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No Blade of Grass

Cullen Gallagher — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:02:42 GMT

“No blade of grass grows, and birds sing no more; no joy or laughter where waves wash the shore; gone are all the answers, lost is all we have won; gone is the hope that life will go on.” As the movie progresses, that last line of the first verse proves to be unsettlingly prophetic. No Blade of Grass is less about preserving humanity in the face of annihilation than it is about the characters’ bitter realization that their world may be irreversibly changed.

92YTribeca Film Series: Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Leo Goldsmith — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:11:09 GMT

On January 16th, we’re hosting a screening of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. More information is available below, and at 92YTribeca.org

“Looks like catfood for constipated French rabbits!” Peter Greenaway’s hearty, lurid helping of Jacobean nastiness stuffs the eye (and all the other senses) with enough sex, gastronomy and haute couture for a half-dozen films. With subtlety thrown violently to the wind, the film is beautiful, demanding and appalling in equally meticulous measure, an overstuffed canvas with music by Michael Nyman, cinematography by Sacha Vierny and costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Bursting through all of this scatological splendor are the electrifying performances of the elite of ’80s West End theater, featuring Michael “Dumbledore” Gambon as the monstrously violent and boorish restaurateur Albert Spica, Helen Mirren as his adulterous wife and Tim Roth and Ciarán Hinds in very early film appearances. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is a sensorially overwhelming experience from one of the most talented, imposing, erudite and reviled filmmakers in the history of the cinema.

Director: Peter Greenaway. 98 mins. 1989. 35mm.

To purchase tickets or for further details, please visit 92YTribeca.org

I Fidanzati

Ben Ewing — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:47:37 GMT

First the glimmering white and black images of Ermanno Olmi’s I Fidanzati light up the screen and warm your heart. Then they abruptly flicker out—like imagined fleeting glances of a love affair you can’t forget but couldn’t hold onto. In seventy-some minutes, I Fidanzati teaches – no, simply lets you learn – about distance, time and the uncontrollable, bittersweet ways in which romances wax and wane.

The Working Class Goes To Heaven

Ian Johnston — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:51:07 GMT

Elio Petri is pretty much a forgotten figure nowadays but in his day made enough of an impact to share a Grand Prix at Cannes for this and to win an Academy Award for his earlier Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. Like that, Working Class stars Gian Maria Volonté, who gives here the ultimate portrayal of Alienated Labour in a full-blooded performance that’s still subtle enough to show clearly how Volonté’s character, factory pieceworker Lulù Massa, is barely conscious of the degree of exploitation he’s suffering, even when the loss of a finger pushes him to radical action. Petri’s film is expressionistic, histrionic, cacophonous, in stylistic tune with Lulu himself as he is buffeted by the forces around him, the speeded-up production line of the factory floor, the oppressive supervisors, the conformist union officials, the solipsistic student radicals, literally hemmed in within the frame by the narrow confines of the apartment he shares with his partner and her young son. What’s wrong with this society is made abundantly clear but the film hardly offers much hope for change: when at the end of the film Lula retells his dream of workers knocking down the walls around them it’s stirring stuffÑexcept that his co-workers can barely hear him over the din of the factory. So, we’re rather left with the image that Petri repeats throughout of the workers, having passed through the factory gates, trudging down the long road, expanses of snow on either side, towards the factory buildings. That, presumably, is “Heaven”.

Taken

Cullen Gallagher — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:13:33 GMT

While the xenophobic anxiety of Americans abroad isn’t a new subject (even Alfred Hitchcock approached the topic in his 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much), it’s difficult to watch certain scenes in Taken without thinking of contemporary parallels. It is moments like these in which the politics of action heroism reveal their hidden complexity. With the line between “good guy” and “bad guy” blurred, we allow the action hero to cross certain moral boundaries that would otherwise be prohibited.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Adam Balz — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:22:06 GMT

While there’s no denying the obvious soullessness to Dielman’s daily routine – subtlety, it seems, is not one of Akerman’s pillars of good filmmaking – it would be too easy to classify Jeanne Dielman as nothing more than a passive-aggressive feminist film—a purposefully long and tiresome experience (and experiment) that challenges the male-centric eyes of cinema to endure four hours of what many women endure for forty years.

Les biches

Sam Wasson — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:27:10 GMT

With looks as blank as these, it falls to Chabrol to make sense of them for us. He becomes, in a sense, a kind of translator, and uses his camera to reveal the quiet violence coursing beneath the façade. To pull it off, Chabrol could, like Hitchcock, dutch the angle (as in I, Confess), or subsume us in point of view (Rear Window), or try out terrific tricks (Vertigo), but – surprise, surprise – he’s too damn French for that.

