Cineholla Collective: Cullen's Blog

"The Moonlighter" (1953)

2010-04-15T17:29:00.000-07:00

"The third pairing of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray finds the duo in the midst of a messy, 3-D oater written by Niven Busch, whose novel The Furies had been adapted into the 1950 film also starring Stanwyck, a far superior film than this dusty reunion proves to be. Problems arise as soon as the credits finish rolling, with MacMurray reprising his hardboiled sneer for a voice-over narration that reminds of Double Indemnity but with none of the pulpy bite. He is in jail for “moonlighting,” that is, roping and stealing cattle by moonlight. While the crime wins the respect of many for the necessary lassoing skills, it angers even more. As he calmly chain-smokes on his bed, a lynch mob gathers outside his cell intent on putting a noose around his neck..."

Read my full review of The Moonlighter here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Janet Gaynor at MoMA and Film Forum

2010-04-01T09:34:00.001-07:00

"For a decade she was one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors, but in the seventy years since she retired from the limelight, Janet Gaynor’s legacy has been overshadowed by the work of her collaborators, her contemporaries, and especially her two best directors: F.W. Murnau and Frank Borzage, both of them visual stylists of the highest caliber. The very characteristics that endeared her to audiences—her delicate charm, and an innocence seemingly out of place with the Jazz Age that created her—may also provide clues as to why she has gone overlooked and underappreciated in the annals of film history. Her wholesome image doesn’t fit the loose girdles and looser morals of Pre-Code Hollywood that modern audiences are eating up these days. However, two current screenings—a three-day matinee run of Borzage’s Street Angel (1928) at the Museum of Modern Art (3/31-4/2) as part of their Auteurist History of Film series, and a weeklong residency of Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) in a new 35mm print at Film Forum (4/2-4/8)—remind us of Gaynor’s reticent grace, in twoand how integral her performance was to both of these masterpieces of the silent screen..."

Read my full essay on Janet Gaynor here at The L Magazine.

No Blade of Grass (1970)

2010-02-08T08:20:00.000-08:00

Directed by Hollywood actor-turned-filmmaker Cornel Wilde, and scripted by Wilde and Sean Forestal from John Christopher’s novel, No Blade of Grass is a distopic narrative of an ecological crisis that leads to the fall of civilization. A mysterious virus is destroying grass all around the world, causing a global panic over food shortage. Crops are in short supply. Cattle are drowned in rivers when there is nothing left for them to eat. Man-made pollution has contaminated rivers and poisoned fish. Bombs are being dropped on cities in order to deplete the population to sustainable levels. In London, citizens get word of the impending extermination and overthrow the government. In the midst of chaos, one-eyed veteran John Custance and scientist Roger Burnham flee with their families to the country in search of John’s brother’s farm, a haven that promises food, shelter, and hope.

Read my full review of No Blade of Grass here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Taken (2008)

2010-02-01T08:13:00.001-08:00

While the xenophobic anxiety of Americans abroad isn’t a new subject (even Alfred Hitchcock approached the topic in his 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much), it’s difficult to watch certain scenes in Taken without thinking of contemporary parallels. It is moments like these in which the politics of action heroism reveal their hidden complexity. With the line between “good guy” and “bad guy” blurred, we allow the action hero to cross certain moral boundaries that would otherwise be prohibited.

Read my full review of Taken here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

James Whale at Film Forum

2009-12-09T20:45:00.000-08:00

A special case needs to be made for James Whale. Though not exactly forgotten—a pair of genre-defining horror masterpieces (Frankenstein and The Invisible Man) and two satires (The Old Dark House and Bride of Frankenstein) have kept him in circulation—he is certainly misremembered. Instead of the easily definable horror-auteur that history would prefer, Whale was an artist of many mediums (theater, cinema, painting, drawing), genres and sensibilities, but the unavailability of the majority of his body of work, either in theatrical revivals or on home video, has prevented audiences from fully understanding him. Encompassing the full range of Whale's style, from gothic to modern and screwball to macabre, Film Forum's 16-film retrospective will do much to restore the director's lopsided legacy.

Read my full essay on James Whale here at The L Magazine.

M. Hulot's Holiday (1953)

2009-11-18T06:27:00.000-08:00

Simply put, Jacques Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday (1953) is one of the most delightful cinematic experiences I have ever encountered, and it is now showing at Film Forum in a restored 35mm print. Like the film's infectious, amiable theme song—whose breezy melody fluidly passes from saxophone to guitar to vibes to piano without interrupting the phrasing—Tati, his camera and his on-screen alter-ego Hulot flit amongst the beachfront tourists like a fellow vacationer. With his perennial floppy hat and a pipe protruding from his lips, Hulot putters into town in his rustbucket and proceeds to join his compatriots in an attempt to enjoy some rest and relaxation under the sun.

Read my full review of M. Hulot's Holiday here at The L Magazine.

Migrating Forms' Half-Inch Half-Life: "Tracy the Outlaw" (1928)

2009-11-13T16:33:00.000-08:00

This past summer, I was invited to participate in Migrating Forms' Half-Inch Half-Life, self-described as "a semi-intimate, public viewing room showcasing a 43-hour marathon of selections from the personal VHS archives of artists, critics, curators, scholars and other devotees to the medium, on a large, media-appropriate television set." My contribution was a rare VHS tape of Tracy the Outlaw. Below are my program notes which accompanied the exhibition.

Tracy the Outlaw is a silent Western from 1928. An independent production by Foto Art Productions, it doesn’t look like most movies we remember from that same year – it neither has the artistic touches of Victor Sjostrom’s The Wind, the stylizations of The Docks of New York, or any of the technical or narrative proficiency that was the Hollywood standard by that time. And that’s exactly why Tracy the Outlaw is important: Hollywood isn’t everything, and outside of it were independent producers and distributors, making raw, unkempt, flawed, and wonderful movies.

But lacking stars, polish, prestige, and any sort of critical status, Tracy the Outlaw isn’t likely to make any appearances at revival houses, or even in history books. It’s a miracle that it was even brought to VHS (and in a pretty decent print) by Videobrary, one of many companies during the 1980s-1990s who specialized in overlooked niches of early cinema, including B-Westerns. There was also Sinister Cinema, Hollywood’s Attic, Nostalgia Family, and Grapevine, to name just a few. (The last two are still around, releasing material on DVD.) There was something special about those small VHS distributors – some sort of magic that seems to be lost in the age of internet. When I was 12, I ordered a video from Facets in Chicago, and suddenly I began receiving black-and-white photocopied catalogs and typewritten lists of old movies on VHS. They were coming from small towns in Maine like Thomaston. I have no clue how I got on this mailing list circuit, but I was flooded with titles I had never heard about. Sadly, I never kept them, as I’d love to see all the great movies I passed up on because of lack of access/information.

But now many of those companies are gone. I no longer receive those wonderful lists. Once in a while, I come across a trove of old Grapevine releases, or some other company. That’s how I found Tracy the Outlaw – three dollars, stuck on a shelf between such other potential gems as Ghost Patrol (a sci-fi Western from 1936) and Border Romance (a musical Western about fugitives from 1929) (both films were released by Sinister Cinema, by the way). The audience for these films was probably small when they came out, and it’s only dwindled in the passing decades. No major home video distributor would ever take these on – the chance of making a profit would be slim. That’s why Grapevine, Videobrary, and all those other companies were – and continue to be – so vital.

The Samuel Fuller Collection

2009-11-13T16:28:00.000-08:00

Samuel Fuller's movies are equal parts street corner and gutter, a combination of two-inch-headline journalistic hullabaloo and pulp poetics. Andrew Sarris called him "an authentic American primitive," while Dana Polan described him as "the opposite of graceful; his style seems to suggest that in a world where grace provides little redemption, its utilization would be a kind of lie." This one-of-a-kind, immediately recognizable persona is on full display in Sony's seven disc box set The Samuel Fuller Collection, which pulls together seven hard-to-find films that the cigar-chomping filmmaker was involved in, none of which were previously available on DVD...

Read my full review of The Samuel Fuller Collection here at The L Magazine.

Death In the Garden (1956)

2009-11-06T10:15:00.000-08:00

A drifter, a prostitute, a priest, a miner, and his deaf-mute daughter walk into a South American jungle. It sounds like the start of a joke, but it happens to be the set-up for Luis Buñuel's anti-colonialist adventure-satire Death in the Garden (1956), just out on DVD from Microcinema International. When Chark (Georges Marchal, of Buñuel's Belle de Jour and The Milky Way) stumbles through a town square past a firing squad, he finds himself in the midst of a revolution.

Read my full review of Death in the Garden here at The L Magazine.

Interview with Vagabond, director of "Machetero"

2009-10-28T16:58:00.000-07:00

Machetero, which screens this Thursday, Oct. 29 at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival, is a film whose guerrilla production matches both the film's visual aesthetic and its narrative. It tells two stories concurrently: one in which imprisoned revolutionary Pedro Taino (Not4Prophet) is interviewed by a journalist (Jarmush regular Isaach De Bankolé, pictured), and the other about the political awakening of a young man (Kelvin Fernandez) on the streets of New York. As directed and written by Vagabond, Machetero's radical politics extend to the film's non-linear narrative, and its use of on-screen titles, foregrounding the revolutionary literature passed amongst the characters, as well as lyrics from the soundtrack by the NYC-based band Ricanstruction (of which Not4Prophet is the lead singer). Recently, I spoke to Vagabond about the film's intersections of art and politics.

Could you say a little about the word "Machetero," where it comes from, and why you chose it as your title?
The direct Spanish translation of the word "machetero" is someone who works with a machete. However, there is a cultural definition to the word that is unique to Puerto Rico. The "Macheteros" were sugarcane field workers who fought against Spanish colonial rule, and when the US invaded Puerto Rico in 1898 during the Spanish-American war, they fought against the Americans as well. In the late 1960s, Puerto Rican independence leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios started a clandestine armed organization called "Ejercito Popular Boricua" ("Popular Puerto Rican Army"). Puerto Ricans throughout the Diaspora called them "Macheteros".

