As some of you may already have seen, I'm sitting this one out. Truth is, Sundance has never been much of a priority for me. At Time Out New York I was perfectly happy to let my colleague Nicole Keeter have that beat, freeing me to attend Toronto and eventually Cannes (plus occasional all-expenses jaunts to Berlin, Rotterdam, Thessaloniki—man, them were the days). Impulsively flew out for the first time in 2005 to support my friend Skander, whose screenwriting debut, Pretty Persuasion, premiered in Competition that year. Was recruited to return in '06 and '07 by Scott Renshaw of the Salt Lake City Weekly, which tried publishing a daily mini-paper but ultimately found that venture less than super-cost-effective. At that point I assumed I was done, but last year a civilian friend of mine wanted to go and found us a cheap rental in SLC for four days, so what the hell, why not? (Because we never got half our security deposit back from the deadbeat owner of the house, that's why not.)
This year, however, fuck it in my opinion. I'd rather save that money in the hope of being able to make it to Cannes come May. What's more, staying home doesn't especially hurt, because there's rarely any sense of anticipatory excitement for me. Sundance's laudable-but-look-out agenda—to discover new American filmmakers working in the creative margins—dictates that the lineup will consist almost exclusively of unknown quantities. Sure, there may be a Primer or Capturing the Friedmans in there somewhere, but the amount of sheer dross you have to sift through to find them can be daunting.
In fact, just now I looked back at the films I saw there from 2005-2008. Seven of those wound up on one of my top ten lists, which isn't too bad—nearly two per year on average. (If I sound unduly harsh in the Spout piece, it's probably because last year there were zero.) But of those seven, only Brick truly fits the Sundance mythos, in the sense of being a dazzling out-of-nowhere feature debut. All of the others were to some extent known quantities. To wit:
Grizzly Man (2005): Herzog.
Sleeping Dogs Lie. (2006): Bobcat. (Admittedly its excellence still took me by surprise.)
Half Nelson (2006): Fleck and Boden's first film, Young Rebels, played ND/NF.
Old Joy (2006): Reichardt's River of Grass just missed my 1995 top ten.
Joshua (2007): Ratliff had previously made a splash with his fascinating doc Hell House.
My Kid Could Paint That (2007): I'd seen and rather liked Bar-Lev's Fighter.
So even at Sundance—a festival expressly dedicated to discovering new voices—I tend to favor films made by people who've done notable work in the past. Which is hardly surprising, really, since first efforts are generally promising at best. (See also New Directors/New Films, a minefield of mediocrity that I now tend to largely avoid, since I end up walking out of almost everything anyway.) No doubt there'll be a couple of terrific pictures among this year's crop (and there'll probably be another couple that receive wild acclaim but strike me as painfully clumsy or mannered, à la Frozen River and the first third of Ballast), but I can wait for those to turn up in NYC, as they inevitably will. Hell, there's now an annual mini-Sundance within walking distance of my Park Slope apartment (at BAM), though I seem to recall that it tends to conflict with Cannes.
Speaking of which, while I've never run any ads on my main site or attempted to profit from it in any other way, I'm considering creating a send-md'a-to-Cannes fund in which those of you who'd really like to read my reports pledge whatever amount you feel they'd be worth. (I'm thinking like $10 or so, maybe $20 if you're flush.) Thing is, I don't want to take anyone's dough if I only wind up collecting $400 or whatever and find that I still can't afford the trip. Is there some service that'd allow me to collect pledges and only actually pull the bank trigger if the total hits a certain amount? E-mail me if you have any ideas.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query sundance. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query sundance. Sort by date Show all posts
15 January 2009
07 June 2012
Viewing Journal: Week of 4-10 Jun
LEST YOU BE CONFUSED: Films in /brackets/ I had previously seen. The ratings are on a 100-point scale that merely signifies my personal and highly subjective degree of enthusiasm, and I use the entire damn scale, e.g. 65 is equivalent to 6.5/10, a mild thumbs-up. Anything 70+ I really liked, and 80+ is generally top ten for any given non-phenomenal year./We Need to Talk About Kevin/ (2011, Lynne Ramsay): 63
Previously addressed at Cannes, and taking a second look changed nothing. Even if we posit that the entire film is an untrustworthy memory play warped by Eva's guilt, Kevin is just too overtly demonic to prevent the film from feeling schematically repetitive, especially when Ramsay abandons her initial flurry of hallucinatory fragmentation and settles into a strictly linear groove (which threatens to become a rut). It's a dazzling dirge, and this time I clung even more desperately to its one mysterious, destabilizing interlude: Kevin's sudden tender affection for Eva when he gets sick. But the faint echo in the film's closing scene, as he awaits transfer to prison proper, just wasn't enough, and I was set adrift once again.
/A Perfect World/ (1993, Clint Eastwood): 50
Ah, 1993. The world was young. Well, I was young, anyway. Had just been blown away by Unforgiven the year before, and so processed this entirely as un film de Clint Eastwood...whereas today I look at it and see a movie written by the guy who made The Blind Side. It disappointed me back then, to be sure, but I vividly recall thinking that the Costner half was a masterpiece and wishing all the dopey scenes of Eastwood and Dern {and wait a second is that Bradley Whitford as the ice-cool sniper?} in lukewarm pursuit would just go away. But that assessment was predicated, if I can trust my memory, on the notion that Costner was trashing his virtuous image by playing a dangerous psychopath, whereas it seems painfully obvious now that he's in fact playing a fundamentally decent guy who turned to a life of crime because of (ugh) Daddy Issues. He and the kid still have a nice rapport—I'm always pleased when small children in genre movies actually behave like small children, getting the piss scared out of them when appropriate and failing to comprehend the adult world in troubling ways—and that offsets the sogginess to some degree; certainly Eastwood seems more keenly attuned to their relationship than to his own feeble subplot, as he can barely work up the energy to pretend he's invested in the boys' club that Dern's (thoroughly modern) Sally aims to invade. And at least the extent to which Costner's felon is projecting his own history onto others is left mostly implicit, rather than being spelled out in trailer-ready dialogue like "You're changing that boy's life." "No. He's changing mine." Small mercies.
21 Jump Street (2012, Phil Lord & Chris Miller): W/O
Just not funny to me, I'm afraid. Its one good comic idea—that the definition of "cool" has radically changed in the seven years since Channing Tatum's apathetic jock barely graduated, making him the outcast upon his return (which as a bonus has pretty obvious real-world resonance)—barely gets any play, at least in the first 40 minutes. (Having them accidentally assume each other's fake identities more or less kills it it any case.) And while, sure, I'm impressed that Tatum's willing to play so enthusiastically against type, he still needs material, as does Hill. Didn't enjoy all the meta-humor, either: "Hey, we're a sad pop-culture cash-grab but at least we know we're a sad pop-culture cash-grab and we don't try to hide it." Good for you.
/Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid/ (1969, George Roy Hill): 52
William Goldman expertly eviscerates his own script in Adventures in the Screen Trade, and I concur with most of his self-criticism. In particular, much of the dialogue is painfully jokey (as opposed to witty) and predicated on cheap reversals of expectation, reaching its nadir at the climax when Butch and Sundance get shot to hell and still keep lobbing sarcastic gibes back and forth. On the flip side, Goldman takes credit for the film's structure, by which I think he really means its sheer cussedness—no other Western I can think of introduces a couple of badass anti-heroes and then has them spend half the movie fleeing a group of faceless, implacable foes, never even really considering putting up a fight. And it's not as if the other half sees them turn the tables, either. "Fuck this noise, next stop Bolivia." Where everything promptly goes to shit. Yet while the opening newsreel self-consciously signposts the end of an era ("all dead now but once they ruled the West!"), the film's tone isn't really mournful or elegiac à la Liberty Valance, just oddly bemused. It's an unconventional portrait that I wish had been written by someone without quite such a glib sensibility (though, again, I admire that Goldman would later so openly dissect his most celebrated work; his nonfiction books are all terrific, especially Hype and Glory which remains the best behind-the-scenes look at a Cannes jury) and directed by someone with a better feel for the outdoors...or at least by someone who'd veto a bike-riding montage set to a Bacharach & David tune. MVP is Redford, who gives away so little here, seems awesomely unconcerned with being liked. Wonder how great he might have been had this film not made him a superstar.
Prometheus (2012, Ridley Scott): 54
Pretty impressive fan fiction, though the plot doesn't make a whole lotta sense even allowing for the likelihood that some open questions will be answered in the now-inevitable sequel. (MASSIVE SPOILERS IN THAT LINK, DO NOT CLICK UNTIL YOU'VE SEEN THE FILM. I dated it 2003 just so nobody could possibly stumble onto it by accident.) I'm less bothered by the Lindeloffing, though, than by the overall shoddiness in every element save for the visual. Alien admittedly didn't boast a cast of Chekhovian characters, but the crew at least seemed credibly professional given that they were blue-collar grunts; here, we're supposed to believe that Noomi and her fella are scientists (with fields of study that mutate as rapidly as the xenomorph, it seems), but they come across like a social worker and the trainer she started dating at her local gym. And it's just impossible to believe that anyone with a functioning brain stem would see that snake-thing rise out of the ooze on some heretofore unexplored world and say "Awwww how cute c'mere lemme pet you!" Only Fassbender, with his Mona Lisa smile forever contradicting any notion of android impassivity, suggests the psychological murkiness required of this philosophically ambitious prequel, which strives for much more than Alien's simple nightmare-in-a-can but achieves so, so much less. Still, it's always stunning to look at, and while the dominoes set up to reach that auto-Caesarean setpiece are laughable (I'm still looking for a plausible explanation of why David would dose the gym rat, given that he should have no clue what would happen), it produced the intended OMG OMG OMG so on some level I have to just give it up.
The Longest Day (1962, Ken Annakin/Andrew Marton/Bernhard Wicki): 67
One look at the directing credits and you can see why this all-star historical epic—a Best Picture nominee that year, losing to fellow epic Lawrence of Arabia—rarely gets mentioned nowadays. But while I was steeled for something stodgy and bloated and incoherent, the film turns out to be almost avant-garde by the standards of its era, to the point where only patriotism could have prevented its wholesale rejection by the public. I can see folks grudgingly coping with all the subtitled French and German dialogue, and even respecting the decision to treat the Nazi command with reasonable dignity; the film emphasizes their tactical intelligence, making it clear that they were caught off guard mostly because a Normandy invasion in that weather seemed suicidal. But only with a subject as momentous as D-Day could even a quasi-Hollywood movie be this relentlessly procedural and uninterested in manufacturing conventional drama. It's truly the story of the operation itself, focusing on individuals only to the extent that doing so clarifies how it went down. John Wayne gives a standard gruff motivational speech early on and then vanishes for long stretches, in part because he's playing an officer whose battalion of paratroopers badly overshot their drop point. Other icons—Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton—are treated no more heroically, nor given any more narrative weight, than are obscure actors playing members of the French resistance. Granted, we're still talking here about three pretty generic craftsmen at the helm, so The Longest Day never achieves the heart-stopping highs of similar sequences in Saving Private Ryan or The Thin Red Line—it's engrossing rather than exhilarating, playing very much like a meticulous adaptation of a nonfiction blow-by-blow. In that sense, it was more or less the United 93 of its day.
