Red Cliff

"Since the turn of the millennium, filmmaking in mainland China has reached international audiences as a schizoid caricature. While the Western film festival circuit has turned a handful of the country’s young, socially conscious auteurs into art-cinema heroes, the most famous of the old-guard directors have set their sights on bigger budgets and pan-Asian glamour. It’s only appropriate, then, that John Woo should deliver the final entry in this decade’s string of Chinese blockbusters. As the only mainland-born director to experience success in Hollywood, Woo has chosen to embrace his birthplace at a time when its commercial cinema is swallowing up the Hong Kong industry in which he built his reputation, and also attempting to reinvent itself as the equal to American gigantism. His career-long commitment to the action film may deny him the pedigree of a Zhang Yimou (Hero) or Chen Kaige (The Promise), but Red Cliff is determined to beat their artier efforts in both scale and price tag..." [Thre rest of the post can be found at The L Magazine.]

New York Film Festival: Precious

Four years ago, in one of its most notorious episodes, The Tyra Banks Show found its host on a mission to enlighten her audience on the issue of anti-obese bigotry. America’s top model did so by placing the burden upon herself, taking her fat-suit to the streets, onto buses, and into blind dates—and arriving at the conclusion that she had hit upon “the last form of open discrimination that’s O.K.” The idea of the show was for Tyra to heroically assert the dignity of a marginalized group, but her histrionic response to a few hours walking around in disguise only led us down the familiar paths of sensationalism. Director Lee Daniels’s second film, Sundance favorite Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, brings this daytime-TV construction of the ultimate oppressed subject to the big screen, and again the purpose is a universal, self-ennobling empathy. As the film asks us to dream ourselves into the skin of society’s least-loved (here, a 300-pound, illiterate black teenager named Precious, who lives on welfare with her abusive mother), we are encouraged to project our own struggles onto her victimization: as the film’s website address informs us, “We are all Precious.”

Like Tyra and Oprah (who serves as executive producer on the film), Lee Daniels shares the talk-show method of illuminating the problems of society through titillating case studies. His first feature as a director, Shadowboxer, played on our expectations and fantasies, using the crime genre merely to frame a crude inquiry into the prejudices that attach to different body types. Pairing off Helen Mirren with Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Mo’Nique with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the film stared the incredulous viewer down, asking “Why not?” There wasn’t much more to the story than the shock of seemingly incompatible cast members thrown into sexual relationships with each other. Precious takes on the same subject of the human body and its experience of shame, but quickly resolves our discomfort with the gospel of self-love. Just as it visualizes Precious’s dreams of being a star, the film honors our desire for contact with an abject other, against whom we can test our own mettle and affirm our relative privilege. But where Shadowboxer jolted us into the strangeness of physical difference, Precious seeks to normalize, and never bothers to inhabit its heroine’s humiliation. As on Oprah, the lesson is ready to be had: we reap the inspiration of Precious’s empowerment without going through the fire. [The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]

New York Film Festival: To Die Like a Man

There’s a part of João Pedro Rodrigues that likes to get down to brass tacks. In the first scene of his 2000 debut, O Fantasma, a dog scratches and yelps at a locked door. Cut to the action inside the room, and we see a black-suited figure right out of Feuillade, busily penetrating a man whose mouth has been stuffed with cotton. In Rodrigues’s sophomore effort, Two Drifters, we’re served up a series of similar shocks: a passionate farewell kiss between two men is swiftly followed by the bloody death of one of them, then by a funeral where a female stranger fellates the corpse’s ring off his finger. These first two films take the universe as one big erogenous zone, in which everything—an ass, a motorcycle, the wall of a public shower, even a tombstone—is waiting to be humped. No need for foreplay; we’re assaulted with the climax right out of the gate. And in its aftermath we meet another Rodrigues, one who withholds, who occludes and mystifies that sense of clear narrative purpose other filmmakers tend to reveal in bold letters. The films circle ritualistically around their initial blast of sensation. In its quest to reconcile the life of imagination and primal desire with the physical realities that close in around us, Rodrigues’s cinema sets his characters off sniffing, licking, and rubbing up against this implacable world in hopes it will respond.

