Directors:

Peter Jackson, Miklós Jancsó, Derek Jarman, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Jia Zhang-ke, Spike Jonze, Neil Jordan, Miranda July

Jabor, Arnaldo

ALL’S WELL (Tudo Bem)

aka: Everything’s Alright

Brazil (111 mi) 1978

User reviews from imdb Author: debblyst from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Juarez Barata (Paulo Gracindo) and his wife Elvira (Fernanda Montenegro), a middle-class, middle-aged couple from Rio de Janeiro, decide to renovate their Copacabana apartment and chaos is installed. Through a series of vignettes, director/co-writer Arnaldo Jabor exposes -- with explosive humor and sharp criticism -- the social, political and cultural differences that separate (but not quite) Brazilian social classes in this operatic, frantic, Carnival-like film that is a rarity among Brazilian comedies: it's not slapstick, it's not vulgar (though it has its share of scatological jokes), it's witty and it's hilarious -- you laugh while keeping your brain working. Who can ask for anything more?

Jabor aims his machine-gun at various issues: fascism, capitalism, imperialism, mysticism, chauvinism, racism, the bourgeoisie, the military regime, the mixed-up relations among social classes in Brazil, etc -- and it's sad to realize they haven't dated at all. There's really no proper plot: the renovation is just a pretext to get the characters together, tease them and start the cockfight. Jabor -- who abandoned his successful film career altogether in 1990 and has since used his bombastic, independent, incisively ironic style to become one of the top Brazilian political/cultural press/TV columnists -- -- manages to combine in "Tudo Bem" a piercing analysis of Brazilian politics and society with his flair for good dialog and interesting musical choices on the soundtrack (including Juarez's fixation on Brazilian birdsong records - "Ah, o uirapuru!!!").

The film benefits immensely from a great cast: veteran Gracindo gives a tour-de-force performance (probably his best on film), alternating a respectable façade when he's sober with nostalgic bravura when he's drunk, at once funny and pathetic; Montenegro (Oscar-nominee for "Central do Brasil") shines as the hysterical Elvira with her inimitable vocal delivery and on-target comic tempo; Luiz Linhares, Fernando Torres and especially Jorge Loredo make a terrific trio of ghosts; Stenio Garcia, José Dumont and Anselmo Vasconcellos have a ball as the workers; Zezé Motta gets to show her callipygian nudity, fascinating energy and fine singing voice. Then-beginners Regina Casé (in her film debut) and Luiz Fernando Guimarães (his 2nd film) sometimes fall back to stage tricks, but they already knew how to strut their stuff and it's nice to see them so young and thin!

Allegoric, loud, intelligent, funny, fast and furious, "Tudo Bem" got a DVD release with so-so quality (they could have remixed the sound: some dialogs get lost under loud music or the workmen's whamming and pounding), but it's one of the best Brazilian comedies of the 1970s and one of Jabor's best -- only the ending is rather flat and disappointing (and Paulo César Pereio hamming it up doesn't help). My vote: 8 out of 10.

Brazil Film Update Robert Stam from Jump Cut

TUDO BEM crowds all of Brazil's social contradictions into the middle-class apartment of a Carioca family. The naively reactionary father, Juarez Ramos Barata, lives at home in his pajamas, surrounded by a private museum of nationalist relics. Counseled by the phantoms of his former friends — a drunken fascist, a failed spaghetti manufacturer, and a tubercular romantic poet — he daily sends off irate letters to newspapers, lamenting the decadence of mores and proposing absurd solutions to the country's problems. He favors capitalism, for example, but deplores profit. His wife Elvira, meanwhile, has her own phantoms. Rather than recognize her husband's impotence, she fantasizes a lover for him, ultimately persuading him to fall in love with her own chimerical creation. Two children  — a bland public relations consultant and a daughter defined largely in terms of her search for a husband — complete the portrait. Of two maids, one moonlights as a prostitute, while the other is a virgin and a mystic.

A decision to have workers redo the apartment becomes a pretext for Jabor to expose the explosive class contradictions of Brazil. Profoundly materialist and wildly comic at the same time, a radicalized NIGHT AT THE OPERA, TUDO BEM shows more and more people invading a confined space. "How many social contradictions," we are led to ask, "can fit into one room — the room being Brazil — without the room exploding?" The inherent injustice of class society becomes strange, intolerable, in the confines of one apartment. At the same time, much of Brazilian culture, relocated in this bourgeois setting, conies to seem subversive, incendiary. Jabor's tactic of radical juxtaposition explodes bourgeois complacencies. The utopian energy of carnival threatens the good order of such an apartment. The slave quarters occupy the Big House of the Masters. The guttural songs of Northeastern peasants, in forced cohabitation with the bourgeoisie, become painful, embarrassing, and unbearable.

A cinematic tour de force, TUDO BEM is never visually boring, despite its spatial constrictions, thanks to its virtuoso variation of cinematic styles and to the visual interest of the decor itself. The film ends with a hilarious allegorical sequence in which a U.S. communications executive, lauding the global village, leads a festive chorus of "Around the World in 80 Days." Thanks to satellites, he says, in a transparent allusion both to Kuleshov and Pele, someone kicks a soccer ball in New York and the goal is scored in Copacabana. First World mass media no longer need 80 days to circle the globe; their transmissions are virtually instantaneous. But lest media executives become overly complacent, TUDO BEN reminds them that Brazil, like the Juarez apartment, is still "under construction." 

Jacir, Annemarie

SALT OF THIS SEA (Milh Hadha Al-Bahr)

France Palestine Switzerland Belgium USA Great Britain Netherlands Spain (89 mi) 2008

Salt Of This Sea (Milh Hadha Al-Bahr) Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

A Palestinian woman agonises over her roots and national identity in Annemarie Jacir's much-anticipated but disappointingly minor Salt Of This Sea. The director's feature debut is clearly made with passion and fuelled by a keen resentment at the plight of the Palestinian people. And the film has an authentic, colour-saturated sense of place. But this is not enough to turn an overlong travelogue-cum-manifesto with a flat romantic subplot into a convincing drama.

With no less than seventeen sources of finance, Salt Of This Sea was always going to be a commercially fragile prospect. In the end, it will play best to indulgent liberal audiences and the Palestinian diaspora in Europe, but seems headed more for filmclubs and themed seasons than for significant arthouse exposure. The fact that Danny Glover is one of ten co-producers may help the film to a little more stateside attention that it might otherwise have received.

The film starts where its heart lies – in documentary mode, with black and white archive footage of Israeli tanks and bulldozers knocking down Arab homes. But we're soon back in colour and the present day, as feisty politicised Soraya (Hammad) arrives at an Israeli airport on her first visit to what she considers her homeland – only to be interrogated and strip-searched at customs, despite her US passport, when she reveals her Palestinian origins. Arriving eventually in Ramallah, she tries and fails to recover money left in a bank by her grandfather in 1948. Adrift in the city, Soraya meets an intense, bitter young Palestinian, Emad (Bakri), who is working as a waiter while he waits for his Canadian study visa to come through.

The idea is that Soraya is looking for a Palestine that no longer exists while Emad has had enough of the exhausting present-day reality of the place. But surprisingly little is made of this, perhaps because Jacir finds it difficult to distance herself from Soraya enough to view her idealism in a critical light. In fact, the only real conflict in the film comes from relentlessly unsympathetic Israeli officials and a stereotyped British regional bank manager. Such cliches impoverish the film, whose best moments consist of what look like stolen footage: especially a brief glimpse of a small baby being passed over a barbed wire border fence from father to mother.

The tension is suddenly upped when Soraya, Emad and their film-maker friend Marwan (Ideis) rob the bank to get back what she feels is hers. But the pace soon drops again as the threesome escape into Israel.

Benoit Chamaillard's carefully-framed photography gives the film's handheld aesthetic a tonal richness and depth, and the use of popular Palestinian music is nicely judged. But there's still a sense that Annemarie Jacir would have done better to make the serious full-length documentary that her fine early shorts seemed to herald.

Jackson, Mark

WITHOUT C+ 78

USA (87 mi) 2011 Without Official Site

This is for the most part a surprisingly uninvolving film, shot entirely on Whidbey Island located at the northern end of Puget Sound and about 30 miles north of Seattle, attainable by ferryboat, where the location alone may be of some interest to viewers, yet nearly the entire film is shot indoors, with just a handful of views of the area. While shot on video, which dulls the natural colors, part of the problem appears to be the lead actress, Joslyn Jensen, who turns out to be something of a despicable character, seen all along as something of a ditz, a shallow 19-year old girl with few redeeming values, one of which seems to be her willingness to display herself naked on the Internet without any thought of the consequences. She arrives on the island to look after Frank (Ron Carrier), an elderly man confined to a wheelchair living in a vegetative state, allowing the family to take a week’s vacation together. Initially, Joslyn receives audience sympathy, as it’s exceedingly difficult to care for such a severely disabled individual, though there are early signs she’s in over her head as she finds it especially difficult to move him in and out of his chair. Eventually, however, the director simply omits these shots, showing Joslyn instead casually running on an Exerciser, performing other fitness routines, while also making a daily run for coffee in the owner’s car. There’s very little interaction between Joslyn and Frank, where he may as well be left to fend for himself parked in front of the cable Fishing Network while she spends nearly all of her idyll time by herself, with Frank completely out of the picture.

It should be stated that Frank’s family left explicit instructions on how to care for Frank, listing pages of details, including how to set the remote to the proper channel and sound level, how to reprogram the TV if something goes wrong, what he likes to eat, how to use the dishwasher, washer, dryer, and other appliances, all contained in what they like to call The Bible. Initially, Joslyn stares at The Bible religiously, not really knowing what she’s expected to do, but over time she’s simply on her own, ignoring Frank as much as possible. Due to the remote location, there is no cell phone service and the family never plugged in the Internet, something she’s able to hook up with little problem, so she spends most of her time bored, staring at photos on her cell phone, where one in particular is seen over and over, including YouTube videos of the two of them together kissing. There is an amusing routine of Joslyn waking up to her loud and overly aggravating cell phone alarm every morning, where day after day, her phone is never where she left it, except the one day she tapes it down to the desk overnight. What evolves is next to nothing about Frank, the reason why she’s there, and almost everything about her, where the movie starts to feel like PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2007), where things tend to move in the night, where the story fits the horror profile of a girl left alone in a secluded wood, where bad things are expected to happen.

The director belatedly pulls things together by the end, where there is a strange side story concerning the girl in the picture, as her mom owns an art gallery on the island, revealing yet another side of this girl who’s blend of the real and the imagined are all a blur to her at times, where Joslyn actually starts suspecting Frank is locking the doors behind her or getting up in the middle of the night and moving her phone, getting aggravated that he’s really faking his disability, yelling and accusing him, though Frank’s given no reason to suspect him. The whole mood shifts into a bizarre interior world, where Joslyn gets naked on the Internet and talks filthy dirty, looks at herself repeatedly in the mirror, begins to see scars or rashes that are gone by the next day, grows overly paranoid about Frank playing games with her, obsesses about the girl on her cell phone, goes out with a guy on the island that she knows is a creep, starts sneaking sips out of the liquor cabinet, and in just a few short days of utter monotony she’s already exhibiting signs of cabin fever. One starts to wonder where they ever found this girl, as she seems utterly irresponsible and uniquely unqualified. The viewer fully expects Joslyn to lose Frank by the end of the week, where he’d be found mangled among some dead logs in a nearby creek, his face half eaten by wolves, or perhaps even murder him herself out of spite for having to put up with him all week. After all, he was no help to her. Whatever the expectations are, this first time writer, director, editor, and producer does not disappoint with the way matters resolve themselves, where there’s always a tinge of underlying ambiguity, but also a loathsome and unsympathetic feel throughout most of this film for a girl so out of her depth.

San Francisco Bay Guardian [Jesse Hawthorne Ficks]

That's right, yet another low-budget indie film made in the Northwest. But boy, is it memorable. Winning a Special Jury Mention at this year's Slamdance Film Festival for Joslyn Jensen's "creative, nuanced and moving performance", you can't help but feel isolated and even trapped in this character study's life. The almost-silent film follows a young girl as she tends to every detail for an invalid over a three-day period; it captures that alone time that for many is the ultimate fear. Warning: this film is not what it seems. A truly chilling and meditative experience all at the same time!

Portable.tv [Yaara Sumeruk]

The Locarno Film Festival—known as the smallest of the big and the biggest of the small festivals—has, for the last 64 years, lived by the ethos of seeking out and promoting emerging talent. They’re a festival more interested in art than celebrity, and the fact that the festival is so elegant and organized makes one endeared to it even more; they do it well for the sake of art.

This year was no exception—their line up of features by first-time directors was impressive. One of these feature films was Without, the debut of US director Mark Jackson. The film is set on a remote island, where 19 year-old Joslyn becomes the caretaker to an elderly, wheelchair-bound man who is in a vegetative state. She has no cellphone or internet connection, and it is in this isolation that she has chosen to grieve a deep loss, a grieving process that sometimes has her taking comfort in the man’s limited company, and fearing him in others.

The beauty of this film lies in how emotionally connected we become to Jocelyn in such a seemingly simplistic and small filmic world, and how Jackson manages to create tension and develop a relationship between two people, one of whom doesn’t speak or move.

The Hollywood Reporter [Neil Young] longer article

LOCARNO — A chilling exercise in precisely measured ambiguity, Without offers an intense, troubling cinematic experience that may leave some frustrated at its enigmatic evasiveness. But there's no mistaking the confident skill with which writer/director/editor Mark Jackson takes us deep into the troubled world of his female protagonist, nor the bravura performance from Joslyn Jensen — like Jackson, a notably promising feature film debut — at its core.

Part psychological thriller and part minimalist art movie, Without isn't an easy sell (that forgettable title doesn't exactly help) but overall is sufficiently distinctive to perhaps gain limited domestic theatrical exposure. Overseas festivals receptive to genuinely independent American cinema should certainly check it out.

The set-up is familiar from the horror/suspense genres: A young woman arrives in a remote location to look after a house for its holidaying owners, and is unnerved by a series of eerie experiences. Here Joslyn (Jensen shares her character's name) is simultaneously housesitter and caretaker, tending to the needs of the family's wheelchair-bound, near-catatonic grandfather Frank (Ron Carrier) while they're away.

A fitness-conscious, quietly spoken 19-year-old, Joslyn struggles to cope with the very limited Internet access on this scenic, leafy island in Washington state. Among the things she is without is that indispensable aspect of modern life, Facebook. She must also deal with the advances of the underpopulated island's over-friendly cab-driver/handyman Darren (genial, imposingly bearish Darren Lenz). As the days slowly pass, Joslyn's mental equilibrium becomes a little unbalanced. We gradually piece together a traumatic back-story that has brought her to this particular place in this particular frame of mind.

While Jackson's script provides certain key pieces of information, it's never easy to know just how much to trust what we're seeing and hearing. There are gaps in our understanding, which mirror Joslyn's own unreliable relationship with reality. There's evidently something badly amiss in this situation, but we're never quite able to put our finger on it. One blink-and-you'll-miss-it special effect even fleetingly hints at a supernatural element at play. This involves the white noise of a television set, one of several untrustworthy manifestations of electronic technology. (Joslyn's near-symbiotic attachment to her Smartphone is a particular source of mystery and even anguish.)

The film's achievement is, as with Roman Polanski's 1965 Repulsion, one obvious influence, to leave us wondering to what extent Joslyn might be in actual physical danger, and to what extent she's the principle source of that danger — both to herself and to others. She's certainly far from the model caretaker. Her increasingly insensitive and cavalier treatment of helpless Frank crosses various lines of inappropriateness in a film which is frank in its presentation of nudity and feminine sexuality.

Biting fearlessly into a role that offers a terrific showcase for a younger performer, Jensen manages to retain our interest and sympathy even when her character's eccentricities shade towards madness. She's especially strong during the monologues - some delivered solo, some in Frank's vegetative presence. These punctuate the sparsely-written screenplay and are notable for their quicksilver unpredictability. The generally downbeat tone is leavened by moments of uneasy humor, as when Joslyn's employers pedantically delineate their exceedingly precise instructions about what she can and can't do in their absence.

Jessica Dimmock and Diego Garcia's high-definition digital cameras get up close and very personal to Jensen on many occasions. Their crisply lustrous imagery is a consistently hypnotic element as Without — nothing if not a mood-piece — establishes and develops its various sinister, chilly atmospheres. Eric Strausser's sound design is a marvel of near-subliminal effects (a wolf-howl here, a twig-crack there) and growling susurrations. Jackson's editing, meanwhile, chops up his claustrophobic little narrative into brisk fragments that keep us constantly on-edge, intrigued and tantalized by a bigger picture that's always just slightly out of reach.

The Stranger [Charles Mudede]

Without opens with a young and beautiful woman sitting on a ferry that's heading to Whidbey Island. She seems lost in her thoughts. The water is gray. The clouds are low.

A ferry employee cleans the tables behind her. She arrives on the island, enters town, and hires a ride to her destination. Her driver is clearly attracted to her beauty. She plays it cool, directs him to a driveway for a home on the left side of the road. She settles her business, gathers her things, shuts the door, walks up the driveway with a noisy roller suitcase, and, from the driver's perspective, disappears behind trees and bushes. After a moment of silence, the driver reverses, turns, and heads back to town. After a moment of silence, the young woman reappears from behind the greenery, makes sure the driver is gone, and noisily crosses the street to a home on the opposite side—her actual destination. It's at this moment that I fell in love with this movie. The timing of the editing and performances, the sound design, the photography—all made it clear that I was in very good hands and that the rest of the work would only deepen this initial love.

There is another scene, early in the movie—there are so many great scenes and sequences in this masterpiece of regional cinema—in which the young woman (Joslyn Jensen), wearing a black floral dress, is helping a catatonic elderly man (Ron Carrier) into bed. This is the job she came to the island to do. The job involves caring for the old man while his family is away on vacation. The house is ordinary, the rules of the house are a little odd but not eccentric, and this is the young woman's first night with the wheelchair-bound man. The difficult task of lifting him from the wheelchair to the bed is shown in such a way that makes her ass very prominent. Each pull of the man's limp waist or legs causes, from our perspective, her ass to rise, round, and expand invitingly. Though the old man can't see her ass (it's on the other side of him), we can't help wondering if he is secreting pleasure from her exertions.

Later in the film, yet another scene. This time it's with an animal, a deer. It walks out of the forest and begins to eat the grass in the home's backyard. The young woman sees the animal through a window. The light, the fur, the black hooves, the chewing, the eyes, the stares. It's a moment filled with something that can only be described as cosmic sensuality, a transanimal field of desire. Without is the region's first erotic tour de force—the cleaning of the old body, the surprise erection, the computer orgasm, the horny visitor, her longing for a lover who is seemingly trapped in the hard drive of her signal-less iPhone. (Humpday was certainly a fine film, but it was not erotic.)

Without is a regional film. Its director, Mark Jackson, though currently living in New York City, was raised in Seattle, and the same goes for the film's star, Jensen. One of the film's producers, Jaime Keeling, who also lives in NYC, once lived in Seattle and was the program director of Northwest Film Forum. Carrier, an actor in my film Zoo and Megan Griffiths's new Sundance-bound film The Off Hours, lives in Seattle.

The movie was shot entirely on Whidbey Island with the camera of the future, a Canon 5D Mark II, and a micro crew. The project had two primary cinematographers, Jessica Dimmock and Diego Garcia—the former, who has worked with Jackson on other projects (one of which is a video for Moby's "Wait for Me") and has a background in photography, essentially did the fixed shots. Garcia did moving shots. This collaboration was successful, as was the film's art direction by Alisarine Ducolomb—she worked on Che: Part One, Babel, and Amores Perros.

Without, which premieres this week at Slamdance (it really is scandalous that it's not in competition in Sundance), reinforces the natural cinematic beauty of our part of the world. The quality of light, the sharpness of colors, the lowness of clouds, the closeness of mountains, and the meshing of rural and urban codes. It is now clearer than ever that a film made in this region must exploit its natural wonders and beauty.

Twitch Film [Ben Umstead]

Movie City News [Kim Voynar]

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

indieWIRE / The Playlist [Erik McClanahan]

Tribune (Locarno Film Festival report) Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge (capsule)

Filmmaker Magazine [Brandon Harris]

Variety [Rob Nelson]

Orlando Weekly [Justin Strout]

Jackson, Peter

Film Reference Philip Kemp

After his first three features, most critics thought they had Peter Jackson neatly pegged: an antipodean maverick whose films made up for their zero-budget limitations with comic gusto and creative ingenuity; films whose gross-out excesses of spurting bodily fluids and splattered guts made George Romero and Sam Raimi look like models of genteel restraint. Jackson's work, in short, seemed to be comprehensively summed up by the blithely upfront title of his debut film, Bad Taste. And then came his fourth film, the award-winning Heavenly Creatures, and suddenly all the assumptions had to be revised. Jackson himself, noting a hint of surprise behind the acclaim, pointed out that like all his work the film stemmed from his "unhealthy interest in the grotesque." But if there was continuity in terms of themes and preoccupations, Heavenly Creatures showed Jackson was also capable of emotional complexity, subtlety, and sophistication—qualities no one would have suspected from his previous films.

Far from striving to disguise the ramshackle, garden-shed genesis of his early work, Jackson gloried in it, making an amateurish, peculiarly New Zealander domesticity central to his humour. The Astral Investigation and Defence Service team ("I wish they'd do something about those initials") who foil predatory aliens in Bad Taste are as far from their jut-jawed Hollywood counterparts as could be imagined; inept, nerdish, and post-adolescent, they shamble around bickering over trivialities or moaning about filling in time-sheets. In Braindead, whose showdown erupts in a bland suburban home, the hero demolishes a horde of flesh-eating zombies, not with flamethrower or pump-action shotgun, but with a rotary lawnmower—"a Kiwi icon," according to the director. It comes as no surprise to read, in the end-titles for Bad Taste, a credit to "Special Assistants to the Producer (Mum and Dad)."

Both Bad Taste and Braindead (whose farcical brand of ultra-physical violence Jackson dubs "splatstick") spoof well-established and much-parodied formulas within the horror genre, respectively the space-invaders movie and the zombie movie. Meet the Feebles is more audacious in its choice of target: the hitherto sacrosanct world of Jim Henson's Muppets. Hijacking the standard Muppet narrative framework of backstage shenanigans, Jackson gleefully subverts the perky ethos of the puppet troupe with lavish helpings of booze, filth, sex, and drugs, culminating in one of his trademark bloodbaths. He also pushes the unstated logic of Muppetry to ends that Henson would shudder to confront; if Miss Piggy can get the hots for Kermit, why shouldn't an elephant have sex with a chicken? (The resultant outlandish hybrid is wheeled on—literally—for our delectation.) Jackson further outrages Muppet conventions by making the frog character in his film a Vietnam vet with a heroin habit, while Kermit's counterpart as stage director is an effete, English-accented fox who mounts a big production number in praise of sodomy.

This fascination with outrage, with the consequences of pushing beyond the bounds of convention, carries through into Heavenly Creatures, Jackson's finest film to date. Based on an actual New Zealand cause celèbre of the 1950s, the Parker-Hulme case, the film traces the progress of two fifteen-year-old schoolgirls into an increasingly unhinged world of ritual and fantasy. Instinctive loners, Pauline and Juliet bond together to turn their outsider status into an exclusive, hermetic society tinged with lesbianism and peopled by personal icons—Mario Lanza, James Mason—along with figures from their medieval fantasy kingdom of Borovnia. Drawing on real case documents (Pauline's diaries and the girls' own Borovnian "novels"), Jackson creates a mood of intense pubescent obsession sliding steadily out of control until—as the borders between the two worlds elide—it culminates in brutal murder.

Determined not to present his heroines as the "evil lesbian killers" they were branded by contemporary press accounts, Jackson not only portrays them with sympathy and insight, but captures the richly creative energy of their shared fantasies. Their behaviour is seen as a reaction to the imagination-starved society around them, since 1950s Christchurch, all garish pastels and agonised gentility, appears no less bizarre and unbalanced a world (and a whole lot less fun) than the one the girls create for themselves. Yet the killing—of Pauline's uncomprehending, well-meaning mother—shares none of the sick-joke relish of Jackson's previous films; it is shown as clumsy, painful, and distressing.

Jackson firmly denies that Heavenly Creatures represents a bid to be seen as a "serious filmmaker" who wants to do "arty mainstream films." "People immediately assume that filmmakers do things because of a grand plan. . . . I do intend to do other splatter films," he told Cinema Papers. "I have intentions of doing all sorts of films. I have no interest in a 'career' as such." As if to prove it, he reverted to splatstick mode with The Frighteners, an Evil-Dead-style horror-comedy made (thanks to backing from Universal) on a less shoestring basis than his earlier films.

Jackson's achievement in staying put at home and persuading the Hollywood money to come to him bodes well for his country's film industry. Most successful New Zealand directors (Roger Donaldson, Geoff Murphy, Jane Campion, Lee Tamahori) have used their first major hit as a springboard for Hollywood. Jackson, remaining true to his roots, has set up his own production base (Wingnut Films) in his home town of Wellington. "I choose to stay in New Zealand earning a fraction of what I could make in Los Angeles because I want to do whatever I feel like doing. . . . The freedom that I have in New Zealand is worth millions of dollars to me." So far, the tactic has worked. By 2000 Jackson was working on his huge, three-part adaptation of Lord of the Rings, with a possible remake of King Kong next in line—all in his native country. The $260 million budget for the Tolkien trilogy is a far cry from the small change it cost to make Bad Taste. But the spirit isn't perhaps so different: armor for the 15,000 extras is being knitted out of string—by the septuagenarian ladies of the Wellington Knitting Club.

Your Mother Ate My Dog! a Peter Jackson website

All-Movie Guide Rebecca Flint Marx

The Peter Jackson Guide Bob Bankard

Jackson, Peter They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

The Bastards Have Landed: Official Peter Jackson Fan Club

DGA Interview by Jerry Roberts, January 2002 from DGA magazine

Hollywood Reporter Interview (2004) by Philip Wakefield

Dark Horizons Interview (2005) by Paul Fischer, December 5, 2005

Time Out Interview (2005) by Dave Calhoun, December 9, 2005

BAD TASTE

New Zealand (91 mi) 1987

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Young filmmakers, take heart; instead of feeling washed up because you haven’t made your Citizen Kane by the time you hit 25, consider this: Peter Jackson may be the lord of Lord of the Rings now, but when he was 25, he was making this scattershot, borderline-unwatchable (and yet still somehow strangely amusing) psychotronic splatter flick. Set in an unspecified and not particularly explained future, Bad Taste is mainly a collection of gross-out gags laid end to end. Defending the earth from an invasion of alien drones who aim to package human beings as intergalactic fast food — they particularly like the "chunky bits" — our human heroes find every possible way to dismember their human-looking foes, and Jackson lays on the fake blood (and brains, and guts) as thick as can be. Though it obviously prefigures the obsession with special effects and other worlds that piqued Jackson’s interest in LOTR, it’s hard to get through more than several minutes of this earliest feature without your attention wandering — and when a ravenous alien scooping brains out of a dead human’s half-exploded head can’t hold your interest, there’s something really wrong. Skip to the end and savor the truly bizarre climax, which features a colonial house blasting off into outer space, or savor the occasional deadpan zinger and Jackson’s borderline-insane performances — as both a ravenous E.T. and an alien hunter whose brain keeps falling out of his head. Disc two of the pricier two-disc limited edition features a half-hour making-of featurette that will no doubt please fans (and Bad Taste certainly has them — check out badtaste.iscool.net), but is hardly worth the twofold increase in price.

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

The fact that Peter Jackson, the director of this cheerfully repulsive alien-cannibal comedy, went on to win multiple Oscars fifteen years later is one of the finer ironies of Academy history.

It certainly makes good on its title. Ravenous extra-terrestrials (“No glowing fingers on these bastards,” growls Jackson as Derek, member of the Astral Investigation and Defense Service) land in New Zealand, assume human form, and commence converting the locals into fast food. It’s up to our boys in the A.I.D.S. to put a stop to it.

Twenty-two when he first began shooting this on weekends in 1983, Jackson scraped together $400,000, gathered friends from his newspaper job, and shot in 16mm, doing half of everything himself. Here, Jackson inaugurated the style of “splatstick” (partly inspired by such sanguinary Monty Python sketches as “Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days”) that would serve him well later. At the time, Jackson said he didn’t want to presume to the thrones of Sam Raimi, George Romero, or Stuart Gordon; but in Bad Taste he outsplats all three, crafting the ultimate “Bunch of Guys Set Out to Make the Grossest, Coolest Movie Ever” project.

Like Raimi, Jackson was never a horror director so much as a comedy director — even the most disgusting passages (“Aren’t I lucky,” beams an alien as he sucks down a bowl of steaming vomit, “I got a chunky bit”) and scenes of ultra-violence are timed for laughs, not shock.

I want this Peter Jackson back. The Peter Jackson who could make a fun, short movie for peanuts. Don't you?

Edinburgh U Film Society [Keith H. Brown/Andrew Hesketh]

Imagine Mars Attacks as a zero budget production made without regard for the certificate. Alternative titles could have included `Man-eating space aliens invade New Zealand and lots of bad imitation gunk and chainsaw accidents ensue', or even ,`The film that will have you laughing to death and wanting to be violently ill at the same time' On reflection however, `Bad Taste' sums it up far better.

Aliens have landed on earth and they aren't friendly:

"There's no glowing fingers on these bastards. We've got a bunch of extra-terrestrial psychopaths on our hands."

Representatives of an intergalactic fast food company, they're here to turn humanity into the galaxy's new taste sensation. The only thing that stands in their way is the unfortunately acronymic Astro Investigations and Defence Service (the indefatigable Derek and three others, armed with uzis, magnum, rocket launcher and chainsaw).

The characters of the film are classic comic figures falling somewhere between the three stooges and Harry Enfield's scousers; witness their sheer determination and imaginative efforts as to the best way to kill the alien invaders and splatter serious amounts of intestine over the screen. In its 90 minute running time Bad Taste gives us an alien who accidentally slits his own throat; vomit eating; multiple mutilations; an exploding sheep and an incredible finale where Derek chainsaws the head off an alien only to exit out of its bum, "reborn".

It's very sick. It's also very, very funny. The gore effects are so unrealistic and taken to such parodic excesses that you can't but help laugh. Jackson clearly understands the difference between good and bad taste; and it's a point of interest that his supposedly bad taste film, with its all male cast, pointedly avoids that bete noire of the horror genre: misogyny.

Its easy to see Bad Taste's flaws/charms: Post synchronised sound which isn't in synch; acting (from Jackson's schoolfriends and workmates) that doesn't merit the term; an atrocious score played by some of these same friends (memorably described in a previous EUFS magazine as "James Last plays The Professionals"). But the real question is whether anyone else could have done any better with the extremely limited resources available and the answer has to be "no". Jackson (more recently directing Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners) took a hand in the production, writing, camera operation, editing, effects and acting, for reasons of budget more than rampant egotism.

Anyone who manages to last to the end will be able to do nothing but agree that Jackson has created a masterpiece (of bad taste). Bad Taste is guaranteed to make you laugh more than many films costing 100 or even 1000 times as much. The challenge for Jackson, now a respected mainstream director, is to continue making great entertainment within a system that doesn't like to take risks.

Bad Taste : Special Edition | Film at The Digital Fix Mark Davis

The Horror Geek Speaks: Bad Taste - IGN Mike Bracken

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Badmovies.org B-Movie Reviews (Andrew Borntreger)

Classic-Horror another fanboy review by Dellamorte

Monsters At Play yet another, by Lawrence P. Raffel

Mutant Reviewers from Hell Justin

HorrorWatch NFlames

Fangoria Michael Gingold

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Doc Ezra

MEET THE FEEBLES

New Zealand (94 mi) 1989

The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]

There are a handful of films that when they are over you are just forced to contend with the fact that you will never be the same again, such as David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre, and Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small.  The typical reaction to these works is “What the fuck?” before one begins seriously considering therapy in order to be able to return to society.  Such is the case with Peter Jackson’s acid-laced, hyper real musical satire of Jim Henson’s The Muppet Show, as he issues his version of what happens between the time the curtain falls and the time it rises once more as only Marquis De Sade would have it.  All this with the addendum that the Muppets are real, self-sustaining creatures.  Creativity be damned, just get ready because I’m not making this up.

Here’s the roster:  A self-conscious hungry hippo named Heidi who, natch, has a weight problem as well as perpetual THO; Wynyard, a mad Kermit parody in the form of  a drug addled ’Nam vet who was forced to play Russian Roulette in a POW camp; a rat referred to as Trevor who is everyone’s boss and, to add insult to injury, has the voice of Peter Lorre; Harry, a hare whom, consistent with the reputation of his species, winds up with AIDS as a result; a paparazzi fly that figuratively stays on the wall while collecting all of his journalistic slime when not buzzing amid the actors trying to pry juicy bits for his next article; the production’s director, a fox named Sebastian, who sings an ode to sodomy on live television; a Hindu contortionist who gets his head lodged in his ass; and Daisy, an S & M porn queen who just happens to be a cow (all nipples pierced) with a hemorrhoid problem.

What you can expect to see during the film:  excessive amounts of gratuitous Muppet nudity, coprophilia, fellatio, two botched suicide attempts, fornication (would this be considered bestiality?), a menage a trios, masturbation, urination, a drug overdose after an anteater mistakes cocaine for Borax, a homicidal killing spree, and a drug war involving crabs, a bulldog, a rat, and a razorback--is a plot really necessary at this point? 

More importantly, does the film work as a satire?  Some would say Jackson didn’t know where or when to stop but in the same motion I believe that is part of his deconstruction of the American entertainment industry and the media’s glossy eye, using our most innocent caricatures as a springboard.

I don’t really have any more comments because I can’t seem to find where exactly my jaw fell . . . probably around the appearance of the eleken or chiphant (the bastard child of an elephant and a chicken).

Absolute Horror The 30-Something Senior

I’m sure I’m not alone when I ask this question. Have you ever wondered what the Care Bears Movie would have been like directed by David Lynch? What would have happened if Wes Craven had written for Disney or if John Carpenter had shot The Barney Christmas Special? What if The Devil’s Rejects had hosted an episode of Sesame Street or if Jim Henson had taken that infamous acid trip to Las Vegas instead of Hunter S. Thompson?

Oh wait, Peter Jackson already answered that last one.

That’s right, before the prodigal-celluloid-son of New Zealand went on to enthrall the masses with his homo-erotic trilogy about munchkins with hairy feet, he whiled away his younger years working at a photo shop, listening to LP’s of The Beatles and self-producing a hardcore BDSM puppet exploitation film.

MEET THE FEEBLES, Jackson’s 2nd film, a more than blatant “parody” of America’s own beloved Muppets, was marketed originally with the tagline “Hell Hath No Fury like a Hippo with a Machine Gun”. Though, in my opinion “Who Knew Fur-vert Pornography Could be this Much Fun?” would have been just as effective. Quite simply stated, in the plainest, most laymen analogy I can muster, MEET THE FEEBLES is the Muppets on crack and it’s an f-ing riot!

The story opens backstage, on the set of The Feebles Variety Hour, where Robert our shy, bumbling, hero of a hedgehog is starting his first day in the Feeble’s chorus, immediately falling head over heels for a dancing poodle named Lucile. Sparks fly and the film’s romance ignites. Not to worry though, while the underlying love story is the same as the Muppet’s in the most gut-wrenching sense, the world of MEET THE FEEBLES at least offers its visitors more shit, blood and spunk than a federal penitentiary.

As we “Meet” the Feebles, we find life behind the scenes of a hit television show to be endearingly similar to our own, and are instantly drawn into the drama of such characters as: Heidi the Hippo who fights to win back her big-shot producer, coke-dealing-drug-lord of a husband Belch the Walrus from the arms of a prostitute pussy; Harry the Hare who discovers that his years of humping like a rabbit have left him more diseased than a leper colony; and Trevor the Rat who desperately searches for the right leading lady to star in his next bovine-bondage fetish flick.

All that, plus it’s a musical to boot! Complete with such unforgettable numbers like “I’ve Got One Leg Missing” and the tear jerking “Sodomy”, which serves as the perfect backdrop for Jackson’s signature B-Movie splatterfest finale. Flat out, if you haven’t seen MEET THE FEEBLES, rent it, buy it or sell your first born to get your hands on it. It truly is one movie that I can say is unforgettable. Who knew two tons of polystyrene and some faux-fur could be this life changing? Hey, leave Joan Rivers out of this.

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

This is Sesame Street directed by the more perverted twin brother of Larry Clark. The puppets are all psychopaths and maniacs: including an overeating diva hippo with a depressive personality. a philandering, drug-dealing, porn-producing walrus; a shell-shocked crack-addicted gecko; an emphysemic chain-smoking worm; an obnoxious good-for-nothing rat; and a sodomy-loving fox. It doesn't stop there. There's also an innocent hedgehog who will fall under the love spell of a dreamy poodle; an elephant who is threatened with a paternity suit by a loose hen; a panty-sniffing anteater; and a rabbit who is suffering from the muppet-version of AIDS.

It's all done in bad taste. Peter Jackson, way before being tamed by the voluminous epic of J. R. R. Tolkien, is a genius in low-budget filmmaking. With funds saved from the grant he got for Bad Taste (1987), he developed this idea (with collaborators Fran Walsh, Danny Mulheron, and Stephen Sinclair) of repulsive characters in repulsive situations. The idea of turning the characters into puppets and mascots is golden; it allows Jackson and his crew to up the depravity without being absolutely obnoxious to the middlebrow viewer. No matter how gross and amoral things become, it'll always be perceived as satirical and not pornographic or gratuitous.

I think that Meet the Feebles is a product mainly created for fun and laughs (yes, weird sex and pointless violence is funny). However, it's not completely depleted of sense --- in fact, the film makes more sense than most pretentious issue films. The subtext of the horrors of show business hinges on legends and stories of drug-inducing, sex-starved, and suicidal stars that have graced the entertainment business. The sleaze, treachery, sex, drugs, and all that jazz that surround the business are exaggerated for laughs and giggles; the disturbing bit here is that it's not necessarily far from the truth. That showbiz people are portrayed as worms, flies, rats, lizards and hogs ups the statement a few notches higher.

The miracle of the movie is that despite its overt trashiness, Jackson inadvertently creates some nuggets of solid magic. That black-and-white flashback to the hippo and the walrus' first meeting evokes the timeless appeal of a newly discovered dreamgirl, where romance and fame mix in unhealthy quantities. That short bit in a puppet version of the Vietnam War has actual grit. Of course everything ends with a gargantuan punchline (the walrus cheating on the hippo with a seductive feline; and the lizard using the Vietnam bit as bate for donations for his drug fund).

Jackson would inevitably lose some of the zaniness of these films (although he somewhat tops the insanity of Meet the Feebles with Braindead (1992), an all-out romp of flying blood, meat and guts). His best work remains to be Forgotten Silver (1995), which is also his most effective joke (that despite being known as the biggest practical joke in cinematic history, remains to be still very funny and quite touching). Heavenly Creatures (1994) would pave his way to Hollywood wherein he will forever be known as the Academy Award-winning director of The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003, a grand epic with a less than desirous lack of Jackson's humor) and King Kong (2005). With his feet upon a high pedestal, I wonder if he still has the guts to return to his roots and give as a lovely yet salty-sour-sweet confection like this one. I hope he does.

Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]

Peter Jackson’s “Meet the Feebles” has probably the highest “Oh, God” count of any movie I’ve ever seen. This means that he repeatedly wheels his camera into rooms and we the audience witness some ghastly, horrifying nastiness and we mutter “Oh, God” in disgust. This response, or something like it, is pretty much universal from the audience. The great divide, however, is whether you cackle helplessly after being repulsed, or you leave the theater and pray for the souls of those responsible. Lord help me, I cackled. Pray for my soul.

“Meet the Feebles” is unashamedly a gross-out movie, but, like Jackson’s own “Dead Alive,” it wants to be the “Citizen Kane” of gross-out movies. The freshest (or maybe stalest?) element of his approach is that there are no human actors at all in “Meet the Feebles,” only animal puppets. They may not be Jim Henson quality, but they are good enough, and many of them are even cute and cuddly until someone vomits on them or squishes their heads open. Among the stomach-churning predicaments we must witness: a doomed romance between a hippo and a walrus, oral sex from a feline prostitute, a rabbit fearing he has AIDS, a car driving down the throat of a sea monster, a knife-throwing frog addicted to heroin, a panty-sniffing anteater, a gay fox singing about the joys of sodomy, a cow with six pierced teats, and a hedgehog with a lisp.

What’s surprising about “Meet the Feebles” is its actual quality as a film. Ghastly episodes are not simply paraded across the screen and then forgotten by Jackson, but connected in an interlocking story with a large cast of memorable characters. Robert Altman would be proud. The film begins twelve hours before the first performance of “Meet the Feebles,” a television song-and-dance variety show vying for syndication. Not surprisingly, this is a hard twelve hours, involving infidelity in the long-time relationship between Hippo Heidi the star and Walrus Bletch the producer. There are tangents—such as Trevor the Rat enlisting the panty-sniffing anteater to help him make a porno movie, a drug deal gone bad between Bletch and Mr. Big, and the frog’s flashbacks to Vietnam—but there are no dead-ends. Each episode either has a comic pay-off, character development, or both, and most tie back to the main storyline.

Many tasteful filmmakers lack Jackson’s ability to develop such a large cast so quickly. By the end of the movie, which only ran ninety minutes, I had come to know the faces, if not the names and motivations, of more than a dozen of his creatures. I think I might have even cared about some of them. Dare I say I was touched when the big blue elephant risked his life during the closing massacre to save his illegitimate infant daughter, whom he had denied throughout the course of the film? Anyone willing to risk the wrath of a hippo with a machine gun to rescue his child can drink from my canteen.

The overall experience is wild, raunchy fun. Most of this probably wouldn’t be as funny if there people instead of puppets. Certainly the Vietnam flashback which reenacts scenes from “Full Metal Jacket” and “The Deer Hunter” are only funny because we’ve never seen frogs playing Russian roulette. “Meet the Feebles” is, not surprisingly, done on a low-budget. Big-budget gore—like “Aliens” or “Saving Private Ryan”—must be in service of some higher goal to be appropriate, but low-budget gore can be for its own sake, because it’s so silly. The score for “The Feebles” works the same—the single MIDI setup running everything for under a thousand dollars is much more appropriate than an orchestral score or a rock band. What is top-notch is Jackson’s direction, which is quick and energetic in the way all great low-budget directors direct, and his willingness to not just give us splat after splat, but likable characters in-between to root for and, yes, laugh at when a hippo with an M60 blows their heads off.

Badmovies.org review Andrew Borntreger

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J. Wright]

HorrorDVDs.com Paff

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

eFilmCritic.com (Justin Helmer)

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

Ted Prigge

Jason Wallis

Mondo Digital

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov)

Read the New York Times Review » Janet Maslin

BRAINDEAD

aka: Dead-Alive

New Zealand (104 mi) 1992

Nashville Scene [Jim Ridley]

If it's over-the-top comic horror you're wanting, forget the stupid, sadistic Scream; Peter Jackson's slapstick holocaust remains the all-time champion splatter flick. The bite of a "Sumatran rat monkey" triggers a contagion of walking death in a New Zealand town; it's up to the hero (Timothy Balme) to confront hundreds of bloodthirsty ghouls with the only weapon at hand--the whirring blades of a lawn mower. Avoid the R-rated version, which, oddly, is more distasteful for being less gruesome; the NC-17 edition is a Tex Avery cartoon of hyperbolic gore, which gets funnier with each disgusting new sight gag. Best of all, you won't feel, as in Scream, that the director made the movie in order to see women tortured. Wes Craven hates his characters; Peter Jackson just liquefies his.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer)

New Zealand’s multi-talented Peter Jackson takes zombie comedy to its obvious (?) apex, with this, unquestionably the single goriest film ever made. With wicked wit, split-second timing, and a sense of the grotesque that crosses Heironymous Bosch with Monty Python, Jackson lays out an unimaginably grisly, nightmarish zombie fantasy and plays it for laughs. After Lionel’s mum is bitten at the zoo by a Sumatran rat-monkey, family life becomes Night of the Living Dead. And there goes the neighborhood: Jackson works out about a jillion ways to pulverise the human body during an extended siege on the family spread, and the whole thing finally climaxes on the roof, as the dysfunctional mother-son relationship grows to outrageous proportions. If you’ve the stomach for it, this is the most satisfying comedy of the decade.

Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]

The Citizen Kane of Oedipal zombie-cannibal-right to death-comedy-love stories. Kiwi auteur Peter Jackson -- best known stateside as the maniac behind the Muppet-perversion Meet the Feebles -- takes the shopworn flesh-eating zombie genre by its rotting horns, adds a dash of Monty Python, and comes up with a film so gleefully over-the-top that it's decidedly hard not to gag while you're laughing yourself incontinent. Rivers of gore, entrails, and ambulating body parts surround poor nebbish Lionel (Balme), a mama's boy whose mama (Moody) just happens to have been bitten by a Sumatran Rat Monkey and consequently degenerates into a flesh-hungry omnivore with a keen knack for oozing pus in front of the houseguests. Before you can say George Romero, she's snacking on the neighbors, and Lionel's up to his neck in overly-mobile cadavers. Though he tries valiantly to keep them sedated (with a big jar of “Sedative,” natch), it's not long before all hell breaks loose in a 30-minute climax that makes Re-Animator look like Captain Kangaroo on a bad hair day. Add to this Lionel's newfound love interest, Paquita (Penalver), his scheming uncle Les (Watkin), and a zombie infant that makes abortion seem like a really, really good idea, and you have quite literally the most disgusting comedy ever. Jackson, obviously aware of the cliché-ridden dangers of “horror comedies,” chucks convention and good taste out the window and goes for the gusto (or is that “gutso”?) with uncanny results. The film moves from gag to gore to gag again like a rocket from the crypt and never lets up -- just when you think you've seen the worst, Jackson tops himself and there you are squirming in your seat again (and loving every minute of it). Sick. Perverse. Brilliant.

Movie Vault [Goatdog]

The hilarious prologue to this New Zealand import sets the stage for the rest of the film. On an island near Sumatra, a zoologist and his assistant are carrying a basket containing a snarling creature. This is the Sumatran Rat-Monkey, a creature so horrible that the natives surround the pair and warn them of the fate which will befall them. The assistant wants to leave it, but the zoologist whips out his permit and thrusts it in the natives' faces. They tear it up and eat it. A chase ensues, ending with the terrified pair taking off with the rest of their crew in a jeep. Unfortunately, the zoologist has been bitten in the hand, so the mostly native crew apologetically chop his hand off. Then they find another bite on his arm, and off it goes. Then, they notice the scratch on his head...

The DVD case advertises "Dead Alive" (originally titled "Brain Dead") as the goriest movie ever made. I would have to agree that it is in contention, at least the 97 minute unrated version I saw. There is an 82 minute R-rated version available, but if you're going to watch a movie like this, you might as well watch it.

The story follows a hapless young man who lives with his domineering mother. He meets an ethnic girl who has been told by a fortune teller that he is the man for her. The two go on a date away from the prying eyes of the disapproving mother. However, she follows them to the zoo, and while spying on them, she is bitten by the Rat-Monkey, which she squishes with her foot in anger. The bite slowly turns her into a zombie-like mess of running sores and healthy appetite. A hilarious scene involves her attempting to serve lunch to members of her ladies' group while she slowly loses control of her facilities, including the loss of her ear, which she eats with her pudding. The terrified but loyal son tries to hide her from the public and his new girlfriend, which is hard after she escapes from the basement and is hit by a train. Even that won't kill her, and the disease spreads quickly as her son attempts to contain the epidemic.

Those familiar with Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" trilogy will appreciate this film, since it blends the same horrific gore and slapstick comedy. This film will make most people sick to their stomachs. It was hysterically funny at times, but the urge to laugh had to compete with the urge to vomit. Oh, and the director, Peter Jackson, also directed "Heavenly Creatures", and is directing the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. That's range, my friends.

Inside Pulse Brad Torreano

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]

Badmovies.org review Andrew Borntreger

Best-Horror-Movies.com Lee Roberts

Movie Cynics (Potentially Offensive) The Vocabulariast

Mike Bracken--Epinions.com still a fanboy

Mutant Reviewers from Hell Justin

eFilmCritic.com (Ryan Arthur)

Best DVD SBG

Ted Prigge

eFilmCritic.com DarkHorse

Livejournal [I Hate Movies] Steve Clark

Mondo Digital also reviewing FORGOTTEN SILVER and THE FRIGHTENERS

Read the New York Times Review » Stephen Holden

HEAVENLY CREATURES A 95

New Zealand Great Britain Germany (108 mi) 1994 ‘Scope

Orson Welles? Aaugh! The most hideous man alive!

There’s something desperately exciting about bodies on stretchers. —Juliet (Kate Winslet)

The happy event is to take place tomorrow afternoon. Next time I write in this diary mother will be dead. How odd, yet how pleasing.

—Pauline (Melanie Lynskey)

This still remains Peter Jackson’s chilling masterpiece in my eyes, his most thrillingly inventive work, one that melds all of his many talents together in this brilliantly edited film, which is a mesmerizing portrait of two dizzyingly adolescent girls who are so disconnected and estranged from the world that they bond in an obsessively infatuating friendship that includes writing a novel together, where the world they write about intersects in their real lives, where the two find it hard to tell the two worlds apart, relying totally and exclusively on the friendship and love of the other, at the expense of all else, as their fragile connection to reality soon loses its hinges. Based on a real life event, Jackson brings it to life through the recreated script obtained from the meticulous diary entries of one of the characters (Pauline), where her exact words are used as much as possible. This is the film that introduces Kate Winslet to the world as Juliet, and she is in every sense of the word superb, as her free-wheeling independence and fertile imagination is what lays open the groundwork for the repressed, darker side of Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) to find expression in the real world. One of the best uses of opera music in any film I’ve ever seen, as it so perfectly expresses that fractured schism, that hole in reality, in this case featuring the extraordinary talents of legendary tenor Mario Lanza as the ultimate image of male sexuality, but not in any real sense, only in a fantasized dream world, while Orson Welles, on the other hand, is despised by Juliet, calling him “It” and also “the most hideous man alive,” where her detestation of Welles comes alive in a shadowy THIRD MAN (1949) sequence, where the two girls are racing against their own internally fantasized images of evil, escaping from him, escaping from themselves, escaping from reality until they end up naked in each other’s arms, perhaps the only salvation either one will ever feel over the course of their entire lives.

Opening brilliantly with the subversively dry Buñuelian tone used in a travel documentary on Christchurch, New Zealand in the early 1950’s, a city where only Copenhagen is more renowned for bicycling, creating an optimistic and positively sun-drenched view of the city which is quickly interrupted by two young girls running and shrieking hysterically through the woods all covered in blood, which leads to the opening title sequence. Pauline is perfectly miserable in her world with large scars running down one leg, where her parents run a boarding home, so unwanted strangers are always entering and exiting her life at will. She seems to have a constant frown on her face, never smiling, looking like the eternal grouch, where in her class portrait, she’s easy to pick out as the only one not smiling. The lovely Juliet enters during the middle of the school year, an English girl who’s spent much of her life traveling, who’s been brought to New Zealand for health purposes, as she’s had a history of spots on her lung. Both girls have spent many months in hospital beds relying upon little more than their own imaginations to help them recuperate. But Pauline fancies Juliet’s moxie, as she’s not afraid to stand up to the ultra strict and conservative teachers while remaining perfectly capable of defending her point of view. Pauline on the other hand simply seethes with anguish most of the time.

As the only two girls who are excused from gym class, the two read and invent stories together, becoming inseparable, where in one of many Mario Lanza montage sequences, their lives are a whirlwind of dreamlike happiness, interrupting Juliet’s parents in their living room, playing a Mario Lanza record, dancing together out of the room and out of the house, and after another quick cut to the gym class, find themselves on a rollicking bicycle ride down a country road where a car forces Pauline off her bike, where the two end up in the woods ripping their clothes off, actually ending with a quick kiss. In yet another, they are building a giant sandcastle by the sea when the camera swoops in through the castle entranceway and enters a fairytale fantasy world of Borovnia, eventually leading to the 4^th world, an idyllic paradise of unparalleled beauty and enchantment. It is here that Pauline and Juliet meet with their imaginary friends, where the intensity of their happiness leads to a kind of intimate closeness that begins to worry their parents, where another ultra conservative family chosen therapist has a close up on his mouth as he slowly enunciates the word with exaggerated perfection for the parents as it rolls off his lips – homosexuality. So to the film’s credit, it doesn’t shy way from this subject, but it’s also not the focal point of the film, as neither of these teenage girls seems to have much of an active sex life. Instead, the film teeters on their fragile hold on reality, where both have hugely depressing parental issues where neither feels appreciated or loved, and only in the protected arms of one another do they feel liberated and safe from the boring conformist existence that surrounds them.

Jackson does a simply exquisite job blending the fantasy and the real, finding an inner tension from that tenuous grasp on reality, while relishing in some brilliantly colorful fantasy sequences that are as visually bold and inventive as anything he’s ever done over his entire career. Winslet and Lynskey are both amazing, and Jackson provides an illuminating dream world to surround them that blends seamlessly into their real lives, where they enter and exit at will, a beautiful mix of ecstacy and anguish as the turbulent world around them grows ever grimmer. The use of Nabucco’s “Humming Chorus” is stunning, one of the more intimately ethereal works in all of opera, feeling like one of the more exquisite death marches ever portrayed onscreen, which couldn’t be more eerie and unbelievably haunting. The tenderness is the key, and that superbly holds the entire film together. Written by Jackson and his real-life spouse, Frances Walsh, it’s a brilliantly written story, perhaps Jackson’s most luminously photographed film, perfectly acted, including the measured performance from Pauline’s overworked, working class mother, uncomfortable at times and hauntingly edgy, while dazzling the audience at other moments with a sublime grasp of cinematic ecstacy and pure joy. The film is simply oozing with inventiveness, making this a remarkable experience that holds up better than anything else this multi-talented director has ever done, perfectly mixing a near documentary realism with a hallucination tinged phantasmagorical fantasy world that is never less than enchanting.

Heavenly Creatures Mark Deming from All Movie Guide

After winning a cult following for several offbeat and darkly witty gore films, New Zealand director Peter Jackson abruptly shifted gears with this stylish, compelling, and ultimately disturbing tale of two teenage girls whose friendship begins to fuel an ultimately fatal obsession. Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) is a student in New Zealand who doesn't much care for her family or her classmates; she's a bit overweight and not especially gracious, but she quickly makes friends with Juliet (Kate Winslet), a pretty girl whose wealthy parents have relocated from England. Pauline and Juliet find they share the same tastes in art, literature, and music (especially the vocal stylings of Mario Lanza), and together they begin to construct an elaborate fantasy world named Borovnia, which exists first in stories and then in models made of clay. The more Pauline and Juliet dream of Borovnia, the more the two find themselves retreating into this fantastical world of art, adventure, and Gothic romance as they slowly drift away from reality. The girls' parents decide that perhaps they're spending too much time together, and try to bring them back into the real world, but this only feeds their continued obsession with Borovnia (and each other) and leads to a desperate and violent bid for freedom. Featuring excellent performances (especially by Kate Winslet) and imaginative production design and special effects, Heavenly Creatures skillfully allows the audience to see Pauline and Juliet both from their own fantastic perspective and how they seem to the rest of the world. Remarkably enough, Heavenly Creatures is based on a true story; in real life, Juliet grew up to become mystery novelist Anne Perry.

User Reviews from imdb Author: ManhattanBeatnik from Waynesville, OH

While watching Heavenly Creatures, we bring ourselves to sympathize with two unlikely heroines, and then they betray our trust by committing an unthinkable crime; by the time the film has ended, we feel as if our emotions have been chewed up and spat back out to the degree where we don't know WHAT to feel anymore. Heavenly Creatures is either the greatest act of manipulation ever put on film or a brilliant masterpiece about the dark side of life: personally, I think it's a little bit of both. Either way, I'm still trying to get my pulse to return to its normal rate. Director Peter Jackson (who before this had only made a number of cheap nasty horror movies -- Bad Taste and Braindead being the most popular --, but later became one of the most talked-about film-makers as a result of his film interpretation of The Lord of the Rings) does some remarkable things with bringing this horrendous true story to the screen: not only is this one of the most amazing motion pictures I've ever viewed, but it is one of the most important films to date. Period. Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet (Kate Winslet) have developed an inseparable friendship whose intimacy is questioned by their strict parents -- Pauline's being the most stern. As their lives (and our sentiments) are suddenly torn apart, they decide to run off together -- but this could mean having to murder someone. I will not go any further in describing the plot (and I fear that I may already have said too much), not because I want it to surprise you, but because this film is so powerful that I would be doing a disservice to it if I tried to describe it in mere words. Written by Jackson and his real-life spouse, Frances Walsh, the screenplay for Heavenly Creatures is nothing short of remarkable (it even garnered the Academy's attention, earning the film's singular nomination). We both hate and love the two main characters, but most of all we just want them to be happy, to which Jackson and Walsh ask us the question, "at what cost?" Their scenes together -- ESPECIALLY the joyous ones -- are drenched with an unbearable amount of foreboding hopelessness that makes the inevitable conclusion even more tense. In her debut film role, Kate Winslet displays much of the potential she fulfilled later on in her career, but Melanie Lynskey (who has only achieved modest success since) deserves an equal amount of praise -- if not more. By the time we're sucked into the story (which doesn't take long), we forget that they're even acting, and our eyes are peeled to the screen with a voyeuristic intensity that is utterly discomforting. Jackson's direction is simply stunning: his visual depiction of the girls' surreal alternate universe is altogether mesmerizing. Heavenly Creatures is both fascinating and repelling in a way reminiscent of David Lynch's Blue Velvet. But after having written all this, I am still brought to the ultimate conclusion that words cannot contain the experience of viewing this film. There are only a few films that were genuinely painful for me to watch (Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men and Kimberly Pierce's Boys Don't Cry among them), but this is certainly such a film, and I would not recommend it to the faint of heart. This is not a movie you enjoy (and if you do, you should seek psychiatric help), but it is one you will never forget; I know I certainly won't.

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

After a few gory items well-loved by the relative few who saw them, Peter Jackson decided to tackle more mature material. Except he didn't. 'Heavenly Creatures' is a quantum leap in substance from gleefully sick flicks like 'Meet the Feebles' and 'Dead Alive,' but it retains Jackson's restless devotion to the delirium of fantasy.

After a diabolically goofy prologue — a heartily square travelogue of 1950s Christchurch, New Zealand — we're thrown rudely into bloody chaos: Two girls, Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet (Kate Winslet), running and shrieking, smeared and spattered with gore. We don't know them yet, and we don't know where the blood came from (though Pauline says "Mummy's terribly hurt"), but we sure are intrigued. The rest of Heavenly Creatures explains how the girls got to that state.

Pauline, a defiantly frumpy girl (played by Lynskey with uncompromising unpleasantness that still manages to be likable), lives with her parents in a clean but cramped house, where boarders sometimes rent a room. The glamorous Juliet arrives from England, instantly antagonizing her new French teacher by correcting the old lady's grammar. Pauline, who's in the same class, is impressed. Soon the girls, sitting out gym class, bond over their illnesses — "All the best people have bad chests and bone diseases. It's all frightfully romantic," gushes Juliet with the sort of passion only Kate Winslet seems able to access. These two were goth and emo before there were goth and emo, and in due time they construct an elaborate fantasy world drawing on standard mythic templates as well as pop culture of the day (Mario Lanza, Orson Welles, etc.). They're escaping their families — Pauline's forbidding drudge of a mother, Juliet's intellectual but cold mother and father — and hurtling toward a place that gives them the status and sense of belonging they crave.

Jackson is always chasing after the girls with his camera as they sprint along the landscape of New Zealand, morphing in and out of the land they call Borovnia. Heavenly Creatures has been called a lesbian film, but even though the girls do kiss and snuggle while acting out the fantasy narrative, they go way beyond sexuality into pathology. Of course, back in the '50s, homosexuality was pathology (the massive close-up of a doctor sibilantly enunciating the word homo-ssseck-shuality is good for a laugh), and the girls' parents — Pauline's working-class family and Juliet's far more cosmopolitan parents — decide the girls have been spending far too much time together. Which, undeniably, they have. Jackson acknowledges that the girls' feverish fantasy life, while rich and satisfying to them, is also leading them down a path from which there is no sane return.

Heavenly Creatures acquires emotional heft partly because of Sarah Peirse's honest performance as Pauline's unsophisticated but hardworking mother. Pauline despises her and is mortified by her very existence, but Jackson paints the mother as a frightened woman who made a lot of mistakes as a girl and possibly sees Pauline unconsciously following in her footsteps. The final reel, in which Pauline encourages her mom to have another piece of cake before their fateful walk in the woods, is exquisitely sad. The girls have been driven to the point where their actions, meant to unite them forever, will do quite the opposite. As the moment of truth approaches, Lynskey and Winslet perform a duet of regret — the awful weight of what the girls are about to do settles rock-like in their stomachs.

On one level, Heavenly Creatures is a stellar true-crime story, which Jackson probably grew up hearing about. The movie also outed Juliet, who'd changed her name to Anne Perry and written a series of popular mystery novels; Pauline now goes by Hilary Nathan. As per court order, they haven't seen each other since 1954. The movie, upon repeat viewings, only becomes more poignant with that knowledge.

I truly don't think Jackson's filmmaking has gotten better since 'Heavenly Creatures' — just bigger. Here, at age 32, he nailed a difficult tonal mix of exultation and anguish he hasn't approached since, though his forthcoming adaptation of 'The Lovely Bones' may restore the old magic. The inner tension of the film emerges from Jackson's enjoyment of the girls' bustling insanity and then his gradual withdrawal from it — turning out the lights, one by one, in the kingdom of delusion.

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

You have to adore a movie in which one of the characters refers to Orson Welles as "It."

Based on the infamous 1954 matricide in New Zealand involving two ninth-grade schoolgirls, Peter Jackson's stunning "Heavenly Creatures" tells the story of an uncommonly powerful love. When Pauline and Juliet are together, the wind is filled with butterflies and the trumpet call of Mario Lanza, "the greatest tenor in the whole world!!" Their universe is an exclusive realm of two, existing half in reality where they are ostracized as peculiar, half in fantasy, where they escape to a highly evolved system of dream lovers and romantic alter egos.

The film begins with Pauline (Melanie Lynskey), a miserable child whose mother runs a boardinghouse. In the photo for her class at her proper girls' school in Christchurch, New Zealand, she sticks out amid all the blond hair and proud smiles like a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake (with apologies to Raymond Chandler). She's the fat one in the back, the disaster, the smudge with the ugly scowl and unruly black curls.

Because of a bone disease that left her with brittle legs, Pauline is unable to share in the sunny, athletic life of her classmates. Then one day her life is changed forever, when a new student named Juliet (Kate Winslet) joins her in her private war against the bores and commoners of Christchurch.

Like Pauline, Juliet thumbs her nose with proud disdain at parochial Christchurch society. But, unlike her new friend, Juliet is not an ugly duckling, but a kind of fairy princess who plucks Pauline from her lily pad, kisses her, and transforms her.

Because she suffers from tuberculosis, Juliet has had to spend almost as much time in the hospital as Pauline, and the girls' common status as invalids sparks a friendship that grows into a murderous passion.

Jackson, who directed and wrote the screenplay, moves through each of these phases with daring and imagination. His camera follows his lovers as they run breathless through the woods before collapsing into each other's arms at the end of the day, spent from the exertions of their special bond.

To his credit, Jackson doesn't patronize this romance as a girlish crush gone ballistic, or pigeonhole it merely as "lesbian." These girls are in love and, clearly, he envies them their abandon and their complete, unguarded commitment to each other. In Jackson's view, theirs is a great romance that, unfortunately, others were not equipped to deal with.

Perhaps, if the world were more enlightened, more flexible, things might not turn out as gruesomely as they do. The problems begin when Juliet's parents begin to see the girls' relationship as "unwholesome." Because of marital problems, her parents are returning to England and plan to send Juliet to South Africa. Rather than be separated, the girls devise an elaborate plan to, as Pauline says it, "moider mother" and escape to Hollywood.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of movies have been made about girlfriends and their unique bond, but I can't think of another one where the topic is addressed more frankly or openly. Though the film's subject is sensationalistic in the extreme, Jackson's style is poetic. He presents Pauline and Juliet, who eventually returns to England, where she becomes an author of mystery novels, as singularly blessed. And he raises the question of whether there is any love purer or more gratifying than this same-sex soul-mating. Because their love ends in murder, it's at least implied that the romance is tainted somehow. Does the fault lie with the girls, or with the cramped morality of the time? Thankfully, this powerful, evocative movie leaves the question wide open.

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FORGOTTEN SILVER – made for TV B 88

New Zealand (52 mi) 1995 co-director: Costa Botes

A dazzling chronicle of the extraordinary life of fictitious New Zealand filmmaker Colin McKenzie, and how his forgotten works have amazingly been recently rediscovered, complete with interviews with film historian Leonard Maltin. The director and his crew forage into unexplored wilderness to discover giant constructed sets of ancient Jerusalem for the 4-hour epic SALOME, also discovering lost film reels which reveal, among other discoveries, that Colin McKenzie attached his own movie camera right onto his bicycle in 1903, creating the first ever tracking shots, actually capturing footage of New Zealand aviator Richard Pearse’s first flight in an airplane some 6 months before the Wright brothers. Also discovered was the first sound film in 1908, unfortunately they were all speaking Chinese, causing the audience to leave the theater in droves, but also the first use of color film, apparently realized by using special berries from Tahiti in 1911. He also invented the close-up, as well as riveting on-the-scenes documentary footage, eventually filming his own death in the Spanish Civil war, putting down his camera to come to the aid of another wounded soldier only to be shot himself. All of these legendary discoveries have been captured on film using fascinating, never before seen archival footage, placing this amazing man in the upper echelon, into the highest pantheon of film pioneers.

All Movie Guide [Mark Deming]

When Forgotten Silver was first shown on New Zealand television, it sparked a minor scandal when some viewers discovered that the film's protagonist, pioneering Kiwi filmmaker Colin McKenzie, didn't really exist, leading some wags to denounce director Peter Jackson as the perpetrator of a fraud, which speaks volumes about just how well executed a satire Forgotten Silver is -- it's one of the most accomplished mock documentaries ever made, flawlessly re-creating "long lost" bits of silent cinema as well as offering a superbly deadpan spoof of television documentaries. While Peter Jackson's oddball humor provided a welcome subtext in horror films like Brain Dead and The Frighteners, here his sly wit is brought to the forefront, and if Forgotten Silver never clearly presents itself as a joke, in many ways that just makes it more potent as it bears the ring of possible truth. Jackson and co-director Costa Botes are also ably assisted by their crew (especially cameraman Alun Bollinger, who is asked to emulate nearly 80 years of cinematography technique and never misses a trick) and the cast (the actors in the silent segments capture the broad histrionics of D.W. Griffith-era filmmaking with commendable accuracy, and the contemporary interview subjects hit their marks just right). Forgotten Silver is crafted with so much attention to detail that it takes a fairly committed film buff to see through the surface and catch all the jokes, but anyone who loves movies will delight in it -- and if you take it at face value, it's still a fascinating story about a truly remarkable man.

eFilmCritic.com [Rob Gonsalves]

Together with Costa Botes, Peter Jackson pulled the wool over New Zealand's eyes with this pitch-perfect mockumentary, which clocks in at just under an hour and fooled a lot of viewers when it got aired on NZ television.

It's of course vastly more funny if you know it's all fake, though it'd be interesting to watch it with someone who's not in on the joke. The conceit is that Jackson, playing himself and narrating, has discovered some old reels of film in a shed — the lost works of New Zealand film pioneer Colin McKenzie, who according to Jackson did everything in movies before anyone else. We see copious examples of McKenzie's ouevre (personal favorite: the world's first tracking shot), all immaculately staged, shot, and probably personally trampled upon by Jackson himself to look like actual period footage. As if that weren't enough, Jackson brings in expert testimony from the likes of Leonard Maltin, Sam Neill, and Harvey Weinstein, all of whom attest to McKenzie's visionary genius.

Quite aside from being perhaps the most elaborate prank in Jackson's career to date (or since), Forgotten Silver is a brilliant piece of moviemaking in and of itself; Jackson obviously relishes the opportunity to "re-enact" McKenzie's "work," dabbling in the language of silent film and paying tribute to the birth of cinema. This is easily the least-known must-see film in Jackson's filmography. Along with Heavenly Creatures (and, to a lesser extent, Dead Alive and Meet the Feebles), it proved Jackson's skill at creating an older or alien world so believable in every detail that you never question it (which may explain why so many New Zealanders fell for the hoax).

This, of course, would come in handy when it came time for Jackson to get to work on Middle-Earth.

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THE FRIGHTENERS

USA New Zealand (122 mi) 1996

Tucson Weekly [Stacey Richter]

Peter Jackson's follow-up after the critically acclaimed Heavenly Creatures is a surprisingly unambitious, B-style horror movie. Michael J. Fox stars as Frank Bannister, a "psychic investigator" who uses his genuine ability to commune with the dead to swindle the bereaved into using his services. Then a real, totally malevolent ghost shows up and begins knocking off townspeople left and right, and Bannister must finally use his powers for good. Part horror movie, part comedy, The Frighteners tries to play both ends against the middle and ends up not being consistently funny or consistently scary. The special effects are great though, and you can't beat that campy, seventies, B-movie feeling.

Mike D'Angelo

At last, a big-budget summer movie that actually delivers on its promise of entertaining escapist entertainment, without insulting the audience's intelligence in the process. While it's inevitably a bit of a disappointment, coming as it does on the heels of Jackson's staggeringly brilliant Heavenly Creatures, The Frighteners is nonetheless first-rate goofy fun, marred only by a rather weak first act and a truly lame denouement (the final five minutes or so seem to have been imported from some other, considerably dumber summer movie...maybe that one with the tornadoes and Helen Hunt running around in a flimsy white tank top...can't remember what it was called...). And get this: the movie actually has a plot. You remember plots, don't you -- those sequences of events that keep you wondering what might happen next? (If you've forgotten, I can't say as I blame you, as it's been quite some time since a film with a budget this big featured one worth paying attention to.) Granted, it's a fairly derivative plot, incorporating elements from Ghostbusters, Ghost, The Shining, and various other supernatural flicks, but Jackson and his co-writer, Fran Walsh, manage to combine these influences into a surprisingly satisfying blend of over-the-top comedy and ghoulish horror. Ultimately, though, it's Jackson's inventive, kinetic, madcap direction that truly impresses; his visual panache, as always, is consistently exhilirating without ever becoming gratingly excessive. The film's climax, set in an abandoned hospital, is a tour-de-force of rhythm and motion, fluidly moving back and forth between past and present in breathtaking fashion. Best of all, Jackson knows how to use exciting special-effects technology without letting it run roughshod over the narrative; the effects are impressive, but they're also an integral part of a story that would still be of interest even with dime-store, cut-rate work in this department. (Would anyone have cared about Jurassic Park if the dinosaurs had been so-so?) Performances range from slightly-more-than-adequate (Michael J. Fox, Trini Alvarado) to dementedly inspired (Jeffrey Combs, whose fine low-key work in Re-Animator failed to prepare me for his hilarious histrionics as Milton, a very deranged FBI agent). Water in the desert, this one.

Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs)

Peter Jackson's The Frighteners is a rare thing, an intelligent, funny, dynamic movie. It even has ideas. It also has Michael J. Fox, but really, that's okay here. As "psychic investigator" Frank Bannister, Fox gives a deft and understated performance, no small feat in a film where he's interacting with bluescreens more often than he is with people or even machines (just think of all the dopey drop-jawed reaction shots you've seen in recent special effects-heavy films, and you'll get a sense of what I mean).

Frank's con is a trendy one (post-Ghostbusters and post-X Files): after a near-death trauma some years ago (one which involved the death of his wife, for which he feels extremely guilty), he can see and communicate with ghosts. So he and three of them (played by Chi McBride, Jim Fyfe and John Astin) scam neighbors and newcomers alike: the ghosts make ooky noises and shake up household appliances, the afflicted homeowner calls Frank, and he — after a lively, thingamajiggy-jazzed performance — declares the place "clean," for a fee of course. (The team also has a side business in allowing grieving relatives to speak to the recently departed: Frank shamelessly passes out his cards at funerals.)

While all this might provide the entire plot of someone else's movie, for Jackson (whose previous films include Dead Alive and Heavenly Creatures), it's only the beginning. Working from a story he wrote with his partner and wife, Frances Walsh, the filmmaker weaves unconventional characters, circumstances and pop cultural references — not to mention a completely delightful assortment of CGI-model bluescreen effects and beautifully conceived sets — into a kind of expedition across a weirdo mindscape. It's subjective but it's also drawing from a variety of obvious and non-obvious sources — ranging from Norman Bates, Freddy Krueger and Tales from the Crypt to Charles Manson, The Haunting, and Natural Born Killers, among others. The movie never stays still long enough to get predictable (except in its general romance frame, but what can you do?).

It's hard to distill the plot to a few lines, it twists and turns so continually. Suffice to say that it involves a haunted house (really haunted, not by Frank's crew), a social worker (Trini Alvarado) who is trying to help the woman (Dee Wallace Stone, who is perfect, and it's good to see her again) trapped in that house, a serial killer (Jake Busey), and a terrifically goony FBI agent (Jeffrey Combs, playing what might be called the anti-Mulder) hot on the trail of Frank, whom he believes to be a ruthless murderer. In other words, there's too much going on here to lay out in a straight line. The slides between past and present, between bodies (the ghosts here are constantly renegotiating their relationship to the material world), between life and death, all make the movie pretty much nonstop, culminating in an especially trippy final action sequence.

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THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING C 76

USA New Zealand (178 mi) extended version (208 mi) 2001 ‘Scope

My favorite moment of the entire epic saga, which was rewritten from the book, and occurs early in this first film when Gandalf notices Sam Gamgee lurking outside Frodo's window while he was explaining the dangerous history of the ring.  Asked what he heard, Sam blurts out:  "Nothing important.  That is, I heard a good deal about a ring, a Dark Lord, and something about the end of the world."

Michael Wilmington looks at the DVD from the Chicago Tribune (link lost):

J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" is one great literary achievement that reached the screen without being much altered, diminished or betrayed. Instead, Peter Jackson's faithful and elaborate three-film adaptation (comprising "The Fellowship of the Ring," "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King") preserves and translates much of the original's fantasy and thrill, along with its huge Middle Earth canvas. The excitement is there and the supernatural beauty, but the complexity is there as well: the sense of a whole magical world opening up before us. Jackson's "Ring" (2001-2003) easily takes a place among the all-time best film adventure epics and, as far as I'm concerned, among the all-time best movies.

You might wonder, with this embarrassment of riches, which DVD issue of "Lord of the Rings" you should own. I'm fond of the old extended edition, with the director's cuts and numerous documentaries. But the new "The Lord of the Rings" Limited Edition set, featuring DVDs of all three films, deserves the nod. These editions contain both the original theatrical releases and the extended director's cut versions, as well as three newly released behind-the-scenes documentaries by Costa Botes ((star)(star)(star))--all shot cinema verite-style. Even if you've got one of the "Rings" DVD sets, these issues are pure magic.

HERE Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge

The Lord of the Rings : The Fellowship of the Ring is three hours of persuasive, exciting, heart-pounding, eye-popping, spectacular nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with epic entertainment, of course, but you have to wonder whether it’s worth lavishing so much time (theirs and ours), money, talent and effort on the fatuous 50-year-old mental doodlings of an Oxford don. Despite the moviemakers’ delusions of grandeur this is a project swollen with its own self-importance, taking its cue from old John – sorry, J R R – Tolkien himself, right from that impossible mouthful of a ten-word title.

Tolkien, of course, made no bones about his borrowing from Beowulf, Arthurian legend, Wagner’s Ring of the Valkyrie, Homer’s Odyssey and other sources to create his own legend as an excuse for a series of concocted languages and cultures. The book has been described as ‘an exercise in philology’ (the study of language), with the story pretty much secondary and arbitrary: Frodo Baggins (Wood) inherits an all-powerful ring from his cousin Bilbo (Holm). His wizard friend Gandalf (McKellen) realises that the ring must be destroyed before it can be reclaimed by its maker, the satanic Lord Sauron. But the ring can only be destroyed where it was made in Mordor, Sauron’s kingdom. Frodo and Gandalf set off on the perilous trek to Mordor, accompanied by hobbits Sam (Astin), Merry (Monaghan) and Pippin (Boyd), dwarf Gimli (Rhys-Davies), human warriors Boromir (Bean) and Aragorn (Mortensen) and elf archer Legolas (Bloom): the nine-strong Fellowship of the Ring…

‘Rings’ caused little stir on its first appearance back in the 1950s – Mervyn Peake’s ‘Gormenghast’ attracted much more interest and serious consideration. It was only when ‘Rings’ was re-issued in American paperback that it clicked with the same late-60s altered-states crowd that turned 2001 into a blockbuster, and its influence on impressionable prog-rock musicians was immediate and profound. For years it lingered quietly on in the shadowy world of Dungeons&Dragons fantasy-game playing - until now. But no matter how dramatically Jackson shifts his characters between The Shire, Rivendell, Moria and Mordor, these are all suburbs of the same grim territory: Squaresville.

Watching Fellowship is like being teleported into a series of Roger Dean mid-70s prog-rock album covers, with the occasional foray into the sulphuric world of their bastard cousins, the sleeves of heavy metal LPs. In movie terms, it’s like alternating between Ridley Scott’s Legend and Michael Mann’s The Keep, except with worse music. Tolkien – whose fantasy is strictly Anglo-Saxon – would have hated the movie’s relentless Celtic pan-pipes soundtrack, but they’re perfect for the soft-rock mood Jackson wants to create: the end-credits song is written and performed by Enya, who’s about as far from the cutting edge of music as it’s possible to get.

Jackson pulls off some impressive visual feats in Rings – in conjunction with the amazing sets crafted by his collaborators, and the equally amazing New Zealand countryside, crafted by God, but that doesn’t make him a visual stylist, much less any kind of cinematic visionary. He’s more of a crazed enthusiast, closer to the rough edges of Kevin Smith’s Dogma than, say, the loopy surrealism of David Lynch’s Dune. There’s no shortage of amateurish moments when his excitement gets the better of him, including a hilarious Jackson-on-mushrooms sequence where he humiliates Cate Blanchett (as Elf queen Galadriel) by having her float in the air while electric-blue lights zip and pop like something out of a bad Toyah Willcox video.

While the other actors avoid such embarrassment, it’s painful to watch classically-trained performers like McKellen, Holm and Bean dignifying Tolkien’s dialogue by treating it like Shakespearean battle poetry. No such problems with Christopher Lee – he’s been mouthing this kind of portentous nonsense for six decades, and actually thinks it’s good, important, psychologically intricate material. In fact, Rings has no more depth than Harry Potter, which, for all its faults, never took itself this seriously. As a movie, Rings is a more exciting experience – the opening battle against Sauron and the climactic confrontation with the demon Balrog in the ruins of Moria, are genuinely stunning moments. But to be the truly great film some viewers and critics have hailed, shouldn’t Rings do as much for the mind as it does for the eyes and the nerves?

If anything, the movie is anti-thought: the more you think about it, the worse it gets. Leaving aside the very dodgy racial angle, Tolkien’s fable is an anxiety dream about the industrialisation of the British countryside – specifically, the growth of Birmingham, which Tolkien feared was about to engulf his idyllic home village of Sarehole. Rural = good, urban = bad is Rings’ fundamental message, with the hobbits as caricatures of English peasantry, their twee countryside threatened by the brutal, tree-destroying Orcs. But neither Tolkien nor Jackson seem to have thought any of this through.

And if Fellowship of the Ring actually is about anything, shouldn’t it at least be about fellowship? If so, who does Sam, who’s supposedly Frodo’s best friend and no kind of social inferior, keeps calling him ‘Mister Frodo’ all the time like he’s some kind of servant flunkey. At the end, after the pair have been through all manner of tribulations, Sam says it again - Frodo turns round with an understanding smile on his face and we think: at last, he’s going to say ‘Sam, just call me Frodo’. But no: “I’m glad you’re with me, Sam,” is all he can manage. As the credits roll and Enya’s warblings fill the cinema, you find yourself hating Frodo, Elijah Wood, Peter Jackson, John Tolkien, and everyone else involved in the whole damn palaver. Even as you impatiently start wondering what’s going to happen next.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

"Much that once was is lost" is the poignant opening phrase in Peter Jackson's long-awaited, mega-million-dollar production of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Absent fidelity may be less the issue than temps perdu—there's an elegiac tone to this lavish first installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's cult trilogy.

Robustly ranging from the cozy nook of a hobbit's parlor to the blasted pitch-pots of darkest Mordor, visualizing Nordic elves and subhuman, blue-faced orcs, staging wizard wars with the panache of a Hong Kong master and building slowly to a boffo ending, Peter Jackson's adaptation is certainly successful on its own terms. Like the animated skeletons in a Ray Harryhausen adventure flick, the relics have come to life. With the release of The Fellowship of the Ring, American critics of a particular age (and possibly gender) have their own Harry Potter.

Indeed, watching the smoky, twisted images of the computer-generated masses in hand-to-hand combat with decomposing goblins or listening to the wit and wisdom of Gandalf the Grey (an unrecognizable Ian McKellen), I was forced to acknowledge the degree to which Tolkien's imaginary universe had impressed itself on my 12-year-old brain—and, despite the timeless struggle between good and evil, how little that mattered to me now. For me, the trilogy's appeal was exemplified by its maps, the invented languages, and the hundred pages of appendices at the back of the final volume. Unlike C.S. Lewis's Narnia, Tolkien's Middle Earth has no discernible religion. The book itself is a sacred text—which is to say, it proposes the world as a text, a literary analogue to the abstract pleasures found in the purely statistical universe of baseball.

Back in the day, the whole idea of a Lord of the Rings movie would have seemed a desecration. Where Ralph Bakshi's ill-fated and largely forgotten animated version lacked gravitas, Jackson has marshaled all manner of digital wizardry in the service of Tolkien's pre-technological fantasy of doughty little creatures defeating the forces of absolute evil. The effects are more literal than literary and less archaic than newfangled. Utopia exists: Not only have Ian Holm, who plays Bilbo Baggins, and Elijah Wood, as his nephew Frodo, been reduced to an imaginary hobbit height of three feet, but Liv Tyler's Elvish princess seems to have enjoyed some sort of virtual liposuction. Indeed, impossible crane shots notwithstanding, everything feels visually enhanced. Even the unnaturally green and rolling New Zealand landscape has seemingly been improved with impossible gorges and canyons.

Although the Elvish settlement of Rivendell resembles an Alpine ski lodge for garden gnomes, and the more rustic Elves of Mirkwood would appear to dwell in a kind of tree house expansion of the Enchanted Tiki Room, the movie only rarely achieves a sense of kitsch grandeur—as in the image of colossal statues in the river mist. More often, it's a cluttered attic of cloying pre-Raphaelite visual notions. The equivalent of Tolkien's often turgid descriptions, a single Jackson image is likely to include falling leaves, cascading water, and streaming sunlight (not to mention the sound of panpipes in the gloaming). The strongest sequence is virtually monochromatic, for being set amid the ruined columns of a vast underground city.

The phantom zone where Frodo finds himself whenever he slips on the sinister ring he is charged to destroy is similarly restrained—a blurry, blustery realm of negative images. I was amused to see that these include noisily suggestive cutaways to the fiery slit of doom that is the object of the quest, but then I'm no longer a believer. (My faith was shaken back in high school when I flippantly referred to The Lord of the Rings as the greatest novel of the 20th century and a friend's older brother asked if I was talking about The Magic Mountain.) Still, it's a religion I remember, particularly as a spell cast over the more fanciful wing of the '60s counterculture. What happened to those "Frodo Lives" pins, the anti-war graffiti written in Elvish, the underground newspapers with names like Gandalf's Garden, the fey psychedelic troubadours singing songs of Middle Earth?

The metaphors were surely relevant. I doubt I'm the only one to survive a lysergic experience in which the world was unpleasantly divided between hobbits and orcs or who recognized Richard Nixon as some sort of miserable Gollum. How much fun it would have been to see a real desecration of Tolkien that periodized the trilogy's cosmic adventures by having them played out inside the brain of some acid-ripped hippie—the Fellowship leaving the snug communes of northern Vermont on a perilous mission to cast the "ring of power" into the boiler of some fetid East Village basement. But that would defeat the entire concept of timeless fantasy.

In the essay "On Fairy-stories," written in the late '30s at the time that the idea for The Lord of the Rings was taking shape, Tolkien argued that "the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds was the heart of the desire of Faërie." Some will surely find a parallel between Tolkien's cosmic struggle and our own current crusade, but reference to this world is the last thing that The Fellowship of the Ring wishes to make.

Mastering Middle Earth: Fellowship of the Ring - Bright Lights Film ... Phil Cooper from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 2, 2002

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The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Wikipedia

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS C- 67

USA New Zealand Germany (179 mi) extended version (223 mi) 2002 ‘Scope

more rampant carnage

The Nation (Stuart Klawans)

Can't prestige be coupled with something invigorating, like box-office clout? It can be, and it is in The Two Towers, the new installment of the immensely popular, award-winning The Lord of the Rings. I confess I was less than thrilled by the first installment, The Fellowship of the Ring, which amounted to a long series of fights and battles, interrupted by episodes of sexless mooning. The Two Towers is better, if only because it's got a single big battle, which it saves till the end. It's also brightened by the introduction of Gollum (voice of Andy Serkis), a pathetic, wasted creature who once possessed the evil Ring. Whenever Gollum struggles with his conscience, the movie twitches into life. For the most part, though, The Two Towers is preoccupied only with inanimate forces: the flood of water that engulfs a wizard's tower, or the flood of pixels that pour across the screen as computer-generated armies. I began to wonder, as the waves crashed about: Is it still possible for a movie to get excited about people?

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

The Empire Strikes Back notwithstanding, the middle parts of trilogies don't have the best of reputations, composed as they are mainly of connective tissue, the bits that fall inbetween the introduction and the conclusion. It's no surprise that the characters in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers spend an awful lot of time walking. Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan) spend at least an hour of screen-time being carried through the forest by an ambulatory tree (known to Tolkien fans and crossword buffs as an Ent), while more intrepid Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) make it all the way to the gates of the dread forest Mordor before backing off and circling around to try an alternate route.

Even if you're not familiar with the scope of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, this can't come as much of a surprise. Having decided in The Fellowship of the Ring that all their hopes rest on the success of Frodo's quest to drop the ring of power into the molten heart of Mount Doom, destroying it and the dark lord Sauron with it, the characters have but one objective -- which is to say if they actually made it all the way to Mount Doom in part two, all that would be left for part three would be three hours of people standing around going, "Whew, that was a close one." But the reduced burden of plot actually allows The Two Towers to be a better realized and more satisfying experience than its predecessor (even in the superior, more leisurely version released on DVD). For all the sorcery and swordplay -- and, it should be noted, The Two Towers has plenty of both -- what the film really offers us is a chance to inhabit Tolkien's world, which this time we get to do without worrying about how we got there or where we're going next.

If you look back at the movie's end, you may realize that very little has happened to the major characters, but it's hardly likely to occur to you while you're watching the movie. It begins with a great bang, a dream flashback to Gandalf's demise, this time expanded to show the frail-looking wizard plummeting through space, grabbing a sword out of the air and hacking at the flaming Balrog as they both descend. And it ends with one, too: the battle to protect the human stronghold of Helms Deep, which in the book occupies only a few dozen pages, but is here expanded to occupy most of the movie's last hour, in one of the most elaborate and complex battle sequences ever committed to film. Since all three films were shot concurrently, there's no noticeable difference in style, but the digital effects, which progress one film at a time, are noticeably improved, particularly when it comes to Gollum, the shrivelled creature who once held the ring, and has been reduced to a reptilian hulk by its loss. Entirely digital (though based on the movements of actor Andy Serkis), Gollum seems nearly as real as the furry-footed hobbits he shares scenes with -- which is to say, real enough, but not too much so. And in essence, that's the secret to Jackson's approach, emphasizing the physical combat and military maneuvering without losing the historical and ecological underpinnings of Tolkien's tale. None of the great films are epics, but this is about as good as they get.

Reel.com [Tor Thorsen]

When it comes to making trilogies, the second film is always the hardest. While they often contain plenty of conflict and complications, they can't offer any final resolutions. Repetition is also a problem — while some background info is needed to bring newcomers up to speed, filmmakers can't waste too much of well-informed series fans' time for fear of boring them.

The best solution is to hit the ground running. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers literally does, joining three of the Fellowship of the Ring's protagonists — the dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), the elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom), and human Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) — as they sprint into the rolling hills of Rohan, a kingdom of noble cavalrymen. They're hot on the heels of a group of fearsome Uruk-hai orcs who kidnapped two hobbits, Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd), in Fellowship's finale.

However, instead of catching up to the wee abductees, the trio runs into the middle of a full-fledged war. The malevolent wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee), creator of the Uruk-hai, is now openly allied with the dark lord Sauron, the once-omnipotent forger of the ring of power. While the latter is still massing his armies in the wasteland of Mordor, the former is on the move, dispatching a group of wild barbarians to burn Rohan's outlying villages. A 10,000-strong phalanx of Uruk-hai is also marching on the realm's capital, Edoras, the not-so-restful locale where Aragorn and his companions find themselves.

Meanwhile, hobbits Sam (Sean Astin) and Frodo (Elijah Wood) are trudging toward Mordor and the completion of their mission, the destruction of the ring in the volcano of Mount Doom. However, their journey is slow-going and treacherous, even though the feared Ringwraiths are gone (at first, anyway) and there isn't an orc in sight. That's because the ring is beginning to take hold over Frodo, draining energy from the short-statured hero's stout heart. He's also beginning to obsess over the accursed bauble, stroking it with his fingers and staring at it throughout the night.

Frodo's fascination with the ring pales in comparison to that of Gollum (voiced by Andy Serkis and based on his on-set movements), the twisted creature from whom Bilbo Baggins originally stole it. Seen only momentarily in Fellowship, the computer-generated character emerges from the shadows here. Unlike The Phantom Menace's poo-poo-joke-spouting abomination Jar-Jar Binks, Gollum delivers a full-fledged dramatic performance. On one hand, he's a poor wretch, his body withered and mind poisoned by centuries of contact with the ring. On the other, he's a devious psychopath, laying murderous plots to separate Frodo from his malevolent cargo. These two sides clash in brilliantly edited, schizophrenic internal dialogues during which Gollum's good and bad personalities argue, Raising Cain-style, as though they were different people. Although the CG creature isn't always 100% convincing in medium shots, in these close-ups, he's totally mesmerizing.

In J.R.R. Tolkien's book The Two Towers, Frodo's and Aragorn's tales are told separately in its first and second halves. In the film, co-writer/director Peter Jackson alternates between the plots, but ultimately gives the latter primacy. Hobbit-spotters may be disappointed by the ring-bearer's decreased role. However, this decision allows for spectacular amounts of action, particularly during the battle of Helm's Deep. Although it only took up a few pages in the book, the clash is the film's climax, a full 45 minutes of orc-hewing, elf-skewering action which make Gladiator's opening skirmish look like a Pee-wee soccer game. The battle is even more suspenseful because Jackson shows exactly what's at stake — hundreds of cowering refugees — and how long the odds are: a few hundred men against a snarling horde of bloodthirsty monsters.

There are plenty of other examples of effects wizardry besides Gollum and Helm's Deep. The film opens with a jaw-dropping continuation of the fight between the Balrog and Gandalf (Ian McKellen) which knocked the wizard down, but didn't necessarily take him out. Viewers get to see the impregnable gates of Mordor, the nattily dressed new villains the Easterlings, the seven-story-tall war pachyderms called Oliphaunts, and a group of old nemeses who return astride even more terrifying mounts. The film also introduces the Ents, a group of mighty tree-creatures straight out of a lumberjack's nightmare. Although their slow-moving gait looks odd (and elicited some chuckles from the crowd), these woodland guardians are depicted exactly as described in Tolkien's book — a testament to Jackson and his design team's dedication to the author's vision.

However, while Two Towers' imagery is true to Tolkien's Middle-earth, there are several story changes which have purists grumbling. The most jarring for this reviewer was the portrayal of Faramir (David Wenham), the brother of fallen Fellowship member Boromir (the sorely missed Sean Bean). When he encounters Frodo in the book, he's downright nice to the poor fellow; in the film, Faramir is as power-mad as his brother, tying up the hobbits and threatening to take the ring for himself. This might make for better character development, but Faramir fans will find the change jarring, to say the least.

The film's other main shortcoming is its pace. Although the build-up to Helm's Deep is methodical, the rest of Two Towers feels rushed, as though New Line Cinema's bean-counters wouldn't let Jackson out of the editing suite until he had a running time under three hours. Even though the final cut is only one minute shy of that goal, some important scenes feel truncated. This is especially true at the end of the Helm's Deep scene, where a pivotal event — one that would have showcased some dazzling combat — is missing. A stunning battle at the foot of Isengard, Saurman's lair, is also cut short, apparently saving the very end for the next installment. While the extended DVD version of Fellowship felt a bit bloated at times, the longer cut of Two Towers will probably feel just right.

However, these faults are dwarfed by Two Towers' achievements. Visually breathtaking, viscerally exciting, and dramatically moving, it's the very definition of epic adventure. Jackson has always said that The Lord of the Rings isn't so much a trilogy as it is a nine-hour film, and Rings-lovers who take the time to watch Fellowship before seeing Towers will find the transition seamless. Helping to no end are the cast's performances, which deliver vital dramatic continuity, and no star shines brighter than Mortensen as Aragorn. Delivering his lines with Shakespearean passion and Wagnerian grandeur, the actor transforms from brooding beefcake to mythic figure. Watching him shout a defiant battle cry into the snarling faces of thousands of orcs, there's little doubt about about the identity of the titular monarch in Return of the King.

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THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING B 83

USA New Zealand Germany (201 mi) extended version (251 mi) 2003 ‘Scope

Despite the obvious attention to detail, the natural settings, the set design, especially the look of immortality expressed by the world of the elves, always shot in a glowing, shimmering light, like a world of angels at play under the moonlight contrasted against the warlike swords and novel uses of armor, my biggest surprise in Lord of the Rings, other than the discovery in the opening of Pt III that Gollum was once a man, was that so much of it was about Sam, and not one of the more athletic "star" figures.  Despite the epic battles, the legendary myth and lore, the endless battle sequences of human slaughter wrapped in superhuman strengths and spectacular imagery, this is really Sam's journey, a simple man who is called upon to endure one disaster after the next, yet is expected to maintain his bearings and all sense of reason. In the end, he's a good man surrounded in mythological subtext designed to take our eyes off him, but he is one of us.  Like Jiminy Cricket to Pinocchio, Sam is Frodo's conscience, a constant reminder of why they've left everything behind and must go on their perilous journey, against all odds, and why they have no choice – they must succeed.  It's significant that this is not the voice of a wizard or a warrior, or a person possessing amazing traits, but simply an ordinary man (or Hobbit) that is willing to sacrifice all to protect a friend. 

Another surprise was that so few of the original Fellowship died, only 2, and one, Gandalf, came back to life.  Throughout all the incessant battle sequences of the 2nd and 3rd films, none of the others lost their lives.  Had they, as they did in SEVEN SAMURAI or THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, which certainly came to mind in comparison, it might have put into perspective the arduous journey at the end for Frodo and Sam, where they were so exhausted they could only crawl ("like insects"), and even then only in short bursts.  If those around them in the original Fellowship had paid a price with their lives, their final efforts may have felt more desperate, like a last breath of hope before life was extinguished altogether.  But it never felt that way.  Instead, they were like super heroes who were immune to death.  Even the elf that got shot in battle protecting the White City had little to worry about, as elves are immortal.

Peter Jackson utilized the same stereotypical imagery of John Ford's vision of battle personified by his Westerns, begun in 1939 with STAGECOACH, where whites are surrounded by "savage" Indians, and every shot by whites knocks an Indian off their horse, and sometimes knocks the horse down as well – all with a single shot, while the hordes of savages, who greatly outnumber the whites, rarely hit their target.  Throughout decades of westerns, this exact same pattern reoccurs again and again.  Likewise in Lord of the Rings, the blond elf (Legolas) never runs out of arrows, never misses his target, always kills a foe, and never receives so much as a scratch in return.  More laughable in my eyes were scenes after scenes where soldiers on horses rode into throngs of the enemy on foot, on battlefields as well as narrow bridges, and the enemy just dropped like flies, falling in all directions, while none of these riders was ever pulled off a horse, or had their horses brought down.  I don't believe the book would be guilty of this same over-exaggeration which typifies an unintended depiction of racist superiority of one race over another.  The grotesque and disfigured look of the enemy all too much resembled H.G. Wells's depiction of the Island of Lost Souls.

In this film, the horrors of war, where all is lost and certain death appears imminent is immediately replaced with wish fulfillment, like the arrival of the wizard who resembles the cavalry ("Look for me at dawn – look to the East!") and instant victory occurs.  This sudden turnaround was so amazing that the rotating battle sequences, especially in Part II, become inconsequential.  For my part, having never read the book, I couldn't tell who was fighting who, who captured the 2 Hobbits or who captured Frodo.  And while I understood the obvious metaphor of the talking trees as earth, the wearying back and forth editing from intense scenes of certain death in battle on the one hand to a leisurely paced conversation of a couple of Hobbits talking to trees felt all too ludicrous after awhile.  (In battle, the trees resembled the Apple Bonkers in YELLOW SUBMARINE).  Similarly, the importance placed on destroying the ring, where evil will be wiped off the face of the earth, is so overly simplistic that it discounts all the other human factors that contribute to disagreements, dissatisfaction, and war.  Yes, this is a fantasy adventure story, perhaps spawned by how quickly humans surrendered their free will to the advancing age of industrialization (what, are we expected to return to the era of the Amish?), but if we think of the ring as an inevitable force that threatens to take away our freedom, I can think of a few living forces placed in leadership positions in our own country that are guilty of the same.  Not all leaders are the personification of evil, nor are their destructive influences so easily wiped off the face of the earth.  Some are just petty and make poor decisions, usually based on narrow interests and greed, yet we have to learn to live with these collective forces of poor judgment and wisdom all wrapped into one earth, a highly volatile and constantly changing equation, as things are not so rosy even in times of no war. 

Some interesting similarities between Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings:

Harry and Ron resemble Frodo and Sam

Dobby resembles Gollum

Dumbledore and Gandalf  

Voldemort and his evil minions are like Sauron and the Dark Lord, with his legion of spies

The Flying Dementors and the Dark Riders, especially the Black Captain on the Winged Nazgul

Aragos in the Forest of Spiders and Shelob in his Cave

Buckbeak the Hippogrif and the Flying Eagles

Harry's invisibility cloak and the ringbearers invisibility

Sirius Black fights to save Harry as Aragorn fights to save Frodo

The Order of the Phoenix and the Fellowship of the Ring

The healing power of the Phoenix tears and the healing power of the world of the elves, which keeps out evil

The back and forth struggle between good & evil taking place inside the scarred souls of Professor Snape and Gollum, both eventually succumbing to evil

The Sorcerer's Stone and the Ring, which make Nicholas Flimel and Bilbo Baggins ageless, yet both must eventually be destroyed

The invented language, the parsel tongue language of snakes and the subtitled language of the elves

Harry carries the scar of Voldemort on his forehead while Frodo feels the effects of his Spider wound for the rest of his life

Both feature themes of the old vs. the young, the ageless wisdom of wizards vs. the journeys and adventures of the young

Both feature recurring themes of rescues at the moment of peril, while at stake is the doom of the entire world

DVD Times - Extended Edition Mike Sutton in #5 Posted Comment from DVD Times

I personally think the LOTR trilogy is vastly overrated and well made without being particularly interesting. They're impressive adaptations in the sense of being close to the books but there's no real cinematic imagination put into them, certainly not in the sense that Fritz Lang reimagines Norse myth in his Siegfried films. The secret of great adaptation lies in how well the filmmaker can escape the confines of the book rather than simply recreating it on screen - and the incredibly badly edited "Return" demonstrates how Jackson can't do that.

I can think of several cinematic trilogies which are infinitely better in every respect - John Ford's majestic "Cavalry Trilogy', the Bergman "Trilogy of Faith", the Leone 'Dollars' trilogy immediately spring to mind. There's not a single moment in Jackson's films to match any of them.

Would you care to explain what makes any of the LOTR films better than, say, "Winter Light" or "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon?"

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

With Christmas rapidly approaching, I don't have adequate time to give Peter Jackson's mesmerizing The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King its due. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to extol, however briefly, the virtues of this series' awe-inspiring finale. Jackson culminates his trilogy in grand style, elevating the film's central clash between good and evil to majestic heights not reached in the story's first two installments. While the film gorgeously intertwines grand spectacle (the climactic Battle of Pelennor Fields) with intimate human drama (Sam, Frodo, and Gollum's ascent up Mount Doom to dispatch the One Ring of Power), what's truly spectacular is the way in which the film seems bestowed with near-biblical import. The war between man and Orc is nothing less than a holy crusade for the fate of civilization, and it's hard not to see echoes of the United States' current predicament in Middle Earth's cataclysmic crisis. Not to say that The Return of the King succeeds because of its topicality. Whether it's the haggard desperation of Elijah Wood's Frodo, the courageous determination of Sean Astin's Sam, the cunning malevolence of Gollum, the regal serenity of Ian McKellen's Gandalf, or the stubborn pluckiness of Miranda Otto's Eowyn, the film imbues its central conflicts with mythic timelessness. With the surprising exception of Viggo Mortensen -- who, as the titular ruler, is given little to do but react to those around him with dull resolve -- the cast's performances are all charming. Still, the film belongs to Jackson, whose swift and dexterous direction recalls, in its enormous size and scope, the work of Lean and Griffith. Using a combination of on-the-ground hand-held photography and swooping crane and airborne shots (the best of which zoom around and under the titanic, Mastodon-like beasts used by Sauron's armies), Jackson thrillingly immerses us within the frenetic combat. I'm not wholly convinced that The Return of the King is the year's best film, but there's no doubt that Jackson's three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is one of the modern cinema's crowning achievements.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

The most hallucinatory of war films, The Return of the King concludes the Lord of the Rings trilogy with a burst of smoky grandeur. As our suffering Frodo (Elijah Wood), his faithful Sam (Sean Astin), and the grotesque Gollum (Andy Serkis) continue on their mission behind enemy lines, Gondor is besieged. Will the United Nations of Middle Earth be too late? As a wizard tells an elf—or is it vice versa?—it's "the great battle of our time."

Be that as it may, Peter Jackson's hobbit epic is certainly the greatest feat of pop movie magic since Titanic—albeit more boy's tale than romance. Speaking as a deprogrammed, once-upon-a-time Tolkien cultist, I imagine that fans will be ecstatic. The multifarious characters all come to fruition; even if the movie hadn't had the mystical good fortune to coincide with the wars against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, its complex mythology would still have the inevitability (and superior CGI) of a perfect storm. Truly, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; it's fruitless to point out that Jackson's magnum opus is hermetic and overdetermined, lacking the visionary chutzpah and demented social energy that characterized the great pulp fantasies created by Fritz Lang in the 1920s, Die Nibelungen and Metropolis.

What else is there to compare this to? The Matrix trilogy imploded; the Star Wars series seems but a pale Tinkertoy Tolkien imitation. For three and a half hours, Jackson deploys multitudes of digital and digitally enhanced creatures—not just orcs and ents, but dive-bombing pterodactyls, Humvee mega mastodons, dragonic battering rams, lava ogres, and the scariest spider that ever spun a web. Conflict is eternal. The extravagant battle scenes are spiced with flash-forward telepathies and enlivened by stray shards of character psychology: Gollum's divided consciousness, Frodo's anxious paranoia, the filial conflict between the grand grouch of Gondor (John Noble) and his son Faramir (David Wenham), the fiery torch carried for Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) by the amazon Rohan babe (Miranda Otto).

Look, don't listen. (Aragorn's Agincourt speech is not exactly Shakespeare.) And, as Pippin learns from the peep stone, don't look at anything too long ere it begins to look back. The natural wonders of New Zealand notwithstanding, Jackson's visuals have a fusty, storybook quality. The besieged citadel Minas Tirith is a splendid Dubrovnik-like stone city, but in more contemplative moments, the production design tends toward the chintzy. The elf forest has the feel of an emptied-out tropical resort; the interiors have the cloying quality of a Victorian faerie painting. Yet, with four or five narratives to follow, there probably hasn't been so much parallel action in any movie since the Birth of a Nation or even Intolerance. It's so addictive that The Return of the King suffers when it returns to ordinary two-story suspense—not that the climactic cataclysm isn't suitably colossal, as the Black Tower crumbles, the Black Land collapses, Mount Doom erupts, and the Great Eye explodes.

In short, this Krakatoa is at once exhausting and riveting. It's a technological marvel, and for those not with the program, a bit of a bore. And that's before the interminable farewells, Celtic airs, longing looks, Shire celebrations, and expeditions into a New Age sea of light that make up the lugubrious closer. The Ring trilogy may be fiercely chaste, but its hobbituary denouement is gayer than anything in Angels in America. Now, there's a scenario worthy of Lang. Watching Angels on TV, I couldn't help but wonder how many people might be prepared to graduate from Tolkien's millennial fantasy to Kushner's.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

To say that the Lord of the Rings trilogy is a singular accomplishment in movie history is almost too timid praise; there are many things that have only been done once, and in many cases, it was one time too many. Likewise to say that it’s the great commercial trilogy of our day: There are decongestant commercials I’d sooner re-watch than all the Star Wars or Matrix movies. It may be exaggerating to say that Peter Jackson and his cast and crew of thousands have redefined the rules of moviemaking, but it’s probably closer to the truth, and if a three-film, nine-hour saga doesn’t inspire a bit of exaggeration, something has gone horribly wrong.

It's possible to single out sequences, like The Two Towers' breathtaking battle of Helm's Deep, or The Return of the King's equally stunning assault on the last human stronghold of Minas Tirith, or performances, like Sean Astin's surprisingly moving turn as the faithful hobbit Samwise, or the mind-blowing blend of computer animation and Andy Serkis' performance that brings tactile life to the malicious but tormented Gollum. But above all, the Rings cycle is a triumph of careful construction, an elaborate jigsaw puzzle whose pieces fall magically into place. (Compare the blithering incoherence of the simultaneously shot Matrix sequels.) And yet, like a jigsaw puzzle, completion becomes almost redundant after a certain point, and you know just how things will look in the end.

Having hit its stride with The Two Towers, the series continues apace with The Return of the King, whose three-hour, 20-minute running time shows the extent to which the DVD "extended editions" have colored Peter Jackson's approach to editing -- and even then, the film arrives with reports that a nine-minute prologue featuring Christopher Lee and Brad Dourif was cut at the last minute. (It will, of course, be on the DVD.) With the twists already twisted, the exposition exposed, there's not much left to do except suit up and dive in, and The Return of the King wastes no time (well, not much) before the first swords are crossed. As in the Helm's Deep sequence, the defense of Minas Tirith flawlessly balances hand-to-hand combat and battlefield tactics, never losing sight of the characters or the overall struggle. In the midst of a massive onslaught by Orcs and mercenary humans, there's still time for Legolas (Orlando Bloom) to climb a lumbering beast, dispatch the enemies from its back, slay the creature, then slide down its trunk as it crashes to the ground. It's the sheer audacity of such stunts that makes you cry out in joy, but it's the sense of the overall battle that makes you feel like you're not just being taken for a ride.

Still, The Return of the King seems to retreat somewhat from the moral complexity of The Two Towers. While that movie saw Frodo (Elijah Wood) being ever more tempted by the power of the ring he is charged to destroy, and Gollum and his schizophrenic better half, Smeagol, battle for control, The Return of the King draws the battle lines more clearly. Even the traitorous spirits Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) calls on for aid opt to join humanity for one last battle, while the humans who fight for the evil eye, Sauron, remain distant, masked figures. Jackson and his many collaborators have given us the battle to end all battles, but the battle between good and evil which the movie ultimately depicts has no real ending.

Any fantasy series that externalizes our internal demons ultimately dead-ends in the same cul-de-sac: How do you proclaim victory over something that we know will never be vanquished? (I mean, without lying.) Buffy the Vampire Slayer approached the subject in its final season, then turned away. Harry Potter may owe some of his power to Voldemort's sting, but it remains to be seen how close J.K. Rowling will bring the young wizard and his malignant counterpart in the final two installments. The Return of the King opens with a recapitulation of Gollum's story, how the once-lighthearted creature named named Smeagol was seduced and deformed by the ring's chance discover. But by the final scene's he's reduced to pure antagonism, a grasping caricature. The movie's lengthy postscript ends in a surprising place, with the simplest of characters, suggesting that all the great struggles we've seen were fought in defense not of some overarching good, but the ability to live a simple, undisturbed life. It's the perfect grace note, undercutting the story's mythic dimensions and replacing them with domestic needs. It isn't evil that's been defeated, it's instability.

World Socialist Web Site Margaret Rees

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KING KONG C 75

USA Germany New Zealand (187 mi) 2005 ‘Scope

The film that inspired Peter Jackson to become a filmmaker, where the story has it after watching the movie on television when he was 9, he woke up the next day and began making models, turning his own updated version into something along the lines of an Indiana Jones adventure story, where much of the look of the landscape feels as if you are at Disneyland wandering around one of the artificially designed set pieces, a special effects bonanza, where the director obviously got carried away with the buckets of money he was given to make this film, so much of it is overdone to the point of excess, some of it downright ridiculous, as so much is over the top, but in the quiet moments, which were few, it works wonderfully. The Fay Wray part was extended and reconceptualized with Naomi Watts, where she plays a down on her luck burlesque performer during the Depression, her face seen through a reflection on a sidewalk window glass by safari adventure photographer Jack Black, who dreams of making a film on the never discovered Skull Island, an unchartered island that remains perpetually “out of time,” a place where compasses and navigational equipment don’t work. Black obtained a kind of treasure map which led him to this journey, where he brings Naomi Watts along for the ride.

The opening sequence on the island is creepy and scary, beginning with a ridiculous move by Black to offer a piece of chocolate candy to a horrid looking native child, believing everything will be under control. So of course, all hell breaks loose as they are attacked by almost zombie-like decrepit-looking humans that could be hundreds of years old. These are the black-skinned, nose and face pierced, face painted native inhabitants, who could just as easily eat you as look at you. But the boat crew arrives with guns to clear the way. But Naomi has escaped in the night to the thunderous sound of drums with Kong. The journey to find her leads to a stampede of dinosaurs, where men are running underneath them in a scene resembling INDIANA JONES (1984), but also the stampede sequence of LION KING (1994). Instead of stepping to the side, they continue to run underneath where they can easily get squashed. Surprisingly, all but a few survived. Meanwhile, Watts inexplicably decides to perform her burlesque act in front of Kong as a means of pleasure and amusement, which leads to a huge temper tantrum when she stops. But that’s the last of his bad moods, as Kong fights off a series of dinosaurs, perhaps a half-dozen or more, including three at once, all with Watts in his hand, switching her back and forth as he crushes skulls, breaks jaws, swings them around like a wrestler, throwing them against the rocks, even socking them square in the jaw. Only at the end of this prolonged sequence does Watts realize she’s safer with him than without him. Kong looks at her like, what do I have to do for you to pay attention to me, and walks off in a huff. She yells after him, “Hey, wait for me,” and runs after him where he scoops her up and throws her on his shoulder as he thunders through the jungle.

Meanwhile, the boys from the ship, with all their weapons, have their hands full with the dinosaurs and bugs, including a swamp sequence where giant sucking creatures swoop down atop a man’s head and suck him in, something right out of Alien (1979), or another giant roach eating sequence that is really gross, where machine gun bullets wipe them off of human bodies, without so much as a scratch to the humans. What aim! And this from a kid who has never fired a gun before, who throws it away afterwards like it’s tainted goods. Again, the crew from the boat save the day with still more weapons, most all of whom survive, but oddly, all are on one side of a canyon while Adrien Brody, the supposed script writer and romantic interest (showing zero chemistry), the only man who actually cares about saving Watts, is on the other. So he sets off alone into the jungle to find her. Within a few film seconds, he amazes us by finding the exact spot where they have laid down for the night to snooze, a spot perched high over the entire valley with the river below and the sun setting far away. ”It’s beautiful,” Watts repeats to Kong, attempting to humanize his feelings. Brody finds her, and as Kong awakes pissed off, catching him stealing his girl, giant flying bats decide at that moment to descend upon Kong in droves, distracting him sufficiently while Brody and Watts can escape, grabbing hold of giant bat wings and descending to the bottom of the canyon falling safely into the water — another one of the ridiculous moments. The beauty of the original King Kong (1933) is in its simplicity, where the cutting edge special effects were a marvel of invention at the time and continue to elicit awe and amazement well into the next century. If Jackson’s film causes audiences to revisit the original, it can be viewed as a success.

Needless to say, Kong is on them within seconds, and purely by accident they are able to subdue to beast with a bottle of chloroform to the nose. Black sees dollar signs in his eyes and the scene shifts to New York for the extravaganza opening for the Eighth Wonder of the World. When all hell breaks loose, Brody has mysteriously anticipated it all, and only he senses that Kong’s wild rage will only be subdued by the presence of Watts, and he tries to lure him to where he thinks she is. After a scene that could just as easily be car crashes and city mayhem from SPIDER MAN (2002), there is a momentary calm. Out of the steam rising from the street walks Watts, almost in slow motion, like Clint Eastwood entering the scene in a Sergio Leone movie. When they reunite, it’s the closest thing to happiness in the entire movie, reflected in a magical sequence where he takes her into Central Park in the snow, where he slips on the frozen ice, and the two slide around on his giant butt, as if ice-skating, laughing with glee, as if they are the only two beings on earth. This is the money shot in Jackson’s remake, a beautiful expression of extreme tenderness, where nothing in the rest of the movie is as memorable. Enter the military, who make their idiotic presence felt late at the end of the film, stupidly shooting without thinking. Kong’s climb to the top of the city’s highest building is a delight, carrying Watts most of the way, stopping to enjoy another sunset where Watts can again utter “It’s beautiful,” but as the airplanes appear, he carefully places her out of harm’s way and climbs alone the last few stories.

In perhaps the film’s most ridiculous moment, the darkness following a sunset suddenly turns light and the rest of the film plays out in the daylight. Amazingly, she climbs an outside staircase up to the top to join him, where the airplanes are sending a barrage of bullets at him and the accumulated damage is slowing him down, but the two have moments together at the top of the world, where Kong looks sad and somehow aware of his mortality. Both are infatuated by what they can’t understand, but there’s a peculiar peace between them, where love is certainly in the air. Brody breaks through the police barricade and rushes up the 100 floors or so on the elevator to greet Watts after Kong tumbles down to the ground, which is captured with a sky cam. Down below, the wretched humans are gleefully praising the Air Force, but Black, or course, has the last line, “It wasn’t the airplanes, it was Beauty killed the Beast.” There are simply too many references from other films on display here, where imitation is a form of flattery, but very little is original, and the victimization of Kong in the hands of his enemies is over-accentuated to the point of wretched excess, attempting to dramatize all the lurid melodramatic aspects of the story, but it brings nothing new, where the romantic notions eventually lose weight and are overcome by an overlong, overindulgent and often annoying CGI special effects/action/adventure movie.

The Nation (Stuart Klawans)

The holiday movie season that began with the Narnia lion has reached its climax with the giant ape--and you can guess which beast I'm rooting for.

Writer-director Peter Jackson, relaxing after The Lord of the Rings, has slacked off by making a King Kong that runs a mere three hours, involves only a dozen or so major characters (plus uncounted extras) and deploys just enough special effects to rebuild 1930s Manhattan, with an entire prehistoric world thrown in. Jackson knows he cannot re-create the meaning of the original but only reflect upon it. (If he keeps the Empire State Building, he uses something that is now an icon of nostalgia, not modernity. If he decides instead to go contemporary and have Kong scale the Petronas Towers, he makes too telling a comment on our distance from the era of Merian Cooper.) So, not trying too hard, Jackson has retold King Kong as a Depression-era story, but with improvements. If Cooper had Kong wrestle a dinosaur, Jackson must have him fight three--while caught midair in a tangle of vines, juggling Naomi Watts.

She's so splendid, by the way, that she upstages the special effects, as Jackson would have wanted. Her talent, and the soulfulness of Kong (animated on the model of Andy Serkis), make this a movie fit for adult audiences.

Well, that and the mammoth carnivorous worms.

Crazy for Cinema Lisa Skrzyniarz

Being a fan of both Jackson and the original, I really wanted to like this movie...and sometimes I did. What kills the enjoyment of this version is not only the film's length, but the utter lack of character depth (except for Kong) and the endless, mindnumbing action sequences that add little value to the story and just elongate the torture. Visual effects are a wonderful thing, especially when they can create a living, breathing creature like Kong. Andy Serkis does it again as the man behind the giant ape's soul. If only Jackson pumped as much life into his human creations, he might have had a real winner here. Ann Darrow may be beautiful, charming and sweet, but frankly that wouldn't be enough to get my ass onto that island to save her. Her beauty is all we're given to work with and that just ain't enough. There are even fewer reasons to care about the crew, so their various deaths at the hands of giant bugs, vicious dinosaurs and an angry ape just become an endless parade of bloody, meaningless carnage, which takes away from the film's core story – beauty taming the beast.

Given that she had nothing to act against, Watts turns in a brilliant performance as the terrified, yet fascinated leading lady. It could not have been easy and she truly makes you believe Kong is alive and well. Their scenes together are the only entertaining aspect of this venture. Why Brody would accept such a worthless and empty part, considering his resume, is a mystery. He has no chemistry with Watts and little to do but look befuddled, scared and horrified. Black has wonderful moments as the ruthless filmmaker out for fame at any cost, but even his character turns out to be a fairly one trick pony. KONG is gorgeously crafted, but it brings nothing new to the mystique of the tale. I normally love long movies, but there's not enough plot or chracter development to justify the length. By the time they reach New York I just didn't care anymore about anyone...even Kong. Clearly Jackson was blinded by his love of the original film and after his worldwide success there wasn't anyone who was going to go against his vision, which is a real shame. A firmer hand and better script could have really turned this into something special.

Edward Copeland on Film Josh R. from Review Comment #1

I agree with you that the fawning critical response to Peter Jackson's King Kong has been, for the most part, disproportionate to the film's actual merits. You've outlined in good detail exactly why the first third of the film is pretty rough going - the limitations of Team Jackson's screenwriting skills are painfully apparent in scenes that feature more talking than running (or, in the case of the LOTR trilogy, decapitating Orks).

That said, I found more to enjoy in Kong than you did. It's obviously no match for the 1933 original, which retains a kind of beauty in its simplicity - the cutting-edge effects from the Meriam C. Cooper version look fairly primitive by modern standards, but they're executed with a kind of gonzo ingenuity that still elicits gasps. Peter Jackson has that same kind of breathtaking, barnstorming ability when it comes to the crafting of action sequences. In terms of the way they've been conceived and choreographed, Jackson's action is as compelling in its own right as Spielberg and Cameron's. When the film is on the move, it's a rocking good time - it's only when it's standing still that things fall flat.

If there's one thing I would point to as...well, I won't call it an improvement, since that would be tantamount to sacrilege...but if there's one respect in which Jackson's film distinguishes itself from its predecessor in a positive way, it's in its consideration of the relationship between Kong and Ann Darrow.

The decision to humanize Kong to the point where he actually functions on the level of a human character yields a very unexpected and satisfying result. The bond between Kong and Darrow is rendered in such a way that it does manage to achieve the kind of mythic-romance proportions that Jackson is striving for. Admittedly, this is due in no small part to the invaluable contributions of Noami Watts and Andy Serkis; but credit is also due to Jackson and his collaborators, who find a fascinating new wrinkle in a classic piece of American iconography. For the first time, this is a real relationship, with complicated emotions on both sides. For all its bells and whistles and high-octane action, the film's best scene is probably its quietest - the tender, funny yet sad moment between Kong and Darrow on the ice in Central Park. Of course, we know that such a delicate moment can't last; what makes it so moving is the manner in which Noami Watts and her computer-generated partner communicate to the audience that they know it too.

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

As Peter Jackson tells it, the original King Kong made him a filmmaker. After watching it on television when he was 9, he woke up the next day and began making models. It's almost too tidy a story, but it's probably true. King Kong is the kind of movie that can plant hooks that dig in for a lifetime. In 1933, its effects were groundbreaking, but the real breakthrough had as much to do with the heart as the eyes. Effects master Willis O'Brien and co-directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack made Kong come alive in every sense. When he made his fatal plummet, they made it easy to forget he was really just a lump of clay.

Peter Jackson made a lot of smart choices in making his new version of King Kong, but not trying to outdo the original might be his smartest choice of all. Sure, Kong, co-written by Jackson with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, is longer, louder, and more action-packed than its predecessor, and filled with effects unimaginable in the '30s. But it's also fundamentally the same double-edged tragedy of humans and apes wanting what can never be theirs. (Also, scenes of apes fighting dinosaurs continue to play an important part.)

Retaining the original film's art deco-and-Great Depression setting, Jackson's King Kong opens on a world of big dreams and dire straits. Struggling actress Naomi Watts gives her all to vaudeville audiences who can barely be bothered to look up from their newspapers, while across town, producer Jack Black struggles to keep a jungle-adventure film afloat. In sudden need of a leading lady, Black ropes Watts into a scheme to run off with some studio resources and film on an uncharted South Pacific island. (Nothing beats a good location, after all.) After half-kidnapping playwright Adrien Brody, they set sail for the not-so-welcoming-sounding Skull Island.

What happens next will be familiar to anyone who's seen the original (or even the all-but-forgotten 1976 Dino De Laurentiis remake), but Jackson finds ways to make every moment feel new. After a start heavy on exposition, the film strings one action setpiece after another, each realized with the breathless excitement of an adventure pulp cover. It's as if Jackson set out to bring to life every fantasy of the last moment before earth gave way to space as the site of the final frontier.

Then there's Kong. Portrayed pre-special effects by Andy Serkis (who did the same for Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings), he's simultaneously a fully realized character and every inch an animal. Rather than projecting human emotions on him, Jackson lets him behave like an ape, launching into violent rages when needed, then turning playful and sulky as his circumstances change. Special effect or not, he holds his own against Watts, and their impossible relationship becomes the heart of the film.

The big ape sees something he wants in the human world and doesn't understand why he can't have it; the humans attempt to drag a bit of untamed nature back to the modern world, and their efforts only underscore the gulf that divides civilization and nature. It's a long way down to the bottom of that gulf, but for a brief moment, Watts and Kong find a way to ignore it. Jackson gets that right as surely as he does the sick thrill of tentacled creatures emerging from a pool of mud. He's made a Kong as sure to evoke the same sense of wonder and heartbreak as the original did for him.

BFI | Sight & Sound | King Kong (2005) Kim Newman from Sight and Sound, December 20, 2011

King Kong - Bright Lights Film Journal Alan Vanneman, February 1, 2006, also seen here: Bright Lights Film Journal [Alan Vanneman]

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Edward Copeland on Film

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THE LOVELY BONES B- 81

USA Great Britain New Zealand (135 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

”What am I now? The dead girl? The lost girl? The missing girl? I’m nothing.” —Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan)

A gentle and loving portrait of death as seen through the eyes of a young 14-year old girl who is brutally murdered, Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon, who’s not yet ready to let go of her life just yet, so after death she remains lingering in “the in between,” a hereafter between heaven and earth, still holding onto as much of her life as she can before finally moving on. It’s always interesting to hear narrations from characters that acknowledge they’re already dead, such as SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950) or AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999), as it adds an eerie dimension of extra depth, as there’s a foreboding shadow that hovers over everything the audience sees. But unlike those others, Susie is a child, so her world is still decorated in a child-like fantasy of rainbow colors and wonderment. Ronan is really very good in the narration, as her knowledge about herself is wise beyond her years and challenges the audience to share her uncommonly sharp perceptions about the world from this place where none of us have ever been. Since a good deal of this film comes from the afterlife, where one can look down from above and sympathize with their own family trauma but they can’t see you, it’s interesting how much of our lives remain unfinished and incomplete even after death, as the questions and reverberations about our death may linger in people’s minds for a long time afterwards. In this way, the movie makes us appreciate the short time we have in life, as we never know when it could abruptly be taken away so unexpectedly.

Susie has an ordinary life, with loving parents and a younger brother and sister, and she’s discovered her first boy, Ray Singh, played by Reece Ritchie, who’s actually interested in her, that leaves her dreamily off-guard, a contributing factor in her death, as she was too easily distracted and missed visible signs that might have warned her away from her eventual killer. But as she points out, in the early 1970’s, there were no TV stories, no amber alerts or child hotlines, and no pictures on the sides of milk containers, as no one had any idea that these kinds of things actually happened, so she was totally caught off-guard by her life’s final chapter, which is menacingly suggested without being shown shown, deleting rape or other sexual deviations that occurred in the book, as this is a family picture. Her life suddenly turns into a dream world where she remains invisible, where she’s left to wander silently, having no impact on what she sees, where she hopes her family can figure out the clues, but the loathsome killer (Stanley Tucci), who lives just a few doors down the block, feels more comfortable every passing day believing he’s actually gotten away with it. The gist of the story becomes the dramatic contrast between her father’s grief and the killer’s compulsions, as the audience wonders if the killer will get his comeuppance and the father can avenge his daughter’s horrible murder. Moving back and forth between the two worlds, Susie discovers that while her own family’s life is in utter turmoil from the grief, despair and complete disbelief, there are also several other victims of the same killer.

While the film does feel overly long, and moving back and forth between worlds eventually does grow tiresome, the lyrical tone of the film remains appealing, as it’s hard not to feel for what Susie and her family are going through, as her experience fills us with the same regrets that she has. It’s interesting that even in the afterlife what she most regrets is never knowing the feeling of that first kiss. There is an offbeat side character living on the outskirts of town that no one likes, Ruth (Carolyn Dando), but Susie grows to appreciate her from the world beyond, as she’s a seer who senses the presence of dead souls and channels them into her life, while Susan Sarandon is weirdly introduced as the free spirited alcoholic family grandmother that supposedly holds the family together, an improbable notion and probably a completely unnecessary one, as her comic tone doesn’t fit with the devastation of the family loss. When the killer starts getting ready to strike again, this time targeting Susie’s younger sister, a certain panic sets in. Might he actually get away with it? The idea that different levels of awareness exist side by side is intriguing, as is the visual conception of the afterlife, suggesting there are stages to pass through before entering heaven, but even more compelling is the idea that the living could potentially interact with the afterlife, or vice versa. Certainly there are connecting thoughts, but this is one of the few films that blends a dialogue between both worlds.

One of the underlying subplots of the movie is the film’s history, where Lynne Ramsay was initially hired to adapt a screenplay from the Alice Sebold novel and direct the film. But once Stephen Spielberg came onboard to produce the movie, she was fired in favor of fellow blockbuster filmmaker Peter Jackson, who it turns out was probably the wrong choice, as while the interplay between worlds, the living and the in between, is miraculously conceived with some eye-popping computer imagery, the brightness of tone is all wrong for a story involving brutal victims of rape, serial killings, and even dismemberment. It’s missing the dark edge that Ramsay would no doubt have brought to the story. One would have to be familiar with the book to be aware of all the grisly details, which are completely omitted from the movie, and while the choice of narrator is excellent, all the rest feels oddly inconsistent with a strange reliance on a candy colored afterlife.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [2.5/4]

Loyal readers have waited since 2002 to see the movie version of Alice Sebold's novel; the project has changed hands a few times, unfortunately bypassing Lynne Ramsay and winding up in the hands of Peter Jackson. I suppose that if Jackson could have made something akin to his masterpiece Heavenly Creatures (1994), he may have been onto something, but the finished film of The Lovely Bones is more like one of his "boy's adventure" movies, filled with jokes, suspense and special effects. Saoirse Ronan stars as Susie Salmon ("like the fish"), who is murdered at age 14 and watches her family from heaven. Her father (Mark Wahlberg) becomes obsessed with finding the identity of the murderer: a creepy neighbor (Stanley Tucci), who builds dollhouses and keeps to himself. Rachel Weisz plays the mother who gives up and runs away. Thankfully Susan Sarandon is on board as Grandma Lynn, who drinks constantly and makes it look as if everyone else is nuts. Meanwhile, Susie occupies a visually splendid heaven, with all kinds of colorful, ever-shifting images, shared with the mysterious "Holly Golightly" (Nikki SooHoo). More than anything, The Lovely Bones feels like a film circling the book, eyeing it uncertainly and trying different kinds of styles and moods to see if anything fits. As it stands, some scenes work and some do not, and they fail to add up to a coherent artistic whole.

The New Yorker (David Denby) review (Page 2)

Of all human illusions, the hardest to give up is the belief that consciousness exists after death. This may seem a stiffly rational response to anything as shrewdly executed as Alice Sebold’s best-selling 2002 novel, “The Lovely Bones,” but it becomes inescapable when you see the bizarre and sentimental movie that Peter Jackson has made from the book. In the movie, as in the book, Susie (Saoirse Ronan), a fourteen-year-old girl, narrates her own murder, in 1973, at the hands of a neighborhood creep (Stanley Tucci). Then she watches him cover his tracks, and her father (Mark Wahlberg), her mother (Rachel Weisz), and her sister (Rose McIver) try to cope with her death. She is not merely present in their minds; they can’t quite see her, but she is there, prompting, warning, claiming a kiss from her handsome teen boyfriend.

The book was brought off with considerable delicacy—it’s really an affectionately detailed portrait of a suburban girl’s life. Literalized in the movie, the material is closer to a high-toned ghost story. Jackson intermingles family goings on with Susie’s gossamer interventions, and some of the brushed-with-ether imagery verges on the uncanny. Yet Jackson has become an undisciplined fabulist: the movie is redundant and undramatic. Heaven is notoriously harder to make interesting than Hell, but Jackson has outdone other artists in cotton candy—there are luscious hills and dales, and gleaming lakes and fields of waving grain, and sugarplum fairies with music by Brian Eno rather than by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. “The Lovely Bones” has been fashioned as a holiday family movie about murder and grief; it’s a thoroughly queasy experience. The lesson that Susie has to learn is that she must “let go” of her past life. Meanwhile, skilled, opportunistic artificers like Alice Sebold and Peter Jackson won’t let go of a chance to mingle life and death. 

The Onion A.V. Club review [C] Tasha Robinson

Everything about Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s bestselling book The Lovely Bones is worked out to an excruciating fault. The décor is precise for the early-1970s middle-America setting, with photo cubes, period knickknacks, and hideous wallpaper dominating the sets. Jackson’s version of the afterlife—a majestic, bright realm where Important, Obvious Symbols dominate a shifting fantasy landscape—is rendered in gorgeous digital detail. Unfortunately, the themes are similarly fussed-over and underlined, as if Jackson and his habitual co-writers—his wife Fran Walsh and their partner Philippa Boyens—are worried that viewers might dare to get lost in the arty visuals and miss the slight messages about grief and obsession.

Atonement’s Saoirse Ronan stars as the story’s narrator, a murdered girl (and rape victim in the book, though the film elides that entirely) who refuses to move on to heaven; trapped in a beautiful between-realm shaped by her desires, she watches her sister and parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) struggle emotionally over her death, while her murderer (a convincingly creepy Stanley Tucci) plots his next crime. Her fixation on her incomplete life and the man who cut it short mirrors Wahlberg’s fixation on finding her killer; Wahlberg provides an early key to the story when he gives Ronan a banal primer on obsession. He also explains a snow globe in terms that will later become significant when she, too, is trapped outside of time, within a perfect world. It’s that kind of film, where every casual utterance later winds up draped in weighty significance or irony, and where Ronan, in a breathy little whisper of narration, spends nearly every moment of the film reminding viewers what they should be thinking or feeling.

And yet The Lovely Bones is often moving, almost in spite of itself. Jackson draws excruciating tension out of scenes where the audience knows exactly what’s coming but the characters don’t, and his dreamlike, allusive handling of Ronan’s murder is stunning. The afterlife scenes are gorgeous, even though they often seem to be ultra-glossy updates of sequences he managed with more heart back in 1994 with Heavenly Creatures. And Ronan remains a tender, touching performer, though Wahlberg edges perilously close to his bug-eyed sincerity mode from The Happening. But for all its successes, Bones remains more crafted than sincere, more meant to look achingly pretty on the screen than to resonate in the heart. 

Time Out Online (Dave Calhoun) review [2/6]

Let nobody say that Peter Jackson doesn’t like a challenge. After filming Tolkien’s three ‘The Lord of the Rings’ books and spending over $200 million on a new three-hour version of ‘King Kong’, the New Zealand director who started out making splatter horror in the late 1980s has turned to Alice Sebold’s hugely popular ‘The Lovely Bones’, the 1970s-set American novel narrated from beyond the grave by Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a 14-year-old who is raped and murdered by a neighbour in a field near her suburban home . From a vantage point somewhere between heaven and earth, Susie follows the reactions and behaviour of her parents (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz), her sister (Rose McIver)  and her killer, Mr Harvey (Stanley Tucci), as she struggles to gain the closure that will allow her to depart this earth completely.

Not that we see anyone raped or even murdered in this $100 million, 12A version of the story: Jackson softens the edges of both the initial tragedy and its fallout among Susie’s family. But that’s not the main fault of the film. The real let-down is its heavy reliance on overblown special-effects sequences to represent the celestial limbo where Susie resides immediately after death. Coming across like Salvador Dali was commissioned to represent Middle Earth for the New Zealand tourist board, these scenes dominate the film to such an extent that you begin to doubt that Jackson has much concern for the real family disaster at the film’s heart. Wahlberg, Weisz and McIver are all sidelined in favour of the magic of the animator’s hard drive. It doesn’t help that a gin-swigging Susan Sarandon is called on to play Susie’s louche grandmother for inappropriate comic effect just when you feel the film could do with a touch more tragic weight.

However, these are mere niggles compared to the film’s fatal flaw: perspective. Who’s telling us this story? The answer, of course, should be Susie Salmon, and at points, we hear some of the book’s first-person narration as voiceover, including the well-known opening – ‘My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973 – which graces the film’s opening and close . But there’s no consistency to Susie’s presence as the prism through which we see her story. Certainly the chocolate-box look of this American suburban world, which barely ever feels real, suggests that it’s a 14-year-old girl’s view of life. Yet there are whole sections of the movie when we forget Susie’s all-seeing eye and don’t know whether we’re in a family drama, a crime thriller or a horror. There are distracting hints of all three, without any of them taking hold and defining the tone of the film.

There are good points. Saoirse Ronan is a compelling presence as Susie Salmon, especially as she must have been acting alone and against a green screen for much of the shoot, and both her and the film are strong at capturing her burgeoning attraction to her schoolmate Ray (Reece Ritchie), a hint of adult sexuality cut short by tragedy. Stanley Tucci is creepy as Mr Harvey (even if he resembles a million movie paedophiles), and Jackson is at his best as a director when creating a sense of dread around Harvey whenever he’s anywhere near Susie or, later, her sister. Yet there’s no escaping the digital glare of Susie’s half-dead existence – a glare that threatens to blind us to anything remotely human in this drama.

Some Came Running: "The Lovely Bones" Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running, December 8, 2009, which includes an interview with the director: Peter Jackson Answers Questions From The Auteurs Community

For those so inclined, I remind them that an interview with Peter Jackson, featuring reader-generated questions, and conducted by myself, is up now at The Auteurs' Notebook, here. 

I've mentioned this before, but I think it bears repeating: I was quite a bit more excited about the prospect of Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones being made into a movie when Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish visionary behind Ratcatcher and the spectacular Morvern Callar, was attached to said adaptation. Not excited enough to go out and read the novel, which is told from the point of view of 14-year-old Susie Salmon, the victim of a horrific rape and murder. I did wonder if Ramsay would jettison the book's first-person narration, as she did with Morvern Callar, also an adaptation of a novel, and find a new way to tell the story. I wondered quite a few things. And then, for reasons never made fully clear in the trades, at least to my knowledge, Ramsay was off the project, replaced by writer/director Peter Jackson and longtime partner and co-writer Fran Walsh, and longtime co-writer Philippa Boyens. At first I rather resented this, not least because it likely meant that I was going to wait that much longer for the next Lynne Ramsay film. (Morvern Callar came out in 2002; Ramsay, it appears, is currently preparing to shoot We Need To Talk About Kevin.) As my investment in the actual source material was minimal, I didn't feel much beyond that, except, you know: Peter Jackson, whose sensibility I like and whose films a largely admire, was going to direct it, and so I was probably going to want to see it on some level. Had a studio handed it over to Joel Schumacher we wouldn't be having this conversation. 

And so, Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, a film I found, well, enormously frustrating. I was not put off by the elaborate CGI visuals that many viewers of the film take to depict "Heaven" (and as a matter of fact, they don't depict Heaven, which you'll understand if you're paying attention; Jackson addresses the issue very diplomatically in the above-mentioned user-driven interview I conducted with him for The Auteurs' Notebook); and I don't think that it looks too much like What Dreams May Come, or some such—have you seen What Dreams May Come lately? Totally different thing, and bad.

No, my frustration stems from the picture's thoroughly inconsistent tone, the way it can grab you by the throat one minute and make you throw up your hands the next. A picture that can cut from a searing depiction of a father's grief to a goofy montage of his tipsy mom moving in to "help," scored to the tune of The Hollies' "Long Cool Woman," to cite the one instance that doesn't involve dropping a major plot spoiler. The sore-thumb-like lapse in judgment is not an entirely new feature for Jackson; remember the depiction of the Skull Island natives in his King Kong, or the ill-advised soft-show with which Naomi Watts entertains the titular lug in that film? (Although Watts was so game she almost pulled it off, I have to say.) One feels rather grateful for Tolkien fanatics, if it was the fear of their wrath that kept Jackson so thoroughly focused and faithful in his Lord of the Rings telling. 

First, it's a fantasy/thriller, and as the film depicts Susie's awful death, and how she sees her killer from the afterlife getting away with murder, the thriller aspect here is particularly ferocious. Bones also wants to be an intimate portrait of how a family heals, or doesn't heal, in the wake of such a terrible trauma. And a little of it wants to be an affectionate half-sendup of the American '70s. And of course there's no reason this film can't be all three. But Jackson seems incapable of mixing, or melding, his modes. Instead, it's as if the film starts, and then stops and restarts every time he wants to switch gears. He's got a lead foot on the clutch. 

And more I cannot say, without giving away major parts of the film's storyline. I will note that I had many of what I call "Deuce" moments watching the film; that is, times when I felt like yelling something up at the screen. Not in a good, excited way, like "Get out of that vent you stupid motherfucker the demon is crawling right up your ass," knowing all the while that the demon's gonna catch up with whoever anyway; but in a bad, irritated way, like "What the hell is wrong with you people why aren't you calling the goddamn police RIGHT NOW!" Of course you can't do that in a screening room. After the picture's been out for a while maybe we can get into it, and we can get into my...wait for it...philosophical objection to the film, too.

Before I go, though, a word about Brian Eno's score. Again, I am frustrated, and I'm a big Eno fan. Actually, I'm frustrated on account of being a big Eno fan; viewers who aren't familiar with the guy's work are simply not going to have this problem. Which is: about one-third of the score (at least) is adapted, mashed-up, or remixed from previously-released Eno work from the '70s. Mostly. Which meant that during crucial stretches of the picture, this viewer, and a colleague who's also similarly knowledgeable, were sucked into a game of "Name That Brian Eno Tune" for much of the movie. You're supposed to be galvanized, emotionally fraught, by some on-screen violence, and instead you're thinking, "Interesting how he staggered the intro to Robert Fripp's guitar solo on 'Baby's On Fire' so that the most frenzied part would hit just as [name redacted] is getting whalloped with a baseball bat..." But as I said, the majority of viewers won't have this problem, and nice for them. 

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Pajiba (Daniel Carlson) review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]

Bloody-Disgusting review [3/5] BC

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [3/5]

Critic's Notebook [Robert Levin]

Addictive Thoughts John

Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [2/5]

Screen International (Mike Goodridge) review

IFC.com [Alonso Duralde]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2.5/4]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) - [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]

DVD Talk (Jason Bailey) review [1/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [1/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B]

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [B-]

CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C]

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [C] also seen here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

CineSnob.net (Kiko Martinez) review [C]

"The Lovely Bones" trailer gives us a glimpse of heaven ... Dorothy Snarker from After Ellen, August 5, 2009

Gerald Peary - interviews - Lynne Ramsay April, 2003

Lynne: People quote your films at parties. Mike: Those are lousy ... Oscar contender Mike Leigh and Lynne Ramsay talk about what works on screen - and what doesn't, by Leo Benedictus from The Guardian, February 4, 2005

Entertainment Weekly review [C+] Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Hollywood Reporter review Kirk Honeycutt

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [3/6]

Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [2/6]

The Lovely Bones attracts most complaints in 2010 Ben Child from The Guardian, June 14, 2011

Austin Chronicle review [1.5/5] Marjorie Baumgarten

Tulsa TV Memories [Gary Chew]

San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1.5/4]

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review

The Lovely Bones (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lynne Ramsay - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jacobs, Azazel

TERRI B 86

USA (105 mi) 2011

The director is the son of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, but zeroes in on a fairly likeable Sundance indie feel with this film about a teenage social outcast Terri (Jacob Wysocki) who is continually teased about his enormous size. Little is made of the fact that he also wears pajamas around town (“because they fit”) as well as to public high school without anyone raising objection, which by itself suggests a certain tolerance for the character, which just doesn’t have the feel of credibility, as kids themselves would likely raise an uproar about broadening the acceptable dress code standards for one kid while adults would be sending him off to see the shrink. Instead the film focuses in on his gently attentive daily routines, where he lives with his eccentric and senile uncle, Uncle James (Creed Bratton), who has an extensive collection of books and old record albums, occasionally showing the clarity to impressively play the piano, much to the delight of Terri, who is something of a quiet recluse himself, used to taking care of him, making sure he takes his medicine, watching his moods and his behavior so he doesn’t do something he’ll regret, and also putting him to bed at night. His uncle is friendly enough, but has a tendency to easily forget things. With the film opening on their morning routine, making sure his uncle has what he needs before he sets out for school, it’s easy to see why Terri has a history of arriving late, which gets him sent to the Principal’s office, none other than the always offbeat John C. Reilly as Mr. Fitzgerald, who welcomes him as a buddy, suggesting they meet regularly just to see how things are going.

With Mr. Fitzgerald, one is never sure who’s weirder, him or the misfit kids that are sent to see him, which includes Terri, though he soon comes to question why he has been included with this group of outcasts. Fitzgerald appears to be sincere, but he is clearly unlike other school authority figures who would just as soon banish Terri from their classrooms or gymnasiums than have to look at him, as his unmotivated mild manner and seeming disinterest in school alarms them, as they think he’s just a big fat oaf, not bothering to see beyond that blank expression on his face. Terri is unusually clever, however, as he spends much of his time observing others as they continually try to annoy him or ignore him, developing a kind of third eye, sensing what’s going on around him even as he withdraws socially. What’s soon apparent is how the film quietly becomes fascinated exclusively with unconventional characters, where outsiderism becomes the norm, as there are few glimpses of anything resembling mainstream behavior. Instead what we see touches on the bizarre without ever actually going there, never fully exploring the ramifications. Outside of Terri, few other characters are fully explored, including Fitzgerald, as they are only seen within the context of their relations with Terri. One of the other misfit kids, Chad (Bridger Zadina), an angry kid who continually pulls his own hair out and is likely to do just about anything, having no cautionary feelings, attempts to befriend Terri, but the closeness catches him offguard and comes as something of a surprise, like why me? —something he’s perhaps not expecting or even ready for yet.

The heart of the film changes when Terri observes an attractive girl, Heather (Olivia Crocicchia), being taken advantage of sexually by a boy appropriately enough named Dirty Jack (Justin Prentice) during Home Economics, which quickly becomes the subject of unstoppable school rumors, where the girl is about to be expelled from school until Terri speaks up to the Principal, claiming it happened against her wishes, changing the entire perspective of the event. This sequence also changes the tone of the film, as the focus is finally on someone other than Terri, as the entire student body turns against the girl, except Terri, becoming even more ostracized than the previously identified group of misfits. This leads to a friendship, of sorts, which only proceeds in the most offbeat path imaginable, where for a moment, Terri, Heather, and Chad become a psychologically demented, John Hughes style BREAKFAST CLUB (1985), where they have to decide what to do when they have too much time on their hands. One thing is for certain, and that is the languid pace of Terri’s unhurried life, which allows this film to develop slowly, accumulating pertinent details and developing character traits, all of which combine to paint an unusual portrait of teenage alienation when seen under this probing miscroscopic scrutiny, where life on the edges stops feeling so miserablist and alone, where shared experiences, even the most atypical and bizarre, make these kids feel less like the monsters they have been portrayed as and more like something closer to their own skin. This film, perhaps overly optimistic and upbeat, has a way of taking the teenage spirit of rebellion and insurrection and somehow offering it a safe place in this world, where, in reality, one is not so assured that safe havens like this exist outside the realm of the imagination.

Review: Terri - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Gerald Peary

He's gawky, obese, and neither charming nor funny, so why would we want to spend a whole movie with Terri (Jacob Wysocki), an unpopular high-schooler who annoys the teachers with his lateness and lethargy? Credit indie director Azazel Jacobs for building a case for Terri, so that — without manipulation or sentimentality — we begin to appreciate the clumsy lad at the same time that he starts to shed his self-loathing. Maybe the respect begins with our enjoyment of Terri's wardrobe, a different pair of pajamas for every day of class. And we are warmed by Terri's weird friendship with his school's deeply out-to-lunch assistant principal (a superbly fruitcake John C. Reilly). Finally, Jacobs and co-screenwriter Patrick Dewitt manage the impossible, getting Terri involved, sort of, with the perkiest girl at school (Olivia Crocicchia). Terri is subtle, sweet, and eccentric, and marks Jacobs, who earlier succeeded with Mama's Man (2008), as an independent filmmaker of formidable talent.

Nick Dawson interview with the director from Filmmaker magazine, January 18, 2011 (excerpt)

Azazel Jacobs’ profile has grown steadily since he made his striking, black-and-white debut feature, Nobody Needs to Know, in 2003. He followed it in 2005 with the delightfully quirky and inventive The GoodTimesKid, a film which found a devoted audience on the film festival circuit and was eventually released theatrically in 2007. Jacobs’ third feature, Momma’s Man, a poignant tale of adult regression into childhood, had its world premiere at Sundance. It became one of the hits of the 2008 festival, and played in theaters later that year to universal acclaim.

Jacobs, the son of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, grew up in New York City and is now based in Los Angeles, and his first three features were all set in one or the other of those two cities. With Terri, his fourth film, he moves into new territory as he tells a touching tale of a obese, socially withdrawn teenager (Jacob Wysocki) in a small California town who develops a surprising friendship with his high school headmaster (John C. Reilly). Jacobs, who seemingly never repeats himself as a filmmaker, has made a more polished and commercial kind of indie film that nevertheless still bears the sensitivity, emotional insight and deft directorial touch that is the mark of his work.

The Village Voice [Karina Longworth]

Azazel Jacobs' higher budget, much more conventionally polished follow-up to his 2008 Sundance hit Momma's Man, Jacob Wysocki stars as Terri, a fat kid loner who lives with his mildly mentally ill uncle and lumbers off to school wearing pajamas to school every day. 

Chronically tardy and harassed by the other kids for his "double ds," Terri is embraced as a problem case by his high school's assistant principal Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reily), who has problems of his own. When Mr. Fitzgerald asks Terri to meet with him every Monday, the grown-up bills it as a friendly gesture--"What's weird about two guys sitting down, sharing snacks and shooting the shit?"

But Terri soon realizes that he's one of a half dozen other misfits who meet with the adult weekly, and that since the others are either physically deformed or obviously crazy, the tap from Fitzgerald only confirms that Terri is "part of a group of ... monsters."

Humanistic without being moralistic, and very funny, Terri is a measured, observational examination of the stratification of teenage loser-dom. It sketches out the steep learning curve of high school, in which the playing field between a mean-spirited burnout and a sweet kid who simply doesn't fit in is leveled with a single incident, and a lapse in self confidence can plunge a would-be mistress of the universe several levels down into the freakiverse. At the same time, Terri bitter-comically reveals that the disciplinary structure of teenage life is a farce compared to the muddled, endless purgatory of adulthood.

Its climax, a glorious extended three-hander in which Terri, his love interest and a frenemy get wasted and confront their basest impulses, is perfectly modulated. The kind of scene that would be played for nihilist shock in a typical Amerindie, Jacobs stages it to reveal depths, layers, and vulnerabilities to characters who couldn't reveal their vulnerabilities until forced by intoxicants. Crowd pleasing without being pandering, Terri above all else feels true.

Film Comment [Amy Taubin] at Sundance

Letters wasn’t the only movie where an enchanted forest provided refuge for an outsider. In Azazel Jacobs’s Terri, a shy, overweight adolescent (Jacob Wysocki) leaves the ramshackle house that he shares with his only caring relative, an uncle in the early stages of dementia, and walks to school through a wooded glen that we see though his eyes as a place where he can lose his self-consciousness and even feel empowered. As he pauses on a ridge to look down on the high school sports field, we know he is trying to marshal the strength he gained from his brief idyll so that he can face yet another day of not being accepted by a pitiless teenage hierarchy. Working with a beautifully observed script by Patrick deWitt, perfectly pitched between comedy and pathos, Jacobs makes the silence around dialogue come alive through the gestures and gazes of his marvelously understated actors and the way subtle changes in light can illuminate not only the outside world but a shift in the inner life of the person on whom it falls. (Tobias Datum’s 35mm cinematography is outstanding.) Neither sentimental nor exploitative, Terri depicts high school as a place where, as the assistant principal (John C. Reilly) explains, Terri has the opportunity to come to terms with the fact that “life is a mess, dude, but we are all just doing the best we can.” Terri bonds with this unusually honest adult and with two other students who are also receiving counseling: anxiety-ridden Chad, who compulsively pulls out his own hair strand by strand, and gorgeous Heather, whose popularity takes a sudden plunge after she allows her boyfriend to finger-fuck her in plain sight of every student in the cafeteria. In the climactic scene, the three repair to Terri’s house where they down a bottle of Scotch and an array of prescription drugs. The ensuing trip, which at a few moments touches the sublime, recalls a similar shared adolescent rite of passage in Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke’s Duck Season. Like that film, Terri is a teen comedy that is not sadistic, salacious, or scatological—i.e., not easy to market.

Jacobs made such brilliant use of concrete autobiographical materials in his previous feature, Momma’s Man, that one wondered if he could let go of the mother-lode. But Terri is every bit as personal to Jacobs’s filmmaking voice.

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

It is not unfair to look upon the story being told in Azazel Jacobs's new film Terri on paper and groan heavily -- if not tear off your clothes, curl up in a fetal position, and cry from sheer exhaustion. The 39-year-old Jacobs's sixth film concerns the titular overweight outsider (Jacob Wysocki) as he is taken under wing by his friendly, odd, and oddly honest vice principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (the great John C. Reilly), following a string of homeroom tardies and general anti-social behavior. His home life with his dementia-ridden uncle (Creed Bratton of The Office) is weird, to say the least; he has a crush on a popular, damaged but essentially kind-hearted girl, Heather (Olivia Crocicchia); the only people he could possibly call his friends are Chad (Bridger Zadina), an outlandish deviant suffering from trichotillomania, and Mr. Fitzgerald. The funk of presaged, quirk-heavy familiarity is enough to make one pass out -- which makes Jacobs's sublime triumph all the more surprising and riveting. This is a clear sign of a major film artist breaking through the chrysalis.

Jacobs himself has spoken of the film as a break from the personal storytelling of his previous feature, the superb Momma's Man, though it doesn't seem that this has affected his highly intimate style. Even so, it's hard not to see the significance of Terri's jolly, energetic stroll through the woods in the morning, freed from the cluttered environs of his uncle's house, which is something like the loft the "hero" of Momma's Man shared with his parents transplanted to a Los Angeles suburb. Teased at school for his "double d's" and his habit for wearing matching pajamas to school, Terri finds solace in the freedom and power of nature, never so much as when he witnesses a hawk devour a dead mouse. Out there he is a king; in school, he is one of Mr. Fitzgerald's "monsters," an unsettling term Terri uses for the outcasts and special-needs kids that the vice principal pencils in for personal time during the week. He feels isolated, weirder than ever, and Fitzgerald's attempts to paint it over with a few white lies and a speech about "good hearts" only make matters worse.

Jacobs embeds his film with pathos which blends beautifully with the film's robust humor, which can be attributed to both Patrick deWitt's witty, nuanced screenplay (based on his own short stories) and Jacobs's deft work with his talented cast. The humor derives from the inherent innocence and gentleness of our lumbering hero, contrasted against the cynicism, wisdom, hormones, and discipline he encounters at school. Heather's near-immediate fall from grace, precipitated by her willingness to get fingered publicly by a boy in home economics, is followed immediately by a scene in which the boy holds out his still-moist fingers for Terri to sniff. The scene is inherently raunchy, but Jacobs handles it with a sense of sincere discovery that befits the tenderness that Terri exudes. It's the same tenderness that everyone but Terri withholds from Heather when she returns to school and is essential to the friendship that blossoms between the two outcasts and, to a lesser extent, between Terri and Chad.

What is perhaps most striking about Jacobs's film is how perfectly he pitches it between waking life and real life, with Terri as his oversized Little Nemo and the dreadful age of maturity galloping towards him like a wild, haunted steed. The death of Mr. Fitzgerald's secretary, for example, begets a stirring speech about the small horrors and mediocre triumphs of adulthood, which Reilly delivers with his patented shaggy dog honesty. It's told by a man who has been disappointed by life, but the essential message is that of understanding, of doing your own thing while trying to tolerate what other people do.

Terri's relationships with Heather and Chad are on uncertain ground by the end, but his friendship with Mr. Fitzgerald survives and promises respite. Terri's wonderment at such small pleasures as nailing a hook shot gives Fitzgerald hope, even in the face of his troubled marriage, and Jacobs harnesses that delirious sweetness without stumbling into sentimentality. This is to say that despite its narrative pedigree, which strikes the difference between John Hughes and Good Will Hunting, the film's hazy, transcendent beauty and distinct artistry reclaim the rote set-up. Jacobs has stated that the film was born out of both his love for and experience in independent cinema (his father is the brilliant avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs) and the early influence of the late Hughes's films. In Terri, we can see those two forces within the titular, lovable oddball: The struggle and yearning for acceptance, and the need to be the singular self. And for once, the two forces do not collide, but rather intertwine and meld, the result of which is a deeply humane comedy that touches the ethereal. It's one of the few outright masterpieces that have graced the cinema thus far this year. 

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones]

REVIEW: Terri Is More Than Just Another Fat-Kid Movie | Movieline Stephanie Zacharek

Terri : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Jason Bailey

Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]

notcoming.com | Terri Katherine Follett

indieWIRE [Eric Kohn] at Sundance

Terri Review | "Angus" with a Side of Cruel, Brutal Truth | Pajiba ... Dustin Rowles from Pajiba

'Terri' Review | Screen Rant Kofi Outlaw

Film-Forward.com [Adam Schartoff]

PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]

ReelTalk [Diana Saenger]

Slant Magazine [Bill Weber]

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

Hollywood Jesus [Darrel Manson]

Film School Rejects [Robert Levin] at Sundance

Terri - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Temple of Reviews [Nathan Adams]

Film Threat [Don Lewis]

Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]

HitFix [Daniel Fienberg] at Sundance

Terri | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Noel Murray

Review: 'Terri' | KPBS.org Beth Accomando

eFilmCritic [Jay Seaver]

Screen Daily [Anthony Kaufman]

Gordon and the Whale [Allison Loring]

CompuServe [Harvey Karten]

Terri: movie review - CSMonitor.com - Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

The NYC Movie Guru [Avi Offer]

Moving Pictures Magazine [Caroline J. Nelson]

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

Film.com [Eric D. Snider]

The Reel Bits [Sarah Ward]

Lonely Reviewer [Vatche]

SLUG Magazine [Jimmy Martin]

ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]

The Reel Deal [Mark Sells]

Sundance 2011. Azazel Jacobs's "Terri" David Hudson at Sundance from Mubi, January 27, 2011

Nick Dawson interview with the director from Filmmaker magazine, January 18, 2011

The Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]

Variety.com [Peter Debruge]

Time Out New York [Joshua Rothkopf]

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

'Terri' review: a fresh adolescent misfit film - SFGate Walter Addiego

Terri Review | 'Terri': Review - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

Terri :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews

Movie Review - 'Terri' - 'Terri,' Directed by Azazel Jacobs ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times, June 30, 2011

Jacobs, Ken

All-Movie Guide

Cinematexas Profile

Conversation with Ken Jacobs, Film Artist 5-part series by Harry Kreisler, October 14, 1999

Jacobs, Ken They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON

USA (115 mi) 1969–71 color and b&w, silent

Electronic Arts Intermix

This special edition of Jacobs' classic work Tom Tom the Piper's Son includes the two-hour film, which is recognized as a structuralist masterpiece, as well as A Tom Tom Chaser (2002), Jacobs' never-before-seen poetic riff on the transformation of his film from chemical to electronic form during the telecine process.

Writes David Schwartz of the American Museum of the Moving Image: "Jacobs reveals film as a Frankenstein art. What is a movie but a celluloid corpse brought to life by the electrical spark of the projector? Rephotographing a 1905 Biograph one-reeler, Jacobs penetrates into the image, delving into each shot, zooming in on details, probing deeper and deeper... A journey into the abyss."

Ken Jacobs writes: "Ghosts! Cine-recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead... I wanted to 'bring to the surface' that multi-rhythmic collision-contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force areas struggling edge to edge for identity of shape... to get into the amoebic grain pattern itself - a chemical dispersion pattern unique to each frame, each cold still... stirred to life by a successive 16-24 frame-per-second pattering on our retinas, the teeming energies elicited (the grains! the grains!) then collaborating, unknowingly and ironically, to form the always-poignant-because-always-past illusion. A movie about penetration to the sublime, to the infinite..."

The VHS (or 1/2") format editions also include a 214-page bilingual book. The publication is a special "Tom Tom" issue of Exploding, the French magazine of analysis in film experimentation, and includes articles by Xavier Baert, Nicole Brenez, Frédérique Devaux, Vincent Deville, Ken Jacobs, Emeric de Lastens, Loïg Le Bihan, Stéfani de Loppinot, Christophe Passemard, Emmanuel Siety.

User Reviews from imdb Author: Son of Cathode from New England

I must confess; when I saw this legendary avant-garde experiment in 1972, in some weirdo hippie church in Boston, I thought I had seen the ultimate experimental film rip-off. No, this wasn't even a film. It was an exercise in tedium. Jacobs took an old silent fairy tale and dissected it cinematic ally, by running it first forward, then backward, then fast, then slow, then enlarging certain scenes, then freezing frames, and even letting it whir by the film gate for minutes without registering a clear image of any kind. It was not only non-linear and bizarre, it was excruciating. It was torture. I was in pain; my hippie pal (now a Hollywood superstar editor,) waltzed up with glassy eyes and barked, "Wow! Isn't this great?"

Thirty-odd years later, my aesthetic taste veers dangerously close to certain aspects of Jacob's work, and I see how brilliant, unique and revolutionary this film is. Jacobs turned me on to a radical new perspective that I wasn't ready to embrace until years later, as if he had planted an intellectual seed which took, in my case anyway, a long time to germinate. Better late than never!

By dissecting an old film, one not only explores and comments on it, one threatens to annihilate it. Jacobs eschewed the narrative structure of the old silent cinema by replacing it with the shockingly nihilistic uber-structure of post-modernism. This wildly revisionist exercise has the power to rewrite history itself, symbolized here by a simple children's yarn turned into sheer aesthetic mayhem. Brilliant, disturbing, frustrating, even frightening, Jacobs challenged the structure, indeed the very essence of the filmic experience as a fictional temporal reality, by deconstructing it with extreme prejudice. The results, although unnerving in the extreme, are revelatory.

Movie Martyr [Jeremy Heilman]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

KEATON’S COPS

USA (23 mi) 1991

User reviews Author: from United States

All in all, I thought this movie was fantastic. The plot grabs you from the beginning and never lets go. I was expecting the movie to deal with the daily rigors of life as a cop named 'Keaton', but the director really took it in a different direction.

Helen Ackerman turns in an exceptional performance as the crying lady. She deserves her own starring role in a major Hollywood picture, and until she gets one, there will be injustice in the world.

Kenny Freed loves the movie 'Waiting', not because it was funny, but because it gives him many opportunities to stare at guys' balls. He likes that.

OPENING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 1896

USA (9 mi) 1991

User reviews from imdb Author: Michael Sicinski [Hey! Who’s this Michael Sicinski guy??] from United States

The cinema of Ken Jacobs is most importantly about experiencing light, shadow, and motion on the screen, as stunning phenomena which don't require a "story" or a "plot" to thrill. "Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896" is a Jacobs piece comprised of an 1896 tracking shot from a European train window, shot by the Lumiere brothers. In re-presenting this film, Jacobs distributes light-polarizing filters on wands, which audience members are asked to hold over one eye, then the other, and back again. This filter takes the "flat" information on the screen and imbues it with astonishing multi-planar depth. Trees, buildings, telegraph wires, all move horizontally across the screen in recessed space, all at different rates and in different three-dimensional spaces. The filter allows us to see this film in ways unimaginable to its makers. As Jacobs said at the conclusion of his presentation, "There it is, folks, 3D, 1896."

BI-TEMPORAL VISION: THE SEA

USA 1994

Bitemporal Vision: The Sea Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

CIRCLING ZERO: WE SEE ABSENCE

USA (114 mi) 2002

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Having first seen In Praise of Love in Toronto last September 12, I found Godard's rote anti-Americanism particularly tiresome. A year later, his not unwarranted grievances seem subsumed in his melancholy film's overall sense of loss. It's not that America appropriates the rest of humanity's history so much as it solipsistically replaces that history with its own. The events of September 11 may well be the most extensively documented catastrophe in human history. Among the numerous anniversary series and screenings, I'd single out Ken Jacobs's feature-length video Circling Zero: We See Absence, showing twice this weekend as part of the "Attack and Aftermath" program at the American Museum of the Moving Image.

No less than his acerbic Swiss contemporary, Jacobs is a cine-philosopher whose continually innovative and richly eccentric movies mix heady formalism with deeply intuited film-historical and social concerns. Circling Zero is less focused on the attack than its aftermath. Jacobs, who lives on Chambers Street (formerly in the shadow, literally, of the Trades), was out of town the day the buildings fell, and much of Circling Zero concerns his and his wife Flo's attempt to slip past the police barricades that marked the militarized forbidden zone and re-enter their loft. (Amazingly, they get through. Pasted on a neighbor's door is the scrawled note, "I Just Started Walking North.")

Jacobs interpolates some footage of the WTC aflame that was shot by his daughter Nisi from the building's roof. It's striking to note how many other people are up on their roofs similarly documenting the unfolding disaster. (One result is the real-time WTC Uncut, screening at AMMI September 11.) Circling Zero is intensely personal—in visual terms, it's totally first-person—but it's also a portrait of the body politic. The crowds of cops, volunteers, vendors, and tourists that circle the absence are as organic as antibodies surrounding a wound. The tape's last half explores another fact of nature: the Sargasso Sea of flowers, votive candles, and handmade placards that consumed Union Square last fall. Jacobs is fascinated by the fantastic assemblage and new public space. The impromptu performances and metaphysical debates of this spontaneous agora are, in every sense, signs of life.

INTERSTELLAR LOWER EAST SIDE RAMBLE

USA

Interstellar Lower East Side Ramble Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

[At the Q&A following this multimedia performance (film and video sequences along with Nervous System light objects), Jacobs noted that in his recent formal explorations, he's been increasingly interested in velocity. How can you generate effects by making abstract forms move in space? To be honest, the forms didn't seem to be hurtling by that quickly, but I will say that my mind was definitely lagging behind my eyes and ears, so perhaps Ramble's speed-demon intent impressed itself on my body. I always want to be more eloquent when addressing Jacobs' Nervous System works, for a number of not-very-original reasons. For one thing, these pieces move me more than just about any ongoing series of film explorations. I tend to sit before them in a state of slack-jawed amazement, a sort of "oh, fuuuuuuuck" disbelief in what I am witnessing. So when work is this enthralling, I would like to have something at least nominally intelligent to say about it. For another thing, not many people write about this work, and the reasons given are usually some variations of the same basic copout -- they are so abstract, so visceral in their impact, they defy description. But I think maybe we're just not trying hard enough. So here goes. Ahem.]

Interstellar Lower East Side Ramble consists of a halting amalgam of four distinct components. The two non-Nervous System elements are projections of single-channel film works that, if you will, "interrupt" the main action of the other two components, the Nervous System "magic lantern" play and a phenomenal (in both senses -- wonderful and physically bone-rattling) electronic score performed live by Ikue Mori and John Zorn. If you've seen Jacobs' recent video completion of Star Spangled to Death, certain "remixed" portions of that piece will be familiar as they reappear here. There are moments of Jack Smith street theatre, and a long passage of Jerry Sims' apartment, studying the notes and pictures and scraps of paper stuck to his walls, perhaps a grungier version of Aby Warburg's "Mnemosyne Atlas" collages, or just stuff he liked. These reprised moments from SSTD come later, as the first long digressive insert (shown on film) is an unfinished Kodachrome portrait of Orchard Street, alive with bustling street commerce, neighborhood grocers and sidewalk sales, a vibrant scene with New Yorkers of every stripe. What these two parts have in common, apart from the Lower East Side, is their placement within the overall fabric of Ramble. Much like Star Spangled to Death, which breaks up hilarious, atmospheric footage of Smith, Sims, and friends with found footage of racist, anthropological, and pseudo-scientific stupidity, Ramble also interrupts its own program. But instead of the outside world crashing in on our very private relationship with Jacobs' world, we see this world juxtaposed with another, more cosmic way of seeing. The Nervous System portions of the program are deeply colored, bulbous forms which exceed the bounds of the screen on all sides. Like magnified soap bubbles becoming solid forms, or like parts of a metal carburetor with holes that pulsate and become convex forms over and over, these magic lantern effects (like so much of Jacobs' work) emphasize unstable relationships between positive and negative space. They also operate on multiple cognitive channels, since these forms (whirling and emerging in 3D from the screen, due to the action of the Nervous System propeller) connote a cellular-microscopic viewpoint, a heavenly-telescopic one, and neither -- something with no concrete reference to "the world" as we know it. (Nothing much looks like these forms, but the only things that come close are the paintings of Terry Winters.) The order of presentation gives us an Orchard Street of the 50s, and its dialectic between what has changed (even in NYC, the human exchange depicted is giving way to top-down global capitalism) and what remains (many of the buildings, the alleyways, the unique street life that, for me and many others, is NYC). And then we see the SSTD excerpts, the improvised thought-in-action of Jacobs' friends, their interactions and interventions in that street life, as it was and as they were. The framework, instead of being the mundane media world Jacobs and the gang were / are fighting against (as is the case in SSTD, and rightfully so), is another way of envisioning the freedom and the energy the other passages memorialize. Together with the score, which builds on musique concrete recordings of city sounds, honking cars, subway rattling, the sonic physicality of the urban, the Nervous System portions of the piece take the eye on an adventure of uncertain seeing, where forces of love and life cannot be constrained by representation. This dialectic -- between a New York that can be depicted and a bodily sensation of being in NYC, and how the two extend and communicate with one another -- is the balancing act holding the work together. At the Q&A, Jacobs also mentioned that he wanted to show that a small area like the Lower East Side is in reality an infinite space, an entire universe of perception. I've been an admirer of Jacobs' work for quite some time, but after seeing Interstellar Lower East Side Ramble I realized that, apart from his numerous other creative achievements, he is one of the pre-eminent poets of the New York City experience.

STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH

USA (402 mi) 1957 – 2004

Time Out

One of the last surviving giants of avant garde American cinema, Ken Jacobs spent 50 years assembling this six-hour epic video commentary on a half century of US mischief, mistakes and occasional downright madness. This found-footage feast of cartoons, information films, documentaries and musicals, given fresh context and impact when threaded with Jacobs' own sequences. Primarily from street-level late '50s NYC, these chart the emergence of a new cinema, society and way of being. It's a panoramic vision of a country's schizophrenic stumbling towards this delirious now. Moments to savour include a pre-presidential Nixon seeking the modest man's vote with a telling lift from Abe Lincoln: 'God must have loved the common people, he made so many of them.'

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman] May 2004, later named Hoberman’s #1 Film of the Year in 2004, seen here: J. Hoberman: 1977-2006

Finished—or perhaps abandoned—after nearly half a century of work, Ken Jacobs's monumental, monstrous Star Spangled to Death receives its first ever theatrical run this week at Anthology Film Archives. The movie is a six-hour assemblage of found audio-visual material ranging from political campaign films to animated cartoons to children's phonograph records, interwoven with gloriously eccentric original footage shot mainly on the streets (and in the dumps) of late-'50s New York.

Do these underdog antics gloss the evidence Jacobs has gathered? Or is it vice versa? The movie is a vast, ironic pageant of 20th-century American history and consciousness. Fantastic street theater alternates with classroom hygiene films or dated studies of behavioral modification; Jacobs's performers, notably the young Jack Smith, hobnob with Mickey Mouse, Al Jolson, and American presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to George W. Bush. Obsession overflows as Jacobs's private mythology and outspoken cultural criticism merge with relentless documentation of America's ongoing military mobilization and institutionalized racism. I reviewed Star Spangled to Death when it was shown once last October as part of the New York Film Festival; since then Jacobs has made it even more topical in his references to our current war.

Jacobs has availed himself of advancing technology by adding all manner of annotation, some even subliminal. As a work of art, Star Spangled to Death has as much in common with the Watts Towers or the Barnes Foundation as with cinema as we know it; still, its theatrical run is most likely the movie event of the year.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman] October 2003

The ultimate underground movie, Star Spangled to Death, Ken Jacobs's epic, bargain-basement assemblage, annotates a lyrical junkyard allegory with chunks of mainly '30s American movies—or is it the other way around?

When Parker Tyler identified the cinematic desire to "provide a documentary showcase for the underdog's spontaneous, uncontrolled fantasy," he was surely thinking of Jacobs's desperately beautiful immersion in childish behavior and political despair. Jacobs began shooting Star Spangled in the late '50s, and the movie has become his life's work. Over the years, he's screened it in various versions—for the 1976 Bicentennial as Flop, heavily Reaganized in 1984, and a few years later for his AMMI retro. The movie has always been "too long," but this six-hour, possibly definitive, version, showing at the New York Film Festival, adds even more found footage—including a 30-minute prologue drawn from a documentary of Osa and Martin Johnson in Africa—while updating sections with references to the war in Iraq.

Jacobs alternates between marshaling evidence and showcasing manic performance. The young Jack Smith appears variously as a sheikh, a matador, a bishop, and an odalisque. Smith is fearless in making a public spectacle of himself. Repeatedly mixing it up with his environment—erupting on the Bowery in gauze-festooned splendor or materializing on St. Marks Place with a paper-bag crown and brandishing a mop—he provides a constant Feuillade effect, introducing wild fantasy into the sooty neorealism of '50s New York. Jacobs provides him with a foil—an emaciated piece of human wreckage, Jerry Sims, typically seen amid the creepy clutter of his Lower East Side hovel. (In the last chapter, Sims's misery is redeemed—he's permitted to set fire to a campaign poster for the movie's bête noire Nelson Rockefeller.)

Jacobs uses movies throughout—a Warners short made to publicize the NRA; an early, scummy Mickey Mouse cartoon; an excerpt from Kid Millions in which Eddie Cantor opens a "free" ice-cream factory—to ground the action in Depression flashbacks. This found material, often layered with added sound, allows Jacobs to brood on human programming, military triumphalism, and—most insistently—American racism. There's a devastating progression from a virtual Nazi-toon version of Uncle Tom's Cabin through Al Jolson's infamous "Going to Heaven on a Mule" and an excerpt from Oscar Micheaux's God's Step Children to Khalid Muhammad's speech in praise of LIRR gunman Colin Ferguson. The Holocaust figures here as well—although Jacobs ultimately apologizes for typecasting the outcast Sims as suffering ghetto Jew.

Although the movie's collage structure is designed to boggle the mind, individual shots can be breathtaking. Jacobs's dynamic compositions use mirrors, scrims, and random debris in a manner anticipating Smith's Flaming Creatures. (Indeed, shown as performance, Star Spangled to Death provided the model for Smith's own unfinished epics—particularly No President.) In the end, the movie turns mournfully self-reflexive. With its intimations of aesthetic utopia amid the rubble of social collapse, this is a tragic meditation on what Jean-Luc Godard called "the film of history."

Star Spangled to Death Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Star Spangled to Death Ken Jacobs’s own comments about his film from Cinematexas

Martin Teller

Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]

New York Times (registration req'd) Dave Kehr

DVDBeaver.com [C.P. Czarnecki]

RAZZLE DAZZLE

USA (92 mi) 2007

d+kaz [Daniel Kasman]

Ken Jacobs spends almost ninety minutes digitally taking apart and exploring A.C. Abadie’s 1903 short for the Edison company Razzle Dazzle in as many ways as one can imagine only to reach the conclusion that there are nearly an infinite amount of details of motion, distortion, horror, surprise, and secrets in any given amount of moving film. Abadie’s single-shot short is of a fairground ride that is a gigantic suspended circle, upon which ride mostly children and some adults, and is spun and tilted around and around by men pushing the orbital ring. The oscillation of the ring as it approaches the camera and recedes gives an almost three dimensional sense of space to the film, one which Jacobs becomes fascinated with. He juxtaposes the false sense of dimensionality of this short with stereopticon photographs (the ones where binoculars combine two images taken adjacently to produce an optical illusion of three-dimensionality) which he cleverly edits together, cutting rapidly back and forth between the two images so that they appear animated. Coupled with additional digital warping (the entire film is digitally made, processed, and projected) makes these “still” photographs almost look like the camera is moving around a three dimensional object, unlike the clips of Razzle Dazzle which for all its false dimensions is but a flat projection. Meanwhile, Abadie’s short is being endlessly explored: for the most part changing the color scheme to a bleeding red, white and black, Jacobs deeply zooms in, stutters motion, slows it down, performs picture in picture, overlaps the footage with slower or faster footage, and so on. As in Lars von Trier’s excerpts and remakes of Jørgen Leth’s short in The Five Obstructions we never see the source material in its original form all the way through, though a tantalizing glimpse of unaltered, unzoomed footage about fifteen minutes in becomes an unexpected physical relief on the eyes. All the manipulations find unique elements inside what seems like the limited motion and content of Abadie’s beautiful but simple film, everything from miniscule human gestures to abstractions of shapes and movement beyond recognition. These often tilt towards the horrific; zoomed in so far, the colors saturated and warped, and the footage slowed down to grotesque levels of distortion, often times the human faces seem to melt, the eyes turning hollow and ghastly very much like a nightmarish Edvard Munch character. These silent, screaming figures that seem to erupt from the footage or more likely lurk beneath its surface gaiety are reflected in the turn the film takes in its last third, moving most overtly away from all the varied and repeated manipulation of Razzle Dazzle and moving towards a montage of the stereopticon images, almost all dealing with war (specifically the Spanish-American war of this proto-cinematic era), the soundtrack quoting Edison’s “first” recording of his voice in giving his support to what sounds like American intervention into World War I, and a final use of the three dimension effect to bubble out a pile of skulls as eerie and undercutting as Holbein’s implicitly referenced optical illusion in The Ambassadors.

To what end is all this? It is not clear; the film’s burrowing absorption with Abadie’s short and experimentation with digital manipulation (much of it inspired, some of it unfortunately baring the marks of someone not used to the conventions of computer imagery—some of the three dimensional uses Abadie’s short with spheres, squares, and receding imagery looks awkward and dated) is indeed alarmingly painful, exhilarating, tiresome, revelatory, rhythmic, and fascinating in and of itself, as much about film texture (and the digital texture of film) as it is about Abadie’s specific photographic content. The connection with the optical view of the life inside the film with its digital manipulation, and its comparison to the more surreally paradoxical “still lives” from stereopticons, unreally animated into partial movement, lightly touches on phenomenological questions about cinema as a medium. There is a strange gap in the idea and perception that the still images, taking place over space (next to one another) cognitively approximate real life better than the two-dimensional Razzle Dazzle. Yet Abadie’s short, taking place over time, provides real movement that can only be simulated in Jacob’s manipulation of the stereopticon (just like the 3D effect of the short is likewise only approximated digitally). And it seems like it is movement in time rather than space that is most interesting overall, as Razzle Dazzle seems to provide an immense catalog of details and moments that the stereopticon lacks in its powerful spatial “thereness”. Yet it is these latter images that call into question most directly and literally the state of the world, both around the time of their creation and now, during another imperialist state of war. This theme’s connection to the Edison film seems mostly tangential, unless one reads some of the horror lurking in the digital, pixilated depths of its images as a kind of implicit acknowledgement that behind any utopist scene or sense lays a suggestion of darkness. The film may never coalesce—if it was even meant to, though one with so few parts so carefully played with suggests a strong, concrete deliberation—and definitely overstays its welcome, but the amount of visual variety and mystery to be found in an early silent film and the degree to which new technologies can root out and find new pleasures and meanings in an old, perhaps forgotten film is a pleasure to see. The larger questions asked in terms of dimensionality of images and this aesthetic and perceptional notion’s relationship to death, war, and politics, is much less clear but no less stimulating.

SURGING SEA OF HUMANITY

USA 2007

2007 New York Film Festival "Views from the Avant-Garde" Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Much of Jacobs' recent post-Star Spangled to Death output has consisted of his finding new and unique ways of employing video to create permanent versions of the 2D / 3D pulse-and-flicker film-performances known as the Nervous System. Although the rate of flicker is different, and Jacobs has a slightly altered set of tricks at his disposal when sitting down to the editing console, video has served him well. The hypnotic, deeply physical character of the Nervous System has carried over, even if the specific quality of light and shadow is less tangible. However in many if not most of these new works, Jacobs is examining a concrete artifact of visual culture -- an early movie, a stereoscope card, a set of photos -- and this lends significant optical weight to the pieces in question. Surging Sea of Humanity is a fine example of this work. In it, Jacobs uses digital superimpositions, kaleidoscopic reverb and flange, and differential focus to take us around an image of a late 19th century crowd gathered at the World Columbian Exposition of 1893. Jacobs shatters the picture but always brings it back together with a tunnel-like focus on a single individual from the crowd, as though both the orthogonals of the image and the crowd itself were organizing and reorganizing itself around a single body. In time, figures becomes paneled excerpts which strobe and flicker, and the two parallax views of the stereoscope are presented in rapid succession, giving the visual field a 3D, hologrammatic feel. But Jacobs' continual realignment of "the mass" around shifting individual souls hints at a social theory, a radical democracy of both the image and the public sphere. Surging Sea provides a glimpse of how we might act collectively without sacrificing our subjectivities to the mob.

DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN’T BUY

USA 2007

Dreams That Money Can't Buy Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

In all fairness, this is the sixth Nervous System-derived performance work I've seen, and while every single one of them entails dazzling effects and visceral thrills you will never find anywhere -- Jacobs is an American master in every meaningful sense of the word --, Dreams was the first that struck me as uneven and rather murky in its overall structure. One way through the piece, a productive one that offers some concepts without minimizing the pure phenomenology of the work itself, is to recall that Jacobs has dedicated Dreams to Phil Solomon. The performance has concrete correspondence to Solomon's work, particularly the thick, hovering tactility of his work in celluloid. Jacobs' work here produced fewer individual forms across time, instead opting for craggy sheets of visual material that allude to the surfaces of Solomon's films while also momentarily solidifying into semi-objects. Dreams is the most purely abstract Magic Lantern work I've seen from Jacobs, and it makes perfect sense here -- Jacobs is performing (no firm object or residue) and producing effects, not forms (nothing much to "apprehend" in an acquisitive, vicarious-ownership kind of way). As one might expect, the results are somewhat inconsistent across time, and Reed's soundtrack reflects this. It's more a series of musical snippets that a symphonic work, per se. All in all, Dreams is usually lovely, and often a dark, shimmering world in which it's a pleasure to lose oneself.

CAPITALISM: SLAVERY

USA (3 mi) 2007

Nov Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

When confronted with experimental film or video, it's not an uncommon response for viewers to find themselves at a loss for words. This typically hasn't been a problem for me; in fact, I'd tend to say I throw rather too much verbiage at the avant-garde films I love. But for weeks now, I've been at a bit of a loss for just how to grapple with Ken Jacobs's Capitalism: Slavery, a videowork of deceptive simplicity. Like many of his recent videos, Capitalism: Slavery is a transcription of certain procedures Jacobs has adapted from his Nervous System performances. In this case, he has taken a stereoscope image of slaves in a field picking cotton, with a white overseer monitoring them on horseback, and zeroed in one certain portions of the image. Furthermore, he has once again chosen to alternate rapidly between the two parallax views, resulting in a twisting, pulsating 3D force field in which the image "moves" but does not progress. I have now seen this three-minute video three times, and only this time do I really feel prepared to comment on it in any substantive way.

The piece is quite remarkable, in part because its rather straightforward presentation of an emotionally volatile historical fact slowly reveals itself as a far more complex, more plangent work of art -- a silent threnody, if you will. At first I couldn't get past the content of what I was seeing -- the visual record of one of the most unfathomable injustices in human history. What's more, Jacobs's pairing of the piece with the longer Capitalism: Child Labor makes a larger, crucial political point, that our present New Gilded Age, and all wealth amassed since the foundation of the American nation, is borne on the backs of the oppressed, a ledger forever stamped in blood. No reparation, no monument, and no day of remembrance can change this. But Jacobs's video actually accomplishes something more. In the opening shot, we see a young woman, scarf-covered head down, in the airy, entwined tendrils of the cotton field. She is lovely, and in any other context her pose and poise would make her a candidate for immortalization by Vermeer. At this split second of the camera's click, her misery has accidentally assumed a classical pose. Jacobs allows us to admire her beauty and her dignity, and then slowly he reintroduces her surroundings -- the cotton field, the other slaves, the slavedriver. Near the middle of the film, Jacobs again isolates individuals, allowing them to come forth in their individual radiance and singularity before they are, in essence, forced to return to "the field" of visual generality. As with his other recent works, Jacobs has found abstract aesthetic means to promote a rigorous intellectual program that asks nothing less than a reimagining of our social relations. Like those earnest pamphleteers who tell us next to nothing, all he asks is a few minutes of your time. The rewards are immeasurable.

PUSHCARTS OF ETERNITY STREET

USA (13 mi) 2011

Pushcarts of Eternity Street Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

In his brief comments before the screening, Jacobs (tongue presumably in cheek) noted that since "everything is futile," he had given up on grand endeavors and was (temporarily?) restricting himself to "small gestures." I suppose this makes a lot of sense after spending decades completing Star Spangled to Death, a film so trenchant and anarchically righteous that should have brought about instant regime change. Working in an entirely different vein, Pushcarts is in every way a deliberately minor work, and although it is quiet and lovely, it is the sort of piece that might function more successfully as a gallery installation. Jacobs extends an early actualité of street vendors and their clientele milling about a city street, using video to introduce a periodic stutter into the footage. Naturally this allows us to see isolated gestures and fragments of the original film that, if it were moving at normal speed, we'd never notice. But Jacobs has been working with these strategies for quite some time, and Pushcarts is the first piece of his that seems limited in the spectatorial possibilities it could generate. From Tom, Tom through the Nervous System pieces, to say nothing of Jacobs' infamous pedagogical work with the analytical projector, there has been a trajectory of increased dispersal, "cinema" as an ever-expanding galaxy. Pushcarts, despite its beauty and built-in nostalgia, feels comparatively small -- not reductive, exactly, but certainly bounded tightly on all sides. The imagery flickers but doesn't lose its forms in abstraction. The stuttering advancement of the film is measured out, but no clear impact results from this structure. Jacobs asks us to see this short film with new eyes, but it would require a more expansive framework, or Jacobs himself at the podium, to really let the original film mutate into something new.

Jacobs, Michael

AUDIENCE OF ONE D- 52

USA (88 mi) 2007

“If you ask me, this was the message of Christ: To dream big.” —Pastor Richard Gazowsky, Voice of Pentecost Church, San Francisco

A completely forgettable movie experience, though there were bits of unanticipated humor due to the sheer absurdity of it all, but I was unpleasantly surprised at how completely uninteresting the subject of this documentary film is, an exposé on an arrogant, self-inflated Pentecostal preacher from San Francisco whose life should hold little interest to anyone. But because he believes God speaks to him, and he makes wild proclamations, people listen, forgetting that Mark Chapman, John Lennon’s convicted assassin also felt God was speaking to him as well, as well as many other sociopaths. That in itself is not news (See: "God Made Me Do It" and any other number of similar occurrences). But what’s ludicrous here is that so many people actually listen to this man for more than thirty seconds, apparently buying into his delusional story that God told him to create the greatest film company in the world and make the greatest movie, a Christian message movie where he initially alleges he has received over $250 million dollars in financial backing. Knowing absolutely nothing about the business of making films, he travels to Italy with his congregation and hires movie extras on faith alone, expecting everyone to ardently follow his optimism that simply wishing it so will make it so. A series of one folly after another, what can go wrong will go wrong, seen as a behind the scenes BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE (1971), he shows no regard for the health concerns of the crew, working them all hours of the night for shots that never get made, using shoddy equipment that continually breaks down and oftentimes places individuals into hazardous situations, while he simply overlooks everything placing his faith in the Lord.

When his overseas adventure doesn’t work out, he sets up his film crew in an abandoned warehouse on an island in the San Francisco Bay (See: Treasure Island (California) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). But when his alleged funding doesn’t come through, he is quickly served eviction notice for non-payment of rent, where he preaches to his flock that the politicians are also being tested by God, as are they, to have faith that it will come, yet can be seen still spending money (on credit) that they don’t have. Unlike AMERICAN MOVIE (1999), a terrific movie about making a home grown movie on the fly, there’s little to learn here about the moviemaking process itself or the crazy notions that inspire a vision, as unlike other documentaries that actually attempt to educate the public about a certain subject or issue, this one simply shows this preacher and his congregation in operation, where his own mother, the previous pastor, all but disowns him, claiming she never should have turned the ministry over to her son. One disaster after another, they continue on their path of believing that this is what God has told them to do. Out of nowhere, in the direst hour, the pastor comes up with his latest solution, the 8 Arrow Path, which includes owning a Christian airline as well as the first Christian colonization of another planet, which is met with enthusiastic applause, as they all pray that God will somehow provide this miracle. While the filmmaker never interjects or asks for sensible explanations, he simply records their actions, but in doing so, he never attempts to hold them rationally accountable for any of their actions and instead quietly goes about the business of making his own film, come what may. In this manner, there is absolutely no lasting value to anything offered up in this film. Some may sit back and laugh “at them,” but that is equivalent to watching the Saturday morning cartoons on TV. There is no reason to sit through this film. I found it mind-numbingly vacuous.

Audience of One Andrea Gronvall from The Reader

Richard Gazowsky, pastor of San Franciso's Voice of Pentecost Church, saw his first movie at age 40 and, claiming a divine mandate to create "the greatest movie ever made," persuaded his small but loyal flock to pool their money and energies on what he described as a cross between Star Wars and The Ten Commandments. The flamboyant clergyman seems like an ideal target for cheap shots, but Michael Jacobs, who directed this rollicking 2007 documentary, treats him and his parishioners with compassion and restraint. Still, this is a chronicle of delusion and hubris: everything that can go wrong on a movie set does, from equipment failure to budget problems to disgruntled crew members who realize too late that Gazowsky's heavenly instructions don't include any pointers on directing. 89 min.

AUDIENCE OF ONE Facets Multi-Media

Near the end of the 20th Century, a Pentecostal pastor from San Francisco was praying on a mountain top, when he received a vision from God to "spread the Gospel through filmmaking." Using donations from his congregation, he slowly transformed his church into a fully functioning movie studio, and the production company Christian WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Filmworks was born. After experimenting on a number of small projects, Pastor Richard Gazowsky announced that he and his WYSIWYG crew were to begin production of the sci-fi epic, Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph – a biblical science fiction movie that would redefine the Hollywood epic! Audience of One chronicles a journey - from pre-production meetings in the church basement, to principal photography in Italy, to the leasing of a gigantic Bay Area studio –that would ultimately test the limits of everyone’s faith. Hilarious, provocative, and always entertaining, Audience of One, expertly documented by director Michael Jacobs, is a story of stupendous ambition, staggering inexperience and, ultimately, the sort of faith that few of us can muster for anything, much less a divinely ordained feature film in all its convoluted glory. Directed by Michael Jacobs, USA/Italy, 2007, 35mm, 88 mins.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

San Francisco Pentecostal minister Richard Gazowsky received word from God that he was to make a movie. Not just any movie, but an epic science fiction, Biblical epic shot in 70mm, with a budget that eventually swells past $100 million. Documentary filmmaker Michael Jacobs documents the process, which -- to say the least -- goes slightly less well than Noah's building the ark. The new documentary -- largely shot in my neighborhood -- breaks down into two main sections. We see all the planning, and all the aliens and gizmos that Gazowsky dreams up for his movie, followed by a quick trip to Italy for five days of shooting. Although, thanks to many camera problems, those five days come down to just a couple of completed shots. Then the crew comes back to San Francisco, rents a space in the luxurious Treasure Island studios, and waits, fending off thieves and beaurocrats until more money comes in. Gazowsky is a likeable enough character, with a larger-than-life personality, but the key to this film should have been in finding a balance between passion and insanity. Even Gazowsky himself admits: "a guy says he hears the voice of God; either I'm right or I'm crazy." Unfortunately for the film, Jacobs chooses a side in the final scene, thereby negating all the mystery and anticipation. Moreover, the film feels unfinished and anticlimactic, with too many huge leaps in time and no real ending. But I'm still recommending it, mainly because of the great story it hints at and for the way it genuinely captures the excitement and heartbreak of filmmaking. Arne Johnson, also known as the director of the documentary Girls Rock! (2008) is interviewed in his capacity as editor of Film/Tape World, who has the "real" scoop on Gazowsky.

User comments from imdb Author: JustCuriosity from Austin, TX

This film screened at the SXSW film festival in Austin, TX where it was very well-received by audiences and received a Special Jury Award. Audience of One may be the first "Making Of" film for an unmade film.

The film captured the incredibly bizarre story Reverend Richard Gazowsky's San Francisco-based Pentecostal Church and their efforts to create a film studio and film a great Christian epic film that would be a combination of "Star Wars" and the "Ten Commandments." Audience of One brilliantly captures the inevitable train wreck that ensues as they assemble a cast and crew of mostly incompetent amateurs and attempt to create a great film. Their mistakes are laughable and absurd to any film professional.

Despite persistence and dedication, they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and are never able to come anywhere close to creating a real film. Audience of One is really a study of the meaning of fundamentalist faith and asks us where we should draw the line between reason/rationality and faith in God. Rational Modernists could view their actions as insane and irrational and wonder whether these people would actually "drink the Kool-Aid" if asked. The film is also a study of the power of charismatic leadership to make people act in ways that seem irrational to outsiders. Still, while their pursuit may seem wasteful and a little foolish it is ultimately fairly harmless compared to, for example, the Rev. Fred Phelps "God Hates Fags" ministry as portrayed in the brilliant documentary "Fall from Grace" (which also screened this year at SXSW).

Audience of One is a truly enjoyable film to watch. It is both humorous and sad at the same time. While Audience of One serves as a warning about the dangers of fundamentalism, it should also offer secular viewers people a useful window into the power of religious faith to inspire believers. Perhaps the real lesson is that faith is a powerful tool and if harnessed for the right means can actually inspire believers in many ways. Here the task that people are inspired to pursue is one that is beyond their means, but that should be contrasted with the vast amount of good deeds that is accomplished by religious believers on a daily basis. I hope that people don't take from this film only the message that faith is dangerous and destructive, but rather the message that faith needs to be balanced with rationality.

User comments from imdb Author: Adam Donaghey (anonymous.kook@gmail.com) from United States

After the screening of Audience of One, much to the surprise--nay, the horror--of viewers, Pastor Richard Gazowsky and some of his congregation approached the stage with director Michael Jacobs. I, for one, had my hand over my mouth; my eyes were widened; and I certainly didn't know what to expect next.

But I'm getting ahead of myself--let's backtrack.

It took Gazowsky forty years to see his first feature film. Now the mission statement of his San Francisco based WYIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") Filmworks is: "To bring the presence of God to people all over the world through entertainment." A highly unlikely candidate for a director, Gazowsky has made it his lifelong mission--since God told him to do it, of course--to get the biggest film ever on screen. It's kinda like "Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments"; shot on 65mm, it will be "the greatest movie ever made" and with a two million dollar budget to boot! A humble goal, indeed. Well, with that kind of pressure on your shoulders, it's no doubt that the film hasn't been made, despite hundreds of thousands of dollars and over a decade invested.

Jacobs doesn't really interfere much, in this film. He simply sits back and watches the roller coaster that is WYSIWYG Filmworks. Throughout the documentary, we see a highly inexperienced crew, a director who treats the set as a dictatorship instead of a collaboration, and a train wreck of goofs, mix-ups and failures. Anyone outsourced--and with any experience--ends up leaving, due to the misguided creative vision of the wannabe director. The crew spends money they don't have, relying on "investors" we never see; who end up dropping the whole project in the grease. Yet, the troupe hold on to that crazy vision and pray like there's no tomorrow because they are bound by faith! Just about the entire film made me laugh out loud, but at the same time, I felt a little ill in my stomach. The real question here--despite all the buffoonery and delusion--seems to be of immense import: is all of this a tad bit dangerous? Going back to the Q&A session, after the film; one audience member asked the pastor if he'd immediately turn to operate, if God had asked him to be a surgeon. And while the pastor's answer is an obvious one, the question still lingers in the air. Is this man's ambitiousness capable of hurting others around him? I certainly don't doubt this man's determination or his conviction--he actually sold his house to help the project--however, I do have doubt in his ability to deliver. And while he may be blinded by his own ambition, it's simply no excuse to waste the hopes and aspirations--and money!--of true believers, on the weak foundation of a deluded dream. This problematic, cultish mentality might be funny from the outside; but as we've seen so many times over: fundamentalism can be a very dangerous thing.

The pastor's response to all of this?

"It's like watching yourself go to the toilet," he says with sincerity. "I don't like to see myself cry. I feel like a total idiot in front of you guys. But what if we end up getting funded, dude? Then I'm not so stupid. Maybe." Maybe. Or, perhaps you're just a charlatan, who's just wasted another large sum of money--and someone else's dreams--due to false promises, based on absurdity and lofty goals, impossible to meet.

Karate Party Steve McCleary

Audience of One is the documentary about Richard Gazowsky, pastor of the Voice of Pentecost Church in San Francisco (you know, the types of churches that tend to involve groups speaking in tongues and having dancing fits), and his belief that God spoke to him and told him to take his congregation on the path to creating the biggest Biblical epic in film history. It was to be entitled Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph and set in the future. This is the story of Pastor Richard and his goal that has shaped the life of his Church for the last ten years as they attempt to fight against all odds, with none bigger than their own naivety and ignorance. But then the question remains…is this any different than any other aspiring filmmaker?

This documentary is extremely fun to watch, although tinged with sadness. If you remember the end of Borat, where he visited a Pentecostal Church then you have a small insight into what I mean. It’s kind of humorous watching people blame Satan for the power company shutting off their power, when they really should be blaming the fact that they didn’t pay their power bill in six months. But then, it’s sad to know that people live this way…never really understanding the way the world really works, expecting hand-outs and special treatment constantly, and when that doesn’t work out then it’s ‘evil forces’ conspiring against them. This is pretty much the case in this film.

I’m a pretty big fan of documentaries like this one. And right from the get-go I think you already know whether there is any chance of you going to see it…if this type of thing doesn’t interest you then you're not going to go. If it does, the main questions are ‘will it be any good…will I be preached to…what angle is taken?’ Simply; yes, it’s a good one. And the pleasant thing about this filmmaker is that there is no preaching, or anti-religion message, from them. They remain completely neutral and you never get an idea for how they feel about the situation as it unfolds. That is a key point here, as you need an impartial eye to follow the Pastor and his dedicated flock, as well as follow the tales of the poor people taken along for a ride they never signed up for. Things, of course, are edited a certain way (as with all docos) to create a certain effect, but the events that take place are still things that actually happened. It’s a good job by all.

This is worth seeing for the bizarre people involved. From the poor actor (with no specific religious inclination-just looking for work) who gets trapped in their production, to the naming of their production company ‘WYSIWYG’ (What You See Is What You Get…catchy) to another main actor who I’m pretty certain is Tommy Chong’s illegitimate child. There is much humour and many awkward moments contained within for your viewing pleasure. And hey-you haven’t heard of this film taking the world by storm, so there’s an indication of how it all turns out...

Having seen a lot of these types of documentaries, ones about filmmaking and ones about religious groups, I found this quite entertaining and fascinating. I heartily recommend it for an enjoyable watching experience.

Twitch (Todd Brown) review

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

Cinematical James Rocchi

The Lumière Reader David Levinson

Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale

Providence Journal Michael Janusonis

Pop Journalism [Sarah Gopaul]

Hollywood Jesus Elisabeth Leitch

Slant Magazine review Keith Uhlich

Movie Patron [Andrew James]

Variety (Ronnie Scheib) review

Boston Globe [Wesley Morris]

Austin Chronicle James Renovitch

San Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review

Jacobsen, Jannicke Systad

TURN ME ON, DAMMIT! (Få meg på, for faen) B+ 92

Norway (76 mi) 2011

While the film title reflects a whimsical, almost comic book style silliness, where there’s not likely to be anything to take seriously, this is instead a hilarious, surprisingly complex and insightful youth film, told from the point of view of one 15-year old Norwegian girl, Alma (Helene Bergsholm), who is smart and sarcastic as hell. Just the opening segue introducing her tiny Norwegian town in the mountains as a place of empty roads and sheep, where absolutely nothing ever happens, where the girls her age give the village sign the finger every time they enter town, which is in stark contrast to the majestic mountainside forests with a pristine lake down below set in the rugged fjords of the region. In fact, it looks like a perfect vacation destination, but every kid loathes the town they get stuck in. Alma hangs out with two sisters, Ingrid (Beate Støfring), a buxom Scandinavian Brünnhilde with a love for lip gloss and Saralou (Malin Bjørhovde), an edgier outcast with a social conscience closer to Thora Birch’s Enid from GHOST WORLD (2001). Alma, herself a blond beauty, pokes fun of the world around her while continually imagining herself in the throes of some wild sexual experience, where unlike many teen movies she isn’t having lots of sex, she’s dreaming of having lots of sex, keeping her so confused her fantasy and reality worlds are interchangeable, keeping the viewer off balance as well where they can’t tell the difference. Her alternate world is sexy and hilarious and certainly keeps her upbeat and happy. The problem is having to return to reality and bear the same monotonous doldrums again.

Based on a novel by Olaug Nilssen, about a girl in a small place with very active hormones, the story could be anyone and is not unique to Alma, but the director wraps this film around Alma’s snappy wit and personal charm, making this something of a Scandinavian delight constantly poking fun at itself, a film that would never be made in the United States, as the uninhibited sex scenes are scandalous showing teenagers actually enjoying themselves—how novel an idea. For instance, in the opening scene, Alma gets down and dirty on her kitchen floor, fingering herself while listening to Stigge, an overfriendly phone sex operator from “Wet and Wild Dreams.” But the real object of Alma’s desires is Artur (Matias Myren), a cute kid living nearby that she sees at school and also occasionally while walking her dog, but she envisions him climbing through her window at night crawling into bed with her and spending the night in each other’s arms. Instead she meets him at a dance at the local youth center, which is basically a gymnasium without basketball nets and old beat up sofas sitting outside. While Alma is standing outside sipping a beer, Artur walks up and exposes himself, actually poking her thigh with his erection, where it’s impossible to know whether this is real or imagined. However venomous rumors rapidly spread throughout the school and Alma is immediately shunned and ostracized, even by her own friends, becoming the least popular kid in class, where graffiti on the bathroom walls label her “Dick-Alma.”

This is like every 15-year old’s worst nightmare, expressed in a laceratingly dark comic style that also contains a touch of poignancy, as despite the fact her fantasies do resemble the sexually hyper-exaggerated world of musicals, she is completely devastated by the turn of events. Making matters worse, her mom finds out about her phone sex bills and blabs about it to everyone she knows all over town. This is the true portrait of small towns where everyone knows everybody else’s business, where you can’t do a thing without the whole world knowing about it. In panic, Alma runs away to Oslo to visit Saralou’s older sister Marie in college, hoping she can offer some perspective, where after hearing Alma’s story one of her boyfriends actually composes a tender tribute song on the spot called “Dick-Alma.” Wonderfully capturing the awkward age of teenagers, this is a coming-of-age comedy where Alma hopes to reclaim her lost self esteem, where her sexual awakening coincides with her newly developing maturity, where she has to find a way to handle the gossipers and backstabbers that thrive in every small town. This first time filmmaker hits all the right notes with this one, writing an impressively smart screenplay that obsesses and thrives on teen boredom, a socially observant and delightful romp, drop dead hilarious at times, made even more appealing by the outstanding music from Ginge Anvik.

Film-Forward.com Yana Litovsky

The landscape of teenage daydreams (the raunchy kind) are captured with titillating precision in this stylish comedy about one girl’s explosive sexual awakening. Stuck in a tiny Norwegian town, Alma spends her afternoons calling a friendly phone sex operator and fantasizing about a dreamy classmate. When she’s shunned by her school (and even the neighborhood toddlers) for telling an uncorroborated story about said crush’s unusual pass at her, her social isolation winds her sexuality into even more of a frenzy. Frequent musical interludes over images of angelic blondes in gleaming IKEA-laden apartments seem like commercials for organic cotton, but they are cut off as harshly as an interrupted reverie.

ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]

Finally, there is a coming-of-age teen comedy that addresses the confused effects of horniness from a young girl’s perspective. That such an inevitable viewpoint comes from Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, a Norwegian woman filmmaker, seems fitting. Jacobsen’s debut film draws its twitching heart and soul from its 15-year-old leading character Alma (persuasively played Helene Bergsholm).

Alma hates her small rural town of Skoddenheimen, Norway. She and her friends ritually flip the bird at the town’s roadside sign whenever they pass it.

Momentarily addicted to masturbating with the aid of a paid phone sex line, Alma almost gets her real-life wish when her heart-throb neighbor Artur (Matias Myren) presses his bare member against her dress while the two chat privately outside a house party. Excited by the event, Alma makes the grievous mistake of announcing Artur’s sexual overture to everyone at the party. Ostracized by the community, and given the unfortunate title of “Dick Alma,” the confused young woman suffers even more than her reproving single-parent mother could ever hope for as punishment. Based on a popular Norwegian novel, “Turn Me On, Dammit!” is at once a celebration of youthful sexuality and a cautionary tale of kissing-and-telling.

Spout [Daniel Walber]

We’re halfway through Tribeca and “Turn Me On, Goddammit” still holds up as my favorite narrative film premiering at the fest. I wrote about it before in our pre-festival recommendation post, but in the context of the rest of the World Narrative Competition, I need to sound off a bit more. The first word that comes to mind when I think on the Norwegian sex comedy is “refreshing,” a point which I think can’t be over-stated when it comes to coming of age movies of this caliber.

Alongside “Turn Me On” in the competition is “She Monkeys,” a drama that is a sort of understated companion piece from across the border in Sweden. Directors Jannicke Systad Jacobsen (“Turn Me On”) and Lisa Aschan (“She Monkeys”) each take a look at the standard sexually-focused coming of age narrative and add not only a great degree of honesty and integrity but also an emphasis on the experience of young women that is often severely lacking (at least in American cinema).

There are a few obvious points to make first. The actors in the films are roughly the age of their characters, none of this 20-something or even 30-something casting that seems to pervade every teen movie produced in the US these days (“Prom” is a notable exception, which deserves to be commended). There’s also a commitment to veracity of character in “Turn Me On” and “She Monkeys” and their respective filmmakers present their adolescent protagonists with the perfect collage of innocence, awkwardness and emerging desire. American movie teens tend to be either saturated with an unrealistic sexual sophistication or extraordinarily idealized naïve purity, both of which fall far off the mark.

More importantly, however, is the way that these two films take seriously the goal of creating well-constructed and genuine young women to lead their narratives. I acknowledge that I’m the kind of guy that just can’t turn off the Bechdel test in my head, but it is definitely worth pointing out that both “Turn Me On” and “She Monkeys” bring some much needed humanity and vitality to the generally boy-crazy teenage girls that populate their genre.

The two films and their protagonists, Alma (Helene Bergsholm) and Emma (Mathilda Paradeiser), are very different. Alma is somewhat possessed by her burgeoning sexuality, spending far too much of her mother’s money on phone sex (to hilarious result) while Emma is daring but inexperienced, and much more introspective. Yet they each have a deeply complex and developing perspective, like any real teenager. Moreover, the interactions they have with the other female figures in their lives, whether friend or mother or coach, are artfully written articulations of the way these girls live. Shockingly, it seems that the days and nights of teenage girls are not completely dominated by obsessing over boys. Who knew? Someone please send some screeners of these films to Catherine Hardwicke.

Culture Blues [Jeremiah White]

The last few years have been pretty good for teen comedies. We've finally evolved past the American Pie induced era of gross out fests, and have been getting more choice offerings like Adventureland, Superbad and last year’s terrific Youth in Revolt. It seems the trend is not limited to the States, as Norway’s Turn Me On, Goddammit is a fresh and highly enjoyable treatment of all the familiar teenage issues: fitting in, escaping the trappings of a small, provincial hometown and, of course, sex.

Based on a novel by Olaug Nilssen, Turn Me On tells the story of Alma (played with poise by newcomer Helene Bergsholm), a relatively unspectacular teenager whose overactive imagination and hyperactive hormones only exacerbate her frustrations with a concerned mother, a nosy old neighbor, and bitchy friends. Unlike many movie teenagers obsessed with sex, Alma does not spend her time trying to do the deed, she spends most of her time thinking about doing it. It’s much more palatable and interesting than a bunch of horndogs desperate to lose their virginity before they graduate.

An awkward pseudo-sexual encounter with her popular crush turns Alma into an outcast. Despite battle lines being drawn, Turn Me On avoids treating its characters as good guys and bad guys. The audience can sympathize with Alma throughout, but she can also be a bit of a brat. Her best friend, Sara, pulls away from her along with everyone else at school, rather than face the exclusion and scorn of peers herself. It’s not exactly noble, but it’s easy to understand her desire to not make waves. High school is bad enough without going out of your way to make enemies.

Turn Me On acts out a number of Alma’s daydreams. It’s a common ploy in teenage movies, but here these sequences are not just an excuse for exaggerated scenes of triumph and humiliation or predictable jokes where Alma is jolted out of her reverie. Instead, they help deepen our understanding of Alma. A unique and welcome twist is that Alma even imagines some scenes where she isn’t present, and others are simply talking about her. As a teenager, what people say about you is just as important as what happens to you.

Turn Me On is the first narrative film from veteran documentary filmmaker Jannicke Systad Jacobsen. Her understated direction furnishes the film with a dry sense of humor and a melancholy appropriate for a bunch of kids who can’t wait to graduate high school but don’t know what they are going to do afterward. The laughs aren’t constant, but they’re well earned and Turn Me On’s atmosphere and story don’t require constant gags to hold the viewer’s interest. Consider it further evidence of the teen comedy renaissance.

NPR [Ian Buckwalter]

TRIBECA REVIEW | Despite the Crude Title, “Turn me on, goddammit” Is a Delicate Drama Eric Kohn from indieWIRE

Teenage Girls Want Phone Sex? Turn Me On, Dammit! Honestly Explores Teenage Sexuality Emma Pearse from Slant

Movieline [Alison Willmore]

Tribeca Film Fest Review - “Turn Me On Goddammit” > Shadow and ... Tambay from the indieWIRE blog

Turn Me On, Dammit! - Filmcritic.com Movie Review Chris Cabin

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

Anomalous Material [Nick Prigge]

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson] also seen here: JEsther Entertainment [Don Simpson]

The Velvet Café [Jessica] (English)

Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]

Review: 'Turn Me On, Dammit!' A Fun Yet Uneven Look ... - indieWIRE Christopher Bell from the IndieWIRE Playlist

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

Movie Buzzers [Alex DiGiovanna]

Turn Me On, Dammit! - BOXOFFICE Magazine Sara Maria Vizcarrondo

HollywoodSoapbox.com [John Soltes]

Pick 'n' Mix Flix [Colin Harris]

Bonjour Tristesse (English)

Jannicke Systad Jacobsen × Helene Bergsholm “Turn me on ... Cool Bilingual Art Magazine, including an interview with the director and lead actress, May 14, 2011

Turn Me On, Goddammit! - The Hollywood Reporter Jordan Mintzer

Variety Reviews - Turn Me On, Goddammit - Tribeca Reviews ... John Anderson

Time Out New York [Matt Singer]

Jacobson, David

DOWN IN THE VALLEY B+ 92

USA (125 mi) 2005

DOWN IN THE VALLEY, with an accentuation on the word “down,” includes a soundtrack of extremely personalized, so- quiet-it’s-nearly-inaudible music, just a soft voice and a lone guitar, personified by a scene in the film where a character (David Morse) sings Hank Williams “I’m So Lonely I Could Cry.” For the most part, I thought the film actors themselves were singing their own songs, as they had such a personalized amateur sounding frailty that sounded overly downbeat, to the point of being morose and peculiar, actually distracting from the film itself. Despite the willingness of this film not to condescend to Hollywood’s expectations, as well as the powerfully affecting performances of the entire cast, it veers a little too far off the road, stretching the credulity of the viewer, feeling overly influenced by the multiple film styles of other films. Despite its dour, off-beat presentation, what happens always felt predictable, even if how it happens remained tantalizingly appealing.

Opening with David Gordon Green’s ALL THE REAL GIRLS, highlighting the experience of the personal, represented by naturalness and authenticity, perfectly demonstrated by the effortless performances of Edward Norton, a seemingly naive, super alienated urban cowboy mysteriously living in the San Fernando Valley, and Evan Rachel Wood, a lost and bored teenager who senses a world beyond the confines of her teen circle, who, in a car filled with giddy teenage girls, picks him up from his job working at a gas station and takes him to the beach, as he claimed he’d never seen it before. The ease of their relationship and how quickly they take to one another, expressed by scenes kissing in the water, where two tiny heads are alone in a huge mass of ocean, or later still smooching on the bus in front of other embarrassed riders, accentuates the theme of two lost souls completely oblivious to the rest of the world, immersed in their own closeness. The audience is moved by their obvious affection for one another.

But the film takes a strange turn, as Norton does his best Travis Bickle TAXI DRIVER imitation, where we see him alone in his cheap motel room acting out fictitious cowboy movie scenes in his head, always leading with his guns blazing, offering some very peculiar conversation that is an odd variation of real life incidents, as if he is fantasizing his wish fulfillments, ultimately having his way, showing up whoever it was in real life that made him feel small. The film is rooted in another strong performance by David Morse, Wood’s overly stern father who works in law enforcement, apparently as a corrections officer. He keeps a collection of guns in the house, but leaves his kids to wander on their own, especially Wood’s younger brother, Rory Culkin, who feels so completely detached from reality and abandoned that he may as well be parentless. We find out later that Morse is not his real father. Norton comes looking for Wood one day, finds no one at home except the kid, and takes him out for a little target practice, offering a love-starved kid what may very well be the first friend he’s ever had. The scenes of Norton on a horse with either Wood or Culkin on his back, riding along the smog covered hills, overlooking the long reach of the valley, best express what this film has to offer, a man left alone from the worries or responsibilities of the real world, in his element riding a horse on the edge of the world looking in.

At this point, the film takes a turn into BADLANDS, as the stern reaction of Morse to this weird cowboy is stunningly similar to Warren Oates’s reaction to Martin Sheen, as is Norton’s response, becoming the living personification of that film’s character Kit, returning to the home where he has been banished by the father figure, insisting that the girl run away with him. But as we knew it must, the doors of reality come kicking in on Norton’s world, but this is where the film parts company and walks its own separate path, turning into an outlaw on the run movie, perhaps James Dean, with Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, but this guy’s a real outlaw, and a demented one at that, succumbing to a nearly delusional world where everyone is out to get him except, somehow, these two strange abandoned kids from this randomly chosen family, which leads to very similar territory already explored in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, as he tries to get his mitts on them. In this man’s mind, they are his future, and they belong together, come what may. The delusion takes on special resonance when, while on the run, they awake in what appears to be a fictitious ghost town that is actually filming a live movie on the set, interestingly mixing illusion with reality until Morse arrives in his car. The scene turns into a real shoot out, with the man on his horse, taking the kid, making his get away. There are eerie moments on the run, not the least of which is what happens to the girl, but there’s a beautifully developed night scene in a strange darkened haze, eventually becoming somewhat ludicrous the next morning when the guy on his horse makes his way directly into the urban sprawl of a newly developed suburban subdivision, complete with row after row of identical looking houses, hiding out in the construction zone of newly built homes, being chased by a man in a car. Hiding the horse in the garage was a mistake, as it brays its dissatisfaction at being couped up, a metaphor for the Norton character, a wild beast that wants to be free, cooped up in a human body that must adhere to society’s rules that make no sense to him. He has no choice but to stand his ground, even when he has no ground to stand on.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Hollywood could exist in no other place but Los Angeles, the city of dreams, a place malleable enough to accommodate fantasists of all stripes because it doesn't have a particularly strong identity of its own. In David Jacobson's strikingly beautiful Down In The Valley, Edward Norton stars as one of those fantasists, a pistol-slinging, 10-gallon-hat-wearing cowboy who turns contemporary Death Valley into his personal OK Corral, willfully oblivious to the times. And for as long as it can, the movie plays it straight: There's no suggestion of who he really is or how he came to embrace this persona, and Norton's enormous charisma sells him as a charming naïf, cheerfully out of step with an ugly, vulgar world. So, too, Down In The Valley, which recalls George Washington or The Brown Bunny in the way it looks and feels like nothing on the independent scene, and the way it owes more to idiosyncratic '70s films like Badlands, Taxi Driver, and Two-Lane Blacktop than to today's arthouse quirkfests. It's no wonder a film this accomplished took so long to find a distributor.

Lean and handsome, with an easy drawl that could pass for Montgomery Clift's, Norton first appears as a gas-station attendant, smiling his way through the veiled insults of a station wagon full of teenage girls en route to the beach. But one of those girls, a lithe beauty played forcefully by Evan Rachel Wood, takes an instant liking to him and invites him along, perhaps in part because she knows it'll tick off her domineering father (David Morse), who goes toe-to-toe with her every night. Though they seem mismatched, Norton and Wood connect deeply and palpably, in spite of—and in some ways because of—his anachronistic manner, which can be gentlemanly and full of surprising romantic gestures, like stealing a horse for a gentle gallop around an unspoiled landscape. Norton also takes a shine to Wood's young brother (Rory Culkin), a shy kid who feels empowered by a father figure who isn't so obviously disappointed in his weakness.

Of course, reality inevitably comes crashing down on Norton, whose beautiful vision curdles into a frightening obsession, and Wood, who's too fundamentally levelheaded to not see the cracks in his façade. Jacobson (Dahmer) makes their relationship work through exceptional direction, which turns the city's few undeveloped territories into a sun-dappled idyll, the only place where such an unlikely affair could flourish. It's almost a shame that the film has to shift into murkier psychological ground in its second half, when Norton's true nature starts coming into focus, because the film could just as easily be about the modern world encroaching on paradise. Either way, it's mysterious and bold at every turn, and refreshingly removed from the commonplace.

Mike D'Angelo review

Set deep in the San Fernando — depicted here largely as an infertile crescent of looming power lines and anonymous housing tracts — David Jacobson's terrific new film probes the absurdities of contemporary suburbia in time-honored (and still potent) fashion: by introducing a walking anachronism. En route to the beach to escape her domineering sheriff father (David Morse) and her perpetually needy little brother (Rory "the talented Culkin" Culkin), rebellious hot-pants teen Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) meets up with a courtly, aw-shucks stranger in jeans and a Stetson. Harlan (Edward Norton) seems to have wandered into town directly from some long-forgotten B-Western. Creepy age difference notwithstanding (and bravely uncommented upon), Harlan and Tobe begin a passionate affair, much to the consternation of her dad, who's convinced that Harlan's genial twanginess has to be a put-on. And indeed, Harlan turns out to be something other than he seems, though not necessarily in the cut-and-dried way you might expect.

Mostly ignored when it premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival (in the smaller Un Certain Regard section), Down in the Valley has reportedly since been trimmed by about twenty minutes, though I didn't notice anything of import missing in the shorter cut. Still present, for better (aesthetically) and worse (pragmatically), is a key scene in which Harlan practices his gunslinging moves before his boarding-room mirror, which has prompted lazy critics to dismiss the character as a dime-store psycho and the film itself as a pale retread of Taxi Driver. But Harlan's reasons for creating his lone-warrior persona are far more personal than sociological, and Down in the Valley soon veers in a completely unexpected and fearsomely complex direction, making it clear that Jacobson's true interest is exploring the definition of masculinity, and, by extension, paternity. (Norton has repeatedly said in interviews that he sees the film as a companion piece to Fight Club.) Distinguished by dynamic widescreen compositions and a quartet of superlative performances, the movie is essentially an old-fashioned showdown between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, duking it out over the soul of a small boy. That you're never entirely sure who you want to see prevail is a testament to its power.

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

Down in the Valley Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Auteur Seeks Complex Character / Writer-Director David Jacobson ... Lily Percy interviews the director for MovieMaker Magazine, March 3, 2007

Jacques, Guy

ZE FILM D+ 65

France (105 mi) 2005

An annoying mess of a film that only grows more annoying as the film progresses. The film is designed to look young and carefree, an improvisational ode to youth, as a trio of young guys quite by accident have a loaded movie truck dropped into their laps, including a 35 mm camera along with much of the equipment needed to make a film. So they line up all their friends, hold a humorous audition, and decide to cast Romeo and Juliet as an Arab girl and a white guy living in their housing project where they live outside Paris, whose families, of course, disapprove, which allows them to film scenes of disastrous consequences, including a stolen motorbike, a car chase scene with an unexpected three spins in the air collision, jealousy by the filmmakers, one Arab and one white, over how to treat the leading lady, which leads to more and more expressions of adolescent stupidity. And while one of the kids is appealingly funny, the rest routinely breaks down in a jumbled, disorganized mosaic that has little to nothing to offer, as each idea is left alone to fall flat, nothing is ever explored, nothing is revealed, it’s largely a waste of time.

Jacquet, Luc

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS B+ 90

USA France (80 mi) 2005

A visually extraordinary experience, carrying us off into the distance of a remote and uninhabitable land that none of us would otherwise see, much less imagine, the bleakest and most inhospitable terrain on earth, which may as well be the surface of the moon or Mars, enhanced by the very spare music of Alex Wurman. Here the filmmakers have trod off into this desolate wilderness lugging cameras and film equipment to show human beings how emperor penguins, with utter grace and simplicity, all breed at the same isolated region some 70 miles from water, where they have to walk single-file to get there, a spot chosen as the ice is deep enough that it won’t melt in the spring, protecting the newborn chicks from drowning. Unbelievably, they survive the hostile winters of Antarctica, the lone animal to do so, where the temperatures alone get to 80 degrees below zero, where the winds reach 100 mph, where it turns to only night, where the males huddle together in packs to conserve heat, protecting their lone egg for up to four months in these conditions, losing one-third of their weight without eating, waiting for the females to return, passing the egg back to them so they as well can make the long trek to back water, which eventually shortens as winter wanes and the temperatures rise. In these bitter conditions, these impressive creatures not only adapt, but survive year after year. The landscape itself is overwhelming, a vast emptiness of ice, and the fact that human camera crews, cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison, could actually survive there to make this film is stunning, but the documentation of the details this species undergoes to actually breed is utterly amazing, one egg at a time, losing many to the elements, causing horrible anguish when they do, but they endure and they survive, narrated sparingly and eloquently by Morgan Freeman.

Jacquot, Benoît

THE DISENCHANTED (La désenchantée) B+ 91

France (78 mi) 1990

Written by the director in collaboration with Marcel Bozonnet, this is sort of a music box, existentialist fantasy, a fleeting moment in the eyes of a young girl whose world is racing out of control. We get a sense of her restless anxiety as she has to make very adult decisions trying to decipher how to maneuver her way through her own desires, and at the same time being the object of other men’s desires. These opposite forces create an internal paralysis for which she finds no way out.

Judith Godreche plays 17-year old Beth, who is forced to reveal her innermost thoughts in bed to her manipulative boyfriend against her will, so she reveals a dream, like a nightmare, about a young, empty-hearted hooker who finds sex loathsome, responding to no one, until one day she discovers a man who is fucking her from the rear is her one true love. But when she looks back, it is an ugly, old geezer, the only one, however, that moved her. Her boyfriend insists she needs to find the ugliest man she can find, which he hopes will make her appreciate him, so she runs away, thinking he’s a jerk. She picks up her younger brother, Remy, from school, telling him she spent the night with what’s-his-name, but they’re through. Remy has found a marble lying in the street and hands it to her, “Here’s a marble for your tears.” They live at home with their invalid mother, supported by her friend that they all call Sugardaddy, but Sugardaddy has his eyes on Beth.

Beth meets a girlfriend at a loud disco where they can go window shopping for boys. Her friend bets her 100 francs that she can’t pick up the ugliest boy on the dance floor. “You’re on.” After a rather pathetic display on the dance floor where her hands and body are all over him while he just stands there, he brings her home to his mom’s house, sneaks her into his room while his mom is entertaining guests, and lets her flip through the pages of an art book, Treasures of the Louvre. She dwells on a photo of ancient Egyptian sculpture, and later visits this sculpture in the Louvre, where parts of the head and legs are missing, damaged through the passage of time, as in the background we hear Chris Isaak sing: “I never dreamed I’d need somebody like you, I never dreamed I’d lose somebody like you. No, I...don’t want to fall in love...” After he clumsily attempts to maul her, she runs away, taking the art book with her, which she immediately sells on the street, “What a wicked thing to say, what a wicked thing to do, make me fall in love with you. No, I don’t want to fall in love with you.”

In class the next day, she gives an oral presentation on the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, “I used to believe in all manner of enchantments,” reporting Rimbaud searched his entire life, but discovered “his long bitterness was his failure to find his enchantment, a shadow reflected on his soul. ‘I understand, but not being able to express enchantment in words, I prefer to remain silent.’ So Rimbaud gave up writing, but remained a poet, the silent man, the penniless poet, an envoy of darkness. Why are you strange? Why are you a stranger to everything?” The teacher’s response was to tell Beth she better stop getting so carried away or she wouldn’t pass.

Beth decides to meet what’s-his-name, but hey get in a big fight. A stranger intervenes, actually pulling a knife, chasing the boy away, giving Beth his business card with only the initials A.D. Meanwhile, her mom tells her that Sugardaddy has made a date to see Beth tomorrow, and he’ll give her the family check from now on. Later, with the help of a graffiti artist friend, they spray paint a picture of what’s-his-name on the wall of his address with the word “Bastard” next to it, before going to see A.D, who turns out to be a writer with a large switchblade collection. He challenges her to stand still next to a wall while he throws a knife near her outline. She trusts him, but he doesn’t throw the knife. Then he challenges her to recite a poem by heart, threatening to leave if she refuses. She refuses and he leaves her alone in the apartment to stare at her reflection in the window, only to return later with the same demand, so she recites: “You want the world to end because of her. You ant to end yourself, then re-enter the world.” He carries her off to bed, leaving a note as he leaves the next morning to meet again the next night.

She visits Sugardaddy for lunch the next day, but refuses to speak to him. “Words aren’t everything,” he tells her, “a person’s face may be louder. Now that you’re here, you wish you could leave, but you’re not going to. You have so many different ways of being beautiful,” before being called away to the phone. She silently walks through his house, which includes a doctor’s office, where she finds a marble on the floor. She undresses, meeting Sugardaddy when he returns completely naked. “An utterance at last,” he muses, as she faints. She goes to meet A.D. and sees him waiting from her view from a bridge above him, deciding to watch him wait, but then she turns and runs away down a busy city street noisy with cars and traffic, disappearing alone into her room.

A SINGLE GIRL (La fille seule) B+ 92

France (90 mi) 1996

Written by the director with Jerome Beaujour, this expresses an experimental, near documentary film style, as the story plays out in a series of natural time sequences. There’s an interesting audience reaction when one sequence re-appears again, as if a reel was placed out of time. Featuring the incomparable Virginie Ledoyan as a young Parisian girl, Valerie, who discovers she’s pregnant, deciding she wants to keep the child with or without her boyfriend, the film opens with the two of them squabbling in a coffee shop before she heads to her first day at a new job with room service in a luxury hotel, agreeing to meet again in an hour.

The camera follows Valerie from start to finish throughout the entire film, each and every shot, every glance, every gesture, every wince, every smile, called by some critics “an intellectual fuck fantasy.” This film features a lot of brisk walking as the camera follows her walking down endless corridors on her rounds, up and down elevators, performing routine tasks on her job before walking across the street and arguing with her boyfriend over a cup of coffee, creating a rhythmic cycle of repetition. A whole emerges from the cumulative effect of revealing minute details in a single girl’s life, whose mother was also a single girl, both of whom feel the need to live without the certainty or need for a man’s presence or love. Valerie observes the various sexual quirks taking place everywhere in the hotel, and as she is astonishingly young and attractive herself, men are all inclined to be drawn to her. She tells her boyfriend, “They fuck because they feel abandoned,” then finds an excuse to return back to work late before deciding to tell him the truth that she was pregnant and breaking up with him at the same time. The screen fades to black, but we hear music from a Dvorak string quartet, then a scene in a park with Valerie and her young son, leaving him with her mother as she wanders off, disappearing into a crowded street, where she could be anyone, everyone.

TOSCA B+ 91

Great Britain France Germany Italy (126 mi) 2001

Filmed in Rome, while nearly impossible to transport opera to the screen, and this film version is NOT for the purists, as it's extremely stylized, but this is *the* emotional powerhouse of opera, and it's simply rapturous, here the heightened passion is delivered with in-your-face close-ups, capturing a much more intimate feel than you would ever get in an opera house, featuring a real-life husband and wife team as the lovers on screen, some wonderfully original set designs, which includes a few video asides, and stunning, luminous color – Angela Gheorghiu as Tosca is nothing short of breathtaking.

RIGHT NOW (A Tout de Suite) B- 82

France (95 mi) 2004

A film that opens like a remake of BREATHLESS, re-establishing the same New Wave mood and atmosphere, a fast-paced, widescreen, low-grain black and white film featuring a pretty girl on the run with a wanted thief, featuring plenty of close-ups and street scenes in exotic locales. From her dull and mediocre upper-class existence, danger now lurks everywhere, so of course, she chooses danger. I found this surprisingly lame, as it all felt like déjà vu, especially the girl, a pouty, sullen, brat (Isild Le Besco) who is being showcased like she’s the next Bardot in AND GOD CREATED WOMAN. However, the mood changes midway through the film when the pace comes to a screeching halt and the focus shifts from her carefree, indulgent naiveté to utter paralysis, lost in the void of her own delusions. While that at least made it more interesting and less predictable, much of this film never rises above standard cliché’s. I guess this shows what a little promiscuity will do for you.

Jaeckin, Just

THE STORY OF O (Histoire d'O)

France Germany Italy (97 mi) 1975

Time Out

For those who enjoy kitsch, Just (Emmanuelle) Jaeckin's adaptation of Pauline Réage's S&M novel is a must. There's puffy, blank-faced O (Cléry) with cruel lover René, (Kier), the one with the husky eyes and 'I'm an arsehole' hairdo. So far, so risible. But then the film gets a story. It's Sir Stephen (Steel) who does it, the older man who brands O's bottom with his own initials. She suddenly seems madder, but not in a photogenic, wild child way; what she comes to resemble most is a raging bourgeois housewife, a role she's been prepared for from childhood. Having lived the modern life, complete with her own apartment and Vogue photoshoots, O gravitates towards a house with servants and lacy tablecloths and realises her taste for them. Thus, when she finally turns the tables on Sir Stephen it doesn't feel like a coda tacked on to appease feminists: she's just discovered what it means to be adult, and her attendant sensations rush over us too. As anyone who's seen Romance will know, the film has obviously been influential - but not enough so. Stanley Kubrick borrowed the visuals - the ornate face masks and the cloaks - but his orgy slaves were pure Barbara Cartland. The Story of O disturbs precisely because it takes us through the dumb mask, to the damaged, unpredictable human brain beneath.

filmcritic.com Christopher Null

This is old-school cheesy softcore porn. We're talkin' dinosaur cheesy softcore porn. The standard, with Emmanuelle, against which all late-night Cinemax films are measured. The start of it all. Well just about, anyway.

And now at last The Story of O (based on the classic, scandalous erotic novel) comes to DVD, 27 years after its introduction way the hell back in 1975. And it's just as salacious as ever. Filled with fuzzy lighting, soft focus, large hairdos, and sounds-like-classical synthesizer/vibraphone music, O set a benchmark for its genre.

As the film begins, O (Corinne Clery) finds herself abruptly dropped off by her boyfriend (Udo Kier) at a kind of brothel/dungeon, where she is to be educated in the ways of sex and servitude. Whippings, chains and handcuffs, easy-access outfits, and of course near-constant sex training sessions quickly fill the day. O takes this all in stride, philosophizing all the while. She's into it! Eventually she moves on to a series of five or six "masters," each with their own sexual proclivities. (And don't miss the final scene, aped nearly exactly in Eyes Wide Shut.)

As an NC-17 (originally rated X) movie, O is pretty tame save for the constant nudity. The bondage is tame, and the sex is off-camera. Only the subversion of an utterly submissive woman (and her companions in the castle/schoolhouse/whorehouse) as the film's star is cause for much alarm. Even that's kind of tongue-in-cheek jokey -- Clery doesn't exude the wanton idiocy of the women that have followed her into the hard-R and beyond. She's playing a role here as a subtle deviant, and she's doing a damn fine job of it -- even if it's unconvincing that anyone is actually even touching her with that whip.

The Story of O is hardly a great movie. It's completely silly and cornball, but it's that it's pioneeringly silly and overwhelmingly cornball -- and a true part of cult movie history -- that make it a must-own for any true movie buff. Not into naked chicks? Open a bottle of wine, warm yourself up to period pieces on a Jane Austen adaptation, and ease yourself into O.

You go, girl.

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Story of O (1975) Linda Ruth Williams from Sight and Sound, December 1999

DVD Talk (D.K. Holm)

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg]

DVD Net (Anthony Horan)

MediaScreen.com Paul Brenner

Channel 4 Film

Pornography and doubleness of sex for women Joanna Russ from Jump Cut

Interview with women porn stars Annette Fuentes and Margaret Schrage from Jump Cut

Jalili, Abolfazi

DANCE OF DUST (Raghs-e-khak) A- 94

Iran (73 mi) 1992

Certain films gain an enhanced reputation when it is banned in their own country, later released for viewing several years later. This film was banned since its screening in Iran in 1992, due to the harsh depiction of impoverished bricklayers, was re-edited, adding an offscreen narration which the director had nothing to do with, then resurfaced again about 7 or 8 years after its initial release, returned to its original form, supposedly due to a recent liberalized arts policy in Iran. The film follows a young boy, Ilia, Mahmood Khosravi, who works in a brick kiln, and a young girl Limua, Limua Rahi, who lives with a family of seasonal workers, using a near wordless documentary style, adding a love story between the boy and the girl which is more than a mere suggestion of romance. The film reveals a poetic sense of longing, an imaginary escape from the brutal and dreary world they live in, reminding me of an impoverished, stark contrast to Julie Dash’s elegantly beautiful film DAUGHTERS IN THE DUST, especially when the innate culture of the characters is revealed in such a poetic exploration of their imaginations.

DON (Daan) A- 93

Iran (90 mi) 1998

A chilling and unique portrait of slum life in Iran, especially in the way it reveals such dire consequences on children. Using a documentary style of film realism, a 9-year old boy tries to find work without an ID card, causing him to have to confront such adult issues as child labor, heroin addiction, prisons, even suicide as he quite successfully weaves his way in and out of society’s outcasts.

When both parents have a history of heroin addiction, the government threatens to intervene and send their four children to a government orphanage. Instead they eventually send the father to prison, leaving their 9-year old son, Don, to support the entire family by working at a factory burning broken glass. His sister, who was scoring at the top in her class, is removed from school without ever being told a reason by her mother, who is not seen, only heard, as she remains an addict, hidden behind closed doors. Told somewhat out of sequence, we see, interspersed with the daily routines of their lives, incessant police interrogations leading up to the father’s incarceration. When Don steals a typewriter from his employer for his sister to learn, hopefully so she can get a job, his own father sells it for money. Don’s employer won’t give him back his work ID until he returns the typewriter, leading to ever more improbable circumstances that simply get worse, as behind every turn are only relentless roads to rejection. The film is dedicated to Don and the children in the orphanage dormitory.

James, Eugene S.

A FACE OF WAR

USA (72 mi) 1968

User comments from imdb Author: John Schindo (jschindo@twcny.rr.com) from jschindo@twcny.rr.com

I not only saw this documentary but I served with Mike Co. during the filming of it.

This is an exceptionatly well made film about the Vietnam war during 1966, during a time when we as Marines thought we were doing something that was helping the people of Vietnam. We set up on hill ten which was between two villes, Phuli3 and no name village. Phuli3 was very friendly and after the area was secure, which was no easy task, we were allowed to walk there in pairs and get haircuts, buy soft drinks, Vietnamese beer and other creature comforts and play with the kids. The film showed how a few hundred meters would change things drasticly. On other side of the hill was no name village. Going out on a patrol on that side of hill 10 was a different world. The ville its self was loaded with booby traps and more often than not we would have one or two Marines wounded or killed as the Viet Cong would change the locations of the booby traps almost nightly. In the film it showed us relocating the people and leveling it and using a flame throwing tank burning the entire area to the ground. The film makers were a very brave lot as they were right with us during most of the intense fire fights and ambushes. Everyone in Mike Co. had the utmost respect for these unarmed brave men, armed only with their camera and sound equipment. Anyone who would like to see how a Marine rifle company operates would not be dissapointed watching A FACE OF WAR. For the most part it centered around one squad which spent their nights in Phuli3 protecting the people from the VC. There is quite a bit of other action involving the entire company. People who want to see what it was all about before the war became unpopular will see that the Vietnam vets were not a bunch of lowlife drug addicted "baby killers" as we were portrayed by the protesters in the latter years, and why,'til this day, the combat vets of the Army and the Marines suffer from PTSD and other problems coping with every day life.

Time Magazine May 3, 19968

Combat photography has become almost a commonplace, an adjunct to the 6 o'clock news and weather. A Face of War, though, has a rightful claim to be judged as art: it is a documentary in the great tradition begun by Civil War Photographer Matthew B. Brady when he took his cumbersome cameras to Virginia in 1861. The film's producer-director is Eugene S. Jones, a veteran television cameraman who fought with the Marines during World War II. He spent 97 days with a company of Marines in the heartland of Viet Nam. In the course of that time, more than half of Mike Company's 135 men were killed or wounded; Jones was wounded twice, and an assistant once.

What Jones and his crew caught in their cameras and microphones is a superbly balanced sampling of this war of snipers and booby traps, night patrols and burning villages, in which the enemy is almost always at hand and almost never seen. No commentator's rhetoric comes between the audience and the action. All that is on the sound track is the noise of what is happening —the tense silence of a patrol exploding into a racketing firefight, the terrible pleadings of wounded men, the ominous urgency of a chaplain's sermon about death. The men of Mike Company are not identified by name until the epilogue; by that time many of them have already established their personalities by what they say and do.

The excellence of A Face of War is not only in its fine camerawork but also in its sense of completeness. Its 77 minutes encompass the totality of Viet Nam combat: the fear and pain and boredom, heat and rain, rare relaxation, and uneasy meetings of East and West. The Marines are genial giants running a village clinic or delivering a baby; they are stunned young men around the whimpering body of a mortally wounded child; they are stone-faced juggernauts of mechanical war evacuating bewildered civilians in helicopters, methodically incinerating their houses with flamethrowers to deprive the enemy of a hiding place.

A Face of War grinds no axes, pleads no cause. The war it shows is the specific war of small and large necessities, braveries and sacrifices, and its record of this battleground should endure long after the agony is ended.

The winning and losing of hearts and minds: Vietnam, Iraq, and the claims of the war documentary Tony Grajeda from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4] who describes THE FACE OF WAR as he reviews THE ANDERSON PLATOON

The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review

James, Steve

HOOP DREAMS A 98

USA (170 mi) 1994

People say, “When you make it to the NBA, don’t forget about me.” I feel like telling them, “Well, if I don’t make it, make sure you don’t forget about me.”
—William Gates, in the final scene

Winner of an Audience Award at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, HOOP DREAMS became the first documentary to close down the prestigious New York Film Festival, and ended its theatrical run at the time as the highest-grossing documentary in U.S. history. Shot on Betacam, blown up to 35mm, it now lies at #26 (Documentary Movies at the Box Office - Box Office Mojo), described by film critic Roger Ebert as “the great American documentary” and “one of the best films about American life I have ever seen.” Long before 2014 Top Ten List #1 Boyhood, Steve James and his crew followed two young basketball hopefuls around Chicago for a period of six years, from 8^th grade until a year after they both graduated from high school, where their dreams to play in the NBA alongside Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas shifted dramatically as each came face-to-face with more pressing real-life issues in their lives. And that’s what separates this film from other well-intentioned documentaries, as the cameras of this film take us places viewers have simply never been before, providing access into the hallways of an integrated but largely white suburban St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in Westchester and the Chicago public school, all-black, inner city Marshall High School, including their tiny, jam-packed basketball courts filled with the frenzy of over-enthusiastic cheerleaders and fans, but also inside the daily lives of families living in crime-riddled black neighborhoods and tenement housing projects where the surrounding dilapidation, vacant lots, and a complete absence of businesses or medical centers reveals an impoverished world in decay, where drug dealers pick up the slack and can be seen openly selling their wares on playgrounds where young kids are playing basketball. The film opens on the Delano Elementary School playground from Chicago’s West side, where Earl Smith, a portly middle-aged black man acknowledges he works downtown during the week as an insurance executive, but catches weekend pick-up basketball games on the city’s outdoor playgrounds searching out young local talent, where he acts as an “unofficial” freelance recruiter for legendary coach Gene Pingatore at St. Joseph’s High School, the same guy that coached Isiah Thomas and has won more than 960 games in his still active 46-year career. (They just won the state championship in 2015. Ironically, it is Pingatore that encourages the filmmakers to check out another young prospect with even more potential, William Gates.) On this day Smith singles out 14-year old Arthur Agee, a shirtless kid that just graduated from grammar school who has the quickest first step he’s seen in years, telling Steve James behind the camera, “In four years you’re going to be hearing from this guy.” In no time he has the kid signed up to enroll in St. Joseph’s in the fall, though it involves a 90-minute one way commute just to get there, “way out to la-la land,” where it may as well be a completely different world than what this kid is used to, clean hallways in the schools, plenty of trees and grassy lawns with homes in well-manicured neighborhoods, and a predominance of white people, probably never before venturing more than a few blocks from his West Garfield Park neighborhood during his whole life. With dueling stories about two inner city kids heading out to the promised land of the suburbs, Arthur starts for the freshman team at St. Joe’s, while William Gates is another entering freshman from the near north Cabrini-Green Housing Project who will be starting on the varsity squad that is one of the elite teams in the entire state.

Alec Banks from High Snobiety, October 20, 2014, How 'Hoop Dreams' Became a Reality | Highsnobiety

The second child and first son of Arthur “Bo” Agee Sr. and Sheila Agee – memorable characters themselves who certainly played a large role in the filming of Hoop Dreams – Sheila was initially skeptical of Arthur’s claims that Hollywood beckoned. “I went home that day and said, ‘Yo, mama. These dudes want to make a movie about me!’ She laughed at me and looked at me and said, ‘Boy get your ass out of here! Nobody wants to make a movie about you!’ The next day these three guys come with the cameras on, with the boom mic on, up the stairs. Mama comes to the door and she didn’t have her teeth in. Her top teeth were false. So she came to the door and saw the cameras and ran to the back and put her teeth in. So she comes back to the door like, ‘Hello! How are you guys doing!? Arthur told me you were coming!’ I’m like ‘mama stop lying, you didn’t even believe me!’”

With a $2,000 grant from the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, what starts out as a five day shoot in the summer for a possible thirty-minute documentary to be aired on PBS television turns into something altogether different once these kids are followed into their respective homes, where William has an older brother Curtis who averaged 39 points a game at Wells High School, earning a scholarship to Marquette, but instead, due to poor grades, attended Colby Community College in Kansas where he showed little discipline and did what he wanted on the court, eventually transferring to Central Florida where he rode the bench for repeated philosophical differences with the head coach, eventually dropping out of school and heading back home. Arthur’s father Bo has a similar experience, regretting the fact he never went to college, believing that if he went to college he would have ended up in the NBA (a priceless moment, where his boasting leads to his wife Sheila just rolling her eyes in astonishment), but instead he had a son, Arthur, which inevitably altered his future, where now his dreams have been transferred to his son. Among the most prominent social factors on display are the weak or altogether missing father figures, where these kids have to make it on their own, yet also carry the burden of generational pressure placed on their shoulders to carry out this mythic dream to make it in the NBA where they would become instant millionaires. While never mentioned, the odds of high school seniors just being drafted by an NBA team is three in 10,000, or .03 percent, roughly the same chance of being dealt four-of-a-kind in a game of poker, so much of the success lies not only in talent, but body size, where people towering six feet four inches may be giants to the ordinary public, but are among the smaller players in the game. Reality was never an issue to the players in this film or kids around the country as they approached high school, as they were driven by a similar desire to succeed, urged to “Be Like Mike,” as this memorable Gatorade commercial that first aired in 1992 suggests, BE LIKE MIKE - GATORADE COMMERCIAL ... - YouTube (55 seconds). The tragic element is that kids from impoverished black neighborhoods have far fewer outlets to succeed, as one out of every three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetimes, 58 percent of black youth in juvenile detention will be sent to adult prisons, more than half of the black Americans born into the lowest fifth economic percentile remain there at age 40, black children are much more likely to be raised in a single-parent household, black students attend worse schools, black wealth barely exists, while seven out of ten black Americans born into the middle class will fall into a lower percentile as adults, where even black Americans who make it to the middle class are likely to see their children be less financially successful. These are the stark realities underlying this film. The other is the lure of Isiah Thomas, who Arthur idolizes throughout his entire childhood, with his picture plastered on the walls of his bedroom, where the sheepish look of adulation on his face when he has a chance to meet the NBA star on the court at a St. Joseph’s summer camp is simply priceless.

Alec Banks from High Snobiety, October 20, 2014, How 'Hoop Dreams' Became a Reality | Highsnobiety

As filming progressed, the narrative was starting to take shape given that both he and Agee were enrolling at St. Joe’s. Yet, Arthur found himself completely in the dark when it came to the production. “They would film three times a week for that first year because they didn’t have any money. This is just a small production company on the North Side of Chicago. After the third and going into the fourth year, that was when I was like ‘damn, y’all ain’t through with this project yet?! When are you going to be done with it?’ Even through those years they didn’t tell me that the project is just on me and my family and Will and his family. I’m thinking for three or four years that they’re doing a film about different basketball players. They said we’re not going to be done with it until you graduate and go off to college.”

Shooting only seven days of freshman year, and ten days of sophomore year, James was able to receive several grants to expand his film, most notably $250,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of the largest non-for-profit organizations in the world, where they shot 40 days in junior year, and 100 days between the summer following junior year and the end of the film. Tests at the beginning of the school year reveal both William and Arthur are struggling academically, where both have the equivalent of a 4th or 5th grade education, which was simply overlooked at their previous schools. But the first signs that this is no ordinary film is the financial trouble experienced by Arthur, where his family is unable to make tuition payments, which keeps him out of school for a period of two months in the beginning of his sophomore year, losing all credits for that semester, where he has to transfer to Marshall High School in the middle of the school year. Simultaneous to this happening, St. Joe’s is able to provide a financial sponsor for William, none other than Patricia Wier, President of Encyclopedia Britannica, who not only pays for his entire tuition throughout high school, but also gives him a summer job working for her company. What’s revealed here is a two-tiered system, implying that basketball coach Pingatore was disappointed with Arthur’s play, “Coach keeps asking me, when are you gonna grow?,” failing to intervene when his family experiences financial difficulties, even allowing the kid to leave school, while William is one of his premiere players, so he pulls out the red carpet. Arthur’s mother Sheila feels betrayed by the coach and the recruiters, claiming they promised to take care of books and expenses, leaving them in a precarious situation. Marshall’s no-nonsense basketball coach Luther Bedford sums it up, “If he had gone out there [to St. Joseph’s] and played like they had predicted him to play, he wouldn’t be at Marshall, and it don’t take no brilliant person to figure that out.” Making matters worse, Bo loses his job, any sense of self-esteem, and begins drifting back onto the streets, where we see him go one on one with his son on the playground before heading off to the distant corner for the drug dealers, where Arthur, in one of the most poignant moments of the film, is left to stare in pained disillusionment. After twenty years of marriage, Bo eventually leaves the home. Shortly afterwards, Sheila loses her job as well as a nurse’s assistant due to chronic back pain, resorting to welfare with no other alternatives. At one point, in obvious distress, she turns to the camera and says, “Do you ever ask yourself how I get by on $268 a month and keep this house and feed these children? Do you ever ask yourself that question?” It’s a moment where this stops being a film, where all artificiality is stripped away, and becomes a life-embracing plea for sanity and understanding. Just how does any of this make sense?

While Arthur makes the varsity in his junior year, there are additions to the family, as Sheila’s sister moves in, along with her newborn, and also Arthur’s best friend Shannon, who is escaping troubles in his own family. While both are the same age, the time they spend together prevents Arthur from doing homework, where each year he just barely gets by, but is never once seen studying or answering a question correctly in class, even the softballs lobbed to him on camera. Coach Bedford offers acute commentary on guys like Arthur, who never seems to be able to focus on the moment, as his mind is always somewhere else, where he sees plenty of guys on the streets after high school talk about how if they had the opportunity to go to college they would have ended up in the NBA, but instead they’re left with nothing to show for it. With a lackadaisical effort, he worries Arthur may end up one of those guys. Sheila’s welfare benefits are cut off for missing an appointment, going 3 months with no income whatsoever, causing her electricity and gas to be turned off, where the family ends up living in the dark. While it’s not shown in the film, the director, to his credit, actually paid the bills to get the utilities turned back on. Marshall Coach Luther Bedford, unbeknownst to the filmmakers, also brought groceries to the Agee family when they needed help. Nonetheless, it’s a particularly painful segment, as we also learn Bo has become a crack addict, with signs of physically abusing his wife, eventually spending seven months in prison for burglary, causing a huge emotional rift between father and son. Mirroring this downward spiral, William injures his knee in practice, a torn ACL that requires surgical repair, which makes him miss most of his junior year. What’s most intriguing about these doctor visits is that no adult accompanies him, as he’s a 16-year old kid left on his own to figure out the myriad of medical options, where it’s clear he’s in over his head. Nonetheless, he receives the best of care, completely paid for by the school insurance. In yet another shocking twist, as if he doesn’t have enough pressures, William is next seen holding a baby in his arms, a tiny girl named Alicia, along with his longtime girlfriend since middle school, Catherine Mines, where both have been a carefully kept secret, something neither his coach nor his teammates had even the slightest inkling, placing his life in an entirely new perspective. It says something about William’s needs and his character that he keeps this family hidden from his coach for as long as possible. While William’s father was never around during his lifetime, he’d make it his life’s mission to be fully present in her life, expressing wisdom even at the tender age of 16. With his injury and the birth of his daughter, William’s grades plummeted. As he’s getting offers from various colleges, he takes the ACT college entrance exams, but disappointingly scores only a 15, while 18 is the minimum score to receive a college scholarship. As a result, the school contacts Encyclopedia Britannica which pays for a college exam preparatory course to help him be more successful taking the test.

While it’s clear both kids are indifferent students, where getting a good education might have been a better career path, it’s certainly not surprising to see how obsessed the sports dream, however fragile, remains such a prominent focus of their lives, spurred on by older authority figures that wish to realize their own failed dreams through these kids, where it defines their identity from an early age, as it’s one of the few things they excel at, giving them a sense of pride and self-satisfaction, where aspiring to be great is simply the natural outgrowth of the dream, despite being beyond the reach of most mortal men. William’s injury, and the warnings of how it could tear again, and will likely make him a candidate for arthritis down the road, are the first steps in the disintegration of that dream. In Arthur’s case, while Marshall (9-16) had their worst season in twenty years, as a junior in 1990 he got a firsthand view of a sensational King High School scoring guard Jamie Brandon, the standout player in the Chicago public leagues. At 6-4, and about 200 pounds, he was a three-time All-Stater, named Mr. Basketball of Illinois in 1990, the year his undefeated team, ranked #1 in the country, won the state title, where he could score from the inside or behind the arc, totaling 3,157 points in his career, third most in state history, with his team going 63-1 in his final two years at King, where he got a scholarship to play at LSU alongside Shaquille O’Neal. But despite all the accolades, and the stats to back them up, where Brandon was the Chicago-area’s most publicized high school athlete of his era, and perhaps any era, yet this guy was never drafted by the NBA. This little piece of trivia was left out of the film, but it would certainly have been common knowledge to Arthur. By the time William gets cleared to play, it’s the last game of the season as they get ready to enter the state tournament. While he has spurts of his former glory, perhaps he returns too soon, as in the tournament he’s also troubled by his lingering injury, and in the final elimination game to make it downstate, he’s actually taken out during the 4th quarter stretch run for a medical evaluation allowing the other team to take the lead. By the time he gets back, with the game on the line, he seems to lose his confidence and the final moments are disheartening. Afterwards, he’s even examined by the Chicago Bulls team doctor where another surgery is performed, rehabbing afterwards at their professional facilities. He’s invited to a Nike summer basketball camp of the hundred best high school players, including future Michigan Fab-Five stars Jalen Rose, Chris Webber, and Juwan Howard, where as many as two hundred fifty college coaches attend in search of talent, with the inspection resembling a “meat market,” where director Spike Lee makes a chilling reminder that what all these coaches see in them are dollar signs, as to them “it’s all about money.” William performs well, giving him a huge boost of confidence, where afterwards he’s recruited in his home living room by Marquette University’s basketball coach Kevin O’Neill, offering him a full athletic scholarship for four years, irrespective of what he does on the court, giving him an opportunity to earn a degree. While there are other offers, Marquette’s well-designed recruiting visit turns his head and William jumps at the chance. After the earlier travails with his injuries, he’s so ebullient, it’s as if he’s reached the Promised Land.

Bo returns to the household as a born-again Christian, claiming he’s off the drugs and is a changed man, while Arthur and Shannon spend the summer working at Pizza Hut earning $3.35/hr. They’re also required to take summer school classes to earn credits for classes they otherwise wouldn’t pass, though Shannon soon drops out from disinterest. In a fascinating twist that you won’t find anywhere else, the drug dealers in the neighborhood give these guys money so they can dress more stylishly, singling them out as future NBA stars, giving them pizzazz and more attitude. Arthur still has unfinished business with St. Joe’s, as they won’t release his transcripts with an outstanding bill of $1800, causing his parents to make a special trip to the school where a payment plan can be drawn up, and the credits will be released only after the receipt of two months of “good-faith” payments. Spike Lee’s comments are especially appropriate when it comes to a school holding a student’s records hostage for ransom. Surprisingly Arthur finally grows a few inches and becomes a star in his senior year, despite his academic deficiencies, where it’s the closest school comes to being part of his comfort zone, where he and the other players are noticeably happy and having the time of their lives, called giant killers, as they knock off some of the most favored teams in the league. William, on the other hand, has to endure the demonstrative rants and overly critical assessments from Coach Pingatore, who frequently berates his team with expletives, where he and the other players are always on edge for fear of what to expect next. A perfect example is the team bus to an away game, where Pingatore sends a solemn message, “Now remember, think about the ball game,” resulting in dour faces and a hushed silence afterwards where you can hear a pin drop, while Arthur’s team bus is entirely different, as loud music can be heard from boom boxes as a boisterous group can be seen laughing and playing cards, where this all-black group couldn’t be more relaxed and ready to have some fun. It’s like a party atmosphere, remaining one of the most unique portraits of the visible differences between the black and white worlds, beautifully expressed in the parallel shots of a single sequence. Part of the brilliance of the film is capturing the small, day-to-day details that accumulate over time, providing a superbly rich feel for the times and what they entailed. The camera literally brings the viewer along for the ride, where our interest is always rewarded, as these are complexly defined characters with unique life experiences. In William’s awkward final scene with Coach Pingatore as he nears graduation, the disappointment and coldness in his tone are unmistakable, “I need to know your number so when you ask me for money, I can turn you down.” Shannon eventually ends up on the streets and succumbs to the dope dealers, while Arthur’s in for the ride of his life, as in 1991 the Marshall Commandos not only win the Public League Championship, beating King, which in the previous year won the state championship, now featuring two starting seven footers, but earn a trip downstate to compete for the state title. What Marshall featured with Arthur was dazzling speed, where they were renowned for stripping the ball, for applying relentless defensive pressure and creating utter mayhem on the court, causing multiple turnovers, where they could steal the ball on successive possessions and literally demoralize bigger and taller opponents, finishing in third place with a season record of 25-7.

One of the unsung success stories in the film is Arthur’s mother Sheila, who graduates at the top of her class to become a nurse, finally making her way off of welfare. Brushing tears from her eyes, she hugs her teacher while commenting, “I didn’t think I could do it. And people told me I wasn’t gonna be anything.” It’s an especially proud and celebratory moment that is not missed by the filmmakers, who were not even aware that she was attending school. Interestingly, adding another parallel, William’s mother Emma also works as a nurse’s assistant. With the focus on the other two, William struggled to obtain the required score of 18 on his ACT exams to earn a scholarship, but eventually, on his fourth try, he obtained an aggregate score of 17.5, which was rounded up to 18, attending Marquette on a four year scholarship, where he appeared in every game during his first two seasons, but left in the spring of his third year when he reinjured his knee and was unable to make the starting lineup. He dropped out for a while, but eventually returned to graduate with a communications degree. As Arthur’s grades are marginal, he receives an athletic scholarship to Mineral Area Junior College in southeastern Missouri, where all seven of the school’s black students play on the basketball team and live together in one house, a small cinderblock structure that sits all alone, seemingly in a vacuum, but Arthur uses the experience to obtain an athletic scholarship to Arkansas State University, where he plays for two more years at a Division I school. While neither of these guys ever played a single game in the NBA, they certainly had their successes, part of which, even while they were going through it, was dragging a crew of three white guys following around behind them with a camera, which must have caused a sight in high school classrooms or hallways, bringing extra attention to these already complicated young lives. The naturalism throughout is unadorned, where you couldn’t script these kinds of experiences, which are artfully captured by these filmmakers, even from the opening frames, where there’s a beauty and rhythm to the street shots with the elevated train rumbling overhead, with added emphasis on the musical soundtrack by composer Ben Sidran, much of which resembles the soulful and meditative style of John Coltrane’s quiet tenor sax introduction to the song, “Alabama,” JOHN COLTRANE Alabama - YouTube (6:03), providing surprising depth to what we are experiencing. Despite the passage of more than twenty years, there are few, if any, films that provide such a vast and extensive examination of the black community from such an intensely personal perspective, where the film takes us into the homes, playgrounds, schools, and churches of the inner city, which is like being immersed into the heart of a James Baldwin novel, where the film’s meticulous detail matches the literary description in his novels, where there is a similar dramatic narrative arc following two appealing subjects that is never less than inspiring and profound. It’s a critique of the American Dream, while providing a starkly honest and frank representation of everyday life in black America, where the lifeblood of the film are the aspirations of the urban poor, where racism, poverty, drugs, and education intrude into their daily lives, where it would be hard to invent a more grating story of how white America uses and discards young black men. At times it’s filled with the blistering rage of injustice, including a descent into domestic violence and drug abuse, sinking lower than anyone could have ever imagined, yet there are multiple scenes showing the influence of a near-empty church, humble in tone, with the family gathered around to provide faith and inspiration, where it’s also about elevating one’s stature in life, transcending the personal struggles with unforeseen triumphs, finding a purpose when all hope seems unattainable. It’s one of the great American documentaries because of its spirit of openness, never knowing what lies ahead, yet still believing in yourself, following your own path into an unknown future that awaits us all.

Postscript

The film was not nominated for an Academy award in the Best Documentary category. According to Roger Ebert, the Academy’s documentary committee had a system as they collectively viewed potential films, each carrying little flashlights. When a viewer had seen enough and given up on the film, they waved a light onto the screen. When a majority of flashlights flashed their lights, the film was switched off. HOOP DREAMS was stopped after fifteen minutes.

William Gates got a Bible degree at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and became pastor at the Living Faith Community Center in Cabrini-Green, a position he held until July 2012, when he relocated his family to San Antonio, Texas. Gates has four children and his sons are now being recruited to play basketball just as he was during the filming. His older brother Curtis was shot and killed in an apparent car hijacking in 2001 at the age of 36 (Man chased down and slain - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Rick Hepp from The Chicago Tribune, September 13, 2001).

Arthur Agee runs the Arthur Agee Jr foundation which he founded in 1995, whose main goal is to “educate parents and families that they are role models for their kids – and they shouldn’t be looking up to entertainers and athletes as a [outlet] to get out. The parents should be setting the morals and grounds for them to be successful. And it starts with education,” while also working as a motivational speaker for inner-city youth. He started a Hoop Dreams sports clothing line in 2004 with the slogan, “Control Your Destiny.” Agee now has five children and still lives in the Chicago area.

His mother Sheila works as a private nurse for affluent families. On Thanksgiving morning 1994, Agee’s older half-brother, DeAntonio, was gunned down at Cabrini–Green, while his father Bo, a minister and clothing salesman, was shot in an alley behind his home in 2004 while attending to merchandise in his garage (`Hoop Dreams' father slain - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Hal Dardick from the Chicago Tribune, December 17, 2004). Berwyn police charged Ronnie Taylor, 33, of Chicago with first-degree murder and for allegedly accepting money in a contract hit-for-hire to kill Arthur “Bo” Agee Sr, but Taylor was acquitted of all charges in January 2010.

The Hoop Dreams Live On, by Seth Davis from Sports Illustrated, August 30, 2006, boardsanddimes

Arthur’s mother, Sheila, was so devastated by her husband’s murder that she moved to her original hometown of Birmingham, Ala. (Arthur told me a burglar broke into his mother’s house in Alabama last month.) That left Arthur with the responsibility of selling his father’s house. “I’ve never sold a house, dude,” Arthur says. “It got so bad I had to take out a loan on my car title just to rent a truck to move everything out of my dad’s church. My family got broken up when my dad got killed. Now I’m just trying to get back on my feet as far as my personal life is concerned, because my stuff was way out of order.” In an effort to gain some financial security, Arthur applied for a bank loan. That led to another disturbing revelation. The woman at the bank told him he was registered as deceased. According to Arthur, it turns out Bo had used Arthur’s social security number to take out some two dozen credit cards in Arthur’s name, and some of them were delinquent. That left Arthur several thousand dollars in debt and his credit in shambles. It also put him in the position of contacting the Berwyn police to, as he puts it, “file a report on a dead dad.” “He scammed me,” Arthur says. “I actually would have to press charges against him if he were alive.” Asked if he feels anger toward his father, Arthur replied, “Do I? You don’t understand. If my dad was alive, I’d want to kill him. To just swallow it and say like God wants, to turn the other cheek? That’s hard to do.”

Coach Pingatore and St. Joseph’s High School filed a lawsuit against the filmmakers in October, 1994 claiming their school, and varsity basketball coach Pingatore, were depicted “in a false and untrue light,” claiming the school provided access to the filmmakers because they promised the film would be used exclusively for educational purposes, having been told it would be a non-profit project to be aired on PBS, not a commercial venture, where the recent commercial release suggests the film could earn several millions. The suit was settled the following year on February 15, 1995 when the filmmakers agreed to donate scholarship money for students at both St. Joseph and Marshall High Schools. Pingatore now uses the film as a recruiting tool. The film grossed about $8 million dollars, where the director split the profits of about $200,000 with both the Agee and Gates families. Agee subsequently bought a house for his mother in the western suburb of Berwyn, a short 10-minute drive from their old apartment in the West Garfield Park neighborhood in Chicago.

Hoop Dreams, directed by Steve James | Film review - TimeOut

Steve James' essential inner-city epic chronicles the lives of two young blacks growing up in a Chicago housing project. At 14, basketball prodigies Arthur Agee and William Gates win scholarships to a suburban high school, St Joseph's. Then their fortunes diverge. William looks set to follow in the footsteps of St Joe's favourite son, all-star Isiah Thomas. Arthur doesn't make the cut. Skinny and immature, he finds himself back in the inner city when his parents fall behind on the fees. Over the next four years, however, the boys' lives are to intersect more than once, and in unexpected ways. A three-hour documentary about basketball is probably not most people's idea of a night out, but this one rewards the effort. James and his collaborators shot more than 250 hours of footage, and the cumulative emotional power is simply devastating. Sport is the only dream Arthur and William are allowed, their only ticket out of the ghetto, but they also have to carry the weight of their parents' aspirations - and if they make it, they will become role models for thousands of kids just like them. Unforgettable.

Hoop Dreams Review | Movie - Empire

In American Cinema, baseball is always associated with nostalgia and fondly-imagined virtues of family and country, but the current rash of basketball films (Blue Chips, White Men Can’t Jump etc.) are about a divided, desperate American present. Easily outclassing the fiction films is this extraordinarily compelling near three-hour documentary, which follows a pair of black kids from Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing project through four years of high school, examining the assumption that their basketball talent is a chance to get out of the ghetto and into college, and which is being heavily talked up as a possible Oscar contender outside(ital) the documentary category.

Both Gates and Agee are spotted as 14-year-olds by a recruiting man who arranges basketball scholarships for them at an up-scale school. Both struggle, Gates with injuries and Agee with low academic achievement, but continue to shine on the court. With exceptional skill at distinguishing drama from the raw footage of fly-on-the-wall shooting, James hits on a real irony: Agee’s presence peps up his no hope team into a winning streak while Gates is troubled by doubts and a “good but not great” career.

Though there is plenty of hoop action, the film focuses on the various pressures on the heroes (and heroes they become) from families, schools, coaches, friends, sponsors, college recruiters and hanger’s-on. Confident enough to leave plenty to implication — both kids are fathers by the time they leave high school and Agee has a friend who seems to be leading him into a life of crime — this is the best type of documentary, giving an intensely personal story you can’t help but become involved in, and also raises fundamental issues about America in the 90s.

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]

The documentary "Hoop Dreams" has the sprawling force of the best fiction. In fact, it's the closest movie equivalent to the great American novel I've seen in years.

If you're wary of a nearly three-hour film about basketball, so was I, at first; sports bore me to tears. Yet I watched the movie in an absolute trance of fascination. Hoop Dreams is less about hoop than about dreams -- dreams nurtured, dreams annihilated. In its understated, journalistic way, the movie is overwhelming in its cumulative impact. It's both depressing and exhilarating; it's truth and it's life.

The film tracks two 14-year-old boys -- Arthur Agee and William Gates, both from squalid sections of Chicago -- whose one and only passion is basketball. Watching them sitting mesmerized and ecstatic in front of a game on TV, you realize you're seeing the primal moment of awakening: This is what you were put on Earth to do, so go practice your jump shot. William, who is taller, and who develops a thick neck and imposing build as the years pass, is a dependable shooter with balletic moves. Arthur, a shorter boy with a quick, casual smile, is a more erratic player but also more electrifying; his are the kind of moves that look foolish when they don't work but dazzle when they do work. The movie is a parallel study of these boys as they grow into young men, father children, and respond to various forms of crushing pressure.

Pressure. We often take sports stars for granted, mumbling about their astronomic salaries. Hoop Dreams implicitly challenges our perception of athletes as spoiled rock stars. For these boys, the question of whether they have the skills to make it to the NBA is the least of their worries. The film suggests that grabbing the gold ring in the pitiless world of sports requires inhuman persistence and resilience -- the ability to weather constant blows to the body, the mind, the soul. William and Arthur are sent to the suburban school St. Joseph's, alma mater of the legendary Isiah Thomas. Arthur, whose parents can't come up with the tuition, is forced to drop out and enroll in a city school, where he keeps playing but sinks into a haze of disappointment. William, meanwhile, in his comfortable position on St. Joseph's team, is nearly crippled by a knee injury. His knee becomes an almost metaphysical villain in the film's second half; William's frustration at being sidelined is so palpable you can feel the angry heat of his flesh.

Hoop Dreams makes the unsurprising point that the boys, who are both goof-offs in school, have been shaped into basketball machines -- incomplete people, who worship the game to the exclusion of almost everything else. (By the end, one of them will have learned that there are other things in life.) Who can blame their parents for pushing them? This is the boys' ticket out of the ghetto, and the film daringly focuses on family members -- Arthur's screw-up father and William's disillusioned brother, both former high-school hoop stars -- who hang over the boys' careers, experiencing their triumphs vicariously. (The boys' mothers, less sensuously obsessed with the game, encourage their sons but keep a hard eye on their grades. We come to love these women.)

The blame falls on the shoulders of the coaches and recruiters, themselves entrenched in the bizarre, punishing culture of high-school athletics. Gene Pingatore, the coach at St. Joseph's (he resembles Mandy Patinkin in the cruel lines around his tight mouth), bullies his players towards greatness. When William's knee gives him trouble during an important game, Pingatore takes him aside and says, "Of course, if your knee is bad, you shouldn't be playing." This is an innocuous remark on the face of it, but Pingatore's tone gives him away; we know he's trying to shame William into playing hurt. Pingatore emerges as a Dickensian figure, a remorseless man who never stops justifying his callousness and bursts of temper. Yet you also see that he's powerless to be anything other than what he is. If his team doesn't win, his ass is at stake, and so is St. Joseph's. The culture of sports doesn't respect, doesn't even acknowledge, the concept of benevolence. The boys are in the rough hands of wrathful, insecure gods.

As Arthur bucks the odds and cracks the books, and William studies half-heartedly and grows disgusted with the game, Hoop Dreams pulls its themes together. The filmmakers -- Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert -- began this project as a study of playground hoop. What they came back with goes far beyond the usual sports movie. Passing awkwardly into manhood, the boys create themselves out of the rubble of their dreams. At the same time, the people who love them are either enjoying their own triumphs or destroying themselves.

Watching this documentary about basketball (which I don't care about, in and of itself), I kept brushing tears away. "Hoop Dreams" seems to encompass everything and resolve nothing. The metal hoops, so seductive and high, await the next generation of boys, ready to exalt or humble them.

Hoop Dreams - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Rob Edelman from Film Reference

Hoop Dreams is a richly human and profoundly American film. It is at once an allegory about striving to achieve, and the politics and pressures of achievement; and a story of the anguish of poverty in urban America and an indictment of the meat market aspect of contemporary scholastic and professional athletics. While the film is a documentary, there is as much drama and suspense as any deftly plotted fiction. The difference is that the emotions and lives unfolding on screen are real.

The film opens with the NBA All-Star game being played in Chicago. Just a few miles beyond the fanfare, two boys are coming of age in rough urban neighborhoods. Both watch the game on television, almost in awe, while nurturing aspirations for stardom as professional basketball players. Both dream of one-way tickets out of the ghetto, complete with new houses and spiffy cars.

William Gates and Arthur Agee have honed their athletic skills on the neighborhood playgrounds. William is seen practicing slam-dunks in a park, by a bare brick building: a world away from the glare of a Madison Square Garden or an Orlando Arena. Both teens are recruited to play basketball at St. Joseph, a suburban Catholic high school. Years earlier, former Detroit Pistons hoop star Isiah Thomas (who also appears in the film) graduated from St. Joseph. The film now asks the question: "If Isiah can become not only a professional athlete but a perennial All-Star and certain Hall of Famer, why not William and Arthur?"

As William's career at St. Joseph progresses, the media compares him to Isiah, while Gene Pingatore, the school's basketball coach, sees within Arthur the potential to become a "great player." Later on, the image of Arthur shooting hoops in a playground garbed in a red basketball uniform with the name "Thomas" stitched on the back speaks volumes about his dream. Being accepted at St. Joseph, however, is the initial step of a lengthy, arduous process. Arthur and William will have to acclimate themselves to a school outside their neighborhood, in an interracial climate. Each day, they must endure a three-hour commute to and from school. Once there, they will have to succeed academically as well as athletically.

Hoop Dreams is an up-close-and-personal look at five years in the lives of William and Arthur. It opens with their enrollment at St. Joseph, and concludes with their heading off to college. In between are the traumas and victories they experience on and off the basketball court, and the answering of questions which are posed as the boys begin attending St. Joseph: How will William and Arthur relate to the school, and how will the school and the drill sergeant-like coach relate to them? How will their athletic skills develop? How will their lives and perspectives change over the years? How will all this impact on their relatives? Arthur's dad, Bo, is a failed athlete who feels he "could have made the pros," and does not want his son to experience the "bad things" he has known in his life. William's older brother Curtis is another ex-jock who lives through his sibling while observing that "all my basketball dreams are gone."

With keen insight, the film reflects on the value system of contemporary American society. Their basketball prowess certainly affords Arthur and William an opportunity for education, and self-improvement, in an academic environment far superior to their neighborhood high school. When William begins his freshman year at St. Joseph, his reading skills are at the fourth grade level but, by the time he is a sophomore, his reading level has gone up several grades. The film raises several societal questions here, including: "What about all the ghetto kids who do not have William's physical aptitude?" and "How many kids will never have their ability tapped because they are unable to slam a ball through a hoop?" Furthermore, Arthur and William are attending St. Joseph not out of altruism. Are they being exploited for their talents? Are they perceived as being little more than bodies, who will help a team win a championship? If they were to fail on the court, or suffer a potentially career-ending injury, will they be discarded? Arthur is only on a partial scholarship and is booted out of school because his parents cannot keep up tuition payments, then loses all academic credit. St. Joseph refuses to release his transcript until his family pays $1800 in back tuition. The welfare of the teenager becomes secondary to the collecting of a bill from a family where the breadwinner is a minimum wage-earner.

In telling the story of William, Arthur, and their respective families, Hoop Dreams serves to reaffirm the humanity of black males. Bo Agee sadly fits a negative stereotype of the African-American man as an irresponsible, violent, drug-abusing loser. At one point, he even abandons his family and is later seen pushing drugs in the playground where his son plays basketball. Bo's fall continues when he becomes a crack addict, beats his wife, is arrested for battery, and spends seven months in jail for burglary. While his behavior is not condoned in the film, it is clear that he is unable to adequately support his family on a minimum wage and is tragically weakened by his loss of self-esteem.

Despite the specifics of its setting and subject, Hoop Dreams is a film with universal meaning. Arthur is eventually enrolled in a Chicago high school, and leads his unranked team to the city championship. He and his teammates then travel downstate, to play for the state title. In one sequence, Arthur's parents are seen walking across the University of Illinois campus, where the game will be played. One of them notes that "a child" should have the experience of attending such a school. This idle observation expresses every dream that every parent has ever had for any child.

But what resonates long after seeing Hoop Dreams is an unavoidable fact of contemporary American life. For every Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal, or Isiah Thomas, there are thousands of young men like Arthur Agee and William Gates: young hoop dreamers who are forged in the ghetto, and who never will earn all of the glory and affluence they so desperately crave.

Hoop Dreams Movie Review & Film Summary (1994 ... Roger Ebert, July 8, 2001

There is a point in ''Hoop Dreams'' where the story, about two inner-city kids who dream of playing pro basketball, comes to a standstill while the mother of one of them addresses herself directly to the camera.

''Do you all wonder sometime how I am living?'' asks Sheila Agee. ''How my children survive, and how they're living? It's enough to really make people want to go out there and just lash out and hurt somebody.''

Yes, we have wondered. Her family is living on $268 a month in aid; when her son Arthur turned 18, his $100 payment was cut off, although he was still in high school. Their gas and electricity have been turned off in the winter. The family uses a camp lantern for light.

Arthur cannot graduate from Marshall, his Chicago high school, without transfer credits from St. Joseph's in suburban Westchester--the suburban school that recruited him, dropped him, and won't release the transcripts until $1,300 in back tuition is paid. Since this debt would not exist if scouts had not found Arthur on a playground and offered him a scholarship, there is irony there. The rich school reaches into the city, not to help worthy students, but to find good basketball players. If they don't make the grade, they're thrown back in the pond. But then it's payback time. Arthur becomes a star at Marshall and helps them finish third in the state. St. Joseph's is eliminated earlier in the playoffs. And William Gates, the other kid who, as an eighth-grader, was recruited by the school, has missed months of playing time because of injuries. When Arthur plays in the state semifinals at the University of Illinois, both Gates and his coach, Gene Pingatore, have to sit in the crowd.

No screenwriter would dare write this story; it is drama and melodrama, packaged with outrage and moments that make you want to cry. ''Hoop Dreams'' (1994) has the form of a sports documentary, but along the way it becomes a revealing and heartbreaking story about life in America. When the filmmakers began, they planned to make a 30-minute film about eighth-graders being recruited from inner-city playgrounds to play for suburban schools. Their film eventually encompassed six years, involved 250 hours of footage, and found a reversal of fortunes they could not possibly have anticipated.

Early in the film, we see the young men get up at 5:30 a.m. for the 90-minute commute to the suburbs. One of them talks about St. Joseph's with its ''carpets and flowers.'' From the beginning, William Gates is more naturally gifted than Arthur Agee. He stars on the varsity as a freshman, while Arthur plays for the freshman team. William is quick, brilliant, confident; Pingatore compares him with his great discovery Isiah Thomas, the NBA star who was also recruited by St. Joseph's. Both students arrive at the school reading at a fourth-grade level, but Gates quickly makes up the lost time, suggesting that his neighborhood schools were to blame. Arthur makes slower progress, in classrooms and on the court. ''Coach keeps asking me, 'When you gonna grow?' '' he smiles. He is eventually dropped from the squad, loses his scholarship, and after two months out of school enrolls at Marshall.

Gates seems headed for stardom, but injuries strike him. A ligament is repaired in his junior year. Torn cartilage is removed. Maybe he returns to the court too soon. He injures himself again. He loses confidence. Meanwhile, at Marshall, Arthur grows into his game and leads the team to a brilliant season. But the spotlight is still on Gates. He attends the Nike All-American Summer Camp at Princeton, where promising prep stars are scrutinized by famous coaches (Joey Meyer, Bobby Knight) and lectured by Dick Vitale (a showboat) and Spike Lee (a harsh realist). Arthur spends that summer working at Pizza Hut at $3.35 an hour. Then comes the senior year where Arthur leads his team to the state finals.

Both young men are recruited by colleges. Gates, despite his injuries, gets an offer from Marquette that promises him a four-year scholarship even if he can never play. He takes it. Agee, whose grades are marginal, ends up at Mineral Area Junior College in Missouri. There are eight black students on the campus. Seven of them are basketball players, and live in the same house. If his grades are good enough, he can use this as a springboard to a four-year school (and he does).

The sports stories develop headlong suspense, but the real heart of the film involves the scenes filmed in homes, playgrounds and churches in the inner city. There are parallel dramas involving fathers: Arthur's leaves the family after 20 years, gets involved with drugs, spends time in jail, returns, testifies in song at a Sunday service, but does not quite regain his son's trust. William's father has been out of the picture for years; he runs an auto garage, is friendly when he sees his son occasionally. The mothers are the key players in both families--and we also glimpse an extended family network that lends encouragement and support.

Every time I see ''Hoop Dreams,'' I end up thinking of Arthur's mother Sheila as the film's heroine. During the course of the film her husband leaves and gets into trouble, she suffers chronic back pain, she loses a job and goes on welfare, Arthur is dropped by St. Joseph's--and then, in the film's most astonishing revelation, we discover she has graduated as a nurse's assistant, with the top grades in her class.

There are moments in the film where the camera simply watches, impassively, as we arrive at our own conclusions. One is when Arthur and his parents visit St. Joseph's to get his transcripts, and are told they need to come up with a payment plan. ''Tuition provides 90 percent of our income,'' a school official says. Yes, but the school was not looking for tuition when it recruited Arthur; it was looking for a basketball player, and when it didn't get the player it expected, it should have had the grace to forgive him his debts.

Coach Pingatore and the school were parties to a suit to prevent the film from being released theatrically. The school comes off looking pragmatic and cold, but then ''Hoop Dreams'' reflects a reality that is true all over America, and not just at St. Joseph's. As for Pingatore, I think he comes across pretty well. He has his dream, too, of finding another Isiah Thomas. He wants to win. His record shows he is a good coach. He gives William sound advice, although perhaps he's too eager to see him return after his injury. William tells the filmmakers that the coach thinks sports are all-important, but I covered high school sports for two years and never met a coach who didn't. After saying farewell to William, Pingatore observes ''One goes out the door, and another one comes in the door. That's what it's all about.'' There is sad poetry there.

The movie was produced by the team of director Steve James, cinematographer Peter Gilbert and editor Frederick Marx. They benefitted from a remarkable intersection of opportunity and luck. They could not have known when they started how perfectly the experiences of Agee and Gates would generate the story they ended up telling. Over the years, there have been updates on their progress. William played for Marquette for four years and graduated; he did social work while supporting his wife's college education, then planned to return to law school. Arthur got into Arkansas State, played two years, has done some movie acting, has formed a foundation to help inner city kids get to college. Neither one played for the NBA. (Of the 500,000 kids playing high school basketball in any given year, only 25 do.) But their hoop dreams did come true.

Hoop Dreams | The Nation Stuart Klawans from The Nation, January 3, 2009

…are made to be broken, as Arthur Agee and William Gates learned the hard way over the five years their lives on and off the court were filmed.

Filmed by three white guys in Chicago from a script by God, Hoop Dreams is an epic of American life in the here-and-now. It’s about the near-total divorce in our cities between black society and white; about the grind of poverty, by the day and by the year; about the various ways in which the impoverished respond – with courtliness, optimism, self-control or self-loathing – as they see dollars showered in frivolity all about them.

The hope that some of those dollars might float their way drives the people in Hoop Dreams onward; in the simplest terms, the film is about two young black men from the Chicago ghetto, Arthur Agee and William Gates, who are determined at all costs to become players in the National Basketball Association. We learn, in great detail, what the words “at all costs” might mean to such young men. We also learn the somewhat different meanings of those words to their families and friends, to coaches and teachers, to recruiters and broadcasters and the onlooking throng. As the film takes in this very broad sweep of American society, it also works up portraits of Agee and Gates, portraits that are unexpected–breathtaking–in their intimacy. It’s this combination of the panorama with the close-up that makes Hoop Dreams a landmark film–that, and the valor of the film’s subjects, the persistence of its filmmakers, the cunning of that scriptwriter who was working out of sight.

Some background: In 1986, Steve James, Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert approached a distinguished documentary production company, Kartemquin Films, with a proposal to make a movie about schoolyard basketball players in Chicago. As the trio has since explained – with a laugh – they were envisioning a half-hour program for public television. Then, touring the playgrounds with a freelance scout named Earl Smith, they met Arthur Agee, a 14-year-old grammar-school kid from the Garfield Park neighborhood. Smith wanted to take Arthur to a tryout at St. Joseph, a nearly all-white, Roman Catholic high school in the suburbs. The filmmakers tagged along; and so they found themselves recording how the St. Joseph coach, Gene Pingatore, recruited Arthur, hooking his parents with talk of a college education while dazzling the young player by introducing him on court to St. Joseph’s most famous graduate, Isiah Thomas.

Pingatore was happy to acquire Arthur for the freshman squad; but his dreams of a state championship rested with another 14-year-old, William Gates, whom he had recruited from the Cabrini-Green housing project and put straight onto the varsity squad. With William’s permission and that of his family, the filmmakers started following him as well.

Did they approach any other young basketball players? At a recent press conference at the New York Film Festival, the filmmakers explained that they had not; having started with $2,500 in their pockets, they barely had enough money at any one time to keep filming William and Arthur. But they did keep filming–for four and a half years, all the way through the young players’ high school careers, until some 250 hours of footage had piled up. Once edited to a release length of a little over two and a half hours, Hoop Dreams turned out to have the insane shooting ratio of 100 to 1.

None of this would matter, of course, had James, Marx and Gilbert amassed 250 hours’ worth of garbage. But life turned out to be marvelously accommodating, for the filmmakers if not for the subjects. As Hoop Dreams unfolds, William’s story winds up complementing Arthur’s almost point for point, giving the film a depth and completeness that are all the more thrilling for having been impossible to plan.

Born into a family of stolid, roundfaced people, William sets to work at St. Joseph with a determination that’s as quiet as it is joyless. Coach Pingatore tells him what to do; so does his older brother Curtis, whose own hoop dreams have failed; so, in her way, does the St. Joseph fan who helps pay William’s tuition and gives him a summer job. William, soft-spoken and shy, mostly listens and obeys. He asserts himself with pleasure in two areas only: in the classroom, where he discovers that he can stand up to the white students academically, and at home, where he starts a family of his own by the time he’s in the eleventh grade. It says something about William’s needs and his character that he keeps this family hidden from his coach for as long as possible.

Singled out for success, relentlessly pressured and promoted, William is the type of player who soars on the court. Arthur, by contrast, is the type who scoots. Like his parents, Sheila and Bo, he’s high-strung and rabbity. Like them, he can be vividly demonstrative or else shut out other people entirely; but he will not practice the guarded courtesy that William excels in, nor does he get the first-class treatment that William enjoys.

Having disappointed Coach Pingatore with his erratic play, Arthur somehow never encounters any tuition-paying fans. So, midway through his first semester of tenth grade, the school sends him packing. His mother, suffering from a bad back, has had to give up her job and cannot pay St. Joseph. As for Arthur’s father, he has been laid off from a series of jobs by now and is settling into a period of unemployment, drug use and street crime. It’s not clear in the film whether the drug habit caused the job losses or was caused by them. (It’s not always clear in life, either.) To all of the Agees, though, it seems very clear that St. Joseph would have tolerated the debt had Coach Pingatore thought more highly of Arthur’s skills. Marked a failure at 15 and still reading at the fourth-grade level, Arthur has to plunge at midterm into the metal-detector atmosphere of Chicago’s Marshall High School, joining classmates and basketball players who are not used to having him around.

It would be hard to invent a more grating story of how white America uses and discards young black men; and if Hoop Dreams concluded at this point, it would be a memorably devastating picture (not to mention a much shorter one). But the filmmakers’ virtue, like Arthur’s, was to keep going. More reversals ensue, in Arthur’s fortunes and in William’s, enough of them for a whole novel. Meanwhile, as the subjects’ lives arrange themselves into a pattern of Dreiserian irony, the movie fills up with multitudes of detail. To the average viewer, these particulars may seem repetitive, even downright exhausting; but only a fool would give them up.

It’s important to see, for example, that the Agees and their community organize a ceremony to mark each change in life. Humble in tone, despite the participants’ great care to look their best, these events usually involve a lot of unoccupied folding chairs and invariably feature a gospel singer, who rises above the pings and echoes of the hail’s amplifier to perform a heartfelt solo. One such ceremony, incorporated into a film, would amount to local color. Hoop Dreams gives you three or four, so you can feel the cumulative rhythm in the Agees’ lives of struggle and thanksgiving.

Other elements of Hoop Dreams also have their cumulative effect: the basketball games, with their rising intensity as each season wears on; the physical changes that overtake the subjects, as children grow to maturity and parents lose their teeth; the words–all those orders and counsels, blandishments and threats–that pour in a steady torrent over William and Arthur. Since Arthur has a way of going deaf around authority, a casual viewer might think him unaffected by the yak-yak, for good or ill. But the increasing steadiness of his play leads me to believe he must have paid some attention to his coach at Marshall, Luther Bedford, who as a black man has, shall we say, a different perspective from that of Gene Pingatore. We hear Bedford speak forcefully about the one-time hoop-dreamers who now stand on street corners in Chicago, owning nothing but the empty boast that they once played for Marshall. A vivid picture – though Pingatore seems strangely unfamiliar with it. His talk is all about the disappointment gnawing at Isiah Thomas’s heart to this day, because he never led St. Joseph to a state championship. It does not surprise me that William Gates, after listening to this stuff for four years, said goodbye to Pingatore in one of the coldest scenes ever to be recorded on celluloid.

“I have to play basketball:’ William has said at one point to his girlfriend, Catherine. “It’s my way out. It’s the only way I’m ever getting to college.” Her reply: “Well, I’m going to college, and I don’t play basketball.” By the end of the film, William seems to have learned what she already knew. He will go to college, but he will study as much as play, knowing he needs a life beyond basketball. (What will he study? Communications, he tells Pingatore–“so when you come asking me for a contribution, I’ll know the right way to turn you down?’) Arthur, too, is disillusioned, though still intent on a basketball career, he now pursues his goal with cold eyes.

By this time, Arthur has learned what he amounts to in the sports business, and in the society that business serves. If he’s good–if he’s very, very good–then he’ll be what a coach in Hoop Dreams admits he’s searching for:

“Professional meat.”

Hoop Dreams: Serious Game Criterion essay by Jay Edgar Wideman, May 9, 2005

Hoop Dreams: The Real Thing Criterion essay by Robert Greene March 31, 2015

Hoop Dreams (1994) - The Criterion Collection

Rude Awakenings | Miscellany | Chicago Reader Ben Joravsky, April 20, 1995

"Hoop Dreams" by Murray Sperber - Jump Cut Hollywood Dreams, by Murray Sperber from Jump Cut, March 1996

Hoop Dreams Hoop Realities, by Lee Jones from Jump Cut, March 1996

How 'Hoop Dreams' Became a Reality | Highsnobiety Alec Banks, October 20, 2014

Hoop Dreams: the Struggle and the Triumph | E t h e r i e l ... Grace Wang

Hoop Dreams | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Chuck Bowen

Hoop Dreams: Criterion Collection (2004) | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Ultimate Book of Sports Movies Ray Didinger and Glen Macnow

Cut to the Left | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Bill Stamets, October 27, 1994

Movie Vault [Aaron West]

Steve James, Peter Gilbert and Frederick Marx's 'Hoop Dreams ... Scott Foundas from Documentary magazine

Collector's Corner [Wes Marshall]

ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

CINEMA: False Hoops - TIME Richard Corliss from Time magazine

Review for Hoop Dreams (1994) - IMDb Scott Renshaw

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection, also seen here: Hoop Dreams - Turner Classic Movies

DVD Talk - Criterion Collection Bill Gibron, Criterion Collection

The DVD Journal | Quick Reviews: Hoop Dreams: The Criterion ... Clarence Beaks from DVD Journal, Criterion Collection

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review Criterion Collection

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5] Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Patrick Bromley] - Criterion Collection

Hoop Dreams Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Shannon T. Nutt, Criterion Blu-Ray

DVDizzy.com - Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Luke Bonanno] Criterion Blu-Ray

Hoop Dreams (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Ryan Keefer, Criterion Blu-Ray

Criterion Collection: Hoop Dreams | Blu-ray Review - U.S. ... Jordan M. Smith from Ioncinema, Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) [David Johnson] Criterion Blu-Ray

Hoop Dreams · Film Review Two teens reach for their Hoop ... A.A. Dowd from The Onion A.V. Club

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [5/5]

Cinema Sights [James Ewing]

Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]

Anthony's Film Review [Anthony]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]

AboutFilm.com (Jeff Vorndam) review [A] Top 25 Films of the 90’s

Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber

Documentary-Review.com

Hoop Dreams - A Review - Documentary Films .NET Ronnie D. Lankford Jr.

'Hoop Dreams' (1994) - 30 Best Sports Movies of All Time ... Rolling Stone magazine, August 10, 2015

CriterionForum.org: Hoop Dreams Blu-ray Review film discussion website

Hoop Dreams - Top Documentary Films

An oral history of Hoop Dreams, 20 years after its première ... Jason Guerrasio interviews from The Dissolve, January 15, 2014

Twenty years of Hoop Dreams | Dazed Jason Ward interview from Dazed, October 14, 2014

William Gates still marvels at Hoop Dreams success Christopher Dempsey interview from The Denver Post, April 1, 2015

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman, also seen here: Movie Review: 'Hoop Dreams' | EW.com

Hoop Dreams - Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings ... TV Guide

Variety.com [Todd McCarthy]

My favourite film: Hoop Dreams Christian Bennett from The Guardian, November 11, 2011

Hoop Dreams: where are the main figures now? | Sport ... Gabriel Baumgaertner from The Guardian, February 18, 2015

'Hoop Dreams' - Washington Post Hal Hinson

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Looking Back At Broken 'Dreams' (washingtonpost.com)" Mike Wise from The Washington Post, July 5, 2004

Metro Pulse (Knoxville TN) [Joe Tarr]

Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]

San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]

Movie Reviews : 'Hoop Dreams' Hits Nothing but Net : The ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] October 21, 1994

Siskel & Ebert org - Hoop Dreams (video)

The great American documentary | Roger Ebert's Journal ... Roger Ebert on the 15th anniverary, November 5, 2009

Movie Review - Hoop Dreams - FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW ... Caryn James, also seen here: The New York Times (Caryn James) review and here: Hoop Dreams - The New York Times

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

Hoop Dreams Blu-ray - Steve James - DVDBeaver.com Gary W. Tooze

Hoop Dreams - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hoop Dreams [Book Review] - I Spit Hot Fire book review by Michael Nguyen

Hoop Dreams - Ben Joravsky - Paperback 1996 book by Ben Joravsky, 320 pages

Hoop Dreams by Ben Joravsky — Reviews, Discussion ... 1996 book

Hoop Dreams by Steve James |Steve James, William "Pop ... 1996 book

Watch Hoop Dreams Online | Hulu (2 hours, 51 minutes)

the complete film online. from Joost (2 hours, 51 minutes)

`King' Wheat's Killing Mirrors Change In Gangs ... George Papajohn from The Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1994

St. Joe's Calls Foul On Film - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Janita Poe from The Chicago Tribune, October 6, 1994

`Dreams' Exposes Reality Of A Big-time Basketball Program ... Barry Temkin from The Chicago Tribune, October 7, 1994

"Hoop Dreams: Dreaming the Dreams, Realizing the Realities." Caryn James from The New York Times, October 7, 1994

Lives Forever Changed The costars of Hoop Dreams didn't ... L. John Wertheim from Sports Illustrated, September 20, 1999

Man chased down and slain - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Rick Hepp from The Chicago Tribune, September 13, 2001

"The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made" The New York Times, April 29, 2003

""Hoop Dreams" father slain" Benji Lipsman from The Chicagoist, December 17, 2004

`Hoop Dreams' father slain - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Hal Dardick from the Chicago Tribune, December 17, 2004

"Father Of "Hoop Dreams" Star Slain" Hal Dardick from Black Athlete, December 19, 2004

Looking Back At Broken 'Dreams' (washingtonpost.com) Mike Wise from The Washington Post, July 5, 2004

1 of 2 suspects held in Berwyn killing - tribunedigital ... Angela Rozas from the Chicago Tribune, July 24, 2005

"IDA's Top 25 Documentaries" Listed as #1, by Tom White from Documentary magazine, November/December 2007

One dream, two paths - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Sarah Olkon from the Chicago Tribune, November 14, 2008

"Dreams don't cost a thing" Rob Harrington from Independent Weekly, April 1, 2009

What Ever Happened to the Stars of 'Hoop Dreams'? - U.S. Kathy Shwiff from The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2012

Why 'Hoop Dreams' still matters | SI.com Seth Davis, July 21, 2009

Acquittal in 'Hoop Dreams' case - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Chicago Tribune, January 20, 2010

STEVIE A- 94

USA (140 mi) 2002

This certainly resembles a welfare film – a truly remarkable look at the world of social services in crisis that we have all seen before, some of us have actually worked in it as well, but probably never seen reflected back in our faces quite so memorably as this does. Filmed in Murphysboro and the neighboring Southern Illinois rural community, this is an oddly affecting film, an unbelievably accurate portrayal of a backwoods, trailer park outcast who is one truly flawed and messed up individual, who represents every bit of the welfare system, beaten and abandoned by his mother at an early age, raised by his grandmother until he was 11, spending the rest of his adolescence raped and/or neglected in every single juvenile foster home in Southern Illinois, building a huge rap sheet of petty crime upon his release, spending time at Choate Mental Health Center, and finally, through a horrific trial process revealed as part of this film, sentenced to 10 years for a Class X felony conviction for molesting his 8 year old cousin. My guess is he'd already been well known in the Southern Illinois community even before the making of this film, but the attention to detail here was riveting for me.

If ever the purpose of art was to expose the world to a particular time and place that is unlike their own, this is it, as we come to know this man's world and the few people who populate it, by examining him through the lens of all the people who know him, and we hear all persons concerned point of view, until we are able to see, in a more objective light, the kind of man, and the kind of world, he lives in. Despite the personalized vantage point of the filmmaker, who happened to be the Big Brother of this troubled kid when he was in college, a potentially exploitive attachment that remains troublesome to the viewers throughout the film, this is the kind of film that makes the world seem like a different place afterwards, deep in the heart of Steve Earle country where you hunt rattlesnakes and where the character in question was not afraid to run with the brothers of the Aryan nation. Aghast as it sounds, their appearance in the film is significant, as they are appropriately connected to his life and the choices he faces, and they actually help paint this rather extraordinary portrait of a wretched and miserable soul, the heart of which is provided by the continued hope of his learning-impaired girl friend, who may not even know why she has hope, but in this rather decrepit world, she has it.

STEVIE Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

THE INTERRUPTERS A 96

USA (125 mi) 2011 Trailer Official site

We got over 500 years of prison at this table. That’s a lot of fuckin’ wisdom. — Zale Hoddenbach, former gang member, now a CeaseFire interrupter

First of all, gang violence is not something most people understand or have any insight into, considered a cultural phenomenon unique to neighborhoods infested with gangs, and largely ignored, out of sight, out of mind, by people living in safer neighborhoods. It’s like prison reform, as you never stop to consider the ramifications of undermanned and overcrowded prisons until the day you find yourself incarcerated. But in large urban areas across the country, this is the story that usually leads off the evening news, another senseless death, a child accidentally shot down in a gang shooting crossfire, where it’s rarely the intended victim that’s harmed. The stories are relentless, with few, if any solutions offered, because the perpetrators are outside the reach of the police, family, or church influence, and therefore usually end up dead or in prison at an early age, supposedly immune to the powers of persuasion, or so we thought.

In the aftermath of this 2008 New York Times piece, a thoroughly engaging essay by Alex Kotlowitz that scientifically examines the root causes of Chicago gang violence, offering treatment along the lines of neutralizing a medical epidemic, actually offering a bit of insight into the seemingly impenetrable gang culture for a change, documentary filmmaker Steve James, the heralded director of HOOP DREAMS (1994), enlisted the assistance of Kotlowitz in following on camera some of the individuals mentioned in his article who were providing gang intervention, known as “violence interrupters,” as they hope to stop the neverending cycle of revenge and prevent future shootings before they happen. With the experience of having been in gangs and prison and survived, some for committing murder when they were teenagers, these interrupters already understand the mindset of the upcoming gang youth who shoot before they think, never for a second thinking about their own lives they are throwing away, instead it’s all about getting immediate retribution in a moment of anger, thinking that in some way killing makes things right, at least in their eyes—Death before dishonor. This kind of thinking is what fills the prisons.

This is one of the most heartbreaking and excruciatingly painful subjects of any film you’ll ever see, as the camera searches out families of recently shot teenagers, including their younger brothers and sisters or their grieving parents, focusing on their immediate reaction, oftentimes on their front steps, in their living rooms, or at the funeral and burial services. Unlike the news media that exploit these situations, the violence interrupters routinely put their own lives on the line, trying to diffuse anger by placing themselves in harm’s way, where they have unique insight into just what these kids are feeling and how they intend to resolve the conflict. But violence isn’t inherited at birth, it’s a learned behavior that reflects the world around them, where kids are just following the examples of people they know. The interrupters have an obligation to re-educate them on the spot, using as examples those around them who are dead or imprisoned, where they could become just another statistic or they could have a second chance at life. The interrupters are placed in the precarious position where they are not cops and do not inform on illegal activity, and while they don’t condone gang activity, they’re not in a position to change or even alter that culture, only the hair-trigger response of certain individuals to shoot whoever shot one of them.

The film documents a year in the life of an inner city organization called CeaseFire, founded by an infectious disease physician Gary Slutkin who spent a decade in Africa with the World Health Organization attempting to halt the spread of infectious diseases, returning home to Chicago where he viewed the spread of youth violence as similar to an infectious outbreak. Tio Hardiman, a neighborhood social activist with a prior history of drug and alcohol abuse, invented the interrupters program, attempting to stop the violent outbreaks using individuals who have street credibility not just with gangs, but in the eyes of youth who have few positive role models. Especially because they are so familiar with the effects of violence in their own lives, having somehow survived, now returning back to the streets offering an alternative, this is an extremely volatile and highly personalized approach to mediation, getting in the faces of gangbangers and angry kids who just lost a brother or an innocent nephew, attempting to redirect their hostility, which usually means staying with them, continuing a lengthy dialogue much like negotiating with a hostage taker or a downbeat individual considering suicide, until the inflammatory anger passes, and then following up afterwards, continuing to offer crisis intervention services.

While the city’s interrupters meet weekly with Hardiman to discuss their works in progress, James chooses three to follow, all extremely charismatic individuals with tortured pasts whose impressive turnabout makes them uniquely qualified. Ameena Matthews gives what is perhaps the most wrenching performance of the year, whose no nonsense authenticity, directness under pressure, and personal charm gives her an overwhelming onscreen presence. The daughter of Jeff Fort, iconic founder of the Black P. Stone Nation and imprisoned-for-life leader of the notorious El Rukn street gang, she was a drug using party girl (seen in vintage El Rukn home video) and former gang lieutenant now converted to the Muslim faith. When Derrion Albert, a 16-year-old honor student at Fenger High School was beaten to death walking home from school, all caught on YouTube by a camera phone (Beating Death Of Derrion Albert, 16, Caught On Video), her family asked for Ameena to speak at the funeral service, which is an awe inspiring and unforgettable moment, attempting to publicly hold those responsible accountable for their actions. But her easy, down-to-earth manner and accessibility in the lives of wayward teens is exemplary, if not heroic.

Ricardo “Cobe” Williams is a big man with a similar purpose, a kid who went haywire when his father was beaten to death by a baseball bat, spending his youth in and out of prison until he also found religion, where he seems determined to offer a path of redemption for others that he never experienced himself. Another easy going guy, whose wife says is really “nerdy,” where according to Hardiman, among his many talents is knowing when to walk away in dicey situations. This is a guy so dedicated that he continued going to work even after the funds dried up and he was laid off for a period, because like a CIA undercover operative in the field, once you make a promise to be there in saving people’s lives, people in high risk situations where their lives may be in danger, you have a commitment to be there. One of the most riveting scenes in the film is Cobe bringing a young 19-year old armed offender known as Li’l Mikey, a youth who spent nearly 3 years in prison, back to the scene of the crime where he held up a barber shop. This kind of theater you can’t invent, as it’s among the most dramatically powerful and intensely personal moments of the film. Mikey is so committed to finding that redemptive path that Hardiman actually considers him as their first teen interrupter.

Eddie Bocanegra shot a killed another kid when he was 17. Now, like the other two, he’s on a spiritual mission to make up for it, talking to disaffected youth, offering an art class for those kids who have been affected by violence, where one 11-year old girl describes the experience of her brother getting shot in the head and dying in her arms. Because of the tender age of many of these kids, he’s more like a big brother offering them positive alternatives or a shoulder to cry on, where their heartfelt comments are remarkably unfiltered. One of the more poignant moments is joining the family at the cemetery site, where they gather every single day, offering a silent communion for their loss. While Eddie is able to console the young girl, the figure of her father sitting there in silence every day is a haunting and tragic sight.

For 25 years murder has been the leading cause of death among black men between the ages of 15 and 34, while more than 11% of black males age 25 to 34 are incarcerated, while black women are incarcerated at nearly 4 times the rate of white women and more than twice the rate of Hispanic women. Nothing seems to put a dent in these numbers despite neighborhood marches, media speeches, church activism, a Mayor’s attempt to ban handguns (which was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court), and the police continually asking for crime witnesses to step forward. While it’s impossible to measure the results, CeaseFire claims they show a 40 – 60% reduction in shootings in six targeted neighborhoods, which would include West Garfield Park, Englewood, Maywood, Logan Square, Roseland, and Rogers Park, with as much as a 67% reduction in others. Despite these claims, the interventionist program has continued to face budget cuts, where 50 or 60 interrupters were reduced to less than 20, where the elected politicians seem as far removed from this problem as those living in the isolation of the rural plain states. As profoundly relevant as any documentary seen in the past 5 years, there’s a soulful, organ drenched rendition of “Don’t Give Up on Me” by Solomon Burke that plays over the end credits, an ominous reminder of just how hard it is to remain committed to a lifelong project fraught with this degree of intense tragedy and pain.

THE INTERRUPTERS | siskelfilmcenter.org Barbara Scharres

In this stirring and powerfully insightful year-long journey through Chicago’s inner city, Oscar-nominated director Steve James (HOOP DREAMS), in collaboration with author Alex Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here), follows three courageous “violence interrupters” working for the innovative organization CeaseFire, as they patrol the city’s meanest streets to defuse scenarios of heart-stopping volatility. Interrupters, including dynamo Ameena Matthews, daughter of notorious gang leader Jeff Fort, are seen to be the only force standing between a killer and his victim when gang vengeance threatens. With unprecedented access, and with the specter of Derrion Albert’s horrific death hanging over the community, James captures the increasingly urgent one-on-one encounters where lives hang in the balance. HDCAM video

The Interrupters Tom Huddleston from Time Out London

Stories of life on the mean streets of America’s inner cities have become far too familiar: does the world really need another movie, even a well-meaning documentary like ‘The Interrupters’, telling us how tough it is on the block? Well, as it turns out, yes. ‘Hoop Dreams’ director Steve James isn’t interested in bemoaning gang culture or pointing fingers at the cops – his film simply documents the daily grind of a group of ‘interrupters’, or conflict resolution experts, from Chicago’s CeaseFire initiative.

Most of James’s subjects are ex-bangers themselves, even articulate activist Ameena, the undoubted star of the piece, a woman so intensely self-possessed she can stand in the midst of a group of six-foot teenage thugs and still look like the toughest person in the room. ‘The Interrupters’ lacks the crowd-pleasing sports movie arc that fired ‘Hoop Dreams’ – this is, by necessity, a more fractured, disparate piece of work – but the political and emotional power behind it is impossible to ignore.

The Interrupters : The New Yorker Richard Brody (capsule review)

Steve James’s documentary, based on an article by Alex Kotlowitz (who also co-produced), follows members of CeaseFire, a Chicago-based conflict-mediation group, over the course of a year of their attempts to defuse potentially violent situations. Most of the group’s activists, as seen in the film, were once criminals themselves, which, together with their roots in the community, gains them the respect of the people they advise, cajole, dissuade, and mentor. James centers the film on a few of these “interrupters” and a handful of young people in need of guidance, and, with his insistent yet compassionate camerawork, gathers poignant, troubling stories. Among the recurring themes are the nefarious influence of gangs, the allure of easy money, the emotional toll of families broken by violence and drugs, and the need for jobs—and the hard-won wisdom the elders convey also includes their frequent mention of incarceration as the ultimate dissuader. Law enforcement comes across as awkward and misguided, yet it looms, ubiquitous and unexamined, in the film’s margins. James’s approach is not analytical but emotional; his depiction of people bearing inextinguishable pain is empathetic and powerful, and the struggle toward stability of one profound and troubled soul (a thirty-two-year-old man who has spent fifteen years in jail) has a Dostoyevskian intensity.

The Wooden Kimono [Joe Gastineau]

Next up was a film I was hugely excited about, Steve James' The Interrupters. James' Hoop Dreams is one of the best films I've ever seen, so this certainly had a lot to live up to. Much like Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters takes a sobering look at life in Chicago's inner city, where the murder rate is reaching epidemic proportions. The titular Interrupters are the members of Ceasefire, an organization made up of former crime kingpins and gangbangers, intent on mediating disputes between warring factions to avoid further bloodshed. Amongst their number are Ameena, daughter of a Chicago's 2nd biggest gangster since Al Capone, who has the biggest balls of any human being I've ever seen. She thinks nothing of wading into a throng of hoods about to kick off and reducing them all to submissive silence using nought but her powerful oratory. Other members of the Ceasefire team include Cobe, who struggles to keep hot-headed Flamo from retaliating in the face of police harassment and Eddie, a soft spoken convicted murderer who uses art to educate youngsters and also try to find a little redemption for himself.

It's a hugely powerful work, focussing as it does on flawed but inspirational individuals trying to make a real difference. It never once feels patronizing or voyeuristic and stays fixed on getting beneath the surface of the Ceasefire team and those they are most desperately trying to reach. Also, if I see a funnier introduction to a character this year than when we meet the furious dealer Flamo, I'll be god damned. Touching and tragic, The Interrupters is essential viewing.

exclaim! [Allan Tong]

They were once gang-bangers. They were teenagers when they gunned down enemies on the streets of inner city Chicago, often over a careless word or the wrong look. They served time and grew up behind bars. Now, they return to their old neighbourhoods to stop the bloody vendettas that poison young lives and perpetuate the cycle of violence.

Steve James (who directed the Oscar-nominated Hoop Dreams) follows three Violence Interruptors over the course of a year as they negotiate with headstrong young men and women to lay their guns down and stop the bloodshed. They don't hold back and speak in hard, frank terms.

Ammena, Cobe and Eddie grew up in a spiral of drugs, sexual abuse and poverty. The program they work for, CeaseFire, views inner city violence as a virus, in that the disease must be snuffed out at the source. They literally stop fights on the street, knock on the doors of those they counsel and at the darkest moments, attend funerals. They risk their lives, as we see in one tearful scene where an Interruptor lies in a hospital bed after getting shot in the back.

Though running at 142 minutes, The Interrupters is one lean, unapologetic film — there isn't a wasted frame. It's gritty and harsh, but also inspiring. There's nothing sentimental here — no voiceover to reveal someone's inner feelings. It's all on screen. This is one of the best films of this festival.

The Interrupters | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

Unlike many other socially engaged documentaries, the films of Steve James (Hoop Dreams) are more descriptive than prescriptive, exposing deep, intractable problems that may not have solutions, in spite of the best efforts of those concerned. James’ heartbreaking 2002 documentary Stevie relayed his own challenges and shortcomings as a Big Brother to a violent, erratic young man in rural Illinois. Produced in collaboration with Alex Kotlowitz, a journalist who wrote a 2008 New York Times piece on the effort to curb violence in Chicago, James’ powerful new film The Interrupters offers the lessons of Stevie writ large, as local activists commit, with varied results, to halting a tragic epidemic. It’s a job fraught with volatility and peril, taken with the understanding that some cases may ultimately end in failure.

Filmed over the course of a year that saw more killings on the streets of Chicago than among American soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Interrupters embeds with CeaseFire, an organization devoted to violence prevention. Founded by Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist who likens the violence to the spread of infectious diseases, CeaseFire employs mediators whose credibility often lies in the tragic lessons of their own criminal histories. James follows three of them: Ameena Matthews, the daughter of notorious gang leader Jeff Fort, who’s shown counseling a 19-year-old girl with immense reserves of anger; Cobe Williams, whose disarming charisma helps tame a young parolee who served an armed-robbery stint and a squatter who constantly threatens to use the pistol tucked in his jeans; and Eddie Bocanegra, a former Latino gang member trying to atone for a murder he committed at age 17. 

The Interrupters was shot at a time when violence in Chicago became national news, spurred on by the case of Derrion Albert, a 16-year-old honor student whose death in a South Side mêlée was captured on videotape. Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan both swung by the city for press conferences, and there was talk of National Guardsmen being deployed in “war zones” like Englewood and Roseland. But after the media spotlight fades, CeaseFire remains present to do the tricky work of putting itself in the middle of conflicts, which takes enormous courage on several fronts simultaneously. CeaseFire members aren’t in the business of stopping criminal activity or serving as informants, which occasionally puts the group at odds with the police, and its mediators routinely throw themselves into dangerous situations where they stand between warring parties.

James’ camera is present for moments of extraordinary tension: A contrite ex-con apologizing to the family he terrorized in a barbershop robbery; a street fight that escalates with a butcher knife and a hunk of concrete; a pair of brothers so hostile that they come to blows whenever they see each other. Witnessing outreach workers intervening in these situations is inspiring enough, but their subtlety and nuance in neutralizing people of different backgrounds and temperaments is especially impressive. Given such a wealth of material, James has trouble wrangling it all: Different cuts have been screened at 164 minutes and 145 minutes, and the current 125-minute version feels rushed, with a uncharacteristically pat postscript. If there’s one lesson to be learned from violence interrupters, it’s that their work is never done.

The Interrupters reviewed: This documentary on Chicago gang violence is the most necessary film of the year. Dana Stevens from Slate

The Interrupters (The Cinema Guild), a documentary about an initiative to stop urban violence in Chicago, may be the most necessary film you'll see this year. But if you go to the movies in search of emotion rather than edification, don't let that word necessary deter you, because this is also one of the most engaging films you'll see this year, full of vibrant, complex real-life characters whose troubles and joys will stay with you long after the movie's done. The "violence interrupters" are a group of ex-convicts and former gang members who've joined CeaseFire, an organization with a unique approach to quelling youth violence. Rather than lecturing in schools or running drop-in centers, they get out on the street, find kids in situations of potential danger (on the South Side of Chicago, they're in no short supply), and do what it takes to resolve conflict on the spot, whether that involves wresting a chunk of concrete out of the hands of an angry teenager or taking a disaffected 19-year-old dropout to get her first-ever manicure.

Filmed over the course of a year—we watch the seasons progress in four separate chapters—The Interrupters does a magnificent job of establishing what's at stake for the workers at CeaseFire: Consumed with regret over the sins of their youth (which, in the case of at least one, included murder), they will stop at nothing to keep kids in their community from making the same mistakes.

As in his classic 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, director Steve James (collaborating with Chicago journalist Alex Kotlowitz), establishes an immediate and powerful sense of intimacy with his subjects. The interrupters aren't holier-than-thou do-gooders, just struggling, suffering, astonishingly brave people. Ameena Matthews, the daughter of a legendary Chicago gang leader who's now in jail for life, spent her youth living the high life as a drug-running party girl; she's now a married mother, a convert to Islam, and one of CeaseFire's star interrupters. In the course of her work with neighborhood kids, she develops an intense relationship with the aptly named Caprysha, a troubled girl who swings rapidly from puppylike devotion to sullen withdrawal.

Cobe Williams, a former gangbanger who's now a suburban family man (his wife describes him dryly as "a very, very nerdy person"), is shown intervening in several different cases, most notably that of Flamo, a volatile loner whose resistance to being helped at times places Cobe in physical danger. And Eddie Bocanegra, a Latino ex-con with a monklike devotion to his work, teaches a painting class to young children who live in fear of random violence, then counsels a depressed girl who watched her older brother die in her arms.

Some scenes are difficult to watch; I wasn't the only one on my row occasionally shielding my eyes as if from a horror film. A group of women runs down a city block seeking revenge for some slight done to their brother, one of them wielding a kitchen knife, as children age 4 or 5 tag along after. At a teenager's funeral, his friends pose for pictures next to the open casket, taking turns playing the role of the corpse. On a wall mural with the names of local kids who've lost their lives to violence, a graffiti scrawl reads "I am next."

Just when you're about to despair, though, The Interrupters offers glimpses of the hope that must be what keeps the interrupters plugging away at their exhausting work. Li'l Mikey, a young man who held up a barbershop two years ago, agrees to return to the shop with Cobe to apologize to everyone who was there that day. His reconciliation with a woman whose children are still traumatized by the memory is harrowing and uplifting at once. The movie's epilogue, in which we follow up with each case after the year is over, contains a few joyful surprises—not happy endings, perhaps, but at least the prevention of endings that could have been so much worse.

“Blocking the Transmission of Violence” New York Times Magazine, Alex Kotlowitz Alex Kotlowitz from The New York Times, May 4, 2008, also seen here: Blocking the Transmission of Violence - Alex Kotlowitz - Gang ...

Meet Chicago's Interrupters… Andrew Anthony from The Guardian, August 6, 2011

Slant Magazine [Lauren Wissot]

Pick of the week: Real-life crime drama "The Interrupters" - Andrew ... Andrew O’Hehir from Salon

Movie Review: The Interrupters | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the month: The Interrupters (2011) Michael Brooke, September 2011

In Theaters: "The Interrupters" - Film Writings by Jason Bailey Fourth Row Center

The Film Pilgrim [Frances Taylor]

indieWire [Eric Kohn] also seen here: Sundance Review | Fighting Gang Violence in Steve James’s “The Interrupters”

Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]

Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]

The Interrupters: Heroes in an Urban War Zone - TIME - Time Magazine Richard Corliss

The House Next Door [Christopher Ellis Gray]

Gordon and the Whale [Brian Kelley]

New Statesman [Ryan Gilbey]

Cinespect [B.L. Hazelwood]

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

The Interrupters: Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz document CeaseFire Deanna Isaacs from The Chicago Reader

Cinematical [Christopher Campbell]

ReelTalk [Donald Levit]

Moving Pictures Magazine [Jeremy Mathews]

The Interrupters — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Box Office Magazine Vadim Rizov

The Interrupters | Review | Screen - Screen International Tim Grierson

Best For Film Lara Choksey

Little White Lies Magazine [Matt Bochenski]

The Interrupters - 2011 - Movie Review - Documentaries - About.com Jennifer Merin

City Pages [Ira Brooker]

The Interrupters Ed Koziarski from The Chicago Reader

'Interrupters' Take On Chicago's Youth Violence NPR interviews with various cast and crew, June 29, 2011

Interview: Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz Interview Elise Nakhnikian interview from Slant, July 28, 2011

Gang 'Interrupters' Fight Chicago's Cycle Of Violence : NPR NPR interviews with some of the film’s participants , August 1, 2011

'The Interrupters'—Stopping Violence Before It Spreads in Inner-City ... Ari Berman interviews the fimmakers from The Nation, August 2, 2011

'The Interrupters' Look to Stop Inner-City Violence Nick Anderson interviews the writer and director from The Wall Strreet Journal, August 3, 2011

A Conversation with Writer Alex Kotlowitz of The Interrupters Interview from The Chicagoist, August 9, 2011

The Interrupters: Sundance Review - The Hollywood Reporter John DeFore

Variety [Peter Debruge]

The Interrupters and Elite Force 2 – city violence spreads to the big screen Danny Leigh from The Guardian, August 12, 2011

The Interrupters – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

The Interrupters – review | Film | The Observer Philip French from The Observer, also seen here: The Interrupters – review

The Interrupters (15) - Reviews, Films - The Independent Anthony Quinn

The Miami Herald [Rene Rodriguez]

The Interrupters - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

Letters: Blocking the Transmission of Violence Letters to the Editor from The New York Times, May 18, 2008

“Upending Twisted Norms” New York Times, Bob Herbert Op/Ed Piece, May 10, 2010

Murder of Derrion Albert - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"4 Teenagers Charged in Youth’s Beating Death" Emma Graves Fitzsimmons from The New York Times, September 28, 2009

Final sentencing in Fenger beating case Jason Meisner from The Chicago Tribune, August 29, 2011

Last suspect in beating death of Derrion Albert gets 32 years Don Babwin from The Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 2011

Daily Journal - Violence 'interrupter' says police outreach better after ... The Daily Journal, August 29, 2011

Chaos Theory Part I Josh Gryniewicz from CeaseFire, October 28, 2010

Chaos Theory Part II Josh Gryniewicz from CeaseFire, November 3, 2010

Chaos Theory Part III Josh Gryniewicz from CeaseFire, November 9, 2010

“Homicide that Didn’t Happen” Chicago Tribune, Dr. Gary Slutkin February 9, 2011

“Chicago’s CeaseFire Program Targets Poor Youth in Dangerous Urban Neighborhoods” The Huffington Post, March 26, 2011

Evaluation of CeaseFire U.S. Department of Justice Study

Copy of the full report CeaseFire Evaluation Report

Jeff Fort - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Black P. Stones - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Moorish Science Temple of America - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blackstone Rangers/ Black P. Stone Nation/El Rukns (c. 1957--c ... Black Past

FBI — El Rukns FBI Records

El Rukn - Terrorist Organization Profile - START - National ...

The Chicago Crime Scenes Project: El Rukn Leader Jeff Fort's Home

The Chicago Crime Scenes Project: El Rukn "Temple"

El Rukns Indicted In Libya Scheme - Chicago Tribune Maurice Possley and William B. Crawford Jr. from The Chicago Tribune, October 31, 1986

Jury Convicts 10 Members of Notorious Gang - New York Times August 11, 1991

El Rukns had early terror ties Carlos Sadovi from The Chicago Sun-Times, June 11, 2001

New book on the Black P. Stone Nation - Chicago Tribune Courtney Crowder interview with Natalie Y. Moore, the author of the new book, The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang

Qaddafi: Ties to the El Rukns Chicago Gang Natalie Y. Moore from The Root, March 16, 2011

LIFE ITSELF A- 93

USA (115 mi) 2014 Official site

Gatsby’s house was still empty when I left — the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had made a story about it all his own. I didn’t want to hear it and I avoided him when I got off the train.

I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.

On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby finale, 1925, Ebert’s favorite literary passage

Arguably the most powerful documentary seen so far this year, as it’s like witnessing the passing of a close personal friend, adapted from Ebert’s 2011 autobiographical memoirs, written five years after thyroid cancer left him unable to speak, eat, or drink, but he “began to replace what I lost with what I remembered,” making a resurgence on the Internet with his interactive Ebert blog where he only became more prolific and influential as a writer, where his legacy is contained on his revamped website (www.rogerebert.com) that currently receives 110 million visits per year, where there are some 70 writers offering diverse opinions and views carrying on his name. The only film critic with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and for almost 30 years he was the only film critic to ever win the Pulitzer Prize back in 1975 for outstanding criticism. Ebert was also an honorary member of the Director’s Guild of America, working as the film critic for The Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013, his reviews were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and Canada. Ebert also appeared on television for four decades, including twenty-three years as cohost of Siskel & Ebert & the Movies (1986–99), becoming the most popular and best known film critic of our time, eventually accepted as a familiar household name. While the sadness of his death was a tragic loss, much of it expressed in an outpouring of affirmation at his public funeral service (Roger Ebert), much of this film captures behind-the-scenes glimpses of Roger and his wife Chaz while he was undergoing extensive rehabilitation treatment in the hospital, which includes the dramatic mood swings that come with the territory of reaching the end stage of one’s life, where this film doesn’t sugar coat it, showing the depths of exasperation and depression, where despite his overall positive attitude, there were times when he preferred to end it. This is no movie version of death, but brings the viewer into the wrenching personal moments when he was simply overcome by the devastation of his illness. As he is unable to speak, Chaz acts as the narrator of his thoughts, reading personal notes that he writes or recounting his innermost feelings that he shared. His death serves as the backdrop to what is otherwise an exposé of his life.

Born as a middle class kid from Urbana, a small Midwestern town in central Illinois, his father was an electrician and his mother a housewife, where they subscribed to three newspapers to accommodate Roger’s voracious interest. While he hoped he could follow in the Kennedy’s footsteps to Harvard, his working class family could only afford the nearby University of Illinois where he became the editor of the school newspaper, spending late evening hours setting the type press, a notable experience to others who remember Roger as he already knew how to write in a distinctively mature style, as evidenced by an article he wrote after a Birmingham church bombing (16th Street Baptist Church bombing) killed four young black girls on September 15, 1963, beginning with a quote from Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. who told then white separatist Alabama Governor George Wallace “The blood of four little children…is on your hands.” At only 21, Ebert took issue with King’s comments, suggesting in The Daily Illini that the blood was on the hands of not just one man, but many, as legislated white separatism must pass through the minds and thoughts of hundreds, then voted upon by hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions more voters before it is enacted into law, enforced by still more police, sheriffs, district attorneys, juries, and ultimately judges who sit upon the wisdom of such racially divisive practices. While he moved to Chicago as a doctoral student in graduate school at the University of Chicago, the economic reality meant he also needed money, so while he intended to be a freelance reporter with the Chicago Sun-Times while still attending classes, he was actually hired as a reporter and feature writer. In less than a year, without asking for the position and without so much as an interview he was offered the job as full-time movie critic when Eleanor Keane left the paper in April 1967, becoming the youngest film critic in the nation at age 24, a job he never relinquished until his death. Enriched by old black and white archival photographs, narrated by a few old clips of Ebert himself, but mostly voice actor Stephen Stanton as Ebert, there are plenty of recollections from friends, colleagues, and drinking buddies, recounting tales from Ebert’s drinking days at O’Rourke’s Pub near Old Town where a bartender recalls, “Back in the old days, Roger had the worst taste in women of probably any man I’ve ever known. They were either gold diggers, opportunists, or psychos.”

Improbably, or perhaps not, Roger developed a close association with schlock sexploitation maestro Russ Meyer, writing the screenplay for the cult film BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970), which captured the thoughts of young director Martin Scorsese, who started amusingly with the title, claiming they meant it when they say it goes “Beyond…Far Beyond,” always remembering the editing sequence when the girl has sex in a luxury Bentley car, which edits the grill of the Bentley into the middle of the sex act. Scorsese recalls the interest a young Ebert took in one of his earliest efforts, WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR (1967), seen when it was entitled I CALL FIRST, already recognizing the talent behind the camera, which he recalls in his book here, Scorsese by Ebert by Roger Ebert, an excerpt. In one of the lowest periods of Scorsese’s life in the early 80’s, after several failed marriages, he acknowledges he was actually contemplating suicide, but before he had the chance to act, he received an invite from Siskel & Ebert to join them in a retrospective panel discussion about his works at the Toronto Film Festival, something he never forgot, as it literally saved his life. Scorsese’s comments were particularly heartfelt, even as Ebert lambasted his film THE COLOR OF MONEY (1986), which struck a nerve, but he insisted that even when writing a negative review, Ebert never lost his professionalism or went for the juggler, a trait that describes his innate humaneness. Similarly, Errol Morris attributes much of his success to Ebert’s enthralling endorsement of his first documentary film GATES OF HEAVEN (1978), a small film about pet cemeteries that Roger championed throughout his life. The same could be said about Werner Herzog, who calls Ebert a “soldier of cinema, a wounded comrade,” but it is Morris who acknowledges, “Here I had someone writing about my work who was a true enthusiast. His enthusiasm has kept me going over the years, and the memory of his enthusiasm will keep me going for as long as I make movies.” The director’s own association with Ebert dates back to 1994 when Siskel & Ebert used their television show as a platform to endorse his unheralded urban basketball documentary HOOP DREAMS (1994) as one of the best films of the year, where both listed it as their #1 Best Film. All of this attests not only to his influence, but his personal generosity, reflected by countless others who recall how Ebert took the time to acknowledge their work when nobody else was, like Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF SHEEP (1979) or Gregory Nava’s EL NORTE (1983), where kindness is a recognizable human attribute one never forgets.

After winning the Pulitzer Prize, The Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee tried to lure him away with a big-money offer, but Ebert continually refused, replying, “I’m not gonna learn new streets.” Much is made of Ebert’s professional legacy, specifically the thumbs up/thumbs down shorthand of film criticism, a technique that film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum dismisses, claiming it is not film criticism, which Ebert is not ashamed to acknowledge, as television time restraints demand a simplistic rating system, a short cut style of divulging sufficient information for viewers to make an intelligent choice. But other serious cinephiles were equally appalled by the system, including this erudite March/April 1990 Film Comment attack by Richard Corliss, All Thumbs: Or, Is There a Future for Film Criticism? that attacks the dumbing down, sound bite mentality of movie reviews as little more than television marketing. In the next edition of the magazine, Ebert's reply may be as meticulously detailed, lengthy, and well-argued as the original piece, delivering a strong defense for the show. This perfectly illustrates Ebert’s clear-headedness, as according to newspaper colleagues and friends, Ebert never spent more than a half hour writing a review, that he comes from a newspaper background where the secret is outlining the ideas in your head before you start to write. Ebert had the ability to write, and speak, in whole paragraphs while retaining the ability to remain clear and concise, displaying old-fashioned Midwestern logic and common sense. Even when writing about complex artists like Bergman, Dreyer, or Bresson, Ebert never wrote above the heads of the audience by describing often incomprehensible film theory (which he was known to do in classrooms, spending hours dissecting movies shot by shot), always aware that he was writing for the widest possible readership. When paired with philosophy major and Yale graduate Gene Siskel, a man who never met one of his own opinions he didn’t prefer, Ebert was often stunned by his inability to convince his partner of the error of his thinking, where both stubbornly refused to acquiesce to the other, which provided the fireworks for the show. As someone ingeniously acknowledged, “Gene was a rogue planet in Roger’s solar system.” Of course there are film clips from the show, including inflammatory shouting matches objecting about the incredibly poor taste of their partner, over BENJI THE HUNTED (1987), of all films, where Ebert strains to yell over another Siskel snide remark, “I disagree particularly about the part you like!” But the worst behavior occurs during a series of outtakes where both are seen continually trading personal insults, captured on camera as they dutifully flub line after line of promo shots, eventually walking off the set in a huff. Eventually, perhaps because of the amount of time they spent in such close quarters together, they grew a special affection for one another.

Among the many surprises of the film is not about Roger, but Gene Siskel, former playboy, who was part of Hugh Hefner’s inner circle of the early 70’s before he became a movie critic, seen jet setting around the country with a bevy of beautiful models on the Playboy private jet. And who would have guessed that among Roger’s favorite literary works was a special affection for The Great Gatsby, often asking his lifelong friend Bill Nack to recite the final lines in the book from memory, which he proudly does onscreen, as he has done hundreds of times, where the overriding hope and optimism of a new and better world ahead seems to have been Roger’s guiding light. At the beginning of the film he offers his description of cinema as “a machine that generates empathy,” which has an almost science-fiction feel to it, suggesting there is a healing power in cinema, which may have transformed his life. He wasn’t particularly proud of his reckless behavior on display during the 70’s while working for The Chicago Sun-Times, describing himself as “tactless, egotistical, merciless, and a showboat,” where he was also a preeminent storyteller that could hold a room, a womanizer, and an alcoholic, eventually joining Alcoholics Anonymous, where he remained sober since 1979. In his book, Ebert claims Ann Landers introduced him to his eventual wife Chaz at a restaurant in Chicago, but the film tells another story, that he met the love of his life at age 50 in an A.A. meeting. A former chair of the Black Student Union at her college, and perhaps the least likely person to choose a white man for a husband, Chaz steadfastly remains at Roger’s side throughout his most difficult ordeals, often understanding the underlying anguish and despair even as Roger tends to remain optimistic. Despite the graphically uncomfortable moments where Roger has to continually return to the rehab hospital five times, each time thinking it would be his last, that it would lead him on the road to recovery, where he was initially informed, “They got it all. Every last speck,” only to realize the cancer had continued to spread elsewhere. This stream of medical news is exhausting and demoralizing, none of which is hidden from view, where among Roger’s more acute observations was his wife’s inextinguishable support, “To visit a hospital is not pleasant. To do it hundreds of times is heroic.” In a startling revelation, Chaz describes the final moment when they finally decide to let go, easily the most heartbreaking moment in the entire film, where death has rarely felt more genuine. Yet it is this heartfelt intimacy that carries us through this film that helps us understand the power of love, where it nearly has the capacity to raise the dead, perhaps best expressed by Kenneth Turan from The Los Angeles Times:

If you had asked me ahead of time what I would have found most interesting about Life Itself, I would have guessed that it would be the parts I knew least about, specifically Roger’s harum-scarum days as a young film critic about town in high-spirited Chicago. Paradoxically, the opposite was true, (where perhaps most surprising are) the sections that enlarged my understanding of Roger’s relationship with his remarkable wife, Chaz, particularly as their vibrant marriage took on the cataclysmic series of illnesses that marked the final decade of Roger’s life. The cascading surgeries that Roger went through would have toppled a less indomitable man, and it was difficult for me to watch the scenes that show Roger in obvious discomfort and pain. But having a behind-the-scenes look at the truth of Roger’s remark that Chaz’s love was ‘like a wind pushing me back from the grave’ genuinely brought tears to my eyes.

Roger loves Chaz | Roger Ebert's Journal | Roger Ebert July 17, 2012, a selection from Life Itself: A Memoir:

The greatest pleasure came from annual trips we made with our grandchildren Raven, Emil and Taylor, and their parents Sonia and Mark. Josibiah and his son Joseph came on one of those trips, where we made our way from Budapest to Prague, Vienna and Venice. We went with the Evans family to Hawaii, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Venice, and Stockholm. We walked the ancient pathway from Cambridge to Grantchester. Emil announced that for him there was no such thing as getting up too early, and every morning the two of us would meet in a hotel lobby and go out for long walks together. I took my camera. One morning in Budapest he asked me to take a photo of two people walking ahead of us and holding hands.

“Why?”

“Because they look happy.”

Ramin Setoodeh 5 of the Film’s Most Surprising Moments, from Variety at Sundance, January 19, 2014

Roger Ebert knew that he wouldn’t live to see “Life Itself,” the documentary based on his 2011 memoir. In one of the most touching scenes of the riveting film by director Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”), Ebert learns that his cancer has metastasized to his spine. The doctors estimate he only has six to 16 months to live, although he doesn’t make it that long. Ebert died in April 2013 at 70.

“It is likely I will have passed when the film is ready,” Ebert calmly predicts on-camera.

At the Sunday premiere of “Life Itself,” James broke into tears as he introduced his film, which will air on CNN. The next two hours were a sobfest, as most of the audience cried — and often laughed, too. When the credits rolled, Ebert’s wife Chaz took the stage joined by Marlene Iglitzen, the wife of Ebert’s longtime movie sparring partner Gene Siskel.

Chaz talked about how people called her a saint for taking care of Roger as his health failed after a thyroid cancer diagnosis in 2002. “What they didn’t know is how much my heart grew from having been with him for all those years, for loving him, for taking care of him, for having him take care of me,” Chaz said. During the Q&A, an audience member asked what Ebert would have thought of “Life Itself.” Chaz knew that “he would say two thumbs up.”

The stirring documentary, which was shot during what would be the last five months of Ebert’s life, includes interviews with Ebert’s director friends Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, as well as critics A.O. Scott and Richard Corliss. Here are five of the film’s most surprising moments.

1. Ebert never got to say good-bye to Gene Siskel. In the documentary, Marlene talks about how Gene hid his brain cancer diagnosis in 1998, out of fear that Disney would replace him on ABC’s “Siskel & Ebert.” Ebert had planned to visit Gene at the hospital, but he passed two days before the visit. Chaz said that Ebert was so heartbroken, he was determined to share the details of his own health after he got sick.

2. Ebert signed “a do not resuscitate.” In the final days of his life, he sent James emails like “i’m fading” and “i can’t.” He said his hands were so swollen, he wasn’t able to use a computer. He secretly signed a DNR at the hospital without telling Chaz, which she learned about on the day of his death. In the film, she described the moment of his passing as “a wind of peace” and “I knew it was time to accept it.”

3. Ebert met Chaz at Alcoholics Anonymous. In his memoir, Ebert claims to have first talked to her at a Chicago restaurant, after an introduction by Ann Landers. In the film, Chaz says she met Roger at AA, a fact that she had never publicly revealed. And until he started dating her, Ebert had a wild bachelor streak–according to one pal, he used to court “gold diggers, opportunists and psychos.” Another buddy recalls that Roger introduced him to a prostitute he was seeing.

4. Laura Dern once gave Ebert a present that belonged to Marilyn Monroe. After Ebert presented Dern with a Sundance tribute, Dern sent him a heartfelt letter with a special memento. It was a puzzle that Lee Strasberg had given her, a gift from Alfred Hitchcock to Marilyn Monroe. Ebert later gave the puzzle to director Ramin Bahrani, with the instructions that one day, “You have to give it to someone else who deserves it.”

5. Ebert loved “The Great Gatsby.”It was his favorite book. He had his journalist friend Bill Nack recite the final lines back to him hundreds of times. Here it is, Roger: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Ebert compiled "best of the year" movie lists beginning in 1967, thereby helping provide an overview of his critical preferences. His top choices were:

1967: Bonnie and Clyde 1968: The Battle of Algiers 1969: Z 1970: Five Easy Pieces 1971: The Last Picture Show 1972: The Godfather 1973: Cries and Whispers 1974: Scenes from a Marriage 1975: Nashville 1976: Small Change 1977: 3 Women 1978: An Unmarried Woman 1979: Apocalypse Now 1980: The Black Stallion 1981: My Dinner with Andre 1982: Sophie's Choice

1983: The Right Stuff 1984: Amadeus 1985: The Color Purple 1986: Platoon 1987: House of Games 1988: Mississippi Burning 1989: Do the Right Thing 1990: Goodfellas 1991: JFK 1992: Malcolm X 1993: Schindler's List 1994: Hoop Dreams 1995: Leaving Las Vegas 1996: Fargo 1997: Eve's Bayou 1998: Dark City

1999: Being John Malkovich 2000: Almost Famous 2001: Monster's Ball 2002: Minority Report 2003: Monster 2004: Million Dollar Baby 2005: Crash 2006: Pan's Labyrinth 2007: Juno 2008: Synecdoche, New York 2009: The Hurt Locker 2010: The Social Network 2011: A Separation 2012: Argo

Roger Ebert Documentary Life Itself Is a Poignant ... - Vulture David Edelstein

Steve James’s Roger Ebert documentary, Life Itself, is a tender portrait of the late film critic, who managed to put an apparently Brobdingnagian ego to benevolent, ultimately life-affirming ends. James—whose Hoop Dreams was the beneficiary of a fervent campaign by Ebert—cuts back and forth between Ebert’s last days and the story of his rise, first as a daily newspaper critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, then as co-host with Gene Siskel of Sneak Previews (later Siskel & Ebert & the Movies). Friends and colleagues allude to the hugeness, the Chicago-ness of the man—the appetite for food, booze (until he sobered up in 1979), raucous storytelling, and sex. (“He had the worst taste in women … gold-diggers, opportunists, or psychos,” says one old pal.) But that portrait is poignantly at odds with the man who appears on-camera missing much of his lower face, a flap of skin hanging in the approximate shape of a chin. The surgery—which eliminated Ebert’s ability to speak, eat, or drink—gives his face a simpleminded, Quasimodo-like cast that is constantly belied by the words he types and that are spoken aloud by a computer. Not even The Diving Bell and the Butterfly drives home the mind-body schism as movingly.

According to friends and colleagues, Ebert was “facile”—he never spent longer than half an hour writing a review. He was an old-fashioned newspaperman: clear, succinct, logical. His concentration was phenomenal. He had the ability to outline in his head, to write (and speak) in whole paragraphs. That’s one reason he paired so well with Siskel, no less an egomaniac but a random sputterer, an often touchingly vulnerable blowhard.

James does a superb job chronicling their hate-love relationship, suggesting in the end that apart from his wife, Chaz, Ebert never had a truer bond. That might be because no one else got away with challenging him—he hated being jarred out of those elegant paragraphs. Nevertheless, he reached out to other critics. A few of the best—A. O. Scott, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Richard Corliss—attest to his influence and personal generosity. More surprising is the number of directors who appear and with whom he hobnobbed: Werner Herzog, who calls Ebert “a soldier of cinema, a wounded comrade,” and Martin Scorsese, who credits Ebert and Siskel with shoring him up at a very low point in his career. But it’s easy to see why they deferred to him. He was, for a time, the most powerful critic in America and a TV celebrity. He was one of them.

Love him or not, the modern film critic must define himself or herself against Roger Ebert—especially in how he adapted to changing technology, finally building a community via blogging and tweeting around his titanic self. The modern human being must define himself against how he lived his final years, when he lost his (big) mouth and discovered an even stronger, truer voice.    

jonathan rosenbaum | The Cape Cod Film Society also seen here: richard corliss | The Cape Cod Film Society

When I was preparing to go to the Nantucket Film Festival, the first thing on my list of films to see was Life Itself. I wanted to see it because it is a documentary about Roger Ebert, a film critic who was so central to the development of film criticism in America, and also probably the first person to introduce me to the idea that films could be taken seriously enough to argue about them on television. When I realized that the film was directed by Steve James, whose 1994 film Hoop Dreams was also central in my development as a documentary filmmaker, I was filled with anticipation for what I thought would be a film about Ebert’s work. But the film I saw was not really about film criticism and Ebert’s significance to the field; it was a document of the end of Ebert’s life, when the man known for his words could no longer speak.

I’ve gone back and forth in my mind as to whether or not this was a disappointment. Life Itself does tell Ebert’s story, and there was a lot to his professional development that I did not know about, but because James’ focus is on the man behind the thumbs, the documentary is more about Ebert’s spirit. Yes, there are interviews with directors whose work he championed (most notably Werner Herzog and Martin Scorsese, both of whom I admire), and other film critics, such as A.O. Scott, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Richard Corliss are interviewed about  his contributions to their field, but a good portion of the film is spent on the footage James got of Ebert in his hospital room and in rehabilitation as he tried to recover from cancer, which had plagued him for 10 years. It is that end-of-life struggle that resonates most.

Ebert is depicted as a character of depth and complexity, which is rare in contemporary documentaries. In fiction films, we are given complete access to the characters created for the story–their emotional lives, as well as their behaviors. But in a documentary, we are often limited by the subject’s power to reveal only what (s)he wishes to make public. In this case, the film is based on Ebert’s previously published memoir of the same name, but in James’ hands–with this footage of Ebert at the end of his life, the choice to include his step-children and grandchildren, who learned a lot from him, as well as early outtakes from the Siskel and Ebert television show that demonstrate the very real animosity between the two critics–we see many layers to Ebert’s personality. He is a loving and beloved husband, stepfather, and grandfather. He is a sometimes arrogant film critic and writer who had no trouble defending his views, but who, unlike the stereotypical critic, was just as passionate in promoting outstanding films as he was in cutting down poorly conceived, bad films. It is not all a show for the cameras, although Ebert seems to have been very pleased to have become a film subject in his last days. There are things missing from this documentary (for example, Siskel’s successor, film critic Richard Roeper is never mentioned, although he co-hosted At The Movies with Ebert for eight years), but then how could there not be; no one’s life story can be told in 116 minutes. This depiction feels very real.

Ebert was criticized, along with Gene Siskel, for having simplified criticism with the thumbs up/thumbs down designations, but for those of us who have actually read Ebert’s criticism and not just watched him on TV, the thumbs are a minor part of his contribution. Ebert, the film tells us, once called the movies “a machine that generates empathy.” Life Itself fits that description as well. It also leaves us thinking about mortality, love, passion, and how to embrace life’s challenges. The feeling I left the Dreamland Theater with after seeing Life Itself was one of loss, but at the same time, I felt reinvigorated about the value of cinema, and I think Ebert would have liked that.

Life Itself / The Dissolve Genevieve Koski

At one point in Life Itself, Steve James’ documentary based on Roger Ebert’s 2011 memoir of the same name, Ebert’s wife, Chaz, wryly mentions that her husband is “death-obsessed”—an understandable position, given that at this point in filming, Ebert was in the midst of what would turn out to be the last of many, many hospital stays during his 11-year battle with cancer. But there’s an overwhelming sense that Ebert’s fixation on death is simply an extension of his zeal for life in all its complexity, which Life Itself embodies from its title on down. Death is a part of life—one that informs everything we do, on some level or another—and watching Ebert characterize whatever time he has left as “money in the bank,” from what viewers know is his deathbed, is life-affirming and heartbreaking in equal measure. 

Those hospital scenes help make what could have been a fairly straightforward profile a remarkable piece of documentary filmmaking, as much a discourse on life and death in general as the story of one specific, extraordinary life. Credit for that certainly goes to James, but also to Ebert, who helps the director orchestrate the movie as it’s filming, via onscreen emails and the computer software that allowed him to speak when his body would no longer let him. When Ebert cheekily orders James to film himself in the hospital-room mirror, or sends the director an email expressing glee that they got some grody footage of his G-tube being suctioned out, it’s clear he considers himself more than just the subject of this film.

Such moments of fourth-wall-breaking are appropriate in the context of Ebert’s life, a good portion of which was spent hobnobbing and collaborating with the filmmakers he wrote about in his official capacity as the Chicago Sun-Times’ film critic, and later, as the co-host of Sneak Previews and At The Movies. (James is among those filmmakers; Ebert, along with Gene Siskel, was a vocal advocate of Hoop Dreams when it came out in 1994.) Ebert wrote about film, yes—prolifically, astutely, and seemingly effortlessly—but he also lived it, and the filmmakers he befriended along the way were cast members in the movie of his life. Many of them are actual cast members in Life Itself as well, including Martin Scorsese (who also executive-produced), Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Ramin Bahrani, and Ava DuVernay, who all contribute fond remembrances of Ebert as both a critic and person.

But not too fond. Appropriately, Life Itself is reverent while still being critical of its subject, acknowledging his flaws (his alcoholism, his terrible taste in women pre-Chaz, a prurient streak that led, among other things, to his collaboration with Russ Meyer) in the context of his humanity. The film’s overview of Ebert’s rivalry with Siskel in particular is fascinating for the glimpse it provides of both men’s insecurities, as well as their biting wit; a blooper reel of At The Movies where the two snipe at each other between takes, camera-ready smiles pasted on as they hiss between their teeth, is deliciously awkward. But it also makes time to acknowledge the deep-seated—sometimes very deep—respect the two held for each other, even if it took Siskel’s death for it to become completely evident to Ebert and those around him.

The At The Movies era was arguably the most important phase of Ebert’s career, and Life Itself spends an appropriately sized chunk of time exploring it, via archival footage and interviews with producers and Siskel’s widow Marlene, among others. But it’s only a single chapter in the sprawling story of Ebert’s life, which the film skips through semi-chronologically, filling in the essential moments on the timeline, but finding much more fruitful material in the footnotes. The stamp he used to print his byline as a journalism-obsessed adolescent; the time he literally stopped the presses of the college paper The Daily Illini as a cocky, audacious editor; his stilted, disastrous first time on camera; him explaining Michael Apted’s Up series to his granddaughter as he writes a review of 56 Up from his hospital bed: These are the shadows and highlights that fill in the picture of Ebert as a person, not a Wikipedia entry. And they’re given further life by Ebert’s words, written in the book Life Itself and judiciously delivered via voiceover in the film by voice actor Stephen Stanton, who makes his voice sound just enough like Ebert’s to make the narration feel natural without tipping over into spooky.

Despite all that, the specter of death hangs heavy over Life Itself, which went into production when Ebert was still alive and relatively optimistic about the future. (A short scene where Roger and Chaz discuss the re-design of rogerebert.com, which didn’t launch until after his death in April 2013, is an especially meta bit of foreshadowing.) Watching that optimism fade over the course of the present-day footage in the hospital is gut-wrenching, particularly when James focuses his camera on the steadfast Chaz, who lets only the tiniest glimpses of fear and frustration peek through her resolute façade. Those glimpses are enough, though, to remind viewers that they are watching Ebert’s eulogy, one he helped author in more ways than one.

But Life Itself’s most powerful element is one Ebert had no control over: its context.  Ebert was an advocate of context in criticism, and it would probably please him as both a critic and a fan of irony to know that his death is what enlivens Life Itself. Watching that context actually take shape onscreen is remarkable—remarkable that James had the premonition and audacity to capture it as he did, and that Ebert not only let him, but encouraged it. After 45 years of watching, critiquing, and loving film, the man knew what made a good movie.

'Life Itself': Ode to a cinematic game changer - Brent ... Brent Marchant

It’s a rare occasion when someone comes along who ends up being a genuine game changer in his or her particular field of endeavor. But, when such individuals make their presence felt, they leave an indelible mark on their craft, changing it forever. In the field of film criticism, that distinction belongs to Roger Ebert (1942-2013), who almost single-handedly altered the way we look at movies and whose storied life is now the subject of the engaging new documentary, “Life Itself.”

Based on Ebert’s autobiography, director Steve James’s documentary chronicles his subject’s life story from his teenage years as neighborhood reporter for a self-published newspaper to his acclaimed career as America’s top movie critic to his heartbreaking yet ever-hopeful battle against terminal cancer. In presenting Roger’s story, James serves up a wealth of archival material, coupled with narrated segments from Ebert’s memoir, interviews with family, friends and colleagues, and candid footage of the difficulties his subject faced in his final days. The result is a remarkable and surprisingly forthright depiction of Ebert’s life, something he insisted on before agreeing to be involved in the project.

Ebert’s contributions to the field of film criticism are almost too numerous to mention. His 46-year career included positions as Chicago Sun-Times movie critic, as co-host of several TV series (most notably Sneak Previews, At the Movies and Siskel & Ebert & The Movies) and as the author of numerous books. He was also a regular presenter about cinema at the Conference on World Affairs and even co-wrote the screenplay for the Russ Meyer cult classic “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” (1970). And his efforts didn’t go unnoticed, either. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the first film critic ever to receive this prestigious award. Then, in 2005, he was honored again, this time with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the only film critic ever so recognized. (Not bad for a middle-class kid from Urbana, Illinois.)

While the picture covers the entire spectrum of Ebert’s career, much of it examines his famous (some might say infamous) relationship with film critic Gene Siskel (1946-1999) of The Chicago Tribune. As rivals at Chicago’s two daily newspapers, they initially vied for the attention of the Windy City’s moviegoing public. But that was just the beginning. The duo would later go on to host the aforementioned TV series, which often featured spirited – sometimes downright nasty – debates about current film releases. Their colorful arguments made for great television, but those disagreements (and the shows themselves) also changed the way movie lovers viewed the cinematic landscape. They brought film criticism out of the pages of the newspaper and made it more available to a wider audience. In doing so, they became the best known (and some would say most influential) film critics in America, as well as celebrities in their own right. Yet, for all the fame and fortune they built together, they never much cared for one another, their contentious rivalry characterizing much of the nature of their relationship (some of which becomes plainly apparent in outtakes from promos for their TV series and in interviews with Siskel’s widow, Marlene Iglitzen, and several of their shows’ producers).

The film also focuses heavily on the other significant relationship in Ebert’s life, that of his marriage to his wife, Chaz. Roger met Chaz late in life after years of dating women who, according to some of his friends, were of “questionable character.” But Chaz changed Roger’s life, introducing him to the love that always eluded him in his younger years. She would prove to be his rock in his waning days, too, remaining loyal and upbeat through all of his travails, which were much more taxing than most people knew, despite his very public presence almost right up until the end.

But what’s perhaps most illuminating about this film is its portrayal of the relationship Roger had with himself. He was very much in touch with who he was and how his life unfolded. In fact, he believed that we each compose the script of our own lives, that they’re like our own personal movies in which we’re actor, director and screenwriter all rolled into one. And, even though he was quite outspoken in his criticism of alternative life philosophies (such as New Age thought), his own outlook nevertheless seems remarkably consistent with the principles of conscious creation, the notion that we create our own reality with our thoughts, beliefs and intents. Some might argue that there are discrepancies between his views and those who practice conscious creation, but, in my opinion, I believe any such differences are mostly semantic, particularly given the similarities in the outcomes that each outlook propounds to evoke.

The creations Ebert materialized were quite impressive, to say the least. For instance, through his TV series, he brought film criticism to the masses, and, in doing so, he made it accessible to those who may have previously seen the subject as too high-brow or aloof. In fact, he was so successful at this that industry insiders were initially reluctant to embrace these shows (or even to measure their impact) simply because they were hosted by “Midwestern” film critics, presenters viewed as folksy rubes who couldn’t possibly possess the sophistication and clout of New York or Los Angeles critics like Pauline Kael. How wrong the detractors were, especially when the shows took off and became hits in the ratings.

By broadening the audience for serious film criticism, Ebert also helped to broaden the profession itself. This is most evident on his web site, www.rogerebert.com, which became his “voice” after his cancerous lower jaw was surgically removed and left him unable to speak. But, in addition to providing a venue for Ebert’s output, the site also became a platform for upcoming film critics whose words might not otherwise have been given voice. By mentoring a new generation of reviewers, Roger furthered the reach of his calling and those who would take up the gauntlet in his wake. His efforts in this regard are praised in the film, too, in interviews with fellow critics like A.O. Scott and Richard Corliss.

Roger’s generosity of spirit was apparent not only in the nurturing of new critics, but also in the development of new cinematic talent. Throughout his career, Ebert was famous for giving press to the works of aspiring or little-known directors, such as Martin Scorsese, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, Ramin Bahrani, Greg Nava and Ava Duvernay, all of whom are interviewed in the film. He was instrumental in helping to make their careers, something that benefitted both those artists and the moviegoing public.

However, despite Ebert’s willingness to support the works of up-and-coming directors (and even to befriend them in some cases), he maintained a scrupulous degree of integrity when it came to assessing their pictures. Scorsese, for example, discusses Ebert’s harsh (and disheartening) criticism of his film “The Color of Money” (1986). Despite four Academy Award nominations (including a best actor win for Paul Newman), Ebert tore into his friend’s picture. Scorsese confesses that he was disappointed at the time, but he also admits how he later recognized that Ebert’s criticisms helped make him a better filmmaker, a “gift” that would prove valuable in his future projects. In being honest, Ebert may have ruffled some feathers in the short run, but his wisdom subsequently helped elevate the art form he so loved, another of his inspired creations, to be sure.

But, for all his professional accomplishments, his personal triumphs were amazing achievements as well. Just ask Chaz and her family, many of whom are interviewed in the film and serve as a topic of discussion in voiceover narrations from Roger’s memoir. Through them, he built a family for himself. And that accomplishment, as fulfilling as it was, wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for another of his achievements – kicking the drinking habit – for it was through his association with Alcoholics Anonymous that he would meet his future bride (and everything that came with that). Indeed, to paraphrase Clarence, the lovable guardian angel from Frank Capra’s legendary Christmas classic, “Roger, you’ve truly had a wonderful life.” And, fortunately for Roger, he recognized this, too, regardless of whatever difficulties may have graced his path along the way.

“Life Itself” paints a beautiful portrait of a towering figure, and it does so with sequences that are both heartbreaking and heartwarming. Its selection of archive, interview and recent footage tells a balanced, frank and compelling story, warts and all. There are both ample laughs and touching moments, as well as film clips from many of Ebert’s favorite movies, all combining to create one of the most complete pictures I’ve seen in quite a long time. The film is a sure-fire contender in the documentary categories for this year’s awards competitions.

As a longtime Chicago resident, I became well-acquainted with Roger Ebert over the years through his work as a critic for the Sun-Times, a movie reviewer for the local ABC-TV affiliate and as a co-host of Sneak Previews, the PBS series produced by the network’s Chicago affiliate, WTTW. But, beyond his published and broadcast works, I came to admire Roger’s approach to film criticism, one that was thought-provoking but that never went beyond the audience’s comprehension. And, just as Roger saw himself as the creator of the movie of his own life, I frequently offer comparable observations in my own writings – but, then, I had a good source of inspiration to draw from.

Roger Ebert left an incredible mark on an industry, an art form, even the nation’s culture. He helped transform a casual pastime into something more, something that both entertains and enlightens but that also maintains a certain familiarity we can all relate to. That’s quite an accomplishment, one for which all moviegoers should be grateful.

Take a bow, Roger.

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

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Life Itself: The Roger Ebert documentary, directed by Steve ... Dana Stevens from Slate

Sight & Sound [Jason Anderson] November 14, 2014

1NFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]

Nonfics [Christopher Campbell]

Film Racket [Chris Barsanti]

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

A Critical Movie Critic [Howard Schumann]

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Sundance Review: 'Life Itself' - Film.com James Rocchi

Sound On Sight [Josh Spiegel]

Indiewire [Chase Whale] The Playlist

Life Itself Celebrates Roger Ebert and His Capacity for Joy Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice

Film Pulse [Adam Patterson]

Sundance 2014 Review: Thumbs Up For Roger Ebert Doc LIFE... Jason Gorber from Twitch

'Life Itself' Review: A Too Loving Tribute to Roger ... - Pajiba Corey Atad

In Review Online [Drew Hunt]

Grolsch Film Works [Jack Jones]

Film Corner, The [Greg Klymkiw]

Cinemixtape [J. Olson]

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Life Itself - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

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Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]

Film-Forward.com [Ted Metrakas]

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Sundance Review: LIFE ITSELF | Badass Digest Devin Faraci

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FILM REVIEW: Life Itself - The Buzz - CBC.ca - Canadian... Eli Glasner from CBC News

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5 surprises about CNN's Roger Ebert film, 'Life Itself' Thom Patterson from CNN, January 7, 2015

Daily | Sundance 2014 | Steve James's LIFE ITSELF - Fandor David Hudson from Fandor

'Life Itself' Director Steve James Explains the Challenges of ... Eric Kohn interview from indieWIRE, July 5, 2014

Chaz Ebert and director Steve James on Roger Ebert's legacy Andrew O’Hehir interview from Salon, July 2, 2014

Life Itself: Sundance Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy on the Secret to Roger Ebert's Popularity Todd McCarthy from The Hollywood Reporter, April 11, 2013

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'Life Itself' Review: Roger Ebert Gets the Doc He Deserves ... Scott Foundas from Variety, also seen here: Ebertfest: Roger Ebert's Film Festival: Life Itself

Roger Ebert Documentary 'Life Itself': 5 Most Surprising ... Ramin Setoodeh from Variety

Guardian.co.uk [Mark Kermode]

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Guardian.co.uk [John Patterson]

Documentary Life Itself is strangely devoid of Roger Ebert's ... Liam Lacey from The Globe and the Mail

Examiner.com [Rick Marianetti]

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

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Review: “Life Itself” lovingly chronicles the complex life of ... Steve Murray from Atlanta Arts

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Roger Ebert doc 'Life Itself' deserves a thumbs up - Los ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

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Chuck Koplinski: 'Life Itself' unique and moving Chuck Koplinski fron The Champaign-Urbana News Gazette

Life Itself Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz

RogerEbert.com [Michal Oleszczyk]

Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents [Seongyong Cho]

And Fade Out ... but Not Fade Away Geoffrey O’Brien from The New York Times, also seen here: 'Life Itself,' Reminiscences of Roger Ebert - NYTimes.com

Jancsó, Miklós

Jancsó, Miklós World Cinema

Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó gained international recognition in the late 1960s, when The Round-Up (1966), The Red and the White (1967) and The Confrontation (1969) garnered numerous awards at a variety of international film festivals. Displaying evidence of a developing revolutionary vision and uniquely formalistic cinematic style, these films not only established Jancsó's reputation as an auteur, but also helped to serve notice to the world that Hungarian filmmaking had entered into a dynamic new era.

Jancsó's world-wide acclaim reached its peak with Red Psalm (1972), for which he was named best director at the Cannes Film Festival. Red Psalm stands as perhaps the most coherent expression of the director's desire to combine a revolutionary form of filmic language with the theme of the moral complexities of social revolution. Although he would receive a lifetime achievement award at Cannes in 1979, Jancsó's more recent films, such as The Dawn (1986) and Season of Monsters (1987), have not found the widespread approval granted to his films of the 60s and early 70s. His films are now criticized as experiments in purely abstract formalism, devoid of social relevance and lacking in human compassion. Ultimately, his most enduring contribution to cinema may well be the role he played during the 60s in liberating Hungarian filmmaking from the formal and thematic constraints of state-sanctioned realism. — Baseline

All-Movie Guide Sandra Brennan from All Movie Guide

A key figure in the development of the new Hungarian cinema, filmmaker Miklós Jancsó earned international recognition for his films Szegénylegények/The Round-Up (1965), Csillagosok Katonák/The Red and the White (1967), and Csend és Kiáltás/Silence and Cry (1968). These films best reflect Jancsó's tendency toward abstraction and contain a distinctive combination of revolutionary viewpoints and highly structured, formal cinematic style. Imagery is more important than dialogue, which is used sparingly to encourage audiences to contemplate Jancsó's underlying messages. The director tends to place actors in geometric patterns that mirror the landscapes around them.

Born in Vac, Hungary, Jancsó studied ethnography and art history while earning his law degree in 1944. He spent several years in Transylvania doing ethnographic research before enrolling in Budapest's Academy of Dramatic and Film Art, where he graduated in 1950. Jancsó began filming numerous newsreels and documentary shorts until 1958, when he made his feature debut with A Harangok Rómába Mentek/The Bells Have Gone to Rome (1958). The film is one of the few in Jancsó's repertoire that does not reflect his signature style. In 1963, he earned international acclaim for his medical drama Oldás és kötés/Cantata (1963).
Many of Jancsó's films examine the terrible aftermath of war. Although his first films offered sympathetic explorations of the human characters, his later works became increasingly concerned with the use of imagery for its own sake. Jancsó's landmark films of the '60s won many international awards and special recognition at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1972, he again earned international acclaim and the Best Director Award at Cannes for Red Psalm. Seven years later, Jancsó won a lifetime achievement award from the prestigious French film festival. He continued to make films throughout the rest of the century, earning particular acclaim for a number of increasingly enigmatic works, including Szeressuk Egymast Gyrekek...A Nagy Agyhalal/Let's Love One Another...The Great Brain Death (1996) and Nekem Lampast Adott Kezembe Az Ur Pesten/The Lord's Lantern in Budapest (1999).

Film Reference Charles L.P. Silet

Miklós Jancsó is probably the best internationally known of the directors to emerge from the new wave Hungarian cinema of the 1960s. With his hypnotic, circling camera, the recurrent—some critics say obsessive—exploration of Hungary's past, and his evocative use of the broad plains of his countries' Puszta, Jancsó fashioned a highly individual cinema within the confines of a state operated film industry. Although a prolific director of short films during the 1950s and an equally prolific director of feature films since the early 1970s, it is for his work during the middle and late 1960s that Jancsó is best known outside his own country.

Beginning with My Way Home, which dealt with a young Hungarian soldier caught up in the German retreat and Soviet advance during the Second World War, Jancsó discovered both a set of themes and a style which helped him to fashion his own voice. My Way Home, unlike most of Jancsó's films, has a hero, but this hero often behaves in a most unheroic way as he makes his way home. Set free by the chaos of the war's end, he is fired upon both by the Russians and the Germans and finally dons a Russian uniform as a protective disguise. Although clearly focused on individual figures, Jancsó's movie does contain an interesting allegory of the fate of his native country as, freed from Nazi oppression, the soldier only reluctantly dons the Russian uniform.

Szegénylegények (The Round-up, literally The Hopeless) established Jancsó as a filmmaker of international importance. The film is set in the Hungarian plain in a fort that houses a group of peasants under surveillance following the Kossuth rebellion of 1848, and focuses on the ritual quality of the games played as tormentors and informers and rebels interchange in a mysterious, elliptical dance of human passions. Shot in black and white, the film also revealed a purity of style as each meticulously composed shot conveys Jancsó's preoccupation with humans dislodged from convention and victimised by history. In spite of its scope, however, the film won praise for its analysis of the politics of terror and of the Kafkaesque state machinery through which such terror works.

Csillagosok Katonák (1967, The Red and the White) and Csend és Kiáltás (1968, Silence and Cry) moved into the early twentieth century and are concerned with communist revolutions of the immediate post-World War I period. The Red and the White was commissioned by the Soviet government to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the October revolution. The film isolates a group of Hungarian volunteers who are fighting on the side of the reds during the Russian civil war. Once again the expansive plain provides an open background against which huddle the opposing groups, both red and white. It is interesting considering the source of his commission that Jancsó refuses to choose to side with either the red or the whites but rather to present each as a mixture of compassion and understanding, barbarity and stupidity. Silence and Cry, operating on a smaller scale, deals with an isolated farmstead but also raises questions about people caught up in a society torn by social and political change. Here Jancsó's circling camera becomes hypnotic, and his tendency to depsychologize his characters is at its most extreme. Jancsó explains very little in his plot, leaving the viewer to wrestle with its obscurities and ellipses.

The claustrophobic qualities of Silence and Cry prepared his audience for Fényes Szelek (The Confrontation), set in the immediate post-war world and dealing with students, both Catholic and Communist, who square off in a quadrille interweaving accusation and intimidation. Clearly the film was occasioned by the student riots and sit-ins in 1968–69 in Budapest. It pits the Marxist students as the voice of change and revolution against the conventions of the Catholic students. The plot is minimal and Jancsó's camera at its most vertiginous, hardly ever stopping in its unceasing search for the truth. The truth, of course, as it so often does, eludes us, as the confrontation finally has more to do with temporary power games than it does with ultimate reality.

In Sirokkó (Winter Wind), made in Yugoslavia as a Franco-Hungarian co-production, he returned to the use of color (as in The Confrontation) and photographed, like Silence and Cry, with a minimum of shots, twelve in this case. The story deals with the historical and political irony of a Croatian anarchist leader of the 1930s who is destroyed by his own forces, only later to be resurrected as a hero. Égi Bárány (Agnus Dei), a favorite film of Jancsó's and regarded by many Hungarians as his most nationalistic, is once again set in the broad Hungarian plain during the period of civil war, but it is far more symbolic and anticipates the new ground he would explore in his next film.

With Még Kér a Nép (Red Psalm), Jancsó returned to the Puszta and to the end of the last century during a period of peasant unrest. A confrontation between workers and their landowners is interrupted by the army. The subsequent action follows patterns established earlier in Jancsó's other films. But there is a difference in Red Psalm—the symbolic elements always present in the earlier films become foregrounded: a dead soldier is resurrected by a kiss from a young girl; the soldiers join the peasants in a Maypole dance but eventually surround the rebellious farmers and shoot them down; a girl outside the circle using a gun tied with a red ribbon guns down all of the soldiers. The mannerisms noted by a number of critics are missing here, and Jancsó seems to have found a new direction amidst old material: the symbolism of the film elevates it beyond Jancsó's usual concerns. Red Psalm exemplifies what is often hidden in his other films: the totality of the film, and the celebration of life in the revolution which will bring joy in the renewed possibilities for human expression and freedom.

Although Miklós Jancsó has gone on to make other films, many of them outside Hungary itself, his body of work from My Way Home to Red Psalm seems to best exemplify his unique contribution to world cinema. Like many of the other new Hungarian filmmakers, Jancsó rejected the traditions of the conservative and classic bound national cinema he inherited, turning to a more liberating and avant-garde style that allowed him not only greater artistic expression but also increased freedom from state censorship. By adopting a more modernist approach, most notably evident in his use of a minimal plot and in the dialectical tensions between the images, he has urged his audiences out of their complacency by challenging the status quo through his questioning of the uses and abuses of state power wielded in the name of the people. This has made his films truly revolutionary.

Red Modernism: Miklós Jancsó - Film Comment J. Hoberman, September/October 2006

It was the last century’s impossible dream: a double vanguard, radical form in the service of radical content. There were moments—the Soviet silent cinema, Brecht’s epic theater, Surrealism perhaps, the Popular Front anti-fascism of Guernica and Citizen Kane, the promise of underground movies. And then, from the very back of beyond and close to the fashionable heart of international modernism, for a half dozen years from the mid-Sixties to the early Seventies, there was Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Jancsó.

First manifest in The Round-Up (65), Jancsó’s boldly stylized film language appeared to be a synthesis of Antonioni (elegant widescreen compositions, austere allegorical landscapes), Bresson (impassive performers, exaggerated sound design), and Welles (convoluted tracking shots, intricately choreographed ensembles), even as his free-floating existential attitudes and “empty world” iconography evoked the theater of the absurd, albeit without the laughs. Jancsó’s subject or, rather, his prison, was history. His narratives recalled the literature of extreme situations-pivoting on cryptic betrayals, mapping the seizure of power, dramatizing the exercise of terror- and his politics were ambiguously left, perhaps crypto-Trotskyist.

How the Partisan Review crowd might have loved Jancsó, had they only been watching movies. So far as I can tell, the only one of the New York intellectuals—Stanley Kauffmann, Dwight Macdonald, Susan Sontag—to comment on The Round-Up when it turned up at the 1966 New York Film Festival, its blurb referencing Bresson and “In the Penal Colony,” was Manny Farber. He called it “a movie of hieratic stylized movement in a Kafka space that is mostly sinister flatness and bald verticals . . . Jancsó’s fascinating, but too insistent, style is based on a taut balance between a harsh, stark imagery and a desolate pessimism.”

Pessimism or realism? Jancsó’s twin compulsions are to simplify and withhold. His film form may be universal but his narrative content is often barely decipherable outside the arcane realm of Hungary’s history or its cultural politics. As the 20th century dawned, Jancsó’s homeland was Austria’s junior partner in the Hapsburg Empire. After WWI (which it fought on the losing side), the new nation was a short-lived Communist republic and then a military dictatorship; during WWII, Hungary was a Nazi terror state. After that (having once more allied itself with the losers) it became a short-lived parliamentary republic that segued into a nightmare Stalinist people’s democracy. Communist rule was interrupted by another glorious revolt, the bloody trauma of 1956. Russian tanks crushed Hungarian freedom fighters 50 years ago this fall, but then, after a time, the country was permitted to become the Soviet bloc’s most modest and humane form of really-existing socialism-at least until the bloc dissolved in 1990.

Hungary’s divisions ran through Jancsó’s family. He was born in 1921, the son of a Hungarian father and a Romanian mother, with Jewish relations on his mother’s side, and was raised in a village 20 miles up the Danube from Budapest. He received a Catholic education but converted to Communism, joining the Party in 1945. Jancsó was something of a perpetual student, having variously applied himself to law, art history, and ethnography (including a period of fieldwork in Transylvania), before entering the Academy of Dramatic Art. A documentarian throughout the Fifties, he didn’t find himself as a filmmaker until, at 44, he made what was immediately recognized in Hungary as perhaps the greatest film ever made there.

The Round-Up is set in the late 1860s. It is 20 years after Lajos Kossuth’s failed revolution against the Hapsburgs, and remnants of Kossuth’s army still roam the Hungarian countryside. Austrian soldiers detain entire villages to uncover the individual partisans concealed among them. The Round-Up concerns one such mass arrest, and the complex round of interrogations and betrayals that inevitably ensue.

The rhythms are hypnotic. The viewer is at once hemmed in by and outside the action. Most of the often-cryptic scenario is confined to a wooden fort—a gingerbread house concentration camp, stark as a Grotowski stage—on the vast expanse of Hungary’s central plain. In the middle of nowhere at the edge of infinity, Austrian automatons in operetta uniforms play endless cat-and-mouse mind games with the exotic, impassive peasantry they’ve corralled. (Perhaps not so exotic: seen in the light of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the image of hooded prisoners being marched in a circle has a new and shocking relevance.) A few summary executions notwithstanding, the torture is largely psychological- and yet the historical subjects are psychologically opaque.

“In Hungary, or at least in Hungarian culture, film nowadays plays the role of the avant-garde,” the venerable Marxist philosopher and critic Georg Lukacs told Yvette Biró, then editor of the Hungarian journal Filmkultura, in the course of a celebrated interview held in Lukacs’s shabby, book-crammed Budapest apartment during the glorious May of 1968. Lukacs had been particularly impressed by The Round-Up. Yet this laconic succession of fluid takes isolating tiny figures in the windswept nothingness of the puszta synthesized all that the philosopher repressed.

“If I can’t prove my identity, they’ll kill me,” one doomed prisoner complains. Beyond The Round–Up‘s veneer of chic existentialism, anathema to orthodox Marxists, Lukacs might have easily seen the “decadent modernism” of Kafka, Beckett, and Genet, not to mention obvious parallels to the nihilistic theater of the absurd. Instead, Lukacs discovered an imaginative representation of the circumstances under which he himself had lived his life-and, beyond that, the unmistakable (but also unspeakable) evocation of the unrepresentable 1956. The Round-Up‘s Hungarian title may be translated as “Hooligans,” the official term for those whom Time dubbed Freedom Fighters. And as these captive losers are imprisoned in open space, so the movie maps a particular state of being: “Do you accept this condition?” an Austrian officer asks a Hungarian detainee who, in order to save his own neck, is about to inform on his nephew. “Well, sir, I must,” is the reply.

Jancsó futher developed The Round-Up‘s ceremonial cruelty in his next film, The Red and the White (67). Commissioned by and shot in the Soviet Union to mark the October Revolution’s golden anniversary, The Red and the White presented a brigade of Hungarian volunteers fighting for the Reds in the 1918 Civil War. The Red and the White was in production at the same time as Alexander Askoldov’s later-banned Civil War drama Commissar and, in contrast to Askoldov’s subversive revolutionary idealism, offered a remarkably perverse celebration of the proletarian internationale: wide screen and wildly aestheticized, the movie’s narrative and characterization are even more abstract than in The Round-Up, and all sense of the “fraternal” is turned on its head.

Civil War in The Red and the White is a chess game in which two armies battle back and forth, successively occupying the same indifferent landscape in a series of lethal, geometric reversals. The camera prowls through the action, catching sight of a marching formation or dodging back from a pair of wheeling horsemen. It was claimed that Jancsó first choreographed his showy camera maneuvers and then blocked the action to match; others reported that it was all improvisation and he directed the camera operator as the scene unfolded. (A colleague present on location wrote that “the camera [was] taking part in the gigantic confusion as a continuous observer.”)

Jancsó’s world is the totality of its laws—aesthetic and otherwise. He remains resolutely outside his characters, noting merely their wariness, vulnerability, and resignation in the face of death. As The Round-Up reminded some of Kafka, The Red and the White evokes the cruel beauty of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry. Few war films have been so little concerned with heroics and so fascinated by the logistics of killing. Although not shown with bloody verisimilitude, the disposal of prisoners is all the more horrifying for its matter-of-factness. (There’s a sense in which Jancsó is the European equivalent of Sam Peckinpah.) Captors take target practice on fleeing captives as they run naked through the fields or shoot their prisoners point blank and dump their bodies in the placid Volga that eddies through the verdant landscape.

Mass murder in bucolic summer: The Red and the White is something like an austerely pornographic pastoral. Midway through, Jancsó introduces a field hospital staffed by a gaggle of pretty wood (or water) nymphs. The Whites march them and a military band into the birch wood for some girl-on-girl waltzing. Then, in a further demonstration of their power, they compel the unwilling nurses to identify the Red patients in their care-as well they might.

Such forced betrayals and denunciations notwithstanding, the movie’s back-and- forth action is programmatically difficult to follow. The Red and the White‘s built-in joke of having the Reds speak Hungarian while the Whites use Russian may have insured that the film would never be released, at least as Jancsó shot it, in the Soviet Union—although by the time the movie ends the distinction between the two sides is nearly moot.

Jancsó played out a similar dialectic in his next film, the glum chamber drama Silence and Cry (68). Here the conflict is contained within a single tormented family. The Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 has collapsed. A Red soldier seeks refuge in the countryside, and a White commandant (who may be his brother) orders a farmer’s family to hide him. The diminutive peasant, himself a former Red, is at once being punished by the authorities and poisoned by his wife. These sinister enigmas force the fugitive to blow his cover and shoot the commandant. Jancsó’s direction is characteristically terse-nothing is explained and the soundtrack is all but liquidated. It was here that Jancsó introduced a new editing pattern: each lengthy shot constituted an individual scene, and every cut marked either a spatial or temporal shift. This strategy would come to fruition the following year with his first color film, the French-Hungarian-Yugoslav co-production Winter Wind (69).

Capping the icy symmetry of his previous films, Winter Wind was composed of only 13 shots, some as long as ten minutes, and each a completely mapped-out sequence. These tracking shots are, in fact, the subject of the film, which ostensibly depicts the cell of Croatian fascists (Ustashi) who assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia on his 1934 visit to France—an incident that nearly triggered a Mitteleuropean war when it was revealed that the terrorists were trained in Hungary.

As usual, Jancsó’s interest is more geometric than geopolitical, eschewing the big picture for micro-social behavior. Opening with a newsreel of Alexander’s killing, Winter Wind purports to dramatize the intrigue that preceded it, “a mechanism that had gone mad,” per the filmmaker. As the terrorists plan the assassination, one of their leaders, a grim revolutionary ascetic named Marko (played by the film’s French producer Jacques Charrier), escapes a bungled ambush in Yugoslavia and crosses the border to the group’s Hungarian hideout.

Despite Marko’s devout Catholicism, he’s far more an anarchist than a nationalist. And although he’s considered a national folk hero, there’s an utter absence of trust between him and the rest of the cell. Indeed, Marko refuses to take an oath to their organization. He’s a royal pain, and, when the Hungarian authorities let it be known they consider him too hot to harbor, his fellows gladly make him a martyr and are last seen pledging their allegiance to Croatia in his name. But this obvious irony is only a detail in a film that concentrates mainly on Marko’s not unjustified paranoia amid the group’s shifting patterns of loyalty.

“Don’t stand behind me,” Marko snaps at one of his supposed comrades, as much director as revolutionary. “How many of our men have you shot in these rooms?” Everyone’s motivations are ambiguous. The elaborate, oblique power struggles enlivened by a cheesy, barely motivated lesbian love affair between Marina Vlady and Eva Swann take on epic proportions as registered by a peripatetic camera pacing back and forth through the snowy landscape with the relentless deliberation of a caged animal. (The camera is less mobile when it ventures indoors but Jancsó maintains the beat with the amplified sound of boots treading the wooden floors.)

Appropriately, this coolly formalist exercise in political prurience and svelte sadomasochism was distributed in the U.S. by Grove Press. Making a note of it in his Village Voice column, Jonas Mekas seized upon it as evidence that there was avant-garde film east of Vienna.

The dance of the dialectic continued. Winter Wind was invited to Cannes in May 1968, but Jancsó was unable to screen the movie when student militants and their filmmaker allies closed the festival. Times had changed but the more things change . . .

Jancsó’s next film, The Confrontation (69)—in which dancing, singing student Communists face off against Catholic youth in the brave new Hungary of 1947—would extend his fascination with group dynamics, while addressing the zealotry of the New Left. The director dressed his own generation at the zenith of its youthful idealism in the blue jeans and miniskirts of the Sixties.

Subsequent films were blatantly allegorical. Agnus Dei (70) made no pretense of naturalism in putting an assortment of peasants, soldiers, and priests through a symbolic reenactment of Hungary’s 1919 revolution and counterrevolution; the abstract folk musical Red Psalm (71) mixed Catholic liturgy and classical mythology to create a socialist passion play celebrating the “harvesting strikes” which swept rural Hungary in the 1890s.

For its first hour Red Psalm unfurls as sinuously as a strand from the maypole around which the peasants dance. The strikers are ultimately massacred by the army that has been circling around them throughout, but this attempt to recast history as ritual is Jancsó’s most optimistic film-perhaps the most ecstatic fusion of political and formal radicalism in the 40 years since Dovzhenko’s Earth. But optimism was not a Jancsó forte; writing its own epitaph, Red Psalm would also be the last.

Miklos Jancso facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles ...

Metro Cinema Society: The Films of Miklós Jancsó

Miklós Jancsó - Veteran of European Film - Kino Tuškanac Undated

Miklós Jancsó Before and After the Revolution | Andrei Gorzo ... 38-page essay (Undated) (PDF)

Miklos Jancso's Nekem lampast adott kezembe az Ur Pesten Hamlet in Wonderland, Andrew James Horton from Kinoeye, July 5, 1999

Red Psalm - Rouge the final major essay written by Raymond Durgnat, from his estate, reprinted from Rouge, 2002

Kinoeye | Hungarian film: A round-up of Miklos Jancso's career Miklós who?, an introduction to Miklós Jancsó, by Andrew James Horton from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003, also seen here: Miklós who?

Read Part I (Overview and the 1960s and 70s) Images of power and the power of images: The films of Miklós Jancsó, Part I from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

Kinoeye| Hungarian film: Jewish themes in Miklos Jancso's work György Báron from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

Two men against history - Kinoeye A comparative analysis films by Miklós Jancsó and Andrzej Wajda, by Krzysztof Rucinski from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

Kinoeye| Jancso's The Red & the White, Silence & Cry, Agnus Dei The Aura of History, The depiction of the year 1919 in the films of Miklós Jancsó, by Andrew James Horton from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

Kinoeye | Hungary: Miklos Jancso's Private Vices, Public Virtues Rolland Man from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

Kinoeye | Three Hungarian films by Miklos Jancso from the 1970s Miklós Jancsó’s Szerelmem, Elektra (Elektreia, 1974), Magyar rapszódia (Hungarian Rhapsody, 1978) and Allegro Barbaro (1978), by Peter Hames from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

Images of power and the power of images: Part II Part II: 1981 onwards from Kinoeye, March 3, 2003

Kinoeye| Hungarian film: Miklos Jancso in the 1980s (part 1) The Tyrant’s Waltz, Miklós Jancsó’s films in the period 1981 to 1991, by Graham Petrie from Kinoeye, March 3, 2003

Kinoeye | Hungarian film: Miklos Jancso in the 1980s (part 2) Now's the time to rot forever, Miklós Jancsó’s films in the period 1981 to 1991, a second view, by Jaromír Blažejovský from Kinoeye, March 3, 2003

Kinoeye| Hungarian film: Miklos Jancso in the 1980s (part 3) Acquired uncertainty, Order and chaos in the art of Miklós Jancsó, a third view, by Gábor Gelencsér from Kinoeye, March 3, 2003

Kinoeye | Hungary: Miklos Jancso's Lord's Lantern in Budapest Miklós Jancsó's Nekem lámpást adott kezembe as Úr Pesten (The Lord's Lantern in Budapest, 1998), expansion of earlier 1999 article by Andrew James Horton from Kinoeye, March 3, 2003

Dream Documents of Civil War: Three Films by Miklós Jancsó - Bright ... Gordon Thomas from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2008

Facets : Cinémathèque: The Films of Miklós Jancsó January 2009

The Miklós Jancsó Collection DVD review | Cine Outsider L.K. Weston, December 5, 2011

VIDEO ESSAY: Mapping the Long Take: Béla Tarr and Miklós Jancsó ... Kevin B. Lee from indieWIRE, September 17, 2012

Miklós Jancsó obituary | Film | The Guardian Ronald Bergan, January 31, 2014

Miklos Jancsó - obituary - Telegraph January 31, 2014

Miklos Jancso, Hungarian Filmmaker Who Won at Cannes, Dies at 92 ... Variety, January 31, 2014

Obituary: Miklós Jancsó (1921-2014) – filmcentric January 31, 2014

Miklos Jancso Dies at 92; Made Stylized Films of War and Tyranny in ... The New York Times, February 1, 2014

Oeuvre explored oppression | The Budapest Times Alex Udvary, February 14, 2014

Miklós Jancsó Memoriam • Senses of Cinema Christopher Mildren, March 19, 2014

Remembering Miklós Jancsó. A long take of his early oeuvre ... Tim Deschaumes from Photogénie, May 26, 2014, also seen here: Remembering Miklós Jancsó. A long take of his early oeuvre ...

Miklós Jancsó: Visions of Conflict by Keifer Taylor - A Nos Amours blog November 7, 2015

Miklós Jancsó, 1921-2014 | Sight & Sound | BFI Michael Brooke, March 10, 2016

Films by Miklós Janscó and Andrei Tarkovsky - Mature Times Robert Tanitch, September 27, 2016

Dance of the Firebird: Freedom, Femininity, Power and Paganism in ... Dance of the Firebird: Freedom, Femininity, Power and Paganism in Miklós Jancsó’s Electra, My Love, by Kat Ellinger from Diabolique magazine, October 23, 2016

Private Goes Public in Miklós Janscó's 'Private Vices, Public Virtues ... Imran Khan from Pop Matters, November 14, 2016

Miklós Jancsó and the Wages of War: Close-Up on "The Red and the ... Jeremy Carr from Mubi, January 21, 2017

Jancsó, Miklós They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

There's Nothing More International Than a Pack of Pimps - Rouge Conversation between Pierre Clémenti, Miklos Janscó, Glauber Rocha and Jean-Marie Straub convened by Simon Hartog in Rome, February 1970, published in Rouge, 2004

Kinoeye | Hungarian film: Gyula Hernadi interviewed Graham Petrie interviews novelist Gyula Hernádi in 1985, published in Kinoeye, March 3, 2003

Kinoeye | Hungarian film: Miklos Jancso interviewed I haven’t changed, the world has, Graham Petrie interview in 1985, from Kinoeye, March 3, 2003

A true actor can't exist without the theatre - Kinoeye A true actor can't exist without the theatre, actress Mari Törőcsik interviewed by Graham Petrie in 1985, from Kinoeye, March 3, 2003

It takes a lot of cunning - Kinoeye It takes a lot of cunning, Studio head István Nemeskürty interviewed by Graham Petrie in 1985, from Kinoeye, March 3, 2003

Kinoeye | Hungarian film: Miklos Jancso interviewed Andrew James Horton interview from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003, also seen here: This silly profession

We should see the world the same way - Kinoeye Cinematographer János Kende interviewed by Graham Petrie from Kinoeye, March 3, 2003

Miklós Jancsó - Wikipedia

CANTATA (Oldás és kötés)

Hungary (107 mi) 1963

User reviews from imdb Author: marcbanyai from Romania

This is Miklos Jancso`s most Antonionian film. I`m saying this because it draws most eloquenty the figure of the estranged intellectual in search for his roots. Beautifuly photographed, intelligently exposed. Don`t go searching for a plot though; focus on the characters.

Oldás és kötés (1963) Kristie Hassen from the All Movie Guide

Highly acclaimed Hungarian director Miklos Jancso brought this interesting film to the Argentina Film Festival in 1964, indicating to the world what was going on in the art community of Hungary at the time. Based upon a story by Jozsef Lengyel, this drama details a few days in the life of a doctor (Zoltan Latinovits). Working in a hospital, he takes leave to go back to the place of his childhood where his father is deathly ill. During his journey and stay at the old farm, he becomes introspective about the importance of friendship and family. Oldas Es Kotes/Cantat is Jancso's earliest work which illustrated his characteristic style of long takes and strong, symbolic imagery. He would go on to make more highly acclaimed films like Szegenylegenyek/The Round Up (1966, also starring Latinovits), Csillagosok, Katanok/The Red and the White (1967) and Meg Ker a Nep/Red Psalm, for which he would win a Best Director award at Cannes Film Festival in 1972.

Kinoblog [Michael Brooke]

THE ROUND UP (Szegénylegények)

Hungary (90 mi) 1966 ‘Scope

Time Out

A vast, burned-out plain; dwarfed in the middle of it two buildings, whitewashed walls blazing in the sun, against which black-cloaked figures flit to and fro; silence, except for occasional curt words of command, as a man running for the horizon is coolly shot down, others are taken away never to return. As one watches, fascinated but mystified, a pattern begins to emerge, and one realises that a terrifying cat-and-mouse game is being played. The setting is the years following the collapse of the 1848 revolution against Hapsburg rule; the authorities, to crush the last traces of rebellion, must eliminate the legendary Sándor Rózsa's guerilla bandits; and the plan deploys a Kafkaesque mix of fear and uncertainty to winnow, slowly but inexorably, the guerrillas from the peasant populace which has been rounded up. Jancsó's formally choreographed camera movements later developed into a mannerism; but here the stylisation works perfectly in making an almost abstract statement of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed. There are effectively no characters, no heroes one can admire or villains to hate; simply the men who always win, those who always lose.

Derek Malcolm's Century of Films: The Round-Up from the Guardian

Those who have never seen a film by Miklos Jancso from the 1960s, when this Hungarian director was at his peak, are usually astonished by the experience. When The Round-Up, his third film, came to London in 1965, the broadsheet critics almost dropped their pens in surprise. Here was a deeply serious, decidedly uncamp and certainly not musically-minded middle European Busby Berkeley, who made formal patterns on the screen with humans and horses in order to illustrate the betrayals of his country's history. I joke, but not much. To watch The Round-Up or 1967's The Red and the White for the first time is to witness a kind of film ballet entering the realms of political drama.

In The Round-Up, Austrian soldiers representing the triumphant Hapsburg empire trap and interrogate the Hungarian partisans whose revolt against the empire's rule has petered out. The period is the mid-19th century and only the legendary Sandor Rosza's fighters stand in the way, succoured by the peasants. The drama is virtually divested of characters we can either sympathise with or hate. Instead, it deals largely in formal, abstract generalities. It is as if Jancso is merely watching, regretfully conscious that there are those who will be killed and those whose job it is to kill them. A man running on the horizon is calmly shot down. Another is taken away to be tortured. Short words of command seem to be the apotheosis of dialogue. The film achieves, in one critic's accurate view, "a total absorption of content into form".

All this takes place on a very particular landscape: the vast, summer-scorched Hungarian plains where whitewashed buildings, cloaked men and their horses appear to be the only occupants. It seems like a world apart, but one able to illustrate both a specific vision of Hungarian history and part of the story of mankind, where the powerful slowly but surely triumph over the weak.

The film is so precisely choreographed that the patterns play on the mind until they become clear and obvious in their meanings. The camera style is beautiful but almost merciless. If the film can be criticised for its lack of emotion, it can't be for its absence of power or for its cold appreciation of the situation it illustrates.

Later, with films such as The Confrontation and Red Psalm, Jancso's work begins to lose something through familiarity, and his obsession with half-naked girls and patterns becomes enervating. When he left Hungary for Italy in the 1970s, making erotic films such as Private Vices and Public Virtues (based on the Mayerling story), it seemed he had little more of value to say, or no way of saying it without repeating himself or exaggerating his weaknesses.

But the first few films were astonishing, whether dealing with Kossuth's rebels of the 1860s or the aftermath of the 1919 Hungarian revolution. They bitterly analysed the history of his persecuted country and commented, too, on the nature of violence in more general terms. No one has tried quite the same thing in the same way, and that is his most formidable legacy.

Dream Documents of Civil War: Three Films by Miklós Jancsó - Bright ... Gordon Thomas from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2008

Read Part I (Overview and the 1960s and 70s) Images of power and the power of images: The films of Miklós Jancsó, Part I from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

Kinoeye | Hungarian film: Miklos Jancso interviewed Andrew James Horton interview from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003, also seen here: This silly profession

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

Strictly Film School Acquarello

DvdClassik Review (French)

The Round-Up (1966 film) - Wikipedia

THE RED AND THE WHITE (Csillagosok, katonák) A 99

Hungary (92 mi) 1967 ‘Scope

A brilliant visual style, absolutely stunning shots, which bring to mind Tarkovsky’s 1966 film ANDREI RUBLEV, particularly in the obsession with capturing extraordinary images of horses in and out of battle. No one choreographs the movements of horses like Jansco. Set in Central Russia in the aftermath of the 1918 Revolution, the Bolshevik Red Communist forces are clashing against the Cossack White Guard czarist forces that are ordered to crush them. The film is a stark depiction of the Hungarian forces who joined the Red army, detailing the constant shifting of power between the two sides, first at an abandoned monastery, later at a field hospital, where soldiers, horsemen, and peasants shift from the background to the foreground, and back again, reflecting the continually shifting nature of power and ideology. Jansco uses a widescreen ‘Scope technique consisting of very long takes, a friend Fred Tsao counted 43 shots, some five to eight minutes in length, using a ceaselessly tracking camera movement which weaves in and out of the geometrically shaped groups, featuring meticulous, intricately choreographed scenes, using an almost ballet-like artistry, very smooth and fluid with grand, gorgeous sweeping shots, a powerful work, the sheer beauty of which is elegant and haunting.

In one of the more extraordinary filmed sequence, two biplanes fly over a ridge. From their view in the sky, a thunderous herd of horses can be seen below, some with riders, some without, making a mad dash in a cloud of dust, while rifle shots are continually heard. Later, as the sound of shots continues, all the horses are running without riders, herded by the airplanes, while men on foot are chased by the airplanes as well, both running as fast as they can, herded to the river. Few of the men on foot have any arms. Those without can be seen lined up next to the river to be shot. From the airplane, the camera glides through the air, flying through the fields past a farmhouse, where soldiers on horses are seen waving their arms. In another stunning sequence shot on an open field, we see a Calvary charge, absolutely wonderful stuff, horses charge with soldiers raising their sabers high in a cloud of dust, the bugle sounds as the camera glides by, side by side with the charging horses.

The aura of history Andrew James Horton examines the history of 1919 from Kinoeye (excerpt)

Jancsó's films are frequently set in obscure moments of the past, such as 1919, suggesting a degree in European history is needed to understand their context. Andrew James Horton argues that Jancsó is really not that interested in the past at all and merely uses it as a backdrop for timeless and mythic struggles.

Miklós Jancsó is commonly perceived, particularly when considering his films made in the 1960s and 1970s, to be a director who is interested in the power dynamics of revolutions and popular uprisings. This may be so, but it is interesting to note that Jancsó has been conspicuous in avoiding the most obvious choices of subject matter for his films. Although he worked on a Soviet-Hungarian co-production that was supposed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917, the resulting feature, Csillagosok, katonák (The Red and the White, 1967), was set two years later in the Russian Civil War. He worked with French co-producers but has never made a film about the French Revolution or its aftermath (unlike that fellow central European portrayer of historical oppression, Andrzej Wajda). And despite having an intense interest in Hungarian history, he never shot a direct representation of the 1956 uprising, possibly the deepest scar in the Magyar historical psyche. [ That 1956 was a taboo subject for film-makers during the period of Communism might at first glance seem to be a plausible explanation on the last point. Yet the topic was broached before 1989 in films by Márta Mészáros (Jancsó's wife from 1960 to 1973), Károly Makk, Pál Sándor, Péter Gothár and others, and Jancsó clearly had the clout to be able to make—and get distributed—films that rubbed the Hungarian authorities up the wrong way. Critics have famously read Jancsó's films as allegories of 1956, particularly Szegénylegények (The Round-up, 1965), but nevertheless the director's avoidance of this most obviously revolutionary event is notable.]

Instead, Jancsó has focused more on marginal and inauspicious moments of the past. The variety of periods he has chosen to represent is considerable and includes Greek mythology, Roman antiquity, the reign of Attila the Hun, mediaeval times, 19th-century peasant rebellions, the period between the two world wars and the dawn of the Israeli state, as well as the contemporary settings that have dominated his films since the mid-1980s.

The range is, perhaps naturally enough, skewed towards more recent history, but the most represented period from the past is the year 1919, which is the backdrop to three Jancsó films: Csillagosok, katonák shows Hungarian volunteers fighting on the side of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War, Csend és kiáltás (Silence and Cry, 1968) is set in the aftermath of Hungary's short-lived Communist government of 1919 and Égi bárány (Agnus Dei, 1970) depicts the dying days of the same regime.

With the whole sweep of history and all its power struggles to choose from as subject matter, why did Jancsó return to this specific year three times? The question is particularly pointed given that Jancsó's use of historical period is often incidental and there is usually little effort to expand on background to the era being represented. This has given Jancsó a reputation of being a difficult film-maker, perhaps because in a historical film lack of "filling-in" on such details usually indicates that the director expects his audience to be totally familiar with the historical background. For Jancsó, as it will become clearer in the course of this article, this lack of filling-in merely indicates that the director thinks it is broadly speaking irrelevant and he would rather we turned our attention to more general themes within the action.

Although I understand why Jancsó might want us to forget the historical background, this point is obviously lost on many viewers, particularly non-Hungarians, who see these films and find them dense and historically impenetrable. I will, therefore, do exactly what Jancsó would like us not to do—pay particular attention to the historical background—in order that we can, in a relaxed and confident way, do what he would like us to do. In examining the context of 1919, I also hope to shed light on why the year interested Jancsó so much.

Troubled times

The history books tell us that the First World War ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. For Russia, the end had come rather sooner, in March 1918, with the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Even before that, the country had been in a situation of "no war, no peace," Trotsky's maxim to describe Russia's unilateral withdrawal from hostilities. However, tension and even conflict continued across central and eastern Europe into the early 1920s.

The Russian civil war raged from 1918 to 1921 and the Russo-Polish war from 1919 to 1921 with the Poles taking Kiev before being beaten back to Warsaw and then recapturing a great deal of their losses. Germany also kept an active army in its Baltic lands (contrary to the peace agreement) and continued to use it to fight off border incursions from the Russians (the reason that none of the Great Powers objected to this contravention of the armistice conditions). Poland meanwhile invaded Lithuania and took Vilnius, and the Polish-Lithuanian border wasn't settled until 1922.

Czechoslovakia took advantage of Poland's involvement on its eastern front to invade and take the town of Teschen, while Poland also lost territory when Silesia was partitioned following a series of uprisings. The newly formed Kingdom of Serb, Croats and Slovenes (soon to become Yugoslavia) also caused numerous border disputes with its new neighbours, including Bulgaria, Italy, Austria and Hungary. Hungary itself lost territory to Austria after a popular uprising which led to a plebiscite. Some Slovak parts of Czechoslovakia were occupied by Hungary from November 1918 until January 1919, and the country was reinvaded in the spring of 1919, when Béla Kun's short-lived Communist government tried to regain territories the Hungarians had lost. Romania, who had gained land from Hungary, was clearly worried by this attempt to reclaim pre-war borders, and invaded the country. They held Budapest until the Kun government collapsed and Hungary's expansionist aims vanished (at least from the immediate agenda) with the devastating Treaty of Trianon of 1920, which confirmed the country's territorial losses.

Aside from warring between armies, there were numerous border incursions across the region, political terrorism was rife and the whole continent was littered with soldiers trying to make their way home (in the context of the Second World War, this theme was illustrated in Jancsó's Így jöttem / My Way Home, 1964). A lack of food and a surplus of arms didn't help stabilise the situation.

The chaos was aggravated by the fact that most countries in the region suffered from an infrastructural dysfunctionality. Poland, for example, was made up of the off-cuttings of three different empires and had to merge different currencies and legal and taxation systems, problems that Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia also had to contend with. Transportation was also a problem, as many of the links reflected the borders of the old empires. Thus Poland and Romania had two different gauges of track in use throughout their rail networks (having inherited land from Russia), and Czechoslovakia did not have a train line that ran within its borders that went from Prague to Slovakia—most routes in the Czech part of the country headed to Vienna, just as train lines in Transylvania headed for Budapest not Bucharest and so on.

Trading patterns were also disrupted. Slovak loggers, for instance, could no longer send wood to Hungary because of high import duties—yet most Slovak rivers, the main form of transport for timber, flowed into the country. Hungary lost access to the sea (absurdly, the regent of this now land-locked country, Miklós Horthy, was an admiral). And this is not to mention the dislocation of ethnic groups—particularly the Hungarians—from their homeland as the borders of central and eastern Europe were redrawn.

After the horrors of war, the "peace" that prevailed must have seemed like cold comfort. Indeed, Trotsky's triumphant maxim of "no war, no peace" could also serve as an ironic description of central and eastern Europe from 1918 and into the early 1920s.

Arguably, peace never took root at all, and the unresolved problems of the First World War simmered until they boiled over in 1939. That, however, is another story.

Contrasting colours

The films Csillagosok, katonák, Csend és kiáltás and Égi bárány are thus all set in times of extreme chaos and social trauma. This is directly reflected in the films' plots, their narrative structure and stylistic elements, which has led many viewers to have problems with them. Particularly, Graham Petrie considers Égi bárány to be "probably the most obscure and enigmatic of Jancsó's films," and Csillagosok, katonák has gained widespread notoriety for the demands it places on the viewer in keeping track of the story.

Plot-based descriptions of the films, short of a scene-by-scene description of the action, are of necessity somewhat vague and generalised. Characters in Jancsó films are often unnamed, and there is frequently no attempt to define one person as the central character through whom we see the story. As such, there is little or no overall narrative arc of personal experience or development.

Csillagosok, katonák is the most visually mathematical and perhaps the coldest of the three. It is also the most famous of them. The action takes place in Ukraine on the frontline of the Russian Civil War, where the Tsarist "Whites" and battling the Bolshevik "Reds," the latter assisted by international irregulars, including Hungarians. There is little for the casual viewer to distinguish the two sides (although the Whites generally have less shabby uniforms).

The first focus of attention is around an abandoned monastery which a Red insurgent (András Kozák) escapes to following a riverside skirmish. The Reds have just captured the building, and they strip White prisoners of their uniforms and then release them topless. The Whites then retake the building and the Tsarist officers play cruel games with the lives of the men they capture, but some are able to get away. Following these men, the focus then switches to a hospital by a river, which the Whites take over in their hunt for escapees. The Whites are again brutal to Reds they capture, but also amongst themselves (a White caught sexually assaulting a woman is shot on the spot) and to the nurses.

In fact, the nurses are subjected to one of the most bizarre forms of humiliation in any Jancsó film. They are rounded up from the hospital—presumably fearing, as the viewer does, that they will be shot or raped—and taken into a forest, where they are forced to put on elegant clothes and dance with each other to waltzes while the officers watch on. The nurses are then allowed to return to the hospital unharmed.

The hospital is then recaptured by Reds, who shoot Whites who will not switch side and a nurse who helped the Whites find enemies in the encampment. The Hungarian irregulars are rounded up into a platoon, which shortly after leaving is surrounded by Whites and marches to its death in one of the most visually striking sections of the film. The final image, equally memorable, is a (rare) close-up of András Kozák, who has arrived too late with his troops to save his comrades, holding a sword up in front of his face in memory of the dead.

Jancsó's approach in depicting war in Csillagosok, katonák can be outlined in the following scheme, which is a summary of one adopted by Matt Johnson: [ Matt Johnson, "Pardoxical Phase," The University of Texas, Austin website, accessed 28 Jan 2003]

• war as predetermined ritual in which characters accept their fate;
• a lack of "rules of the game";
• an inversion of war film conventions (important actions—particularly those leading to reversals of power—occurring off-screen, birdsong on the sound track);
• deliberate confusion as to who is on whose side to the extent that one wonders if sides even matter;
• characters have their own internal logic for their actions, but we are not privy to it (ie a lack of psychologising)
• denial of the individual in a mass process (as there are no recognisable characters);
• victory leading to senseless humiliation (due to an absence of larger military goals);
• denial of the meaningfulness of victory.

Johnson considers Csillagosok, katonák to be an absurdist comedy (although he admits it is "humourless") and concludes, drawing on observations by Graham Petrie, that the film is a more powerful anti-war statement than most films in the genre (which mimic the stylistic and narrative conventions of heroic war films) precisely because of the factors that lead some people to find the film difficult—its dehumanised feel and confusing nature.

Dream Documents of Civil War: Three Films by Miklós Jancsó - Bright ... Gordon Thomas from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2008

Read Part I (Overview and the 1960s and 70s) Images of power and the power of images: The films of Miklós Jancsó, Part I from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

Kinoeye | Hungarian film: Miklos Jancso interviewed Andrew James Horton interview from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003, also seen here: This silly profession

Miklós Jancsó and the Wages of War: Close-Up on "The Red and the ... Jeremy Carr from Mubi, January 21, 2017

VIDEO ESSAY: Mapping the Long Take: Béla Tarr and Miklós Jancsó ... Kevin B. Lee from indieWIRE, September 17, 2012

Second Run DVD - The Red and the White

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Ian Johnston]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

The Red and the White - The New Yorker Richard Brody (capsule)

The Red and the White | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum (capsule)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

SILENCE AND CRY (Csend és kiáltás)

Hungary (73 mi) 1967 ‘Scope

Time Out

The Round-Up and The Red and the White both dealt with key moments in the Hungarian suppression of Communism, and introduced Jancsó's method as an ultra-stylised manipulation of politically symbolic figures in harsh, unyielding landscapes. Silence and Cry resumes the discussion at a newly intimate, domestic level, and introduces the psychological questions that dominate some of Jancsó's later movies. It centres on a refugee from the 'Red' army, hiding out from the police in the farmhouse of some politically dubious peasants, and focuses on his horror at his hosts' bland acceptance of their situation, which eventually provokes a 'meaningless' tragedy. Jancsó's characteristic sequence-shots turn the chamber drama into a political thriller pregnant with wider connotations, including veiled comments on the contemporary state of Hungary.

Dream Documents of Civil War: Three Films by Miklós Jancsó - Bright ... Gordon Thomas from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2008

Read Part I (Overview and the 1960s and 70s) Images of power and the power of images: The films of Miklós Jancsó, Part I from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

THE CONFRONTATION (Fényes szelek)

Hungary (80 mi) 1969 ‘Scope

Time Out

'What is the role of the individual in history?' asks one of the characters in Jancsó's film, set in the Hungary of 1947 and concerned with the problems of revolutionary tactics, this time posed for a group of students. The Confrontation has more talk than is usual in Jancsó's films, precisely because its form is that of a debate on revolutionary tactics, though of course there is the usual recourse to the specifically Hungarian marching, dancing and folk-song rituals which make his movies continually seductive.

User reviews from imdb Author: mark banyai

This is a very significant and specific hungarian portrait of the sixties as we know them, with their rebel youth, solid concepts worth fighting for, while times "they were a-changing". Highly recommended in order to know that hippies weren`t only american...

Read Part I (Overview and the 1960s and 70s) Images of power and the power of images: The films of Miklós Jancsó, Part I from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

WINTER WIND (Sirokkó)

Hungary (80 mi) 1969 ‘Scope

User reviews from imdb Author: James Malcolm Brown (brow0341@flinders.edu.au) from Adelaide, Australia

Winter Wind opens in a snow-bound forest, concentrating on a small band of seemingly hero-worshiping rogues. Over the next few minutes, the camera moves through the forest onto a nearby road, waits while a horse and carriage approach, occasionally tracks off to have a close-up look at the activity of some otherwise hidden characters, circles the carriage as it is shot to pieces by the gang, and follows one of them as he escapes into the forest and runs onto a wasteland of snow and ice.

I'm not sure what has happened, why and exactly how, but it doesn't really matter. The appreciation for this film exists on another level, namely to look in wonder at the masterful tracking shots which create an unparalleled dynamic between character, camera and audience.

Of considerable interest also are the on- and off-screen sound effects, the movement of characters in and out of frame, and the atmosphere of intrigue and paranoia Jancso creates as we are never made explicitly aware of the political situation nor given any sense of recent history and backstory.

I can't say much about the plot: a man, some kind of heroic General made untouchable for his value as a symbol to people we never get to see, is held for his own protection in a small cottage somewhere in the wilderness. But, he wants to actively fight and becomes suspicious of those who want, and practically force, him to stay. The audience is led to empathise with his solitary state by the frustrating and disturbing lack of the formal properties of a regular plot: exposition, motivation, characterisation. Or, rather, it all exists momentarily because from one incident to the next everything in the plot contradicts what we already know. Just as the General can't trust anything neither can we.

So, watching Winter Wind for its story is likely to make anyone a temporary loon.

For those who appreciate camera movements that can, for instance, do this: begin in the cottage, wander around from room to room following several characters framed from long shots to close-ups, steadily and smoothly make its way outside (down the steps) and then perform a few laps of the cottage, stopping briefly to look into a window, before winding down the hill a bit to another group of characters and finally watch them ride off into the forest, there is a lot on offer. I never saw track marks in the snow, the central action was always in sharp focus, an actor hardly ever had to be slightly re-framed. It's an incredible treat and a sign of immense labour (I've heard each shot was rehearsed for a week before actual shooting).

Obviously a good film for cinematography students to analyse. More probably needs to be said about colour, set design, and the minimal use of sound but I'll leave that to another reviewer. It's hard to find but Winter Wind is just as impressive as the other Jancso film I've seen (The Red and the White) and well worth finding if you like your films unique (or at the very least, original). For camera buffs and devotees of Jancso, it's probably indispensable.

Read the New York Times Review » Vincent Canby, also seen here: NYT review - The New York Times

OF the eight films made by Miklos Jancso, the 48-year-old Hungarian director, I've now seen four — the brilliant "The Red and the White" and "The Roundup," which were released here last year, "Ah! Ca Ira," a pageant of revolution shown at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, and his newest, "Winter Wind," which opened yesterday at the Bleecker Street, the Evergreen 11th Street and the Cinema Village Theaters. "Winter Wind" is the first of 12 films being distributed here under the omnibus title of Grove Press Film Festival.

Like "The Red and the White" and "The Roundup," "Winter Wind" is said to be based on a moment from history, but unlike those two films, it is almost completely unintelligible in terms of conventional or even epic narrative. It is, instead, a parable of political opportunism so spare and stylized that it finally comes to look as if it were a virtuoso exercise in camera mobility.

The people photographed—and the snowscapes, the forests, the fields, and rooms in which they are placed—are never more important than the manner in which the camera moves around them, sometimes in long, serene, swooping pan shots, sometimes darting in and out of close-ups like a moth successfully resisting a light bulb. Although the style is personal, the effect is just the opposite — cool, distant and geometric. There are relationships in the film, but they are between camera and object rather than between people, between people and events. It's an interesting concept, but I don't think it really works.

In an interview in the Grove Press festival program, Jancso is quoted as saying: "Since all [Hungarian filmmakers] want to say something, and at the same time are not forthright enough to do so, we count a great deal on the form of the film to make a statement."

The form of "Winter Wind" is certainly spectacular, as are the individual images. I didn't count them, but I'm told that the entire film consists of just 12 shots, and that some "takes" last as long as 10 minutes. This is an extraordinary accomplishment and sometimes works to beautiful effect, as in the first sequence of the film in which Jancso's camera, as if it were mounted on a Hovercraft, captures in one uninterrupted movement the preparation, the execution and the aftermath of a roadside ambush.

Succeeding examples of this sort of technical facility become increasingly less effective, however, as the prepared mind begins to speculate on just how Jancso is going to choreograph his scenes, especially interiors where space for maneuvering is necessarily restricted. Not since the "Othello" of Orson Welles have I been so conscious of riding a travelling camera, but Welles's use of space and movement was always in relation to people and events. It wasn't an end in itself.

The time of "Winter Wind" is set by some pre-opening newsreel shots of the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in Marseilles in 1934, followed by a title card explaining that the events of the film could have been a preamble to that act. Just how, I'm not sure, but the statement serves to attach to the movie a perspective that would otherwise be missing.

The film is the story of Marko (Jacques Charrier), the leader of a group of Croatian anarchists who is forced to flee Yugoslavia for Hungary, whose government secretly protects him. Marko is never sure whether his protectors are, indeed, protectors, or whether he is a prisoner in his forest retreat. Among those around him are the sad, very womznly Maria (Marina Vlady), who may be spy, and Illona (Eva Swann), provided him as a camp whore. Eventually, Marko must be sacrificed so that the Hungarian government can continue to protect the movement, while pretending to placate the Yugoslavs.

This final irony seems somewhat too clear and too banal for all of the obscure, enigmatic confrontations that lead up to it. The metaphor thus seems a good deal less interesting than some of its parts—the end effect is that of a one-act, one-set play that has been inflated by means of precious movie devices. Oddly enough, "The Red and the White" and "The Roundup," which contained no continuing characters, seem both more personal and more truly epic than this ambitious but, ultimately, unsuccessful film.

Read Part I (Overview and the 1960s and 70s) Images of power and the power of images: The films of Miklós Jancsó, Part I from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

THE PACIFIST (La pacifista - Smetti di piovere)

Italy France Germany (85 mi) 1970

User reviews from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States

This film from the era of radical youth protests was made in Italy by the great Hungarian director Miklos Jancso. We get a lot of footage of students shouting "Ho Chi Minh! Ho Chi Minh!" A journalist (Monica Vitti) is preparing a story on extremist youth and falls in love with a young radical (Pierre Clementi) who fears being killed by his companions when he is unable to commit a political assassination. Virtually unknown today, the film is a stylish ballet of love and death. It is also excruciatingly dull.

Read Part I (Overview and the 1960s and 70s) Images of power and the power of images: The films of Miklós Jancsó, Part I from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

RED PSALM (Még kér a nép) A 95

aka: And the People Still Ask

Hungary (88 mi) 1971

Very much a 1960’s style film, influenced by Godard’s long tracking shots in WEEKEND, a film that very much looks like parts of WEEKEND, with an opening shot that, according to a friend Fred Tsao, was twelve and a half minutes long. Fred counted 23 total shots in the entire film, though there are reportedly 26. Taking place almost entirely on an open field, it resembles an abstract, impersonal ballet with almost dream-like choreography of movement and imagery, accentuated by Communist musical theater, expressing explicit revolutionary sentiment. The film depicts the 1898 peasant farmer strikes, a rural movement crushed by the military, using only symbolism, color, movement and song.

While the film is striking and bold for its originality in concept, the impersonal nature of this Bertolt Brecht-style living theater is also overwhelming, in contrast to say, Chen Kaige’s highly personalized YELLOW EARTH, which expresses such a strong emotional drive, revealing a yearning, a need for something more, a new hope, something actually worth dying for. Here, this film is presented more as an open air Requiem for the dead, a tribute to fallen heroes. Winner of the Best Director at the 1971 Cannes Film fest.

Red Psalm, directed by Miklós Jancsó | Film review - Time Out

Where Jancsó's Agnus Dei was opaque and difficult, this is crystal clear and involving: looking for a language in that film, he found it here and uses it with dazzling precision. Like his earlier films, Red Psalm is centred on a specific period in Hungarian history: the turn-of-the-century uprising of landless agricultural workers. It was a socialist uprising, and songs of the period - including a remarkable socialist Lord's Prayer - are woven into the film. A work of amazing and totally uncosmetic beauty, it's a folk tale around the belief of the people in their own ultimate victory, and the symbol Jancsó has chosen is the wounded palm that's also a rosette of hope.

Még kér a nép Clarke Fountain from the All Movie Guide

Red Psalm, or Még kér a nép (literally: "The People Still Ask") is one of the great Hungarian film director Miklos Jancso's best-known films. It recounts quite poetically the story of a peasant uprising on an estate in Hungary in the 1890s. It examines the nature of revolt, and the issues of morality and violence. This film uses symbolic imagery and language involving the color red to great effect and was filmed in a virtuoso manner, using only 28 shots. Reviewers reported that Jancso's storytelling technique most closely resembled that used in ballet. The pacifistic peasants, who seek some basic rights, are in a standoff with local authorities and later, the army. Everyone takes a break in the confrontation in order to celebrate a festival. Afterwards, the peasants resume their strike and meet with a tragic end.

User reviews from imdb Author: Lucia Joyce from United States

I saw this three times on the same evening as a teenager at UC Santa Cruz, which claimed at the time (this was before DVDs) to have the only existing print in the United States; this is almost 20 years ago now, but I still remember being -- if not exactly entranced, at least lulled, by Jancsó's restless, dancing camera, and the underground pulse of menace that pushed and shaped the actors' dancing. It takes place on a great plain or meadow, I think; and there's a cast of what seems to be a hundred dancers, dancing in the circle-dances not unlike the end of Bertolucci's "Last Tango In Paris," Communism and film form all one. The shots are long and languid, like Bela Tarr: there's something like 17 edits in the entire 90 minute film. And the last image is still seared on my mind's eye: a beautiful woman slits her palm with a knife, holds it to her breast, and then faces the camera, showing us her wound: instead of blood, a red scarf is tied around her hand, a banner that combined with her defiant pose speaks revolution, the red psalm of the title.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

East Side Story, a recent documentary about communist musicals, assumes that communist-bloc directors were just itching to make Hollywood extravaganzas and invariably wound up looking strained, square, and ill equipped. But Red Psalm (1971), Miklos Jancso’s dazzling, open-air revolutionary pageant, is a highly sensual communist musical that employs occasional nudity as lyrically as the singing, dancing, and nature; within its own idioms it swings as well as wails. Set near the end of the 19th century, when a group of peasants have demanded basic rights from a landowner and soldiers arrive on horseback, Red Psalm is composed of less than 30 shots, each one an intricate choreography of panning camera, landscape, and clustered bodies. Jancso’s awesome fusion of form with content and politics with poetry equals the exciting innovations of the French New Wave in the 60s and early 70s. The music, ranging from revolutionary folk songs to "Charlie Is My Darlin’," will keep playing in your head for days, and the colors are ravishing. The picture won Jancso a best director prize at Cannes, and it may well be the greatest Hungarian film of the 60s and 70s, summing up an entire strain in his work that lamentably has been forgotten here. The Hungarian title means "And the People Still Ask," and one of Jancso’s characteristic achievements is to create a striking continuum between past and present, a sense of immediacy about history that can be found in few other period films.

Movie Review - - Miklos Jansco's 'Red Psalm' Screened - NYTimes.com Roger Greenspun

Miklos Jansco's "Red Psalm" takes place at an indeterminate time on an open field where a group of peasants confront and, in the long run, symbolically conquer a group of soldiers and landed aristocrats. Thus there are political issues at stake—though for Hungary of the 1970's, I should think, exceptionally safe ones—but I'm not sure they matter much. In "Red Psalm," as in Jansco's movies generally ("The Round-up," "The Red and the White," etc.), the point is not what things are, but what they look like.

On one level things look pretty good. The cast is made up mostly of handsome young men and beautiful young women, and some of the young women undress from time to time in a kind of solemn masque of eroticism. The color is lush, the movements are graceful and the camera work — a Jansco trademark—is spectacular.

According to the current issue of the film magazine, Sight and Sound, "Red Psalm" contains only 26 shots. An ordinary movie of this length (88 minutes) would contain several hundred shots. To make up the difference, the camera moves and people move back and forth and in large or small circles, and I suppose it is right to say—as everybody says—that a Jansco film is not so much directed as choreographed. Actually, it looks to me less like choreography than a cross between eurythmics and close-order drill.

It is difficult to pinpoint the reasons for the incredible monotony of so much vigorous activity, but surely one reason is that nothing happens in "Red Psalm" except for the benefit of the camera. That may sound like any movie, but actually it is like no movie (except another Jansco movie) and is virtually a negation of the whole, necessary relation of cinema to life.

Nothing could be further, say, from the great fluid camera movements of a Max Ophuls than the elaborate cycles and epicycles of the Jansco world, where everybody — open fields notwithstanding—is imprisoned within rigid limits of the director's rage for abstract patterns.

Red Psalm - Rouge the final major essay written by Raymond Durgnat, from his estate, reprinted from Rouge, 2002

Read Part I (Overview and the 1960s and 70s) Images of power and the power of images: The films of Miklós Jancsó, Part I from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

Kinoeye | Hungarian film: Miklos Jancso interviewed Andrew James Horton interview from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003, also seen here: This silly profession

Kinoblog [Michael Brooke]

The Gospel According to Comrade Miklós (Red Psalm) - (New) World Michael Sooriyakumaran, August 31, 2012

Cine Outsider [L.K. Weston]

Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]

Electric Sheep Magazine [Alison Frank]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Subtitledonline.com [Colin John Gardner]

Movie Review - - Miklos Jansco's 'Red Psalm' Screened - NYTimes.com

DVDBeaver.com [Arvid]

Red Psalm - Wikipedia

ELECTRA, MY LOVE (Szerelmem, Elektra)

Hungary (70 mi) 1974

Time Out

There are two main levels in Jancsó's enthralling reinvention of the Elektra myth as a fable of permanent revolution. One is the troubling analysis of people's capacity for submission to tyranny; the other is the triumphant celebration of the 'firebird' of revolution, reborn daily with the rising sun. Grounding the political fable in the story of Elektra and Orestes' revenge on their father's murderer, Aegisthus, gives it an implicit psychoanalytical dimension of a kind new in Jancsó's work. The film's balletic and musical elements are even more central than they are in Red Psalm: the rhapsody of song and dance replaces conventional dramatic exposition, leaving Jancsó free to explore the dialectical cross-currents of his subject. It's mesmerising.

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

A great semi-forgotten master, Hungarian new wave pioneer Miklos Jancso reorchestrated camera movement, off-screen space, long-take realism, and landscape into a stream-of-consciousness style that allowed his films to be roamed around in as if they were small countries. Inspiring Tarkovsky and Sokurov, the unique formal attack was ideally suited for mass portraits of political rupture. But in this rarely seen tour de force, Jancso re-envisions the Euripides drama as an experimental theater-dancework, performed by hordes of metaphoric extras on the windblown Hungarian plains. In this superhumanly gorgeous movie, even the flocks of birds obey the laws of composition, and the age-old revenge myth acquires a hulking machine's chilling inevitability.

Electra, My Love Clarke Fountain from the All Movie Guide

Most movies are composed of many small snippets of film which are spliced together, connected by "wipes," and "dissolves" and any number of other clever techniques which move the eye (and the story) from one piece of film to the next without being too obtrusive. Renowned Hungarian director Miklos Jancso has instead shot this film recounting the classical story of Electra's revenge in about nine long "takes." This is a technical feat of some magnitude; it is all the more remarkable because he makes it seem perfectly natural to the story, which is told in an allegorical and highly symbolic fashion, mixing primitive Greek settings with modern ones. In it, the woman Electra seeks vengeance for the murder of her father. Due to the highly abstract form of storytelling used, this film might best be appreciated by those who have studied or have knowledge of the original Greek myth on which it is based.

PopMatters Chris Elliot

Electra (Mari Töröcsik) is filled with a long-simmering rage and she's not afraid to let people know it. As she says in Miklós Jancsó's 1974 film Electra, My Love, "I was born to disturb men's peace."

Who could blame her? The current king of the land, Aegisthus (J¢szsef Madaras), murdered her father/his brother Agamemnon, the rightful king, usurped the throne, and cast out her brother Orestes (György Cserhalmi). That was all 15 years ago and just about everyone's managed to erase the dirty little details from their collective consciousness, but Electra remembers. As she puts it, "I, Electra, who does not forget. While one person lives who doesn't forget, no one can forget."

Still, for Aegisthus and the rest of the population, the true story of Agamemnon's death is best forgotten. It's easier to believe the administration-approved version of events: the old king was a fool, burdening his people with a freedom they could not handle and failing to impose much-needed order on the land. It doesn't matter that "order" is imposed violently and results in a repressive regime (a consistent image throughout the film shows naked commoners being herded around the landscape by the king's whip-wielding men). Order is all. Says Aegisthus: "A ruler knows that to keep order in his kingdom, roads must be paved with skulls and walls plastered with cries. I don't like blood, Electra. But it buys order.... People are content if they know what to fear."

For Electra, this explanation doesn't cut it. And for years after, she persists, hoping that Orestes will return and avenge their father's death. Unfortunately, Orestes is nowhere to be seen through much of the film, leaving Electra and Aegisthus to circle around and around each other (in an increasingly wearying manner), holding forth on civic management.

At heart a didactic film (concerned as it is with laying out its competing social visions), Electra drives its point home with an unfortunate degree of regularity: killing the lawful ruler (Agamemnon) is bad, willfully forgetting about it is bad, subjecting the people to tyrannical rule is bad, and (if you're the "people") rolling over and accepting the state of affairs is, well, bad. How many different ways can the protagonist say, "I, Electra, will not forget"? Okay, point taken. It doesn't help that the dialogue is delivered in a sometimes mechanical fashion. Maybe the point is to problematize viewers' reactions, a kind of Brechtian gesture towards deconstructing the "naturalistic" tendencies of film.

But this pay-off in self-reflexivity, if that's what it is, just becomes annoying after about 30 minutes. Luckily, Jancsó manages to bring a bit of formal flair to the didactic regime. Considering it's emotional subject matter (murder, tyranny, revenge, etc.) Electra is pleasantly reserved on the technical front. Jancsó used a meager 12 long-sequences in Electra, a decision that could have been disastrous (as in, turgid, slow, ponderous) if executed poorly. Jancsó camera-work is nimble, however, composed of fluid tracking shots and movements from long-shot to close-up and back again. It has an organic feel to it that's in stark contrast to the acting style and delivery noted above.

Things get a bit mysterious and symbol-laden in the latter quarter of the film. Without giving away the ending, suffice it to say that it involves a red helicopter and revolvers, which is a bit strange given that until that point the film was happy enough to unfold in a pre-industrial age landscape of horses, knives and spears. Whatever inspired Jancsó to tack this sequence onto the end, the effect is to explode the film's narrative trajectory, violently pulling the audience out of what was a gentle downswing towards a logical and traditional cinematic closure.

The sequence is a bit ridiculous and poetic at the same time, replete with a voiceover narrative extolling the virtues of perpetual revolution that would give even the most bureaucratic party apparatchik a bit of a rise. It's a mix of (apparently) real reverence and over-the-top slapstick that's contradictory to say the least, and not exactly palatable.

And perhaps that's Jancsó's point. The film was directed and released in Hungary at a time when the Soviet Union, and the Soviet bloc in general, were in an imminent state of collapse. Contradiction was the order of the day - not least of which was the contradiction between the utopian party rhetoric and the realities of a repressive state system. One can imagine today that Electra's conclusion held a certain self-reflective relevance for the Hungarian audiences at the time.

Kinoeye | Three Hungarian films by Miklos Jancso from the 1970s Miklós Jancsó’s Szerelmem, Elektra (Elektreia, 1974), Magyar rapszódia (Hungarian Rhapsody, 1978) and Allegro Barbaro (1978), by Peter Hames from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

Read Part I (Overview and the 1960s and 70s) Images of power and the power of images: The films of Miklós Jancsó, Part I from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

Dance of the Firebird: Freedom, Femininity, Power and Paganism in ... Dance of the Firebird: Freedom, Femininity, Power and Paganism in Miklós Jancsó’s Electra, My Love, by Kat Ellinger from Diabolique magazine, October 23, 2016

DVD of the Week: Electra, My Love | The New Yorker Richard Brody, August 24, 2010

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Movie Review - - Erratic 'Elektreia' Retells Legend - NYTimes.com Richard Eder

Electra, My Love Blu-ray - Mari Töröcsik - DVD Beaver

PRIVATE VICES, PUBLIC PLEASURES (Vizi privati, pubbliche virtù)

Italy Yugoslavia (99 mi) 1976

Time Out

This continues Jancsó's attack on paternalist authority, but its dreamily languorous pace is about all it has in common with its predecessors. Filmed in Italy, it uses the Mayerling story as the basis for a political fable about an act of rebellion: a young prince refuses to bend to his father's will, by staying on his country estate and by debauching the sons and daughters of local landowners to create a scandal in the capital. Apart from the cruel but inevitable pay-off, that's really all that happens, but Jancsó elaborates it into an extraordinary multi-sexual erotic rhapsody, using dancers rather than actors to turn the pastoral drama into something like an Elizabethan masque. The sexual aspect manages to be completely forthright (it centres on the figure of a hermaphrodite) but not at all prurient; as if Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' were the ultimate weapon against patriarchal tyranny.

User reviews from imdb author: Rod Evan from Amsterdam, Netherlands

This is an excellent film, with an unfortunate and misguided bad reputation. Partly because Jancso antagonised the critics by including explicit (for its time) sex when they had been used to more "political" content. Jancso used the sexuality in his film to point out that we live in a repressive society and showed that the characters in his film were willing, up until the point of death, to live out their free attitudes towards sexuality. This was and still is a subversive issue as sexuality still seems to need some dismal excuse for inclusion in non-pornographic films. In this film Jancso was bold enough to present eroticism within a deliberately anarchic context. Contrary to other readers comments this film is neither boring nor rubbish. The fact also that it has homosexual imagery disturbs a lot of narrow minded viewers, but there again Jancso showed these images to represent a multi-sexual utopia. This utopia of course in the film had to be destroyed. You can't get more political than that.

User reviews from imdb Author: Mattydee74 from Sydney, Australia

The Australian video release cover of Miklos Jancso's 1975 ode to sexual freedom and personal rebellion had it placed alongside pornography in Australian video stores when it was released in the 1980s (alongside other classics like In The Realm of The Senses and A Zed and Two Noughts). It features naked bodies moving and lying all over one another in a wildly joyous orgy. Once you watch the film, you realise this is no simple recitation of the pleasures or mechanics of the flesh.

This is a fascinating film which can be aligned for many reasons with Pasolini's Salo (they were both made almost in parallel). Both films are subversive historical studies of human sexuality and the treatment of the human body as a political object. Or more simply, the way bodies are always at the centre of the forces of power. The two films are very different - but not absolutely distinct. Both do concern the events at a distant place where sources of political and social power subvert the order of things. In Salo, however, it is an insatiable facistic power which reproduces itself through acts of abuse and murder. In Private Vice..., it is a subversive power of a less annihilistic order aiming to alter order by embracing passions and overturning the military order. Quite the opposite to Pasolini's much more bleak vision of politics in the shadow of modern forms of exploitation since WW2.

Private vice, Public Virtue follows a rebel son embracing the ideals of sexual freedom, dionysian joys such as wine and song, and the rebellious refusal to accept the orders of absent elders. The scenes where they mock the military ruler with caricatured masks as the army returns from battle is one such example. But throughout, the film seeks to alter roles and power structures. Women wield dildoes, nakedness is not the domain of women as in so many other films and sexual expression is an unstoppable force. The film is both a beautiful, utopian vision and a tale of the violent power of history

User reviews from imdb Author: (ArpadGabor) from Bay City, MI

For many, this film is pure pornography with a lot of pretension.

But, for some -'in the know'- it is a historical allegory reinterpreting the real-life "Mayerling affair," in which the Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince Rudolph and his mistress, the Baroness Maria Vetsera, committed suicide at the family hunting lodge, Mayerling, because they were not allowed to marry. The official records of the deaths were long hidden, then destroyed and the public's imagination was captured for decades to come with the mysteries surrounding the love/political affairs of the ruling society.

The film director Jancsó, having long artistic controversies of his own, suggests that contrary to this official version, the lovers were indeed assassinated by his father, Emperor Franz Josef. Rudolph and his friends were in direct opposition with the world of the Emperor on many issues and used plots to convince him that his time was past, and that it was now the moment to allow the Young&New to rise to power. Some of those plots consisted of attracting the youth of the best families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to their castle involving them in giant orgies. Photographs were taken during these orgies and sent to the Emperor, in order to blackmail him and convince him to let the new order rule (?!). After the soldiers -led by the Austrian secret police- shot the couple, their corpses were arranged suggesting a romantic suicide pact-to avoid scandal or radical overthrow of a society obsessed with image.

In this movie, Jancsó is inventing a 'real story' in order of translating the complexities of the realities of repression and freedom into images. In it he replaces a romantic cliché with a modern politicized take on a particularly tormented historical period, but his visual language's coding brings forth the controversy that rendered this piece of his art to obscurity. The explicit use of nudity and erotic encounters of all kinds seems to be concealing the message of aspiring political freedom from an initial and superficial glance. The use of nudity is a recurrent visual element in Jancsó's art, but, while in his earlier works it was a symbol of humiliation, now it is a sign of liberation and he goes much farther than that. The mix of both sexes in wild celebration of nakedness and sex in a state of joy and ecstasy is an expression of rebellion and free will. This is in contrast with the attitudes of those in power, who seem to want to cover every inch of flesh with as many layers as possible and every act of life with prude social contacts ('In MY family, we do not have sex!'). This revolution replaces the unnatural uniforms of the army and clergy with natural uniformity of the nakedness of all-beautiful young bodies, and the highly coded social behavior with spontaneous sexuality. This alone indeed, often places the unprepared spectator at certain unease.

Due to contractual terms, Jancsó enjoyed less than usual artistic freedom that shows up as discontinuity with both, his previous and later works when it comes to editing, using of music and photography. Despite these minor artistic flaws, the film remains a powerful work, reflecting on youth movements that attempted revolutions in the 60s and 70s' Western World, bearing signs of knowing what they did not want-but being not sure of what to replace them with. Jancsó proves himself to be a lucid analyst not only of history but also of modern society. The young in this film are mistaken by hoping to make their voices heard, as silence and conformance with the social order is to be maintained by those in power - regardless the arbitrary nature of this order. One can argue that the mock-rituals of the Crown Prince are as legitimate as the Imperial etiquette, but a revolution without proper preparation is doomed to failure.

In summary, 'Vizi privati, pubbliche virtú' is a sorrowful meditation on the limits of a revolution that failed to come to life, not a pretentious porno flick - as an unperceptive observant would judge it to be. The question is ours now to answer: 'Is our society -and we ourselves- are so far removed from the puritanical world of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef and his obsessively clean image? '

User reviews from imdb Author: L. Denis Brown (bbhlthph@shaw.ca) from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

This is a fascinating historical film, created by Miklos Jancso - a highly competent director, and it is sad that it has become regarded by some as an essentially erotic work dressed up in the trappings of a historical drama. I find it hard to understand how any viewer who watches it carefully can fail to recognise that the Director was not attempting to create an erotic drama for its own sake (this would have been much easier to do free of the constraints associated with the historical theme), but had what he felt was an important message to convey through his largely fictional story. Remember that the events portrayed in this film have had a major influence on the lives of most of us. The death of Crown Prince Rudolf and his mistress in 1889, was a fundamental link in the chain of events which led to the start of the war of 1914-18, and subsequently to the development of World War II. At the time, these deaths were officially attributed by the Hapsburg government to a suicide pact which followed their recognition that the couple would never be able to marry; but right from the start many commentators (both nationally and internationally) suggested that foul play was a more probable explanation. The full story was exceedingly complex and had more twists than most detective novels, but there can be no doubt that the Hapsburg authorities attempted to conceal many of these facts, adding fuel to speculations that the Emperor himself may have been involved in some sort of plot designed to end Rudolf's illicit liaison with his mistress, Baroness Maria Vetsera. This is the story line followed in the film which suggests that Rudolf was attempting to force Franz Joseph to abdicate by gaining the support of the Austrian society of the time for a more liberal social order; and that Franz Joseph either planned or condoned the assassination of the couple in order to avoid their licentious activities continuing to embarrass the Imperial Court.

I believe it is intrinsically unlikely that Franz-Joseph would have ever contemplated the assassination of his son, the heir to the Hapsburg throne, however acutely he had been embarrassed by his behaviour. After more than six centuries of continuous rule by the same family, the Hapsburg dynasty was almost unique; and throughout Franz Joseph's long life devotion to the continuation of this dynasty had been the major driving force for most of his activities. He had little respect for his brothers son, through whom the succession would pass, and it is recorded that he never once spoke to the great nephew who was his eventual successor during the remaining 27 years of his rule. He must have been aware that his death would constitute a major crisis which the empire itself might not survive; and it is hard to believe that, whatever the provocation, he would deliberately have done anything to create such a crisis. There are at least two other more credible explanations for the assassination of Crown Prince Rudolf. Over the centuries the Hapsburg empire had expanded, more by marriage than by conquest, until it incorporated a vast array of diverse ethnic groups which became difficult to hold together after the Napoleonic wars released their tide of libertarianism and nationalism. One revolt in Hungary was suppressed, but the Empress persuaded her husband to make a very conciliatory settlement with the Hungarians in 1867 which effectively created what became known as the joint Austro-Hungarian Empire. Rudolf was also strongly supportive of Hungarian aspirations, and this antagonised many members of the Imperial old school. Some of them may well have decided to take steps to ensure that Rudolf would never succeed Franz-Joseph as Emperor. An alternative explanation for his death is supported by near deathbed testimony from Countess Zita, the wife of Emperor Karl, Franz Joseph's eventual successor who inherited the imperial throne in 1916, following the assassination of his uncle in Sarajevo in 1914 and the death of the old Emperor during the resulting world war. Empress Zita lived to the age of almost 90, dying in 1989 fourteen years after this film was produced. Before her death she recorded accounts of Hapsburg family conversations which suggested that Rudolf's death followed an approach from French authorities seeking to gain his support for an attempt to persuade Franz Joseph to abdicate so that Rudolph could introduce a more liberal regime which internationally would support the French rather than Germany. Rudolf had indignantly rejected this proposition and reported it to his father. His assassination at Meyerling followed - presumably by French agents or their Austrian sympathisers. Her account was largely ignored at the time it was first published, but three years after her death (and several years after this film was released)it was supported by late autopsies of the bodies of the two victims which showed that, contrary to the official accounts, Baroness Vetsera had not been shot but had been battered to death, and that Rudolf had fired six shots from his revolver before he died. It is interesting to speculate how this new information might have changed the message Jancso was attempting to pass on, if it had been available when the film was produced.

We are now never likely to know what actually happened; but if, like me, you do not believe Franz Joseph was directly responsible for the death of his son, you can still enjoy this film and its message that the old order will eventually have to yield to the pressures created by a younger and more virile generation. It is an important film which should be made available as a DVD, but be aware that whilst the Rudolf of the film is just a libertine who is something of a caricature, the historical Crown Prince appears to have been a well travelled, cultivated individual with remarkably progressive views who was highly regarded by most of those that had anything to do with him.

Kinoeye | Hungary: Miklos Jancso's Private Vices, Public Virtues Rolland Man from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

Read Part I (Overview and the 1960s and 70s) Images of power and the power of images: The films of Miklós Jancsó, Part I from Kinoeye, February 17, 2003

Private Goes Public in Miklós Janscó's 'Private Vices, Public Virtues ... Imran Khan from Pop Matters, November 14, 2016

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

Private Vices, Public Pleasures - Wikipedia

LORD’S LANTERN IN BUDAPEST (Nekem lámpást adott kezembe az Úr, Pesten)

Hungary (107 mi) 1999

Nekem Lampast Adott Kezembe Az Ur Pesten (1999) Gönül Dönmez-Colin from the All Movie Guide

Experimental filmmaker and elder statesman Miklós Jancsó's surreal allegory about the present stands out with its twisted humor -- a cemetery is the film's starting point and leitmotif. The protagonists, Kapa and Pepe, are two gravediggers who sit on a little bench in the cemetery and while away the time fooling around with the world (including Jancsó and screenwriter Gyula Hernadi, who appear as themselves). The gravediggers are at the same time hoodlums, bankers, lawyers, nouveau riche, bankrupt entrepreneurs and terrorists. One thing is certain; they are indestructible. They are like the director and the screenwriter, who get shot because their names are on a list, but little do they care. In the meanwhile, the audience is greatly entertained with a lot of humor. Instead of a story, there are several episodes, and life, death, success and failure, philosophy, humor and satire are all mixed in these seemingly disconnected episodes. What connects them is the locale; they all take place in Budapest, where anything can happen. Nekem Lampast Adott Kezembe az ur Pesten earned the Gene Moskowitz foreign critics award at the 30th Annual Hungarian Film Week festival in 1999 and it was also screened as part of the International Forum of New Cinema section of the 49th Berlin Film Festival, 1999.

Miklos Jancso's Nekem lampast adott kezembe az Ur Pesten Hamlet in Wonderland, Andrew James Horton from Kinoeye, July 5, 1999, expanded here: Kinoeye | Hungary: Miklos Jancso's Lord's Lantern in Budapest Miklós Jancsó's Nekem lámpást adott kezembe as Úr Pesten (The Lord's Lantern in Budapest, 1998), expansion of earlier 1999 article by Andrew James Horton from Kinoeye, March 3, 2003

Miklos Jancso is possibly the most famous and most highly regarded Hungarian director of all time. His reputation rests on a body of work which makes high intellectual demands of its audience and provokes awkward questions without trying to answer them.

After a long period in the doldrums, Miklos Jancso has re-emerged with Nekem lampast adott kezembe az Ur Pesten (The Lord's Lantern in Budapest, 1998), a blackly humorous look at the post-1989 culture of violence that won him the Gene Moskovitz prize from international critics at the Hungarian Film Week in Budapest earlier this year.

The reception was a mixed one, however, with the Hungarian pre-selection judges for the festival eliminating the film from the competition whilst pushing through what could charitably called masterpieces of the Hungarian new wave of unintented kitsch. They cannot be totally blamed, however. Nekem lampast is almost impenetrably dense in its richness and lacks a plot in any meaningful sense of the term. To understand why it is a masterpiece, the film must be seen in the context of Jancso's career.

Jancso, like so many directors of the classic period of Hungarian film, began by making documentaries in the early 1950s. In 1958, he turned to feature films, and his first masterpiece, Igy jottem (My Way Home) was made in 1964. A string of internationally acclaimed works followed, including Szegenylegenyek (The Round-up) in 1965, Fenyes szelek (Confrontation, 1968) and Meg ker a nep (Red Psalm) in 1971, for which he was awarded at Cannes as best director the following year.

His approach has always been intelligent and experimental. In fact, sometimes too intelligent and too experimental, as several of his films are so elliptical to lose all but the most dedicated Jancso fans. Although a committed Marxist, Jancso's mature work remained independent of the Party line and several of his works - notably Szegenylegenyek - can be read as highly critical of Communism as it was practised in Hungary.

After the highly productive years of the 60s, Jancso's career floundered. Although a profoundly Hungarian artist, he decided to work on several projects in Italy in the 70s and 80s and these noticeably lack the impact of the works made in his home country. However, his career in this period was diverse, covering historical feature films, a documentary of a Hungarian rock group, a Faustian television series and much work in the theatre.

With the fall of Communism in 1989, Jancso has been in an interesting position in cinema. Ever inquiring and critical, and still retaining his Socialist beliefs, he has become a sceptical observer of post-Communist society. Kek Duna keringo (Blue Danube Waltz, 1991) is a characteristically bleak look at Hungary's emerging political scene. However, his films still failed to conjure up the magic, and the critical attention, of his works of the 60s.

His latest film, Nekem lampast adott kezembe az Ur Pesten (literally "The Lord Put a Lantern in My Hand in Pest" but marketed as the snappier The Lord's Lantern in Budapest for English-speakers), again sees him questioning contemporary Hungarian culture. He also continues on from his previous work by employing two significant and long-standing collaborators: the novelist Gyula Hernadi, who has been writing screenplays for Jancso since Igy jottem, and Ferenc Grunwalsky as director of photography. (Grunwalsky incidentally is a director in his own right [click here for Kinoeye's review of his latest film which contrasts with Jancso's])

The central characters of Nekem lampast are Pepe and Kapa, two grave-diggers in a Pest cemetery, and Zsolt, some sort of mafia business man who likes to hang out there for no obvious reason. However, in this film nothing can be certain: Pepe is also a policeman who is about to arrest Kapa for drinking behind the wheel of his car to calm himself after he discovers his entire family has been wiped out by his niece, and Zsolt is his wife's favourite doctor. Kapa is a multi-billionaire trying to buy Budapest's parliament building and the castle, who tries to talk Pepe out of taking a suicide leap from the Chain Bridge. Additionally, Pepe is a cleaner and Kapa a tattooed mafia mobster. In amongst these bizarre and inexplicable personality changes is music by Hungary's premier rock group Kispal es a Borz and guest appearances by Jancso and Hernadi as themselves. And that is a simplified description of the film.

Starting with the words "If I were an animal, I wouldn't keep a man as a pet," Jancso's work is a sharply acted film of cynical asides and black one-liners, but with no discernible plot-line in the conventional sense of the term. However, strong performances and perfect timing by Zoltan Mucsi and Peter Scherer make the film as enjoyable and dynamic as it is morbid, although the pace does fall off towards the end of the film. Jancso introduces us to a world in which money and violence are everything and nothing.

The gun rules supreme, but its effects are meaningless, as characters are repeatedly killed and then resurrected without explanation. The characters live numbed in a world that is insulated from the true meaning of the violence which surrounds them: Pepe has never even heard of Adolf Hitler and during one scene of violence, the hysterical screaming of young women is brought to a neat crescendo by Zsolt, who acts as an impromptu choirmaster. Not to mention the casual air with which characters kill off their nearest and dearest.

The world is a purely cinematic one and the characters are constantly intrigued by the screen and its limits. They cannot see other characters standing next to them because they are off-screen and objects thrown into the action from outside of the frame materialise for them as if from nowhere.

The characters also question their own existence, whether it is through contemplation of suicide or by questioning why it is that they are still alive even though they have been killed. Furthermore, the principal roles of the two main characters as grave-diggers sets up obvious Shakespearean allusions. However, the metaphysical questions Pepe and Kapa ask themselves and each other remain unanswered. Ultimately, their futile existential enquiries are merely bad imitations of even the most basic analytical thought, to say nothing of the rich musings of the Bard.

The mocking publicity for Nekem lampast urges the viewer to live their life and be content without questioning it. Jancso, of course, has never produced a film which has not attempted to do exactly the opposite. Nekem lampast is an attack on the complacency of present-day Hungarian society, a culture which is itself obsessed with violence but cannot comprehend its consequences, does not care to and only half-heartedly questions its surroundings. For all the "through the looking glass" type games Jancso plays with his plot, Nekem lampast is essentially a portrait of the real world as it exists today.

Nekem lampast is a heavyweight of a film, particularly if you are not Hungarian. The first time I saw the film was in the cinema reserved for international delegates at the 30th Hungarian Film Week. The critics emerged looking tired, serious and dazed at the end of the performance. When I saw the film a week later in downtown Pest, the Hungarian audience reacted completely differently and Jancso's quips were met with a hearty laughter that united everyone at the showing.

The film is made more difficult for international audiences by its intense interest in Hungarian themes. Among those mentioned are the Kossuth rebellion of 1848, the Hungarian national poet Petofi, Marx, General Bem and repeated references to the 13 Arad martyrs (generals fighting for Hungarian independence in 1848, whose executions were toasted with beer, for which reason Hungarians never touch beer glasses when raising them for a toast).

And, of course, there is the continual joking about suicide, something of a national obsession in Hungary, which has the highest suicide rate in Europe. It is some measure of the density of these references that even the Hungarian pre-selection committee for the 30th Hungarian Film Week was left baffled by the film. God only knows what the Czechs will think of it when it shows at Karlovy Vary.

Afterword

This article first appeared in the Electronic New Presence, after which I was lucky enough to watch the film for a third time at its London premiere at the Hungarian Film Club. As well as the delight of seeing the film again and the opportunity to appreciate it more deeply, I was anxious to hear what Dr Sandor Striker, the director of the Hungarian Cultural Centre had to say about the film in his introduction. With a film so rich and complicated, I felt more than a bit nervous about being the probably the first person to write an extensive article on the film in English and it is always reassuring to discuss your opinion with someone else. He seemed to be a little nervous about his introduction and eager to talk to me for the same reason. However, his ideas, although not too different from mine, deserve to be discussed on their own. In up-dating my article, I have clarified some of my thoughts on the basis of some of Dr Striker's thoughts.

Also picking up on the Hamlet references, Dr Striker considered the film as part of a linear progression: in Hamlet, the hero wonders what it is he should do; in Tom Stoppard's take on Hamlet - Rosencrantz and Guildenstein are Dead - the heroes wonder if they should have done something; and in Nekem lampast, the enquiry is a step further removed, and the heroes have no knowledge or awareness of anything at all.

After the London showing, Dr Striker asked me if I thought this might be Jancso's last film. This is possible in terms of his age - he was born in 1921 - but it is also possible in terms of Nekem lampast's content. As well as being a potential swan song, the film depicts the death of the director (twice) and at one point he and his script-writer are dismissed as being "has-beens" by the grave-diggers. Furthermore, Jancso dresses in pure white throughout the film, looking half like an angel and half like an escapee from a home for the dangerously senile. Is the director trying to tell us something?

There are several articles on Nekem lampast on the web in Hungarian, though. If you can speak Hungarian, then you have a review from Filmkultura, a review from Nepszabadsag Online and an interview with the director and cast. (Incidentally, I tracked these down through the excellent Internet Movie Database, which has varying levels of information on a huge range of international films, including Nekem lampast). There is also a pre-Nekem lampast interview with Jancso available.

There is some general information on Jancso in English, notably a brief but interesting analysis of Szegenylegenyek and an article entitled "Paradoxical Phase: Miklos Jancso and the Comedy of War". This latter piece is a very detailed and accessible discussion of one of Jancso's more demanding works Csillagosok, katonak (The Red and the White, 1967). The author, Matt Johnson, compares it to films such as Kanal, Dr Strangeglove, Catch 22 and Apocalypse Now. I read the article after I wrote the review of Nekem lampast above and was particularly interested, in the light of my own comparisons between Jancso and Alice in Wonderland, that Johnson likens Csillagosok, katonak to "a war movie by Lewis Carroll".

Kinoeye | Hungary: Miklos Jancso's Lord's Lantern in Budapest Miklós Jancsó's Nekem lámpást adott kezembe as Úr Pesten (The Lord's Lantern in Budapest, 1998), expansion of earlier 1999 article by Andrew James Horton from Kinoeye, March 3, 2003

Filmkultúra (review in English) Ildikó Kárpáti

Film Journal International (Peter Henn)

Jang Jun-hwan

SAVE THE GREEN PLANET! (Jigureul jikyeora!) C 70

South Korea (118 mi) 2003 (Trailer: 300k)

So long as South Korea keeps putting out films like this, don’t expect a reunification with North Korea anytime soon, as large sums of money spent on this style of hyper-kinetic gruesome gore and torture, where all the characters are ultimately bad guys, all in the name of some sci-fi spoof, will only be seen as an era of ever more commercialization, raking in the dough as entertainment. Hard to believe a film like this is getting good reviews, the story itself sounds great, but I found it forgettable. A young man, with the help of his overweight tightrope walker girl friend, kidnaps the CEO of a large company in the insane belief that he’s a visitor from another planet with designs to destroy the world, then proceeds to lock him up in chains and torture his victim, initially shaving his hair, as he believes this is how he communicates with aliens, that his hair act as tiny antenna. Occasionally, the guy gets away, which calls for more blood and gore. Along the way, a few inept detectives chase down the wrong guy, while another weather-beaten cop, who’s assigned only kitchen duties as punishment for his lack of blind obedience to his boss, actually traces the guy down from clues, realizes this guy has undergone a horribly traumatic childhood, but of course, becomes more grist for the gruesome mill. The victim turns the tables on our kidnapper, and seems to gain the upper hand, only to be thwarted again and again. I easily grew weary of this kind of blood and splatter film. As it turns out, the guy was an alien and he destroyed the earth in a nanosecond, but got really pissed off when his crew didn’t rescue him in time. They whine that they couldn’t hear any signals. But of course, how could he send signals when his hair was cut off? Eventually, to the film’s credit, the end is something right out of Buster Baxter’s imagination from the children’s TV show Arthur, as the end is actually pretty good, including a very tender segment that plays over the end credits, which includes a hauntingly gorgeous musical theme. However, despite the gloss of mixed genres, horror action thriller with bits of comedy, stretching the limits of each, even paying an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, which was really pretty awful, as it shows the aliens were here before the dawn of time, but it led into the end sequence, which was a relief.

Save the Green Planet! Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

How can I begin to describe a film whose sole claim to "originality" is the order in which it arranges the myriad other films it rips off? I suppose if one were feeling generous, you might think of it as a live-action, all-new-footage feature-length equivalent to a Bruce Conner film, or even as a sample-laden hip-hop film, a sci-fi splatter-comedy for the turntablist set. But no, that's absolutely wrong. Conner transforms his appropriated footage through careful juxtaposition and internal commentary. Likewise, artists like Jay-Z and DJ Shadow transform their source material through dense layering and careful attention to texture. That's why these works are magnificent on their own terms, and engaging with them is never just a game of Spot-the-Reference. Green Planet! is little more than a game show in this regard; I found no way to access it other than silently ticking off its stylistic and thematic grabs. Save the Green Planet bites X-Files, The Silence of the Lambs, Brazil, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tribulation 99 (bonus points to Chuck Stephens for spotting that one), The Usual Suspects, Peppermint Candy (for its emotional-pinnacle montage, "deepening" the film at the 80-minute mark), David Blair's forgotten videowork Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (as per Colin Geddes' TIFF catalogue blurb), Plan 9 From Outer Space, and eventually those Warner Brothers cartoons with Martin the Martian. (I still haven't seen last year's The Forgotten, but from what I know of the plot, that film may have actually bitten Green Planet! back. The fun never ends.) Trust me, if you really feel the need to test your trainspotting acumen, three rounds of Scene It! will substitute nicely, while allowing you to log some face time with the family.

Save the Green Planet Darcy Paquet from the Korean Film Page

Young director Jang Jun-hwan first drew notice in the Korean film industry for a 30-minute short he made in 1994 called 2001: Imagine. The film impressed a lot of people, and so when news surfaced that he was shooting his feature debut, it created a fair amount of expectation. Save the Green Planet also featured a plotline that promised something out of the ordinary, so that for critics and industry people (though sadly, not audiences in general) this film has been 'one to watch' ever since it started shooting.

The hero of Save the Green Planet is a mentally-unbalanced young man on medication who believes that aliens are plotting an imminent assault on the planet Earth. After much research, mostly through viewing B-grade science fiction films and reading some very non-mainstream books, he determines that the head alien in charge of leading the invasion is already on earth, masquerading as the successful CEO of a large conglomerate. With the survival of humanity on the line, he and a sympathetic young tightrope walker from the circus take it on themselves to kidnap the man/alien in hopes of averting the invasion.

The narrative thrust of the film centers around the confinement of the man/alien in the basement of a rural home (a dark, nightmarish sort of place) and the efforts of rival groups of detectives to track down the kidnapper. As the film progresses and all those involved grow more desperate, viewers may find their sympathies pulled in odd directions. The hero, played by Shin Ha-kyun (in perhaps his best acting performance ever), resembles in many ways our typical downtrodden hero, but his impassioned and increasingly violent behavior makes us pull back in shock at times. The supporting cast, meanwhile, are among the film's great strengths, particularly an eccentric, disgraced detective played by Lee Jae-yong.

As for the directing, it appears that we can add a new name to the list of Korea's most distinctive and talented filmmakers. Jang Jun-hwan excels at the technical aspects of filmmaking, and is very good at controlling the film's emotions. His screenplay is also quite daring, showing little regard for either Hollywood narrative conventions or for playing it safe commercially.

Alas, Save the Green Planet bombed badly at the box-office, with most viewers opting for the warm humor of My Teacher, Mr. Kim or the glitz of Chicago to the dark imagery, depressing themes and seat-squirming violence offered up here (though a vocal minority praised the film highly). The film is more suited as a cult item, and audiences at fantasy film festivals around the world are certain to go crazy over it.

Maybe it was my mood when I watched it, given the wars and pestilence which crowd the news wires these days, but I could hardly speak for close to half an hour after this movie ended. More than anything else, it's extremely sad, and it hit me in a vulnerable spot. This was the 12th Korean film released so far this year, and in my opinion it's worth more than all the other eleven combined.

Jang Sun-Woo

Jang Sun-Woo biography and interview by Tony Rayns (1993) from CineKorea

PASSAGE TO BUDDHA (Hwaomkyung)

South Korea (136 mi) 1993

User reviews from imdb Author: poikkeus from San Francisco

Jang Sun-Woo, who is known for his later (and occasionally extreme films), can always be counted on for intelligent, probing work -- however amusing or even shocking. Hwaomkyung is set in the modern day, telling the story of a Buddhist sutra as through the often surreal events that happen to a young boy. The story follows the general format of stories about spiritual seeking, except this one is so visually convincing that you almost feel as if you've been on a spiritual quest yourself. This has much of the earthiness of Im Kwon-Taek's Mandala, but it doesn't take itself quite as seriously. As a result, the viewer is likely to be entranced by this totally original spiritual quest -- as magical as any Journey to the West -- but one that somehow retains an aura of the sacred. As a result, those who feel they might be turned off by a film like this are likely to be surprised; it's moving, and often quite amusing.

Hwaomkyung is, in short, a near-miracle of a film, one that transcends the pitfalls of your average religious film by divorcing itself from preachiness and doctrinal baggage. Instead, we end up with scenes that are almost transcendent. The story, the images...just breathtaking.

RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL (Sungnyangpali sonyeoui jaerim)

South Korea (123 mi) 2002

Time Out

Jang's splendid folly uses the form and digital effects of a mainstream blockbuster to explore two besetting questions: (1) Can you live in a tropical paradise on someone else's money? (2) Can the ego be transcended by chasing the yellow butterfly of Taoism? Ju (Kim Hyun-Sung, admirably ordinary) delivers Chinese food for the Great Wall Restaurant and dreams of becoming a champion gamer. He enters the virtual reality game of the title (the object is to save Hans Christian Andersen's forlorn heroine from assorted predators so that she can safely freeze to death), but very quickly loses his identity and his ammo. And the Match Girl (now selling cheap lighters) suddenly starts taking her defence into her own hands. Despite fabulous casting (famous Chinese transsexual Jin Xing as the lesbian game player Lara) and spectacular stunts, it doesn't really work as a genre movie - which is no doubt why it lost money on Korean release. But as a Jang Sun-Woo auteur piece it's up there with Hwa-om-kyung: a philosophical fun-ride with thrills, spills and a serenely materialistic happy ending.

Box Office Prophets Chris Hyde

Jang Sun-woo’s The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl is an ambitious, sprawling mess of a movie: a diffuse and thought provoking work that soars even as it falls apart.  But maybe that’s the point.

In a world where many films tread a safe and formulaic line that often leaves them somewhat lacking in scope, it’s nice to know that some productions are still willing to take a gamble in their storytelling.  Unfortunately, those still willing to stick their neck out narratively risk a flat-on-your-face fall if audiences don’t accept their flights of fancy.  That’s what happened to this project, as after four years in production and huge budget overruns that made it the most expensive Korean production ever, the movie was rejected outright by fans and flopped horribly upon its debut.  The damage was so great that the failure essentially caused its primary backer, Tube Entertainment, to become financially insolvent and vulnerable to acquisition by its rival CJ Entertainment.

But for a movie such as this one, in a certain sense it seems utterly appropriate for its failure to be so gigantic.  The entire enterprise is so far reaching, confused, contradictory and aspires to do so much that its theatrical run should truly only have only been a grand success or a glorious disaster.  With something like The Little Match Girl there’s seemingly no room at all for breaking even; throwing all its chips on the table for one big spin of the wheel the film simply gambles everything at one go.  And to these eyes therein lies much of the appeal of the entertainment -- for much like the raffish charm of the raconteur who is willing to hazard everything and live with the consequences, The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl possesses a go-for-broke spirit that lends its excessive overreaching a meritorious edge.

Inspired by a Korean poem by Kim Chong-ku that is itself a take on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Seller ( http://hca.gilead.org.il/li_match.html), Jang Sun-Woo’s film first introduces us to Ju (Kim Hyun-sung), a young man whose primary entertainment is playing videogames in a local arcade.  His ultimate goal in life is to become a professional gamer like his best friend Yi (Kim Jin-pyo), and beyond that he has little else besides his menial job delivering food.  The only other thing that appears to occupy him is his attraction to Hee-mee (Im Eun-gyung), the girl who works the counter in the gaming parlor.  After one long night of videogaming, Ju meets a strange and scruffy street vendor selling lighters who is the exact doppelganger of his arcade crush, and out of curiosity buys one of the lighters she is blankly hawking.  He also follows the mysterious girl through the night and sees her apparently engaging in the illicit activity of selling her body for others’ pleasure. 

At this point the film begins to enter videogame territory, as Ju notices that the lighter he is holding has an odd phone number printed upon it.  Dialing into this exchange leads him directly into a surreal world of gaming, a virtual reality where to emerge victorious he must find the Match Girl and impress her enough so that her last thoughts upon dying will be of Ju.  But of course he isn’t the only one competing for the attention of the battered waif; instead, there are many other players vying to become the girl’s last thoughts and some of these characters possess abilities that are powerful and dangerous.  As Ju stumbles around in this alternate universe trying to learn its rules as he goes, he encounters many offbeat personages -- such as Lala (played by Chinese transsexual Jin Xing), a gun-toting lesbian who may be either friend or foe.  Along the way our hero also runs afoul of the System, the all-seeing entity that runs the game in a manner unsurprisingly similar to the pseudo-software environment seen in the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix films.  When the System decides that this young gamer constitutes a threat to its integrity, it sends out its minions to eliminate him and take in the Match Girl for reprogramming, and thus Ju must use the skills he has learned and the friends he has found to defeat the big boss and come out on top.

Any short summary of the plot of this film, however, is destined to make the proceedings sound much more linear and coherent than they really are on screen.  The film unfolds in all sorts of fascinating and frustrating ways, and its postmodern storyline fractures and turns back upon itself repeatedly throughout the film’s two-hour length.  Plot details surface and then vanish, reality is layered with unreality, and the tonal moods shift from dead seriousness to flat out parody.  If you’re the type of moviegoer who demands a tight plot or a unified mood in order to accept a film as a successful outing, then this movie will undoubtedly be a major disappointment to you.  The screenplay instead actually revels in its dualistic looseness as it tries to encompass a wealth of characteristics: it’s part fairy tale and part modern storytelling, part tribute and part rip-off, part videogame and part cinema, part philosophy and part entertainment, and additionally part revisionist criticism and part modernist indulgence.

Whether the film ultimately satisfies would seem to hinge on an audience’s willingness to embrace its inherent contradictions and scattershot approach.  There’s little here in the way of real character development or contemplative insight, and the frenetic cut-on-action editing and nonstop flashy style of The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl can be overwhelming at times.  But there’s enough lurking inside this piece of cinema to make the movie an interesting exercise if not an outright success; with the big budget, heavy special effects action directed by a filmmaker known more for his controversial noncommercial work, the seeming shallowness has hidden depth.  Jang Sun-Woo in the past has helmed mostly movies that are outside of the mainstream and that tackle difficult subjects that challenge his viewers.  At the same time, the director has at times taken some flak for his past work, as some critics see him not so much as an examiner of society’s ills as an exploiter of them.  (His last film, Lies, was an s + m story of an older businessman and his young schoolgirl girlfriend that raised the hackles of South Korea’s censors.)

So what exactly is a controversial director known for his provocative films dealing with the nature of sex and violence doing directing a cyber action film that ended up costing more than any Korean movie ever made before?  It’s likely that Jang Sun-woo for his part simply was interested in trying his hand in the commercial arena, but at the same time also wished to use The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl as a platform to explore modern themes that revolve around Korea’s younger generation.  At the same time, given the final nature of the project, it could easily be seen as an attempt to subvert the genre from the inside; working within the milieu of the genre picture gave Jang the opportunity to both celebrate and criticize the form itself.  Though in the end the multiplicity of themes and their double-edged characteristics are so overwrought that they threaten to collapse in on themselves, the philosophical angles brought from behind the camera give the movie an added dimension that helps make it much more than a first look at its gleaming exterior would indicate.

For in addition to his asides about contemporary Korean youth culture and its mores, Jang Sun-woo here in many ways mines much of the same postmodernist territory as the Wachowskis do when they filter Borges through the lens of cyberspace and movie screen.  Just as that great Argentine writer explored the nature of fiction and its relationship with reality, the director in this case is extremely interested in pursuing ideas that contemplate the essence of the imaginary and the way that it can both complement and intrude upon what is seen to be “real.”  Where exactly the line is drawn between these two realms is something that seemingly becomes more confused with every passing day, and as the story of The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl progresses reality comes piled on top of unreality until the viewpoint shatters and the audience is left wondering where exactly they sit.  This approach thus allows the filmmaker to utilize the rubric of the action picture to comment directly upon the form itself; whether or not this style is to be seen as frustrating or hypocritical is more or less left up to the viewer.  (Though given the tepid box office reception for the film in the director’s home country, there’s little doubt as to how most South Koreans feel about this means of storytelling).

Finally, then, whether or not one sees The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl as a successful special effects laden blockbuster, an insightful tract that dissects the essence of reality or just another run-of-the-mill explosion filled piece of action escapism is mostly a question of perspective.  To these eyes, what makes the film such an intriguing piece of cinema is that it really can’t be pigeonholed as being any one of those particular things -- instead, these are just different facets of its multifarious nature.  In a celluloid world where so many films are just one-dimensional pieces of formula, a film such as this one is somewhat unique with its textural variety and all-encompassing eye.  Undoubtedly, however, the shifting nature of the narrative here and its deeper implications are destined to turn off many who might be looking for a more traditional storytelling approach.  The style employed is such that this viewer still remains unsure as to whether or not the filmmaker’s goals are in the end achieved by his approach; but in any case it’s sure a testament to Jang Sun-woo’s skills that the movie continues to provoke ruminations on my part long after the flickering has faded from the screen.  So while it may be that at the last this project won’t actually manage to stand up to repeated viewings and may ultimately be judged a failed attempt at a deeper reading of the genre picture, the fact remains that its complexity is great enough to warrant continued thought and follow-up viewings.  With the world full of cinematic work that barely rates even the initial look, a movie like The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl should at the very least be praised for its ambition and scope.  The world of film could be so much richer if more films tried as hard as this one to bite off more than they could chew.          

BeyondHollywood.com Nix

Subway Cinema

Janisch, Attila

LONG TWILIGHT (Hosszú alkony) A- 94

aka: Long Dusk

Hungary (70 mi) 1997

Chicago Reader (Lisa Alspector)

Respectable more than interesting, this adaptation of Shirley Jackson's "The Bus" depicts the nightmarish journey of an aging archaeologist. After leaving a site where she's been both honored and humiliated, she's unable to get home, seeming doomed to revisit--or hallucinate revisiting--landmarks from her past. Menacing male figures she encounters treat her disparagingly, implying that as she's lost her youthful femininity she's also lost something of her humanity. Seamlessly structured and markedly atmospheric, this 1997 movie is a pretentious yet impressive technical exercise. The cinematography is by Gabor Medvigy (Satantango); Attila Janisch directed. With Mari Torocsik.

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

Of the four Hungarian films in the 1997 Toronto festival (including Kusturica's Underground, a co-production), one of the most visually unique and dramatically absorbing was Attila Janisch's second feature Long Twilight (following Shadow on the Snow [1991]), adapted from Shirley Jackson's short story "The Bus." An elderly, forgetful professor (evocative Hungarian actress Mari Törócsik) embarks on a routine journey that soon turns hostile and surrealistic, as rickety public transport deposits her in a strange landscape that might be the countryside, and just might be her mind. Sure to crop up at subsequent regional festivals, Long Twilight is provocative, handsomely mounted and touchingly played.

San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]

An old woman's life falls apart and a hip poet tries to save his catatonic, schizophrenic brother. Those stories and more unfold as the San Francisco International Film Festival continues this week and next.

Shirley Jackson's short story ``The Bus'' gets a chilling translation in ``Long Twilight,'' a short Hungarian gem about a university professor who takes a nostalgic side trip to her childhood haunts and finds herself caught in a twilight zone of paranoia and instability. Think of ``The Trip to Bountiful,'' which won an Oscar for Geraldine Page in a similar role, then replace the sentimentality with the menacing logic of a nightmare -- and you'll have an idea of the emotional territory here.

Veteran actress Mari Torocsik plays the central character, who announces at the beginning of the film, ``I advise everyone to get old; old people have memories and unlimited time.'' Director Attila Janisch proceeds to play havoc with her smiling serenity, twisting time and perception into knots and taking the professor on a journey into oblivion.

A surly bus driver goes all night without stopping; a passenger dies on the roadside; two pairs of truck drivers mock the professor; and a crusty innkeeper offers the professor a room where twisted childhood memories come to life.

Janisch establishes a mood of creeping unease, and Torocsik is touching as a woman struggling to keep her dignity even as her most basic assumptions betray her.

Attila Janisch: Hosszú alkony (Long Dusk) Erzsébet Bori from the Hungarian Quarterly (excerpt)

Attila Janisch was also honoured as best director for Long Dusk, which is based on the short story “The Bus,” by Shirley Jackson. Janisch and his regular co-scriptwriter, András Forgách, note that the script makes liberal use of the literary material. They borrowed only the metaphor of the bus journey, and developed it further, placing the story in a Hungarian landscape, in a Hungarian world. In their version, the main character does not confront her past or suffer for the fact that she has given herself away. There is no judgment - Long Dusk is not a moral story. This woman has simply become old and, in the strict sense of the word, she has to wake up to the fact that her life is at an end. A short while ago, she was celebrating her birthday and her latest professional success with her colleagues, when, answering an unexpected urge, she sets out on a journey in the familiar countryside, never to find her way back again. She gets on an old bus which, like a bad, bungling time machine jolts and shakes her very soul and takes her back to her childhood, to her parents’ house, to timeless times, to the beginning of the end. The film is about death, more precisely, dying. Which is not a precise moment - more a process. It is a task which we have to prepare for, a condition we have to fit into. The precise metaphor for this process becomes the journey with its own recurring passages, its beginning lost in the mist and its inconceivable end. The elderly woman - at first unconsciously, then of her own free will, sets out on the journey into the unknown.

Long Dusk says without words, simply with the strength of the images, and by making the story into a visual construct, the things we cannot talk about. The actors make no philosophical pronouncements or remember the past in gauzy flashbacks or make deep and meaningful declarations; there is only banal dialogue about the rain, the timetable, and plans to report the insolent driver. But the landscape, or a building or objects say much more than words; a field of golden sunflowers, a forest path disappearing into darkness, a petrol pump, an old lorry, a portrait of parents on the wall, a beautiful doll with real hair from a childhood long gone. And the human face is the face of Mari Törõcsik, who plays the old woman. This great actress lent her own ageing features and unembellished presence to the packed seventy minutes of Long Dusk.

Jankovics, Marcell

THE TRAGEDY OF MAN (Az ember tragédiája) B 86

Hungary (160 mi) 2011 Official site [hu]

At times bombastic, while at other times beautifully surreal, the director spent 30 years making this massive, nearly three-hour animated film, a work that feels like a lifelong obsession spent coming to terms with man’s futile existence on earth since the dawn of creation. Adapted from the rarely seen Imre Madách play by the same title published in 1861, this is a play in 15 acts, set in 10 different historical periods, that has been translated into 90 languages and is considered one of the great works of Hungarian literature. The story itself is a very long dream sequence mostly between Adam and Satan, who carry on a running philosophical dialogue throughout about the bleak futility of man and open each act in various disguises, usually joined afterwards by Eve. While the film also includes 15 different sequences, the uniquely distinctive aspect of the film is each one was made with a different animation technique. Also of interest, while the story deals with the creation and eventual fall of man, the most influential role is Satan, a decidedly sinister and malicious character whose sole desire is to destroy mankind in order to prove God, who cast him out of heaven, a failure. Something of a parallel to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, an epic poem from 1667 published in ten books, both concern themselves with the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and how they were expelled from the Garden of Eden, where in each Satan plays a prominent role. But in this film, there’s 13 more scenes yet to come, making visits to ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, 18^th century France, 19^th century London, as well as the future, outer space, a distant future ice age, and back again to the beginning of time, among other visits. While the film shows evidence of massive carnage, including beheadings, stabbings, suicides, and shootings, Satan takes Adam on a tour of the great civilizations at the height of their power only to see mankind’s noblest aspirations fail miserably.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is the excessive, overly chatty, and nonstop verbiage, including a completely redubbed voice soundtrack recorded just prior to the 2011 release, where the booming, over-the-top voice inflections all sound like the voice of God shouting down from the heavens, an uncomfortable practice that one quickly tires of, yet it continues relentlessly throughout the entire duration, where sound actually dominates and eventually overwhelms the sumptuous visuals, which was not likely the original intent. Another problem is that this is a decidedly male affair, especially the dialogue, and while women are present, the action is nearly entirely male driven, where the prevailing view of women from the outset is a weaker member of the species. It is, after all, Eve that hands Adam the forbidden apple, though in each successive scene Eve figures prominently in offering some degree of hope for the future, where the film is to some extent a study of human relationships. But it is also a battle of wills, where even as God is creating the universe, Satan, aka Lucifer, needs only a small foothold in the Garden of Eden to forever alter God’s intentions. Possessing only two trees, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Immortality, Lucifer goes to great lengths to influence Adam and Eve to defy God’s will, offering the promise of much more even as he convinces Adam that his life will be meaningless and that mankind is doomed. Traveling to various points in history, Adam and Lucifer are introduced at the beginning of each scene, where Adam usually assumes a famous historical role while Lucifer acts as his attentive aide. Initially Adam is all too eager to point out mankind’s greatest achievements, which are quickly countered by Lucifer only too happily pointing out the flaws and human weaknesses where mankind fails to live up to its initial hopes and promises. While Lucifer acts more as Adam’s time traveling tour guide through various civilizations, Adam’s optimism diminishes through each successive historical period, until eventually he fails to grasp the meaning of his existence if mankind’s future is so bleak.

Because of the ambitious scope of the film, spanning the entire history of man’s existence on earth, there is some comparison to Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), including overt Christian messages, where the choice use of classical music adds an underlying depth and complexity. Much of the music and material, however, feel overly repetitive, where the length doesn’t add greater magnitude, as Lucifer’s monologues grow tiresome after awhile, preaching his same message of doom, made worse by the incessant shouting throughout. It seems more important that each segment of history is examined, including the future, instead of creating a significant build-up of dramatic impact. Perhaps the pastel beauty of the Garden of Eden sequence is the most colorfully lush, set in a primitive, almost Henri Rousseau dreamlike atmosphere, while the outer space sequences may be the least imaginative, appearing awkwardly dated. But the film is a visual spectacle, where the seismic shifts in artistic design are intriguing, even as the storyline grows darker and more hopeless. One of the more clever illustrative devices is the use of a Ferris wheel to evoke modernization, where a glimpse at each passing carriage on the moving wheel reveals different insight into history, including the emaciated, naked bodies of the Holocaust falling off the wheel in droves, while another glimpse allows us to see a rising and falling cavalcade of stars, where we are introduced to Lenin, Stalin, Mao, but also Mickey Mouse, Marilyn Monroe, and the Beatles. Perhaps the bleakest characterization of the future reflects the grim and colorless existence living under a socialist totalitarian regime where humans are little more than scientific specimens, newborns are not named but numbered, and interesting figures in history are punished for using their imaginations instead of continually performing the exact same assembly line task that all humans have been reduced to performing. It’s a hopelessly dreary and pitiful existence where Plato talks only to the wind as a lonely shepherd and Michelangelo is seen as a disgruntled factory worker. Adam grows older and more feeble with each passing sequence, as his spirit is literally drained from him, awakening from his dream with suicidal thoughts and hopes he could prevent all this meaningless suffering from occurring, but Eve, of course, announces she’s pregnant, while God, who’s been absent since the opening sequence, returns to remind Adam to “have faith.” It’s not so much a fitting conclusion as the film ends with a whimper back at the beginning, reflecting a cyclical Sisyphus pattern endlessly repeating itself.

The Tragedy of Man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (excerpt)

SCENE 1 - In Heaven, immediately following the creation.
SCENE 2 - In the Garden of Eden at the Beginning of Time.
SCENE 3 - Outside the Garden of Eden at the Beginning of Time.
SCENE 4 - Egypt, c. 2650 BC. Adam is a Pharaoh, most likely Djoser; Lucifer his Vizier; Eve is the wife of a slave.
SCENE 5 - Athens, 489 BC. Adam is Miltiades the Younger; Lucifer is a guard; Eve is Miltiades' wife.
SCENE 6 - Rome, c. AD 67. Adam is a wealthy Roman; Lucifer is his friend, Eve is a prostitute.
SCENE 7 - Constantinople, AD 1096. Adam is Prince Tancred of Hauteville; Lucifer is his squire; Eve is a noble maiden forced to become a nun.
SCENE 8 - Prague, c. AD 1615. Adam is Johannes Kepler; Lucifer is his pupil; Eve is his wife, Barbara.
SCENE 9 - Paris, AD 1793 (in a dream of Kepler). Adam is Georges Danton; Lucifer is an executioner; Eve appears in two forms, first as an aristocrat about to be executed, then immediately following as a bloodthirsty poor woman.
SCENE 10 - Prague, c. AD 1615. Adam is Johannes Kepler; Lucifer is his pupil; Eve is his wife, Barbara.
SCENE 11 - London, 19th century. Adam and Lucifer are nameless Englishmen; Eve is a young woman of the middle class.
SCENE 12 - A Communist/Technocratic Phalanstery, in the future. Adam and Lucifer masquerade as traveling chemists; Eve is a worker who refuses to be separated from her child.
SCENE 13 - Space. Adam and Lucifer are themselves, Eve does not appear in this scene.
SCENE 14 - An ice age in the distant future, at least AD 6000. Adam is a broken old man; Lucifer is himself; Eve is an Eskimo's wife.
SCENE 15 - Outside Eden at the Beginning of Time.

THE TRAGEDY OF MAN Facets Multi Media

If anyone could have any claims on adapting Hungary's best-known drama into a feature-length animated film, it is Marcell Jankovics, Hungary's best-known living animator. The Tragedy of Man tells the epic and bleak story of human progress, from the Garden of Eden to a chilling humanoid future.

Based on Imre Madách's eponymous play (considered one of the great works of Hungarian literature), it takes place over the course of one very long dream, as Adam, Eve and Lucifer, the co-creator of the world (in his opinion!) visit the world's great civilizations at the height of their power, only to watch humanity's noblest hopes and dreams end in disaster. In each period, all of these dreams are exposed as being futile, flawed, or unattainable, as we bear witness to a journey which is always interesting, visually stimulating, but never pretty. The kaleidoscopic nature of these stories are varied and remarkable as Jankovics spent 30 years making this film, and by creating distinct styles for each individual segment, he has made a visually-rich tapestry that's sure to stir the imagination.

Chicago Reader (2) The historic importance of this week's trippiest high-art attraction, by Ben Sachs

Even out of context, The Tragedy of Man, a Hungarian animated epic opening tonight at Facets Multimedia, is pretty stunning. In my short review, I compare it to such cult classics as Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet and Ralph Bakshi's Heavy Traffic; and like those films, it marries artisanal, hand-drawn animation with heady, adult ideas. (If it weren't nearly three hours long, it would make a great midnight movie.) Yet it's also a personal adaptation (by veteran animator Marcell Jankovics) of one of the most famous works in Hungarian literature. So it helps to know a bit of history before going in.

The author of Tragedy of Man, Imre Madach, was better known in his lifetime as a lawyer and politician than as a writer. Born in 1823 to a wealthy family, he finished law school in his early 20s and was elected to a minor public office shortly thereafter. In the late 1840s, he supported the liberal movement that had spread throughout the territories of the Austrian Empire and culminated in the numerous failed revolutions of 1848. He provided sanctuary to the secretary of Lajos Kossuth, one of the leaders of Hungary's failed War of Independence; Austrian authorities arrested him for this and imprisoned him for a year. Madach embarked on his most serious writing after his release, though he returned to politics in the early 1860s. He was elected to the Hungarian Parliament in 1861—the same year he wrote Tragedy of Man—and died in office three years later. He didn't live long enough to witness the publication of his most famous work (in fact, he shared it only with colleagues during his lifetime). The first public performance didn't occur for almost two decades after his death.

