A silent-era freestyle, Häxan (pronounced "Hek-sen") still casts a spell in this digital age. A "scientific" look at witchcraft circa the medieval period, Benjamin Christensen's 1922 classic transcends time through spooky, hocus-pocus visuals — whether animation, an intertitled slideshow on ancient cosmology, or a graphic recreation of the Inquisition. While the most ingenious (and mischievous) bit may be Christensen's self-cast Satan, the shorter 1967 version fits in another surreal element: William Burroughs as narrator. Monkey Town screens this latter-day edit tonight with a live score by Jeremy Slater, Matt Picone, Bradford Reed, Maxx Klaxxon, and Murder of Angels.
A "Made in Japan" horror film means buckle up. Hausu (House), for one, is a 1977 trip into the realm of the nonsensical. Overflowing with satire, visual invention, and kitsch, this import fleshes out the demise of seven schoolgirls at and by an old woman's haunted manse. A hair-raising cat also pops up, an appearance that enables BAM to pair the film with the feline-friendly Sleepwalkers for a hysterical evening. Stephen King's first script features more oh-Lord and gore than a bullfight gone wrong; after all, the titular creatures (a mother and son here) sustain themselves on a strict diet of virgins.
A set-in-stone icon on the performance art timeline, Marina Abramović has put her body through long, intensive physical tests in search of that eureka moment. Tonight, the Belgrade native talks with art historian Jovana Stokić about performance in a gallery setting — among other aesthetic topics. Besides that back-and-forth, Location One screens footage of her radical group exhibition for which the works inside the Manchester Whitworth Art Gallery were removed to make room for a series of expressive acts. The evening also marks the launch of the Abramović Studio, an educative space where performance art can flourish.
If you're on the hunt for the Faulkner corpus or just a sole Bellow tome, Book Thug Nation is the latest go-to for used fiction and martial-arts manuals — all under one Williamsburg roof. That last word actually represents a coup for the co-owners, four independent booksellers you have probably brushed past or bought from many a time on Bedford Avenue. Besides selling literary categories A to Z on the cheap, this memorably named establishment also puts on readings, lectures, and even neighborhood meetings.
"Give it a sweet melody" was the aesthetic must for Vestie Davis, a painter who froze mid-century New York in winsome, ordered, flat-colored detail. Davis' professional résumé was of various collar — train conductor, circus barker, undertaker — and, in his bustling tableaux, the streetwise observations join with a fine-drawn love for the city's architecture and populace. Thirty-six of these back-in-the-day drawings and paintings decorate the walls of the Folk Museum's Lincoln Center branch, where the clangs of construction further accent his frames as aides-memoires of a faded era.
1962: The Yankees were Champs, Silent Spring raised hell about Earth, and "Bond, James Bond" leapt off the page with Dr. No. And, at year's end, the citywide newspaper strike precluded the New York Film Critics Circle from its annual laurels. BAM hosts the society's belated plaudits for a dozen of the best: the Duke (Hatari!, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence) and Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim) double up; Jerry Lewis contorts and deconstructs as The Errand Boy; and Agnes Varda's real-time gem, Cléo From 5 to 7, keeps company with husband Jacques Demy's sublime opus, Lola.
Tangier was home to Paul Bowles for 50-plus years, and in Mohamed Ulad's American in Tangier, the polymathic expat looked back on a life spent in cultural translation. For tonight's Bidoun-and-Semiotexte soirée, that 1993 rarity screens before two Michel Auder travelogues, Chronicles/Morocco and Morocco 1972: The Real Chronicles with Viva. Made 30 years apart, Auder's vivid, diaristic shorts both stem from footage of a family vacation with then-wife/Warhol starlet Viva. Morocco's first openly gay writer, Abdellah Taïa introduces the shorts and explores his country's lure for the outsider.