In To Die Like a Man, it does. Despite its fair share of dreary, seedy interiors, this story of a Lisbon drag icon named Tonia (Fernando Santos) is a retreat into the natural world and, briefly, into the cosmos. It’s a film that yearns for and touches upon the wholeness that can be found in a landscape, a film in which the universe can be heard talking back to us in our loneliness. Though it contains many more moments of conventional emotional intensity than its predecessors, it’s ultimately a mellower film, and its long running time of over two hours lends an almost leisurely pace that contributes to a surprising serenity. With echoes of Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget, the film is also a tough portrait of aging queer, of the trials of living in a body torn between persistent desires and a growing rejection of itself. Where Rodrigues’s earlier works are built around urgent expressions of youthful, hormonal lust, To Die Like a Man questions what desire means for someone preparing to leave his body—and, more provocatively, what it means to be transsexual as the body relinquishes its hold on one’s identity... [The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]

New York Film Festival: Ghost Town

Since we cannot belong to all places and cultures at once, films that open a window onto the outside world will always be invested with a certain degree of documentary value. But in the case of China, the idea of cinema as a candid reflection of real life extends beyond this habitual, often unconscious response. The finest filmmaking to come out of the mainland this decade bears a commitment to updating us on the soul of the nation, and this duty has placed it in a tight bond with that old theorists’ whipping boy: realism. Much of the authority we find in recent Chinese cinema comes from its aesthetic of immersion, that documentary impulse which has been a guiding force in even the country’s apparently fictional films. Through a shared vocabulary of patient observation and extreme duration, today’s vanguard of Chinese directors have been voraciously hoarding away as much reality as they can—as if hyperaware that their landscape has never been more subject to rapid disappearance, and that there has never been greater international demand for stories of those living through this dramatic historical moment.

The astonishing ambition of these works is rooted in their desire to devour the society whole, and to deliver it to us under an illusion of a complete and comprehensive mimesis. But there are complications in this dream of totality. In their quest for an ultimate intimacy with the real—which serves as a corrective not only to the grand illusions of the nation’s authoritarian government but also to the fantasies of its big-budget prestige pictures—contemporary directors have coupled their righteous conviction in the power of cinematic verisimilitude with a scrupulously maintained remove from their human subjects. Even as they allow us to slip into faithful replications of time’s passage, these films hold us at arm’s length emotionally, lest we should mistake ourselves for anything other than outsiders. [The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]

New York Film Festival: (Re)Inventing China

More than two decades after the debuts of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou signaled Chinese cinema’s emergence as an international phenomenon, cultural gatekeepers like the Film Society of Lincoln Center remain as invested as ever in its destiny. But since much of Western film criticism maintains an inflexibly auteurist persuasion, the Fifth and Sixth Generations still receive the lion’s share of the attention, and have largely been packaged as a lineage of heroic artists struggling against an authoritarian regime. This approach leaves the preceding decades of PRC production to be dismissed for their intolerance of individual talent and their adherence to socialist dogma. Films from the “Seventeen Years” era—which began with the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 and ended with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution—are routinely overlooked, on the one hand because the vast majority are inaccessible to English-speaking viewers, and on the other because critics assume them to be the province of history and scholarship rather than of great aesthetic interest... [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]

Bright Star

Some love affairs are looked upon as works of art in themselves. Perhaps these relationships possess a mysterious golden ratio of joy and pain that encapsulates a culture’s most fundamental notions about romantic attachment. As with our relationship to art, our appreciation of these mythic pairings can help us reconcile the messy materials of life with our ideals, and allow us to maintain the belief that, if we love with sufficient fierceness and dedication, we can confer immortality on the things we hold dear. What the great Romantic poet John Keats shared with his neighbor, Fanny Brawne, during the early nineteenth century holds a prominent place in this lovers’ hall of fame, and part of the enduring appeal of their story lies in the contrast between Keats’s taste for beauty and perfection and the darker truths of class, illness, jealousy, and grief. As the poet’s star has steadily risen over the past century, the image of his one great love has only served to solidify his reputation as a man of unsurpassed sensitivity, a myth born as much out of his haunting (and now widely read) love letters as from his verse. [The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]

Disgrace

Having lost his mojo to the ravages of middle age, Professor David Lurie (John Malkovich) has resigned himself to life as an ivory-tower sociopath. When we meet him in the film version of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, his days are being spent glaring through windows at passersby, losing himself in hazy collegiate settings shot in soft focus, and preying on the innocence of a beautiful mixed-race student. After a public scandal ignited by his illicit affair, this punishingly grim tale proceeds like a row of dominoes, with one form of injustice toppling onto and often obscuring a host of others.

