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!

Catching Up With Some New York Film Festival Reviews

NEW YORK—I've been in a flurry of review-writing as a whole bunch of New York Film Festival assignments have converged in the past few days. Now, I have three more pieces at The House Next Door to show for it.

First up, here's my review of Like Someone in Love. Set not in his native Iran but in Japan, Abbas Kiarostami's latest film plays like a more downbeat companion piece to his last film, Certified Copy; in some ways, this might be an even richer achievement, though one that is admittedly more difficult to warm to on first blush compared to its airy, lovely predecessor. Nevertheless, this has a strong possibility of ending up being my favorite film of the festival so far.

A strong runner-up for favorite film of NYFF comes in the form of the melancholy blast that is Léos Carax's  Holy Motors, his first feature in 13 years. Many have pegged this truly singular work as a kind of middle finger to the digital era. Maybe, maybe not. I'm inclined to look at it less as a grand, pessimistic statement about the future of cinema as it is simply about an actor snatching personal victories from the jaws of a larger defeat. "In the midst of life, we are in death," as the famous Biblical saying goes—but boy, what life does Carax and his usual leading man Denis Lavant bring to the table! My review is here.

And then there's Michael Haneke's Amour and David Chase's Not Fade Away. The first feature from the creator of The Sopranos strikes me as a mostly negligible, if pleasant and genial, nostalgia trip. Haneke's film, however, is a trickier case. I don't necessarily see the "humanism" the film's many partisans see; especially with some of the late-breaking developments in the film's last half-hour, the Austrian director still strikes me as icy and finger-wagging as ever. And yet, when it comes to the kind of unflinching depiction of mortality that he's attempting here, maybe some emotional detachment isn't a negative attribute. Besides, I think Amour is ultimately less about death than it is about the struggles of the living to deal with an awareness of it, especially when they see it every day in a loved one. If nothing else, it's undeniably effective at what it sets out to achieve; what you, the individual viewer, get out of it is entirely up to you. You can read my reviews of both here.

The 50th New York Film Festival: Barbara, A Quiet Stunner

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—The New York Film Festival officially begins tomorrow, but my first review of the festival went up at The House Next Door yesterday.

I'll let my review of Christian Petzold's Barbara speak for itself; the only thing I'll add is that the more I think about it, the more I kind of love it. It's definitely worth your time and perhaps a bit of your patience; this is a slow burn par excellence, a film requiring active viewing in order to simply get a sense of not only the characters, but the dangerous world in which they reside. For me, though, the quietly stunning payoff was worth the effort.

Summoning Up My Inner Schwartz in Writing About Spaceballs

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

My second contribution to The House Next Door's "Summer of '87" series is a look back at Mel Brooks's sci-fi/consumerist spoof Spaceballs—never a film I held in nearly the same esteem as a lot of my friends, and often considered one of Brooks's lesser comedies, but one that I found myself enjoying more than I remember doing in previous viewings. Maybe I was just in the mood for some dumb laughs that night—though, as I try to argue in my piece, not all of the jokes are dumb; some of them, in fact, do have a considerable edge to them.

You can read more here.

P.S. Just for kicks: Hey, all you fellow Generation Y-ers, do you all remember that ol' blog-hosting site Xanga? I had one of those things during my freshman year of college. It was during that year that I finally saw Spaceballs uncut and uncensored for the first time. Here's what I wrote then, for your collective amusement:

...Spaceballs was playin' in the Lounge on the big screen TV tonight. It was good to watch most of it unedited for the first time—but i still think a lot of it is just plain stupid. Frankly, though i enjoyed the musical of The Producers, i've never been a big Mel Brooks fan. The movie of The Producers was all right (more strange than hilarious to me, although the musical numbers were the best), and Young Frankenstein is his best spoof—but his comic timing is sometimes faulty, and seriously, he must take us for dumbasses if all he's done after Producers and The Twelve Chairs are dumb no-brainer spoofs, some mildly funnier than others. I dunno...i just prefer the ZAZ spoofs. You know—Airplane!, Top Secret!, and the Naked Gun series, and let's not forget Hot Shots! Part Deux...

