“I would be the first one out of a job if there were no movies or commercials, but I would not miss them,” Michel Gondry told me while promoting “Be Kind, Rewind” in winter 2008. He published a slim book about the same time, called “You’ll Like This Film Because You’re In It: The Be Kind Rewind Protocol.”
There are a few pages of passages like, “I believe in systems. Well, not the big and vague entity that seems to run the world against everyone.” While brief, it’s valuable, as his French accent is near impossible to transcribe, no matter how fluent and charming he sounds in person when you interview him. Most of the book is composed of exercises and structures drawn from his tries at teaching a group of youngsters with disparate ideas. “”There was a lot of of compromising that ultimately [creates] some absurd narratives. It’s a mix between an exquisite corpse and Scrabble.”
The first feature co-directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, the scrappy shaggy-dog tale of epically failed parenting, “Daddy Longlegs” (known variously on the festival circuit as “Lenny and the Kids,” “Go Get Some Rosemary” and “Rosemary”), brings Gondry’s privileged utopianism to mind. In the future—or even right now—who are filmmakers making their work for? (With Monday’s introduction of the latest iteration of the iPhone, with iMovie editing software installed, it could be as few as two.) The Safdies made well-regarded shorts, and Josh made an earlier feature, 2008′s “The Pleasure of Being Robbed” about a young female pickpocket in Manhattan. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s a concept lurking whenever I talk to people who write about film, or filmmakers, or film people at festivals. Let’s call it “the conversation.”
The conversation is the cultural conversation: how does storytelling stand out and seep into the larger consciousness in the twenty-first century? I’m writing this as the early figures have come in from Sunday: yes, “Avatar” has been beaten at the box office for the first weekend since it opened by “Dear John,” a movie directed toward a female audience, from a Nicholas Sparks novel. “Dear John” made $32.4 million, $10 million more than the most optimistic estimates. Multiple movies directed toward multiple constituencies or demographics, all making money: that’s how an industry survives and thrives.
But the Monday morning number that’s more striking is the ratings estimate of the Super Bowl, its 106 million viewers set to topple the “Most Watched Television of All Time” title held by the last episode of “M*A*S*H.” There’s the conversation: what gets more than a roomful of people talking for more than five minutes. It’s more than the nominal idea of the “water cooler conversation”: it’s about a notion or an idea taking root and being handed along. With new distribution strategies, it’s a difficult concern for, say, a social-issue documentary like Steve James and Peter Gilbert’s superb contemplation of the death penalty, “At the Death House Door,” which was financed by IFC and made available on cable and on demand. In the mid-1990s, when “Hoop Dreams” was made, a theatrical release window before video was the first of a series of platforms, and along the way, not only the film but its concerns were discussed in the media. But nowadays, there’s the danger that a finely tuned documentary with sports at its center can have a sterling first-shot audience if it debuts on ESPN, but it doesn’t strike a chord in the culture. “On-demand,” on the vast scrolling menus, can mean “no demand.” Each film becomes part of the cultural clutter; it’s a plateau instead of a platform. Subtextual issues of race, class and economy don’t become part of the conversation.
Steering clear of how “the conversation” is steered in contemporary politics, and staying with movies, in the case of “Avatar” the most prevalent conversational topic has been “is it worth the extra money?” and “Oh yes, it’s worth the extra money.” Nothing wrong with a smooth ride. Then other factors, and media memes erupt: is it an anti-American tract? Is that abrupt ending transcendent or nihilist? Is its story a match to “Strange Days,” a movie by Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron about transplanted consciousness that had its genesis at the same time as “Avatar”? Is this ride a rebirth of the moviegoing experience or the death of literate cinema? Its sleek success as the highest-grossing movie in history becomes a topic in itself: are 3-D and IMAX tariffs going to necessitate putting an asterisk beside its entries like a steroid-injecting baseball player? (Probably not questions to pose directly to Cameron: filmmakers and writers are supposed to be a little off the mark in life, and surfacing after years in the “Avatar” bathysphere, he’s living up to his own bold reputation.)
Nothing succeeds like success, it’s said, but nothing gets talked about like success. One of my treasured experiences this decade was seeing the entirety of Jacques Rivette’s twelve-hour-and-fifty-three-minute-long “Out One” over a Memorial Day weekend at Siskel; sold out, buzzing, a conversation onscreen and off, but quickly, you realize that single 16mm print has only been exhibited less than fifty times and that auditorium holds 197 people. 197! That conversation will eddy outward.
After Sunday night’s Super Bowl, not being in the company of full-on sports fans, the conversation afterwards was about the eight spots for upcoming movies and for a single commercial that were satisfying as narrative in the way that good movies are. Notably, it was the first broadcast ad for Google search. By yesterday afternoon, before it was identified as the ad Google would run, more than a million people had watched the sixty-second clip, “Parisian Love,” since its YouTube upload in November. A slosh in the bucket, still, compared to the Super Bowl audience.
