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| ricarda |
 Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2007 12:53 am Post subject: Movie Reviews |
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Movie Review
The 11th Hour (2007)
August 17, 2007
Helpful Hints for Saving the Planet
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: August 17, 2007
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the environment, blah, blah, blah, melting ice caps. To judge from all the gas-guzzlers still fouling the air and the plastic bottles clogging the dumps, it appears that the news that we are killing ourselves and the world with our greed and garbage hasn’t sunk in. That’s one reason “The 11th Hour,” an unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity, is such essential viewing. It may not change your life, but it may inspire you to recycle that old slogan-button your folks pinned on their dashikis back in the day: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
The problem looks overwhelming, literally, as demonstrated by the images of overflowing landfills and sickeningly polluted bodies of water that flicker through the movie like damning evidence. Structured in mainstream fiction-film fashion (in other words, like a term paper), it opens with an introduction that presents the case, builds momentum with an absorbing analytical middle section and wraps up with just enough optimism that I didn’t want to run home and stick my head in an energy-efficient oven. No matter how well intentioned, political documentaries that present problems without real-life, real-time, real-people solutions — an 800 number, an address, something — just add to the noise (pollution), becoming another title on some filmmaker’s résumé as well as a temporary salve for the audience’s guilt.
Written and directed by the sisters Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, and narrated on- and off-camera by Leonardo DiCaprio, who served as one of the producers, “The 11th Hour” attempts to stave off helplessness, and the nihilism that often follows it, mostly by appealing to our reason.
In one interview snippet after another, dozens of scientists, activists, gurus, policy types and even a magical-mushroom guy go through the arguments, present the data and criticize the anti-green faction, putting words to the images that are liberally interspersed between these talking heads like mortar. Every so often, Mr. DiCaprio pops up on screen to interrupt this show and tell, squinting into the camera and pushing the narrative to the next topic.
If your head isn’t lodged in the sand, much of what’s said in the movie will be agonizing and familiar. Gasping children, disappearing animals, gushing oil, billowing smoke, dying lakes, emptying forests, warming weather — the list of ills is numbingly familiar. In the movie’s eye-catching opener, the directors riffle through a veritable catalog of timely snapshots, some obvious (a smoggy skyline), others less so (a human fetus).
Effectively blunt, this sequence provoked a colleague to invoke the name of the avant-garde giant Stan Brakhage, but the truer visual and structural model here is a film like “Koyaanisqatsi,” with its streaming global landscapes. The difference is that the images in “The 11th Hour” are pointedly horrifying, not reassuring, pacific or aestheticized.
That can make it tough to watch, which the directors clearly know. They whip through the pictures and the interviews fast — at times a little too fast — and keep the information flowing as quickly as the visuals. This swift, steady pace means that you receive a lot of bad news from a lot of different sources. The ecologist Brock Dolman explains, “When we started feeding off the fossil fuel cycle, we began living with a death-based cycle.” From there the topic nimbly jumps to climate change, national security (courtesy the former director of the C.I.A., R. James Woolsey), Katrina, asthma and the stunning news from the oceanographer and author Sylvia Earle that “we’ve lost 90 percent of most of the big fish in the sea.”
Yes, it’s bad, but it’s not over yet. Many of those same sober talking heads also argue with equal passion that we can save ourselves, along with the sky above us and the earth below. The capacity for human beings to fight, to rise to the occasion, as Mr. Woolsey notes, invoking America’s rapid, albeit delayed jump into World War II, gives hope where none might seem possible.
It is our astonishing capacity for hope that distinguishes “The 11th Hour” and that speaks so powerfully, in part because it is this all-too-human quality that may finally force us to fight the good fight against the damage we have done and continue to do. As the saying goes, keep hope alive — and if you’re holding this review in your hands, don’t forget to recycle the paper.
“The 11th Hour” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It has freakily scary environmental images.
THE 11TH HOUR
Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
Written and directed by Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners; narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio; directors of photography, Peter Youngblood Hills and Andrew Rowlands; edited by Pietro Scalia and Luis Alvarez y Alvarez; music by Jean-Pascal Beintus and Eric Avery; production designer, Ms. Conners; produced by Mr. DiCaprio, Ms. Petersen, Chuck Castleberry and Brian Gerber; released by Warner Independent Pictures. Running time: 91 minutes.
Leonardo DiCaprio on the set of “The 11th Hour,” a documentary he helped make about the environment, directed by Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/movies/17hour.html?th&emc=th
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Quiet City (2007)
Erin Fisher and Cris Lankenau in Aaron Katz’s “Quiet City.”
Between the Mumbles, Images of Sorrowful Poetry
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: August 29, 2007
Aaron Katz’s film “Quiet City” is punctuated with images of New York at twilight that cast a mood of reflective melancholy reminiscent of the loneliness at the heart of Edward Hopper paintings. Silhouettes of television aerials against a glowing orange and purple sky; yellow traffic lights on a nearly deserted avenue; a silvery subway train in the middle distance slipping through the dusky, blue-gray light; an industrial landscape at sunset: These and other beautiful images, photographed by Andrew Reed, resonate with the characters’ lives.
“Quiet City” belongs to the movie genre labeled mumblecore, so named partly because the young, nerdy characters in these films rarely address any subject outside their immediate social sphere. If they don’t actually mumble their words, the tone of their conversations is restricted to various shades of chat, much of which seems trivial. It is a filmmaking sensibility, filtered through Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes and distantly related to punk, with the spirit of defiance replaced by resignation to the art of diminished expectations.
God, as they say, is in the details. And as the two main characters, Jamie (Erin Fisher), a visitor to New York from Atlanta, and Charlie (Cris Lankenau), a recently unemployed New York resident, make their way through Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, you are as likely to define them by who they’re not as by who they are.
They’re not the sort of sexed-up would-be celebutantes who overrun MTV, VH1 and tabloid television. Nor are they soulless, well-tailored M.B.A.’s or eccentric dot-com visionaries with billionaire agendas on whom the media also likes to dote.
Clean-cut bohemians might be the most accurate description, although there is nothing especially arty about their demeanor. Charlie confesses that his ideal job would be one in which he supported himself doing absolutely nothing. Jamie admits, with some embarrassment, that she works in an Applebee’s restaurant. She is very pretty, while Charlie, who doesn’t seem to have a vain bone in his body, epitomizes the word schlub.
For all its air of casualness and the actors’ unerring ability to deliver semi-improvised dialogue that sounds overheard, “Quiet City” is a formal movie, elegantly edited, whose images, both still and moving, are conjoined to a soundtrack that reduces the noise of the city to an evocative background hum, quiet but not silent. When music intrudes, it tends to be minimalist pop played on a toy keyboard.
Jamie and Charlie meet by chance in a nearly deserted subway station when Jamie, dragging a suitcase, approaches him to ask for directions to a diner where she is supposed to meet her New York friend Samantha. Charlie escorts her there and waits for Samantha to appear, but she never does.
He eventually invites Jamie to hang out at his apartment, and the two end up spending the next 24 hours drifting around New York. They drop in on a friend of Charlie’s to retrieve a borrowed hat, and visit a Park Slope art opening and its after-party.
The mumblecore genre, with its minimalist aesthetics, minuscule budgets, home-movie casting of friends and acquaintances and its fly-on-the-wall, quasi-documentary spontaneity, is so wide-open for parody that it is a sitting duck for the most withering send-up. “Quiet City” is fortunate to arrive just before the inevitable demolition crews arrive to tear it to shreds. Tender and sad, it is a fully realized work of mumblecore poetry.
QUIET CITY
Opens today in Manhattan.