The Intouchables (2011, Eric Toledano & Olivier Nakache): 45
Reviewed for Las Vegas Weekly, where I didn't have enough space to sigh heavily, for example, at the way this pandering mediocrity twice employs the tired routine where you cut from someone insisting that under no circumstances will he [do whatever] directly to a shot of him in fact [doing whatever]. Nor was I able to properly address the question of racism, and in particular answer the reasonable-sounding assertion made by one annoyed French journalist, viz. that The Intouchables commits no ostensible offense or sin that can't also be found in Beverly Hills Cop. I would invite that journalist to take a good look at the scene in this film that has Driss dancing to "Boogie Wonderland," which is problematic not merely because it's a black man demonstrating rhythm to an audience of white stuffed shirts, but because of the way Omar Sy has been photographed: beaming and strutting almost directly to the camera as if desperately seeking its approval. Eddie Murphy did not do that shit.
Whisper of the Heart (1995, Yoshifumi Kondô): 43
Feels like a movie made not just about a teenage girl but expressly for teenage girls, the cinematic equivalent of young-adult fiction. Without Ghibli's usual otherworldly elements (present here only in fleeting sequences depicting the story Shizuku's writing), there's precious little to interest an adult viewer beyond lovely animation; everything's spelled out in afterschool-special dialogue, and Shizuku's growing pains—dominated by a peculiarly Japanese anxiety about measuring up to idealized others—are just too banal to be presented so straightforwardly. (As if to emphasize its commitment to triteness, the film hilariously treats John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" as if it were "Eleanor Rigby" or "Like a Rolling Stone," a holy text to be endlessly decoded and reinterpreted.) Also, while I recognize that it's a bit silly to take the ending seriously, two little kids who barely know each other getting engaged doesn't inspire in me the paroxysms of joy that were clearly intended (which would be less of a problem were the film not so resolutely mundane—there's no fairytale aspect to this union). Again, though, it's not really my intention to beat up on Whisper of the Heart, which is a perfectly serviceable tween-empowerment tale. I'm just a bit baffled, as I was regarding last year's much-touted Winnie the Pooh flick, that it appeals to anyone for whom puberty is a distant memory. Watercolor splendor aside, it's more Judy (Blume) than Kiki.
06 March 2009
Festival Flashback: Week of 6 Mar.
Phoebe in Wonderland (Daniel Barnz, USA): 53 [Sundance '08]
The hottest ticket at Sundance 2007 — for the increasingly desperate press, if not for the general public — was Hounddog, in which Dakota Fanning played a barefoot farm girl so desperate for tickets to see Elvis Presley that she was willing to strip naked and gyrate around à la The King, only to get brutally raped for her trouble. Many fewer journalists flocked to see this year's less sensationalistic Phoebe in Wonderland, starring Dakota's equally precocious younger sister Elle — which is a shame, since it's a much more interesting film, albeit somewhat muddled. Phoebe's dangerous obsession isn't Elvis but Alice: Her mother (Felicity Huffman) has been working for years on a Lewis Carroll dissertation, and Phoebe desperately wants the lead role in her grade school's production of Alice in Wonderland, to be directed — sort of — by a singularly bizarre new drama teacher (Patricia Clarkson). So badly does Phoebe want the part, in fact, that she devises an elaborate system of games and rituals designed to secure it for her. She paces the school hallway for hours, carefully avoiding any cracks in the floor. She hops up the stairs at her house, then hops down twice, backwards, then up again, then a half-turn, clapping, then repeat. She washes her hands again and again and again, until they bleed.
Writer-director Daniel Barnz plays a rather pointless game of keep-away with Phoebe's condition, which isn't named until the movie's final moments, but I'll respect his wishes. (I'm pretty sure it's two comorbid conditions, actually, though the script doesn't specify; if I tell you that she also shrugs her shoulders a lot and occasionally repeats other people's sentences, that should clinch it for the neuro-heads.) Barnz's goal here — quite an admirable one, in an after-school special kind of way — is to suggest that such conditions are only the extreme end of a continuum upon which we all reside. But he also wants to make a more general plea for tolerance, so we get a subplot about an effeminate little boy in Phoebe's class who wants to play the Red Queen in drag and is immediately labeled queer. And he also wants Clarkson's drama teacher to be one of those Dead Poets Society educational martyrs who encourage kids to chuck all rules and regs before being marched to the guillotine by some humorless authority figure (here, inexplicably, Campbell Scott, who can't do humorless with a gun to his head). And he also wants to beguile us with Gilliamesque fantasy sequences, at which he sucks, quite frankly. The main reason to see Phoebe in Wonderland is for yet another astonishing Fanning performance. How these little girls are able to summon such powerful reserves of fear and anguish and terror, I have no idea. I'm not really sure I want to know, to be honest.
Also opening this week in NYC but not previously addressed by me except via Twitter:
Frontier of Dawn (Philippe Garrel, France): 43
[Why go to all the trouble of creating ravishing b&w compositions if you're only gonna infect them with the empty, preening narcissism of Louis Garrel? Oh, right, because you spawned him, etc. Early scenes still fairly potent, nicely capturing the mercurial highs and lows of infatuation-as-self-regard, but Frontier pretty much flatlines when Smet does (SPOILER!), since we're then trapped with a couple of good-looking vacuums and their travails in cozy domesticity. And while I didn't find the film's subsequent shift into the quasi-supernatural remotely problematic (Orpheus being a personal favorite), Garrel's approach is so studiously uninflected that he needs an actor with depth and charisma to provide an emotional charge. Which I believe is where we came in...]
Tokyo! (Michel Gondry/Leos Carax/Bong Joon-ho, Japan): 56
[A rare omnibus film where my overall reaction is mixed not because the quality of the individual shorts varies wildly, but because all three are kinda sorta okay, flawed but intriguing. Gondry's in full-bore cute-whimsy mode, which I find largely insufferable at feature length but could tolerate here in a reasonably small dose; the idea itself is so bizarre that you can't help but shake your head in wonder. Carax is making a heavy-handed statement—albeit one that's admirably critical of Japanese xenophobia, given the nature of the project—but it's hard to feel too preached at when you're watching Denis Lavant stumbling down the street in crazy-troll regalia, muttering gibberish and licking passersby. And while Bong's segment ultimately succumbs to bathos, its details are fascinating enough to make me wish he'd expand it into a longer, grittier film about the hikikomori phenomenon, which really begs to be addressed by a sensitive, probing outsider.]
I currently don't intend to see Watchmen, if you're wondering. Read the original in comic form at the time (despite not being at all a comics person; my friend Chris tipped me off) and consider it a masterpiece; can't imagine it surviving adaptation into any other medium, and the reviews seem to confirm that it's a Fotonovel at best.
18 March 2009
A heartfelt but nonetheless semi-objective plug.
Longtime readers will know that I pull no punches, even regarding films written and/or directed by close personal friends. One of my buds' pictures was strong enough to be selected for Sundance's Dramatic Competition and wound up getting a moderate theatrical release; I gave it 57 good-effort points of criticism. Another pal still laughs when he recalls the kindest response I could come up with after seeing his feature debut: "Well, that wasn't terrible!" (40 points of criticism; terrible would be < 28, I decided.) So when I urge those of you in the greater Los Angeles area to check out a new indie film that'll be screening at Method Fest later this month, and then confess that it's the work of my friend Nicholas Gray, trust that this is not just me being loyal. I wouldn't call your attention to it if I didn't genuinely consider it worth your time.
First, I must apologize for the title, which Nicholas is very well aware I can't stand. (When I told him I was doing this he insisted that I be 100% honest.) The film is called If You Could Say It in Words, and for the most part it's a gratifyingly subtle and remarkably assured (for a novice filmmaker) character study that happens to be—and one of the most impressive things about this film is that it really does seem like it just happens to be—about someone with Asperger's Syndrome. I'm telling you that up front because you'll find out anyway if you click on the link to the film's website or read the festival blurb or whatever, but what's kind of amazing is that if you didn't know this in advance it might not dawn on you until deep in the movie's second act. Apparently, there was an egregiously mawkish Asperger's movie at Sundance this year (I haven't seen it), but Words (as I guess I'll call it for short) couldn't possibly be less disease-of-the-week. I have significant problems with the ending, and as a result my rating wound up being a 54 (which drives Nicholas nuts because 54 is my top C+ rating and he keeps wanting to shove it up into the B- column), but to be honest I was kind of dreading watching the film, afraid I was going to have find some tactful way of telling Nicholas it blows, and was very pleasantly surprised.
But the main reason I'm urging you Angelenos to check it out is because Method Fest, which I had frankly never heard of before, is a festival specifically dedicated to "breakout acting in independent film," and Words does in fact feature one of the most stunning performances I've seen in the past couple of years—easily my top Best Actress pick for various polls and surveys, at this writing, should the film get a New York commercial release. That would be the young woman pictured above, name of Marin Ireland. Alvin Keith, who plays the Asperger's dude, is also quite strong, nicely underplaying in what's obviously a fairly tricky role. But it's Ireland's stunningly naturalistic and almost preternaturally sensitive work as the woman who falls for him, without quite understanding the nature of his quirks, that gives Words its considerable power and prevents it from ever lapsing into cheap bathos. I was literally only ten minutes into the film when I stopped the DVD and started Googling the hell out of her to find out who this instantly riveting presence was. (An accomplished and award-winning theater actress, it turned out; she's currently starring in Neil LaBute's latest on Broadway.) Even if you don't care for the movie overall—and, again, I'm pretty mixed on it myself—you'll be glad later that you got in on the ground floor of what's sure to be an amazing career.
If You Could Say It in Words screens at the Calabasas Civic Center at 7pm on Sunday, 29 March. Stop by, witness a future star, and tell Nicholas his movie still needs a better title.
10 April 2009
Festival Flashback: Week of 10 Apr.
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Rawson Marshall Thurber, USA): 58 [Sundance '08]
[Michael Chabon's complicated first novel has been reduced (by Dodgeball's Rawson Marshall Thurber) to a simple bisexual love triangle, with two major characters—Arthur and Cleveland—melded into one, and another, the improbably named Phlox, distorted almost beyond recognition. And yet the movie still almost kinda works, mostly because Peter Sarsgaard commits himself so fully to his ludicrous bad-boy manipulator that we, like the dazed young protagonist, are completely taken in.]
ADDENDUM, 10 April: The above was filed post-Sundance as part of a very quick wrap-up report, addressing a number of lesser films I hadn't had time to tackle at greater length. So it's obviously not super helpful, in that I basically just say (1) adaptation not very faithful but (2) Sarsgaard rocks. Both of which are true, but I wish that my memory of the film, over a year later, were a bit less fuzzy, because it's getting trashed by critics to a degree that seems to me not just unwarranted but almost malicious. I can't make any great claims for this fussy, superfluous litpic, and wouldn't even really recommend it, but it's hardly the train wreck you'll see described elsewhere. Mostly it suffers from paralyzing earnestness and a very weak lead performance—though even the latter has its inadvertent strengths in context, since Art is pretty much designed as a passive receptacle. Anyway, eminently ignorable, but still thornier and less rote than the bizarrely overpraised Adventureland, to which it bears a very superficial resemblance.
13 March 2009
Festival Flashback: Week of 13 Mar.