The title of the film comes from a saying the Macheteros had, "¡Todo Boricua Machetero!" ("All Puerto Ricans Are Machetero!") which connected Puerto Ricans to their revolutionary past. When I thought more about that saying, it seemed to me that what the EPB was trying to do was to create this idea of the Machetero as warrior and protector of the Puerto Rican people in much the same way that the Samurai is in Japan.

Read the full interview here at The L Magazine.

Black Rain (1989)

2009-10-22T07:42:00.000-07:00

It seems grossly obvious to lump adjectives like "haunting" and "harrowing" onto Imamura's narrative about Hiroshima survivors dealing with bodily and psychological strain in the aftermath, particularly when the film is most affecting when it is least direct. The opening sequence of the bomb dropping is undeniably powerful, but the simple shot of black rain landing on a young girl's face is even more so. Restraining even reticence, Imamura cuts the shot short, limiting the possibility of catharsis through the symbolic image. What is shown on the surface is never so important as what is not, Imamura suggests throughout the movie, and that the most devastating wounds are those beyond visibility...

Read my full review of Black Rain here at The L Magazine.

Daniel and Abraham (2009)

2009-10-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

Typically, when we speak of film as a collaborative art form we mean that the production process involves so many people (be it dozens or hundreds) that, at some level, assigning individual credit is insufficient and misleading. No one element in a completed film exists on its own: always it is interacting with other sights, sounds, and processes. Daniel and Abraham takes this notion of collaboration to an ambitious, minimalist extreme. The entire crew of this feature film consists of three people: director Ryan Eslinger, and the film’s sole actors David Williams and Gary Lamadore. All three shared writing duties, as well as all the other behind-the-scenes responsibilities. However, this stripped-down, DIY production style makes for more than just an interesting back-story to relate in interviews and post-screening Q&As. Instead, it’s an ironic counterpoint to the film’s narrative of deep-seated mistrust and human disconnection. The intense participation and investment of the makers comes through loud and clear on-screen.

Read my full review of Daniel and Abraham here at Hammer to Nail.

Interview with Charles Silver

2009-10-16T13:08:00.000-07:00

Last month, the Museum of Modern Art embarked on one of its most ambitious and exciting film series in recent years, An Auteurist History of Film. Curated by Charles Silver, the two-year-plus series takes as its organizational principle the Auteur Theory (which posits the director as the primary author of a film), and aims to cover pre-cinema (such as “magic lanterns” and other early visual and photographic technologies) all the way to the present day. The breadth of its programming is highly promising, with opportunities to revisit and reevaluate more canonical works, as well the chance to see long-neglected and often non-commercially available films (such as Benjamin Christensen’s The Mysterious X from 1914). Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Charles Silver about the guiding principles of his latest series, as well changes in the New York City film scene over the past several decades.

The L Magazine: What was the motivation for doing this series now?
Charles Silver: It seems like as good a time as any. I’ve been at The Museum of Modern Art for almost 39 years now, and I’ve been going to the movies for close to 60 (or maybe more) and I thought it would be good to go back and survey our film archive (which begins in the 1890s and goes up to the present day) and try to define the Auteur theory through the collection. There have been, in the past, other film history cycles at the museum, so it is not totally novel, but I thought that approaching it from the Auteur Theory would make the most coherent expression of film history, at least up until the point that the studios broke down, and we had films really by committees and computers. It is hard to argue that a lot of current movies could be the expression of individual artists although I think there are many exceptions.

Read my full interview with Charles Silver at The L Magazine.

Mother (2009)

2009-10-16T06:28:00.000-07:00

Bong Joon-ho’s films have been characterized by bizarre humor (Barking Dogs Don’t Bite) tinged with dark political commentary (Memories of Murder) in the guise of cross-genre experiments (The Host). Bong’s fourth feature, Mother, continues this trend, and while its examination of (in)justice bears certainly similarities to his second movie, Memories of Murder, it is by no means a repetition. As his latest film shows, Bong able to hit all the notes that audiences have come to expect in his movies while still developing his narrative techniques and visual aesthetic.

Read my full review of Mother here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Marlene (1984)

2009-10-14T13:36:00.001-07:00

Marlene is not your typical non-fiction celebrity portrait—and really, how could it be when your "star" refuses to appear on-camera? Dietrich herself admits that "Documentary is a thing that connects the voices that are talking," so what happens when that seemingly crucial connection is severed? Schell uses this disjunction between sound and image to explore the star persona of "Diectrich" to see what, if anything, it reveals of the "real" Dietrich that she so desperately tried to hide from the camera.

Read my full review of Marlene here at The L Magazine.

Crossroads of Youth (1934)

2009-10-07T11:59:00.001-07:00

Viewing Crossroads of Youth in its intended presentation format, the way Korean audiences would have when it originally premiered in 1934, was like encountering an entirely different art form. All that I thought I knew about how to watch silent cinema—forgiving improper frame rates that make the actors’ movement cartoonish, or understanding that live accompaniment may have differed not only from theater to theater, but from performance to performance at the same venue—was not sufficient to prepare me for how to take in the wide array of sights and sounds—yes, sounds—of this special New York Film Festival screening.

Read my full review of Crossroads of Youth here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Munyurangabo (2007)

2009-10-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

I first saw Lee Isaac Chung's Munyurangabo (2007) at New Directors/New Films in 2008, and was struck both by the film's reticent morality as well as by Chung's subtle yet perceptive direction. Considering its political context (the cultural memory of genocide in Rwanda), the film could have easily flown off in the direction of heavy-handed earnestness. Instead, Chung managed to reign in "the message" and focus more on a narrative that is hauntingly empathetic in its exploration of cultural clashes, without giving in to easy answers or reductive symbolism. For the work of first-time filmmaker working with non-professional actors and improvising scenes based on a brief scenario in a language he doesn't speak, it's extremely impressive that Munyurangabo is as nuanced and discerning as it is, in both its political content and cinematic sensibility.

Read my full review of Munyurangabo here at The L Magazine.

The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

2009-10-06T21:12:00.001-07:00

Literary adaptations for the silent screen pose certain difficulties. Limited to intertitles and images, how then to cinematically “translate” text-based literature onto the screen without turning the movie into an illustrated manuscript? For an author like Edgar Allan Poe, there is the issue of not only plot, but also the cadence of his language, which gives so much flavor and atmosphere to the stories. For his film of The Fall of the House of Usher, Jean Epstein took a bold approach, not so much following Poe’s directly as moving parallel to it, using cinema’s distinct capabilities to create something analogous to what Poe was doing with language. As Jean-André Fieschi wrote of Epstein, “he is less interested in the expressive possibilities of visual writing than in a certain degree of autonomy pertaining to it.”

Read my full review of The Fall of the House of Usher here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Wild Grass (2009)

2009-10-03T15:38:00.000-07:00

The ever-playful Resnais continually reinvents his movie throughout the story’s progression (quite literally up until the last frame, with a truly bizarre final shot!) with red herrings, plot reversals, false endings, and other sudden tonal shifts. At age 87, and with over sixty years of directing behind him, Resnais is still one step ahead of the audience, and his filmmaking remains as vigorous and youthful as ever.

Read my full review of Wild Grass here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Police, Adjective (2009)

2009-10-01T23:31:00.000-07:00

One of the great ironies of the detective-centered plot is that, more often than not, it is the observer who is being observed. And not just by other characters in the narrative, but primarily by us, whether we are watching a movie or television show, or reading a pulp yarn. From the Continental Op to Veronica Mars, it has been the detectives themselves more than their cases that have commanded our attention. It is this attraction that is under scrutiny in Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, a movie that bends, as much as it obeys, the genre’s conventions.

Read my full review of Police, Adjective here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Daughter of Darkness (1948) and Burke and Hare (1972)

2009-09-30T12:50:00.000-07:00

UK-based distributor Salvation Films have just unveiled two new-to-DVD releases on their Redemption USA line: Daughter of Darkness> (1948) and Burke and Hare (1972). While both share a debt to Val Lewton's less-is-more B-horror productions (the former to Cat People [1942] and the latter to The Body Snatcher [1945]), neither is merely imitative. Instead, they diverge from their forerunners in distinctive, and often eccentric, ways, culminating in works that at once pay tribute to their roots but also stand apart.

Read my full reviews here at The L Magazine.

Sweetgrass (2009)

2009-09-28T20:01:00.000-07:00

Is Sweetgrass even a movie about sheep? Not in the sense that March of the Penguins is about penguins. There’s hardly a frame in Sweetgrass without a specimen of Ovis aries bleating, grazing, or even gazing into the camera, yet the educational and didactic rhetoric that typically characterizes entries in the “animal documentary” genre is noticeably absent. Diverging from the cutesy aesthetics that made Luc Jacquet’s penguin exposé an accessible, international hit, filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor taken a far more empirical approach. There is no voice-over narration or “talking head” commentary, and until the very end of the movie there are no explanatory intertitles, either. Instead, they have crafted an ambient narrative in the cinéma vérité tradition that demands patient observation from the audience, but also rewards their attentiveness...

Read my full review of Sweetgrass here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Private Century (2006-2008)

2009-09-24T21:47:00.001-07:00

Originally an eight-part miniseries for Czech television, Sikl's cycle recollects the history of Czechoslovakia throughout the twentieth century by using different families' home movies with narration based on memoirs, diaries, and interviews with surviving friends and family. Each episode tells a distinctive story (though a couple are related), and together they form a powerful alternative to any notion of an official history that privileges politicians and isolated demographics. Instead, the only milestones celebrated here are births, first loves, family gatherings and other minutiae that capture joys both banal and transcendent. The tragedies, however, are inexorably linked to the larger political climate, and Sikl's microcosms bring much-needed specificity to the ambiguities of history's annals.

Read my full review of Private Century here at The L Magazine.