Written, directed and edited by Aaron Katz; director of photography, Andrew Reed; music by Keegan DeWitt; produced by Brendan McFadden and Ben Stambler; released by 600 West. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 78 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Erin Fisher (Jamie), Cris Lankenau (Charlie), Joe Swanberg (Adam), Sarah Hellman (Robin), Tucker Stone (Kyle), Michael Tully (Michael) and Karrie Crouse (Karrie).
_________________
Struck by the sounds before the sun, / I knew the night had gone.
The morning breeze like a bugle blew / Against the drums of dawn. (Bob Dylan) |
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Movie Review
In the Valley of Elah (2007)
September 14, 2007
Seeking Clues to a Son’s Death and a War’s Meaning
by A.O.Scott
Viewed from one angle — straight on, from the ground level of its busy plot — “In the Valley of Elah” might be mistaken for a tidy crime procedural. A retired military police officer named Hank Deerfield (played by Tommy Lee Jones with his usual brisk, gruff economy) learns that his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker), an Army specialist recently returned from Iraq, has gone AWOL from his base in New Mexico.
Before long, the young man’s charred and dismembered remains are found in the desert, and Hank joins Emily Sanders, a local detective played by Charlize Theron, in trying to figure out who could have done such a terrible thing to his boy.
As in an episode of “Law & Order,” suspicion veers one way and then another as new information comes to light. Was it drug dealers? Gang members? Soldiers from the young man’s own squad? Was Mike himself guilty of terrible things? Paul Haggis, the writer and director, obeys the rules of the whodunit genre by providing answers to some of the basic, literal questions at the center of the film. And considered strictly as a crime drama, “In the Valley of Elah” is a bit pedestrian, with a few too many set pieces, extraneous subplots and predictable turns.
But an air of irresolution nonetheless lingers around it, a sorrowful, frustrated sense that the deepest mysteries cannot be contained within any narrative framework. Underneath its deceptively quiet surface is a raw, angry, earnest attempt to grasp the moral consequences of the war in Iraq, and to stare without blinking into the chasm that divides those who are fighting it from their families, their fellow citizens and one another.
This is not to say that the detective story, suggested by the actual murder of Specialist Richard Davis in 2003, is entirely beside the point. Rather, the mechanics of the plot — the forensic discoveries, the squabbles over jurisdiction between military and civilian authority, the rounds of paperwork and the squad-room arguments — serve as the scaffolding for a more unsettling, open-ended inquiry. Much as Hank wants to know what happened to Mike the night he died, his real quest is to find out who his son was, and what happened to him in Iraq.
The only clues he has are some JPEGs his son e-mailed to him, the memory of a desperate late-night phone call from the war zone and some smeary, scrambled video recovered from Mike’s cellphone. These hectic, unfocused clips stand in jarring, pointed contrast to the neatly composed frames and carefully paced shots that make up most of Mr. Haggis’s film, and they pose an agonizing challenge: How do you extract meaning from such chaos?
To his great credit, Mr. Haggis tries to coax an answer out of his story rather than imposing one on it from the start, as he did in “Crash.” That film, which owes its best-picture Oscar to the dedication of its cast and the obviousness of its themes, turned racial intolerance into fodder for a self-righteous, schematic allegory.
While “In the Valley of Elah” has its share of overreaching and throat clearing — including clumsy references to the biblical story of David and Goliath, the source of its title — it is mostly free of moral grandstanding. (A brief scene in which Hank gives voice to some of his half-buried ethnic bigotry is more credible than any of the similar moments that make up most of “Crash.”)
Not that the message of “In the Valley of Elah” is ambiguous or unclear. The message is that the war in Iraq has damaged this country in ways we have only begun to grasp. For some people this will seem like old news. Others — in particular those who pretend that railing against movies they haven’t seen is a form of rational political discourse — may persuade themselves that it is provocative or controversial.
But however you judge the movie’s politics, and whatever its flaws, there is something inarguable, something irreducibly honest and right, about Mr. Jones’s performance. Hank exists on a continuum with the other lawmen he has recently played, in particular the Texas sheriffs in “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” which he directed, and Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country for Old Men,” which will be released later this fall.
Like them, Hank carries around an innate sense of right and wrong, and Mr. Jones’s creased face, at once kindly and severe, is a manifest sign of his old-school temperament. Hank is the kind of man who shines his shoes every night, says grace before each meal and makes his motel-room bed according to military standards.
It’s unlikely that a veteran M.P., whose service covered at least some of the Vietnam years, would entertain the illusion that all fighting men are Boy Scouts. But it is clear that Hank has both a general fondness for soldiers and a father’s assumption that he knows his own son. That may be part of why the grisly nature of Mike’s fate, and the possibility that some of his buddies were responsible for it, disturbs him so much. Something, he suspects, has gone terribly wrong with the institutions and the men he has always loved and trusted.
At every point, as Hank nags and pushes Emily in her investigation, the movie registers the panic and dread that he fights to keep down. These feelings come through to some extent in the reactions of his wife, Joan (Susan Sarandon), whom he tries to protect, but more decisively, and more hauntingly, through the moods Mr. Haggis creates (with the crucial assistance of Roger Deakins, the cinematographer responsible for the movie’s austere, washed-out look, and Mark Isham, who wrote the eerie, sparingly applied musical score).
Almost no violence takes place on screen, but there are times when “In the Valley of Elah” feels almost like a horror film. Its steady crescendo of suspense builds toward the revelation — and vanquishing — of some unspeakable, monstrous evil.
But since the monster has no identifiable physical shape, it is not so easily defeated. While there are killers, liars and sadists to be found in this movie, there are not really any villains. And there is no reassuring conclusion. If it is anguished, even despairing, “In the Valley of Elah” is also compassionate. At heart it is a somber ballad about young men who remain lost in a dangerous, confusing place even after they come home.
“In the Valley of Elah” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). There are some violent scenes and a general atmosphere of brutality and fear.
IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH
Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
Directed by Paul Haggis; written by Mr. Haggis, based on a story by Mark Boal and Mr. Haggis; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Jo Francis; music by Mark Isham; production designer, Laurence Bennett; produced by Patrick Wachsberger, Steven Samuels, Darlene Caamano Loquet, Mr. Haggis and Laurence Becsey; released by Warner Independent Pictures. Running time: 120 minutes.
WITH: Tommy Lee Jones (Hank Deerfield), Charlize Theron (Emily Sanders), Susan Sarandon (Joan Deerfield), James Franco (Sergeant Carnelli), Jonathan Tucker (Mike Deerfield), Frances Fisher (Evie), Jason Patric (Lieutenant Kirklander) and Josh Brolin (Chief Buchwald).
A father (Tommy Lee Jones, with Susan Sarandon) tries to solve his son's murder in Paul Haggis's film, "In the Valley of Elah."
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/movies/14elah.html?th&emc=th
_________________
Struck by the sounds before the sun, / I knew the night had gone.
The morning breeze like a bugle blew / Against the drums of dawn. (Bob Dylan) |
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Movie review
JOE STRUMMER: The Future is Unwritten
Friends Sitting Around a Campfire, Telling Stories About a Legend
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: November 2, 2007
The documentary “Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten” uses rare footage, interviews and even snippets of an animated “Animal Farm” to tell its story
When the Clash was labeled “The Only Band That Matters,” it may have been record company hype, but when I was a teenager, there was probably no band that mattered more to me. The idealism, the earnest anger, the democratic, sometimes clumsy way of mixing styles and sounds — I am almost as susceptible to it now as I was at 15. This is all by way of disclosure: It’s likely that I would have been stirred and moved by “Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten,” even if it were the straightforward, VH1-ready rock star biography it might, at first, appear to be. The film, however, is much more than a biography of the Clash’s guitarist and lead singer: It’s history, criticism, philosophy and politics, played fast and loud.
Directed by Julien Temple, an able and tireless chronicler of the pop life, “Joe Strummer” assembles clips and interviews into a fast-moving timeline. Mr. Strummer’s voice, captured from radio broadcasts and old conversations, provides narration and companionship. That his presence is limited to audio and archival material provides a sad and subtle reminder of his absence, of the void left by his sudden death at 50, from a heart attack, in 2002.
Like Mr. Temple’s two movies about the Sex Pistols — the eyewitness “Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle” (1980) and the revisionist “Filth and the Fury” (2000) — “Joe Strummer” is not so much a portrait as a collage. Sometimes the images are conventionally documentary, serving as literal illustrations of the story. But just as often they provide a kind of free-associative context, reminding us that an individual’s life is made up not only of experiences and events but also of ideas, dreams and possibilities. So while we are treated to marvelous and rare footage of the Clash in rehearsal and Mr. Strummer’s previous bands in performance, we also sample news video and snippets of the cartoon version of “Animal Farm.”
And we hear abundant testimony from Mr. Strummer’s friends, lovers, colleagues and admirers. They are not identified in the course of the movie, though some (Bono, John Cusack, Steve Buscemi, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) are not hard to recognize. Mr. Temple gathers them around campfires with other, less well-known people, and by the time the metaphorical significance of the fires is explained, late in the film, it’s clear that they represent Mr. Strummer’s egalitarian, bohemian spirit.
The story Mr. Temple tells is, like most rock ’n’ roll biographies, one of self-invention. Joe Strummer was born John Graham Mellor. His father was a diplomat, and Joe’s youth was more cosmopolitan and more privileged than his scruffy, proletarian musical persona might suggest. An art school dropout in the best British rock ’n’ roll tradition, he spent the early 1970s as a hippie vagabond, taking the name Woody (as in Guthrie) and bumming and busking around London and other English cities. He was part of the West London squatter scene and the leader of a band called the 101ers when punk rock arrived.
The Clash did not invent punk — who did is the subject of endless argument among partisans of Malcolm McLaren, John Lydon and the Ramones — but the band was decisive in infusing its raw, raging energy with a sense of ethical integrity and political commitment. The heart of “Joe Strummer” is the narrative of the band’s rise, triumph and eventual unraveling, a tale told by survivors, participants, hangers-on and fans and animated by performances that have lost little of their immediacy or force in the intervening years.
The usual rock-doc motifs are there: trouble with management; drug problems; tensions between Mr. Strummer and Mick Jones, the band’s other guitarist and creative force. Once the Clash has broken up, in the mid-1980s, there is a long denouement — for me, I guess it’s called adulthood — during which both Mr. Strummer’s career and Mr. Temple’s film lose a bit of steam. But the waning of punk’s heat leaves behind a surprising afterglow and allows you to appreciate Joe Strummer’s warmth.
JOE STRUMMER
The Future Is Unwritten
Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
Directed by Julien Temple; director of photography, Ben Cole; edited by Mark Reynolds, Tobias Zaldua and Niven Howie; produced by Amanda Temple, Anna Campeau and Alan Moloney; released by IFC First Take. In Manhattan at the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 124 minutes. This film is not rated.
_________________
Struck by the sounds before the sun, / I knew the night had gone.
The morning breeze like a bugle blew / Against the drums of dawn. (Bob Dylan) |
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Two Short Fables That Revel in Freedom
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
ALBERT LAMORISSE’S “White Mane” (1953) and “The Red Balloon” (1956) are among the world’s most famous and most honored films for children. Both were prizewinners at Cannes, and “The Red Balloon,” which is 34 minutes long and contains about half a dozen lines of dialogue, improbably received an Oscar for its screenplay. But kids’ stuff they are not.
The stories are simple, fablelike; the heroes are boys; the subject in each case is the purity and power of a child’s imagination; and the tone of both films is that of open-mouthed wonder. Yet these movies are also shot through with a very adult melancholy, an awareness that life tends not to measure up to the glorious pictures in our minds. The young are enchanted by “White Mane” and “The Red Balloon.” Grown-ups, who know too well how fragile this beauty is, are likely to cry.
There has recently been a long overdue surge of interest in Mr. Lamorisse’s two great films, some of it sparked by the estimable Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsien, whose feature-length homage, “Flight of the Red Balloon,” was screened at the New York Film Festival this fall. And starting Friday “White Mane” and “The Red Balloon” will be shown on a double-bill at the Film Forum in Manhattan, in superbly restored prints. “White Mane” also has a new English-language narration by Peter Strauss, which is a more scrupulous translation of the original French than previous versions. (The earliest, written by James Agee, is gorgeous, but — not surprisingly — a good deal more verbose than Mr. Lamorisse’s spare text.)
The most striking benefit of the restorations, though, is the delicate color of “The Red Balloon,” which heightens the contrast between the muted loveliness of Paris streets (it always looks like first light, somehow) and the bold, stunningly incongruous red of the title object. In a less vibrant print “The Red Balloon” would still be touching and ingenious, but it wouldn’t be half as funny.
If you haven’t seen the film since attaining the age of reason, you might have forgotten how dryly brilliant its (mostly) silent comedy is: Mr. Lamorisse times the balloon’s entrances and exits from the frame with the precision of a crack farceur.
At the beginning of the movie a schoolboy (played by Pascal Lamorisse, the filmmaker’s son) happens on a large, fortuitously untethered balloon, and, knowing a good thing when he sees one, grabs the string and claims it as his own, as if it were a stray mutt. (Or — to cite a movie that, 25 years later, took possession of the spirit of “The Red Balloon”— as if it were E. T.) Pascal then discovers, to his delight, that his new toy/pet is eminently trainable. He teaches it to follow him, off string, and to wait faithfully for him when he’s at school, on a bus or in one of the many other places where big balloons are not welcome.
The movie is essentially a series of elegant slapstick routines, in which the balloon — which has its mischievous side — darts or bobs or soars, as the situation requires, and gets laughs from the constant surprise of its appearances and disappearances. The sheer absurdity of giving a balloon the personality of a friendly, frisky dog is, of course, central to every one of Mr. Lamorisse’s gags, and it’s a conceit that could easily have become mighty tiresome. But he knows enough to keep the action brisk and the movie short, and he doesn’t press his luck by treating us, as a lesser artist might, to close-ups of his small hero’s happy face. Everything in “The Red Balloon” happens, as it should in physical comedy, in long and medium shots: no special pleading, no unseemly appeals for the viewer’s approval.
When the film is over, you realize that although you’ve been entirely enveloped in little Pascal’s fantasy world, you’ve learned next to nothing about the boy himself. His parents are not in evidence. He lives with a stout, black-clad, rather fearsome-looking old woman who may or may not be his grandmother. We’re given no idea whether he’s a good, bad or indifferent student, or who his friends are. The intensity of his attachment to the balloon suggests that he’s a lonely, dreamy child, living in his own head, but we can’t be sure; the movie gives us nothing solid to go on.
With such a skimpy back story the film runs the risk of abstraction, but Mr. Lamorisse’s reticence has the odd, bracing effect of making everything he chooses not to show us seem deeply irrelevant. All that matters here are the balloon, the boy (whoever he is) and the steep, narrow streets of Ménilmontant, where they play together.
Just how unnecessary the particulars of the boy’s “real” (i.e. nonballoon) life really are is emphasized, inadvertently, by Mr. Hou’s “Flight of the Red Balloon,” which will be released theatrically in the spring. That movie’s boy, named Simon (Simon Iteanu), has real life to burn, a messy one with a frazzled single mother (played by Juliette Binoche) in a cramped apartment. And when a red balloon enters this boy’s life, courtesy of the young Asian film student (Song Fang) who has been hired as his nanny, the contrast between his imaginative world and the world he actually inhabits feels, with all this extra detail, too pointed; Mr. Hou manages to keep poignancy at bay, but it’s touch and go.
We don’t know much, either, about the boy named Folco (Alain Emery) whose story is told in “White Mane.” He comes from a family of fishermen in the marshy southwestern region of France called the Camargue, where wild horses roam in packs. His household consists of a bushy-bearded, unidentified elderly gent and a little brother (Pascal Lamorisse, a toddler then). The lone important fact about Folco, as far as Mr. Lamorisse is concerned, is his relationship with White Mane, the alpha stallion of the herd, who, the narrator tells us, doesn’t like men but who comes to trust this boy. In a way this 39-minute, black-and-white movie is a draft of “The Red Balloon”: the unrulier, more disturbing story of which the later film is a charming, whimsical variation
“White Mane” is no less carefully composed than its better-known successor: both pictures have the economy, the clarity of purpose and the pleasing symmetry of a sonnet. For Albert Lamorisse, who began and ended his career as a documentary filmmaker, the difference lies in the landscape. A metaphorical balloon would make no more sense (even comic sense) in the Camargue than an untamed stallion would in the streets of Paris; and although both, in their respective films, represent the freedom of the imagination and both, consequently, have enemies, the threat feels much graver in “White Mane.” The envious boys with slingshots who chase down Pascal’s balloon are almost parodies of the fierce-looking riders of the Camargue pursuing White Mane for the worst and commonest reason — for the awful joy of breaking a creature freer than they are.
As Folco rides the horse, bareback, across the marshes, over the dunes and through the strange, sparse, gnarled vegetation of his native region, you sense, as in few other films, the real terrors of nature, its arbitrariness and flat indifference reflected in the very changeability of its beauty. (Compared with this, both the attractions and the dangers of the city seem like child’s play.)
It takes an extraordinary filmmaker to evoke that sort of feeling and then to cap his thrilling climactic chase with an image as ecstatic as it is disquieting, the distant sight of a boy and a horse heading out to sea. “The Red Balloon” ends with a similar flourish of ambiguous release, but it is, appropriately (and literally), a lighter one.
And Lamorisse, these movies show, really was a remarkable artist: one of the cinema’s best poets and a fearless explorer of the scary and exhilarating outbacks of the imagination. He lived for 14 years after “The Red Balloon,” mostly making documentaries. While he was shooting what would be his last picture, “The Lovers’ Wind,” in Tehran in 1970, his helicopter crashed; he was 48. Even he might not have been capable of imagining a more fitting end: He rose to get a clearer, freer view of the world, and fell from the sky.
The Red Balloon & White Mane Trailer
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"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night" ~ Edgar Allan Poe |
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Movie Review
I'm Not There (2007)
Christian Bale as an incarnation of Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There."
November 21, 2007
Another Side of Bob Dylan, and Another, and Another ...
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: November 21, 2007
From Andy Warhol to Lonelygirl15, modern media culture thrives on the traffic in counterfeit selves. In this world the greatest artist will also be, almost axiomatically, the biggest fraud. And looking back over the past 50 years or so, it is hard to find anyone with a greater ability to synthesize authenticity — to give his serial hoaxes and impersonations the ring of revealed and esoteric truth — than Bob Dylan.
It’s not just that Robert Zimmerman, a Jewish teenager growing up in Eisenhower-era Minnesota, borrowed a name from a Welsh poet and the singing style of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl troubadour and bluffed his way into the New York folk scene. That was chutzpah. What followed was genius — the elaboration of an enigmatic, mercurial personality that seemed entirely of its moment and at the same time connected to a lost agrarian past. From the start, Mr. Dylan has been singularly adept at channeling and recombining various strands of the American musical and literary vernacular, but he has often seemed less like an interpreter of those traditions than like their incarnation.
His persona has been as inclusive as Walt Whitman’s and as unsettlingly splintered as that of Herman Melville’s Confidence Man. Vulnerable as Mr. Dylan is to misunderstanding (“I couldn’t believe after all these years/You didn’t know me better than that” in “Idiot Wind”), he also actively solicits it (“Something is happening here/But you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mr. Jones?” in “Ballad of a Thin Man”). So it is only fitting that Todd Haynes, in “I’m Not There,” his incandescent rebus of a movie inspired by Mr. Dylan’s life and music, has chosen to multiply puzzles and paradoxes rather than solve them. Not for nothing does one of Mr. Haynes’s stories take place in a town called Riddle.
Among its many achievements, Mr. Haynes’s film hurls a Molotov cocktail through the facade of the Hollywood biopic factory, exploding the literal-minded, anti-intellectual assumptions that guide even the most admiring cinematic explorations of artists’ lives. Rather than turn out yet another dutiful, linear chronicle of childhood trauma and grown-up substance abuse, Mr. Haynes has produced a dizzying palimpsest of images and styles, in which his subject appears in the form of six different people.
Not one is named Bob Dylan (or Robert Zimmerman), though all of them evoke actual and invented points in the Dylan cosmos: Billy the Kid, Woody Guthrie, the Mighty Quinn. They’re not all musicians: One is a poet named Arthur Rimbaud; another is a movie star.
These divergent visions of Dylan are played by two different Australians (Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett); a young British actor (Ben Whishaw); a prepubescent African-American named Marcus Carl Franklin; Richard Gere; and the most recent Batman. Their stories collide and entwine, adding up to an experience that is as fascinating and inexhaustible as listening to “Blood on the Tracks” or “The Basement Tapes.”
It is unusual to see a masterwork emerge from one artist’s absorption with the work of another, though Mr. Haynes came close with “Far From Heaven,” his 2002 homage to the director Douglas Sirk. And while “I’m Not There” is immersed in Dylanology, it is more than a document of scholarly preoccupation or fan obsession.
Devotees of Dylan lore will find their heads swimming with footnotes, as they track Mr. Haynes’s allusions not only to Mr. Dylan’s own music but also to the extensive secondary literature it has inspired, from books by David Hajdu and Greil Marcus to films, including D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary, “Don’t Look Back,” some of which Mr. Haynes remakes shot for shot.
But the film is anything but dry, and like Mr. Dylan’s best songs, it is at once teasingly arcane and bracingly plain-spoken. Mr. Haynes, switching styles, colors, film stocks and editing rhythms with unnerving ease (and with the crucial help of Jay Rabinowitz and Edward Lachman, the editor and the director of photography), has held his cerebral and his visceral impulses in perfect balance. “I’m Not There” respects the essential question Mr. Dylan’s passionate followers have always found themselves asking — What does it mean? — without forgetting that the counter-question Mr. Dylan has posed is more challenging and, for a movie, more important: How does it feel?
As you watch the mid-’60s renegade folk singer Jude Quinn — embodied in Ms. Blanchett’s hunched, skinny frame and photographed in silvery Nouvelle Vague black and white — pinball through swinging London, subsisting on amphetamines, Camel straights and gnomic talk, it feels like a pop earthquake. The ’60s, man! As Mr. Ledger’s character and his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) meet, marry and fall apart, it feels like the heartbreaking aftermath of a moment of high promise and possibility. (That would be the ’70s.)
Riding the rails in 1959 with a pint-size, wisecracking hobo who calls himself Woody Guthrie (Mr. Franklin) and saddling up with Mr. Gere’s Billy the Kid in Riddle, Mo., in the 19th century, you feel a piercing nostalgia for a pastoral America that probably existed only in legend. With Christian Bale, playing a star of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene who resurfaces as a Pentecostal minister in Los Angeles years later, you experience a prickle of confusion and morbid curiosity. As it all unfolds, there may be other feelings too, including awe at the quality of the performances and occasional exasperation at Mr. Haynes’s sprawling, hectic virtuosity.
Still, I would not subtract a minute of this movie, or wish it any different. Nor do I anticipate being finished with “I’m Not There” anytime soon, since, like “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” it invites endless interpretation, criticism and elaboration. Instead of proposing a definitive account of Bob Dylan’s career, Mr. Haynes has used that career as fuel for a wide-ranging (and, if you’ll permit me, freewheeling) historical inquiry into his own life and times. In spite of its title, “I’m Not There” is a profoundly, movingly personal film, passionate in its engagement with the mysteries of the recent past.
“Live in your own time.” That’s the advice young “Woody Guthrie” hears from a motherly woman who offers him a hot meal and a place to sleep. It’s sensible advice — he’s daydreaming of the Depression in the middle of the space age — but also useless. It’s not as if anyone has a choice. To slog through the present requires no particular wit, vision or art. But a certain kind of artist will comb through the old stuff that’s lying around — the tall tales and questionable memories, the yellowing photographs and scratched records — looking for glimpses of a possible future. Though there’s a lot of Bob Dylan’s music in “I’m Not There,” Mr. Haynes is not simply compiling golden oldies. You hear familiar songs, but what you see is the imagination unleashed — the chimes of freedom flashing.
“I’m Not There” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has sex, swearing, brief violence and drug use.
I’M NOT THERE
Opens today nationwide.
Directed by Todd Haynes; written by Mr. Haynes and Oren Moverman, based on a story by Mr. Haynes; director of photography, Edward Lachman; edited by Jay Rabinowitz; production designer, Judy Becker; produced by James D. Stern, John Sloss, John Goldwyn and Christine Vachon; released by the Weinstein Company. In Manhattan at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
WITH: Christian Bale (Jack/Pastor John), Cate Blanchett (Jude Quinn), Marcus Carl Franklin (Woody Guthrie), Richard Gere (Billy), Heath Ledger (Robbie), Ben Whishaw (Arthur Rimbaud), Kris Kristofferson (Narrator), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Claire), David Cross (Allen Ginsberg), Bruce Greenwood (Keenan Jones/Pat Garrett), Julianne Moore (Alice Fabian), Michelle Williams (Coco Rivington), Richie Havens (Old Man Arvin), Peter Friedman (Morris Bernstein), Alison Folland (Grace), Yolonda Ross (Angela Reeves), Kim Gordon (Carla Hendricks), Mark Camacho (Norman), Joe Cobden (Sonny) and Kristen Hager (Mona).
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Struck by the sounds before the sun, / I knew the night had gone.
The morning breeze like a bugle blew / Against the drums of dawn. (Bob Dylan) |
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Roman Judge
Joined: 17 Feb 2005
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I haven't seen Beowulf yet, but the trailers inspire in me a certain morbid curiosity as to why a Danish sea monster talks with the accent of Natasha Fatale.
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My boss is a cyborg.
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Movie Review
Oswald's Ghost (2007)
A Dallas police mugshot of Lee Harvey Oswald from the 2007 documentary film "Oswald's Ghost," directed by Robert Stone.
Haunted History
By MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
Published: November 30, 2007
The documentary “Oswald’s Ghost” initially plays as yet another primer on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the vilification of Lee Harvey Oswald, the normalization of conspiracy theory and the collective aftershocks of a murder many Americans still consider unsolved.
Because the movie covers well-worn territory — and interviews the usual boldface names, including the assassination theorists Mark Lane and Edward Jay Epstein, the former CBS beat reporter Dan Rather and Norman Mailer — its existence raises a question: Why go here again?
The answer coalesces in the film’s second half. The director Robert Stone (“Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst”) draws parallels between the Johnson-Nixon era and the post-9/11 years — periods of introspection, paranoia, conservative-liberal animosity, executive-branch secrecy and war.
These comparisons aren’t new, either, but Mr. Stone does a diligent, sometimes eerie job of articulating them. Along the way he showcases plenty of television news snippets of Oswald and his assassin, Jack Ruby; Mr. Lane; the future senator Arlen Specter, who coined the dismissive phrase “magic bullet”; and other pivotal players. And he collects autumnal interviews with witnesses to a period when it seemed, to quote Mailer, “as if God had removed his sanction from America.”
OSWALD’S GHOST
Opens today in Manhattan.
Written, produced and directed by Robert Stone; director of photography, Howard Shack; edited by Don Kleszy and Mr. Stone; music by Gary Lionelli; released by Seventh Art Releasing. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. This film is not rated.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/movies/30oswa.html?th&emc=th
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Struck by the sounds before the sun, / I knew the night had gone.
The morning breeze like a bugle blew / Against the drums of dawn. (Bob Dylan) |
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| Posted: Fri Dec 07, 2007 10:47 pm Post subject: |
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Roman Judge
Joined: 17 Feb 2005
Posts: 5605
Location: Glorious People's Republic of California (a division of Lucasfilm Limited)
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I get the impression that Robert Stone wants to clear the family name, which is currently associated with a director noted for never taking his medication.
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AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR
http://harvey-rrit.livejournal.com/
My writing partner is a Renaissance man.
My boss is a cyborg.
I receive messages from the future.
This is the coolest job in the world.
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| Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 11:18 am Post subject: |
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Over 7500 - Terra Poster
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| Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:39 pm Post subject: |
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John Lennon’s Death Revisited Through the Words of His Killer
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
“I was nobody until I killed the biggest somebody on earth.”
Those are the boastful words of John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman (Jonas Ball), who shot Lennon on Dec. 8, 1980, in front of his home at the Dakota, the Manhattan apartment complex at 72nd Street and Central Park West.
Everything Mr. Chapman says in “The Killing of John Lennon,” Andrew Piddington’s devastating re-enactment of events leading up to, including and immediately after the murder, is taken from interviews, depositions and court transcripts. Because much of the dialogue is voice-over, the film takes place largely inside Mr. Chapman’s feverish mind. Lennon appears in the movie but only briefly, and in shadow: a phantom to be slain.
Shot in a quasi-documentary style at the actual locations where the events took place, including the sidewalk outside the Dakota, the movie is extremely uncomfortable to watch. Using a minimum of photographic tricks, it evokes episodes of mental disorientation in which images jiggle and blur into one another. Its fragments from the movies “Raging Bull,” “Taxi Driver” and “Ordinary People” suggest the volatile interaction of popular culture and mental instability. And its sampling of vintage clips of the Beatles and of Lennon is heartbreaking.
Although “The Killing of John Lennon” doesn’t ask you to sympathize with Mr. Chapman, who is now serving a 20-year-to-life sentence in Attica state prison, it requires you to spend nearly two hours in his disturbing company. That’s asking a lot. Grandiose, narcissistic, subject to delusions and extreme mood swings, he comes across as the kind of maniacally self-centered creep who, if encountered in a bar, would prompt most people to disengage after five minutes of small talk.
Listening to him gas on about his twisted obsession with “The Catcher in the Rye” and his identification with its troubled teenage protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is torture. That J. D. Salinger novel set off the sort of brainstorm in Mr. Chapman that some evangelical Christians have described as their reaction to encountering a Bible on the eve of conversion.
Encountered by Mr. Chapman when he was “searching for some kind of guidance,” the book became “an electric current in my hand, burning my body,” he recalls. From then on, Mr. Chapman began confusing himself with Caulfield, often signing the character’s name instead of his own and in the courtroom quoting passages from the book as if they were Scripture.
As evidence of Lennon’s phoniness, Mr. Chapman cites the lyrics of “Imagine” (“Imagine no possessions”), then enumerates that star’s properties.
The film begins in Honolulu, where Mr. Chapman lived with his Japanese-American wife, Gloria (Mie Omori), and worked as a security guard (a job he quit) in the months before his first visit to New York City in October 1980. In Honolulu he complains of severe headaches and of difficulty eating and sleeping. We meet his mother (Krisha Fairchild), a blowsy blonde with a Southern accent whom he describes as a character out of “The Glass Menagerie.”
During his initial visit to New York, when he discovers that Lennon is away, he sees the movie “Ordinary People,” which temporarily dissuades him from his mission. “My rage was defeated,” he declares proudly. “The volcano was capped.” But not for long.
I’ve met enough desperate hangers-on in the pop music world who resemble the loser portrayed by Mr. Ball to recognize him as a classic celebrity stalker seeking fame by association. The difference between Mr. Chapman and thousands of others is that in his case, a screw came loose in his mind. Mr. Ball, who is somewhat better-looking than photographs of Mr. Chapman but of the same physical type, captures the tiniest nuances of obsequiousness and cunning that such people exhibit. In Mr. Chapman’s case the precarious balance between adoration and envy tilted lethally toward the negative.
Describing his feelings during the killing, he says: “There was no emotion, no anger. There was dead silence in my brain.”
Afterward, when a psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital Center asks why he did it, Mr. Chapman replies: “Because I thought he was a phony. I actually loved his music.”
If “The Killing of John Lennon” is a well-made film, it is also a total bummer.
THE KILLING OF JOHN LENNON
Opens in Manhattan on Wednesday.
Written and directed by Andrew Piddington; director of photography, Roger Eaton; edited by Tony Palmer; music by Makana; production designer, Tora Peterson; produced by Rakha Singh; released by IFC Films. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Jonas Ball (Mark David Chapman), Krisha Fairchild (Mr. Chapman’s mother), Mie Omori (Gloria Chapman) and Robert Kirk (Detective John Sullivan).
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Struck by the sounds before the sun, / I knew the night had gone.
The morning breeze like a bugle blew / Against the drums of dawn. (Bob Dylan) |
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| Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 3:59 pm Post subject: |
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An Actor Whose D'Approccianti to Singing Lets the Words Take Center Stage
Johnny Depp in “Sweeney Todd.” Mr. Depp has said that when he signed for the film, he had never sung a complete song in public.
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
As a devotee of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals and a big Johnny Depp fan, I was surprised, intrigued and very dubious when I first heard that Mr. Depp would play the title role in Tim Burton’s film of “Sweeney Todd.”
On one level it seemed an ingenious casting stroke. A courageous and vulnerable actor, Mr. Depp would surely be able to convey the tormented demon barber of Fleet Street. But Sweeney Todd is a vocally daunting role in a musically complex Sondheim score. Could Johnny Depp sing it?
Indeed he can. Or perhaps the way to put it is that his performance as captured on screen is stunning in every dimension: dramatically, psychologically, physically and, yes, vocally. Naturally, Mr. Depp, who is nominated for a Golden Globe for best actor in a comedy or musical, takes a film actor’s approach to singing. His voice does not have much heft or power. Don’t expect him to play the role onstage.
But in the film he can almost whisper many lines. “These are my friends/See how they glisten,” he intones to the gleaming silver razors that Mrs. Lovett, his accomplice, has stashed away during his unjust imprisonment. “Speak to me, friend/Whisper, I’ll listen,” he continues in a hushed, confessional voice. The effect is chilling.
In Mr. Depp’s portrayal, words come first in the shaping of a phrase. Expression, nuance, intention and controlled intensity matter more than vocal richness and sustaining power. These principles of vocal artistry matter just as much onstage, as the best operatic artists understand. But too many opera singers are overly focused on making beautiful sounds and sending notes soaring at the expense of crisp diction and textual clarity. They could learn something from Mr. Depp’s verbally dynamic singing.
I don’t mean to suggest that his vocal performance is merely a savvy kind of sung speech. There is musical distinction in his work. Mr. Depp has debunked his own musical skills in interviews. Though he played guitar in rock bands for years and sang backup vocals, he has said that when he signed up for “Sweeney Todd” he had never sung a complete song in public.
His ear is obviously excellent, because his pitch is dead-on accurate. Of course he recorded the role in a sound booth in a recording studio, so he had plenty of takes to get things right. Still, he brings such breadth of statement and lyrical integrity to his phrasing that I can’t believe the performance was spliced together from mini-fragments.
Even if it was, the on-screen results are what counts. Beyond his good pitch and phrasing, the expressive colorings of his singing are crucial to the portrayal. Beneath this Sweeney’s vacant, sullen exterior is a man consumed with a murderous rage that threatens to burst forth every time he slowly takes a breath and is poised to speak. Yet when he sings, his voice crackles and breaks with sadness. “There was a barber and his wife/And she was beautiful,” he sings, letting the sustained tone on the word “beautiful” swell with shaky vibrato and linger with impotent longing.
Mr. Depp has said that the character he created comes directly from Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics and music. Of course it’s rewarding to hear Sweeney Todd sung impressively by a real musical theater baritone, like Len Cariou, who created the role in the original Broadway production in 1979, and George Hearn, who took it over later in the run (and appears opposite Angela Lansbury, the original Mrs. Lovett, in an acclaimed television presentation).
Still, as Mr. Depp told Entertainment Weekly, Mr. Sondheim emboldened him to approach the role as an actor, since “the singing was secondary to hitting the notes emotionally.”
It’s not surprising to me that in his preparations Mr. Depp wanted nothing to do with voice teachers. He regarded the role as a formidable acting challenge. In a way, treating singing as an extension of acting is a throwback to the high days of the studio system.
Think of Debbie Reynolds, a 20-year-old starlet when MGM tapped her to play the chorus girl in the 1952 classic “Singin’ in the Rain.” Sassy and charming, Ms. Reynolds had a sweet, bright singing voice. But she had done little dancing and was naturally intimidated at the prospect of partnering with Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor in dance routines. Under Kelly’s demanding tutelage, she found a way to channel her natural agility and buoyancy into stylish dance steps.
In saluting Mr. Depp’s singing I do not take for granted the sheer vocal beauty of great operatic voices. Opera singers work terribly hard to cultivate these wondrous voices. But the best opera singers will tell you that words and sound are one.
Compare the artistry of Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland. The perception that Callas was a dramatically mesmerizing but vocally imperfect singer, whereas Mr. Sutherland was the opposite, vocally glorious but dramatically flat, seems a gross simplification. Callas could sing with exquisite technique and elegance, and Ms. Sutherland could sing with excitement and poignancy. But Ms. Sutherland’s diction was generally indistinct, whereas you could take dictation from Callas’s recordings. It’s the urgency and clarity of the text in Callas’s performances that render her artistry more compelling and immediate.
Acting was the top priority in the casting considerations for the other major roles in “Sweeney Todd.” Patter does not come easily to Helena Bonham Carter in Mrs. Lovett’s bleakly comic songs, especially “The Worst Pies in London.” But during “My Friends,” when Ms. Bonham Carter confides her feelings for Sweeney in understated vocal utterances (“I’m your friend, too, Mr. Todd/If you only knew, Mr. Todd”), her singing is lyrical and seductive. Alan Rickman gives a harrowingly understated portrayal of the evil Judge Turpin, which comes through in his literate, dry and menacing singing.
The actors benefit enormously from the inventive work of Mr. Sondheim’s longtime orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick. Adapting his original orchestrations, Mr. Tunick has created a soundtrack that has old-fashioned Hollywood film plushness. Yet there is still so much color and detail in his scoring that the orchestra sounds like a pit band for a classic Sondheim show.
Many lovers of “Sweeney Todd” will be disappointed that with the musical turned into a gothic and gory film, the choruses have been eliminated — “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” and its refrains, which advance the narrative like a Greek chorus in a Sophocles tragedy. Mr. Tunick has transformed these choral numbers into lush, sweeping orchestral transitions that run through the film. In one way, though, this change brings the work closer to Mr. Sondheim’s original inspiration: the British melodrama. In that once-popular theatrical genre of mysteries and melodramas, an ominous orchestra would churn away in the pit almost continually during the play.
But the film rests on Mr. Depp’s performance. Once in a while, when he reaches for a high note, you can tell he wants to let it rip and cannot quite make it happen. But the vocal struggling just enhances the tragic depth of his portrayal.
What’s next? Johnny Depp as Billy Bigelow in some bleak new film version of “Carousel,” directed by, say, Sidney Lumet? Or as the star of a Mike Leigh film of Britten’s “Billy Budd”? My guess is that Mr. Depp’s career as a singer on screen will end with “Sweeney Todd.” But what a way to go out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/arts/music/12depp.html?ref=arts
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Struck by the sounds before the sun, / I knew the night had gone.
The morning breeze like a bugle blew / Against the drums of dawn. (Bob Dylan) |
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| Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 4:25 pm Post subject: |
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Over 7500 - Terra Poster
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I went and saw it last week ... Depp is outstanding.
It is a rather sanguine story. 
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| Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 5:35 pm Post subject: |
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1000 plus club poster
Joined: 05 Nov 2005
Posts: 1699
Location: Inverness Scotland
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There was a better version here in the UK with Ray Winston.
I much prefer a British actor to play the role of Sweeney Todd, and Ray Winston looked the part, and sounded the part.
Depp is too......poncy? For a grim London barber.
Americans must think everyone wore top-hats at the time in England.........
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| Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 7:28 pm Post subject: |
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Over 7500 - Terra Poster
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I´m soooo glad about your comments. Since the American movies usually open half a year later in Europe, I would like to know your opinions.
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Struck by the sounds before the sun, / I knew the night had gone.
The morning breeze like a bugle blew / Against the drums of dawn. (Bob Dylan) |
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| Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 11:29 am Post subject: |
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SPIEGEL ONLINE - January 16, 2008, 03:31 PM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,529002,00.html
SCORSESE SHINES A LIGHT
Rolling Stones Movie to Rock Berlin Film Festival
Martin Scorsese's movie about the Rolling Stones is to kick off the Berlin Film Festival on Feb. 7. Concert footage, interviews and archival material will be included in a film that seeks to shine a light on one of the world's biggest and most enduring bands.
This year the opening film of the Berlin Film Festival could well have people dancing in the aisles: Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones concert film "Shine A Light" will premier in the German capital on Feb. 7, kicking off the 10-day festival.
The film was shot at two concerts at New York's Beacon Theatre on Oct. 29 and Nov. 1, 2006 during the band's massive two-year world tour. Scorsese' award-winning team shot more than half a million feet of film using 16 cameras. The film also features special performances by Jack White of the White Stripes and Christina Aguilera.
Scorsese, who likes to make extensive use of contemporary music in his movies, made a documentary about Bob Dylan in 2005. In his Stones film he has included archival material as well as interviews and behind-the-scenes footage.
The director and band are expected to attend the screening and the festival's director, Dieter Kosslick, expressed his enthusiasm about the opening film. "We are extremely excited to have the world premiere of this magnificent film as our opening gala," he said in a statement released Tuesday. "Martin Scorsese has captured the pure essence of an iconic band on the big screen."
The film festival, now in its 58th year, has always been one of the most important for introducing new talent and bringing non-mainstream films to a wider audience. It is also notable for having an audience made up of both the film industry and members of the public.
The line-up of films competing for this year's prestigious Golden Bear include "Happy-Go-Lucky" by British director Mike Leigh, a new film by veteran Polish director Andrej Wajda on the massacre of Polish war prisoners by the Russians in 1940, and a documentary on the war on terror, "Standard Operating Procedure," by Oscar-winner Errol Morris. France has two films in competition, "Julia" by Erick Zonca and "Lady Jane" by Robert Guediguian.
Spanish director Isabel Coixet is showing "Elegy," based on the Philip Roth novel "The Dying Animal," and staring Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley. Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" will represent the United States. The film is already being mentioned as a serious contender for the Oscars, after its star, Daniel Day Lewis, won a Golden Globe last week.
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Struck by the sounds before the sun, / I knew the night had gone.
The morning breeze like a bugle blew / Against the drums of dawn. (Bob Dylan) |
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| Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 4:18 pm Post subject: |
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[b]Movie Review
Still Life (2006)
A wasteland amid the grandeur of the Yangtze: Zhao Tao as Shen Hong in “Still Life.”
Those Days of Doom on the Yangtze
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: January 18, 2008
A modern master of postmodern discontent, Jia Zhang-ke is among the most strikingly gifted filmmakers working today whom you have probably never heard of. During the past decade he has made some half-dozen documentary-inflected fictions and several documentaries that weigh the human cost of China’s often brutal, dehumanizing shift from state-controlled communism to state-sanctioned capitalism, a price paid in the blood and sweat of people who have, paradoxically, inspired him to create works of sublime, soulful art.
In “Still Life,” which won the grand prize at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, the blood and the sweat run directly into the Yangtze River, where they mingle with more than a few tears. The movie takes place amid the clatter and misery of the Three Gorges Dam, which cuts across the Yangtze in central China. The largest dam in the world, Three Gorges is a site of great cultural and political strife because of both environmental and humanitarian concerns. More than one million people have been displaced because of the dam (more are expected to follow), evicted from their homes by a ravenous hunger for power, electric and otherwise, that is washing them and history away.
This may sound like a prescription for social cinema, but Mr. Jia’s interest lies in visual ideas and human behavior, not agendas. Elegantly photographed by Yu Jianmin in high-definition digital video, the movie opens with a series of nearly seamless, seemingly contiguous lateral pans across men, women and children congregated in a boat on the Yangtze near the dam. The camera sweeps across the passengers slowly enough so that you can see each person alternately laughing, chattering and in repose. After exploring the formal possibilities of the long shot in his breakthrough film, “Platform” (2000), Mr. Jia has again started to edge near his characters. In “Still Life” he uses human bodies as moving space, to borrow Michelangelo Antonioni’s peerless phrase, but with enormous tenderness.
Antonioni’s influence on Mr. Jia is pronounced, evident in the younger filmmaker’s manipulation of real time and the ways he expresses his ideas with images rather than through dialogue and narrative. The drifting, rootless men and women in many of his movies, and the wide-open, nominally empty landscapes through which they on occasion wander, further underscore the resemblances between the filmmakers. Even so, when Mr. Jia’s characters roam through the crumbling town in “Still Life” — which is being demolished in anticipation of an engineered inundation — it’s impossible not to think even further back in cinema history to Rossellini’s postwar films, like “Paisan” and “Germany Year Zero,” works in which the director’s moral position is etched into every human face and fallen building.
Like Rossellini, Mr. Jia has found a great subject in his rapidly changing country and its people, who seem to be casualties of a different, more elusive war. The two principal characters in “Still Life,” Sanming (Han Sanming) and Shen Hong (Zhao Tao), land in Fengjie separately and never actually meet, bound only by a shared desire to find their errant spouses. Sanming, a fireplug whose muscular arms and back owe something to his time toiling in one of the country’s coal mines, arrives in Fengjie hoping to find his runaway wife and the 16-year-old daughter he has never met. For her part, the willowy, more overtly middle-class Shen Hong, a nurse, is searching for the husband who stopped coming home two years earlier.
Written by Mr. Jia and two collaborators, Sun Jianmin and Guan Na, “Still Life” unfolds as a series of minor events and incidental bits and pieces with little obvious connective tissue. Things happen, though not necessarily as a consequence of what took place in the previous scene. Almost as soon as he enters the doomed town, Sanming walks into a scam (he answers the con with a flick of a switchblade), visits his truculent brother-in-law (who barely looks up from his rice bowl) and joins the ranks of the local work force by picking up a sledgehammer. After about 40 minutes, Mr. Jia suddenly shifts his attention to Shen Hong, who also comes to Fengjie in time to see the 2,000-year-old town die.
Sanming and Shen Hong inhabit separate spaces and personal stories but remain connected by context, culture, language and landscape. The same astonishingly beautiful mountains soar above both their heads. The two are routinely dwarfed by their environments, by the ruined buildings and surrounding gorges alike. The connections between the natural landscape and the man-made one, between the easy beauty of immutable nature and the eerie beauty of devastated culture (Mr. Jia is a poet of decay), are powerful and unsettling. The dam may not outlast either the gorges or the Yangtze, but if it does, you can always see the image of one of the gorges printed on a Chinese currency bill , yet another reminder of a disposable, commodified past.
Despite the heaviness of this strange, alien place — where government graffiti mark the water levels that will swallow the town — “Still Life” has been painted with a lightness of touch, and with none of the hollow lugubriousness familiar from some of the recent Chinese imported pageants and epics. Mr. Jia’s characters are always of their historical moment, but not necessarily its martyrs. Neither is he a slave to history. His work exists on a continuum with the modernist masters, among other influences, but he is very much an artist of his own specific time and place. His canvas is China, where, as the indelible image of a tightrope walker in “Still Life” suggests, people navigate the fine line between heaven and earth.
STILL LIFE
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Written (in Mandarin, with English subtitles) and directed by Jia Zhang-ke; director of photography, Yu Likwai; edited by Khung Jinlei; music by Lim Giong; art directors, Liang Jindong and Liu Qiang; produced by Xu Pengle, Wang Tianyun and Zhu Jiong; released by New Yorker Films. At the ImaginAsian Theater, 239 East 59th Street, Manhattan. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Han Sanming (Sanming), Zhao Tao (Shen Hong), Li Zhu Bing (Guo Bing), Wang Hongwei (Wang Dong Ming), Ma Lizhen (Missy Ma) and Lan Zhou (Huang Mao).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/movies/18stil.html?ref=arts
_________________
Struck by the sounds before the sun, / I knew the night had gone.
The morning breeze like a bugle blew / Against the drums of dawn. (Bob Dylan) |
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Movie Review
Cloverfield (2008)
New York City encounters a new threat in “Cloverfield.”
We’re All Gonna Die! Grab Your Video Camera!
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: January 18, 2008
It was only last month that Will Smith started up boogeyman patrol in Manhattan in “I Am Legend,” and yet here we go again with the end of the world, or at least some of the city’s most exclusive ZIP codes. This time, the annihilation comes courtesy of a reptilian creature with a slithering, smashing tail, multiple grabby appendages and an apparently insatiable appetite for destruction. At one point in “Cloverfield” you get a close, very personal look at that hungry mouth, which agape recalls that of the adult monster designed by H. R. Giger for the first “Alien,” though without any of the older beastie’s freakily sexualized menace or resonance.
Like “Cloverfield” itself, this new monster is nothing more than a blunt instrument designed to smash and grab without Freudian complexity or political critique, despite the tacky allusions to Sept. 11. The screams and the images of smoke billowing through the canyons of Lower Manhattan may make you think of the attack, and you may curse the filmmakers for their vulgarity, insensitivity or lack of imagination. (The director, Matt Reeves, lives in Los Angeles, as does the writer, Drew Goddard, and the movie’s star producer, J. J. Abrams.) But the film is too dumb to offend anything except your intelligence, and the monster does cut a satisfying swath through the cast, so your only complaint may be, What took it so long?
As it happens, “Cloverfield” clocks in at 84 minutes, a running time that includes the usual interminable final credits. The movie moves relatively fast, though it’s nowhere near as economical as its colossus, whose thunderous shrieks and fiery projectiles bring a downtown loft party to a merciful, abrupt end. The loft belongs to a blandly pretty young thing named Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who, on the eve of relocating to Japan for work, has been thrown a farewell party by some other blandly pretty young things. The names we’re meant to remember are those of Rob’s brother, Jason (Mike Vogel), and Jason’s insignificant other, Lily (Jessica Lucas); a bored, boring single, Marlena (Lizzy Caplan); and Rob’s nitwit buddy, Hud (T. J. Miller), who has been recruited to videotape the party.
“Cloverfield” is nominally a monster movie, but mostly it’s a feature-length gimmick. It opens with some official-looking United States government text claiming that the following images were retrieved from what was once known as Central Park. The big (or rather only) idea here is that almost everything we subsequently see is the presumably unedited video material shot by Hud, who, though initially reluctant to pick up the camera, develops a mania for documentation once the monster strikes. So consummate is his dedication to his version of cinéma vérité that he keeps the camera plugged to his eye even while he’s running through hailstorms of debris, trying to cross a fast-collapsing bridge and witnessing friends melt down, bleed out and even die.
For a brief, hopeful moment, I thought the filmmakers might be making a point about how the contemporary compulsion to record the world has dulled us to actual lived experience, including the suffering of others — you know, something about the simulacrum syndrome in the post-Godzilla age at the intersection of the camera eye with the narcissistic “I.” Certainly this straw-grasping seemed the most charitable way to explain characters whose lack of personality (“This is crazy, dude!”) is matched only by their incomprehensible stupidity. Smart as Tater Tots and just as differentiated, Rob and his ragtag crew behave like people who have never watched a monster movie or the genre-savvy “Scream” flicks or even an episode of “Lost” (Hello, Mr. Abrams!), much less experienced the real horrors of Sept. 11.
And, so, much like a character from a crummy movie, Rob hears from an estranged lover, Beth (Odette Yustman), who, after the attack, begs for help on her miraculously working cellphone. Against the odds and a crush of fleeing humanity, he tries to rescue her (unbelievably, ludicrously, the others tag along), which is meant to show what a good guy he is. But heroism without a fully realized hero proves as much a dead end as subjective camerawork that’s executed without a discernible subjectivity. Like too many big-studio productions, “Cloverfield” works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt.
Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.
“Cloverfield” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Monster violence and bloody wounds.
CLOVERFIELD
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Matt Reeves; written by Drew Goddard; director of photography, Michael Bonvillain; edited by Kevin Stitt; production designer, Martin Whist; visual effects by Double Negative and Tippett Studio; produced by J. J. Abrams and Bryan Burk; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes.
WITH: Lizzy Caplan (Marlena), Jessica Lucas (Lily), T. J. Miller (Hud), Michael Stahl-David (Rob), Mike Vogel (Jason) and Odette Yustman (Beth).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/movies/18clov.html?em&ex=1200805200&en=c4df30e56ada3a62
_________________
Struck by the sounds before the sun, / I knew the night had gone.
The morning breeze like a bugle blew / Against the drums of dawn. (Bob Dylan) |
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