The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) A Film by Martin Scorsese

Tomorrow's real Christmas miracle will be the release of Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that's such a vile affront to good taste that it's amazing it's getting nationwide exposure on one of the holiest days of the year. It's also fantastic, one of Scorsese's funniest and craziest movies in a long time and one that revives the antic spirit of his earlier directorial self. My full review is up now at In Review Online.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013) A Film by Adam McKay

Even if the results are unmistakably "messy" and, to some eyes, just plain bad, the improvisational bombast of Adam McKay's filmmaking intrigues me. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is the director's zaniest achievement since Step Brothers, similarly baffling in its narrative logic and tonal dexterity as well as equally magnetic in its pull of weirdness. McKay and star Will Ferrell routinely push scenes past their seeming breaking point*, which, to me at least, is the domain of hesitation, verbal vomit, and physical awkwardness in which the film really enters a zone of inspired idiocy. My full review is up at In Review Online.

*Of note is McKay's directorial technique, which is described in a stellar review by R. Emmet Sweeney at Film Comment.

A Selection of Excellent Film Writing from 2013

These days, I spend more time reading criticism than I do actually watching films. I imagine this to be the case for many on-and-off writers like myself, so it seems silly to not take some kind of annual stock in this activity. Not to mention that in a year of so many disheartening layoffs in the film-journalistic professional world, as well as the continuing dispersal of online cinephilia, critics are not exactly in the highest public or professional opinion. Frankly, I feel respect is due. I'm active on Twitter, where film discussions tend to get fairly muddled and schizophrenic. Appreciation is so often parsed out in the form of minute-by-minute mentions, favorites and retweets that it can be hard to tell when someone really means something. In this regard, take this is a gesture of clear-headed and considered gratitude.

The following criticism – essays, reviews, weekly columns and, in one case, a list of blurbs (with the exception of one piece that also functions as a review, I omitted interviews because I just don't read many) – stands out cumulatively as a corrective against a movie culture of prevailing simple-mindedness. Distinguishing these pieces is their sense of a voice: unique, often openly personal, and always politically, historically, and aesthetically engaged. In some cases, the writing is witty and sarcastic in its direct dismissal of a film or cinematic trend; other times, the writers convey an immense openness, a knack for methodically (perhaps even "objectively") weighing the pros and cons of a given film. In special instances, through sheer conviction and passion, novel philosophies regarding the cinematic medium – its value and importance as personal, political, or spiritual pursuit – become apparent. Taken together, the criticism linked to here is fertile proof that, regardless of how fiscally unprofitable it may be, the online cinephilic community is alive and well.

Note: I didn't keep a real-time record this year of all the fantastic pieces I was reading on a daily basis. This collection is an act of top-of-my-head recollection, so hopefully the cream rose to the top. That said, I'm obviously missing so many great writers and essays. I apologize for that, and hopefully what I may (or may not) have retweeted on Twitter over the past twelve months is of some value.

Second Note: You'll notice that I've made very little attempt to be all-inclusive with regards to the websites I've pulled from. What will become clear is that I'm a pretty avid reader of MUBI, Reverse Shot, and cinema scope. With all due respect to the many other sites that are bookmarked on my browser and are more than worth your time (Slant, Fandor, Film.com, etc.), these three hubs have yet to be trumped for quality, seriousness and consistency. On a somewhat related note, it seems personal blogs have fallen out of fashion in the last few years, which is a real shame.

Without futher ado...

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Michael Atkinson: "Viva Mabuse! #61: Ebony and Ivory" // 11/11/2013 // Sundance Now Blog // (Discussion of contemporary films "about race")

Doug Dibbern: "On Not Seeing Movies" // 5/17/2013 // MUBI Notebook

David Ehrlich: "Like a Movie" // Reverse Shot // (Review of Like Someone in Love)

Michael Glover Smith: "Richard Linklater and the VHS Generation" // 6/1/2013 // White City Cinema

Daniel Kasman: "Crime & Existence: Lav Diaz's North, the End of History & A Conversation with Lav Diaz" // MUBI Notebook // (Cannes Report)