How, the film asks, will such a classically repugnant figure like Lurie come to reinhabit his humanity? A retreat into the countryside seems to promise redemption through his daughter’s we-are-the-world ideals. But when she gets raped by three black strangers, the film makes it clear that its concerns lie not with the future of South Africa’s historically oppressed, but with the post-apartheid white male condition. Locked inside Lurie’s feelings of both guilt and victimization amid a shifting social order, we watch as this former lecher is made impotent by a nation unable to fathom its own heart of darkness. [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]

Beau travail

As Claire Denis embarked on making Beau travail, there was a certain amount of resistance to her idea of transplanting Herman Melville’s Billy Budd to the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti. According to Denis, rumors had spread among the Legion that this esoteric French auteur was getting ready to make “an anti-French army film, then a porn film about Legionnaires and young Ethiopian girls, and then a film about homosexuality in the Legion.” When it was finally released, critics hailed it as her breakthrough, but a few critics, including Kent Jones and Jonathan Rosenbaum, dismissed the focus on the film’s homoeroticism as reductive, even though the many scenes of half-naked men performing one ritual after another in unison, and Denis’s own assertions in interviews about the homosexual panic she experienced among the Legion while shooting, seemed to encourage such a reading. So where exactly does Beau travail stand as a queer text? The “So what?” response from Jones in Film Comment, for example, bespoke a fatigue brought on by prior decades of literary criticism in which the excavation of same-sex desire from works that were not openly gay-themed had become a cliché and a dead end. While Billy Budd had been at the center of this upsurge in gay literary studies, by the end of the ’90s when Beau travail premiered, the question seemed to be: what does it profit us to rehearse the same old critical methods—which were fashioned to address closeted texts written in closeted times—in our engagement with a film whose homoerotic content is so self-evident that it needs no parsing to be recognized?" [The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]

Ang Lee's Father-Knows-Best Trilogy

Time may have named Ang Lee "America's Best Director" in 2001, but film snobs have since found it increasingly easy to dismiss the Taiwan-born filmmaker as an aesthetic conservative, especially after the excessive Oscar-baiting tastefulness and glaring lack of emotional commitment in Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution. For all his artistic and public reticence, though, Lee has never been a mere metteur en scène — and to see just how personal he can get with his perennial theme of individualistic desire butting up against socially enforced discipline, one need only turn to the three family comedies that jumpstarted his career. [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]

A few words on Michael Jackson

I came into pop-music consciousness right as Michael Jackson's image as a freak was beginning to solidify. I remember living in Malaysia, riding to school in the third grade, listening to my classmates blast the Bad album every single morning. I became so sick of it that I would get nauseous anytime I would have to listen to it again. So my first childhood encounters with MJ actually inspired me to run as far away as I could from his music. I remember even having nightmares of the weird-ass gigantic MJ statue on the cover of his album HIStory emerging from the center of my bedroom, the way Ursula came up from out of the sea at the end of The Little Mermaid.

Jacko really scared me. And it was not until I was in late middle school that I began to discover his greatest work with the Jackson 5 and on Off the Wall and Thriller. I never became as obsessed with him as I was with other '80s pop royalty such as Madonna and Prince (and even his sister Janet)--all of whom were much more compelling as human personalities--but no one who hears his music can deny what he was. He wasn't just an extremely talented person; I think he was a genius. This has nothing to do with the media hype or the mountains of money he was able to rake in; it is something you can hear with crystal clarity on songs like "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" and "Workin' Day and Night," which are still my favorites. Genius is who he was.

From Bad onward, though, his songwriting was given to sickening extremes of sentimentality, paranoia, and self-pity (try listening to a song like "Childhood" all the way through), but some of his darker songs from the lesser albums were great if you could get past the frightening persona fueling them. I think tracks like "Who Is It" and "They Don't Care About Us," which never really got their due, are among his most interesting. The jittery rhythms of "Leave Me Alone" and "Tabloid Junkie" are a perfect and extremely disturbing soundtrack to our modern-day media circus.

MJ had an otherworldly gift as a dancer, performer, pop craftsman, and video personality ("Black or White" and"Scream" are extraordinary pieces of filmmaking--and far greater than the overrated, cheap camp of the "Thriller" opus), but I think of him first and foremost as a truly masterful singer. Who else has a voice like that? Who else in the past thirty years has invented such a unique vocal style? People talk about how much his singing has influenced Usher, Ne-Yo, and Justin Timberlake, but to be honest I don't really hear the similarities, because MJ's natural gift was such a singular and, frankly, a deeply weird instrument. The way he adapted the R&B idiom in which he began his career and applied it to the sounds of mainstream pop-rock has a lot to do with how his vocal style evolved.

