Best of 2010

The delightful Mexican poster for Uncle Boonmee



Herewith a roundup of the 20 best new films I saw for the first time in 2010. The ranking is somewhat arbitrary.

1. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
2. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
3. Mysteries of Lisbon (Raul Ruiz)
4. Poetry (Lee Chang-Dong)
5. Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard)
6. Carlos (Olivier Assayas)
7. Oki’s Movie (Hong Sang-Soo)
8. The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira)
9. Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean)
10. Another Year (Mike Leigh)

The first ten films all played at this year’s especially strong New York Film Festival. Only three of them will have opened theatrically in New York by the end of the year.

Guest

11. Guest (Jose Luis Guerin)

A film about a year spent attending film festivals as a guest, Guerin's beautiful black-and-white film is only tangentially about the festivals where he presented his great film, In the City of Sylvia, in 2007-8. His real subject is the people he meets outside the festivals, primarily the poor and dispossessed citizens of cities such as Bogota, Cali, Havana, São Paulo, Lima, Santiago, and finally Jerusalem. Their eloquence matches the power of Guerin's poetic images.

12. The Social Network (David Fincher)
13. Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)
14. The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)

The next three films prove that genuine auteurs can still occasionally make great films within the decaying remains of the Hollywood system.

The Portuguese Nun

15. Our Beloved Month of August (Miguel Gomes, 2008)
16. The Portuguese Nun (Eugène Green, 2009)

Two belated releases from Portugal that further confirmed the vitality of a national cinema that nurtured masters such as Ruiz and de Oliveira, Pedro Costa, João Pedro Rodrigues and the late João Cesar Monteiro, some of whose delightfully unclassifiable films I first discovered this year.

17. Inside Job (Charles Ferguson)
18. And Everything Is Going Fine (Stephen Soderbergh)

Two excellent documentaries: a lucid explanation of how the financial crisis happened and who is responsible; and a moving, engaging portrait of the late Spalding Gray that uses no superfluous commentary, only clips from the arc of his fascinating life and career.

19. The Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Love)
20. Animal Kingdom (David Michod)

UPDATE 1/18: I'm going to see the powerful Australian crime thriller/dysfunctional family drama Animal Kingdom for a second time in anticipation of my trip to Sydney and Melbourne in March.

UPDATE: Let me add that one of the most powerful, emotionally wrenching films I have seen in this or any year, Lee Chang-Dong's Secret Sunshine, now playing at IFC Center, screened over 3 years ago at the New York Film Festival which is where I first saw it. If I had not seen it previously it would surely rank near the top of my list.

Honorable Mention: Somewhere (Sofia Coppola); How I Killed My Mother (Xavier Dolan); Greenberg (Noah Baumbach); Winter's Bone (Debra Granik); Please Give (Nicole Holofcener); Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright); Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold); True Grit (Joel and Ethan Coen); October Country (Michael Palmieri, Donal Mosher)

The Tree of Life

Here is the trailer for Terence Malick's long-awaited film, The Tree of Life, and it looks extraordinary. Palme d'Or 2011, peut-être?

Late Spring / Late Autumn

Above, Setsuko Hara plays the daughter who marries and leaves her widowed father (Chishu Ryu) alone at the end of Ozu's Late Spring (1949).

11 years later, in Late Autumn (1960), Hara plays the widowed mother who decides not to remarry and is left alone after her daughter's marriage. The angle of Hara's head in the two images is almost identical, but the change of expression speaks volumes about the passage of time.

Mundane History

Anocha Suwichakornpong's modest but beautiful new Thai film, Mundane History, which played at the Rotterdam at BAM festival earlier this year and is currently at MoMA's Contemporasian for a week, is a very promising first film. Its deceptively simple story follows the relationship between a recently paralyzed young man, Ake, and the male nurse, Pun, who is sent to his family's mansion to care for him following his accident. Pun encounters bitterness and resistance from Ake and considers leaving, but gradually a relationship of trust and even affection develops between them. There are also subtle scenes of Pun's interaction with Ake's distant father and with the family servants.

