Billy the Kid (2007)

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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

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)

"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/

Häxan (1922)

"Delineating between documentary (the research-based lecture), fiction (the narrative segments), and meta-commentary (asides referring to events that may or may not have occurred during filming), Benjamin Christensen has created an enquiry into both the historical and contemporary role of “the occult” and “religion” in society. At the same time, he has also crafted an extraordinarily detailed example of the macabre, one that revels in dark corners, shadowy figures, hallucinatory specters, gnarled corpses, and grotesqueries that had rarely been seen before, and even now – eighty six years later – can hold its own against any modern computer generated effects. Häxan’s power to fascinate, disturb, entertain, and enlighten, have only grown over time, the true sign of a masterpiece."

Read my full essay on Häxan here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

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

Taking Father Home (2006)

Taking Father Home is a marvel of low-budget filmmaking: a debut feature film shot on a borrowed video camera for less than $5,000, using friends and non-professionals for actors, and all without the permission of the Chinese government. Director Ying Liang trumps every technical and economic limitation through his highly refined visual sensibility, as elegant as it is imaginative. And yet it’s rather limiting to consider the film only in terms of its “limitations”—Ying makes no excuses for its rough-around-the-edges quality, which only adds to its DIY attitude.

Read my full review of Taking Father Home online here at Hammer to Nail.


http://www.hammertonail.com/?p=378#more-378

Robert Flaherty Film Seminar at BAM

"Whereas the nurse of Casa de Lava and the narrator of Cargo represent the gaze of outsiders looking in, Kent MacKenzie’s docu-fiction hybrid The Exiles (1961) represents the insider speaking out. Examining the everyday lives of a Native American community in 1960s Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, the narration of The Exiles is culled from interviews with the film’s subjects. Recently rescued from obscurity by Milestone Films, The Exiles is nothing short of a revelation: a West Coast Shadows (1959), of sorts, in which MacKenzie captures the anxieties of assimilation and the tensions surrounding ethnic identity in a big city melting pot."

Read my full coverage of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar at BAM online here at The L Magazine.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__09110808.cfm

David Lean Retrospective at Film Forum

"Celia Johnson appeared in Lean’s next film (and first solo directorial effort) This Happy Breed (1944). Johnson is perfect as Lean’s middle-class muse, wide-eyed with dreams that would eventually be crushed by domestic disappointment. Ronald Neame’s creamy Technicolor photography elevates this story of “common people” to tragic heights: after his return from the first world war, a husband and his wife set down roots in a small town and start a family. Instead of the idealistic happiness of their dreams, the husband and wife become witnesses to their children’s disappointment, disaster, and even death. In This Happy Breed, the home becomes a landscape of human suffering, discontent, and uncertainty, all rendered through Lean’s exquisite direction and restrained performances of the cast."

Read my full essay on David Lean online here at The L Magazine.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__09100809.cfm

We Can't Go Home Again (1973-1976)

"The line between what is and is not real in We Can’t Go Home Again is more than just a blur: it’s downright schizophrenic. And not just to the extent that its narrative mirrors the circumstances in which it was made – Nicholas Ray, weary after decades of Hollywood filmmaking, assumes a teaching position at the State University of New York at Binghamton and instructs his students through a collaborative feature-film endeavor – but to the possibility that what we are witnessing is the manifestation of Ray’s own mental breakdown."

Read my full essay on We Can't Go Home Again online here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

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

The Janitor (1974)

"The Janitor is at once the result of a few days of furious filmmaking, working through the night, and inspired improvisation, and the accumulation of a lifetime of preoccupations, neuroses, and anxieties. Like his previous film, We Can’t Go Home Again, The Janitor continues to push the divide between the new and old “Nicholas Ray”—the revolutionary experimenter and the Hollywood auteur. But whereas We Can’t Go Home Again expressed Ray’s reluctant optimism—his hope for a younger generation—The Janitor is decidedly misanthropic..."

