****/**** Archives - Page 12 of 27

A Perfect World (1993) – Blu-ray Disc

November 25, 2013****/****, 1990s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Road Movie, Thriller

click any image to enlarge

****/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Laura Dern, T.J. Lowther
screenplay by John Lee Hancock
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Time and distance have conspired to replace Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven with A Perfect World in my mind as his best film and one of the best movies of the '90s. The two occur within a year of each other and mark, with In the Line of Fire between them, a renaissance of the Eastwood brand that had taken a few licks of late with embarrassments like Pink Cadillac, The Rookie, City Heat, Heartbreak Ridge, and on and on. While I was growing up, Eastwood was a Dirty Harry joke and the guy who acted with Orangutans. The first time I saw him in anything was in Bronco Billy, which, frankly, isn't the first time you want to see anyone in anything. What Unforgiven did for me was inspire a curiosity about Sergio Leone and, with that, a new reason to respect Eastwood's legacy; my first time through A Perfect World disturbed my notion of who Kevin Costner was (baseball player/cowboy) at the height of his power and sway in Hollywood, and I was distracted. Every time I've revisited A Perfect World since (and I've been compelled to revisit it at least once every few years), as Costner's star has faded and Eastwood's elder statesmanhood behind the camera has somehow dwarfed his iconhood in front of it, I feel the melancholy nostalgia of the film more and more. It's an American masterpiece. I make that distinction because it's distinctly American; and I mean it when I say that it's as fine an essay of the dying of an age as anything in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy.

SDFF ’13: The Fifth Season

November 13, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery

La cinquième saison
****/****
starring Aurelia Poirier, Django Schrevens, Sam Louwyck, Gill Vancompernolle
written and directed by Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth

by Walter Chaw It begins as a puzzle, the active-engagement kind where a film, maybe an art film not very good and certainly not lacking in pretension, wears all the hopes of its creators on its sleeve. But then, out of nowhere, Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth's The Fifth Season (La cinquième saison) ties together all the pretty pictures into an entirely honourable updating of a few of the ideas from, but most importantly the atmosphere of, Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man. Truth be told, the pictures are more than just pretty: they're stunning at times, and it's easy to be mesmerized by them–by their surrealism and meticulous framing, and, at the end of it all, by their gorgeous absurdity. This is rapturous filmmaking that in its first minutes watches two teens kiss, tentatively, in the cold and the woods, their breath trembling the soft down on each other's faces. We feel, with them, the discovery of something new. The Fifth Season is a film about textures, but rather than just be a film about textures, it does something that maybe Terrence Malick's movies do, certainly Bela Tarr's: it makes its form comment on its function.

SDFF ’13: Blue Ruin

November 10, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Thriller

****/****
starring Macon Blair, Devin Ratray, Amy Hargreaves, Kevin Kolack
written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw Six years after his surprisingly poignant, unexpectedly deft, and, of course, funny debut Murder Party, multi-hyphenate Jeremy Saulnier (he writes, directs, and photographs his movies) returns with something very much like a genre masterpiece with Blue Ruin, the best Coen Bros. noir since they were making them. Grim in exactly the way that can be delightful, it's paced beautifully, written beautifully, and performed, that's right, beautifully. Saulnier's intelligent script is a model of restraint and a strong sense of humour. Macon Blair's reluctant avenging angel Dwight is someone I've never met before in a movie, and when Dwight seeks out old pal Ben (Devin Ratray) for help at some point, well, I'd never met him before, either. It's fair to say that nothing that happens in Blue Ruin happens the way I thought it would happen, if it happens at all. Note an early moment in the picture where Dwight sets up an ambush and doesn't pay it off, or that standard thing in movies now where the hero goes to a drugstore to pick up the supplies they need to perform self-surgery, which here ends with…that would be telling. All the requirements are there for a grand satire, it's true, yet Blue Ruin isn't that. Instead, it's a film that understands exactly what it is and what space it occupies, and at the end it's not merely an extraordinary character piece (Blair's turn would be star-making in a just universe), it's also a nimble thriller full of outrageous fortune and stunning reversals meted out perfectly between its breathless moments and the moments where it breathes.

