How can one adapt James Baldwin's prose for the screen? How can you hope to retain that hard, mournful poetry?
Unsurprisingly, the director of Moonlight did not attempt a literal interpretation. He retained the plot points and the simmering anguish and frustration, but found a tonal analogue in the films of Wong Kar-wai, Claire Denis, and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Jenkins explores the texture of...
2018-12-19 05:01:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Roma is fine. At first I was rather irritated by Cuarón's insistence on cramming the film with so much incident -- brass bands and wildfires and unplanned pregnancies and civil unrest -- until I realized that this isn't really intended to be a particularly realistic film. It's more of a memory fantasia, a coalescence of multiple times and spaces that the auteur recalls from his childhood, p...
2018-12-17 21:58:44 +0000 UTC View Post
A good friend of mine, cinephile Ryan Wu, once compared Lars von Trier's Dogville to a beautifully baked piss pie. The craft is impeccable, and by all reasonable judgment it is the best possible piss pie you could ever hope to encounter in the annals of baking. But, you know, it's made of piss, and so it's never going to be any good no matter how much care and attention is lavished on it. ...
2018-12-17 00:54:38 +0000 UTC View Post
I have already logged a review of this film in my coverage of TIFF Wavelengths 2018, based on having watched four of its eight hours -- not something I'm particularly proud of, but an absolute necessity given the sheer bulk of material I had to plow through in a short amount of time. Fortunately, my original review stands, with the possible exception that I have a greater admiration for Dead Souls ...
2018-12-17 00:11:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Any halfway decent critic should admit when he or she is out of their depth, and the truth is I am painfully unqualified to even scratch the surface of Terror Nullius, the astonishingly dense, politically scathing found-footage featurette by the Australian duo who call themselves Soda_Jerk. It would probably take a degree in Australian Studies to fully comprehend the historical and filmic re...
2018-12-13 22:48:02 +0000 UTC View Post
...for a throwaway reference to these ads from the 1970s.
2018-12-13 19:29:54 +0000 UTC View Post
David Robert Mitchell is not an intuitive filmmaker, but that is no vice in itself. It Follows demonstrated that, if he had a single strong idea, he could track it to its logical conclusion. But that single guiding idea is what he lacks in Under the Silver Lake, a film that, whatever one may think of it, carries the pungent aroma of great ambition.
Another way of putting it is,...
2018-12-13 16:11:06 +0000 UTC View Post
The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Desiree Akhavan, 2018)
I should begin by stating for the record, I have not seen Boy Erased. Nevertheless, it strikes me as curious, and more than a little sexist, that that film has eked its way into the year-end awards conversation (as a longshot, admittedly), while no one seems to be talking about Cameron Post at this point. ChloÃ...
2018-12-13 11:51:46 +0000 UTC View Post
The "wild boys" are women.
(That's a "spoiler," but it's clear.)
Mandico plays with gender but
it's retrograde, I fear.
Wild boys join a crusty captain,
and he takes them captive
to an island that is queer.
He tries to break them,
with estrogen and shame.
Wild Boys! (Wild Boys!)
(This is one for the "forced feminization" canon, but there's an under...
2018-12-12 17:05:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Aside from its other virtues, Spike Lee's newest film serves as a scathing antidote to everything that is wrong, morally and intellectually, with Green Book. That wretched artifact of blinkered white liberalism purports to explore the alienation of a black man, Dr. Don Shirley, from his own people. But it does so by claiming, insultingly, that a white Italian racist is more in touch with "blackness...
2018-12-12 13:20:16 +0000 UTC View Post
DO NOT READ UNTIL CHRISTMAS!
Maybe Adam McKay is the Brechtian filmmaker we deserve. I found myself gritting my teeth through Vice, even though by any objective standard it's a very "watchable" film. It moves at a nice clip, has a compelling antihero at its center, and condenses forty years of American history into a small, digestible capsule. But that's part of the problem. ...
2018-12-12 02:54:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Could this possibly be more interesting than an officially "completed" version by Welles? It's hard to say exactly how close this is to the director's vision, although expects seem to believe it's awfully darn close. But this is above all a film about art in jeopardy, about compromise, and about self-consuming artifacts of the implacable Hollywood machine. In a sense, its damage is a badge of honor. It wear...
2018-12-12 02:34:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Another film, like Happy as Lazzaro, that I found myself admiring more than liking, although I certainly enjoyed it more from moment to moment. In fact, that's part of the difficulty. Although I certainly wouldn't deny that the screenplay is impeccably written, I felt that Davis and McNamara too often went for the snappy bon mot over character development, which would be forgivable if ...
2018-12-10 22:51:58 +0000 UTC View Post
I discovered French director Guillaume Brac several years ago when two very different cinephiles, director Dan Sallitt and producer / actress Roxane Mesquida, recommended his debut featurette A World Without Women to me on separate occasions. It was a good tip. The film showed a young director with a touch of Bresson's structural jones and a whole lot of Hong Sangsoo's sense of comedic gender misco...
2018-12-10 04:02:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Happy as Lazzaro shares some clear stylistic affinities with Rohrwacher's previous film The Wonders, which I found irksome and affected. I had some difficulty again with the aggressively rough, deep-rural cinematographic approach, which saturates everything with a "timeless" atmosphere and harkens back a bit too explicitly to Rossellini and especially Pasolini. But ultimately I admired
British experimentalist Ben Rivers has produced some highly unusual films in his career, but nothing in his filmography prepared me for Now, At Last. A duration-based work that reminded me somewhat of the gallery-based structuralism of Tacita Dean and Sharon Lockhart, this latest film is just under 40 minutes long, and could be said to constitute a kind of sly in-joke regarding the so-called...
