REVERSEBLOG: the reverse shot blog

April 2015 Film Preview

Tory Kamen and Becca Rose — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 14:00:00 GMT

Summer blockbuster season is just around the corner, but there's no need to wait until then to see a great movie. April brings us a wide variety of women-centric projects, as well as quite a few films helmed and/or written by women.

The month starts off with "Woman in Gold," starring Helen Mirren as a Jewish woman on a journey to recover her family's heirlooms, which was stolen by the Nazis. It's based on a true story, and Mirren roots the film with her powerful presence. "Closer to the Moon" is another WWII-era drama set for an April release, this one based on the crime capers of a group of Jewish resistance fighters a few years after the end of the war. "Marie's Story" is another period piece, centering around the efforts of a 19th-century nun to help a girl born blind and deaf.

There are a few more women-focused dramas being released in April, including the much-buzzed "Clouds of Sils Maria," which garnered Kristen Stewart the prestigious Cesar Award for supporting actress. Stewart has made waves for being the first American actress to win the French award, and the film looks to capitalize on that with its American release. “Félix & Meira" is another award-winner coming out this month. The Best Canadian Feature from the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival aims to make its mark with the story of an unconventional and radical love affair, one that reaches across racial and religious lines. "About Elly" also confronts cultural biases with its depiction of Iran's upper middle class.

"Effie Gray" tackles the sexual politics of the Victorian era, and with a screenplay from Emma Thompson, it's sure to be intriguing as well as quick-witted. Speaking of intriguing, "The Age of Adaline" follows a woman who mysteriously stopped aging eight decades ago. Blake Lively centers the film as Adaline, struggling with love and trust and all the other things that might follow when one lives seemingly forever.

Courteney Cox makes her big-screen directorial debut (the actress has previously directed episodes of "Cougar Town," which she stars in) with "Just Before I Go," and screenwiter Gren Wells makes hers as well with "The Road Within." Director Mia Hansen-Løve ("Goodbye First Love") directs Greta Gerwig in "Eden," a look at the rise of French electronic music in the 90s.

The month will also see the release of a few very different documentaries. "The Hand That Feeds" focuses on undocumented immigrants struggling to form an independent union, while "Iris" follows 93-year-old Iris Apfel, a flamboyant New York City fashion icon. "Antarctic Edge: 70° South" is focused on the changing climate of the Antarctic's Peninsula and was made with the collaboration of Rutgers University students and scientists.

We'll also see comedic projects featuring Mary Elizabeth Winstead ("Alex of Venice") and Rose Byrne ("Adult Beginners"). Nia Vardalos returns to the screen with a role in "Helicopter Mom," which promises an outrageous performance from the "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" star. "Sweet Lorraine" and "Farah Goes Bang" round out the women-centric comedy offerings of the month.

Here are all the women-centric films opening in the month of April. All descriptions are from press materials unless otherwise noted.

April 1

Woman in Gold

"Woman in Gold" is the remarkable true story of one woman’s journey to reclaim her heritage and seek justice for what happened to her family. Sixty years after she fled Vienna during World War II, an elderly Jewish woman, Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren), starts her journey to retrieve family possessions seized by the Nazis, among them Klimt’s famous painting "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I." Together with her inexperienced but plucky young lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds), she embarks upon a major battle, which takes them all the way to the heart of the Austrian establishment and the U.S. Supreme Court, and forces her to confront difficult truths about the past along the way.

April 3

The Hand That Feeds (doc) - Co-Written and Co-Directed by Rachel Lears

At a popular bakery café, residents of New York’s Upper East Side get bagels and coffee served with a smile 24 hours a day. But behind the scenes, undocumented immigrant workers face sub-legal wages, dangerous machinery, and abusive managers who will fire them for calling in sick. Mild-mannered sandwich maker Mahoma López has never been interested in politics, but in January 2012 he convinces a small group of his co-workers to fight back.

Risking deportation and the loss of their livelihood, the workers team up with a diverse crew of innovative young organizers and take the unusual step of forming their own independent union, launching themselves on a journey that will test the limits of their resolve. In one roller-coaster year, they must overcome a shocking betrayal and a two-month lockout. Lawyers will battle in back rooms, Occupy Wall Street protesters will take over the restaurant, and a picket line will divide the neighborhood. If they can win a contract, it will set a historic precedent for low-wage workers across the country. But whatever happens, Mahoma and his coworkers will never be exploited again.

Effie Gray - Written by Emma Thompson

In her original screenplay “Effie Gray,” Emma Thompson takes a bold look at the real-life story of the Effie Gray-John Ruskin marriage, while courageously exposing what was truly hiding behind the veil of their public life. Set in a time when neither divorce nor gay marriage were an option, “Effie Gray” is the story of a young woman (Dakota Fanning) coming of age and finding her own voice in a world where women were expected to be seen but not heard. “Effie Gray” explores the roots of sexual intolerance, which continue to have a stronghold today, while shedding light on the marital politics of the Victorian era.

April 8

About Elly

As with director Asghar Farhadi's better-known films, “About Elly” concerns the affluent, well-educated, cultured, and only marginally religious members of Iran's upper-middle class. Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti), a pretty young woman invited as a possible romantic interest for one of the newly single men among this group, disappears suddenly without a trace. The festive atmosphere quickly turns frantic as friends accuse one another of responsibility. Plot-wise, Farhadi's drama has been compared to “L’Avventura”; but the film is less concerned with Elly's disappearance per se than with exploring the intricate mechanisms of deceit, brutality, and betrayal which come into play when ordinary circumstances take a tragic turn.

April 10

Clouds of Sils Maria

At the peak of her international career, Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous twenty years ago. But back then, she played the role of Sigrid, an alluring young girl who disarms and eventually drives her boss Helena to suicide. Now she is being asked to step into the other role, that of the older Helena. She departs with her assistant (Kristen Stewart) to rehearse in Sils Maria; a remote region of the Alps. A young Hollywood starlet with a penchant for scandal (Chloë Grace Moretz) is to take on the role of Sigrid, and Maria finds herself on the other side of the mirror, face to face with an ambiguously charming woman who is, in essence, an unsettling reflection of herself.

The Sisterhood of Night - Directed by Caryn Waechter and Written by Marilyn Fu

Based on the short story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steven Millhauser, "The Sisterhood of Night" is a story of friendship and loyalty set against the backdrop of a modern-day Salem witch trial. Shot on location in Kingston, NY, the film chronicles a group of girls who have slipped out of the world of social media into a mysterious world deep in the woods. The tale begins when Emily Parris (Kara Hayward) exposes a secret society of teenage girls. Accusing them of committing sexually deviant acts, Emily’s allegations throw their small American town into the national media spotlight. The mystery deepens when each of the accused takes a vow of silence. What follows is a chronicle of three girls’ unique and provocative alternative to the loneliness of adolescence, revealing the tragedy and humor of teenage years changed forever by the Internet age.

Farah Goes Bang - Directed by Meera Menon, Written by Laura Goode and Meera Menon

A road-trip comedy that centers on Farah (Nikohl Boosheri), a twenty-something woman who tries to lose her virginity while campaigning for John Kerry in 2004. Farah and her friends K.J. and Roopa follow the campaign trail to Ohio, seizing this charged moment in their lives and the life of their country.

April 17

Closer to the Moon

Set in 1959 Bucharest, “Closer to the Moon” opens as the crime is hatched and executed by old friends from the WWII Jewish Resistance, who seek to recapture the excitement of their glory days. Led by a chief police inspector (Mark Strong) and a political academic (Vera Farmiga), the quintet also includes a respected history professor (Christian McKay), a hotshot reporter (Joe Armstrong), and a space scientist (Tim Plester). Their postwar influence fading amid an ongoing Stalinist purge of Jews and intellectuals, the disillusioned gang retaliates by hijacking a van delivering cash to the Romanian National Bank, staging the robbery to make it look like a movie shoot. Caught and convicted in a kangaroo court, the culprits, with help from an eyewitness (Harry Lloyd) to the robbery, are forced to reenact their crime in a devious anti-Semitic propaganda film.

Felix & Meira

Winner of Best Canadian Feature at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, “Félix & Meira” is the story of an unconventional romance between two people living vastly different realities mere blocks away from one another. Each lost in their everyday lives, Meira (Hadas Yaron), a Hasidic Jewish wife and mother, and Félix (Martin Dubreuil), a Secular loner mourning the recent death of his estranged father, unexpectedly meet in a local bakery in Montreal's Mile End district. What starts as an innocent friendship becomes more serious as the two wayward strangers find comfort in one another. As Felix opens Meira's eyes to the world outside of her tight-knit Orthodox community, her desire for change becomes harder for her to ignore, ultimately forcing her to choose: remain in the life that she knows or give it all up to be with Félix.

Alex of Venice - Co-Written by Jessica Goldberg and Katie Nehra

In “Alex of Venice,” workaholic environmental attorney Alex Vedder (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is forced to reinvent herself after her husband (Chris Messina) suddenly leaves the family. Dealing with an aging father (Don Johnson) who still aspires to succeed as an actor, an eccentric sister (Katie Nehra), and an extremely shy son (Skylar Gaertner), Alex is bombarded with everything from the mundane to hilariously catastrophic events without a shoulder to lean on. Realizing she will thrive with or without her husband, Alex discovers her hidden vulnerability as well as her inner strength as she fights to keep her family intact in the midst of the most demanding and important case of her career.

Cas & Dylan - Written by Jessie Gabe

When 61-year-old self-proclaimed loner and terminally ill Dr. Cas Pepper (Richard Dreyfuss) reluctantly agrees to give 22-year-old social misfit Dyland Morgan (Tatiana Maslany) a very short lift home, the last thing he anticipates is that he will strike her angry boyfriend with his car, find himself on the lam, and ultimately drive across the country with an aspiring young writer determined to help him overcome his own bizarre case of suicide-note writer's block. But as fate would have it, that is exactly what happens. Suddenly Cas's solo one-way trip out West isn't so solo. With Dylan at his side, the two take off on an adventure that will open their eyes to some of life's lessons -- both big and small.

Antarctic Edge: 70° South (doc) - Directed by Dena Seidel

Dena Seidel’s documentary not only offers rare, beautifully shot footage of West Antarctic Pennisula's rapidly changing environment, studying the connections that reveal the concrete impact of climate change; it is also a one-of-a-kind collaboration between the Rutgers University Film Bureau and the Rutgers Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences and contains interviews and insights from some of the world’s leading ocean researchers. It is a fascinating look at their life’s work trying to understand how to maintain our planet.

The Road Within - Written and Directed by Gren Wells

Vincent (Robert Sheehan), a young man with Tourette's syndrome, faces drastic changes after his mother dies. Because his politician father is too ashamed of the disorder to have Vincent accompany him on the campaign, Vincent is shuttled off to an unconventional clinic. There he finds unexpected community with an obsessive-compulsive roommate and an anorexic young woman, and romance eventually -- and uneasily -- follows.

One of Variety's "10 Directors to Watch," screenwriter Gren Wells makes her directorial debut with this ambitious yet light-hearted coming-of-age tale about the potent medicine we all carry within ourselves. The film is packed with a talented ensemble, from emerging talents Zoë Kravitz, Dev Patel, and Sheehan to beloved veterans Kyra Sedgwick and Robert Patrick.

April 23

Sweet Lorraine

The double life of a Methodist minister's wife (played by Tatum O'Neal) catches up to her, as her husband campaigns for mayor in a small New Jersey town.

April 24

Just Before I Go - Directed by Courtney Cox

Ted Morgan (Seann William Scott) has been treading water for most of his life. After his wife leaves him, Ted realizes he has nothing left to live for. Summoning the courage for one last act, Ted decides to go home and face the people he feels are responsible for creating the shell of a person he has become. But life is tricky. The more determined Ted is to confront his demons, to get closure, and to withdraw from his family, the more Ted is yanked into the chaos of their lives. So, when Ted Morgan decides to kill himself, he finds a reason to live.

The Age of Adaline

After miraculously remaining 29-years-old for almost eight decades, Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) has lived a solitary existence, never allowing herself to get close to anyone who might reveal her secret. But a chance encounter with charismatic philanthropist Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman) reignites her passion for life and romance. When a weekend with his parents (Harrison Ford and Kathy Baker) threatens to uncover the truth, Adaline makes a decision that will change her life forever.

Adult Beginners - Co-Written by Liz Flahive (Simultaneously releasing to VOD)

A young, hipster entrepreneur (Nick Kroll) crashes and burns on the eve of his company’s big launch. With his entire life in disarray, he leaves Manhattan to move in with his estranged pregnant sister (Rose Byrne), brother-in-law (Bobby Cannavale), and three-year-old nephew in the suburbs – only to become their manny. Faced with real responsibility, he may finally have to grow up – but not without some bad behavior first.

Eden - Directed and Co-Written by Mia Hansen-Løve

The film follows the life of a French DJ who's credited with inventing "French house" or the "French touch," a type of French electronic music that became popular in the 1990s. Greta Gerwig costars. (IMDB)

24 Days - Co-Written by Emilie Frèche

January 20, 2006: After dinner with his family, Ilan Halimi (Syrus Shahidi) gets a call from a beautiful girl who had approached him at work and makes plans to meet her for coffee. Ilan didn't suspect a thing. He was 23 and had his whole life ahead of him. The next time Ilan's family heard from him was through a cryptic online message from kidnappers demanding a ransom in exchange for their son's life. (IMDB)

Helicopter Mom - Directed by Salomé Breziner

An overbearing mom (Nia Vardalos) decides that college would be more affordable if her son were to win an LGBT scholarship, so she outs him to his entire high school. However, he might not be gay. (Rotten Tomatoes)

April 29

Iris (doc) (Opening in New York City)

"Iris" pairs legendary 87-year-old documentarian Albert Maysles with Iris Apfel, the quick-witted, flamboyantly dressed 93-year-old style maven who has had an outsized presence on the New York fashion scene for decades. More than a fashion film, the documentary is a story about creativity and how, even in Iris' dotage, a soaring free spirit continues to inspire. "Iris" portrays a singular woman whose enthusiasm for fashion, art, and people are life's sustenance and reminds us that dressing, and indeed life, is nothing but an experiment. Despite the abundance of glamour in her current life, she continues to embrace the values and work ethic established during a middle-class Queens upbringing during the Great Depression.

April 30

Marie’s Story

At the turn of the 19th century, a humble artisan and his wife have a daughter, Marie (Ariana Rivoire), who is born deaf and blind and unable to communicate with the world around her. Desperate to find a connection to their daughter and avoid sending her to an asylum, the Heurtins send fourteen-year-old Marie to the Larnay Institute in central France, where an order of Catholic nuns manage a school for deaf girls. There, the idealistic Sister Marguerite (Isabelle Carré) sees in Marie a unique potential, and despite her Mother Superior's (Brigitte Catillon) skepticism, vows to bring the wild young thing out of the darkness into which she was born. Based on true events, “Marie's Story” recounts the courageous journey of a young nun and the lives she would change forever, confronting failures and discouragement with joyous faith and love. (Film Movement)

See It Big: "Play Time"

robbiefreeling — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:07:18 GMT

The first clue is in the title. Not in its meaning exactly, but in the fact that when Jacques Tati’s 1967 cri de coeur, three painful years in the making, was finally released in French cinemas, the title was in English. Gasp!

What was already clear to those who knew and worked with Tati was that by the early 1960s he was royally fed up—with being the “French Chaplin,” with being the filmmaker whose films (as Godard so cruelly put it) were watched by people who “didn’t really go to the cinema.” And most of all, he was starting to tire of his alter ego, Monsieur Hulot, whose popularity threatened to asphyxiate Tati’s career. A decade earlier, Mon oncle had introduced the concept of “Hulot versus mechanization” on a micro-level (Hulot visits his brother-in-law’s home and factory), but Tati wanted, and felt he had earned the right to, a wider canvas—so he built one, across a five-acre patch of wasteland outside Paris. There he shot Play Time.

“I could have carried on doing the same thing, there was no financial risk, it would have worked: the postman [from Jour de fête] gets married; the postman robs a bank or gets conscripted or whatever—like churning out canned food. In the end I made four films I wanted to make and my story ends there,” Tati would solemnly reflect years later when the fallout had started to ease off. For if Play Time was Tati’s Modern Times, it was also, regrettably, his Heaven’s Gate: the most expensive film ever made in France, it baffled audiences and flopped, despite always enjoying critical success and attaining masterpiece status years later when its manifold predictions about the dysfunctional relationship between man and modernity (cubicle-based working, wastefully vast reception space in modern office buildings) had started to come to pass. The film’s commercial failure contributed to Tati’s decline into bankruptcy and the great artist’s cliché of a penniless death.

Read the rest of Julien Allen's article and see Play Time at Museum of the Moving Image on November 4 and 5 as part of the series See It Big, guest curated by Reverse Shot.

Castles Made of Sand: Genevieve Yue reports from the 2011 Abu Dhabi Film Festival

robbiefreeling — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 05:00:58 GMT

bu Dhabi isn’t exactly a superlative city, save, perhaps, for its interest in superlatives. As the glitzy, modern capital of the UAE, a country that gained independence only 40 years ago, Abu Dhabi is an exceptionally recent invention, having constructed much of its air-conditioned environment within the past five years. While it can’t claim distinction through ancient cultural heritage, it has aggressively tried to make up the difference through grandiose titles designating things as largest, tallest, or most opulent. Take, for example, the Emirates Palace Hotel, the most expensive hotel in the world, and site of last year’s Abu Dhabi Film Festival, or, the plasma signs in the Marina Mall prominently displayed during the fest, which read “Guinness World Record Achievement for Road Safety Awareness,” whatever that means. Sadly, many of the honors have ceded to neighboring Dubai or Doha, including, at the Sheik Zayed Grand Mosque, what used to be the largest (and, possibly, the most bedazzled) chandelier. Luckily the mega-mosque can still lay claim to the world’s largest rug.

Flanking the city’s long boulevards and seaside Corniche with cheerful flags, the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, now in its fifth year, is one of the city’s most treasured events. Along with the projects at Saadiyat Island, where a campus for NYU Abu Dhabi recently opened and construction is currently underway for the Guggenheim and the Louvre, these ambitious undertakings loudly telegraph the kind of cultural cache the city seeks, or as some see it, import. Where it concerns the festival, this means Hollywood glamour, miles of red carpet, and yes, “the world’s largest open air cinema.”

Read Genevieve Yue's entire article on the 2011 Abu Dhabi Film Festival.

Photo above: from the film On the Edge.

A Few Great Pumpkins VI—Seventh Night: Fear(s) of the Dark

robbiefreeling — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:58:50 GMT

It’s commonplace to bemoan the sad reality that animation has been so long considered a children's medium. The limitless possibilities for expression and beauty and terror and surreality offered by the form make it frustrating that it has been co-opted by the gatekeepers of kids’ entertainment. Every once in a while, a Persepolis or a Waltz with Bashir comes along and reminds people that animation is, shockingly, not just for tots.

Of course, it’s impossible to not connect even those films to being young, as there’s an inherent picture-book quality to them that recalls for us those stories of our childhood, that gives us a sense of flipping through detailed pages. Their images have an emotional impact different from what words can summon. The spareness of our children's books is what lends them their specific atmosphere, quite different from the more overcrowded frames of graphic novels. There’s a painterly minimalism at work in the best storybooks, one which was harnessed extraordinarily for the exquisitely designed and uniquely unsettling 2008 French-produced anthology film Fear(s) of the Dark. A selection of animators, including Charles Burns, Blutch, and Marie Caillou, contributed horror-themed shorts, all of them in black-and-white, though of varying tones. Naturally, the result is a hodgepodge, and since Burns is the perhaps the best known of the animators, his segment, the first, a psychosexual transformation tale that’s part of erotic fantasy part Cronenbergian body horror, has been the most discussed. But if the viewer sticks it out for the final two segments, they’re in for the real treats. It’s in those two—Lorenzo Mattotti’s “The Great Plains” and Richard McGuire’s “Light and Dark”—that Fear(s) of the Dark lives up to its haunting title and also to the eerie uncanniness of the best children’s picture books. Read the rest of this year's final entry in our Great Pumpkins series. And Happy Halloween!

A Few Great Pumpkins VI—Sixth Night: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

robbiefreeling — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 06:07:36 GMT

Because Fredric March won the best actor Oscar for his double-role as the twin protagonists in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the film is primarily remembered for his performance. Yet to ignore the astonishing filmmaking on display by the great Rouben Mamoulian is to miss one of the most elegant, technically audacious Hollywood horror films of all time, not to mention one of the most truly dangerous. This is definitely pre-Code stuff: a flash of nudity, sure (from madman's prey Miriam Hopkins, in bed), but also a surprising rawness in its violence and a vivid anger permeating its every shock. It feels particularly fresh today in the way it dares to go deep—not into the psychology of its two-faced protagonist, but into the animalistic undertones that permeate Robert Louis Stevenson's original story and that influenced every "dual side of man" tale that popped up in its wake.

As a filmmaker in an era when talkies were new, Mamoulian clearly had free reign to try new things. And this being his second film (after Applause), he pulled out all the stops. The film begins with an extended, extreme point-of-view sequence, in which we see Jekyll's house through his own limited eyes, even as he walks up to the mirror to get ready to leave for a lecture. The claustrophobic images set us up for an awkward identification with the good doctor, as well as give us a fluid, maze-like sense of the laboratory and house in which he will turn himself, inadvertently, into a tragic character. This is gorgeous work by cinematographer Karl Struss (Island of Lost Souls, The Great Dictator), and throughout the film he's always putting the camera in surprising places—not only did he make expressive use of the frame, he seemed to really understand horror cinema in a preternatural way; there's nothing scarier than a hushed, detached camera resting quietly while the monster enters blurred in the background, creeping closer. Read the rest and keep checking back for new Great Pumpkins.

A Few Great Pumpkins VI—Fifth Night: The Howling

robbiefreeling — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 08:41:14 GMT

“Repression is the father of neurosis,” chides Patrick MacNee in the first clearly audible moments of The Howling (1981). Fortunately, Joe Dante’s never been one to hold it all in. This is, after all, the guy who unleashed not one but two sets of crazed Gremlins (and a squadron of homicidal plastic G.I. Joe knock-offs) on multiplex audiences, the guy who first made his named with something called The Movie Orgy. If the werewolf genre is all about giving over to the beast within, then movie-brat Dante would seem to be an ideal to candidate to helm an all-out howler.

And yet The Howling isn’t nearly as zany as the rest of Dante’s films. It has a finely controlled script by John Sayles, who, long before his enshrinement as the (social) conscience of the Amer-indie movement, was trying to Say Something: namely, that in an over-saturated mediascape populated by chattering pop psychologists, slavering TV personalities, and cartoonish advertisements, the sudden, on-camera transformation of a human being into an honest-to-goodness monster would seem pretty de rigueur. (That’s the film’s punchline). Dante would further mine this vein in his amazing contribution to Twilight Zone: The Movie, “It’s a Good Life,” which imagined a world at the whim of a TV-addicted boy, but without the undergirding of Sayles’s (blessedly humorous) cynicism. In The Howling, these two very different film artists found a wonderfully wobbly equilibrium.

Read the rest, and keep checking back all week for new Great Pumpkins!

A Few Great Pumpkins—Fourth Night: Kill List

robbiefreeling — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:48:00 GMT

Some horror movies send you off into the dark night giddy with fear and pleasantly reeling from revulsion. Others give you a glimpse of something so dark and bleak that you’re left with a queasiness in the pit of your stomach. What you witnessed was not in any traditional sense enjoyable (outside of the momentary thrills one can get from the exhilaration of shock), yet you’re moved. It managed to burrow to someplace not only grim but that you hadn’t really thought of before. Films like this are so rare—Psycho, The Wicker Man, Salò, The Blair Witch Project—that they tend to be later regarded as benchmarks for the genre. Who knows if Ben Wheatley’s phenomenally upsetting Kill List will ultimately follow in their forbidding footsteps, but from my point of view it has the potential.

Read the rest, and keep checking back all week for new Great Pumpkins!

Kill List is playing this weekend at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Scary Movies series.

[VIDEO] Reverse Shot Talkies #32: Todd Rohal, Robert Longstreet, Steve Little

clarencecarter — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:46:00 GMT

East meets west on the high seas in Reverse Shot's first Talkie/Direct Address mutation. Watch as DA host Damon Smith and filmmaker Todd Rohal canoe Austin's Town Lake and grapple with even discussing his hilariously bizarre new comedy, The Catechism Cataclysm.

Meanwhile, Talkies host Eric Hynes interviews CC stars Robert Longstreet and Steve Little about the worst direction Todd gave them and working with directors who don't like actors—all while paddling swan boats.

A Few Great Pumpkins VI—Third Night: Whistle and I’ll Come to You

robbiefreeling — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 05:44:44 GMT

Third Night:
Whistle and I’ll Come to You

Imagine a horror film with no anticipation, no sense of danger, no foreboding, no inexplicable happenings, no haunted house, no droplets of blood or creaking floors, or ominous bass line on the score. Imagine no music at all.

What if there was only the fear itself? Would that work?

Jonathan Miller’s Whistle and I’ll Come to You, produced for BBC television in 1968, is a singular piece of horror cinema because for its first half, it eschews “atmosphere” almost completely. Minimalism is not really a sufficient description; absenteeism would be better. Miller harnessed one of the characteristics of the short ghost story, which is that it is often told by amateurs like a joke, providing only the essentials required for the punchline to work, and took this idea to a startling extreme. The resultant film is, to many, almost inexplicably petrifying.

Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was not just a writer of ghost stories but also a legendary teller of them. His tales were read by candlelight to a small group of friends every Christmas Eve in the rooms of Kings College, Cambridge, where James was vice-chancellor, and later to schoolboys at Eton College. So popular were they that they have never since been out of print. Read to oneself, or out loud to an audience, James’s stories are still deliciously effective today, and Miller’s monochrome version of James’s most popular tale, Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad is both a reverent retelling and a subversion. For James delighted in descriptive atmosphere, painting vivid pictures of solemn landscapes and coloring complex characters with filigreed detail. James’s subtle, gradual build-up of tension is from the classical school of storytelling, but Miller (like James a Cambridge polymath, a qualified doctor, comedian, and director of radical English-language versions of classical Italian operas) takes this story to another place.

Read the rest of Julien Allen's entry, and keep checking back all week for new Great Pumpkins!

A Few Great Pumpkins VI–Second Night: Lost Highway

robbiefreeling — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 15:51:19 GMT

David Lynch is not often thought of as a director of horror films, yet for the past 30-plus years he has given us some of the most genuinely terrifying imagery in American cinema. Taking into account all the horror movies that have come and gone in the past decade, and all the momentarily effective genres that have had their moment to cast their long shadow (J-horror, torture porn, shaky caught-on-camcorder mockumentaries), was there a scene more pit-of-your-stomach-and-soul dreadful than the one set at Winkie’s diner in Mulholland Drive? It’s not merely the scene-punctuating emergence of the monstrous man lurking out back—it’s the entire buildup, which functions on a palpable dream logic better than any I’ve ever seen attempted in a film. The two mysterious men at the booth; the haunted-looking one letting the straight-arrow know he asked him here just to talk about his nightmares; the fear that the man of his dreams is out there and the vague declaration that “he’s the one who’s doing it” (doing what?! ); the camera that seems to haphazardly float around them as they talk; the moment when the straight-arrow’s specific position when paying his bill at the counter brings to fruition the man’s dream world; and finally the inexorable walk out back: we know he will be there. He pops out, ghost-like, the sound sucks out of the scene save a muffled pulse, and we feel we’re having a heart attack along with the terrified character.

There’s something heartening to all us genre fans that the greatest film of the last decade contains a sequence so truly disturbing, and one that relies on (and perfects) the bizarre unreality and uncanniness that makes horror what it is. This scene alone (and the film’s climactic night terrors) might be enough to consider Mulholland Drive a horror movie, but before this Lynch made Lost Highway, which is clearly the closest the director ever got to making a bona fide horror film beginning to end. Though in its bifurcated structure and narrative of radically shifting identities, the film now feels like a warm-up to Mulholland, Lost Highway remains a remarkable film—and a remarkably terrifying one. Its first hour is perhaps Lynch’s most tonally sustained work, a cryptic, profoundly unsettling creepshow that functions as its own contained narrative of jealousy and surveillance and features some of the richest pitch blacks ever realized onscreen (the great cinematographer Peter Deming proves himself a true master of the dark arts here).

Read the rest, and keep checking back all week for new Great Pumpkin entries!

See It Big: "The Shining"

robbiefreeling — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 06:49:48 GMT

When Stanley Kubrick announced he was planning on making his first horror movie, people had the right to be afraid. Too often tagged as a cool modernist, the New York–born director (living for many years in England a life that had been somewhat mischaracterized as overly remote and isolated) had in fact been responsible, despite his predilection for clean lines and damning irony, for some of the most heated, visceral images in cinema. Consider Colonel Dax’s impassioned dressing-down of the top brass (after it’s too late to save his men) in Paths of Glory; General Ripper’s dangerous, tobacco-haloed delusional behavior in Dr. Strangelove; HAL’s slow dismemberment in 2001: A Space Odyssey; any of the gut-churning spectatorial discomforts of A Clockwork Orange; the agonizingly protracted duels in Barry Lyndon—take-no-prisoners moments all. A Kubrick film doesn’t just make you feel what you’re watching, it forces you to watch helplessly as the world spins into controlled chaos.