Read my full review of Nicholas Ray's The Janitor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://notcoming.com/reviews/thejanitor/

High Green Wall (1954)

"Like so many of Nicholas Ray’s protagonists, Henty (Joseph Cotten) is on the run, in search of an ideal space where he can be free of society’s restrictions and expectations. And, like those in Ray’s other films, Henty eventually discovers that no such space exists, and that one must create such an environment themselves. Humphrey Bogart [in In a Lonely Place] and James Dean [in Rebel Without a Cause] each pushed social boundaries past the breaking point; Henty, on the other hand, never pushed anything, but instead kept wandering until, finally, there was no place left to go. So he stopped—and the final note of capitulation is one of the most desolate endings in all of Ray’s work..."

Read my full review of Nicholas Ray's High Green Wall online here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://notcoming.com/reviews/highgreenwall/

More on "La France" (2007)

"Whereas the traditional musical (Fred Astaire, for example, or any of the other Hollywood archetypes) emphasizes the body of the performer—requiring actors lip-synch so they can concentrate on choreographed movement—La France shifts the focus to the performance itself: stationary, the actors’ focus is not on mimicking a prerecorded song, but in the organic creation of one on-screen."

Read my full review of Serge Bozon's La France here at Reverse Shot.

http://www.reverseshot.com/article/la_france

Knock on Any Door (1949)

'Simply put, this is the nightmare of Nicholas Ray: “When life is based on one law: fear. An island of outrage: work and sleep and eat by command; pray by command… Look over the gray fence at the far away hill, look through the bars at the free night, without hope except someday get out, get even.” In Knock on Any Door, lawyer Andrew Morton (Humphrey Bogart), a former child of skid row who was able to overcome circumstance, may be speaking about the experience of juvenile incarceration (which he knows intimately from first-hand experience), but he could very well be enunciating the subjectivity of any of Ray’s protagonists. Fear not only the demons from without, but also from within – as much the capacity for being wronged as for committing wrong – that one may “get out” and successfully “get even"...'

Read my full review of Nicholas Ray's Knock on Any Door online here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://notcoming.com/reviews/knockonanydoor/

A Woman's Secret (1949)

"A Woman’s Secret (1949), Nicholas Ray’s second film, is arguably one of the most maligned and ignored films of his career. While the criticisms seem well deserved (it is clearly one of the director’s weaker movies), the lack of any thorough, sustained criticism on the film is certainly not so deserved. Even enthusiasts of the director’s career, it seems, either circumvent the topic or write it off a failed contract-job in which Ray had little interest—thus justifying their own dismissive evaluations... What stands out in the finished film—and what aligns it with Ray’s characteristic interest in both marginalized, countercultural characters and tension-wrought relationships—is the interaction between Gloria Grahame and Maureen O’Hara. What could have been played as a strict ingénue/director binary becomes a complex power struggle, at once male/female and mother/daughter, which overflows with sexual and adolescent undercurrents..."

Read my full essay on Nicholas Ray's A Woman's Secret online here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

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

The Devil Inside: Filming Jim Thompson’s first-person pulp psychosis

Mark Ash and I co-wrote an essay on the cinematic adaptations of Jim Thompson recently for Moving Image Source. It is called "The Devil Inside: Filming Jim Thompson’s first-person pulp psychosis."

"In Jim Thompson’s America, men are born killers—they don’t have killing thrust upon them. The major forebears of Thompson’s pulp fiction, written primarily for the paperback market beginning in the 1940s and continuing until the early 1970s, were the small-town narratives of James M. Cain. But in Cain, everymen are turned into murderers by circumstance, for the sake of money or a girl; Thompson’s innovation was to turn circumstance into a psychological state. It’s not the lure of temptation or the crush of necessity that drives his protagonists to crime, but the perception of its requirement, for self-preservation or out of moral obligation."

Read the full essay here at Moving Image Soruce.

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-devil-inside-20080811

Elegy (2008)

"Evoking the deep, rich hues of Velazquez and Goya, director Isabel Coixet brings a baroque elegance to her compositions — coming close to conveying Roth’s own virtuoso display of language, if inevitably falling short. Coixet and screenwriter Nicholas Mayer thankfully make no significant compromises with Roth’s novella: no Terms of Endearment here, Elegy finds no sentimental closure to Kepesh’s mortality or his lingering insatiability for a physical existence."

