Post by jeffan on Feb 19, 2009 19:05:54 GMT -5
A.O. Scott
New York Times
February 19, 2009.
In 2008 more than 600 movies were released into commercial theaters in Manhattan, a daunting number that nonetheless represents a fraction of the number that could have been released, if there were but world (or money) enough and time. Every year, on the international festival circuit and beyond it, hundreds, perhaps thousands of potentially interesting films — really, who knows how many? — pop into view, only to disappear into the limbo created by an intractably capricious distribution system. Great little pictures by new directors, solid work by unsung artists, even new projects by recognized masters languish far from their potential audiences.
It may not be the explicit intention of Film Comment Selects, an annual series presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, to rectify this sad situation. But the program’s chief virtue is that it makes a smart, serious effort in that direction.
Film Comment Selects, now in its 10th year, does not have the institutional presence or historical authority of the New York Film Festival or New Directors/New Films, other mainstays of the Film Society calendar. Instead it has an eclectic, idiosyncratic spirit reflecting the magazine that is its guiding intelligence.
Film Comment is a proudly serious publication, but it is also wide-ranging and unpredictable. It is occasionally provocative, sometimes wrong, but almost never dull.
And the magazine’s coverage is gratifyingly wide-ranging, extending from commercial Hollywood fare to pop-culture cultism to the most rarefied precincts of cinematic art. The films it selects are accordingly diverse. Spread out over two weeks (from Friday until March 5), this year’s choices — 19 new or newish features, plus a handful of revived or rediscovered films — span continents and genres, the result being a fascinating, sometimes puzzling grab bag, driven less by a single curatorial imperative than by a restless curiosity.
Restlessness certainly characterizes “Paradise,” the new film from Michael Almereyda, which opens the program on Friday night. Though it observes real people in real situations, “Paradise,” which travels from Los Angeles to New Jersey to Iran, is less a conventional documentary than a series of impressions and jottings, as if the filmmaker were using his camera as a pencil to capture fugitive thoughts in a notebook. The effect is disorienting at first, but as you let go of your expectations of continuity you become absorbed in the found beauties and small mysteries Mr. Almereyda discovers in pedestrian vistas and everyday events.
“Paradise” — a nonlinear, meditative, technically simple engagement between the camera and the world — could be said to stand at one end of the cinematic spectrum sketched by Film Comment Selects. At the other end would be the closing-night attraction, Kathryn Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker,” a large-scale, ferociously suspenseful war film about a team of soldiers in Iraq whose specialty is defusing explosives.
First shown at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and slated for release sometime in 2009, “The Hurt Locker” is less a combat picture than a thriller about the risks and intoxications of professional passion. The main character, brilliantly played by Jeremy Renner, is consumed by his work, at once meticulous in his techniques and reckless in the way he deploys them. In this respect he resembles Ms. Bigelow (her other movies include “Point Break,” “Blue Steel” and “K-19: The Widowmaker”), who turns the discipline of action filmmaking into a kind of visceral visual poetry.
In between the ruminations of “Paradise” and the jolts of “The Hurt Locker” you can find an assortment of styles and effects, not all of them pleasing but most of them provoking at least interested distaste, rather than indifference. Jean-Claude Brisseau, a French practitioner of soft-core boudoir philosophy, is represented by “A L’Aventure,” in which several attractive women speak soberly about the logic of their erotic desires and then obligingly act them out. The action proceeds from mild kink — a threesome, a spanking — toward more mystical activities, including hypnosis and levitation, and ends, as most of Mr. Brisseau’s films do, by provoking a question: Is he serious?
It is not a question you would ask of Paul Schrader, a filmmaker who combines earnest moral inquiry with an acute sense of human perversity. His “Adam Resurrected” is a concentration camp drama, starring Jeff Goldblum as a Berlin cabaret artist who survives Auschwitz only to be confined to a sanitarium in the Israeli desert, where strange things happen to him. The movie itself is intriguingly strange, and deserves more exposure, and more debate, than it has received so far.
Film Comment Selects also offers a chance to keep abreast of developments in countries like Argentina, Austria and South Korea, all of which have emerged as sites of cinematic ferment.
“The Mugger,” from Argentina, is on the surface a simple crime story, following a middle-aged robber whose peculiar specialty is stealing tuition money from private schools. But within its modest scope the film, directed by Pablo Fendrik, uncovers latent social tensions and psychological disturbances. Similarly, Götz Spielmann’s “Revanche,” the Austrian nominee for the best foreign-language film Oscar, marries a somewhat familiar narrative of underworld criminality to a somber investigation of a Europe uncomfortably caught between its rural past and its global future.
Not every film in the program will satisfy everyone — though I don’t see how anyone could fail to be seduced by Laura Dern, Diane Lane and members of the Clash in “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains,” Lou Adler’s scruffy punk-feminist road picture from 1981 — but that’s just the point. Film Comment, a forum for contention and debate, is dedicated to the proposition that movies are worth arguing about. And that is certainly true of the films selected this year.
www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/movies/20comm.html
New York Times
February 19, 2009.