To Be or Not to Be (1942) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 29, 2013****/****, 1940s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, War

Tobeornottobe2

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack, Felix Bressart
screenplay by Edwin Justus Mayer, based on a story by Melchior Lengyel
directed by Ernst Lubitsch

by Walter Chaw Ernst Lubitsch took chances, none greater than To Be or Not to Be. Released in the first months of America’s involvement in WWII, in that initial flurry of propaganda that saw the Nazis as murderous, animalistic, inhuman Hun, Lubitsch chose instead to portray them as ridiculous, as human–to make a comedy, a farce…and a masterpiece, as it happens. It’s a crystallization of his work in that way: He’s always more interested in foible than in oppressive arcs of personal failure–if Nazis can be seen to be possessed of the same faults as the rest of us, the same vanities, the same fears. Make no mistake, To Be or Not to Be is no olive branch. Seventy years on, it remains among the most withering satires of totalitarian governments and the politics of groupthink, but it suggests that Nazism is just one of many insufficient sops to the insecurities hardwired into us–that we’re all just thin projections strutting and fretting our hour on the proverbial stage, each susceptible to things that would give relief from the pain of lack of self-confidence and identity. It’s a film that seeks to explain why people create cults of personality. That it sets itself amongst a theatre troupe performing “Hamlet”, itself a play that houses another play within itself (holding a mirror up to nature, indeed), makes total sense in a picture that, through this absurdity, seeks to highlight greater absurdities. Of all his great films (and when push comes to shove, I’d say Trouble in Paradise is and likely always will be my favourite Lubitsch), To Be or Not to Be is inarguably his greatest.

MHHFF ’13: Shorts Program #4

October 20, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror, Music, Short Films

Next Exit **/**** (UK, 14 mins., d. Benjamin Goodger) A light bit of nothing, Next Exit is a little Ludditism along the lines of that one episode of the American "The Office" where Michael Scott follows the bad instructions of his GPS directly into a lake. The performances are good, the direction is fairly pedestrian, and the story, about a girl who accepts a ride home from a pub one night, has a couple of decent twists but is ultimately more mildly clever than disturbing or compelling. In its short time, it does manage to cover the bases in terms of going out of cell-phone range and the suggestion of a cyclical ending, but it fails mostly in terms of generating much in the way of horror or comedy. Mostly, I had trouble with the idea that anyone would think a hotel–or a hospital, or anything–is located in the middle of the woods.

Slacker (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 15, 2013****/****, 1990s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Richard Linklater, Rudy Basquez, Jean Caffeine, and a whole bunch of people
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Jefferson Robbins Before it became a lazily-applied shorthand for my generation in particular, Slacker was a film about doom. It’s pervasive throughout this seemingly casual, meticulously constructed, 24-hour baton-pass through bohemian Austin, Texas, in which characters confront intimations of death, their own or that of the species in general, and respond with rhetoric, bemusement, a fatalistic shrug, or a joyride. Writer-director Richard Linklater awakens from vivid dreams on a bus in the opening scene, then unspools his vision to a Buddha-silent cab driver (Rudy Basquez). His most memorable dreams, he reports, often feature sudden death: “There’s always someone gettin’ run over or something really weird.” Fair enough to wonder if we’re not dreaming along with him, in some dress rehearsal for Waking Life, when he quickly happens upon a mother (Jean Caffeine) sprawled in a residential Austin boulevard, freshly driven over by her disturbed son (Mark James).

Autumn Sonata (1978) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 13, 2013****/****, 1970s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Directors: Ingmar Bergman, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Music, Sweden, The Criterion Collection

Höstsonaten
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann, Lena Nyman, Halvar Björk
written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

by Bryant Frazer By 1978, Ingmar Bergman was in trouble. The director had fled his native Sweden two years earlier after an arrest on charges of tax evasion. (He would be completely exonerated in 1979, but his mood was no doubt grim until then.) He visited Paris and Los Angeles, then settled in Munich, where he would shoot his first English-language film, the 1920s Berlin-set The Serpent’s Egg, a Dino de Laurentiis co-production co-starring David Carradine and Bergman stalwart Liv Ullmann. The Serpent’s Egg was a box-office flop in Sweden, a critical and commercial failure internationally, and most of all a big artistic disappointment for Bergman himself–a decided stumble for a director riding high on the success of 1970s titles like the harrowing Cries and Whispers, which enjoyed huge success in the U.S. in the unlikely care of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, and the audience-friendly The Magic Flute. At the same time, Bergman was embarking on what would prove to be an unhappy tenure at Munich’s Residenztheater, where he managed to mount eleven productions before being fired in 1981. In this turbulent context, the very Bergmanesque Autumn Sonata can be seen as a kind of comfort film–a deliberate return to roots. Someone once described it as “Bergman does Bergman,” and the gag stuck. Bergman himself eventually quoted the remark, calling it “witty but unfortunate. For me, that is.”

