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May 31, 2007
Knocked Up (2007, *** 1/2)
IN A DECIDEDLY DISINGENUOUS COVER STORY in the New York Times Sunday magazine this past week, Judd Apatow, whose career includes stints at memorable television series like “Larry Sanders Show” and “Freaks and Geeks,” and finally, the commercial and comedic success of his feature debut The 40 Year Old Virgin and of his co-producing efforts, such as “Anchorman” and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, is painted as a cry-prone, damaged man exploiting his own fears and life to make art that both 
entertains and alarms. While the unkindness of the reporter’s phrasing of certain delicate moments he observes over the course of a year and a half hanging out with Apatow is troubling, there are insights into the comic mind behind these efficient, generous movies.
Seth Rogen plays Ben Stone, a 23-year-old chubby, goofy-funny, um, stoner, who lucks one loosey-goosy night into a hookup with Alison Scott, an older woman who works for E! Entertainment Television. Condom hijinks lead to the titular condition. Ben’s surrounded by a houseful of bosom buddies, all weird and funny but deeply, darkly 23, blurting more puerile humor than you can shake a man-stick at. They’re convinced soon, someday, they’ll start up a website that tells you precisely where you can find the nude scenes in movies; there’s a funny double payoff when they discover someone’s done their dream job already. Mostly, they get high, insult each other, talk about sex, and get high. Accoutrements of the post-collegiate male American lifestyle today litter the sets: bongs, Perfect 10 magazine, Sierra Nevada, Corona, Pacifco, Red Stripe. (The Canadian Rogen speaks in his native cadences, as well as making hilarious references to his Vancouver origins.)
Beyond the inconvenience of becoming pregnant at the onset of her broadcasting career, Alison’s got the example of her older sister, Debbie (Apatow’s wife, Leslie Mann, about whom I will note for the record I am over the moon about) and Paul Rudd (who’s gone from being threateningly handsome to hilariously charming in recent years; he’s pretty and pretty wonderful, too), 
whose marriage with two kids is often at loggerheads. Apatow’s own plays the two daughters, and their battles are as cringe inducing as any of the other deeply realistic stuff that’s in between the inspired gags. Before I knew they were his kids, I wondered how he got away with the scene where one girl brains the other with a toy. (And one of them has the fiercely real yet inspired taunt, “Mommy, I Googled murder.”) That’s the gift of Apatow’s work: he understands the place of mortification; when we’re embarrassed for something we’ve done ourselves, we empathize more with a character who’s just been a dubious shit.
There are so many gags, most of which tend to the far reaches of scatology and obscenity, that even giving a few away won’t spoil the experience. Who on earth would come up with a female ob-gyn slipping during an exam and exclaiming, “That is not your vagina, that is your ass-hole.” That would be the same man who has Ben explain away his frizzy hair in his gravelly, oddly cadenced voice? “I use Jew, that’s what it’s called.” And in the same scene, Jewishness is further underlined with the declaration, “If any one of use get laid tonight, it’s because of fucking Eric Bana in Munich.” Other jokes involve the relentless cajoling of a roommate who’s growing a huge beard on a bet: “’Cos your face looks like a vagina”; “See you, Scorsese on coke.” Plus folk wisdom galore: “It’s not herpes if it’s everywhere.” And while I can’t remember the context, from my notes I can guarantee you, someone does wield the phrase, “buttfucking ham palace.”
But back to Mann: for me, she steals this rude laugh and heart machine, as a fortysomething Tourettic sexpot with a slightly nasal voice, in every scene simmering like a woman still ascending her sexual peak. (Hot.) When she says “Am I hotter than these little bitches?” in a nightclub and hits five or six vocal and comic notes, my eyes went wide. Has a woman ever said, “fuck” this much in an American movie outside of porn? “I’ve had about three Red Bulls in the last fifteen minutes and it’s incredible” is another line she hits out of the park that doesn’t have a swear in it. The most classic may be her delivery while tipsy and hiccupy of the word “cunt.” Here’s the verbal construction: ruing the babysitter waiting for her back home, she says, “Pissy little high school cu—(hic!)” and you don’t think she’ll finish the word, but it comes out like this “Cu-hic!-uh. Cunt!”
Harold Ramis has several scenes as Rogen’s dad, and one of his lines offers a glimpse of how rough, complicated and life-like “knocked Up” is in its restless, relentless fucked-uppedness: “Tragedy? Tragedy is grandmother with Alzheimer’s so bad she has no idea who the fuck I am.”