Sunshine Cleaning (Christine Jeffs, USA): 44 [Sundance '08]
My guess is that a lot of the people reading this have at least one screenplay in progress. Might I make a suggestion? You know that Big Secret you've got lurking somewhere in the third act—the traumatic past incident that retroactively explains your characters' troubling present-day neuroses? Ditch it. Lose it. Nuke it. You don't need it. It doesn't help.
Had I made this plea a year ago, perhaps we might all have been spared the ordeal of Sunshine Cleaning, one of the big-buzz titles in this year's Dramatic Competition. Directed by New Zealand native Christine Jeffs, whose mildly promising debut Rain now seems a distant memory (she also made Sylvia, the inert Plath biopic starring Gwyneth Paltrow), it stars Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, both in reasonably fine form, as hard-luck sisters who start a new business wiping up the blood and viscera that accumulates at crime scenes. The ick factor makes for a few funny moments, but, alas, screenwriter Megan Holley has more serious issues in mind. Both young women seem devoted to their father (Alan Arkin, reprising his labored shtick from that other Sunshine movie), but Mom is nowhere in sight. Might our heroines possibly be working through some personal issues related to the discovery of a bloody, horrific mess? And isn't that conveeeenient. People, this sort of Freudian nonsense is killing narrative fiction. Characters are far more intriguing and memorable when their behavior can't be reduced to the sum of their childhood traumas. Just let them be however screwed up they are; we'll happily speculate about the cause. (Case in point: the underrated Margot at the Wedding.)
Unfortunately, I failed to get into Sugar, which all reports suggest boasts the same impressive degree of relaxed naturalism as Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's previous Sundance triumph, Half Nelson. [MARCH 2009: Much less impressive, sadly.] But it sounds like the antidote to the Sunshine Cleanings that infest this festival. [MARCH 2009: Still yes, however.]
Also opening this week is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata (60), which was the very last film I saw at NYFF '08 and which consequently became one of last year's inevitable burnout casualties, review-wise. Not that I have a whole lot to say about it now. Interesting to see Kurosawa shift his apocalyptic sensibility to an ostensibly ordinary domestic drama, but I'm basically down with the faction who thinks the lunatic third act is something of a sharkjumper, only partially redeemed by a beautifully judged denouement. Plus I've now seen too many recent movies about patriarchs hiding their termination from their families, even if two of them (Time Out and The Adversary) were inspired by the same real-life incident. Still very much worth your time, of course, and I was startled to realize halfway through that Teruyuki Kagawa, the actor who plays the lumpen husband and father, was also the maniacally pissed-off Japanese prisoner in Devils on the Doorstep. Now that's range.
Also, today I received official confirmation of my Cannes accreditation, so I'll definitely be there. My heartfelt thanks yet again to the many generous folks who made this possible. Your awesomeness sustains me.
03 February 2015
Skandies: Quick preamble
Apologies for the slight delay in getting things rolling this year. For the first time since 2007, I attended Sundance for more than three or four days, arriving back home right before the survey deadline; my own ballot, which in the past I've submitted two weeks or more in advance, wasn't complete until nearly the last minute, meaning I couldn't start spot-checking other ballots. (This year's results will clearly demonstrate that I don't tweak my ballot to alter the results, tempting though that is.) And then the revised software (following last year's crash of the Skandies site) had the usual bugs, which Mark Pittillo valiantly eradicated. And then I had a ton of post-Sundance work to deal with before I could put the whole thing together. But here we are, finally.
Turnout this year was the lowest in some time, for a variety of reasons. Of the 42 folks I invited, 36 returned a ballot. Abstaining, for those who want to know where to affix asterisks, are: Skander Halim (spent the year concentrating on his improv/comedy-writing gigs; saw 11 films total), Dan Sallitt (due to illness; wish him well), Andrew Wright (scheduling conflict of some kind), Fred Da (likewise, though his wife, Roxane Mesquida, shares his taste so closely that they might as well file jointly anyway), and Matthew Butcher (who generally abstains because he lives in Japan—permanently now, it seems). Also, a fond farewell to longtime AVB member Greg Murphy, who's decided that he just no longer sees enough new movies to vote.
#20 will be up first thing tomorrow, which may actually mean late tonight, depending on which time zone you're in. Predictions of shocking upsets should be made now. (Atli, I have your top 20 predix if the comments for the temp post I deleted are your only record.)
Turnout this year was the lowest in some time, for a variety of reasons. Of the 42 folks I invited, 36 returned a ballot. Abstaining, for those who want to know where to affix asterisks, are: Skander Halim (spent the year concentrating on his improv/comedy-writing gigs; saw 11 films total), Dan Sallitt (due to illness; wish him well), Andrew Wright (scheduling conflict of some kind), Fred Da (likewise, though his wife, Roxane Mesquida, shares his taste so closely that they might as well file jointly anyway), and Matthew Butcher (who generally abstains because he lives in Japan—permanently now, it seems). Also, a fond farewell to longtime AVB member Greg Murphy, who's decided that he just no longer sees enough new movies to vote.
#20 will be up first thing tomorrow, which may actually mean late tonight, depending on which time zone you're in. Predictions of shocking upsets should be made now. (Atli, I have your top 20 predix if the comments for the temp post I deleted are your only record.)
29 February 2008
See Chicago 10, unless by chance you are a dolt.
I've been asked to say something about Lukas Moodysson's avant-garde curiosity Container, which just made a belated appearance on my 2006 top ten list. I hope to get to that this weekend, but in the meantime, do me a favor and ignore the passel of mixed and negative Chicago 10 reviews that just saw print, which merely regurgitate the wrongheaded reception the film received when it premiered at Sundance a year ago. I am so very weary of reading stuff like this, courtesy A.O. Scott:
Here’s a small quiz: Who did the Democrats nominate in 1968? What candidates opposed him? Which Republican did he face in the general election? Who won? Anyone who doesn’t know the answers will not learn them from Chicago 10, a movie about 1968 in which Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon and Robert F. Kennedy are never mentioned, and Eugene McCarthy’s name is heard only in passing.
Apparently, director Brett Morgen made a terrible mistake in failing to sit down and draw up a list of every '68 factoid that a completely ignorant potential moviegoer might not already know, and then ensure that each one is addressed somewhere in the movie. Because of course the purpose of a documentary is to convey factual information to the viewer. Just like a book, only there are pictures! That move! Doesn't that make the expository nature of the enterprise so much more entertaining?
What makes Chicago 10 such an arresting experience is that Morgen truly doesn't give a damn about providing historical context. He's filmmaker enough to assume that you already know the pertinent details—and that if by some chance you don't know them, you shouldn't be learning them from a goddamn movie. Instead, he offers something far more valuable: a fully present-tense experience, one that comes as close as a 90-minute feature possibly can to conveying, for those of us too young to have been around or to remember (I was in diapers), what it must have felt like to watch it unfold. I made this argument at Sundance (scroll down a bit), but was heartened today to find Andrew O'Hehir's interview with Morgen at Salon, in which my new hero makes many of the same doc-based complaints I've been voicing for years:
For anybody who's younger than 50 or 52, it takes this moment of history that we've heard about but have a limited knowledge of, and allows the audience to do what film is uniquely suited to do—experience it. There are an insane amount of books and films and plays and radio shows about those events, and the one thing I thought was missing was something that allowed me to experience that chaos first-hand.
I see movies like No End in Sight, and I have a hard time even calling them movies. I think they're essays, and they're incredibly valuable documents. But I'm happy that film didn't win an Oscar, because I just didn't feel it was cinematic. If people voted for that film, they were voting for the politics of the film. Too often in nonfiction, most of us don't take advantage of the full breadth and width of what film has to offer. I'm trying to deviate from broadcast journalism. No End in Sight is something I could just as easily watch on television.
To which I can only say: Yes.
26 January 2006
Sundance: Day Seven
This is one of those films I'd rather not talk too much about, for fear of ruining the experience for others. (Not that anyone's likely to see it -- hands up, everyone who saw Reichardt's equally terrific River of Grass in its initial commercial run.) I'll just say (a) that this is the movie I wanted Blissfully Yours to be, and (b) that afterwards I was so choked up I couldn't eat, even though my stomach was rumbling for the entire 83 minutes. Oh, and also (c) that I still can't believe that's the preacher kid from Matewan.
Country of origin is accurate but misleading -- this feels very much like a Korean film, albeit closer in spirit to the hormonal adolescent fumbling of (say) the Doinel series than to Park, Kim, & Co. Delicate and nuanced, with the ambiguous central friendship-cum-romance handled quite deftly; I don't get the comparison to Funny Ha Ha, whose characters are inarticulate in a completely different (i.e. much more garrulous) way. Sundance oughta be chock-full of movies like this.
Makes all the arguments you'd expect, but with enough wit and energy that the converted won't mind being preached to. Plus, it's almost as much a procedural about private investigators as it is an expose about the MPAA's secret cabal. The revelation of the appeal board's identities (not the allegedly average parents who decide upon the initial ratings) produced first audible gasps and then incredulous laughter at my screening; it's so ludicrously damning that Dick doesn't even bother commenting upon it. He just immmediately ends the film. Because, really, what else can you say?
But here, lemme break it down for ya.
"Hoist" (Barney): D+ [Just plain silly. The last thing this dude needs is an opportunity to literalize his sexual preoccupations.]
"House Call" (Prince): D ["In his signature style," sez here. If this is what he does, sign me up for some more Ken Jacobs.]
"Impaled" (Clark): C+ [Absolute genius, so long as you also believe Ed Powers to be America's preeminent artistic figure.]
"Sync" (Brambilla): B+ [This dude should never be allowed to make a film longer than two minutes ever again ever.]
"Death Valley" (Taylor-Wood): A- [Hilarious Sisyphean gag, best enjoyed with a rowdy audience -- mine eventually started clapping along in time.]
"Balkan Erotic Epic" (Abramovic): C+ [Scattershot sketch comedy; animated bits stand out.]
"Babysitter" (Noé): D- [So unbelievably pretentious and stupid that it makes me want to retract my high opinion of his previous work.]
11 August 2005
Goddamn their confusion.
.
On the one hand, I can't pretend to be completely unbiased about Pretty Persuasion, a very black comedy that opens tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles. I have slept on the fold-out couch of its screenwriter and co-producer, Skander Halim, and he, by turn, has taken one look at my couch, which does not fold out and which comfortably seats maybe 1.5 normal-sized people, and immediately announced, "There's no way in hell I can sleep on that." (I gave him the bed, which was kind of a Pyrrhic victory for him given that the mattress was delivered the next morning.) In Rotterdam two years ago, we split the cost of a rather expensive hotel room when an idiot colleague, who shall remain nameless until someone inevitably outs him in the comments, neglected to inform us that his own hotel room, which the three of us were supposed to share, was roughly the size of a Greyhound lavatory. What I'm trying to say is that there's a history of awkward temporary accommodation here that precludes 100% objectivity in my appraisal of this particular motion picture. Also Skander is a good friend of mine.
On the other hand, honesty tends to trump loyalty for me in situations like these, and I suspect that my 57 rating for Pretty Persuasion (up from a 52 the first time I saw it, at its Sundance premiere; in the letter grade schema that's basically a middling B-) is pretty close to what I would have allotted had Skander and I never met. It's not as if I'm overlooking the film's numerous flaws as part of some fraternal rah-rah campaign. In Variety's classic "crix pix" parlance, I am Mixed. I can't recommend Pretty Persuasion to you without reservations, even though I was quite willing to see it a second time just to savor the dialogue's numerous cherry bombs (not all of which were in the script) and a host of sharp, funny performances. But I can tell you, with a clear conscience, that it's a good deal more interesting, ambitious and impassioned than many of the reviews suggest.
