Goodbye, First Love

By Ray Pride

After summer’s somersaults, autumn through Christmas is when the grownup movies come out to play, and the forty-seventh edition of the Chicago International Film Festival has a lot to celebrate. In this rundown, I’ll keep “great” as a random adjective to a minimum. (Disclosure: I was a program consultant for this year’s Docufest section.)

From the highlights of the program, it seems like it’s going to be a strong season for good, solid movies in coming months. The range of films being shown that have been submitted for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award seem to be uncommonly strong as well. While there may well be other discoveries to be made, most of the films recommended here will show up in commercial or art-house release. Screenings can sell out in advance, which may partly be due to the capacity of the smaller screens at River East. The festival is keeping a running tally of shutouts on their Facebook page. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Ray Pride

By Ray Pride

Mike Mills’ “Beginners” wears its hearts on its sleeve.

Based on his own father’s coming out at 70 after the death of his mother, as well as the dating tribulations of latter-day thirtysomething Los Angelenos, the writer-director-illustrator (“Thumbsucker,” “Does Your Soul Have A Cold?”) has composed a love note to letting go and holding on. Memories are what “Beginners” holds onto, jumping across several years in the life of Oliver (Ewan McGregor) as he narrates the life of his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), a museum administrator, and meets a French actress, Anna (Mélanie Laurent, “Inglourious Basterds”) and falls tentatively into tipsy love. Part of the tenderness of Mills’ story is the father and son are alike in so many ways, and that fact being in the weave of the story and not its larger plot. Oliver’s tentativeness with the opposite sex, and the pleasantly goofy Anna, is indicated, not explained: simply, before they die, the two men have to understand how to simply be (and, if lucky, to be in love). 1950s conservatism restrained Hal; Oliver and Anna’s obstacles are self-made. The acting is tremendously affecting: Plummer, plucky; Laurent, lovable; McGregor, understated, hopeful, melancholy. Plus a Jack Russell that, cutely, appears to read minds, as he’s passed down from Hal to Oliver. I am in awe of the brass of a filmmaker that subtitles a dog’s thoughts as if channeling Barbara Kruger, “Tell her the darkness is about to drown us unless something happens soon.” 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 »

Top 5 Domestic Films

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“Che,” Steven Soderbergh

“Paranoid Park,” Gus Van Sant

“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme

“Ballast,” Lance Hammer

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Films

“Man on Wire,” James Marsh

“Reprise,” Joachim Trier

“Happy-Go-Lucky,” Mike Leigh

“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle

“A Christmas Tale,” Arnaud Desplechin

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Films

“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle

“Ballast,” Lance Hammer

“Hunger,” Steve McQueen

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“In The City of Sylvia,” Jose Luis Guerin

—Bill Stamets

Top 5 Films

“Milk,” Gus Vant Sant

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“Man on Wire,” James Marsh

“Let the Right One In,” Tomas Alfredson

“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme

—Tom Lynch

Top 5 Performances – Female

Sally Hawkins, “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Melissa Leo, “Frozen River”

Kristin Scott Thomas, “I’ve Loved You So Long”

Kate Winslet, “Revolutionary Road”

Kat Dennings, “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Performances – Male

Benicio Del Toro, “Che”

Sean Penn, “Milk”

Mathieu Amalric, “A Christmas Tale”

Michel Blanc, “The Witnesses”

Ben Kingsley, “Elegy”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Supporting Performances – Female

Ann Savage, “My Winnipeg”

Nurgul Yesilcay, “The Edge of Heaven”

Viola Davis, “Doubt”

Penelope Cruz, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”

Zoe Kazan, “Revolutionary Road”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Supporting Performances – Male

Michael Shannon, “Revolutionary Road,” “Shotgun Stories”

Danny McBride, “Pineapple Express”

Richard Dreyfuss, “W.”

Toby Jones, “W.”