By the mid-20th century, however, Tragedy occupied a place in the national literature comparable to Paradise Lost or Faust, and Madach became an almost-mythic figure in the national culture. Joseph Remenyi, in his informative but rather purplish tome Hungarian Writers and Literature (1964), summarizes the Madach myth as such: "Burdened with the question of good and evil, conscious of the lamentable conditions of his own existence, of his nation and of humanity as a whole, and endowed with a catholic taste, Madach wrote a play that is the cry of a soul tormented by loss of hope and inspired by a desperate yearning for hope."

The play begins with God and Lucifer struggling for influence over mankind, but the Creator soon disappears from the story. Lucifer becomes one of the central characters—he takes Adam and Eve on a journey into the future, and all three assume different identities in each time and place they visit. (It's a bit like Stanley Donen's Bedazzled, but without the jokes.) Every episode culminates with the same questions. Will civilization pursue the values of peace and liberty? And if so, to what end? Two back-to-back episodes consider the capitalist nightmare of early 19th-century London and a communist nightmare set sometime in the future. It seems that Madach, despite his revolutionary sympathies, was skeptical of all political dogmatism.

Yet The Tragedy of Man is ultimately philosophical rather than political. Its concerns are abstract, which makes animation a better vehicle for its ideas than live action. My favorite passages of the film are those that break from representational art to conjure a meditative experience. They make up for the more prosaic sections, which can be a bit of a slog.

NYTimes | 'The Tragedy of Man' by Marcell Jankovics, Animator Robert Ito from The New York Times, November 9, 2012

IN 1996 the Hungarian Film Festival of Los Angeles screened 18 minutes of early footage from “The Tragedy of Man,” an animated work in progress by the director Marcell Jankovics. In the segment Lucifer and Adam visit a socialist community sometime in Earth’s grim future, a time when poetry and rose cultivation are banned, babies are issued numbers rather than given names, and the desiccated corpses of citizens are recycled to make household goods. Michelangelo — or at least his reincarnated form — is a frustrated factory worker; Plato spends his time herding oxen.

“The people loved it, ” Bela Bunyik, the festival’s founder, recalled of that sneak peek. “ ‘When’s it coming? When’s it coming?’ they asked. Everybody was waiting.”

As it turns out, that footage was just a small excerpt from a film that wouldn’t be completed until 2011, fitting for an epic that begins at the dawn of creation, ends with man’s last gasp and includes stopovers in ancient Greece, 17th-century Prague, Dickensian London and outer space, among others. At 160 minutes — about three hours, including the intermission — the film includes one visual spectacle after the next. Each of the 15 sections is animated in a different style, and cameos abound, from Lenin, Stalin and Hitler to Mickey Mouse, Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles of the “Yellow Submarine” era. There are also death and carnage on a grand scale: beheadings, stabbings, suicides, crucifixions, mass shootings, deaths brought on by sheer exhaustion and so on. “It won’t be a film everybody will see,” Mr. Jankovics admitted.

The full version of “The Tragedy of Man” will have its American premiere next Sunday, returning to the same festival 16 years after that initial screening and nearly three decades since Mr. Jankovics first began working on the film. At the world premiere in Budapest last December Mr. Jankovics said he told the audience that he was happy that he had lived to see this moment. “I couldn’t say anything more,” he said in a recent phone interview from Budapest “or I would have started to cry.”

The film is an adaptation of the poet Imre Madach’s play of the same title, which has been translated into 90 languages and is considered one of the great works of Hungarian literature. The action takes place over the course of one very long dream, as Adam, Eve and a chatty Lucifer visit the world’s great civilizations at the height of their power, only to watch as humanity’s noblest hopes and dreams come to naught. At 15 scenes long, set in 10 different historical periods, the play can be a beast to stage, let alone sit through. “Reading the play is exhausting,” Mr. Jankovics said, “so I think a film is a good solution.”

If anyone had dibs on adapting Hungary’s best-known drama into a feature-length animated film, it’s Mr. Jankovics, Hungary’s best-known living animator. In 1976 his film “Sisyphus,” a short-form masterpiece about the doomed, boulder-pushing king, was among the nominees for an Academy Award; the next year his “Kuzdok” (“The Struggle”) won the Palme d’Or for short film at Cannes.

“In Hungary people know him in the way they know Walt Disney,” said Paul Morton, who studied Hungarian animation in Budapest while on a Fulbright fellowship in 2008. “When I was on the street, and I told people what I was doing, they would immediately go, ‘Oh, have you talked to the great Marcell Jankovics?’ ”

By the time Mr. Jankovics first started working on “Tragedy,” in 1983, he had already directed two full-length films: “Janos Vitez,” Hungary’s first animated feature, and “Feherlofia,” which stars a horse-suckled hero, his two brothers and a combative hobgoblin who loves to eat piping-hot porridge atop the bellies of his defeated enemies. “I knew pretty well that I needed three years to make one movie,” Mr. Jankovics said. “Since this is an extralong movie, it counts as two, so that’s six years. So I basically spent six years making the movie.”

And the other two decades or so? “The rest of the time,” he said, “was spent raising funds.”

Production began in 1988, at the tail end of what is now considered the golden age of Hungarian animation. Filmmaking in that country was a state-run affair, and the Pannonia Film Studio financed by the Communist government, had become a mecca for many of the top animators, including Mr. Jankovics. A year later the government fell, forcing artists and directors to find other means of financing.

Mr. Jankovics worked a section at a time, starting with the shortest scene, in which Adam transforms into a giant robotic spaceship as he and Lucifer hurtle through the cosmos. As soon as one section was finished, he’d go about raising money for the next, applying for small grants from organizations like the Hungarian Motion Picture Foundation. In the meantime he wrote several books on art and mythology, directed films and television series, and served as president of the Hungarian Cultural Society.

The film crews he led as the “Tragedy of Man” director and writer changed substantially over the years, with animators retiring or dying. “The voice of God and Lucifer remained through the whole production,” Mr. Jankovics said. “But Adam and Eve grew old, so younger actors were brought in.”

The last bit of money to complete the film came in 2008, when Mr. Jankovics allowed General Motors to use “Sisyphus” in an ad for the GMC Yukon Hybrid. The commercial — which compared Sisyphus’ legendary stick-to-itiveness to that of the vehicle — was broadcast during that year’s Super Bowl.

“Tragedy” has now played throughout Hungary, where it has been praised by critics, as well as at festivals in Russia, Serbia and the Czech Republic. This month the film will screen at festivals in Poland, Portugal, Armenia and Canada, in addition to its American premiere. There are no plans at the moment for a commercial release.

“It’s a monumental, gigantic opus that Marcell Jankovics created,” said Marton Orosz, curator of photography and media arts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. “It’s the film he was preparing for his entire life.”

Near the end of the film, under Earth’s dying sun, one down-on-his-luck Eskimo asks Adam, whom he mistakes for a god, for more seals to eat, please, and fewer humans to share them with. After viewing eons of human misery in a single night, Adam wonders what the point of all this is, and viewers have to wonder along with him. The film ends with the timely return of Eve and God and this heavenly directive: Keep struggling, keep striving, no matter how lousy life gets.

It’s hardly a feel-good ending, but for Hungarians, at least, it’s a satisfying one. While in Budapest, Mr. Morton said, he heard a local woman explain one fundamental difference between Hungarian stories and American ones: “She told me, ‘You always end the story with “and they lived happily ever after.” We end our stories, “and they lived happily ever after ... until they died.” ’ ”

The Tragedy of Man by Marcell Jankovics: review - Zippy Frames Vassilis Kroustallis

The Tragedy of Man (2011) directed by Marcell Jankovics • Reviews ... Adam Cook

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Chicago Reader Ben Sachs (capsule review)

User Reviews from imdb Author: (Draco2-0)

"Curriculum Vitae (magyar nyelvű)" Director website, also seen here: Jankovics bio

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Mihály Zichy's Illustrations of The Tragedy of Man

Jaoui, Agnès

LOOK AT ME (Comme une Image) B+ 91

France (110 mi) 2004

A film of French conversationalist humor, filled with witty dialogue that is a brisk mix of humorous social satire and middle class, self-centered snobbishness, all presented in a nicely paced rhythm with exquisitely refined taste and exemplary acting all around. A follow up to her 2000 film, THE TASTE OF OTHERS, Jaoui writes a terrific part for Jean-Pierre Bacri, her writing partner and former husband, depicted here as a famous, constantly complaining, self-centered writer who gets all the attention, even while he obnoxiously suffers through writer’s block, while his overweight, overly sensitive young 20-year old daughter, Marilou Berry, longs for his attention, which he seems incapable of giving. Bacri has a beautiful, young wife, Virginie Desarnauts, who also shares his hurtful insolence and complete indifference. The film opens with an obnoxious cab-driver taking out his wrath on Berry, until Bacri gets into the cab and the roles are reversed. Jaoui is Berry’s singing instructor, and seems about to lose interest in her as well until she discovers who her famous father is, and immediately schedules more rehearsals. Jaoui’s husband is an unpublished writer, and while she seems sympathetic, happy and carefree, her husband is moody, self-absorbed, and disinterested in others, but jumps at the chance to be recognized in Bacri’s social circle. So the two husbands are part of the same social milieu, successful men who flaunt their success at the expense of others. Berry, who’s extremely self-conscious about her weight, goes through a musical chairs charade of boyfriends, which is both humorously depicted and achingly sad at the same time, always feeling they’re only interested in her because of her father. Jaoui falls into this same category, but turns the tables late in the film when Bacri is revealed to be the despicable bastard that we always knew he was, but secretly pretended to be otherwise. The film has a gorgeously written ending, with terrific use of ensemble classical duets or trios to provide the dramatic charge that these cold, emotionally void men are incapable of feeling . Winner of the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes 2004.

Look At Me (Comme Une Image) Allan Hunter in Cannes from Screendaily

Five years after her hugely successful directorial debut Le Gout Des Autres, Agnes Jaoui rewards her impatient admirers with Look At Me (Comme Une Image), a wise and witty ensemble exploration of individuals attempting to overcome their own insecurities and the wounding tyranny of other people’s expectations.

Reminiscent of vintage Woody Allen, the film casts a warm glow with its acute insights into complex human behaviour and rounded characters rich in failings and fears. Sophisticated urbanites everywhere should respond well to the film, suggesting a French response on a par with Le Gout Des Autres and strong international prospects. This is one Cannes competition title that should travel widely - especially if the jury honours the talent of beguiling newcomer Marilou Berry with an acting prize.

Bridget Jones was delighted to discover a man who loved her just the way she was and in many respects Look At Me is a more wide-ranging and perceptive reflection on those tortured by a lack of self-esteem and what we are all willing to endure in the hope of being liked, admired, reassured - and even loved. There are characters and situations here that everyone will recognise from aspects of their own lives which suggests a film that can spark plenty of debate and the kind of word of mouth approval on which a sustained theatrical career can be built.

A little plump and a little plain, Lolita Cassard (Berry) appears to be justifiably angry with the world. Bruised by life, she has a permanent sense of injustice about not being pretty enough, thin enough or good enough. Her problems largely stem from the relationship with her curmudgeonly, self-obsessed father Etienne (Bacri), a famous novelist with a younger second wife Karine (Desarnauts) and a small child. Lolita does not even seem to register on his radar. She is an afterthought and an inconvenience, and he remains blithely oblivious to the hurt he causes her. Lolita even believes that people only see any merit of a friendship with her in the shortcut that it might provide to her father.

The one area in which Lolita excels is her singing. Here talent is the great leveller and superficial appearances are less important. Her voice coach Sylvia (Jaoui) offers her some encouragement but Etienne doesn’t even listen to the tape that she gives him. When Sylvia learns that she is Etienne’s daughter, she is prompted to take Lolita’s ambitions more seriously, especially as her husband Pierre (Grevill) is a struggling author who might benefit from Etienne’s patronage.

When Lolita meets journalist Sebastien (Bouhiza), he seems to love her just for herself but she is unable to recognise the purity of his feelings.

Tracing the relationships that develop between the central characters, especially the genuine bond between Lolita and Sylvia, the film has interesting things to say on the corrupting flame of celebrity that surrounds Etienne and the courage it sometimes takes to just be yourself without any hidden agendas and do the right thing regardless of the consequences.

Beautifully written and paced, Look At Me is one of those films where you can relax because you are in safe hands. It has a graceful flow, with every scene adding a little to our understanding of each character, their weaknesses and strengths, ambitions and desires. We come to admire Sylvia, despise the bullying Etienne and fall in love with Lolita who is smart and sulky and very funny in a self-deprecating way.

On a shopping trip with her waif-like stepmother, she bemoans the fact that there is nothing that will fit her but is persuaded to try on something that is not black, baggy and craving anonymity. She heads off to the changing room moodily declaring: “I hope I can fit in the booth.“ In Shrek terms this is definitely a woman who sees herself more as an ogre than a princess.

Berry effectively captures all the truculence and mood swings of Lolita, blending her constant exasperation with a poignant longing for affection and some small sign of approval from her father. It is an award-worthy performance that should put her on the map but a performance that also blends in with an immaculate ensemble that ranges from Jaoui’s immensely sharp and sympathetic performance to Bacri’s callous monster Etienne and Grevil as a man whose constant weakness makes your initial sympathy for him ebb away.

The film climaxes at a performance from an amateur vocal ensemble in which Lolita gets to perform. Here, music plays a vital role within the film as an expression of her talent and an emotional richness that the characters cannot seem to find in their lives.

Jaoui's "Look at Me"; A Brilliantly Observed Social Comedy - Indiewire Peter Brunette

Among a competition that has featured largely impenetrable, overlong, artistically self-indulgent films, Agnes Jaoui's "Comme une Image" (Look At Me) stands out. It actually deals with recognizably human characters, paints a picture of a contemporary Paris that is at once exotic and completely recognizable (the high-end publishing world), and explores conundrums about interpersonal relationships that audiences around the world will connect with. It's even witty, acerbic, and often hilarious. Given all this, it's sure to be panned by many of the purists who flock to Cannes every year looking for rare, audience-proof gems.

Jaoui also directed "The Taste of Others," her well-received first film that came out in France in 1999. She's a brilliant actress as well as an accomplished screenwriter (she's written for such cinema luminaries as Alain Resnais) and, as such, meshes perfectly with the identical talents possessed by her co-star and co-writer -- for this and the other films she has written -- Jean-Pierre Bacri.

Bacri plays a self-absorbed writer named Etienne Cassard. His daughter Lolita (Marilou Berry) is 20 years old, overweight, and desperate for her father's attention. Alas, Etienne can't even spare any time for or lend a sympathetic ear to his gorgeous trophy wife Karine (Virginie Desarnauts), so Lolita, a far cry from her fictional namesake, doesn't stand a chance. She also believes that everyone who has anything to do with her is merely trying to get closer to her famous father, which is usually the case. One of these people is Sylvia (Agnes Jaoui), Lolita's singing coach and choral director. Her husband Pierre (Laurent Grevill), a frustrated, lesser-known writer also finds it to his advantage to cozy up to Etienne, who is more than happy to reciprocate when Pierre's latest book gets a smashing review. The final figure in the puzzle is Sebastien (Keine Bohiza) a student of North African descent who -- this will probably not surprise you -- genuinely likes Lolita for herself though she refuses to believe it.

No new aesthetic ground is broken here, and one does not come away from watching the film with precious new insights about the human condition. It is, however, a brilliantly observed social comedy of a certain fascinating Parisian milieu, and the delightfully witty and occasionally nasty script is honed razor-sharp. (The send-up of the French intellectual talk-show that Pierre appears on is especially rich.) What's more, since most of the people involved cut their first teeth in the theater, the acting is top-notch and meshes seamlessly with the ultra-arch dialogue. Bacri, especially, emerges as the obnoxious egotist you love to hate and Jaoui's nervous, edgy performance makes her character unforgettable. Bacri and Jaoui have also had the good sense to provide a climax that centers around a performance of classical music, a gesture that was undoubtedly quite calculated on their part, but virtually never a bad idea in an art film.

Seen by itself, away from the hothouse for rare and super-delicate artistic orchids that the Cannes festival often wants to see itself as, this film may turn out to be completely conventional and not very special at all. At this point, however, it's like manna in the desert.

Jarecki, Andrew

Andrew Jarecki interview by Gary Dretzka, June 10, 2003

CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS A 95

USA (107 mi) 2003

This film is a continuous surprise, as events keep evolving that contradict what the viewer believes is the premise, and by the end, it is as hellish an experience as IRREVERSIBLE. What appears, at first, to be a closely-knit, middle class family with a penchant for home movies, capturing every waking moment on film, including the typically happy horseplay of children, turns instead into a cinematic revelation of each and every embarrassing family moment. The power of this film is the subject matter, pedophilia, in the manicured affluence of Great Neck, Long Island. Charged are the father and his teen-age son, who may himself have been abused by his father at an early age, but the individuals involved, the alleged perpetrators, the alleged victims, the neighbors, the police, an investigative reporter, the Sexual Crimes Unit, the defense attorneys, the District Attorneys, and even the presiding judge, all are scrutinized by the filmmaker when a host of contradictory information is revealed. The editing is extremely effective, as little by little, bits and pieces of information are carefully revealed, each continuously changing the complexion of the issues being examined. This myriad of “evidence” doesn’t come close to revealing the truth, not as you and I would like to believe, not to a degree of certainty, but is instead a bizarre RASHOMON-experience of mixed-up, partial truths, with plenty of never-ending denials. These denials, on the part of the father, the son, and the loving family that simply can’t bear to believe these allegations, are perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of the film, as such intimate, personal awkwardness repeatedly captured on film, simply makes the viewer cringe with discomfort.

However, the film is beautifully composed, mixing family photographs and videos with documentary footage, the subject is thoroughly examined. There was a little of the secrecy of AUTO FOCUS to this film, only unlike the outlandish sexual activism and nonchalance shown there, the repression here is so severe it’s emotionally suffocating, and we are left with the devastating after-effects, literally, of chaos and turmoil. These broken parts will never be put back in place again, and the sick feeling in our stomach is likely to be our own unease with our failed attempts to come to terms with so gripping a subject. This is a shattering film experience.

Capturing the Friedmans David Denby from the New Yorker

Andrew Jarecki's startling documentary offers an approach to truth as richly nuanced but ultimately as futile as Kurosawa's great "Rashomon." In 1987, in Great Neck, Long Island, the police arrested a beloved retired schoolteacher, Arnold Friedman, and his son Jesse on the charge of sexually abusing the young boys who regularly gathered at the Friedman home for computer lessons. Jarecki interviews the police, the attorneys, the judge, and the alleged victims in the case, but the heart of the movie is the family's own footage: the layers of Friedman home movies and stills and the voluminous videos shot by David Friedman, the oldest Friedman boy, throughout the crisis. The two accused men were part of a loving family of five, although Mrs. Friedman, emotionally stranded by her husband, was not part of the jokes and camaraderie. Before our astounded eyes the entire fantastic mess unfolds like a bloody Greek legend—the House of Atreus reincarnated in a middle-class Jewish family. Edited by Richard Hankin.

Steve Erickson in Cineaste 06-24-2003:

”Maybe I shot the videotape so I wouldn’t have to remember it myself,” says David Friedman, whose brother Jesse and father Arnold were accused of numerous incidents of child molestation. He’s referring to a tape of the three men hanging out in their house shot the night before Jesse’s sentencing. Capturing the Friedmans integrates present-day interviews with the Friedman family’s home movies, and does it in a riveting manner. Eventually, its innocent images of the past take on a dread and loss that only emerges in the context of the Friedmans’ entire lives.

In the 80s, the Friedmans lived in the upper-middle-class suburb of Great Neck, Long Island. Arnold worked as a schoolteacher and gave private computer lessons in his spare time while his wife Elaine stayed home and cared for their three children. Then the Great Neck postmaster discovered that Arnold ordered child pornography from the Netherlands, eventually resulting in a house search and arrest on Thanksgiving, 1987. The bust led to a score of accusations against Arnold and Jesse for molesting Arnold’s private pupils. Though Arnold’s lifelong pedophilia is never in doubt, there’s no real physical evidence against him or Jesse. Many of the charges were solicited by asking leading questions or putting children under hypnosis.

Capturing the Friedmans is constructed as a drama, constantly introducing seemingly contradictory accounts or bits of evidence. As such, it feels a bit coy and manipulative. One moment, it seems likely that Arnold or Jesse is being railroaded; the next, director Andrew Jarecki brings up some convincing indictment against them. However, it’s also an incisive study of a family in the process of meltdown. Films about Middle-American dysfunction are nothing new, but this isn’t American Beauty (1999): it’s the painful sight of people having to live together while hating each other.

The film never offers a safe “character” to identify with, as David and Elaine, neither of them seeming particularly sympathetic, dominate the present-day interviews. (One member of the Friedman family, Arnold and Elaine’s son Seth, refused to be interviewed.) Jarecki also keeps himself offscreen, leaving it up to us to decide what he thinks of the case. If Jarecki was absolutely convinced of Arnold and Jesse’s guilt, he probably would never have made the film; if he was convinced they were innocent, the film would be far different. He does tilt his hand in the latter direction, especially given the absence of interviews with any of the parents of children they allegedly molested. (Perhaps he couldn’t find any willing to speak on camera.) Even so, the case turns into Rashomon within the Friedman family, with Elaine absolutely repulsed by Arnold, and David acting as though defending his every move is the only moral approach.

Jarecki juggles several different forms and textures of video: the interview segments he shot, and the Friedmans’ various kinds of home movies. The family seems remarkably unself-conscious in their own videos, whether goofing around or screaming at each other. Still, they’re completely aware of the power issues involved in taping someone. Coming home on the night of Arnold’s arrest, David covered his head with underwear to avoid TV cameras. Several times, Elaine yells that she doesn’t want to be filmed. In a 1988 video diary, David screams out his frustration, an emotion all the more pressing because he lacks an audience for it. (Or so he thought at the time.) Despite the turbulence governing their lives, David and Elaine show little vulnerability when facing Jarecki’s camera. However, Arnold’s brother Howard, who seems quite camera-shy, is on the verge of tears during his entire interview.

Arnold and Jesse were constantly faced with the question of how they could possibly represent themselves in court. Being accused of pedophilia guarantees an instant trial by media and, for the most part, a presumption of guilt. Admittedly coming too late, Capturing the Friedmans attempts to give Arnold and Jesse a fair trial. On the other hand, David’s instinct to step away from the spectacle, which his job as a children’s entertainer forces him to do, proves to be correct. The idea of video as a portable storage unit isn’t unique: Atom Egoyan could easily have put many of David’s words into one of his character’s mouths. He’s a perfect “character” for an era where one’s most private thoughts could eventually make their way onto film, or into a TV show (Capturing the Friedmans will eventually be shown by HBO). The key is that he’s only willing to do so on his terms.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Capturing the Friedmans (2003) Xan Brooks, April 2004

ALL GOOD THINGS C 75

USA (101 mi) 2010

A dreary, morbidly sad and gloomy affair, made more so by the dark and grainy look of the film, none of which looks cheerful except some opening home movies of the feature characters as children growing up, where their sunny dispositions are a stark contrast to the otherwise morose mood of gloom that pervades nearly every frame of this film. Oddly enough, the film opens as a hopeful love story where David Marks (Ryan Gosling) is attempting to find happiness with his sweetly dispositioned girlfriend Katie (Kristen Dunst) outside the reaches of his tyrannically overbearing father who owns a family real estate empire in Times Square in New York City, before the story takes a dark detour becoming a moody, atmospheric murder mystery where the details are scant but the inferences are disturbing. Set in the 1980’s when Times Square was filled with nudie joints, peep shows, and hookers, a high crime area which the police largely ignored as the owners of the property were large Democratic political contributors. It took a Republican elected mayor before the city cleaned up the area. Even the acting here is overwrought, as Marks in particular is shot in long takes where he’s often quietly brooding, obviously disturbed by something, but he doesn’t have the capacity to express it. Katie learns about this dark side much too late, as Marks imposes upon her abusive behavior displaying a violent, controlling temper, and while her own family gets a whiff of this side, they surprisingly do little to help her.

Frank Langella is David’s father, a powerful man who is used to getting what he wants, who runs criminal enterprises with an iron hand, but pays off the cops to keep their distance. The most extraordinary family recollection was David’s mother committing suicide, jumping off a roof while he watched at age 7. Despite extensive therapy, he continues to display some sort of emotional displacement disorder, as he rarely, if ever, shows his real feelings except when on a violent rampage, where he quickly calms down afterwards as if nothing has happened. Katie is in the middle of this, offering him nothing but unconditional love without a hint of what’s laying in store for her, which is a brick wall of resistance once she attempts to get too close. Despite signs of danger, she instead goes to medical school (against his wishes) to improve her chances of independence, which only lead to more controlling and abusive behavior. Eventually she disappears without a trace, becoming one of the great unsolved mysteries in the New York City police department. When the case is re-opened twenty years later, the story grows bizarre and nearly unrecognizable, actually turning into a secondary story with only the hollow remains of the original. Due to the ugly look of the film, as if shot on cheap film stock, the mood is equally squalid and depressing, as there is nothing memorable here except the dreary remains of a horribly ugly love story gone awry, leaving nothing more than ambiguous traces of the truth.

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

It's certainly not difficult to see why All Good Things has been languishing on the shelf for a couple of years, as the movie primarily comes off as a tedious, thoroughly pointless piece of work that boasts few attributes designed to capture the viewer's interest. All Good Things follows Ryan Gosling's David and Kirsten Dunst's Katie as they attempt to start a life together in the face of his wealthy family's disapproval, with the film subsequently detailing the various (and increasingly sinister) problems within the couple's relationship. Director Andrew Jarecki instantly finds himself unable to overcome the story's almost eye-rollingly familiar trajectory, as screenwriters Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling offer up a culture-clash romance that comes off as a pale imitation of other similarly-themed films (including Gosling's own The Notebook). Jarecki's inability to transform the two central characters into figures worth rooting for and caring about proves disastrous, and there's consequently never a point at which the viewer is able to work up even an ounce of interest in their ongoing exploits. (Not helping matters is Gosling's less-than-enthralling performance, with the actor's surprisingly bland turn exacerbated by his decision to mumble his way through most of the dialogue.) The film does, however, threaten to improve once it becomes clear that there's something not quite right with David, yet Jarecki squanders even this aspect of the proceedings by emphasizing a midsection that couldn't possibly be more tedious (ie it boils down to a repetitive series of sequences in which David acts sinister and Katie attempts to escape from his grasp). By the time the absolutely inexplicable final 20 minutes rolls around (in which David takes to cross-dressing), All Good Things has certainly cemented its place as an utterly misguided piece of work with little worth recommending - which is a shame, really, given the presence of several undeniably talented performers within the supporting cast (Frank Langella, Philip Baker Hall, etc).

All Good Things | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

The tabloid nickname writes itself: “The Millionaire Murderer.” Robert Durst, the eccentric heir to a real-estate fortune worth several hundred million dollars, has been questioned or tried over the fates of three different people: His first wife, who disappeared mysteriously in 1982 and never resurfaced, his closest female friend, who was found shot execution-style in Los Angeles in 2000, and an elderly neighbor in Galveston, Texas, whose body parts were found floating in the bay in 2001. Only that last crime yielded any prison time, and that was for improperly disposing of the body; a jury acquitted him on murder charges, convinced that he acted in self-defense. And these are just the broad outlines of a lurid story that includes cross-dressing, suicide, schizophrenia, and an almost Shakespearean level of family tragedy and treachery. 

Making his narrative feature debut, Capturing The Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki seems like the perfect man for the job, someone skilled in finding the nuance and complicated blood bonds behind a sensationalistic story. But All Good Things, his long-on-the-shelf dramatization of the Durst case, proves disappointingly timid. With names changed to protect the innocent (and the most likely guilty), the film stars Ryan Gosling as David Marks, the reluctant heir to a property empire built mainly on Times Square properties of ill repute. In the early ’70s, a rebellious young David seeks to escape his destiny by marrying a commoner (Kirsten Dunst) and opening a health-food store in Vermont. But when the family business—led by his domineering father, played by Frank Langella—lures him back to New York, David’s behavior grows more erratic and his marriage starts to fall apart, making him a prime suspect when his wife disappears.

All Good Things is unambiguous about David’s guilt, but Jarecki and his screenwriters, Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling, work hard to detail the corrosive influences to David’s psyche, starting with having to witness his mother’s suicide at a young age. Yet their attention to motives that aren’t, in the end, all that sophisticated robs the film of any pulp momentum. Here’s a story about a man who befriended and eventually killed a Texan while going incognito as an exceptionally frumpy woman, then was eventually nabbed shoplifting a chicken-salad sandwich while carrying more than $500 in his pocket. Why underplay that?

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]

Andrew Jarecki's All Good Things arrives with the expected bad buzz of a so-called "troubled production"; it was shot back in 2008 and initially intended for a fall 2009 release before hitting the fabled Weinsten shelves, where it languished for a year or so before director Jarecki bought back the domestic distribution rights and cut a deal with Magnolia Pictures. Considering some of the pap that the Weinstein Company has foisted on us in that year, the fact that they didn't think All Good Things was worth releasing would seem, for most, a telling indication of the quality of the picture. Instead, it's a reminder of the continuing decline in judgment at the Weinstein Company, since the film they sat on for a year is, come to find out, outstanding.

It is one of those "inspired by a true story" affairs, taking its narrative cues from the tabloid-friendly troubles of Robert Durst, son of a wealthy New York real estate mogul, suspected of committing (or at least being involved in) three separate murders in New York, California, and Texas. Here renamed David Marks (presumably to avoid a nice, fat lawsuit), he is played by Ryan Gosling in a live-wire performance as a free spirit who can imagine no fate worse than going into the family business; he's handsome and charming, and when he meets Katie McCarthy (a sunny Kirsten Dunst), they hit it off right away. They marry and go to Vermont to live the charmed life, but his father (Frank Langella) turns the screws on him to join the family business, and convinces David that he'll have to make a good living to keep Katie happy--planting a seed of resentment towards Katie that's manufactured out of sheer fiction.

As David sinks into his depressing job, a darkness is gradually revealed--a troublesome undercurrent, a deep and somewhat worrisome unhappiness that manifests itself in "voices" both in his head and out loud. Soon, David becomes both psychologically and physically abusive, prone to violent outbursts, capable of losing his tenuous grasp on reality. "Does that girl know how fucked up you are?" a friend asks him. To her detriment, she does not.

The film's most basic, fundamental strength is how it refuses to give itself away (avoid the details of the story, if you can); it is masterful in its ability to slowly uncoil its revelations, to allow dread and misfortune to seep in from the edges of the frame until the situation comes to a scary--and somewhat inevitable--head. But then the film jumps a full 18 years ahead (ballsy), and that's when things get really weird.

Director Jarecki, who helmed the unforgettable 2003 documentary Capturing the Friedmanss, makes the wise choice to play even the most bonkers material straight (with the notable exception of the deliberately, almost comically, melodramatic score, which is like something out of a vintage DePalma picture). His background as a documentarian is one of the film's greatest assets--not just for his attention to detail and authenticity, but for his refusal to snicker at even the strangest story twists. The film's only real flaw is its occasional reliance on visual clichés--has there ever been a movie about a happy family that begins with grainy 8mm home movies?

He's also got a real way with actors--Gosling is somehow both impenetrable and impossible to take your eyes off of, and this is without question Dunst's best work to date. She's been a little scarce lately, so it's good to see her from the beginning, and in their scenes of flirtation and romantic glow, she's cute, warm, and charismatic. But she moves easily into the picture's darker corners, her keenly-felt performance a stirring slow-motion account of a woman going right to pieces (she's doing some stuff in the back of that cab that you can't even pinpoint, it so rich and pointed). It's a tremendous piece of work.

By the time All Good Things arrives at its shocking conclusion, the audience is a bit wrung out--by the tale's intensity, and by the picture's scope. It hopscotches genres and tones without jarring; it tales a true story without sopping to Lifetime-movie schmaltz. It is an odd, challenging movie, but compelling and intelligent all the same. No wonder the Weinstein folks didn't want to have anything to do with it.

ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

On paper, the story of Robert Durst makes for fascinating drama, even though it's missing an ending and several parts of the middle. When someone is writing a nonfiction book or making a documentary, such things have limited importance. But when it comes to a feature film, leaving an audience with an incomplete feeling is not always the best approach. Director Andrew Jarecki, best known for his documentary, Capturing the Friedmans, deserves credit for sticking as much to the facts as he reasonably can. However, by not resorting to invention, his dramatization of Durst's life and alleged crimes, All Good Things, feels unfinished.

All Good Things isn't just based on Durst's well-publicized story (which was the subject matter for an episode of CBS's 48 Hours Mystery), it is Durst's story. For creative and legal reasons, the names have been changed. Durst, as played by Ryan Gosling, is now "David Marks." His wife, Kathie McCormack, is now "Katie McCarthy." And so on... Most of the narrative problems with All Good Things stem from the fact that Durst is suspected of having done some really bad things, but most of them have never been proven. There's enough circumstantial evidence for Jarecki to take the position that David Marks is guilty, but he tells more than he shows. And, although the movie posits a solution to an infamous missing person's case, it does so in a manner that is less than satisfying.

The narrative spans a roughly 30-year period, beginning in the early 1970s, jumping to the late '70s, the early '80s, and finally the early '00s. It opens with the meeting between David Marks, the son of a New York City real estate mogul, and Katie McCarthy (Kirsten Dunst), a woman of no special pedigree. They marry, much to the chagrin of David's father, Sanford (Frank Langella), and move to Vermont, where they live the country life for a while before being wooed back to the city by a persistent Sanford. Their idyllic marriage starts to sour when business pressures cause David's psychological problems (stemming from a childhood incident - he saw his mother kill herself) to escalate and Katie is forced to abort the child she desperately wants because David is firmly set against fatherhood. From there, things spiral into darker territory. David becomes emotionally and physically abusive and Katie begins snorting cocaine as a means of escape since, according to a lawyer she visits, she is essentially trapped in her marriage.

Rather than presenting events in a purely chronological fashion, Jarecki elects to use a non-linear approach, with the majority of the story being related in flashbacks (a visual representation of David's testimony at a trial), although there are mysterious, noir-ish inserts of a woman throwing trash bags off a bridge into a river at night. One generally expects there to be a point to using a wrap-around style; however, in this case, it adds nothing and, if anything, detracts from the progression of the narrative by the inclusion of distracting and unnecessary voice-overs.

The complexity of the relationships detailed in All Good Things make for a refreshing change from the staple interactions viewers have come to expect in American-made dramas. The twisted, co-dependence of David and Katie goes a step beyond how movies often depict dysfunctional relationships, and there's an equal amount of conflict in the way David relates to his powerful, emotionally shielded father. In the end, it's apparent that everything David does, including perhaps committing murder, has some relation to Sanford. In a late scene, David makes a cryptic comment to his father about them now both being "the same" that is chilling because of its implications.

This kind of dark material is familiar territory for both Frank Langella and Ryan Gosling, and their assured performances reflect their ability to move freely through grim surroundings. It's another matter for Kirsten Dunst, who appears to be gravitating toward more adult roles after spending the majority of her career in lighter, box office friendly endeavors. Her work as Katie is credible and should open doors for her with filmmakers reluctant to hire someone who is known primarily as Mary Jane Watson. (In fact, she will be appearing in Lars Von Trier's next project, which is about as far from the mainstream as one can get.) Kristin Wiig has a small supporting role that is in no way supposed to be funny, and illustrates that she may be a better dramatic actress than a comedienne.

A victim of The Weinstein Company's continuing economic woes, All Good Things has languished on the distributor's shelves since it was completed in 2008. Jarecki, concerned that it might never see the light of day, bought back the domestic rights and shopped them to Magnolia, which is using a multi-phased approach (pay-per-view TV simultaneous with a Landmark theatrical release) to open All Good Things. The film, although deeply flawed, is at times compelling, even if it seems as if a reel is missing. And, when the end credits begin rolling, one can be forgiven the thought that perhaps Jarecki, gifted non-fiction filmmaker that he is, would have been better served telling this tale as a documentary. The feature fit is awkward and ultimately unsatisfying.

IC Places [Chris Knipp]

REVIEW: True Love (and Good Filmmaking) Goes Awry in All Good ... Michelle Orange from Movieline

The Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]

DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]

A Nutshell Review [Stefan S]

Movie House Commentary [Greg Wroblewski] Johnny Web

The QNetwork [James Kendrick]

Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]

Filmcritic.com Jason McKiernan

JWR [S. James Wegg]

PopMatters [Chris Barsanti]

All Good Things | Review | Screen Brent Simon from Screendaily

GOOD THINGS - ShowReview Frank Swietek from One Guy’s Opinion

eFilmCritic Reviews also seen here: DVD Talk [Brian Orndorf] and here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

Compuserve [Harvey Karten] also seen here: All Good Things - movieweb.com [Harvey Karten]

Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]

Film-Forward.com Brendon Nafziger

ReelTalk [Betty Jo Tucker]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

The Fighter, The Tourist, All Good Things, The Company Men | Film ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal

B. Fatt & Lazy [B. Fatt & Lazy]

All Good Things — Inside Movies Since 1920 Amy Nicholson from Box Office magazine

The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] also seen here: Common Sense Media [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Variety Reviews - All Good Things - Film Reviews - New U.S. ...

Critic Review for All Good Things on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday

Review: All Good Things - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

'All Good Things': Tabloid tragedy of family's haunting secrets ... Steven Rea from the Philadelphia Inquirer

Movie review: 'All Good Things' has just some good things ... Chris Hewitt from St. Paul Pioneer Press

San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]

Movie review: 'All Good Things' - Los Angeles Times also seen here: Chicago Tribune [Betsy Sharkey]

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis, December 2, 2010

Film: That’s Me on Screen, but I Still Didn’t Do It Charles V. Bagli and Kevin Flynn interview Robert Durst, whose story is portrayed onscreen from The New York Times, November 24, 2010

"Times Square’s Seedier Side Returns (Have a Peep)" Jennifer Lee from The New York Times, June 26, 2008

"Movie based on Durst's wife's disappearance" Leigh Jones from The Galveston Daily News, August 22, 2008

All Good Things (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jarecki, Eugene

WHY WE FIGHT

USA France Great Britain Canada Denmark (98 mi) 2005

Why We Fight Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

There's nothing particularly wrong with Why We Fight, at least nothing that isn't also wrong with Fahrenheit 9/11 or The Power of Nightmares or the Robert Greenwald DIY docs. They all employ rather transparent propaganda tactics (cribbed more from negative campaign ads than Potemkin or Triumph of the Will), and as a leftist I always cringe at this blatant lowering of the level of discourse even as I know that It Gets Results, sort of. But I'm beyond caring about any of that. These things are what they are, and it's my fault for even engaging with them. No, the real problem with Jarecki's film is that it's a rehash of information and editorial material that's been circulating for years. Newsflash! Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex! Dick Cheney has peddled his political influence on behalf of his cronies at Halliburton! Wolfowitz and the neo-cons have been "fighting" the war against Iraq on paper for decades, and used 9/11 as a pretext for actually executing it! Essentially this film is a greatest-hits record of (a) the influence of defense contractors in Congress and at the Pentagon; (b) the shift in the media's role vis-a-vis the government from Vietnam to Iraq; (c) how we were all lied to about the WMDs and why. The frustrating thing is that Jarecki, operating with funding from major entities like the CBC and ARTE, gets less done in the way of research than Greenwald's charmingly homemade salvos, and skims the surface of intellectual issues that Adam Curtis at least tried to put front-and-center. (Why We Fight's Reader's Digest leftism makes it go down easier, which is probably why Sony Classics picked it up. They were reportedly sniffing around Nightmares but no doubt found it a harder sell for the same demographic.) So, in short, if you're on the left, hopping mad, and have no earthly idea how we got into this mess, Jarecki's gonna break it down for your uninformed ass. [NOTE: Why We Fight aired on the BBC and so is available as streaming video online. The picture is about the size of a saltine cracker and can't be enlarged, but I found Jarecki's images to be negligible anyway.]

Jarman, Derek

Introduction from the Queer Cultural Center

Leading avant-garde British filmmaker whose visually opulent and stylistically adventurous body of work stands in defiant opposition to the established literary and theatrical traditions of his sometimes staid national cinema. With influences ranging from the eccentric writing-directing team Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to seminal gay aesthetes Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger, Jarman advocated a personal cinema more dedicated to striking imagery and evocative sounds than to the imperatives of narrative and characterization. His comments on one of his strongest films are revealing: The Last of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema."

Like the noted American underground filmmaker Anger, Jarman displayed a fascination with violence, homoeroticism, gay representation and mythopoeic imagery. Proudly and openly gay, Jarman shared news of his HIV infection with his public and incorporated his subsequent battles with AIDS into his work, particularly in The Garden (1990) and Blue (1993). Excavating and reclaiming suppressed gay history was an ongoing project that informed his several unconventional biopics: SEBASTIANE (1975), Jarman's sun-drenched directorial debut about the martyred Christian saint; the unusually accessible and slyly anachronistic Caravaggio (1986); the raw and angry modern dress version of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II (1991); and the stark and theatrical Wittgenstein (1993).

Trained in the fine arts, Jarman began as (and remained) a designer of sets and costumes for ballet and opera. He made his first films (super-8 shorts) while working as a set designer on Ken Russell's THE DEVILS (1971) and SAVAGE MESSIAH (1972). He continued to paint and exhibit his work at London galleries while making his own films, which also reflected a painterly concern with composition. Jarman's features, shorts and music videos display an artist's lively interest in contemporary and historical English culture. In JUBILEE (1978), Queen Elizabeth I is conducted on a tour of a futuristic England in which violence and anarchy hold sway; the film became something of a beacon of the punk movement in the late 1970s. Jarman's take on THE TEMPEST (1979) was a typically irreverent and somewhat rambling reworking of Shakespeare's play. The WWI poems of Wilfred Owen, set to the music of Benjamin Britten, shaped War Requiem (1988), a powerful essay on the wastes of wars past while commenting on the modern ravages of AIDS.

Jarman's feature about the painter Caravaggio was perhaps his most popular film. This stylishly rendered biopic dramatized the conflicts between the artist's need for patronage, his religious beliefs and his sexuality. Noting that Caravaggio consistently painted Saint John as muscle-bound, Jarman suggested that the painter found sexual as well as aesthetic elation with the street thug he used as a model. The director also had fun creating filmic facsimiles of some of the painter's best known works. Curiously, although it undercuts narrative conventions by using heavy-handed anachronisms—typewriters, motorbikes—the film nevertheless reiterated one of the hoariest clichés of Hollywood biopics such as LUST FOR LIFE: i.e., that art is little more than immediately recorded experience, "life" thrown directly onto the canvas; the process of artistic creation is completely glossed over.

Like the celebrated American underground filmmaker Stan Brakhage, Jarman was a compulsive film diarist. He chronicled much of his life on super-8 film and incorporated this footage, blown up to 35mm, into his more personal, non-linear narrative films. Jarman's super-8 movies of beautiful young men in dramatic landscapes featuring caves, rocks and water lent a lushly romantic mood to THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION (1985), a non-traditional rendering of Shakespeare's sonnets. Last of England, a raging, despairing, and emotionally overwhelming vision of Britain as an urban wasteland, intercut shots of Jarman writing in his room with excerpts from home movies shot by the director, his father, and his grandfather and surreal tableaux of violence and degradation. Pastoral sequences of Jarman's childhood evince a longing for simpler times for the filmmaker and the nation. Jarman described himself as one of the last generation to remember "the countryside before mechanization intervened and destroyed everything."

Though much of Jarman's work is intensely personal, it was also supremely collaborative. He worked with many of the same people—in front of and behind the camera—on each of his projects. He welcomed and encouraged contributions; significant Liverpool sequences in THE LAST OF ENGLAND were shot by members of Jarman's crew without his direction. Composer-sound designer Simon Fisher Turner provided powerful scores and/or densely layered soundtracks for CARAVAGGIO, THE LAST OF ENGLAND, THE GARDEN, EDWARD II and BLUE. Distinguished actor Nigel Terry starred as the tortured Caravaggio, and his rich deep voice narrated THE LAST OF ENGLAND and parts of BLUE. Jarman's most important performer was the prodigiously talented Tilda Swinton, whose intensity and unusual beauty graced THE LAST OF ENGLAND, WAR REQUIEM, THE GARDEN, EDWARD II, WITTGENSTEIN, BLUE and Jarman's segment of Aria (1988).

In his last years, Jarman was an outspoken advocate for the rights and dignity of gays and PWAs (Persons With AIDS), but art remained his primary cause. A champion of film art and a dedicated experimentalist, he was a critic of, and at odds with, what he saw as the stifling, repressive commercialism of mainstream cinema. Always struggling for funds, Jarman produced his first seven features for a combined cost of only $3 million. His final film, Blue, was his most unconventional—an unchanging field of blue over which we hear voices and sounds. Blind and mortally ill, Jarman remained a visionary film maverick. He authored a number of books, including a 1984 autobiography, Dancing Ledge. Jarman succumbed to AIDS complications at age 52.

Film Reference Duncan J. Petrie, updated by Rob Edelman

Derek Jarman became one of Britain's most original and highly controversial filmmakers. Vilified by the self-appointed guardians of the nation's morals, he has been hailed as a genius by others. It was Jarman's uncompromising and direct approach to cinema which resulted in such extreme and polarized evaluations of his work. Like Ken Russell, who introduced him to filmmaking by inviting him to design The Devils and Savage Messiah, Jarman consistently assaulted comfortable, conservative assumptions of "good taste." The powerful and explicit treatment of homo-erotic passion in his work has generated the greatest hostility, with Sebastiane, one of the most erotic and uninhibited British films ever made, the target of a particularly nasty anti-homosexual campaign generated by the tabloid press.

Drawing on personal experience to a greater degree than most British filmmakers, Jarman's sexuality and his public school/military background profoundly influenced his cinema. He paid tribute to other gay artists such as Caravaggio, deducing his tragic love affair with RanuccioThomasoni from clues in his paintings, and Benjamin Britten, creating stunning images for his War Requiem. He also interpreted the island in Shakespeare's The Tempest as a metaphor for homosexuality and read his sonnets as homo-erotic love poems, incorporating them into the soundtrack of The Angelic Conversation. Jarman's films also abound with militaristic images, particularly uniformed authority figures. Such images are often ambivalent, an echo of Jarman's own relationship with his father, who was a wing commander in the RAF.

Jarman's later work is more explicitly autobiographical. The Last of England, for example, is constructed around the presence of the artist: the fictional elements of the film are integrated with sequences featuring Jarman working at home and wandering around the streets with a camera. There are also fragments of old home movie footage shot by Jarman's father and grandfather, including images of the filmmaker as a child playing with his mother and sister. Despite being regarded as subversive by many, Jarman is paradoxically a traditionalist. He is nostalgic for a world uncorrupted by the bourgeois bureaucrats and advertising executives whom he regards as forces controlling our culture. The motif of the garden, that very English symbol of personal spaces, a haven to be cherished and protected, occurs time and time again, particularly in his later work such as The Angelic Conversation, his section for Aria, and The Garden, the title of which relates to Jarman's own garden at Dungeness on the Kent coast.

Trained as a painter, Jarman's cinema betrays a diversity of aesthetic influences. In contrast to the dominant literary/theatrical tradition in British cinema, he draws heavily on painting and poetry. He consistently experimented with narrative, from the cut-up collage approach of Jubilee to the poetic open narrative style of his Super-8 work from Imagining October to The Last of England. Such an approach requires an active participation on the part of the audience, often forcing them to impose their own coherence and meaning on the visual and aural collage. This aesthetic eclecticism is reflected in the design of Jarman's productions, which frequently eschew realism by mixing period costumes and props with modern elements, part of the director's effort to generate and communicate living ideas and concepts rather than attempt to excavate a dead past. In contrast to the clutter that characterizes much British realist cinema, the interior designs in Jarman's films are often rather austere, drawing attention to the significance of objects.

Derek Jarman sought to preserve his independence from the aesthetic and ideological compromises inherent in mainstream commercial cinema. This made the task of financing his projects extremely difficult, and he was forced to make his films on shoestring budgets. No other major British filmmaker has consistently worked with such meager resources. The seven-year struggle to raise money for Caravaggio prompted Jarman to return to the Super-8 filmmaking of his pre-Sebastiane days.

By the mid-1980s it was possible to make technically sophisticated experimental films by generating images on Super-8, then transferring this material to video tape for editing and post-production while maintaining the texture and quality of the Super-8 film image in the process. The results have been extremely interesting, culminating in the production of The Last of England, the first full-length British feature film to be made in this way. These experiments confirmed Jarman's status as a genuine innovator who constantly challenged orthodox approaches to filmmaking. His refusal to be absorbed into the mainstream ensured his integrity as an artist but kept him on the margins of a rather conservative British film culture.

Jarman's premature death—he was yet another casualty to the scourge of AIDS—robbed the film world of one of its most daring and controversial talents. Among his last films were Wittgenstein and Edward II, both pointed, characteristically outlandish Jarman concoctions which deal with the lives of famous homosexuals. The former charts the life of the influential Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, depicting everything from his family background to his association with Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes, examining the evolution of his ideas as well as his gay relationships with younger men. The latter, detailing the undoing of the title monarch and his lover, serves as an expose of gay oppression throughout theages. Meanwhile, The Garden is yet another of Jarman's jarring examinations/condemnations of homophobia. Via striking imagery, he offers comparison between the persecution of gays and the crucifixion of Christ.

Blue (not to be confused with the Krzysztof Kieslowski film of the same title) is a fitting close to Jarman's career. It is a deeply personal meditation on the artist's life in the face of his impending demise. The screen is entirely blue, and via narration Jarman exposes his soul as he considers his existence and his struggle with disease.

Derek Jarman - SlowMotionAngel.Com the Derek Jarman website

BFI Screenonline: Jarman, Derek (1942-1994) Biography Erik Hedling, Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors from BFI Screen Online, also seen here: screenonline: Jarman, Derek (1942-1994) Biography

Derek Jarman Queer Cultural Center, including a biography and filmography

Derek Jarman • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Brian Hoyle, May 12, 2007

Derek - TCM.com profile by Michael Atkinson

All-Movie Guide bio info

Biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film 

Jim's Reviews - The Films of Derek Jarman Jim Clark

Photographs of Prospect Cottage Jarman’s home from Flickr, and garden details

BBC - Kent News - Feature - Derek Jarman - Prospect Cottage allowing a panoramic tour from the front gardens of Jarman’s home in Dungeness

Behind the Scenes Chicago Public Radio producer Sherre DeLys explanation of Jarman’s Gardens

BBC - UK MOVIES - Sally Potter Director's Diary 4 Jarman’s Garden, by Sally Potter

VIEWER MAKES MEANING James Tucker essay examining Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope and Derek Jarman's Edward II to explore issues surrounding the ‘coded’ and not so coded representations of homosexuality (undated)

Derek Jarman: Preserving A Harlequin Nick Clapson from Spike magazine, August 1, 1996, also seen here: Preserving A Harlequin

Queer Cinema: A Reality Check • Senses of Cinema Dmetri Kakmi, July 18, 2000

Lights! Camera! Paintbrush! • Senses of Cinema Jane Mills, December 29, 2001

ESSAY ON BLUE Des Hagarty’s Essay on BLUE from Slow Motion Angel, January 8, 2002

In the spirit of Derek Jarman | Film | The Guardian Tilda Swinton eulogy essay from The Guardian, August 16, 2002, also seen here: LETTER TO AN ANGEL

Life on planet Jarmania Life on Planet Jarmania, by Dave Calhoun from Times Online, February 19, 2004

British Cinema Now: The Lost Leader Colin MacCabe from Sight And Sound, January 2007

Remembering Derek - Times Online Remembering Derek, by Tim Teeman from Times Online, May 12, 2007

Influential: DEREK JARMAN James Marcus Tucker from Vertigo magazine, Spring 2007

WHAT COLOUR IS TIME? Stephen Barber essay from Vertigo magazine, Summer 2007

A RIGHT ROYAL KNEES UP Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, July 20, 2007

THE GENIUS OF DEREK JARMAN Dave Calhoun from Time Out London, February 5, 2008

Derek Jarman the painter Ossian Ward from Time Out London, February 5, 2008

SERPENTINE EXHIBITION The Serpentine Salutes the Unique Genius of Derek Jarman, by James Christopher from Times Online, February 8, 2008

Derek Jarman was buried by cinema's shifting sands | Film | The ... Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, February 14, 2008

Jon Savage reports on irrepressible artist and film-maker Derek ... Against the Tide, Jon Savage from The Guardian, February 14, 2008

Watch our film about Derek Jarman Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, February 26, 2008

Celebrating Derek Jarman 20 years after his death | Film | The Guardian Neil Bartlett, January 24, 2014

Jarman, Derek They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Derek Jarman - Moving Pictures of a Painter English/German description of the book by Martin Frey

Derek Jarman Shrine

Derek Jarman on Find-A-Grave

Derek Jarman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

SEBASTIANE

Great Britain (90 mi) 1976 co-director: Paul Humfress

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Not exactly typical of the British independent cinema, this not only tackles an avowedly 'difficult' subject (the relationship between sex and power, and the destructive force of unrequited passion), but does so within two equally 'difficult' frameworks: that of exclusively male sexuality, and that of the Catholic legend of the martyred saint, set nearly 1,700 years ago. Writer/director Jarman sees Sebastian as a common Roman soldier, exiled to the back of beyond with a small platoon of bored colleagues, who gets selfishly absorbed in his own mysticism and then picked on by his emotionally crippled captain. It's filmed naturalistically, to the extent that the dialogue is in barracks-room Latin, and carries an extraordinary charge of conviction in the staging and acting; it falters only in the slightly awkward elements of parody and pastiche. One of a kind, it's compulsively interesting on many levels.

Sebastiane Slow Motion Angel

300 A.D. : the Roman Sebastianus is exiled to a remote outpost populated exclusively by men. Weakened by their desires, these men turn to homosexual activities to satisfy their needs. However, Sebastianus becomes the target of lust for a homosexual centurion, but he rejects the man's advances.

Sebastiane is a controversial 1976 film written and directed by Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress. It portrays the events of the life of Saint Sebastian, including his iconic martyrdom by arrows. Most of the controversy surrounding the film derives from the homoeroticism portrayed and suggested upon between the soldiers. It is significant for being the first film to be entirely recorded accurately in Latin, which went as far as the translation of erotic language by a Latin scholar into correct vulgar Latin. As well as this it is the only film made in England to be released with subtitles in English.

PopcornQ review

Long the subject of fascination among gay men (Yukio Mishima had his first orgasm while looking at a print depicting his martyrdom), St. Sebastiane was an obscure Roman mystic who might barely be remembered today were it not for the homoerotic rumors which have persistently clung to him. In Sebastiane, directors Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress bring all the implied into the foreground, creating the frankly homosexual world of their St. Sebastiane. In the process they have pulled off an amazing trick. They have made a beautiful film which evokes a realistic feeling of another place and time, explores the dual nature of spirituality and sexuality, and also depicts an ultimate homosexual fantasy.

Handsome nude men seen relaxing together, practicing for battle, and having sex might be enough to make this film the cult favorite that it is, but this is no mere porn movie. Every element, including the excellent photography, editing, Latin dialogue (with subtitles), and music by Brian Eno combine to lift the viewer into the world of Sebastiane and into the tug-of-war between the soul and flesh which is at the heart of this story.

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Homoerotic story of St Sebastiane and his eventual torture, rape and martyrdom. Gloriously gay and powerfully universal.

Writer-director Derek Jarman transposes the legend of the martyred Saint Sebastian to the time of the Roman Empire, and re-creates him as Sebastianus, a common Roman soldier exiled to the back of beyond. Here, he is victimised by a superior officer after he rejects his sexual advances.

This is arthouse movie-making at its most cerebral: the dialogue is entirely in Latin and Jarman's storytelling, which is full of pastiche and parody, makes his film the antithesis of no-brain, popcorn-munching entertainment.

The story is intensely homo-erotic and the film's concentration on the emerging homosexual relationships between the soldiers further distances it from standard fare. But the film's theme is universal and compelling: it deals with the relationship between sex and power and the destructive force of unrequited passion.

This was Jarman's directorial debut. He went on to carve himself a particular niche in British arthouse filmmaking, as an avant garde auteur, unafraid to make demands of his audience, and intent on crafting sophisticated, richly visual, innovative films.

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]

Sebastiane, the cult film that marked the debut feature by gay experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman, treads an almost imperceptible line between using devout fidelity to ratify its source and using rampant infidelity to undermine it. Set in 303 A.D., the film provides a blow-by-blow account of the exiled Roman soldier, devout Christian, and eventual Saint Sebastian who is martyred for rejecting the sexual advances of a commanding officer. After an extended sequence that takes place during a Roman orgy and recalls Kenneth Anger’s gaudy Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, the locale shifts to a remote military outpost, where the rest of the film unfolds. Similarly to The Gospel According to St. Matthew, also directed by a gay man, it’s difficult to tell from what’s on screen alone whether or not Sebastiane is celebrating the Saint or deriding the religion that chose him as an ideal. Whereas Pasolini’s Gospel used a nearly neo-realist approach that somewhat obscured his political intentions, Jarman and his more glitzier style appear to have a clearer agenda. The primary concern of the film seems to push the boundaries of what’s acceptable on screen. Just as the old silent Biblical epics allowed filmmakers to legitimize tales that were laden with sex and violence, Sebastiane uses its context to justify the presence of copious amounts of full frontal male nudity and characters that openly have same-sex intercourse.

As opposed to the coy talk of oysters and snails that dotted sword and sandals epics such as Spartacus, Jarman packs Sebastiane with overt homosexuality. While I’m not versed enough in the history of the time to say to what degree this portrayal of the soldiers’ sex lives is historically accurate or embellished by gay wish fulfillment, within the diegetic world of the film, it makes sense. One suspects though that historical accuracy was a prime concern here, if only to make a statement about the factual whitewashing that typically occurs in the genre (oddly the violence never seems to be excised). The film’s dialogue is all spoken in Latin and the costumes, while scant, feel believable. The prime element that seems out of place on historical terms is the effective score, composed by modern minimalist Brian Eno. Otherwise, Sebastiane’s production values are more than sufficient to give the impression that the viewer is watching an actual group of Roman soldiers as they train and frolic. Though the actors never make the combination of homosexual overtones and a regimented military lifestyle have the emotional resonance that it did in Claire Denis’ masterpiece Beau Travail, Sebastiane nonetheless manages to be a captivating, and titillating, original.

Sebastiane | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Derek Jarman first worked in the film industry as a production designer, for Ken Russell’s The Devils and Savage Messiah. Sebastiane was his solo effort as director (jointly with Paul Humfress, also the film’s editor). Shot on a tiny budget on Sardinia with Latin dialogue, it’s an overtly homoerotic interpretation of the life of St Sebastian (Leonardo Treviglio), who was exiled and finally put to death.

Whatever your thoughts about Jarman’s output – and I’ll state right now that I’m not a fan – Sebastiane remains a unique film. Like much of his later career, it was made in the face of considerable opposition. You have to admire Jarman’s courage and resourcefulness in putting his vision on screen, even if you fail to respond to the result. On its release, Sebastiane's explicit content, and copious amounts of male nudity (often full-frontal) proved controversial, equally so when Channel 4 showed it in 1985. Nowadays, its capacity to outrage has lessened, and I suspect anyone likely to be offended would be hardly likely to pick up this DVD in the first place. And even if they did, the opening scene, depicting a feast/orgy at the court of the Emperor Diocletian (and featuring Lindsay Kemp and his troupe) would finish them off.

Sebastiane, made nine years after male homosexuality became legal in Britain, is much more openly defiant than other British gay films of the time (for example, Ron Peck and Paul Hallam’s Nighthawks, from 1979) which, while undoubtedly groundbreaking, seem nowadays almost quaint and apologetic. At one level, Sebastiane is a feature-length study of the male body as erotic object. As most mainstream films are made by and aimed at heterosexual men, it can be startling to be reminded of an alternative view. A film that Sebastiane prefigures is Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, another film that explores the erotic allure of the male body in a desert/military setting. However, there similarities end: an article on the differing ways straight women and gay men view men, as shown by these two films, would be fascinating but is outside the scope of this review.

Jarman and Humfress’s film is in the record books as the only feature film to have Latin dialogue, and hence the only English film to be released in Britain with English subtitles throughout. (I emphasise "English" as I’m not counting the small number of Welsh- and Irish-language films, and Barney Platts-Mills’s brave but misconceived Scots Gaelic Hero.) Jack Welch deserved plaudits for translating the language – including a significant amount of profanity – into Latin, though at one point he resorted to a Greek word, translating “motherfucker” as “Oedipus”.

BFI Screenonline: Sebastiane (1976) Cherry Smyth from BFI Screen Online

Jim's Film Website

PopMatters [Matt Mazur] reviewing the Derek Jarman Collection

Gayteens.org Editor

James Wegg Review S. James Wegg

Fin de cinema: Film for Music August 3, 2006

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [4.5/5] Phil Hall

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

JUBILEE

Great Britain (100 mi) 1978

Time Out review

It's almost an understatement to say that Jubilee has a lot going for it. Jarman has conceived the ingenious idea of transporting Queen Elizabeth I through time to witness the future disintegration of her kingdom as marauding girl punks roam a junky and violent urban landscape. Its patchily humorous evocation of this landscape lays the film open to criticism: several sequences stoop to juvenile theatrics, and the determined sexual inversion (whereby most women become freakish 'characters', and men loose-limbed sex objects) comes to look disconcertingly like a misogynist binge. But in conception the film remains highly original, and it does deliver enough of the goods to sail effortlessly away with the title of Britain's first official punk movie: 'Rule Britannia', as mimed by Jordan, should have 'em pogoing in the aisles.

Edinburgh U Film Society (Spiros Gangas) review

One of the early Jarman films and one which caused much discontent among the critics. Jubilee is laden with anarchic elements and it can be interpreted as a critique of England's past and present. Set in the future in a chaotic England, it conceives ingeniously of Queen Elizabeth I as travelling through time observing the collapse of her kingdom in a landscape harassed by violence...

The cinematic pioneer of the punk era Jubilee forms an uncomfortable prediction of the unsettled Eighties and mocks humorously the nostalgia for England's "glorious past". Its blunt attitude to violence has confused many critics who seem to have missed the point: irony and cynical humour as a means of diagnosing the malaise of contemporary Britain, its paradoxes and puritanism. That there are flaws in the film it's hard to deny - mainly in terms of its theatrical stage of the story and its attempt to invert gender roles - but it is also difficult to deny the film's aesthetic innovation which still remains very impressive. Jarman's uncompromising criticism might be vulnerable at points but at that time it was something of an oasis in a milieu suffering from conventionalism. Witty, raw and imaginative Jubilee might not provide answers to the burning questions of British society. but it will certainly provide an accurate and often darkly funny description of them.

Jubilee Slow Motion Angel

In the year 1578, Queen Elizabeth I asks her court magician, Dr. John Dee, to give her a vision of "the shadow of her time." Dee invokes the angel Ariel, who transports the Queen and Dee to the England of the future--a post-punk post Thatcherian wasteland where civilization has come to a halt. Bands of teenage girl punks roam the streets. Equally dangerous are the fascistic police. Buckingham Palace is a recording studio, the center of an entertainment empire controlled by media czar Borgia Ginz, who owns everything from the C of E to the BBC. The anti-heros of the film are led by Elizabeth's mirror image Bod, the murderous leader of a mad household that includes the historian Amyl Nitrate, the pyromaniac Mad, the sex-obsessed actress Crabs, loving brothers Sphinx and Angel, the artist Viv and their French au pair, Chaos. Jordan on Jubilee. "Jubilee pushed me to the limits mentally and physically. I had to dance on points on concrete - no ballerina has to do that they've got supple wooden floors. My toes bled.." She had learned ballet from aged four to eighteen.

In the NME interview of 15/4/78 Jordan says Derek Jarman is " very, very clever" pointing out it was he that wrote her screen monologue on the merits of Myra Hindley . Jordan believed in the interview that Myra should be freed.
She also has a different opinion of the film in that she thinks "Its a laugh...that's the point everyone misses. I've seen really straight people literally crying with laughter at it. ..Any other director would have done a...sensationalist sex and violence quicky..." Which is weird because it certainly has all the sex and violence elements !! "We actually got arrested that day 'cause Derek insisted on using real guns and the police took us away. We tried to explain that the guns had no firing pins but I don't think they even knew what they were."

Jubilee (1979) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Pablo Kjolseth

Derek Jarman (1942 - 1994) is often referred to as quintessentially British, gay, low-budget, avant-garde, and more. But the Encyclopedia of European Cinema probably put it best when it said that "there is something disingenuous about Jarman's appeal to the English tradition, and it is a tradition refracted through the more camp sensibility of Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger and David Hockney." This connection should strike anybody with a penchant for anarchy and punk music as a badge of honor. With the recent dvd release of Jubilee (1978), viewers can gauge this assessment for themselves and revisit the roots of the Blank Generation by taking in early performances and music by such key players as The Slits, Brian Eno (doing his first original film score), Adam and the Ants, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Toyah, and others.

To sum up the story of Jubilee is a fool's errand, but here goes: We begin with a vision of Queen Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre) in the 1500's asking a court magician to give her a vision of "the shadow of her time." An androgynous angel (David Haughton) appears, reflecting beams of light from a mirror he holds between his legs (this may seem an unnecessary detail but it's a striking and campy image that, in some ways, epitomizes the film). The angel proceeds to show her the post-Thatcher wasteland of England which is populated by Kid (Adam Ant), Amyl Nitrate (played by Malcolm McClaren's sex shop protage, Jordan), the red-haired pyro Mad (Toyah Willcox), nympho Crabs (Little Nell), two incestuous brothers (played by Karl Johnson and Ian Charleson), and many others, including a wild-eyed media mogul by the name of Borgia Gins (played with zestful glee by Orlando).

One of the great things about Jubilee is that it's a film of integrity; its style compliments the story and the ideas therein. Plenty of films today claim to be one thing (ie: theological puzzle-pieces like The Matrix), but in their form are something else altogether (ie: sunglass commercials). Jubilee has many faults, but it is pure insofar as it is about anarchy, music, and the youth that rises out of the rubble in a corrupted environment and it tells this story with an aesthetic that is also anarchic in its form and pacing.

Criterion's widescreen dvd release of Jubilee is generously fitted with many extra's that include a theatrical trailer, a new digital transfer struck from the original 16mm camera negative and which was cleaned up using the MTI Digital Restoration System, an original documentary on Jarman and Jubilee, liner notes from Jarman biographer Tony Peak and cultural historian Jon Savage, and ephemera from Derek Jarman's personal collection. Viewing the latter as a precursor to watching the film is recommended as a primer and include, among many other things, various close-ups and still frames that allow viewers to read an involved t-shirt critique of the film. The t-shirt review, like the film it critiques, is punk and sassy in what it says and how it says it.

Images Movie Journal [Joe Pettit, Jr.]

In 1977, Great Britain was plagued by economic and political turmoil. The economic recession hovered at an all-time low and the unemployment rate skyrocketed. The war between the British Empire and the IRA seemed incessant. Foment and unrest manifested in the music of a new breed of unwashed youths with orange hair, ripped clothes, and nasty attitudes. They sneered "God save the Queen" in snotty voices while jubilantly proclaiming they had no future.

As Queen Elizabeth II ordered a year of celebrations honoring her Silver Jubilee (25th) anniversary since taking the throne, filmmaker Derek Jarman had the idea to capture his friends operating in their milieu, in particular the striking Jordan, who had gained Punk credibility from working in the Kings Row boutique run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, the impresarios behind the Sex Pistols. Jarman's producers convinced him to expand his idea into a feature-length fictional film by incorporating ideas from his earlier unproduced film, The Angelic Conversation of John Dee. The resulting film, Jubilee (1978), recently released on DVD by Criterion, baffled mainstream and art house audiences alike. Furthermore, the film alienated British punk rockers, who interpreted the film as a lifeless, upper-crust exploitation of their dynamic movement. With the hindsight of twenty-five years, Jubilee is prophetic in its vision of an apocalyptic, noise-ridden future where chaos reigns and everyone ultimately sells out.

At its heart, Jubilee is a movie of ironic contrasts, a look through a glass darkly from England's Golden Elizabethan age towards the anarchic, economically and artistically desolate future embodied in Great Britain during Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee anniversary. Legendary alchemist, mage, and court astrologer John Dee (portrayed by Rocky Horror Picture Show's Richard O'Brien) grants Queen Elizabeth I's (Jenny Runacre) request to summon the angel Ariel to provide her with a glimpse into the future of her beloved country. What the two find completely astounds them. Expecting to see a logical extension of the glory and wonders of her tranquil empire, Elizabeth and Dee discover England blasted to rubble and ablaze with bonfires. Anarchy reigns. Roving girl gangs savagely attack any persons foolish enough to be caught walking alone, while the police coolly stand back laughing at the spectacle.

Within the first ten minutes of their vision, Queen Elizabeth II is murdered off-camera by sociopathic gang leader Bod (Jenny Runacre in a dual role) who then dons the purple royal crown. Most of the film revolves around the activities of Queen Bod's court -- which includes 1) Amyl Nitrate (Jordan), a punk intellectual whose impromptu history lessons provide much of the film's narration, 2) Mad (Toyah Willcox), a foot soldier whose cures for boredom usually include pyromania or thuggery, and 3) Crabs (Rocky Horror Picture Show's Little Nell), a talent scout with an insatiable sexual appetite. Hovering in the wings is the evil genius Borgia Ginz (Orlando), an impresario with an iron clad grip on all facets of the entertainment industry. He spouts Oscar Wildean aphorisms regarding the seemingly endless human capacity for selling out artistic principles for fifteen minutes of fame, punctuating each cynical delivery with bouts of hysterical laughter.

It's no guessing matter where Jarman's sympathies lie. His idyllic portrayal of the court of Queen Elizabeth I completely bypasses that era's very real social problems. However, he does make a compelling argument. Almost five hundred years later, the Elizabethan Age still resounds in our cultural imagination. From Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe to John Dee and Elizabeth I, the historical figures of the age still fascinate and inspire. It seemed that the magic and intrigue which filled the imagination of these people was in the very air they breathed. When compared to the cultural and societal vision offered up by the neutered royalty and bitter artists of the 1970s, Jarman finds that British society has become sterile, losing its way amidst piles of rubble and nonstop noise. There is no more magic, and no one has the patience for poetic experience.

It is no small wonder that Jubilee pissed off the Punks. Jarman dared to hold a poetic mirror up to 1977 and project where the widespread nihilism and anger would lead. With the streets ablaze in Brixton and Toxteth, even the gangs sell out to the moneymen in exchange for security and a gated community. The picture proved to be less than flattering -- but remarkably prescient of todays prefabbed "bad boys." In the words of Borgia Ginz, "they all sign up in the end, one way or another."

The Criterion Collection once again comes through in their DVD presentation of Jubilee. Notable extra features include excerpts from Jarman's scrapbook for the film, an insightful essay by Jarman biographer Tony Peake, a full-length version of Jordan's ballet dance around the bonfire featured in the film, and the documentary Jubilee: A Time Less Golden, made by Jarman regular Spencer Leigh. This documentary takes a fascinating look into Jarman's creative processes, examining the controversy surrounding Jubilee on its release and providing glowing appreciations of Jarman's work by his former collaborators. At the very least, this DVD release of Jubilee should inspire a positive re-appraisal of this idiosyncratic and beautiful film, if not a resurgence of interest in this unusual filmmaker's work.

Jubilee Criterion essay by Tony Peake, May 26, 2003

Jubilee: No Known Address . . . or . . . Don’t Look Down . . . Criterion essay by Tilda Swinton, May 26, 2003

Jubilee (1978) - The Criterion Collection

Jim's Reviews - Jarman's Jubilee - JClarkMedia.com Jim’s reviews

Criterion Confessions: JUBILEE - #191 Jamie S. Rich, also seen here: Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]

Derek Jarman's Jubilee (1978) Revisited - Bright Lights Film Journal Julian Upton, October 1, 2000

BFI Screenonline: Jubilee (1978) Cherry Smyth from BFI Screen Online

Jubilee (1978) | PopMatters Todd R. Ramlow

Jubilee (1979) - Articles - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

Jubilee | Film at The Digital Fix Jon Robertson

Jubilee | Film at The Digital Fix Raphael Pour-Hashemi

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

not coming to a theater near you [Rumsey Taylor]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/5]

Jubilee - Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video James W, Powell

DVD Journal [Clarence Beaks]

digitallyOBSESSED! [Robert Edwards]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [5/5] Thomas Bennett

Movie House Commentary Tuna and Johnny Web

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [1/5] Richard Scheib

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review

Mondo Digital also reviewing CARAVAGGIO and THE TEMPEST

TV Guide

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

A RIGHT ROYAL KNEES UP Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, July 20, 2007

Jubilee (1978 film) - Wikipedia

THE TEMPEST

Great Britain (95 mi) 1979

Time Out review

Jarman's rendering of the Bard's last act is his best picture to date, superbly shot in crumbling abbeys and mansions that look like Piranesi's Gothic drawings of fallen Rome, and turning the triteness of camp into absurdist comedy. The ending is pure Python and a major mistake - a cabaret with Elisabeth Welch singing 'Stormy Weather'- but until then Jarman's gleeful re-imagining of the play and his serious debate with it works wondrously well. Ages and influences crash together - Caliban as an Edwardian butler, Ariel a sight for gay eyes, Prospero a character out of Blake - but it's all of a piece, directed like a magic show.

Tempest Slow Motion Angel

Prospero, a potent necromancer, lives on a desolate isle with his virginal daughter, Miranda. He's in exile, banished from his duchy by his usurping brother and the King of Naples. Providence brings these enemies near; aided by his vassal the spirit Ariel, Prospero conjures a tempest to wreck the Italian ship. The king's son, thinking all others lost, becomes Prospero's prisoner, falling in love with Miranda and she with him. Prospero's brother and the king wander the island, as do a drunken cook and sailor, who conspire with Caliban, Prospero's beastly slave, to murder Prospero. Prospero wants reason to triumph, Ariel wants his freedom, Miranda a husband; the sailors want to dance.

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Punky Shakespeare that's a plank of Jarman's saintly reputation, and a godsend for A-level English teachers desperate to convince unwilling students that Shakespeare is cool.

Toyah Wilcox's lisping, bruising Miranda is the principal point of interest in Jarman's skittish adaption, and Sonnaband's art direction is much more focused and vivid than the dreary fuss of Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books. But it's harder in hindsight to see the brilliance and individuality often claimed for Jarman.

The film is now good evidence that he never really escaped the influence of his mentor, Ken Russell - the red-faced exploitationist who gave him his first break. It's sleazy, baroque, self-consciously intellectual and done on the cheap.

User comments from imdb Author: John Richards (monolith94) from Newburyport, MA

For me, the Tempest and its characters (by which I mean the admirable ones) are like old friends. Ever since I first began to experience the play through acting classes (I played Ferdinand) I found myself immediately caught up in the fantastic world that Shakespeare created. I can distinctly remember one student deciding not to play Ferdinand after all, and so I took the stage and had the honor of playing opposite an excellent Miranda.

One of the virtues that a great friend has is that you can never fully know them - there is always something you can discover about their character. A film production of the Tempest of quality is thus like a visit to an old friend, dear to one's heart: each visit presents one with new perspective on the memory we had of the work. With Prospero's Books, the ritual and the elegance of the play was emphasized, the exuberant celebration of art within the art. Here, we see a vision as esoteric mysticism, with lovingly crafted interiors full of candles and chalk diagrams on floors, more Aleister Crowley than Naples nobleman. It also made me reconsider - why was it that Prospero was cast out of Naples? His magical power is so palpable in this production that it makes one wonder whether it was just politics that doomed Prospero to exile, but rather the fact of his difference from his peers. So, in the real world, he suffered. Was cast out, powerless to change the wrong to the right. All of the villains in this play, whether they realize it or not, act in accordance to creating a more pain-filled, hell of a world - it is always in the interest of the oppressor to make life on Earth closer to hell. But Prospero manages to bring these terrestrial villains into his island, the realm where he has (absolute) dominion.

Shakespeare brings his audience to the theater, the realm where Shakespeare dictates the events, the words, the outcomes. Shakespeare is, of course, Prospero - but what this film adaptation does that really honors the text is to make Prospero so sympathetic such a figure of reason, despite the fact that he is surrounded by what society calls irrational (astrological texts, alchemical symbols, magical diagrams, etc.). Is it more rational to be a man of the cloth and murder, or to be a heretic and work towards the righting of wrongs? Prospero IS a heretic, for the reason he abandons his magic is not because the books will lose their value in Naples, but because they are not necessary anymore - the world itself - has become the magic of the books.

In Hamlet, Hamlet presents a play to his peers. The play accuses his fellows of conspiring against others for their own advancement. The reaction of the audience varies: while Ophelia is puzzled, Claudius reacts with stunned shock. This happens within the play, and then Shakespeare has this play performed for the men of his time. Did Shakespeare watch for their reactions? In the tempest, Prospero lives the play he is constructing, and we live it with him. How do we react? Do you react with simple delight at the happy ending? Are you upset and shocked by the strangeness of this production, which is entirely fitting given the source material? Do you feel sad at the fact that this little life, the play, is rounded with a sleep, as transient as it is eternal? The tragedy is that Shakespeare creates a paradise of reason and hope for mankind's life on Earth but man is weak, and unwilling to realize it in favor of petty power struggles. We have Claudiuses.

Like a good friend, this film is not without its flaws. I disagree with the choice to paint some scenes entirely in blue. The dance of the mariners is rather tangential. But at the heart this is truly The Tempest, and one of its many faces.

User comments from imdb Author: tedg (tedg@FilmsFolded.com) from Virginia Beach

Thinking about film can occasionally be dangerous. Some films are designed to trigger this, but once in a while some rather simple film unintentionally leads me into uncharted territory. This IS a simple, unassuming film, but it prompted more rumination than say Branagh's `The Tempest' cleverly masquerading as `Dracula.'

I have had only one experience with Jarman, with his `Wittgenstein,' which actually offended me with its lack of nuance. Jarman is that kind of artist who has a single impulse, one thing to say and adapts any material to support it. Like others of this type - Stone, Spike, Campion - that impulse is richer than a mere political view and their expressive talent is similarly rich. But no matter how technically sweet their expression, the fact remains that it is applied to a view of the world that bleaches rather than distills, simplifies rather than clarifies and dulls into stereotype instead of sharpening into archetype.

Shakespeare works with ideas; those ideas have agency, engage in being themselves and weave their own tapestry in a spirit-like world, somewhat independent of human action. He expresses that tapestry in words where the manifold ambiguities and multiple threads reinforce each other, idea and meaning. Those words necessitate characters and situations and such, but characters are mere parts in a celestial machine. `The Tempest' is, to my mind, the most perfect and self-referential of his constructions: the one most concerned with its own nature, creation and structure. It is bottomless, worthy of exploration for years.

Now, along comes a stage tradition that believes the entire world of drama revolves around characters, the way they are written and played. Unfortunately, when actors hijack Shakespeare, they turn the equation on its head. Suddenly the tapestry of finely spun ideas has to be reduced to a few strong, obvious threads in order to `explain' and support the plot. So `Romeo' becomes a love story, `Hamlet' about indecision, and `Tempest' about revenge. It is a travesty as blunt as TeeVee wrestling. So-called schools conspire with the selfishness of the theater market to perpetuate this.

Now here's my dilemma. I liked this production; I really did. Miranda is supposed to be 14, sexually pure, and the `white space' on the conceptual palette. Greenaway's `Prospero's Books' - the best film Tempest by far - understood this. Around this center of discovery, which includes us the audience, swirls all sorts of confabulated issues, cosmic and trivial. At least in the play.

Jarman gives us a different type of center: a buxom, sexy punk rocker who has the best understanding in the cast of vocal sculpting and presence. And at the same time, Jarman so simplifies the play and characters (by omission, by making things `clear,' by using unsophisticated language, by giving each character a `role') that he turns the whole construction on is head. Everything else is white space EXCEPT her. She is the magician. This is truly an unsettling notion. All the swishy dancing at the end is mere background noise to this dangerous notion.

The photography and staging is a treat unto itself. Of all his plays, this one is the most difficult to stage because Shakespeare himself was struggling with the new technologies of the art. He created all sorts of hooks for effects, and much of the action depends on those effects. Jarman's notion is inspired, using the abbey as he does. It is perfect in its own way. Miranda's costume - the only one that matters - together with Ferdinand's nudity is pretty effective.

So where I was expecting Shakespeare's engrossing insights on the superficialities of the world, I instead find myself captivated by that very world. It may take some time to recover.

See this and imagine the perfect film Tempest. At the moment, I would include this dual, dangerous notion of passive/aggressive, sexuality in the girl as part of the ambiguity, something Shakespeare couldn't do (but would if he were here today). It would be between Jarman's lines and those of Larry Clark. It would be animated in the manner of `Sprited Away' (itself a version of the Tempest) but all players would be nude. It would have grand political clockworks like `Ran` and simple, imaginative love like Holly Golighty's. It would have the literary layering and emphasis on image-then-language of Greenaway. It would have all the special effects machinery of the most popular current version of `The Tempest,' `The Matrix' (without the guns and glasses), and by this I mean not the effects of the movie but of the world within. And it would be a serial.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 4: Worth watching.

BFI Screenonline: Tempest, The (1979) Michael Brooke from BFI Screen Online

BFI Screenonline: The Tempest On Screen Michael Brooke from BFI Screen Online

The Tempest Jim’s reviews

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib

Apollo Guide (Dan Jardine) review [77/100]

Mondo Digital also reviewing JUBILEE and CARAVAGGIO

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION

Great Britain (77 mi) 1985

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

More of an aesthetic object than a movie, this 78-minute study by British filmmaker Derek Jarman (Sebastiane, The Tempest) consists of stop-printed Super-8 images of two handsome young men climbing rocks, lugging burdens, and swimming blown up to 35-millimeter, where the exaggerated graininess makes them almost abstract. Meanwhile, selected Shakespearean sonnets are read in voice-over by actress Judi Dench, and the result is a sort of extremely rarefied pornography.

Time Out review

Jarman's setting for twelve Shakespeare sonnets has no narrative as such, and the only dialogue is Judi Dench's reading of the poems. Yet even though it dispenses with such conventions, it remains a hypnotically beautiful film. Its textured, stop-frame tableaux of caves, rocks, water, and figures in strange and terrible landscapes throw up myriad painterly similarities: the lesser religious nightmares of a Bosch or Brueghel, Victorian landscape of the 'Gordale Scar school'. Very romantic.

Angelic Conversation Slow Motion Angel

An unseen woman recites Shakespeare's sonnets - fourteen in all - as a man wordlessly seeks his heart's desire. The photography is stop-motion, the music is ethereal, the scenery is often elemental: boulders and smaller rocks, the sea, smoke or fog, and a garden. The man is on an odyssey following his love. But he must first, as the sonnet says, know what conscience is. So, before he can be united with his love, he must purify himself. He does so, bathing a tattooed figure (an angel, perhaps) and humbling himself in front of this being. He also prepares himself with water and through his journey and his meditations. Finally, he is united with his fair friend.

User comments from imdb Author: LaFeeChartreuse from Toronto

This is possibly the most visually beautiful film I've ever seen.

Like many of Jarman's works, it has no conventional narrative, but a montage of images, music and voice. The film was made by putting the original footage through a variety of different visual processes which end up giving it the look of an oil painting in motion -- I've never seen anything quite like it. The hypnotic (and frequently homoerotic) visual imagery coupled with ethereal, ambient music and a female voice reading Shakespeare's love sonnets is almost trance-inducing -- you seriously feel like you're in an altered state of consciousness by the end of it.

Highly recommended for those who enjoy experimental/art films, but those who don't will probably find the lack of a conventional plot confusing.

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Barry from Canada

Derek Jarman is a brilliant filmmaker, and along with Peter Greenaway, probably the most important British filmmaker of the Post WW2 era.

The Angelic Conversation, while a quality work of extraordinary textural richness, isn't Jarman's best. The problem here lies partially in the editing. It's far too aesthetically disjointed and the optical effects seem cheap and reaching. Maybe it's because a million so-called experimental filmmakers have achieved similar results to a much less pointed effect. That kind of copying unfortunately makes this film seem tired, though the soundtrack and script are spectacular.

It is also Jarman's most personal film aside from perhaps, Blue. This is unfortunate, because Jarman has always been most effective when he looks outward. Sebastione, for instance, was a brilliant historical film that literally transports you back in time and The Garden was a scathing political portrait of fin de siecle England under Thatcher. See those before you watch this, but all Jarman is interesting. Coil fans will also appreciate their contribution to this film.

PopcornQ review David Robinson

Derek Jarman brings to his films a painter's eye, and with it the technical ingenuity by means of which he has devised, out of the marriage of film and video, a whole new palette of visual effects. An example is the characteristic, stroboscopic style of his most recent films--analysing motion into successions of still images not unlike Muybridge or Marey sequence photographs. Jarman has devised a novel technique to attain the effect. The action is first filmed with a stop-motion camera at the rate of around 3 frames per second. The moving image is then reconstituted by projecting at the same rate, and recording from the screen to video. (It is characteristic of Jarman's practical approach to film problems that he is as delighted by the economy of celluloid the device acheives as by the visual conquest.) In the case of Angelic Conversation, the process of successive transfer from Super-8 to low-band video to high-band video to 35mm film obtained the striking textured effect of the images. Jarman's distinctive color effects are produced by processing black-and-white images on video. To achieve particular effects he will sometimes deliberately trick and confuse the electronic equipment--for example, by substituting a bright green gel for the white card ordinarily required for color correction. At the first sight characterized by a system of repetition, Angelic Conversation never succumbs to monotony. The repetitions tend in fact to be variations which serve to concentrate the attention and heighten the significance of small gesture: the climactic homoerotic love scene achieves powerful effect just through chaste and tender touching and twining of hands. More than earlier films, this one demonstrates the meeting of cineast and painter that gives special character to Jarman's most successful work. Every image is arresting for its compositions, its use of mass and shadow, and of color that is sometimes so elusive that you are momentarily uncertain whether you see it or not. Jarman paints in light.

BFI Screenonline: Angelic Conversation, The (1985) Kamila Kuc from BFI Screen Online

Gentle and romantic, The Angelic Conversation was Derek Jarman's favourite artistic project. Structured around fourteen of Shakespeare's sonnets read by Judi Dench, the film is an exploration of love and desire between two men: Paul (an archaeologist from Jarman's The Last of England, 1987) and Philip. Also inspired by the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, the project began as a series of improvisations and experiments shot on Super-8 in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Jarman was fascinated with the visual effects mirrors create, as seen in his short film The Art of Mirrors (1973). Mirrors operate here as a symbol of homosexual desire: a scene of two men kissing is constructed in such a way as to evoke Narcissus kissing his own reflection. The film has no structured plot and the journey of its two lovers is reminiscent of Homer's Odyssey, with a confusion of dream and reality, past and present. The director employs slow motion and stop-frame techniques to generate a hallucinatory effect of suspended time, while he deliberately limits his colour palette by experimenting with the white balance controls and different colour filters. This is one of the most painterly of Jarman's films, and is strongly reminiscent of the work of William Blake.

In common with other Jarman works, there is much reference to religion and ritual: a scene in which a prince's feet are washed recalls Christ and the cleansing of sins; Paul's carrying of a post evokes the stations of the cross. The film's idealisation of love is contrasted with a depressing reality: a burning car, a rotating radar and a fence suggesting surveillance and control. The presence of nature (the Dorset seascape, the cliffs of Dancing Ledge, the caves at Winspit and the garden of the Montacute mansion in Somerset) corresponds with images from the work of Humphrey Jennings and Powell and Pressburger, where the alliance of man and nature represents an idyllic escape from the industrial world.

The Angelic Conversation was made after a decade of gay liberation, and at the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the UK and North America. Jarman was not yet aware of his own HIV infection, yet critics have noted that the film raises issues of safe sex. With the accompaniment of Benjamin Britten's 'Sea Interludes' (from Peter Grimes) and Coil's atmospheric electronics, it is a haunting 78-minute haunting journey described in vibrant images.

The Angelic Conversation Jim’s Reviews

Metroactive.com [Richard von Busack] reviewing the 4 disc set Glitterbox

DVD Verdict- Glitterbox: Derek Jarman X 4 [Brett Cullum] reviewing the 4 disc set

The Angelic Conversation (film) | Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing ...

William Tsun-Yuk Hsu capsule review

Channel 4 Film capsule review

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

CARAVAGGIO

Great Britain (93 mi) 1986

Caravaggio Slow Motion Angel

Jarman tells the story of painter Caravaggio rather like Caravaggio would paint, infusing it (effortlessly) with the central themes of his life's deepest convictions, creating a portrait which reflects the subject and the artist with equal relevance. What's more, many of the same themes that have been identified with both artists - sexuality, transcendence, violence, censorship, politics (religious/sexual) and the tumultuous source of creative identity are present in both men. It works as very few films do. This is also an unusually accessible film for Derek Jarman. The performances are entertaining and it's filmed with astounding beauty and simplicity. This film is a masterpiece.

Time Out review

As Caravaggio (excellently played by Terry) lies dying at Porto Ercole in 1610, his mind drifts back over a short life of extraordinary passion: his relationship with his model, Ranuccio Thomasoni, who posed perhaps as the muscular assassin in so many 'martyrdom' pictures, and the other apex in the triangle, Lena, who is Ranuccio's mistress and Caravaggio's model for the Magdalene and the dead Virgin. Jarman proposes a murderous intensity as the mainspring for both Caravaggio's love life and for his furious painting, and it certainly carries great weight of conviction. For all the melodrama of the story, however, he has elected a style of grave serenity, composed of looks and glances, long silences in shaded rooms, sudden eruptions of blood. It all works miraculously well, even the conscious use of anachronisms and the street sounds of contemporary Italy.

Caravaggio Pat Graham from the Reader

Like the aesthetically suspect filmmaker of Jean-Luc Godard's Passion, Derek Jarman devotes much of this free-form meditation on the life and art of Caravaggio (1986) to creating living tableaux of the baroque master's most famous paintings, though the literalizing question of whether the impersonations are "real" enough (they are for the most part, the Deposition staging uncannily so) tends to obscure the subtler things Jarman's doing here. In a sense, Caravaggio's less about its ostensible subject than Jarman's own homoerotic vision, of eros turned inward, toward private fantasy and longing (the film unfolds in a kind of hermetic mental box, with scarcely a hint of an open-air world beyond the closed-in sets). The playing around with period yields some clever anachronistic touches, and the stylized theatricality makes up for occasional bouts of clunky camerawork. With Nigel Terry, Sean Bean, Tilda Swinton, and Michael Gough. 93 min.

Caravaggio | Reviews | guardian.co.uk Film Andrew Pulver from the Guardian, March 11, 2005

Patrons of the National Gallery's Caravaggio exhibition shouldn't expect to obtain scrupulous biographical information in this opportunist re-release of Derek Jarman's 1986 treatment of the celebrated painter. Instead, Jarman builds on the unquestionable homoerotic charge in Caravaggio's work to speculate on the artist's relationship with his models - especially with hunky Ranuccio (Sean Bean), whose well-toned physique is supposedly captured in The Martyrdom of St Matthew, and who becomes the centre of a vicious love triangle involving his wife (Tilda Swinton) as well as the artist.

Purely on cinematic terms, Jarman's film is bit of a curate's egg. Arguably the most accessible of his films, it remains a testament to his distinctive visual style. Taking a leaf out of Pasolini's book, Jarman jettisons period authenticity in favour of highly aestheticised spaces, filled with beautifully composed and lit pictorial tableaux. The theatrical acting and dialogue, as well as the occasional token anachronism - designed to emphasise the artificiality of it all - only succeeds in patches, and occasionally verges on the ridiculous.

But there's a genuine, haunting power to Jarman's film, which feels somehow like a valedictory letter from a distant era - the pre-Aids 1980s, when Jarman's high-minded camp seemed to be the future of art cinema. Jarman's highly-publicised announcement that he was HIV-positive came shortly after Caravaggio's release, and his own work took a decisively political turn in consequence.

BFI Screenonline: Caravaggio (1986) Cherry Smyth from BFI Screen Online Show full synopsis

The life and work of the painter whose death in 1610 followed years on the run as a murderer. The film links the characters in Caravaggio's art with the violent events of his career.

As with his earlier film, Sebastiane (co-d. Paul Humfress, 1976), Jarman is interested in how "man's character is his fate" in his meditative portrait of the Renaissance painter Michelangelo Caravaggio (1573-1610). His treatment relies less on naturalism than on an attempt to visualise the world as Caravaggio saw it. The chiaroscuro of the period is so well delivered that often the staged scenes appear at first to be Renaissance portraits.

The young Caravaggio, played with impish sensuality by Dexter Fletcher, sells his work and his body and gives himself over to Bacchus: "I took on his fate, a wild orgiastic dismemberment". Patronage from a cardinal allows the artist to live well and learn how to "repeat an old truth in a new language".

The film cuts between the older Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) on his death bed and earlier episodes of his life, knitted together with a poetic voice-over which articulates the artist's struggle with doubt and how to invest art with the passion of lived experience. It is clear that Jarman himself wrestled with these elements, and the film is most successful when he captures the tension between emotional reality and the creative representation of it. Many scenes linger on the patience art demands, showing the artist waiting for the canvas to breathe life into his subjects.

The dramatic intensity of lived experience threatens to overtake Caravaggio when he meets the young brawler, Ranuccio (played with Cockney relish by Sean Bean) and his lover, Lena (one of Tilda Swinton's best performances for Jarman). A messy love triangle ensues and Caravaggio is wounded rather symbolically in the side by Ranuccio in a fight. Jarman's anachronistic elements, such as the sound of a train, a typewriter, a magazine, keep the themes eternal rather than historical, and add another texture of the lived experience Jarman brings to his artistic practice.

Jarman's love of ritual finds full expression in the elaborate enactments of Catholic ceremony upon Caravaggio's death and the final scene suggests that the artist as a young boy found his vocation upon seeing a performance of the Passion. Some may find the parallel between Christ and Caravaggio heavy-handed, but the film grapples ardently with the portrayal of an artist's life in ways that must have inspired films such as Love is the Devil (1998), John Maybury's portrait of Francis Bacon and Looking for Langston (1989), Isaac Julien's meditation on Langston Hughes.

Caravaggio Jim’s Reviews

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

Caravaggio | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Edwin Jahiel review

Movie Magazine International review Moira Sullivan

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review

The Age review Philippa Hawker

Urban Cinefile dvd review Andrew L. Urban

PopcornQ review

allmovie ((( Caravaggio > Overview ))) Hal Erickson

Mondo Digital also reviewing JUBILEE and THE TEMPEST

Metroactive.com [Richard von Busack] reviewing the 4 disc set Glitterbox

DVD Verdict- Glitterbox: Derek Jarman X 4 [Brett Cullum] reviewing the 4 disc set

Caravaggio Movie Overview (1986) from Channel 4 Film

Guardian/Observer

Caravaggio Philip French from The Observer

Washington Post (Paul Attanasio) review

The New York Times (Walter Goodman) review

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

Caravaggio in pictures The Complete Caravaggio, gallery photos from The Guardian

The National Gallery's Grand Tour Gallery photos, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

The secret Caravaggio Jonathan Jones from The Guardian, January 6, 2001

Centre stage for artist's shocking final works Maev Kennedy from The Guardian, February 12, 2005

'He lived badly, brutally' The Complete Caravaggio Part One, by Jonathan Jones from The Guardian, February 17, 2005, also seen here: part one

The complete Caravaggio part two Jonathan Jones from The Guardian, February 17, 2005

The complete Caravaggio part three Jonathan Jones from The Guardian, February 17, 2005

Caravaggio, National Gallery, London Prince of Darkness, Adrian Searle from The Guardian, February 22, 2005

Art: Bring me the head of Caravaggio Laura Cumming from The Observer, February 27, 2005

Mafia informer asked to solve mystery of stolen Caravaggio Barbara McMahon from The Guardian, November 28, 2005

Jonathan Jones on the new Caravaggio exhibition from the Royal Collection Jonathan Jones from The Guardian, March 29, 2007

If only there were honour among art thieves Jonathan Jones from The Guardian, August 26, 2008

The masterpiece that may never be seen again Jonathan Jones from The Guardian, December 22, 2008

THE LAST OF ENGLAND

Great Britain Germany (87 mi) 1987

The Last of England Slow Motion Angel

A visual poem/meditation on the state of England under Thatcher's regime and modernity as a whole. Visually striking images denotative of urban decay and a society held hostage by fear present themselves within a fractured, seemingly directionless film that ignores narrative constraints in favour of stylised images of the cityscape in ruin. The film states an identity between life and the cinema in the most poetic sense.

Time Out review

'What proof do you need the world's curling up like an autumn leaf?' Jarman's most uncompromisingly personal film is of many parts. Shots of the man himself are accompanied by the mournful voice of Nigel Terry. Clips from home movies are spliced with endless scenes of inner-city decay and rent-boys throwing bricks. Pop video techniques are substituted for dialogue and linear progression. References to the Falklands War, drugs, the Bomb and the Royal Wedding are supposed to indicate the state of Britain today. Jarman, however, is not engaged with his subject but playing with it, a suspicion strengthened by continual allusions to his other work. The recurring images of desolate beauty are poetical not polemical, mesmerising not shocking - style has subverted substance. This is art of the state. Still, no one else could have made it.

Chicago Reader (capsule) Jonathan Rosenbaum

Derek Jarman's kaleidoscopic experimental film (1987)--a dark, poetic meditation on Thatcher England--is visionary cinema at its best. Shot in Super-8, transferred to video for additional touches and processing, then transferred back to 35-millimeter, this work combines more than half a century of home movies of Jarman's family, a documentary record of industrial and ecological ruin, and sustained looks at Jarman regulars Tilda Swinton and Spencer Leigh. The often astonishing results become increasingly spellbinding as the work proceeds. Over an evocative narration by Jarman (which includes apocalyptic quotes from such poets as T.S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg) and stirring use of music and sound effects, images in black and white, sepia, and color explode and merge with mesmerizing intensity and build toward a powerful personal statement.

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]

Highly personal experimental film that may well be Derek Jarman's greatest achievement. An avant-garde montage of cinematic elements and over 50 years of home movies mixing tones, filters, images, and sounds to create a shattering portrait of the decline of his country, a country gone insane with decadence and corruption that's trapped in the perpetual rubble of its past (pre WWII) glory. Jarman processes the film to garner a look somewhat reminiscent of classic silent cinema with tinting, high frame rates, and all sorts of trickery. However, the film is very much ahead of its time except perhaps thematically, as Thatcher's present day England is depicted as an industrialized wasteland where unemployed solitary working class men pound away at bricks. The film can't be boxed in though, and is simply one of those indescribable love it or hate it experiences that won't soon be forgotten. Jarman may be the only true gay filmmaker in the sense that he is willing to load a film with imagery that turns him on but is apt to make straight guys uncomfortable. Jarman doesn't mind making his audience squirm, but his work is undeniably tinged with ravishing beauty and alternately balances the negative with the positive in it's longing for better times. This apocalyptic yet lyrical work asks us to remember "the countryside before mechanization intervened and destroyed everything." Still it's a draining work that gets under your skin as if stuck in your veins like a needle. A challenging film both in structure and politics, neither of which we get often enough. The poetic voice that alternates with the instrumentals often seems to exist apart from the images, while the densely layered compositions relate but each segment contains a different type of music. This unique combination creates a cinematic poetry that exceeds the verbal poetry or whatever statement could have been made with a traditional narrative.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

"The world's curling up like an autumn leaf," observes the narrator of Derek Jarman's ardent, poetic protest film. "The wind's coming to blow it into the final winter, and on every green hill, mourners stand and weep for the last of England." At once apocalyptic and nostalgic, The Last of England blends home movies (Jarman's own) with distorted visions that could be tomorrow, or next week, or never. Shot mainly on Super 8, transferred to video and then back to 35mm (and now, of course, to DVD), the film's images have a grainy, oversaturated quality, with skies so orange it looks as if the world's on fire. The film has no narrative, but its cumulative logic is ineluctable: Bedraggled figures are herded through industrial wastelands by balaclava-clad men with machine guns, while a clothed male soldier and a naked man couple on top of the Union Jack. It's a world where pleasure is furtive, but not necessarily less pleasurable for it. Jarman's overheated imagery is itself a form of rebellion, its refusal to make sense a rejection of the "nice, orderly protests" at which Nigel Terry's voiceover scoffs.

Released in 1987, The Last of England is specifically a rebuke to Thatcherism—in one of few dialogue sequences, a wealthy woman congratulates a soldier for his work in the Falklands; he hopes that the next war "will be a big one." But Jarman's visionary outrage is as undying as the conditions it protests, which may be why, according to the audio commentary by several of Jarman's collaborators, the film was a success abroad but a failure at home: Britons who weren't immediately offended probably expected Jarman to be more of an issue man. At times, particularly during a Bacchanalian montage scored to Andy Gill's stuttering guitar, the editing is so rapid your mind simply can't keep up. Jarman's poetic didacticism overwhelms your conscious faculties, but the underlying motives are crystal clear, as when he juxtaposes a naked, wild-haired figure gnawing cauliflower on a rubbish heap with a wealthy, corset-clad man pouring food over his head while the soundtrack blends a QVC pitch and "Pomp and Circumstance." Featuring Jarman veterans Spencer Leigh and Tilda Swinton (who takes over the movie's desperate climax), The Last of England is as much a rebuke to the heavy-handed issue movies currently hogging headlines as it is to right-wing rule. Jarman reminds us that true political art challenges the way viewers see, and not just what they think.

BFI Screenonline: Last of England, The (1987) Kamila Kuc from BFI Screen Online Show full synopsis

England in the future: a nightmarish journey through a dark landscape of totalitarianism and despair.

In The Last of England, Derek Jarman's memories, thoughts and fantasies are assembled in a collage of styles (quasi-documentary chronicle, home movies and video), to vent his fury at Thatcher's England. The use of dream-like imagery, superimpositions and different colour hues express Jarman's nostalgic yearning for the past, and the film has been compared to Humphrey Jennings' poetic documentary Listen to Britain (1941), which hymned wartime Britain.

The Last of England is Jarman's second film diary. In Jubilee (1978) he presented a 1970s England transformed by punk rebellion. The Last of England offers an apocalyptic vision of the nation's future as a homophobic and repressive totalitarian state. The country's sickness is mirrored by the grim landscapes of East London's still-derelict docks - used near-contemporaneously by Stanley Kubrick in Full Metal Jacket (US/UK, 1987) to represent the horrors of the Vietnam War. England's decline is manifested in the mental and physical disorder of its inhabitants: a naked man eating then vomiting up a cauliflower, Spring injecting himself with heroin.

A shaky hand-held camera evokes anxiety and paranoia, and the ever-present melancholy is expressed in the extracts from poems, including T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men and Allen Ginsberg's Howl, monotonously intoned by narrator Nigel Terry. The feeling of displacement and confusion is further conveyed by rapid editing and unusual camera angles. An unsettling juxtaposition of images and sounds recalls Dante's Inferno: a fireside danse macabre is intercut with dramatic images of shooting. Such images are counterpointed by Bach violin sonatas and 1980s disco. Skulls, fire and ashes embody death and destruction, while scenes of sex on a Union Jack and Spring masturbating subvert social conventions and suggest a country in a state of chaos and sordid decadence.

The breathtaking final sequence shows a bride mourning her executed husband. She dances on a beach, tearing her wedding dress apart, embodying the creative and destructive forces, the water and fire, that pervade the film. In the final shot, she departs the diseased land by boat - a scene reminiscent of Ford Madox Brown's pre-Raphaelite painting which provided the film's title. Profoundly influenced by Goya's paintings and by Pier Paolo Pasolini's grotesque allegory of Mussolini's Italy, Salò (Italy/France, 1975), The Last of England mourns the loss of youth and hope and rails at a society grown sick and cruel. Despite continuing rejection by the mainstream, Jarman was here at the peak of his creative powers.

The Last of England Jim’s Reviews

DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [3/5]

PopcornQ review Mark Finch

Reel.com dvd review [1.5/4] Tim Knight

filmcritic.com (David Bezanson) review [1/5]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [2/4]

Variety review

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

WAR REQUIEM

Great Britain (92 mi) 1989

War Requiem Slow Motion Angel

A dialogue free film shot to the lyrics of Britten's oratorium, reflecting the horrors of war. An English Solider and his nurse are dramatised, interspersed with images from documentary footage of wartime.

Time Out review

Jarman's finest work to date takes as its soundtrack/ score Benjamin Britten's masterly religious poetic choral work. A work of unrelieved mourning - an unfashionable sentiment - it mingles Wilfred Owen's World War One poems (written in the trenches) with the text of the Latin mass. The score is complex, long, non-narrative, and uninterrupted, which demands much of Jarman; and he delivers. His script subtly intertwines the poems' slight strains of a story - guns, dying, death, hell, loss, and reconciliation - with imagined scenes around the poet at war, along with cruelly honest, uncensored found footage of wars distant and current. He also wrings remarkable silent performances from Swinton, who embodies the awful roles traditionally allotted the female principle in war; from Parker as the poet; and Teale as an unknown soldier transmuted by war.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Less concentrated in its anger and more general in its targets than his earlier The Last of England, Derek Jarman's visualization of Benjamin Britten's great symphonic lament is nevertheless a work of considerable emotional surge. Britten incorporated into the Latin text a number of poems by Wilfred Owen, a British soldier fallen a week before the end of World War I; Jarman structures the piece as a series of visions throbbing within the memories of the Old Soldier (Laurence Olivier's swan song). In wordless passages swinging from savage to ethereal, Owen (Nathaniel Parker), the Nurse (Tilda Swinton), the Unknown Soldier (Owen Teale) and the German Soldier (Sean Bean) pop up to give body to the oratory's cycle of waste, intercut with super-8 interludes and collages of battlefield bloodletting across the years. Much of the film's imagery (contorted bodies caked with mud, repellently chalked-up faces leering at autopsies, a bugle rusting in a puddle) is standard anti-war stock, but Jarman's own obsessions (including a tinselly religiosity that's no less affecting for its kitschiness) lend it force. Like his "Depuis le Jour" Aria segment, Jarman's treatment is less an illustration of music than a reaction to it, far closer to the Dziga Vertov of Three Songs of Lenin than to the MTV aesthetic of fellow Brits Alan Parker (I'm thinking of the soulless doodling of Pink Floyd: The Wall) and Julien Temple. With Nigel Terry, Patricia Hayes, and Rohan McCullough.

BFI Screenonline: War Requiem (1989) Kamila Kuc from BFI Screen Online Show full synopsis

A complex collage of images of war, inspired by Benjamin Britten's oratorio and Wilfred Owen's poems.

With its dialogue-free collage of images evoked by Wilfred Owen's WWI poems and set to the music of Benjamin Britten, War Requiem, made with a budget of just £670,000, can be seen, in a sense, as an extended music video - Jarman directed videos for the likes of The Smiths and Marianne Faithfull. The film's theme and bleak mood reflect Jarman's own state of mind, since this was his first artistic project since learning he was HIV positive.

Britten composed his 'War Requiem' for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1963, after the original was destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs in 1940. Jarman's film grew out of the director's traumatic memory of a military hospital, where as a child he spent a few days, alongside damaged victims of WWII. The film moves between past and present, its narrative unfolding through the eyes of the Old Soldier (Laurence Olivier in his last on-screen role), who begins his account with a stanza from Owen's poem 'Strange Meeting'. The film's narrative is complex, with spatial and temporal jumps and flashbacks-within-flashbacks, and the actors' performances are more symbolic than naturalistic.

Its ornate Christian iconography, absence of dialogue and oratorios sung in Latin make War Requiem one of Jarman's most challenging films. The director likens the fates of Owen and his fellow soldiers (their lives sacrificed for the satisfaction of wealthy bankers, represented here as heavily made-up men) to Christ's martyrdom. The final scene depicts the Unknown Soldier as Christ himself, in echo of Piero della Francesca's Renaissance painting, 'Resurrection'. Jarman's use of religious symbols brings to mind Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew (Italy/France, 1964), a major influence.

War Requiem evokes memories of several previous Jarman works: the scene in which Owen appears as the Biblical Isaac recalls Caravaggio (1986), while the Britannia figure and cross-dressing soldiers evoke scenes from Jubilee (1977). The gay subtext, religious motifs and the use of Latin are strongly reminiscent of Sebastiane (1976), his controversial first feature.

Jarman emphasises the atrocities of war through WWI newsreel footage, alongside images of the Cambodian conflict and the bombing of Hiroshima. In a way redolent of his earlier The Last of England (1987), the traumas of conflict are juxtaposed with sequences of Owen's idyllic childhood, shot on Super-8. The Gothic labyrinth of Dartford's Darenth Park Hospital makes a convincing likeness of Hell.

Washington Post (Joseph McLellan) review

"War Requiem," which opens today at the Biograph, is not exactly a movie; it is the most sustained, elaborate and intensely emotional music video in the short history of that genre. It is the first music video that must be taken seriously as a classic work of art. The remarkable thing about it is that director Derek Jarman, with the help of some highly skilled English actors, has produced an hour and a half of visual images that match the power of Benjamin Britten's music.

The Requiem Mass was already powerful enough -- a religious experience shaped collectively by all of Christian Europe through centuries of repetition; a literary text that has inspired great music from many composers, including Mozart, Berlioz and Verdi. In 1962, composing a work for the dedication of the new Coventry Cathedral (the old one had been destroyed by Nazi saturation bombing), Britten intensified the effect still further. Into the Latin text he inserted, at thematically appropriate points, a cycle of poems by Wilfred Owen, an English poet who fought in World War I, fixed the experience on paper in all its horror and pity, then died at age 25 -- a week before the war ended. Then Britten set it to music that ranks with the best ever inspired by the Requiem text, producing one of the musical monuments of the 20th century.

Now Jarman has added visuals so intense that this is likely to be the ultimate embodiment of the idea until someone develops a technique for recording and playing back physical sensations other than sight and sound: the impact of a shell exploding a few yards away; the feel of mud everywhere; the taste of blood coughed up from a lung wound.

The soundtrack of Jarman's film is the 1963 recording of the "War Requiem" conducted by Britten with the singers for whom he had written it: soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, tenor Peter Pears and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. No other sound is heard amid the violent, constantly shifting images, except a voice-over at the beginning: Sir Laurence Olivier reading Owen's poem "Strange Meeting" about a British and German soldier, dead, meeting in hell and finding it a relief from war: "I am the enemy you killed, my friend. . . . Let us sleep now. . . ." The same words recur at the end, sung to an other-worldly melody by the tenor and baritone; this Requiem is a work not only of horror and pity but ultimately of consolation and reconciliation.

Olivier's cameo appearance, his last work on film before his death, frames the visual element; he is an old soldier in a wheelchair fingering his medals, and the visions on the screen are his memory and reflections -- including newsreel footage of World War I, an atomic explosion and scenes from Afghanistan and Vietnam. There also are personal scenes: Owen (Nathaniel Parker) killing and reflecting on death; an Unknown Soldier (Owen Teale) embodying the horror of life (and death) on the battlefield; a nurse (Tilda Swinton) who represents the compassion and powerlessness of those who observe but do not fight. They perform brilliantly in this violent, horrifying, ultimately inspiring film -- an eloquent, complex and profoundly negative statement on war.

War Requiem Jim’s Reviews

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review

myReviewer.com [Si Wooldridge]

Eye for Film (Adam Micklethwaite) review [4/5]

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review

Shadows on the Wall (Rich Cline) capsule review

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

PopMatters [Matt Mazur] also reviewing SEBASTIANE and THE TEMPEST

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

War Requiem (film) - Wikipedia

Wilfred Owen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gay Great - Wilfred Owen detailed biography from Fyne Times

The Wilfred Owen Collection Biography from Digital Archive

Wilfred Owen - Greatest War Poet in the English Language tribute to Owen at War Poetry website

Wilfred Owen - Dulce et Decorum Est - best known poem of the First ... one of Owen’s best known poems, from War Poetry

Selected Poems at Poetseers a treasuretrove of Wilfred Owen poems

Lost Poets of the Great War an extensive compilation by Harry Rusche from Emory University

"The War Poets at Craiglockhart"

Benjamin Britten Page which includes more here: The War Requiem

Featured works - War Requiem - brittenpears.org extensive background on the piece, along with recordings and recommended readings

BBC - h2g2 - Benjamin Britten's War Requiem

Text of the War Requiem

War Requiem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Derek Jarman / Benjamin Britten WAR REQUIEM ... on YouTube (1:45) DVD trailer

Benjamin Britten in Rehearsal and Performance (... (3:37) Benjamin Britten conducting

Britten War Requiem Rostropovich Requiem aeternam (6:46) Part I

Britten War Requiem Rostropovich Dies Irae open... (7:07) Part II opening

Britten War Requiem Rostropovich Lacrymosa (7:54) Part II finale

Britten War Requiem Rostropovich Sanctus Kasrashvili (6:37) Part III

Britten War Requiem Rostropovich Sanctus Kasras... (6:37) Part IV

Britten - War Requiem - Agnus Dei (3:45) Benjamin Britten conducting, Part V

Britten - War Requiem - Libera me Pt 1-3 (7:37) Benjamin Britten conducting, Part VI

Britten - War Requiem - Libera me Pt. 2-3 (9:48) Benjamin Britten conducting, Part VI

Britten - War Requiem - Libera me Pt. 3-3 (5:33) Benjamin Britten conducting, Part VI

War Requiem (11:13) a short documentary film

THE GARDEN

Great Britain Germany (92 mi) 1990

The Garden Slow Motion Angel

A nearly wordless visual narrative intercuts two main stories and a couple of minor ones. A woman, perhaps the Madonna, brings forth her baby to a crowd of intrusive paparazzi; she tries to flee them. Two men who are lovers marry and are arrested by the powers that be. The men are mocked and pilloried, tarred, feathered, and beaten. Loose in this contemporary world of electrical-power transmission lines is also Jesus. The elements, particularly fire and water, contend with political power, which is intolerant and murderous.

Time Out review Tony Rayns

At first this looks like The Last of England 2, but there's a crucial difference: this time, there's no pretension to objectivity. Jarman's own presence is central, and everything else on the screen is presented as his subjective dreams. Hence Jarman looks at his own garden near the sea in Dungeness, and imagines that it's the Garden of Eden or Garden of Gethsemane; Jarman reads about the government passing Section 28 and about the Synod witch-hunting gay priests, and imagines that Christ died for downcast gays; Jarman contemplates his own mortality (he is HIV-positive), and imagines that the end of the world is nigh. Touching, intense, sometimes unexpectedly amusing, sometimes agonising, and always achingly sincere.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review

Derek Jarman's lyrical visionary 1990 movie--made after he tested HIV positive and before he made his highly political version of Marlowe's Edward II--alternates views of himself sleeping and dreaming and his seaside home and garden with enigmatic and apocalyptic images of the life of Jesus, the state-endorsed persecution of homosexuals (among other horrors of post-Thatcher England), and diverse fancies and fantasies that often combine these themes. Deftly mixing video and film shot with different stocks and in various gauges, this kaleidoscopic reverie also makes room for a mordant restaging of the "Think Pink" number from Funny Face, many glimpses of children and nature, offscreen recitations of poetry, and such Jarman regulars as actress Tilda Swinton and composer Simon Fisher Turner. For all its virtuosity and beauty (especially apparent in some of the editing patterns), this complex meditation intermittently depends on a fascination with sadomasochism that many viewers won't share. But even if you find yourself--as I did--waiting out these sequences and bemused by portions of the personal symbolism, you're likely to be transfixed by much of the rest.

PopcornQ Review Paul Bollwinkel

Viewers who embrace the elliptical, "experimental," style of rock music videos will welcome The Garden, British filmmaker Derek Jarman's ninth feature--a challenging, ultimately very moving look at the link between homosexuality and religion. Set in the garden and surrounding headlands of his home in rural England, it takes us on a shrewd, often puzzling journey that works on at least two levels. First as a sardonic retelling of the Passion story that alternates a gay couple with Christ, then as a surreal barrage of images and sounds that are humorous, shocking, and seemingly unrelated. It isn't often that one film includes both a campy version of "Think Pink" (from the 1957 musical Funny Face) and a bizarre scene of gay lovers being tarred and feathered with molasses and cotton batting.

Is it important--or even possible--to understand every reference and image in The Garden? You won't need to penetrate all of Jarman's private obsessions to be moved by the heartbreaking elegy he reads near the film's end. While it's clear that Jarman is making a connection between the Christ story, gay oppression, and his personal battle with AIDS, stylistically he is demanding that we look through his enigmatic eyes for 92 minutes. The result is a visually dense, nearly hypnotic work of art that further solidifies Jarman's reputation as England's premiere gay filmmaker

The Garden | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

The Garden is a loosely-linked series of episodes with no real “plot” as such, filmed largely around Derek Jarman’s cottage and garden at Dungeness. However, one strand of the film is an interpretation of the life of Jesus. In a typically Jarmanesque touch, Mary Magdalene is a man (Spencer Leigh). Meanwhile, two male lovers are married and arrested and attacked by authorities.

Throughout his career, Derek Jarman alternated narrative features with more experimental non-narrative ones, shot on even tinier budgets than the pitiful ones he was usually accorded. Many of these films were shorts, of which Jarman made a great number, but The Angelic Conversation (1985), an interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets, was feature-length and had a cinema release. After the long-planned and comparatively conventional Caravaggio, Jarman made The Last of England, a splenetic outburst at the state of the country where he was born but which frequently thwarted him. In the last half-decade of his life such plotless films dominated his output, often shot quickly and cheaply on Super 8mm. War Requiem seemed sadder, and The Garden seems mellower still. Jarman knew his days were numbered – he had been HIV-positive for some years – but he continued to work at a furious rate. He completed two more narrative features (Edward II and Wittgenstein) before making his “final” non-narrative work, Blue, a collage of voice and sound against an unvarying blue screen attributed to his then-failing sight. He died in 1994.

Like the works of Kenneth Anger, clearly a huge influence on Jarman (and where’s the DVD of the Magick Lantern Cycle?), The Garden works more as a series of images, accompanied by very little dialogue, some voiceovers and a score from Simon Fisher Turner. There are references to the two most notable gardens in the Bible, Eden and Gethsemane. Elemental images, fire and water notably, contrast with images of authoritarianism and repression. All very serious stuff, but at times you have to wonder if Jarman is being more than a little tongue in cheek. In the early stages of the film, a man in full gay-clone gear (moustache, peaked cap, leather chaps and chains) crawls across the beach. And the film is not above sheer camp. There’s a whole sequence where Jessica Martin sings “Think Pink” (originally from Funny Face) and the screen virtually bursts with the colour: flowers, the two male lovers’ suits, Martin’s dress, not to mention pink-tinted footage of gay rights marches. That final touch is perhaps a little too obvious.

I’ll confess straight away that I’m not a Jarman fan, and anyone who is should adjust my score accordingly. Certainly this is not a film to introduce people to his works, and anyone expecting a conventional narrative, or any kind of story at all, should certainly look elsewhere. I can only admire Jarman the man, making his own films on his own terms and with his own distinctive vision with pitiful budgets, in the face of considerable opposition, official and personal, not to mention terminal illness. How you respond to the results, it’s good to see one of England’s most singular film directors represented on DVD over a decade after his death.

User comments from imdb Author: jamesmarcustucker (jamesmarcustucker@yahoo.co.uk) from Brighton, England

VideoVista review John Percival

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow

EDWARD II

Great Britain (91 mi) 1991

Edward II Slow Motion Angel

Edward II makes a brilliant hodge-podge of history by vaulting a sixteenth century play about a fourteenth century English king onto a dark, abstract twentieth century stage. Iconoclastic, yes; anachronistic, yes; imbecilic, no. While on the page Marlowe's poetry speaks for itself, in Derek Jarman's hands it provides a counterpoint to the film's daring, elegant, eloquent visuals. King Edward and his lover, Piers Gaveston, are attacked by the raving heteronormative toffs for their homosexuality and Gaveston's less-than-aristocratic background. Great moments include a cameo by Annie Lennox and a bull's-eye by Tilda Swinton.

Chicago Reader (capsule) Jonathan Rosenbaum

My candidate for best movie by the late Derek Jarman is this politically potent, deliberately shocking, anachronistic adaptation of the Christopher Marlowe play (1992); Jarman rethinks it in terms of contemporary English homophobia and the Thatcher-Reagan legacy. Shooting his spare settings in crisp 35-millimeter images, Jarman gives the tragedy a seriousness and potency that puts Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books to shame. Coscripted by Stephen McBride and Ken Butler; with Steve Waddington, Andrew Tiernan, Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry, and Jerome Flynn. The music is performed by the Elektra Quartet (and at one climactic juncture, Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics performs Cole Porter's "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye").

Time Out review

This modern dress adaptation of Marlowe's play excites through its sheer guts and combativeness. Despite the visual lyricism, the mood is raw and angry. Jarman re-uses his sub-Brechtian clothes-as-class characterisation: scheming Mortimer (Terry) in army officer kit; nobles in business suits; Isabella (Swinton) in a Vogue's gallery of designer dresses; Edward's supporters as gay Outrage activists. Jarman rips from Marlowe what is relevant to our times, to comment on the repressive nature of the British state; but this is problematic. The tragic, idealistic love of Edward (Waddington) for lowly-born, upstart Gaveston (Tiernan) speaks volumes about gay relationships in repressive, class-conscious societies, but Isabella's relationship with Mortimer is shown in images redolent of horror movies. This ambivalence, however, does not deny the film's power. Central to its pleasures are the performances; it isn't Jarman's best film, but it's his most accessible.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Equally didactic and just as eye-pleasing, Derek Jarman's Edward II (Image) is the late queer firebrand's signal work, a bold revision of Christopher Marlowe's play as classically erudite as it is politically lethal. Resetting the play in a stucco netherworld which glows with Caravaggio lighting, Jarman snips away all connective tissue, stripping the story to its bones: a recently crowned king whose love for the common-born Gaveston undermines his reign and spawns a treacherous usurpation. The plotters, who include Tilda Swinton's ice-cold queen, wear the square-shouldered evening dress of Thatcherite bluebloods, and the protests over Gaveston's banishment are staged as a clash between riot police and queer protestors carrying signs that read "Gay desire is not a crime." It's impossible to think of a contemporary English-language filmmaker who so deftly mixes artfulness and unsheathed political protest; as Swinton says in a galvanizing encomium appended to the DVD, "It has snowed, and your tracks are covered."

Edinburgh U Film Society (Richard Dewes) review

Possibly Derek Jarman's best. He films Christopher Marlowe's play in a sparse, austere style with blank walls and strong lighting creating an enclosed, highly stylised setting. Stephen Waddington plays the king, unsettling the military-industrial junta of his courtiers by flaunting his relationship with Piers Gaveston.

Edward's queen, Isabella, is played by Tilda Swinton who gives an icy, terrifying performance, somewhere between Grace Kelly and Evita Peron. The character may be given a hard deal in the film, which shows her exacting a monstrous, vampiristic revenge when she's rejected by her husband, but her demonisation may be a crucial part of the Jarmanising of the play, by which the barely-concealed sexual sub-text is brought full-bloodedly to the fore, creating a parable of gay martyrdom in the face of institutionalised homophobia. In this vein Jarman mixes in telling anachronisms, like the double-breasted moral-majority chorus and Edward and Gaveston's M&S pyjamas, to bridge the historical gulf and make the film unavoidably contemporary; thus Marlowe's Elizabethan dialogue rubs shoulders with Outrage and Queer as Fuck slogans.

User comments from imdb Author: David (davidals@msn.com) from Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Before his AIDS-related death in 1994, English filmmaker Derek Jarman (also an acclaimed painter and writer whose introduction to film was working as a set designer for Ken Russell) created a large and aggressively experimental body of work, developing a vivid personal style notable for its' political ferocity and its' unbelievable visual lushness. By the time EDWARD II appeared, Jarman had honed his innovative mix of surrealism, mind-bending shifts in perspective, and a well-articulated take on the political implications of gay liberation into a vision that at once placed him in the vanguard of late 20th century independent filmmakers, while simultaneously establishing him as one of the most uncompromising activist/artists to have never been described or marketed as such.

EDWARD II – very loosely adapted from a 500-year-old Christopher Marlowe play about the doomed, deposed (and gay) English king – is all of the above combining in one brilliant flash, and Jarman was aware of the irony built into the fact that this very challenging, explosive tour-de-force of a film - shot on a shoestring budget - brought him closer to 'mainstream' success than anyone (including Jarman) would've ever believed possible. Maintaining much of Marlowe's original play – and the Old English dialog – while visually placing the story in the present day (the sets are minimalistic, with contemporary clothing and set design), Jarman attempts to locate – with surgical precision - the origins of violent, contemporary homophobia, and contemporary class bigotry as well (Edward's lover was a peasant, so the implications of social-class transgression are also integral to the story) in historic precedents.

Jarman's art background contributes to the stunning visual effect, and he had worked with most of the cast before, lending the film an effective intimacy – things never seem too avant-garde, and the righteous sense of corrosive rage seen here (this is one of the angriest, most politically enraged films I've ever seen) – essential to this story – never veers off target.

Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review

“Edward II,” Derek Jarman's phantasmagoric, outrageously stylized interpretation of the Christopher Marlowe play, is more a creature of its director's sensibility than its creator's.

In its settings (mostly bare walls and dirt floors) and its wardrobe (characters wear contemporary, mostly black fashions) and countless other anachronisms, the film presents an out-of-time, theatrical sense of history. Faithfulness to either period or text has been abandoned in favor of a politicized, revisionist version of the play's events in which Marlowe's buried subtext -- in particular, the sexual proclivities of his principal characters -- becomes the main text. And, in the process, Jarman's soapbox.

Jarman, the British director who suffers from AIDS and whose past work ("Caravaggio" and "Sebastiane," among others) has dealt openly with gay themes, has found in Edward a martyred hero, a victim of repression and injustice whose obsessional passion for another man, the despised Gaveston, leads to his overthrow and savage murder. Regardless of whether his view of the material matches up with history, Jarman hasn't tortured his source to fit his agenda. Instead, he's found support for his themes within the text.

That doesn't mean that his departures aren't radical. In his hands, "Edward II" has become a chic melodrama that's part art object, part "The Valley of the Dolls." The king (Steven Waddington) and Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan) parade around with their followers at their heels like a surly street gang spoiling for a fight. They're young toughs, the classical equivalent of skinheads, who outrage the establishment with their lewd behavior and disrespect for authority. The earls and barons, who are appalled by the power Edward has bestowed on Gaveston, are portrayed as corporate board members, bland bureaucrats in three-piece suits. They want the base Gaveston gone, one way or another.

Jarman's directorial choices are always a surprise, and sometimes strikingly so, even if he reduces the play to the level of "we don't like your boyfriend." His decision to have Annie Lennox serenade the departing Gaveston and his lover with a rendition of Cole Porter's "Every Time We Say Goodbye" is a brilliant stroke; it's Marlowe meets MTV. And his idea of casting Edward's queen, Isabella (the beautifully mannequin-like Tilda Swinton), as a medieval Imelda Marcos, sublimating her sexual frustrations with ever more lavish Hermes gowns, is outrageously appropriate.

Jarman's political activism is at times shoved vividly into the foreground -- for example, when he has members of England's real-life gay rights group OutRage protest the repression of homosexuals in picket lines outside the castle. The director's flagrant celebration of gay love isn't an advertisement, nor is the presentation of his homosexual characters always benign. Though sometimes unflattering, sometimes galling, they are gay images fashioned by an engaged, inventive artist who is less interested in what's politically fashionable than in what's true to himself.

Jim's Reviews - Jarman's Edward II - JClarkMedia.com Jim’s reviews

VIEWER MAKES MEANING James Tucker essay examining Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope and Derek Jarman’s Edward II to explore issues surrounding the ‘coded’ and not so coded representations of homosexuality

filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5]

JWR [S. James Wegg]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review

Frank R.A.J. Maloney review

PopcornQ review Daniel Mangin

Pedro Sena retrospective

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

Washington Post (Joe Brown) review

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

WITTGENSTEIN

Great Britain Japan (75 mi) 1993

Wittgenstein Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

This Brechtian biopic (1993, 75 min.) by the English filmmaker Derek Jarman about Ludwig Wittgenstein encompasses everything from the philosopher's pampered childhood to his friendships with Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes and his relationships with rough young men. This is quite probably the best of Jarman's narrative features, presented in a series of spare but powerful tableaux--beautifully and thoughtfully designed, like Joseph Cornell boxes with black backgrounds. With Karl Johnson, Michael Gough, and Tilda Swinton.

Wittgenstien Slow Motion Angel

A dramatization, in modern theatrical style, of the life and thought of the Viennese-born, Cambridge-educated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), whose principal interest was the nature and limits of language. A series of sketches depict the unfolding of his life from boyhood, through the era of the first World War, to his eventual Cambridge professorship and association with Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes. The emphasis in these sketches is on the exposition of the ideas of Wittgenstein, a homosexual, and an intuitive, moody, proud, and perfectionistic thinker generally regarded as a genius.

Time Out review

Jarman's biopic brings to life the seriously eccentric philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: Viennese millionaire's son, schoolteacher, WWI infantry officer, hospital porter, gardener, naturalised Briton and homosexual. Initiated as a small-budget educational TV programme, then produced for the BFI by one-time Trot Tariq Ali from a script by Marxist professor Terry Eagleton, it hardly sounds enticing. But thanks to genuinely engaging performances by Johnson and Chassay (as Ludwig, man and boy), as well as a witty script and economical direction, this turns treatise into treat. It's shot on the simplest of sets against black backgrounds, with all the money spent on costumes, actors and lights, and framed like dark Enlightenment paintings. If it ranges wide rather than deep - the philosophy is either dropped into conversation or presented like a blackboard primer - Jarman still manages to capture the spirit and complexity of his fascinating subject. Of the entertaining cameos, Quentin's epicene John Maynard Keynes (in a delightful series of pastel shirts) and Gough's miffed Bertrand Russell are the most telling.

PopcornQ review

Derek Jarman's first film since "Edward II" is a humorous portrait of one of this century's most influential philosophers. Made for Britain's Channel Four TV, "Wittgenstein" reflects Jarman's distinctive sense of style. Inventive images and vibrantly colored costumes (most of them containing the extraordinary Tilda Swinton) are filmed against a pitch-black background; it's what Jarman calls "the eradication of all that flim-flam." The result is so striking it almost hurts the eye. It won the Teddy Award at the 1993 Berlin International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival for Best Gay Feature.

Young Ludwig (Clancy Chassay) was born in Vienna in 1889. His family was wealthy, though mysteriously ill-fated. During studies at Cambridge University, Wittgenstein (played as an adult by Karl Johnson), is seen as an intensely brilliant thinker, not without his erotic impulses. He is patronized by Bertrand Russell (the sublime Michael Gough) and Russell's imperious mistress, Lady Ottoline Morell (Swinton, of course). Ludwig's search for intellectual self-development results in some rather shabby treatment of Johnny (Kevin Collins), the working-class man he loves.

Wittgenstein struggled with self-alienation throughout his years. He died of cancer in 1951. His final, mocking words were: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life." Jarman's film captures this life with energy and imagination.

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]

With Wittgenstein, film director Jarman explores the mind of the twentieth-century Viennese philosopher. Using highly stylized visual and dramatic strategies, this British director has once again merged the historical with the contemporaneous (Edward the II, Caravaggio, Sebastiane) to create a unique biographical text quite unlike any other film biographies (except, perhaps, those of Ken Russell, for whom Jarman, early in his career, worked as a set decorator). The history of Wittgenstein's life is told through Brechtian tableaux set against a black backdrop. Beginning with his childhood, we're given glimpses of his aristocratic family background that produced three brothers who committed suicide; his intellectual probes into the nature of philosophy, communication and language; his interplay with the intellectuals of the Cambridge and Bloomsbury circles; his thorny yet ongoing relationships with his early mentor Bertrand Russell and antagonist John Maynard Keynes; his dialogue with a small, green-skinned Martian; his devoted coterie of young believers; his physical self-denial, emotional arrogance and ill-fitting romance with manual labor; and his repressed homosexuality that is, nevertheless, critical in shaping his thoughts and beliefs about self-identity. Staged with wit and humor, this hypothetical biography is hardly the dry recitation of a philosopher's life. In fact, oftentimes the tableaux are downright silly and fanciful, but as young Wittgenstein says, “If people don't sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.” Throughout the movie, abstract ideas are presented in concrete visions that bring the ideas to life, though the tableaux vivants set-ups keep the material from getting too pedantic or overwhelming. As in his recent Edward II, Jarman posits conflicted homosexuality and social intolerance as some of the building blocks of personality. Openly gay himself, Jarman, was a rarity amongst major filmmakers. Forthright about his status as an HIV-positive individual, Jarman has always included his modern sensibilities and concerns in his work, be it historical or fictional. In that sense, Wittgenstein is more an essay than a biography. It merely uses the past as an avenue into the present. Sadly, Jarman died from AIDS this past week and thus, Wittgenstein and his yet-to-reach-Austin movie Blue are the last new works we'll ever see from this most original of talents.

BFI Screenonline: Wittgenstein (1993) Cherry Smyth from BFI Screen Online Show full synopsis

The life of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, his original ideas, his personal torment, his relationship with Bertrand Russell and Maynard Keynes, and the intellectual and social circles within which he moved at Cambridge.

One of Derek Jarman's last films shows a starker, leaner imaginative vision than in his early work. Once again, he draws an idiosyncratic portrait of a famous man, this time Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Viennese philosopher who revolutionised the way the limits of language were understood. As with Caravaggio (1986), the film is shot entirely in the studio but again, Jarman turns this to his advantage, creating pools of light in the darkness, concise chronological cameos and minimal art direction to convey a very particular sense of time, place and intellectual space and even the universe itself, with the insertion of a Martian character.

Performances by Karl Johnson (as Wittgenstein Senior), Michael Gough (as Bertrand Russell) and Tilda Swinton (Lady Ottoline Morell) are impeccable, driving the action forward with economical gestures and humour. Swinton convinces as a much older, down-to-earth hedonist who, faced with one of Wittgenstein's conundrums, replies, "How the bloody blue blazes should I know?". She excels instead in wearing garish and extravagantly-feathered hats. And if one asks if Jarman's films were sexist, one might answer as Maynard Keynes does to one of Wittgenstein's questions, "That's like asking why you can't play a tune on a carrot".

The film is at its best when showing the gap between Wittgenstein's ground-breaking enthusiasm and mental fervour and the bewildered reception his ideas received, with friends like Russell complaining that "he was trivialising philosophy". The blackness beyond the edge of the set seems to echo the intellectual pits of doubt Wittgenstein stumbles upon, especially when he cannot reconcile his own homosexual desires. His naive but earnest idealism is handled with wry humour, as Jarman repeatedly cuts between the adult and boy philosopher as if to suggest that some part of the man never quite matured emotionally.

Wittgenstein insists on going to fight in the First World War and then visiting the Soviet Union, intending to work in a factory to become a "decent human being". His attempts to reach the common people, by teaching logic in a rural school, lead to cruelty and dismissal. In a final scene, in which the philosopher is stranded inside a cage back in Cambridge, Jarman suggests that the answer to some of his questions lay where he refused to go, namely the arms of a good lover.

Wittgenstein Jim’s Reviews

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

User comments from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

Epinions DVD review [Stephen O. Murray]

Edinburgh U Film Society (Spiros Gangas) review

Urban Cinefile dvd review Andrew L. Urban

Metroactive.com [Richard von Busack] reviewing the 4 disc set Glitterbox

DVD Verdict- Glitterbox: Derek Jarman X 4 [Brett Cullum] reviewing the 4 disc set

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Variety (Derek Elley) review

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

BLUE

Great Britain (72 mi) 1993 Blue Text

Blue Slow Motion Angel

Against an unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.

Blue Queer Cultural Center

The screen of this movie remains plain and unchanging during its 72 minutes. Over the blue surface of the screen, the voices of four actors, close friends of the director, the speech of the director himself, the sound effects and the music narrate Derek Jarman's experience with the AIDS virus, alternating the description of the progress of the virus with deep considerations on poetry, art and life.

The idea of this extraordinary attempt was suggested to Jarman by his loss of sight during the last stages of the illness; he was inspired by the French painter Yves Klein, who eagerly experimented with monochromes. The blue surface represents serenity and contemplation. "Blue" is the last, touching work by Derek Jarman, who succumbed to AIDS some months later. His artistic testament, anyway, is a hymn to life and art: Jarman, mortally ill, does not give up the irony and experiments a radical shift of the limits of sight.

The blue screen is accompanied by Simon Fisher Turner's poetic music and seductive words, sublimely formulated by the actors Nigel Terry, John Quentin and Tilda Swinton, all of them faithful, long-time collaborators of Jarman's.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The title of the final film by avant-garde British maverick Derek Jarman evokes the theoretical banality of Andy Warhol's '60s experiments (Sleep, Blow Job, Harlot), and the narrative is no less conceptual. For practically all of its running time, it consists of nothing more than an unchanging blue screen upon which we hear a barrage of ruminations, remembrances and assorted pensées from the ailing, sightless Jarman. What rescues it from tedious abstraction (and keeps the picture from being simply filmed radio) are Jarman's stylistic modernism and his absolute adherence to clear-eyed unsentimentality. Jarman's layering of the movie is more aural than visual (with scrupulous attention to overlapping sound bridges), yet as the Elizabethian words modulate from plummy to morbid to bracingly obscene to ethereal, the blue on the screen seems to ondulate with feeling -- it alternately suggests a serene sea, the sky, a burnt retina, the chilliness of death and, maybe, transcendence. Only late into it did I begin to understand it as more than Jarman's requiem to himself -- blind and dying of AIDS, he uses it to purge and purify himself, staring into the darkness and finding unlikely bliss. The contrast here is not simply between image and sound, but between a man's failing body and his ardent mind. Despite being the virtual antithesis of the savage imagery punctuating the director's more famous works (Jubilee, The Tempest, The Last of England), Blue is arguably his most radical work. John Quentin, Nigel Terry and Tilda Swinton, friends and collaborators, are among the other voices heard.

DVDBeaver.com [Paul Haynes]

Blue, Derek Jarman's final film, was made as he was dying of AIDS and blind, his vision hijacked by constant blue light. For its entire duration, the screen is filled with the color blue and nothing more, while Jarman, with voice contributions from frequent collaborators Tilda Swinton, John Quentin, and Nigel Terry, weaves a poetic, angry, wistful, and sometimes humorous account of his illness and impending mortality. He speaks of having become a "walking laboratory," taking up to thirty pills a day, of the chore of hospital waiting rooms, of the brusque indifference of medical personnel, of the hypocrisy of charity, and of the color blue. Jarman's voice is commanding. This is not an informal affair. He often speaks in verse, augmented with music and sound by Jarman's regular composer Simon Fisher-Turner, as well as Brian Eno, Coil, Momus, The King of Luxembourg, and others, forming an atmospheric wall of sound that is the film's imagery and is constructed in a highly cinematic way, with abrupt shifts in texture and tone. (The short-lived ambient sketch-comedy radio program Blue Jam created a similar mood.) Jarman invokes a sense of journey within the viewer, and the effect is hypnotic and moving. You walk away from it with total identification with Jarman, and once your eyes return to the corporeal world, it's as though sight has been restored. In terms of form, this movie is as bold as anything Jarman has done.

If the 1990s was largely defined by the mainstreaming of AIDS, Blue is a key film from that decade. Like Wim Wenders' Lightning Over Water, about the dying of Nicholas Ray, Blue is a naked portrait of a dying artist, although it is perhaps more intimate in that it originates from within. Blue goes further toward demystifying AIDS than straightforward documentary content has done, and Jarman is not nor was ever shy about retaining his sexual identity in spite of the stigma of his disease, the politics of which he address here with frank combativeness. In an ideal world, it is Blue and not the contrived and didactic Kids that would have made a splash as a provocative document of the modern epidemic—although, in an ideal world, neither film would be necessary. The fact that Jarman's final film hardly registered a dent is evidence that the medium of cinema has failed.

Blue Review Gridley Minima from the Queer Cultural Center

This "film" (if film it be), the last to be completed by the painter and diarist Jarman before his death early this year of AIDS, is, I'm pretty sure, the best movie I've ever seen (if it's even "seeable"). One hour and seventeen minutes of luminous blue 35mm glow, unchanging, calming, irritating, numbing, and a soundtrack laboriously collaged out of snippets of sound and music and Jarman's meditations on his encroaching blindness and approaching death, and on the blindness of the world to its own slower but equally inevitable demise.

Jarman, the consummate image-crafter, whose films are quite literally "moving pictures," coming to grips with the disappearance of all images from his field of vision, then the disappearance of his own self-image into the all-transcending blue of death. Realizing that, on the world's screen, he has no image; as a queer, an outsider, none of the images he has midwifed into the world will be allowed to have lives of their own and enter the viral give-and-take of autonomous phantasms that is "culture." So, facing death, he faces not the immediate post-mortem acclaim granted to those who, while unbearably unproductive while alive, were, at least, fertile; but rather the amnesia our society reserves for those whose existence it has never acknowledged in the first place.

"From the bottom of your heart, pray to be released from image."

But of course, none of this stuff is why I wanted to mention it to you; I brought it up because it struck me, like a bolt out of the blue, as an answer to my prayer in my anti-review of Dracula, six months ago. A cinema that has transcended its own images. Even-tually the effect of the droning blue screen is that you are inside Derek Jarman's head, seeing what he sees (nothing), hearing what he hears, both outside and inside, and then, when the movie's over...The one truly human experience, death, communicated, by a master artist transcending the materials and limitations of his own art by facing his own nonexistence, and ours.

The film's ancestors would be the monochromies of Yves Klein (the color is actually very similar to International Klein Blue), he of the "leap into the void"; it doesn't take very long before the brain (or the world), like a sponge, soaks up the blue of the screen (the same way it would have fed on the fast food of images, had there been any) and, in the unified blue of the blue world, we attain, as the old Tibetan texts say, the faculty of walking in the sky, if only for this short, magic hour and seventeen minutes of cinematic time.

And so it is that, at the movie's very end, in the midst of an incredibly lyrical and erotically charged love song, Jarman is strangely reassuring about the world's blindness. "Our name will be forgotten, in time, no one will remember our work," he says, as if this is a good thing, because it allows us to concentrate on our love, which is what really matters. Freed from self-conception as artists, queers, or anything else, we are free to become what only death can make us, human, and hence free to realize the true potential of our estate. Beyond words, beyond names, beyond subject and object "In the pandemonium of image, I bring you the universal Blue."

ESSAY ON BLUE Des Hagarty’s Essay on BLUE from Slow Motion Angel, January 8, 2002

In 1992 Derek Jarman completed his last film/video entitled ‘Blue’. When it was first shown at the Venice Biennale Film Festival it received a standing ovation and was described in the programme notes as, “…a bold, moving, controversial statement of life and death”. Blue was first screened in the UK on Channel 4 with a simultaneous broadcast of the sound track on BBC Radio 3, an unusual collaboration, and also, virtually unique for independent television, there were no commercial breaks. It is the last in a trilogy of film works comprising, ‘The Last of England’ and ‘The Garden’. He also wrote a book called ‘The Last of England’ as a series of diary notes and discussions on the project. Derek Jarman died in 1994 in London from an Aids related condition.

Much of Jarman’s work is autobiographical as is ‘Blue’. The film/video was produced by Jarman as he was living through the late stages of HIV/AIDS. It is a montage, a single intense all pervading image, (an electronically produced blue normally used in edit suites as a key to drop in other images) and of an eclectic mix of poetry, prose, music and sound effects with the voices of actors and friends. The sound track and the music gradually divulge Jarman’s experience with AIDS, alternating the description of the progress of the virus and the treatment with verbal metaphysical images on life and art. The track begins with sounds reminiscent of clocks chiming gently in a pre-television household, playing a yet to be composed tune. They set the scene as it were and we gradually become aware of Jarman’s paradox of his early life in middle England with all its supposed warmth and protection, the womb-like security of childhood, time standing still whilst the clocks tick and then carry on ticking whilst time is running out. Time runs out for one person but time itself never runs out. The continuum is set in place.

The voices provide a montage of audio images: ‘blue bottle; blue heat haze; blue heart; blue delphinium day (one of my favourites); universal blue, an open door to the soul; cobalt rings and indigo slaves’. All these metaphorical ideas are set against a screen consisting of saturated blue, a chroma-key or matte colour used for special effects filming. (The principal has been used since the early days of photography and film makers carried on the practice with varying degrees of success until the advent of the computer motion controlled cameras in the mid-seventies. Even then such films as superman and Star wars had to rely on dark backgrounds to hide the ‘cut marks’.) For Jarman the irony must have been profound. For the length of the piece, some 72 minutes, he had at his fingertips, the ability to drop into the screen any image or special visual effect he wishes but, for a person going slowly blind, what is the point?

These iconic ideals of the colour are verbally inter-cut with Jarman describing his super reality of his regular visits to the hospital and his consultant’s attempts to, “…first identify the problems and then reduce the rate of progress ”. “…my retina is destroyed, …I have to come to terms with sightlessness” Then back to the imagination. “…Blue is the universal love in which man bathes, it is the terrestrial paradise.”
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Jarman did not consider himself a film-maker, rather an artist painter who happened to use film or video for one project or another. .AL Rees describes the man as, “Breeding new cinematic cross-breeds between Super 8, 16mm and digital video editing.” He compares himself to Italian director Pier Paulo Pasolini saying “…all Italian film-makers look through painters eyes.” And his own techniques bare little resemblance to normal film production. He was known to project and re-film or re-video work in order to degrade or colour the image. Nowadays this would be done electronically but his was a real hands-on affair. He often did this with little regard for the aesthetic of retaining a pristine image. Montage seems to be his by-word. Montages of faces, places and whole scenes laid one over the other but all within the movie frame.

His previous work ‘The Garden’, uses the chroma key matte technique in a number of scenes but to particular effect when Jarman shows us a series of last suppers scenarios, all of which are parodies on Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco. As for instance when we see a group of women running their fingers around the edge of their wine glasses all filled to different levels and all producing a musical note. Interestingly, the matte shot background is not at all subtle but at the same time it sits well with the foreground image. In the early seventies John Duncane, one of the key figures in the London Film Makers Co-op showed Jarman the method of superimposition. It was a lesson well learnt and took to his heart. Most directors using this technique try to disguise the effect but Jarman relishes the lack of sophistication. It is presented as a montage, a style that Jarman is very familiar with through his painting. In his book ‘The last of England’ he is quoted as saying,
“… I am interested in work that has no obvious function or should I say compunction.” Similarly, the musical notes of the wine glasses are dubbed in a very obvious way but again seem to blend in with the overall scheme of the piece.

Despite the nature of ‘Blue’, a static unchanging colour ground, it is a moving and impressive reflection on life and death combining both humour and pathos. His sight was failing and whilst it is a contemplative piece of his death to come, as he says in the sound track it is about his experience of “living with aids” The ironic fact that he is dying from the disease is left unsaid. Despite all the possibilities for self-pity, the work is remarkably enlivening. Jarman meditates on the colour blue. It is one of the last things he sees as the doctor tests his vision using flashing lights that leave a blue residual colour. He says “…blue transcends the solid geography of human limits.”

The psycho geography is a key element to the images Jarman conjures up. Jarman talks of “… pearl fishers in Asian seas…” or how “…blue is the universal love in which man bathes, it is terrestrial paradise” and again he says “…I have walked behind the sky”. Surprisingly the constancy of the colour has a mildly soporific effect and it is left to the sound track to change mood and pace. He is also noted as saying “Back in 1960 I got hold of “The Doors of perception’. …The (Aldous) Huxley book should definitely be read by all film students; it contains more useful information than any textbook I’ve read”.
Blue is a recurring theme in his work. He was interested in the French painter Yves Klein and his inspirational work in monochromes. By coincidence (or possibly by design) the electronic saturated blue used as the image is very similar in intensity to Klein Blue, the colour Yves Klein patented for exclusive use in his work. In The Last of England, he describes his secret ambition to find the ‘Blue’ rose, the Holy Grail of gardeners. He talks of his desire to see the blue irises of Giverny, Monet’s garden, and how, having travelled from the UK by hovercraft on a day trip, he and his friend are refused entry by a ‘fascist’ gatekeeper because a private party is about to start within half an hour. They pear over the wall to see stolen glimpses of the empty garden in bloom but have to leave for the return ferry never to return. The sense of loss is tangible. I would even go so far as to say (without sarcasm or irony) that it created a ‘blue’ mood for just long enough before the next experience occurred.

The synaesthetic aspect of the piece is interesting in that the visual sensory stimulation should be set, however the sound track often overrides this with suggestions such as ‘cobalt’ or ‘indigo’ or ‘walking behind the sky and the archaeology of Sound’. Other sensory ideas are triggered at key points, the warmth of a summer beach the fear and smell of a hospital consulting room. The cross referencing of sensual experience has only recently being investigated as a psychological phenomenon in particular by the University of California San Diego but in ‘Blue’ Jarman approaches the concept twenty years early.

‘Blue’ as a piece of film art challenges the medium in one fundamental way. The idea that the audience will accept a static image when they have expectations of movement is to turn film on its head. Interestingly whilst I watched or rather listened to the progress of the work, I found myself transcending various states. At times I found the sound mesmeric at others I was drawn to the movement created within the blue image by the worn out quality of the VHS video. Moiré patterns appeared and disappeared like spectres on the screen, sometimes synching with the sound track, at other times acting totally independently.

Had Derek Jarman survived with his sight intact to see this low quality of reproduction, I believe he would have approved. I also believe it validates a theory of mine that the sound track of a film is the most important element and in nearly all cases puts the visual aspect into second place, so perhaps, a blue screen on the radio might be fun.

Jim's Reviews - Jarman's Blue - JClarkMedia.com Jim’s Review

outrate.net (Mark Adnum) review

Blue | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review

Shadows on the Wall (Rich Cline) capsule review

DVD Outsider Slarek, also reviewing GLITTERBUG

Metroactive.com [Richard von Busack] reviewing the 4 disc set Glitterbox

DVD Verdict- Glitterbox: Derek Jarman X 4 [Brett Cullum] reviewing the 4 disc set

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

GLITTERBUG

Great Britain (60 mi) 1994

Glitterbug Slow Motion Angel

Assembled after his death, an illuminating and moving evocation of a generation, through the camera of artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman. 20 years of edited together super-8mm footage tied together through Brian Eno's music that remains sympathetic to the tones and ideas being provoked by the images. The footage continues Jarman's tradition of film-making found in his features - fascination with the male body, nature, landscapes, cityscapes, close up of detail, personal expression and camera experimentation.

User comments from imdb Author jamesmarcustucker (jamesmarcustucker@hotmail.com) from Brighton, England

Whilst this film will not appeal to everybody, it is however, an illuminating and moving evocation of a generation, through the camera of artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman. I am a fan of Jarman, and so found Glitterbug - 20 years of edited together super-8mm footage - a fascinating watch.

Brian Eno's music accompaniment is sympathetic to the tones and ideas being provoked by the images. The footage continues Jarman's tradition of film-making found in his features - fascination with the male body, nature, landscapes, cityscapes, close up of detail, personal expression and camera experimentation. A fascinating film for anyone interested in the life of this great filmmaker.

Glitterbug Review Adina Wise

Released in 1994, less than a year before his death, Glitterbug chronicles the pre-AIDS life of British filmmaker Derek Jarman. Through a series of still-images and short, mostly high-speed clips (all blinking to the foreground beats of composer Brian Eno), Jarman and his satin-ribbon of unidentified, inconstant companions are found dancing, sitting, working, smoking and soaking up sun.

The homosexual director’s 53 minute farewell to the world of the living and filming is inevitably nostalgic, but the film is hardly ominous and refrains from offering any hackneyed insights. On his own, Jarman is seen doing only what he has to and it is a delight to observe the intricacies of his directorial acumen even when the content has turned mundane.

Prior to Glitterbug, Jarman made 11 feature films, most of which were controversial and all of which dealt with homosexual politics. In 1992 he was awarded the Fipresci Prize for Young Cinema for Edward II, a radical interpretation of the 16^th century play by Christopher Marlowe. In the film, King Edward is portrayed as openly – even flamboyantly - homosexual and Jarman emphasizes the relationship between the monarch’s out-of-closet lifestyle and resulting assassination.

Though he is primarily remembered for his unique and fearless filmmaking, Jarman’s passion for literature, world history and dramatic juxtaposition show up with comparable frequency in painting. His first love, Jarman was behind the canvas long before he laid eyes on the camera and, while cinematography ultimately took over in the public eye, he continued to paint until his death. The audacious colors and chaotic feel of the artist’s landscapes (1991 – 1992) depict an incensed side of Jarman that viewers of the often gray-scale Glitterbug never encounter.

Though some of Glitterbug’s rolling images do suggest an affected contrast between young and old and healthy and ill - which allude to the outraged motifs of his later portraits - for the most part the thematic elements of the film are pleasingly subtle. Glitterbug achieves reflection without reprehension. If Jarman believed life to be fun and games only until someone got hurt, it was a notion he took to the grave.

Review — Glitterbug Jim’s reviews

SHIFT | THINGS | GLITTERBUG from Shift

Sky Arts - Glitterbug

allmovie ((( Glitterbug > Overview ))) Sandra Brennan

DVD Outsider Slarek, also reviewing BLUE

Metroactive.com [Richard von Busack] reviewing the 4 disc set Glitterbox

DVD Verdict- Glitterbox: Derek Jarman X 4 [Brett Cullum] reviewing the 4 disc set

Jarmusch, Jim

Jarmusch, Jim Art and Culture

Jim Jarmusch could be called the father of American Independent Film -- if it didn't seem uncouth to bestow such a grandiose title on a man still so relatively young, and to declare the paternity of such a squirming and bastard art form. Jarmusch moved to New York from his hometown of Akron, Ohio, to attend Columbia University and later the NYU Film School. His second film effort, "Stranger Than Paradise" (1984), marked a turning point in American independent cinema. It won Jarmusch the Camera d’Or prize for best new director at the Cannes Film Festival and broke through the glass ceiling that had come to exist over nonstudio American film, which at the time received little recognition or funding. (The only notable independent movies being made were those of bankable directors like Woody Allen). An offbeat comedy that plays with American motifs like the immigrant and the "On the Road" automobile trip, the film presents the American landscape from a new perspective.

Jarmusch continued his exploration of America's byways and backwaters with "Down By Law," set in Louisiana, and "Mystery Train," filmed in Memphis, Tennessee. His films are noted for their dry, absurd wit and amazing soundtracks. Their success opened up new opportunities for a whole generation of indie filmmakers: small-scale productions like "Clerks," "Slacker," and "El Mariachi" have followed Jarmusch's lead. His film, "Dead Man," revisits the Western, the classic locus of American identity, innovatively rewriting the story of boom and bust with Johnny Depp as the innocent stranger who comes to town.

Jim Jarmusch Rupert Vandervell from biogs

Jim Jarmusch was born on 22 January 1954 in Akron, Ohio.

The son of a film critic, Jim Jarmusch was obsessed by film from an early age. After graduating he spent a year in Paris, immersing himself in the French life and culture, in particular the last vestiges of the French New Wave movement. He was influenced by the likes of Truffaut and Godard amongst others, who made a lasting impression on him.

After completing a degree in English Literature at Colombia University, Jim Jarmusch realized he had to move into the world of film, his real passion and he enrolled at New York's Tisch School of Arts. Once there, he was taken under the wing of legendary filmmaker Nicholas Ray who helped him with his first film Permanent Vacation (1980). Despite this, Jarmusch left without a degree.

Four years later, Stranger Than Paradise (1984) proved that Jim Jarmusch had the credentials to make serious pictures. The film earned him several awards including the Camera d'or at the Cannes Film Festival for best first film. One theme that runs through Jarmusch's work is his fascination with music. Indeed, he himself appeared with a band, The Del-Byzanteens, at around the time of the film’s release.

Elegantly filmed in black and white, Jarmusch's next film Down by Law (1986) with Tom Waits, was a masterpiece of wit and style, the story of three cell mates on the run. This was followed in 1989 by Mystery Train, starring another musician, this time Joe Strummer from punk band The Clash and in 1990 by Night on Earth. Less well received by the critics, the films were perhaps seen as being clever but lacking in anything particularly different from his earlier work. Jim Jarmusch was seen as having style but little variation.

It wasn’t until 1995 with Dead Man that he was able to silence the critics and prove that he could deal with major issues such as death and the American heartland. Johnny Depp stars in grainy black and white against a harsh Western backdrop.

In 1999 Jarmusch made Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which uses the gangster formula to interesting effect and Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) returns Jarmusch to comedy in a film of separate sketches released earlier in his career.

In 2005, Jim Jarmusch directed Broken Flowers, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and starred Bill Murray, Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton, Frances Conroy and Julie Delpy.

Jarmusch FAQ and biography Taken from Current Biography Yearbook 1990 (abridged)

“I have no desire to make films for any kind of specific audience,” the independent and uncompromising American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has declared. “What I want to do is make films that . . . tell stories, but somehow in an new way, not in a predictable form, not in the usual manipulative way that films seem to on their audiences.” In 1984 Jarmusch emerged from the downtown New York art scene with Stranger Than Paradise, a picaresque film, made in black-and-white on a shoestring budget, that won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and he followed up two years later with another picaresque fable, the critically acclaimed Down by Law. In 1989 Jarmusch rounded off his first cinematic trilogy with the release of Mystery Train, a film that prompted Vincent Canby of the New York Times to call him the “most adventurous and arresting filmmaker to surface in the American cinema in this decade.” Jarmusch has explained that he looks at the United States “through a foreigner’s eyes” and that his ambition is to create a new cinematic language shaped by his two major influences: the world cinema of Europe and Japan, and Hollywood. “I’m interested in finding a bridge between these,” he has said. I’d like to embrace both sides without negating one or the other.”

Jim Jarmusch was born in the industrial city of Akron, Ohio, not too far from Cleveland, in 1953 [22 January]. He has characterized his father, a businessman on the payroll of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, as a kind man who worked hard to support his family. Before her marriage, Jarmusch’s mother was a newspaperwoman on the staff of the Akron Beacon-Journal who covered show business and movies, among other assignments. One of his grandmothers, a lover of modern art and literature, encouraged her grandson in his literary pursuits. “The only beautiful thing about growing up in Akron,” Jarmusch told Paul Attanasio of the Washington Post (October 2, 1984), “was the [Goodyear] Blimp. You’d be taking a walk and you’d see the blimp. I love the blimp, it’s so beautiful.”

Soon realizing that his future did not lie in Akron, Jarmusch escaped by enrolling in the School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1970, but, believing that “poets are the lifeblood of any culture” and having wanted to become a poet since childhood, he transferred in 1971 to Columbia University on New York’s Upper West Side. There, he majored in English and American literature under such teachers as David Shapiro and Kenneth Koch, prominent figures in the so-called New York School of avant-garde poets. He also began to read “post-post-structural fiction and the deconstructed narrative and all that stuff,” as he recalled in an interview with Jane Shapiro of the Village Voice (September 16, 1986), and to write “little . . . semi-narrative abstract pieces.”

While growing up in Akron, Jarmusch saw Japanese horror films and James Bond movies, but two black-and-white American films that starred Robert Mitchum made a deeper impression on him. Those movies were The Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton, in which Mitchum memorably played an implacably evil “preacher” with “love” tattooed on the knuckles on one hand and “hate” on the other, and Thunder Road, a B-movie about hillbilly moonshiners that has since gained a cult following. “Before that time,” Jarmusch told Jane Shapiro, in referring to Thunder Road, “I didn’t know movies could be this dangerous and this seductive.” In 1975, during his final semester at Columbia, Jarmusch went to Paris, where he discovered world cinema through the vast archives of the Cinémathèque Française. In an interview with Lawrence Van Gelder of the New York Times (October 21, 1984), Jarmusch said, “That’s where I saw things I had only read about and heard about - films by many of the good Japanese directors, like Imamura, Ozu, Mizoguchi. Also, films by European directors like Bresson and Dreyer, and even American films, like the retrospective of Samuel Fuller’s films, which I only knew from seeing a few of them on television late at night. When I came back from Paris, I was still writing, and my writing was becoming more cinematic in certain ways, more visually descriptive.”

Back in New York, Jarmusch applied to the prestigious graduate department of film studies at New York University. Since he had no hands-on experience in film, he was surprised when he was accepted on the strength of an essay about film and some still photographs that he had submitted. At New York University he became a teaching assistant to the venerable American auteur Nicholas Ray, the director, among other films, of In a Lonely Place, Rebel without a Cause, and Johnny Guitar. He also met the noted German director Wim Wenders and worked as a production assistant on Lightning over Water, Wender’s documentary film about the dying Ray’s last years. “When I . . . began learning technically how to make films,” Jarmusch told Lawrence Van Gelder, “I decided that’s what I really wanted to do.”

During the four years that he studied at New York University, until 1979, Jarmusch also entered enthusiastically into the post-punk scene that was flourishing in the East Village. He frequented the arty Mudd Club and joined a new-wave band called the Del-Byzanteens, for which he played keyboards, sang, and helped to write numbers like “Atom Satellite,” with lyrics made up entirely of tabloid headlines. “At the time, everybody in New York had a band,” Jarmusch told Paul Attanasio. “The idea was you didn’t have to be a virtuoso musician to have a band. The spirit was more important than having technical expertise, and that influenced a lot of filmmakers.”

Encouraged by Nicholas Ray and by Amos Poe, an underground New York filmmaker, Jarmusch decided he really wanted to make movies. “Nick told me,” he said to a reporter for People magazine (December 10, 1984), “‘If you really want to make a film, don’t talk about it. Do it.’” Using money from a fellowship grant that was supposed to pay for his tuition, Jarmusch set about fulfilling the program requirement of a student film by starting work on Permanent Vacation in 1979, about two weeks after Nicholas Ray died. As he explained to Lawrence Van Gelder, Permanent Vacation was about “two and a half days in the life of a young guy doesn’t really have any ambitions or responsibility. He doesn’t live anywhere specifically. He doesn’t go to school. He doesn’t work.” Frowned upon by New York University officials because of its “excessive” eighty-minute length, Permanent Vacation (1980) was distributed by the art circuit in Europe, where it gained a small cult following, but “it really didn’t do anything” in the United States, as Jarmusch pointed out to Van Gelder.

It was in about 1981 that Jarmusch began to work on the script for a short film with Stranger Than Paradise as its working title, but which is now known as The New World. Impressed by Permanent Vacation, Chris Sievernich, the executive producer of Wim Wender’s films, gave Jarmusch about forty minutes’ worth of unused film stock, from which experienced directors could expect to get about five minutes’ worth of finished film. [---] Having learned from Nicholas Ray that if the “scene is there, the movie is there,” Jarmusch filmed his story over a single weekend in February 1982. Casting his friend John Lurie, the saxophonist in an arty jazz band called the Lounge Lizards, as the “cool,” taciturn Willie, the actor Richard Edson as the gregarious Eddie, and the Squat Theater’s Ezster Balint as the tenacious Eva, Jarmusch got a thirty-minute film out of the donated film stock, largely because he framed each scene as one extended shot, with no cutting away to different camera angles within the frame. “I personally thought he was out of his mind,” Lurie has commented. “If anybody had gotten the flu during the shoot, that would’ve been the end of the film.”

While editing his footage in his small downtown apartment, Jarmusch decided that it could be a feature film in three chapters, and by the time he had the film edited, he also had a script for the feature. [---] In 1983 the short version of Stranger Than Paradise won the international critics prize at the 1983 Rotterdam Film Festival, and Jarmusch traveled around Europe trying to drum up financial backing for a full-length version of his film. His efforts were to no avail until he met Otto Grokenberger, a young West German who aspired to become a film producer.

In January 1984, in New York, Jarmusch resumed the shooting of Stranger Than Paradise, and what had been an $8,000 short subject was in the process of becoming a $120,000 ninety-minute film. In March Jarmusch showed his movie to Cannes Film Festival official, who selected it for inclusion in the program of that much -publicized film competition. At Cannes he lost the Palme d’Or, or grand prize, to his old friend Wim Wenders for Paris, Texas, but he was awarded the coveted Camera d’Or for best [first] feature film.

[And the rest, as they say, is history.]

Film Reference Rob Winning, updated by Rob Edelman

In the 1980s, Jim Jarmusch quickly rose to the forefront of young, independent American filmmakers. Recognition has been his from the very beginning with the release of Stranger than Paradise, a work that won a Camera d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival (for best "first film") and "Best Picture" from the National Society of Film Critics. The key to Jarmusch's success is a well-defined and thoughtfully conceived stylistic approach and a coherent circle of interests.

The focal point of all Jarmusch's work is the apparent contradiction that exists between the popular perception of the American Dream and what that dream actually holds for the individual who doesn't quite fit in. This contradiction is explored through the interaction of a characteristic ensemble of characters. Each of Jarmusch's early films is built around a trio of characters, although Mystery Train varies that slightly by using three separate stories to explore this central theme. The characters are all decidedly off-beat, but all seem to have a vision or aspiration which echoes a popular perception of America. The central characters—Tom Waits' down and out disc jockey in Down by Law, or John Lurie's small-time pimp in the same film—are forced to confront their misconceptions and misguided dreams when they are thrown together by fate with a foreigner who views this dream as an observer. In Down by Law, for example, the two central characters find themselves in jail with an Italian immigrant who has murdered someone for cheating at cards. The character carries a small notebook of American slang expressions from which he quotes dutifully and incorrectly. He refers to this notebook as "everything I know about America." It is this kind of character situation that Jarmusch uses to scoff at an America he sees as misguided and woefully out of touch with itself.

Stylistically, Jarmusch's films echo the work of the French "New Wave" directors, in particular the Godard of Breathless and Weekend. Jump-cuts are frequently used to disconnect characters from sublime and rational passages of time and space. A sense of disenfranchisement is created in this way, separating characters from the continuity of space and time which surrounds them. In Down by Law, for example, Tom Waits sits in his cell, then lays on the floor, then lays across his bed, but what seems like "a day in the life" editing approach actually concludes with days having passed, not hours. Jarmusch also uses moving-camera a great deal, but unlike his predecessors in other traditions, his fluid camera style is not functional. Camera movements in films like Down by Law and Mystery Train create a visual world that is always in transition. Down by Law opens with camera movement first right to left down a street in a small town, then left to right. As a result, the audience is introduced, through a visual metaphor, to the collision course that is central to the film's themes.

Jarmusch capped his early period with Night on Earth, an exhilarating five-part slice-of-life, each of which unravels at the same point in time in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. All are set in taxis, and spotlight brief but poignant exchanges between cab driver and passenger. The best of many highlights: the sequence in which a black Brooklynite (Giancarlo Esposito) and an East German refugee (Armin Mueller-Stahl) reveal their names to each other. Jarmusch's point is that people are people, whether black or white, American or French or Finnish.

The filmmaker then disappointed with Dead Man, a well-intentioned but annoyingly obvious allegorical Western. Dead Man charts the experiences of a young man named William Blake (Johnny Depp), a bespeckled Cleveland accountant who arrives in a grubby, mud-soaked Western town and promptly finds himself accused of murder and wanted by the law. Jarmusch's point of view is without argument: America is a violent country, founded on bloodletting and bloodletting alone. But the problem with the film is that his portrait of America-the-violent is all-too-obvious, and anything but subtle. One of the film's few female characters keeps a gun in her bed. "This is America," is her reason for doing so. Blake eventually crosses paths with an Indian who is symbolically named Nobody; after all, in the quest to achieve "manifest destiny," did not the white man render the American Indian anonymous? (In the film's cleverest touch, Nobody mistakes Blake for the poet-painter of the same name returned to life.) Eventually, and predictably, William Blake becomes a for-real killer—but just as predictably, Nobody is the far more interesting character. He is a spiritual man, the lone one in the story. Even Blake, whom he befriends, is too dense to comprehend the Indian's worldview. Meanwhile, all the white men endlessly shoot at each other, often with fatal results. One of them, a celebrated bounty hunter, even has a sideline as a cannibal. In one scene, he dines by a campfire on what clearly are the remains of a severed hand. It is here where you will be thankful that Jarmusch has chosen to shoot the film in beautiful black and white. In Dead Man, Jarmusch casts screen veteran Robert Mitchum as the semi-demented industrialist who is the town's key powerbroker. Mitchum is on-screen ever so briefly, but his presence is one of the film's few highlights.

After directing Year of the Horse, an affectionate documentary chronicling Neil Young & Crazy Horse's 1996 concert tour, Jarmusch ended the 1990s with Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. The film is thematically linked to Dead Man in that it contrasts a knowing, spiritual racial minority and mindlessly violent white men. But the difference between the two is that Ghost Dog is a compelling film, a thoughtful and multi-leveled rumination on age-old enlightenment pitted against modern-era dysfunction. Ghost Dog is a portrait of the title character (Forest Whitaker), an African-American contract killer who is a loner, alienated and cut off from the American mainstream. In a classic Jarmusch touch, his one friend, an ice cream vendor, speaks only French; Ghost Dog does not understand that language, yet the two men somehow communicate clearly and understand each other perfectly.

Ghost Dog has earned his nickname because, professionally speaking, he is "like a ghost," and is "totally untraceable." He also is fascinated by the disciplines and philosophy of the samurai, and lives by the codes of the 18th-century Japanese text The Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai. This allows him to understand the meaning of loyalty, and so he remains faithful to his boss, a small-time hood who once saved his life. During the course of the film, Ghost Dog is pitted against a gang of Italian mobsters; he is shown to be their superior because he is philosophical—he has firm, grounded beliefs—while they are fallible because they are mindless. The Italians casually whack each other, or any innocent citizen who happens to be in their way, and they order Ghost Dog killed because he has the temerity to spare the life of a young girl who is present during one of his hits. But Ghost Dog will persevere, because the wisdom that permeates his soul is pure and true. Conversely, the Italians are doomed because they are as dysfunctional as they are amoral.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is loaded with the ironic, caustic humor that is so typically Jarmusch: the Italian gangsters are disbelieving when they learn that the hit man is called Ghost Dog, yet they remain oblivious to their own ludicrous nicknames (such as Sammy the Snake). Also throughout the film, Jarmusch employs the image of birds as a metaphor for independence; Ghost Dog communicates with his boss via carrier pigeon, and there are recurring shots of birds flying in the sky.

Jarmusch also is not averse to working in the short film format. In 1987 he made Coffee and Cigarettes, in which an American (Steven Wright) and an Italian (Roberto Benigni) meet in a cafe and converse over coffee and cigarettes. Jarmusch reworked the film's concept and structure twice more: Coffee and Cigarettes II (Memphis Version), made two years later, in which an argument between twins Joie and Cinque Lee is intruded on by an overly earnest waiter (Steve Buscemi); and Coffee and Cigarettes III (Somewhere in California), made four years after that, this time featuring a barroom conversation between Iggy Pop and Tom Waits.

Jarmusch's cool style and strangers-in-a-strange-land subject matter have influenced other filmmakers. Cold Fever, a likable 1995 Icelandic feature co-produced and co-scripted by Jarmusch colleague Jim Stark and directed by Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, chronicles a Japanese businessman's odyssey across Iceland to perform a memorial ritual at the spot where his parents had died seven years earlier.

Like other emerging filmmakers of his generation, such as Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch approaches the American way of life with a sense of hip cynicism. A product of contemporary American film school savvy, Jarmusch incorporates a sense of film history, style, and awareness in his filmmaking approach. The tradition which he has chosen to follow, the one which offers him the most freedom, is that established by filmmakers such as Chabrol, Godard, and Truffaut in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Jim Jarmusch Home Page official website

The Jim Jarmusch Resource Page info and resource guide

A Jim Jarmusch Home Page an excellent site with plenty of photos and links

Jim Jarmusch JD Lafrance from Senses of Cinema

Jarmusch bibliography a reference site, including links to articles and essays

All-Movie Guide Jonathan Crow from All Movie Guide

Dead Man Stefan Herrmann (Undated)

"Jim Jarmusch's Guilty Pleasures" mildly enhanced Jarmusch essay originally appearing in Film Comment Vol.28 no.3 (June 1992)

"Guilty Pleasures" Film Comment, Volume 28 No 3, June 1992

"Movies for a Desert Isle" Jarmusch’s thoughts as he was finishing the script for DOWN BY LAW

this list Jarmusch’s submittal to the Sight and Sound 2002 poll for the ten best films of all time

Jim Jarmusch in Black and White Black and White films with an impact

Full citation and Abstract Rosemary L. Matich, Functional Criticism: Cinematic Space/Time Theory and Phenomenology. [Analyzes four 'postrealist' films, one being Stranger in Paradise] PhD diss. Northwestern University, 1989

"Is It Shot Or Is It Dead?: The Western According To Virgil and Shakespeare" Vincent Tocce CINE 344 December 15, 1998

Jim Jarmusch: A (Post)modern Interpretation by Colin Lawlor, submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for Advanced Diploma in Communications, Dublin Institute of Technology, College of Commerce, May 14, 1999

Perceptual Dawnings: Jim Jarmusch's Offbeat Poetics of Cinema Ludvig Hertzberg PhD dissertation proposal/introduction, February 2000

Lost in Paradise: The Cinema of Jim Jarmusch - Screening the Past Fiona A. Villella, December 1, 2001

<em>Dead Man</em> - Screening the Past Fiona A. Villella reviews Jonathan Rosenbaum’s book Dead Man, December 1, 2001

Jarmusch in the American Weeds | Jonathan Rosenbaum an earlier Jarmusch overview initially published in The Guardian, August 27, 2004

Jim Jarmusch, Jim Jarmusch Symposium from Reverse Shot

Introduction Stand by Your Man, Jim Jarmusch Symposium from Reverse Shot

Jarmusch, Jim They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

"Jim Jarmusch Breaks In: Discovering a Hot New Director at the New York Film Festival" Paul Attanasio interviews Jarmusch for The Washington Post, October 2, 1984

"Tom Waits meets Jim Jarmusch" Jim interviews Tom, Straight No Chaser 20 (Spring, 1993)

A Gun Up Your Ass: An Interview with Jim Jarmusch | Jonathan ... an article and interview by Jonathan Rosenbaum from Cineaste, April 12, 1996

Robert Fulford's column about Jim Jarmusch from the National Post, April 4, 2000

"Skin Deep" Jarmusch interviews Isaach De Bankolé, Time Out New York (November 8 – 15, 2001)

interview with Jarmusch Jonathan Rosenbaum interviews Jarmusch about pairing other director’s films with his during an October 2001 Jarmusch film retrospective

"'A Sad and Beautiful World': The Jim Jarmusch Interview" Gil Jawetz, Cinema Gotham / DVDTalk.com, November 22, 2002

"The White Stripes: Getting to know the most interesting band in music today" Jarmusch interviews Meg & Jack White, Interview (2003)

"Stranger Than Average Guys" Jarmusch talks to Butthole Surfer Gibby Haynes

indieWIRE Interview Erica Abeel interviews Jarmusch for indieWIRE at the Toronto Film Fest September 2003

Jim Jarmusch | The A.V. Club Joshua Klein interviews Jarmusch for the Onion, March 15th, 2000

Jim Jarmusch | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias interviews Jarmusch for the Onion, May 19, 2004

Jim Jarmusch Gavin Smith interview from Film Comment, May/June 2009

"The 'Quirky' New Wave" at Alternate Takes The Quirky New Wave, by James MacDowell from Alternate Takes, July 21, 2004

[comment] book review by Ludvig Hertzberg, Rolf Aurich & Stefan Reinecke (eds) Jim Jarmusch (Bertz Vlg, 2001), 304 p. (In German)

Nature Mort & Five Bagatelles two Jarmusch poems published in the Columbia Review, v. 54 no. 1, (Winter 1975), pp. 29-30

"The Garden of Divorce" First draft of an abandoned film script from Cahiers du Cinéma, 400-supplement (Wim Wenders, ed.) (October, 1987), p. 33

"Open Letter to John Cassavetes" Jarmusch letter from John Cassavetes: Lifeworks, Tom Charity (ed), September 2000

Notes on Nicholas Ray, William Burroughs, R. Crumb, Samuel Fuller, Robert Mitchum and Allen Ginsberg, collected from various sources

Jim Jarmusch Picture Gallery

Strange and Beautiful John Lurie website

Jim Jarmusch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

PERMANENT VACATION

USA (75 mi) 1980

Time Out

Jim Jarmusch's 16mm feature debut, made not long after the writer/director graduated from film school, is an oblique study of a young man (Parker) adrift on the streets of New York. As he roams, he has chance encounters with a car thief, a saxophone player and a grizzled war veteran, among others. Learning their stories, he begins to seem more and more isolated. Even his relationship with his girlfriend (Gastil) is coming under strain. Perhaps the film doesn't have quite the charm of its successor, Stranger Than Paradise, but Jarmusch's freewheeling episodic approach to storytelling is already evident.

Permanent Vacation Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

The only Jim Jarmusch feature that qualifies as apprentice work is his first (1980), shot in 16-millimeter for a master's thesis at NYU. Sixteen-year-old drifter Chris Parker plays a version of himself as he walks the decrepit streets of lower Manhattan (the best scene shows him dancing to an Earl Bostic record). Jarmusch has already discovered his milieu, and his interest in both minimalist form and character as plot are already in evidence. But this lacks his characteristic charm, stylistic focus, and feeling for interactions between people, and the slowed-down Javanese gamelan music on the sound track only makes this seem more stodgy and intractable. 80 min.

Permanent Vacation - Archive - Reverse Shot Nick Pinkerton, August 1, 2005

I went to see Jim Jarmusch speak a few years ago, and he seemed like an effortlessly laid-back guy—cool, for lack of a better word. He was presiding over a retrospective of his filmography at the Wexner Center in our mutual home state of Ohio, sharing the stage with Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of a slim BFI Modern Classics volume on Jarmsuch’s movie Dead Man. The two managed a pretty good Mutt and Jeff routine between them: squat, professorially-maned Rosenbaum prodded and praised excitably while the lean, unflappable director shrugged off analysis and goofed for the crowd. Jarmusch had a hipster’s ease about him—I don’t mean this in the pejorative, authenticity witch-hunt sense that’s become so popular lately, just in a kind of relaxed old-school hepcat way. Maybe he was just jetlagged and a little drunk.

Whatever the case, I’ll always remember him as a prototypical cool guy, a semi-stoned musician kind of cool guy—he’s even said that it was lack of musical ability that by default led him to filmmaking. If I felt like playing “spot-the-influence” with his body of work, I think the list would end up heavily favoring bands. I think that some loft jazzy idea of cool is pretty vital to Jarmusch’s essential works—it’s hard for me to separate his movies from the context of some far-out Downtown spiritual heritage leading from Ginsberg through No Wave—and his films feel as much like “Beat filmmaking” as Pull My Daisy (which Jarmusch screened at that same retrospective). He shares with the Beats that same restless exuberance for travel, for foreign places and sounds, spurred by a played-up sense of cultural homelessness; that same sentimental penchant for self-poeticizing pockets of romantic aloneness in the night; that same obsession with fluid, loose-limbed going-with-the-flow. But there’s something in Jarmusch’s flicks that’s okay with me while Kerouac’s insistent ecstasies just irk; maybe it’s the filmmaker’s deadpan drollness and those little moments when he reveals fissures of lack behind the bluff. Like the “bored because they’re boring” travelogue of Stranger than Paradise. Like Yokohama hepcat Masatoshi Nagase in Mystery Train, whose much-voiced preference for Carl Perkins over Elvis Presley belies a serious cool complex, and who we see trying to shrug off sexual ineptitude with a surly front. Like feckless little dork Roberto Benigni enjoying Down by Law’s only happy ending (and woman), while Tom Waits and John Lurie are left to out-slick each other with too-slow handshake disses.

Jarmusch’s little-screened collegiate 77-minute debut feature, Permanent Vacation, is another movie wrapped up in cool, but the humor and circumspection marking those later films is absent. For a protagonist we have Aloysious Parker (Chris Parker), a skinny, swan-necked, out-there kid who dresses like a Fifties jazz sideman and sports a greasy Charlie Feathers ’do. Don’t expend too much energy wondering how this honky wound up with a brother’s name—it’s as natural and Downtown as Lou Reed singing “I Wanna Be Black” or James Chance’s whole “white soul brother” routine. Allie hangs around his cold water flat, musing in voice-over on his complete sense of disconnect. He dances alone while his dour girlfriend smokes the day away, shimmying himself into a fever to the tune of an old 45; he reads a passage of Maldorer out loud, finally dropping off, concluding “I’m tired of this book”; he leaves their bedroom with the mattress on the bare floor (it reminds me of a postcard I used to have of Richard Hell in his apartment) to wander littered alleyways, floating on the vertiginous sax bleat of Jarmusch and John Lurie’s soundtrack. After dropping by to see his mother in the asylum, Allie visits the now-defunct St. Marks Cinema where Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents is screening (the poster in the lobby is on loan from Ray’s widow, Susan), where a gorgeous and unhappy art-school cutie with a sensuous frown half-remembers the movie to him. Finally, he steals a car (a black chick on the street enthuses: “That dude was wild style!”) and uses the proceeds of his theft to hop a boat for Paris—we last see him staring scrunch-faced and blasé off the deck, sporting a shameless white cravat and speaking the title line in a cringingly on-the-nose voice-over thesis statement. Aloysious is one of those incurable wanderers, and the call to move on has come: “That’s it—time to split, time to go someplace else.”

This movie, where it’s been written on, has benefited hugely from knowledge of Jarmusch’s high-profile future; it’s draggy and at times intolerably Amos Poefaced. Where this aloof, zilch-budgeted project does work—for me at least, though this probably says more about my own romantic hang-ups than anything else—is in encapsulating what it could’ve felt like to skulk through a certain time and scene in New York City. The film takes place in a near-deserted wreck of a metropolis, in the aftermath of some vaguely alluded to half-apocalypse (a war with the Chinese, it seems), and the now-legendary squalor of Big Apple on the brink of the Eighties seems appropriately crumbled by “landlord lightning.” Watching Parker vogue past Dresden-like vistas in his thrift-store sports coat, I had to think of the NYC of the compulsively-readable-if-dubiously-reliable punk history Please Kill Me, an ailing city that abandoned its downtown no man’s land to decay and gutsy, pretentious kids. I love that cooler-than-thou Manhattan for those moments when its accomplishments matched the heights of its dandyish self-regard; it’s easy enough to take potshots at some pompous, ectomorphic square from Delaware who moves to NYC and starts a band and lifts his stage name from a 19th-century French symbolist poet—but then just listen to Marquee Moon…

Permanent Vacation is no masterpiece; it’s unpolished, the sound is murky and shittily-recorded, but overall Jarmusch’s wispy tonal filmmaking, including a sequence of Ozu-cribbing, empty establishing shots, is far more sophisticated than, say, Ulli Lommel’s Blank Generation from out of the same scene. The movie’s puffed-up melancholia and unabashed love affair with being a hip, unattached, good-looking young guy is winningly straight up. It’s enamored with the simple acts of turning on a record player, going to a repertory house, or walking around the city and seeing some crazy shit—enamored enough to make a movie out of all that stuff. I like Permanent Vacation for that, even if the flick is so startlingly full of itself; it’s a movie by the coolest guy in his NYU class, and it feels like it, sometimes painfully so.

Permanent Vacation lays out the template for future Jarmusch films featuring cool cat wiggers playing incredulous dress-up in the inner city (John Lurie as a New Orleans pimp? Limey Joe Strummer a blue-collar dude in downtown Memphis?); it’s scoff-able to be sure, but a lack of irony or condescension in these games of racial appropriation helps put the conceit through. The easy dialogue between white and black hipitude that Jarmusch strikes never feels one bit nasty or hands-off like some snide art school brats with removable gold teeth who rah-rah-ed Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s kooky crack habit. Permanent Vacation and the movies that follow it are unmoored drifter’s stories, and, to borrow from Down by Law, they simply realize that the slums can be pretty “sad and beautiful” when you’re just passing through. Tourist Jarmusch keeps his eyes open in neighborhoods where nobody wants to be and, at his blue-note best, in Permanent Vacation and its kin, finds a little bit of the downbeat poetry of a lyric from David Berman’s Silver Jews: “When the sun sets in the ghetto/ All the broken stuff gets cold.”

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz)

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

STRANGER THAN PARADISE

USA Germany (89 mi) 1984 initially a 30 mi short in 1982

Time Out

A beautiful little independent film that paved the way for the more accessible (but perhaps less exhilarating) delights of Down by Law, this three-part road-movie-with-a-difference is shot in long, static black-and-white takes, and features an excellent score that straddles both Screaming Jay Hawkins and Bartok. The story is slight: cool, laconic New Yorker Lurie (of Lounge Lizards fame) reluctantly plays host when his young female cousin arrives on a visit from Hungary. When the girl finally disappears to Ohio to stay with an eccentric old aunt, Lurie suddenly finds himself feeling lonely, and he and his buddy Edson slope off westwards in search of...whatever. It's an ironic fable about exile, peopled by carefully, economically observed kooks who, at least after the first half-hour, are drawn with considerable warmth and generosity. Not a lot to it, certainly, but the acting and performances combine to produce an obliquely effective study of the effect of landscape upon emotion, and the wry, dry humour is often quite delicious.

Stranger Than Paradise | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Jim Jarmusch's amusing independent feature welds European modernism and American sleaze to produce a very workable definition of hip circa 1984. A New York lowlifer (musician John Lurie) reluctantly agrees to share his fleabag apartment for ten days with a newly immigrated Hungarian cousin (Eszter Balint); though they don't exactly hit it off, he's smitten enough to follow her one year later to Cleveland, where he persuades her to join him and his burned-out buddy (Richard Edson) on a depressive joyride to off-season Florida. The film is divided into a series of very brief scenes, each shot in a single long, static take; by the end Jarmusch seems constrained by his own formal ploy, though much of the time the impassive camera serves to echo and underline the absurd underreactions of the characters, which become the film's chief comic principle. Jarmusch's eye for blighted landscape (he films in a grainy black and white) is hilariously sharp, and he sends his performers on their zomboid rounds with a keen sense of rhythm and interplay. 90 min.

Channel 4 Film

Jarmusch made a small, indie-sized splash with what was effectively his feature debut, after the shortish 16mm Permanent Vacation.

The plot, such as it is, has Lurie (leader of the band the Lounge Lizards and co-star of Jarmusch's wonderful Down by Law) as the very languid New Yorker who reluctantly plays host to his quirky Hungarian cousin (Balint). The two of them and Lurie's buddy (Edson) hang out for a while, the tension between them eases a bit, they don't do a great deal, and then she goes off to visit an aunt in the Midwest while the two friends head off for an adventure of their own.

This is one of those films that requires you to adjust yourself to its slow-burn, very dry wit. Gradually the characters, embodied in beautifully understated performances, exert a kind of seductive charm and the film becomes ever more funny and touching. There's something almost courageous about Jarmusch's technique here - scenes come to a natural if quirky end, but the camera refuses to turn away from the inaction, and we are left to enjoy the painful, pregnant silences. This is Jarmusch at, or very close to, his best.

DVDBeaver.com [Trond Trondsen]

I don't recall if it was Stranger than Paradise that ignited my love for the Cinema, or if it was Paris, Texas. I think it was the former. The inital tracking shot of Eszter Balint walking down the street, boombox in hand and blasting Screaming Jay Hawkins - it just made perfect sense to me. I was convinced I had seen the future of Cinema, and that his name was Jim Jarmusch. The next months found me proclaiming the wonders of this Jim on my radio slot. Nobody believed me. And 20 years later, they still don't.

Amongst the funniest movies ever to be put on celluloid, beautifully shot with brilliant construction, this is one immensely engaging film. Not a minute drags on, not a frame is worth skipping. It grabs you by the scruff of your neck, and drags you away on an observers drive through the human soul and the heart of middle america. Be forewarned: the action takes place in the pauses, between the lines, cleverly embedded within a highly satisfying case of three-way anti-communication. Like its kissin' cousin the Haiku, the film lends itself to be completely missed in a blink. The film has its imperfections, to be sure... a bit rough around the edges and slightly anemic - just like an old friend. Still my favorite Jarmusch movie, even after all these years together, warts and all. How many films can you name that make you want to visit Cleveland? I rest my case.

eFilmCritic.com The Ultimate Dancing Machine

Artistically if not economically, the '80s were awfully dismal times for Hollywood, which, after the restless experimentation of the previous decade, reverted to assembly-line moviemaking under the guidance of the Eisners and the Ovitzes and the Spielbergs. It's not surprising that one of the decade's true highlights is this beautifully loping piece of black-and-white minimalism.

Centering on the random escapades of a knockabout trio--Willie (John Lurie), his Hungarian cousin (Eszter Balint), and Willie's pal Eddie (Richard Edson)--STRANGER THAN PARADISE stands out from the plot-driven Hollywood product simply by daring to omit plot. The action, if you can call it that, scrolls from New York to Ohio to Florida (the film was entirely shot on location), but, perversely, nothing really happens. The movie plays out in a minor key--this is its strength. The film's laconic humor depends on the apparent pointlessness; each scene ends with a abrupt blackout, which only underscores, rather effectively, the apparent emptiness of the material. The film may or may not be making a broad comment on culture clash; it's hard to say. Just imagine a feature film composed of "deleted scenes" and you have a sense of the movie's aimless texture.