If anything, the movie is way too ambitious. Skander was about 21 years old when he wrote the first draft of the screenplay, and Pretty Persuasion feels very much like the product of an angry 21-year-old liberal (and Canadian) determined to cram everything that's wrong with America into a single bitter draught of satirical hemlock—to provoke peals of guilty laughter that wind up stuck in the throat. Which is to say that it's both admirably corrosive and (at times) disappointingly sophomoric, taking scattershot aim at a host of eminently worthy targets. It's a movie that has the courage and the dudgeon to introduce us to its protagonist, Kimberly Joyce, a privileged and frighteningly intelligent teen played with blistering eloquence by Evan Rachel Wood, and then immediately have Kimberly matter-of-factly tell her new Muslim friend that while she respects all races, "I'm really glad I was born white." (This charming sentiment is followed by an exhaustive, in-order-of-preference rundown of desirable ethnicities, with bonus points awarded to black women who possess Caucasian features.) Equally biting and timely is the film's exploration of the sexual double standard, by which young girls are simultaneously rewarded and punished for carnal enthusiasm. Unfortunately, some of the satire's force is diluted by cheap shots and crude exaggerations. To my mind, the most injurious scene is the one that formed the basis of Skander's short film "Family Dinner" (which I didn't much like; his second short, "Guest Room," is terrific, though), which attempts to "explain" Kimberly's burgeoning psychosis by depicting her father, mother, stepmother and putative boyfriend as grotesque, rapacious caricatures. Much of this material is less funny or acute than simply shrill, and the stuff with the absent mother (who's so not-there that she thinks Kimberly is five or six years older than she actually is) verges on bathetic. All of it falls under the general heading of Trying Too Hard to Do Too Much.
Still, better to overreach than to underwhelm. For all its flaws, Pretty Persuasion is obviously—obviously!—a movie with a very serious and heartfelt agenda, which makes it rather bewildering that so many reviews have dismissed it as insincere and gratuitously outrageous. "Cynical, eager-to-shock Sundance indie...wears its notion of incorrectness with a smirk," harrumphs EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum...though I must say I almost prefer that to Owen Gleiberman making it sound like a salad dressing in the ads ("brimming with zesty shock value!"). "Shock for shock's sake," shrugs some chick I've never heard of. Are these people kidding? Can they really not perceive that every tasteless joke masks an undercurrent of pain and anger? A third-stringer for the Village Voice even has the temerity to claim that the film is "predicated on a streak of misogyny," a charge supported by a single line of dialogue spoken by a clueless character for whom we have zero sympathy. (That's like citing dialogue by one of the husbands in The Stepford Wives as evidence of Ira Levin's misogyny.) Yeah, maybe I'm partisan, but that doesn't make these folks any less dimwitted.
Being heartfelt doesn't make a movie good. Frickin' Seabiscuit was heartfelt. And I'm not making any great claims for Pretty Persuasion, which joins such highly touted efforts as Murderball, The Squid and the Whale, Last Days, Millions, Good Night. And, Good Luck and The World among a long list of Really Intriguing Films That Didn't Altogether Work for Me. (Other movies that I've given a 57 over the last few years: Lost in Translation, Gangs of New York, Tarnation.) But opportunistic it ain't. And if you'll allow me just a brief shake of the pom-poms, I do think it's well worth seeing—on its own terms, as an intermittently hilarious and remarkably daring comedy, and as the first volley from a promising new talent. Look for his directorial debut, The Smallest Couch of All Time Ever, sometime next year.
On the one hand, I can't pretend to be completely unbiased about Pretty Persuasion, a very black comedy that opens tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles. I have slept on the fold-out couch of its screenwriter and co-producer, Skander Halim, and he, by turn, has taken one look at my couch, which does not fold out and which comfortably seats maybe 1.5 normal-sized people, and immediately announced, "There's no way in hell I can sleep on that." (I gave him the bed, which was kind of a Pyrrhic victory for him given that the mattress was delivered the next morning.) In Rotterdam two years ago, we split the cost of a rather expensive hotel room when an idiot colleague, who shall remain nameless until someone inevitably outs him in the comments, neglected to inform us that his own hotel room, which the three of us were supposed to share, was roughly the size of a Greyhound lavatory. What I'm trying to say is that there's a history of awkward temporary accommodation here that precludes 100% objectivity in my appraisal of this particular motion picture. Also Skander is a good friend of mine.
On the other hand, honesty tends to trump loyalty for me in situations like these, and I suspect that my 57 rating for Pretty Persuasion (up from a 52 the first time I saw it, at its Sundance premiere; in the letter grade schema that's basically a middling B-) is pretty close to what I would have allotted had Skander and I never met. It's not as if I'm overlooking the film's numerous flaws as part of some fraternal rah-rah campaign. In Variety's classic "crix pix" parlance, I am Mixed. I can't recommend Pretty Persuasion to you without reservations, even though I was quite willing to see it a second time just to savor the dialogue's numerous cherry bombs (not all of which were in the script) and a host of sharp, funny performances. But I can tell you, with a clear conscience, that it's a good deal more interesting, ambitious and impassioned than many of the reviews suggest.
If anything, the movie is way too ambitious. Skander was about 21 years old when he wrote the first draft of the screenplay, and Pretty Persuasion feels very much like the product of an angry 21-year-old liberal (and Canadian) determined to cram everything that's wrong with America into a single bitter draught of satirical hemlock—to provoke peals of guilty laughter that wind up stuck in the throat. Which is to say that it's both admirably corrosive and (at times) disappointingly sophomoric, taking scattershot aim at a host of eminently worthy targets. It's a movie that has the courage and the dudgeon to introduce us to its protagonist, Kimberly Joyce, a privileged and frighteningly intelligent teen played with blistering eloquence by Evan Rachel Wood, and then immediately have Kimberly matter-of-factly tell her new Muslim friend that while she respects all races, "I'm really glad I was born white." (This charming sentiment is followed by an exhaustive, in-order-of-preference rundown of desirable ethnicities, with bonus points awarded to black women who possess Caucasian features.) Equally biting and timely is the film's exploration of the sexual double standard, by which young girls are simultaneously rewarded and punished for carnal enthusiasm. Unfortunately, some of the satire's force is diluted by cheap shots and crude exaggerations. To my mind, the most injurious scene is the one that formed the basis of Skander's short film "Family Dinner" (which I didn't much like; his second short, "Guest Room," is terrific, though), which attempts to "explain" Kimberly's burgeoning psychosis by depicting her father, mother, stepmother and putative boyfriend as grotesque, rapacious caricatures. Much of this material is less funny or acute than simply shrill, and the stuff with the absent mother (who's so not-there that she thinks Kimberly is five or six years older than she actually is) verges on bathetic. All of it falls under the general heading of Trying Too Hard to Do Too Much.
Still, better to overreach than to underwhelm. For all its flaws, Pretty Persuasion is obviously—obviously!—a movie with a very serious and heartfelt agenda, which makes it rather bewildering that so many reviews have dismissed it as insincere and gratuitously outrageous. "Cynical, eager-to-shock Sundance indie...wears its notion of incorrectness with a smirk," harrumphs EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum...though I must say I almost prefer that to Owen Gleiberman making it sound like a salad dressing in the ads ("brimming with zesty shock value!"). "Shock for shock's sake," shrugs some chick I've never heard of. Are these people kidding? Can they really not perceive that every tasteless joke masks an undercurrent of pain and anger? A third-stringer for the Village Voice even has the temerity to claim that the film is "predicated on a streak of misogyny," a charge supported by a single line of dialogue spoken by a clueless character for whom we have zero sympathy. (That's like citing dialogue by one of the husbands in The Stepford Wives as evidence of Ira Levin's misogyny.) Yeah, maybe I'm partisan, but that doesn't make these folks any less dimwitted.
Being heartfelt doesn't make a movie good. Frickin' Seabiscuit was heartfelt. And I'm not making any great claims for Pretty Persuasion, which joins such highly touted efforts as Murderball, The Squid and the Whale, Last Days, Millions, Good Night. And, Good Luck and The World among a long list of Really Intriguing Films That Didn't Altogether Work for Me. (Other movies that I've given a 57 over the last few years: Lost in Translation, Gangs of New York, Tarnation.) But opportunistic it ain't. And if you'll allow me just a brief shake of the pom-poms, I do think it's well worth seeing—on its own terms, as an intermittently hilarious and remarkably daring comedy, and as the first volley from a promising new talent. Look for his directorial debut, The Smallest Couch of All Time Ever, sometime next year.
19 February 2012
Skandiewrap, or: More Than You Really Wanted to Know
Some years it's obvious months in advance which film is going to win our Best Picture award, while other years I'm gnawing my fingernails waiting for that final ballot to arrive. I'd thought 2011 belonged to the former category, but it turned out to be much closer to the latter, with eventual winner The Tree of Life trailing most of the way—it was actually in 4th place at roughly the midpoint. In the end, however, as I'd suspected, it was just on too many ballots (27 out of 36), which, in combination with Malick's several crazed partisans among the voting body, did in fact ultimately seal the deal. Poor Asghar Farhadi—I idly suggested late last year that he could potentially win both the main survey and the Undies sidebar, and instead he wound up the bridesmaid in both. On the other hand, as noted below, his screenplay did set a new all-time record for most points amassed, even if that's not 100% meaningful given that the number of participants doesn't remain constant. (It's been fairly static for a while, though, with a regular rate of attrition/recruitment. Arguably I should try to add a few more folks to ensure that nothing like Shame ever happens again.)
HIGHEST AVERAGE RATING (1996–2011)
(includes only films receiving a minimum of ten votes)
LOWEST AVERAGE RATING (1996–2011)
(includes only films receiving a minimum of five votes)
MOST DIVISIVE FILMS (2010)
(std. deviation >= 0.75; minimum 2 votes 3.5 or higher, 2 votes 1.5 or lower)The Future (0.76)
Rubber (0.75)
BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT
(lowest-ranked film seen by at least 75% of respondents)
PASSIONATE MINORITY AWARD
(lowest average among top 20 films in Picture voting)
DAMNED WITH FAINT PRAISE
(highest-ranked film by average rating not to place in Picture voting [10+ voters] )
DAMN THE REVIEWS, FULL SPEED AHEAD
(lowest average among films seen by at least 10 respondents)
SELECTION COMMITTEE ON CRACK
(lowest average for a film that screened at the New York Film Festival)
ALONE AGAIN (NATURALLY)
(suggested by Alex Fung; lowest average for a film that received a 4-star rating
MAJOR FESTIVAL PRIZE WINNERS: OUR VERDICT
Most Appearances in Top 20 (Actors)
(ties for number of appearances broken by average placement)
Most Films Landed in top 20 (Directors)
(again, ties broken by average placement)
And finally. Back when I started the survey, I remember looking forward to the time, a decade or so later (i.e. now), when there'd be tons of accumulated data to wade through. In particular, I was excited about the prospect of being able to compare how various films from major directors had been received over the years. Granted, that process isn't exactly definitive—the AVB has mutated over the years and even the diehards tend to be stingier with their star ratings than they were back in the mid-'90s. But perhaps my favorite task after receiving the averages is updating my Directors' Gallery, plugging this year's films into various post-'94 oeuvres. Here are the entries that saw additions this year—every filmmaker who's ever placed in the Director top 20. 2011 films are in bold. Numbers in parentheses indicate how the film placed in Best Picture that year, if applicable; if the film title is in parentheses that means it received fewer than 10 votes and hence the result is a bit less meaningful. N/A (not applicable) means it was eligible but didn't even get five votes and so didn't make the main list.