Anil Kapoor, “Slumdog Millionaire”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Directors

Mike Leigh, “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Joachim Trier, “Reprise”

Danny Boyle, “Slumdog Millionaire”

Tomas Alfredson, “Let the Right One In”

James Marsh, “Man on Wire”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Screenplays

Fatih Akin, “The Edge Of Heaven”

Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, “Reprise”

Simon Beaufoy, “Slumdog Millionaire”

Charlie Kaufman, “Synecdoche, New York”

Martin McDonagh, “In Bruges”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Domestic Documentaries

“Encounters at the End of the World,” Werner Herzog

“The Order of Myths,” Margaret Brown

“At The Death House Door,” Steve James, Peter Gilbert

“The Unforeseen,” Laura Dunn

“Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father,” Kurt Kuenne

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Documentaries

“Man On Wire,” James Marsh

“Of Time and the City,” Terence Davies

“Waltz With Bashir,” Ari Folman

“Up the Yangtze,” Yung Chang

“Young@Heart,” Stephen Walker

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Follies

“Speed Racer,” The Wachowski brothers

“The Fall,” Tarsem

“Adam Resurrected,” Paul Schrader

“Australia,” Baz Luhrmann

“My Blueberry Nights,” Wong Kar-wai

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Films You Can’t See Yet

“24 City,” Jia Zhang-Ke

“35 Shots Of Rum,” Claire Denis

“The English Surgeon,” Geoffrey Smith

“Liverpool,” Lisandro Alonso

“Voy a Explotar (I’m Going to Explode),” Gerardo Naranjo

—Ray Pride

By Ray Pride

Ever fallen in love with somebody you shouldn’t've fallen in love with?

That Buzzcocks lyric was ringing in my ears after the end credits of Peter Sollett’s fine second feature, “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” which comes six long years after his superb debut, “Raising Victor Vargas,” a glorious, full-blooded, oft-profane, fully inhabited microcosm of life and love among teenagers on New York’s Lower East Side. Bubblegum that never loses its snap, Sollett’s second feature miraculously hits some of the same heights within a slightly contrived structure drawn from the novel of the same name by Rachel Kohn and David Levithan. Nick (Michael Cera) is the straight member of a “queercore” band who’s made a desperate succession of mix CDs for his ex of three weeks. After opening a show on the Lower East Side for indie band Bishop Allen (a neat nod to Andrew Bujalski’s “Mutual Appreciation,” built upon that band and its lead singer), in a room charged with misguided attachments and sudden flirtations, Nick meets Norah (Kat Dennings), and their shared taste in music is only the start of a long night of discoveries, including the quest for a secret show played by a band called “Where’s Fluffy?” (Dopey name, but Sollett knows just how to play it: the characters act like they’re sussing out how to get to an epic revelation like My Bloody Valentine.)

One of Norah’s jokes in the advertising, “I don’t want to be the goody bag at your pity party,” is about as close as the humor gets to “Juno”-land. There’s clever wordplay throughout, but not of the Diablo Cody ilk (which I admire as her characters create their own stylized world from word one), but of a sort that suggests that Nick and Norah are smart teenagers who live lots of their life in their heads, and when charmed, pearls of interior monologue revealed fumble from their smiles. (Cera continues to underplay. There’s one smile he throws, however small it may be, that arrives with force that in relative scale approximates Jack Nicholson going off on the waitress in “Five Easy Pieces” and requesting that she place the chicken salad between her knees.)

Sollett guides his performers to an economy of gesture even in cartoonish moments (a scene with an overflowing toilet manages to suggest “Trainspotting” and hold back the disgust with ease). The knack lies in the generous editing of interaction, and the behavior observed is richer, deeper than the plotted action that allows the characters to jape and cajole. The genre of teen comedy and one-night-in-the-city after-hours is more defined than in “Vargas,” yet the accomplishment is equally fine: as director, he crayons within the lines, and the result is precocious and dear, a romantic comedy that eludes its requirements of plot to revel in its attention to behavior, nay, I would go so far to claim, to being. Every scene is suffused by the grace of surprise. Do you know the breath that catches in just that second when you’re looking toward the just-round face? Sollet’s rhythms are right, held just enough until you know the dizziness in much more than a matter of oxygenation.

The sleight-of-hand is terrific, the film functioning as a deliberative taxonomy of mutual and eventually reciprocal attraction, while well within the boundaries of a poppy, confected teen romance. This ain’t mumblecore. And “Juno” what? The sensation of freshness works until the very last scene, capturing shopworn sensations well remembered by anyone whose heart’s past teenage and the first half-dozen hurts felt or dealt, meted or memorialized. None of these moments feels cauterized or even in need like wound.