Oh, I was so young then! But the fact that my 26-year-old self enjoyed Spaceballs far more than my 18-year-old self did...well, I'll let you all parse the implications of that yourselves. (That said, my take on the original 1968 Producers notwithstanding, I would say my views on Mel Brooks and ZAZ haven't changed all that much.)

Feel free to read that whole Xanga post, by the way, if you dare (and imagine me blushing while doing so).

If I Had a Sight & Sound Film Ballot...

NEW YORK—Last week, cinephiles all over the world waited with baited breath for the unveiling of the latest best-films-of-all-time poll held by the British film magazine Sight & Sound, held every 10 years since 1952. Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) had stood unchallenged as the top vote-getter since 1962 (Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1947) was the victor of the inaugural Sight and Sound poll); would it hold onto its reign at the top this year?

Nope, it turns out.

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) became the new champ this year, at least in the critics' poll, leading to all sorts of triumphant hurrahs as well as the usual contingent of dissenters. (In the directors' poll, Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) emerged No. 1, with Vertigo placing seventh.)

As everyone was trying to weigh in on this supposed seismic shift in critical opinion, The House Next Door, the blog offshoot of Slant Magazine—both of which feature my own pieces of film criticism—began a new series in which it offered up the ballots of those contributors who had not been asked to participate in the Sight & Sound poll. My own ballot went up yesterday, for those who are curious as to what I consider my personal Top 10. It's not entirely the straight-from-my-gut lineup that my introduction suggests; I did engage in some contemplation over my choices. But all of the films I list have had some kind of profound effect on me in some way, as I tried to describe in each entry. So I'm happy with this list (though, of course, I'm hardly bound by this particular personal canon, reserving the right to alter it at the flip of a switch if I felt like it).

You know who else was happy with this list? A certain legendary film critic who, among other things, I met last year at a festival bearing his name, if this tweet from him is any indication...

"Summer of '87": Looking Back at Predator

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

For the past few years, The House Next Door has co-presented a "Summer of..." series with Aaron Aradillas, Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of the Blog Talk Radio podcast Movie Geeks United!, publishing a series of retrospective posts tackling films released during a summer 25 years before the current one. Thus, this being 2012, House contributors are writing about films released during the summer of 1987 in this year's installment. So far, the blog has put up posts on Ishtar, Creepshow 2 and a previously-unknown-to-me Irish comedy called Eat the Peach.

Now we come to my first contribution to this "Summer of '87" series: Predator—yes, John McTiernan's sci-fi/action jungle epic with Arnold Schwarzenegger and a bunch of other soon-to-be-crushed specimens of viriles homines. I might not go so far as to call this a genre masterpiece (after all, McTiernan's Die Hard was only a year away)...but I think it's a far more interesting and even somewhat subversive picture than many have given it credit for being. It also has one of the greatest final showdowns in the history of cinema, one that continues to thrill even after 25 years. The titular alien may be one ugly motherfucker, but the movie itself is, more often than not, a beaut.

Anyway, I pool my many thoughts on the film here. Enjoy! (As to what my second contribution will be...well, those of you who follow my artistic consumption logs closely may have an idea what it is by now.)

A Preview of New York Asian Film Festival 2012

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Wu xia (2011)

It's that time of year again: the New York Asian Film Festival is back for its 11th year of rip-roaring, ass-kicking fun!

This year, I decided to act the part of a professional film critic and come up with a preview piece for the festival before the festival officially started tonight. Alas, I see that, compared to the New York Asian Film Festival previews I've seen from others—like, say, Michael Atkinson's Village Voice round-up and R. Emmet Sweeney's summary at Film Comment's blog—mine isn't nearly as deep; I only ended up seeing about five of the 50-or-so films playing at this year's festival, so I can't vouch for some of their recommendations, like The Sword Identity or Scabbard Samurai. (They certainly weren't screened for press; the ones I cover at length in my preview were.)

Nevertheless...well, I hope, for all of those New Yorkers who intend to dive into this insanely wide-ranging festival, my House Next Door round-up will offer something of a starting point.