There are telling details littering every cluttered frame; when Ben and Alison have the 
pregnancy conversation in a crowded restaurant—“Fuck me”; “You did”—she’s got a bowl of pasta fagioli soup in front her; he’s got a bulging shrimp cocktail. (Even an earthquake serves to offer character revelation.) Director of photography Eric Edwards has done some of the most gorgeous work of recent decades, including Kids, To Die For, My Own Private Idaho and Cop Land, but this is one of the worst looking movies in ages. (The homey homeliness of Once overcomes its grubby palette for different reasons.) Focal lengths are mismatched, close-ups collide against each other, and yet it’s precisely edited and the characters carry the day: visual beauty would get in the way of capturing and calculating the comic reactions of the dozen-plus characters. This is a movie John Hughes never grew up to make. Beneath the scabrous verbal filth, there’s a conservative message that could be embraced by even arch-kooks like James Dobson, that reactionary mouth anointed a spokesman for faith by a credulous media. Family’s worth it, family’s hard, family’s necessary. Oh, and family is hard.
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May 29, 2007
How Kubrick composed: Leon Vitali describes
Over at The Reeler, Jamie Stuart has a heckuva Q&A with former Kubrick assistant Leon Vitali, and most of it consists of fascinating technical bits. For instance, here's Vitali on how on his final films, Kubrick composed for more than one format: "You have the whole frame. When he shot through the camera what he would do was compose for 1.33—which is the full TV screen—and also for 1.85. It's not an uncommon thing to do. But he would intentionally have action going on in the top of the frame. In Full Metal Jacket, a really good example, on the TV screen you see it in a really different context. It doesn't lose its power. Suddenly you're seeing tops of buildings. You're seeing how small these people are inside that milieu. And that danger can come from anywhere. The same with The Shining. It has another kind of power on the TV screen. And another kind of power when it's shown theatrically. But there's no doubt about it, when you see a film like Barry Lyndon or 2001—and I'd say also The Shining—theatrically they're a hell of an experience. It's an experience, that's what it is." [Photo © 2007 Jamie Stuart.]
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May 25, 2007
Bug (2006, ***)
AT THE AGE OF 71, WILLIAM FRIEDKIN'S MANAGED TO MAKE A MOVIE that has moments that are even more terrifying than The Exorcist (1973). The sustained intensity of that movie remains mysterious: a while back, over the course of several weeks, I watched 
Friedkin’s blunt yet elusive film five times in a row, in 10-minute bites each day. I have some notions, but its power (beyond the great male fear of the power of emerging female sexuality) remains enigmatic. (Mark Kermode has written a couple of editions of an exceptional book about that film.) The exquisite and troubling Bug is based on a Steppenwolf-produced play from 2004 by Tracy Letts (who also wrote the screenplay). Michael Shannon, who originated the role, plays Peter, a Gulf War veteran who happens into the life of Agnes, a weary Oklahoma woman who lives in a motel literally named “Rustic,” the letters on its roof battered by years of winds. Ashley Judd plays Agnes with unstrung empathy, and a certain modicum of fearlessness as the story turns brutally dark. Agnes still lives in fear of her ex, Goss, played by a bulked-up Harry Connick, Jr., especially after she finds out he’s been released from prison early. Once the pair bond, “Bug” grows relentless. There’s a staggering amount of technique on display, even as the events of Peter’s growing paranoia about “all the technology, the chemical, the information” become repellent. The dialogue is theatrical without coming off stagy; there are swell small observations like Agnes’ “People who don’t drink make me nervous”; “I was bad to drink back then”; “You a con?” getting the very con-like reply, “No, ma’am”; and Judd’s drawn-out Kentucky drawl, “Not that I got much to say unless I talk about mis-e-ry.” Directing opera of late seems to have reinvigorated Friedkin’s interest in storytelling through sound; the sound design, which includes nearly silent passages, the whoosh of ceiling fans and helicopter blades (real or imagined). These are the wings of dark angels, as in Douglas Sirk’s final masterpiece, the equally claustrophobic Talk To Me Like The Rain (1975). Michael Grady’s boldly colored cinematography, and a willingness to zoom from close to closer up, lends even more intensity to the febrile goings-on. Shannon’s generously theatrical, gestural performance is matched by a couple of shared hallucinations by Peter and Agnes, as we see what they think is happening; with a roar of helicopter noise, the motel room is battered and lit and shakes like they were inside the house that detonates at the end of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Poin.” (There is a little bit of Billy Bob Thornton’s Karl Childers in the clipped mien adopted by Shannon, but that is only a parallel, and surely not an influence on his fully realized performance.) Some will reject as familiar the down-at-the-mouth characters and others will find the increasing violence intolerable. Still, I was awestruck by huge chunks of the movie’s infuriating descent beyond madness and the inexorable style. For example, there’s a jumpcut from a striking sex scene to an exterior shot of the motel by day, which immediately jumpcuts to night. That’s a Billy Friedkin editing shock. There’s also the memorable end credit, “Additional Music by Serj Tankian,” and yes, those stings from the System of a Down frontman are used in just the way they ought to be. [Ray Pride.] Bug opens wide Friday.