Bastards (2013)

October 11, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, France, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller

Les salauds
****/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille, Lola Creton
screenplay by Jean-Pol Fargeau and Claire Denis
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda A Claire Denis film through and through, Bastards is nevertheless a brilliant departure for one of the most distinctive artists in world cinema–an indignant revenge thriller with, of all things, a straightforward plot. Of course, the plot is scrambled, doled out in the runic fragments that have become Denis’s stock-in-trade. We open, for instance, in the rain, as a throbbing Tindersticks track underscores a series of beautiful but inscrutable nocturnal images: glimpses of a man forlornly staring out his window, languorous tracking shots of a nude young woman in heels roaming through a deserted street, and finally a tableau of a dead man’s body splayed out beneath a fire escape, surrounded by paramedics in the background as a woman, probably his wife, is draped in a tinfoil blanket in the fore. Although films like L’Intrus have primed us to accept such shards as part of an impressionistic array of visual information, adding up to a textured view of nighttime Paris as a hopelessly lonely place, in Bastards the pieces fit together in a precise way we’re simply not allowed to know until we’ve arrived through the movie’s own idiosyncratic channel, and at its own deliberate pace. That makes it one of the most elegantly constructed of Denis’s eleven features–a grim noir story broken into its component parts, then reassembled into a haunted funhouse image of itself.

Seconds (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 1, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Sci-Fi, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Rock Hudson, John Randolph, Salome Jens, Frances Reid
screenplay by Lewis John Carlino, based on the novel by David Ely
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the longest time I wanted to write a book about John Frankenheimer, the crux of which would be a closer look at the relationship, if there was one, between the declining quality of his work and the assassination of his buddy Bobby Kennedy. It would be a cultural study, see, this way to tie the death of the Sixties with a director who for me definitively speaks to the rises and valleys of that decade, and who paved the way for the despairing paranoia flicks of the 1970s. In the end, I was defeated by the prospect of dealing with Frankenheimer’s later films–not because they were all as bad as Prophecy (or that any of the others are near as bad as Prophecy, or that anything could be), but because many of them are really, really good in really, really difficult ways to quantify. Closer to the truth of his output post-RFK assassination is not that it’s terrible, but that it’s all Seconds again in some form or another: diaries of personal apocalypses and the constant threat of the dissolution of identity. Besides, I think there might be an entire book in 52 Pick-Up alone.

Day of the Dead (1985) [Divimax] – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

September 25, 2013****/****, 1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Zombie

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Richard Liberty
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Far from the weak sister that critics and fanboys have branded George Romero’s conclusion to his zombie trilogy, Day of the Dead is at once the most hopeful and the most melancholy of the trio while falling short of the stark satirical perfection of the first (Night of the Living Dead) and the bloated satirical imperfections of the perhaps over-celebrated second (Dawn of the Dead). In fact, I find Day to be the equal of Dawn in almost every way and to exceed it in terms of its alacrity–its relative tightness in the development of its ideas about the nature of man unfolding against the backdrop of a rise of a new society. The obvious precursor to the zombie mythos is the Christian faith, with its saviour a zombie installing a new order (covenant) and its key ritual dedicated to a celebration of the eating of the saviour’s flesh and blood: a literal consumption of the Host that incorporates into its rite terms of infection and contagion. In fact, Day of the Dead, of the three, seems the most serious in exploring that spiritual/thaumaturgical connection with the introduction of what is essentially a demigod–an offspring of thought and body in the same way that Christ was meant to be God made flesh in all its weakness–in the form of the much-reviled Bub (Howard Sherman).