Two Serviceable Documentaries on Great Subjects

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

When I reviewed the documentary Gerhard Richter Painting for Slant Magazine back in March, I gave it a 2½-star review, admiring the integrity of its almost wholly observational approach while wondering if the fairly limited insights offered into the German artist's life and creative processes justified that rigor. And yet, when I watched two recent artist-centered documentaries, Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, I couldn't get Corinna Belz's film out of my mind. Certainly, neither of those two films have anything like the formal and conceptual daring of Gerhard Richter Painting (and in the case of the Abramović film, director Matthew Akers throws in a lot of annoying visual tricks early on to give things a spuriously "cinematic" flavor), preferring to spoon-feed interpretations of their respective subjects' life and art instead of allowing us to draw our own conclusions. Both films are fine on their own terms (the Abramović documentary, for instance, made me deeply regret missing out entirely on her much-discussed Artist is Present  performance at the Museum of Modern Art two years ago; the film makes it seem like it might have been a near-transformative experience), and I'm sure viewers not too familiar with the work of either artist would find them duly enlightening. Nevertheless, I can't honestly say I feel a whole lot of passion for them; both strike me as merely serviceable films on great subjects.

Anyway, I expounded at length on Akers's Abramović film at Slant Magazine here and on Alison Klayman's Ai Weiwei documentary at The House Next Door here. As for Gerhard Richter Painting...well, the more I think about it, the more I feel that, at the very least, the film may have deserved at least half a star more from me.

A Few More Dispatches from the Tribeca Film Festival

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—The Tribeca Film Festival ended Sunday night, so as far as I know, you won't be able to see any of the films I saw and/or reviewed since my last Tribeca round-up. Still, that doesn't mean you can't read my pieces and keep the ones I reviewed positively in mind for the future...right?

Death of a Superhero

I ended up seeing "only" four more films since that last Tribeca post, two of which I officially reviewed: Ian Fitzgibbon's surprisingly decent Death of a Superhero at Slant Magazine and Alex Karpovsky's insinuating psychological thriller Rubberneck at The House Next Door.

Neither of the two other films left me in the mood to wildly sing its praises. At least Magnus Martens's Swedish crime comedy Jackpot is good for a few genuine bad-taste laughs to go along with its utterly predictable nihilism, especially in an extended setpiece that follows the central criminal band's increasingly hapless and hilarious attempts to dispose of a corpse. Jackpot could best be described as the Coen Brothers' Fargo redone as out-and-out cartoonish farce; if that kind of thing sounds appealing to you, this one delivers the bloody goods.

The Fourth Dimension is a tougher nut to crack. An anthology film featuring contributions from Harmony Korine, Alexei Fedorchenko and Jan Kwiecinski, it opens with title cards explaining the concept of the "fourth dimension" (including, helpfully, a quote from Back to the Future), and then setting out a bunch of rules imposed by producer Eddy Moretti on the three filmmakers—many of which are openly silly (examples: "The hero must have a missing tooth," "The director must direct one scene from the film with a blindfold on over his or her eyes" and so on), none of which have anything to do with any "fourth dimension." What binds these three disparate short films together, then? Perhaps just the idea of characters achieving some higher plane of existence, whatever that means to them personally.

In any case, Korine's "The Lotus Community Workshop" is memorable chiefly for featuring Val Kilmer playing himself as a self-help guru/charlatan who spends the rest of his time basically getting stoned and hanging out with his girlfriend (Rachel Korine). None of this adds up to much more than a prank, but Kilmer is a hoot to watch, especially when you get to the end and hear his auto-tuned "Fourth Dimension" song at the end.

Fedorchenko's "Chronoeye" is the closest this omnibus comes to directly engaging with the fourth dimension, featuring as it does a scientist named Grigory (Igor Sergeev) who has created a device to try to visit moments in the past and future—except that, whenever he is able to visit the past and the future, the camera always seems to be pointed at the most undesirable angles. In his obsession with exploring the past, Grigory seems ignorant of what's around him in the present, including the sexy female neighbor (Darya Ekamasova) who seems to have a thing for him. This is, for my money, the most interesting of the three segments, and sure, I'd consider it my favorite.