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May 23, 2007
Errol Morris' Abu Ghraib doc: SOP: Standard Operating Procedure
An item about Danny Elfman getting an honorary doctorate reveals the title of Errol Morris' new documentary, on American torture practices: SOP: Standard Operating Procedure. (Elfman's doing the ditty duties on this one; more on the degree below.)
DANNY ELFMAN AND REBECCA WALKER
TO SPEAK AT COLLEGE, HIGH SCHOOL
COMMENCEMENT CEREMONIES
AT NORTH CAROLINA SCHOOL OF THE ARTS
Also Will Receive Honorary Doctorates
WINSTON-SALEM – Chancellor John Mauceri has announced that award-winning film composer Danny Elfman and best-selling author Rebecca Walker will speak at the North Carolina School of the Arts’ commencement ceremonies for college and high school graduates, respectively, on June 2 at NCSA’s Stevens Center.
“What an extraordinary day this will be for our School!” Chancellor Mauceri said. “Two great artists will celebrate NCSA – as we celebrate them – and elevate an already joyous occasion with their presence.”
Elfman, whose compositions range from TV’s “The Simpsons” and “Desperate Housewives” to feature films BATMAN and SPIDER-MAN, as well as purely orchestral works, will speak to the college graduates at the 1 p.m. ceremony. Walker, who at just 25 was named by Time magazine as one of the 50 most influential future leaders of America, will speak to the high school graduates at the 9 a.m. ceremony.
Elfman and Walker also will receive honorary doctorates at the ceremonies.
Elfman was invited to speak by Chancellor Mauceri, who recorded the composer’s “Serenada Schizophrena.” Elfman composed an overture for Chancellor Mauceri’s final concerts as director of The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra last September.
One of today's most successful creators of movie music, Danny Elfman is also one of few who have managed to make the transition from rock musician to orchestral score composer.
The Grammy-winning, Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated writer has been toiling in the motion-picture arena since 1985, when director Tim Burton and star Paul Reubens -- fascinated by Elfman's playfully macabre music for the cult L.A. rock band Oingo Boingo -- called him to write the music for PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE.
The Elfman-Burton collaboration continued with the clever and quirky music for BEETLEJUICE (1988) and reached a high point with the massive, Gothic score for BATMAN (1989), which won a Grammy for the composer -- and legions of fans, who felt that his Wagnerian approach gave the comics' Dark Knight a new and entirely appropriate sound.
Since then, Elfman has scored nearly all of Burton's alternately spooky, weird and otherworldly cinematic excursions, including the touching EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990), with its delicately lyrical choral passages; the funhouse-from-hell music for the mad Penguin and Catwoman in BATMAN RETURNS (1992); the songs and score for the imaginative Halloween fable THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993); the '50s-style sci-fi score for MARS ATTACKS! (1996); the intense and powerfully orchestrated SLEEPY HOLLOW (1999); and the percussion-driven PLANET OF THE APES (2001). Five of his eight Grammy nominations are for Burton films. The Elfman-Burton duo is responsible for the blockbuster CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, for which Elfman created not only the dazzling score, but wrote the songs and also sang the voices of all the Oompa Loompas. This was followed by the stop motion tale TIM BURTON’S CORPSE BRIDE. Elfman is currently writing the score to Peter Berg’s fall thriller, THE KINGDOM.
Elfman received his third Oscar nomination for his magical score for Tim Burton’s BIG FISH, which was also nominated for a Golden Globe. But the Burton scores demonstrate only one side of the Elfman persona – and constitute a fraction of his more than 40 scores (and contributions of themes or songs to a dozen more). His haunting music for the drama GOOD WILL HUNTING and his raucous sounds for the sci-fi comedy MEN IN BLACK won him dual Oscar nominations in 1997.
Elfman is equally proud of his small-combo score for the comedy MIDNIGHT RUN (1988), his music for Warren Beatty's comic-strip adaptation DICK TRACY (1990), the romantic SOMMERSBY (1993), his ethereal BLACK BEAUTY (1994), the often dissonant score for DOLORES CLAIBORNE (1995), the urban funk of DEAD PRESIDENTS (1995) and the unsettling, eerie musical effects of A SIMPLE PLAN (1998). In addition to Burton, his other regular collaborators include Sam Raimi (DARKMAN, A SIMPLE PLAN, SPIDER-MAN, and SPIDER-MAN 2) and Gus Van Sant (TO DIE FOR, GOOD WILL HUNTING, the remake of PSYCHO).