And then there's the sad case of Margaret, which managed to finish third in Best Picture and win two acting categories despite barely being released. 28 voters still managed to see it, but those other eight might well have made the difference, since it was less than 50 points behind. And of course, we didn't have the help of an official awards screener to pass around, as Fox Searchlight only sent those out at the last minute, following weeks of pressure from aggrieved critics. I did manage to track down a horrible copy of an unfinished version from 2008, with no sound editing and temp music, but most of the voters who live in cities where Margaret never opened chose not to watch it, for aesthetic or ethical reasons (or just garden-variety paranoia, I suspect, in one case). Average rating suffers from no such hindrances, however, and in the insanely detailed stats section below you'll find Margaret among the ten highest-rated films in Skandie history—the first film to crack that list in 11 years, along with A Separation (but not The Tree of Life, a film with a few more skeptics).
As always, I'm overjoyed when we crown winners who are both (a) richly deserving and (b) unrecognized elsewhere. I'd dared to dream that Peyman Moadi (whose transliterated name I'd thought was Moaadi, which looks way cooler; IMDb and Sony Classics say 'Moadi,' though, so I've switched over) might squeak out a victory in Actor, but never imagined for a moment that he'd win by a near-landslide. And while Jeannie Berlin does fine work in Margaret, and I didn't begrudge her surprise victory in the indieWire and Voice polls, my own heart belongs to J. Smith-Cameron, whose richly nuanced performance suggests/implies an alternate version of the film in which she's the protagonist and Lisa just one of her many daily challenges. Even the underseen House of Pleasures scored a victory for its almost unbearably anachronistic use of the Moody Blues (plus top five in Picture and top three in Director, which is hugely impressive for a film completely ignored by every other American voting body).
Meanwhile, a number of widely acclaimed pictures left this group (and yours truly) fairly cold—not just presumptive-at-this-writing Oscar winner The Artist (which actually got a respectable 2.82 average), but also alleged career highlights from the likes of Woody Allen, Alexander Payne, David Cronenberg and Aki Kaurismäki. Midnight in Paris, in particular, received almost no love at all, despite being a critical and commercial smash; since I exited its world premiere at Cannes holding my nose, it's nice to be vindicated by my self-selected peers.
Speaking of Cannes, 2011 was further proof that that's where the vast majority of first-rate movies come from. Nine of the films in our top 20, including the winner, premiered on the Croisette, and 11 of 20—over half!—played the festival. (Martha Marcy May Marlene and Take Shelter went to Un Certain Regard and Critics' Week, respectively, from Sundance '11.) Venice, by contrast, boasted only two finalists, one of which (Shame) only got two votes. Sundance: the two noted above. Berlin: 2. Toronto: 2. Tribeca: 1. There's just no comparison, frankly.
Okay, now for the number-crunching. (Many of you will want to check out at this point.) What follows are the stats I used to send out to voters (via snail mail!) back in the '90s, which I still maintain for my own obsessive amusement.
HIGHEST AVERAGE RATING (1996–2011)
(includes only films receiving a minimum of ten votes)
01. 3.65 The Sweet Hereafter (1997)
02. 3.61 Being John Malkovich (1999)
02. 3.61 A Separation (2011)
04. 3.58 Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996)
05. 3.57 In the Company of Men (1997)
06. 3.56 Secrets & Lies (1996)
07. 3.53 La Promesse (1997)
08. 3.52 Yi Yi (A One and a Two…) (2000)
09. 3.50 From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996)
10. 3.48 Irma Vep (1997)
10. 3.48 Lone Star (1996)
10. 3.48 Margaret (2011)
LOWEST AVERAGE RATING (1996–2011)
(includes only films receiving a minimum of five votes)
01. 0.20 Date Movie (2006)
02. 0.58 Miss March (2009)
03. 0.60 Dragonfly (2002)
04. 0.61 The Roommate (2011)
05. 0.67 3000 Miles to Graceland (2001)
06. 0.70 Beastly (2011)
07. 0.75 The Mod Squad (1999)
08. 0.79 I Melt With You (2011)
09. 0.80 Just One Time (2000)
09. 0.80 13 Ghosts (2001)
09. 0.80 What’s the Worst That Could Happen? (2001)
(Incredibly, Battlefield Earth dropped off the list this year.)
MOST DIVISIVE FILMS (2010)
(std. deviation >= 0.75; minimum 2 votes 3.5 or higher, 2 votes 1.5 or lower)
(That's it. No significant love/hate feuds this year; even Shame and We Need to Talk About Kevin got enough grudging respect from detractors.)
BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT
(lowest-ranked film seen by at least 75% of respondents)
1996: Twister (1.80)
1997: The Lost World: Jurassic Park (2.33)
1998: He Got Game (2.59)
1999: Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (2.18)
2000: Nurse Betty (2.31)
2001: Vanilla Sky (2.20)
2002: Storytelling (2.03)
2003: The Matrix Reloaded (2.29)
2004: The Village (2.30)
2005: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2.49)
2006: Little Miss Sunshine (2.52)
2007: Ocean's Thirteen (2.52)
2008: Milk (2.83)
2009: The Hangover (2.35)
2010: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2.71)
2011: Midnight in Paris (2.47)
PASSIONATE MINORITY AWARD
(lowest average among top 20 films in Picture voting)
1996: Dead Man (2.94)
1997: Crash (2.52)
1998: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (2.68)
1999: The End of the Affair (2.96)
2000: Requiem for a Dream (2.73)
2001: Amélie (2.71)
2002: 8 Women (2.79)
2003: The Good Thief (2.81)
2004: I ♥ Huckabees (2.84)
2005: Oldboy (2.68)
2006: Manderlay (2.69)
2007: Once (2.79)
2008: Funny Games (2.83)
2009: A Serious Man (2.83)
2010: The Exploding Girl (2.75)
2011: Shame (2.63)
(As you can see, Shame has the lowest average for a film to make the list since Cronenberg's Crash.)
DAMNED WITH FAINT PRAISE
(highest-ranked film by average rating not to place in Picture voting [10+ voters] )
1996: Get on the Bus (3.29)
1997: Forgotten Silver (3.36)
1998: The Kingdom II (3.14)
1999: My Name Is Joe (3.18)
2000: Erin Brockovich (3.14)
2001: No Man’s Land (3.19)
2002: Roger Dodger (3.14)
2003: The Weather Underground (3.18)
2004: Bright Leaves (3.16)
2005: Howl's Moving Castle (3.15)
2006: The Devil and Daniel Johnston (3.18)
2007: The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (3.25)
2008: The Duchess of Langeais (3.20)
2009: Night and Day (3.07)
2010: Another Year (3.21)
2011: Senna (3.07)
DAMN THE REVIEWS, FULL SPEED AHEAD
(lowest average among films seen by at least 10 respondents)
1996: Twister (1.80)
1997: Batman & Robin (1.28)
1998: The Avengers | Stepmom [tie] (1.50)
1999: Jawbreaker (1.14)
2000: Pay It Forward (1.41)
2001: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (1.26)
2002: Scooby-Doo (1.08)
2003: Bad Boys II (1.60)
2004: Exorcist: The Beginning (1.21)
2005: Undead (1.29)
2006: The Hills Have Eyes (1.65)
2007: Smokin' Aces (1.64)
2008: Jumper (1.54)
2009: Gigantic (1.00)
2010: The Last Airbender (1.05)
2011: Vanishing on 7th Street (1.55)
SELECTION COMMITTEE ON CRACK
(lowest average for a film that screened at the New York Film Festival)
1996: Flirt (2.20)
1997: Kiss or Kill (1.79)
1998: Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1.80)
1999: Dogma (1.89)
2000: Before Night Falls (2.31)
2001: La Ciénaga (1.95)
2002: In Praise of Love (1.95)
2003: Chi-Hwa-Seon: Painted Fire (2.19)
2004: Free Radicals (2.08)
2005: Palindromes (2.15)
2006: Rolling Family (1.83)
2007: The Go Master (1.93)
2008: Married Life (2.25)
2009: The Windmill Movie (2.13)
2010: Hereafter (2.05)
2011: We Are What We Are (1.64)
(Worst. NYFF selection. Ever.)
ALONE AGAIN (NATURALLY)
(suggested by Alex Fung; lowest average for a film that received a 4-star rating
1996: The Stupids (2.30) | Bryan “Frankenseuss” Theiss (ret.)
1997: Kissed (2.46) | Alex Fung
1998: Psycho (2.11) | Erik Gregersen
1999: Twin Falls Idaho (2.28) | Milton Lawson (ret.)
2000: Beautiful People (2.29) | Keith Collins
2001: The Road Home (1.88) | Erik Gregersen
2002: In Praise of Love (1.95) | Jeremy Heilman
2003: Gigli (1.92) | Jeremy Heilman
2004: The Passion of the Christ (2.18) | Victor J. Morton
2005: The Brothers Grimm (2.29) | Bilge Ebiri
2006: The Fountain (2.21) | Peter Reiher
2007: Southland Tales (1.88) | Dave Cowen; Jeremy Heilman
2008: Jellyfish (2.36) | Daniel Waters
2009: 12 (2.29) | Bilge Ebiri
2010: Somewhere (2.41) | Nictate
2011: A Serbian Film (1.81) | Daniel Waters
MAJOR FESTIVAL PRIZE WINNERS: OUR VERDICT
Cannes Palme d'Or
1995: Underground (#15, 1997)
1996: Secrets & Lies (#2, 1996)
1997: Taste of Cherry (#15, 1998)
1997: The Eel (did not place)
1998: Eternity and a Day (did not place)
1999: Rosetta (did not place)
2000: Dancer in the Dark (#10, 2000)
2001: The Son's Room (did not place)
2002: The Pianist (did not place)
2003: Elephant (did not place)
2004: Fahrenheit 9/11 (did not place)
2005: L'Enfant (The Child) (#6, 2006)
2006: The Wind That Shakes the Barley (did not place)
2007: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (#1, 2008)
2008: The Class (did not place)
2009: The White Ribbon (did not place)
2010: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (#9, 2011)
2011: The Tree of Life (#1, 2011)
Venice Golden Lion
1995: Cyclo (#14, 1996)
1996: Michael Collins (did not place)
1997: Fireworks (Hana-Bi) (#5, 1998)
1998: The Way We Laughed (did not place)
1999: Not One Less (did not place)
2000: The Circle (did not place)
2001: Monsoon Wedding (did not place)
2002: The Magdalene Sisters (did not place)
2003: The Return (did not place)
2004: Vera Drake (#6, 2004)
2005: Brokeback Mountain (#3, 2005)
2006: Still Life (#18, 2008)
2007: Lust, Caution (did not place)
2008: The Wrestler (#13, 2008)
2009: Lebanon (did not place)
2010: Somewhere (did not place)
2011: Faust (TBD)
Sundance Grand Jury (Dramatic)
1995: The Brothers McMullen (did not place)
1996: Welcome to the Dollhouse (did not place)
1997: Sunday (did not place)
1998: Slam (did not place)
1999: Three Seasons (did not place)
2000: Girlfight (did not place)
2000: You Can Count on Me (#3, 2000)
2001: The Believer (did not place)
2002: Personal Velocity (did not place)
2003: American Splendor (#20, 2003)
2004: Primer (#10, 2004)
2005: Forty Shades of Blue (did not place)
2006: Quinceañera (did not place)
2007: Padre Nuestro (did not place)
2008: Frozen River (did not place)
2009: Precious (Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire) (did not place)
2010: Winter's Bone (#2, 2010)
2011: Like Crazy (did not place)
Most Appearances in Top 20 (Actors)
(ties for number of appearances broken by average placement)
[The same five as last year but Swinton moves into 2nd place.]