Other critics, for some reason, seem to be picking Kwiecinski's segment, entitled "Fawns," as their pick for best in show in this anthology. Personally, I found this parable of hipsters learning to care for someone other than themselves during an impending apocalypse to be an interminable bore—occasionally striking visually but a complete void as far as human interest goes.

One out of three in the case of The Fourth Dimension = not enough to give me a reason to recommend it even for its intriguing concept and occasional choice bits. So it goes with yet another one of these portmanteau films.

And on that (slightly sour) note, thus ends my Tribeca Film Festival experience this year. Obviously, if I wasn't also juggling a day job in addition to checking out films screening at the festival this year, I might have seen more of what I really wanted to see (the one film I regret not being able to schedule: Ira Sachs's new film Keep the Lights On, which played to generally appreciative audience at the Sundance Film Festival a few months ago). But hey, since I'm not doing this film-criticism thing full time, I'll gladly take what I can get!

A Few Dispatches from Tribeca Film Festival

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Yossi

So far at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, I've seen five films. The closest that has come to blowing me away is Yossi, the latest film from Israeli director Eytan Fox; I explained what I liked about it in this House Next Door review. Unfortunately, there are no more screenings of the film scheduled at the festival, so you fine people will have to wait for either a future theatrical release or a subsequent home-video appearance to see it. But it's definitely worth your time.

Your Sister's Sister, the latest film from Humpday writer-director Lynn Shelton, is also worth your time—at least, up until its third act, which becomes a bit too plot-heavy and melodramatic for my taste. But all three of its lead actors are terrific, and there are other admirable aspects to it, as I tried to explain over at Slant Magazine here.

Less worthy of your attention is Postcards from the Zoo, a terminally boring hunk of whimsy from an Indonesian filmmaker who goes by the name of Edwin. One-and-a-half stars to go along with this Slant Magazine review? I think that's the lowest star rating I've given at that site!

Two films I've seen at Tribeca which I didn't review, but which are of varying degrees of interest: Sleepless Night and Cut. The former is a French action thriller that, like the recent Indonesian film The Raid: Redemption, has generated a lot of positive buzz since its world premiere at Toronto last year. Gareth Evans's film offers up an abstract ballet of violence and choreography; Frédéric Jardin's film, however, features actual human interest underpinning its fiendish plot complications and twisty morals. Both are enjoyable in their own ways (and I wrote so about The Raid when I saw it at South by Southwest last month), but given the choice between the two, I would opt for Jardin's film without question.

As for Cut, Iranian filmmaker Amir Naderi's brutal Japanese-language poison-pen letter to cinephilia—well, the film leaves me with deeply mixed feelings, but as frustrating and sometimes grueling as the experience of watching it was, it still sticks in the memory, for better and for worse. As a bitterly ironic riposte to recent nostalgic old-movie valentines like Hugo and The Artist, it has a certain crude, pummeling effectiveness. As Roger Ebert said about The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, I can't quite recommend it, but I wouldn't discourage you from seeing it.

More to come at Tribeca...

A Laundry List of Links

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—This post will basically be a collection of links to my recent published work outside of this blog—and these days, the great majority of the writing I'm doing is admittedly outside of this blog. Of course, those of you who follow me on Facebook and Twitter will have, I hope, encountered these pieces already; nevertheless, in the interest of self-promotion, I like to collect all those links here at My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second because hey, they are part of my life, after all!

Where to begin, then? Well...how about South by Southwest?

Tchoupitoulas (2012)

Yeah, I went to Austin, Texas, for SXSW again this year...and truth be told, because I had already done this last year, I admit that I was perhaps inevitably less than overwhelmed by the experience this time around. Plus, I found the selection of films I saw, at least, to be wildly mixed in quality: very little that I'd consider actively terrible, but also very little that left me feeling flush with an exhilarating sense of discovery. Two films came closest to inducing such euphoria in me: Tchoupitoulas, the latest documentary from the Ross Brothers, the sibling duo behind the terrific 45365 (a Roger Ebert favorite; he programmed it at Ebertfest last year); and Keyhole, the latest Guy Maddin dreamscape/love letter to classic Hollywood cinema. Oh, and I should probably give a special mention to 21 Jump Street, which received a raucously enthusiastic reception at its world premiere at SXSW and which comes closer than any recent Hollywood comedy I've seen to approximating the anarchic spirit of Airplane! (1980). It's pretty consistently hilarious, even if it's never quite as smart as it thinks it is. (But hey, at least it never turns irritatingly snarky like Drew Goddard/Joss Whedon's overpraised horror-deconstruction romp The Cabin in the Woods, which was SXSW's opening-night film.)