The director shows hints of influence from modernist directors like Tsai Ming-Liang (close-ups of a turtle swimming in a tank), Lisandro Alonso (a burst of jarring guitar music over the opening credits), and David Lynch (the droning musical score), not to mention Apichatpong Weerasethakul in the film's divided structure. The chronology of the story is occasionally reordered, which allows for the film's amazing centerpiece, a cosmic view of the universe and an exploding supernova, to take us by surprise. This sequence later turns out to be part of a planetarium exhibit which the two young men are visiting, a setup for a funny scene where they are the only two people in the auditorium trying to decide where to sit. Jeanette Catsoulis in her NY Times review even praises Ms. Suwichakornpong's "ability to depict nongratuitous full-frontal nudity," which is also not a bad reason to see the film.

Mikio Naruse's Yearning

Last week Asia Society screened Mikio Naruse's late masterpiece, Yearning, to a completely sold-out house. I was 15 minutes late to the screening and had to stand in the back the entire time, but I never considered leaving. The film's raw emotional power had a cumulative effect, building through a 3-act structure to one of the most devastating finales in all of cinema. Keith Uhlich in Slant Magazine describes the film well in his 2006 review from the time of Film Forum's massive Naruse retrospective.

Naruse's great lead actress, Hideko Takamine (an icon for Naruse comparable to Kinuyo Tanaka for Mizoguchi and Setsuko Hara for Ozu) plays Reiko, whose life has been built on self-denial ever since her husband's death in the war 18 years earlier. She is trying to run a small family grocery store whose days are numbered as a new supermarket chain threatens to destroy the business. Her much younger brother-in-law, Koji, has been living a dissolute life of drinking and sleeping around when he suddenly confesses to Reiko that he has loved her all these years. Her slavish devotion to her late husband's memory makes her instinctively reject this new reality. She is of course simultaneously attracted and repelled by Koji's attentions. The husband's framed photo recurs constantly in the background of several shots, and becomes a sort of fetish object in her suitcase when Reiko finally packs up and tries to escape.

At this point the heartbreaking final act begins as Reiko boards a train to flee to her distant hometown. This might serve as the end of a late Ozu film, with the resigned departure on the train and acceptance of her lonely fate. But Naruse ups the emotional ante, as Koji follows Reiko onto the train and they begin a flirtatious courtship during the long journey. Once they stop for the night, however, Reiko rejects Koji again, leading inevitably to tragedy. Reiko has placed a paper ring on Koji's finger, a symbol and portent of the fragile nature of their bond. Koji slips away and when Reiko wakes in the morning, she looks outside and sees the paper ring identifying his dead body. She runs after him but fails to catch up as stretcher-bearers carry him away.

Keith Uhlich aptly describes this shattering ending: "This brings us full-circle to Reiko's final close-up, about which pages should be written though such extended analysis will not be attempted here. Suffice to say that it is one of the cinema's most primal images, a silent scream of recognition and understanding by way of soul-crushing regret, one that forever hangs, like a masterpiece of portraiture, within its own timeless space, waiting to be looked upon so that it may gaze back, alternately, in horror and in revelation."

UPDATE: I've added a couple new photos, in their proper Tohoscope ratio.

Autumn in New York

This is a fair sample of the richness of repertory cinema offerings recently shown or upcoming in New York.

A River Called Titas (Ritwik Ghatak), from World Cinema Foundation at BAM

Variety (E.A. Dupont), from Weimar Cinema at MoMA

Beau Travail (Claire Denis) at IFC Center

 Love Streams (John Cassavetes), from the Cannon Films Canon at Walter Reade

More Apichatpong

Courtesy of David Bordwell's blog report on the Vancouver Film Festival, two t-shirts featuring Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I'm proud to say I own one of the black shirts pictured on the right.