01. Philip Seymour Hoffman (13)
3s. Charlie Wilson's War
5. Capote
6. Synecdoche, New York
6s. The Talented Mr. Ripley
6s. Almost Famous
10s. Magnolia
10s. 25th Hour
11. Doubt
12. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
12s. State and Main
15s. Happiness
15. Owning Mahowny
19s. Mission: Impossible III
02. Tilda Swinton (10)
1. Julia
4s. Michael Clayton
5. The Deep End
5. We Need to Talk About Kevin
9s. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
11. I Am Love
12s. Burn After Reading
13s. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
18. Female Perversions
19s. Thumbsucker
03. Nicole Kidman (9)
2. Eyes Wide Shut
2. Dogville
2. Margot at the Wedding
6. Moulin Rouge
9. The Others
9. The Hours
11. Birth
16. Rabbit Hole
18. Birthday Girl
03. Isabelle Huppert (9)
2. The Piano Teacher
2s. 8 Women
4. Gabrielle
8. The School of Flesh
12. White Material
13s. I ♥ Huckabees
15. La Cérémonie
17. Time of the Wolf
19. Home
05. Kate Winslet (9)
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
8. Titanic
9. Jude
10s. Quills
10. Revolutionary Road
12. Little Children
13. Holy Smoke
16s. Hamlet
17. Hideous Kinky
Most Films Landed in top 20 (Directors)
(again, ties broken by average placement)
[The same five as last year but Von Trier moves into second place.]
01. Joel [& Ethan] Coen (8)
2. No Country for Old Men
4. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
5. The Man Who Wasn't There
6. Fargo
7. A Serious Man
11. Burn After Reading
12. The Big Lebowski
12. True Grit
02. Lars von Trier (6)
1. Breaking the Waves
1. Dogville
7. Melancholia
10. Dancer in the Dark
19. The Five Obstructions
20. Manderlay
03. Christopher Nolan (5)
2. The Prestige
3. Memento
5. The Dark Knight
13. Inception
19. Batman Begins
04. Claire Denis (5)
6. Beau travail
10. 35 Shots of Rum
13. Trouble Every Day
14. Friday Night
19. White Material
05. Quentin Tarantino (4)
1. Inglourious Basterds
2. Kill Bill Vol. 1
4. Kill Bill Vol. 2
4. Grindhouse
And finally. Back when I started the survey, I remember looking forward to the time, a decade or so later (i.e. now), when there'd be tons of accumulated data to wade through. In particular, I was excited about the prospect of being able to compare how various films from major directors had been received over the years. Granted, that process isn't exactly definitive—the AVB has mutated over the years and even the diehards tend to be stingier with their star ratings than they were back in the mid-'90s. But perhaps my favorite task after receiving the averages is updating my Directors' Gallery, plugging this year's films into various post-'94 oeuvres. Here are the entries that saw additions this year—every filmmaker who's ever placed in the Director top 20. 2011 films are in bold. Numbers in parentheses indicate how the film placed in Best Picture that year, if applicable; if the film title is in parentheses that means it received fewer than 10 votes and hence the result is a bit less meaningful. N/A (not applicable) means it was eligible but didn't even get five votes and so didn't make the main list.
Tomas Alfredson
Let the Right One In (17): 2.96
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: 2.61
Woody Allen
Everyone Says I Love You: 3.09
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (19): 2.98
Match Point (13): 2.93
Sweet and Lowdown: 2.63
Deconstructing Harry: 2.61
Cassandra's Dream: 2.60
Midnight in Paris: 2.47
Small Time Crooks: 2.37
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion: 2.33
Scoop: 2.28
Whatever Works: 2.24
Anything Else: 2.13
Hollywood Ending: 2.13
Celebrity: 2.04
Melinda and Melinda: 2.00
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: 1.93
Pedro Almodóvar
Talk to Her (12): 3.21
All About My Mother: 3.11
Volver (14): 3.00
Live Flesh: 2.88
Bad Education: 2.87
The Flower of My Secret: 2.75
Broken Embraces: 2.65
The Skin I Live In: 2.62
Gregg Araki
Mysterious Skin (16): 2.92
Kaboom: 2.57
[Smiley Face]: 2.53
(Nowhere): 2.42
(Splendor): 2.33
Joe Berlinger
Paradise Lost (7): 3.58
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster: 3.06
(Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory): 2.71
(Crude): 2.58
(Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2): 1.13
Brad Bird
The Iron Giant (11): 3.24
The Incredibles (8): 3.13
Ratatouille (14): 3.08
Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol: 2.91
Kenneth Branagh
Hamlet (9): 3.29
(A Midwinter’s Tale): 2.83
Thor: 2.39
Love’s Labours Lost: 2.10
Sleuth: 1.40
Catherine Breillat
Bluebeard: 3.02
The Last Mistress: 2.88
Fat Girl: 2.85
The Sleeping Beauty: 2.75
Sex Is Comedy: 2.66
Romance: 2.00
Anatomy of Hell: 1.77
David Cronenberg
A History of Violence (7): 3.11
eXistenZ: 2.74
Eastern Promises: 2.73
Crash (18): 2.52
A Dangerous Method: 2.48
Spider: 2.34
Cameron Crowe
Jerry Maguire (10): 3.27
Almost Famous (15): 2.99
We Bought a Zoo: 2.50
Vanilla Sky: 2.20
Elizabethtown: 1.90
Pearl Jam Twenty: N/A
The Union: N/A
Clint Eastwood
Million Dollar Baby (9): 3.06
Letters From Iwo Jima: 2.82
Mystic River: 2.81
Changeling: 2.70
Space Cowboys: 2.63
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: 2.57
Invictus: 2.53
Flags of Our Fathers: 2.52
Gran Torino: 2.46
Blood Work: 2.35
Absolute Power: 2.32
True Crime: 2.31
Hereafter: 2.05
J. Edgar: 2.04
David Fincher
Zodiac (3): 3.27
The Social Network (4): 3.22
Fight Club (3): 3.19
The Game (9): 2.95
Panic Room: 2.79
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: 2.44
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: 2.42
Jean-Luc Godard
Notre Musique: 2.67
Film Socialisme: 2.59
In Praise of Love: 1.95
(For Ever Mozart): 1.58
Michel Gondry
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2): 3.28
Dave Chappelle's Block Party (19): 3.02
Be Kind Rewind: 2.59
The Science of Sleep: 2.53
Human Nature: 2.40
Tokyo!: 2.37
The Green Hornet: 2.00
The Thorn in the Heart: N/A
David Gordon Green
George Washington: 3.05
All the Real Girls (15): 2.93
Pineapple Express: 2.71
Undertow: 2.56
Snow Angels: 2.56
The Sitter: 2.00
Your Highness: 1.89
Werner Herzog
Grizzly Man (1): 3.40
(Little Dieter Needs to Fly): 3.10
Encounters at the End of the World: 3.09
The Bad Lieutenant—Port of Call: New Orleans: 2.91
My Best Fiend: 2.85
(The White Diamond): 2.83
Cave of Forgotten Dreams: 2.73
Rescue Dawn: 2.73
Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life: 2.64
(Wheel of Time): 2.57
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done: 2.53
(The Wild Blue Yonder): 2.25
Invincible: N/A
Abbas Kiarostami
Certified Copy (4): 3.43
Taste of Cherry (15): 3.10
The Wind Will Carry Us (11): 3.10
10: 2.64
A.B.C Africa: 2.18
(10 on Ten): 1.88
Takeshi Kitano
Fireworks (Hana-Bi) (5): 3.26
The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi: 2.79
Kikujiro: 2.70
Outrage: 2.46
Brother: 2.38
Dolls: 2.34
John Lasseter
Toy Story 2 (4): 3.46
A Bug’s Life: 3.05
Cars: 2.62
Cars 2: 2.45
Kenneth Lonergan
Margaret (3): 3.48
You Can Count on Me (3): 3.29
Terrence Malick
The Tree of Life (1): 3.45
The New World (2): 3.14
The Thin Red Line (13): 2.95
Steve McQueen
Hunger (6): 3.10
Shame (18): 2.63
Takashi Miike
Audition (6): 3.22
13 Assassins: 3.03
Dead or Alive: 2.79
Ichi the Killer: 2.74
The Happiness of the Katakuris: 2.73
Gozu: 2.61
The City of Lost Souls: 2.56
Three…Extremes: 2.47
Sukiyaki Western Django: 2.32
The Great Yokai War: 2.25
(One Missed Call): 2.20
(DOA: Final): 2.17
George Miller
Babe: Pig in the City (9): 3.13
Happy Feet: 2.42
(Happy Feet Two): 2.20
Errol Morris
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (4): 3.42
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara (11): 3.24
Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.: 3.10
Tabloid: 3.00
Standard Operating Procedure: 2.98
Jeff Nichols
Take Shelter (17): 2.94
Shotgun Stories: 2.92
Alexander Payne
Election (6): 3.26
(Citizen Ruth): 3.22
Sideways (7): 3.05
About Schmidt (14): 2.97
The Descendants: 2.68
Roman Polanski
The Pianist: 2.96
The Ghost Writer (18): 2.94
Oliver Twist: 2.71
The Ninth Gate: 2.38
Carnage: 2.36
Cristi Puiu
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (11): 3.06
Aurora: 2.29
Lynne Ramsay
Ratcatcher: 3.12
Morvern Callar (20): 2.96
We Need to Talk About Kevin (20): 2.85
George Ratliff
Hell House: 2.94
Joshua (15): 2.92
(Salvation Boulevard): 1.25
Kelly Reichardt
Old Joy (5): 3.17
Meek's Cutoff (8): 3.13
Wendy and Lucy: 2.98
Raúl Ruiz
Time Regained (14): 3.00
Mysteries of Lisbon: 2.95
Shattered Image: 2.20
(Klimt): 2.20
(Genealogies of a Crime): 2.17
Three Lives and Only One Death: N/A
John Sayles
Lone Star (3): 3.48
Men with Guns: 2.96
Limbo: 2.70
(Honeydripper): 2.60
Sunshine State: 2.53
Casa de los Babys: 2.45
(Amigo): 2.21
(Silver City): 2.00
Martin Scorsese
The Departed (1): 3.42
Kundun (7): 3.22
Shutter Island (14): 3.05
Gangs of New York (9): 3.01
The Aviator: 2.96
Hugo (19): 2.93
(Public Speaking): 2.79
Bringing Out the Dead: 2.52
Shine a Light: 2.50
Living in the Material World: N/A
Bruce Sinofsky
Paradise Lost (7): 3.58
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster: 3.06
(Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory): 2.71
Steven Soderbergh
Out of Sight (1): 3.37
Traffic (5): 3.24
Erin Brockovich: 3.14
The Limey: 2.99
Contagion: 2.96
(Gray’s Anatomy): 2.94
Ocean’s Eleven: 2.93
The Informant!: 2.92
Solaris: 2.86
And Everything Is Going Fine: 2.75
The Girlfriend Experience: 2.72
Schizopolis: 2.70
Bubble: 2.66
The Good German: 2.66
Full Frontal: 2.63
Ocean’s Twelve: 2.52
Ocean's Thirteen: 2.52
Che: 2.35
Eros: 2.15
Steven Spielberg
Saving Private Ryan (8): 3.27
Minority Report: 2.92
AI (7): 2.91
Munich (14): 2.88
Amistad: 2.83
War of the Worlds: 2.82
Catch Me if You Can: 2.79
War Horse: 2.79
The Adventures of Tintin: 2.78
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: 2.39
The Lost World: Jurassic Park: 2.33
The Terminal: 2.10
Bertrand Tavernier
(Capitaine Conan) (12): 3.50
It All Starts Today: 2.93
(Safe Conduct): 2.83
The Princess of Montpensier: 2.53
Tom Tykwer
Run Lola Run: 2.94
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (17): 2.75
Heaven: 2.74
The International: 2.43
The Princess and the Warrior: 2.31
Paris je t'aime: 2.24
(3): 2.08
Gus Van Sant
Paranoid Park (6): 3.15
Gerry (4): 2.93
Good Will Hunting: 2.84
Milk: 2.83
Last Days: 2.79
Elephant: 2.40
Paris je t'aime: 2.24
Psycho: 2.11
Finding Forrester: 2.10
(Restless): 1.94
Lars von Trier
Breaking the Waves (1): 3.43
Dogville (1): 3.22
The Kingdom II: 3.14
Melancholia (7): 3.06
The Five Obstructions* (19): 3.03