The Saragossa Manuscript (1965)

2009-09-24T05:57:00.000-07:00

Like Russian matryoshka dolls, The Saragossa Manuscript is an incessant parade of narratives-within-narratives-within-narratives (and still more). Minor characters overtake the role of narrator, interrupting one story in order to tell their own, which is inevitably interrupted by the start of another story from another narrator. Igniting this labyrinthine progression is the chance encounter between two soldiers of opposing sides during the Napoleanic Wars, both of whom momentarily bond over a dusty, antiquated volume that, as it turns out, recollects the adventures of one of their grandfathers, Captain Alphonse van Worden. Such is the first of many leaps back and forth through time and space.

Read my full review of The Saragossa Manuscript here at The L Magazine.

Paradise (2009)

2009-09-24T05:55:00.000-07:00

Michael Almereyda’s Paradise begins with a slow tracking shot taken from a moving walkway in an airport. It’s a contradiction of movement and stasis: the camera and its holder are completely still, yet the ground beneath them perpetually propels them forward. Later in the movie, a character will comment that they love natural disasters because they “like that the earth is changing and moving.” Even the modernist architecture of the passageway—cool and steely lines converging in a distant vanishing point and whose hues fluidly shift from blue to green to purple—lends an aura of science-fiction to the shot, as though we are more than moving through a single corridor, but traveling beyond the liminal boundaries of our everyday world.

Read my full review of Paradise here at Hammer to Nail.

Foolish Wives (1922)

2009-09-09T20:34:00.000-07:00

Foolish Wives is less a comedy than a mockery, taking as its targets the moral underpinnings of society; the sanctity of marriage; love’s purity; masculinity; femininity; and, of course, the aristocratic elite. A cursory glance at von Stroheim’s filmography reveals these as reoccurring preoccupations: compulsive concerns that the director never tired of holding a mirror up to and revealing the hypocrisy that lay beneath a virtuous façade. Von Stroheim’s laughter is sadistic. He derives pleasure from exposing the fraudulent virtues of others, even though he, more than anyone, is complicit in the widespread corruption.

Read my full review of Foolish Wives here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Oh, the Depravity! The Cinema of Erich von Stroheim

2009-09-09T20:32:00.000-07:00

What remains of an artist, his career, or his work, after having endured so many detours, disappointments, and derailings? Titles changed, credit revoked, productions halted, scenes reshot by other directors, and the humiliation of being thrown off the set of your own movie. These are but a smattering of the setbacks encountered by Erich von Stroheim throughout his directorial career, which began with a bang in 1919 and ended with a whimper in 1933 with a film that bore no mention of his name. All of this makes von Stroheim’s status as an auteur at once obvious and problematic. Few directors before him were as gung-ho about artistry and authorship (his name proliferates the credits of his films, leaving no question as to whom is the true creator); fewer dared to cause the scandals that he did, pushing the buttons of censors and studios past the point of compromise; and no one had their films as distorted (sometimes released incomplete) as Erich von Stroheim...

Read my full essay "Oh, the Depravity! The Cinema of Erich von Stroheim" here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, qui du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

2009-09-09T20:30:00.000-07:00

A minimalist explosion of aesthetic and political rage, there's never been anything quite like Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, qui du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) either before or since. At first glance the film, new on a Criterion DVD, may resemble a fusion of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michael Fengler's Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970) and John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence (1974), the former a timebomb of middle-class ennui and the latter an expression of gender-binding anxiety in the suburbs. It's true, Jeanne Dielman hits these marks, but the 25-year-old director takes these themes to a radical, transcendent extreme...

Read my full review of Jeanne Dielman, 23, qui du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles here at The L Magazine.

Gaumont Treasures: 1897-1913 (Kino)

2009-09-09T20:29:00.001-07:00

The history of film is anything but set in stone. New discoveries, much-needed restorations and increased availability often change our perspective on topics long since thought to be behind us. The most exciting and intriguing part of Kino's new 3-DVD box set Gaumont Treasures: 1897-1913 isn't the work of either of the already celebrated filmmakers—Alice Guy (among the very first women filmmakers) or Louis Feuillade (the stylized master of series such as Les Vampires and Judex)—but a relatively obscure name whose films have been absent from shelves, and whose legacy has unfortunately been overlooked: Léonce Perret.

Read my full review of Gaumont Treasures: 1897-1913 here at The L Magazine.

Husbands (1970)

2009-09-09T20:27:00.000-07:00

Husbands is an essential companion piece to A Woman Under the Influence, made four years later. To see one without the other is to get only half of the story of domestic discontent pushed to its limits. Just as Gena Rowlands's Mabel of A Woman Under the Influence is frustrated and unfulfilled by her role as the stay-at-home mom who alternately waits for husband and kids to come home, the male trio at the core of Husbands are equally dissatisfied by the strict gender binary which has written out their role for them with little room for agency or expression. They are alienated from their wives and children, disconnected from their friends, and living only for "the job" and nothing else...

Read my full review of John Cassavetes' Husbands here at The L Magazine.

Woman on the Beach (2006)

2009-09-09T20:24:00.000-07:00

What is remarkable about Hong’s directorial style is its directness. In this digital age, where the influence of technology over movies is so controversial, Hong seems to speak to a different sensibility. His style is sparse: that compositions seem natural seems to be the most important thing. What one notices in Woman on the Beach is a lack of stylized lighting, obvious color schemes, extreme high or low camera angles, fast cutting and special effects. Hong favors an unobtrusive camera, using long-takes to best capture the relaxed performances of his actors, with light zooming or panning in order to re-frame the action or pay particularly close attention to an actor...

Read my full review of Hong Sang-Soo's Woman on the Beach here at Coupe Cinema.

Westward the Women (1951)

2009-08-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

“Only two things in this world that scares me,” confesses Robert Taylor at the start of Westward the Women, “and a good woman is both of them!” As the veteran wagon guide Buck, he will have to confront both of his worst fears in a big way when he is hired by California territory settler Roy Whitman to lead 140 women from Chicago half-way across the country to his settlement, where a community of men are waiting eagerly for wives. This initial impetus for the story seemingly objectifies women to a social commodity — the men need wives to have children, and Whitman’s town relies on this cycle of life in order to prosper. But it is exactly this objectification that the narrative continually rejects and fights against throughout the movie. Much to Buck’s chagrin, his female “passengers” repeatedly transgress stringent gender binding, embracing this westward expansion as both a social and personal journey as well. For this band of women, Manifest Destiny is more than a geographical crusade — it’s about redefining oneself outside the strictures of society.

Read my full review of Westward the Women here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Arizona (1940)

2009-08-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

“Put that money on the table or get ready to feel lead!” orders Phoebe Titus as she holds a shotgun on two lackeys who robbed her the night before. Although played by Jean Arthur (who was known for playing bold, independent female characters that could be both tough and romantic at the same time), this certainly isn’t the same actress we’re familiar with from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, History Is Made at Night or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Gone is the coiffed, good-humored sophisticate that was so endeared by audiences — that Jean Arthur has been replaced by one who’s face is covered in dirt and is clad in jeans, vest and cowboy hat (which is more in tune with Arthur’s performance as Calamity Jane four years earlier in The Plainsman). With the whole saloon at her knees, Phoebe gets her money back with the assistance of newly arrived Peter Muncie, but she could care less that he’s played by the soft-cheeked matinee idol-in-training William Holden. No — her eyes are on retribution and nothing else. “Timmons, take that whip and give Longstreet five of the best lashes you got in you,”she tells the crooks. “Longstreet, you do the same to him. And if either of you eases up, I’ll make it twenty.” Money in hand, Phoebe listens as the whip cracks off-screen. “Harder! That’s more like it.”

Read my full review of Arizona here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

The Gun Woman (1918)

2009-08-17T10:23:00.000-07:00

When we first meet Texas Guinan in The Gun Woman – a character nameless except for the moniker “The Tigress” – she is outside of her saloon at night, lingering half in the shadows, lighting her cigarette. Pre-Dietrich and pre-Noir, Guinan has femme fatale written over every inch of her body — yet this was made in 1918, and it is a Western. The cinematic predecessors that influenced film noir (namely German Expressionist and American hardboiled literature, both of the 1920s) were years away from being developed. Yet there she is, a deadly, dangerous woman, lurking in the darkest corners of the Old West – our lady Tex, “The Gun Woman” herself.

Read my full review of The Gun Woman here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

49-17 (1917)

2009-08-17T10:22:00.001-07:00

In the introduction to his essential and illuminating study The Silent Feminists: America’s First Women Directors, film historian Anthony Slide remarks that during the early days of cinema, “not only were women making films, but contemporary observers were making little of the fact. It was taken for granted that women might direct as often and as well as their male counterparts, and there was no reason to belabor this truth.” In the intervening decades, much of the legacy of women directors in the silent era has been lost or forgotten — films no longer exist and filmmakers’ lives and careers are ambiguous at best. How to reverse this process with so little evidence, and so few films? The release of Ruth Ann Baldwin’s 49-17 on DVD, her second feature film as director from 1917 – and the first known Western to be directed by a woman – was certainly a big step forward towards documenting this history and making it available to the public.

Read my full review of 49-17 here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Women of the West

2009-08-17T10:19:00.000-07:00

Contrary to how it is generally perceived, “The Western” is in no means an exclusively masculine genre. The West wasn’t founded solely by frontiersmen, cattle ranchers and John Ford, and cowboys weren’t the only ones with six-shooters hanging at their side, warming their bellies with whiskey, running the bad boys out of town on their horses, or corralling the livestock as part of a hard day’s work. Women were alongside them, and in some cases in front of them, every step of the way...

Co-written by Jenny Jediny and myself.

Read the full essay at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Rambo (2008)

2009-08-17T10:14:00.000-07:00

The entries in the Rambo series, whether affectionately or derisively, are often referred to not by their original titles, but by the abbreviation “Rambo” plus whatever number film in the cycle they are referring to. Technically, this is only accurate for Rambo III. And while calling the fourth film simply Rambo might make this all the more confusing, the decision is ultimately quite significant. It heralds a new era for the Rambo franchise—a new generation of fans, a new film industry, a new cultural and political climate, and ultimately a new action hero. This is now sixteen years after the release of First Blood, and much more blood has been drawn since then, and many more wrongs committed. To stick by that original title would be to indicate that Rambo hasn’t moved beyond that initial film. But, as evinced by the other entries in the cycle, he clearly has, and throughout Rambo he will continue to change even more because, if anything, this latest film is all about movement, both as an aesthetic choice and narrative motif.

Read my full review of Rambo here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Rambo III (1988)

2009-08-17T10:12:00.000-07:00

Rambo III is a mess—an irreconcilable mélange of the awesome and the absurd, the ridiculous and the serious. Obstructing the narrative is a slew of contradictions and irregularities that break up what is otherwise a reworking of its predecessor, Rambo: First Blood Part II. But for something that tries to follow so closely the path set out by the previous two films, it is a surprisingly distinct entry in the series. I say “surprisingly” not because the other films are so cookie-cutter – in fact, if anything can be said for the Rambo cycle, it is that each entry has its own individual feel and conception of the titular character – but because Rambo emerges as a different entity seemingly against the intentions of filmmakers. Rambo III is an unwieldy beast that offers no easy, clear-cut analysis or summation, and for this the film is at once a headache and a delight, and ultimately an enigma.

Read my full review of Rambo III here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

The Ballad of Little Jo (1993)

2009-08-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

At the very start of The Ballad of Little Jo, Josephine Monaghan finds herself caught in the dichotomous, reactionary web of nineteenth century American morality. Pregnant out of wedlock, her family takes possession of her child and sends her packing. On the road, a traveling salesman picks her up, seemingly engaging her as his assistant only to pawn her off to a couple of violent cowboys who chase her deep into the woods. Escaping, she flees to a local shop but finds hostility instead of sanctuary. Good girls would never get themselves in such a fix, it seems. When Josephine holds a pair of men’s trousers up in front of the mirror, the female shopkeeper warns, “Its against the law to dress improper to your sex.” Rejecting society’s label of “whore” because she wasn’t their idea of a “saint,” Josephine’s only recourse is the ultimate transgression: to cross the gender divide itself, from “Josephine” to “Jo.”

Read my full review of The Ballad of Little Jo here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Dazzle (2009)

2009-08-17T10:08:00.000-07:00

Watching Dazzle, I couldn’t help but thinking of the song “At the Window of Vulnerability.” Most of the (in)action occur by a window; not only does it look out over an Amsterdam street and a river, it also acts as a screen through which a young woman (Georgina Verbaan) projects her own anxiety and guilt. We never see her engage in the world around her, which seems to be one of her biggest problems. Throughout the film, she talks on the phone to a complete stranger (Rutger Hauer), retelling to him the various events she has seen through the window, such as a junkie masturbating in the street or a mouse that commits suicide by leaping into the river. She sees desperation, but is not moved to enact any change herself; contrarily, the open spectacle of need inflicts upon her a great guilt, which she feels is unwarranted. Unable to cope, she reaches out to the stranger on the phone, a doctor in Buenos Aires, who is confronting his own doubts about his profession and his life...

Read my full review of Dazzle here at The L Magazine.

FILM IST. a girl and a gun (2009)

2009-08-17T10:07:00.000-07:00

In the grand tradition of epic poetry, FILM IST. a girl and a gun fuses found footage from cinema’s past and ancient Greek text, by the likes of Sappho, Hesiod and Plato, into 24 frames-per-second of kinetic ecstasy. Combing the vaults of international film archives and the Kinsey Institute, Austrian artist Gustav Deutsch returns to Tribeca with the third installment in his Film ist (“Film is…”) series, bringing to light some of the most entrancing and indelible images of early cinema that you’ve never seen. The spectacles range from purple-tinted bodybuilders to Annie Oakley, nudist athletes to stop-motion flowers that blossom before the camera’s eye, stag film models to gun-toting women. Using the Greek writings as intertitles, Deutsch orchestrates the images into a five-act structure: Genesis, Paradeisos, Eros, Thanatos and Symposion. Within this framework, seemingly disparate images collide, creating a new cinematic world of gods and goddesses...

Read my full review of FILM IST. a girl and a gun here at The L Magazine.

World Nomads: Haiti at The French Institute

2009-08-17T10:05:00.001-07:00

It is only fitting that the French Institute would choose to open its World Nomads: Haiti film series with Jonathan Demme's The Agronomist (2004), a documentary about Jean Dominique, who (among other things) happened to found Haiti's first Cine Club at the French Institute in Port-au-Prince in 1961. Co-curated by Demme with filmmaker David Belle (founder of Ciné Institute, Haiti's film school) and the French Institute's Marie Losier, the series — along with its companion Haitian Documentary Series at The Maysels Institute — makes available a national cinema that has received far too little exposure, either in theaters or on DVD.

Read my full coverage of World Nomads: Haiti here at The L Magazine.

Departures (2008)

2009-08-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

On the one hand, it's obvious why Departures won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. It's overflowing with a familiar cloyingness that won't alienate audiences, and yet there's ample "foreign-ness" to make it appealingly exotic. Recently laid-off Tokyo cellist Masahiro Motoki returns to his hometown with his wife (J-pop superstar Ryoko Hirosue) and secretly begins work as a mortician. Ashamed, he keeps it a secret from her — and, expectedly, she and the town find out and ostracize him.

But then there's the influence of Juzo Itami's uncouth, bodily humor, which exerts itself in Depatures through Motoki's boss, played by Tsutomu Yamazaki of Itami's Tampopo and The Funeral. Whether slobbering over fried chicken, making off-color jokes about rotting corpses or using Motoki as a "human model" for the ritualistic preparation of the body (which includes stuffing gauze in unwanted areas), Yamazaki brings a much-needed inappropriateness to the film. His zest for pervy unpretentiousness does not go unappreciated.

Originally published in The L Magazine.

The Outfit (1973)

2009-08-17T10:02:00.000-07:00

Robert Duvall plays Parker (here called Macklin) with an understated hardboiled demeanor. No cracking wise here — Duvall understands that he is playing a businessman whose cool head and emotionless disconnect isn't a sign of sociopathy but of his integrity. After foiling a hitman's attempt on his life, Macklin discovers that an organization known as The Outfit is after him for knocking over one of their banks. No beating around the bush, he goes straight to the man responsible for placing the hit, Menner (Tim Carey, with his characteristic élan), robbing him of all his poker winnings and demanding $250,000 for the inconvenience of almost being killed.

Read my full review of The Outfit here at The L Magazine.

The Housemaid (1960)

2009-08-17T10:01:00.000-07:00

Filming the story almost entirely in a cluttered, half-finished home, Kim Ki-young makes full use of narrow corridors and glass-paneled sliding doors to emphasize the sense of global paranoia that runs rampant throughout The Housemaid. Filming through chairs, banisters and windows, he turns the home into an inescapable prison of unrepressed passions. Once the skeletons come out of the closet with a vengeance in the film's second half, it is as though the outside world ceases to exist. This pulp-chamber drama reminds of something that Gil Brewer might have penned for that publisher of lurid poetics Gold Medal. In fact, both Brewer's 13 French Street (1951) and The Housemaid both share a common nightmare of corruption of the middle class home and the perversion of its moral system.

Read my full review of The Housemaid here at The L Magazine.

10 Rillington Place (1971)

2009-08-17T09:58:00.000-07:00

If 10 Rillington Place weren't based on real events, it would take the warped mind of Jim Thompson to imagine such paranoid, psychosis-driven characters as the soft-spoken serial killer John Reginald Christie (Richard Attenborough) and his dim-witted, unknowing cohort Timothy John Evans (John Hurt). Christie is a closet deviant who lures desperate women to his home under false pretenses of being a doctor. The illiterate Evans moves his wife and child into the apartment above Christie because it's all he can afford. His life is nothing but two rooms the color of rotting mouse fur, filled with furniture his wife neglected to pay, and a child on the way that he can't afford. Unfortunate circumstances have thrown the group together, and while Christie's phony doctoring seemingly offers Evans and his wife a way out of this purgatorial existence, it's only the beginning of a descent into murder, madness, and the overbearing weight of guilt that's enough to bury any man alive and make them wish for the gallows...

Read my full review of 10 Rillington Place here at The L Magazine.

The GoodTimesKid (2005) and Mantrap (1926)

2009-08-17T09:56:00.000-07:00

From Benten comes The GoodTimesKid (2005), the second feature from Azazel Jacobs (whose latest film, Momma's Man, was one of the best films of 2008, and is available on DVD from Kino). With the exception of a brief prologue, the film unfolds throughout the course of a single day as the unspoken ennui and anxiety of a trio of alienated misfits manifest themselves through spontaneous relationships and mad dashes for wild, illogical dreams...

Also, just out from Sunrise Silents is a never-before-available silent film, Mantrap (1926), starring that iconic flapper of the silver screen Clara Bow (who was only twenty-one at the time of the film's release). And while her role as the titular "It" girl from It (1927) certainly defined a bobbed-hair zeitgeist, it has also come to be the sole definer of her career (outside of the cartoon she inspired, Betty Boop). Mantrap's arrival on DVD is a welcome reminder of the flirtatious charm and uninhibited sexuality that were the key ingredients of Bow's comedic style...

Read my full review of The GoodTimesKid and Mantrap here at The L Magazine.

"Bardelys the Magnificent" (1926)

2009-07-28T07:07:00.000-07:00

Bardelys the Magnificent (1926) marks Gilbert's fifth collaboration with director King Vidor, who also led Glibert to two of his greatest triumphs with The Big Parade (1925) and La Boheme (1926), breaking him out of the “pretty boy” mould and giving him challenging, meaty roles which brought his hitherto untapped acting potential. Vidor, similarly an unfortunately forgotten figure, was one of the top filmmakers of the 1920s, with a rarely equaled gift for naturalistic yet poetic storytelling, effortlessly moving between comedy, romance, drama and — as Bardelys the Magnificent proves — action, as well. A comic swashbuckler in the Douglas Fairbanks tradition (and one of the few that actually deserves the comparison and rivals any of the master's own films), Bardelys the Magnificent features Gilbert as a notorious ladykiller of the court, handing out lockets with snippets of his hair (which really come from a wig) like there's no tomorrow. When his abilities to win any woman are challenged, Gilbert masquerades as a wanted rebel in order to win the damsel’s hand. Unfortunately, he also wins the attention of the law, who want to hang him for his crimes against the king.

