Archive for January, 2008
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
Jennifer Phang’s Sundance Frontier entry Half-Life received something of a critical honor recently when producer Mike Ryan, whose thoughtful and passionate reviews can be found at the new Hammer To Nail, cited the film as his favorite of the 34 he saw at this year’s festival.
An excerpt:
We often see an art film that may leap around in perspective, mostly for rhetorical or comic effect, but it is truly rare to be carried emotionally through a film that tells a multi-perspective story through a seamless integration of naturalistic action, animation and self consciously artificial CGI compositing. Half-Life exists on a whole other, higher level of cinematic ambition than any other film at Sundance this year. It is formally inventive, deeply personal and emotionally compelling, all on a tiny indie budget! This is ambitious indie filmmaking at its best!
For more with Phang, check out this interview with her appearing on the KCPW Sundance podcast.
As a side note, Half-Life was one of two Park City films that received mentorship and support from the IFP Rough Cut Labs. The other was Tom Quinn’s The New Year’s Parade, which won the Grand Prize at Slamdance.… Read the rest
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
Over the next eleven days, Anthology Film Archives, in association with Yale University, is hosting the first serious stateside retrospective of Olivier Assayas, one of the most consistently daring Gallic auteurs working today. He’ll be at Yale today having tea with students and introducing the first American screening of his Boarding Gate, which played Cannes last year to mixed notices. Tomorrow he’ll sit down with Kent Jones of Film Comment, one of the first American critics to recognize Assayas’ work, for a long public chat before heading to Manhattan to introduce Irma Vep at Saturday night’s Anthology screening.
It’s poised to be a terrific month at the little downtown repository for Avant-Garde and other forms of non-pasteurized cinema. Right on the heels of the ten day Assayas retro, Anthology plays host to a Charles Burnett retrospective, featuring not only the recently rereleased Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding, but his forays into early 90s indiewood, To Sleep With Anger and The Glass Shield. Also on tap are a number of shorts spanning his entire career, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, his part doc part experimental deconstruction of the myths surrounding the slave rebellion leader, and an extremely rare revival of Billy Woodberry’s 1983 feature, Bless Their Little Hearts, which Burnett shot for his UCLA classmate and friend.… Read the rest
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
On the 25th anniversary of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Cinemart, the prize for the “best project” has gone to Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, a follow-up to her The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema which also features philosopher Slajov Zizek. The award comes with a cash prize of 10,000 euros, which one guest at the party tonight quipped would be about equal to the film’s first clip license.
Here’s Variety’s wrap-up of the event, and below is a clip from Fiennes’s previous collaboration with Zizek.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
If you just bookmark this blog page and don’t check the main site, head over there so as not to miss professor and critic Ray Carney’s essay on Aaron Katz’s Quiet City, which hits DVD stores this week.… Read the rest
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker, premiering here in Rotterdam, is Barbara Caspar’s thoughtful and creative film biography/essay on the late writer, whose formally inventive novels, published from the ’70s through the mid-90s, challenged assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and the literary canon. A beguiling and intensely contradictory figure, Acker is best known for books which creatively appropriated texts from Great White Male writers, retelling them in an emotionally raw, sexually blunt, and politically questioning female voice. And with her appearance in several conceptual art videos in the ’70s, her close-cropped dyed blond hair, her tattoos and her piercings, Acker was also performance artist, proto riot grrl, and living link to the transgressive authors of the ’50s and ’60s U.S. and French experimental fiction scenes. Acker died of breast cancer in 1997 and now, just over ten years later, Caspar has made a film that captures the essence of both Acker the writer and Acker the person while arguing convincingly for the continuing relevance of her work today.
Caspar includes a lot of the conventions of the artist bio-doc — interviews with friends and associates, archival footage, etc. — in a film that covers in broad strokes the different eras of Acker’s life. There’s a lot here that I didn’t know, from those conceptual art videos to her quite vanilla (and short-lived) marriage when she was 20. Perhaps one of the strengths of the doc is that I didn’t think about what is left out, like some of her key relationships (her marriage to the composer Peter Gordon is not included here) and artistic endeavors (like her large-scale theatrical collaboration with Gordon, Richard Foreman, and David Salle, The Birth of a Poet) until the next day. In fact, Caspar doesn’t discuss Acker’s books with any great degree of specificity. She’s all about capturing the broad strokes of Acker’s ideas as well as conveying to the viewer the galvanizing, seductive and complicated nature of her persona. Caspar includes discussion of Acker’s attraction to sexual masochism, the plagiarism charges against her, and her willful but misguided attempt to beat cancer by … Read the rest
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
The Four Eyed Monsters filmmaker is offering a handshake and a hug to the perpetrator if his stuff is returned.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
Over at her Thompson on Hollywood blog, Ann Thompson posts an email she received from indie producer and former distributor Jonathan Dana about “the surfeit of Sundance acquisition titles, many of which remain unsold at fest’s end.” He breaks the indie sphere down into three sections, from the studio specialty titles down to the out-of-nowhere surprises, and concentrates his commentary on the middle sphere, the professionally produced films with name actors that are financed by new money largely based on their presumed marketability. It’s worth a read.… Read the rest
Monday, January 28th, 2008
The following essay by Ray Carney on Aaron Katz’s Quiet City accompanies a 2-disc DVD release from Benten Films out this week of Quiet City and Katz’s first film, Dance Party, USA.