An entirely different audience knows Danny Elfman for his classic television themes, including the famous, quirky and undeniably catchy "The Simpsons" and the creepy, atmospheric "Tales from the Crypt" (both 1989). His title theme for the current cultural phenomenon “Desperate Housewives” brilliantly sets the unique tone of the show.
Elfman remains in high demand for big action scores: Witness his success with the driving music for MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996), which he followed with the big-screen adventure of PLANET OF THE APES; SPIDER-MAN and SPIDER-MAN 2; the landmark action-comedy scores for MEN IN BLACK and MEN IN BLACK 2; RED DRAGON, the Hannibal Lecter thriller from director Brett Ratner (whose THE FAMILY MAN also boasted music by Elfman); and THE HULK, directed by Ang Lee.
Elfman, 50, loved movies as a kid and grew up in Los Angeles appreciating the efforts of composers like Bernard Herrmann (for the Hitchcock suspense films and Ray Harryhausen fantasy flicks) and Max Steiner (for many Warner Bros. movies). His years with the popular troupe Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo (in the '70s), and later as the leader of Oingo Boingo (in the '80s and '90s), provided the theatrical training that would serve him so well as a film composer.
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May 20, 2007
Once tour diary: director and star react to Kenny Turan's LA Times review
A larky moment as director John Carney reads the rave review aloud, with an utterly appropriate punchline that suits the fillum to a T.
In this snippet about the rigours of interviews on the road, Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard are uncommonly cute.
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May 19, 2007
Zoo (2007, ***)
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG . “Little Miss Chris Marker” this is not. Robinson Devor’s darkly bruised essay film on taboo, Zoo, finds him rejoining the writer, Charles Mudede, and cinematographer Sean Kirby, who together made the hypnotic slice of Pacific Northwest weirdness, Police Beat (2005). There’s some murkiness about which of the actual participants 
in the events are heard or seen on film, and I’m content to consider it a fictional essay. Zoo, follows the reaction in the Washington after a gathering of “zoophiles,” who gathered on a ranch to have sex with horses, which was then legal in that state, led to the death of one man, whose handle, possibly from AOL, was “Mr. Hands” from a perforated colon. (There are three incredibly brief and distant bursts of imagery that are explicit.) As a succession of impressionistic reenactments, Zoo, visually, is one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen this year. The way one image follows another is often majestically constructed, which makes one wonder what they will do next with a less unsavory subject. The fleet, assured, satisfying editing is very busy, with intermittent traveling shots that hold the weight of gravity. Dark color and shadow are bolder in Zoo, than brightest light. (The ecstatic fracture of Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002) also comes to mind.) Perhaps the taboo transgressed here is not bestiality, but the boundaries of cinematic genre. It’s unsettling more in its stylistic extremes than its ostensible subject matter of taboo otherness and self-justifying perversion. At moments, it also resembles a Clare Denis project photographed by fine arts photographer Gregory Crewdson. [Zoo expands to Austin on May 25.]
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May 18, 2007
Waitress, (***, 2007)
AT THE AGE OF FORTY AND WITH HER THIRD FEATURE, Waitress, writer-director Adrienne Shelley, known to some as the pint-sized brain-and-beauty of Hal Hartley’s early movies like The Unbelievable Truth and Trust had found her bumptious voice, a warm-hearted but not-so-soft-headed comedic tone that mixes discomfort with grown-up reassurance. Her characters 
are so far from perfect, and do things people usually do in the real world but not on screen, but there’s something, well, delicious here. It’s the arrival of an almost fully-formed goofy comic voice, and sadly, the end as well: Shelley died before finding out her film had been taken up by Sundance and then bought by Fox Searchlight for this Mother’s Day release. In a small east coast town, Keri Russell plays a savant of pies at the local diner, someone who can express their every frustration in the form of chocolates and cherries and delicious crust. She’s peeved most of the time by her alarmingly stupid husband, played by Jeremy Sisto as an ignorant, possessive boor, and a pregnancy leads to complications with the new doctor in town (Nathan Fillion). The mix of dark and sweet is Shelley’s very own: I do not believe that someone actually got the line, “Calm down, you psychotic ape!” to function both as cartoon and character—”Sorry, it was a compliment” is another indicator of her tone of dialogue—and when one of the other waitresses dolls up another server played by the writer-director, and she murmurs, “Look what you did. You made me almost pretty,” the heart breaks. Murder and suicide jokes are slightly discomfiting, but a role as a randy local for Andy Griffith, fifty years after A Face In The Crowd, is wonderful. “Once you’re done wiping away your indiscretions, I’ll be in my booth,” he drawls. (Griffith has a gorgeously written, nicely overwrought speech late in the tale.) [Waitress expands on May 18 to 125 locations across the country.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2007