The Triumph of William Henry Harrison suggests that our ninth President faked his own pneumonic death in order to pursue a much darker agenda. It's a mockumentary of course and one indie from this festival's boatload— 200-plus animations, features, docs, and shorts from 35 countries/territories. Documentaries of interest include Resting Places, a Liam Neeson-narrated look at the quarrel about roadside memorials, and Just Laugh!, which illuminates why the titular act is indeed the best medicine. Feature-wise, there's the Canadian coming-of-age Growing Op and the self-explanatory Oy Vey! My Son is Gay!
As one suspects, John Wesley Harding isn't the acclaimed folk musician's real name, but a well-chosen alias. Rather, it's Wesley Stace that appears on the chap's birth certificate and the best-selling paperbacks, like his superb debut about a lad raised as a lass in 19th-century England, Misfortune. His Cabinet of Wonders makes a return to the site of its spring triumph to further highlight this split fluency in (and affinity for) music and literature. The three variety shows on schedule feature an impressive bill that includes novelists Rick Moody and Patrick McGrath; musicians Rhett Miller, A.C. Newman, and Steven Page (formerly of Barenaked Ladies); and comedians like Eugene Mirman.
My published Flavorwire post: Black Dynamiteis a euphoric amen to blaxploitation and its low-budget pulp — in fact, the genre’s $hortcomings and stereotypes go a long way in this hilarious parody. Michael Jai White plays the title’s baadasssss hero, toggling between deadpan and over-the-top modes with surprising ease. Black Dynamite is known far and wide for lady-killing one-liners and administering tough love to the Man via .44 Magnum and kung fu (nunchucks too if push comes to smashmouth). He even struts to a chorus.
Naturally, there’s “kung fu treachery” everywhere. For one, some jive turkeys murdered his brother and, worse, the hood has been flooded with so much smack that even orphans need a fix. With his license to kill reinstated, Dynamite and a posse that includes prissy Cream Corn (Tommy Davidson in near-In Living Color form) and rhyming Bullhorn (co-writer Byron Minns) commence their vigilante-style antics only to come upon a really nutty conspiracy that’s linked to Anaconda Malt Liquor, the only government-approved malt liquor and one that gives you “Oooooooooo.”
Director Scott Sanders reproduces the grainy, high-contrast look of his predecessors and mines their trademark discontinuities, reused bits of footage, and tremulous zooms for laughs. He also bottles that old-school flavor: the wham-bam fights, the slang-ridden dialogue, and, of course, the righteous, if-I-ruled-the-world attitude. Adrian Younge’s catchy wah-wah score provides more funk and energy, while there are amusing cameos at a pimp council by Arsenio Hall (as Tasty Freeze), R&B singer Brian McKnight (Sweet Meat), and Reno 911!’s Cedric Yarbrough (Chocolate Giddy-Up). Angelenos can look out for the “origins” of Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles too, herein known as Roscoe’s Chili and Donuts.
Last week, we sat down to talk with director and star/writer about Black Dynamite and the perfect blaxploitation line-up.
Flavorpill: How did you settle on the punchy name of Black Dynamite?
Michael Jai White: Well, at first, it was called Super Bad [after the James Brown hit]. But that was taken by a movie that didn’t…
Scott Sanders: That shall go nameless. [Laughs]
MJW: [Laughing] And then Scott came up with Black Dynamite. Actually, we were throwing some names around and when he said “Black Dynamite,” I was like “Uhh, let’s think further about it.” Then I thought about the scene when the mother, on her deathbed, calls her child Black Dynamite seriously. I thought that’s pretty damn funny and it made me know.
SS: I’m trying to think of the origin…there’s a trailer for Willie Dynamite and the guy goes “AND HE’S EXPLODED ON THE SCREEN LIKE BLACK DYNAMITE!” And I was like heyyy. Then I thought, “Isn’t there a movie called Black Dynamite?” I actually did a Google search.
MJW: And you didn’t use that sound byte?
SS: Nah. Well I tried to in our fake trailers.
FP: Speaking of which, the film looks like a long-lost print that’s been recently discovered. How were you able to capture that datedness so beautifully?