TIFF ’13: The Strange Little Cat

September 14, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Esoterica, Family, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF

Das merkwürdige Kätzchen
****/****
directed by Ramon Zürcher

by Angelo Muredda In his essay on the origins of the uncanny, Freud looks into German etymology to find that heimlich is one of those words that means a given thing as well as its opposite–that which is, on the one hand, familiar, and also that which is kept out of sight. The unheimlich, or uncanny, is by that token always latent within the ordinary–it’s the thing that should have stayed hidden away but has instead come to light. People in Ramon Zürcher’s marvellous debut are always calling the familiar things around them uncanny, and no wonder, given the alien eye with which Zürcher observes them. Set in a bustling Berlin apartment that houses a reserved matriarch, her visiting twentysomething children, her adolescent daughter, her ailing mother, and a pair of pets (including the ever-roving orange tabby that supplies the title), The Strange Little Cat has the ingredients of a multi-generational melodrama about a family coming together and splitting apart in an uneasily-shared space–an August: Osage County for the arthouse set. But Zürcher happily forgoes such narrative dead ends in pursuit of something more playful and unsettled, working with the weird formal properties of the objects that fill this domestic space, from a child’s misspelled grocery list to a glass bottle that spins around a bowl in the sink as if propelled by its own volition.

Telluride ’13: Under the Skin

September 7, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2013

****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Krystof Hádek, Jessica Mance
screenplay by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Michel Faber
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw Trouble Every Day and The Man Who Fell to Earth as directed by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing Under the Skin marks his return to feature filmmaking after a nine-year hiatus. The loosest of adaptations, cherry-picking from Michel Faber’s strong novel of the same name, Under the Skin is home to a trio (at least) of indelible images and a style and presentation that function as shunts into a thicket of thorny existential questions; it’s the best film I’ve seen this year and among the best films I’ve ever seen. Stripped to the bone, as capable of viciousness as it is tenderness, it achieves what seems impossible by creating a sense of the mysterium tremens in the body of a human-looking alien. When it works, it’s a stunner worthy of mention in the same breath as Blade Runner, but more significant than its immediate impact is its lingering afterimage. I liked it initially. In the six days since I saw it, scarcely an hour’s gone by that I haven’t thought about it. Under the Skin, not to be flip, burrows exactly there, and nests.

Telluride ’13: The Unknown Known

September 2, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

****/****
directed by Errol Morris

by Walter Chaw Errol Morris returns
to The Fog of War form in what could be seen as a complementary piece: a
feature-length conversation with Donald Rumsfeld called, appropriately, The
Unknown Known. It's a phrase that repeats throughout a picture that's scored
in a Philip Glass-ian way by Danny Elfman (who at one point channels Michael
Small's music for The Parallax View) and ends with a rimshot that would
be funnier if it weren't terrifying. Different from The Fog of War and
an apparently repentant Robert McNamara, The Unknown Known's Rumsfeld
comes off as not so much unrepentant as incapable of reasonable
self-reflection. There's a story I like to tell about talking with Capturing
the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki, who revealed to me that at an
initial screening one of the subjects of his documentary, watching herself
speak, muttered, "I didn't say that." Rumsfeld appears to be like
that: he's not lying, he's having some kind of psychotic break. I don't
mean it flippantly, and Morris, whose line of questioning ranges from WMD to the
popular public misconception that Hussein was involved with 9/11, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, allows Rumsfeld to clarify his non-equivocal equivocations.
When Rumsfeld laughs, it's frightening–an alien thing's attempt to simulate a human
emotion. Another highlight: a portion of the Nixon tapes where Tricky Dick
reveals his mistrust of Rumsfeld to Haldeman. The Unknown Known is as fine a film as Morris has
made, all the more timely now that the United States–under new leadership, elected
on a platform of hope and change–is on the eve of another act of war.

Medium Cool (1969) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 31, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound B- Extras B+
starring Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill
written and directed by Haskell Wexler

by Walter Chaw No one has ever been cooler in a movie than Robert Forster is in Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool. The title comes from Marshall McLuhan’s assignation in his Understanding Media of television as a “cool” medium, i.e., one that requires a more active participation to benefit from meaning–in opposition to something like film, which he identifies as a “hot” medium. It could just as soon refer to Forster’s John Cassellis, however, the avatar for a new generation of existential detachment. The multifoliate rose of this contraption reveals its first complication in being a film about Cassellis, a television cameraman active at the very end of a decade of immense internal tumult in the United States, where television gradually emerged as primary witness–if not also prosecution, defense, jury, and judge–of the death of the counterculture. It’s telling, too, that one of the best studies of American ’60s cinema is by Ethan Mordden and titled Medium Cool–acknowledgment, along with Wexler’s film, that the movies can provide “hot” context for their “cool” counterpart.

Computer Chess (2013)

July 18, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Patrick Riester, Myles Page, James Curry, Robin Schwartz
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

by Walter Chaw Sneakily, the best science-fiction film of
the summer is Andrew "Godfather of Mumblecore" Bujalski's decidedly
lo-fi Computer Chess, shot with a late-'60s, made-for-home-video Sony
AVC-3260 analog tube video camera that approximates the very look and feel of something you'd
find in a box in someone's garage. It endeavours to tell the story of a weekend
tech convention where proto-hackers engage in mortal combat over who will be
the first to create a computer chess program that can defeat a human master
(Gerald Peary (!)) and, incidentally, collect a $75k booty. The money, though,
is incidental to the glory of scientific discovery, of being the first to push
the limits of artificial intelligence to the point of…what? Aggression?
Sentience, perhaps? It's telling that Bujalski, at the forefront of a specific
DIY subgenre of independent cinema reliant on largely-improvised performances
with no budget nor, theoretically, affectation (it's like the American version
of the Dogme95 movement), has produced the most affectless, genuine artifact of
the dogme philosophy through his greatest feat of affectation: he's
created a time capsule of an era in a film about the eternity of the human
instinct to create simulacra first and deal with issues of functional
equivalence later. In its way, Computer Chess works like a sprung, found-footage diary of the birth of Skynet. It's Mary Shelley, and Blade Runner, and it
gets to being about what it's about without being an asshole about it.

To Have and Have Not (1944) + The Big Sleep (1945/6) – DVDs

July 8, 2013****/****, 1940s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
****/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Dolores Moran
screenplay by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Howard Hawks

THE BIG SLEEP
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone
screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett & Jules Furthman, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler
directed by Howard Hawks

by Walter Chaw While biographer Todd McCarthy refers to the two versions of Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep as marking the delineation point separating linear (early) Hawks from non-linear (later) Hawks, I feel like you can mark the director’s affection for bonzo non-sequiturs throughout his sultry To Have and Have Not. The picture tells its tale of immigrants marooned off the islets of war and sexual sophistication–an island bell jar and pressure cooker envisioned as a sequel of sorts to Casablanca. But where Casablanca‘s sex was mature and companionate (the sizzle replaced by simmer) and tinged with regret, To Have and Have Not has a slick of bestial sweat to it that promises that the explosion of really naughty stuff is looming rather than in the rear-view. (There’s no sexier film in all the Forties.) The story of the corrupt Vichy government and the brave French underground unfolding behind the red-hot flirtation between diplomatically non-affiliated fishing boat captain Harry “Steve” Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) and lost American teen “Slim” (Lauren Bacall) is punctuated helter-skelter by husky lounge numbers courtesy Slim and Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael) and riff sessions with Steve and Slim that have the cadence and unpredictability of jazz improvisation. It’s not so much a narrative as a medley in a bouncy key, and Hawks is not so much a director as a bandleader. Much has been made of Hawks’s skill in casting (and it’s hard to argue otherwise when he sniffs out the alchemical enchantment between old man Bogie and new thing Bacall (and Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell; and Dean Martin and a bottle)), but looking at To Have and Have Not–the first of Bogie/Bacall’s four collaborations–is to glimpse something more than a good casting eye: it’s to witness the evolution of a true musical genius. The rhythms are subterranean, the verses in between the words; to watch this and The Big Sleep (Hawks’s other collaboration with Bogie/Bacall) back-to-back is as close to rapture as this experience gets.

Swimming to Cambodia (1987) – DVD

July 7, 2013****/****, 1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Concert Doc, Directors: Jonathan Demme, DVD, Scream/Shout! Factory

****/**** Image C Sound C Extras B
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw I learned about memoir as art watching Spalding Gray in Jonathan Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia. Although I was a freshman in college when I first saw it, I’m not sure that I ever really knew what “memoir” was before, and, since, I’ve been hard pressed to find any examples that measure up to the bar it sets. Swimming to Cambodia also provides an impossible standard for direction, as Demme takes Gray’s “monolog” format (essentially him, alone, on a stage) and turns it into something like an expressionistic piece, something that is at once inside Gray’s mind and inside yours using thoughtful editing choices and clever sound and lighting design. In a year that saw the release of Predator, Full Metal Jacket, The Untouchables, Empire of the Sun, Raising Arizona, Near Dark, A Better Tomorrow II, Angel Heart, Evil Dead II, and RoboCop, it’s a little astonishing to realize the best-directed film is this one with a guy sitting at a table. For what it’s worth, as I was writing my own memoir of a very particular moment in my life, the only readership I really imagined for it consisted of my father and Gray–Gray, who killed himself over water in 2004, and my father, who died a year before that. If the one was the reason, the other was the way.