Seconds

Aaron Cutler — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:35:57 GMT

This 1966 film, starring one of Hollywood’s biggest movie actors at the height of his success, is a sci-fi/horror/character study, and it flopped spectacularly upon its initial release. The narrative points cryptically in several directions without ever settling on one, confounding not just possible meanings and interpretations but the highways and byways that viewers take to find them. We know that the story is a pointer, but we’re unsure of precisely what it points to.

The Baby of Mâcon

Rumsey Taylor — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:54:23 GMT

Peter Greenaway – Violence in a Peter Greenaway film is presented under the pretense of fabrication, because his films are so notably visually embellished. But what makes this sequence particularly frightening is that this pretense does not diminish the severity of what is occurring in principle: a woman’s greatest torture and its approving audience.

Stalag 17

Eva Holland — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:37:23 GMT

Maybe it was the somber mood of the day – I watched Stalag 17 way back on November 11th – but I was left feeling puzzled and vaguely disapproving of this Second World War POW-camp classic. The story follows captured American soldier Sgt. J.J. Sefton, accused by his fellow prisoners of spying for the Germans after two of his fellows are killed in an escape attempt. Alright so far. But where The Great Escape leavened a very serious story with occasional doses of humor, Stalag 17 seems to do the opposite, filling the bulk of the movie with goofy sidekicks and light-hearted quips, interrupted by the occasional burst of deadly machine gun fire from the camp guards or a sudden outbreak of self-policing violence among the prisoners. I wonder if the movie’s proximity to the end of the war might be a factor – if humor was the best tool for tackling a subject that was still so fresh? In any case, if you like your war movies solemn and reverent, this may not be your best bet.

King Creole

Eva Holland — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:11:21 GMT

King Creole isn’t your standard Elvis flick. Sure, there are girls and baddies and bad one-liners – and, of course, a soundtrack’s worth of songs – but the whole thing is a few notches darker than, say, Blue Hawaii. 23 year-old Presley seethes convincingly as Danny Fisher, a high school flunk-out caught up in the crime and intrigue of 1950s New Orleans. The interspersing of death and despair with some truly goofy moments can be jarring, but the music – mostly a mixture of big-band NOLA jazz and early rock’n’roll – and the black-and-white French Quarter footage alone were enough to keep me happy throughout.

Heavy Metal Parking Lot

Katherine Follett — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:52:50 GMT

It’s 1986. Landover, Maryland. Judas Priest is playing the USAir Arena. Dokken opening. Two guys with cameras hit the tailgate. The short documentary, really just an extended montage, is exactly what you would expect.

And yeah, there’s a lot of implied condescending sniggering, a lot of scoffing at the mullets and rolling eyes at the shirtlessness and giggling at the unknowingly hopeless women who want to “jump Rob Halford’s bones”. But the thing I took away most from the 20-minute gonzo cult treasure was this:

My god, there are NO fat people there.

So who are we, with the advantage of hindsight, to feel superior?

Youth In Revolt

Evan Kindley — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:21:26 GMT

In Miguel Arteta’s Youth in Revolt, based on a series of short stories of C.D. Payne, Michael Cera plays Nick Twisp, a winsome sixteen year old hung up on Sheeni Saunders, a girl with fundamentalist Christian parents and a thing for Jean-Paul Belmondo. In order to be with her, he needs to get kicked out of his mom’s house, which means transforming himself into a juvenile delinquent named François and committing grand arson. This conceit allows Cera to take a novel approach to the problem of typecasting by playing a variation on the ineffectual-nice-guy character we know from Arrested Development, Superbad and Juno as well as the alpha male alter ego of same. This lets Cera show off what he does best — he’s the reigning king of the flustered, awkward reaction — while also stretching out in some impressive new directions: turns out he can do sociopathic intensity too! Luckily the film is able to match him in both sweetness and rage. Recurring references to Sheeni’s crush suggest a desire to make a teen Breathless, but Arteta’s direction has a controlled wildness and a knack for casual blasphemy that suggests Luis Buñuel remaking Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Rarely has a comedy surprised me so often without once violating its own tone or logic. The icing on the cake is the squad of expert character actors who inhabit the film’s margins: Steve Buscemi, Fred Willard, Mary Kay Place, M. Emmet Walsh and Justin Long are all familiar enough faces, but they’re rarely as funny or effective as they are here.