Shrek The Third, (2007, 0 *)
IF TIDELAND, TERRY GILLLIAM'S MISANTHROPIC MISFIRE, taught us anything, it is that a real trainwreck, not a metaphorical one, ought to be depicted as a crushing, onrushing, unmoored bulwark of metal and spark and fire and steam and dread. The charmless, innocuous, overpopulated, hardly-written Shrek The Third is the first depiction of a trainwreck I’ve ever witnessed set to “mute.” (And Tideland is a better movie.) While there are isolated gags that are either inspired or satisfying to the 
snickering child in all of us, such as the one oft-repeated in commercials, of a post-“Mr. Bill” gingerbread cookie that poops a peanut M&M from quaking fear, and a few quick glimpses of a nerd having a nosebleed (the only time I heard uniform laughter) they’re few and far between. (Note that I have resisted the temptation to Google the phrase, “Shrek The Turd.”) Long passages of inertia are broken up by gusts of tedium. Most of the settings and the themes, such as the fear of having children, something dealt with ickily, stickily, hilariously and with great, great heart in Judd Apatow’s upcoming powerhouse comedy Knocked Up, seem less about satisfying a diverse audience than about addressing middle-aged-verging-on-sclerotic issues close to the makers of Shrek—wealth, the fear of losing wealth, and whether their children will have cause to hate them just for being older and irrelevant to them. (The joke music cues tend toward the iPods of those born in the 1940s or 1950s as well, such as Heart’s “Barracuda.”) Let’s throw in a cooking metaphor: Shrek the Third is like a complex sauce made by someone with no sense of smell. Cameron Diaz and Eric Idle, voicing a knobby-kneed wizard, are the only voices that shine through. For most of the movie, Mike Myers’ Shrek, Eddie Murphy’s Donkey and Antonio Banderas’ Puss-‘n’-Boots don’t sound phoned-in, they sound phoned-in by uninspired imitators. (Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Puss? Yes.) At several points, dozens, nay, hundreds of characters fill the screen. These incomprehensible passages are more like a reading from the Far Far Away telephone directory than any kind of fun. (How in the ungodly fuck do you mess up the framing and timing of a joke about one of the three blind mice tumbling out of frame down a flight of cement stairs?) I think the last word ought to be left for the youngest critic in the room the Tuesday night screening I attended, a croupy little girl who gooed loudly at a quiet moment about forty-five minutes in, “Mommy, can we go home and watch Shrek?” [Corrections 18 May; h/t reader Armin T.] [Ray Pride.]
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[VIEWING] Our Daily Bread (*** 1/2)
WATCHING PROCESS PLEASES ME LIKE ALMOST NOTHING ELSE: to watch work, as I would when I worked on training films, asking someone to reassemble, then disassemble again, after taking apart a steam turbine engine. Fiction filmmaking doesn’t afford many opportunities to demonstrate work as work; watching paint being painted is not the same as watching it dry; but still, watching a writer write is not the same as what a writer feels while writing and after the task has unfurled. While Richard Linklater’s 
ambitious Fast Food Nation ends with a shot-in-three-days on-the-killing-floor slaughterhouse scene, reminiscent of Georges Franju’s great short documentary, Blood of Beasts, Austrian documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot) is another creature: deeply rooted in landscape and duration, it is hypnotic and magisterial, about moment and passage, about the industrialization of food and the necessity of nurture. Geyrhalter shot and directed, and his eye for the surreal reality of the highest tech of industrial farming monumental and surreal, wordless, a collation of clean, bright images of supernal calm and the most striking cropduster scene since North by Northwest. An experimental non-narrative epic, featuring rushing rivulets of peeping chicks, floating apples, tomatoes sorted by roving, unmanned machines and fish-gut sucking devices of metronomic efficiency, Our Daily Bread is a strange, lovely, and wholly disturbing look at one of the many worlds behind our accepted world. [Our Daily Bread has its American television premiere on Sundance Channel, Friday, May 18 at 12:35AM and 10:35AM, and Sunday, May 20 at 3:35PM. Clips and resources are available here.]
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May 16, 2007
Fay Grim (2006, ***)
A WICKED BEDAZZLEMENT AND SOME SORT OF FUCKED-UP TREASURE, Hal Hartley’s comedy-turned-terror Fay Grim is as misunderstood (and darkly subversive) as the deepest runnels of American foreign policy. A ton of reviewers hate the fact that Hartley’s unexpected return to form begins as a comedy and matures into something angrier and much, much less than hopeful: can the clever yet smarmily arrogant Henry Fool face up to an Osama Bin Laden figure? Or did Fool inspire a generation of jihadists? This is dastardly stuff, with lots of deadpan jokes, nicely embroidered if difficult to follow paranoia, and intermittent beauty.