Mainstream film is so much an art of the maximum – the biggest, the flashiest, the fastest, the most exaggerated – that it is easy to forget that the great films all go in the opposite direction. They are, almost without exception, triumphs of minimalism. They rely on subtlety, understatement, indirection, and simplification. In Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law, and Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch sets long sections of each work in almost empty rooms. In Femme Douce and L’Argent, Robert Bresson silences his characters to such an extent that room tone and traffic noises become more important than what the characters say to each other. In Joan of Arc and Gertrud, Carl Dreyer immobilizes his actors and actually prevents them from “acting” by insisting that they talk in conversational tones even at moments of high drama. But the effect of these acts of reduction is the opposite of a feeling of emptiness or depletion. As is so often the case in art, less is more. When physical distractions, editorial razzle dazzle, and actorly scenery chewing are removed, the smallest sounds, gestures, and tones of voice become of colossal importance. When everything that is non–essential is pared away, anything that remains is deepened and enriched.
The patron saint of Aaron Katz’s Quiet City is another practitioner of cinematic minimalism, Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. As Ozu did, Katz organizes his film around shots of trains, stations, and platforms, and inserts repeated “pause points” between his short scenes – moments in which the narrative simply is switched off, and the viewer is left contemplating shots of city skylines, trees, buildings, and light posts.
Katz’s insertion of these static shots may seem like a trivial stylistic device, but it has enormous consequences. The periodic rest stops change everything. They drain away narrative impetus and energy. The dragster accelerations of American narrative are sent crashing into … Read the rest
Monday, January 28th, 2008
There were a number of teen angst movies this past year — Eagle vs. Shark, Superbad — but the one I thought brought the most originality to a very watered down genre was Jeffrey Blitz‘s Rocket Science, and seeing it again just reaffirms my belief. Armed with great writing, a humorous yet sensitive performance by the talented Reece Daniel Thompson as the film’s unorthodox lead Hal Hefner, and an amazing score by Clem Snide frontman Eef Barzelay, the film is a smart and funny look at the awkward high school years.
The film begins with ace debater Ben (Nicholas D’Agosto) cruising to win the New Jersey state championship when he abruptly stops in mid-sentence, crushing the dreams of his teammate/girlfriend, Ginny (Anna Kendrick). Across town things also go silent at the Hefner household as Hal’s father walks out on them. These two separate incidents starts Hal’s journey to young adulthood, and finding his own voice.
And Hal needs a voice. Along with being unpopular, he has a stutter which makes it hard for him to order what he wants for lunch let alone joining the debate team, which he does after Ginny offers him a chance to join the team. Hal builds up the nerve to do it, mostly because he wants to get in her pants.
Ginny shows Hal the ropes of debating leading up to them teaming up at a regional tournament. This is where the film takes off as Hal realizes he’s been duped by Ginny as she transfers to a rival school leaving Hal to fend for himself and leading to a hilarious scene where he tries to speak in an accent to overcome his stutter at the tournament. Later he gets drunk and bikes to Ginny’s house looking for payback while Clem Snide plays in the background. Once the haze lifts Hal realizes the only way to get back at Ginny is to team up with Ben to win states.
Blitz, whose previous film was the popular doc Spellbound, creates a well polished narrative, filled with … Read the rest
Monday, January 28th, 2008
Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 24, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Ray Pride interviewed Once writer-director John Carney and lead Glen Hansard for the Spring ’07 issue. Once is nominated for Best Original Song for “Falling Slowly” (Music and Lyric by Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova).
When Baz Luhrmann was promoting his musical phantasmagoria Moulin Rouge, I asked him how far you could go in the other direction — could a film musical consist simply of a couple coming together and moving apart? His advice was this: “It’s the song, and the song is a dance.” In John Carney’s limber long-player Once, several songs suggest a life, a small, wonderful world consisting of a few Dublin haunts where an unnamed street corner performer, or busker (Glen Hansard), and an unnamed younger Czech woman (Markéta Irglová), who has a winsomely resourceful command of English, meet, tease, learn but mostly, with eyes wide open, develop a mature relationship deepened by the dance of several songs, including the gorgeous “Falling Slowly,” which the extremely affable and charming pair convincingly “compose” in front of us.
In traditional narrative terms, Once is the slightest of artifacts, and yet it possesses a quiet integrity and charm, with undercurrents about all manner of human boundaries, offering lessons in how simply a tale can be told. Shot in two weeks in unprepossessingly fuzzy high definition for only $100,000 (which looks only Mini DV grade, truth be told), Once is a grand, effortless Irish musical povera, written and directed by Carney, who was for several years in the fine band The Frames, along with star-composer Glen Hansard. Carney works some very sophisticated insights about the representation of music on film and also how one walks, talks, lives, breathes, stumbles, fumbles, and triumphs while trying to fashion any form of art. Layers peel away, their preconceptions of each other (and ours of them) fall away, and Hansard’s music, as urgent and lovely as ever, grows in collaboration with someone … Read the rest