Prospero’s Books

Rumsey Taylor — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:57:28 GMT

Peter Greenaway – From the opening forward, the film remains relentlessly, coercively visual, as impenetrably dense as an encyclopedia of literary and aesthetic allusions. Prospero’s Books is an astonishing work, in this sense. But it is not precisely the cinema that astonishes; rather, it is the collage of scenario, superimposition and meta text, and this, for better or worse, is unique to no other body of work.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

Leo Goldsmith — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:46:51 GMT

Peter Greenaway – In a body of work many have described as chilly or elitist, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover stands as an exemplary and impassioned film about love and life under siege, an ode to that which is rich and strange in all things, a vision beyond the strictures of conventional art-making that magnifies rather than denies its many sumptuous pleasures. That it is also an unflinching exploration of all those things we wish to avoid is a testament to Greenaway’s conviction that art is not an escape from real life, but an experience that allows us to feel it more deeply. And that sometimes it must be rammed down our throats.

Drowning by Numbers

Evan Kindley — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:14:53 GMT

Peter Greenaway – The look of Drowning By Numbers is slightly unusual for Greenaway: the film was shot on location in East Anglia, mostly outside, mixing natural light with artificial in order to produce, in Greenaway’s words, “a surreal effect of trying to compete with God on his own lighting scheme.” The metaphor of competition is appropriate, since there is a protracted tussle going on throughout the film between Greenaway’s ultra-refined aesthetic and the provincial English setting. Greenaway has always been at once unmistakably English and indefinably alien (or pan-European, which for many English people comes to the same thing).

The Belly of an Architect

Leo Goldsmith — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:56:33 GMT

Peter Greenaway – In spite of its title, the film is not only about the titular architect’s round, dyspeptic stomach, which begins to deteriorate during his stay in Rome, but also about his wife’s uterus as it carries their unborn child. The visual connections abound between these two bellies – one growing with fecundity, the other pinching and collapsing in on itself and its bearer – and rhyme with Greenaway’s other major concern throughout the film: classical and neoclassical European architecture.

Transporter 3

Cullen Gallagher — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:21:25 GMT

The third (and hopefully not last) entry in the Transporter series opens with a scene unthinkable in either of the two previous movies: Frank Martin (Jason Statham) and Inspector Tarconi (Francois Berleand) in a boat, fishing on a lake. The short-lived tranquility of the scene is something of an anomaly in the series, as is the actual meeting of Martin and Tarconi (something that was always thwarted in Transporter 2). The apex of the joke, however, is Martin’s costume: instead of his iconic chauffeur’s uniform, he appears in full fishing regalia. The joke relies on the success of the franchise, and ultimately confirms Statham’s star status. His persona—hardboiled with a hint of sarcastic charm—is so solidified that a mere change of costume and scenery can immediately evoke laughter.

Overall, Transporter 3 is a vast improvement over Transporter 2, but the first film is still the best. Increased emphasis on Statham’s character (no Matthew Modine, no annoying children), and the chase scenes are more grounded and rely less on hyperbolic stunts. The plot gimmick that Statham can’t stray too far from his car (or else the bomb attached to his write will explode) is an interesting constraint that keeps the story focused and saves it from excessive, unnecessary digressions.

At this point in the series, you could put Statham in a car and have him chase after most anything and I’d watch it for 90 minutes.

A Zed & Two Noughts

Leo Goldsmith — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:51:55 GMT

Peter Greenaway – Zoological taxonomies and alphabetical structures are recurrent preoccupations in Peter Greenaway’s work, but it is in A Zed & Two Noughts that they find their first full and obsessive expression. With typically exacting detail and symmetry, Greenaway combines these twin obsessions even in the film’s title, which is itself a wordgame of alphanumeric substitution. Extending the organizational neurosis of his prior work to the animal kingdom, the titular zoo serves as the setting for a typically violent and perverse struggle to catalog and comprehend nature itself.

War

Cullen Gallagher — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:36:27 GMT

The debut feature by “In Da Club” music video director Philip G. Atwell is a confusing yet exciting collision of the FBI, Chinese Triads, and Yakuza. Jason Statham plays a determined FBI agent looking to avenge the death of his partner by a deadly assassin known only as Rogue, played by Jet Li. Rogue’s mission, it seems, is to double cross every organized crime and government agency on the face of the planet. Ancient stolen treasure (gilded horse statues!) is passing hands, the perfect example of a MacGuffin that no viewer could care less about. Instead, viewers are like the FBI in the movie: they enjoy watching Rogue single-handedly wipe out all the Triads, basically doing their work for them. Statham and Li have the right amount of charisma for their roles: enough humor to make their one-liners entertaining but not cheesy, and enough swagger to seem undeniably badass.