A sequel of sorts to Hartley’s 1998 Henry Fool, the mannered writer-director’s tenth feature stars Parker Posey as single mother Fay Grim, from Woodside, Queens, who’s raising 14-year-old Ned (Liam Aikin, from Henry Fool and Lemony Snicket) in the shadow of the reputation of his disappeared dad, that crude brawler of a Zelig, Forrest Gump savant and polymath who has more secret pasts than most of us have socks. Something’s happened: two CIA men, including Agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum, gorging on Hartley’s meritorious mouthfuls), prompt Fay into a welter of international intrigue that’s been prompted by notebooks left behind by Henry, and interpreted by her imprisoned brother, Simon (James Urbaniak, with customary dour depth) and Simon’s publisher of his jailhouse poetry, Angus (Chuck Montgomery, all beard and baritone). There are consistent, insistent bursts of gratifying grandiloquence that could well be inspired by the lavish, logorrheic, lovely Don DeLillo. A typically flavorful passage from this world where literature matters as much as anything comes when Fay’s trying to figure out why the notebooks are so important to so many governments, and Angus says, “Iconoclastic avant garde poetry of the kind your brother has come to personify, this marginal yet vital form of artistic expression, it is becoming less and less popular in America... But I have an idea.” Then again, Hartley’s not above paraphrasing Goebbels’ “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver,” by writing “Why is it when I hear someone talk about ‘civilization,’ I hear machineguns?”
From glimpsing a range spiteful and dismissive reviews, I figure that Fay Grimis a movie that may amuse and amaze only a few people, a verdict shared by Magnolia/Landmark/HDNet Films who have cut back on the movie’s release in anticipation of its Tuesday DVD release. (“Why don’t you make movies like The Unbelievable Truth anymore, Mr. Hartley?”) Aw fuck it, they’re wrong, their instincts are spinach, and I say to hell with it. Fay Grimis a subversive masterpiece and let me tell you, I’ve deliberated long and hard on that and I’m content to claim that after a third viewing. (It’s worth seeing on the big screen, where cinematographer Sarah Cawley Cabiya’s richly colored images and intent focus on the light in characters’ eyes shines best).
Glib and glam, Fay Grimis a fashionably appointed batshit-crazy clutsterfuck, best-friend-will-turn-on-you ratfuck. (And of course I mean that in only the nicest way.) I’ll pass over in silence Hartley’s habit of canting the angle of every widescreen shot, but beyond that tic, I was tickled and thrilled and horrified beyond belief from start to finish. Contrived? Hell, yes. Talky? It’s Hal Hartley. Filled with stop-start roundelays of conspiratorial mayhem? Hartley’s an American citizen living in Berlin, f’chrissakes. Hartley dwells on the modest notebooks, a few fake marble Mead comp books, a stack of seven, a varied life within. The look of the move is as if someone jetlagged yet Macchiatoed were to go to the Edicola bookstore in Milan’s Malpensa airport and tear pages from Italian fashion magazines like Lei and shuffled their pages with the nearby paperbacks of international intrigue with intuition rather than logic. “Civilization, Fay,” Goldblum murmurs at one point, “Shit happens.”
”It’s called plausible deniability, mom,” Ned tells Fay in response to all the compartmentalizing she’s finding the larger world built from. 
But she loves him, even if it’s tough love: “Go away, you conceited little monster.” (We’ve just found out he was expelled from school after something he was caught doing after a lovely shot where two teenage girls in school skirts standing midway up a flight of stairs, looking down on him like eager raptors ready to swoop.”
The women Hartley adores all come off wondrously: there’s the leg-baring Posey in a long black spy sheath, in a state of constant sexual perturbation, offering up a performance more moist than twitchy (even if the cell set to silent she’s shoved into her panties didn’t keep going off). Who wouldn’t relish the image of Posey surrounded by a surging SWAT team at a nice hotel? Elina Löwensohn is the mysterious one, as in earlier Hartley films. The taciturn bad woman is Saffron Burrows, whose breccial facial features of near-granite boniness are awe-inspiring in the HD light.
A grab-bag of wordy wonder, starting with one of Hartley’s characteristic, gnomic key lines: “An honest man is always in trouble.” And: “It’s all Greek to me, Fulbright, I’m going home”; "We think Faye's been roped into some kind of international espionage, Father”; “how goes the Jihad, you cheap fuck?” “Hey, I was suave enough in my day.”
Eventually, Fay finds out about her man, and the movie becomes a parable of searching for other ghosts, such as Bin Laden, and how a culture allows those ghosts him to evaporate again and again, to nourish the least kindly reaches of the zeitgeist. Hartley goes to a deep, dark place, but he also gives us Posey in boots and then black, ornamented Turkish widow’s weeds on the streets of Istanbul and Löwensohn in a rocker in profile, quietly, compulsively nourishing herself with a cookie. The DVD includes an episode of “Higher Definition” focusing on Fay Grim; a making-of; deleted scenes; and Hartley’s own trailer for the pic. [Ray Pride.]