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

http://thelmagazine.com/6/22/Film/feature4.cfm?ctype=2

"Max Linder and the Death of Bourgeois Respectability"

“Laughter is a new kind of weapon. A type of light gun, very effective in cases where there is no need to employ heavy tanks of social wrath,” wrote Sergei Eisenstein in 1937, describing his ideal vision of Socialist Comedy as a new genre. Just over thirty years earlier in France, as cinema was nearing the decade mark and Georges Méliès was exploring the fantastic and the macabre as had never seen before, Max Linder was aiming his revolutionary camera-as-gun at the bourgeoisie and their sacred rituals. He tore down pretension and ridiculed respectability. The very symbols of social refinement – clothing, manners, marriage, propriety – are the targets for his humor. The greatest victim, however, is always Linder himself...

Read my full essay on Max Linder online here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://notcoming.com/features/maxlinder/

Satantango (1994)

"Surpassing the high-standards set by the Criterion Collection and Masters of Cinema, Facets’ long-awaited release of Bela Tarr’s Satantango (1994) is a shoe-in for one of the best DVDs of the year. Meticulously restored, the film’s deep, oceanic black-and-white images retain all of Tarr’s signature hypnotic beauty...Unfolding over the film’s seven and a half trance-inducing hours, Tarr’s extended long takes (many lasting several minutes) invoke an almost out-of-body experience in the viewer, as real-time blends with Tarr-time and the minutes on-screen encapsulate something both intimately specific and profoundly universal. Time has rarely been used more wisely in cinema..."

Ready my full review of Satantango online here at The L Magazine.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__07240806.cfm

Back to Normandy (Retour en Normandie) (2007)

"Embedded in these modest memories is the crux of Philibert’s film: the idea that cinema can act as a personal, or even communal, history, and that the images don’t just tell the narrative as written in the script, but also act as a visual record of the real people involved in the production. It’s an example of narrative cinema functioning as a home movie. Philibert waits until the final moment of the film to reveal his true motivation for making the film: his own father, recently deceased, had a small role in the film that was eventually cut."

Read my full review of Nicolas Philibert's Back to Normandy (Retour en Normandie) online here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://notcoming.com/reviews/backtonormandy/

I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother… (1976) and Back to Normandy (2007)

"Fusing anthropology and noir with a neo-realist aesthetic, René Allio’s cinematic adaptation of Michel Foucault’s I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother… (1976) is as bleak and severe as its title suggests. Using local farmers and their families as actors, Allio shot the film on location, not far from the small French village where the original murder occurred in 1835... Blisteringly realistic and disturbingly acute in its exploration of familial betrayal and social ethics, the film is rarely screened and not available on video in the US. Its obscurity unjust, I, Pierre… is deserving of wider attention and re-evaluation..."

"Playing alongside I, Pierre… is Back to Normandy (2007), the new documentary by Nicolas Philibert (To Be and To Have [2002]), who was Allio’s assistant on the former film. An imaginative and innovative departure from the typical 'behind the scenes' documentary, the film isn’t merely interested in chronicling the production history of I, Pierre… but instead is captivated by the real-life personalities of the villagers who acted in the film..."

Read my full review of I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother… and Back to Normandy online here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__07230806.cfm

Mary Ellen Bute Retrospective at Anthology Film Archives

Using popular pieces of classical music as a foundation, such as Copland’s “Hoedown” and Saint-Saëns’ “Danse Macabre,” Mary Ellen Bute and her alternating cast of collaborators (among them Norman McLaren and her husband Ted Nemeth) created an unprecedented cinematic sensation: an animated synthesis of music and abstracted impulses that pulsed and gyrated in organic ecstasy. There is such unbridled joy in her films — as though the images themselves were an elastic and ever-expanding dance — as well as an irresistible sense of humor...

Read my full essay on Mary Ellen Bute online here at The L Magazine.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__07170809.cfm

La France (2007)

"France has given us two of the most charmingly original films of the year so far, both of them fond, modernist interpretations of the musical genre. First was Christophe Honore’s tale of young love in the city, Love Songs, and now Serge Bozon’s WWI battlefield fable, La France."

Read my full review of La France here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/19/Film/feature4.cfm?ctype=2

New Video! "My Mouth" by Modern Silent Cinema

Here's a new video for the song "My Mouth" by Modern Silent Cinema, from the album "Gets Hiccupy." Email if you want a copy of the album.

www.myspace.com/modernsilentcinema

Frederick Wiseman's "Manoeuvre" (1979)

"If Basic Training documented an overly confident army (as characterized by one officer’s declaration, 'The United States Army has never lost a war,'), then Manoeuvre is documenting the aftermath of such brashness. Under Wiseman’s characteristic impartial direction, uncertainty and insecurity mar the illusion of an institution that typically presents itself as invulnerable, thus offering an unusually nuanced portrait of an institution all too often stereotyped as one-dimensional."

Read my full review of Frederick Wiseman's Manoeuvre online here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://notcoming.com/reviews/manoeuvre/

Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

"A murderous attack on bourgeois conventionality, Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux represents the apex of the artist’s subversive humor. Chaplin’s films have always been anti-establishment, favoring marginal characters cast aside by society and left to fend for themselves."

Read my full review of Monsieur Verdoux here at The L Magazine.

http://thelmagazine.com/6/16/Film/feature4.cfm?ctype=2

Frederick Wiseman's "Basic Training" (1971)

"Even without the presence of a subjective voice-over narration, it’s difficult not to read the repeated shots of hand-to-hand combat with stuffed dummies in light of the ultimate goal of training: to fight in Vietnam. Wiseman’s insight isn’t at all an irony, but rather an incongruity between the controlled circumstances during training and the actual circumstances in which they will have to utilize their lessons."

Read my full review of Frederick Wiseman's Basic Training online here at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

http://notcoming.com/reviews/basictraining/

New Song! New EP! Modern Silent Cinema!

Just posted a new song called "Than Burning" on MySpace from my upcoming EP, "Gets Hiccupy." The artwork (featured here) is by Mat Hinkel of Mat Design. I think he did a pretty awesome job. Check out his page and give him some applause! Anyway, check out the song, leave some comments, let me know if you want a copy of the album.

www.myspace.com/modernsilentcinema for more info.

Little Fugitive (1953)

"Little Fugitive delicately blends documentary realism and candid-camera style photography with a sparse, unobtrusive narrative, the combination of which recalls equally the light touch of early cinema actualities and 1940s Italian Neorealism. Engel’s background with the Photo League, as well as Orkin’s newsreel training during WWII, give the film’s portrait of New York City, and particularly Coney Island, a staggering, nostalgia-inducing authenticity."

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

http://thelmagazine.com/6/13/Film/feature3.cfm?ctype=2

Idiots and Angels (2008) Tribeca Film Festival Preview

"The lovingly sullen atmosphere of the film never falls into misanthropy, partially because Plympton (and his audiences) find too much joy in laughing at the characters’ ornery behavior and the bizarre way the situations resolve themselves. The detour may be long and nightmarish, but at the end of Plympton’s journey there is redemption and hope, however—as Penelope Huston said of the endings of Preston Sturges’ films—always with a Cheshire cat’s grin."

Read my full review of Bill Plympton's Idiots and Angels online here at The L Magazine.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__05010804.cfm

Sita Sings the Blues (2008) Tribeca Film Festival Preview

As if to emphasize Sita’s relevancy for modern viewers, Paley interweaves into the narrative a contemporary story of a young woman whose boyfriend moves to India for work (just as Rama left to go hunting). Only instead of waiting behind, this woman packs her bags and moves to India of her own will. The ensuing domestic discontent becomes a counter-point to the original story, and offers a potential answer to the question of, “What does an ancient story like Sita’s have to do with today’s world?” Paley’s charming response confirms that the past can have quite a bit to say about the present.

Read my full review of Sita Sings the Blues online here at The L Magazine.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__04300806.cfm

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.