Movie Love

Last Train Home

2010-09-05T11:47:00.000-07:00

The best Chinese documentaries of the past decade seem designed to fuel our apocalyptic imagination. Whether in the post-earthquake wasteland of Du Haibin’s 1428, the critiques of Kafka-esque bureaucracy in Zhao Liang’s Crime and Punishment and Petition, or the monumental portrait of a declining industrial district in Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks, we discover a world in which the center is barely holding and the stakes could not be higher. This is severe, tough-as-nails realism that tests the audience’s endurance, even as the life-and-death urgency beneath the surface makes it difficult to turn away.

Rivaling China’s finest documentarians, first-time director Lixin Fan begins his Last Train Home with a handful of unshakable images. First he presents a stunning aerial view of the nation’s overflowing masses, slowly panning left until the screen is clogged with a sea of migrant workers waiting for their train ride home for the Spring Festival. A subtitle bills this claustrophobic vision as the largest annual human migration in the world. Soon after, Fan cuts back to the kind of dingy, fluorescent-lit environments where this floating underclass spends the rest of the year eking out an existence. His camera repeatedly returns to the endless piles of blue jeans lying around the Guangzhou factory where his central subjects, a middle-aged married couple, make just enough money to fund their children back in faraway Sichuan. [The rest of the post can be read at Film Comment.]

Mao's Last Dancer

2010-08-17T18:24:00.000-07:00

Watching Mao’s Last Dancer, Bruce Beresford’s adaptation of Chinese-Australian ballet star Li Cunxin’s memoir, you might find yourself forgetting that ballet is an art. We meet the young Cunxin as an unremarkable 11-year-old mountain villager in the late Seventies, plucked by the fates to join the prestigious Beijing Dance Academy and undergo years of grueling training to become a ballerino. In these early scenes, dance is introduced as an escape from a life of poverty and obscurity, not as a medium that might provide emotional release in an era of Maoist oppression. From then on, the film maintains a consistently uncurious and coldly practical view of ballet, one in which effort is enough to equal creative achievement. After taking the proverb-laced advice of his wise old master, the young-adult Cunxin (Chi Cao) begins working on strengthening his technical abilities and distinguishing himself from his classmates, a task that pays off when visiting American ballet director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood), who enlists him to join his company in Houston, Texas. And so a star is born, though we are never allowed to understand what exactly makes Cunxin such a magnetic performer. Dance, after all, is merely a matter of athletic discipline, a means of international exchange, a set-up for cheap family melodrama—anything but an art form that might have something to communicate to its audience. [The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]

Spring Fever

2010-07-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

When a movie takes it upon itself to exorcise a society’s moral and sexual hang-ups, the process can be both exhilarating and exhausting to watch. If the filmmaker’s attempt to play cultural crusader elicits something less than the intended shock and awe, we are left wondering what all the fuss is about, and whether the taboos at hand have not already become old news. Following in the footsteps of such recent hot-blooded provocations as the New French Extremity and the marathon sex in Ang Lee’s PRC-censored Lust, Caution, Lou Ye’s Spring Fever opens with two men, Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao) and Wang Ping (Wu Wei), making their way to a secluded shack in the woods for an afternoon fuck. Cloaked in heavy shadows, their tryst becomes an act of disappearance. “I love you,” one whispers, his wedding ring gleaming in the dark. [The rest of the post can be read at Film Comment.]

Stevie Wonder's Jungle Fever

2010-07-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

At the height of its popularity, soul music earned its reputation for plumbing emotional depths and encouraging social awareness. But in movies, more often than not, the genre is dismayingly used in unimaginative and superficial ways. Michael Mann’s Ali is a good example: each time the film becomes stiff and tight-fisted just as it’s supposed to be hitting an emotional high point, Mann insists on plugging in predictable selections from the Sixties R&B songbook. A lovers’ spat is scored to Aretha Franklin’s “Ain’t No Way”; the death of Malcolm X is announced by the surging orchestration of “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The choice of music feels at once incidental and obligatory, and though together these two songs constitute only a few minutes in a two-and-a-half-hour biopic, it’s painful to listen to such deep reservoirs of feeling and artistry being used as short cuts for what the dramatically lit, coffee-table-book images lack. In Ali, Mann treats black pop in the same thoughtless way Lawrence Kasdan did in The Big Chill—as a string of oldies-but-goodies that reproduce our stereotypes of a particular historical moment.

Since even the best pop songs tend to hew to a single definable mood or circumstance (a simplicity that becomes even easier to take for granted as time passes), how can a filmmaker use an old chestnut in ways that are emotionally ambiguous and politically suggestive? And how can a film do justice to the complexity and history of the music it employs without making music the center of its attention or the object of excessive reverence? Jungle Fever is the only movie I can think of that provides a multifaceted, forward-looking response to these questions in the context of classic R&B. Like many of the finest Spike Lee joints, the 1991 film is inconceivable without its carefully crafted soundtrack, and the music smooths out and opens up new ways of entering into Lee’s dynamic, purposefully choppy structure. Despite being one of the director’s most passionate urban symphonies, this is a work so aesthetically and thematically scatterbrained, so willfully contradictory, that it often gets lost in a career packed to the brim with provocations. But more than in any of Lee’s other work, incoherence serves as a source of its vitality, giving him the license to avoid the neatly defined philosophical binaries of Do the Right Thing and the pieties of Jungle Fever’s immediate follow-up, Malcolm X. [The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]

Ondine

2010-05-05T07:42:00.001-07:00

Swooping across sparkling azure waters, the first shots of Neil Jordan’s Ondine envision Ireland amid a sea bubbling with ancient mystical forces. When the camera settles on the boat of a glum-faced, scruffy-haired fisherman named Syracuse (Colin Farrell), we know sooner or later that something supernatural is bound to intrude upon his dreary routine. It finally arrives in the form of a beautiful amphibious female (Alicja Bachleda) curled in a fetal position in his net, a discovery whose strangeness the fisherman accepts matter-of-factly. As in the director’s previous cinematic homecomings, such casual acknowledgment of the world’s magical-realist capacities serves to indicate cultural Irishness—a reliance on wild Celtic imagination in the face of an unstable modernity. Once Syracuse’s young, wheelchair-bound daughter (Alison Barry) identifies his catch as a “selkie”—a half-woman, half-seal creature who can shed her original moss-clump of skin in exchange for a seven-year fling with a landsman—we are encouraged to suspend our disbelief, sit back, and wait for these unconvincingly reticent lovers to get it on. [The rest of the post can be read at Film Comment.]

Henri Cole: Pierce the Skin

2010-04-26T09:53:00.001-07:00

The idea of an anthology of Henri Cole’s selected poems will likely inspire conflicted feelings among his most ardent readers. Much like a museum retrospective does for a visual artist or a greatest-hits album does for a pop singer, this kind of collection can serve two important functions in the life of a poet: not only does it implicitly coronate him as a major force within his art form, but it also symbolically sets aside his previous work and enables him to advance into the next chapter of his career.

The problem with this format, though, is that like many of his peers, Cole tends to write books, not just loose arrangements of easily excerpted poems. The scope and texture of his finest verse is best appreciated by reading his three most recent volumes as they were originally published, back to back, in as few sittings as possible. While modern poetry’s bias toward book-length projects can often seem like a beleaguered genre’s attempt at self-aggrandisement, in the case of Cole and other authors of his caliber, it allows for an expansiveness of mood and form, and endless possibilities for juxtaposition and Whitmanian self-contradiction—qualities that inevitably get lost when the poems are reassembled and recontextualised. [The rest of the post can be read at The Oxonian Review.]

No One Knows About Persian Cats

2010-04-14T09:11:00.000-07:00

Taking its cues from Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up and Jafar Panahi'sOffside, both of which employed a blend of fiction and documentary to chronicle extreme cases of fandom, No One Knows About Persian Catsoffers a number of Tehran's real-life indie-rock obsessives an opportunity to enact their trials and vent their frustrations on camera. Filmed surreptitiously over the course of seventeen days, Bahman Ghobadi's latest follows twentysomething rockers Negar and Ashkan, who—fresh off their brief stints in prison—are frantically trying to gather their fellow bandmates to play a music festival in London. As they scramble to obtain fake passports, polish their songs, and mount a local show, Ghobadi surveys the cultural landscape: a network of cellars, attics, cowsheds, and hidden studios that provide the only available space for these musicians to indulge their illegal passions... [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]

City of Life and Death

2010-04-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

More than anything else in cinema, films about twentieth-century atrocity heighten our awareness of what’s ethically at stake in the representation and dramatization of suffering. Writers across a wide range of disciplines continue to discuss how such subject matter has held visual media—and indeed our entire image-saturated culture—in a moral and epistemological crisis. At times this strain of philosophizing has proven tiresome, particularly in the obvious ways it yokes a discourse of melodramatic extremes (with adjectives like “unfathomable” providing the routine description of the Holocaust) to film theory’s ever-shifting, ideologically charged attitudes toward realism. Still, the topic has the power to organize artists and critics along partisan lines, pitting self-conscious avant-garde practices against seamless traditional narrative, Godard against Spielberg. It’s no surprise then that Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death has found itself embroiled in a controversy of increasingly global proportions. This big-budget epic about the Nanjing massacre has received a mixed reception not only in China, where its ambiguous political sympathies have periodically been attacked as unpatriotic, but also in the world of international cinephilia, where the atrocity film maintains its schizoid status as a prestige item, a bad object, and a testing ground for the capacities and inadequacies of art.

For viewers on the mainland, City of Life and Death is an unprecedented opportunity to see one of the most devastating episodes in the nation’s history elevated through a universalizing, readily exportable cinematic language. Much of the film’s urgency stems from its conviction, implicit in its aesthetics, that the massacre is worthy of being translated in slick Hollywood terms, and that it should be canonized as one of cinema’s great historical subjects. The process of memorializing those horrific few weeks in 1937 when over 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were exterminated has been an arduous one, since the most conservative Japanese continue to deny that it ever happened, and the PRC government has repeatedly manipulated the facts to its own political advantage. Previous Chinese and Hong Kong–produced films on the subject have been uniformly crass, though audiences have rallied around glorified exploitation flicks like T.F. Mou’s Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre and Wu Ziniu’s Don’t Cry, Nanking (both from 1995), because they at least mirrored the intense feelings the massacre continues to provoke. Since the event only reached widespread international recognition in 1997, when American journalist Iris Chang published her book The Rape of Nanking, this high-class silver-screen treatment seems like one more significant step in granting the mass killings truth and legitimacy, the appearance of a commonly shared knowledge. If the major task of cinematically commemorating a past trauma is to earn it admission into popular consciousness, then Lu’s may be the first truly successful Chinese film of its kind. [The rest of the post can be found at Reverse Shot.]

Neil Young Trunk Show

2010-03-18T06:51:00.000-07:00

Though few aesthetic experiences are as necessarily social and participatory as concert-going, when live music is captured in that other communal art form known as cinema it is difficult for it to feel anything but awkwardly isolating. Sitting in the darkness of the theater, watching others experiencing the performance at some previous time, the concert-film viewer is always stuck on the outside, unsure whether to clap, stomp, or sing along or just watch reverently. A successful product of the genre, like 2006’s Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, can reduce our awareness of this chasm between ourselves and the onscreen stage, inviting us to bask in the good vibes. Or, like Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young: Heart of Gold (also released in 2006) and its new follow-up Neil Young Trunk Show, it can ignore the live audience altogether and emphasize its own meticulously designed theatricality. [The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]

Sinophilic Cinephilia: Asia Society's "China's Past, Present, Future on Film"

2010-03-04T08:21:00.000-08:00

There are a few reasons to justify Richard Brody’s claim that Chinese filmmaking was “the crucial story in cinema of the past decade.” The astonishing output from Jia Zhangke, Wang Bing, Li Yang, Ying Liang, and other young Mainland mavericks has not only been the perfect complement to the Western media’s sensationalized narrative of an ancient, exotic civilization’s reemergence onto the world stage, but it has also functioned as an antidote to millennial death-of-cinema anxieties. Here it seemed that a national movement of filmmakers were reclaiming the moral and political commitment that had made movies a central part of American culture in the Sixties and Seventies, and that in the process they were building an aesthetic legitimacy for the digital medium that was rumored to be spelling the end of their art form. Wrap all of this up into the image of a courageous, self-jeopardizing auteur defending his art against an authoritarian regime and delivering news to the outside world about the oppression of his people, and the new Sinophilic cinephilia seems even more of an inevitability.

I don’t mean to sound willfully cynical about high-brow Western spectatorship, or to dismiss the much-praised progress of Chinese cinema as a mere marketing ploy. To my non-Mainlander eyes, the profound achievements of this latest generation of Chinese filmmakers are as fascinating as the iconicity they have acquired. I’ve certainly been complicit in heroizing a Jia or a Wang, and as much as a critic would like to maintain his cold rationality, most recognize that the excitement, sentimentality, and outright fandom that a great artist or promising new wave can inspire are the very essence of cinephilia. In the midst of all the hype, though, it helps to watch as widely as possible and keep a firm grasp on the bigger picture. This has been slightly easier to do in New York in the past year, which has seen a handful of strong film series covering both classic and contemporary PRC cinema.

Thanks to The Film Society of Lincoln Center, audiences have been treated to a small collection of recent work from independent directors like Ying Liang, Yang Jin, and the Korean-Chinese Zhang Lü (in last April’s “On the Edge: New Independent Cinema from China 2009”), as well as an unprecedented retrospective of films from the “Seventeen Years” period between the founding of the PRC and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (in the New York Film Festival’s Masterworks sidebar last September). If that didn’t satisfy your appetite, an ardent filmgoer could seek out the occasional screening at China Institute or the Asian CineVisions series at MoMA. This month, though, is a real embarrassment of riches, with MoMA’s Jia Zhangke retrospective launching this Friday (complete with short films, other rarities, and appearances by Jia and actress Zhao Tao), and Asia Society’s program of seven independent Chinese films made between 2005 to 2008. [The rest of the post can be read at The Auteurs.]

Jia Zhangke's Retrospective at MoMA

2010-03-03T07:08:00.001-08:00

Art cinema is no less invested than Hollywood in the act of star-making. Take for example Jia Zhangke, whose career now seems marked by destiny. Charging through the 00s with a steady flow of extraordinary films, this precocious director quickly soared into the uppermost echelon of international auteurs, finally landing last year on the pages of his own New Yorker profile. The current wave of China fever has further cemented his role as the leading ambassador between his nation's underclass and the rarefied world of Western aesthetes, but reputation is a slippery thing. Since gaining approval from China's censorship board, Jia has begun to look more like a figure of the establishment, an image in conflict with that of the renegade whose earliest works were made illegally and on the cheap.