[Fay Grimopens Friday, mostly at Landmark locations, in Atlanta, Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Hartford, Huntington, NY, Huntsville, Manhattan, Minneapolis, Palm Desert, Palo Alto, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Ana, Santa Fe, Seattle, St. Louis, Washington D.C., and L.A.’s NuArt. It also plays on the hard-to-find HDNet Movies later this week, and on Magnolia DVD on Tuesday May 22.]
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[LOOK] The French trailer for My Blueberry Nights (2007), plus more WKW clips & a Chris Doyle masterclass
Sight unseen, based entirely on a few of the images in this coming attraction, I want to put in a good word for the work of cinematographer Darius Khonji, who shot Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights, which opens Cannes today, and has already been insta-blogged and rapid-dissed. Reportedly, the movie opens with this shot of Norah Jones, nodding at a bakery counter, with frosting mussing her lip. Doesn't the composition suggest a Buddha head you might have seen at the end of In The Mood For Love? Here's the link to the trailer. Below: ten minutes of WKW at Cannes 2000 with Mood; a grubby copy of a WKW Motorola commercial with Faye Wong; WKW's swell video for DJ Shadow's "Six Days"; deleted scenes from Happy Together; and a nine-minute segment on DoP Chris Doyle from the BBC "Culture Show."
Two additional clips are offered at the end of this one.
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[LOOK] Salvador Dali on "What's My Line?"
Ten minutes of Sr. Dali with Bennett Cerf.
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May 15, 2007
[LOOK] A close-up of the human face: Day Night Day Night (2006, ****)
It's nice when someone notices you noticed a masterpiece: It's much more thrilling to see a stellar trailer for a brilliant movie than for a friend to point out that you're unexpectedly quoted in it. Julia Loktev's gorgeously restrained work is only hinted at with these glimpses of Benoit Debie's remarkable HD cinematography. Debie's showreel is worth a peek. Leslie Schatz's intent sound design is only hinted at in this trailer. [H/t Thea Stranger & Larry Gross.]
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May 10, 2007
The original Bottle Rocket (1994)
The original Texas short from Anderson + cohorts which impressed Jim Brooks and Polly Platt sufficiently to get the feature rolling. [H/t Faisal Qureshi at ScreenGrab.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 09, 2007
Away From Her (2006, ****)
I AM NOT ONE TO RESIST THE OPPORTUNITY TO RUSH HEADLONG AND HEEDLESS toward an apparent horizon of light and gush when I see a movie that cares for the mystery of love and longitude in shared human experience, but I have to say that the only release in 2007 to hover near the Irish marvel of a musical, Once, opening next week, would be 28-year-old Sarah Polley’s feature debut as a writer-director, Away From Her. After 12 years as a memorable screen presence, and six years since her 38-minute, dearly laconic comedy I Shout Love (2001) etching a dysfunctional, twentysomething Canadian relationship tethered to repetition, proximity and Hockey Night on CBC.
Away From Her, based on the Alice Munro short story "The Bear Came Over The Mountain," [linked here] opens with credits on white, something filmmakers are usually urged to avoid for a number of technical reasons. But that, succeeded by cross-country ski tracks across a white field, gently, yet emphatically, introduce the content of the story: all that fades; light, memory, life. Julie Christie plays Fiona, a woman who realizes that her memory is fading and that she will have to urge Grant, played by the iconic patriarch of Canadian cinema and television, Gordon Pinsent, to do the right thing, to recognize that the conflicts that will come as her Alzheimer’s progresses must be addressed now. Of course, Fiona is in the person of 66-year-old Christie, her shoulder-length armor of curled tresses, this wildness of hair gone to silver and straw, and she is powerful, in scenes of strength and precognition, but later in those of loss and befuddlement and rage as well.
Polley’s husband, David Wharnsby, edited the picture, and they traffic in a shattered temporal scheme of great acuity, understated yet blissfully right for a story about losing grip of memory. One is reminded of her co-producer Atom Egoyan’s experiments in movies like The Sweet Hereafter,
in which she acted, but Polley and Wharnsby work with a deft, even effortless touch, more like Alain Resnais' early films like Last Year at Marienbad. Of course a movie about memory’s synaptic reaches and catches ought to be fractured!
