Stuff I've Written in May

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Apparently it just worked out that it took another whole month for me to finally get around to doing my usual self-promotional round-up of stuff I've written and published.

Well, the big news of May is that I attended—to the consternation of my ever money-conscious dear mother—the 66th Cannes Film Festival and covered it for my site, In Review Online. I ended up getting four dispatches out of it:

The Immigrant (2013)

The Bling Ring, A Touch of Sin, The Past, Like Father, Like Son and Stranger by the Lake here
The Missing Picture, Blind Detective, Shield of Straw, Ain't Them Bodies Saints and Inside Llewyn Davis here
Closed Curtain, Only God Forgives, All Is Lost and Bastards here
Nebraska, Norte, the End of History, The Immigrant, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Only Lovers Left Alive and Manuscripts Don't Burn here

Perhaps I'll say more about my first-ever Cannes experience in a separate blog post; it had its ups and downs, admittedly (screw you, colored-badge system), but of course I'd gladly do it again in the future!

I also wrote about the great Chinese documentary Disorder for In Review Online here and Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood for The House Next Door here. Yes, I somehow managed to rattle off more than 1,000 words on a silly Friday the 13th movie. (I really should start trying to make more of an effort to get, you know, paid for writing shit like that.)

Stuff I've Written in April

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Let's start from most recent first this time.

The Machine

New York's own Tribeca Film Festival came to an end on Sunday, and once again I was on the beat for Slant Magazine. I ended up writing four reviews:

Flex Is Kings (here)
Frankenstein's Army (here)
A Case of You (here)
The Machine (here)

As you can see, I was mostly underwhelmed by these four (The Machine was the best of the bunch, and even then I wouldn't make any grand claims for it as a great, visionary sci-fi achievement or anything); in fact, the only Tribeca Film Festival title that truly blew me away was Before Midnight, the latest in Richard Linklater's Before... series—and alas, I wasn't assigned to review that one (I did write this short Letterboxd entry, though). Actually, truth is, I didn't see a whole lot of films at Tribeca this year, so I'm sure I missed a lot of potentially good stuff (especially on the non-fiction front, as I kept hearing Tribeca had a lot of great documentaries to offer this year).

Otherwise, three more non-festival reviews: this of Terrence Malick's latest film, To the Wonder (I'm firmly in the "pro" camp); this of Shirley Clarke's recently restored 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason; and this of Unmade in China, a problematic but nevertheless compelling documentary about one filmmaker's increasingly nightmarish attempts to make a movie under the ultra-controlling grip of the Communist Chinese government.

Holy crap, did I write all that in April? I've sure kept myself busy this past month—and that also includes editing reviews for In Review Online and writing up shorter reviews at Letterboxd! And next month is looking to be about as productive...being that I'm going to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time!

A Self-Promotion Catch-Up of Epic Proportions

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—As many of you could tell, I indeed have been slacking mightily in keeping this blog active...but this week has been a bit of a lighter one than I expected—perhaps a welcome calm before the storm that is Tribeca Film Festival, which I'll be covering for Slant Magazine again this year—so now I have a bit of time to catch up on promoting things I've been writing in the past couple of months.

So let's go all the way back to January, when, over at In Review Online, I wrote this review of Hors Satan, the latest film from French filmmaker Bruno Dumont. Good movie—maybe not quite as good as I remembered it from Toronto International Film Festival back in 2011, but still a fascinating watch.

Then came three reviews for Slant Magazine. The "best" of the trio, relatively speaking, was The Sorcerer and the White Snake, a martial-arts spectacle that didn't entirely leave me unaffected—I admit, the romance aspects sort of got to me towards the end—but which can't help but pale by comparison to the splendors its director, Ching Siu-tung, once unleashed in films like A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) and Duel to the Death (1983). You call that CGI "state-of-the-art"???

But at least I found that more passably entertaining than either the egregiously hagiographic Mumia Abu-Jamal documentary Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey With Mumia Abu-Jamal (reviewed here) or, worst of all, the insufferable glorified globalization sitcom Shanghai Calling (here).