SS: We used older lenses. But the trick of it was the Super 16 color reversal. They use it for music videos a lot, but they don’t use it on feature films because it’s very unforgiving. Once you do it, that’s it. But it looks old. That’s the great thing about our producer Jon Steingart — most producers are way more cautious because they want options. He’s like, “You gotta do it.”
FP: So it’s just like one take?
SS: Well, let’s say you shoot something on color negative. You can manipulate it. This, the blacks get crushed. The colors are just so contrast-y. But it looks great. It was worth it. I’m really pleased.
FP: There’s an exuberant tone to the film. What was the set like?
SS: It was fun, but with a big strain. Making it in 20 days [in Los Angeles] was difficult; it gave us challenges. And those challenges, I think, gave the film have a really good energy. We shot a movie like they shot blaxploitation movies.
FP: On the run you mean?
SS: Yeah, it was on the run. And [Michael] had to memorize tons of lines and kung fu choreography.
FP: What say you Black Dynamite?
MJW: Well, I was working with my friends, so it was kind of a dream come true. We had so much fun; it was almost a guilty pleasure. It’s been a joyous endeavor from the very start to the very finish.
FP: You used to have blaxploitation nights at your house. What’s the perfect triple bill?
MJW: Well, with those you’re encouraged to heckle the screen. So I tend to go for the campier ones. Disco Godfather because it’s the most ridiculous one. What is that one…
MJW: You know, the funniest part about that is the name.
SS: I mean it’s pretty raw in parts too. It’s weird. That’s a weird one.
MJW: I might playTrouble Man because Robert Hooks was one of the coolest people to ever play a lead. And I might do Coffy or Foxy Brown. That pimp man…
SS: King George.
MJW: Yeah…wait, is that the same one with [in a high-pitched voice], “WHATCHA GONNA DO WITH THE GUN MAMA?”
SS: No, that’s Sheba, Baby. [Laughs] We’re just riffing about a performance in Sheba, Baby. That guy does like an old-school, Rochester-type thing.
MJW: I mean, wow, he presents an extreme. [Laughs]
FP: How many blaxploitation movies do you think you watched in preparation?
SS: Uhh, probably too many. [Laughs] You get down to Black Sister’s Revenge and what’s the Brother Charles one called?
SS: That’s the one where this guy grows a gigantic penis and chokes white people with it. And it’s serious. It’s a serious movie. [Laughs]
MJW: You remember Abar?
SS: Nope.
MJW:Abar — oh God, I gotta watch this again — was like this big buff brother who walking around like he was supposed to be some android and he was just killing white folks.
FP: Are these all on DVD now?
MJW: Yeah, I mean you can probably find Abar. [Editor's note: You can.]
SS: I want to show you Black Sister’s Revenge because that one is ridiculous.
FP: What are the ingredients for a great blaxploitation movie?
SS: The black paranoia thing is always a fun place to start. The more you take that element seriously, the more fun it can be. I think there’s a lot less of that now, there’s a lot less need for black people in our culture to have all these conspiracy theories. But I mean we have one about Liz Claiborne, Church’s Fried Chicken, whatever. But, you know, those crazy conspiracy theories are always fun to play with.
MJW: You gotta pour in some super evil white people, chase scenes that seem to last for days, cars that fix themselves after accidents and blow up miraculously just by going off a cliff. You have people who get shot in the chest yet fall forward instead of backward like natural…
SS: Militants who are plotting to overthrow the government in really small rooms in a little tiny house. So from a kitchen table or a small living room through kung fu…
FP: Basically everything you’ve mixed into this movie. Black Dynamite is going to be animated for a Cartoon Network show right? How involved are you with that process?
SS: Pretty involved. Carl [Jones] is gonna run the show from the animation world. But we’ll write scripts. Obviously Mike’s Black Dynamite so he’ll be the voice. It’ll be fun because we’ll get to explore crazy, fantastical stuff that maybe we wouldn’t do…
FP: Yeah, it’ll be on Adult Swim after all.