Yet the movie, with its maturity and grace, never announces itself as “art.” Like most Canadian filmmakers, Polley is not afraid of profanity, and there is a great scene where a young woman, younger than Polley’s own 28, observes Grant as he observes Fiona across the room, now obsessed with another patient at the nursing home. Even when she introduces a character that could be a stand-in for expectations of a young, female director, she does so with humor and lived-in gusto. There’s even a terrific, recurring hockey gag I won’t give away, and you have to love a resident who admires Grant as a “charmer,” and further reflects, “At this age, it’s a real clusterfuck, all the charmers are taken. Or dead. Mostly dead.” (When Fiona’s disinhibition rises, she’s given lines like “People want to be in love every day. What a liability!” And Polley hints deftly at Grant’s past indiscretions by having Fiona reflect on his many female students, “All those sandals, all those bare female toes, Grant…”)
The couple has been together for over four decades. Resentments have been tamped, if not banked. Fiona and Grant seem genteel, characters who would read Alice Munro aloud to each other, as they do Louis MacNeice and W. H. Auden’s travelogue "Letters from Iceland" and Michael Ondaatje’s heart-dashing poem, "The Cinnamon Peeler": “When we swam once/ I touched you in the water/ and our bodies remained free,/ you could hold me and be blind of smell./ You climbed the bank and said/ this is how you touch other women… / And you searched your arms/ for the missing perfume.” Polley imports only a few of those lines, yet the film is as much an adaptation of those words as of Munro’s. Away From Her—a title drawn from within the short story that quietly 
shakes the rafters when it is spoken aloud and illuminated in the picture—is also discernibly an actor’s work, rich with reflective pauses, faces caught in consideration, the simple in-between-ness of the human pause.
Polley’s been promoting the hell out of this movie, in hopes of many more to come, and recent profiles keyed to the film's release such as Karina Onstad's in The New York Times, have made ready pop-psych out of her life story, which includes childhood scoliosis and as a result, steel rods in her back for life. (Julie Christie, I will grant, has said that Polley is much more mature than she and that she loves the insistent metaphor of Polley’s spine alongside her gentle demeanor to reflect her gifts as a director.) But Polley's doggedness is unmistakable. This is the sort of movie that can smash the heart to bits and 116 minutes later, piece it back together, filling the room with more oxygen than you can stand. There are moments of fathomless lucidity and grace.
Every film upon the face of creation could end profitably with one of two images: the flat horizon beyond the sea or the turn of a woman‘s face toward or away from the camera (as at the end of Godard’s A bout de soufflé or in paintings by Gerhard Richter), turning her neck to evade or engage a gaze. Polley understands both iconic gestures in her closing shot. Her potential is great and Away From Her is just so measured, so tender, so kind, so very, very good. (Lionsgate's official site is here.) [Ray Pride]
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
28 Weeks Later (2007, *** 1/2)
SLEEK, STRIPPED DOWN, AND MEAN AS THEY COME, 28 Weeks Later, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s sequel to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, is a grim, sincerely nihilist, urgently political, wholly contemporary parable about life in wartime, more Goya than GOP. (The word “Iraq” has entered the conversation.) Coincidences and plot conveniences are rife, but the fury of action and the undeniable thematic intent surge forward. Most of this relentless horror movie takes place post-apocalypse, after the unthinkable is already splattered across your face, on the island portion of London’s Canary Wharf development. 
Deserted city streets are often shown in sweeping, geometrically pleasing aerial shots while street-level, the grainy, jumpy long-lens style of 28 Days Later. In the next 80 minutes or so, after a couple of apocalypses and sustained genocide, there are several primal scenes of familial investment; a Tony Scott-style phalanx of CCTV screens observing one of the world’s most surveilled cities that eventually show plasma walls of flame until cameras lenses themselves melt and darkness is all; blood geysers and compounded viscera; and a Blair Witch passage; arriving, at the end, at an utterly classic final image. But the most impressive passage is the profoundly upsetting central set piece, which begins with a soldier’s cry, “Aw man, this is FUBAR,” and hurts like hell. Self-protection by American peacekeepers leads to a vivid and explicit depiction of willful, wanton massacre by Army snipers above a city plaza. Just like a walk through a “normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,” to borrow a page from Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN). (There is a zombie harvest by helicopter rotor, the viscid slaughter of which is an operatic embellishment on Martin Scorsese’s 1967 Vietnam War allegory, The Big Shave.) There’s some intrigue or fluency in almost every shot: my favorite is a slow wipe left across the screen when a major character realizes all hell has broken loose, that is mere genius. With Rose Byrne, Robert Carlyle, Catherine McCormack, Harold Perrineau, Jeremy Renner. 91m. [Ray Pride] [A nice making-of pic here.]
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May 06, 2007
Indie returns Wednesday [really!]
Provlita
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May 01, 2007
LOOK: Video for "Falling Slowly," from Once
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[LOOK] Olivier Assayas at lunch with David Poland, Ray Pride
Oooh, I don't know if I'm ready to watch this.
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack