Echoes
Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955, d. Henry King): Boyhood (2014, d. Richard Linklater):
Echoes
Fearless (1993, d. Peter Weir):
FFC’s Best of ’13
by Walter Chaw Searching for themes in 2013, you come upon the obvious ones first: the frustrations of the forty-five percenters; the growing income gap; and the death of the middle class, encapsulated in brat-taculars like The Bling Ring and Spring Breakers and prestige pics like Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, David O. Russell’s American Hustle, and, um, Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. You see this preoccupation with the economy in Nebraska‘s quest for a million-dollar Clearinghouse payday, and in Frances Halladay’s desire for a place to sleep and a career that can subsidize it (see also: To the Wonder and Byzantium). It’s there in the identity theft of Identity Theft and the motivations of the prefab family from We’re the Millers, paid off with picket fences in an ending with echoes of My Blue Heaven and Goodfellas. Consider All is Lost, an allegory for pensioners who’ve lost everything to the wolves of Wall Street, adrift on a limitless span, taking on water but plucky, damnit. Too plucky, in the case of Redford’s Everyman hero–who, frankly, would’ve better served his allegory had he drowned with salvation in sight.
Halloween Horror Video Essay: The Monster In The Painting
by Jefferson Robbins Back in September, I published the Kindle ebook The Curse of Frankenstein: A Dissection–a scene-by-scene analytical love letter to a film that shaped me and discloses hidden depths the more one looks at it.
Mile High Horror Film Festival ’13: An Introduction
by Walter Chaw I’d been vaguely aware of the Mile High Horror Film Festival its previous three years to the extent that I’d reached out at some point to see about coverage, but it came to nothing and was easy for me to ignore. Then a good friend moved from the Denver Film Society to the newly-opened Denver location of Alamo Drafthouse as creative director, and one September morning, I found myself driving down to meet with him and chat about his new position. This Drafthouse is beautiful, by the way, and for cinephiles in the Denver area, it’s a hope devoutly wished, answered. If you don’t support this venue and its mission statement (“to save cinema,” its co-owner, Tom, declared to me proudly), you don’t deserve it. Anyway, in the cavernous, leather-lined lobby, I met my friend, who had just come from a planning meeting with festival founder Tim Schultz. Handshakes facilitated, I got in touch with ace PR guy Travis Volz a few days later, and suddenly found myself sitting in a little booth across from Jim Mickle, director of a very, very good remake/not-really-a-remake of We Are What We Are.
Heads-up!
If you're looking for our review of this week's big release Gravity, just a reminder that Walter Chaw reviewed it last month as part of his Telluride Film Festival coverage. Check it out here.
TIFF ’13 Wrap-Up
by Bill Chambers The cause célèbre at this year’s TIFF was critic Alex Billington’s 9-1-1 call. For those living under a rock, what happened was that Billington entreated Festival volunteers to do…something…about the guy using his light-emitting cell phone at a P&I (press and industry) screening of Ti West’s The Sacrament. When they declined, Billington dialled emergency services, live-tweeting the whole sorry affair as a gift to the gods of schadenfreude. This is indeed absolutely childish and cowardly behaviour, yet a similarly insufferable sanctimony deluged the incident in think pieces and @ replies, some of them from yours truly. Yes, crying wolf to 9-1-1 is irresponsible, though I imagine Billington’s wasn’t the first or even second false alarm Toronto EMS received that morning. Yes, P&I screenings are free, throwing Billington’s sense of entitlement into relief, although they do come with the Faustian obligation to write about them at some point. (Something that isn’t made easier by a viewing filled with peripheral distractions.) And, sure, industry folk need to be able to conduct business in a darkened theatre if it comes to that, because TIFF is a buyer’s market ultimately supported by the wheeling-and-dealing that happens over a ten-day period.
Telluride ’13 Wrap-Up
by Walter Chaw The drive home always feels faster. I didn’t think it would this time, but it did.
Telluride ’13: An Introduction or, The Stand
by Walter Chaw It’s a six-and-a-half hour drive from my home in Arvada, CO to Telluride on the Western Slope, and there are two ways to get there. One way is all highway; the other way is all beauty. I took the second route, and it made all the difference. I’ve been in a dark, difficult place for a long time now, or, at least, long enough in the parlance of near-crippling depression. I was caught in eddies; I had become inert. I had almost completely stopped writing. Not just essays like this one, but reviews, too, which I used to be able to pump out with I think alarming speed and ease. Early on, someone asked my editor how I did it; at times over the last couple of months, I wondered if I’d ever write like that again. Things are hard when you’re dark. Getting out of bed was a negotiation–getting out to a screening was a near act of God. The thought of accidentally eavesdropping other people’s thoughts was agony. The times I did, of course, were good, because the guilt I would have felt had I gone and not written on the privilege would have been untenable. Would that the guilt of not writing on home-video releases have the same lubricative effect.
