With a new restoration coming to theaters on May 1, or International Workers’ Day, and the film’s recent induction into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, The Wobblies is once again in the public eye, and the story it tells remains as relevant as ever.
Check back throughout the week for regular updates from the Sundance Film Festival.
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For our latest Film Comment talk at Film at Lincoln Center, we were delighted to discuss work and class with veteran independent filmmaker John Sayles, whose film about striking miners, Matewan, is now available in the Criterion Collection. Also joining Sayles and FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was Teo Bugbee, a contributor to Film Comment and The New York Times who also works as an organizer for Writers Guild of America East....
What We Do in the Shadows For starters, the Midnight section was the best in years. The fest’s growing taste for half-baked horror-comedies finally paid off with What We Do in the Shadows, which put a little life back into the mockumentary genre. Directed and written by its stars, regular Kiwi collaborators Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, the film features four male vampire roommates who reveal to us—or rather the camera crew that’s documenting them—the details of their nocturnal life....
Medical Center When Chad Everett left the building earlier this summer, he took with him some of the best, and worst, haircuts in the history of American popular culture. At the peak of his stardom, as the emotionally arid Dr. Joe Gannon on the hit TV series Medical Center (69-76), Everett, as far as much of his audience was concerned, was his hair, and little more: a good-looking but almost comically constricted performer with an incredibly precise coif—the fin de siècle Hollywood he-man as dense, inert, freshly milled lumber....
You can see (and contribute) to our ever-growing index of un-films. See titles A through K or L through Z. Heart of Darkness Orson Welles Adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novella. The production began to fall apart when Welles took a long delay in getting the script out to his actors. In addition, the script was too long (at 184 pages) and with special effects work, miniatures, process and matte shots, and huge jungle sets, the film’s budget exceeded $1 million....
The 16th edition of Views from the Avant-Garde at the New York Film Festival opened not in a cinema, but on the largest digital monitor in existence. Phil Solomon’s “EMPIRE” (2008–2012) is considerably shorter than the 1964 Andy Warhol film on which it is based—a mere 48 minutes as opposed to Warhol’s endurance-testing eight hours—though in the videogame world in which “EMPIRE” takes place, the film amounts to a full day, passing through rain, sunset, night, and, come the following afternoon, the return of stormy weather....
Panamerican Machinery (Joaquin del Paso, Mexico) Cut off the head of a snake and the body dies too. Or it may refuse to acknowledge its own decapitation and stubbornly slither on, albeit blind and disoriented. When Don Alejandro, the eccentric millionaire president of Panamerican Machinery, keels over within the first several minutes of Joaquin del Paso’s Panamerican Machinery, his employees find themselves thrust into uncertainty. What ensues is a black comedy that paradoxically retains a light-hearted feel, or, as del Paso put it in an interview with Film Comment, “a comedy that self-destructs....
Beau Travail There is no great mystery as to why the role of cinematographer was, until the past few decades, almost entirely closed to women. Men have long cherished the idea that women are incapable of handling machinery or understanding anything scientific, and the cameraman’s job is thought of as both technical and rather swashbuckling—it is called “shooting,” after all, as though the image were big game. Challenging these assumptions, “The Female Gaze,” a series running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center from July 26 to August 9, brings together 36 films with female cinematographers....
Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is an inescapably major movie, by virtue of the unique circumstances of its production if nothing else—and there is a lot else. Shot over the course of a dozen years, it follows a Texas boy, Mason, from his preadolescence to his first day at college. As Mason grows up, so too the actor who plays him, Ellar Coltrane, grows up before our eyes, while his divorced parents, played by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, begin to develop the deepening lines and furrows of incoming middle-age....
Furious 7 At around 3:30 p.m. on the afternoon of November 30, 2013, a 605-horsepower 2005 Porsche Carrera GT went out of control after failing to maneuver around an uphill curve while traveling eastbound on Hercules St., which runs through Rye Canyon in the business-park area of Santa Clarita, California. The driver, Roger Rodas, and his passenger, the 40-year-old actor Paul William Walker IV, were coming from a nearby benefit for Walker’s nonprofit, Reach Out WorldWide, and friends of both men were in earshot when they heard the vehicle explode upon impact with a tree and telephone pole....
Chad Hanna Fugitive slave laws are an explicit part of Chad Hanna, which I recently had the pleasure of seeing at the Museum of Modern Art as part of their ongoing “Glorious Technicolor: From George Eastman House and Beyond” program. The film’s namesake, played by Henry Fonda, is a sometime boatman and stable boy working at an inn along the Erie Canal in Canastota, a day’s ride from Syracuse, who gets himself into trouble with the law when he sells a tip on the whereabouts of a runaway slave to a bounty hunter, then uses the proceeds to help the quarry escape to Canada, before himself running off with a traveling circus....
Images from To the Ends of the Earth (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2019) During the age of Atsuko, which lasted seven years, AKB48 dominated the Japanese pop landscape like no group before or after. Clad in a short plaid skirt, Atsuko Maeda, the ace of the largest idol act in the world, would scrunch her eyes, smile, and place a hand on her hip, and hundreds of thousands of male votes would pour in every summer to rank her first in the AKB48 elections, which also meant sales of hundreds of thousands of CDs....
In Baby Driver, Edgar Wright drapes the bare-bones structure of crime movies like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai or Walter Hill’s The Driver with a pop-aesthetic coat of many colors. Merging his extravagant audiovisual appetite (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) to the laconic style and improbable virtue of strong, silent anti-heroes from the movie past, he emerges with an entertaining hybrid. At its best, it affects us like adrenaline mixed with laughing gas....
Buffalo Boys sounds like a comedy about fratters addicted to hot wings. Set in 1860, it’s actually a good-looking, erratic, cartoonish, and ultimately rousing ultraviolent Indonesian Western. The Buffalo Boys, who do end up riding buffaloes into battle, are two Javanese sultan’s sons, Suwo (Yoshi Sudarso) and Jamar (Ario Bayu). Raised on the American frontier by their uncle Arana (Tio Pakusadewo), they’ve been working on the transcontinental railroad when an impromptu gunfight convinces him that before his time runs out, they must go home to Java “to set things straight....
I assume the title The Best Man wasn’t used because it was already taken. In their hagiographic portrayal of astronaut Neil Armstrong, director Damien Chazelle, screenwriter Josh Singer, and star Ryan Gosling depict him as the perfect—no, the only—choice to be the first man on the moon. He’s inherently modest and self-effacing; he’s all about putting the Gemini and Apollo programs first and letting actions speak for themselves. We’re made to understand that Armstrong’s emotional struggle with the cancer death of his and Janet’s two-year-old daughter Karen not only colored all his relationships but also drove him to achieve excellence when he joined NASA in 1962....