While some cry "sell-out," what of the films themselves? Jia's breakthrough came with Platform and Unknown Pleasures, two patiently observed views of hometown ennui that remain his greatest achievements. Attuning his audience to the passing of each moment, he unravels large swaths of time punctuated with signs of his characters' entrapment: the whistling of a kettle; a pair of lovers quarreling on a wall that encircles their city; a motorcycle that repeatedly breaks down. Following these first successes, The World and Still Life seem to focus and intensify Jia's gifts as a visual stylist, applying them to a broader, more boldly surrealistic canvas even as he reveals a weakness for the metaphorically obvious. The recent fiction/non-fiction hybrid 24 City is a triumph of a different order: a seemingly prosaic talking-heads doc that gives off exhilarating sparks of melodrama, allowing Jia's muse Zhao Tao to match the exquisite expressiveness of Gong Li. [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]

A Brighter Summer Day

2010-02-26T11:20:00.001-08:00

Those of us who get easily swept up in the tender, boundless empathy of Yi Yi may find it difficult to remember (or, due to the general lack of availability of Edward Yang’s other films, may not even realize) that much of this great Taiwanese director’s career sprang from his bitter sense of irony. While Yang’s final masterpiece suggested an artist beginning to make peace with an unjust world, his other major works were made in a spirit of indignant protest against a culture he felt was actively suppressing its own history and cheating its youth. Now that the World Cinema Foundation’s newly restored print of the 1991 epic A Brighter Summer Day is finally making its stateside debut as part of this year’s Film Comment Selects slate, Yang fans will get a stronger dose of the anger that only occasionally disrupted Yi Yi’s chastened world-weariness and Ozu-like tranquility. Where Yi Yi was dominated by brightly lit compositions contrasted with a handful of melancholy nighttime sequences, A Brighter Summer Day traps its audience in a permanently murky atmosphere—one that seems intended to precisely capture the political anxiety of its historical moment, but that also renders our relationship to time and space unstable.

Nothing about the film’s premise leaves room for the lightness that Yi Yi endowed its ruminations on life and death. As if A Brighter Summer Day’s four-hour length weren’t intimidating enough to the uninitiated viewer, Yang makes sure to weigh his film down from the get-go, both formally and thematically. The unusually long Chinese title makes blunt reference to the first case of juvenile homicide tried in Taiwanese history, an event that galvanized the island and upon which the film’s central plot strand is based. The first shot metaphorizes Yang’s commitment to bringing a buried history into the light, with a single bulb hanging down the center of the screen, barely illuminating the darkness of an unidentified room. Soon after, a title card appears to situate the film’s sprawling, novelistic narrative and large, mostly early-adolescent ensemble within the context of the mass migration of mainland Chinese to Taiwan, which began after the Kuomintang’s defeat in 1949. By the Sixties, a generation of young people had emerged whose only sources of security were admission to a prestigious school or alliance with a street gang.

With its sovereignty as a state held at the mercy of its various colonizers (and long denied in both the East and West), Taiwan has always been a contestable and provisional nation. It is within this marginality that Yang locates the dilemmas of a contemporary Chinese identity, one that is both liberated and imprisoned by the globalization of culture. As in a number of other important Chinese-language films, such as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness and Jia Zhangke’s Unknown Pleasures, the shifting political landscape is communicated through bits of sound design, usually a fuzzy news broadcast placed incidental to the action. The implication is that the characters’ sociopolitical fates are as tenuous as these barely audible sounds, which ironically must travel down the same channels as the imported pop culture that the nation fanatically consumes. Here, the first instance of government-controlled media being used as a narrative device is a roll call of honor and implied humiliation, as a radio announcer robotically recites the names of students whose exam scores have earned them entry into a good school. The obsession with education that has been forced upon this society—and the accompanying illusion of Taiwan as a meritocracy—forms the basis for tragedy ahead. [The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]

Blood Done Sign My Name

2010-02-17T15:34:00.000-08:00

As the source of so many of our ideas about justice and heroism, the Civil Rights Movement would seem like an ideal subject for tough, complex filmmaking. More often than not, though, cinema has reimagined our nation's racial history as a string of misty water-colored memories, and has shown less interest in examining unhealed wounds than in immortalizing an image of one big American kumbaya. First-time director Jeb Stuart's Blood Done Sign My Name travels a similar path, opening with the requisite archival footage of hippies, James Brown, and the moon landing, and interviews of smiling North Carolinians reminiscing about the good ol' days. When it launches into the first of its multiple intertwining narratives, one would be forgiven for fearing yet another tale of valiant whites a la Atticus Finch or the FBI agents in Mississippi Burning. Based on the autobiographical recollections and research of historian Timothy Tyson, the film frames the murder of a black Vietnam veteran in Oxford, North Carolina, and the riots and legal battles it gives rise to, with a portrait of Tyson's progressive white family trying to take a strong anti-racist stance in their segregated town. [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]

Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives

2010-01-27T09:03:00.001-08:00

More than thirty years after Word Is Out premiered at San Francisco's Castro Theater, one of the most intriguing things about it is how clearly and drastically it has aged. Watching this pioneering gay documentary now, it's easy to view it as a barometer of how much has changed for the public perception of homosexuality in America, since the film predates the AIDS activism that galvanized the gay community in the Eighties, the post-structuralist queer theory that became academic vogue in the Nineties, and the mainstreaming of gay experience that continues to reach new heights (or lows—depending on your perspective) in the new millennium. Formally, Word Is Out is also something of a relic. Intercutting the direct-to-camera reminiscences of twenty-six gays and lesbians, it combines two modes of self-exposure—the act of coming out and the interview-based documentary—that trace their appeal to the psychoanalytic notion of a "talking cure," which has since fallen out of favor as a model for truth-telling. Understandably, the contemporary audience wants more from its queer cinema than an expression of what now seems obvious; aesthetic subversion and politically astute critique have taken precedence over earnest, tear-stained testimonies... [The rest of the post can be found at The L Magazine.]

A Room and a Half

2010-01-20T10:34:00.000-08:00

The writer in exile emerged as a romantic figure over the last century, providing soundbite-ready evidence that art can be a vessel for a society's jeopardized soul. But while this collision of tortured artist and sweeping political backdrop seems like perfect fodder for many a biopic, it also risks accentuating what people hate about the genre: its tendency toward monumentalism, and its simplification of history through the lens of individual heroism. [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]

Favorite Films of the '00s: Two Lists

2009-12-31T10:33:00.000-08:00

Though I don't have time right now to annotate these lists, I did want to quickly share with you what I cherished this decade. Maybe I'll come back later and add some notes and comments, so stay tuned. Like many film lovers, cinema has been a passion of mine from as early as I can remember. But in terms of broadening my horizons beyond Hollywood commercial films, I really started getting my feet wet in the late 90s, when an Ingmar Bergman series on TCM rocked my world (I think in 1998). 2000-2001 was really the year I fell in love with contemporary art cinema and began writing film criticism in earnest, with the mad ambition of being next Pauline Kael (who sadly passed away shortly thereafter). It was the perfect time to mature as a cinephile, since - as you can tell from my list below - I am confident that it had the decade's highest concentration of flat-out masterpieces. I would love to walk down memory lane some more, since for me each of these films is attached to some sentimental memory, but for now these lists will have to suffice. As you will see, I do have significant blind spots, the most glaring of which are avant-garde and documentary. And so my education continues...

What is it that Umberto Eco says about lists? That we like them "because we don't want to die"? I guess I take these ridiculous exercises so seriously because, deep down, I think he has it exactly right.

First, the list I submitted to Film Comment's end-of-decade poll:

1. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)

2. 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

3. Platform (Jia Zhangke, 2000)

4. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)

5. The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2002)

6. Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2003)

7. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)

8. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008)

9. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

10. 13 Lakes (James Benning, 2004)

11. Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2002)

12. Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003)

13. Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, 2000)

14. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005)

15. Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005)

16. Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004)

17. When the Levees Broke (Spike Lee, 2006)

18. What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001)

19. Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003)

20. Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, 2003)

21. Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, 2000)

22. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, 2008)

23. 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)

24. Moolaadé (Ousmane Sembene, 2004)

25. Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

26. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)

27. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

28. Neil Young: Heart of Gold (Jonathan Demme, 2006)

29. A ma soeur! (Catherine Breillat, 2001)

30. Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003-2004)

Much love to the films that have wandered in and out of my top 30, or rank just slightly below: In Between Days (So Yong Kim, 2006); Unknown Pleasures (Jia Zhangke, 2002); The Good Shepherd (Robert DeNiro, 2006); The Circle (Jafar Panahi, 2000); Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, 2004); Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001); The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007); Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005); Wild Grass (Alain Resnais, 2009); Two Lovers (James Gray, 2009); Hamlet (Michael Almereyda, 2000); Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001); Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005); Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2004)

Off the top of my head, some of the film artists who made a deep impression on me this decade, minus the usual auteurist suspects, were Meryl Streep, Mark Lee Ping-bin, Agnès Godard, Yu Lik-wai (as a cinematographer), and Mark Romenak (whose videos for The Wallflowers' "Sleepwalker," Johnny Cash's "Hurt" and Jay-Z's "99 Problems" certainly belong with the best of contemporary filmmaking).

And the best Chinese-language films of the decade:

1. Yi Yi

2. Platform

3. In the Mood for Love

4. Three Times

5. What Time Is It There?

6. Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks

7. The Other Half (Ying Liang, 2006)

8. Oxhide (Liu Jiayin, 2005)

9. Ghost Town (Zhao Dayong, 2009)

10. Everlasting Regret (Stanley Kwan, 2005)

With honorable mention going to: Blind Shaft (Li Yang, 2003); Exiled (Johnnie To, 2006); Summer Palace (Lou Ye, 2006); Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, 2004); Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000); July Rhapsody (Ann Hui, 2001)

And, just for fun, a revisit to my favorites of the '90s, against which my '00s canon stacks up very well. Although this past decade has been a genuine artistic breakthrough for mainland Chinese cinema, the previous one offered an equally astonishing (and perhaps larger) array of masterpieces from Sinophone filmmakers, so many that I wish I could stuff the following into the top 10: Tsai Ming-liang's The River, Ching Siu-tung and Stanley Tong's Swordsman II, Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite, Peter Chan's Comrades: Almost a Love Story, Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time, Jia Zhangke's Xiao Wu, Wang Xiaoshuai's The Days, and Hou Hsiao-hsien's Good Men, Good Women and Flowers of Shanghai, and Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou... Now that's an incredible line-up.

1. The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993)

2. Actress (Stanley Kwan, 1992)

3. Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997)

4. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)

5. The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)

6. Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh, 1999)

7. The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993)

8. Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter, 1999)

9. Time Indefinite (Ross McElwee, 1993)

10. Mother and Son (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1997)

The Decade in Rhythm and Blues: Part 1

2009-12-23T13:39:00.000-08:00

D'Angelo, Voodoo (2000)
Erykah Badu, Mama's Gun (2000)

Almost ten years later, the one-two punch of these twin masterpieces still seems like a promise of creative revolution in soul music. I was just starting high school when I brought these two albums home, and I listened to them almost religiously until graduation four years later. It seemed that D'Angelo and Badu had given me license to claim soul music as my own with the same amount of fervor that fans of Aretha in the Sixties or Stevie in the Seventies had been able to. Sadly, it has so far been a promise left unfulfilled. One would have imagined that, as members of the black-boho Soulquarians clique, the two most adventurous R&B stars of our time would have gone on to revitalize neo-soul. Instead the movement quickly became the territory of middle-of-the-road Starbucks sentiment peddled by the reasonably gifted but boring likes of Alicia Keys and John Legend.

Never mind that for now, since these two records remain inexhaustible. Their classic status seems a built-in aspect of their virtuosity,though that doesn't mean they received instant acclaim. Voodoo, like Marvin Gaye and Al Green before it, got overwhelmed by its reception as baby-making music, as if its only place was in the boudoir. And while there's no arguing the fact that D'Angelo's multi-tracked, falsetto-indulging vocals and the slow, organic grooves are some of the most erotic creations popular music has ever produced, there's more here than just atmosphere. Unlike his debut Brown Sugar (which was merely sublimely sung and competently written), this is music that demands careful listening--not least because D'Angelo has a way of layering his voice, accenting it, muffling it, and breaking out into Prince-ly coos and hums that can often obscure the deeply felt lyrics.

While Voodoo was divorced enough from radio-ready melody to eventually be embraced as a Serious Black Album, many critics initially labeled it "monotonous" and "meandering" (the same critics, of course, who pissed themselves over Kid A). But its expansive length and improvisational (yes, sometimes pretentious) tangents are some of the reasons I love it -- and for me it's more a matter of historicity than chutzpah. This record is built out of a sheer love (and lust) for soul music; it's the kind of record made for fans who need it bad. It takes for granted that soul has a unique appeal to our sensuality, and proceeds to explore every corner and facet of the genre's well-worn aesthetic until it can present the music anew to us. It's a masterful deconstruction, with different flavors emerging out of a riskily uniform sound. The rhythms at times feel so emphatic that they seem to dig into the ground--even at their lightest, they are always visceral, pushing themselves through the listener's body. D'Angelo borrows a lot of the direct physicality of his music from James Brown, Sly Stone funk, even though (quite remarkably) the album is consistently languorous in its pacing.

The vocals are so mind-blowing primarily because of their immateriality and amorphousness. Eschewing both clear enunciation and passionate belting, D'Angelo's method of singing draws attention to the space where a word (or some other unintelligible utterance) meets the air and is enveloped by it. Even Al Green--who made an art out of melodic whispers, yawns, and chuckles--never took a risk on an entire album this whispy, this difficult to pin down. Apart from a few instances in each song where he lets out a sandpaper-toned, Ronald Isley-like purr, D'Angelo seems adamant about offering his singing to us as a kind of aestheticized sighing. He vocalizes not just through the diaphragm and throat but through the nostrils. The album repeatedly hits the listener's sweet spot by building up to climaxes entirely constructed out of D'Angelo's harmonizing voices, egged on by the percussion (listen to "Send It On" and tell me you don't get tingles up your spine at least five or six times). And it's somewhere in between the tactility of its textures and thumping beats and the haziness of D'Angelo's musical exhalations that Voodoo slips in its old-fashioned Black Power vision: somewhere between the rooted body and the untethered, racially proud imagination. No, Voodoo is not exactly a political album, but it is ultimately (at least partly) about being transported back to one's mythic homeland through the rhythmic engagement of one's body--about nursing a diasporic longing by eroticizing it.