In 2008 more than 600 movies were released into commercial theaters in Manhattan, a daunting number that nonetheless represents a fraction of the number that could have been released, if there were but world (or money) enough and time. Every year, on the international festival circuit and beyond it, hundreds, perhaps thousands of potentially interesting films — really, who knows how many? — pop into view, only to disappear into the limbo created by an intractably capricious distribution system. Great little pictures by new directors, solid work by unsung artists, even new projects by recognized masters languish far from their potential audiences.
It may not be the explicit intention of Film Comment Selects, an annual series presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, to rectify this sad situation. But the program’s chief virtue is that it makes a smart, serious effort in that direction.
Film Comment Selects, now in its 10th year, does not have the institutional presence or historical authority of the New York Film Festival or New Directors/New Films, other mainstays of the Film Society calendar. Instead it has an eclectic, idiosyncratic spirit reflecting the magazine that is its guiding intelligence.
Film Comment is a proudly serious publication, but it is also wide-ranging and unpredictable. It is occasionally provocative, sometimes wrong, but almost never dull.
And the magazine’s coverage is gratifyingly wide-ranging, extending from commercial Hollywood fare to pop-culture cultism to the most rarefied precincts of cinematic art. The films it selects are accordingly diverse. Spread out over two weeks (from Friday until March 5), this year’s choices — 19 new or newish features, plus a handful of revived or rediscovered films — span continents and genres, the result being a fascinating, sometimes puzzling grab bag, driven less by a single curatorial imperative than by a restless curiosity.
Restlessness certainly characterizes “Paradise,” the new film from Michael Almereyda, which opens the program on Friday night. Though it observes real people in real situations, “Paradise,” which travels from Los Angeles to New Jersey to Iran, is less a conventional documentary than a series of impressions and jottings, as if the filmmaker were using his camera as a pencil to capture fugitive thoughts in a notebook. The effect is disorienting at first, but as you let go of your expectations of continuity you become absorbed in the found beauties and small mysteries Mr. Almereyda discovers in pedestrian vistas and everyday events.
“Paradise” — a nonlinear, meditative, technically simple engagement between the camera and the world — could be said to stand at one end of the cinematic spectrum sketched by Film Comment Selects. At the other end would be the closing-night attraction, Kathryn Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker,” a large-scale, ferociously suspenseful war film about a team of soldiers in Iraq whose specialty is defusing explosives.
First shown at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and slated for release sometime in 2009, “The Hurt Locker” is less a combat picture than a thriller about the risks and intoxications of professional passion. The main character, brilliantly played by Jeremy Renner, is consumed by his work, at once meticulous in his techniques and reckless in the way he deploys them. In this respect he resembles Ms. Bigelow (her other movies include “Point Break,” “Blue Steel” and “K-19: The Widowmaker”), who turns the discipline of action filmmaking into a kind of visceral visual poetry.
In between the ruminations of “Paradise” and the jolts of “The Hurt Locker” you can find an assortment of styles and effects, not all of them pleasing but most of them provoking at least interested distaste, rather than indifference. Jean-Claude Brisseau, a French practitioner of soft-core boudoir philosophy, is represented by “A L’Aventure,” in which several attractive women speak soberly about the logic of their erotic desires and then obligingly act them out. The action proceeds from mild kink — a threesome, a spanking — toward more mystical activities, including hypnosis and levitation, and ends, as most of Mr. Brisseau’s films do, by provoking a question: Is he serious?
It is not a question you would ask of Paul Schrader, a filmmaker who combines earnest moral inquiry with an acute sense of human perversity. His “Adam Resurrected” is a concentration camp drama, starring Jeff Goldblum as a Berlin cabaret artist who survives Auschwitz only to be confined to a sanitarium in the Israeli desert, where strange things happen to him. The movie itself is intriguingly strange, and deserves more exposure, and more debate, than it has received so far.
Film Comment Selects also offers a chance to keep abreast of developments in countries like Argentina, Austria and South Korea, all of which have emerged as sites of cinematic ferment.
“The Mugger,” from Argentina, is on the surface a simple crime story, following a middle-aged robber whose peculiar specialty is stealing tuition money from private schools. But within its modest scope the film, directed by Pablo Fendrik, uncovers latent social tensions and psychological disturbances. Similarly, Götz Spielmann’s “Revanche,” the Austrian nominee for the best foreign-language film Oscar, marries a somewhat familiar narrative of underworld criminality to a somber investigation of a Europe uncomfortably caught between its rural past and its global future.
Not every film in the program will satisfy everyone — though I don’t see how anyone could fail to be seduced by Laura Dern, Diane Lane and members of the Clash in “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains,” Lou Adler’s scruffy punk-feminist road picture from 1981 — but that’s just the point. Film Comment, a forum for contention and debate, is dedicated to the proposition that movies are worth arguing about. And that is certainly true of the films selected this year.
www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/movies/20comm.html