Daniel Kasman and Fernando F. Croce: "TIFF 2013 Correspondences" // May 2013 // MUBI Notebook // (A series of 9 exchanges covering the Toronto International Film Festival)

Glenn Kenny: "5+1 Transcendent Movie Theater Experiences I've Had Over The Past 12 Months" // 8/9/2013 // Some Came Running

Glenn Kenny: "Hitchcock's Bubbles" // 6/28/2013 // Some Came Running // (Discussion of a moment from Hitchcock's The Ring)

Michael Koresky: "Passing Through" // Reverse Shot // (Review of Before Midnight)

Ryland Walker Knight: "Bounding 'Round Town" // 7/18/2013 // MUBI Notebook // (Review of Frances Ha)

Peter Labuza: "Tokyo Story Hits Criterion Blu-ray: Questioning a Canonical Classic" // 12/3/2013 // The Film Stage

Kevin B. Lee: "Argo Fuck Yourself" // Slate // (Review of Argo)

Calum Marsh: "The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes is the Scariest Movie Ever Made" // 10/30/2013 // Film.com // (Column on Brakhage's film)

Adrian Martin: "The Moves #1: Blood" // August 2013 // Transit // (Discussion of a "move" in Pedro Costa's O Sangue)

Adrian Martin: "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" // 8/30/13 // Fandor's Keyframe Daily // (Essay on Night Across The Street)

Adam Nayman: "Atrocity Exhibition" // Reverse Shot // (Review of 12 Years a Slave)

Adam Nayman: "Victory Lap" // cinema scope // (Review of Nebraska)

Nick Pinkerton: "Bombast #119" // Sundance Now Blog // (Column on Inside Llewyn Davis)

Jeff Reichert: "Into the Wild" // Reverse Shot // (Review of Post Tenebras Lux)

Vadim Rizov: "Your Opinion Sucks" // 11/8/2013 // RogerEbert.com // (Report from Comic Con)

Vadim Rizov: "And Everything is Going Fine" // cinema scope // (Review of Side Effects)

Bill Ryan and Keith Uhlich: Conversation on Twixt // October 2013 // To Be Contd.

Michael Sicinski: "A Sculpted Homily" // cinema scope // (Review of Camille Claudel 1915)

Josh Timmerman: "Terrence Malick, Theologian: The Intimidating, Exhilarating Religiosity of The Tree of Life and To the Wonder" // 6/22/2013 // MUBI Notebook

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: "Dear Roger" // 4/5/2013 // MUBI Notebook // (Tribute to Roger Ebert)

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: Review of Grown Ups 2 // 5/11/2013 // The AV Club //

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: "What is the 21st Century? Revising the Dictionary" // 2/1/2013 // MUBI Notebook // (Essay on concept of "workflow")

Blake Williams: "Master Shots: Tsai Ming-liang’s Late Digital Period" // cinema scope // (quasi-review of Stray Dogs)

Various Writers: 100 Greatest Horror Films of All Time // 10/28/2013 // Slant Magazine

(Final Note: Please post your favorite pieces in the comments section to, you know, further spread the love.)

Liv & Ingmar (2012) A Film by Dheeraj Akolkar

You don't need to look much further than its cornball poster art to get an idea of what kind of film Dheeraj Akolkar's Liv & Ingmar is. In honor of Liv Ullmann's 75th birthday, NYC's Film Society of Lincoln Center is holding a week-long celebration of the actress' collaborations with Ingmar Bergman, and the brief retrospective kicks off with this documentary, a rather disproportionately gushy opening act to a series of bleak, intense dramas. My full thoughts, for In Review Online, can be read here.

