Latest entries
Toy Storytelling
Ozon satirizes filmmaking, class and desire Sloppy storytelling has become so standard for American filmmakers (Side Effects, The Place Behind the Pines) that Francois Ozon’s new trifle In the House feels especially pleasurable. Storytelling is its subject in the same sense as Todd Solondz’s 2001 Storytelling. Ozon plays with his increasing filmmaking skill to illustrate...
Punch-drunk Humanism
Time to revisit the great Terminal Bar As an alternative to the patronizing media praise of Portrait of Jason, consider Terminal Bar, a non-exploitive documentar. Review originally printed Oct. 15, 2002 New York Press. “I’m trying to tell people what‘s happening. If you don’t put it down on paper nobody knows.” That’s an ironic commentary...
Superego Negro
Shirley Clarke’s infamous doc puts race in a boho mirror The difference between Antonio Fargas playing a pathetic Black queen based on Jason Holliday in Next Stop Greenwich Village and Jason Holliday playing himself in Portrait of Jason is crucial. Fargas, a real actor, conveyed the multiple and paradoxical meanings in a dramatized character; Holliday,...
Blink First
Luigi Ghirri’s photographs give new perspective A few of the images in Luigi Ghirri’s “Kodachrome” series (on view now at the Matthew Marks gallery) are unexpectedly religious. A wooden bench with a soft, curved back sits on a pink and white tiled floor in an old hotel. An arched brick doorway reveals a folded beach...
Classical Rock Stars
Nights with Gustavo Dudamel and Dmitri Hvorostovsky When Gustavo Dudamel took the stage at Avery Fisher Hall, the crowd screamed and screamed. He is a “rock star,” as everyone says—a rock star of the classical scene. On this night, the Venezuelan conductor led his Los Angeles Philharmonic. They opened with a piece by Claude Vivier,...
Central Park Jive
How Ken Burns’ “wilding” doc promotes the status quo Comedian Chris Rock embarrassed himself at this year’s New York Film Critic Circle dinner when presenting a prize to the Ken Burns film The Central Park Five. The black, Brooklyn-born Rock declared “It makes you think ‘I was wrong!’ Burns shows we were all wrong!” about...
See-Thru Disaster
Satire slouches toward L.A.’s death wish As black comedy goes, It’s a Disaster manages a shade of verism in its portrait of the 30-something Angeleno before thinning dull gray. That makes the washout all the more disappointing. The cast suggests a potential comedic depth never explored in the movie’s monotonous fixation on surface eccentricity and...
Road To the Wonder
Terrence Malick’s Christian cinema quest The affecting if imperfect Les Miserables was cruelly mocked because its essentially Christian story of forgiveness and redemption was out of sync with modern movie nihilism. It takes a cult figure like Terrence Malick to challenge this intolerance in his boldly Christian new film To the Wonder. Critics who prefer...
Built to Last
Jackie Robinson and Hollywood make history again We are fortunate to be spared Spike Lee’s take on the Jackie Robinson story, which surely would have been spiteful: emphatic about race grievance and loaded with numerous Spikey tangents. But Brian Helgeland has fashioned 42, a superbly watchable tale, from Robinson’s groundbreaking desegregation of professional baseball through...
Operatic Politics
Chile’s Violeta on screen When Salvador Allende first addressed his citizenry after winning Chile’s 1970 presidential election, he did so under a sign that read, “No Hay Revolución sin Cancion”: There is no revolution without songs. In this case, those songs would have been nueva canción, or “new song,” a quasi-political artistic movement spearheaded by...
African Caesar
New take on Shakespearean politics at BAM Julius Caesar doesn’t usually get ranked as one of Shakespeare’s most exciting plays but last year theatergoers in England were given reason to change their minds after seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company’s revival, reset in modern Africa, with an all black cast. In its new incarnation, directed by...
Who Is Sylvia?
Julia Adolphe’s psychological opera floats Bargemusic For fifty-two weeks a year, four days a week, New Yorkers can find chamber music in all its forms—early, canonical, and contemporary—right under the Brooklyn Bridge. There, Bargemusic offers 220 concerts annually, even tendering weekly free tickets to groups and one free concert monthly in order to reach as...
Dawson’s Crease
Danny Boyle exploits Rosario Dawson–and us Guys all wanted to sex Rosario Dawson after The 25th Hour where she dressed in schoolgirl drag as the ultimate stroke book fantasy. Dawson is always cast for sultry provocation–sometimes movingly as Channing Tatum’s girl who got away in Ten Years and now outrageously in Trance, Danny Boyle’s latest...
Girlfeminist in a Coma
Blancanieves uses radicalism to ruin Snow White Blancanieves is the most hilariously misunderstood movie since people took Haneke’s Amour to be a sweet love story. Is this peculiarity as simple as illiteracy or is it another case of cinematically illiterate critics who don’t know how to read what they see on screen? Spanish director Pablo...
The Way They Weren’t
Redford film misremembers 60s radicals for Occupiers Ten years ago, a documentary titled The Weather Underground opened at Film Forum and inadvertently exposed the follies of romanticizing the radical student movement of the 1960s. Now Robert Redford presents his own romantic version in The Company You Keep. It’s an old-timer’s look at the movement’s faults...
Wearable Art
Impressionists, Fashion and Modernity at the Met A big show founded on a simple idea, “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” is like taking a gander at the walk-in closet of some very elegant people, only they’re expecting you. The dresses, also a few men’s frock coats, are there, as well as hats, corsets, even dressing table...
Eye on Auctions
Photos and Fine Books loom large A spate of auctions cluster around the annual AIPAD (Association of International Photography Art Dealers) Show, April 4-7 (aipad.com), and the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, April 11-14 (nyantiquarianbookfair.com), both at the Park Avenue Armory. The upcoming auction previews showcase rare works from a number of significant private collections....
The Bandit, the Cop and the Boys
A modern epic fail and the return of a classic Derek Cianfrance must be a pimp to get a project like The Place Beyond Pines green-lighted. Its less than compelling story about a swaggering sociopath (Ryan Gosling) and a timid police officer (Bradley Cooper) whose lives cross (a newspaper headline identifies them as “Moto-Bandit and...
Sojourner Snoop
A hip-hop icon’s chronicle of reincarnated rap culture Rapper Snoop Dogg’s not the first African-American musician to be smitten by reggae culture. For the most part, though, Black American traditions, both religious and musical, are too entrenched and compelling themselves to cede to Haile Selassie worship over the one drop riddim. Still, old school Rasta-reggae’s...
Out-loud Outlaw
P.J. Hogan’s Mental offers a compassionate screwball masterpiece P.J. Hogan, Australia’s most appealing yet least heralded filmmaker, returns to prominence with Mental, a kind of musical screwball comedy about social misfits that at first seems perfectly designed for the era of “It Gets Better” nostrums. But Hogan is bolder than the politically correct pandering of...
Locked Inside the Kubrick Cult
Room 237 lets the nerds loose Following the IFC Center’s very canny “The Films of Stanley Kubrick” series, comes the documentary Room 237 which sums up the Kubrick cult. Comprised of theories spoken by five different Kubrick nerds over an assemblage of movie clips and diagrams by director Rodney Ascher, Room 237 pretends to dissect...