Mama's Gun is also a staggering work by an eccentric, original vocalist coming into her own. When Badu dropped her debut in the late 90s, the media compared her thin, scratchy, reedy voice to Billie Holiday. It's an appropriate analogy, and one that she plays with to eerie effect on the disc's 10 minute-plus magnum opus "Green Eyes" (written post-Andre 3000 breakup), in which she gives a dead-on impression of Lady Day's iconic, behind-the-beat drawl. But Mama's Gun was also the first indication of how much power Badu had stored up in those vocal cords. The difference between her and, say, the bigger-voiced Jill Scott is that she has unmistakable sonic character and presence, and she throws her listeners genuinely surprising curve balls. She's like a female Cee-Lo, but with an exponentially greater capacity for depth. She can play with a line in the best tradition of jazz. She can find humor in the slightest bit of intonation, a sly Southernism thrown in here and there. And she can discover emotional variations in an itty bitty range before letting it rip with a piercing, Chaka-style cry to the heavens -- which she uses so sparingly that it never fails to pack a devastating punch.

One of the things that turns people off an artist like Badu is her insistence on mythologizing herself with her mix-and-match mysticisms (the rock version would be Tori Amos). People forget that Stevie Wonder was guilty of the exact same thing (just check out the liner notes for Music of My Mind). But emotional commitment in music can't be faked, and more than any of Badu's other albums (all of which indulge in their share of look-at-me eccentricity), Mama's Gun possesses raw vulnerability and social consciousness behind all the spiritual frontin'. My mind immediately races to the stunning trio of songs that closes the album -- each of which offers comfort and affirmation for the intended listener (in "Bag Lady," a sista; in "Time's A Wastin," her son; in "Green Eyes," her own broken heart). But the best track here is the Betty Wright collaboration "A.D. 2000," a powerful statement on the Amadou Dialou shooting that takes a beautifully restrained tone (quite different from Bruce Springsteen's epic protest rocker "American Skin") -- which might seem surprising for a woman who has long been developing an affinity for Black Panther fist-raising. Badu is a fantastic, often funny lyricist, but in this mournful tune she finds herself at a loss for words, falling back on a series of gorgeously harmonized "ooh"s and tormented scats. Like any musician reared on hip-hop, she's given to making one too many boasts, but this ambitious album never comes across as a hermetically sealed work by an arrogant artist. For all her braggadocio, Badu gives some of the gentlest, least self-aggrandizing pep talks in all of pop music.

It's Complicated

2009-12-23T11:11:00.001-08:00

In a year that counts three films by women—The Headless Woman, 35 Shots of Rum and The Hurt Locker—among its most daring and widely embraced work, it’s beyond offensive that Nancy Meyers’s glossy, sanitized portrait of middle-aged womanhood should be marketed as the studios’ holiday gift to their long-neglected female audience. The territory could scarcely be more familiar: a variation on the 30s comedy of remarriage, the film follows a pair of exes (Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin) trying to rekindle their flame as they face one more child leaving the nest. Drama ensues when the woman, who has built herself a cushy life as the owner of a successful bakery, begins to weigh her options with the tender-hearted, recently divorced architect (Steve Martin) who is helping design her dream home. Overwhelming the plot’s rom-com conventions is an upper-middle-class fantasy less escapist than insulting. Coming out alongside Up in the Air’s self-conscious reflection on our economic crisis, Meyers’ blithe vision of undisturbed financial stability—complete with lingering shots of well-groomed lawns and pristine suburban interiors—can’t help but seem a little tactless. [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]

Movie of the Decade: Yi Yi

2009-12-16T12:14:00.001-08:00

Cinephilia is usually characterized as an insatiable, promiscuous kind of love, but Edward Yang’s Yi Yi tempts me to think of it as monogamous. While this certainly isn’t the only film I’ve ever held dear, the reverence it commands leads me to a few hyperbolic convictions most often associated with romantic commitment: that its entrance into my life was destined; that I never truly loved before it; that it will always mean this much to me. As with most worthwhile passions, though, this personal canon of one arouses an impulse for self-doubt. What is it in Yi Yi that makes me think, however momentarily, that I could relinquish the rest of cinema’s varied treasures? Insofar as one’s professed aesthetic values function as an advertisement of an idealized self-image, there must be a strong element of narcissism in my devotion to this film, perhaps the false implication that I have successfully internalized the wisdom at its heart. Surely there is something maudlin about my desire to understand my life in parallel to it and my eagerness to subscribe wholeheartedly to its worldview. Not only does Yi Yi offer a space for its audience to make peace with life’s contradictions (or at least imagine what it would be like to do so), but it couples its serenity with the sense that we—like its characters—possess profound capacities for emotion that counteract bourgeois numbness. Or maybe, in love, timing is everything. My intense identification with Yi Yi—a film that came to me just as I began to fret over what it might mean to be a grown-up—once satisfied a late-teenage compulsion to rehearse the responsibilities and disappointments of adult life from a safe distance. Could it be that my continued adoration is rooted only in nostalgia? [The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]

Nine

2009-12-16T12:11:00.000-08:00

No one at this point is expecting the true heir of Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen to step out of the shadows and resurrect the Hollywood musical once and for all, but did we have to get saddled with the consistently joyless Rob Marshall as the genre’s most visible advocate? Here is a filmmaker so unimaginative in his approach to rhythm and space that an attentive viewer could easily learn to predict the speed with which the camera somnambulates through all his dream- and stage-bound numbers. Armed with nothing but glitzy Broadway lighting and TV-commercial editing to distract us from our boredom, it’s no wonder his big set pieces are inserted between thinly written slabs of narrative, and brought off with a let’s-get-this-over-with hurriedness. [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]

A Single Man

2009-12-11T20:35:00.000-08:00

Sometimes in movies a heartbroken love story can come together with one exquisite detail: a woman’s hand slowly being loosened from a lacey glove in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence; a head resting on a shoulder in In the Mood for Love. Any film that hopes to map the sinuous contours of a past romance can be helped along by one of these smoldering moments, in which love is a delicate rare bird and reality splits off into an instant memory of itself. In Tom Ford’s A Single Man—which, like my previous examples, is a painstakingly aestheticized period piece that situates eros within a persistent longing for lost time—this scene arrives early. George (Colin Firth), a middle-aged British expatriate teaching at a small Southern Californian college in the 1960s, receives a phone call in his living room on a leisurely night alone. It becomes clear that the call is about Jim (Matthew Goode), his lover of sixteen years who, in the film’s opening dream sequence, is seen lying dead in a snowy landscape after a car crash. George’s response to the bad news is disarmingly elegant: while clearly flustered, he also maintains the steadiness of his voice so as not to impose his distress on the deliverer of the message. We grow curious to see how much pain will crack through Firth’s stereotypical poker-faced Englishness. Then, as if on cue, a sliver of water moistens the bottom of each eye. Only when the phone has returned to its cradle do two perfectly round tears come traveling down George’s otherwise minimally expressive face.

If there has been a more beautiful piece of Oscar-hungry melodramatic acting this year, or a more welcome expansion of a movie star’s previously constricted persona, I haven’t seen it. And yet the almost mathematical control and precision of Firth’s lacrimal glands points to what proves to be most problematic about A Single Man, particularly when considering it alongside the poignant but harder edged 1964 Christopher Isherwood novel on which it is based. In Ford’s interpretation, the protagonist is a bookish, hermetic neat freak whose experience of loss has driven him even deeper into his shell. While the book grants him a few flickers of catharsis, Ford keeps George hemmed in, and then proceeds to use the character’s micromanagement of himself as a guideline for composing every shot. There is hardly an image that goes by that doesn’t feel strained and sweated over—from the opening underwater ballet of naked male bodies to the languorous tracking shots through George’s family-friendly neighborhood—and we are forced to search for a pulse in this airbrushed vision of grief and loneliness. Certainly there can be something exhilarating about seeing a filmmaker obsessively tending to each onscreen detail and its corresponding emotion, but this requires a master like Wong Kar-wai, whose meticulous approach seems both effortless and irrepressibly passionate. Ford tries to access the swooning, regretful romanticism that’s become Wong’s specialty, most obviously through his collaboration with 2046 composer Shigeru Umebayashi. But neither Ford’s studiousness nor his overall competence can disguise his inability to distinguish between an emotion that is genuinely felt and one foisted upon us through showy surface effects. [The rest of the post can be read at Reverse Shot.]

Before Tomorrow

2009-12-02T06:56:00.000-08:00

What strikes you immediately is the limited palette taking over the screen: white blanketing an endless terrain, the beiges and browns of fur clothing, then—like a jolt to the eyes—the brilliant azure of sky and water. When folk duo Kate and Anna McGarrigle start singing “We are carbon, we are ether” over the opening titles, their anachronistic New Age sentiments reflect what our foreign eyes might assume about life here in the Arctic Circle: that it is pure and elemental in ways that free it from the weight of history. Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu’s Canadian-produced Inuktitut fiction feature Before Tomorrow may be set in 1840, but the visual extremes of its location loosen our grip on the specifics of time and place. Further marked by the present through its digital cinematography and modern-day source material (the 1975 Danish novel Før Morgendagen), this is one period film whose very existence is based on an uneasy relationship to its own temporality. [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]

Red Cliff

2009-11-18T07:37:00.000-08:00

"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

2009-10-03T08:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-01T17:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-26T10:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-25T21:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-18T08:02:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-16T22:32:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-25T14:44:00.001-07:00

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

2009-07-31T15:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-26T14:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-22T17:42:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-11T21:36:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-27T06:56:00.001-07:00

"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

2009-05-06T08:43:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-04-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

"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.]

Fighting

2009-04-21T20:34:00.001-07:00

"With its swooping overhead shots of New York, set to a predictable but reliably funky soundtrack, Dito Montiel’s Fighting promises to deliver another tourist’s fantasy about the grit and passion of life in the big city. Ten minutes in, though, one wonders if even Jerome Robbins could have injected enough sass and swagger to redeem this punily imagined paean to the streets, or at least wake Channing Tatum up from his sleepwalking star turn. Playing a down-and-out Alabama transplant who achieves the American dream by kicking multi-ethnic ass in the city’s violent underbelly, the former Abercrombie model modulates between a total of two expressions: a blank, indifferent stare, and a gratingly self-satisfied grin. Of course it is for those who have already confused Tatum’s hulking physicality for genuine sex appeal, and his bumbling inarticulateness for boyish charm, that this genre exercise has been designed..." [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]

An interview with Jia Zhangke

2009-03-07T16:06:00.000-08:00

As you can see from this blog, Jia is one of my favorite living directors. This conversation happened on September 27, 2008, at the Park Lane Hotel in Manhattan, a couple hours before the premiere of his film 24 City at the Ziegfeld Theater in the New York Film Festival.

"Anyone following the early films of Jia Zhangke would have pegged the mainland Chinese wunderkind as a realist, fixated on the gritty textures and languid rhythms of provincial life. Who would have guessed that, in The World (04), Jia would start toying with cartoon interludes and rainbow-colored dance sequences? Or that a UFO would lift off from the rubble of the Three Gorges in Still Life (06)?

Like the China of today’s headlines, Jia’s films bundle together epic ambitions and uncomfortable dissonances, so it only makes sense that they would broaden their scope to visualize both the minutiae of day-to-day experience and the fantasies that underpin the nation’s breakneck progress. These startling leaps of imagination have coincided with other developments over the past five years that complicate our understanding of Jia’s art. In addition to winning government approval for his projects and a Golden Lion in Venice (forStill Life), he has departed from the setting of his home province of Shanxi and repositioned himself as a wide-ranging national auteur.

In his latest films—the documentary-fiction hybrid 24 City and the short Cry Me a River—Jia has caught a serious case of nostalgia. Channeling the mood that emerged from the Maoist era and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre through a series of aesthetic and pop-culture references, this new work finds him at his most cinephilic and meta-cinematic. Not only do the films impart what it is like to live in the aftermath of these two generation-defining moments, but in their playful allusiveness they offer a glimpse of what Chinese cinema has meant to native audiences, past and present." [The interview can be read at Film Comment.]

Everlasting Moments

2009-03-04T19:53:00.000-08:00

"Set in fin-de-siècle Sweden, Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments locates itself between the traditional values of the previous century and the imminent arrival of the modern age — both of which are embodied in the life of one tough working-class heroine. Facing a bleak future with an alcoholic husband and a growing brood of children, this steadfastly faithful matriarch stumbles into the role of an artist when she begins using a camera she won in a lottery. As she discovers within her the heart of an entrepreneur and community documentarian, she also manages to lose her heart to another local photographer who recognizes her talent.

For a film that celebrates the pleasures of picture-taking, it’s appropriate that every frame appears to have been composed as a tribute to the art of cinematography. Suffused with subtle beauty and tiny astonishments — a moth dancing on a windowpane, faces floating in a darkroom bath — each image looks as though it could fade at any moment into the sepia tones of an old photograph. Even when the action feels closed off inside a series of drab interiors, the rooms are always artfully lit, often with the irrepressible sunlight pushing through a drawn curtain..." [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]

Paradise

2009-02-20T16:59:00.000-08:00

"Imagine each of us arrives in this life equipped with a kino-eye, and that we’re given the task of producing a mix-tape of our favorite sights and impressions. Michael Almereyda has turned in his first draft of the assignment, Paradise, and it’s a film intoxicated by the exponential possibilities of its form. Bookended by images of moving walkways—the obvious symbol of time propelling us relentlessly forward—it isn’t so much obsessed with detailing the way we live now as with the intricacies of nowness itself. Scene after scene, the filmmaker plunges us in medias res, and we wait for a surprise, a punchline: a boy accidentally falling into a swimming pool; a Sonic Youth concert stopped short by technical difficulty; drops of rainwater fanning out on an airplane windshield. The question, though, becomes: how much curiosity can we muster for people we don’t know, and for everyday events we may feel we know all too well? Repeated viewings of Paradise reveal a transfixing and richly patterned patchwork, but on the first try it feels like alien territory, and it can be difficult to find one’s way in.

It’s helpful to consider Paradise first as a slightly more challenging offshoot of 2005’s William Eggleston in the Real World, a documentary that found Almereyda shedding the tongue-in-cheek cleverness of his first decade of filmmaking (which culminated in his exhilarating, schizophrenic update of Hamlet in 2000), and beginning to adopt the great photographer’s mission to make art out of every ordinary thing. This tension between aesthetic ambition and surface modesty is registered within the first few moments of Paradise, when the opening credits couple the film’s Dantesque title with a humbler admission: “Work in progress.” But the disclaimer isn’t meant to imply that the film hasn’t already been lovingly crafted; instead, it undermines the notion of a totalizing work of art in which every choice bears the mark of perfect inevitability. In the post-Eggleston world, where even the most quotidian sights cry out for artistic representation, the pretense of finality has been rendered quaint.

If Paradise is intended as its maker’s masterpiece (as Almereyda has already intimated in interviews), then it brings to mind the very categorizations it initially seems all too eager to elude, ultimately locating its canonical aspirations both within and beyond traditions of ephemera. As a self-serious artwork, this project—like the earliest instances of diary filmmaking in the 1960s—is enabled by the heightened attention our modern era pays to artists’ and authors’ notebooks, those leftover scribbles and doodles that often reveal a less-rehearsed master, processing the world with his guard down. In this case, it seems appropriate that these quick-and-dirty sketches should be positioned as the centerpiece of a career that has always straddled the boundaries between genres, and between pop and art sensibilities. On its lower-brow flipside, the film also suggests a kinship between home movies and more recent phenomena like reality shows and YouTube videos, resulting in a mash-up of largely domestic forms which Almereyda endows with the mobility of a travelogue...[The rest of the post can be found at Reverse Shot.]

Two Lovers

2009-02-14T07:35:00.000-08:00

“This isn’t some high school crush!” yells our sniveling hero (Joaquin Phoenix) at the woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) spurning his advances. My immediate response to this outburst was one of eye-rolling incredulity, but something about this scene also impressed upon me what makes each of James Gray’s four films irritating as well as unexpectedly heartbreaking. For all its super-sized emotions and Greek-tragic aspirations, his is a body of work rendered with straight-faced, almost dogmatic sincerity, one that envisions itself as a corrective to the hipper-than-thou irony pervading much of recent American cinema. While watching a Gray movie, our powers of empathy are meant to be in full gear, and our cynicism momentarily suspended—a melodramatic imperative that has encountered its fair share of resistance from critics and audiences.

For those who give in to Gray’s first head-on romance, Two Lovers, watching Phoenix fall helplessly and unaccountably for Paltrow might feel like revisiting one’s own adolescent obsessions, without the reassurance that such toxic extremes of feeling can be sealed off in a hormonal teenage past. There are times when Phoenix’s protagonist, Leonard Kraditor, seems like an unintentionally comic caricature of high-school histrionics: chained to a cell phone that vibrates endlessly with calls, his voice quivers whenever his dream girl’s on the other end. What makes this film so uncomfortable is that, for Gray, the hierarchies of romantic attachment—distinctions between mature and naïve, true and false, short-term and forever-after—are irrelevant. Emotions fly out at us unmediated by moral or intellectual assessment. We’re left to wonder: how desirable is this approach to human behavior, this disregard for value judgments? And how should we reconcile the sense of this film as a valentine to the highs of headlong love with its dramatization of Antonioni’s pronouncement that “Eros is sick”?.... [The rest of the post can be found at Reverse Shot.]

Days of Being Wild

2009-02-03T22:43:00.000-08:00

"For some, 2007’s My Blueberry Nights confirmed a lurking suspicion that Wong Kar-wai—one of the rare celebrity directors in contemporary art cinema—was always an emperor with no clothes. Landing on our shores serving clichés of Americana instead of eye-popping images of urban Asia, the film at its worst came off as self-parody, as if it were exposing a shallowness in his work that had previously been masked by subtitles. If Wong’s career can be divided before and after 2000’s In the Mood for Love on the basis of that film’s aesthetic ambitions and the heightened international recognition it earned him, then the first real dud of his career seemed to bring this exciting new chapter to a screeching halt. And if last year’s retooled Ashes of Time comforted us with evidence of his past, precocious mastery, the recycled material also made it appear that his well of ideas had finally run dry.

So it looks like the WKW brand-name in erotic longing might be losing its edge. But even if an artist’s reputation is subject to such lapses, sometimes it is an audience’s job to refresh its memory and return to the source. 1990’s Days of Being Wild, the sophomore effort that established wandering souls and romantic misconnection as Wong’s enduring fetish subjects, still reverberates with some of the most haunting passages in any Hong Kong movie—and of course it is this colonial city, as much as the ache of love itself, that provides the cause for swooning..." [The rest of the post can be found at The House Next Door.]

Year-end thoughts at Reverse Shot

2009-01-21T14:21:00.000-08:00

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: "Shot in colors that evoke liminal states in time—mainly the browns and golds of autumn, amber, dim lamplight, and hourglass sand—The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is one of the strangest and saddest contemporary films to be underestimated by critics as studio schmaltz. At first glance, this knee-jerk dismissal is no surprise. Adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s idea of a man born old and growing younger, the film looks ready to pull out all the stops and pigeonhole itself as a Hollywood folly. The technological gimmicks and century-spanning scope seem evidence of cinematic gluttony, as if David Fincher were making claims to deliver us a whole life, the whole world, and then some, unimpeded by his medium’s limitations or conventions. The surprise of Button, then, is how it weaves itself through a series of omissions. Seeing that this is a film about being trapped in a reverse trajectory, in a body incapable of reflecting either the shallowness or depth of one’s knowledge and experience, it’s appropriate that we never find our bearings in the flow of history, or even inhabit any single scene without anticipating its transience. Time may be the fire in which we burn, but, like Benjamin, we are often floating on top of it, unable to merge with the passing instant. To simulate this sense of existing outside of one’s own time while also being victim to its laws, Fincher shoots the narrative full of holes and absences that complicate our grasp of the moment. On the one hand, this frustrates our expectations of an epic’s obligatory social awareness, as when the film glides between eras without directly acknowledging important cultural shifts, historical milestones, or racial politics. But, more importantly, this evasive style harnesses the poetic suggestiveness of all that is left unsaid and undepicted, best exemplified when Fincher veils what might have been the year’s most devastating love scene behind an exquisitely timed dissolve to black..." [Read the rest at Reverse Shot.]

Zhang Yimou's Beijing Olympics opening ceremony: "Forget Iron Man: Zhang Yimou’s romanticized conceptualization of the Chinese people as one mean singing, dancing, contorting, fighting, and peacemaking machine was the year’s supreme example of onscreen superheroism. An extension not only of the director’s recent CGI-driven wuxia pian but also of his majestic theatrical extravaganzas (including one performed on the Li River that I had the good fortune to see in 2005), the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony was a production whose glamour and lavishness I had initially planned on resisting. Something about the show’s attention-hungry expensiveness, cute humanitarian didacticism, and insistent use of the Chinese character for “peace” seemed crass, particularly amid reports of the government’s continued persecution of human rights activists and crackdowns on subversive elements. Furthermore, if Hero and House of Flying Daggers appeared to have been made with the Western audience foremost in mind, then this spectacle would certainly be an even more naked instance of self-exoticization and grand-scale flossin’ for foreign eyes. No more than 20 minutes in, though, I had to figure out why I was tearing up. Then I wondered: what influence should cultural identification hold over our spectatorship in this modern, globalized, fashionably disillusioned world?...." [Read the rest at Reverse Shot.]

Getting Home and other films of Zhang Yang

2009-01-14T21:33:00.000-08:00

"Is it possible for a mainland Chinese filmmaker to possess an unabashedly popular sensibility while also examining the many social and political pressure points that have, for so long, been off-limits in the nation’s commercial entertainment? Where other contemporary directors like Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai, and Lou Ye have positioned their careers in the context of international art cinema, Zhang Yang—who lies within the same late-thirties, early-forties age group as these acclaimed auteurs—has never fit in with the trendy grit and edginess of what a 2001 Lincoln Center program dubbed the “Urban Generation.” Nor has he taken after his most famous predecessors, exhibiting neither the obsession with historical pageantry of Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Feng Xiaogang, nor the subdued craftsmanship of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s recent work. From the beginning, Zhang Yang seemed comfortable in his own niche: unlike his peers, he has become a pioneer in obliquely addressing painful national themes in a manner palatable to the widest possible Chinese audience and, most significantly, to the censorship-happy government..." [The rest of the post can be found at The House Next Door.]

Cadillac Records

2009-01-06T09:11:00.000-08:00

"What will the next Great African American Movie look like? What will it be about, and who will make it? As if in answer to these questions, the past few years have seen the emergence of a new black prestige picture, a breed of studio-driven, Oscar-ready fare that runs parallel to a whole subgenre of independents aimed squarely at black viewers. Presenting a counterpoint to the T.D. Jakes adaptations and Tyler Perry comedies, films like Ray,Dreamgirls, The Pursuit of Happyness, The Great Debaters, and Talk to Mefocus on historical or socially conscious subject matter, with the ultimate aim of demonstrating the black community’s contribution to mainstream American culture. But like the rest of each year’s Oscar hopefuls, it’s been (at best) a mixed bag, both commercially and artistically, and as usual the triumphs have belonged exclusively to actors rather than filmmakers..." [The rest of the post can be found at The House Next Door.]

Favorite movies of 2008

2009-01-01T22:18:00.001-08:00

1. Still Life (Jia Zhangke) - a film as great and monumental as his masterpiece Platform, but also one that goes in a very different direction aesthetically. As much as it distresses me that he's treated (at least in serious American film culture, it seems) as the only mainland Chinese director worthy of sustained consideration right now, and as much as I'm wary of the festival-film pedigree that surrounds him, and as much as I realize how easy it is to overrate a filmmaker whose subject has attracted such international attention.... I also know there is no reason to apologize for what Jia has been doing over the past decade. He is indeed, at his relatively young age, one of our major directors. Every new film is an event, every single one has been beautiful and fresh but also deeply troubling, and he has yet to make a true disappointment. Hate to seem like a partisan for any director (especially after posing for so long - at least in my own head - as a Pauline-like anti-auteurist), but his work continues to move and astound me. See my article here.

2. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh) - I love Mike Leigh's movies with all my soul, but my absolute favorites seem to be the happier ones -Topsy-Turvy, of course, and now this. Poppy was the year's great superhero, teaching us that happiness takes hard work, discipline, and active, day-to-day problem solving. How on Earth does Leigh pull it off so beautifully? -the film isn't cynical for a moment, but it also has its own layers of ambiguity, uncertainty, darkness. A big improvement over the bad, overrated Vera Drake, and the best kind of crowd-pleaser. Like only a couple other films from recent times, I think about this one on a very regular basis.

3. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien) - My first reaction was that Hou had done this kind of thing better in 2003's Café Lumière, which on some days is my favorite of his. I still hold that opinion, but after trying it one more time, I agree with J Hoberman that it's a film "of genius." A film so charged with turbulent emotion and everyday stress and tension (through Juliette Binoche's possibly career-best performance), but rendered light as air. Like ballet, like music. Props to Mark Lee Ping-bin, my vote for favorite contemporary cinematographer. His work keeps getting more sensual, more emotionally resonant, more rhapsodic, more alive. The effects of Hou's filmmaking have moved beyond my ability to encapsulate them in words, though this one certainly deserves a more long-form effort from me.

4. Ashes of Time Redux (Wong Kar-wai) - saw this at the Ziegfeld when it screened at the New York Film Festival, and had the wind knocked out of me. If nothing else, this blast from the past was the spectacle of the year (more so than Zhang Yimou's amazing, if problematic, Beijing Olympics opening ceremony - but that's another story). With this new sublime, digitally enhanced, re-edited version, the film can take its place with In the Mood for Love and 2046 as one of the most visually orgasmic experiences in the Wong canon. It's startling to discover how similar Ashes Redux is - not just thematically but aesthetically - to those two films. And nowhere, not even in the star-studded Days of Being Wild, do you get such an amazing assemblage of Hong Kong superstars (the addition of Anita Mui would have rounded out the pack, for me), shot so worshipfully by Christopher Doyle, with the ache of erotic longing. The cast is Chinese sex appeal of the highest order.

5. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher) - a beautiful follow-up to last year's superb Zodiac, shot mostly in autumnal and nighttime colors, evoking the beauty and melancholy of the liminal, the transient. Time runs in all directions in this film, and even though its passage is one of the story's central anxieties, the way it's represented is looser, much more spacious and poetic, than in that other Eric Roth screenplay, Forrest Gump. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett - two actors who have always seemed alternately impressive and limited to me - add to the film's enigmatic power, not so much because of their performances (which, like the rest of their work, is not all that dynamic) but because of what Fincher does with them as physical presences on screen. What we see as their "blankness" is pitch-perfect here, for what other mainstream American film in recent memory has so poignantly highlighted the gulf between a person's appearance and his or her interior life, between the boundless human capacity to feel and our limited ability to express what we feel? There's something very strange about this film's narrative approach, as if it were told from an alien onlooker's perspective, somewhat detached from the commonplaces of American social and political life. For all its expansiveness, it leaves the audience to grapple with the holes in its storytelling, which rarely dramatizes Benjamin's anguish over his plight, or engages with the social issues and historical moments it alludes to (the World Wars, race, Hurricane Katrina). The worst consequence is that the wonderful Taraji P. Henson, who wowed me a while back in John Singleton's Baby Boy and here leads a small group of black supporting cast members, is utterly wasted in a thankless role. Nevertheless, somehow, most of the story's frustrating omissions only make the film more haunting, more mournful, as if - like the characters - it were struggling and failing to locate itself in time. With its elegiac mood, thematic ambition, technical brilliance, eerie evocation of childlike wonder and dread, and (yes) its many obvious missteps, it brings to mind another Hollywood masterpiece from earlier in the decade, Spielberg's A.I. It's a film I can't stop thinking about.

6. The Witnesses (André Téchiné) - can't think of a recent gay American film as tender, moving, compassionate, unpretentious as this one. On the face of it, seems pretty conventional, but it's at least as vital as Wild Reeds, a film that rocked me to my young gay core back in high school.

7. Mukhsin (Yasmin Ahmad) - Nothing else I've seen in the touted Malaysian New Wave equals this modestly lovely film, which screened for less than a week at MoMA earlier this year. In June, I wrote: "In a film whose quirkiness is so matter-of-fact, whose tone is so unassuming, and whose achievement seems at first more charming than brilliant, we somehow find a gift all too rare in movies: a reminder of how intensely private and isolated, how fueled by imagination, first love can be." And... "at a time when questions about Barack Obama’s biography have brought Southeast Asian Islam under the microscope, Mukhsin might be just what American audiences need: a positive, deeply personal view of a religion whose followers are far more diverse in ideology and ethnicity than our government would have us presume." See my article here.

8. Moving Midway (Godfrey Cheshire) & The Order of Myths (Margaret Brown) - Two powerful documentaries that find new Southern filmmakers confronting the legacy of racism with rare honesty, insight, warmth, and humor. Made with keen journalistic perceptiveness and curiosity, both approach their subject by exploring an institution: in the former, the mythology of the Southern plantation, and in the latter, the celebration of Mardi Gras. As chronicles of Southern life today, they are more than worthy heirs to the films of Ross McElwee - and, I think, move one step ahead of him. They capture a wealth of unforgettable characters, and share McElwee's conversational, personable approach to dramatic content, but - without ever getting heavy-handed or overly feel-good - they also go deeper into the subject of racial grievance and reconciliation in the South than any documentary I can think of. That's a real achievement that fits perfectly with our hopeful moment in time.

9. Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing) - Last month I wrote: "The unshakable power of Wang’s film lies in the tension between its fraught subject and its calm setting, in its desire to function as both a cry of pain and a sigh of relief." See the article here. His West of the Tracks is also very much worth a look.

10. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Christian Mungiu) - not a flat-out masterpiece like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu - it's a virtuosic exercise in dread that could have used more of that human touch - but it still had me engrossed, and left me with my jaw hanging. Can't wait to see what else Romania has in store for us.

Not far behind are Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt), Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant), Cadillac Records (Darnell Martin), two more French films - The Class (Laurent Cantet) and A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin) - and two blockbusters - Hancock (Peter Berg) and Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke). And Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog) - my favorite Herzog doc of the '00s after The White Diamond, and that heart-stoppingly gorgeous new restoration of Lola Montes.

Least favorite of the year: Afterschool (Antonio Campos), Made of Honor (Paul Weiland), My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin), Ballast (Lance Hammer), Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes), Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman), Australia (Baz Luhrmann), Stop-Loss (Kimberly Pierce)

Fengming: A Chinese Memoir

2008-12-03T09:56:00.001-08:00

"Night is falling as an elderly Chinese woman sits down in her armchair, faces the camera, and begins recounting her life story. In the Fifties, He Fengming was a journalist who had turned down a promising academic career to become a revolutionary. At the height of Mao’s Hundred Flowers Campaign, during which intellectuals were advised to contribute their opinions and let “a hundred schools of thought contend,” her husband wrote an essay criticizing the corruption of bureaucracy, which led to the couple being branded as rightists. A long period of darkness ensued, separating the family, and transporting the woman from one state of persecution to another in China’s labor camp system..." [The rest of the post can be found at Reverse Shot.]

RR

2008-10-06T21:40:00.000-07:00

"Moments of transcendence are rare in cinema, but when they do come along, you’re left trailing after the filmmaker hoping he can offer more of the same. My first and only prior encounter with the work of James Benning was 2004’s 13 Lakes, and while its screening at Anthology Film Archives last year stands as one of the most overwhelming aesthetic experiences I’ve had in recent memory, I wondered what more could surprise me about a style that seemed chained down by its own rigidity. If Benning’s latest, RR, reveals the unexpected range of variations that so-called 'structural' cinema can accommodate, it also, at least initially, amounted to a mild disappointment. Where much of the pleasure of watching 13 Lakes stemmed from the film’s lean, mathematical organization—its commitment to ten-minute shot lengths, a pre-announced number of shots, and uniform half-sky/half-water compositions—RR is avid in its portraiture of trains passing through American landscapes, and racks up a total of 43 chapters in its nearly two-hour length. The result at first feels excessive, mainly because the film never aims to duplicate its predecessor’s distilled form..." [The rest of the post can be found at Reverse Shot.]

24 City

2008-09-28T11:39:00.000-07:00

"To follow Jia Zhangke’s career closely is to witness a great, restless artist wriggle out of a number of our film culture’s pigeonholes. Despite his reputation as a master in the school of austerity—that art-house mode which has encouraged artistic complacency and political indifference in several of his peers—Jia’s aesthetics remain under construction and open to the full range of cinematic possibilities. At a time when the other leading figures of Chinese-language cinema, including Wong Kar-wai and Tsai Ming-liang, seem fully committed to (or, in a few cases, trapped by) the styles and themes that made them famous, with each new film Jia is adding new tools to his art in order to renegotiate his relationship to realism, and to make the quest for personal and national truth ever-renewing rather than predictable and monolithic. His latest, 24 City, is a blend of documentary and fiction that omits some of the main tropes we associate with those genres, aspiring to neither vérité nor conventional plotting. Performed by both nonprofessionals and established actors, the film gathers stories across three generations of workers connected to a state-owned factory in Chengdu, now being converted into a luxury apartment complex. Their revelations range from devastating memories of long-lost family members to bittersweet recollections of puppy love, and the common struggle of all the interviewees seems to be (as one woman puts it) to 'smile through one’s tears,' at least on camera—an attitude that lends the film its schizophrenic sense of boundless hope and suppressed tragedy. But what begins as a straightforward oral-history project results in a rocky marriage between seemingly irreconcilable impulses, and a disorienting provocation on the sacredness of truth in the documentary form..." [The rest of the post can be found at Reverse Shot.]

Hou Hsiao-hsien

2008-09-23T07:14:00.000-07:00

Two articles at Reverse Shot on early Hou Hsiao-hsien:

Cute Girl; Cheerful Wind; The Green, Green Grass of Home: "In his last Chinese-language film, 2005’s Three Times, Hou Hsiao-hsien reintroduced himself to audiences as one of cinema’s most exquisite love poets. The directness of that film’s lush beauty and sensuality highlighted a range of emotions that are central but often muted in his work. Looking back on an oeuvre whose towering subject has been the entanglements of Taiwanese nationality and Chinese identity—a preoccupation so grave and culturally specific it almost bullies foreign audiences into uncomprehending admiration—even ardent Hou fans are apt to forget how his masterpieces hinge on delicate portraits of romance, including the young sweethearts in Dust in the Wind, the humorous flirtations in The Puppetmaster, and the doomed affairs of courtesans in Flowers of Shanghai. How strange, then, to realize that Hou began his career with three blatantly commercial romantic comedies, vehicles for the Hong Kong pop star Kenny Bee (a.k.a. Zhong Zhentao) churned out in a brisk two years. Where love, like sociopolitical identity, proves compelling but indefinable in his mature work, there is nothing mysterious about it at all in his first features Cute Girl (1980), Cheerful Wind (1981), and The Green, Green Grass of Home (1983)—whose juvenile English titles are reflective of how minor they are. Stripped of such undesirable byproducts as lust, jealousy, and personal compromise, love flows easily enough between Bee and his female costars, so that director and audience alike can feel free to take it for granted. In the first two films, when the couples finally overcome their challenges, finding their path toward uncontroversial marriages, Hou extends them his non-ironic “Congratulations!” in cheeky end titles, as if to insist he was really invested all along in their predictable happiness..."

The Sandwich Man: "Hou Hsiao-hsien’s eponymous episode in the omnibus film The Sandwich Man (more literally translated from the Chinese as His Son’s Big Doll) begins with an image that can be interpreted as absurd, even slightly surreal, before it reveals itself as tragic. Sticking out like a cartoon character in a live-action film, protagonist Jinshu lumbers through the humid streets of small-town Taiwan, buried in clown make-up and a multi-colored wig. An opening title establishes him and his story as representative of a particular historical moment: the year is 1962, and the setting is identified by the politically contentious name “Min Guo,” or “Republic of China.” At first it is difficult to know how we should respond to this grotesquerie—with laughter or revulsion—until we see the man’s face in close-up, a ridiculous red smile painted over his permanently wincing expression. By the time the clown has passed by a food rations line and made his way home to his family, we have already guessed the film, like many others about poverty, will center on the physical and emotional degradation that often accompany male breadwinning...."

Classe Tous Risques

2008-06-22T06:23:00.000-07:00

"Until recently, Claude Sautet’s Classe Tous Risques was a long forgotten noir relic. A commercial flop in its own country, it was only released briefly in the U.S. in a dubbed version called The Big Risk before it fell completely out of sight. But thanks to a Rialto Pictures re-release in 2005, and the attraction of lead performances from stars most consider among the immortals, it has the air of a major new discovery. Following hopeless fugitive Lino Ventura as he sneaks his way from Milan to Paris with wife and children in tow, Sautet’s first major film adopts some of the mood and energy from American crime movies but—like a handful of French films before and after it—tries to endow the genre with a conscience. Responsibility to friends and family humanizes even the most heartless, and Classe Tous Risques takes as its subject the masculine codes of honor that are upheld and broken by those who dare to live outside the law"... [The rest of the post can be found at The House Next Door.]

Mukhsin

2008-06-12T22:16:00.000-07:00

"Two friends on the cusp of adolescence consummate their relationship with a kiss. And suddenly the boy, who has been waiting the entire film for his meek overtures to be noticed and for his love to be reciprocated, slowly floats up, stopping in midair, suspended above the road as if by a string. Donning the traditional Muslim songkok, he becomes in our eyes, for the first time, a spiritual figure, the look on his face one of peace rather than joy or pleasure. In this remarkable moment toward the end of Yasmin Ahmad’s Mukhsin, what is later revealed to be a mere dream is represented with a clarity that normalizes the film’s one gesture toward the magical and the surreal. It is only here that we begin to appreciate how precisely Ahmad has captured the wooziness of first love, as we recognize the scene not as an attempt to amuse the audience but as the necessary embodiment of feelings that can find their articulation only through fantasy. As if under the influence of J.M. Barrie or Frances Hodgson Burnett, Ahmad sympathizes with the depths of longing that lie beneath young people’s make-believe, and she tells her tale as if the only way real love can be accurately envisioned is with the wonderment and helplessness of the young. Unlike much of the rest of this chatty, open-hearted film, the mood of this scene surprises us by how hushed and prayerful it allows itself to be, and how well-earned it feels"... [The rest of the post can be found at The House Next Door.]

The Ice Storm

2008-03-18T16:26:00.000-07:00

"As an NYU-educated Taiwanese filmmaker, Ang Lee seemed to make it clear with his 1992 debut that his concerns were both Eastern and Western. Only a few years on the heels of Amy Tan’s bestselling The Joy Luck Club, Pushing Hands and its commercially successful follow-up, The Wedding Banquet -- two films which were mainstream in their temperament, but bold in their bilingualism -- inserted themselves into an environment increasingly hospitable to Asian-American immigrant narratives. These first films were among the very few of their time that were interested in seriously examining the ways in which Chinese and Westerners interact in today’s world, and it is difficult to know what Lee could have contributed to the stunted development of Asian-American cinema had he mined this subject further. Instead of maintaining the intimate, personal tone of what would later be dubbed as his “Father Knows Best” trilogy, Lee went on to balance his first three modestly made Chinese-language films with three prestigious English-language ones, surprising viewers with how seamlessly he assimilated into a diverse set of quintessentially Western milieus. Some regarded his choice of material as if it were an astonishing stunt, because while Europeans from Fritz Lang all the way down to Milos Forman had experienced great success in Hollywood, no Asian director in history had ever even attempted to embrace Americanization on quite this level. Though Hong Kong’s Peter Chan (The Love Letter) and mainlander Chen Kaige (Killing Me Softly) have subsequently tried to pull off their own breakthroughs, Lee remains the only contemporary Chinese filmmaker to have integrated completely into the American movie industry"... [The rest of the post can be found at The House Next Door.]

The Dragon Painter

2008-03-18T16:23:00.000-07:00

"To watch The Dragon Painter today is to realize how little the role of Asian characters, viewpoints, and aesthetics has advanced over the history of mainstream American cinema. Here is a long-lost silent film, one of the countless casualties of the medium’s early era, coming back from the dead to return to us the legacy of forgotten Asian-American icon Sessue Hayakawa -- only to remind us that, in the intervening years, almost no Asian Americans have come close to rivaling his eminence as a traditionally dashing male lead. In the wake of Hayakawa and the even greater Anna May Wong, it seems that the dream of Asian agency in white Hollywood petered out, so that now all we are left with are tired caricatures (from Rush Hour to Better Luck Tomorrow) that keep a still-developing hybrid culture at a standstill. How is it that the silent era -- the era of yellow face -- gave birth to two of the most legendary, free-spirited Asian American performers, while modern cinema and contemporary pop culture have produced none? Maybe the answer lies in the fact that silent cinema was rooted as much in the mystique and the eye-opening possibilities of the new medium as it was in the racist hierarchies of the time. Perhaps the lack of dialogue meant that immigrant actors with heavily accented English could still carry the starring roles in films. Perhaps the thrill of a young art form led people to seek out new images, and allowed the Asian face to become, for a time, part of the vocabulary of spectacle"... [The rest of the post can be found at The House Next Door.]

The Last Emperor

2008-02-27T11:42:00.001-08:00

"Before the average person could afford to travel by air, movies were the most viable form of transportation. Audiences were stunned by how this new medium could convince the eye it was having an intimate encounter with a corner of the world previously inaccessible. It is dismaying, then, to realize that a certain stock of images have always dominated cinema history, and that the art form so rarely lives up to its capacity for introducing new sights and sounds to our worldview. In the 1980s, when the Chinese government granted Bernardo Bertolucci unprecedented access to the Forbidden City, an entire nation that had been ignored in popular world cinema suddenly became a new frontier for Western viewers. The promise of the project must have seemed overwhelming: at a time when good old camp like The Good Earth and Shanghai Express were still Hollywood’s paradigmatic depictions of the country, here was the most sensual of European masters taking on the role of a modern-day Marco Polo. He would come back to share with us treasures that had never appeared before on a movie screen. When the resulting achievement, The Last Emperor, became an international hit and a whirlwind success at the Academy Awards, it was a breakthrough for Chinese images in Western cinema. But behind the silk veils and looming structures of Bertolucci’s biggest blockbuster remains one of the strangest mainstream epics imaginable, a film that wears its compromises of style and perspective on its sleeve"... [The rest of the post can be found at The House Next Door.]