Screening Notes #23 (Year-End Catch-Up Blurbs)

Nebraska: The above image gets at the heart of Alexander Payne's latest. From the perspective of a television set beaming a Detroit vs. Chicago NFL game (is there a more classic, long-standing matchup?), we see pale, wrinkled, defeated men, eyes frozen by the familiar spectacle before them even as their investment seems less a product of genuine excitement than numbing routine. A common critique lobbed at Nebraska, and at Payne in general, is that the director creates grotesque caricatures only to belittle them. I feel Payne recognizes these Midwestern bumpkins waiting to die in their sunken sofas as tragic manifestations of accumulated repression and resignation to life's shortcomings and disappointments, and the resulting sense of dark humor comes, at least in this case, not from smug superiority but from a heavyhearted acknowledgment of the ways in which life wears on everyone. Seeking to replace lost pleasures, the film's characters resort to materialistic desires, illusory as they are; a father's (Bruce Dern) misguided pilgrimage to claim his transparently phony million dollar reward becomes the central narrative and thematic thrust, but the falseness of the promise only exacerbates the breakdown of trust and support within his estranged family. "I just want one," grumbles a perpetually hungover and out-of-it Dern of his desire for a new pickup truck, crystallizing the prevailing attitude of the ensemble: when life no longer seems to offer joy, wealth and belongings are assumed to be the corrective. Nebraska's resonant monochrome widescreen images are in the vein of the predominantly gray, sparsely populated Midwestern landscape photography of Stranger than Paradise (1984), another film which regards the stubborn commitment to a fading lifestyle with a tarnished romanticism. But Payne's film offers another level specific to today's America; in the deceptively schmaltzy denouement, we're not quite watching a man's triumphant re-discovery of himself, but rather the full emergence of a new, more dispiriting form of father-son bonding predicated on the temporary relegation of real problems to shiny distractions.


Dallas Buyers Club: On this one, I'm mostly in agreement with R. Kurt Osenlund, whose politically charged piece intones with a sense of fed-up finality: Why must we continue to not only accept but elevate this sort of myopic message-mongering? As a heterosexual, I can't speak with the same authority, but I nonetheless found the film's portrayal of LGBTQ culture to be staggeringly one-note and its bid for queer awareness to be almost pathetically flawed. Matthew McConaughey's portrayal of Ron Woodroof as a vitriolic homophobic redneck-turned-gay-hugging-survivalist has a definite exhibitionist force (the actor lost considerable weight for the role, and sinks into his despicable identity with great conviction), but it's squelched by what he represents: a hateful prick being implausibly sheohorned into the dominant Hollywood narrative of redemption. What results is a classic case of eggs-in-the-wrong-basket storytelling. Director Jean-Marc Vallée strains to render Woodroof a tragic hero at the expense of showing any logical demonstration of how he traverses the vast ideological ground that takes him from regarding "faggots" as the bane of the Earth to getting into fistfights over them in grocery stores. In the meantime, the struggles of an entire people – represented here as only the most radically marginalized personalities, the folks most likely to stir homophobic fire – becomes a mere footnote, the vehicle for Woodroof's character arc but rarely a palpable large-scale tragedy. A late-stage shift into hetero melodrama (Jennifer Garner's flimsy doctor never confronting Woodroof's greatest human failings even as she initially expresses disgust towards him) starts to feel in this context like an insult.


The Last Time I Saw Macao: Unclassifiable and unpredictable, João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata's utterly unique documentary-fiction hybrid (I realize that in today's festival landscape such a characterization might sound contradictory) begins as a fairly straightforward visual travelogue of Macao (a "Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China" that was once a longtime Portuguese colony), then lays over the top of it an entirely invisible narrative with campy shadings of noir and sci-fi before ultimately surrendering the film to some uncanny conspiratorial force that enshrouds the movie's final passage in a cryptic, wordless, vaguely apocalyptic fog. Prior to watching this, I had only seen Rodrigues' short Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, which shares with Macao a cash-strapped inventiveness; the director and his screenwriting partner conjure up their enigmatic atmosphere via mostly static documentary images of contemporary Macao and the latter's paranoid narration alone. While Mata guides the viewer in his quest through his old hometown for a stripper in trouble named "Candy," the camera seems to adopt his perspective (one that's prone to Pedro Costa-like urban tableaux) but is equally likely to "construct" suggestive details through nifty compositional tactics. For instance, Candy's supposed murder at the hands of gangsters occurs at a shadowy dock where construction equipment and nautical structures obscure the line of sight, leaving us to speculate upon the source of bone-chilling screeches that could either be the menace that Mata speaks of or mere industrial clamor. The film is tantalizingly drawn to the disconnect between what we see and what we hear, a dissociative spell it seems to link to the post-colonialist mindset (Mata, after all, plays a Portuguese filmmaker returning as if by some magnetic pull to his old colony). Moreover, street animals – specifically cats – are omnipresent throughout as bizarre escorts, suggesting Rodrigues and Mata are consciously working in the lineage of Chris Marker.