There are a lot of striking things about it (including cleverly avoiding the clever ending of clicking on “I’m Feeling Lucky” as the final image of the commercial), but in terms of moviegoing today, and how people talk about movies (such as “The Hangover” or “The Blind Side”), as well the evolution of the distribution of smaller films, of foreign language films, “art-house films,” to use a phrase used as little as possible by distributors today, is the embedding of the phrase “Who is François Truffaut?”
It’s a bright, breathless ad but in the middle of its rush, that was the pause for me: that question has to be asked? But immediately the eyes-wide realization: that rhetorical question breezed past 106 million sets of eyes, not 197. Audiences are fragmented, attention is diverted, but subversive little details drop into the conversation. Plus, it’s the best short I’ve seen so far in 2010, with a late, great filmmaker name-checked in an elegant piece of commercial whimsy. And yes, “Avatar” is anti-human.
Francois Truffaut’s kindness and curiosity were much noted in his productive yet relatively short life (he died in 1984 at the age of 52). His interviews with Alfred Hitchcock a few years after hanging up his critical spurs and only a couple films into his career made an important book, but the hours of unedited conversation between the two directors that you can find on the Internet are even more endearing: some questions that seem silly as they’re translated back-and-forth between French and English are quietly effective, whether for his effusion or for the older man’s instinct about what the young director is hoping to ferret out. Truffaut was 38 when “The Wild Child” was released, and it was the first time he’d acted. While his comic performance in “Day for Night” as a harried film director is esteemed by many, and the little-seen “The Green Room” is especially haunted, his tutorial knack as the teacher of an eighteenth-century feral foundling is graceful, and holds heartening echoes of his own belligerent, malcontent childhood, from which he was extricated by his own father figure, critic Andre Bazin. How do we survive childhood? Do we listen, do we learn? When do we stop resisting? How do we make our way in the world? Comparisons to his debut feature, the autobiographical “The 400 Blows,” are inescapable. Cinematographer Nestor Almendros’ black-and-white light is astonishing. 83m. Restored 35mm print. (Ray Pride)
Anything-for-a-kick cinematic style is the highlight of Francois Truffaut’s larky second feature, “Shoot the Piano Player,” in which the former film critic takes on an American noir novel (by David Goodis) and works with impish success that the autobiographical charms of “The 400 Blows” could be matched by the inventiveness of his imagination. While charming on video, Truffaut was, of course, thinking of the big screen when he made this widescreen tribute to the effortless images of the movies he loved that came to Paris in bunches at the end of World War II. Truffaut called the role of Charlie, filled by chanson stylist Charles Aznavour, a “portrait of a shy person,” and it’s that, too, as well as a tragicomic delight. (Ray Pride)
Can anyone master any aspect of modern China? Not even its bureaucrats and commissars and Army seem capable. For a Westerner with better-than-average knowledge of cultural currents, a few remarkable exports seem to arrive each season. In film alone, the U.S. has recently seen releases of “Summer Palace,” a film about a young woman’s coming of age that mingles strains of Truffaut and Hou Hsiao-hsien, and the magical miserablist Jia Zhang-ke’s “Still Life” and “Dong,” one a fictional film, the other a semi-documentary about life in the Three Gorges area of China where for years rising waters have been covering thousands of years of civilization (Canadian-Chinese director Yang Chung’s “Up the Yangtze” also opens this week). Trimmed by Chinese censors before its Cannes debut, Li Yang’s 2007 “Blind Mountain” (his second feature after 2003′s pulpy “Blind Shaft”) is an often-beautiful film about brutal occurrences, largely the things that happen to a young woman who’s sold in the early Nineties to a family who farms pigs. As part of a “sixth generation” of Chinese filmmakers, Li has not yet succumbed to the neutral pictorialism of his predecessors. The ending is a cataclysm, but likely a daily occurrence in the uncharted territory of that vast land. 97m. (Ray Pride)
Goodwill may be the rarest commodity in movies today.
Not buzz from ill- or half-informed rumormongers, not good word-of-mouth after a film opens, when the text “S GOOD!!” rains from the skies. Simple goodwill. Journalists around the world fell upon themselves to repeat a New York Times article that repeated a downbeat report about “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” that had been posted to a spoiler site, written by someone in the industry who claimed to had attended a legally mandated exhibitor’s screening. In other words, a pseudonymous dis by someone who was violating a key tenet of his job had pissed on a product he would be distributing to the public. Or, as the case could be—no one but the Times reporter and his editors know for sure—it might be a repeat of ruckus from last summer involving a projectionist of twenty or so who saw nothing wrong with reviewing movies he was paid to show. (God and Homer did not invent “Doh!” for nothing.)
But “Indy”: all I’d heard for weeks from kids from 15 to 50 was a big, tall case of the warm-’n'-fuzzies. The movie premiered at Cannes, and its North American press screenings were a few hours later, midday Sunday. Insta-reviews cascaded in. New York freelancer Eric Kohn text-messaged dribbles from Cannes, a stunt for which, a commenter at David Poland’s Hot Blog aptly suggested, “The guy should have been dragged out of the theatre and treated like a gambler caught cheating in old Vegas.” Who’s on first? Who fucking cares?