“Shrink-Ray”
Please excuse this self-indulgent post, but the latest episode of my side-project "The Monster Show", "Shrink-Ray," just went live, in glorious 1080p. Thanks for checking it out, I hope it's a pleasant waste of your time. If you like what you see, you can catch up with previous instalments here.
Echoes
Opening shot of Seconds (1966, d. John Frankenheimer):
Extracurricular Activities: “The Monster Show”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NqEpjagt3WA%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_detailpage
by Bill Chambers Recently, my brother Derek and I–a failed screenwriting team if ever there was one–took advantage of the new technological democracy and decided to make our own web cartoon, spun off from a short story Derek wrote (“The Monster Strikes”) about a closet monster who goes on strike and becomes roommates with his intended victim. For years, we had scribbled ideas for a potential TV show based on the concept, though our initial desire to satirize sitcom tropes changed (evolved?) over time as we realized we wanted to get away from meta-humour and do something more organically stupid.
“Zero Dark Thirty”: The Ashes Of American Flags
by Jefferson Robbins Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is politically abhorrent, an ideologue’s digest of how torture “works” on behalf of democratic governments seeking to defend from or avenge themselves upon terrorism. There’s no debate: by means of torture, CIA operative Maya (Jessica Chastain) digs her way from Osama bin Laden’s outer network to his inner circle, one, two, three. As journalist Malcolm Harris put it, “That Kathryn Bigelow used to be involved in left aesthetics should make us shiver in fear about who we may yet become.” But subtly, in the way Bigelow presents her lead character’s view of the battlefield and the flag under which she strives, Zero Dark Thirty betrays mixed feelings about its own ramifications.
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A Man and a Woman: Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva – TIFF Cinematheque Retrospective
by Angelo Muredda When Michael Haneke’s Amour met its first wave of hosannas at Cannes, the press seemed eerily unanimous with respect to all but the film’s place within the German-Austrian taskmaster’s oeuvre. Although some were quick to call it the warmest of his many portraits of couples in crisis (it would be hard not to be), others saw it as of a piece with his austere horror films about complacent bourgeois hoarders reduced to ashes by external invaders–in this case, not the home intruders of Funny Games or Time of the Wolf (though there is a break-in, for those keeping score), but the more insidious threat of age-related illnesses. The truth is probably somewhere between those poles. It’s no surprise that the key players in this two-hander are named, as they always seem to be in Haneke’s pictures, Anne and Georges Laurent–sturdy middle-class monikers for tasteful piano teachers. But it’s difficult to wholly ascribe the universal quality we often associate with Haneke’s Laurents to the familiar, if weathered, faces of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, who–far more than the chameleonic Juliette Binoche or Isabelle Huppert, other Haneke collaborators–recall a bygone era of French cinema.
Annual Professional Commentary on the Oscar Nominations (2013 edition)
by Bill Chambers
Best Motion Picture of the Year
Amour (2012): To Be Determined = sure
Argo (2012): Grant Heslov, Ben Affleck, George Clooney = shrug
Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012): Dan Janvey, Josh Penn, Michael Gottwald = barf
Django Unchained (2012): Stacey Sher, Reginald Hudlin, Pilar Savone = still haven’t @!$#ing seen it
Les Misérables (2012): Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Debra Hayward, Cameron Mackintosh = barf
Life of Pi (2012): Gil Netter, Ang Lee, David Womark = hmmm
Lincoln (2012): Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy = you knew this was coming
Silver Linings Playbook (2012): Donna Gigliotti, Bruce Cohen, Jonathan Gordon = yawn
Zero Dark Thirty (2012): Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow, Megan Ellison = thumbs-up emoticon
Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2012
by Walter Chaw I wish To the Wonder had been released this year–Take Shelter, too. The one because I love Terrence Malick and I’m excited that he’s working so much, the other because I fear that Take Shelter is the last time Michael Shannon will anchor a picture without being instantly Christopher Walken-ized. It’s his The Dead Zone, and he’s amazing in a movie that takes big risks and pays off in a meaningful way; if he were to star in it now, I think it would be mistaken for camp. I also wish I’d seen Margaret in time for my 2011 list. Alas, local publicity has never been terribly interested in my participation. Nevertheless, thanks mostly to Netflix and FYC screeners, I saw a great many great films this year.
Echoes
Opening shot of The Night of the Hunter (1955, d. Charles Laughton): Opening shot of Dune (1984, d. David Lynch):
Wrapping Up TIFF ’12
by Bill Chambers There’s something a little ghoulish about still reviewing TIFF movies at this late date, I know, but I wanted to briefly touch on a few of this year’s selections I never got around to reviewing in full, before they became indistinguishable dots in the rearview.
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