Later in February, I gave a second look to Gebo and the Shadow, the latest film from that seemingly ageless Portuguese auteur Manoel de Oliveira (he's 104!), and wrote this up over at The House Next Door as part of its coverage of Film Comment Selects, a local festival hosted by the renowned film magazine. If nothing else, the film offers a master class in making something truly cinematic out of the theatrical.

Fast-forward to March. I went to South by Southwest for the third year in a row! I ended up filing these five dispatches from Austin, Texas:

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and V/H/S/2 (here)
Prince Avalanche and Drinking Buddies (here)
Museum Hours and Spring Breakers (here)
Downloaded, Touba and Before You Know It (here)
Cheap Thrills (one of the worst of the festival) and Short Term 12 (one of the best) (here)

And finally, I reviewed Bob Byington's ne plus ultra of deadpan comedy Somebody Up There Likes Me (no relation to the Robert Wise boxing picture with Paul Newman)—a review that apparently so annoyed a certain well-known film critic with my suggestion that Byington might actually be doing something somewhat Robert Bresson-like with his style that he made an offhand dismissive comment about it in this comment thread at the film site Letterboxd. I'll, um, take it as a compliment that I engendered some kind of reaction, however contemptuous. (As for whether I'm just full of shit, well, you should just watch the film for yourselves and decide.)

Speaking of Letterboxd: In between not blogging here and handling all the other crap in my life (occasional existential crises included), I've become rather addicted to the site's capabilities of allowing one to keep track and log reviews of films you watch. So if you all want to know what I've been watching since the beginning of this year, check out my profile and explore...because who knows if I'm ever going to revive that consumption-log thing I used to do?

Catching Up on Promoting Myself

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Oh man, I've got a lot of catching up to do in regard to self-promotion on this blog!

For much of my November and December, I found myself consumed by balancing my Wall Street Journal day job with my In Review Online editor-in-chief duties, which in December including trying to organize an end-of-year cinema wrap-up. Now 2013 is finally here, all of that is done, and I can finally focus on other things. Behold the end result of all my duties here! (Thank you to all my writers at InRO for helping me pull this off!)

As a contributor to Slant Magazine, I also contributed to that site's end-of-year movies feature with a short blurb about my favorite film of 2012, Moonrise Kingdom. Click here to check out the whole shebang (Wes Anderson's film placed at No. 10). Oh, and speaking of Moonrise Kingdom, listen to me basically re-read my Slant blurb for Peter Labuza's Cinephiliacs podcast at some point during this most recent two-part end-of-year wrap-up episode.

Amidst all this, I still somehow managed to write some film reviews! Let's start with a couple of negligible items, both of them for Slant Magazine: that of Darragh Byrne's completely forgettable Irish drama starring Colm Meaney named Parked (review here) and Antonino D'Ambrosio's marginally more engaging documentary about the rise of punk entitled Let Fury Have the Hour (see here).

Over at Slant's sister blog The House Next Door, I penned this review of Brad Bernstein's Far Out Isn't Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story, which screened during the DOC NYC festival here in New York in early November. I didn't love the film, but I wouldn't necessarily discourage anyone from seeing it whenever it receives a proper theatrical release; its interview subject—a cartoonist who pushed the boundaries of taste with his illustrations in the '60s and eventually got ostracized for his fidelity to his vision—is, if nothing else, an endlessly fascinating personality to witness onscreen.

Speaking of documentaries, I made my first proper review at In Review Online that of The Central Park Five, Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon's often scalding chronicle of the institutional and personal injustices that befell five black New York City youths as they were sentenced for a horrific gang rape in 1989 in Central Park that they did not commit. It's an entirely honorable and sometimes incisive picture and definitely worth seeing, though I would hesitate to call it a great one (if only Spike Lee had handled this material instead of the ever-respectable Ken Burns...).

For my second review to date at InRO, however, I took on one of the biggest films of 2012: Kathryn Bigelow's much-lauded search-for-Bin Laden chronicle Zero Dark Thirty. Let's just say, I'm not entirely on board with the near-universal praise this film has been getting. You can read my ambivalent take on it here.

And I think that's it for catching up. Here's to more great films and film writing in the new year!

Lost in the Hurricane Sandy Shuffle

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Two film criticism-related things on the personal end got lost earlier this week amidst the Hurricane Sandy mess.