Byzantium (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Ireland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire

****/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley, Caleb Landry Jones
screenplay by Moira Buffini, based on her play
directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw What is it about the Irish character, that particular quality of melancholy fatalism, that seems to inform the great works of native sons Beckett, Joyce, and maybe Yeats in particular? I like G.K. Chesterton’s description of Ireland as a place of “men that God made mad,/For all their wars are merry,/And all their songs are sad.” It infects the folklore, the story of the crags and the heather, the looming, low skies pregnant with what Michael Almereyda’s criminally underestimated (and long forgotten) The Eternal fashioned into a creation story involving unimaginable losses and the sweet, bitter tears they inspire. To that film, add John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish, Neal Jordan’s Ondine, and now Jordan’s rapturous Byzantium: a quartet of supernaturally-tinged pictures that together form a lush polyptych that captures the very sensation of walking through Dublin in the rain, or along the shores of Galway, or through the pages of Ulysses in the company of Leo and Nora. As for Byzantium, it’s beautiful, and sad, and has an eternity to it that’s reflected in its tale of a “soucriant,” a succubus of sorts with a Dominican history and favoured by Jean Rhys in novels that were themselves attempts to come to terms with the tragedies of her life as an outsider. Jordan, well-read and never shy about expressing that literariness in his pictures, is producing in his later work the very evocation of a city from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (a book he once told me he admires): Ersilia, an abandoned city built not of walls, but of strings the lost inhabitants used to mark connections with one another. Jordan weaves an intricate web with Byzantium, a film that, before even attacking the tensions within, provides tensions without in its title, most likely taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which is itself about tensions between the “artifice of eternity” and the temporariness of youth. Turns out, the film is about that, too.

Museum Hours (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Mary Margaret O’Hara, Bobby Sommer, Ela Piplits
directed by Jem Cohen

by Angelo Muredda The closing
credits of Jem Cohen’s warm and wonderful Museum Hours give equal thanks
to John Berger and Patti Smith, and it’s not hard to see why. Further to being
Cohen’s friend and occasional collaborator, Smith occupies a rare place at the
intersection of art stardom and punk history, while Berger might be the only
figurehead total newcomers to art criticism can name, his TV series “Ways of Seeing” having turned innumerable undergraduates onto ideologically-inflected
readings of popular images. Whatever their personal contributions to the film
may have been, Berger’s knack for providing the novice critic with the
armature to see intelligently and ethically is as instructive here as Smith’s
mercurial punk ethos. Museum Hours–which, like Berger’s BBC miniseries
and book, is destined to have a long afterlife in college art courses–is an
absorbing and richly humanist synthesis of those seemingly contradictory
impulses, a puckish walking tour through an art gallery that doubles as a
manifesto for seeing deeply into the rubbish beyond the walls of the museum.

Band of Outsiders (1964) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 3, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, The Criterion Collection

Bande à part
****/****
Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur, Danièle Girard
screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard (uncredited), based on the novel Fool’s Gold by Dolores Hitchens
directed by JeanLuc Cinéma Godard

by Bryant Frazer For the casual observer, Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (Bande à part) may as well be titled The Eyes of Anna Karina. The famously radical director’s follow-up to the hit film Contempt isn’t a favourite of American movie buffs for its politics or its thematic rigour. Instead, it’s a veritable spoof of film noir–at times a near-farce–involving a couple of small-time schemers who take their cues from Hollywood. Though Band of Outsiders is thought of as one of Godard’s most accessible works, it’s also one of his most dissonant. It’s a gritty crime drama wrapped around a light romance; a breezy comedy shot through with intimations of the geopolitical landscape of the 1960s; an homage to U.S. culture that incidentally imagines the decline of the American empire. In Godard’s body of work, Band of Outsiders–its story based on a novel by American mystery writer Dolores Hitchens–can be read as the connective tissue between the bones of Breathless, which is full of loving references to American cinema and pulp fiction, and the later Weekend and Tout va bien, which are explicitly critical of western culture in general and capitalism in particular.