Anyway, here are links to the five House Next Door posts I filed while I attended SXSW:
No. 1: Girl Model, Tchoupitoulas and Killer Joe
No. 2: Keyhole and The Raid: Redemption
No. 3: Compliance
No. 4: Girls and Sleepwalk With Me
No. 5: Under African Skies and Last Call at the Oasis

While I was in Austin, my review of Gerhard Richter Painting—an intriguing and sometimes beautiful documentary about the German painter—was posted at Slant Magazine.

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2012)

When I returned from SXSW, I was immediately thrown into another film festival: New Directors/New Films, a collaboration between Museum of Modern Art and Film Society of Lincoln Center in its 41st year this year. Of the 29 feature films that screened during ND/NF this year, I reviewed three of them for Slant Magazine:

Goodbye, the latest film from imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof (here)
Generation P, Victor Ginzburg's ambitious Russian epic about advertising in post-Soviet society (here)
Twilight Portrait, Angelina Nikonova's sometimes inscrutable female-centered character study (here)

None of those three films, for all their virtues, approached the highs of An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, the debut feature of New York-based filmmaker Terence Nance and a heady mix of self-analysis, postmodern self-reflexivity and cinematic experimentation that was, head above shoulders, unlike anything I saw not only at ND/NF, but at the movies all year long. I do hope it eventually gets picked up for theatrical distribution. (Alas, I ended up being unable to see Oslo, August 31st—Joachim Trier's much-lauded follow-up to Reprise—at ND/NF, so who knows if that film might have bested Nance's as the highlight of the festival?)

And I think that brings me up to date as far as links go. For now, I'm taking it easy on the writing and mentally preparing for the upcoming maelstrom that will be the Tribeca Film Festival.

A Linkthrough Catch-up, Or Stuff I've Published Recently

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—At the beginning of the year, I made a resolution to, if nothing else, try to be more productive on the writing front. I don't know what happened last year or why, but I went through long stretches where I felt barely a desire to write any serious film criticism at all beyond those brief sketches of reviews I'd set out in my artistic consumption logs. 2012, however, feels like the year in which I need to make some kind of major change in my life; I'm still not really sure what that change would entail, but perhaps I could at least push that change along by making more of an effort to be productive as a critic/writer.

Thus, I've been a bit busier both at and outside of my day job...so busy, it seems, that I haven't even had time to put up links here at this blog to the stuff I've published recently!

So here, in list form, are some links for you all to peruse, if, for some reason, you haven't been following me on Facebook and/or Twitter:

The Snowtown Murders (2011, Justin Kurzel)—reviewed here [P.S. This film was originally called Snowtown, and some of you may have already heard about this film by that name. That title, in my opinion, should have remained.]
On the Ice (2011, Andrew Okpeaha MacLean)—reviewed here; I also did this interview of the director
Transfer (2010, Damir Lukacevic) and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (2011, Adam Curtis)—both reviewed here
We Have a Pope (2011, Nanni Moretti)—reviewed here

As I get more stuff published going forward, I will try to be more prompt with the linkthroughs. Considering that I will be heading off to Austin, Texas, once again for South by Southwest in a few days, I suspect the linkthroughs are about to get even more plentiful!

DOC NYC 2011: Two Short Films About Japan

NEW YORK—The Kenji Fujishima review-writing train merrily rolls along (for now, at least).

Yoshihiro Takishita, from Minka

On Monday night, as part of the ongoing DOC NYC festival, I decided to check out a program of two short documentaries set in Japan, both made by non-Japanese filmmakers. One of them, Minka, is about the intersection of history and architecture; the other, The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, is about cultural symbols and the ways in which many Japanese are projecting feelings of both resignation and hope in the cherry blossom now more than ever in the wake of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in March. Both are good, but both also show the benefits and limits of perceiving a culture from an outsider's perspective. All of this I elucidate in my latest House Next Door review.