And here's a wonderful picture of Joe at Cannes happily displaying his Palme d'Or.

NYFF 2010 - Mysteries of Lisbon and Festival Wrap

Raul Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon, the final film I saw at this year's New York Film Festival, is also one of my top three films from the festival, right behind Uncle Boonmee and Certified Copy. (I'm seeing Carlos this weekend outside the festival so that ranking may change.) Runners-up were Poetry, The Strange Case of Angelica, Oki's Movie, Film Socialisme, Tuesday, After Christmas and Another Year. Special mention goes to James Benning's Ruhr, of which I only saw the first half. Benning follows up the great RR with another beautiful film about the power of looking closely at seemingly ordinary landscapes.

For now I'll just say that Mysteries of Lisbon, aptly described by David Bordwell as a "rich, high thread-count" film, is the kind of dizzying, all-enveloping experience to make one swoon over the beauties that cinema is capable of.

Parabens! by João Pedro Rodrigues

Here is João Pedro Rodrigues's delightful early short Parabens! (Happy Birthday!) which screened Wednesday at BAM along with his great first feature, O Fantasma. The short film stars João Rui Guerra da Mata, Rodrigues's art director and partner, who joined Rodrigues and Dennis Lim in a post-screening Q&A.


Gay Themed Short - Parabéns! (Joao Pedro Rodrigues 1997 )
Uploaded by esta2. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

NYFF 2010 - Day 10

Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica was a hauntingly (in every sense) beautiful film from the ageless Portuguese master, a supernatural ghost story grounded in everyday reality. Its classic formal elegance and defiantly old-fashioned nature are qualities which are quickly vanishing from cinema, so this is a film to be treasured.

There was a lot of skepticism about Abbas Kiarostami making a traditional Euro-art film after a decade of experimental work in Iran. However, Certified Copy is unmistakably a Kiarostami film. With the help of two superb performances, by Juliette Binoche and William Shimell, Kiarostami explores how our perceptions of art and marriage alter the nature of those institutions. When a woman observing Binoche and Shimell mistakes them for a married couple, they begin to act out those roles, but are they just pretending or are they really in a turbulent 15-year marriage? The ambiguity contributes to the richness of detail in this great film.

NYFF 2010 - Oki's Movie

Hong Sang-Soo's Oki's Movie is one of his best films as it plays with multiple narrative structures in a way reminiscent of his rarely-seen A Tale of Cinema. It consists of four segments, each introduced by the same crude credit sequence on a blue background as Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance is repeated, supplying a short pause for reflection between the separate episodes. The four seemingly autonomous tales (as in Rohmer's Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle) actually build upon each other as the focus subtly shifts from the two male characters' point of view to that of Oki, the woman who narrates the final episode and comes to control events through her voiceover analysis of her simultaneous relationships with the two men, an older film professor and a younger film student. Hong continues to work variations on the same basic themes in all his films but has yet to exhaust the possibilities. Not to mention that his Q&A was hilarious and worthy of an appearance in one of his films.

NYFF 2010 - Day 5

Radu Muntean's brilliantly acted tale of adultery, Tuesday, After Christmas, was shot in only 30 long takes whose form doesn't call attention to itself because the naturalistic drama is so compelling. The film begins almost in mid-story with a post-coital scene between the husband and his mistress, and sets up the approaching revelation and its aftermath with a precise, behaviorally convincing logic which is a tribute to Muntean's writing and extensive rehearsal with his actors. The remarkable Romanian New Wave seems to show no sign of flagging any time soon.

Alexsei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls is a poetic miniature full of indelible images of northern Russia and the rituals of grief, eroticism, childhood memories and the longing for both a deceased wife and a vanishing culture and way of life. Some images brought to mind the tableau style of Paradjanov, and the overall mood struck me as one of serene melancholy.