Jia Zhangke

2008-01-30T05:57:00.000-08:00

"Last year marked the tenth anniversary of Xiao Wu, a low-budget Chinese film that was never distributed in the United States. In 1997, few could have anticipated this work would usher in a new generation of Chinese filmmakers, or have guessed that director Jia Zhangke would become one of the world’s leading auteurs while still in his early thirties. Since then, he has made four feature films, most of which are masterpieces and none of which are failures. His many astonishing gifts notwithstanding, it has become easier with time to see why he has caught on with Western critics and enjoyed the kind of reputation no young American director of his generation has achieved. At a time when Western curiosity about China continues to grow, he offers different images of the country than those found in the work of Fifth Generation directors of the ’80s and ’90s. Jia’s films historicize the present moment, and they do so without the visual sumptuousness that helped Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou’s period dramas break Chinese cinema onto the international scene. Where Chen and Zhang satisfied their audiences’ desire to see China reflected through exotic pageantry (à la Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor) and neorealist grit, Jia’s work fits perfectly into two trends of the current moment (or the recent past): (a) the critical privileging of a more ascetic aesthetics, as embodied by Bresson, Ozu, Kiarostami, and the Taiwanese New Wave, and (b) the Tarantino-fetish for pop culture and self-reference"... [Continued at The House Next Door]

La Pointe Courte

2008-01-24T07:35:00.000-08:00

The fourth in my series of essays on the new Criterion box-set, 4 by Agnès Varda:

"In the first shot of Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte, the camera travels down a corridor in a small fishing village on the Mediterranean coast, brushing against the hanging laundry and peering into open windows. The first several scenes are spent getting acquainted with the town, the difficult work the inhabitants engage in everyday, and the little tragedies befalling them that they accept without melodrama. Soon a couple in urban dress drifts into the frame. We see them from the back at first and then from the front; they are silent at first but then, all of a sudden, extremely talkative about the problems that plague their young marriage. The man (Philippe Noiret), who grew up in la Pointe Courte, is satisfied with the relationship, but the woman (Silvia Monfort), a Parisian, craves something else that she cannot define. As sorrow piles on top of sorrow, the film maintains its surpassingly gentle touch, lightening the mood at times with whimsical music or an eccentric detail. Moving forward and pulling back, it travels between the worlds of the villagers and the spouses, and keeps them separate until a final sequence gathers everyone at the town’s ritual jousting match"... [Continued at The House Next Door]

Cléo from 5 to 7

2008-01-23T06:27:00.000-08:00

The third in my series of essays on the new Criterion box-set, 4 by Agnès Varda:

"Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, the film that put the “Grandmother of the French New Wave” on the international map, follows a pop singer (Corinne Marchand) through the streets of Paris as she awaits medical results that will report the severity of her cancer. Captured in approximate real time, her journey begins in a fortune teller’s office; within minutes, a foreboding tarot reading has her convinced she’s done for. But the film that follows is never chained to the heroine’s sense of impending doom. From start to finish, Cléo is a remarkably tonic portrait of urban anxiety, the sloth of the privileged, and the hazards of day-to-day, hour-to-hour living. Usually identified with the more serious and radical Left Bank division of the New Wave (which also included Alain Resnais and Chris Marker), Varda adopts the free-spirited attitude of Truffaut and Godard’s earliest popular successes, resulting in a film that is both a study in stylistic possibilities and a valentine to urban life"... [Continued at The House Next Door]

Le Bonheur

2008-01-22T08:16:00.000-08:00

The second in my series of essays on the new Criterion box-set, 4 by Agnès Varda:

"Shortly after making a then-controversial but now little-seen gem named Le Bonheur, Agnès Varda wrote that she had envisioned the film as “a beautiful summer fruit with a worm inside.” More than forty years later, one hears in this statement echoes of Buñuel’s anti-bourgeois perversity, Sirk’s subversion of lush surfaces and narrative clichés, as well as the basis for a whole tradition of American films (exemplified by David Lynch on one end and American Beauty on the other) that claim to expose the demons lurking behind the white picket fence. Then and now, there is a great pleasure in watching forces of chaos and insanity eat away at the glamour of cinema. When Le Bonheur (meaning “happiness”) opens to the carefree strains of Mozart and images of sunlight, sunflowers, and family members hand-in-hand, the contemporary viewer is immediately clued into the joke, having been taught by years of hyper-ironic filmmaking to respond to these symbols with scorn. We can already guess the film is about the tyranny of eternal happiness. What follows is, indeed, a story that demolishes the initial portrait of domestic bliss, replacing it with a version that is cruel and animalistic. But the predictability stops there. The power of Varda’s film is that it remains startling even in our savvy era, leaving us as uncertain and suspicious of its intentions as its first audiences must have been"... [Continued at The House Next Door]

The Passenger

2008-01-21T16:53:00.000-08:00

My review of Antonioni's The Passenger at emanuellevy.com

Vagabond

2008-01-21T12:25:00.000-08:00

The first in my series of essays on the new Criterion box-set, 4 by Agnès Varda:

"Despite the persistent belief that great art is driven and justified by an intellectual (rather than emotional or aesthetic) impulse, it is in fact difficult to make a film whose basis is conceptual without the results coming off as simplistic or overly designed. Such films present themselves with the challenge of filtering the world through an idea, a phrase, or even a single word, and ultimately fail if the starting-point diminishes our worldview rather than expanding or complicating it. There are, of course, some outstanding examples of films that wear their thematic concerns on their sleeves while also succeeding as art, one being Kieslowski’s Decalogue, which addressed the limits of its approach by embracing and revising the old form of the parable. Another example would be the major films of Agnès Varda, which employ a mode of storytelling that launches from ideas, or from the rickety language we use to encapsulate ideas, and risks the theoretical and the literary in order to achieve (at its best) a beautifully nuanced metacinema. With the Faulkner-inspired structure of La Pointe Courte, the real-time experiment of Cléo from 5 to 7, and the explorations of one-word concepts (“happiness” and “gleaning”) in Le Bonheur and The Gleaners and I, Varda encourages her audience to question the ways in which movies construct, interrupt, and sometimes collapse the narratives and meanings they put forth"... [Continued at The House Next Door]

Malaysia in the Movies

2007-11-14T07:31:00.000-08:00

"When I moved back to the United States after four years of living in

Malaysia

, one of my most urgent desires was to see images of the country I had just left projected onto an American movie screen. I remember wondering: if none of my classmates have ever seen Malaysia on film, then how will they ever believe me when I tell them that such a place exists? As Susan Sontag observed in her classic On Photography, the modern world has fallen into the habit of substituting photographic (and, by extension, cinematographic) images for vision, using them as talismans of the past, and entrusting them with the work of confirming the existence and authenticity of our surroundings. Somewhere in my pre-adolescent thoughts, I had put a great deal of faith in a medium that could bridge the two realities I felt, at the time, were irreconcilable..." The rest of the post can be found at The House Next Door.

Charles Burnett

2007-09-14T08:57:00.000-07:00

"Who would deny that the revival of Charles Burnett's career has been the major film event of the year? Though his 1977 debut feature, Killer of Sheep, had already managed to enter the canon without ever having enjoyed a theatrical release, Milestone Films’ pristine 35mm print still came as a revelation when it arrived this past spring. It wasn’t just that the film proved to be every bit the equal of the Italian neorealist classics to which it has often been compared, but that it also served as a potential wake-up call to its audience, even the most conscientious of whom may have forgotten how scarce depictions of the urban black community still are in American film..." The rest of the post can be found at The House Next Door.

James Benning's 13 Lakes

2007-07-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

"The most advertised aspect of James Benning's landscape film 13 Lakes is the fragmentation of its 135-minute running time into thirteen stationary shots, each ten minutes long, each separated by a black screen. So a few moments into the first segment, amid the nervous coughing and rustling of a New York audience, my MTV-bred attention span felt a twinge of panic and secretly wanted to negotiate for mercy. Instead of thirteen lakes, why not ten? Instead of ten minute shots, how about eight minute shots? Then came predictable suspicions about the sentimentality of yet another artist calling us to smell the roses, and the film’s ability to evade all criticism by consisting solely of unquestionably beautiful images..." The rest of the post can be found at The House Next Door.

Edward Yang (1947-2007)

2007-07-01T20:37:00.000-07:00

There's nothing useful or insightful I can say in the wake of his death, but I am compelled to make some sort of effort, however clumsy or embarrassing. Because it became obvious to me a couple years ago, and has remained crystal-clear ever since, that Edward Yang was one of the greatest artists of our time, and a major part of keeping my flame lit for the movies (when I find myself susceptible to the most ludicrous extremes of cynicism) has been realizing that films like Yi Yi are still being made. What a miraculous event that movie was, and still is, for me; I remember seeing it in 2000, at the peak moment of my movie love, and not knowing it would have a permanent effect on the way I viewed my place in the world, and the way I understood (through his long shots, his devastating style of mise en scène) my physical and emotional relationship to my landscape.

When I saw the overwhelmingly tragic A Brighter Summer Day (perhaps an even greater film) less than a year ago, it only confirmed for me that Yang's was a voice to live by, just like the uncompromising but strangely comforting voices I found at the end of James Joyce's "The Dead" and Woolf's To the Lighthouse: like many of the artists we come to love in our lives, Yang's work and the unique palette of emotions it introduces to us take on a talismanic quality. But while there are many films that accompany us through life because they are so memorable or ingenious, there are also those that do more than that, those that we routinely use to understand, define, and cope with our humanity. How many can you honestly name? In this and other respects, Yi Yi and Brighter Summer Day are once-in-a-lifetime films.

Though we hear all the time about movies that express and expand the human condition, the ones that succeed at the highest level are extremely rare, because even the greatest films often lack the wisdom about chance and choice, emotion and restraint, history and mortality, and art and life that can change us for the better. Yi Yi in particular belongs to a special class of films that (for me, at least) also includes Bicycle Thieves, Tokyo Story, the Apu Trilogy: films whose most valuable artistic achievement may be that they immerse us in aesthetic mastery but ultimately deliver us back into the world—and remind us that life is more important than art. This is not the idea you get from other paradigmatic ensemble dramas, such as Robert Altman's Nashville or Short Cuts, or Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (brilliant though they are). But for me that's what makes Yang's films essential.

This post certainly doesn't begin to suggest the scope of Yang's work, since most American viewers, including myself, have only had the privilege of seeing his most readily available films. I haven't even mentioned the caustic satires he made before Yi Yi, which I have never gotten the chance to see. What's obvious is that his career is one we have only begun to evaluate and appreciate. Is it premature for an American cinephile like me to shower such superlatives on a filmmaker who has only received distribution once in the United States? When will we get access to the rest of his oeuvre? Why has it taken so long? I pray we can soon do justice to a man who made at least two of the most ambitious but delicately rendered masterpieces of his era.

In both Yi Yi and Brighter Summer Day, we see artistic virtuosity being recognized as incidental to the largeness of life. We witness the private life being contextualized within the poltiical, cultural, and economic—a feat that is fashionable nowadays but is usually attempted with far less feeling for the precise mood, tone, and pulse of that relationship between personal and social transformation, as it is lived. As we return again and again to these films, we can feel ourselves (in our bodies, communities, histories) with a renewed sense of uncertainty, with an ache of nostalgia and shock of recognition, as if we are learning all over again, from scratch, what it is to be alive.

Please check out Movie City Indie, Godfrey Cheshire's piece at the Village Voice, Senses of Cinema, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and a discussion of licensing issues and the Criterion DVD of Yi Yi.

Notes on The Chelsea Girls

2007-06-12T19:07:00.001-07:00

I came to one of MoMA's recent screenings of Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls as a novice to both avant-garde film and the wild underground characters who populate this notorious 1966 classic. In other significant ways, though, I was well prepared for the alleged impenetrability of its three-hour, double-projected, unedited vision of drug-induced debauchery. I had heard the film euphemistically referred to as "challenging but rewarding" and more bluntly described as "agony." To introduce it that Friday, a Warhol expert informed the audience that a couple nights ago half the viewers walked out, as if he were daring us to stay put in our seats. But why at MoMA, of all places, would an audience be made to feel as if difficulty, quirkiness, and provocation were qualities unusual in a work of modern art? Why talk about this movie as if it doubled as both torture device and badge of honor?

Perhaps it's because typical cinephiles aren't used to watching Art Films that are, in almost every way imaginable, confrontationally uncompromising and merciless with their audience. Or maybe because Chelsea Girls, with its attachment to famous names and its spectacular conceptualization, has the misleading air of a blockbuster; it is, after all, still the American avant-garde's highest-grossing achievement, and its grand-scale novelty is reminiscent of absurd populist gimmickry aimed at expanding the movie experience, like Cinerama or Smell-O-Vision. Unlike the vast majority of avant-garde films that fly below the average viewer's radar and find their home at museums, Warhol's experiment—as with much of his oeuvre—is a Hollywood-influenced indulgence in idolatry; its portraiture of the junkies, rock stars, and underground eccentrics who pass through its twelve reels is marked by the commercial image-making and iconography Warhol obsessed about in his most famous artwork. Like Gone With the Wind, to which it is sometimes jokingly compared, the film is defined by a supreme arrogance, and by the relishing of its own monumentality—things that turn up as either fatal flaws or saving graces in mainstream follies.

But within five minutes I realized this was not a film to be apologized for. Once the left image shot up on the screen and clashed so dramatically with the right, I was head over heels, wanting to forgive Warhol for any kind of torture he would have me endure. The richness of this kind of juxtaposition seemed seductive and compelling enough to do without narrative or sense. And the torture (despite a constant bee-like buzz on the lopsided, purposely poor soundtrack) never came, even in the moments when Warhol's visuals reminded me of the flashy soullessness of a David Lean vista. Though the double projection at first seems ideologically hollow, it's hard to deny its visceral impact, especially for anyone who has received film history from home-viewing. Obviously, this is a film that must be seen on a big screen to be appreciated at all, and one of the few great films that cannot be viewed intact on a television.

