The milieu isn't many football fields away from the subculture Blitz explored in his breakout documentary "Spellbound" — swapping out spelling bees for high school debate competitions, Blitz unceremoniously allows his characters their own hyper-learned way of speaking as his hero, a beleaguered nebbish with a disastrous stutter.
Ongoing Coversations
- Comedy, schmomedy 1 comments
- In one week... 4 comments
- maverick44 1 comments
- If anyone needs Film Music.. 1 comments
- Hard Day's Night 2 comments
Most Commented
Most Recommended
- The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema: #1-5 (2)
- The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema (3)
- The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema: #41-45 (0)
- George A. Romero on "Diary of the Dead" (0)
- Fake Names, Real Oscars: Five Nominees Who Didn't Really Exist (0)
- Joel Hodgson on "Cinematic Titanic" (1)
- The Demon Dog Eat Dog Film Career of James Ellroy (1)
- Ramin Bahrani on "Chop Shop" (0)
- SXSW 2008: Jay Delaney on "Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie" (0)
- David Gordon Green on "Snow Angels" (1)