NYFF 2010 - Day 6

Day 6 was dominated by Jean-Luc Godard's dazzlingly beautiful meditation/collage/puzzle, Film Socialisme. All I can do at the moment is echo the title card that ends what will possibly be Godard's last film, No Comment.

Wednesday also offered Benjamin Heisenberg's The Robber, an Austrian film about a champion marathon runner who doubles as a bank robber, constantly running to escape capture. It's an absorbing genre film in which the character's motivation remains ambiguous.

NYFF 2010 - Day 3

Day 3 of the NYFF consisted of Michelangelo Frammartino's contemplative Le Quattro Volte and Lee Chang-Dong's followup to Secret Sunshine, the powerfully resonant, masterfully written and acted Poetry.

Before these two films, however, was the HBO Directors Dialogue with Apichatpong Weerasethakul and selection committee member Dennis Lim. There were well-chosen clips from his three most recent features as well as the short video/installation piece Primitive, which I had never seen before. To top off this event, I was able to get Joe to autograph my copy of James Quandt's essential book Apichatpong Weerasethakul. He was extremely gracious as he inscribed the pink inside front cover "For Jim with Love, Apichatpong W." which I will treasure forever. My last glimpse of him came later that evening as I spotted him walking to dinner with Richard Peña and other festival guests just after having dinner myself. It was a Zenlike convergence worthy of an Apichatpong film.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Empire

NYFF 2010 - Day 2

This is Day 2 of the NYFF but Day 1 for me. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's exquisite Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, winner of the Palme d'Or this year at Cannes, is the hands-down winner of my own Palme d'NYFF although I've only seen 5 of my 20 scheduled films thus far. I can't find words adequate to describe the experience of being immersed in Joe's world of wonder, where uncanny ghosts and reincarnations are part of the natural order of life in this remote region of northeastern Thailand (and a bit of modern urban life in the final section for good measure). The sound design, mixing a myriad of animal, bird and insect sounds with an eerie ambient drone familiar from Syndromes and a Century, is even richer than in that previous masterpiece. As in Tropical Malady, the contrast of extreme darkness and radiant light is wondrous (for instance, no one films a canopied bed more beautifully than Apichatpong). Rather than the bifurcated structure of his previous three features, in Uncle Boonmee Apichatpong applies six different visual strategies to the roughly six acts of the film. The most stunning is a playful evocation of a Thai royal costume drama involving a princess and a catfish; this section temporarily abandons the family drama of the rest of the film while maintaining the spirit of mysticism and transcendence evident throughout. Holding it all together is a deeply moving love story between Uncle Boonmee, dying of kidney failure, and his wife Huay who died 19 years earlier but has returned as a ghost to share his last moments and lead him to the next world. They are joined by other family members including Boonsong, a son who has returned after a long disappearance in the form of a monkey ghost. The embrace of Boonmee and Huay, pictured above, takes a triangular form matched by the inverted triangle of the bed canopy above them; this harmonious composition adds immeasurably to the poignance of this scene. One other detail which I found extremely powerful is the moment in the cave shortly before Boonmee's death when the tube attached to his kidney is opened to release a flow of urine onto the ground, as if draining his last lifeblood. Then there's a very erotic scene in which Tong, Boonmee's nephew (Apichatpong regular Sakda Kaewbuadee), takes off his orange Buddhist monk's robes and takes a shower. And once again Joe uses a catchy pop tune at the end simply because he likes it, and why not celebrate the joy of continuing life in just this way? I can't wait to see this film again and to see where my favorite contemporary film director goes in his next work.

Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men was an excellent fictionalized recreation of the massacre of a community of monks in Algeria in 1996, aided by great performances from Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale. Finally Michael Epstein's John Lennon documentary LENNONYC, although fairly conventional in approach, benefited from a great subject (Lennon's post-Beatles years in New York with Yoko Ono) and access to some terrific audio and video of recording sessions, radio shows and concert appearances. A special bonus was the post-screening appearance in the guest box of Yoko Ono, waving a peace sign to the cheering audience.