As a child, he could really let it rip, but later he somehow merged his sweet, vulnerable Motown-bred cooing and his James Brown and Jackie Wilson-influenced cries with the increasingly noisy gestures toward big-stadium pop-rock that began with Bad. This was part of his genius; this was how he momentarily erased the lines dividing traditionally "black" and traditionally "white" styles of music. He took Motown's mission to universalize black pop and ran with it, turning it into an art form with a truly global reach. (I'll leave his place as a symbol of both racial pride and self-hatred to other cultural pundits, though I acknowledge that remains an inextricable part of his enigma.) As he got deeper into the '90s, his voice went from that most purely emotional of American musical genres--R&B--to an ethereal, almost alien dimension: without losing any of his brilliance or passion as a singer, he really did come to sound as odd as he looked.

His vocal performances took on a schizophrenic quality, swooping from a soft, whispy, ghost-like register to punchy, rhythmically flawless staccato phrasing and loud exclamations (usually in service of some accusation against the media). On a song like "They Don't Care About Us," he creates an almost overwhelming level of tension by delivering all the verses in a forceful grunt, as if he were chewing and spitting his way through the words. This brand of exclamatory singing had less in common with church testifying, which had once provided R&B's stylistic and emotional core, and more to do with the frantic urge to keep up with the breathless pace of '90s commercial R&B and its New Jack Swing and hip-hop influences--which now sound like the sonic embodiment of an increasingly chaotic world.

Prince and Madonna possess their own brilliance, but theirs is a little easier to wrap your mind around. With MJ, it's difficult to describe what made him such a towering artist, because in the end it comes down to his voice--which he developed into a sound that seemed to defy the laws of nature, and was so unique that no one could hope to ever duplicate it. In the past two decades, MJ has come to embody the most hideous extremes of American ambition and superstardom, and his last few records sometimes played like a parody, so hopelessly lost were they in the current pop/R&B scene. But when you hear him sing, the depth of his artistry and his innovation is self-evident.

Rebirth of a Nation

I first encountered DJ Spooky’s multimedia project Rebirth of a Nation four years ago, when I was still a student at the University of North Carolina. Back then this radical revision of D.W. Griffith’s masterpiece was still making its rounds as a live performance, and the idea of it alone was enough to make it an ultra-hip, must-see event. Condensed from three hours to a little under two, the film was sliced up and projected on a triptych of large screens, allowing for a surprising juxtaposition of storylines, and giving off the sense that this monolith in cinema history was being fractured into a form commensurate to its multiple personalities. The DJ stood on the stage in deep concentration, mixing the music live as the towering images flickered above his head. And perhaps more than anything else I saw that night, the vision of DJ Spooky (whose real name is Paul Miller) working away at his turntable in the dim light was an intriguing addition to the Griffith legacy.

Like Miller’s quirky book-length manifesto Rhythm Science, Rebirth is designed as a grand statement on the vitality of DJ culture and the primacy of the sound-recycler as author. But beyond all the visual and sonic manipulations on display was the very presence of this young African American artist, which begged the obvious question: what extraordinary journey have we taken from these blackface caricatures we’re seeing on the screen to this black man on the stage freely expressing himself to a crowd of college students? The son of a former dean at Howard University’s School of Law, Miller studied philosophy and French at Bowdoin, then freelanced at The Village Voice and Artforum before becoming a pioneer in experimental hip hop. His attempt to publicly deconstruct and outwit a famously racist text seemed not only like poetic justice but also a rare personal and historical gesture in the art of turntablism, where the man behind the mixer so often gets lost in an avalanche of decontextualized sources. [The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]

Moving Midway

The idea of the “Obama movie” has quickly become a cliché, but it still seems an appropriate framework through which to consider last year’s remarkable Moving Midway, a documentary that film critic Godfrey Cheshire began making before most Americans even allowed themselves to believe a black man could be elected president. My first viewing was at the premiere at the 2007 Full Frame Film Festival, and I remember being filled with excitement and anxiety. Since teaching the only film class I took in college, Godfrey has remained a good friend and generous mentor to me, and over the two years preceding Midway’s completion, I had the privilege of hearing his stories about the filmmaking process. Naturally, I was worried about what I might say if I ended up being less than thrilled with the results. Halfway in, though, I heaved a sigh of relief, feeling something not unlike what I would later experience watching Obama’s great “race” speech. I went home that day and wrote Godfrey an email, telling him: “I really can’t think of another movie that has gone as far as yours in reconciling the love for Southern culture and family history with the sins and tragedies of the past."

