The sad reality of a day job prevents one from devoting full days to a fleshy portion of a film festival's schedule. But luckily a good chunk of the movies one has to miss for myriad reasons--scheduling of course, but probably the cost of a $13 ticket price, too--luckily, a lot of those movies will get released in the succeeding months. Thus, after finding out director Anton Corbijn's pseudo-documentary on the truncated life and times of
Joy Division front man Ian Curtis in
Control was sold out (and was to be released theatrically 2 weeks later); and that scheduling issues would make me miss Julian Schnabel's
The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (yet to be released in the Chicago area), I made three ticket purchases with the following provisions: 1) something new and/or by a director I knew; 2) something with a lot of buzz that I'm unfamiliar with; and 3) a retrospective. There are pros and cons to be argued for these logistics, the cons being that treading on unfamiliar territory can lead to some rather dull cinema. But the inverse can also be true; there is something exciting about wandering into a film you know nothing about, it could end up being the best thing you see all year.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
The Walker, a new release by cinema veteran Paul Schrader, a screenwriter (
Taxi Driver (1976),
Raging Bull (1980)), director (
Affliction (1997),
Autofocus (2002)), and occasional movie critic, was underwhelming in that "aw, shucks" kind of way (and certainly was not the best film I've seen all year.) By that I mean, with the set of credentials behind Schrader we want to be awestruck again with something that redefines what the world looks like, and it is usually its darker underside.
Taxi Driver is seventies disillusionment defined;
Raging Bull has a seedy swiftness that bowls you over in defeat; and his directorial contributions are likely to reveal regular peoples' more wretched sides (
Autofocus takes this to a raunchy extreme.)
The Walker stars Woody Harrelson as the homosexual son of a deceased senator with an outlandishly strong southern accent, an eye for high fashion, and a prejudice for almost no one. Weaving through the web of Washington society and politics he's a perfect fit among his gossipy gal pals (Lily Tomlin, Kristen Scott Thomas and Lauren Bacall) for weekly card games, but when a murder turns things terribly awry his friends disappear quickly. Washington politics are dirty, the story overtly goes. What's curious about
The Walker, however, are how brightly lit his characters and sets are; the aesthetic is unnaturally sterile and symmetrical for a story regarding characters in up to their ears in deception, lies and greed. An irony that tips its hat directly to the planned, museum-like landscape of Washington, D.C. itself perhaps. If nothing more, Schrader remains consistent with
The Walker in the way he shows us that nothing is ever as regal as it appears. It's the lack of urgency in this story where he diverges from his past.
Friday, October 12, 2007
The Man From London was the first film I've seen by Hungarian director Bela Tarr, and was decidedly the most important to watch at the festival after the critical buzz his past films had received. I am going to think of this film as an easier, or at least more digestible, introduction to Tarr, whose
Sátántangó (1994) clocks in at 450 minutes (that's 7 1/2 hours), and
Werckmeister harmóniák (2000) at 145 minutes. The two hour run time of
The Man From London felt a touch longer than that, but only as an adjustment from the standard film fare these days that allows for an abundance of (some say unnecessary and/or sloppy) cuts and close-ups. The first thing to know about Bela Tarr is his penchant for the long shot and long take. The still image from the film above is a nice illustration of this, the primary establishing shot of the movie that later comes back as a bookend at the film's conclusion. What you won't glean from the image above is the thick texture of the picture, the deep contrast of black against white so dense and dimensional it's analogous to the sound of a needle on a dusty record, a tactile sound, and in Tarr's case, image. It is a movie to be seen on a big screen, on DVD-TV at home as a last-ditch effort, for much of the meditation on form will probably be lost in translation. The scenery is stark and minimal, yet enveloping and hypnotizing; there's a simple sense of space the characters live in that doesn't make it seem artificial, even though each scene is staged as much (if not more) than that of any other fiction film.