BONUS UPDATE: Here is the video of that "catchy pop tune" mentioned above, titled Acrophobia:

The Next Director: João Pedro Rodrigues at BAM

O Fantasma

To Die Like a Man

BAM Cinematek will be presenting a retrospective of João Pedro Rodrigues's three features and two of his short films in October. Unfortunately my NYFF schedule conflicts with two of the screenings, for Odete and To Die Like a Man, but I will be seeing his remarkable debut, O Fantasma (above) plus a short, Happy Birthday!, and there will be a discussion with Rodrigues after the films. Why BAM perversely decided to program these films at the same time as the New York Film Festival is a mystery to me.

NYFF 2010 Short Films

In looking through the short films accompanying some of the features at this year's NYFF, I found two which immediately caught my attention.

Before the screening of Pablo Larrain's Post Mortem, there's a new short film by the great Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, The Accordion, described as "Two child beggars learn a lesson in class solidarity." Panahi was released from prison earlier this year, but although his new short just premiered at Venice, he was denied permission to attend by the Iranian regime.
And preceding Hong Sang-Soo's Oki's Movie is a new 13-minute film by Tarnation director Jonathan Caouette, All Flowers in Time. According to the festival website it's "a guided tour through the shattered remains of memory and identity. With Chloë Sevigny."

Rosenbaum on L'Eclisse

On his blog today Jonathan Rosenbaum posts some brief comments on and images from Antonioni's L'Eclisse which nicely summarize my own feelings about this modernist masterpiece:

"The conclusion of Michelangelo Antonioni’s loose trilogy about modern life at mid-century (preceded by L’avventura and La notte), this 1961 film is conceivably the greatest in Antonioni’s career, but perhaps significantly it has the least consequential plot. A sometime translator (Monica Vitti) recovering from an unhappy love affair briefly links up with a stockbroker (Alain Delon) in Rome, though the stunning final montage sequence — perhaps the most powerful thing Antonioni has ever done — does without these characters entirely. And because these two leads arguably give the most nuanced and charismatic performances of their careers here, the shock of losing them before the end of the picture is central to the film’s devastating final effect.

"Alternately an essay and a prose poem about the contemporary world in which the “love story” figures as one of many motifs, this is remarkable both for its visual/ atmospheric richness and its polyphonic and polyrhythmic mise en scène. Antonioni’s handling of crowds at the Roman stock exchange is never less than amazing, recalling the choreographic use of deep focus employed in the early features of Orson Welles, where foreground and background details are juggled together in brilliant juxtapositions.

"But it is probably the final sequence, which depends on editing rather than mise en scène, that best sums up the hope and despair of the filmmaker’s vision."

Our Beloved Month of August / Contemporasian

I'll have more to say after I've seen Miguel Gomes's Our Beloved Month of August. In the meantime, here's a lovely image from the film which has received rapturous reviews. From all indications Gomes would appear to be a major emerging director of the Portuguese New Wave, if there is such a thing (Pedro Costa, João Pedro Rodrigues).

UPDATE 9/9: Our Beloved Month of August more than lives up to its advance praise. Roughly the first half of the film, shot in and around the annual music festival in Arganil, takes the form of a documentary about the festival, the local residents and visitors, the natural beauty of the mountainous region, and Gomes’s inability, due to lack of financing, to make the fiction feature he originally planned. After we’ve been immersed in the leisurely pace of the music and conversations for some time, a narrative suddenly begins to emerge, performed by actors who had previously appeared to be “real people” talking about their lives. However, the film’s structure is built on layers of ambiguity between what is fiction and nonfiction, and the soundtrack involves a constant layering of natural sounds, conversations and bits of music recorded at various times. If I’m not mistaken, there is even an audio clip from a film by the late Portuguese filmmaker João César Monteiro, reciting a speech as his screen alter ego João de Deus. Gomes himself appears from time to time as the director of the film within the film, in playfully scripted conversations with his producer, his soundman, and in one instance a delightful scene where a couple of girls try to audition for parts in the film. It’s all shot in a beautiful, often long-take style. The result is a unique hybrid of music doc, travelogue, domestic drama and personal essay about the process of making a movie.

