One of the year's best American films appears to have been overlooked by a significant portion of the critical establishment. Even I took a little too long to actually watch it. While it would be easy to attribute this reluctance to Lingua Franca's subject matter -- a story about an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines who happens to be a trans woman -- I actually don't think that's i...
2021-01-21 05:20:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Hard to evaluate, largely because of the deterioration of the copy I had to watch, Werther is nevertheless instructive. While it's certainly easy to see the germs of Ophüls' later greatness in this film, it hardly stands alongside the director's most notable works. Those like myself who were bothered by the breakneck pace and awkward narrative shorthand of Armando Iannucci's recent take on ...
2021-01-19 00:02:00 +0000 UTC View Post
While I wouldn't make any great claims for Herself, it boasts a few significant elements that raise it above the standard tearjerker. There are a number of plot points that are rather baldly telegraphed, and viewers will have to decide to what extent that mitigates their eventual impact. And formally, director Phyllida Lloyd doesn't have a great deal to contribute most of the time. She has a...
2021-01-18 01:48:22 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a tricky one, partly because Ophüls is negotiating a number of different registers here. I'm tempted to call this a stealth melodrama. That's in part because, unlike the classic "women's pictures" of the studio era, Letter From an Unknown Woman is painfully subdued, its emotional content disseminated in passing looks of disappointment or slight twitches of uncontrolled joy. Joan Fon...
2021-01-15 03:47:26 +0000 UTC View Post
You know, the sorts of things people say about Hong Sangsoo would apply just as well to Philippe Garrel. From film to film, there is great continuity of theme and formal approach, such that those who are temperamentally unsympathetic to what Garrel does can reasonably wave them away as tired repetitions. The films will be in black-and-white. They will always grapple with young adult romance. And typi...
2021-01-13 21:11:45 +0000 UTC View Post
I don't have a great deal to say about this one. I mostly watched it to bring my 2019 Cannes bingo card one spot closer to blackout. (Will we ever see Kechiche's Intermezzo? I'm thinking no.) At first I bailed on this at the halfway mark, since its plotting and characterization felt predictable and overdetermined. (Ladj Ly will eventually work in Hollywood, mark my words.) But I che...
2021-01-12 22:04:58 +0000 UTC View Post
For the most part, Soul is a genial riff on the sorts of themes that Pixar has been working with for the better part of fifteen years. They love wayward characters (Rémy, Carl Fredericksen, WALL-E, Joy and Sadness) who are struggling to discern the true meaning of life. In its focus on a "beyond" realm, or a level of reality apart from the material and the quotidian, Soul is very m...
2021-01-11 19:11:36 +0000 UTC View Post
When Matt was a kid, around the ages of 4 and 5, he had his favorite YouTube channels. Most kids are like this today, and Matt had a few common interest points with others of his generation. He loved watching videos of toy "experts" opening blind bags to see what sort of mini-action-figures they'd acquired. He was way into Peppa Pig before it caught on in the States. (He also liked the Peppa "spin-off" Ben and Holly, which doesn't seem to have cracked the Nick Jr. m...
2021-01-10 21:17:33 +0000 UTC View Post
For a film so concerned with formal control, A Girl Missing is really very undisciplined. For awhile now I've been intending to dip into the work of Kôji Fukada, who as become a "name" on the festival circuit in recent years. But just looking at the reviews, and even the descriptions, of these films, they haven't exactly been enticing. I got the sense that Fukada was someone interested in a...
2021-01-10 20:44:57 +0000 UTC View Post
... I humbly suggest the above for the new National Anthem. Four seconds, then play ball!
2021-01-09 06:22:45 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm starting to think we are in a Wag the Dog scenario, masterminded by Ryan Murphy. This shit is way too on-the-nose.
Also, once the big Nazi round-up is complete, coul...
2021-01-09 05:22:32 +0000 UTC View Post
"Sophistication" and "urbanity" are threatening to become overused watchwords in my discussion of Max Ophüls' cinema, but how else to characterize this remarkable adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's 1897 theatrical roundelay? One of the most sexually frank plays of modernism's early period, La Ronde employed heterosexual assignations in order to examine European class relations, in particular...
2021-01-09 05:16:16 +0000 UTC View Post
The first thing I noticed about The Eaarings is that Ophüls displays a moral sophistication and urbanity that far outstrips most of the American cinema of the time. This struck me as a direct outgrowth of the Renoir tradition, the sense that the accurate depiction of complex human relations demands at least a temporary bracketing of judgment. As my first exposure to Ophüls, this film appea...
2021-01-08 23:00:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Reportedly his last words were "I conquered Thebes."
UPDATE: Sadly, it appears that this story is apocryphal. The man's widow says he was unarmed, outside the Capitol, and dropped dead from a heart attack while on the phone. I apologize to the man's MAGA memory.
2021-01-08 19:13:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Sorry, I'm a bit distracted from movies and such. Never been in an attempted coup. I'm sure our friends from Turkey, Argentina, Portugal, Thailand, and other locales could give us some insight here.
Stay safe. Let freedom ring. Fuck Trump. Seriously.
2021-01-07 00:24:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Sorry for the delay in posting. Like many of you, I had Georgia on my mind.