If anything, I suspect the attraction of Chelsea Girls' cinematic qualities has only grown with time, as we move further into the age of movie-going through TVs, laptops, and iPods (what David Denby calls "platform agnosticism"). The double projection unravels our sense of sound film's preordained synchronization by emphasizing freshness at the most basic level, back in the projector's booth (though the innovativeness of this has diminished since the order of the twelve episodes was standardized). It also suggests the expansiveness of the widescreen format while reminding us, on either side of the bisected screen, how tight and claustrophobic a 1.37:1 aspect ratio can be. Warhol wasn't the first to try a multiscreen, but one of the miracles of the film is that he makes the gimmick feel like an artistic breakthrough and a match for his subject matter. In both length and size, he sketches out the shape of a movie epic, but in the film's compartmentalized structure he offers a chamber-drama intimacy that, without the cushion of overarching narrative, quickly gives way to hysteria.

By posing as a rule-breaker, Warhol presents us with one of conventional filmgoing's unquestioned notions—that the integrity of a film lies in a single pure projected image, with all visual ingredients pulling together to emanate from one source. He rebels against this belief in cohesion, which has allowed for movies' easy mass production, and tries to usher in a cinema in which the very light that makes films possible is fractured into self-consciousness, and becomes ever-renewing, ever-surprising. A cinema that allows for mulitple projections, choices among soundtracks, variant matchings of meanings, collage-like mixing of textures. But through the inter-reel juxtapositions he also encourages us to view the simultaneously projected frames as one unit, maintaining the traditional idea of a work of art that possesses one singular self. The crux of Warhol's film, however, is beyond all this, and isn't particularly intellectual or emotional—those two adjectives by which we habitually split up the arts. Its surfaces invite analysis, and its format reeks of the most obvious avant-garde narcissism, but the film's visual playfulness and formal elements have an almost automatic appeal, one that hits us even before we think or feel anything about what we're seeing. Out of all its self-generating controversy, it emerges (for me, at least) as an authentic aesthetic experience.

Chelsea Girls works well as a companion to Warhol's most recognizable art; as in his silkscreen paintings, it employs his usual methods of repetition (most obviously in the dialogue and occasional camera movement) and imposition of color (as when Eric Emerson and Nico are shot as art objects bathed in kaleidoscopic light). But while his portraits of Elvis, Mao, and Marilyn Monroe have an iconic solidity and aura of permanence, the tools of time and movement that cinema affords give his Pop Art style an exploratory tone not hinted at in his paintings' extreme two-dimensionality. Each of the film's 33-minute reels ends up playing like an exercise in star-making, an audition for cult status, as it stumbles through the uncertainties of dead-end improvisations. The camera frames and reframes actors as they repeat the same rock-star poses—Nico with her blank-faced bang-snipping; Hanoi Hannah's icy glare; Brigid Berlin surrendering to self-satisfied laughter; antsy Emerson grooving on himself. Characters return over and over to favorite phrases (like Ingrid Superstar's hilarious "You ought to be ashamed of yourself" or Mary Woronov's deafening "Shut up!") as they reel off dialogue like a slow version of Katharine Hepburn's manic rhythms in Bringing Up Baby or Lucky's monologue in Waiting for Godot. In the aesthetic cool that bolsters its rendering of chaos, the film earns Jonas Mekas' description of it as "tragic... full of desperation, hardness, and terror."

Perhaps I like Chelsea Girls so much because it reminds me of the innocent rapture I had on first encountering one of my favorite films, Persona, whose famous opening sequence establishes an analogy between film projection and psychic violence. Also released in '66, Bergman's masterpiece shares Chelsea Girls' main obsessions with close-ups, confessions, and the self-conscious splintering of reel time (though, because Warhol is less insistent on brooding symbolism, his visual approach now appears less dated). Chelsea Girls may be as easy to dismiss today as Joyce's novels or Eliot's "The Waste Land" once were, but the negative half of its reputation is surprising to me simply because, like Bergman at his most sensual, there is real pleasure to be had in the film. I admit it helped that, having been prepared for the worst, I was freed up to take in everything at my own leisurely pace. I approached the movie wondering what it could offer a non-expert like me, someone with no previous fixation on the Velvet Underground or interest in being toyed with by a silly drawn-out vision, but I came away three hours later surprised and pleased: I could not have guessed how funny, moving and extraordinary Warhol's film so frequently is, or how (without being overtly painterly) its unforgettable images would place me right at the vital intersection between canvas and screen.

Spring (and Springtime) in a Small Town

2007-05-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

"Since we know so little in this country about pre-‘80s mainland Chinese cinema, you would think the recently released DVD of Spring in a Small Town—ranked by the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2005 as the greatest Chinese movie ever made—would warrant more coverage from film journalists than it has received..." The rest of the post can be found at The House Next Door.

Away From Her

2007-05-22T19:10:00.000-07:00

Sarah Polley’s directorial debut, Away From Her, is the kind of movie you want to get behind, sort of in the way Brokeback Mountain was. It seems, at least at first, to take seriously a subject that mainstream films routinely trivialize or marginalize. Not only is Polley’s film a sensitive look at the toll Alzheimer’s takes on a marriage, but it also puts a great, aging female star back in the headlines—an achievement that can no longer be taken lightly in our oft-lamented age of youth-obsession. Like Brokeback, the film is an adaptation of a New Yorker story, one that tempers its inherently melodramatic subject with an admirable degree of emotional restraint. But, also like Brokeback, the film doesn’t fully transfer to the screen what made its source material so moving.

Julie Christie lends the first scenes a vague sense of promise, which the film coasts on to the very end. What she is able to get out of her audience is rare and special: the moment she appears, we are immediately sympathetic, even before she is suffering anything; we are ready to buy into her completely. Not even the most beautiful young faces can elicit the kind of reaction a star receives when she has earned our knee-jerk nostalgia (for many, the memories extend back to the ‘60s; for me, I can only say that Doctor Zhivago used to be my favorite film). Christie has been so hermetic for so long that this movie’s “universal acclaim” (according to Metacritic) could in some ways be chalked up to the baby boomers who write about her like she’s a precious natural resource. It might be dismaying to some that she doesn’t actually get much time to radiate; as Fiona, a woman who makes the decision to move into a nursing home despite her adoring husband’s pleas, her lines are brief and progressively infrequent.

As in much of her acting throughout the past four decades, what Christie does on screen doesn’t often strike one as technically remarkable. One could consider her work in this film in light of last year, when an unprecedented three of the top Best Actress contenders were elder female veterans, but she doesn’t do much to merit comparison with Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep, and Judi Dench, who have always worn their greatness (and training) on their sleeves. This performance even lacks the crackling intelligence Christie exhibited in Afterglow, her last big role ten years ago. As Fiona she’s merely effective, signaling mental disintegration with predictable wide eyes and a childlike voice.

But what Away From Her does remind us is that her consistently startling physical presence has always approached something like cinematic profundity. A face like hers was obviously made for the big screen. Her beauty, even when she’s at her most standoffish, can arouse surprisingly deep emotions, and it’s a mystery we engage with every time the camera zooms in for a close-up. Here she is a visual match for the character, a stranger to both physical and emotional inelegance; we can tell Fiona’s really lost it when her husband spots her in an ugly yellow sweater and says, “My wife would never wear that.”

Gordon Pinsent, as Fiona’s husband of more than forty years, gives us the film’s best acting; he’s as compelling to watch as Erland Josephson, only he’s incapable of cruelty. But the unwavering core of decency and strength his character seems to have no trouble holding onto is part of the reason Polley’s approach fails. The Alice Munro story on which the film is based ("The Bear Came Over the Mountain") exercises emotional detachment through the tonal control of a third-person speaker; in simple brushstrokes of narrative, the story’s acceptance of the unpleasant surprises life brings our way hides a strong dramatic undercurrent, a series of scenes we can imagine the writer has left out: sleepless nights, uncontrollable tears, mistakes. This effect isn’t as easily achieved in movies, since we’re not used to getting a sense of a storyteller (independent of the film) whose reticence adds a layer of complexity, and because tone is not an element most audiences consciously separate from the action on screen.

The film does have a fair share of overpowering moments, more than enough to make it a notable debut. At its center is a dream of an adult love story—almost as beautiful in outline as the one in Before Sunset—presented with the unalloyed romantic idealism Munro lacks. (Polley also brings in a nice local specificity, reminding American audiences of her and Munro’s Canadian nationality with a poem from Michael Ondaatje and songs by Neil Young and k.d. lang.) The most resonant scenes occur at the beginning, when the characters’ attempts to be nonchalant about Alzheimer’s point to their struggle to hold onto a way of life they realize is disappearing. But, later on, Polley doesn’t follow through with that sense of drama being withheld. You can tell that tension was intended to be there, but it isn’t developed; the wife is too much of a lady and the husband too much of a saint. Munro allowed her characters their unexplained depths and shadows; Polley often smothers hers in a static, overly resolute niceness: a young person’s vision of what compassionate, educated, ideal old people are like.

Even when the issue of Pinsent’s past infidelity is raised, it barely distracts us from his loveliness; even when he strikes up a relationship with Olympia Dukakis, the requisite twinge of guilt doesn’t register. Toward the end, to further underline the endearing simplicity and heroic toughness of her protagonists, Polley indulges in one too many philosophical statements along the lines of “Things are never what you’d hoped they’d be.” This brave, wise, steadfast acceptance of life’s disappointments is hard-won in films like Tokyo Story and Yi Yi, but Away From Her’s stiff upper lip feels more like a tacked-on gesture.

Her Propers: Aretha Franklin in the '90s

2007-05-17T07:35:00.000-07:00

This country has a habit of forgetting its best soul singers. Who could imagine a new Rolling Stones album—no matter how bad—being greeted with the type of inane, uninterested one-paragraph blurbs that some of our greats have received for their latest releases? Things are getting better: in recent years, Solomon Burke, Candi Staton, Bettye LaVette, and Mavis Staples have been snatched up by indie labels and had their careers resuscitated, partly by their white rock admirers. And the short-lived neo-soul fad did us all a favor by turning our attention to soul songwriting, reviving the legacies of half-neglected artists like Donny Hathaway. Maybe the iTunes revolution, which could shift the focus of the establishment from the album back to the single, will somehow increase the number of good critics we have for a genre that was never centered on concept albums.

I guess this is my cranky, roundabout way of getting into a subject I'm scared I won't do justice to: Aretha Franklin. It would be ridiculous of me to argue that the Queen of Soul isn't getting her propers, since few pop musicians have enjoyed the praise she has (Rolling Stone named her the ninth greatest immortal in rock history), but does our culture really have to represent her as such a fusty, one-dimensional caricature? Can we all admit that even the most serious of female vocalists are less likely to be described as geniuses the way male gods like Lennon and McCartney, Dylan, and Coltrane have been from the beginning? What is Franklin to us beyond the black female archetype in "Respect" and "Natural Woman"? And am I the only one besides Robert Christgau who believes a good handful of her later songs measure up to her legendary Atlantic recordings?

I'm writing this because (as all my friends know) I'm beside myself with excitement that she's opening the Memorial Hall season at UNC in August (i.e., don't steal my ticket). I'm not getting my hopes up for the concert itself, really, because I've seen her on TV in recent years and know what a lazy, disappointing live performer she can be. But I'll be humbled in the presence of someone who has taught me so much about what it means to be an emotional, sensual, spiritual human being. When my parents gave me the four-disc Queen of Soul: the Atlantic Recordings for Christmas almost six years ago, I realized that great soul singing produces the effect Emily Dickinson identified as the sign of poetry: the feeling “as if the top of [one’s] head were taken off.”

The consensus seems to be that Franklin peaked in a span of less than ten years, between the ‘60s and ‘70s, and has been coasting on hall-of-fame mode ever since. I don't buy that. It is a fact that the days when Franklin's voice was sharp as a knife are long gone. That precious window of time during which Aretha could whip out “My doctor said... Take it eeeasy!” and sound like she was going to blow a hole in the roof—they were gone by the '80s, a decade in which she recorded much too little of value. The artificiality of all those synth burbles rubbed up against the magnificence of her voice, and the combination became depressing. She never could wrap her sassiness around that frivolous noise, as Chaka Khan managed to, though it's true she never chose a comeback as hot-blooded as “I Feel For You.”

In the '90s, she began to emerge one song at a time, first with C+C Music Factory’s gospel-cum-disco anthem “A Deeper Love” in 1994. Then she had something on the ’95 Waiting to Exhale soundtrack called “It Hurts Like Hell,” a by-the-numbers Babyface composition she shredded through with trills, yells, and warbles that sound not like the marks of pain but the essence of pain itself. But her voice had lost a lot of its sonic definition; in the late ‘60s, you could draw a line around its peaks and valleys, it was so crisply and cleanly delivered. Anyone who grew up on her first few LPs for Atlantic, like I did, has to grapple with the new fuzziness in her tone, her increasingly flawed elocution, and the occasional phlegmy croak.

But maybe here it might be helpful to talk about two Arethas. However reductive or inaccurate, this is the perspective from which I’ve begun to love some of her later work. Beginning in 1967, the first of her masterpieces were deep soul marked by the magic of pop craftsmanship. The brilliance of her “Respect” lies in its streamlining of Otis Redding’s stomping, chanting plea into an instantly memorable, hummable, and chartable pop nugget. There isn’t a false move in the whole two-and-a-half minutes, barely a moment of wasted time, and no unnecessary exhibition of vocal talent. The voice knows precisely which texture and which note goes where; each part fits snugly and pleasurably into place. (That sense of well-oiled efficiency is of course reinforced by the thousand times an American is likely to hear the song in his or her lifetime.) Franklin’s early albums contain blues, like “Dr. Feelgood (Love Is a Serious Business)” and “Going Down Slow,” that meander playfully, but it's always clear that's she's got a map in front of her, that she's in complete control. The sureness of Franklin’s musicianship, the no-bullshit razor-sharpness of her instincts, the unobtrusiveness of her piano playing and arrangements lasted through her first four albums and in several songs up to her last great LP, 1972’s Young, Gifted and Black.