Read my full review of Bardelys the Magnificent here at The L Magazine.

"The John Barrymore Collection"

2009-07-28T07:05:00.000-07:00

Considered one of the great actors — of both stage and screen — of his day, John Barrymore is the subject of an eponymous new box set from Kino, featuring four of the performer's silent pictures made between 1920 and 1928. Showing off his wide range of skills and charms, the set reminds us why the performer was once so beloved by audiences, and why he deserves to continue to be so. Despite his stage training and theatrical family background (he came from a long line of actors, and his siblings were the equally renowned Lionel and Ethel), John had a natural presence on screen. He may be best remembered for his screwball hamming in Twentieth Century (1934) opposite Carole Lombard, but he is anything but histrionic or over-the-top in these four films. His subtle but communicative control of bodily and facial gestures, debonair persona and iconic good looks make for a commanding screen presence.

Read my full review of The John Barrymore Collection here at The L Magazine.

"Last Year at Marienbad" (1961) and "Diary of a Suicide" (1972)

2009-07-28T07:03:00.000-07:00

The attraction of the enigmatic has rarely been so strong as in a pair of French avant-garde films, one returning to DVD and one new to the format. Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Stanislav Stanjoevic's Diary of a Suicide (1972) share not just two actors — the sphinx-like Delphine Seyrig and the inscrutable, deadpan Sacha Pitoeff — but also a common romanticized ideal regarding the mystery of narrative. The central action of both films is, essentially, one character telling a story to another, though this hardly does justice to either of the films' richly nuanced scripts or the entrancing performances of the actors. Both films feed off our desire for resolution and clarity, and in denying — or drawing out — our needs, they become commentaries on listening and perception as much as storytelling.

Read my reviews of Last Year at Marienbad and Diary of a Suicide here at The L Magazine.

Au Bonheur Des Dames (1930)

2009-07-28T07:02:00.000-07:00

Concurrently a modernist fantasia and urban nightmare, Au Bonheur Des Dames focuses on the rivalry between a fast-rising department store, Ladies' Paradise, and a small mom-and-pop storefront across the street. A 20-year-old Dita Parlo (that vision of monochromatic beauty from Vigo's L'Atalante and Renoir's Grand Illusion) stars as the young woman caught between the two businesses. Arriving in Paris to work in her uncle's small fabric shop, Parlo finds the sky literally raining advertisements — planes overhead are dropping flyers for Ladies' Paradise. In an urban montage that rivals the surreal multiple-exposures of Murnau's Sunrise and Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, Parlo is accosted by visual representations of the clamor and crowds of the metropolis, a sequence which culminates in the excessive splendor of Ladies' Paradise, a department store to end department stores. A palace of fast-moving crowds, shiny objects, grand staircases and sickeningly ornate architecture, the department store is a beastly manifestation of all of consumerism's grand promises.

Read my full review of Au Bonheur Des Dames here at The L Magazine.

Shinobi no Mono 4: Siege (1964)

2009-07-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

The fourth in a series of eight films chronicling the role of the ninja in Japan's turbulent feudal past, Shinobi no Mono 4: Siege (1964) opens at the dawn of the Tokugawa Period, as a peace treaty between the reigning Shogun and his rival clan, the Toyotomi, is signed. The treaty, however, is just the calm before the storm, as the Toyotomi get word of the Tokugawa's secret plotting to destroy them once and for all. Coming to their rescue is legendary ninja Kirigakure (series star Raizo Ichikawa, who made nearly 100 films in his fourteen-year career, cut short by his death at the age of 38), but when he is kidnapped in a cunning ambush by enemy ninjas, even he must wonder if defeat is inevitable.

Read my full review or Shinobi no Mono 4: Siege here at The L Magazine.

"Man Hunt" (1941)

2009-07-28T06:59:00.000-07:00

Known mostly for his Weimar-era silent films, Fritz Lang's career as an exile in Hollywood is all too often overlooked not only by audiences, but also by home video distributors. His 1927 sci-fi epic Metropolis (1927) may get all the buzz, but it's hard to deny that it is heavily marred by wife Thea von Harbou's cloying and sentimental script. Far better are Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (1922) and M (1931), neither of which have lost any of their edginess or grit after over seven decades, and both of which are available on nicely restored DVDs by Kino and Criterion, respectively. Slowly but surely, his near-forgotten American films, many of which are either on par or superior to his work in Germany, are making their way to DVD. Just released today is his near-forgotten Man Hunt (1941), an anti-Nazi thriller whose masterfully and subtly crafted suspense rises above any mere label of propaganda.

Read my full review of Man Hunt here at The L Magazine.

"Falling Down" (1993)

2009-07-28T06:56:00.000-07:00

"The street was mine," P.I. Mike Hammer lamented in Mickey Spillane's One Lonely Night back in 1952, acknowledging a loss of security and identity as The City mutated out-of-control into a messy, violent, overpopulated asphalt jungle. Forty-one years later, the phrase echoed loudly throughout Joel Schumacher's nightmare of urban discontent, Falling Down (1993), which is being rereleased today in both a Deluxe Edition DVD and Blu-Ray. Time has only shown how bold and audacious Schumacher's film was, from its claustrophobic opening highway scene borrowed from Fellini's 8 1/2 to a high-noon showdown on a Venice Beach pier that recalls the hardboiled romanticism of Jean-Pierre Melville. And then there's the matter of its anachronistic central character, a noir protagonist straight out of the 1950s who defies notions of hero and antihero, victim and villain. Out of work, prevented from seeing his daughter on her birthday by a restraining order, and stuck a traffic jam on a sweltering summer morning — Michael Douglas just snaps. Abandoning his car, he crosses Los Angeles on foot, exacting vengeance for all of society's hypocrisy and corruption.

Read my full review of Falling Down here at The L Magazine.

"It's Love I'm After" (1937)

2009-07-28T06:55:00.001-07:00

One of the lesser-known entries in the screwball cycle of the 1930s is not only arguably one of the best, but until recently also one of the most elusive. Warner Archive has solved that problem by giving It's Love I'm After (1937) its first-ever home video release. This comedy of remarriage — one of screwball's most reoccurring themes, as in 1937's The Awful Truth and 1940's The Philadelphia Story — stars Leslie Howard and Bette Davis as a bickering theatrical couple whose petty, narcissistic arguments perpetually result in postponing their marriage.

Read my full review of It's Love I'm After here at The L Magazine.

"The 10th Victim" (1965)

2009-07-28T06:53:00.001-07:00

Originally released in 1965 and based on a story by Robert Sheckley, Elio Petri's The 10th Victim (just out on DVD from Blue Underground) is a mod ménage of La Dolce Vita, James Bond and The Most Dangerous Game. The film is set in the then-futuristic 21st century; we've lived to see some (but thankfully not all) of Petri's amorally corrupt worldview come to fruition. Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress are players in the world's most popular game: a real-life manhunt in which two participants are randomly chosen by a computer, one to be a hunter, the other to be the hunted. After ten successful rounds, you win a million dollars and the elite status as a "decathlete." The world is their battlefield (except for churches, bars, barbershops and a couple of other off-limits locales) — and other than parking violations not being tolerated, there are no rules.

Read my full review of The 10th Victim here at The L Magazine.

Check out Only Good Movies Blog

2009-07-26T16:40:00.000-07:00

The good folks over at Only Good Movies have come up with a list of the Top 100 Movie Heroes, broken down into genre: Action/Adventure; Horror; Western; Comic Book; Sci-Fi; Dramatic; Sports; Fantasy; Martial Arts; and Animated. They were kind enough to include a link to my review of Rambo: First Blood Part II. Check out the whole list here.

http://www.onlygoodmovies.com/blog/movie-megalists/top-100-movie-heroes/

Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

2009-07-06T06:48:00.000-07:00

If there’s a fundamental difference between First Blood and the sequel made three years later, Rambo: First Blood Part II, it’s that Rambo’s psychological scars seemed to have finally healed. He is no longer the tormented vet wandering the woods of America in search of vestiges of some unknown he could vaguely call “home.” Instead, as the film opens, we find him in prison, breaking rocks under the hot sun. “In here, at least I know where I stand,” he tells Col. Trautman, who has come to arrange his release in order to send him on a mission to locate missing POWs still believed to be in Vietnam. As Rambo stares through the chain-link fence at his former commander, his gaze is cool yet heated. Distrust and disappointment, that unrequited rage, still boils beneath the surface, yet he knows that he has lost the two wars that meant the most to him: the one in Vietnam where he was reborn as a soldier, and the war back at home to make his nation understand what he and his fellow soldiers went through. It’s not that he’s defeated, but that he’s given up the good fight. Rambo knows now that the world won’t listen, won’t change.

Read my full review of Rambo: First Blood Part II here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

First Blood (1982)

2009-07-05T05:12:00.000-07:00

Rambo’s cinematic nativity First Blood borrows significantly from America’s pastoral heritage. Like some mythological figure, he – among the most iconic of action heroes – is inexorably connected to the woods—they gave birth to him (in more ways than one), and it is to the woods that he both continually comes and goes. Tempting as it is to rhapsodize over the many awesome things Rambo does in the movie – from ambushing the police in the woods to his one-man apocalypse that brings a city to its knees – it’s crucial to consider the natural progression of the film itself. Bits of action are orchestrated between largely atmospheric sequences that not only call attention to the gorgeous location photography shot at Golden Ears Park in British Columbia, but also carry an ethereal presence not often associated with the action genre. An elegiac prologue at a country home gives way to a slow burning urban paranoia that culminates in a chase leading back to the woods. Always back to woods, like an irrepressible refrain. Something innate within Rambo beckons him to return to nature, a call of the wild to which he always answers.

Read my full essay on First Blood here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Brighton Rock (1947)

2009-06-17T22:18:00.000-07:00

Wracked with religious guilt and anxieties of inadequacy (both sexual and political) on a Napoleonic level, Attenborough makes a perfect noir protagonist. He combines the boyish good looks of Farley Granger and the psychopathic placidity of Richard Widmark, but also brings a deeply rooted spirituality that offers no easy solutions and only complicates his psyche even more. Thank goodness Greene came on board to co-write the script with Terence Rattigan: like a good Catholic, Greene ensures that punishment outweighs the possibility of redemption...