So the winner is the great Max Ophüls, about whose films I am woefully ignorant. There are several on the Criterion Channel, and I suspect I will begin there. Those include Le Plaisir (1952), La Ronde (1950), Lola Montes (1955), and The Earrings of Madame de... (1953). It appea...
2021-01-06 17:41:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Sometimes films try something bold and it doesn't quite work. You can admire the ambition while still reckoning with the fact that the object in question misses the mark. In Shithouse, first-time director Cooper Raiff, who also stars, appears to be trying to look at the complications of sex and dating among contemporary young adults. This is well-trod ground, but Raiff employs a kind of gend...
2021-01-04 19:43:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Luckily, there are only winners here.
Below are the top three choices for January's Filmatist of the Month. (I know the poll is still open, but I am going to project provisional winners based on my Decision Desk Analysis.)
For the record, all the directors who got votes this time will reappear in the next month's poll. Also-rans will be dropped and replaced.
2021-01-02 19:48:53 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the enduring portraits of failure, in both the theater and the cinema, is Peter Shaffer's hypothetical rendering of Antonio Salieri. This very real composer is imagined in Amadeus as a bitterly jealous rival to Mozart, but that's only part of the story. The tragedy of Salieri is that he completely understands what excellence in music sounds like. Amadeus makes sure to show th...
2021-01-02 06:17:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Obviously I'm a bit late to this one, since I made the choice to hold off watching it until 12/31/20. So there's not too much I can say about Da 5 Bloods that hasn't already been said elsewhere. I will say, it is great to see Lee working on this scale and receiving praise for it. Too often Lee has been smacked down by critics when he's worn his ambitions on his sleeve (Malcolm X bei...
2021-01-01 21:37:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Two films I've seen discussed a lot in recent months are also two films I've been pretty ambivalent about since seeing them upon release. Ngozi Onwurah's Welcome II the Terrordome, which was roundly condemned when it came out in 1995. And Isaac Julien's feature debut Young Soul Rebels was mildly appreciated, but mostly met with a shrug back in 1991. There are concrete reasons for th...
2021-01-01 19:43:10 +0000 UTC View Post
We made it! 2021. In these deeply unsettled times, I want to offer my gratitude for all of you who have continued to set money aside to support my writing. It means more than you can know.
As a small token of appreciation, I want to give you all a bit more say over what I watch in 2021. (Within reason, of course!) Today, I am kicking off a new feature here. At the end of each month (not countin...
2021-01-01 17:47:09 +0000 UTC View Post
The Kid Detective is the sort of movie I wouldn't ordinarily think twice about. It played at TIFF 2020 (such as it was) without garnering much attention. And then, as if to firmly establish its place in the cinematic pecking order, it received a medium-sized American release in the middle of COVID, allowing it to take its place in theaters alongside The War With Grandpa and the late...
2021-01-01 03:13:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Tomorrow I am going to finally watch Da 5 Bloods, so it will "count" as a 2020 viewing. But I may have time for one other (final) film of the year. What should it be?
2020-12-31 05:41:49 +0000 UTC View Post
A film that would've been in Competition if Cannes 2020 had happened, Another Round would surely have nabbed a prize or two -- perhaps the Scenario award, or another Best Actor trophy for Mads Mikkelsen. However, I think that if the film had bowed in the summer, a different sort of discussion might have occurred. In its plotting and organization, its combination of cringe humor and genuine l...
2020-12-30 02:20:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Occasionally, a film manages to go right to the heart of one of the defining cultural crises of the era. Films like this pull into focus a great many suspicions and inklings that have perhaps been experienced in an affective manner but not yet fully articulated. Works like this are rare. And sometimes they display the marks of that struggle to simply identify what we are working with. This means that...
2020-12-30 01:56:09 +0000 UTC View Post
The Trouble With Being Born is very reminiscent of Markus Schleinzer's 2011 film Michael, and I'm afraid that the comparison is not complimentary. Like Michael, The Trouble With Being Born takes on a taboo subject (child sexual abuse) but depicts it with the clinical, emotionally removed tone that has become a bit of a cliché in Austrian cinema. (Call it the "glac...
2020-12-28 20:12:03 +0000 UTC View Post
I realize it's unfashionable to appreciate Atom Egoyan these days. The official line is that he is "washed up," and this judgment doesn't exactly come from nowhere. In recent years he has made some films of, shall we say, variable quality. It sometimes seems as though he is an artist compelled to keep working, whether or not he necessarily has something pressing to say. But while watching Guest o...
2020-12-28 05:03:59 +0000 UTC View Post
It must be said, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is more of a filmed play than a movie. Denzel Washington did a much better job adapting Fences into a reasonably cinematic object. Wolfe, a veteran theater director who has also helmed a number of films, doesn't seem to have a great deal of interest in making a cinematic adaptation of August Wilson. Instead, he's betting everything on Wilson...
2020-12-24 21:16:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Zheng Lu Xinyuan's The Cloud in Her Room is a forbidding film at first. Although it quite clearly centers on the life and relationships of Muza (Jin Jing), many of these connections are held in suspension for quite some time. This is a film that abjures exposition, and even more than this, keeps its main character at a notable remove. But there's a nagging sense that we are missing key bits ...
2020-12-22 02:38:08 +0000 UTC View Post