The Shining turned out to be, paradoxically, Kubrick’s most controlled and most chaotic film, an exquisite structure that finally busts apart, as though with an axe. In Stephen King’s pulpy best-seller, the director saw something more than just a tale of a haunting, or a possession, or extrasensory perception, or split personality, or alcoholism, or the dissolution of patriarchy, or the question of what constitutes domestic normalcy—though it’s all of these things. Kubrick noticed in this story of a family isolated in a Colorado resort hotel during the deserted winter months an immense psychological labyrinth, an epic expression of man’s weakness and his incomprehension in the face of his own mortality. It’s a behemoth of a film, a monster in its own right, which bears down on the viewer, in both image and sound (those openings horns from the fifth movement of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” accompanying vertiginous helicopter images of the Colorado mountains instantly set up something grandly surreal).

Read the rest of Michael Koresky's article on The Shining, which is playing on October 28 at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the series See It Big, co-presented by Reverse Shot.

See It Big: "Alien"

robbiefreeling — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:27:14 GMT

Before I saw a single frame of Alien, it had nested under my skin. First imprinted on my underage mind was an image from the movie poster, which depicted an asteroid-like egg hovering over a latticework of gnarled moon rock, hatching spooky green light. A L I E N, it said, in a futuristic DOS-like type treatment paired with a singularly chilling tagline: “In space no one can hear you scream.” This movie might make me die, I remember thinking. This is a movie I want to see. (As a grade-schooler, I had been oddly immune to the galactic adventures of Luke, Leia, Obi-Wan, and the Rebel Alliance. It was simply a gut instinct—I wasn’t interested in Good vs. Evil. Alien was a different story.)

When I was finally old enough to rent it on video, I was struck not by how gruesome Scott’s classic cosmic-horror flick is, but how empty the film seems at times of physical bodies, earthling or otherwise, and how controlled and terrifyingly tense its air of suspense becomes as a result of those carefully calculated absences. Alien is a film about space, quite literally—not only the ingenious way that Scott deploys his camera in the cramped air shafts and passageways of the doomed crew’s star flyer, where something unimaginably Other has hitched a ride and lurks predatorily, but also how the double-jawed menace accosts the travelers in the grim, lonely vacuum of the cosmos, a vastness that only intensifies the inescapable feeling of claustrophobia and entombment. Seeing this uniquely frightening creature feature on the big screen, where you can fully appreciate Scott’s innovative-for-their-time visual effects, deeply unsettling sound design, and eerie evocation of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as post–Star Wars nightmare death trip, transforms those late-night, pillow-clutching jitters into a widescreen sensory scarefest with few rivals. Alien hasn’t faded from view in the past three decades (a director’s cut was released to theaters in 2003), nor has it lost its ability to induce a sickening dread in today’s see-Saw-prone audiences, because the fear it evokes is primal and profoundly disturbing.

Read Damon Smith's article on Ridley Scott's Alien,, playing on October 27 and 29 at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the series See It Big, co-presented by Reverse Shot.

A Few Great Pumpkins VI—First Night: The Masque of the Red Death

robbiefreeling — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:13:30 GMT

First Night:
The Masque of the Red Death

To these tired eyes, the greatest development in horror cinema in 2011 was the lack of a new Saw sequel. Keep your severed fingers crossed that this isn’t just a fleeting instance of taste from Lions Gate Films, and that the swollen, unimaginative, and sadistic franchise is over for good. Not only were the movies impoverished and cynical, they were doing damage to American horror filmmaking itself, making the genre synonymous with its lowest-common-denominator torture supply-and-demand for a number of years. True horror fans should have been outraged. Of course, sequel-itis was alive and well, nevertheless, with yet another Final Destination film (accident porn turns me off even more than its torturous close cousin), another chance to cheapen-by-making-expensive the Paranormal Activity concept, and the odd spectacle of a fourth entry in the Scream series (and this after Wes Craven imposed a silly “trilogy” superstructure on his series circa 2000). And do we need to mention the usual crop of remakes? (I doubt I’ll ever have the stomach for the CGI update of The Thing or the time for a sexy redux of Straw Dogs; but Fright Night had its atmospheric charms before it devolved into unrestrained and hackneyed spectacle, and I’ve been told The Crazies isn’t completely worthless.)

What of contemporary original horror, you ask? Though James Wan’s Insidious appears to be the year’s breakout hit of the genre, and though it is an admirable and effective scare machine, shockingly adept at creating chilling images that stick in the craw, its overall conception and design is so derivative of so many horror “essentials” (plus, oddly, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace) that one would have to use some form of analytic astral projection to justify it as original. Stakeland has its fans, but I haven’t taken the plunge. So, despite one upcoming winner (which might just be a benchmark of British horror, and which I will expound upon later in the week), 2011 is a fairly bloodless state of affairs for anyone who wants to see something a little, well, different. Not too much to ask for, it would seem, but then again horror is a peculiar form, reliant as it is on certain expectations that must be met, and the seemingly limited arsenal of Things That Scare Us.

Thankfully, as with every Halloween, there’s a seemingly endless treasure trove of horror films from prior decades, and there are even still a handful in there that can take you by surprise. Imagine my happiness upon finally deciding to watch Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death, the final film in the cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations by the independent impresario, and, as shot by cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, the most sumptuous. Next to Corman’s more hearty narrative of The Fall of the House of Usher and even his jokey The Raven with Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and the director’s standby devil, Vincent Price, the 1842 Poe story The Masque of the Red Death might seem at first glance a particularly odd choice for adaptation: at little more than two-thousand words it’s more of sketch than a story, with no vividly drawn characters or perceptible arc. It’s intuitive and metaphorical, a remarkably evocative description of fear and pestilence as it descends upon the merry masked ball of the heedless Prince Prospero, personified in a red-cloaked figure of doom.

Read the rest, and keep checking back all week for new Great Pumpkin entries!

NYFF: Michel Hazanavicius's "The Artist"

robbiefreeling — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 06:28:22 GMT

One of the most celebrated works of the great French cartoonist Sempé depicts a man who sees a lady fall over in the street and cannot contain his laughter, just as a large funeral cortège passes by. The grieving mourners are horrified by his behavior, so he takes refuge in a movie theater, where a Chaplin film is playing. As the entire theater rocks with laughter at the sight of Chaplin’s tramp falling in the street, the man sits quietly and weeps.