It could be that the second Aretha that I’ve come to love—the one with a looser vocal style, baggier arrangements, and an emphasis on exploration—was born out of the gospel set Amazing Grace, which finds her stretching the basic material of old hymns and hymn-like pop into eight-, ten-, fifteen-minute exorcisms. The next album, Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky), was an unfortunate collaboration with Quincy Jones, in which her new elasticity was offered up in a disastrous, airy version of West Side Story’s “Somewhere.” But there are real gems to be found from the end of her Atlantic tenure. “With Everything I Feel in Me” is one of her most commanding sexual statements, built out of repetitions and smatterings of barely formed verses, with no conventional hook in sight. For a year or so, my favorite Aretha song was her ’74 cover of “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing.” Here her voice scrapes against the high notes, ebbing, quaking and zigzagging as if it can't quite scrunch all her emotions into the words. Before the song ends, she finally achieves the exact articulation in an exquisite, brief stretch of melisma on the last refrain. Instead of compressing, as she did with Redding’s “Respect,” she takes Ashford and Simpson’s song and unravels the original melody and rhythm, pushing through to the pain she must have seen beneath the Motown gloss.

This is the Aretha that we hear in her first hit of the ‘90s, the now out-of-print A Rose Is Still a Rose (now going for as cheap as one cent on Amazon.com). Christgau names and describes perfectly two album tracks that stand among her best—“In the Morning” and “The Woman” (a seven-minute tour de force she wrote herself)—and I think his judgment is correct. These are songs that start unpromisingly, like most predictable adult contemporary-influenced R&B, but they gradually unfold, yielding the secrets of a woman who sounds magisterially like her age, a lonely goddess still open to but wounded by love. They are beautiful improvisations of sorrow that gain momentum through the many routes Aretha finds around the same unextraordinary lines—“I don’t wanna be the other woman/I want us to matter and mean something” and “I ain’t never loved a man the way I loved you” (notice the replacement of the present-tense “love” from the title of her first Atlantic single with that devastating past tense). The performances are down-to-earth and spacious enough to crawl into. In “The Woman,” Aretha takes scatting out of the heady Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan rhapsodies from the '50s and transports it all the way back to the days of Louis Armstrong in the '20s, when scat's usefulness as an expressive tool was made clear in the mutterings of a man who couldn’t articulate why he was so black and blue.

Aretha in the ‘90s might be an acquired taste—not the way Billie Holiday’s much darker and more profound Verve sides were toward the end of her life, but in a way that reveals to us that, as with Holiday, the core of Franklin’s art was never her natural voice but, rather, the intelligence, generosity, and sensitivity with which she used it. In the best of her later output, her singing is rich with detail; she teaches us to listen to her closely, note by note. She transforms our primal utterances—shouting, weeping, laughter—into the fabric of rigorous, reflective art. She proves to us, again and again, the lasting value of the music we've inherited.

Maggie Cheung: Actress

2007-05-16T12:57:00.000-07:00

In the 1992 film Actress, director Stanley Kwan asks Maggie Cheung Man-yuk if she hopes future audiences will remember her. In the context of this biopic on Ruan Ling-yu, a '30s film siren often regarded as China's Garbo, the question provides an early key moment that justifies Kwan's self-consciously unorthodox approach of shifting emphasis between text and marginalia. Alternating a vivid recreation of Ruan's troubled life in the golden age of the Shanghai film industry with self-referential scenes chronicling Kwan and cast in pre-production, Actress draws us deeper into its myth-making-and-breaking while also moving us outward. By the end, Kwan’s view of the past (his desire to engage with it; his awareness of its irretrievability; his understanding of its persistent allure) has distinguished itself from the methods of almost every other model biopic by rejecting narrative authority and firmly rooting itself in the skeptical, distancing point-of-view of the present. The making-of interludes turn Cheung into a double-image: she is at once an ambitious actress momentarily selling her soul to the ghost of Ruan, as well as a young cosmopolitan Hong Konger experiencing more personal and expressive freedom than Ruan could have ever imagined.

Indicative of Hong Kong's knack for producing great volumes of disposable entertainment, Cheung had by then already appeared in over 50 films, including Police Story with Jackie Chan. In hindsight, Kwan's question—“Do you hope to be remembered?"—does not only invite comparison of actor and character; it also seems to have successfully laid the foundation for his leading lady's own claim to legendary status. In an industry that thrives just as much as Hollywood and Bollywood do on easily digestible distraction, the question can be heard as a sly challenge from the art-house world Kwan represents, and as a premonition of Cheung’s past fifteen years becoming Asia’s most international superstar.

How is Cheung’s Ruan different from other portrayals of self-destructive divas like Diana Ross’ Billie Holiday and Judy Davis’ Judy Garland? Unlike them, she remains a blank canvas, open and vulnerable to our projections. In an increasingly tabloid-driven culture, we are implicated by this film and its unfulfilled desire to dig deeper and know more about a private, tragic life. Kwan and Cheung cover the film in a visual and emotional gauziness, dismantling our self-deceptions that we can glean from a movie what Ruan and her time period were really like. For some Western viewers this has been off-putting, and the fact that Actress has never been released in the U.S. points to both the narrowness of our market and the film’s cultural specificity. It’s an appropriate and subtle joke, for those who can catch it, that Cheung’s moon-face doesn’t resemble her character at all, and that co-star Carina Lau is from some angles a dead ringer for Ruan.

This and other methods obstruct the leap of faith we take when watching biopics; usually, knowing the film is necessarily a fictionalized account of real life, we place our trust in the authority of the images, but here we aren't given much freedom to be fooled. Because we’re never even fully convinced of Ruan’s greatness by the few clips the film gives us, the focus ultimately falls on Cheung, and on how she conveys so much mysterious emotion while holding back all that is tangible and easily explainable. Not until the film's penultimate sequence—when, in one of contemporary cinema's most haunting death scenes, she delivers a suicide monologue in a low, unexpectedly authoritative voice—are we allowed to hear the character speaking for herself. But Ruan remains tantalizing and enigmatic; even her mind's voice won't allow itself such a public breakdown.

When has meta-cinema ever privileged the performer over the auteur to this extent? (Another instance could be Olivier Assayas' self-mocking Irma Vep, a less successful meta-examination of Cheung’s magnetism; surely no Chinese star has been worshipped and scrutinized on-screen in quite this way—twice, and with such modernist hand-wringing.) For Kwan, Actress has been a career peak he seems unlikely to ever reach again; for Cheung, the film (along with the previous year’s Days of Being Wild) represents the inception of her image as an overseas art-house idol and her gradual abandonment of the commercial genres that endeared her to Chinese audiences. The role of Ruan won her the Best Actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival, and it still seems the central work in her oeuvre, partly because it introduced the theme of mortality that has run through her career ever since. Recently, Cheung has returned to Kwan’s question by commenting on the immortality of film in the digital age. She has decided to stop making so many movies because she wants her work to be worthy of such permanence. This canon-focused forward-thinking has steered her (perhaps unwisely) away from martial-arts showmen like Johnnie To and toward more prestigious names like China’s fifth-generation titan Zhang Yimou, and Assayas, her French ex-husband.

But does Cheung have to worry about being remembered? Of all the Chinese actresses of her generation, none seem more destined for the ages. Others may enjoy greater popularity, respect, or fame (for instance, mainlander Gong Li, whose inbred gift for smoldering Cheung aped with stiff seriousness in Hero), but none have given us performances of such range and restraint. Compare her as Ruan in Actress, as the sexy Thief Catcher in The Heroic Trio, as the expatriate in Comrades: Almost a Love Story, as an innocent version of herself in Irma Vep, as Wong Kar-Wai’s cheongsam model in In the Mood for Love, and as the junkie in the Cannes-winning Clean. Like other great actors who are also movie stars, she disappears into her roles while keeping visible the intelligence and charm that have won her wide audiences. Not even Cheung's frequent co-star, the justly revered Tony Leung Chiu-wai, has risen above his movie-star persona to create as many different personalities as she has.

The work of Maggie Cheung has a strange resonance for me. It’s self-evident that there have been no great, iconic Asian American roles or performances in the history of American cinema, and rather than bemoan that fact any further, I keep turning to the Hong Kong movies of my childhood to find approximations of certain sides of myself and my family. But it’s not Cheung’s Chineseness that does it for me, or even the variety of Chinese women she has played, but rather the extent to which her career has reflected themes common to all diasporal art and experience: multilingualism, the productive dissonance of multiculturalism, the power of collective (both historical and pop-cultural) memory. Cheung is herself the product of multiple migrations: her family moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong; she spent much of her youth in England; she married a French director and now spends most of her time in Europe. In Actress, she speaks Cantonese, Mandarin and Shanghainese; in Irma Vep, fluent English and broken French. In the Mood for Love extends from Shanghai to Hong Kong to Singapore to Cambodia. Comrades: Almost a Love Story—mainstream Hong Kong cinema's finest evocation of being culturally and geographically adrift—moves her from Guangzhou to Hong Kong to New York in search of a better life.

Perhaps unbeknownst to her, Cheung has become for many viewers a symbol of her times just as Ruan was for older generations. Actress never answers the question of why audiences elevate certain actors to stardom, but it does place that impulse right where it belongs: in the context of cultural memory. The acts of historical remembrance that occur in her handful of great films counteract the modern Chinese habit of viewing any interest in the past "as stupid, aberrant" (in her own words). Few films have been able to expose with Actress' elegance the urgency located at the intersection of art and biography, and even fewer have so powerfully explored the ways in which the modern self and its styles of feeling, thinking, and moving are developed out of what we dream up in our movies. Since winning in Berlin, Cheung's career has gained further symbolic significance; her international projects reflect not only the trajectory of globalization but also the pan-Chinese industry emerging from the economic wreckage of unique national cinemas like Hong Kong's. She has collaborated with many good directors and a few brilliant ones, but at her finest she is a vital artist, not someone else's tool. While some critics insist on viewing movies from a narrowly auteurist perspective, Cheung offers an example of how a perfomer can provoke and embody the art form's deepest interrogations.

[Outrageously but not surprisingly, Actress (which Jonathan Rosenbaum named one of the ten best films of the '90s) is still not available on American DVD. I found it for pretty cheap on www.hkflix.com in a French edition that worked on my Region 1 player and had English subtitles. The transfer is good; the movie, priceless.]

The Offense of Dreamgirls

2007-05-14T12:16:00.000-07:00

The kind of musical Hollywood has been clamoring to revive in the past few years held at its core a great fantasy: that as long as there are songs to sing, happiness is accessible to all. Soul, with its direct relation to the blues, is faithful to the opposite idea. In the vitality of its rhythms and urgency of its vocals lies a belief that, as long as there is misery to be experienced, the need for music will remain one of life's constants.

Despite these separate philosophies, the Motown-inspired Broadway hit Dreamgirls proved (mostly with its famous number “And I Am Telling You”) that musicals’ attention-hungry, happy-go-lucky showstoppers and soul’s most unhinged emotions could complement each other. Jennifer Holliday, who won a Tony for the lead role of Effie, made a credible soul performance entirely out of emotional peaks, bravely unearthing the music’s affinities to the grotesque. The yelping, whooping Linda Jones may have been the only major precursor for this theatrical pitch of emotion, which made soul songs sound as if they originated not in the church but in the insane asylum.

The new movie version of Dreamgirls—which botches the fascinating story of cultural miscegenation at the heart of Motown’s success—boasts a dream of a cast, right down to a lively cameo for Loretta Devine, but no one here has come to lay it on the line the way Holliday did. As the Supremes-like girl group of the title rearranges on racial terms and defangs its sound for crossover, the high moral and artistic stakes are barely sketched out for us. Director Bill Condon seems to doubt the ability of movie musical traditions and the tremendous talent onscreen to carry any weight. Only headliners Beyoncé (as an impressionable, mediocre talent modeled after Diana Ross) and American Idol reject Jennifer Hudson (as Florence Ballard, former leader and tragic artist) inspire any interest as they tussle for the film’s spotlight.

Having on her latest album become a worthy descendant of James Brown, Beyoncé has the volcanic energy and authentic handle on funk to usher soul musicals into movie history. She can also comfortably be named among the most luminous screen goddesses, like those George Hurrell photographed in the ‘30s, and one of the few things Condon gets right is the gay-male idolatry of his fashion-photo images: a parade of Beyoncé as Dorothy Dandridge, as Pam Grier, as Cleopatra. It’s a shame she never gets beyond the doe-eyed requirements of her role. Scene after scene depicting her as a wilting flower crushed by Jamie Foxx’s Svengali are pasted in from the most pedestrian R&B videos and send their only emotional signals through the well-styled mess of her hair. It’s unsettling to watch one of the most animated life forces in showbiz reduced to the role of a mannequin.

Hudson is equally unprepared to act and, in the showstopping number, lacks Holliday’s remarkable control and instinct for movement. Mirroring Hudson’s American Idol exposure, the unappreciated diva Effie never gets to really sing; her voice is always contest-ready, out to prove itself, as if articulating emotions were too dull a pursuit. Her rendition of “And I Am Telling You” wrenches applause out of the audience the way an Olympic runner does, not because it bares the soul but because it tests the limits of the human body. When Effie auditions at a nightclub, the name Billie Holiday floats off a character’s lips almost as mockery: it’s a joke on the movie that it claims Lady Day’s subtle phrasing and thin, reedy voice as a touchstone while exalting tonal thickness as a sign of racial authenticity—as if this were a soul singer’s highest virtue and only value.

What Dreamgirls is most guilty of perverting is the legacy of Motown’s great songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland as pillars of pop and of the Supremes as a mischievously brilliant group. The film also dodges the conflicts that led to the invention of soul and its status in our national mythology. The music’s battle for an integrated audience, as well as its compromise of Christian and secular impulses, have forever linked it to what was political and religious about the civil rights movement. It’s one of the crucial stories in popular music, but Condon (despite having two very good, historically evocative biopics under his belt) quickly puts it to sleep with a few race-riot montages and a lot of neon lights.

At the same time, he alerts us to his embarrassment of the musical genre with confused MTV-editing and fumbling transitions between dialogue and song. There's none of the unabashed, cross-medium delight in cinema, theater, and karaoke pop that made Moulin Rouge the only musical this decade worth buying into (well, besides Björk in Dancer in the Dark). Scene after scene, Condon's missteps contribute to the sense, quite rare in musicals, that the singing is not spontaneous action but a chore to be carried out. At a time when artists like Tony Kushner (with his recent musical Caroline, or Change) are at least trying to complexify the obvious connection between '60s black pop and politics, this laziness is particularly offensive. Dreamgirls’ vague outline of two great American artistic traditions—and one of our most towering historical moments—answers everyone’s high hopes with incoherent disaster.