July 2010
5 posts
2 tags
Mad Men Season 4 (Slant Review) →
Mad Men behaves like nothing else on television, a distinction that, after the impressive ratings boost during the bleak, sinewy, and leisurely paced third season, is beginning to beam with triumph—insofar as a lyrically cynical, ethically convoluted portrait of early-’60s corporate marketing can be said to “beam.” Brimming with enigmatic, meticulously cultivated details that...
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Mugabe & the White African (Slant Review) *** →
Much like last year’s crowd-pleasing, muck-aimed Swiffer mop The Cove, Mugabe and the White African is cinema-as-journalism at its most aesthetically confident and humanely satisfying—and it’s all the more profound for being so without a cute, shamelessly anthropomorphized creature to melt its audience into involuntary pots of sympathy fondue. A politically minded documentary that...
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Black Narcissus (Slant DVD review) ****1/2 →
Just as the stoic, skeletal holy man both defies and presides over the feverishly ecclesiastical business of the Palace of Mopu as an intransigent, blood-locked ghost, Black Narcissus impishly keeps watch over the Archers’ canon with a sunken, rabidly prismatic eye. Now rather ironically viewed as perhaps the filmmakers’ most supernal visual achievement,Black Narcissus is nothing if...
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Dogtooth (Bright Lights review) →
With its downright molten tabloid scenario and (to put it delicately) genetically claustrophobic sensuality, the pleasures of Dogtooth might at first resemble our expectations of a splattery, art-house Flowers in the Attic. But Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos eviscerates the tender insinuations and off-kilter alliances of V.C. Andrews’ simmering schlock-psychosis, splaying entrails across torso in...
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The Girl Who Played with Fire (Slant Review) * →
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or as it’s more appropriately known overseas, Men Who Hate Women, is a veritable manifesto of misogyny—thematically handicapped and narratively lumpy, with flashbacks and emotional outbursts that nearly insult real-life survivors of such unthinkable trauma, as well as shot through a sickly green lens that appears to be observing the action just as queasily...
June 2010
7 posts
1 tag
South of the Border (Slant Review) *** →
There’s a shrewdly but skeptically revisionist tone about Oliver Stone’s new documentary South of the Border, one that oddly seems designed to abate any political enthusiasm that the film’s headily socio-economic incisiveness might instill. Interpolating archival media coverage of and personal interviews with a collective of South America’s most demonized and yet most...
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Futurama Season 6 (Slant review) ***1/2 →
How does one continue a TV show that’s already ended more than once? This is the gargantuan task before the singular assembly of math, science, Americana culture, and—oh, right—comedy nerds at the helm of Futurama, a sci-fi/dramedy cartoon adored by a formidable fanbase as much for its sophisticated emotional candor and relatable robots as for its smattering of inside-baseball physics...
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Mystery Train (Slant DVD review) →
That Jarmusch waited until his fourth effort to offer such a lucid argument for his ethos says much about his affinity with the milieu of Mystery Train. The sleepy, barely urban Memphis seen here is no less artificial than the New Orleans of Down by Law or the California frontier ofDead Man (does the Sun Records landmark really receive so few daily visitors?), but it’s been comfily...
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Wah Do Dem (Slant Review) *** →
Wandering the lazy dub jungles between the passionate, if terminally silly, post-ska acumen of Sublime’s “Can’t fight against the youth”-isms and the self-deprecating reggatta de blanc of the Lonely Island’s “Ras Trent,” Wah Do Dem is a brief, peripatetic love letter to Jamaican tropes scrawled on hemp stationary. Conceived and executed by a collective...
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Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky (Slant review) *** →
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It would, however, be generous to refer to Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, or its source novel, as “dramatized” history; with scant evidence at his disposal, author Chris Greenhalgh has arranged a romantic potpourri of corroborated events, educated guesses, daring assumptions, and unabashed fabrications into what appears less a love story than a tale of fleetingly cohabiting...
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The World According to Bruno Bozzetto (House Next... →
It’s appropriate that the peculiar worldview of Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto should be communicated most unabashedly through the appearance of his fuzzy, humanoid caricatures. Hopelessly gawky, if generally well-meaning, they seem all too aware of themselves, as though perpetually and trepidly balancing mixed feelings toward a silent creator who fashioned them lovingly but lazily...
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Finding Bliss (Slant review) 1/2 star →
Naught-eur Davis mythologizes her own rise to sub-fame in Finding Bliss, about a love-luckless twentysomething named Jody (Leelee Sobieski) who finds herself splicing together cum shots post-film school out of necessity while she nurses her own rom-com script. The film tiptoes confusedly around Davis’s de facto frigidity, desperately attempting to avoid judging the sexually gawky,...