2018-12-06 23:32:39 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the major surprises of 2015 was Field Niggas, Khalik Allah's gorgeous, haunting experimental feature. It was clearly the work of someone who'd come up through photography, as it was essentially an hour-long portrait film. Roving the streets of Brooklyn, Allah showed us an image of African-American life that is often deemed too messy or unkempt to put on display: the mostly lower-class denize...
2018-12-06 23:18:43 +0000 UTC View Post
One of those canonical titles that has been out of circulation for years, Daniel Barnett's White Heart is a major achievement. Experimental film history is not complete without it. Operating at the juncture between Hollis Frampton's system-building, Jack Chambers' cryptic mythologies, and Owen Land's cornball conceptualism, White Heart is a film that doesn't fit comfortably into any partic...
2018-12-03 23:12:15 +0000 UTC View Post
When the lineup was announced for the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, there were some of us who were wondering why Sergei Loznitsa's newest fiction feature Donbass was relegated to the Un Certain Regard sidebar, given that he has already played in Competition with his three previous features. Now, having seen Donbass, I have a clearer idea, although I don't particularly agree with the festival'...
2018-12-02 15:39:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)
There they are, our two mismatched heroes, enjoying a drink and potty break at a roadside Stuckey's somewhere along the Southern highways. I wonder if they split a pecan log?
Where do I begin? First I can direct you to some other reviews that quite rightly deconstruct the racism of Green Book back to the stone age. 2018-12-02 15:08:47 +0000 UTC View Post
As you know, I try to provide you with High-Quality Web Content (SM) on a regular basis. But it's that time of year, when the mad dash to the finish line of 2018 means I find myself watching 'em faster than I can write 'em up. This will not take the place of longer, more actualized reviews, but here are some notes on recent films that, for one reason or another, don't exactly merit a fuller analysis.
...
2018-12-02 14:24:28 +0000 UTC View Post
A moderately upbeat, even Jarmuschian fable from Tibet's leading auteur, Jinpa takes its name from its lead actor, who also starred in Tseden's previous film Tharlo. Here, Jinpa plays a man with the same name as his own, although he is clearly not playing himself. This "Jinpa" is a long-distance trucker who traverses the dusty, snowy flats of Kekexili making deliveries. He has tousled rock...
2018-11-25 17:50:09 +0000 UTC View Post
"Well," as my lovely wife Jen put it, "they can't all be F For Fake." Quite right. There's nothing particularly wrong with Can You Ever Forgive Me? But it's a story that seems so rich with subtext that its makers -- director Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) and screenwriters Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty -- don't seem the least bit interested in exploring. After all, the t...
2018-11-25 15:10:19 +0000 UTC View Post
I don't have a great deal to say about this film. Overall I was impressed with Cooper's pacing and direction, which struck me as undergirded by a general respect for 1970s Hollywood. In fact, I'm a bit surprised the film is such a hit, because in certain formal respects it's so out of step with contemporary storytelling. Cooper takes his time, such that -- even more than the patent flimsiness of Ally's pop ...
2018-11-24 03:14:46 +0000 UTC View Post
[NOTE: This post contains spoilers]
Certainly one of the year's most mismarketed films, The Little Stranger came across in its ads as Gothic art-horror along the lines of The Others or Crimson Peak. But then, the film is so strange in terms of what it actually attempts that I would not want the job of trying to sell it to a wide audience. A noble failure at ...
2018-11-24 02:48:42 +0000 UTC View Post
When I first attempted to sum up the latest film by the Coen Brothers, my overall takeaway (with which I am no longer satisfied) was that the world is filled with horrible people (or "assholes," as I had it in my corresponding tweet), and that they were winning the day. Now, I would be dishonest if I didn't admit that in the back of my mind, I felt that perhaps Buster Scruggs might be the Coens' ph...
2018-11-21 17:57:26 +0000 UTC View Post
A curious film. As I watched, I found myself wondering what my friends who are in Disability Studies would make of it, since in certain respects this strikes me as one of the most refreshing depictions of a paraplegic I've ever seen in film or television. John Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix) is not only a complex individual and quite often a self-centered bastard. But he is determined to live his life with humor...
2018-11-19 22:30:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Despite all the hype, Jackson's colorization of the footage from the Great War is really the least impressive thing about this very moving documentary. Yes, it is jarring to see these men, whose like we have witnessed exclusively in degraded black and white, with olive drab uniforms and the approximation of a pink glow of life. But even with current digital technology, the colors warp and smear and seem to ...
2018-11-18 05:53:44 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, this one's for real.
I realized that there were some anomalies in the previous lists. For one thing, I was primarily going by my iTunes playlists. However, there are some key tracks that I exclude from those lists, primarily because the sound level makes them impossible to enjoy in the car. Also, there are certain songs I exclude because I know that Jen does not enjoy them, and others that simpl...
2018-11-15 05:07:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, for some reason, making selections from N-Z was not nearly as difficult as A-M was. So I went ahead and did it. They are not any better, mind you. One note, in case it wasn't obvious: I limited myself to one song per artist, lest I end up with an entire Liz Phair / Neko Case playlist.
Here we go, again.
51. NEKO CASE - "Where Did I Leave That Fire" 2018-11-13 01:46:09 +0000 UTC View Post