Where to Invade Next Michael Moore wastes no time laying out the conceit of his new film, Where To Invade Next. Nor does he waste time making himself central to its proceedings. In the opening sequence, he presents a litany of failed American wars and military interventions, and imagines U.S. leaders coming to him for help. “Michael,” Moore says, as them, to himself, “we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing....
Monica Vitti et Michelangelo Antonioni à la Biennale de Venise de 1962, DR. How do you hang a filmmaker? This question confronts any curator who mounts a gallery show about cinema. When works originally conceived for the black box of projection are transposed to the white cube of exhibition, something is bound to get lost in translation: the specifically cinematic experience of concentrated viewing and narrative duration, for starters. The work of Michelangelo Antonioni is a fascinating test-case of such a challenge, one to which the Cinémathèque Française’s major exhibition, curated by Dominique Païni, rises very satisfyingly....
The restoration of this hefty, propulsive, and preposterous 1928 film comes with an irresistible tag of relevance. The story—“inspired” by Emile Zola’s 1891 novel of the same name—concerns catastrophic financial malfeasance and corrupt stock-market maneuvering, played out alongside more intimate varieties of betrayal and deceit. The more startling fact is that L’Argent displays, in every shot and scene, the outsize talent of its writer-director, Marcel L’Herbier, whose reputation on English-speaking shores has been largely misplaced in the shadows of French film history....
Two portraits of young women who explode—both literally and figuratively—are the highlights of the short-film programs at this year’s New Directors/New Films. In program one, North Pole initially appears to be a dutifully dreary portrait of awkward teen girlhood, but Marija Apcevska’s inventive short upends expectations at every turn. Margo (Antonija Belazelkoska) has something like a boyfriend, though their relationship remains nonsexual, for which her girlfriends tease her. At first she seems to fall in the tradition of gawky, bullied teen heroines like Carrie, lurking in the locker room as more conventionally attractive, Instagram-ready peers task her with filming a group dance for social media, excluding her from the frame....
The first time (though hardly the first time) these questions were posed, the “Her” and “Him” were a forlorn spinster interred without mourners and a clergyman whose heartfelt sermons find no audience. The Beatles took two minutes and eight seconds to blend the two narratives into an overarching “Them,” with telling details (he darns his own socks) and subtle connections (she died in his church). Nearly fifty years after Revolver, Eleanor Rigby—or, rather, her namesake (Jessica Chastain)—is again the feminine half of a wistful, symbol-heavy, bifurcated tract on loneliness....
Shortly after arriving at the 15th installment of the Fantasia International Film Festival—Montreal’s beloved three-week freak show—I found myself in a stare-down with Udo Kier. He continued to eye me suspiciously while he wrote down his e-mail address. I was determined to get his Guilty Pleasures while I was there, but the party we were attending was not the place to do it. He regaled me with tales of recent projects, including: an ongoing venture with Guy Maddin; a role in a Turkish film playing Bela Bartok; something about, I believe, Nazis on the moon; and, most important, The Theatre Bizarre, the omnibus shocker that would soon have its world premiere....
Valley Girl (Martha Coolidge, 1983) There’s a story about Martha Coolidge which speaks volumes. She was casting her first narrative feature, Valley Girl (1983), and was stuck finding an actor to play Randy, the male lead. She glanced at the “reject” pile of headshots, picked up the one on top, and said, “We need someone like this guy.” “This guy” was an unknown named Nicolas Cage. His audition was phenomenal, and his chemistry with Debbie Foreman (cast as Julie, the “Valley Girl” of the title) was electric....
The door to our dark places is guarded by an ape. He’s been there through a hundred years of cinema: Merian Cooper’s Kong, Charlton Heston’s “damn dirty” captors, the test gorillas of Frederick Wiseman’s Primate. He’s there in stories several centuries older, his desperate grunts and almost-human DNA inspiring even that masterpiece of acquired language, Lolita. In his famous afterword, Nabokov traces his American opus back to an “initial shiver” he felt reading an article about an ape that produced the first animal-rendered drawing: “this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage....
After five days (and seven hours) spent trapped in a lonely corner of Utah’s desert canyons, his right hand crushed and pinned beneath a dislodged boulder, amateur outdoorsman Aron Ralston amputated his own forearm with a pen knife so dull it could barely slice through skin. That sure is one sensational hook—I mean, fuck!—but it resolves into an uplifting takeaway (survival against all odds), and the one-two combination has made Ralston instantly and enduringly famous....
The pleasures of fantasy, which can eclipse the act of viewing itself, seem to get short shrift these days, or are at least outstripped by studies of tangible manifestations of such fantasy—fan fiction, cosplay, web comics, mashups—in other mediums, namely TV shows. Yet fantasy takes on unique and essential forms in film fandom: outside of the associations one creates between films, directors, and stars, there are the dreams of films that never quite came about, or, as Hélène Cixous has notably explored, projects for our favorite actors and directors that we dream up ourselves....
Not Fade Away, sexagenarian first-time feature-filmmaker David Chase’s tribute to the garage bands and fuzzy ideals of his mid-sixties youth, opens with a pair of meetings: In black and white, recreating an historic encounter, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards bond on a London tube train over a couple of ratty blues records, then Douglas (John Magaro) and Eugene (Jack Huston) sow the seeds for a band and a friendship in full color outside a New Jersey music store....
Eugene Jarecki is once again a man on a mission. The director behind a cynical investigation into the American war industry (Why We Fight, 05) and two biographies of divisive American political figures (The Trials of Henry Kissinger, 02, and Reagan, 11) turns to race, poverty, and drug laws in his latest documentary. The House I Live In depicts a situation in which, to quote one talking head, “everybody involved hates what’s going on....
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden It makes sense that Shane Carruth, a polymath with a degree in mathematics, would make a film whose mode of telling most closely resembles a fractal. Apart from its references to Walden, Upstream Color is a self-contained, modern-day fable that is built on and beholden to science instead of religion....
Hong Sang-soo’s fractious dramas of sexual dalliance and social frustration tread a fine line between alienated sophistication and self-indulgent preciosity. Like Ozu but more so, he has chosen a restricted palette of both thematic motifs and formal devices; whether writers, directors, or actors, his protagonists are all filmmakers faced with a crisis of productivity, so their disaffection and self-delusion internally refract allegories of cinematic insecurity. And since the films both emerge from and depict the real-life environment of those who make them, his performers are both persuasively real—their interactions apparently unaffected by the codes of Hollywood or even commercial Korean acting—and reflexive....
It’s based on a very old true story—but by the time Tsui Hark finishes revising this tale of an imperial operative working a case during the Tang Dynasty, the results look more like sci-fi. The year is 689 A.D. Detective Dee (Andy Lau) has been freed from prison to assist the ruler who put him behind bars in the first place. Eight years earlier Dee opposed the ascension of Wu Zetian (Carina Lau) to the throne; now, she’s on the verge of becoming the first female emperor in the history of China....