If that sounds a touch bombastic for a film that, on its home-movie surface, seems to be making no big claims for itself, it’s still a remark I plan on sticking by. Taking on two towering American themes—family and race—Midway exists in an echo chamber with behemoths like The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, and it shoulders the unenviable task of saying something lucid and useful above all that sound and fury. How it succeeds is by steering away from the tendency toward epic gestures that characterize images of the Southern past, and relocating myth and memory on an intimate, human-to-human scale. We are brought into Midway as if we were neighbors being told ghost stories in the living room. The film’s modest visual surface (in contrast to the Hollywood grandeur on display in the clips) only enhances its approachability, and disguises the deftness with which it juggles fragments of American history, film history, contemporary issues of suburban sprawl, and a beautiful sense of character development. [The rest of the post can be read at The House Next Door.]

The Dardenne Brothers

"Have festival darlings Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne been spoiling us with too much of a good thing? Last year's Cannes highlighted the first signs of a general indifference toward the beloved Belgian brothers, whose latest film, the excellent Lorna's Silence, got cold-shouldered by American critics for being too consistent with the rest of their oeuvre. As we await Lorna's stateside release in July, an extensive retrospective at Lincoln Center (featuring mostly new prints) offers the opportunity to reassess their work, the growing resistance to which serves merely as an indication of their profound influence on the past decade of filmmaking.

At a time when the idealization of handheld camerawork and nonprofessional acting as the keys to a higher form of cinematic truth has long since been called into question, the Dardennes' rough-hewn aesthetic can either be dismissed as a prime example of naïve realism, or praised as a revitalization of a discredited form. But verisimilitude isn't the only trick these directors have up their sleeve. One need only turn to the earliest offerings in the series to consider the range of other styles the duo has already explored. In the rarely screened documentaries that inaugurated their career, the Dardennes introduced themselves as shaggy-haired, politically engaged historians chronicling the struggles of the disenfranchised. Shot in video, these short essayistic pieces — Lorsque le bateau de Léon M. descendit la Meuse pour la première fois (1979) and Pour que la guerre s'achève, les murs devaient s'écrouter (1980) — commemorate the leftist movement in the francophone region of Seraing, where the brothers were born and raised..." [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]

Flower in the Pocket

"Why is it so difficult to represent childhood convincingly onscreen? The widespread assumption is that the mere image of the very young brings out the filmmaker’s urge for emotional manipulation and the audience’s overeagerness for surrender. Adults who are easily overcome by a child’s adorability don’t have much of an eye for the unique intelligence and resourcefulness of youth, and often end up either ignoring those qualities or romanticizing them. But if movies are going to sustain their capacity for delight in the world’s sensory pleasures amid our jaded, image-saturated culture, there’s still much for them to learn from the ever-renewing inquisitiveness of the innocent. Malaysian-Chinese director Liew Seng Tat’s feature debut, Flower in the Pocket, has arrived at the perfect moment, offering a kind of companion piece to So Young Kim’s Treeless Mountain, which has received much praise for its unsentimental portrayal of children amidst economic uncertainty. Like Kim’s film, Flower treats the preciousness of its two young protagonists as a given, and accepts with grace and dignity the fact that they (along with all the rest of us) will have to learn how to navigate an imperfect world..." [The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]

Lan Yu

"Thinking about Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu, I find it impossible to separate the film from a memory of adolescence, one that I sometimes take pleasure in glorifying as a key moment in my cinephilic puberty. In the years before I got a driver’s license, I would nag my dad every week to take me to the one video store in our city with a substantial foreign-film selection. Though I was already out to my sister and a few close friends, it never occurred to me, compulsively strait-laced as I was, to be so transgressive as to venture into the gay section of the store—certainly not on my father’s watch. If I ever did have the thought I would have rejected it as a kind of betrayal, especially since my father had lovingly assumed the role of chauffeur just so I might cultivate a deeper passion for movies.

On each visit, though, I would make sure to stroll through the Asian aisle to steal another glance at the cover of Lan Yu, with its image of two Chinese men standing in pre-kiss proximity. Of course I lacked the nerve to smuggle it home, but in addition to being extremely curious about what simulated sex between two Chinese actors would look like, I was tantalized by the sense that this movie would surely contain some hint of a life or a sensibility I could understand, some alternative to the American gay culture I felt alienated from. I imagine Lan Yu will always toll me back to that initial desire."[The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]