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, by the way, is on the shortlist for a Best Documentary Short Subject Oscar nomination...so you may be hearing more about Lucy Walker's film in the near future (a future, it appears, that will not include Brett Ratner as Oscar producer and Eddie Murphy as Oscar host, for those who care about such things).

Artistic Consumption Log, Oct. 10, 2011 - Oct. 16, 2011

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Wait...I actually have time to annotate my latest artistic consumption log? Amazing!

Margaret (2011)

Films

New York Film Festival 2011 (all films screened at Walter Reade Theater unless otherwise noted):
Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011, Alex Stapleton)
★ The Descendants (2011, Alexander Payne)
I wrote about the enjoyable if skin-deep Roger Corman documentary Corman's World in my last House Next Door New York Film Festival review here.

The festival ended last night with Alexander Payne's latest film as its closing-night selection...and it turned out to be a pretty good selection. Those who are worried that Payne indulges in his usual penchant for caricature and condescension can rest assured that, in The Descendants, he largely abandons it here...and even when the film threatens to slip into such tendencies with certain supporting characters (Alexandra's dim boyfriend Sid, the philandering real-estate agent), Payne manages to include scenes or moments that humanize even those relatively minor players. What emerges is an often moving portrait of a workaholic father (George Clooney) living in Hawaii who, when faced with the prospect of having to shut off the life-support system of his comatose wife, is forced to not only grow as a father, but also face familial skeletons in the closet that he had long suppressed. Even more so than his last two features, About Schmidt (2002) and Sideways (2004), The Descendants proves that Payne is capable of something approaching genuine human drama, not just the wicked satire of Citizen Ruth (1996) and Election (1999).

And now, thanks to the Toronto and New York film festivals, I think I'm all "film-festivalled" out for the time being!

★ Margaret (2011, Kenneth Lonergan), screened at Landmark Sunshine Cinema in New York
I agreed to write up something about this film for the film- and music-review site In Review Online, so I'll have a chance to flesh out my thoughts on this film later.

For now...well, here is the last line of legendary film critic Pauline Kael's review of Satyajit Ray's Distant Thunder back in 1975: "I don't know when I've been so moved by a picture that I knew was riddled with flaws. It must be that [Satyajit] Ray's vision comes out of so much hurt and guilt and love that the feeling pours over all the cracks in Distant Thunder and seals them up." That's exactly what I would say about Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan's wildly ambitious follow-up to his 2000 chamber drama You Can Count On Me. It's far from perfect—some of its editing rhythms are oddly disjointed, for one thing, especially in its last hour—but it's so intelligent, impassioned and deeply felt in its exploration of one adolescent's response to death and guilt that its flaws, such as they are, are mere piddles in what it successfully accomplishes. It is indeed a staggering achievement, in many ways—and so it's a shame that the film (which was shot way back in 2005 and has a copyright of 2008 on it) only got a token two-week run here in New York as a result of a troubled production history and pending lawsuits over the film's ownership. It deserved far better.

★ Dead Alive (1992, Peter Jackson), screened at 92YTribeca in New York
★ Re-Animator (1985, Stuart Gordon), screened at 92YTribeca in New York
92YTribeca screened these two splatter classics in a double bill on Friday night, so I seized upon the opportunity to fill in two major blind spots in my horror knowledge. Horror? That's just the name of the genre; these two films are more accurately described as gruesome black comedies. These aren't ironic parodies, though; the last thing you could call either Dead Alive or Re-Animator is smug or contemptuous of genre. Dead Alive, for all its extreme bloodletting (this may well be the bloodiest film I've ever seen), works quite beautifully, actually, as a sincere coming-of-age tale about a mama's boy (played by Timothy Balme) who learns to break away from his overcontrolling mother (hey, I can relate!); in this case, though, his maturation requires him to eventually wield a lawnmower and mow down scores of zombies in a masterfully orchestrated half-hour setpiece of blood, guts and mayhem. Jackson's film is full of such witty, bravura blood-soaked setpieces, all shot with a proliferation of exaggerated wide-angle lenses that lend the whole film a comic-book air that takes the brutality out of the grotesque violence.