SS: Yeah, we can go real crazy. Take our most subversive ideas and throw it in there.
The RZA's latest tome of verbal chi gong, The Tao of Wu, takes the nonfiction baton from his 2005 Wu-Tang Manual and carries it to more personal and profound ends. An inlet to the luminous mind of the Ruler-Knowledge-Wisdom-and-Understanding-Allah (shortened to RZA), this memoir is both hip-hopping confessions of an omnivorous mind — taking in the wisdom of Shaolin and Islam, martial-arts flicks, and chess — and letters to a young artist. Tonight, the Wu-Tang chieftain appears to celebrate Tao's release, and to spread the gospel to those ready to receive.
From the Land of the Rising Sun comes a new genus of video artists, and Tokyo-based gallery Pepper's Project curates a transient showcase for some of the city's most promising talent behind the lens. The dozen-plus shorts on display include conceptual beauties and way-out animation. Wataru Ito, one of those featured, was recently in art news for Castle on the Ocean, a phenomenal model city that's made of craft paper.
My published Flavorpill post: Our very own Mark Mangan (that'd be co-founder of Flavorpill) headlines this free session on how to distinguish oneself in this high-traffic age of the Internets. Also on the must-hear program is Gregory Galant, who runs Sawhorse Media and its Twittering empire (including the awesome Shorty Awards, which honors the best 140-characters-or-less content out there), and Sahadeva Hammari, founder of the designer- and connoisseur-friendly t-shirt outlet Rumplo.com. Making a special appearance: the folks from Brooklyn Based, those emailing evangelists for the County of Kings.
My published Flavorwire post: Let this correspondent temper the choral praise for Lee Daniels’ — ahem, Tyler Perry and Oprah’s — Precious. It’s certainly not a total letdown (not with lead performances as immediate and crackerjack as that), but it’s also not the Great Urban Hope that so many have purported it to be. Indeed, the subject matter pulverizes the proverbial envelope — with incest, rape, poverty, illiteracy, teen pregnancy, and child abuse all saddled on the obese, African-American heroine Precious — but each misery is strung up to be drip-dried until the melodrama’s last turn of screw. The best parts, alas, are probably in the trailer.
Based on Sapphire’s best-selling novel, the film takes place in 1987 Harlem. Claireece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is an unhealthy 16, pregnant with her second child (both courtesy of a sick stepfather gone AWOL), and has been booted from school as a result. At her dim and cramped home, she slaves away in the kitchen for welfare-dependent mom Mary (Mo’Nique), who she calls ma’am and who hurls verbal abuse at Precious as if she were the perpetually turned-on TV. These tirades are often punctuated with a fist, pan, or flying object. This early parade of quelle-horreur offers rallying points for the audience, sure, but it also makes Precious a symbol that we can feel sympathy for rather than empathize with.
Then arrives the brief light: against Mary’s wishes, Precious enrolls at Each One Teach One, an “alternative” school for literacy that’s matriculated by outsider “types,” from the narcissistic smart-aleck to the accented immigrant. Here, under the supportive tutelage of Blu Rain (Paula Patton), and a daily routine of journal-keeping, Precious matures, leaves home, and comes into her own. Rest assured, though, more devastation is visited upon Precious, including a last confrontation with Mary that’s mediated by little-used social worker Mariah Carey (in a fine turn, faint mustache and all).
Precious will surely leave you shocked, but ultimately hollow since our heroine’s self-made clean slate is of less importance to Daniels than the harshness from which she rose. He thrives on the pitiable. So as she learns and improves her life, there’s little sense of an authentic turnaround except a rather generic montage and the most facile scene in the film — a classroom in which the history of empowerment is green-screened on all walls. But enough with the bad; the film does best when Daniels quits his visual tics and just allows the actors to act, especially since two performances are worthy of plaudits.
