The first thirty-five or forty minutes or so of Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor is just sublime. It is measured. It reveals itself gradually. It is anchored by a sad and beautiful performance by Richard Jenkins. It's leisurely. It doesn't try too hard to be about anything. Read more
The creation, dissemination, and response to such lists have become marked by pettiness, pomposity, and preening—at least in the film blogosphere, which has become filled with these attitudes in general. I think the two standard tracks are to pick obscure films to validate how avant garde one is or two pick mainstream films to prove how one is not afraid to be labeled bourgeois by the effete and ineffectual critical consensus. Read more
What little buzz I heard about Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys coming out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival was that it was as much of a letdown as a film that wins its director a festival award for best director can be. It’s all about expectations, I guess. Read more
I can immediately think of two primary types of artist biopics. The first is largely dependent on dramatic irony. You know (and really, the film knows) that Will is going to grow up to be Shakespeare or Ms. Austen is going to become Jane, and so every event is infused with significance. These films appeal to the vanity of the informed viewer. (I’m not saying that is all they do or that they are all necessarily bad for doing so.) Because I know who John Webster is, I take delight in the joke that is unexplained. Because I’m familiar with the plays or paintings or novels, I am instinctively a half second ahead of the reveal and feel smart. And make no mistake, people who watch movies like to feel smart; even if they know they are being pandered to on some levels. Read more
When dealing with documentaries of one place (in this case Malegaon, India) for the viewing consumption of another (in this case, America), I tend to think there are two basic categories: those films that emphasize the ways in which once we get beyond the surface differences of culture humans are all the same, and those films that emphasize the otherness of the foreign (to the viewer) culture and the people who occupy it. Read more
The question that has preoccupied me since screening Peter Brook’s The Lord of the Flies is whether or not I would have recognized it as an important or excellent film without the Criterion Collection label on and treatment of the DVD. Read more
Doug Pray’s documentary about the rise of the advertising age, replete with interviews from industry giants and snippets from the greatest television ads of all time, was a real festival crowd pleaser. Read more
Director Stanley Nelson (perhaps best known for Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple ) delivers another great documentary. Equal parts history lesson and civics lesson, Wounded Knee skillfully introduces archival footage without being trapped by it. Interviews from participants are intercut, many from participants in the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee. Though clearly sympathetic to the Native Americans, Nelson is not so married to one political agenda to be unable to see complexity. The first hand accounts of... Read more
Those accustomed to documentaries of place trying to capture a geographical location through a cross section of its people may be slightly saddened to find that Paolo Poloni’s meditation on Thessaloniki is really more of a diaspora story than a Macedonian Dubliners. It’s fascinating nevertheless–and educational (when did that become such a bad thing, I wonder). If nothing else, there is a value in simply listening to these Greek Jews speaking Spanish and thinking about the ways in which our... Read more
Phie Ambo’s Mechanical Love kicked off this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The two main story lines follow a Kyoto engineer working on making a “geminoid” of himself (and quizzing his daughter on which she likes better) and the rise of mechanical pets for the elderly. While there are some fascinating questions raised by the subject matter, the focus on the engineers rather than then humans who interact with their mechanical creations tends to keep the questions on the... Read more
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