There is a shot in Joachim Trier’s “Reprise” that measures out the one-two-three-four-five just-like-that before a man and woman’s gazes fatefully match in a crowded bar. Trier orchestrates a number of elements with lighting, blocking and camera motion that elevate the thrill. Sollett’s gift is simplicity: as in “Victor Vargas,” and working with D.P. Tom Richmond, he finds focal lengths and frames to encase one character, then the other, for the ideal balance. The result is consistently as fresh as a smile evoked by a frolicsome pup on the street. Listen, look. That’s what this film does.

The city’s present, too. Sollett’s topographical exactitude toward New York City, especially involving the Lower East Side and East Village, from Arlene Grocery to Veselka, suggest his own youthful NYC life a good decade ago (however much might be carried over from the source novel). We’re left with a timeless night of now and then that ends on yet undreamt dreams of son and sensation, of touch and tickle, descent, ascent, swoon and fuck. Everything’s possible in Michael Cera, I mean Nick’s tremulous, fearful wanting liquid eyes once he truly catches sight of the woman in front of him and Kat Dennings’, I mean Norah’s, keen-to-be-incredulous smile and yeah-right purrs of satisfaction.

These environs of Manhattan are less canvas than ground, the space to capture deft, moony impression of love found, savored and aptly recaptured from fond, mature remove. Tactile, and between Cera and Dennings, always ineffably in the moment. This is Eric Rohmer territory. And this is how two people look at each other, then flinch, gawp, roll eyes or look away in tender fear. Intimacy of such effortlessly unassuming precision could be mistaken for mere charm. And bravo for that. Sometimes you fall in love without someone you should fall in love with.

“Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” opens Friday.

By Ray Pride

On Tuesday, the L.A. Times started the tom-toms going, gauging if “The Dark Knight” is on the mark to become the highest-grossing movie in the U.S. of all time, rising beneath “Titanic”’s substantial and seemingly unstoppable total that surpasses $600 million. Then again, Christopher Nolan’s dark, conflicted tale has gone above $314 million in a mere ten days, and most of the devoted moviegoers I know who have been dying to see it have faced nothing but sell-outs. (They’re still adamant, and most of them about the IMAX version.)

There are critiques as riotously conflicted as the movie’s politics—which presents, but does not necessarily endorse, the “dark knight”’s apparent turn to the “dark side” in the choices he makes throughout the movie. This is a good thing, I think: ambivalence and ambiguity just shy of notional incoherence make for the kind of movies that make it possible just to watch the zeitgeist burn. (See under: Robert Zemeckis in mid-career movies like “Back to the Future” and “Forrest Gump.”) If the world’s all hopped-up over the relative virtues or failings of “The Dark Knight,” they cannot help but engage with its suggestive political text, can they?

I’m most surprised by the fistful of reviews I’ve read where the portrayal of the city—the City—Gotham—Chicago—never enters into the appreciation. Even without knowing the corners being turned, the buildings just-glimpsed then cut away from, “The Dark Knight” is a city symphony of the hardly planned architectural heap that encircles Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plan for this patch of prairie, this City Beautiful.

The best movie you can readily see this week traffics in the same approach to drama, in a calmer, steadier fashion, and the likenesses were even more apparent last week when I watched Christian Petzold’s glassy dream-thriller “Yella” for the third time. Petzold’s earlier pictures, like “The State I’m In” (2000) and “Something to Remind Me” (2001), have had little play here, confined to a couple of screenings at Siskel. Yet this 47-year-old German director shares the amplitude of ideas about image and sound being as important as text with the Englishman who turned 38 on Wednesday. (Happy Birthday! Here’s $10 million!)

“Yella,” like most movies, unfolds like truth, like a moment, but it is also a dream, or perhaps less a dream than a portrait of a dreamer who cannot wake. Like his earlier movies, the ninth feature from Petzold haunts for what is shown but also for what is merely implied. Petzold works in apparent realism, concrete in his depiction of space and color, yet things remain disquietingly abstract—haunted. (“Ghosts,” the name of his 2005 feature, could title any of his work.)

