On the big screen and in his own skin, Seth MacFarlane looks as dead-eyed and immobile as the characters in the old Clutch Cargo series, which pasted filmed human mouths on still cartoons. But as an uninhibited comedian providing the voice and movements for the foul-mouthed teddy bear in his Ted movies, MacFarlane comes alive as a performer. He brings to the furry creature a chugging, Ready Teddy motion that’s difficult to resist on a stubby-legged 18-inch toy....
Cosmopolis At first, I was fairly sanguine about the omission. Cannes isn’t responsible for seeing that films by women are produced. But as one picture after another rolled out, I could only think that their directors must have been given bonus points simply for being male. Surely the programmers must have seen just one movie directed by a woman that was at least as compelling as these mediocrities. For the record, zero entries by women were shown in the Competition and Out of Competition sections....
Soleil O Right out of the gate, word spread fast about the legendary Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo’s rousing introductions at the screenings in his mini-retrospective, featuring the Film Foundation’s new World Cinema Project restoration of his debut feature, Soleil O (1970). “A pure militant film,” as a French colleague described it to me, Soleil O follows a Mauritanian man (Robert Liensol) who heads to Paris, only to have an impossibly difficult time finding a job and escaping the resilience of the colonialist mentality....
Good films, free beer, elevated discourse, and small town resourcefulness—all were in abundance in Little Rock, as they are in regional festivals throughout North America. They certainly were the week prior at the larger Maryland Film Festival in Baltimore, which set up its own self-contained “tent village” within which filmmakers, critics, and pass holders could commune and consume. These two fests are successive stops on the film festival circuit, tucked between April opportunities in Tribeca, Sarasota, and San Francisco, and June ones in Seattle, D....
Down Hear For an experimental-film cinephile living on the East Coast, the trek to the city to spend a couple of days at Projections in the New York film Festival is an indispensable annual ritual. It is a feast for the eyes and spirit, an opportunity to exchange greetings and hugs with a community that extends across the country and world, and an incitement to think critically and appreciatively about the state of moving images....
The Yes Men Item of the Week: shooting in nine countries over the course of four years, media hoaxers Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, aka The Yes Men, are back! In The Yes Men Are Revolting they take on the issue of climate change and their targets include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. and Canadian government, Shell Oil and Russia’s Gazprom. After 20 years of sticking it to our corporate overlords, the duo are grappling with middle age and how to keep going while working day jobs—plus, they almost break up while trying to save the planet through a series of satirical exposés....
“I wish so much crime didn’t take place after dark. It’s so unnerving,” says the title character (played by a tense Barbara Stanwyck) in Robert Siodmak’s 1950 Paramount noir. One night she walks into the office of alcoholic, lonesome, and married Assistant District Attorney Cleve Marshall (played by a loose-but-tightening Wendell Corey) to report that her rich aunt is being stalked by jewel thieves. The smitten Cleve initially believes her, but the more he learns about Thelma’s past, the less certain he is....
There are two magnificent flourishes in Bohemian Rhapsody, the long-awaited Queen biopic. One is the playful transformation of the familiar opening 20th Century Fox fanfare, brass replaced by the band’s trademark sound of gnarly guitars and choral falsettos. The other is the entirety of Rami Malek’s performance as the band’s singer Freddie Mercury—pretty much the only reason to see the film. As for the rest… mamma mia, mamma mia! Once referring to a specific Eastern European kingdom, the word “bohemian” came to refer to anyone who had an artistic, marginal lifestyle, and was regarded by those to whom it was applied as a badge of honor....
“Living at night isn’t helping my complexion,” lamented Pere Ubu back in 1976. But whatever other ill effects the life nocturnal might have on the characters in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, their complexions don’t seem to suffer. Hansen-Løve’s night people all display that glow that seems particularly to attach to that strain of flaming youth that sees itself as living in a mythical âge d’or. We could be talking about the youth of the Roaring Twenties, or the young radicals of Sixties Paris—in this case, it happens to be the club crowd who were in on the boom of a new French dance scene in the 1990s and of a house music style that came to be known as “French touch....
In an interview in The Guardian this week, Christopher Nolan mused: “What I’ve found is, people who let my films wash over them—who don’t treat it like a crossword puzzle, or like there is a test afterwards—they get the most out of the film.” That’s a fair enough approach to cinema, although hearing it from this director may come as a surprise to anyone who spent time furrowing their brows over the logic of the backwards storytelling in Memento, or that closing shot of the spinning top in Inception....
Norte, The End of History is the new short film by Lav Diaz—OK, that’s the facile joke out of the way. Yes, at four hours, Norte qualifies as one of the Filipino director’s shorter features—a mere divertissement compared to the nine-hour Heremias: Book One (06) or the ten-and-a-half-hour Evolution of a Filipino Family (04). But it’s also true that Norte doesn’t feel long in the least: with its narrative economy, clarity, and gently purposeful forward drive, the film is as streamlined and as watchable as any contemporary mainstream narrative, if not more so....
If you’re a cinephile with an interest in Southeast Asia, chances are you’ll think twice before ever hiring a Taiwanese plumber. Blame director Tsai Ming-liang, in whose films it never rains but it pours—usually indoors, to a degree that would have made even Tarkovsky feel the damp. In Tsai’s films, water seeps through walls, pours through ceilings, gushes up through drains in the floor—a problem that the director claims to have suffered from in every apartment he ever rented, the curse even following him when he moved to Paris....
Aki Kaurismäki’s films are, you might say, joyously lugubrious. Whether or not his work in any way represents the reality of Finnish life, since the 1980s he has certainly been the ambassador of a certain national spirit, or at least a cartoon version of it: a terse, bibulous glumness with a warm-hearted streak of rebellious idealism just underneath its prickly surface. Kaurismäki’s characters have invariably been fairly morose, but his films have increasingly focused on people who genuinely have something to be morose about: economically challenged working people in Drifting Clouds (1996), the homeless in The Man Without a Past (2002), and in 2011’s Le Havre, a film which widened his focus somewhat, to refugees searching for new hope and a new home....
Some viewers get suspicious when presented with movies about cinema. That’s only understandable: little is more off-putting, if you don’t have a taste for the self-reflexive, than films that contain introspective, fourth-wall-breaking mirror play that pushes you back out of the movie that you’re trying to feel immersed in. We all know, then, how much more uncomfortable it can be when you’re watching films about theater—and, even worse, about theater people and their processes of preparation....
The Wonders Like Rohrwacher’s debut, Corpo Celeste, a Directors’ Fortnight selection in 2011, The Wonders is a coming-of-age story. The focus is on a family in rural central Italy—German-speaking father, Italian mother, four girls, a young woman who may be their aunt—that keeps bees and produces honey. Two unexpected arrivals prove disruptive, especially for the pensive oldest daughter, Gelsomina: the father takes in a troubled teenage boy as part of a child welfare program and a television crew shows up to enlist the local farmers in a kitschy celebration of Etruscan culinary traditions (a slyly self-mocking Monica Bellucci plays the bewigged host)....
In writing to President Johnson in December 1965 about his intention to make a film about the Green Berets, John Wayne explained that it was “extremely important that not only the people of the United States but those all over the world should know why it is necessary for us to be there . . . The most effective way to accomplish this is through the motion picture medium.” He thought he could make the “kind of picture that will help our cause throughout the world....
Something Different Chytilová was born in the Moravian town of Ostrava in 1929. She would eventually leave her hometown and strict Catholic upbringing (critical religious themes would appear later in her films) to work as a model and then a clapper girl for the Barrandov Film Studios in Prague, before studying film production at FAMU (Academy of Performing Arts in Prague). Other notable FAMU graduates, and friends and collaborators of Chytilová’s, included Jiři Menzel, Ivan Passer, Miloš Forman, and Jan Nemec—all of whom would come to define this period of the Czechoslovak New Wave with films such as Closely Watched Trains (1966), The Firemen’s Ball (1967), and The Joke (1969), which focused on the surrealism and black comedy of life and national identity under Communism....
