Robert Aldrich Retrospective

The Harvard Film Archive is hosting "...All the Marbles (The Complete Robert Aldrich)" this summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm proud to say I contributed the introduction, as well as program notes on Kiss Me Deadly, World for Ransom, Ten Seconds to Hell, The Legend of Lylah Clare, Attack!, The Longest Yard, Big Leaguer, Apache, The Last Sunset, The Choirboys, The Dirty Dozen, Kiss Me Deadly, The Prowler, Sodom and Gomorrah, Too Late the Hero, The Grissom Gang, 4 for Texas, Hustle, The Southerner, The Angry Hills, The Frisco Kid, Emperor of the North, and The Big Knife.

Here's an excerpt of the intro:

"In many ways, Aldrich came out of the gate with a will to impress and a sensibility largely formed. In the first three years of his career alone, he directed Apache, one of the first Hollywood Westerns to center on a Native American protagonist (despite a bronzed Burt Lancaster playing him) and treat the subject of the white man’s colonization of the West bluntly; Vera Cruz, a financially triumphant vehicle for Lancaster and Gary Cooper; Kiss Me Deadly, a cause célèbre for the tough-to-please Cahiers du Cinéma clique and a sly retooling of the film noir genre; and The Big Knife, a scalpel sunk deep into the charade of a movie industry founded on duplicity and authoritarianism. These were films that aimed to make a mark, upturning expectations for the genres in which they worked and casting a view of society as inherently broken, a wall against which principled men must relentlessly push. They laid down the archetype that would course through Aldrich’s entire body of work. In his words, 'It’s the same character in a number of pictures that keeps reappearing…a heroic figure, who understands that the probabilities are that he’ll lose.'"

The Alchemist Cookbook (2016) A Film by Joel Potrykus

"Joel Potrykus's last film, Buzzard, placed its loafer protagonist in a crushingly dull middle-American milieu until he went berserk, with the donning of Freddy Krueger fingers and Halloween-store masks crudely symbolizing the rejection of a status-quo existence while also staying well within the bounds of realism. His new film, the beguiling The Alchemist Cookbook, begins where Buzzard left off, with the numbing social context a thing of the past and the hero, like some metamorphosing movie monster of yesteryear, transforming hastily into something beyond (or sub) human." Full review of The Alchemist Cookbook, which plays as part of BAMCinemaFest, continues here.

Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy

"Musical leitmotifs play a central role in Wim Wenders's 'Road Trilogy,' acting as both mood-setters and structural backbones. Nowhere is this more evident than in Alice in the Cities, which contains in one track, an arpeggiated acoustic guitar and synthesizer loop banged out in an afternoon by German krautrock group Can, the entire methodology and temperament of what would become a philosophically linked series of films. In musical-theory terms, the piece drones on an Aeolian modal chord and never settles on the root, creating a suspended sense of irresolution and uncertainty that aptly sets the stage for the 1974 film's meandering dramatic trajectory, as well as its ultimate view of life as a series of chance encounters without a clear end point." Full review of the new Criterion blu-ray here.

The Other Side (2015) A Film by Roberto Minervini

"An artist of herculean empathy turns his camera on a narrow-minded community in The Other Side, Italian director Roberto Minervini's fourth cinematic sojourn in the American South. Nearly every moment in this Bayou-set docu-fiction hybrid engenders a tricky twofold reaction: The words and actions of the people on screen often trigger revulsion, anger, or pity, even as Minervini's camera tenderly cozies up to its subjects, examining them in intimate proximity until the root causes and emotional justifications for their destructive behaviors become impossible to ignore." Review continues here.

The Holcroft Covenant (1985) A Film by John Frankenheimer

"Noel Holcroft (Michael Caine) doesn't know how to use a gun when The Holcroft Covenant begins. By the film's conclusion, not only can he hold one with the kind of cool poise expected of spy heroes, but he's also sharp with pistol disassembly and reassembly. This education dovetails with a plot that finds Holcroft, an honest New Yorker in the commercial construction business, becoming the victim of a transnational terror scheme and ultimately learning enough about it to singlehandedly upend its fulfillment of a prospective Fourth Reich. The year is 1985 (“Now,” as a title urgently informs us), a time in which the United States was still using counterintelligence to sniff out Soviet influence. Yet director John Frankenheimer and writer George Axelrod look at espionage and find the very concept a destructive breach of privacy and a route to anarchy, something for which active resistance—in this case, prowess with a firearm—must come into play." Full review here.

Art of the Real

"For those still reeling from seasickness induced by Leviathan, Art of the Real has the tonic. Dead Slow Ahead, another experimental, largely nocturnal portrayal of industrial seafaring, moves with the lava-flow tempo suggested by its spot-on title, with director Mauro Herce's camera a seemingly high-tonnage contrast to Leviathan's plethora of featherweight recording devices. Panning, tilting, and dolly movements are sparse, usually occurring at paces almost imperceptible to the eye as they scan the musculature and intestinal corridors of a gargantuan cargo ship pushing through the Atlantic toward New Orleans like an undigested chunk of food exiting the body. An organism at once labyrinthine and blocky, it becomes the primary object of study for Herce, who appears only to reveal the human laborers on the vessel incidentally—and even then, as tiny instruments within the alien mechanics of the larger machine on which they toil."

That's an excerpt from one of my pieces this year on Film Society of Lincoln Center's Art of the Real series. I wrote two dispatches on the festival: one on festival highlight Dead Slow Ahead and Jose Luis Guerin's The Academy of Muses, and one on Ben Rivers' What Mean Something and Italian entry Il Solengo.

Green Room (2015) A Film by Jeremy Saulnier

"Bigotry ends up playing little direct role in the reckless murderous corruption that advances the plot of the locked-room thriller Green Room. Still, Jeremy Saulnier bluntly sets the record straight, early and often, that the thugs who run the exclusionary heavy metal club in the backwoods of Oregon where the film is set and who cover up crimes on their own premises are wretched, loathsome pieces of shit undeserving of a space on this planet. When our heroes, a woebegone punk quartet called the Ain't Rights, arrive in the titular backstage lair before a gig they've taken in the express interest of some much-needed cash, the background of every shot is littered with a cornucopia of advertisements for modern history's most oppressive institutions: swastika wall scribbles, Confederate flags, and all kinds of shiver-inducing decals advocating for the supremacy of the straight white male." Review continues at Slant.