Dead Alive is a lot of fun, at least for those with strong stomachs (and it's also a welcome reminder of the kind of filmmaker Jackson was before he became all respectable with the Lord of the Rings epics). But Re-Animator—an adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft short story—is on a whole other plane of greatness. The best way I can think to describe this, for those who haven't seen this film yet, is that it is a serious comedy about the fear of death, its outré humor borne out of a genuinely serious consideration of the ways people deal with mortality—especially the possibility of avoiding it, as Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) offers with the shiny green serum he develops. What if you were given a second chance at life? What would you do with it? The answers for some of the re-animated characters here are sometimes outrageously perverse (I sure as heck haven't seen a film in which a live severed head goes down on a naked blonde, have you?), but its morbid undercurrents lend the film a coherence that Dead Alive barely manages (not a knock on the Jackson film, mind you). I wouldn't call Re-Animator disturbing, exactly...but in its own gleefully tasteless way, it's thought-provoking.

One minor quibble with Re-Animator: Are people generally okay with how blatantly derivative of Bernard Herrmann parts of Richard Band's score are? Like, his opening-credits music is pretty obviously a rip-off of Herrmann's Psycho opening; Band doesn't even try to hide it.

Music

★ Scary Monsters (1980, David Bowie)
★ Let's Dance (1983, David Bowie)
As some of you can tell in my previous barebones artistic consumption logs, I've been slowly introducing myself to a good majority of David Bowie's recorded output, at least up to the early 1980s (I hear that it's basically all downhill from Let's Dance onward, so I'm inclined to move on to some other artist at this point...but I'm willing to hear arguments to the contrary). For the most part, it's been an immensely enjoyable and often exhilarating experience, with each album a true musical adventure, for well and ill. These two latest "adventures" aren't quite on the exalted plane of my two personal favorite Bowie albums, Station to Station (1976) and Low (1977), but they all have their moments of brilliance. In fact, "Ashes to Ashes," from Scary Monsters, may well be my favorite Bowie song ever, if only because I find it a rather disturbing song underneath its whimsical oddball surface, especially towards the end, with the arrangement laying on a foreboding bass synthesizer as Bowie's voice, enhanced with a halo-like effect, repeatedly intones, "My mother said to get things done / You'd better not mess with Major Tom." Sounds like an ominous children's nursery rhyme, that. Weird and wonderful: That's Bowie in a nutshell. (Maybe now would be a good time to rewatch The Man Who Fell to Earth, which I found generally boring when I saw it at Film Forum earlier his year...)

New York Film Festival 2011, "Confused Young Girls" Edition

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

My latest New York Film Festival dispatch couples together two films I saw at Toronto International Film Festival: Sean Durkin's tense debut feature Martha Marcy May Marlene and Mia Hansen-Løve's warm and wise third film Goodbye First Love. At first, the only reason I decided to bunch these two together was because I had previously seen them in Toronto; as I started writing this piece, however, I realized that there are some other similarities connecting them—most notably, the fact that both films feature young female heroines under duress, whether extreme in the case of the former or universal in the case of the latter. Similar or not, both are very much worth seeing.

(Both of them have theatrical distribution, by the way, so you won't have to pay, like, $24 to see them in upcoming public screenings. But, hey, far be it from me to discourage you from giving money over to the Film Society of Lincoln Center and their New York Film Festival! Without them, I wouldn't be keeping busy right now and keeping my mind off my stagnant professional career and all that!)

New York Film Festival 2011: Catching Up on Some Links

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

I've fallen behind on linking you all to my recent contributions to The House Next Door's New York Film Festival coverage, so...if you haven't seen them already thanks to my links to them on my Twitter and Facebook pages, here are my reviews of Two Years at Sea, the hypnotic first feature film of British avant-garde filmmaker Ben Rivers; and a dual review of German director Ulrich Köhler's so-so anti-imperialist screed Sleeping Sickness and Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's slow but rewarding police procedural Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

Enjoy! I have three more films to review, and then I'll be done with this year's New York Film Festival. Home stretch, baby!

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.