By Ray Pride

The moment is past but the moment is now: In 2009 Williamsburg, Shelly, a woman of 23 or so, (Stella Schnabel) contends with intense desires, average expectations, quotidian disappointments. Shelly’s inner life is suggested by a voice-over that’s as much interior monologue as it is diary entry or recitation to a therapist, as well as a visual style fashioned in multiple bold formats. There’s an intermittent score by Will Bates as well that uses a percussive tattoo like an accelerated heartbeat, shared by Stella and the film itself, in the same fashion Jon Brion did with his music for “Punch-Drunk Love.” Ry Russo-Young’s second feature, “You Wont Miss Me” (sic), at first glance resembles other contemporary low-budget, digital video idioms, but in fact, it’s a quietly constructed, sharply observed, unsentimental of-the-minute “Alice in Wonderland.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Sunday night pitted two powerful action directors in what seems the journalists’ favorite subject of the season: what’s the difference between a movie made by a man and a movie made by a woman?

Wrathful winter rain fell on Hollywood as James Cameron won Golden Globes for the number two highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, “Avatar,” and he once more rolled out his public persona as King Of The World Of Self-Infatuated Windbags. (His speech surely shared the same writer as the one credited for dialogue in “Avatar.”) His key competition was another tall director, a woman named Kathryn Bigelow, whose formal control in “The Hurt Locker” approaches both mathematics and poetry while functioning as action film and critique of the action film, as embrace of masculine manias while suggesting they are both mysterious and eternal. The two were once married: Bigelow captures one central figure’s physicality, all swagger and smirk, and Cameron creates another of his mixed-message “chick flicks,” an eco-fable part “Aliens,” part “My Little Blue Flying Pony.” Where’s the gender divide there?

In the advance toward the Oscars on March 7, there’ll be even more journalistic comparison-and-contrast. The binary aggravations will intensify, neglecting to embrace the humanity of filmmaking, of faces and fears and hopes. I found myself reaching for B. Ruby Rich’s essential “Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement,” but what I found on the epigraph page was all I needed, a quotation from French cine-essayist Chris Marker: “Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.”

With “35 Shots of Rum” (35 Rhums), French filmmaker Claire Denis throws a lot of things out the window, including her own fascination with the weaknesses of men and women, to embrace a story about happiness, about community and small joys. There are traits you can identify in a director’s style and themes. But are they quintessentially matters of gender or simply of temperament? Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

1. “In the Mood for Love,” Wong Kar-Wai, 2000
Repetition, proximity, music, exchange of glances. Looks of desire, clouds, rain. Unconsummated romance = cinema.

2. “Yi Yi,” Edward Yang, 2000
Perfection. It’s taken for granted because it seems so simple, so easy, so natural. Family as lovingly detailed soap opera; at just under three hours, the late Taiwanese master made a multigenerational epic worthy of a novel. And, strangely befitting his background in computer science, he knew precisely where to place the camera for the most dynamic effect.

3. “Before Sunset,” Richard Linklater, 2004
Linklater knows there’s grandeur in the smallest of shared, skittery moments. This couple that never was, with dreamy memories of their one-night stand, are different people now, older, oft-disappointed, yet despite underlying melancholy, still straining for a moment of genuine contact. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Oliver Assayas’ “Summer Hours” (L’heure d’été, 2008) is a mature masterpiece from one of the best filmmakers working today. I’m sure it can countenance all manner of rigorous analysis, yet its gentle touch belies how he’s masterfully woven all of his diverse themes and concerns in a seemingly simple telling of a family story. The man who made the memorably jangled, jangling twenty-first-century-in-the-making “Demonlover” (2002) and the fin-de-siècle turn of the twentieth century “Les destinees” (2000) and the ever-in-the-moment “Irma Vep” (1996) and “Clean” (2004) and “Boarding Gate” (2007) has combined, with the gentlest touch, these diverse pictures of varying success. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

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)

RECOMMENDED

Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien is an artist of light and color and the inflection of what could be the most banal of moments. In his lyrical French-language riff on the recently re-released 1956 short “Red Balloon” by Albert Lamorisse, Hou allows the balloon to move through the streets and across the skies of Paris, settling once in a while as an observer to the lives of a family comprised of frenetic mom Juliette Binoche, a ceaselessly stressed errand-runner and puppet-maker, her young son (Simon Iteanu) and the Chinese nanny (Fang Song) who’s also a filmmaker making a movie about… a red balloon on the streets of Paris. Neither tedious nor precious, but instead an ineffable drift across several days in their lives, “The Flight of the Red Balloon,” shot with bold primary colors, largely yellow and red, attains some of the mystery of similar work by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski: the concrete suggests other magical, mystical currents that we are aware of only in fleeting glimpses and impulses. There is an extended take in which the balloon, seen by the boy through a window in the apartment, moves away and into the narrow street where another red balloon is part of a mural painted on the side of a building. It’s ridiculously simple, yet magical. Seemingly languid, the film, like most of Hou’s great work, is casually studied and emotional gratifyingly. It’s simple: brilliant, understated composition and pace in the rich light of summer’s golden hour. He also watches Binoche the way he watches his actresses like Qi Shu (“Millennium Mambo,” “Three Times”), catching her in flurries of motion, bending to kiss her child but baring a glimpse of thong, the flex of her bare calves above white Chuck Taylors. Her character is a glorious wreck, and Hou loves her well. The everyday is endlessly precious. 100m. (Ray Pride)