The Boss of It All: 2.85
Dancer in the Dark (10): 2.74
Manderlay (20): 2.69
The Idiots: 2.59
Antichrist: 2.53
* (with Jørgen Leth)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (9): 3.22
Syndromes and a Century (5): 3.07
Blissfully Yours (13): 3.00
Tropical Malady (4): 2.90
(Mysterious Object at Noon): 2.36
Peter Weir
The Truman Show (6): 3.13
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (10): 3.12
(The Way Back): 2.28
Nicolas Winding Refn
Drive (6): 3.27
(Pusher 3): 3.00
Valhalla Rising: 2.83
(Pusher II): 2.71
Bronson: 2.69
Joe Wright
Pride & Prejudice: 3.02
Atonement (20): 3.00
Hanna: 2.57
(The Soloist): 2.14
Zhang Yimou
Hero (5): 3.15
Not One Less: 3.03
House of Flying Daggers (20): 3.00
Curse of the Golden Flower: 2.65
(Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles): 2.50
(Happy Times): 2.44
(The Flowers of War): 2.42
(A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop): 2.19
The Road Home: 1.88
23 March 2009
New Directors/New Films 2009
[Home, directed by Ursula Meier]
New Directors/New Films
25 March - 5 April
Museum of Modern Art | Film Society of Lincoln Center
(I'll never be able to improve on the intro I wrote in 2003, so here it is again, slightly updated.)
Comes a time when a man has to say, in effect: Hey, you know the drill, and if you don't know the drill then you've been painfully remiss in your study of the drill and Remedial Drill Appreciation is probably in order. This festival takes place in New York City every spring. It is called New Directors/New Films. Its focus is new directors and the new films they have made. Most of these pictures are vaguely promising at best, who-did-the-Albanian-cultural-minister-blow-to-get-this-selected-and-where-can-I-meet-a-girl-with-that-kind-of-skill-and-enthusiasm at worst. Occasionally, however, they sneak an Old Joy or a Day Night Day Night or a Late Marriage in there, so it pays to be exhaustive, however exhausting that may be. This year, as a gesture of respect, I've decided to just ignore the (many) movies I didn't make it past reel two of, except to note in passing that the Berlin jury that awarded the Golden Bear to Claudia Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow has a much higher tolerance for zombified dolour than I do. Also, due to an administrative snafu of some kind I didn't receive word about this year's press screenings until they were already half over and so missed a number of notable films, at least a few of which I hope to catch up with at public screenings over the next couple of weeks. But I got my one keeper already, so I'm happy. What follows are not so much reviews as drive-by impressions, largely unencumbered by clarity or insight but liberally garnished with sarcasm. I am too lazy to provide context; if you want to know some basic information about these films, mosey over here. Anybody falls below a certain level I'm not permitted, listen to me, I'm not permitted to give them the premium leads. I'm trying to run an office here. Will you go to lunch. Go to lunch. Will you go to lunch.
Home (Ursula Meier, Switzerland/France/Belgium): 83.
Premiered at: Cannes 2008 (Critics Week)
[Meier is now officially one of world cinema's best-kept secrets. And yet as much as I loved her little-seen debut, Strong Shoulders, about a teenaged girl dangerously obsessed with track and field—you'll find it clinging to the bottom of my 2003 top ten list—that film's blunt, coarse naturalism in no way prepared me for the bughouse absurdism of Home, which transplants the typical French-language domestic drama into a live-action version of Frogger. Basic premise is simple: Eccentric family lives in boondocks alongside unfinished stretch of highway; highway finally opens; all hell breaks loose. But Meier finds in this apparent one-joke idea both an inexhaustible source of comic invention—the blasé insanity here sometimes rivals Charlie Kaufman at his best—and a Big Obvious Metaphor that turns out to be much thornier than it initially appears. (For best results, think house = country and cars= foreigners, although judging from her remarks in the press kit it seems as if that notion never even occurred to Meier. Doesn't matter; the film still works beautifully as xenophobic critique.) Casting Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet as mère and père was particularly inspired, as both are savvy enough to play against the ludicrousness of the material, and also automatically disarm via years of accumulated serious-art-film baggage. Finale admittedly gets a tad overemphatic, but then there wasn't any other direction to take it, really, so I'm apt to be indulgent. And while Strong Shoulders wasn't especially impressive from a formal standpoint, Meier directs the hell out of this one, mining what's essentially a single location for one perfectly composed shot after another. Nutty, inspired and cutting...but also utterly abstract, which inevitably means that the humanism-lovin' gatekeepers don't give a shit. Their loss.]
BirdWatchers (Marco Bechis, Italy/Brazil): 75
Premiered at: Venice 2008 (Competition)
[Concludes with copious text detailing the plight of the Guarani-Kaiowà, along with the requisite here's-how-you-can-help info—which comes as a huge surprise, because the film itself skirts didacticism like nobody's business. I'm generally dubious (with good cause, I'd say) about earnest white dudes who try to represent another culture in a fictional context, but Bechis pulls off a tremendous balancing act here, respecting the Guaranis' undeniable strangeness (from a white perspective) while avoiding cheap exoticism—not to mention the smug, self-conscious "humor" of something like '98 ND/NF hit Smoke Signals, which was made by actual Native Americans and yet still comes across as painfully condescending. It helps that Bechis gets fantastic performances from his non-pro Indian cast, each of whom seems fully at ease in front of the camera and yet somehow retains a certain vaguely amused distance at the same time. (Not sure if IFC plans to release this in theaters, but if so, FYC: Alicélia Batista Cabreira, Best Supporting Actress.) Only in the final stretch, when something like a narrative belatedly emerges, does it become clear that we're experiencing a carefully disguised plea for understanding; the vast majority of BirdWatchers functions as freewheeling community portrait, with a beguiling rhythm and considerable dry wit.]
We Live in Public (Ondi Timoner, USA): 59
Premiered at: Sundance 2009 (Documentary Competition, which it won)
[Undeniably fascinating, but Timoner's throughline seems awfully ad hoc. Only the title experiment really foreshadows the exhibitionism.com surge we're experiencing today, and even that was done first by Jennifer "Jennicam" Ringley, who I'm pretty sure was a much bigger Net phenomenon. (I vividly recall all the time I spent in 1996 ignoring freely available Internet porn in favor of trying to catch a fleeting glimpse of this perfectly ordinary young woman undressing; it almost seems charming now.) But Timoner had tons of footage she'd shot at Quiet a decade ago, so we spend almost half the film watching a pretty stupid conceptual-art project that has little to do with Twitter or Facebook or MySpace or really much of anything apart from the antics of a bunch of people bored enough to play guinea pig for a month. Likewise pseudo.com, which was ahead of its time but also wound up being an object lesson in precisely how Internet content was not going to work. Harris remains a fascinating figure—his Luvvy persona is almost too bizarre to believe—but the case for his uncanny prescience seems pretty weak to me, and I trust the film even less after discovering that today he's not just hangin' in Ethopia teaching basketball to little kids, as the film implies, but is in fact CEO of the African Entertainment Network, a factoid that Timoner carefully fails to mention because it doesn't fit the character arc she's manufactured. An absorbing crock.]
Can Go Through Skin (Esther Rots, The Netherlands): 57
Premiered at: Rotterdam 2009
[Virtually a one-woman show, and superb lead actress Rifka Lodeizen is ready for her many disorienting close-ups, Ms. Rots. I got unduly excited early on when it looked as if a truly startling act of violence was going to be all but ignored—or at least treated as just one notable event of many, no more or less pivotal than Marieke being dumped by her boyfriend (she's unstable from the opening seconds, well before she's attacked) or moving out to the country to renovate the big spooky house. So the film's gradual but unmistakable shift into post-traumatic psychotherapy, complete with flashbacks and fantasy sequences, was disappointing. But Rots is clearly talented, and her expert control of tone and mood in the first few reels suggests that she may eventually be capable of filling the mysteriously vacant spot where Lynne Ramsay used to reside. (What happened there?) Lodeizen, for her part, calls to mind the mercurial anguish of Samantha Morton way back in Under the Skin (ND/NF '97), which this movie resembles in more than just its title. Carine Adler subsequently vanished; I don't think for a moment that Rots will do the same. But then I wouldn't have thought that of Ramsay, either. Seriously, anyone know what happened?]
(Can't find an embeddable trailer, but you can watch one—with English subtitles, even!—here.)
The Cove (Louie Psihoyos, USA): 55
Premiered at: Sundance 2009 (Documentary Competition)
[By Psihoyos' own admission, this is unapologetic advocacy journalism, specifically engineered to spearhead a movement. And on that level it's undeniably effective, unless you're somehow left cold by the horrific sight of friendly dolphins being wantonly butchered, in which case whether or not you like this movie is the least of your problems. That's Ed, The Cove isn't much of an actual film, in the sense that it doesn't really demand 94 minutes of your time; Richard O'Barry's personal journey from Flipper's trainer to maniacal, oft-arrested free-the-dolphins activist holds your attention, but otherwise you're just kinda grimly waiting for the nightmare footage you just know they must be reserving for the last few minutes, the better to send us all straight from the theater to our checkbooks and Paypal accounts. Which is both pragmatic and in a certain sense admirable, but if you're looking for anything vaguely resembling cinema, you've come to entirely the wrong place.]