For this early effort, Jarmusch won the Camera d'Or (Best First Film) at Cannes. There is indeed something distinctly European about his style--introverted, laid-back, deriving more from the Theatre of the Absurd than from American sources. Or perhaps not: STRANGER reminds me of nothing more than the drifting feel of life in the Midwest (Jarmusch is from Ohio). It's difficult to depict banality on film; directors who try usually end by condescending to their subjects--think of Fargo, impressive though it is in many areas. Jarmusch does not. This alone makes STRANGER a major achievement.

Though clearly filmed on the cheap, the movie displays Jarmusch's sure hand at every turn--only one scene, a mistaken-identity bit toward the end, is clumsily staged.

A real charmer, it is--a minor masterpiece, and a rare bright spot from a generally undistinguished period.

Jerry Saravia

Some films only seem to be about nothing. You can say that action pictures try to be entertaining by having a sudden explosion and a wisecrack every few minutes - so much happens in some action films that so little is actually being said. "Stranger Than Paradise" is not an action film. In fact, it is almost inert and has no plot, yet it is chock full of story and fascinating characters. It's just that you do not realize what is happening until the film is over.

Set in New York City, we are quickly introduced to Willie (John Laurie), formerly of Hungary and now living in America, doing very little. He lives in a small apartment, plays poker, sleeps, plays some more poker, goes to the racetrack with his buddy Eddie (Richard Edson), and that is it. It is an empty life until his sixteen-year-old cousin, Eva (Eszter Balint), comes into the picture. She plans to stay with Willie for one week and then stay with her aunt in Ohio. She has her suitcase full of clothes and listens constantly to Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You" over and over again. Willie will not allow her to speak in their native language, and is obviously bothered by her presence. Still, all they do is watch TV and eat TV dinners. Eddie comes over one day and is smitten by her, perhaps because she is at least a new presence in his and Willie's lives. Willie finally accepts her one day when she swipes cigarrettes and groceries - "Hey, you are all right," says Willie. Just when he accepts her, so do we. At that precise moment, Eva has to leave for Cleveland, Ohio, and slowly we sense Willie has lost a bit of his soul too (not that he had much to begin with). There is one marvelous scene where Willie and Eddie stand around in his kitchen, and WIllie looks sullen and dejected and no dialogue is exchanged between the two. We know why.

The film then flashes forward to one year later as Willie and Eddie head to Cleveland to see Eva. She had been working at a hot dog stand, and the aunt, Aunt Lottie (Cecilia Stark), is an expert at poker and wins every hand. Willie and Eddie decide to split to Florida and take Eva with them. The aunt disapproves but there is not much that can be done. When they arrive in Florida, they all stay in some fleabag motel by the beach. Eva is not impressed, particularly when Willie and Eddie leave her alone in the motel room while they go to the racetrack for more winnings. Do these people have any other ways of enjoying themselves?

Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise" seems to be going nowhere but it isn't. It is an examination of three characters and the lives they lead. They do not know where they are headed or where they are going. Jarmusch is also not interested in detailing who they are as much as what they are. This is a film about stagnation and anomie - no direction and no hope and possibly no meaning. The film seems to say that existence has no purpose other than to exist because every place in America looks exactly the same. Eva might have some prospects but we are still left wondering what they might be. These characters have nothing to say yet say so much with their lack of purpose. This is really a study of these characters, following them every step of the way to nowhere. But a miracle does occur at the end that proves life-changing and possibly life-affirming. It is a brilliant masterstroke but you have to be patient to get there.

In his directorial debut, Jim Jarmusch has done something quite unusual - he has observed lives without intruding. He is like a documentary filmmaker who observes and studies. The performances never feel forced and help to make the realism palatable. Musician John Lurie, the funny Richard Edson and the passive Estzer Balint are so natural that you forget you are watching actors. They have lots of terrific moments and all are shot in one take. Jarmusch shows one scene and then cuts to black, another scene and then cuts to black, and so on. This raises the momentum somewhat, and makes us curious to see where it will lead next. Let's just say that the ending brings a satisfaction that is unexpected - it brings a shread of hope to such lonely, directionless people.

"Stranger Than Paradise" has been called a masterpiece in many circles. It has also been categorized as giving independent cinema a bad name. It is not a masterpiece but it is a wonderful slice-of-life of America where everything seems to be the same in every town, as realized by Eddie in one scene. Here, the idea is that the characters are probably bored with their existence and seek to find some enjoyment in it. Eva may have discovered that change is necessary, and Willie and Eddie are still stuck in a stagnant stage without catching up.

I am a fan of films that do not reveal their purpose until the end. A film where the filmmaker trusts his audience and doesn't spell out what his intentions are. "Stranger Than Paradise" is one of those films, and it is as mesmerizing and spellbinding as anything I have seen.

Stranger Than Paradise - Archive - Reverse Shot Michael Joshua Rowin, August 2, 2005

Stranger Than Paradise Rumsey Taylor from Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Extract fromTime and Timing, by Susan L. Feagin

"Life After Paradise" Life After Paradise, by Lynn Geller, including comments from Jarmusch and John Lurie from Spin magazine, 1985

Extracts from Postmodern Modes of Ethnicity, by Vivian Sobchack

digitallyOBSESSED! [Dale Dobson]

STRANGER THAN PARADISE DVD review Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

All Movie Guide [Karl Williams]

Edinburgh U Film Society [Philip Kelley]

"Some Notes on Stranger Than Paradise" the Jarmusch written press release for Stranger Than Paradise

eFilmCritic Reviews iF magazine

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Vincent Canby

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES

USA (6 mi) 1986

User reviews from imdb Author: Filmjack3 from United States

...and what's as fascinating and cool as it is a little disappointing is that the laughs are more of amusement than of the laugh-out-loud sort. While there isn't a whole lot to Wright and Benigni's conversation, what is great about the vignette is how the two find a rhythm, play off each other as though they were the pros of Who's Line Is It Anyway, and it works. The choice and progression of shots is also well timed by Jarmusch with interesting bits of composition via filmmaker Tom DiCillo. The letdown is that the laughs aren't as great as they could've been. Of course Wright is one of the most under-stated of all comics, and Benigni is notorious for being off-the-wall even in his serious movies, though maybe for me something was missing, that a certain bit of un-ease was with them. However, this doesn't stop the short from being a nice little marker on the careers of Benigni, Wright, and Jarmusch, and it's a very good kick-off in the full-length version of the director's latest brew.

An analysis of Coffee and Cigarettes (pdf) a shot by shot analysis, including a Jarmusch interview from Black Snake

DOWN BY LAW A 95

USA Germany (107 mi) 1986

Life is a Limbo Dance, and is a question of what you can get done, and not a question of are you done yet

Probably my favorite Jarmusch film, as it just oozes with wit and personality, a film noir comedy, an extremely inventive 3^rd feature following STRANGER THAN PARADISE, highlighted by some brilliant black and white camera work by Robby Müller. The opening shots of New Orleans with a voodoo soundtrack are simply exquisite, neighborhood rowhouses mixed with elegant stylish mansions, also huge vacant lots under a bare sky. One immediately senses an atmospheric feel for the subject, images of subterranean life, characters on the edge, featuring Tom Waits as an out of work DJ, and Ellen Barkin as his frustrated girl friend who screams and yells and throws records at him, to which he mumbles to himself and says nothing, but when she grabs his shoes, he gets up and pleads, “Not the shoes.” Using a fade to black style, in the next scene, he’s sitting on the streetcorner with his clothes and broken records scattered about, still carrying his new shoes, as the sounds of the blues plays.

John Lurie plays a pimp, who is introduced on the screen in a visual and musical style reminiscent of Cassavetes’ SHADOWS, as a walking bass line follows him as he’s going to meet a girl picked by one of his peers, known only as the “Fat Man,” just for him, calling her “a Cajun goddess,” waiting for him at a hotel where he’s immediately busted for being with a minor. Add to this mix of all people Roberto Benigni, an Italian comedian who maintains his thick accent throughout, who discovers Waits lying in some garbage cans drinking whisky. After singing an improvised blues riff together, a strange man offers them $1000 just to drive a car from one place in the city to another. Despite a moment’s hesitation, they both jump at the chance, only to be arrested for having a dead body in the trunk.

The scene shifts from a seedy world to an equally filthy, seedy prison, complete with hand drawn pictures of naked girls and days marked off on the walls, where Waits and Lurie, two deadpan minimalists stare blankly at the always amazing Benigno, who after a zany Marx Brothers style song discovers a way to escape, a plan that looks right out of THE THIRD MAN, with giant shadows on the wall as they make their escape down the sewer into an open swamp. To the sounds of a lone sax playing over some improvised percussion, this is their traveling music as they head out into the woods for a series of unfortunate disasters, leaving them lost, aimless and adrift, with no idea which direction to go.

Somehow, following what seems like the same path forever, they discover a roadside cafe, Luigi’s TinTop. Playing it safe, they decide to send Roberto inside to make sure the coast is clear, instructing him to let them in if there are no cops. After waiting in the woods for what feels like hours, the two peep into the window where they see Roberto and a woman feasting on chicken and wine. The girl, of course, is from Italy, played by Nicoletta Braschi, Roberto’s real life wife, and the two immediately fall in love while Lurie and Waits stuff themselves on pasta, chicken and wine. Roberto plays a song on the phonograph and slow dances, with Nicoletta’s arms and lips all over him, to the sounds of “It’s Raining” by Irma Thomas: “This is the time I’d love to be holding you tight. Tick Tock, it’s raining.” After spending the night, Roberto decides to stay, while a funky sax takes the other two to a fork in the road where they each go their own way, as Tom Waits sings “Tango Til They’re Sore” over the credits: “Let me fall out the window with confetti in my hair. Deal out jacks or better on a blanket by the stairs. I'll tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past, just send me off to bed forever more.”

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

If you hated the Coen Brothers O Brother, Where Art Thou? for its complete disinterest in character - mocking and condescending to them being their only purpose - and cliche ridden nihilism, you might value Jim Jarmusch's "prison break" film Down By Law. Jarmusch carefully chooses individuals to play versions of themselves, allowing a great deal of creative leeway and improvisation in fully developing the characters rather than casting a big name no actor such as George Clooney to play the main cardboard cutout. Jack (John Lurie) & Zach (Tom Waits) are opposing personalities with the former fashioning himself a stylish pimp, while the latter a beatnik hipster who gets by on oration rather than appearance, that is when the unemployed DJ who was booted out of the house by his woman (Ellen Barkin) bothers to speak at all. These differences also make them too similar, as they narcissistically believe themselves to be the coolest despite their actual status as low rung hoods turned incarcerated flunkies. In Jarmusch people bond and bicker, even meet at all, though coincidence and misunderstanding. Roberto Benigni, who didn't speak English when Jarmusch met him at a film festival, is the glue that holds Down By Law together. The naive happy go lucky sprite whose enthusiasm should be infectious makes clumsy attempts at camaraderie in hilariously broken English, always struggling to keep the peace between the opposing forces he shares a cell with. He seems the most inept due to his presentation, but is the only one who ever gets anything accomplished. Jarmusch's interest lies in the interaction and coexisting of these three disparate convicts. They escape largely only because varying environments bring out more sides of their character, but it's a lucky thing they do since Robbie Muller's cinematography, great in the early and latter portions, flounders in the prison cell. We don't see the "crucial" details (how they escape or Roberto's arrest) or learn the specific details behind Jack & Zach's framing; they don't matter. The film is the characters, the ways they interact and form a tenuous friendship where they have each other's backs even if always at each other's throats. Jarmusch mixes shaggy dog realism with Muller's dreamy black and white photography to create a collision that, combined with the mysterious and inexplicable happenings, results in the timeless otherworldly feeling that he perfected with his masterpiece Dead Man.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs

“It's a sad and beautiful world,” declares Roberto Benigni's character in Jim Jarmusch's DOWN BY LAW. It's his first line in the film, and he says it to Tom Waits' character in a scene that connects the two men before all three of the main characters inexplicably end up in the same New Orleans jail cell. Jarmusch uses a variation of the phrase twice in the interview anthology book Jim Jarmusch: Interviews, once in 1985 when describing the “industrial ugliness” of his Midwest birthplace (Akron, Ohio) and again in 1987 when discussing why he's fascinated with the “problems of language.” Both are themes that appear in much of Jarmusch's work, but are particularly prevalent in DOWN BY LAW, a film about three sort of innocent ne'er-do-wells who wind up in jail but eventually escape into the Louisiana hinterlands. As with many of Jarmusch's films, poetry also plays an important role. Benigni's character mentions Walt Whitman's “Leaves of Grass” during the first half and Robert Frost's “The Road Not Taken” during the second half. (Additionally, the names of John Lurie's and Waits' characters are Jack and Zack, respectively, and at one point, Benigni and Co. break into a vociferous rendering of “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.”) While in jail, Benigni calls it “Leaves of Glass,” a mispronunciation that's reminiscent of their punitive surroundings and reminds one of Jarmusch's elegiacal fondness for gritty locales. The importance of Frost's “The Road Not Taken” is obvious enough; all three men are on a journey of sorts, and at the end, they literally and figuratively must decide which road to take. Benigni's character, who's referred to as Bob by his new friends, calls Robert Frost “Bob Frost,” a fact that amuses Zack and establishes Benigni as the thematic center of the film. (Ironically enough, Benigni spoke no English beforehand, but learned some while filming.) “DOWN BY LAW was something very different for Roberto, and that's what the film is ultimately about, that he is robbed of this basic element of communication,” said Jarmusch in an interview with a Finnish film magazine. “He's very physical, but language is his strength, and it was very challenging for him to try to function with it, he liked that idea.” Benigni also met his future wife, actress Nicoletta Braschi, on set; she plays the owner of the restaurant where the three men find respite. How they managed to find a restaurant owned by an Italian immigrant in backwoods Louisiana is as inexplicable as how these men ended up both in and out of jail together, but Jarmusch would likely assert that it's best left to the imagination. “To me...DOWN BY LAW is almost like a fairy-tale, a more imaginary piece,” Jarmusch further explained in the aforementioned interview. “DOWN BY LAW is more imaginative, since imagination is a theme in the film, Roberto's ability to imagine things, to live in the imagination.”

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

The key statement made by Jim Jarmusch's 1984 masterpiece Stranger Than Paradise, one which defined and resonated through independent cinema for years afterward, was that American films don't have to be defined by propulsive stories, or even by dynamic characters. It was achievement enough simply to evoke a small corner of the world as specifically and flavorfully as possible, preferably one that the audience rarely gets a chance to see. In this respect, Jarmusch's superb 1986 follow-up Down By Law can be described as many things–a minimalist fairytale, a modern twist on '30s prison dramas, an existential comedy–but it's memorable first and foremost as a richly textured look at old New Orleans and the enchanted bayou surrounding it. With music and songs by stars John Lurie and Tom Waits, and stark black-and-white photography by the great Robby Müller (Paris, Texas), the film breaks off from the tourists on Bourbon Street and finds inspiration in the city's decaying underbelly–"a sad and beautiful world," as Waits neatly poeticizes it. Lurie and Waits play two ne'er-do-well lowlifes on parallel tracks; both are framed for separate crimes, and they're assigned a cell together at Orleans Parish Prison, where their similarities naturally lead them to resent each other. Lurie, a small-time pimp who knows nothing about women, sometimes marks time with fantasies about getting out of jail, while Waits, an unemployed DJ, will go several days without saying a word. Jarmusch adds a much-needed comic foil in Roberto Benigni, who reads English from a homemade phrasebook ("If looks could kill, I am dead now") and appreciates the poetry of Walt Whitman and "Bob" Frost. The three tunnel out of prison together, but in the film's most pointed visual joke, they escape to a place that looks dispiritingly familiar at first glimpse. An expansion on Stranger Than Paradise's narrow field of vision and deadpan spirit, Down By Law continues to champion the sort of down-and-out antiheroes that rarely occupy the fringes of other movies, much less take center stage. Jarmusch's schematic plotting and staunch aversion to sentiment could be mistaken as cool detachment, but the film reveals a quiet warmth toward its characters that's perfectly in tune with their reluctant camaraderie. In the 24 minutes of outtakes on this stellar new DVD, Jarmusch's restraint shows in his decision to cut a couple of scenes where Lurie and Waits' mutual affection is more overt, even brotherly. Rather than provide a running commentary, Jarmusch muses on various aspects of the production and themes in an audio-only "Thoughts "Reflections" feature, which is complemented by another, more irreverent Q&A session prompted by questions submitted by fans. Some of the better features are also the most playful, including a series of impromptu phone calls from Jarmusch to his three actors and a hilarious Lurie commentary track over a semi-coherent interview he did for French television at Cannes. ("Oh, no. I don't know who that guy is.") The unpretentious supplements are a refreshing change of pace, not to mention a rare admission that a film speaks well enough for itself.

Washington Post [Rita Kempley]

TOM WAITS, the closest to black a white man can get, rasps his bourbon-soaked blues. The poet with perpetual laryngitis sings till it hurts from a New Orleans curb. The mood is set for the cellblock comedy, "Down By Law."

Jim Jarmusch writes and directs this unconventional, Cajun-country fairytale with its new-Beat lyricism and seminal style. It's like no movie you've ever seen, not even "Stranger Than Paradise," the feature that first brought Jarmusch to the banks of the mainstream. It's a close cousin, with its quixotic cast and off-center dialogue, though more care is evident in the staging of this neo-noir fable.

The look is Peter Gunn Meets Piet Mondrian -- a taut, constructivist film, photographed to perfection by Dutchman Robby Muller, working in black and white for the first time in 20 years. His tracking shots strain your neck for a dizzying look up at the balustrades. The imagery repeats, reverses and reiterates itself. The Louisiana landscapes fly by like wrought-iron nightmares.

Within this strict framework, the droll dialogue sounds almost like comics doing inspired improv. The heroes are like the Three Stooges, but they discuss poetry.

Singer Waits has his first major movie role as dazed deejay Zack, framed for murder and imprisoned uncomfortably with cellmate Jack, a highblown pimp played by John Lurie. Jack has also been framed, for child molestation by a dissatisfied john. Zack is marking time on the wall, which is about one-fourth covered with chalk lines when they are joined by Italian tourist Roberto -- or Bob, as he prefers to be called. Italian comic Roberto Benigni is pure genius in this hilarious role. Like a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Pierre Richard, he is the little clown who could.

Of the trio, the blithely impudent Bob is the only one who actually committed a crime -- he murdered in self defense, with a billiard ball. An avid student of English, he writes down American figures of speech and repeats them in his exaggerated pidgin. "You scream. I scream. We all scream for ice cream," he reads from his traveler's notepad. Soon the prisoners are rioting, rattling their chains and chanting: "You scream| I scream| We ALL scream for ice cream|"

Waits walks on the wild side. His glib drive-time chatter is punctuated by fits of despair, a lovable loser with a mane of messy hair and pointy-toed shoes. Lurie, the big-talking small-timer, is full of bravado as the caged hood with a heart. Neither believes in fairytales.

Thanks to Bob's simple beliefs in movie magic, cliches come true and the jailbirds escape into the bayous -- where the trees prove as confining as bars. Beautifully visualized, symbolically realized, they're like little boys lost in a Grimm Brothers forest.

There's so much to see and imagine, so many twists left to ponder in such a complicated and multi-layered tale -- whether, for instance, the ending is foretold in an early quote from Frost's "The Road Not Taken." Are the characters as carefully framed by the moviemakers as they are by the story villains? The temptation -- and some of the fun -- is to analyze "Down By Law" to death, to chew on it. Hyper-intellectualizing aside, it's pure pleasure for comedy connoisseurs.

Down by Law: Chemistry Set Criterion essay by Luc Sante, July 17, 2012

Color Me Impressed Lee Kline October 28, 2007

Down by Law Polaroids July 17, 2012

Celebrate Your Independents: Eleven Great American Filmmakers photo gallery, July 03, 2014

Down by Law (1986) - The Criterion Collection

Down by Law - Archive - Reverse Shot Nicolas Rapold, August 4, 2005

Camera Eye Evan Pulgino

filmcritic.com Matt Langdon

The DVD Journal | Reviews : Down by Law: The Criterion Collection Dawn Taylor

Down by Law | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

The Lumière Reader (Capsule) David Levinson

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Kevin Clemons)

DVD Times [Raphael Pour-Hashemi]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

Down by Law Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov

Down by Law Blu-ray Review (The Criterion Collection) - DVDizzy.com Luke Bonanno

Down by Law: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the ... Jason Bailey

Criterion: Down By Law, Jim Jarmusch, 1986 | Criterion Close-Up Aaron West

EyeForFilm.co.uk Ben Sillis

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Harral]

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz)

Jim Jarmusch: A Little Nervous Jim Carr from the Boston Globe, September 17, 1986

"From New Orleans to the Coast of Maine" From New Orleans to the Coast of Maine, review by Sheila Benson from the Los Angeles Times October 3, 1986

Jim Jarmusch: Close-Up feature and interview by Leonard Klady from American Film, October 1986

Too Cool for Words Tim Holmes from the Rolling Stone, November 6, 1986

Extract from Independence Within Limits: The Influence of Alternative Cinema on American Independent Feature Filmmaking, by Steve Barnes, from Persistence of Vision 6, Summer 1988

"Jim Jarmusch - Second Time Around" an interview by Katherine Dieckmann from NY Talk

Washington Post [Paul Attanasio]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

Down By Law Blu-ray Tom Waits - DVD Beaver

Down by Law (film) - Wikipedia

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES II

aka: Coffee and Cigarettes (Memphis version)

USA (8 mi) 1989

User reviews from imdb Author: Filmjack3 from United States

One of the shorts from Jim Jarmusch's 17-year compilation devoted to two of the most accepted of habits brings together relations of director Spike Lee, and the then lessor known actor Steve Buscemi. The short pulls off its laughs while being blunt as well as subtle, if that makes sense. The Lee's are stuck in Memphis, and Elvis conspiracizer Buscemi tries out his 'evil-twin Elvis' theory on them. There's not a whole lot to the short, but what it delivers is genuine, and funny. The music as well is placed in with the right gusto. It's hard for me to say if it's my favorite of the vignette's from Jarmusch's mix of caffeine and nicotene laden shorts, however it does strike up as being one of the most memorable.

An analysis of Coffee and Cigarettes (pdf) a shot by shot analysis, including a Jarmusch interview from Black Snake

MYSTERY TRAIN

USA Japan (113 mi) 1989

Time Out

A trilogy of off-beat, Beat-besotted tales, shot in gorgeous colour, set in and around a seedy Memphis hotel. On one level it's about passers-through: a Japanese teenage couple on a pilgrimage to Presley's grave and Sun studios; an Italian taking her husband's coffin back to Rome, forced to share a room with a garrulous American fleeing her boyfriend; and an English 'Elvis', out of work, luck in love and his head as he cruises round town with a black friend, a brother-in-law, and a gun. But on a deeper level, the film is about storytelling, about how we make connections between people, places, objects and time to create meaning, and how, when these connections shift, meaning changes. Only halfway through do we begin to grasp how the stories and characters relate to each other. Happily, Jarmusch's formal inventiveness is framed by a rare flair for zany entertainment: Kudoh and Nagase make 'Far From Yokohama' delightfully funny; Braschi brings the right wide-eyed wonder to 'A Ghost'; and Strummer proffers real legless menace in 'Lost in Space', which at least explains the cause and effect of a mysterious gun shot heard in the first two episodes. Best of all are Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Cinqué Lee as argumentative hotel receptionists hooked on Tom Waits' late night radio show. They, and Jarmusch's remarkably civilised direction, hold the whole shaggy dog affair together, turning it into one of the best films of the year.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Although Jim Jarmusch insists his filmmaking style hasn’t changed, 1989’s Mystery Train says different. Recently brought back into print, the film has a pop sheen that’s been stripped from Ghost Dog and Dead Man (perhaps understandably, given the dead end that was Night on Earth). A trio of stories set in Memphis — which historically speaking deserves the sobriquet Music City a lot more than Nashville does — the film explores the city through three very different sets of eyes: a pair of music-fanatic Japanese tourists, an Italian woman (Life is Beautiful’s Nicoletta Braschi) who’s in town to retrieve her late husband’s ashes, and a gang of aimless locals (including Steve Buscemi and Joe Strummer) for whom Memphis is just another city to get lost in. With each story set in the same day and often in the same hotel, Mystery Train is a tidy masterwork of construction. Though the stories are mostly told in succession, they begin to seep into each other as the movie draws toward its conclusion: A thump made by characters in one story is later heard by characters in another. With appearances by local legends Rufus and Marvell Thomas, as well as the late, great Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (cast deliciously against type as a crafty, sleepy-eyed hotel desk clerk), Mystery Train makes obvious nods to Memphis’ rich musical history, and Jarmusch’s playful sense of pop culture history is on display throughout. (He names one character Will Robinson, then has him perpetually fend off Lost in Space jokes.) As commendable as the moral seriousness and deep thinking of Jarmusch’s recent films are, Mystery Train has a lightness of touch he’d do well to study up on. Just think of Ghost Dog’s clumsy references to Rashomon, and compare with Mystery Train’s Japanese lovers quarreling over the relative merits of Elvis and Carl Perkins. Though it doesn’t strain as hard for meaning, Mystery Train is as much a meditation on great American themes as Jarmusch’s more self-serious films, but it develops meaning instead of asserting it.

Mystery Train | DVD Review | Film @ The Digital Fix Eamonn McCusker

Live in the UK and mere mention of travelling by train will drive even the most environmentally aware of us back to the comfort of our cars. Standing nose-to-armpit, perfectly aware of the perilous state of the track beneath us and limping through the suburbs of London in slam-door rolling stock twenty years out of date, there is little romance in the typical British train journey. Think of the US, Canada or mainland Europe, however, and the romantic imagery of huge express trains cutting through gorges, passing by great rivers, descending from snow-covered mountains or emerging from mile-long tunnels comes immediately to mind - Jack Kerouac both On The Road and coming down from a summer spent fire-watching on Desolation Peak, interailing on an overnight train from Paris to Amsterdam, Kraftwerk singing of the Trans-Europe Express, Johnny Cash pining wistfully for the freedom of movement by train as he rots in Folsom Prison and Elvis Presley singing of the mystery train, sixteen coaches long, that took his girl away.

In Mystery Train, a flea bitten Memphis hotel brings together three stories in one night. The first story sees two Japanese tourists, Jun (Masatoshi Nagase) and his girlfriend, Mitzuko (Youki Kudoh), pull in on a train and visit Sam Philips' famous Sun Studios, where Elvis, among many others, recorded his early hit singles. Sitting in their hotel room, they argue about who invented rock'n'roll - Carl Perkins (him) or Elvis (her) - and drift through the open night of Tennessee. The second story sees Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi), a young widow stopping overnight in Memphis before taking her husband's body back to Italy. Forced to share a room with DeeDee (Elizabeth Bracco), she wakes to find the ghost of Elvis standing in her room. Finally, DeeDee's ex-boyfriend, Johnny (Joe Strummer) holds up a liquor store with the help of his friends Will (Rick Aviles) and Charlie (Steve Buscemi). On the run, they hide out at the hotel for the night until things cool off.

Each story is linked by Cinque Lee as the Bellboy and Screamin' Jay Hawkins as the Night Clerk, checking them in at night, checking them out in the morning. The opening bars of Mystery Train, sung by Elvis Presley, hold onto a steady tick of time going by as Jun and Mitzuko enter Memphis, Tennessee. As with his previous films, Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law, Jarmusch's Mystery Train sees this time pass through daylight hours until his America opens up its unruly nighttime hours, populated by dreamers, drifters and loners, the flip side of the well-oiled corporate America that existed during the day. Jarmusch, who often takes the view of an observer, allows his films to look in on these lives, ones that would normally pass us by and, instead of letting their stories go untold, Jarmusch, if not treating these people as heroic, knows that within a city, it's often only at night that the real characters emerge. In Mystery Train, Jun and Mitzuko might as well be Jim Jarmusch himself, carried effortlessly into a city as a tourist and, in standing wide-eyed on the platform looking around at the heat and dust, sees a new story of America, yet one as old as the country itself, of dreams shattered, of lives begun again and of vast, open country waiting to be explored.

Jarmusch, therefore, tells a story of an America that is both legendary itself and populated by legends. In much the same way as John Ford pulled an American history out of himself, his preferred actor (John Wayne) and the Arizona desert, Jarmusch has a modern American history, one born in diners, hotels, pickups, bars and in the sound of all-night blues stations, much as Hal Hartley has renewed the story once again with hopeless devotion, Martin Donovan and suburban Long Island. In the hands of a director less convinced of his own placing of legends, Mystery Train could have ended up as no more than a kitsch celebration of Gracelands, fried peanut-butter sandwiches and white jump suits. Instead, this portrays the legendary Elvis - decent, hard-working and shimmering in the moonlight like a ghost but, most of all, it celebrates the people who believe in that legend and, in a hotel in which each room has its own picture of Elvis, Mystery Train tells of a place that keeps this legend alive.

Of course, in saying more about a feeling that exists in Memphis, Mystery Train is a wisp of a film, as insubstantial as the ether yet tries to capture the quicksilver of a magical America. The film begins and ends without a clear conclusion to any of the stories, there are no lessons learned and no Paulian conversions take place. Yet it would be uncomfortable if any such thing occurred. Jarmusch sees life as transient and in a single hotel over one night, he demonstrates just how disconnected we are from each other. As the train pulls out the next morning and the characters meet by chance and drift away once more, we are left with the impression that whilst we are only here for a moment, the legend of Memphis and of America rolls on.

Of the cast, not one actor really stands out but, then again, in a film like this, that's not the point when it's in the relationships that one of the strengths of the film lies. Therefore, much of the film's heart, at least that which is not in the director, can be found in the entirely natural interaction between Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Cinque Lee or between Masatoshi Nagase and Youki Kudoh. Joe Strummer does well, given that he's a rock star trying to act and Steve Buscemi is as good as ever as the whiny Charlie.

Yet, this is Jarmusch's film and, though he won't appeal to everyone, there is much to see in Mystery Train regarding one man's vision of a country. Mystery Train certainly will not be for every viewer. Jarmusch has ensured it does not have a conventional narrative but gives the film a sense that we are only dipping into the lives of these people and of the city itself. He does so in a way that less charitable viewers will describe as dull yet I would tend to say lulling. Certainly much of the film is uneventful but there is a beautifully still quality to it that allows the story to shine - not for everyone but recommended nonetheless.

Mystery Train - Archive - Reverse Shot Suzanne Scott, August 5, 2005

"The Filming Luck of Jim Jarmusch" The Filming Luck of Jim Jarmusch, by Steven Rea, from The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday, December 24, 1989

Interview with Michael Wilmington from the LA Times, February 27, 1990

Film's Avant-Guardian Carl Wayne Arrington from the Rolling Stone, March 22, 1990

Strangers In Paradise Scott Cohen from Spin magazine, March 1990

Extract from Modernity and the Vernacular, by Bennet Schaber, Surfaces Vol 1, 1991

Extracts from Reel to Real : Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies, by Bell Hooks, (Routledge, 1996)

short afterword Jarmusch’s afterword to Masayoshi Sukita's photo collection, Mystery Train

Movie Vault [Goatdog]

DVD Verdict (Dean Roddey)

Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen Cox]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

NIGHT ON EARTH B 88

USA France Germany Japan Great Britain (129 mi) 1991

I’m sorry I sound calm. I assure you I’m hysterical.
—Victoria Snelling (Gena Rowlands)

Jarmusch captures a rhythm of the night in five different international cities over the course of a wintry evening and night, following the exploits through the experiences of various cab drivers, where what begins in a whimsical manner in Los Angeles eventually turns colder and gloomier in points further East. Jarmusch expresses plenty of painterly detail with his urban landscape shots, finding lines of palm trees, lone street lamps and solitary business establishments like hamburger stands or used car lots, featuring signs that appear to be art deco eyesores, with plenty of empty spaces and neon-lit streets, creating a sense of isolation and loneliness, using marginal characters whose stories are unfamiliar to moviegoers, continuing themes of displacement and alienation. It’s a collection of five vignettes, where each segment is about 25 minutes long, all taking place on the same evening in different cities around the world, Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. Jarmusch wrote the screenplay in about 8 days and the decision to film in certain cities was largely based on the actors he wanted to work with.

Using Tom Waits songs as bookends, sounding very much like a 1930’s Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil cabaret song, “Good Old World” opens the film with the music before we see anything, Night On Earth (Jim Jarmusch, 1991) - Part 1 YouTube (15:00). The enclosed space of a taxicab allows various speech patterns to develop, each significantly different as the evening wears on, followed by slowly emerging personalities. This is a minimalist theater of non-action, as there are no thrills and spills, little suspense, yet plenty of well-written, personally insightful dialogue that explores the four corners of the earth. For the most part it’s well acted, though on occasion certain roles appear strained. Shot by Frederick Elmes, who worked the camera for three mid-70’s Cassavetes films, also two decades with David Lynch (1970’s to 1990), the opening sequence accentuates the quirky individualism of LA, seen as an artificial wasteland of fast food joints and eccentric personalities, where gum-chewing tomboy Winona Ryder (never comfortable in the role) is an unconventional cab driver continually lost in her own funk, a women who sets her sights so low she may as well not have any ambition at all. When Hollywood casting agent Gena Rowlands (who spends much of the time on a cell phone) gets into her cab, she’s a bit taken aback by her overly aggressive nature, thinking she might be perfect for a difficult role she’s thinking of, exerting youthful angst in nearly every sentence she utters, but Ryder prefers to keep her life uncomplicated, where easy street (in LA) is a life without aggravations or stress.

The transition to the streets of New York City is something of a shock, as the blustery winter cold is a reality check, where Giancarlo Esposito, from Spike Lee’s SCHOOL DAZE (1988) and DO THE RIGHT THING (1989), is a revelation in what is easily the most enjoyable segment, where the guy is a laugh riot throughout, where the sheer force of his continually likable personality dominates the segment. Unable to hail a cab, literally exposing cash dollars to prove he has money for the fare, yet cabs pass by in droves leaving him stranded on the street mumbling to himself. Finally when a clunker arrives in a permanent start and stop mode, we realize this is the taxicab from Hell. Inside is Armin Mueller-Stahl, a driver who can barely speak English, who acts like this is his first day in the United States, looking around the city wide-eyed as if he’s never seen it before. But the guy is such a horrible driver, out of sheer desperation Esposito is forced to take over the wheel. However, on route he sees his sister-in-law, Rosie Perez, otherwise known as the mouth. If Esposito was funny, Perez is hysterical, a non-stop battering ram of verbal insults using the F-word with utter relish, throwing it back in everybody’s face, where this may be the performance of the film, as her energy level is simply off the charts. After awhile, once they’ve settled down, they actually start enjoying one another, where the “real” cab driver may as well be an alien from another planet, as he is so starkly strange and different from them, as are they to him. A running gag on differing perspectives, this segment is a joyous romp, like a wild trip through the wilderness.

Once in Paris, the highly indignant cab driver Isaach de Bankolé (with a band-aid over his eyebrow, something never explained), an émigré from the Ivory Coast, takes offense at the drunk yet blatant stereotypical caricature coming from two black guys in the back seat, supposedly in the employ of highly placed diplomats from Africa, yet their broad-based racial profiling of black Africans borders on repulsive, yet they think it’s hilarious, enjoying every snide remark that continuously belittles others. Isaach contemptuously throws them out of the cab, leaving them on a deserted corner in the middle of the night, refusing to accept any more abuse, eventually picking up Béatrice Dalle, a blind passenger who defiantly wants no sympathy for her condition. When Isaach starts questioning her obvious limitations, suggesting blindness must make her life difficult, she counters with insults about his obvious mental limitations which must deprive him of a fuller life. While their back and forth conversation is testy, it’s always surprising, where both actors find fully realized characters in a brief amount of time, where Dalle especially couldn’t be more delightfully feisty. The two segments of passengers are an interesting contrast, as Isaach grew thin-skinned at the crudely insensitive suggestions of the former, where it turns out he was the instigator of callous remarks with the latter, yet rather than growing furiously temperamental, like Isaach, at what were obviously superficially silly remarks, Dalle deftly handles herself with utter nonchalance, growing annoyed, as if she’s heard it all before, but making fun of his obvious limitations. It’s an interesting play on race and preconceived notions, made all the more appealing by the passing Parisian landscape where the lights over the river look particularly impressive at night.

The sequence in Rome is an endlessly rambling monologue from Roberto Benigni as the cab driver, where easily the funniest part is right at the beginning when in a thick Italian accent he ridiculously attempts to sing the Marty Robbins cowboy song “Streets of Laredo” Marty Robbins - The Streets Of Laredo - YouTube (2:49). This gives you some idea of what kind of loony character he is, where once he picks up a priest, Paolo Bonacelli from Francesco Rosi’s CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI (1979) and Antonioni’s THE MYSTERY OF OBERWALD (1981), he starts right in and can’t stop himself from unleashing an excruciatingly detailed, sexually tinged confession of his earliest childhood sins in graphic detail, revealing every thought, every scent, every gesture, and every glance, a motor-mouthed display of delusional, self-serving confession, making a reality TV show out of it, where it has nothing whatsoever to do with seeking religious penitence, but becomes an exhilarating ride of an endless stream of near masturbatory verbiage. While the priest attempts to dissuade his efforts, suggesting a taxicab is an inappropriate substitute for the church, but Benigni only gets more impressed with the idea of having such supreme luck to pick up an actual priest in his cab, ignoring the obvious medical affliction of his passenger. This is another example of the two being on separate wavelengths, where an actual church official instills no sense of respect, honor, or interior contemplation, but is treated no differently than the whores he chases down on the street, where the driver always remains affable and friendly to everyone, but is too caught up in his own world to ever actually listen or hear what anyone else has to offer, where he will forever remain beholden to himself only, stuck inside a self-deluded prison of his own making, literally a stranger to the world around him.

The sadly poetic final sequence is a brilliant tribute to the Kaurismäki Brothers, set in the frigid snow of Helsinki, where the depressive looking driver is appropriately enough named Mika (Aki’s brother), played by Matti Pellonpää, who appeared in 18 Aki Kaurismäki films and 7 of Mika’s. This final episode carries with it the weight of finality, as it’s literally replete with the miserablism and doom that pervade all their films, turning Helsinki into the literal shithole of the world. A night wouldn’t be compete without listening to a trio of drunken revelers boast about their world of woe, misfits one and all, each one more wretched than the next, where a well-lived life seems to be a collection of heartbreaking experiences, which gives one’s miserablist existence some weight. This miniature perfection of storytelling, which completely captures the darkly comic Finnish state of mind, is told in two segments, where the drunken guys moan and wail about the pitiful life of their third partner (Aki) who is passed out in the back seat, a man much deserving of his semi-conscious state, who is the most drunk after suffering “the worst day of his life,” which they feel is like a badge of honor Night on Earth, Helsinki - Part 1 YouTube (7:32). After hearing their tale of woe, there’s a brief pause, then Mika suggests with complete sincerity, “Things could have been worse.” When the burden of proof is suddenly on his shoulders, he has them crying like babies within minutes, where they’re soon calling Aki’s life “so full of shit…some people have real troubles.” Night on Earth, Helsinki - Part 2 (13:18). With the mood turning on a dime, Jarmusch has captured the essence of the fickle nature of humans, loyal to the very end, until they find someone new. Showing the world with a comic-tinged winter glow, there’s a melancholic sadness about the bleak nature of existence, where misery really does love company, as a new day begins again with Tom Waits bringing home the finale with “Back in the Good Old World” Tom Waits - Good Old World YouTube (9:42).

Night on Earth Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Geoff Andrew

LA, 7.07 pm: chain-smoking Ryder gets movie agent Rowlands in the back of her cab, and inadvertently persuades her she'd be right for a role Rowlands is casting. At the very same time, taxi drivers across the world are also having seemingly inconsequential encounters with passengers: in New York, inept East German exile Müller-Stahl hands over the wheel to young black Esposito; in Paris, Ivory Coaster De Bankolé discusses sight and sex with blind, belligerent Dalle; in Rome, raving Benigni confesses a carnal past to priest Bonacelli; and in Helsinki, melancholy Pellonpää calms three drunks with a tale of infinite sadness. As ever with Jarmusch, as the five sequential stories proceed toward their unexpectedly poignant conclusion, there's a touch of the experimental at play; but it's also a film of great warmth. Character prevails throughout, and with the exception of a miscast Ryder, the performances are terrific. Though it may take a while to get Jarmusch's gist, hang in there; by the time Tom Waits growls his lovely closing waltz over the credits, Jarmusch has shown us moments most film-makers don't even notice.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Alicia Forsyth]

Jim Jarmusch, weirdmeister extraordinaire, is one of the most original directors to come out of that big place across the Atlantic in years as Night On Earth proves.

Night On Earth charts five taxi journeys going on simultaneously all over the world from dusky Los Angeles to dawn breaking in Helsinki. The what-is-happening-to-different-people-at-the-same-time concept is one that Jarmusch had used previously in Mystery Train but I think Night On Earth is a more satisfying and interesting film largely because its content is more varied. While Mystery Train was Memphis bound, Night On Earth travels from Los Angeles to New York, Paris, Rome, finishing off at Helsinki, and making full use of the locations on route with atmospheric shots of the cities at night set to the coolest of cool music. The international locations also mean that Jarmusch used an international cast uncovering many very unknown and very talented actors on the way. Perhaps what is most brilliant about the film is the way that the mood of the film can change so quickly and yet so effectively. At points, Night On Earth reaches almost unrivalled points of hilarity such as the Roman taxi driver's confession of guilt of his adolescent love for Lola the sheep and his sexual predilection for pumpkins; while by contrast it is almost impossible not to be moved to tears by the tragic story told by the Finnish taxi driver. Even within one scene, Jarmusch switches the comic atmosphere of for instance Helmut and Yo Yo's conversation in New York to a frightening, tragic mood as lonely and confused Helmut drives off naïvely through the threatening streets of New York. All this talent and a brilliant Tom Waits soundtrack - what more could you want?

"A film of great warmth... Jarmusch has shown us moments most film-makers don't even notice" - Time Out

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

Jim Jarmusch's "Night on Earth" is a collection of five sketches set simultaneously in five different cities -- New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome and Helsinki -- during the same evening. Jarmusch calls the film a "comedy in five sections" with each "focusing on the brief relationship between a taxi driver and his/her passenger(s) ... sharing the space of a car interior, suspended between fixed destinations."

It's a lovely idea, and if the individual sections of the film were more substantial, or if we sensed some connection between them, some governing principle, it might have resulted in a delicate, poetically funny movie. Unfortunately, Jarmusch's lackadaisical minimalist aesthetic and his chronic lack of energy are the only unifying elements.

Jarmusch has stated that the "beauty of life is in small details, not in big events" -- an easy enough statement to agree with -- but as a chronicler of the trivial and commonplace, he is singularly inattentive. The small details he captures aren't particularly beautiful or telling or distinctive; they're merely small. Nor do they feel particularly anchored in life. Instead, they appear to be exactly what they are -- scenes from a movie -- but with all the weight and dramatic push drained off.

Jarmusch's style turns us into an audience of Peggy Lees; we keep asking ourselves, "Is that all there is?" When Winona Ryder picks up Gena Rowlands at the airport in Los Angeles, the sun is setting, but Jarmusch isn't particularly attuned to the personality of the city at dusk. Nor are the characters given enough time to establish a hold on us. Just as we become interested in them, the vignette is over, and they are gone.

Even though this first section is the film's most engaging -- at least we have the desire to know more -- the characters evaporate in our minds the instant they leave the screen. In the New York section, in which Armin Mueller-Stahl, as a hopelessly inept driver from Eastern Europe, gives Giancarlo Esposito a ride home to Brooklyn, the characters seem to vanish even before the segment is finished, especially after they pick up Rosie Perez, who as Esposito's sister-in-law simply reprises her performance from "White Men Can't Jump."

Remarkably, the blandness appears intentional. Jarmusch doesn't seem to be driving at anything here; he's just cruising around, hoping that the behavioral business the actors provide will sustain our interest. The segments that feature Beatrice Dalle and Isaach De Bankole in Paris and Roberto Benigni and Paolo Bonacelli in Rome are resolutely offbeat, but just as unemphatic. They just lie there.

The last vignette is set in Helsinki, and at least the cast of Finnish actors -- whose faces are familiar from "Leningrad Cowboys Go America" -- provides some laughs. But by this point our senses are already numbed from what has come before. If the picture is designed to open our eyes to the hidden miracles of everyday life, it fails miserably. You get the feeling that Jarmusch is simply too hip to be impressed; his concept of cool is like a pair of shades -- it lays a dulling filter over everything.

kamera.co.uk - film review - Night on Earth directed by Jim Jarmusch ... Adrian Gargett

"Life has no plot, no real conclusion"
(Jim Jarmusch)

Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (1991) is a trans-global taxicab comedy which strings together five different vignettes in five different cities, each observing in acerbic and penetrating detail the singular relationship between passenger and driver as they speed towards their destination.

Juxtaposition is the crucial structuring device in the film as Jarmusch records one moment in one night in five locations Los Angeles, New York, Rome, Paris and Helsinki. In each of the cities the narrative unfolds in a taxi; this both captures the transitory condition of urban experience - unpredictable encounters and journeys - and foregrounds what is usually regarded as insignificant detail, the everyday is central to this film. In interview, Jarmusch emphasizes this point:

"So in a way the content of this film is made up of things that would usually be taken out. It's similar to what I like about Stranger than Paradise or Down by Law, the moments between what we think of as significant" (Interview with Peter Keogh - 'Home and Away' Sight and Sound 2(4) 1991: 9)

Enterprisingly cast throughout, the quintet's opening L.A. story features Winona Ryder as an indomitable, single-minded cabbie deeply unimpressed by high-powered Hollywood agent Gena Rowlands, while Armin Mueller-Stahl tackles a lighter role as an amiable East German immigrant cabbie being given a lesson in Brooklyn street wisdom by Spike Lee veteran Giancarlo Esposito in the New York segment. The Paris section show-cases Beatrice Dalle as a blind girl who "opens the eyes" of prejudiced driver Isaach de Bankole ( who first appeared in Claire Denis post-colonial study Chocolat); Rome is represented by Roberto Benigni and the kind of scabrous cabbie's tales which give his priestly fare (Paolo Bonacelli) a heart attack; and we end the evening in Helsinki - where else? - with a drunken cab-full of Aki Kaurismaki regulars making hilarious efforts to escalate the dramatics of each other's tragedy-laced chronicles of Scandinavian gloom.

The basic connection is the relationship between driver and passenger that each story explores, though the segments are also linked in other, less obvious, ways. As with the best short stories, the segments are less about plot - very little actually happens - than they are about character, dialogue, and mood. Jarmusch is adroit in controlling these elements, and clearly has an intuitive rapport with his cast - who bring the proceedings to three-dimensional life, mining the script for humour and coaxing social and political overtones from Jarmusch's sparse dialogue. All this is perfectly complemented by Jarmusch's moody evocation of the five night-shrouded urban settings.

Jarmusch is not interested in making each section into a definite "short-story" with that obvious configuration. There are no conclusions. The concentration is on character and the relationships that unfold, in the Los Angeles piece, between a tattooed, gum-chewing, chain-smoking young driver and an elegant executive who wants to cast her in a movie. "I've got my life all mapped out," says Corky (Winona Ryder), who hopes to eventually qualify as a mechanic. "There must be lotsa girls who want to be in the movies. Not me." The film doesn't pass judgement, it simply reports an opinion.

To accentuate the characterization of the urban environment as "other", it appears that Jarmusch reproduces and proliferates images of outsiders/immigrants/women as in-excess of the city these are then focused to detail the narrative's otherness. For example the narrative fluidity of the film rotates upon endless loops as one immigrant driver melts into another and as Rosie Perez mutates into Beatrice Dalle. No one has a secure, safe place in Jarmusch's city - and there is no desire or nostalgia for such a place - there is no sense of ownership of the cityscape, hence the concentration on immigrant identity and women. Night on Earth is an offbeat, original examination of concepts of home, belonging, solitude and strangeness. As in previous films Jarmusch continues his structural approach to narrative by replaying essentially the same story in different locations. Once again, his intuitive feeling of cultural difference and his operating outside of the "us" and "them" dichotomy is reflected by a narrative construction that emphasizes simultaneity and the notion that there is no single experience or perspective. The abstract quality of Night on Earth becomes apparent as the recurring framework is animated by new details and nuances. What energizes the film is the tension and myriad associations evoked in the continuous sequence of repeating slightly varied narratives.

Although shot in high-tone colour like its Memphis-set predecessor Mystery Train, Night on Earth's audacious Tom Wait's soundtrack and energetic "mugging" courtesy of maestro Benigni ensure that echoes of writer-director-producer Jarmusch's deftly understated and distinctively monochrome early works resonate throughout. Here the diligently positioned static shots and chunks of black screen may be absent, but as Jarmusch's formal approach diversifies, his powers of human insight have appreciably widened in scope. Part fairy-tale, part-noir mood-piece, Night on Earth both celebrates and derives comedy from its characters' eccentricities. If humour plays a greater part in counteracting the tendency towards style than in earlier films, Jarmusch nonetheless remains true to an experimental aesthetic, with innovative editing, stories deprived of conventional climatic action, and moody or hyper-animated mannerisms that continually undercut "realism". Jarmusch's films are constructed from scenes that are usually neglected in conventional narrative structure. He has explained in interview: "Say a guy breaks up with his girl over the phone and he decides to go to see her and we cut from him leaving his apartment to him entering hers." That's missing the essential elements according to Jarmusch. He wants to show the man on the way to her apartment, show "how he was feeling, what he did and how he got there." (Interview with Geoff Andrew - Guardian Mon. November 15 1999)

Jarmusch focuses on miniature, transitory exchanges between eccentric characters to comment on themes such as stardom and "reality" in Hollywood, the cultural density of the New York population, preconceptions regarding disability, and morality. In its complete arc the film balances between serious contentions in its juxtaposition of a polymorphic arrangement of the elements of reality and the mental dynamic one perceives as an undercurrent, and light-heartedness, as it elides from one intriguing detail to the next.

As always, in Night on Earth, it is the unpredictable and individualistic characters, the mundane yet bizarrely striking situations, that differentiate a Jarmusch film - as well as the soundtrack, constantly beautifully restrained and effective. There is Jarmusch's customary unconventional absurdity apparent in the New York instalment, yet the poignant comment on cultural blinkeredness in the Paris piece and the extraordinary way in which the closing Finnish drama both acknowledges Kaurismaki's individualistic style and achieves a deadpan, funny and simultaneously deeply emotive atmosphere, make Night on Earth Jarmusch's most intelligent, sensitive and complete film.

Jarmusch's films share a visionary, insightful quality, while maintaining an understated honesty and lightness. Jarmusch's attitude to narrative comes across as defiantly non-dramatic and non-explanatory. Although a student with Nicholas Ray whose work principally espouses direct, explicit and literal dramaturgy, Jarmusch's aesthetic is oblique, vague and full of hard-to-decode allusions. However, he displays concentrated insight as the idiosyncratic illustrator of credible characters who are usually relegated to the margins of mainstream movies, and a film-maker of refreshingly hybrid movies that resist conventional categorisation. His visual sense is superb, his control of atmosphere strong, and greater recognition has not compromised his highly individual style.

"I consider myself a minor poet who writes fairly small poems. I'd rather make a movie about a guy walking his dog than about the emperor of China."
(Jim Jarmusch)

Night on Earth: Rome—Superficial Impressions about Jarmusch Criterion essay by Goffredo Fofi, September 03, 2007

Night on Earth: New York—Jim Jarmusch, Poet Criterion essay by Paul Auster, September 03, 2007

Night on Earth: Last Stop, Helsinki Criterion essay by Peter von Bagh, September 03, 2007

Night on Earth: Los Angeles—Passing Through Twilight Criterion essay by Thom Andersen, September 03, 2007

Night on Earth: Paris—Talk the Talk Criterion essay by Bernard Eisenschitz,September 03, 2007

Night on Earth (1991) - The Criterion Collection

Five Easy Pieces [NIGHT ON EARTH] Jonathan Rosenbaum, May 15, 1992

Extract from The people in Parentheses: space under pressure in the post-modern city, by Elisabeth Mahoney, in David B. Clarke (ed.), The Cinematic City (Routledge, 1997)

Extract of an interview with Night on Earth cinematographer Fred Elmes, featured in "Principal Photography: Interviews with Feature Film Cinematographers" by Vincent LoBrutto (Praeger, 1999)

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

Night on Earth - Archive - Reverse Shot Joanne Nucho, August 6, 2005

Jim Jarmusch – Night On Earth (1991) Sporadic Scintillations

Night on Earth: Criterion Collection | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

DVD Talk - Criterion edition [Jamie S. Rich] also seen here: Criterion Confessions

Night on Earth : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Glenn Erickson, Criterion Collection, also seen here: Night on Earth (1991) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com

PopMatters [Emma Simmonds]

Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

DVD Verdict- Criterion Collection [Bill Gibron]

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

Jon Danziger - digitallyOBSESSED! Criterion Collection

NIGHT ON EARTH: THE CRITERION COLLECTION - DVD review Christopher Long from DVD Town

Night on Earth | Film at The Digital Fix Mark Davis

Pure Film——Night on Earth Edwin Jahiel

thomasl@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (thomasl)

EyeForFilm.co.uk Ben Sillis

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Night on Earth Review (1991) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

Night On Earth | Vancouver, Canada | Straight.com Ken Eisner

Welcome to Emanuel Levy » Night on Earth from Jarmusch

Mark R. Leeper

Brian L. Johnson

Details - Tripod The Passenger, Jill Feldman interview with the director from Details, May 1992

Film 4.com [Ali Catterall]

TV Guide Online

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Night On Earth - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Night on Earth - Review/Film Festival - Movies - The New York Times Vincent Canby

DVDBeaver Criterion DVD review [Gary Tooze]

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES III

aka: Coffee and Cigarettes (somewhere in California)

USA (12 mi) 1993

eFilmCritic Reviews The Ultimate Dancing Machine

Two guys walk into a bar--that's the plot. Not much of a plot, you have to admit, but when the two guys are Tom Waits and Iggy Pop and the director is Jim Jarmusch, the results are well worth watching.

Winner of the Palme d'Or for Best Short Film (whatever that's worth), this is 12 minutes of prime Jarmuschian minimalism, filmed in B&W. Waits and Pop, playing themselves, have a Pinteresque exchange at a diner "somewhere in California," with the former becoming testier by the minute and the latter trying fruitlessly to win him over. They talk, in an aimless way, about coffee and cigarettes. Like a well-done short story, the film is economical and punchy, making its wry point with no wasted effort.

This is the third, and the most recent, in a series of related films that Jarmusch has been working on for years. I for one hope he can keep it going.

An analysis of Coffee and Cigarettes (pdf) a shot by shot analysis, including a Jarmusch interview from Black Snake

DEAD MAN A 98

USA Germany Japan (121 mi) 1995

The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

―William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793

From the lower register guitar riffs from Neil Young that play throughout the film, Dead Man - Neil Young (Guitar Solo #1) - YouTube (5:18), that in fact punctuate each scene, the secret to understanding this film is realizing that each character remains true to themselves. Johnny Depp plays the same character he played on his TV debut on 21 Jump Street, a straight arrow who hasn’t a clue what he’s dealing with, as the world around him is immersed in nightmarish greed and corruption as initially prophesied by a coal-faced Crispin Glover, a coal-stoker on the long train ride from Cleveland to somewhere out West, beautifully shot in Black and White by Robby Müller, where his preminiscient ramblings are not taken seriously and also represented by Robert Mitchum in his oddball last role, a capitalist megalomaniac who pulls out all stops in going after Depp, an East coast tinhorn who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was nearly murdered by Mitchum’s son, who with one shot killed a young saloon girl and put a bullet lodging next to Depp’s heart. Depp, firing blindly, finally shoots the murderer and steals his horse before escaping out of town where he awakes the next morning to a full-dressed Indian (Gary Farmer) with a knife to his heart, scraping out what he could from the bullet but claims the rest is too close to his heart, calling him a “dead man.” When Farmer, who calls himself Nobody, discovers Depp’s name is William Blake, he is overjoyed, as he’s actually familiar with his art and poetry and joyfully nurses him back to health. Most of the film is shot with the two of them on horseback featuring mystical poetic musings from Nobody, with hired guns following, cutthroats paid by Mitchum, who doesn’t care if Depp is returned dead or alive, but he wants his stolen pinto pony returned. On the run, Depp and Farmer on horseback attempt to elude the pursuers, eventually increasing to untold numbers as wanted posters keep appearing out of nowhere bringing all number of wannabe’s into of the forest for the reward money.

Nobody’s personal story is interesting, a parable for untold Indian history which nearly nobody’s ever heard, but it contains horrific truths about growing up Indian, in this case by a man who was rejected by both the Indian and the white world, so he wanders alone as an outcast fending for himself, pretty much despising or at least mistrusting both cultures, but thoroughly assimilated into Indian lifestyle where he wears the clothes proudly and finds white people ridiculously stupid. As bounty hunters lurk ever closer, Depp is at first an astonishingly poor shooter, but in time he becomes acclimated to the ways of the West, always speak with a gun first and ignore the myths, the legends and the lore which are outright lies most of the time, but if people have enough money to print enough copies of the myths, people will start believing it. Much of the dialogue between the bounty hunters is absurdly ridiculous, but that’s the point. Their very lives depend on the spreading of Western lore, most all of it fabricated, which is how they were hired in the first place, by reputation, and why they were employed to carry out a job under false pretenses, spreading the word that Depp was a double murderer. As they wander through the forest, everyone’s true nature is revealed.

Told through a series of vignettes, each fading out to black, where the lone sound of the guitar rhythmically adds tone and coherence, Farmer’s character takes on greater significance as he’s clearly the only one with practical knowledge of how to survive, who constantly generates wisdom and humor while Depp is passively subdued by his deteriorating health. As Depp was something of a blank piece of paper when he entered the West, a novice, completely inexperienced, so Farmer is the film, as he tells a story few are familiar with, using poetic references from William Blake’s poems to offer insight into the human condition. Yet he’s also just a man, but he’s a good man. As Farmer knows Depp is already dead, with bad men following him who want to bring him to a bad end, both good and evil are fighting for his soul where Farmer’s singular purpose seems to be preparing Depp’s fate for the afterlife, whether he’ll get a dignified send-off or die an ignominious death. The indiscriminate shooting of buffalo out the train window and the shooting of humans becomes a prominent theme, as every day added to Depp’s life is realized only due to his sudden prowess in the use of a gun. As the sheer look of the forest in the film changes from a gorgeous ride through the bleached out white of birch trees to the immense grandeur of the enormous trees of the Pacific Northwest, Depp moves ever closer to his fate. The final sequence in the Indian village is nearly wordless, yet ponderous and ever so real, using a reconstructed village of the Makah Indian Reservation from Neah Bay on the Olympic Peninsula, one of the few tribes that exists in near exclusivity protected by the harsh rocky landscape and the isolation of the ocean, whose Pacific coast totems, sculpture, longhouse, and art designs profoundly add to the aesthetic. No explanation is needed to this near wordless finale that demonstrates a complete lack of artifice and plays out exclusively in mystical Indian imagery.

Dead Man (1996) Gino Moliterno from Senses of Cinema (excerpt)

With Dead Man, this satire of American culture was making a quantum leap to take on the features of a fully-fledged, passionate, moral denunciation. The target in the earlier films had largely been that vacuousness at the heart of American "throwaway" popular culture, but in Dead Man the object of Jarmusch's critique seems to be nothing less that the very existence of America itself, to the extent that this existence has been clearly predicated on the wholesale destruction of the land and the cultures of native American peoples.

Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs)

Jim Jarmusch does a Western, and it's deeply weird, revisionist and reverential. Johnny Depp is William Blake, a fancy-pantsed accountant who leaves Cleveland for the West, seeking a new life. The opening sequence sets the film's complicated tone and unusual rhythm: after some lengthy minutes on a train, Crispin Glover shows up and starts talking to Blake. Read: Blake is in some surreal trouble now. Arriving in the town of Machine, he finds that the job he's expecting (at Robert Mitchum's metalworks factory) doesn't exist, and he's soon charged with murder and dying of a bullet wound in his chest. Tracked by three assassins (including the dynamic duo Lance Henriksen and Michael Wincott) and various lawmen, Blake is nursed by a Native American who goes by the name of Nobody (Gary Farmer). Their spiritual yet ironic relationship (Nobody says he thinks Blake is the Romantic poet, 50 years dead already) takes the form of a literal journey across a devastatingly beautiful landscape, enhanced by Robby Muller's rich black and white cinematography and Neil Young's evocative lone-guitar score. It's a subtle and often fierce meditation on the West as U.S. mythic concept. It's not as if John Ford hasn't been here before (see, for instance, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or The Searchers), but Jarmusch's inventive, intimate twistedness makes the trip more insightful and less compromised than Eastwood or Costner's versions of same.

Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Renshaw]

For years, Jim Jarmush was more of a zookeeper than a filmmaker. His standard set-up was putting characters in a limited space – the New Orleans jail of Down By Law, the Memphis hotel of Mystery Train, the taxicabs of Night on Earth – and watching with almost clinical detachment as they interacted. As frequently funky and fascinating as his character studies were, they often felt stunted by their nonchalant fatalism. There wasn’t much room in the Jarmusch universe for conflict or personal growth.

It took an experiment in mythology – 1996’s Dead Man – for Jarmusch to bust out into the open air, resulting in what may be his most complete film. His setting is the Wild West of the late 1870s, where a young accountant named William Blake ( Johnny Depp) has journeyed from Cleveland for a job in the frontier town of Machine. He discovers, however, that the man who supposedly hired him ( Robert Mitchum) is a lunatic, and the job is no longer available. Stranded and penniless, Blake winds up in a tragic one-night stand that leaves him with a potentially fatal bullet wound and a trio of hired killers on his trail.

The bulk of Dead Man follows Blake – accompanied by an outcast Native American called Nobody ( Gary Farmer) who believes Blake is the reincarnated spirit of his literary namesake – on a wandering journey through the American wilderness. Jarmusch fills that quest with a series of bizarre encounters, letting his protagonists cross paths with a cannibalistic bounty hunter ( Lance Henriksen), a Scripture-quoting, cross-dressing fur trapper (Iggy Pop), and a casually racist missionary/trading post operator ( Alfred Molina). With his typically wry sense of humour, Jarmusch turns Dead Man into Dances With Wolves as it might have been filmed by the Coen brothers.

What gives Dead Man a surge of resonance is Jarmusch’s deft juggling of elements straight out of a Joseph Campbell text. Blake is the classic questing hero – recently orphaned, he is stranded in a strange land after slaying the son of the local king and makes his way guided by a wise mentor. Depp’s unnatural prettiness allows him to make the transition from boy to man through simple facial expression, while Jarmusch weaves the Greek and Judeo-Christian heroic narrative into the mythology of the American West. Blake becomes an avenger of transcendental truth over the primitive brutality of his era.

The whole thing might have felt like a scholarly game if not for the dazzling atmosphere. Robby Müller’s black-and-white cinematography has a surreal crispness, adding texture to scenes that don’t seem to be taking place in the real world; Neil Young adds a mournfully evocative instrumental score. There’s nothing obvious about Dead Man, which somehow manages to be playfully entertaining and philosophically engrossing at intervals without ever lacking cohesiveness. Always a filmmaker for a particular taste, Jarmusch takes a creative leap with Dead Man, creating a hypnotically compelling film universe fuelled by a little fresh air.

Slant Magazine [Zach Campbell]

Dead Man is likely Jim Jarmusch's most stunning achievement. A period piece, and what's more, one that draws directly upon a genre (the Western), the film stands apart from Jarmusch's other work categorically as well. Johnny Depp plays William Blake, who ventures westward by train to the dystopian town of Machine in search of work. While there, he meets Thel (Mili Avital), whose boyfriend (Gabriel Bryne) catches them in bed. The violence that ensues causes Blake to scramble across the wilderness with a bullet in his chest. Pursued by savage bounty hunters, his journey is an extended death scene—he avoids one meeting with mortality before encountering another.

Depp's Blake doesn't quite grasp the coincidence of his name, which is pointed out to him when he befriends Nobody (Gary Farmer), a Native American familiar with the works of Blake the poet, a fact that instigates a stream of droll comedy. More than minor confusion, though, Dead Man situates Depp's Blake as an ignorant everyman, unaware of his namesake just as Nobody is unaware that this Blake is not the same as that Blake. While Jarmusch undoubtedly got a few kicks letting his audience groove on the joke, he's up to something deeper and more poignant—and he doesn't let a viewer sit lazily from his or her more omniscient vantage point.

Blake encounters a world of danger and decay rather than promise and freedom—the significance of Jarmusch's particular brand of hellishness is important. In 1893 (exactly a century after Blake the poet printed his America a Prophecy) the historian Frederick Jackson Turner advanced a tremendous and controversial thesis about American history. Its essential thrust was this: America's frontier was a vital factor in its national character, and that the frontier had run out. (This offered a historical context for the United States' swift and subsequent interventions into the Philippines, Central America, and the Caribbean during the turn of the century.) Dead Man suggests that the West was indeed vital, but was a place of death rather than growth. Instead of an optimistic assessment of virgin land and opportunity, the film presents the spread of what one might call "white blight," the viral meanness and ignorance spread by European industrialism onto the lands of the lands of the indigenous tribes. That Jarmusch respects but thankfully falls short of romanticizing his Native American characters is one of Dead Man's more singular points of interest.

Like most great Westerns, Dead Man holds the American West and its (white) inhabitants up to close scrutiny, and in this sense its radicalism surpasses virtually every earlier example. While didacticism is not Jarmusch's goal, there is something instructive about Dead Man's critique. The film's power is impossible to extrapolate from its commentary on history and society. One cannot overlook its acknowledgment of environmental degradation associated with progress, its depiction of an indigenous people's ambivalence to whites and their encroachment, and its nuanced grasp of violence, particularly gun violence (not a simple "anti-gun" op-ed, but a beautifully literal rendition of firearms' deployment by people in moments of passion, stupidity, and cold anger).

And yet I don't mean to suggest that Dead Man is above anything else a sociopolitical screed: it is this in conjunction with its literary touchstones, its narrative push, and its formal rigor. Jarmusch applies his low-key tone here as in his previous films, so that the scenes and characters (eccentric and sometimes opaque) acquire a peculiar sense of hazy reality that punctures any notion of the heroic West, while at the same time existing on a suggestive, oneiric plane. When Blake rides the train early in the film, deliberately paced blackouts provide texture for his drifting in and out of consciousness. Each time he awakens, further into the frontier than before, he sees a rowdier bunch of passengers. Neil Young's guitar on the soundtrack parallels the visual and dramatic program, which is hypnotic yet discordant.

The ultimate goal for Depp's Blake is one of consciousness. He must come to an understanding of his own life-and-death as he lumbers through the American West like a wounded animal in search of solitude. His existence in the West is a veritable transition from Innocence to Experience. Eventually he must resign himself to his fate and, as Blake put it in his "Book of Thel," he will "gentle sleep the sleep of death." More than simply being critical of a West that great artists have already attacked for decades, Jarmusch is interested in suggesting something distinctive and otherworldly, where Blake's visionary poetry and New York hipsterism might commingle in a setting alien to them both. He tears down one mythopoetic image of West and in its place resurrects his own, which valorizes nothing so much as the agonizing flirtation one has with an enlightenment that might never come.

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

I had the opportunity to watch Dead Man with its director himself, Jim Jarmusch. Of course, he was sitting all the way across the room in a special roped-off section, and there were several hundred other people in the room, and it was the San Francisco International Film Festival. But still, sometimes during the film I sat there and wondered, "what was Jarmusch thinking just then?", and he wasn't thousands of miles away. He was in the room with me.

Dead Man is a very poetic film that has some plot, but what matters most is the telling, and not the details. Still and all, if you don't want to know about this film, don't read any further.

The plot concerns a young accountant named William Blake (not the poet), played by Johnny Depp, who journeys to the town of Machine to work at Dickinson's Metal Works. When he gets there, his job has already been filled. He spends a night with a local girl, who turns out to be Dickinson's son's fiancee. The son (played by Gabriel Byrne) shows up and shoots the girl and Blake. Blake shoots him back, steals a horse, and hits the road. Dickinson hires a trio of killers to go after Blake and bring back the horse. He wakes up to find a Indian named Nobody (Gary Farmer) digging in his chest with a knife. Nobody informs him that the bullet is lodged next to his heart and that he is a dead man.

The rest of the movie is a dreamy journey through the woods, following Blake and Nobody (who mistakes him for the poet) going no place in particular. Basically, yes, Blake is going to die, and the movie is his journey toward that death. Along the way, he finds many things. Not quite redemption, but other things, compassion, violence, faith. A lesser director would have presented this material as the same, tired old tale it is (outlaw on the lam), but here it's a visual, poetic journey not unlike Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

The movie is written and directed by, of course, Jim Jarmusch, whose feature films up till now have all been made up of self-contained episodes in some form or another. (His debut Stranger Than Paradise (1984) was actually began as a short film that he added onto.) This is his first attempt at a feature narrative. But at the same time, it does not follow the rules of narrative. It plays a little like some of Godard's experimental works, such as Pierrot le Fou.

Even though I've mentioned Francis Coppola and Jean-Luc Godard, Dead Man is completely a product of Jarmusch's singular vision. Some of his benchmarks are here, fading to black between each scene, crisp, black and white photography. But, he tries new things here as well. As odd as his earlier films are, they are all rooted in reality. Dead Man takes place in a dream state. To drive this home, we see several shots of Blake falling asleep or passing out from pain, hunger or exhaustion. By the end of the film, the images we see are dazed and dreamy.

Although the film is downbeat, we get several scenes of Jarmusch's quirky humor (the word "quirky" seems to have been invented for him). We get Robert Mitchum, stealing the first part of the movie in a bit part as Dickinson. Lance Henriksen plays a killer who utters maybe five words in the entire movie. John Hurt plays a whacked out accountant in Dickinson's office. Iggy Pop plays a strange mother-type character in drag out in the woods, with Billy Bob Thornton ("I can't drink whiskey like a usta could") as one of his cronies. And if that isn't enough, we get Crispin "what-am-I-doing-walking-the- streets-among-decent-people" Glover in one scene. Johnny Depp himself adds another oddball character to his charming canon. He is a wonderful actor who completely covers himself up in his parts, which can be both amusing and limiting. At one point in the movie, he is on a train, wearing a funny hat, filmed in black and white, and he reminded me of Buster Keaton, just for a moment. (Very high praise, coming from me.) These characters seem to exist to support Jarmucsh's universe rather than to startle the viewer, such as in David Lynch's Wild at Heart.

Dead Man is scored by Neil Young, who lets loud, amplified electric guitar strains settle in among the pictures. The music is limited, but effective in the same way that Ennio Morricone's music works for Leone's westerns, and also in the way that Dick Dale's "Misirlou" works in Pulp Fiction. The movie is photographed in black and white by the great cinematographer Robby Muller, who always brings a grainy, independent spirit to any movie he works on.Muller photographed Breaking the Waves the same year, and was singled out by the National Society of Film Critics.

Quirky though it is, Dead Man is a western. Blake's first walk through the town of Machine is a sort of tribute to Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, complete with the guy building a coffin and a quick appearance by Gibby Haynes. But other than that, its not like any other western. It's not an easy film to watch, and I predict that a lot of people will call it "joyless". But, I also predict that with the passing of time, this movie will settle in and find a place as a cinema classic.

"Acid Western" Jonathan Rosenbaum, who wrote a book calling this a “quantum leap for Jarmusch,” from the Chicago Reader, June, 1996

<em>Dead Man</em> - Screening the Past Fiona A. Villella reviews Jonathan Rosenbaum’s book Dead Man, December 1, 2001

A Gun Up Your Ass: An Interview with Jim Jarmusch | Jonathan ... an article and interview by Jonathan Rosenbaum from Cineaste, April 12, 1996

Salon.com [Greil Marcus] Here are 10 reasons why 'Dead Man' is the best movie of the end of the 20th century, December 2, 1999

"Mad Poets: William Blake, Jim Jarmusch and Dead Man" Rick Curnutte from the Film Journal

Dead Man - Archive - Reverse Shot Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega, August 7, 2005

Dead Man and Ghost Dog - Archive - Reverse Shot Travis Mackenzie Hoover, August 7, 2005

notcoming.com | Screening Log Leo Goldsmith from Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Dead Man | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

Reviews and Reflections William P. Coleman

09/24/2006 - 10/01/2006 Dan Jardine from Cinemania

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Cinematter (Matt Williams)

Mike D'Angelo

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz)

"Photographing Dead Man" by Christopher Porter, from Projections: a forum for film-makers 7

An Interview with Jim Jarmusch by Mili Avital

“Jim Jarmusch Interview” feature and interview by Thomas Colbath and Steven Blush, Seconds Magazine no. 37, 1996

"Dead Man Talking" Kristine McKenna interviews Jarmusch, from The Los Angeles Times May 5, 1996

Jim Jarmusch Gary Susman from the Boston Phoenix, May 9 – 16, 1996

Jim Jarmusch on Dead Man, God, Sam Peckinpah and Harvey Weinstein from the LA Weekly, May 17 – 23, 1996

How William Blake Got Himself Into a Picture Steven Rea interview with Jarmusch from the Philadelphia Inquirer

Jim Jarmusch / Dead Man press conference transcripts from the Cannes Film Festival 1995

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 Reviews of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s book, Dead Man (BFI Modern Classics Series [BFI UK/Indiana University Press US], 2000), 94 p.

Dead Man New York Trash magazine

"Dead Man Url Tour" from Open Book Systems

Official Makah Indian Nation website

Museum

Makah photos and other items from the Library of Congress

The Makah Nation -- On the Olympic Peninsula

University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections – The Pacific Northwest Olympic Peninsula Community Museum

Makah Cultural and Research Center Online Museum Exhibit

Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board - Makah Tribe Profile

The Makah Tribe: People of the Sea and the Forest

History Link - Treaty of Neah Bay

Makah - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Neah Bay, Washington - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tucson Weekly [Stacey Richter]

Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]

Read Full Review » Jack Mathews from the LA Times

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times a puzzled Rogert Ebert, writing “Jim Jarmusch is trying to get at something here, and I don't have a clue what it is.”

New York Times (registration req'd) a less than enthused Stephen Holden

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

YEAR OF THE HORSE

USA (106 mi) 1997

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Neil Young's scraggly locks may grow sparser and turn grey, but the gnarly behemoth that is Crazy Horse lumbers through the decades untouched. Crazy Horse is generally thought of as Neil Young's backing band, but Jim Jarmusch's proudly lo-fi concert documentary makes a convincing case for "the Horse" as a more communal, even spiritual entity. You get a sense of this when Young introduces himself as "the guitar player in Crazy Horse," or when guitarist Frank "Poncho" Sampedro talks about "turning off his mind and following the music." But ultimately the best example is the live performances (only three of which appear on the album of the same name) which show Young and company in all their elongated glory. With behind-the-scenes footage from 1976, '86, and '96, and an ending that blends versions of "Like a Hurricane" filmed two decades apart, Year of the Horse shows that for Young, playing with Crazy Horse is like returning to the source, recharging his batteries. (It's worth noting that Young's famously uneven early '80s recordings coincide with his longest Horse sabbatical.) There's something vaguely ridiculous about Crazy Horse's bloated abandon, but it's a glorious kind of stupidity.

Chicken Out of Hell, a Column

Jim Jarmusch's Year of the Horse, a documentary of Neil Young and Crazy Horse on the road, brings me back to Robert Christgau gavel-thumping that Elvis Costello was doomed to "never again convert the uninitiated."

Certainly the film proceeds at the flower-blooming pace of an Alejandro Jodorowsky film with some of the same drawbacks. We can watch Neil Young, Frank "Pancho" Sampedro, Billy Talbot, and Ralph Molina from the outside, but we can't connect them to the majesty they make onstage together. Per son to person, Talbot and Molina seen not so much mystics as two men kept for a very long time in a very dark hole with very little light; they cringe, squirm, and fidget in their chairs. Molina remembers the late producer David Briggs as "Going through...ah...help me out here--"

"Chemotherapy?" Jarmusch fills in.

"Yeah something like that."

Young, the band's most mediagenic member, evolves naturally into the biggest bullshitter. His dry delivery, chewing the insides of his lips between sentences, could make Steven Wright break out in hives--asked about the Rockets, the band he lured Talbot and Molina out of, he says never cracking a smile that "That's the hardest part, the guilt of the trail of destruction that I've left." Everyone in the preview audience laughed. But they were mostly the initiated.

Jarmusch's 8 and 16mm footage splays graininess, accentuating facial wrinkles and in some cases, I think, creating them; straight lines fork like split ends while spotlight auras fizzle at the edges, frying from the outside in. It's appropriate to the concert footage with the four men hoodooing either other out of their skins--when the lighting flickers up and down during "Fuckin' Up" you feel that the band is sucking up all the power out of the building, out of the city, out of the ground--backstage and offstage, it contributes, along with discontinuities in time and to a jumpy miasma. Here's the band in 1976, Neil reaching down to find "A joint Jethro Tull left behind in 1971." Here's the band in 1986, setting paper flowers on fire and giggling when the tablecloth won't put it out; a maid enters, indignant, and everyone howls like hyenas as she says, what sounds like, "They're not paper, they're cereal." Here's 1996, the hotel, with Pancho Sampedro taunting from behind the sunglasses he never removes (except onstage, going iris-to-iris with Neil's thousand-yard-stare) taunting Jarmusch that the filmmaker "just wants to come in here and get the whole story in a few weeks. It's never gonna happen."

Pancho gets a call from Neil, who can't figure out how to turn off the computer; Jarmusch's 8mm lens follows until the Young slams the hotel door at it. Two seconds later we're in the room apparently teleported through the door and Neil, in reasonably extreme close-up, is giving what I think of as the quintessentially Neil expression of raised eyebrows and pursed lips, the look perhaps of an old woman hearing her grandson say "penis" for the first time--except for the coruscating blister in those eyes, an enemy's last look from an exterminating Magyar. The scene ends quickly.

So Year of the Horse is a religious film and like a Catholic mass or a Quaker meeting, the experience can bring you to the process and maybe make you drink, but a single experience cannot give you the history.

Sampedro is right about Jarmusch's impossible task, but the musicians show their true mysticism when they confront religion themselves. It's 1976, or 1986 (this tour seems to gone on forever and been filmed for twice that long--though any filmmaker will tell you it's all in the editing) and a young man buttonholes Neil, a young man who talks about having been around for 2000 years, which isn't so long, he explains, when you're saving the world--"All right," Neil cuts him off after a minute of nodding. "Good luck. Hope you make it this time."

It's 1996, or 1995, and the band's lighting director opens up a Bible on the tour bus and reads passages of blood burning sand, smoke, flame, destruction by crushing. "The Old Testament is where God is really pissed all the time," he laughs. "The Old Testament is related to the New Testament," Neil rasps.

If you haven't seen Crazy Horse live, let me suggest that you see this movie on that basis alone; seeing sixty minutes or so of four men converting electrical current into protean wails with the emotional range of opera singers, may well bring you to conversion point . The band spins a song and then skates on its momentum--in "Fuckin' Up" Pancho starts chanting "yer jussa fuck'p" while Neil testifies in the timbre of a street lunatic, "Lemme tellya a story my father told me..." Or they might cripple and dissect the Ur material, as with "Tonight's the Night," a song which "ends" with the death of a friend, but when broken into pieces--verses interrupted seemingly at random for guitar windmilling, the three-word chorus sung over and again ever more flaggingly ragged--renders the death inevitable, foretold, and yet to pass. If the four-hooved fist of electric mysticism leaves you unmoved, at least you paid half the price of a concert ticket and ran far less risk of ear damage.

Year of the Horse - Archive - Reverse Shot Eric Hynes, August 6, 2005

Nitrate Online Lyall Bush

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Sara Vowell

Film Scouts (Karen Jaehne)

Year of the Horse Mike D’Angelo

A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle)

eFilmCritic Reviews The Ultimate Dancing Machine calls it the “dog of the year”

DVD REVIEW: Year Of The Horse not liking it

James Berardinelli's ReelViews ditto

RealAudio interviews originally aired on the radio show Morning Becomes Eclectic, August 14, 1996 & 14 October 14, 1997 (enter Jarmusch in search)

Interview by M. Faust, Artvoice (vol 8, no 47) – December 3 – 9, 1997

Interview by Gerald Peary, The Boston Phoenix, November 1997

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten] a feature and an interview with Jarmusch, November 10, 1997

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Janet Maslin)

GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI A- 93

USA Japan France Germany (116 mi) 1999

Time Out

Jarmusch's engagingly offbeat variation on the hitman thriller finds Ghost Dog (Whitaker) under threat from the wiseguys who've been using his ultra efficient services after the boss's daughter witnesses one of his killings. On to this basic storyline, Jarmusch grafts an unlikely but coherent variety of moods, motifs, themes and gags: the Mob, though themselves memorably eccentric, simply can't cope with a black killer who communicates by carrier pigeon and lives by the ancient code of Japanese samurai. At once a tribute to traditional notions of honour, loyalty, friendship and professionalism, and a stylish, ironic pastiche inspired by the likes of Melville and Suzuki, it's very funny, insightful, and highly original, proving that Jarmusch has lost none of his wit, warmth or invention. Great camerawork (Robby Müller), score (RZA) and bird footage, too.

Samurai 101 Gerald Perry from The Boston Phoenix, March 16 – 23, 2000

The polar ends of East Coast independent cinema: Kevin (Clerks, Dogma) Smith, suburban Jersey child of Sundance, sit-coms, and blockbuster Hollywood; and Jim (Stranger Than Paradise, Dead Man) Jarmusch, serious-minded downtown New Yorker with an allegiance to high modernist European and Asian cinema. In America, college kids relate to Smith. He's their hairy, T-shirt-hanging-out main man: the former video-store guy as auteur. In Europe, it's Jarmusch, the sleek and prematurely white-haired hipster, who's the director-as-superstar. At Cannes last year, I was shut out of three sold-out screenings of Jarmusch's new feature, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (it opens this Friday at the Harvard Square); I finally caught it back in North America at the Toronto International Film Festival.

It was worth the wait: Ghost Dog is prime Jarmusch, a moody and minimalist and formally elegant slice of estrangement and alienation, a gangster genre piece filtered through self-conscious French and Japanese reworkings of the American gangster movie and then brought back to America, still resonant with the foreign trappings.

Jarmusch's protagonist, Ghost Dog (a stirring Forest Whitaker), is the embodiment of the mythic lone hero, a melancholic, monosyllabic African-American hitman who resides on a rooftop among carrier pigeons and steps through his solemnly violent life by adhering to, and constantly quoting, the rules of an early 18th-century Japanese warrior text, The Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai. The Samurai 101 path is to find a master and then devote your very being to obeying and defending that master. Ghost Dog grabs onto Louie (John Tormey), a below-the-line Mafia capo who once saved his life. Now it's Ghost Dog's turn, and he spends much of the movie standing up for Louie, killing for Louie, whether Louie wants him to or not.

There's obvious black humor in the obsessive, destructive way this black Don Quixote follows a seemingly outmoded chivalric code. Is Ghost Dog a hero or a total fool? Jarmusch allows you to decide whether Ghost Dog's trip toward his own annihilation is pure nobility or sheer stupidity. Robby Muller's cinematography makes it all cool and alive, as does the sublime RZA musical soundtrack.

"I started with the actor," Jarmusch said when we talked at Toronto. "I wanted to write something about Forest. He has this big physical presence that could be intimidating, and also his soft side. I like watching him. I like that poignancy. I collected a lot of fragments and details and observances. Eventually I connected the dots, and a story came from that."

Jarmusch was inspired by a remark from his late friend, Rebel Without a Cause filmmaker Nicholas Ray. "I remember Nick saying that dialogue is in the left hand, melody is in the eyes. I wanted to make Ghost Dog a character who doesn't speak much and yet is very expressive.

"The lonely hitman? I've been a fan of crime fiction: Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammett. I also like gangster films: White Heat, Public Enemy. There are a lot of inspirations and references, from the book Frankenstein to John Boorman's Point Blank to the Japanese films of Siejun Suzuki such as Branded To Kill. Suzuki's films about a lone hitman, black-and-white and widescreen, were so strange that Toho cancelled his contract."

I mention another clear influence: the great French gangster works, Le doulos and Le samurai, of Jean-Pierre Melville. Jarmusch agrees. "There was an inside joke in Melville's films: the killers wore white film editor's gloves. Ghost Dog also wears these gloves, and like Ghost Dog, Melville also refers to Eastern philosophies." Jarmusch offers a term he has coined for Melville that, by extension, I might apply to his own cinema: "melange films." He explains: "How do you classify Melville's works? They are so French, and yet he want them to be so American. Is his vision American? Western? Eastern? Hip-hop? What is it?"

For that matter, is Ghost Dog a ridiculously deluded Don Quixote? "He is Don Quixote as a fool in a way, but there's something beautiful, too. By choosing a code from another century and another place, he keeps it intact and in focus. It comes from a spiritual place, where the gun is an extension of his body and being."

And the man behind the soundtrack, Wu-Tang Clan founder and producer the RZA? "He's 29, and a brilliant businessman, marketing genius, and I've been a fan of their music since the first Wu-Tang CD. His music is very cinematic and always refers to martial-arts films, quoting their music tracks or their dialogue. He's an incredible aficionado of martial-arts projects. He said to me, `You make films like music. I make music like films. We're both stupid.' He's a very busy man. He'd look at a rough cut of the film, then he'd make music, give me a tape and say, `Check this out.' He'd say, `Meet me at a van at 53rd and First.' He'd have a tape for me. By our third meeting, he gave me so much beautiful stuff I couldn't use all of it. I would have drenched the film."

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

Sometimes a movie gets you so bad that you need to tell people how excited you are about it. You want to use special words that all too often get used up in describing lesser movies. But I can think of no other word to sum up Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai other than to say that it is a Masterpiece.

Jarmusch works fairly slowly, with only eight pictures in nearly twenty years, but he has always been in complete command of them. He has a definite and personal style, and he has advanced emotionally and technically with every film. His first two big films, Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Down By Law (1986) were amazing and even ground-breaking. They used long, still shots (sometimes without any dialogue), bleak black-and-white film, and equally bleak landscapes. The characters were banal and empty. But the films were insightful, hilarious, and above all, highly original.

But he seemed to work only in episodes. After his next two films, Mystery Train (1989) and Night on Earth (1992), some of us started to worry if Jarmusch could tell a complete story. Then came the astonishing Dead Man (1996) which was too slow for most viewers, but paid off for those who stayed. It was the first sign that Jarmusch could be a master, someone like Michelangelo Antonioni or Orson Welles.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai goes even further. With his story of a modern black urban samurai, Jarmusch brings the methodical rhythm of life from the old west to New York City. We meet Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) who spends his time working as a hit man, feeding his carrier pigeons, and reading samurai literature (The Hagakure), which is not only narrated to us but also printed on the screen. His "master" Louie (John Tormey) is a member of a sort of low-rent Italian Mafia (led by Henry Silva) and saved Ghost Dog's life when he was younger. Ghost Dog's hits are so practiced and systematic that he's never caught and never leaves a trace. He has an electronic device for stealing cars that turns off alarms and starts ignitions. He then drives around, his big hood over his head, listening to hip-hop CD's (music by The RZA from Wu-Tang Clan). He's like a floating bubble of coolness, thought, and serenity. But, due to a misunerstanding, Ghost Dog must go to war against the aging gangsters. As he put the western to sleep with Dead Man, Jarmusch seems to be doing the same to the gangster film with Ghost Dog.

The movie has many small moments that make us laugh but seem connected to some larger world, a much larger story that goes on outside of our line of vision and that we can only grasp a little bit of. A mysterious dog is seen twice just staring at Ghost Dog, unable to communicate what it's thinking. In another scene, Ghost Dog watches a young hoodlum sneaking up on an old man carrying a bag of groceries. The old man unexpectedly kung-fus the hood, who skulks away in pain and shame. Nobody (Gary Farmer) from Dead Man has a small cameo and gets to repeat his great line of dialogue, a little present for those few fans of that movie. And the cars that Ghost Dog steals have license plate numbers that start with the letters Z, Y, and X--the alphabet backwards.

One of the movie's most magical scenes shows Ghost Dog's best friend, a French-speaking ice-cream vendor (Isaach de Bankole, taking Ghost Dog up to his roof to examine the view of another man building a large boat on his rooftop. The Frenchman calls to him, but the boat man only speaks Spanish and mentions that he must get back to work. It's a spectacular scene that speaks volumes about New York, communication, and life's purpose.

Ghost Dog was photographed by the great Robby Muller (Dead Man, Breaking the Waves, Wings of Desire, Repo Man) who makes New York feel like the dusty towns of Sergio Leone's westerns, or the grimy cities of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967), but with moments of enlightenment and hope, as in the "boat" scene.

I'm sure Jarmusch was intending to make something like Rashomon, a book that gets passed around from character to character (Akira Kurosawa made his version in 1950). As with that story, he wanted everyone to see something different in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Some of us would remember the staring dog. Others will have hope that the little girl (Camille Winbush) will embark on the samurai life. Others will wonder if ice cream really has a lot of calcium or not. I usually rely on both my emotional and intellectual reactions and my memory when writing about a movie. With Ghost Dog, I know that I haven't solved all the puzzles, but I know that they're there. I haven't yet unscrambled why this movie made me feel sad, hopeful, happy, lost, and scared. Maybe I never will. But I do know that the movie effected me in that way that very few other movies do.

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review) Nick Davis

The analogy doesn't feel totally convincing, but I'll make it anyway: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is the Being John Malkovich of the year 2000, an act of pure, unadulterated creativity that boasts its narrative gambles and poetic whimsy as badges of honor, even as raisons d'être. I'm new to Jarmusch's cinema, but one of the unlimited pleasures of Ghost Dog is the immediacy with which it spurred me to rent all of the director's earlier work, from the groundbreaking Stranger Than Paradise to 1996's experimental Western Dead Man. More on those movies when I get to them. If any of them turn out to be half as entrancing, as shocking, as joyfully confident as Ghost Dog, you'll be able to knock me over with a feather.

Forest Whitaker, without whom this film is barely imaginable, stars as Ghost Dog, a reclusive, literate, roof-dwelling oddball about whom I find it hard to say anything true. I almost wrote that he never cracks a smile, but he's actually quite friendly with Raymond (Isaach de Bankolé), the neighborhood ice-cream vendor, and Pearline (Camille Winbush), a local adolescent girl who shares Ghost Dog's avid interest in reading. If these scenes characterize Ghost Dog as some sort of gentle giant, I rush to inform you that when the big guy isn't poring over ancient texts of samurai protocol, he's kicking ass and taking names, John Woo-style, on behalf of Louie (John Tormey), a jovially pathetic mobster in a dingy urban jungle-gym that looks like New Jersey. Is Louie, then, Ghost Dog's boss? Not really. He happened to have saved the younger man's life eight years earlier by taking out some street punks who were beating Ghost Dog in an alley. In subsequent years, the poetic, ever-behooded black man has performed contract killings for the wheezy, jowly Italian-American. They never meet but communicate daily. By carrier pigeon.

Okay, okay. But just remember that a year ago, a plotline centering around a porthole into the brain of John Malkovich would have sounded like Saturday Night Live at its most desperately bizarre. Rather than deciding on our behalf how seriously we are to take Ghost Dog, Jarmusch and his collaborators serve up the tastiest kind of dish, a film that entertains handily as both a comedy and a mob drama but yields astonishing answers to any sociological, mythic, or political pressures you might apply to the story. Does it matter that Ghost Dog acts obediently, Charlie's Angel-style, to a white male who doesn't even show his face to him? Sure, and the fact that Louie's mob superiors (a hysterical bunch played principally by Cliff Gorman, Henry Silva, and a skeletal Gene Ruffini) order Ghost Dog's death after his innocent encounter with Silva's sexy white daughter only stokes the flames of such a race-conscious interpretation. Does the screwball comedy of Ghost Dog's conversations with Raymond—the former speaks only English, the latter only [subtitled] French, and the two frequently but unknowingly repeat one another word for word—resonate with the film's meditation on cross-cultural exchange? Absolutely.

Do you have to entertain consciously these deeper thematic questions in order to enjoy the film? Absolutely not—you can merely laugh out loud at the world cinema's first assassination through a sink drain, or marvel at Whitaker's astonishingly graceful rehearsals of samurai swordplay. However affecting in films like The Crying Game or Bird, Whitaker's is not a physique that immediately conjures the adjective "balletic." It's refreshing, though, not only to see an underused actor display unanticipated gifts in an utterly unique role, but also to see that movies written as star vehicles don't have to crumble around them. (See Joan Allen in The Contender for an example of a star acing a tailor-made role in a movie that's not sure what to do with any of the other characters.) Whitaker combines everything Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne were supposed to be in The Matrix—authoritative, athletic, mysterious, principled, and bad-ass—but he doesn't waste anytime winking at how cool he is, or how cool he expects we think he is.

As forceful an impression as Whitaker makes in this part, he doesn't have to pull the weight of the whole movie. The supporting cast, of whom de Bankolé is the only actor I recognized, is uniformly excellent, as is the cinematography of the indomitable Robby Müller. The cameraman's clever use of shadow and unparalleled gift for making colors more beautiful by washing them out makes Ghost Dog's streets and sidewalks a convincingly mythic landscape, majestic and treacherous. Between this film and the very different Dancer in the Dark, Müller has shot the year's two most improbably gorgeous movies, as well as—at least so far—the two best.

Finally, I would be remiss not to acknowledge that you can close your eyes during Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and have a fully satisfying experience of the vibrant score by Wu-Tang Clan's frontman, the RZA. Jarmusch only wrote the script after listening to the music he commissioned from the RZA, and the collaboration of these two men—the boomer auteur without a hit to his name and the firebrand intelligence behind one of rap's most successful and compulsively listenable acts—represents exactly the sort of oddball pairing that Ghost Dog so often showcases in its plot. The match proves made in heaven, however, and literally so in the scenes where RZA's heavy but carefully modulated percussion beats beneath the image of Ghost Dog's passenger pigeon gliding through the sky. It's hard not to view these images and others like it as deft send-ups of John Woo's fascination with doves, though Jarmusch and Müller reproduce the beauty of those shots even as they skewer them. The first pigeon-flight scene is as crudely breathtaking as American Beauty's now-famous cinéma de trash-bag, but whereas that Oscar-winning fable seems a bit more limited with repeated viewings, I suspect Ghost Dog will grow only more enticing the more you watch. Jim Jarmusch has made a film of universal appeal about themes of boundary-crossing, the testing of new identities, and the melancholy attendant to the passing away of old codes and character types. The only melancholy I felt when the film concluded, however, was that it had to end at all.

"International Sampler" Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader, March 17, 2000, also here: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

BFI | Sight & Sound | Ghost Dog The Way of the Samurai (1999) Xan Brooks, May 2000

Spirituality in the 21st Century: Ghost Dog: The ... - Senses of Cinema Fiona A. Villella from Senses of Cinema, June 7, 2000

"Lost in Paradise: The Cinema of Jim Jarmusch" Fiona A. