RECOMMENDED

Robert Persons’ “General Orders No. 9″ is a lyrical essay film at least partly about the urbanization of rural Georgia, an elegy of haunted mood reminiscent of Patrick Keiller’s lovingly dyspeptic but visually striking “London” and “Robinson in Space” or Terence Davies’ brooding memory musical “Distant Voices, Still Lives.” It’s more in those schools than Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life,” the convenient reference point for reviewers upon its overlapping New York week-long run this summer. (The free-floating character of the narration doesn’t distill itself to the many voices of so-similar inchoate spiritual yearning in the Malick film.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Holy apeshit! One of the terrible dangers writing a deadline review about a wildly satisfying entertainment like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is inadvertently revealing the goods in simple synopsis that ought to be superb surprises. (You begin to appreciate a pair of thumbs, even opposed ones, in a case like this: thumbs up, dude. Thumbs up.) The terrific thing is the fact that there are even surprises, inspired surprises, working off a story everyone thinks they know already. There’s a freedom in that aspect for storytellers, as with “Titanic”: the boat sinks. Now let’s get down and get tragic. “Apes”? Somewhere in the unseen future, Charlton Heston catches sight of an iconic landmark poking from the sand by the sea.  Mankind, somehow, some way, ruined itself and power passed back to primates. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

What was the name of the movie again? “Badlands”? “Days of Heaven”? “The New World”? They equally suit the newest Terrence Malick movie. “The Tree of Life” is an unheard prayer, one we, or, no one hears: to a dead brother, from one voice; to a silent god, from another; hopeful, uplifted whispers by several others toward the grace of the universe and the most everyday of everyday events. Malick, in his fifth feature, atomizes his narrative. There are footfalls and footholds, but you’re on your own, with your sense of experience and memory and your own set of cultural references to apply to the pointillist-like approach to amassing shots and sequences as largely discrete fragments of narrative. Part of the running time uses special effects to recreate the birth of the universe, a sustained shebang of a Big Bang, but the largest chunk of memory is given over to family life in a small Texas town in the 1950s, where father Brad Pitt and mother Jessica Chastain raise three small boys.

In 138 minutes, scenes shot over the course of years—mostly a couple of years ago, but which he began almost four decades ago—have been woven together in different lengths for the past two years. Brad Pitt described its elasticity this way: “I’ve seen the film in its four-hour incarnation, then three-and-a-half, two-forty-five, back to three-thirty, and now at two-and-a-quarter. In essence, it’s the same.” But it’s not, that’s hardly possible with the vast amounts of footage Malick shoots. Three versions of “The New World” have been released, and each is substantially different from the others. And if you work with a camera that is autonomous and distracted, as Malick does, with promiscuous principal photography that works from inspiration and not text, and the meaning gets layered in selection, the decisive moment is then in the edit, or more correctly, the multiple edits in the edit bay, not in shooting. Plus, not only has Malick agonized for years, this is he and his family’s fall from the Edenic into the worldly, as captured in natural light by camera great Emmanuel Lubezki and Steadicam dance captain Jorg Widmer. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Adrift on atmosphere and sublime visual beauty, “Delta,” (2008) Kornél Mundruczó’s contemporary Hungarian fable about a brother, a sister and a house goes for the eyes and the gut. (The eyes win.) In a village along the Danube, a shaggy-bearded prodigal son (Félix Lajko)returns to his home village to find his lovely, grown sister (Orsolya Tóth) and mother working in a pub alongside her violent second husband. He’s inspired to build a dock and log house on an island that had belonged to his late father, and his sister joins him in the construction. Quiet moments lead to tragic circumstances: consider the ancient Greeks to have warned the pair. The story moves as implacably as a stream, sometimes maddeningly so. Magyar countryman Béla Tarr is listed as a script consultant in the opening credits; Terrence Malick’s nature-sensitive work needs no credit. Winner of the International Critics Prize at Cannes. With Lajkó , Lili Monori, Sándor Gáspár, Lajos Bertók, Mari Kiss. 92m. (Ray Pride)

“Delta” opens Friday at Facets. A trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s austere “Sweetgrass” follows a team of modern-day Montana cowboys as they shepherd their flock 200 miles into the Beartooth Mountains for summer pasture. Patient, tactile and rapturously beautiful, you can almost smell the chlorophyll, the air, the manure, the lamb rejected at birth by its mother. The film is so cannily descriptive, it’s difficult to describe without falling into forced epiphany or staccato poetry. So the temptation to note parallel filmmaking: Castaing-Taylor’s gorgeous cinematography suggests Terrence Malick, while the long takes of staring, chewing, shearing, the undulation of flocks, suggests the patient Hungarians, Béla Tarr and Miklós Janscó. The unblinking gaze suggests Nikolaus Geyrhalter (“Our Daily Bread,” 2005) and his way of observing agricultural process. There is an allusion in title and form to one predecessor: in 1925, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack made “Grass,” a documentary about Persian sheepherders. “Sweetgrass” is observational, after the Frederick Wiseman school of direct cinema, but mostly it is a feat of attaining sensation, on a ranch that has since been sold.  Sound matters: wind, the jounce of bells, the crisp crunch of chewing, chewing, chewing the cowboys’ spirited profanity. It’s dreamy. It’s also over. “Sweetgrass” was shot in 2001-2003, and this would turn out to be the last drive.  The filmmakers are married Harvard anthropologists: you wouldn’t expect this movie at all, let alone that it is such a superbly edited feat of contemplation.  105m.  (Ray Pride)

“Sweetgrass” opens Friday at the Music Box.

American Girl goes archipelago. Writer-director Marc Forby (one of six executive producers of “Prom Night”) fashions a scenic after-school biopic about Princess Kaiulani (1875–1899). The title royal with a fifteen-century bloodline is the niece of Queen Liliuokalani, overthrown in 1893. Q’orianka Kilcher—Pocahantas in “The New World”—plays another princess who sails to Britain and back. Unfortunately, Kilcher shows none of what Colin Farrell saw in his young co-star while shooting Terrence Malick’s 2005 film: “She’s such an insane mix of lightness and darkness of spirit. But she has a smile that could light up both hemispheres at the same time, and she has a depth of darkness which would make the world stand still.” Kaiulani is a proud teen who takes her destiny to heart. In the end, Forby frames her as self-sacrificial, a figurehead for a monarchy doomed to annexation as a U.S. territory and later statehood. I wish I could have learned more about the complex frictions between missionaries, landowners and the descendants of islanders who sacrificed Captain Cook. Forby even omits the tale of this half-Scottish princess introducing surfing to Brighton. “Princess Kaiulani” overly valorizes a multicultural role model from Obama’s birthplace. Her offscreen politics include driving “a hydrogen fuel cell zero-emissions vehicle.” Her publicists testify: “She has never pumped a single gallon of gasoline.” Kaiulani and Kilcher deserve a more vexed and voluptuous remake by the likes of Werner Herzog or Claire Denis. With Barry Pepper, Shaun Evans, Will Patton, Jimmy Yuill. 100m. (Bill Stamets)

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 »

By Ray Pride

“Breaking News” from Variety on my phone on the 66 home: John Hughes dead at 59. Eyes sting a little and immediately I remember the Simple Minds lyrics, “Don’t you forget about me, no, no, no,” heard in “The Breakfast Club.” John Hughes, the man, had been all but forgotten as a briefly prolific filmmaker (eight features in eight years, thirty-five-plus script credits), but the movies, the lines of dialogue, comic and observational, and yes, the songs, they’re stuck in an impressively expansive collective brain.

. . .

Five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks and loose pages spilled across the surface of the desk. “These are his pages,” the woman offering me the sudden urgent weekend task said. “What you have to do is take all these typed pages and make sure they match up to the pages on the disk,” compiled in a now-defunct, now-obscure word-processing program, “and you have to be careful not to change anything. John doesn’t like anyone changing things. A comma, a word. We just need a working copy for the production office.” I looked at one of the several front pages. “Uncle Buck.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Lance Hammer’s Mississippi Delta-set study of the contemporary working class, isolation and ultimately hope, “Ballast,” is told in the most urgent and emphatic fashion, breathless yet hushed and gentle with a level of filmmaking skill that makes the head spin from its first few cuts. Circumstances bring together a single mother, Marlee (Tarra Riggs) her 12-year-old son James (Jimmyron Ross) and an emotionally devastated convenience store owner, Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith, Sr.). Using non-professional actors, Hammer’s narrative steadily moves these characters in hard-up Canton, Mississippi, toward understanding. They’re quietly beaten down figures: James tries to escape into nature to avoid fighting with other teenagers. Marlee, fired from a menial job for bearing the visible bruises of an argument, says it shouldn’t matter, “like the motherfuckers even know that I’m there! I’m invisible to them.” Synopsis makes “Ballast” sound severe and tragic. Family rifts and blood disputes simmer, with little explained, and much emotion and history and melancholy inferred. Hammer’s work is indisputably cinematic: his control of mood and portent is exceptional, the story felt through setting and imagery. About five minutes in, there are two shots of a freight train racketing through and past the rain-soaked fields: sound and image alike evoke all manner of melancholy, even apart from the just-begun story of misunderstood siblings and boys gone bad. A shot of blackbirds rustle into the sky to great cry and light-blotting number as a troubled child chases them: no literal meaning but evocative nonetheless. Cinematographer Lol Crowley, shooting almost entirely hand-held in 35mm widescreen, honors available light in practical locations as insistently as Terrence Malick. The effects are as rich and etched as plein air painting. The world is grayer, blue at best, sadder, wetter, and yet there is beauty in these stark patches of the Mississippi Delta, landscape damp, gorgeous, drear and oblivious to joy or fearfulness in the foreground. I’d go so far to say this is not a movie that’s well-observed but one that is simply seen. Comparisons to David Gordon Green are worthy in a shared willingness to describe the contemporary working class South (“George Washington,” “All the Real Girls”) and to stir the heart with sorrow brought on by mix-up or madness (“Snow Angels”). Yet I’d like to think Hammer, a refugee from the production side of multimillion-dollar projects, has forged his style through vision and obstinacy. In interviews, he’s spoken of the time he spent in the locations where the film was shot, and Hammer also controls the distribution, preserving birthright and authorship like a hard-won land claim. (One form of alienated labor produces a tale about another form.) While this is the kind of movie you make with a copy of Bresson’s “Notes on Cinematography” rolled up in your pocket like the morning news, it’s also the sort of idiosyncratic, intimate filmmaking that is strangely atypical in the contemporary independent scene. And forgiveness and the portrayal of redemption seldom get such loving attention in American movies at all. A vast country deserves intent artists. I spoke to Hammer during the Chicago International Film Festival, and his optimism about the potential at the end of the long, hard road of filmmaking is pretty much summed up in this one minute of video from our talk: http://www.flickr..com/photos/raypride/296280220. 99m. (Ray Pride)

By Ray Pride

Glamour takes many forms.

And vanity? Is Vanity Fair. I just dropped the most obvious artifact of both on my foot and it hurts. I’d weigh these 444 pages of the March Vanity Fair, “The Hollywood Issue,” on a bathroom scale if I had one. This fat slab of perfume-stripped gloss is it, the idea of glamour in its most mercantile form; although the magazine’s annual A-list shindig was cancelled during the uncertainty of whether the Writers Guild strike would be settled, this toe-smasher is a more readily summoned definition of “glamour” than the habitrail course of awards shows that preceded the Oscars. “There Will Be Blood” has a reek of “Chinatown” on its breath; “Michael Clayton” is a sleeker edition of movies made by Alan J. Pakula, like “Klute” or “The Parallax View”; “No Country for Old Men” traffics in both nihilism and moralism like movies of another time. More old-fashioned would be “Atonement”’s tragic love story (with a well-chosen vulgarity tossed in) and “Juno” is bumptious and fractious and has three stars under 30: Ellen Page, director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody. (For the Academy, that may be the story as much as its have-your-sex-and-eat-it-too storyline, and its near-$150 million box office doesn’t hurt.)
Read the rest of this entry »