First and foremost is comedienne/reality-show personality Mo’Nique as the most self-centered, insane, and abusive mother ever caught on celluloid, one who will beat the sheesh out of you if you endanger her welfare check — in retrospect, she’d be filthy rich if she just kept a swear jar. And, Sidibe delivers a heartfelt debut, hitting a truly crazy range of emotions as her character goes through the loops. At that, the pain and, later, pride spied in her eyes should pay off: Precious’ dream of red carpets has a chance at materializing come February’s Oscars.
The title character in Bong Joon-ho’s bewildering and often brilliant whodunit Mother is the opposite of Mo’Nique, but no less cuckoo beneath the loving facade. Unnamed and exquisitely played by Kim Hye-ja (an actress who has spent decades in Korean minds as the TV mother), she coddles her unpredictable idiot of a son as if he were 7 — they eat and even sleep beside each other. Except Do-Joon (Won Bin) is 27 and before you can cry “Uh, Norman Bates?,” he’s charged with the brutal murder of a poor high-school floozy. The incompetent authorities shut the case, tout court, after discovering a rather incriminating clue at the scene.
From thereon out, his apothecary mother — with maternal instinct in overdrive — devotes herself to a town-wide probe to exonerate her son and thus herself, since she’s the one who impressed the mantra of self-protection at all costs. After a few suspenseful dead ends, her sleuthing comes upon a Pandora’s Box of recessed secrets, which crescendos in a double-whammy that we won’t muck up here.
From the first to last scene — both featuring the mother dancing like a possessed marionette — Bong pulls the audience’s strings with a nimble, precise hand. His now-famous compositional polish keeps the story fluent even as it cuts between the psychotic and slapstick elements, the melodrama and policier genres. And with the diehard aegis of this mother as the core focus, Bong and Kim have crafted an indelible character (perhaps the best in Bong’s gallery thus far) that, after all is said and done, remains off in her own little heaven.
From The Daily Showto NPR’s Fresh Air, LeBron James has been all over the media ticker tape to hype More Than a Game. With his marquee name and plenty of parquet squeaks, it’s a must-see for the basketball obsessed and a hearty yes for those who relish a rah-rah documentary. Others might wish that Kristopher Belman’s debut shone a harsher light on, say, underage athletic celebrity while relating the championship dream of an unseasoned high school coach and five hoop stars led by Ohio’s then-teenage King.
But what Belman does focus on is fabulous in itself; in particular, he eschews Bron hoopla to flesh out his familial, all-for-one bond with coach Dru Joyce and teammates Little Dru, Romeo Travis, Sian Cotton, and Willie McGee (together they form the “Fab Five”). What’s more, the doc catches James in a rare off-guard position when he’s forced to discuss his single-parent childhood and his affection for mom. At our press conference he iterated, “To become the father of the house so fast definitely made me who I am today.”
Belman’s seven-year chronicle began as a “ten-minute documentary piece for his school project, which he got a ‘B’ on” cracked James. This final cut is full of grade-A material, with fascinating home footage that dates back to 1997, childhood photos, and candid remembrances of selling duct tape for jerseys as well as kissing babies once the tidal fame hit. Although this is the LeBron Show (like Truman, we’ve seen this dude’s maturation as a prime-time event). it gives the superstar’s invaluable supporting cast their moment alongside his, providing hiphop-scored uplift on and off the court as they bolt from AAU nobodies to nationally ranked intimidators. The we-good hubris during their junior year leads to the high-flyers’ inexorable return to earth, but also paves the way for their storybook redemption — even then, there’s a hiccup when the media-sieged LeBron is briefly suspended for accepting two throwback jerseys. This is a tale based on fact, after all, even if it’s a bit editorialized for narrative purposes.
The “point A to point B” arc is full of personal cruces, but fortified by a legitimate camaraderie and an easy humor, the highlight being the understated end credit that reads “LeBron decided not to go to college. He found seasonal work in Cleveland.” While we learn that Romeo’s initial a-hole syndromes reflect a broken-up home and that Willie is inspiringly raised by his barely-older brother, it’s the relationship between Dru II and undersized Dru III that forms the emotional core outside of James’ dear-mama. Dru the Elder comes across as a well-meaning and thoughtful man who stepped up from assistant to head coach after the initial one, Keith Dambrot, left for the University of Akron — later, this proves ironic when St. Vincent’s moves their games to the university to accommodate the rabid demand.