Read the full review here at The L Magazine.

L'important c'est d'aimer (The Important Thing Is To Love) (1975)

2009-06-17T22:16:00.000-07:00

Less than a year old, newcomers to the DVD field Mondo Vision have been championing the overlooked ouerve of Andrzej Zulawski, a Polish filmmaker (and one-time assistant to Andrzej Wajda) who has spent much of his career working in France. The company made their debut with his movie The Public Woman (1984); today marks Mondo Vision's second release, Zulawski's L'important c'est d'aimer (The Important Thing Is To Love) (1975), appearing for the first time on home video here in North America in both a single disc and two-disc Limited Edition...

Read the full review here at The L Magazine.

Priced to Own: Time's Up for the Video Store?

2009-05-12T19:58:00.000-07:00

With Virgin Megastore closing in the upcoming weeks, Netflix fast running local video stores out of business, the rise of streaming media online, the continued hubbub about piracy, and the still-uncertain introduction of Blu Ray discs, the fate of the DVD is certainly questionable. Nor is VHS as "obsolete" as many would think: many films are still unavailable on a digital format, and with the industry in such a state of flux, the once assured market for obscure films on home video is no longer a guarantee. That doesn't stop stores from practically giving away VHS tapes of otherwise impossible-to-find movies like King Vidor's (1920), which I found for $3 at I-won't-say-where and have never seen on eBay or Amazon (or in any other stores). In the midst of all this, two of Hollywood's oldest surviving studios, MGM and Warner Bros., are continuing to roll out old movies from their vaults in restored editions on DVD, but both are using drastically different means that belie the uncertainty of the home video market....

Read the full piece at The L Magazine.

Tod Browning at Film Forum

2009-05-11T09:35:00.001-07:00

A teen runaway turned circus barker and vaudevillian, Tod Browning's sideshow life on the fringes of society foreshadowed the outcasts that would become the epicenter of his films. Whether theatrical performers themselves (such as in The Unknown and Freaks) or criminals who use theatricality as part of their schemes (The Blackbird and The Devil Doll), Browning's characters are linked by a shared anguish which manifests itself physically. It is only fitting that Browning learned filmmaking under the guidance of D.W. Griffith, for whom he was an actor. Whereas Griffith's innovative close-ups of Lillian Gish's face to reflect her pure soul, Browning used Lon Chaney's entire body to convey the impurity of his. And for five consecutive Mondays beginning May 11th, sin and lust will rule the big screen as Film Forum celebrates macabre master Browning...

Read my full essay on Tod Browning here at The L Magazine.

A Grin Without a Cat (1977)

2009-05-05T07:26:00.001-07:00

One could view Chris Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat (1977), just released on DVD by Icarus Films Home Video, as an aggressive antidote to such dumbed-down fairytales of that tumultuous time period, but that would hardly scratch the surface of the film’s profundity. In this three-hour tome to two decades of political struggle around the globe, Marker charts the idealistic rise of the international leftist movement in the 1960s and its problematic fracturing in the subsequent decade. Using his characteristic essay-film format, Marker culls interviews and footage from disparate sources, including propaganda and activist films, and weaves them into a complex tapestry of perpetually diverging political viewpoints...

Read the full review here at The L Magazine.

Alain Resnais: A Decade in Film

2009-04-29T07:29:00.000-07:00

KimStim and Kino are shedding much needed (and highly desired) light on the career of French auteur Alain Resnais by making a quartet of his 1980s movies available on home video for the first time. Known primarily for a pair of arthouse classics, Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and the short concentration camp documentary Night and Fog (1954), Resnais’s filmography is spread out over the course of 70+ years — and the octogenarian auteur’s latest film is set to premier at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. But while most of us have to wait for Les herbes folles until it screens over here (a New York Film Festival hopeful?), in the meantime we have these four 80s flicks to remind us of his singularly poetic sensibility.

Read my full review of Alain Resnais: A Deacde in Film here at The L Magazine.

Leon Morin, Priest (1961)

2009-04-29T07:28:00.001-07:00

Jean-Pierre Melville’s name evokes images of fedoras and lengthy trench coats billowing like church robes. In appropriating iconic symbols of American gangster films, Melville created his own world, in which hardboiled mythologies meshed with the philosophical concerns of post-World War II France. But after several films in this mold, such as Bob le Flambeur and Deux Hommes dans Manhattan, Melville wanted a change. Film historian Tom Milne writes: “In a spirit of contradiction, it seems, since the Nouvelle Vague was by then at flood tide, he announced with his sixth film [Léon Morin, Priest] in 1961, that he was tired of being the darling of a handful of cineastes.”

Read my full review of Leon Morin, Priest here at The L Magazine.

"The Films of Shirley Clarke: Rebel With a Cause"

2009-04-23T07:37:00.000-07:00

“There’s a dissatisfaction with merely going to the movies,” proclaims Shirley Clarke in Noël Burch and Andre S. Labarthe’s documentary Rome Burns: A Portrait of Shirley Clarke (1970). Throughout, she is never without two things: a cigarette between her lips, and a sincere humility. Seated on the floor of a Parisian apartment with friends and colleagues (including Jacques Rivette and Yoko Ono), the New York-native Clarke opens up about her revolutionary ideas about cinema, as well as her own misgivings about her earlier works. The three features she had shot at that point—The Connection (1962), The Cool World (1964), and Portrait of Jason (1967)—wrenched burgeoning cinema verite trends in new, groundbreaking directions. But for every liberating frame that passed through her camera, Clarke saw more work that needed to be done. To her, the then-current relationship between the audience and the movie was antiquated: “I don’t want them separated by the screen anymore.” In fusing experimental, documentary, and narrative film techniques, Clarke was a significant force in creating “modern” cinema in the 1960s.

Read my full essay on Shirley Clarke here at Hammer to Nail.

http://www.hammertonail.com/genre/documentary/films-of-shirley-clarke-at-anthology/

2009 New Directors/New Films

2009-03-25T11:33:00.000-07:00

"The standout of this year’s [New Directors/New Films] fest is So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain (pictured), the highly anticipated follow-up to Kim’s debut feature In Between Days, a Sundance and Berlin award winner from 2006. When a mother leaves her two daughters with their aunt in Seoul in order to finalize a divorce, she also leaves them with a piggy bank. When it is full, she tells them, she will return. And so they wait, grilling grasshoppers to sell to local youths, and counting their change. Kim saturates her film with the pregnant stasis of childhood, and her young actors, Hee Yeon Kim and Song Hee Kim, express more depth than any of this year’s leading or supporting Oscar noms."

Read my full coverage of the 2009 New Directors/New Films series here at The L Magazine.

Eclipse Series 15: Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu

2009-03-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

"Our understanding of pre-World War II Japanese cinema has been limited not merely to those few films in distribution, but to those even in existence. Between unstable nitrate stocks (used for early films), poor preservation and earthquakes —not to mention World War II — most of those films are irrevocably lost to history. Contemporary American audiences’ conceptions, in particular, are formed almost exclusively by Yasujiro Ozu’s playful formalism and Kenji Mizoguchi’s tragic heroines. All of which makes Eclipse Series 15: Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu not only an exciting, long-overdue release, but also a historically redefining moment. For the first time, American audiences will have access to one of the foundational artists of Japanese cinema, whose prolific output between 1924 and 1959 (166 films) well exceeds the combined filmographies of Ozu and Mizoguchi."

Red my full review of Eclipse Series 15: Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu here at The L Magazine.

The Iron Mask (1929)

2009-03-02T07:20:00.001-08:00

Douglas Fairbanks was the king of Hollywood in the silent era. Off-screen, he defined the dapper gentleman that was to be expected of Hollywood stars: his wife and queen was “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford, and their castle was Pickfair, a palace where all of cinema’s royalty gathered. On-screen, though, he was something else all together—he was the embodiment of all the magic that the movies promised to provide.

Read my full review of The Iron Mask here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/ironmask/

The Wedding March (1928)

2009-02-26T22:20:00.001-08:00

The Wedding March is, like its “creator,” uncompromising. Full of cruelty and perversion, this is not the vision of the world that the Hollywood of the 1920s projected. (Ironically, it certainly was the preferred off-screen lifestyle of the Hollywood of the 1920s.) Naivety is an alien concept, and innocence long since abandoned. And the token “happy ending”? Nowhere to be found. If this doesn’t sound like the Hollywood that you’re used to seeing, then Erich von Stroheim achieved his goal.

Read my full review of The Wedding March here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/theweddingmarch/

Street Angel (1928)

2009-02-21T08:58:00.000-08:00

“Everywhere… in every town, in every street… we pass, unknowing, human souls made great by love and adversity.” Street Angel is not just the story of a gutter waif (Janet Gaynor) and an itinerant painter (Charles Farrell) who fall in love and must persevere against all the obstacles the world throws at them. Instead, Borzage elevates them to the level of gods. The streets they walk are not those of Naples, but of a mythological space akin to Mount Olympus. Everything, and everybody, is the absolute embodiment of an ideal: life is hardship, love is divine, fate is always against us, and people are either saints or devils. Or, as the title suggests, angels—fallen from the heavens, and left to battle here on earth.

Read my full review of Street Angel here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/streetangel/

"Must Read After My Death" (2008)

2009-02-19T13:12:00.001-08:00

Everything is different in hindsight. Time heals certain wounds, while others fester and deepen with the passing days. Memories go in and out of focus. Problems either work themselves out, or else new dilemmas arise and take precedent, the old ones fading into the past. When the end is in sight, things just don’t look as bad as they once did. Perspective allows us to see things more clearly. And this is precisely what is missing in Morgan Dews’ piercing documentary Must Read After My Death, and also what makes the film so singular, so touching and traumatic to watch.