More to come, possibly. New entries, if any, will be added up top.
18 January 2012
Viewing Journal: Week of Sundance
Wasn't planning to go this year, but it turns out that my next-door neighbor (in Oxnard! not even L.A.) is in the film business, and is also the mother of the kid who played the lead role in Fido, which now that I look that film up again I see that her son was arrested last October for breaking into a Verizon store, which I guess will give us something to talk about on the 12-hour drive to Utah. (I'm flying back.) Anyway. She's giving me a free place to stay, so I'm heading out for a long weekend to see Antonio Campos' Simon Killer plus whatever else I can get into without a press badge. Should be spending a whole lot of time standing in rush lines, so I'll try to kill some of it by writing up drive-bys on my phone. Nothing this week 'til then, probably; I like to take a pre-fest breather.
The Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield): 61. More than just schadenfreude—watching billionaires struggle to make payments after their source of imaginary money has disappeared simply magnifies the average American's financial self-delusion to unimaginable proportions, thereby allowing us to perceive that we're not blameless. A far more trenchant and illuminating view of the lending crisis than was a self-righteous screed like Inside Job; can't help but feel, though, that Greenfield often throws her subjects under the bus to serve her emerging thesis. No question that there's often a staggering lack of self-awareness in the Siegel household, but the degree to which Jackie and David metamorphose from nouveau-riche cartoons to recognizable human beings as their fortunes fall suggests a lot of early deck-stacking via selective editing. I'm still genuinely upset about the lizard, though.
Simon Killer (Antonio Campos): 47. Confirms Campos as a world-class filmmaker, this time with an emphasis on jarring rhythm rather than creeping stasis; multiple cuts took my breath away, especially during the generally excellent "first act" (for lack of a better designation), featuring Simon alone. Once women are introduced, however, the film makes a hugely disappointing nosedive into indie cliché, subdivision Ineffectual Masculinity As Steadily Mounting Horror Show. For a while, I thought Campos might have coincidentally made the same arresting gambit that Petzold does in Beats Being Dead, and was prepared to bemoan his unlucky timing...but no, it's just that one damn movie again, lightly sprinkled with the same flashback-ambiguity that I considered a minor weak point in Afterschool. Corbet's performance in the title role may be the sticking point for many; I was underwhelmed, but again, that's largely because I've seen this character way too many times now. Apart from the student-abroad aspect, there's just nothing distinctive here. It very much feels, I'm immensely sorry to say, like a typical "dark" Sundance movie. Chalk it up to sophomore slump; I'm still excited for the next one.
Celeste & Jesse Forever (Lee Toland Krieger): W/O. Painfully unfunny sitcom-style portrait of a dysfunctional breakup, with only one joke/observation: they can't stop being best friends long enough to get over each other. Having endured that precise situation (for about a year), I can confidently say this film gets nothing about it right. Samberg in particular seems utterly lost trying to be ordinary.
Compliance (Craig Zobel): 53. Amazingly, disturbingly persuasive on a moment-to-moment basis—I'd read extensively about the real-life event(s), hence knew everything that was coming, but seeing it play out in something not too far removed from real time still packed a Milgramesque wallop. Even before the insanity begins, Zobel excels at capturing the mundane details of e.g. fast-food management, abetted (if that's le mot juste—some clearly think so) by a phenomenal cast of pitch-perfect barely-knowns, especially Ann Dowd as the heartbreakingly gullible store manager. The decision to eventually make "Officer Daniels" more than a voice on the phone, however, was horribly misguided, and suggests, along with the damp squib of an ending, that Zobel never really worked out what the point of dramatizing this story was. I understand the impulse to avoid the appearance of a "twist" (which was Zobel's response when questioned after the screening), but there were plenty of ways to achieve that without compromising the restrictive POV; giving the audience more information than the ChickWich employees undermines any ostensible purpose this movie could claim to have. Score is problematic, too, goosing the viewer in ways that are entirely counterproductive (and strengthening the charge of the very pissed-off woman at the back of the Library who kept shouting "Violence against women is not entertainment!"). Just incredibly muddled, really. I feel roughly equal parts admiration and repulsion. But seriously: Ann Dowd. She wipes the mat with Margo Martindale, and I don't say that lightly.
For Ellen (So Yong Kim): 36. Hammers the same doleful note for an hour and a half, to truly numbing effect. Imagine a more depressive version of Clean, minus the drug abuse (just general irresponsibility), with Paul Dano at his most recessive in lieu of Maggie Cheung and a kid who's so determinedly anti-precocious that her blank monosyllables come across just as phony as "The human head weighs eight pounds!" or whatever. Lengthy interlude with Jon Heder as Dano's dork of an attorney had me hoping the film might just abandon its child-custody plot and go somewhere wholly unexpected, but false alarm. This particular strain of low-key indie is really starting to calcify; even the "spontaneous" ending feels pre-programmed, as formulaic in its way as having everyone onscreen applaud on our behalf as boy and girl finally kiss.
Keep the Lights On (Ira Sachs): 49. Writing about Weekend, I expressed my desire to see a gay romance in which homosexuality was taken for granted; now I see that I should have added "and neither one is a drug addict." Sachs does a fine job of fictionalizing what by all accounts is an intensely autobiographical story—nothing like giving your alter ego a different national origin to create some productive distance—but he skimps badly on the dude who broke his heart, allowing him to remain a beautiful cipher with a crack pipe (and confirming yet again that all addicts are tedious in exactly the same way). It's significant, and dispiriting, that we learn a great deal about Erik's filmmaking career—which implausibly has one of his docs opening commercially at the Quad within weeks of its Rotterdam premiere; weird that Sachs would muff a detail like that—but nothing whatsoever about Paul's apparently high-pressure job...or anything about Paul, really, apart from his habit and his cocksmanship. Given that the movie covers nine years of their relationship, that's remarkably ungenerous, even allowing for the fact that we're seeing everything through Erik's eyes. Appealing performance by Thure Lindhardt, who's like a cuddlier Rutger Hauer, and lovely use of natural light streaming through windows are the main attractions here.
Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin): 62. As singular as advertised, fashioning a mythological community out of flotsam and jetsam both physical and cultural. Because I walked in cold, the first 20-25 minutes were thrillingly disorienting; the thought seemed bizarre when it occurred to me, but reading reviews I see I'm not the only one who felt he was watching a more fundamentally faithful adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are than was Jonze's. Consequently, the moment when it became clear that The Bathtub = The Ninth Ward was a bit of a letdown. The more the movie veered into blatant allegory, the more I found myself retreating to distant admiration, and later episodes—the escape from the government refugee camp; the floating brothel—feel comparatively underimagined, mere pit stops en route to that stunning final shot. But visions this unique and arresting don't come along nearly often enough for me to get too bogged down in dramaturgical nitpicking. Beasts isn't wholly successful, but I can't imagine there's a film here this year that's so unmistakably mandatory viewing.
Young & Wild (Marialy Rivas): 62. Marveled throughout at the visually inventive and scarily accurate integration of social media, only learning afterward that the film was in fact adapted from an anonymously-written Chilean blog. Its rallying cry for the libido and distaste for fundamentalism skew too simplistic even for me, and narrative aspects are predictably weak (based on real life or not, the beatific cancer victim only exists to provide gravity for the ending), but lead actress Alicia Luz Rodríguez infuses Daniela with a watchful stillness that beautifully complements Rivas' hypertextual portrait of the adolescent female mind at work. As far as the latter is concerned, it's possible that I'll look back in a few years and find that I was overly impressed by the attention to detail—a tiny italicized "Sailor Moon is writing" during IM chat, as we stare at the intended recipient staring at her computer—but movies have so far whiffed that aspect of modern life so badly that right now it's bracing just to see it done right. The com-box on Daniela's blog alone is potentially worth the price of admission.
Corpo celeste (Alice Rohrwacher): 41. Really, NYFF? (Makes sense for recent Fortnight.) A little girl who gets her first period on the day she's to be confirmed? Visual correlation between a crucifix that falls off a truck into the sea and a bunch of newborn kittens tossed into a reservoir before our sensitive protag's horrified eyes? Doggedly sticking to a single character's POV except for a brief stretch when that becomes inconvenient? Béla Tarr blowing-trash follow-shot? (I asked Rohrwacher politely about this in the Q&A, leaning hard on the word "homage"; she claims she only saw Sátántangó afterwards.) The freakin' symbolic mid-film haircut?!? Well-intentioned and not completely without merit—the lead actress nicely underplays Marta's burgeoning sense of self, and the bit where she fondles Jesus on the cross in a way that could be reverential, sexual or both is a keeper—but this is ND/NF material all the way, mildly promising at best.
V/H/S (Adam Wingard/David Bruckner/Ti West/Glenn McQuaid/Joe Swanberg/Radio Silence): 52. The usual mixed bag, exacerbated in this case by the fact that three of the six filmmakers came up with the same basic shocking twist. By far the best of the lot is Bruckner's "Amateur Night," which tosses one deeply unnerving element into a cacophony of frathouse badinage; it's as if, say, those little girls from The Shining suddenly turned up in the middle of Swingers, and were somehow perceived as perfectly normal. (Great ending, too, especially if it was inspired by the viral video I think it was.) Swanberg's segment boasts a strong gimmick (Skype) and an interesting dynamic between its two leads, but suffers from its ultimate similarity to West's segment, in which Swanberg stars. (Was there no conversation about this?) McQuaid squanders the film's sole idea that's actually intrinsic to the VHS format; Radio Silence look as if they could construct one hell of a haunted-house carnival ride; Wingard's dopey wraparound piece has no purpose save to impose a structure where none is needed. Apart from the last, though, every short is at least a little creepy, so I can't imagine horror aficionados being too disappointed.
Pursuit of Loneliness (Laurence Thrush): 71. Off-putting title doesn't do justice to this gorgeously shot black-and-white reverie, which somehow embodies the paradox of a scripted Wiseman doc. (Specifically, Hospital, which Thrush confirmed as a major influence when I asked him during the Q&A.) It's an unsparing portrait of what it means to die alone, yet it's utterly devoid of pathos, focusing almost exclusively on the banal routines of various caregivers and functionaries—each of whom comes across as a warm, caring, perfectly lovely individual even as she (it's mostly women) maintains the necessary diffidence required for a job that confronts mortality on a daily basis. If not for the consistently stunning compositions, you could often swear you were watching a documentary, so skilled are the film's non-actors at recreating aspects of their profession; there's a unstudied nonchalance to every interaction that's far more plangent—to me, at least—than conventional grieving would have been. Not entirely sure about the occasional flashbacks, which do tug a little more traditionally at the heartstrings (though I loved the Jehovah's Witness visit and its strategic use of the door's peephole, which pays off big later on), and the coda, which shifts to another patient, is a tad ad infinitum for my taste. But this was still the most accomplished, and by far the most unexpectedly terrific (I actively tried to dump my ticket, fearing a dreary downer) film that I caught at this year's fest, and Thrush, whose previous feature (Left Handed) I haven't seen, could potentially be a major talent. A nice note to head home on.
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