The story is simple: a man from London arrives in the opening scene smuggling a briefcase of money ashore; from the watchtower (the view as seen in the still above) a guard watches the man's actions, and his subsequent fight with a man at the dock edge unfold. Without seeing the character from whose eyes we're watching this drama, the camera pans inch-by-inch, back and forth across the window panes of his watchtower, careful not to be seen by anyone below. But after the guard steals the money the camera's perspective changes; we meet his family, towns people, and finally an investigator on his trail to get the money back; that is, he's as vulnerable being seen in public as the first man he witnessed sneaking the briefcase on land. A shot framed by the windows of his tower reveal a skyline of windows from which he too may be seen, and reveals an incredible amount of depth as to be a window itself, and not simply a projection onscreen.
My favorite shot takes place in the last third of the film as the watch guard Maloin (Miroslav Krobot) carries a grocery sack at his side, seen from the tracking low-angle shot directly at the bag's level, and about the height of Maloin's knees; a minor object becomes the subject of greater consideration, and therein lies the beauty of
The Man From London, an attention to the mundane, to everyday objects that adorn life, and how they are placed and consume time within the bigger picture.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
One of the big retrospectives this year at the festival was Rouben Mamoulian's 1935 film based on William Makepeace Thackeray's novel
Vanity Fair, one of the main characters of which is Becky Sharp. If you know the novel, you know her character, a conniving gold digger in search of permanent socialite status. I found the performances over-played, melodramatic, but inadvertently so; the color palette was the main pull of the film, shot originally in 3-strip Technicolor. From reel to reel you could see a drastic difference in the tone and color contrast, and a
friend of mine pointed out after the screening that not every reel was a copy of the 3-strip process, but rather 2-strip Technicolor. The picture at left gives you a good idea of the garish color scheme employed, which in and of itself was dazzling. However, as a piece of cinema the staging and dialogue was too theatrical to be memorable.
No Country For Old Men: I was terribly underwhelmed by this nebulous story on a western man in the dusk of his life, and thought it veered toward viciousness and violence rather carelessly. Stylistically, No Country is stunning, don't get me wrong. I have to tread on this thumbs-down criticism lightly, because there is no question the Coens are two of the most important and talented filmmakers of my generation. But at the same time I can't help but think the movie was too callous in the handling of its subject (the American West, its people) to be received with such adulation. I know I'm in a minority on this one, but I felt cheated by the movie's end; after two hours of slaughter there was hardly any account for its characters, as if they didn't matter to begin with. There is such a distance between the Coens and the characters they create that each one always feels forcefully drawn up, making it that much easier for them to be, finally, expendable. 
And then came director Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and The Butterfly: a sheer visual delight, and a film that has such tenderness for human life. French Elle Editor Jean-Dominique Bauby is suddenly paralyzed from a stroke, and learns to communicate by blinking his left eye; one blink for "yes," two blinks mean "no." By these means he writes a short novel chronicling his experience trapped within his own body, with the assistance of a speech therapist who recites the alphabet until he blinks "yes" for the letter needed to complete his word. The film is based on this true short story, and features a performance by Max von Sydow as Bauby's (Mathieu Amalric) father that rivals for the most emotionally devastating moments on film. 
Yeah, I know, I got to this one right under the wire, just hours before the end of '07, and even then it's sort of pathetic to think I waited all this time for The Simpsons Movie to arrive before my eyes on DVD format. You could see the complexity of the animation, how this "episode" was crafted specially for the big screen. I kick myself for missing this one in theaters last summer for this reason; it truly was a spectacle that I missed (if not a cinematic phenomenon, it was surely a cultural one.) And yet, if you look at the animation there is nothing done that hadn't been done before, and the story was your typical Simpsons arc: Marge and Homer arguing, the whole family suffering a public humiliation for something minor one of the family members (most likely Homer) could have prevented easily; Lisa in love (and Milhouse in love with Lisa); Bart exacerbating an already bad situation by misbehaving; and Maggie as the mystery shooter. So yeah, it was, like, the greatest Simpsons episode ever. I still will always refer to this great review that sums up about everything there is to be said about The Simpsons Movie.
