Modern Silent Cinema - "For Every Mave (There's Some Poor Sap)"

New video for Modern Silent Cinema's "For Every Mave (There's Some Poor Sap)" from the new album "The Curtain Lecture." More info at www.myspace.com/modernsilentcinema

Katyn (2007) Tribeca Film Festival Preview

The real highlight of Katyn is Krzysztof Penderecki’s magnificent score...which often works its discordant melodies just beneath the surface of the film, subtly affecting the mood and quietly amplifying the overall sense of horror. For all its embracing of dissonance, there is something unexpectedly reticent and shy about Penderecki’s score, which makes it all the more commendable and effective.

Read my full review of Andrzej Wajda's Katyn online here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__04280809.cfm

The Caller (2008) Tribeca Film Festival Preview

'The Caller thinks that by virtue of leaving certain plot elements and character motivations unexplained that it will become “mysterious." Instead, the film becomes a lame exercise in sub-par genre clichés, devoid of any sense of intrigue or suspense in either its story or characters.'

Read my full review of The Caller online here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__04240818.cfm

A President to Remember (2008) Tribeca Film Festival Preview

"A President to Remember seems to be the type of documentary that Primary was providing an antidote for. This new film is comprised largely of Kennedy’s telecast speeches, as well as footage from Drew’s four previous Kennedy films, strung together with narration from Alec Baldwin that negates any of the controversies and contentions about Kennedy’s presidency, reducing him to almost picture-book simplicity."

Read my full review of Robert Drew's A President to Remember online here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__04240817.cfm

My Winnipeg (2007) Tribeca Film Festival Preview

'Maddin’s narration (performed by Darcy Fehr, who previously performed as “Guy Maddin” in Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee) carries echoes of David Goodis’ noir lamentations, and while he speaks cynically about his hometown and its citizens, referring to them as “sleepwalkers,” he never forgets how closely linked to them he is (reinforced by the constant reminder to “stay awake” less he forget to get off the train and wake up back home in Winnipeg).'

Read my full review of Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg online here at The L Magazine.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__04240813.cfm

Roman de Gare (2007)

On the way to her engagement party, a woman is dumped by her fiancé at a gas station. A mysterious man (who may or may not be either a serial killer or a bestseller’s ghostwriter) offers her a ride back to her parents’ house, and she asks him to pretend to be her fiancé for one night. Roman de Gare is undeniably cunning with a deft mix of mystery and romance (a Lelouch specialty), though the ending is ultimately more clever than satisfying.

Read my full review of Claude Lelouch's Roman de Gare online here at The L Magazine.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/6/11/Film/feature7.cfm?ctype=2

Toby Dammit (1968) Tribeca Film Festival Preview

"Toby Dammit appears in a new 35mm print whose restoration was overseen by its cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno. With its wide palette of vibrant hues that enhance the film’s delirious and seemingly never-ending tracking shots of leering faces and popping flashbulbs, the film has now been restored to its original hallucinatory glory."

Read my full review of Toby Dammit online here at The L Magazine.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__04220801.cfm

Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha (2008) Tribeca Film Festival Preview

"While at first the film’s amateur DV photography and iMovie-ish editing effects seem charmingly crude, there’s an extraordinary and admirable punk rock quality to them, as though van Peebles were giving the middle finger to every existing standard editing procedure. The editing is crucial to the film’s overarching iconoclasm and DIY-extreme aesthetic, and its technical limitations only seem to instigate even more innovations (the inserting of children sledding and a crowded-beach-shot-ala-Weegee into a sex montage is both breathtaking and scene-stealing)."

Read my full review of Melvin van Peebles' Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha here at The L Magazine.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__04210802.cfm

Alberto Cavalcanti and Henry Wulschleger's "Captain Fracasse" (1929)

"What’s shocking about the conclusion of Captain Fracasse is its unbridled sobriety: coming after a fanciful series of swordfights in which no one actually dies, the stark reality of a single death is chilling...So much of Captain Fracasse can be written off as a fairy tale, which is why this execution scene is so powerful, because it is a moment when the fantastic façade of the fiction falls away to reveal a gritty reality: that actions have consequences, and while the rich are allowed to live a fairy tale existence, those less privileged do not always retain the authorship of their own destinies..."

Read my full review of Alberto Cavalcanti and Henry Wulschleger's Captain Fracasse online here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://notcoming.com/reviews/captainfracasse/

Silent Ozu (Eclipse Box Set)

'And in I Was Born, But…, the highlight of the set (and for my money, a masterpiece to surpass Tokyo Story), two young brothers, while trying to gain the respect of the neighborhood gang, struggle to understand why their father isn’t “important” in the grand scheme of things. The profound simplicity of the children’s disobedience (“Just because he spanked me doesn’t make him important”) and parents’ concern (“Will they lead the same sorry lives we have?”) are characteristic of Ozu’s sensibility, a universal blend of quotidian comedy and transcendental tragedy.'