Read my full review of Must Read After My Death here at Hammer to Nail.

http://www.hammertonail.com/genre/documentary/must-read-after-my-death-this-american-life/

Lonesome (1928)

2009-02-19T11:54:00.000-08:00

The addition of “talking” sequences are not the only sign that the silent age was almost over. In one scene, a character listens to a record alone in their room. Next door, someone else listens intently to the song. Sound traverses space to briefly unite them. Even though they are separate, they share in the experience together. Without the aid of a soundtrack, such a bond can only be intimated and not actualized. Lonesome was released twice—first as the silent picture it was intended to be, and later with a synchronized soundtrack with music, sound effects, and the few dialogue scenes. Fejos fully realizes the potential of the silent screen—but I think he also hints (perhaps unintentionally) at the future possibilities to come with the arrival of sound.

Read my full review of Paul Fejos' Lonesome here at Not Coming To a Theater Near You.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/lonesome/

The Silence After Sound: Hollywood's Last Silent Movies

2009-02-08T19:52:00.000-08:00

"The switchover from silent to sound in the American film industry, which began in late 1927, was primarily complete by 1929 — all of which begs to ask, what happened on American screens in 1928? It was a pivotal year in the transition, an entire year in which silent and sound pictures shared theater marquees, and when both were viable commercial artforms. Though silents would still exist in 1929, their era was not just numbered – it was practically over."

Read my full essay "The Silence After Sound: Hollywood's Last Silent Movies" online here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://notcoming.com/features/silenceaftersound/

The Honeymoon Killers (1969)

2009-01-31T14:08:00.000-08:00

"The Honeymoon Killers (1969) is more Cain than even James Cain himself. Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez, the film’s central lovers/killers, could easily take the place of any of Cain’s partners-in-crime. They’re just as cold-blooded and ruthless as duplicitous wife Phyllis Nirdlinger and insurance agent Walter Huff in Double Indemnity, and just as hot-blooded and passionate as vagabond Frank Chambers and restless waitress Cora Papadakis in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Yet unlike them, Martha and Raymond didn’t come from any author’s imagination—they came straight from the newspaper headlines of 1949."

Read my full review of Leonard Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers here at Hammer to Nail.

http://www.hammertonail.com/genre/drama/honeymoon-killers-the-noir-verite/

Stahl vs. Sirk at Anthology Film Archives

2009-01-22T07:20:00.000-08:00

"John M. Stahl and Douglas Sirk were fated to share a double bill. The passing decades have made it clear that these two icons of melodrama don’t merely reflect their respective time periods, but actively comment upon them. Moreover, as contract directors at Universal, both were fortuitously given the same material to adapt — which not only eagerly invites comparison, but also highlights their singularity as artists."

Read my full coverage of Anthology Film Archives' series Imitations of Life: Stahl vs. Sirk online here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/7/2/Film/feature9.cfm?ctype=2

ROSSELLINI’S HISTORY FILMS - The Change and Growth of An Independent Master

2009-01-13T20:26:00.000-08:00

"But there’s also a larger debt that has gone unpaid for far too long, which is that Rossellini embodied a far more important concept of an 'independent filmmaker' that went beyond topics and aesthetics. He resisted labels and refused to be tied down to a single style. Yet the farther he moved away from the particularities of his earlier work, the more the world rejected Rossellini. He made a certain kind of movie, and that’s what they expected and, more importantly, understood. Such is the dilemma all artists face when they grow and change."

Read my full review of The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966) (Criterion Collection) and Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini’s History Films—Renaissance and Enlightenment online here at Hammer to Nail.

http://www.hammertonail.com/?p=551

In Memoriam: Donald Westlake

2009-01-10T08:30:00.000-08:00

"On New Year’s Eve, Donald Westlake, alias Richard Stark, went to that big bank heist in the sky – the “one last score” you never return from. The 75-year-old Brooklyn-native and writer of more than 150 books (not to mention numerous short stories and screenplays) died of a heart attack while on vacation in Mexico. Born in 1933, Westlake was one of the last remnants of a bygone literary era. He may have attended several colleges, but he never graduated from any. And he certainly didn’t learn writing from any “creative writing” class. Instead, he threw himself into the thriving pulp paperback market and began churning out novels at a rate that would scare many contemporary writers into an early retirement..."

Read my full article on Donald Westlake online here at The L Magazine.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__01080906.cfm

Hoppity Goes To Town (1941)

2008-12-24T08:29:00.000-08:00

"WALL-E isn’t the only dystopic animated feature to tackle humankind’s destruction of the planet. Forty-seven years before Pixar’s social critique, there was brothers Max and Dave Fleischer’s Hoppity Goes to Town (1941), a Capra-esque tale of a young, idealistic grasshopper, Hoppity, who must not only confront the scheming, lecherous C. Bagley Beetle, but also save his bug community from the ever-expanding populace of Manhattan."

Read my full review of Hoppity goes to Town here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__12220808.cfm

Bigger Than Life (1956)

2008-12-24T08:24:00.000-08:00

"Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life feels closer to a suburban monster movie than to any conventional melodrama from the period. Even James Mason, who plays the grade-school teacher secretly moonlighting as a cabbie, undergoes stark physical, psychological and emotional changes that seem an uncanny parallel to the sci-fi mutation films that proliferated during the era. But instead of Godzilla rising from the ashes of nuclear destruction, Ray gives us Mason, your prototypical 1950s white-collar dad, who is collapsing under the strains of meeting the status quo."

Read my full review of Bigger Than Life here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/36/Film/film16.cfm?ctype=2

The Year in Rep

2008-12-24T08:17:00.000-08:00

My Top 10 list of NYC-based repertory events that was published in The L Magazine. Hopefully those in the city were able to catch some of these...

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Ten cinematic spectacles that either can’t be replicated in the comfort of your own home, or wouldn’t be the same on DVD. Netflix, eat your heart out.

Mysterious Objects: The Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Anthology, January) Two sold-out shorts programs were the real gems: minimalist manipulations of sound and space, and his characteristic interest in group aerobics.

Le Grand Franju (Anthology, March) Georges Franju’s career may be reduced to Eyes Without a Face, but this series reminded us of all the hallucinatory hybrids that we’re missing out on, like the biker-youth-over-the-cuckoo’s-nest Head Against the Wall.

Tomu Uchida (BAM, April) As a colleague wrote elsewhere: “Uchida's career is a jumble of high and low concerns, bright spectacle and dark corners, his responsive, protean style answering only to the needs of the moment — the stuff dreams are made of.”

Nakadai (Film Forum, June-July) 25 movies in almost as many days, plus an intimate conversation with the legendary dude himself? It’s like taking a graduate seminar in Tatsuya Nakadai without the bothersome homework.

3epkano (BAM/Walter Reade, July) For two nights this summer, two of silent cinema’s best films (F.W. Muruanu’s Sunrise and Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary) were not only revived but reborn through this Dublin experimental rock group’s eerily hypnotic scores.

Elliott Gould: Star for an Uptight Age (BAM, August) This reluctant role model is just as vital today as he was back in the day. And he brought along his personal 35mm print of Ingmar Bergman’s criminally neglected The Touch.

Hollywood on the Hudson (MoMA, September-October) The forgotten glory of New York filmmaking between the World Wars. Oh, the joys of obscure musicals and ethnic productions…

Carole Lombard (Film Forum, November) This flaxen goddess already saw the country through one economic depression, so what’s one more?

Les Blank (Film Forum, November) The documentary guru of Americana is an underappreciated treasure, and his unique focus on food and music makes every screening a party.

Manny Farber (Walter Reade, November) Extolling the unpretentious virtues of B-Movies long before it was hip to do so, the late Farber elevated film criticism to a high plateau that has rarely been surpassed.

Special mention goes out to the Orphan Film Symposium (NYU) for unearthing the strange, natural beauty of James Blue’s Kennedy-sponsored propaganda, and Lana Turner grilling a streak on live radio for WWII troops overseas, a true fetishist’s delight.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/36/Film/film13.cfm?ctype=2

"Essential Sturges" at Film Forum

2008-12-22T15:45:00.001-08:00

"[Preston] Sturges somehow channeled the pandemonium of the Marx Brothers into a sedate, middle class milieu, and unearthed an encyclopedia of white-collar hypocrisy, idiosyncrasy, and hilarity. Small towns and big cities, ocean liners and offices—none of them are safe from Sturges’ apocalypse. Only those that jettison their safe, conveniently ways and embrace the chaos are able to come out on top..."

Read my full coverage of Film Forum's Essential Sturges here at Blank Screen NYC.

http://blankscreennyc.tumblr.com/post/66306424/preston-sturges-subversive-screwball

"Murnau, Borzage and Fox" DVD Box Set (2008)

2008-12-16T11:39:00.001-08:00

"Among the most anticipated DVD releases of the year by cinephiles, Murnau, Borzage and Fox is to be admired for its daring and thorough offering of no less than twelve feature films, two “reconstructions” of lost films, two coffee table-sized books and one documentary, all housed within a ridiculously handsome faux-leather case. One can’t accuse Fox of going only halfway with this release; as with their comprehensive Ford at Fox box set released this time last year, Murnau, Borzage and Fox digs deep into the archives and comes up with a wealth of highly desired films. Truly a monumental release, this box set not only satiates the ravenous appetites of classic film lovers, it also opens up new critical and historical discourses that were, up to now, impossible because of restricted access to prints..."

Read my full review of Murnau, Borzage and Fox here at The L Magazine.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__12160802.cfm

Just Tony (1922)

2008-12-15T07:17:00.001-08:00

"The visceral joys of the silent B-Western are on full display in Just Tony. Saloon brawls, wild stallions, ten-gallon hats, breathtaking desert ranges, gunfights, fistfights, races, chases—and even a love story to boot. For a 66-minute feature, there’s an incredible number of sub-plots working in conjunction with one another to make the movie all the more thrilling and tense. Each successive scene brings with it yet another complication... Always unpretentious, Just Tony shines in its ability to rework tried-and-true formulas into simple yet effective narratives brimming with charm."

Read my full review of Just Tony here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/justtony/

Refracted Light: The Films of Quinto and Jean-Gabriel Albicocco

2008-12-02T19:14:00.000-08:00

"The centerpiece of the retrospective is The Wanderer (1967) an adaptation of Alain-Fournier’s novel Les Gran Meaulnes. Like a rural fairy tale, the film begins with a young boy getting lost in the woods; like Alice, he ends up wandering through the proverbial “rabbit hole” and into a seemingly supernatural world of enchantment... Outdoing even himself, Quinto Albicocco's cinematography evokes the intoxicating beauty of the imagination through a pallet of smeared hues, shimmering lights, and wide-angle lenses that bend the image to his every whim."

Read my full review of The French Institute's series Refracted Light: The Films of Quinto and Jean-Gabriel Albicocco here at The L Magazine.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__12020803.cfm

Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha (2008)

2008-12-02T19:11:00.000-08:00

"Regardless of how unconventional and experimental it is, more than anything Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Muthais a joy to watch. It certainly breaks new ground, but never at the expense of its sense of humor. Van Peebles never seems as though he is trying to be obscure for the sake of being so; rather, he made the movie the only way he could. Take no prisoners. Make no excuses. Just make the movie by whatever means necessary. Melvin Van Peebles’ conviction and determination is nothing short of inspirational."

Read my full review of Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha here at Hammer to Nail.

http://www.hammertonail.com/?p=504

Mockery (1927)

2008-11-26T14:09:00.000-08:00

"The fantastical demons that beset Benjamin Christensen’s career-defining Häxan may have gone into hiding for the Danish director’s second film made in Hollywood, Mockery, but they are not entirely absent. They’ve worked their way into every inch of Christensen’s characters, corrupting their morals, perverting their intents, and plaguing their souls."

Read my full review of Mockery here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/Mockery/

Carole Lombard Retrospective at Film Forum

2008-11-19T05:36:00.000-08:00

"In an era of dizzy dames and glamour queens, Carole Lombard was the best of both worlds. An earthly deity of the silver screen, she was more than just blonde and beautiful — she also possessed a quick wit and daffy lunacy that remains unsurpassed over seventy years later. Fiercely independent, sexually confident and always cunning, Lombard sent an ordered, masculine-driven society into an irreversible tailspin. Film Forum’s retrospective comprises old favorites and overlooked jewels, and serves as a reminder of just how modern and ahead of her time Lombard really was."

Read my full essay on Carole Lombard here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/33/Film/film1.cfm?ctype=2

“H2N’s Official Election Day 2008″ List

2008-11-03T16:39:00.000-08:00

Hammer to Nail, that great "home for ambitious cinema" that allows me the privilege of writing for them, has posted an awesome collaborative feature: “H2N’s Official Election Day 2008″ List. All of the writers have contributed short pieces on their favorite political themed movies. Here are the two that I wrote, but PLEASE check out the site and read what everyone else has to say, as it's a heck of a good time and might give you a few ideas of how to pass the hours as you wait for the final results tomorrow.

Great McGinty, The (Preston Sturges, 1940)— A reminder of why we are all so cynical, Sturges’ film satirizes not only a crooked political system, but also a thickheaded general public who refuses to open their eyes to the reality of things. A bum (Brian Donleavy) assists a corrupt politician with voter fraud, and winds up a much-loved town mayor. When the public learns the truth, they still love him! Unfortunately reminiscent of our current political climate.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, 1939) — Capra’s unstoppable optimism has never been more affecting or endearing than in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. As the doe-eyed senator who tackles a corrupt political system, James Stewart becomes a hero to all: the embodiment of a pure, untarnished political ideal. Capra’s unconditional sincerity is enough to turn even the coldest cynic into a believer once again, and gives us hope that a real “Mr. Smith” does exist and might be elected.

Read the full featuve here at Hammer to Nail.

http://www.hammertonail.com/?p=462

The Master of Melodrama: The Films of Teuvo Tulio

2008-10-29T06:41:00.001-07:00

"In one of the most exciting rediscoveries of the year, BAM’s retrospective of Finnish auteur Teuvo Tulio offers four masterpieces of melodrama, all made between 1938 and 1946, whose cinematic grandeur will be nothing less than magnificent on the big screen. With a painter’s eye, Tulio can turn an idyllic country landscape into an earthly heaven or a frenzied nightmare — and often his films fluctuate between those two extremes."

Read my full coverage of The Master of Melodrama: The Films of Teuvo Tulio here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/31/Film/film04.cfm?ctype=2

Billy the Kid (2007)

2008-10-28T06:38:00.000-07:00

Unlike the exaggerated characters in even the best high school movies, there’s something unshakably authentic to this fifteen year-old-kid from Brunswick, Maine with a rat tail who wears trucker t-shirts with cut-off sleeves. And it’s not just because Billy the Kid is a work of non-fiction, but rather that director Jennifer Venditti has managed the incredible feat of both finding and conveying cinematically a character who is absolutely singular and unique, and at the same time exists as an “everyman” who sums up our collective adolescence.

Read my full review of Billy the Kid here at Hammer to Nail.

http://www.hammertonail.com/?p=449

Night and Day (Bam gua nat) (2008)

2008-10-27T12:11:00.000-07:00

"Hong’s latest film, Night and Day, extends his career-long preoccupation with the confused male psyche—though, at this point we could almost say that Hong’s films are exercises in ritual emasculation: social experiments in which his male protagonists are given center stage to exercise their libido, only to expose (or, in some cases, to reaffirm) their impotency and inadequacy. At the start of Night and Day, several successive intertitles set up the context for the story: Sung-nam, a forty-something Korean artist, smokes marijuana (for the first time) with an American exchange student, who is subsequently arrested and divulges the artist’s name. Fearing incarceration, the artist abandons his wife and flees to Paris, where the film begins."

Read my full review of Night and Day here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/nightandday/

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006)

2008-10-22T05:40:00.000-07:00

"The span of the film is an entire soccer game, yet the camera never diverts its gaze from the French soccer phenomenon Zinedine Zidane. Eschewing the God-like perspective of broadcast sports, the film zeros in on Zidane, voyeuristically watching him watch the game. Unlike conventional biopics, Zidane appears less a character than a series of gestures and movements. Directors Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno do not seek explanations so much as exhibitions, and their film is thankfully less of a soccer genre-pic than a deconstructionlist essay-film."

Read my full review of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/30/Film/feature6.cfm?ctype=2

Troubled Water (2008)

2008-10-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

"Norwegian director Erik Poppe’s third feature, Troubled Water (De Usynlige), garnered both the Jury and Audience Awards for Best Narrative Feature at the 2008 Hamptons International Film Festival. Well deserving of both, it’s an arresting probe into morality and forgiveness that leaves one stunned not only by its emotionally stark performances, but also by the film’s complex, musical structure that quietly underlies the narrative and binds everything together..."

Read my full review of Troubled Water here at Hammer to Nail.

http://www.hammertonail.com/?p=439

The Curse of Bigfoot (1976)

2008-10-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

"Seemingly a cinematic Frankenstein’s Monster, the film feels like parts of several unfinished movies that were strung together using bits of stock footage and excessive voice-over narration. The title is certainly misleading: only a fraction of the footage has to do with Bigfoot, and there isn’t a curse anywhere to be found. Missing from the title are: a zombie; a mummy; a movie-within-a-movie; an educational lecture; an archeological dig; and Canadian logging… lots of logging, and all of it purportedly in Canada."

Read my full review of The Curse of Bigfoot here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/thecurseofbigfoot/

I'm Gonna Explode (Voy a explotar) (2008)

2008-10-08T16:36:00.000-07:00

"I’m Gonna Explode is a playful concoction from the blender of cinephile/director Gerardo Naranjo—a little Pierrot le Fou, a dash of Badlands, a hint of Harold and Maude, and garnishes from a slew of other entries in the lovers-on-the-run genre. But there’s also something else in there, something unique to Naranjo, and it’s what saves the film from drowning under its many references. In fact, I’m Gonna Explode magically floats on top of a wave of teenage angst, ecstasy, and rebellion. Naranjo abides by the same blend of impulsiveness and uncertainty that the characters live by...."

Read my full review of I'm Gonna Explode (Voy a explotar) here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/imgonnaexplode/

Lola Montes (1955)

2008-10-08T16:32:00.000-07:00

"Max Ophüls’ Lola Montès: the cinematic analog to Charlie Parker with Strings or, better yet, the second movement of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32 (when a whimsical 19th-century sway glides into a heavy ragtime swing, long before such a genre was even around). Like those two musical works, Lola Montès is a near perfect marriage of classicism and modernism. The real-life rise and fall of an aristocratic femme fatale who ends up as a circus attraction (literally), the film’s formal elegance has rarely been matched, and yet the borders of its expansive CinemaScope frame can scarcely contain the director’s kinetic visuals. With every frame saturated with unreasonable grandeur, Lola Montès is nothing short of an Ophüls-explosion..."

Read my full review of Max Ophüls’ Lola Montès here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/28/Film/feature3.cfm?ctype=2

The Last Command (1928)

2008-10-01T16:03:00.000-07:00

The Last Command stands on the precipice of two auteurs. On the one hand, it is distinctly the vision of director Josef von Sternberg, with his overly romantic sense of narrative expression, which privileges style above all else. At the same time, the film is undeniably under the influence of its star, Emil Jannings... He came to represent a dying breed, the final remnant of classical German respectability that had been disappearing since the country's loss in World War I and the ensuing economic depression... Change was blooming and so was Jannings’ career—his characters, however, were most certainly wilting.

Read my full review of The Last Command here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/thelastcommand/

The Dead Don't Die (1975)

2008-10-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

"It’s a hybrid of the wrong-man convicted story á la Cornell Woolrich (in which a relative of the incarcerated has to prove them innocent) mixed with Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (voodoo lore and cheap sets masked by dark lighting and excessive fog). And as charming as the precision-timed fade-outs are – lingering shots of an actor’s face wearing the expression of shocking, new information, meant to cue intrusive commercials – The Dead Don’t Die is far more than just a piece of retro TV ephemera."

Read my full review of Curtis Harrington's The Dead Don't Die here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/thedeaddontdie/