“My son was young and he wanted to play basketball,” coach Joyce explained at the podium, “I just wanted to be involved.” There’s an earnest, thought-out tenor to his voice, one that turns rueful in the film when reflecting on the personal toll that the coach-player relationship had on his father-son one. The family tie is fantastic now, of course, and Joyce embraces his role. “That’s the great thing about coaching: You have an opportunity to pour your life into someone else’s life. I’m even more excited about what they do down the road.”
LeBron is, well, zooming down that road, and he handles it all with relative ease. Even though his responses hint of rehearsal and his build is absolutely herculean, there’s still an inner-child near the surface and he was especially graceful when fielding a few kids’ oh-oh-oh questions (Q: What size shoe do you wear? A: “”I walk around and just relax in 15s. But when I play, in basketball games, I wears 16s because I need a little more room for all the cutting and moving I do.”). He was also diplomatic about Obama’s roundball skills. “I haven’t actually seen him play live. It’s hard to see, you know, how good someone is on TV unless you see them play over and over and over. If I get the invite, I will fly myself down to DC.”
Michael "Casablanca" Curtiz, super-producer Alexander Korda, even Béla Legosi — they and other talented compatriots left Hungary in the early-20th century, anglicized their names, and impressed themselves on our nascent cinema. The awesome, Korda-supervised Thief of Baghdad is an essential pic in this series, as is a 25th-anniversary screening of Jim Jarmusch's bottled LES in Stranger Than Paradise (star Eszter Balint lends the US-to-Budapest cred). Lugosi appears made-up in Dracula and The Mummy (plus the Lubitsch-touched Ninotchka), while Ken Russell's rock opera Lisztomania presents a gonzo rivalry between Wagner and Hungary's finest.
Labeled both a "proletarian thunderbolt" and a communist turncoat, the ever-controversial Elia Kazan was — above the muck of his unfortunate HUAC leak — America's version of the Angry Young Man. With the studio system on the way out come mid-century, Kazan replaced its stilted polish with the emotional flux of the "Method," a feral Marlon Brando and pained James Dean becoming pin-ups for the cause. On the Waterfront and even East of Eden are curricula mainstays, but here's a chance to scope his impassioned, socially aware oeuvre, including A Face in the Crowd, Splendor in the Grass, and the hymnal America, America.
Call it Omar Mullick's 21st-century angle on The Americans. For his first solo show, the photographer hyphenates Robert Frank's landmark observance of the mid-century outsider with intimate, telltale documents of Muslim American life across our land of the free. Collected over seven years and with a title lifted from a Radiohead opening line, this exhibit offers a keen eye into the behind-the-veil aspects of the Muslim community, gracefully capturing madrasahs and halfway houses, children and the elderly. And by stilling the scenes in black and white, Mullick daisy-chains his democratic account to past chronicles of the ever-nebulous American experience.
A prolific 19th-century painter who was once considered "America's first modern" for his prepossessing, flat-color land- and seascapes, Thomas Chambers is now the little-known subject of an impressive revival. This exhibition — the first for the MIA artist since 1942 — features 45 of his vibrant, home-sweet-home compositions, many inspired by the period's open-air etchings and lithographs. Besides his typically patriotic works like The Constitution and the Gurrière (an oceanic composition that led to his rediscovery), the exhibition includes a collection of the era's "fancy" decorative art as well as his contemporaries' striking pieces.
My published Flavorwire post: In 1958, the Paris-based publisher Robert Delpire had the foresight to release Robert Frank’s sheaf of plainspoken, black-and-white images, The Americans. Delpire insisted, however, on a cover of Saul Steinberg’s pencil doodles, a fact presented in An American Journey, Philippe Séclier’s documentary which retraces the 15,000 miles that the Swiss-born legend drove to create the book.