Read my full review of the Silent Ozu Eclipse DVD Box Set online here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/10/Film/feature5.cfm?ctype=2

Street Kings (2008)

The utter lack of character insight and depth could be interpreted as a weakness, but at the same time Street King’s bulldozer-like approach keeps it moving at a swift pace, something lacking in so many recent films. Its “surface-only” aesthetic also seems completely deliberate on the part of writer James Ellroy, whose career is steeped equally in contemporary cop lore and the urban mythology of post-WWII Hollywood (L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia). Essentially, the film feels like a pulpy late-40s noir made on the cheap...

Read my full review Street Kings online here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/9/Film/feature4.cfm?ctype=2

Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres) (2007)

Written and directed by first-time filmmaker Céline Sciamma, Water Lilies feels remarkably assured in its handling of emotion and desire, never resorting to overly emphatic trauma or snarky anti-emotionalism... [The film] lingers on its characters’ hesitations and empathizes with the overbearing sense of risk and self-doubt so symptomatic of adolescence.

Read my full review of Water Lilies online here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/8/Film/feature6.cfm?ctype=2

New Directors New Films 2008

Ballast (Lance Hammer, 2007) 96 min. Gorgeously filmed on 35mm using only natural lighting, Ballast recalls Nestor Almendros’ photography for Claire’s Knee and Days of Heaven transplanted to the Mississippi Delta. Its story, of how a mother and son cope with their estranged father’s suicide, is seductively bleak.

More capsule reviews on this year's New Directors New Films series online here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/8/Film/feature9.cfm?ctype=2

Boarding Gate (2007)

"Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate, a corporate-corruption-neo-noir, could be imagined as Michael Clayton with a sexy, drug smuggling femme fatale in the lead role. But that would be overly emphasizing the corporate context of the story – an aspect that even the protagonist, Sandra, doesn’t fully comprehend at the film’s end – and denying the visceral desolation and emotional malaise that lies at the film’s core."

Read my full review of Olivier Assayas' Boarding Gate online here at Not Coming To a Theater Near You.

http://notcoming.com/reviews/boardinggate/

Le Grand Franju

"Georges Franju opens his 1958 short La Première Nuit with an epigraph that could easily preface any of his other films with equal insight and justification: 'It only requires a little imagination for the most ordinary action to become imbued with disquieting meaning, for the décor of everyday life to engender a fantastic world.' The division between reality and fantasy is not so much highlighted as blurred: Franju imbues the fantastic with a quotidian casualness and uncovers the dormant nightmares in our everyday life."

Read my full review of Anthology Film Archives' George Franju retrospective online here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/6/Film/feature2.cfm?ctype=2

"The Ribald Grapefruit" from Lullabies EP

Just posted a song from the "Lullabies" EP called "The Ribald Grapefruit on myspace. Hope you enjoy.

"Nostalgia, then Clobber"

New video for an album that won't come out until summer, probably. Maybe sooner, if I get things together. It's all done and everything, just that there are 2 other albums done that I finished first. The song is called "Nostalgia, then Clobber," and the album is "A History of Parrots." Hope you enjoy. www.myspace.com/modernsilentcinema for more info.

Inventing the Underground (On the Legacy of Amos Vogel)

"Amos Vogel is arguably the person most responsible for contemporary New York City film culture. Before Anthology Film Archives, Film Forum, the IFC Center or Two Boots were around to introduce audiences to the latest in independent, foreign, documentary or experimental cinema — before there was even much of an inkling such films existed — there was Vogel’s Cinema 16, a film society that introduced audiences to a whole new way of looking at not only movies but also the world around them."

Read my full article on Amos Vogel online here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/5/Film/feature10.cfm?ctype=2

Baby Face Harrington (1935)

"What makes Baby Face Harrington stand out is not its clever satirizing of gangster movies, nor its status as a mid-period film of director Raoul Walsh, nor its cast that reads like a 'Who’s Who' list of underappreciated character actors, but that its very premise is about the elevation of these 'character actors' to star status: the foregrounding of what is normally merely background ephemera."

Read my full review of Baby Face Harrington online here at Not Coming To a Theater Near You.

http://notcoming.com/reviews/babyfaceharrington/

Marcel Duchamp's "Anemic Cinema"

Here's a new score I/Modern Silent Cinema composed and performed for Marcel Duchamp's 1926 avant-garde classic "Anemic Cinema." More info on the band at www.myspace.com/modernsilentcinema.