The French philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard once said in a television interview that no matter how many times he had watched the musical numbers of Singin’ in the Rain, he couldn’t sit through them without feeling his heart pounding in his chest.

What is revealed by these stories of Sempé and Baudrillard, and is so beautifully documented by Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, is France’s love affair with American cinema, in all its contrariness, its jealous aspirationalism, and in its belief in the transcendence of the “moment,” be it Chaplin’s own dancing bread rolls, the heartbreaking gesture of loyalty of von Stroheim’s Max in Sunset Boulevard, or Charles Foster Kane’s descent into madness—all of which and many more are strongly brought to mind, without being directly referenced, when watching The Artist. Read Julien Allen's review of The Artist.

"Martha Marcy May Marlene" plus an interview with director Sean Durkin

robbiefreeling — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 07:50:02 GMT

Like Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter—its only real rival for the title of Fall’s Best American Film—Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene concludes on a shot that’s either totally declarative or sneakily ambiguous. In both cases, it’s up to the viewer to decide whether the filmmaker has placed all of his cards on the table or is still holding a couple close to the vest. The comparisons between the two films don’t end there, either. While largely dissimilar in terms of style and subject matter, Take Shelter and Martha Marcy May Marlene are movies that warily examine gender roles—flipped mirror images of characters looking for a way out to find themselves ever more tightly constricted. Read Adam Nayman's review

And then read Nayman's short interview with Durkin:

RS: Was the idea always to tell the film through two separate timelines?

SD: I thought it would be the best way to represent the character’s confusion. It also came out from some of the research I did early on about cults—one of the first things I learned is that in a lot of cases, these groups don’t use clocks or calendars or anything that lets people keep track of time. It ties into some aspects of Buddhist philosophy, that there’s no such thing as the past, that everything is taking place in an eternal present. So I had the idea of [Martha] getting lost in time as soon as she leaves the compound—lost in time, or maybe stuck in time.

Kaurismäki's "Le Havre" opens this Friday

robbiefreeling — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:56:46 GMT

Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre starts like a caper film: two shoe-shiners stand at a railway station, waves of sneakers passing by. Then, a fine pair of leather oxfords stops before them. The camera tilts up to a man handcuffed to a briefcase, and, with his eyes darting around suspiciously, he lifts his shoe for a polish. He rushes off, and moments later we hear a gunshot. The churlish Marcel Marx (André Wilms) shrugs, “Well, at least I got paid first.”

True to Kaurismäki’s understated style, the setup runs into the blunt end of a deadpan joke; for nearly thirty years, his films have been less concerned with extraordinary events than the downtrodden people who impassively observe them. Quick to avoid the approaching police, Marcel closes up shop and ambles home, brushing off the incident as he does his grocer’s complaints of unpaid bills. Marcel stops in to greet his Finnish wife, Arletty (played by longtime Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen), who feeds him and demurely sends him off with a few coins to the local dive. “Foreigners see bums in a more romantic light,” mutters Yvette, the bar owner, regarding Marcel, but if the neighbors disapprove of this one-time Parisian bohemian, Marcel doesn’t seem to care. Here in the port city of Le Havre, in a dingy quarter left untouched after the war and the rest of the modernizing world, they’ve long put up with each other in grumbling complacence. Read Genevieve Yue's review of Le Havre, opening this Friday in New York and L.A. from Janus Films.

NYFF: Alexander Payne's "The Descendants"

robbiefreeling — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:01:20 GMT

An essentially dark drama bathed in tropical sunlight, Alexander Payne’s The Descendants almost dares you to take it seriously. Its glib direct-address voice-over narration, its sitcom-like establishing shots, its gaudy aesthetic of Hawaiian shirts and palm trees—none of these gestures announce The Descendants as a film striving for artistic credibility. And that’s just fine—for Payne and for us. As he showed in Election and About Schmidt, especially, Payne works in a defiantly accessible and mainstream register, yet manages to inject an emotional authenticity into his films, so that his characters, while clearly readable as regional and social types, behave in a manner that never feels overly cheapened by the machinations of some puppet master behind the scenes.

We’re not talking about uncompromised realism here, but rather a specifically American brand of filtered truth: like most of his fellow countrymen filmmakers, he prefers identifiable emotional arcs, the relatable comedy of behavior, the reliable drama of redemption. With The Descendants, a story of family and inheritance, Payne ventures into potentially uncomfortable territory and comes out with something reassuring—but that doesn’t make the journey unrewarding. Read Michael Koresky's review of The Descendants.

NYFF: Simon Curtis's "My Week with Marilyn"

robbiefreeling — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 06:40:13 GMT

As Andy Warhol well understood, Marilyn Monroe was a particularly modern type of celebrity, better known as an image than any character she played. His screenprinted portraits of her traded on her iconic power, demonstrating in popular culture as well as in silkscreen ink, that where it concerned Marilyn there was no such thing as over-saturation. Monroe’s entire persona, of course, was already a media creation, a role carefully crafted with platinum blonde curls, an alliterative stage name, a wink, and a smile. Since her death in 1962, there has been no shortage of actresses, Vegas imitators, and drag queens that have assumed the part, all to varying degrees of camp, yet beyond any historical interest a filmmaker would have in examining the sensationalist details of her life, her story also occasions a look into the nature of contemporary image-making itself.

Unfortunately Simon Curtis’s My Week with Marilyn, the latest film to tackle the subject, sticks mostly to biopic terrain, though initially, at least, it addresses the disjunction between Monroe’s public face and her stormy private life. Read Genevieve Yue's review of My Week with Marilyn.

NYFF: Mia Hansen-Love's "Goodbye First Love"

robbiefreeling — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:12:42 GMT

Goodbye First Love, the third feature from Cahiers du cinéma critic turned filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love, resembles her last, The Father of My Children, in several key ways. While the two films tell very different stories, both take a look at the fallout from personal catastrophes (in the new movie, the loss by attrition of a first love; in the older one, the death of a father), with a particular interest in these events as formative experiences for young adults. As time passes, via a steady rhythm of daily business (phone calls, appointments, parties, moping around), grief slowly begins to give way, as it never seemed it would, to a tentative levity. Hansen-Love also takes a loose before-and-after approach to these narratives. The Father of My Children is abruptly bifurcated; her new film spans years (around the turn of the twenty-first century) and drifts along episodically, though it also hinges on an imminent loss, if a less irrevocable one. Read Benjamin Mercer's review of Goodbye First Love.

Monday Hangover: The Thing

robbiefreeling — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:12:00 GMT

Monday Hangover:
The Thing
By Adam Nayman and Michael Nordine

“You’ve gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.” It’s too easy, maybe, to invoke David Clennon’s great, bug-eyed exclamation in the 1982 version of The Thing: the only ones kidding themselves are those who thought Hollywood wouldn't get around to redoing—or in this case, “prequelizing”—John Carpenter's career-benchmark thriller. A reimagining of a remake, then—or maybe, to get into the spirit of a story about an alien intelligence hopping between hosts, it’s a kind of inhabitation—an attempt to mimic the textures of its source material so that fans and newcomers alike can’t even tell the difference. Continue reading.

NYFF: Jafar Panahi's "This Is Not a Film"

robbiefreeling — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:56:09 GMT

Jafar Panahi is in danger of being reduced to a cause. Arrested in 2010 on nebulous charges that he was engaged in making a propaganda film attacking the Iranian government, Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison and received a 20-year ban from directing or writing any new movies. Panahi’s arrest galvanized the international film community, eliciting petitions and symbolic acts of protest (Panahi was made an honorary member of the 2010 Cannes jury, and an empty chair was reserved for him at the festival). Lost in all of this advocacy, however, are Panahi’s movies themselves. If he deserves to be called one of the world’s great filmmakers—and he surely does—it is on the basis of his extraordinary oeuvre, not because of the oppressive actions of an autocratic regime.

For Panahi, though, filmmaking has always had a political dimension. From his debut feature, The White Balloon, through 2006’s Offside, Panahi has explored contemporary urban life in Iran through intelligent and humanistic narratives that touch, ever so delicately, on issues of class and gender. Never a didactic or polemical filmmaker, Panahi puts character and story first, thus allowing the political realities that structure his characters’ lives to reveal themselves slowly, lending an authenticity that a more direct approach might compromise. To lose a filmmaker of this caliber at the peak of his career is a staggering blow for world cinema. All of which is to say that This Is Not a Film—which Panahi made while under house arrest awaiting sentencing, collaborating with his friend, the documentarian Motjaba Mirtahmasb—is more than a great, devastating piece of moviemaking; the movie (smuggled to the 2011 Cannes Film Festival on a USB drive inside of a cake) is something of a cinematic miracle. Read Chris Wisniewski's review of This Is Not a Film.

NYFF: Santiago Mitre's "The Student"

robbiefreeling — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:43:45 GMT

Since May, massive demonstrations led by both university and high school students demanding greater educational equality and a complete deprivatization of higher education have swept across Chile. Largely unreported in this part of the world, these protests have comprised marches, a two-day general strike, and occupations of high schools and universities. While gaining widespread national support, these demonstrations have also resulted in the death of at least one student, shot by a police sergeant firing into a crowd. The protests hint at a particular unified culture of student unrest rather unlike that in the United States, where the archetypal college student, long defined by Revenge of the Nerds and Animal House, spends more time binge drinking and contracting mono than engaging in politics. Glimmers of such a political movement can perhaps be seen in the involvement of students in Occupy Wall Street. Some may question what college kids, who enjoy the luxury of educational freedom and a lot of spare time on their hands, have to complain about, but, as the movement in Chile shows, student politics are related to politics at large.

Santiago Mitre’s The Student, from neighboring Argentina, suggests that student and national politics can be strange Machiavellian bedfellows. Read Leo Goldsmith's review of The Student.

NYFF: Gerardo Naranjo's "Miss Bala"

robbiefreeling — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 07:03:59 GMT

Up until now, Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo’s movies have seemed more devoted to energy than content. Earlier efforts like I’m Gonna Explode were brash and callow little things, translating the primal diegetic rebellion of Jean-Luc Godard into Spanish, enchanted by method, indifferent to message, positing his characters in a guerrilla war against the echoes of a distant history. But Naranjo’s new film, Miss Bala—among the toasts of this year’s Cannes Film Festival—may reveal his early work as the efforts of a revolutionary filmmaker killing time until his revolution.

Mexico has long been subjected to the hyper-violent and amorphous war between the DEA and the various drug cartels, but President Felipe Calderón’s 2006 crackdown on the criminal organizations has seen the conflict escalate beyond all precedent, resulting in the deaths of some 40,000 Mexican citizens over the last five years. The indiscriminate collateral damage has reduced several of the country’s states into battlegrounds, the violence almost casually achieving a reach and velocity more common to genocidal dictatorships. The bloodshed that has transformed Naranjo’s country has begun to transform his art: the broken psyche of civilian life has driven the filmmaker to refine and make raw his approach to cinematic expression. Read David Ehrlich's review of Miss Bala.

NYFF: Pedro Almodóvar's "The Skin I Live In"

robbiefreeling — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:17:57 GMT

Only Pedro Almodóvar circa 2011 could so effectively neuter an outré scenario like the one at the center of his new film, The Skin I Live In. Conscientious reviewers will feel the need to tiptoe around its major conceit similar to way the director does—but the more one talks around the film, the less one is likely to get out of it. Most of The Skin I Live In is structured with obfuscating tactics, which, as the plot wears on and its lines are more clearly drawn, only end up distracting from its central ideas. What could have been an inexorable, tragicomic study of a violently furious and genderless love instead becomes a pointless, meandering shell game played on the audience. So let the spoilers fly: unlike Almodóvar, I refuse to dance around The Skin I Live In, which in some alternate-reality cut could have been a touchingly tortured pas de deux rather than just a tortuous labyrinth. Read Michael Koresky's review of The Skin I Live In.

NYFF: Sean Durkin's "Martha Marcy May Marlene"

robbiefreeling — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:36:18 GMT