Madam Butterfly

Another essential screening next week in New York is MoMA's Contemporasian program of short films by four of the greatest contemporary Asian directors. Included are two films I've seen previously, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Jia Zhangke's Cry Me a River, and two others I'm especially eager to see, Tsai Ming-Liang's Madam Butterfly and Hong Sang-Soo's Lost in the Mountains.

NYFF 2010 Wish List

Film Socialisme

Only two films so far are confirmed for the 2010 New York Film Festival, David Fincher's The Social Network and Julie Taymor's Tempest. In anticipation of the imminent announcement of the full lineup, I thought I'd list 16 films from Cannes that I'd like to see at Lincoln Center in late September and early October:

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee
Mathieu Amalric's Tournee
Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's A Screaming Man
Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy
Lee Chang-Dong's Poetry
Mike Leigh's Another Year
Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires)
Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme
Hong Sang-Soo's Ha Ha Ha
Jia Zhangke's I Wish I Knew
Lodge Kerrigan's Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs)
Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica
Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas
Olivier Assayas's Carlos
Gregg Araki's Kaboom

The loss of J. Hoberman and the addition of Todd McCarthy (who hated the new Godard) to this year's selection committee probably means that challenging, offbeat films now stand less of a chance of being chosen, but that remains to be seen. Dennis Lim, Melissa Anderson, Scott Foundas and Richard Pena can still counteract McCarthy's more mainstream, crowd-pleasing influence.

UPDATE 9/3: I'm disappointed that Jia Zhangke and Xavier Dolan didn't make the cut, but about half of my Cannes choices were selected for the NYFF, along with some that are about to be premiered at Venice within the next week.  Juan and I have both faxed in our order forms, and here is my planned list of 20 films and events packed into 16 days:

HBO Directors Dialogue with Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Dennis Lim
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Kent Jones and Martin Scorsese's A Letter to Elia, plus Elia Kazan's America, America
Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men
Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy
Lee Chang-Dong's Poetry
Mike Leigh's Another Year
Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme
Hong Sang-Soo's Oki's Movie
Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica
Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas
Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls
Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte
Raul Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon
Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff
Michael Epstein's LENNONYC
Abdellatif Kechiche's Black Venus
James Benning's Ruhr
Thom Andersen's Get Out of the Car
Joe Dante's The Hole 3D

Olivier Assayas's Carlos and David Fincher's The Social Network will be opening theatrically shortly after the festival, so I will wait to see those in theaters.

Antonioni

Le Amiche

Red Desert

Just a brief entry to celebrate the genius of Michelangelo Antonioni on the occasion of the revival of the devastatingly beautiful Le Amiche in a new print at Film Forum, and the long-overdue release of Red Desert on Criterion DVD. Of course Antonioni's haunting masterpiece L'Eclisse is the inspiration for the name of this blog, as evidenced in the photo that occupies the top of this page.

Great Moments in Cinema

Vive L'Amour

Muriel

The two clips above illustrate the use of extremely long takes (Tsai Ming-Liang's Vive L'Amour) vs. extremely rapid associational montage (Alain Resnais's Muriel). These two great directors use vastly different styles to great effect in analyzing the thought processes of these women. Resnais has always used a combination of montage to travel freely in time and space, and extremely fluid, beautiful tracking shots to immerse the viewer in a particular location. Tsai's style has maintained a largely static, carefully composed, contemplative style, although this early film has a more mobile camera as it follows this lonely woman through the park, before settling in for a powerful, seemingly endless still shot of her crying.