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Mademoiselle Chambon (Slant Review) **1/2 →
Unlike the similarly bucolic and gesture-driven milieu of French films such as Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette or Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours, Stéphane Brizé’s Mademoiselle Chambon is more fascinated by how an individual can become entrapped by his or her singular essence. At its most gently successful, the movie is a character study with intensely baroque observations; at...
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By Brakhage (Slant DVD review ****) →
The cinema of Stan Brakhage has been interpreted as abstract, mythopoeic, philological, and lyrical, but it’s his hyper-auteurist approach that might be most instructive. It’s surely an ironic stroke to associate the filmmaker with auteurism, a critical theory developed to celebratorily grant Hollywood directors ownership of the art they subtly baked into their cookie-cutter...
May 2010
8 posts
1 tag
Walkabout (Slant bluray review) **** →
Set chiefly in the needly Australian outback, where even red clay dirt appears angrily lysergic, the movie acts more like a daring career denouement than a functional transition for a crewmember-turned-auteur. Technically aimed between the fractured passion of Richard Lester’sPetulia and the similarly fissured masculinity of Roeg’s masterpiece Bad Timing, the curious, aquiline-eyed...
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Two in the Wave (Slant Review) ** →
The well-known love/hate relationship between Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut emits an irresistibly folklorish aura, and as such it’s hard not to pore over a detail-rich article like Richard Brody’s “Auteur Wars” with the imaginative humility typically inspired by Bulfinch’s Mythology. Never mind that Rohmer and Chabrol technically produced the first shorts...
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Looking for Eric (Slant Review) *** →
The protagonist of Looking for Eric, Eric Bishop (Steve Evets), is a familiar face in the Loach canon despite the actor’s freshness, but his trajectory represents a unique and resolute act of experimental generosity on the director’s part: It’s as though Loach is gauging how much of the idealism with which he’s always endowed his characters can be converted to...
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SFIFF Dispatch #1 for The House Next Door →
The oldest film festival in the United States packs such a bloated salmagundi of screenings into 14 days that it can feel like cinephiliac punishment, but the necessity of individual choices ensures a singular, specialized experience for every attendee. The San Francisco International Film Festival is nothing if not facilitative of staunch personalization, requiring one to whittle down a...
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OSS 117: Lost in Rio (Slant review) ** →
The French have it easy. Their secret agent-era vintage thrillers and corresponding spy parodies are collected under a single, post-modernly collapsed franchise. OSS 117, the cryptic code name for agent Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, was once a slick, if appropriately artificial, francophonic Bond clone, but the revisionist revival Cairo, Nest of Spies, and its sequelLost in Rio, magnify the...
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The Phrenology of Shutter Island (Bright Lights... →
Perhaps it’s the bald Ben Kingsley, who plays half of the Ashecliff Hospital’s resident doctoral duo (the other member is Max Von Sydow, looking more Aryan and more menacing every day), or maybe it’s Scorsese’s tendency to spill significance about the surface of his films while neglecting their guts, like a chicken laying eggs with yolks on the outside of their empty...
April 2010
8 posts
1 tag
Anton Chekhov's The Duel (Slant Review) **1/2 →
Dover Koshashvili, the sensitive director of Anton Chekhov’s The Duel, doesn’t entirely evade the pitfalls of bringing this particular Russian to the screen: He photographs the bucolic, Black Sea coastal setting of the fevered tale with such painterly light that the squalor seems heavenly, and his British cast takes an irascible, sincerely deadpan approach to what could be taken for...
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Ghost Bird (Slant Review) *** →
An enthusiast’s documentary nearly as rare as its very possibly extinct subject, Ghost Bird uses testimony, history, and dialect-driven landscape to successfully infect us with the same awe-saturated curiosity that inspires the film’s impassioned talking heads. As a summary of recent alleged rediscoveries of the ivory-billed woodpecker, and their investigative rebuttals, the movie...
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Abbott and Costello, the Complete Series (Slant... →
Inviting equal parts empathy, schadenfreude, fondness, and annoyance, Lou Costello’s finely tuned comic persona is one of the most recognizable, and most complex, of the early 20th century. It’s hard to imagine any comedian so shrill and yet so likeable; his signature shrieks of alarm can put you in stitches, but when braved through a hangover they’ll leave your temple...
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Behind the Burly Q (Slant Review) ** 1/2 →
The documentary Behind the Burly Q follows burlesque from its infancy at the turn of the century in traveling tents, to its Minsky’s and Old Howard heyday, all the way to its demise in the wake of porn theaters and television after WWII, but the film is most entertaining when it allows its impressive collection of talking heads, including aged dancers and the descendents of famous funny...
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The Secret in their Eyes (Rumpus Review) →
Adapted from a popular Argentine crime novel, the film clings to the detective genre throughout while roving other, less-ossified tropes. The retired investigator protagonist, Benjamin (played by Campanella regular Ricardo Darín) is attempting to write a memoir of a hauntingly unsolved case; he asks his ex-chief Irene (Soledad Villamil) to assist him in teasing out both forgotten factoids and,...
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Handsome Harry (Slant Review) ** 1/2 →
With grizzled scruff and a conservatively amused smile perpetually plastered on his wrinkled, half-flabby face, the title character of Bette Gordon’s Handsome Harry is something one doesn’t often see in film, independent or otherwise: a genuinely interesting middle-aged protagonist. The character’s soft piquancy resides in the manner that screenwriter Nicholas T. Proferes has...
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Knocked off this vaguely 70’s AOR ditty for...
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It Came from Kuchar (Slant Review) **1/2 →
In an impishly esoteric underground career spanning five decades, twin brothers George and Mike Kuchar have made films that stretch the term “independent” to an asphyxiatingly airy thinness, and have shown these to the world by any means available—private home viewings, art house exhibits, or student-run film school functions. Their oceanic aesthetic has included Super 8 family...
March 2010
7 posts
1 tag
Breaking Upwards (Slant Review) ** 1/2 →
But what’s most irritating is that Wein’s gifts as a filmmaker are more-than-apparent through his movie’s immature, garden-variety detritus. His mise-en-scène is starkly indolent, but he visually achieves a likeably analog, ’80s-VHS frostiness that partially excuses his characters’ youthful befuddlement, and the risk he takes by allowing his skinny, chic-nerd...
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The Sun Behind the Clouds (Slant Review) ** 1/2 →
Long a symbol for Western ignorance of ethnic suffering among the glibly humanitarian, the plight of the Tibetan people is easy to sympathize with but exceedingly difficult to assuage either with socio-political theory or bare-knuckled physical aid. This is the somewhat anticlimactic thesis around which The Sun Behind the Clouds is situated, and as a result there’s a restless futility at...
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ND/NF: Samson and Delilah (Slant review) ***1/2 →
Samson comprises one-half of the obliquely Biblical titular dyad in Warwick Thornton’s hypnotic debut Samson and Delilah, and under his vacant, heat-stroked gaze the film’s potential social resonance becomes una corda to the point of poetic confusion. We sense, in the languid, primeval pulp at the film’s center, dramatic inspiration both ecological and humanitarian: A pervasive...
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Shutterbug (Slant Review) ** →
One-third lysergic plutonian tour, one-third attempted digital-art mindfuck, and one-third pointlessly phantasmagoric twist thriller, Minos Papas’s Shutterbug stylistically suggests the planate obtuseness of an aesthetically retarded man’s David Lynch and the emotive stiffness of the real M. Night Shyamalan. The movie follows a celebrated but archetypically cocky photographer named...
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MST3K Volume XVII (Slant DVD Review) →
Historically speaking, Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Volume XVII may be the most essential MST3K DVD package since Rhino issued “Manos, the Hands of Fate” and “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” on one single, hilariously cineastic disc. There’s no Gypsy or Cambot figurine to accompany the two-inch Crow and Tom Servo figurines fans may or may not have been awarded...
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Delta (Slant Review) **1/2 →
The plot of Delta doesn’t so much unfold as languidly stumble through moments of startling visual grace—abetted intensely by the oneiric ruralism of the geography, a setting so singularly elysian one almost expects incest to hang as ripely from the vines as it did for Adam and Eve’s progeny—and equally jarring violence. There’s not much of an explanation for the brother-sister...
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Harlem Aria (Slant Review) * 1/2 →
Harlem Aria was produced and peddled on the festival circuit back at the start of the new century—quite significantly on the cusp of the independent film industry’s transition to digital video—but not released theatrically until 2010. This makes the texture of the movie difficult to date with accuracy, and it’s curiously jarring. We can’t quite believe that contemporary actors...
February 2010
9 posts
2 tags
The Life and Times of Tim Season 2 (Slant Review)... →
Season one of HBO’s—or, rather, Steve Dildarian’s—The Life and Times of Tim was possibly the animated cable curio of 2009. Eschewing the hyperrealist ribaldry and pop misappropriation with which the Adult Swim juggernaut has continued churning out meta catchphrases and anthropomorphic food stuffs worth silk-screening onto shoulder-hugging tees,Tim finds humor in our haplessly...
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Eclipse Series 20: George Bernard Shaw on Film... →
It’s by now common knowledge that writers cannot be trusted with their own work, not even—or perhaps especially—highly celebrated ones, but by the ’30s Shaw had already been awarded a Nobel prize, and with screenwriting still in its skittish infancy it seemed both logical and preferable to recruit the Irishman to helm scenario and dialog on his own films. Yet to watch Anthony...
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Important Things with Demetri Martin, Season Two... →
Of all the youngish comedians to ascend to near-household-name status in the mid-to-late aughts, Demetri Martin may be the most deserving of a sketch comedy show. It’s not simply that his laugh-per-minute quotient is considerably higher than most of his Comedy Central-tethered peers (including even more high-profile bearers of the stand-up torch such as Sarah Silverman, whose shtick...
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Loudon Wainwright III live (Slant review) →
On February 13th, Wainwright played the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley (once a cramped coffee house, the Freight has since expanded into a modest auditorium large enough for bluegrass moshing) as part of a Northwestern cluster of solo shows. Advertised as a representation of theHigh, Wide & Handsome album, the program turned out to be more or less a Loudon Wainwright show with the...
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Lourdes (Slant Review) *** →
Austrian director Jessica Hausner placidly tackles related moral paradoxes in Lourdes, a deliberately paced examination of Catholic mysticism with sharp sprinkles of magical realism. Christine (a touchingly subdued Sylvie Testud) is a paraplegic touring the titular city and its alleged healing baths with a group of nurse-chaperoned invalids who are referred to by all with a hint of tourist-y...
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Getting Over Him in 8 Songs or Less (Slant TV... →
Debra J. Solomon isn’t quite Joni Mitchell, and her animated diary-musical Getting Over Him in Eight Songs or Less isn’t quite what a Bill Plympton adaptation of Blue might look like, but there are enough traces of the bruised feminism of the former and the fearless fluidity of the latter to warrant a casual comparison. The 30-minute short, which will air smarmily as part of...
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October Country (Slant review) *** →
It feels odd to describe a near-DIY documentary about the shifting familial values and lingering personal demons of Middle America as nothing more than an unequivocal visual triumph, but there’s a distinctively, and hauntingly, dehumanizing quality about the graphic approach of October Country. Essentially a video collaboration between photographer Donal Mosher and director Michael...
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The Life and Times of Tim (Slant DVD Review) →
Tim is the well-meaning but deaf-to-social-rhythm man who’ll take advantage of the ability to purchase a stripper’s twirler brassiere for his long-suffering (but inconceivably committed) girlfriend Amy on Valentine’s Day, who’ll fondle and subsequently compliment the texture and buoyancy of the bosom of his significant other’s wheelchair-bound grandmother upon...
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Promised Lands (Slant Review) *** →
On paper, Susan Sontag had a sensually intimate knowledge of film that few designated movie critics possess; her enumerated philo-goof on sci-fi tropes was as incisively erudite, and observant, as Bazin’s genre dissections (not to mention as funny as Pauline Kael on a good day), and her gush-portrait of Godard flitted lovingly back and forth between the man’s strengths, weaknesses,...
January 2010
7 posts
2 tags
Off and Running (Slant Review) *** →
The locating of one’s birth parents is stereotypically, if not always glibly, approached in film as a necessarily brutal process of self-exploration: It’s assumed, just as much as by more stringent psychologists as by the rules of documentarian tension, that adopted children need to discover and achieve closure on where they came from in order to properly mature. That having been...
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Paris, Texas (Slant bluray review) →
From its hazily Southwestern skyscraper surfaces to its barren, prickly bush and junk car-pocked bedrock, there’s something slightly off-kilter about the America of Paris, Texas. The central masculine cast is nothing if not indigenous—when the sun-punched Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) first stumbles into frame, his uncultivated, hirsute face and dusty red cap seem like natural...
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8½ (Slant Magazine bluray Review) →
Although the extent to which the iconically dark-shaded and silver-streaked Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) can truly be accepted as a Fellini surrogate is a source of endlessly inconsequential debate, we tend to take the lightly fictive director at his word when he dismally claims that he had planned to make a truly honest and direct film this time around. 8½ represents the most...
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Eric Rohmer (4 April 1920 – 11 January 2010)
That Eric Rohmer, who passed away this morning, was both critic and film auteur seems as unsurprisingly organic as the manner in which his movies interpolated text and image, philosophy and drama. In 2006 I quit my first post-college job after suffering a minor breakdown; I spent the following penurious summer on the couch, gathering my wits in the spirited glow of Ray, Ozu, Kiarostami, Sirk,...
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WatchWhat does the Noid have to do with social networking? Everything.
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My Top DVDs and Blurays of 2009 →
I was asked to represent Slant Magazine in DVD Beaver’s annual show-stopping poll…my results are below, and if you follow the above link you can see the whole whopping outcome. Definitely worth reading over lunch/dinner/dessert.
Jon Lanthier and Slant Staff
Top 10 SD-DVD Releases OF 2009
1. Gaumont Treasures: 1897-1913 (Various) Kino; R1
2. Walden: Diaries,...