Screening Notes #22 (Year-End Catch-Up Blurbs)

Stories We Tell: A very pleasurable experience less because of Polley's meta-fictional Investigation into Memory and The Human Condition and more because of the film's loving portrait of an eccentric family/"family," but I'm less interested in talking about how her father resembles Einstein and her brother has some awkward laughing fits than I am in questioning the film's strategies. At its core, Polley's decision to angle her memoir towards a third act twist that reveals the constructed nature of the film's 8mm home-movie flashbacks (it's pretty obvious this is the case right off the bat, as every shot is so conveniently complementary to what's being said) does her no favors. Why not either be forward about concerns of narrative and cognitive reconstruction from the get-go or not spill the beans at all? I can't help but think that in trying to pull the rug out from under the audience, Polley's only dodging the real investigative work that she could have spent over an hour doing. Instead, we get a didactic section in which she deceptively spells out her intentions of highlighting the discrepancies between recollection and fact (obviously unrealized ones unreflected in the film's montage), which winds up having a reverse effect of revealing what the film is actually doing: not studying the cognition of the interviewees' but rather making clear the self-discovery process of Sarah Polley. She's using the duplicitous act of filmmaking in an attempt to understand her parents' history and how it relates to her. All of this is to say the film is more of an exploratory process than a fully realized, internally coherent object, a truth that would go down easier were it not for Polley's muddled but emphatically telegraphed intellectual aims.


Inside Llewyn Davis: Initial impulse is that the Coens' latest nails a series of frustrations particular to independent musicians: 1) the feeling that for whatever reason the zeitgeist has passed you by, that the general consensus is slightly out of step with your creations; 2) the resulting sense of diffused irritation, simultaneously pointed at everyone and no one in particular; 3) a tendency to then retreat inward, convinced of your authenticity within a landscape of phoniness. In a sort of masochistic way (I'm a musician myself that has felt like Llewyn more times than I'd like to admit), I enjoyed the hell out of the film for these reasons, even against my better judgment. In retrospect, I feel skeptical about the film's perhaps too-easy design, which involves trotting out an ensemble that skews a little too neatly towards one-dimensional hostility (Cary Mulligan's sour impregnated careerist the most conspicuous offender, John Goodman's declining jazz-head a more charismatic simpleton). When a character's not expressly designed to belittle Llewyn, they're usually some varying shade of cheaply presented pandering conventionality; thus Justin Timberlake's thoroughly white-bread pop performer, a role that functions at least partly as the actor's winking autocritique. It's clear to me that the film's not working on the level of realism (its best scenes, both set on a snowy highway, have intriguing mystical overtones enhanced by Bruno Delbonnel's death-shrouded cinematography), that its outsized archetypes are more a product of Llewyn's downtrodden subjective filter than they are of the Coens' alleged misanthropy, but there's still something simpleminded about the way the film wipes away any sense of a persuasive human argument against its protagonist's all-consuming pessimism. Already dying to watch this again though, so I have hope that some of my reservations are somewhat negligible.

They Live (1988) A Film by John Carpenter

While everybody rabidly chews up the year's releases in a mad dash for year-end lists (I'm doing some of that too, to be fair), my viewing highlight of the past month is most certainly a 25-year-old film that will get an IFC Center revival starting tomorrow: John Carpenter's exuberantly alive sci-fi satire They Live. The movie features a pro wrestler marching the streets of LA mouthing off to and pulverizing heinously deformed 9-5'ers; in the premise alone, there's basically nothing to object to. I get into some of the film's more complicated achievements, including why it remains one of Hollywood's most intelligent consumer culture takedowns, over at In Review Online.