Opening today at Film Forum, it’s more of a soft-focused supplement to the current Frank-ophilia in New York, with the Met honoring the artist through a retrospective of his filmography (which includes the Beat portrait Pull My Daisy and the pumice-stoned Cocksucker Blues) and a stunning exhibition of his enduring, mid-century documents of life in the land of the free. After the jump, watch the Jack Kerouac-narrated short Pull My Daisy, which stars Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.
For the hour-long Journey, Séclier pictures the loneliness of the roads-less-taken as an impressionistic blur, with pit stops to interview contemporaries, critics, and even those caught in Frank’s 35mm-Leica viewfinder in the ’50s. The locations of a few photographs, like Butte, Montana, are also revisited to mark the march of progress and time — or lack thereof.
Artist Ed Ruscha and photographer Raymond Depardon appear briefly; Sarah Greenough of DC’s National Gallery of Art, on the other hand, tries to lasso the breadth of his handiwork: 767 rolls shot for 27,000 images, of which he developed thousands to select 83 indelible frames. Although there’s a thought-provoking if fleeting look at a Chinese exhibition for Americans, Séclier’s tribute comes across a bit like Jno Cook’s, the creator of The Robert Frank Coloring Book: he’s enthusiastically outlined the photographs, but it’s missing soul.
Closer in extempore spirit is the preceding In the Street, a 1948 silent of Harlem thoroughfares packed with little rascals in idle and at play. Made by photographers Helen Levitt and Janice Loeb along with the one and only James Agee, the hidden cameras offer a rich, compassionate portrait of the tenements and its inhabitants. Of course, after The Americans, Frank took up the film camera to lens truth at 24 frames per second. In 1959, he debuted with Pull My Daisy, a playful chronicle of an upright dinner party that’s mussed up by the beatniks.
Jack Kerouac, who wrote the euphoric introduction to Americans, provides a gleeful, freestyle narration as well as the voices for a cast that includes poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, artist Larry Rivers, French beauty Delphine Seyrig, and Frank’s son Pablo. Although he shared a co-directing credit with Alfred Leslie, the image of a bishop draped in the American flag is trademark Frank.
You’ll be able to catch it on the big screen with the autobiographical Conversations in Vermont at the Met next Saturday. Each Saturday thereafter features a special Frank film, including the rare and aforementioned Blues, his Beat-inspired feature-length debut Me and My Brother, and the Tom Waits-starring Candy Mountain. The photographs and contact sheets of Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans stay up until January 3rd of next year.
Ramin Bahrani’s lovely 18-minute whirlwind, Plastic Bag documents the existential and eye-opening afterlife of a poster-child for pollution. It is voiced by Werner Herzog. The Bavarian auteur — who has been in the blogosphere of late with a new, $1450-priced seminar called the Rogue Film School — lends his familiar brogue to the plain-brown plastic as it goes from the checkout line into its “Maker’s” life.
The “Maker,” as Herzog refers to her throughout, appears to never have heard of other sorts of bags (zip-lock, canvas, so on) and she re-uses our protagonist to hold lunch, tennis balls, ice, and even dog food.
No matter: all bags become flotsam and this is when the bag’s determined, air-to-sea search for meaning and home commences, with Bahrani’s usual DP Michael Simmonds framing it drifting against and past lifeless structures and breathtaking nature scenes (on land, in air, under water). Throughout, the plastic runs into seagulls, horses, and jellyfish — each invariably called “monster” — before the idyll pointedly ends at the Pacific Trash Vortex, a swirling, 100-million-ton mass of the selfsame objects.
Here lies the increasingly apparent message (Herzog: “I wish you had created me so I could die”) of an ecological PSA that’s still poetic and quite potent, one bolstered by Sigur Rós keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson’s lush score. Happily, you’ll be able to watch it online in the near-future since it’s one of the 11 films that make up Futurestates, a new series commissioned by The Independent Television Service (ITVS).
Meanwhile, there’s a beautiful plasticity to Andrey Khrzhanovsky’s A Room and a Half, an ode to the exiled poet Joseph Brodsky and his search for lost time. The Russian animator offers a resplendent visual outing as he freewheels through the post-WWII Leningrad/St. Petersburg that shaped and haunted the Nobel Laureate (class of ‘87). The film’s framing device is an imagined voyage by the elderly Brodsky (Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy) back to the Motherland and past; while at sea, he warns us that the “linear” is better left to math books, that his “memory is simply a developing film.”
With this carte blanche, Khrzhanovsky delicately mix-and-matches the poet’s elegiac time in America — where he’s free but bereft of family — with affectionate, sigh-coated scenes of his childhood, adolescence, and political awakening; archival footage of the Soviet culture from which he was eventually cast off for being a “social parasite”; and animation that’s simply magnificent, from a cut-out orchestra going airborne on a wintry night to exquisite pencil drawings of cats in aerial contraptions.
It turns somewhat sappy as it nears the end, but Khrzhanovsky does slip in a eureka sequence: calling forth Brodsky’s ghostly and incantatory voice, he edits shots of a foreign St. Petersburg to coincide with his line breaks, each sentence flows into the following as each image vanishes into the next, tying life and language into a mighty reverie.
Lebanon, on the other hand, is Israeli writer/director Samuel Maoz’s tank-chamber drama whose myopia curbs its initial promise and its resonance. Set on the first day of the 1982 Lebanon War — and based on the director’s own traumatic combat experiences — the Venice Film Festival prizewinner entraps the audience inside a combat tank where four, unfit-to-serve soldier boys are assigned to man its murderous apparatus.
Plunged into this mucky and claustrophobic interior, the only way to see the ruined outside world is through a gunsight that moves from side to side with a mechanical whirring noise, and whose zoom sounds like a computer pop-up. Cross hairs are stamped on each and every exterior image — whether enemy fighters, crumbling facades, or a Lebanese woman in search of her daughter — and it’s a truly inventive way to simulate the limited, disoriented perspective and power of those in war.
When the shit hits the fan during their supposed “stroll” through a bombed-out town, the action is largely a relentless aural and psychological blitz as the gunner can’t bring himself to fire. This do-or-die tension unsettles since there’s often little clue of their relation to the enemy, and the where-we-be paranoia reaches a fever pitch when a pair of shady phalangists (Christian Arab allies) are enlisted to lead them to safety. Yet throughout these fraught movements, the soldiers never rise above cardboard cutouts (mama’s boy, shell-shocked leader, etc.), these empty signifiers whose darting and frantic eyes can only signify a textbook motif: the horror, the horror.
Lebanon was preceded by Paolo Sorrentino’s wordless Slow Game, in which the Italian’s flamboyant style explores a rugby squads on- and off- field dynamics to metaphorical effect.
Now 81 years old, Cahiers du cinéma alumnus and auteur Jacques Rivette helms Around A Small Mountain, a beautifully-shot, melancholic, but ultimately trying exploration of a few of his usual idées fixes, such as the nebulous intersection of art and life and the processes behind creation. Herein, a small-time circus, rather than the theater, provides the multipurpose stage for what some propose is Rivette’s au voir.
Jane Birkin stars as Kate, a woman who returns to the troupe following her father’s passing and after a 15-year hiatus; she suffers from an emotional backlog that dates back to the freak accident (to reveal it is to snatch half the plot) that led to her departure. First seen beside a broken car, she’s rescued here and hereafter by a peripatetic Italian knight-in-shining automobile named Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto). From there, the sly, charming Vittorio trails the heavy-hearted Kate and her circus, but the interactions between the two seem slight owing to Birkin’s hard-to-swallow performance. The rest of the film feels unmoored as a result, although the nightly fine-tuning of a skit with broken plates and bullets is something to behold, especially once Vittorio steps in for an improvised diversion.
