Film
The Book on Clarke
Recalling a Film Pioneer’s History Shirley Clarke was the godmother of indie films. “Underground films” they were called in the ’60’s, and despite technology that made film and video equipment more maneuverable, making it more accessible to individual creativity, it was essentially a male universe. The Direct Cinema gents –Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker...
Political Pollutant, or Tsunaminity
Polarizing Comedy Exposed in The Dictator Lazily titled after Chaplin’s 1940 Hitler-Mussolini satire The Great Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen‘s new film The Dictator is part of our current political slackness where propaganda is confused with news, parody is confused with satire, principle is confused with bias and mob-mentality is confused with democracy. Cohen mocks an...
Spooky or Kooky?
Tim Burton’s Campy Dark Shadows Gone are the days when Tim Burton films made you laugh first. Now Burton more likely makes you cringe, as in Dark Shadows, his new film version of TV’s 1960s daytime soap opera. It retells the story of Barnabas Collins, an early-American fishing scion who had been turned into a...
Citizen-Artist
A NoËl Coward Film Series to Remember In a Noël Coward-worthy lyric, a pop singer-songwriter once mused about “the stillness of remembering what you had and what you lost.” Seeing some of the newly restored 35mm prints of classic Noël Coward films in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Coward on Film (May 11-13) inspires...
Not Standing Still
Dance Doc Highlights Jacob’s Pillow A documentary filmmaker has two responsibilities. The first is to make an interesting subject even more interesting. The second is to make a good film. Director Ron Honsa hits both marks with Never Stand Still, an intimate look at dance that will galvanize anyone who’s ever moved his body to...
Remembering Adam Yauch and Gunnin’ for that #1 Spot
Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot Directed by Adam Yauch Midway through 2008, something surprising has happened: two films with human dimension and artful expression–Adam Yauch’s Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot and Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness–have flushed the toilet of summer movies. Neither is a special effects extravaganza but they stir emotion by emphasizing the human scale...
CITYARTS EXCLUSIVE: The Boy Who Played with Dolls
Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Meta Movie Returns CITYARTS EXCLUSIVE: LOOKING AT A CLASSIC THAT CONFOUNDS FILM CULTURE Legend says (and an eyewitness confirms) that at the 1974 New York Film Festival press screening of Celine and Julie Go Boating, Pauline Kael walked out in the middle announcing, “I’m going to the movies!” Apparently Jacques Rivette’s...
Pavlov’s Franchise
The Delusion of Marvel’s The Avengers Previous Marvel Comics superhero movies such as Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America and Thor were like roughly cut puzzle pieces that looked odd and unfinished by themselves—pretend movies derived from already established brands. Most of them, particularly Jon Favreau’s dung-colored Iron Man, were poorly directed. Now, fitted together in...
Pavlov’s Franchise
The Delusion of Marvel’s The Avengers Previous Marvel Comics superhero movies such as Iron Man, The Hulk, Captain America and Thor were like roughly cut puzzle pieces that looked odd and unfinished by themselves–pretend-movies derived from already established brands. Most of them, particularly Jon Favreau’s dung-colored Iron Man, were poorly directed. Now, fitted together in...
Stealing Statham’s Style
Boaz Yakin Actioner Plays It Safe Beneath Jason Statham’s chin scruff is a heart of gold. Producer Luc Besson never let it go sentimental in movies like the terrific Transporter series or Besson-influenced productions like War with Jet Li. Neveldine-Taylor took Statham’s violent relentless stoicism to the heights of social satire in the avant-garde Crank...
Little Sheba Comes Back
Darling Companion’s Fetching Marriages The bucolic look of Lawrence Kasdan’s Darling Companion is an indication of its fine sensibility. Kasdan evokes the natural, wooded landscape of Alfred Hitchcock’s idiosyncratic comedy The Trouble with Harry. The colors here are not autumnal nor quite as vibrant yet Kasdan affects a similar tone of respite. His three harried...
There’s Something About N’yuk
The Farrelly Brothers Redeem The Three Stooges “You will always be children!” Steven Spielberg encouraged last year’s Comic-Con gathering when he previewed scenes from The Adventures of Tintin. Infantilization has become contemporary Hollywood’s standard method for making or selling its product but Hollywood rarely deals with that subject as explicitly as in the Farrelly brothers’...
Buddhist, Political or Patronizing?
Besson’s The Lady vanishes Aung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh) writhes in emotional pain on the floor of her family home beneath the glowering portrait of her Burmese revolutionist father, having learned that her husband Michael Aris (David Thewlis) has died of cancer following a period of prolonged separation after Suu Kyi’s anguished choice of...
Boss Ladies
The Political Masks of Yeoh, Newton and Streep “You may not think about politics,” Aung San Suu Kyi (portrayed by Michelle Yeoh) tells one of the guards keeping her in house arrest in The Lady. “But politics thinks about you.” Use of that famous quote proves that director Luc Besson thinks about politics even when...
High, Low, Surreal
Joseph Kahn’s Detention vs. the World of Pop Pop culture moves fast but not as fast as Joseph Kahn’s Detention, a rampage through recent pop history that is so delirious–and so sharp about the cynicism ingrained in commercial pop’s almost hateful seductions of youth–that it sometimes seems one and the same with the target Kahn...
Bouquet of Eccentrics
Whit Stillman’s Damsels in the Clouds “I like my characters to walk in clouds,” said the great comedy director Leo McCarey. “I like a little bit of the fairy tale.” That confession well describes the McCarey classics that execute a precarious balance between realism and fantasy—The Awful Truth, Make Way for Tomorrow, Love Affair, The...
The Bully Pulpit
New Doc Beat Up Viewers Just as the contrived “Kids Killing Kids” hype for The Hunger Games was getting started, a new “Kids Killing Kids” documentary asserts its claim on public attention: Bully, directed by Lee Hirsch, could be one of the challenges in The Hunger Games. It makes a show of how school kids...
Passionate Recall
Terence Davies Salutes Rattigan and Lean When Terence Davies engages his cultural heritage as in his new movie The Deep Blue Sea, he doesn’t go smart-ass and adolescent like Quentin Tarantino. Davies finds the link between his fascination for popular culture (which indeed began in his childhood) and the experience of the world that he...
Starve, Suckers!
Hunger Plays TV Games On the most superficial level, The Hunger Games is about a futuristic post-war society called Panem sacrificing its young people in a gladiatorial-style survival tournament. Each district in Panem sends a female and male Tribute, chosen by blood-type lottery, to fend for themselves in the wild as part of a lethal...
Brother Auteurs
The Dardennes’ Kid Takes Us for a Ride Of all the fine fraternal filmmaking teams, Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne do what feels like the most even-handed, disinterested work. That’s both a compliment and a complaint inspired by their latest film The Kid with a Bike. Its story about high-strung little Cyril (Thomas Doret) who...
CITYARTS EXCLUSIVE: Mad Mania
Return of the Gray Flannel TV Ego With the premiere of its fifth season imminent, Mad Men is trending hard. Everywhere in the mediasphere, you’ll hear that the return of Matthew Weiner’s dramatic series about the social and professional doings of 1960s advertising pros in New York City is a Cultural Event of Unquestionable...