First: my review of Girl Walk // All Day, which begins a week-long run Sunday at the newly reopened reRun Gastropub Theater in Brooklyn. For those who don't live in New York or simply don't want to pay to see it, you can technically see the whole 77-minute film here. But Jacob Krupnick's film is great enough that it deserves to be seen on a big screen, if possible.

Second, a bit of personal news: I have agreed to take on editor-in-chief duties of the film- and music-review website In Review Online from its creator/now-former editor-in-chief (and current Brooklyn roommate) Sam C. Mac. I had made a resolution at the beginning of this year that I would somehow shake myself out of the routine I felt I'd been falling into professionally and personally speaking, so when Sam asked me if I would be willing to help keep his site alive as he focused his energies on other projects, I figured this was as good an opportunity as any to make good on that resolution. I've never been in charge of an entire website before—even at Rutgers, during that one year I was film editor for the weekly entertainment section of The Daily Targum, I didn't play the role of the, uh, "head honcho," so to speak. This, then, will be a fresh experience for me, made possibly more challenging by the fact that I'll still be juggling my day job at The Wall Street Journal while doing so. Nevertheless, on the much-bandied-about theory that one needs to push oneself out of one's comfort zone every once in a while if one has any shot of getting anywhere in life, I'm looking forward to taking on these challenges head-on and hopefully elevating Sam's already very fine site to even greater heights...

...or at least, I'm looking forward to it once I come back from my Amsterdam vacation, which is set to commence in a matter of hours! Amsterdam, you say? More on this later...

Are You There, Moviegoers? It's Me, Margaret.

NEW YORK—

My latest film review published somewhere other than this blog was posted on Tuesday at In Review Online. Under consideration: Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan's film maudit that, even in something less than its creator's ideal form, is one of the best films of 2011. The film is so filled-to-bursting with ambition, beauty and humanity that I could hardly articulate everything I love and admire about this film in one single review...so at the very least, I hope this piece will serve as a starting point for discussion—especially now that it's getting a re-release at Cinema Village here in New York starting tomorrow! Go see it; it's amazing.

NYFFing and TIFFing It Up!

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Over the weekend, my New York Film Festival review of Le Havre went up at The House Next Door. Le Havre is the latest film from Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki—yet another well-regarded world-cinema auteur whose work I wasn't really familiar with before undertaking the assignment to review it. So I decided to make my inexperience with Kaurismäki's work a part of my review. I have the freedom to do that kind of thing at The House! The movie's not bad, either.

Oh, and here's a blast from the (recent) past: I contributed a few capsule reviews for In Review Online's recently published wrap-up of this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Surprisingly, I had a pretty easy time of sticking to 90-100 words for each of my contributions; I totally expected to struggle to condense my always complex opinions on films to such a short amount of space, but they just seemed to flow out of me once I got into a groove.

Anyway, enjoy my latest output! I need to keep up this writing thing, seriously.

From One Filmmaker to Another: Abbas Kiarostami's Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003)

NEW YORK—

Amidst my attempt to balance New York Film Festival coverage for The House Next Door with my day job and even the occasional night out at the movies, this was published recently: a piece I wrote about Abbas Kiarostami's experimental 2003 film Five Dedicated to Ozu as my contribution to the site In Review Online's near-complete retrospective of the legendary Iranian filmmaker. Enjoy, and then by all means, go check out the other articles in this exhaustive series!

Hopefully my New York Film Festival reviews—or, rather, the two I've completed so far—will be going up soon (the festival starts on Friday).

You Can't Stop What's Coming...In Theaters in the Second Half of 2010

NEW YORK—A quick bit of self-promotion: Over at the film- and music-review website In Review Online, I contributed a short blurb about Jacques Rivette's Around a Small Mountain for a staff feature article previewing highly anticipated film releases in the second half of 2010. It's actually a very nice-looking feature, and it even mentions some tantalizing titles I hadn't heard about previously, new films by John Carpenter (The Ward) and Julian Schnabel (Miral) among them.

Take a look, when you can (and, of course, go see Around the Small Mountain, which I wrote about at the end of last week here. Because it's marvelous).