“Yella” keeps the viewer off-kilter with strange happenings, beginning as Yella (Nina Hoss), a woman in East Germany, is stalked by a man who turns out to be her ex-husband. An accident happens. No one could survive. They both do. (Petzold admits reworking Herk Harvey’s “Carnival of Souls” for this story.) She improbably boards a train, drying her blood-colored blouse—Little Red Yuppie Hood?—and heads to the urban west, proves to be proficient in business, the equal of the venture capitalist who employs her. While her ex continues to stalk her, the dance of attraction between Yella and her boss resembles her earlier romance, as if her boss were a hale, hearty version of the earlier man, as if memory could only become moored by repetition. Hoss has the intense features of an older Mena Suvari, with a dash of Greta Scacchi’s coolness, along with an unnervingly steady gaze. Yella is central to nearly every scene, in almost every shot. She wears a blooded-red blouse that suggests vigor within, a burst of liveliness in the VC realm. Petzold’s images are hushed, interiors and compositions in painterly geometry that holds beauty that gratifies the eyes but becomes disturbingly clinical in accumulation. The real becomes spectral before these backdrops and in these spaces.

Working with his usual cinematographer, Hans Fromm, Petzold places his characters in patterns of urban isolation; the effect is studied, but never becomes forbiddingly icy. It’s tempting to explore comparisons to other filmmakers, such as Antonioni, or to the use of space in theatrical work, in which Petzold spent much of the 1980s. Like the late Italian master or Godard in their moment, European directors continue the struggle to capture the modern world as it enfolds us. His cool complexity suggests a familiar world with ease as simple as breath. Like Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck (“The Lives of Others”) or Joachim Trier (“Reprise”), Petzold is an anatomist of the unsettling, the unbearable, the heartbeat that remains beneath the money-counting tick-tock of contemporary commerce.

But I’d still belabor the comparison of Nolan and Petzold: among other things, they’re landscape artists, photographers of precision. (The surfaces submerged by the plotting that only seem to be the primary cinematic element.) Big doings are conveyed in simple gestures and images (with elusive yet evocative potential means that surpass mere framings and focal lengths). In “Yella,” sound matters, too: alarms drill, clocks tick, birds call, bells ring. A sonic boom? Seismic. A crow’s caw, the wind in the trees, the thrumming of a small river: a woman always living, mentally, at water’s edge. 

“Reprise,” Joachim Trier’s marvelous, novelistic, essayistic, bold, assured debut feature, opened last weekend, and I was dying to see it again with an audience.

Sunny Saturday afternoon and a surprising sixty or so people were at Landmark Century, including a friend only a few years older than the 23-year-olds who comprise the characters of “Reprise,” and whose life is also wrapped up in music and letters and the world that is girls. Only afterward did I discover The Reader hadn’t reviewed the movie at all (in a week where its film feature advocating the stealing of an independent filmmaker’s work, which I haven’t seen written about any commercial releases from companies that advertise in their film section). I didn’t want to read Ebert’s review after seeing it’s a two-star notice; it might be as wrong-headed as his writing about Kiarostami (one star for “Taste of Cherry”), or it could be utterly convincing; I’ll stick with my pleasure in “Reprise” for now.

But I was gratified by the audience and with my friend’s reaction afterward: this Norwegian movie from 2006 is more here-and-now than any movie I might be able to see this week. (“Sex and the City,” previewed after press time, would be an instance.) “Reprise,” I wrote last week, is such a vivid, bravura, gorgeous, funny, sad, beautiful, smart (but never smug) display of cinematic fireworks, that it’s a terrible sign of the state of American film-going that it almost never saw U.S. screens. Trier and I spoke on the phone recently about some of the film’s many virtues, including a willingness to hark back to movies like Alain Resnais’ masterpiece, “Last Year at Marienbad,” which recently played the Music Box. This movie is such a bundle of energy, a burst of exuberance, I tell Trier admiringly. “Thanks! Yeah, we’ve kind of looked at it as a bit of a scrapbook film,” the 34-year-old writer-director says. “We didn’t want to restrict ourselves too much, we wanted there to be chaos and digressions and allowed ourselves to do this because of the age of the characters and their types.”

“Reprise” is thinking and digressing and contradicting itself at every turn: it’s a consciousness built on all its characters’ subconscious, like a good novel. “That’s something that both me and my co-writer [Eskil Vogt] are very interested in exploring. This idea, which is a ridiculous idea, that you can’t show thought in cinema! I think it’s rather weird. Certainly there are ways of trying to show associative, or associations of thought patterns in film. It’s something that we just find fun to explore. With ‘Reprise,’ I think we’ve gone the furthest in a way, trying to show that what we imagine, or what we wish for, or what we wish we should have said, or that thing that keeps nagging us from the past, all of that is part of several of the movements we are in. We were trying to play around with that.”

There’s a sequence that’s emblematic for me, when the writer who’s published first is walking down the street with a woman and the voiceover observes she was the only person he ever knew who had The Ramones on vinyl and then he gets hit by a car. Three different layers of cognition going on there, and one of them is, I’m not paying attention, I’m listening to her and looking at her and thinking about her vinyl, so I’m going to walk out in traffic. “Yeah, yeah, true,” Trier agrees. “There are several layers. We like to have sort of a [multiple] perspective on things without being too pretentious about it. I guess a lot of this was trying to use devices—I hate ‘device,’ because it sounds like a mock-contrived approach to storytelling, and hopefully our voiceover is quite integral to what’s going on—but we certainly wanted to have a multilayered, a multifaceted approach to this, in terms of having a narrating third person, almost authorial voice going on. And also at the same time using off-voice, which is closer to thought in a way, almost as if people are thinking back at other moments while they are talking to each other. For instance, [the couple] in the café, they speak about the past, they walk in the park, suddenly we understand the park is in the present as well, we’re not quite sure what was said, but hopefully we get a sense of their reality.”

Trier admires Resnais, but he says, too, that “Andrei Tarkovsky is a big inspiration. The way that he describes in his book, ‘Sculpting in Time,’ his approach to reality is as if you… if you walk down a street and see a man, and you try to re-create that, thinking of reality as an objective truth and put the camera where your eyes [were], you film a man, an actor that looks like the man, you will capture nothing. Because what you have seen is your own thought process. You have seen that the man might have resembled your uncle or an old friend; you might have had a fight with your girlfriend that made you sad as you looked at him. I mean, there are millions of other moments present in that moment. To try to make those connections and contextualizing things is just as important as what is actually seen.”

RECOMMENDED

Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s debut feature has been at festivals for a while, and U.S. distribution is largely because of collaboration by Miramax and Netflix’s Red Envelope at the behest of uber-producer Scott Rudin. The fact that such a vivid, bravura, gorgeous, funny, sad, beautiful, smart (but never smug) display of cinematic fireworks almost didn’t hit screens here is a terrible, terrible sign of things that have already come. The dazzling opening minutes have a narcotic energy, suggesting several potential futures that could branch out from a single moment: two male friends in their early 20s stand in front of a post box, each ready to drop the manuscript of their first novel into the mail, into the culture, into the lives of others. To describe all the dazzlingly realized moments in this cinematic powerhouse would be easy, and wrong. In conversation, Trier is unabashed in his enthusiasm for film history and cultural cross-reference. (As a teen he was a Norwegian national skateboard champion and Tarkovsky is one of his great loves.) Here’s how Trier describes the enterprise: “What I wanted to do was depict a very specific cultural environment, with characters that I know intimately. I wanted to make a film about friendships and aspirations that fail. I wanted to make a film that was as full of contrasts in its form as the lives of the characters. I wanted to use a cinematic language that reflected the narrative culture of a gang of 23-year-old men, full of anecdotes and digressions, searching and open, but with pain and disappointment lying just below the surface. What is intended to be different about ‘Reprise’ is the use of contrasts and contradictions in the material, the mixture of humor and seriousness. ‘Reprise’ should seem as rich in ideas as young men of that age are.” Musical selections from Le Tigre to Joy Division to Paul Weller are sure and apt, and a pivotal apocryphal punk band called Commune, with a hit called “Fingerfucking the Prime Minister,” bears an eye-opening yowl. Lapidary and luscious, heartfelt and heartbreaking, restless yet studied, footloose yet impassioned, “Reprise” is a movie I love. 105m. (Ray Pride)