There are good things and indifferent things throughout this enterprise by the two richest directors who ever lived [pictured]—are they really worth several billion dollars each?—but most of the best (and worst) moments work from surprise, which reviews have already splashed across the media consciousness. If you want to be surprised, be warned that the rest of this piece has spoilers.
While a Lucasfilm production, “Indiana Jones and the Title by George Lucas” opens with a slap at DreamWorks’ partner, Paramount, whose mountain logo melts into what resembles a molehill, from which a prairie dog makes the first of many appearances. (The later swarms of flying monkeys bring far more cheer than the lame chimp in “Speed Racer.”) The original “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was supposed to be based on breakneck, nonsensical no-budget serials that Lucas supped upon as a youth, yet in the fourth iteration (with a fifth put forward by Spielberg at a Cannes press conference), the movie seems consumed by self-nostalgia, with wacky setpieces coming in an undifferentiated rush, an expensive crap rapture. (Lucas’ original title was reportedly “Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars,” and Harrison Ford actually speaks that line.)
An opening that establishes the 1957 setting has Lucas-style road racers drawing us into a military zone (quietly marked “Hangar 51″) and a confrontation with Russian spies, led by Cate Blanchett as the most boldly sexual drawing of Natasha Fatale ever (although Boris Badonov’s consort did not have those astonishing blue eyes). Holding her features in repose, Spielberg elevates her above the “Ilsa: She-Wolf Of The SKG” Blanchett resembled in promotional stills.
The dialogue throughout is painfully expository and mostly lame in a self-aware, declarative fashion, a geezer chic to match leading man Harrison Ford’s 65 years. The stunt men are obvious and his asides are murmured, almost whispered, almost as he didn’t care to be bothered once the fedora was popped on his head. French filmmakers like Truffaut and Godard always made the point of Alfred Hitchcock that his movies were as much about images as about editing and the psychology of point-of-view—not framing or geometry or composition, the basic elements of mise-en-scene, but a bit of action weighted with emotional or cultural undertow. (A man in a business suit chased by a crop-duster across a vast empty field in broad daylight; an extreme close-up of a key; a dying woman’s eye superimposed on the drain where her blood corkscrews away.)
The lack of iconic images was one of the letdowns of “Crystal Skull,” which doesn’t resonate as a Macguffin, either. The action in the last third, filled with CGI, is often as incoherent as a “Mummy” sequel. The most piercing sequence comes early, when Jones blunders into a nuclear test. A perfect, depopulated 1950s suburban tract is peopled by mannequins. The lightly satiric décor takes on a comic yet fearful air in the framing of the figures, like George Segal sculptures, and then in their fiery detonation worthy of the great maker of sardonic sculptural tableaux, Ed Kienholz. Spielberg caps the passage with a low shot from behind Jones, where the “hero” angle from beneath is not granted to our dwarfed protagonist, but by the horror-blooming, dark, rude, dust-filled mushroom, the annihilating terror of the twentieth century dwarfing the man with the hat and the whip.
“Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is now playing.
Ye Lou’s majestic, dynamic “Summer Palace” (Yihe Yuan) is a gorgeous, melancholy epic tracing two decades in the lives of several friends that begins before the summer of the Tienanmen massacre. The fifth feature from the director of “Suzhou River” and “Purple Butterfly” boasts a brilliant central performance by Yu Hong as the country girl who comes to Beijing for college and discovers the complexities of her sexual life as the youth of the country hopes to blossom around her. Ye tips his hands about some of his intentions, with a glimpse of the final shot of Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” near the beginning, with the young Jean-Pierre Leaud running to the edge of the sea (where the story will freeze for all time). Instead of “Shoot the Piano Player,” we move inexorably toward “Shoot the Student Protestor.” Ye layers sound and music masterfully, including narration and quotations from other writers, including Havel and the character’s own journal about her increasingly aching wants, but Yu is the flaming center. At first, we observe her very agreeable features with a gently inflammatory smile, and Ye builds his story in fresh rhythms that alternate acceleration and elision. She’s been with a boyfriend back home, but dorm life leads to exploratory fucking. She’s troubled by her feelings. In a recurring image, she murmurs of illusions and closes her eyes as wind gathers and rushes her face with dandelion tufts. The story grows progressively more heated, naked, intimate, frenzied. About forty-five minutes in, Yu reveals her character in a moment where she sings and all bets are off. “Looking at my face in the mirror, I don’t see the face of a young girl. Instead, I see the face of a mature woman. Complex desires. Emotions ripened prematurely. Nonchalance and coldness.” “Summer Palace” is magisterial yet comfortable in its intimacies, a cosmopolitan juggernaut that staggers the heart. (Plus the best burp I’ve heard in an age.) The Chinese government has banned “Summer Palace” and barred Ye from working for the sexual content, but more importantly, for providing glimpses of Tienanmen Square and archive footage of protestors on their way there. The use of Toni Basil’s “Mickey” and Andy Williams’ version of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” match the near-matchless use of Paul Anka’s “You Are My Destiny” in Peter Gothar’s “Time Stands Still.” 132m. (Ray Pride)
By Ray Pride