Au Hasard, Balthazar

The Long Day Closes

Above are two of the cinema's great uses of music to underscore dramatic action. Bresson's Au Hasard, Balthazar employs a Schubert sonata mixed with natural sounds (bells, the donkey's braying) to create one of the most shattering, transcendent endings in all of cinema. Terence Davies uses a pop song, Debbie Reynolds singing "Tammy," over a series of overhead tracking shots that ritualistically portray and link together the confines of a young boy's life: the bars on which he plays at home, the rows of desks at school, rows of pews in church, cinema, and back home. Davies creates hypnotic visual and aural rhythms unique in cinema.

Next Attraction

This is my first post with an embedded Youtube link. I finally figured out how to do it! The clip is silent.

Yesterday I saw Raya Martin's Next Attraction at the New York Filipino Film Festival and enjoyed it immensely, in spite of its being shown without subtitles. Although I don't speak Tagalog I had no trouble following this experimental, minimalist but highly entertaining film (projected in grainy DVD which also did not seriously detract from my appreciation). The premise is simple: most of the film is a series of long takes in color documenting the making of a short film, the action of which takes place offscreen. Finally the title of the short film appears: Next Attraction, A True Story. Now we see the complete film within the film, but shown silent and in black and white. Raya Martin said this was his coming-out film, and it depicts a young man (Coco Martin) having a fight with his mother (Jaclyn Jose), going out on the street, meeting another young man and having sex with him in the shower, then returning home to shower alone and think about what just happened. I think it's a fascinating example of a gay experimental film that succeeds by using formal strategies to make us complete the simple narrative for ourselves out of the incomplete bits and pieces presented to us.

San Francisco Silent Film Festival Preview

I'm looking forward to attending the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for the second year in a row the weekend of July 16-18. Some of the highlights for me include Rotaie, a late Italian silent directed by Mario Camerini, G.W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl starring the glorious Louise Brooks, and The Woman Disputed, co-directed by Henry King and Sam Taylor and starring Norma Talmadge. These three and most of the other films in the festival will be screened in 35mm prints (an increasingly endangered species) at the indispensable Castro Theater, which I always return to with a sense of awe.

Cannes 2010

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

The Strange Case of Angelica

Les amours imaginaires

Certified Copy

Poetry

The 64th Cannes Film Festival started on Wednesday, and while this year's edition seems somewhat light on works by major directors, there are several films I hope to see in the New York Film Festival this fall. The most highly anticipated is Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, his first feature since 2006's brilliant Syndromes and a Century. Others I'm particularly looking forward to in the Competition include Ken Loach's Route Irish, Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy starring Juliette Binoche, Lee Chang-Dong's Poetry, and Mike Leigh's Another Year. Highlights of a strong Un Certain Regard lineup include Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica, which has already screened to very favorable reviews; Xavier Dolan's follow-up to I Killed My Mother, titled Les amours imaginaires; Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme (the trailer to this looks gorgeous); Jia Zhangke's documentary I Wish I Knew; Cristi Puiu's Aurora; and Hong Sang-Soo's Ha Ha Ha. Olivier Assayas's 5-hour docudrama Carlos, a late entry screening out of competition, should be a major film, and I'm also very much looking forward to Gregg Araki's Kaboom.

João César Monteiro - Silvestre

João César Monteiro, currently the subject of a retrospective at BAM, is a filmmaker previously unknown to me. The images above give some idea of the uncanny visual power of his bizarre 15th-century historical film Silvestre, but can't convey the hypnotic power of the long takes and slow tracking shots combined with highly stylized theatrical acting and sets, beautiful music and a radiant performance by Maria de Medeiros in her first film. I'm in the process of watching his delightfully absurd God's Comedy on DVD and plan to see his final film, Come and Go, next week. It's always a treat to discover a major director like this thanks to the resourceful programmers at BAM Cinematek.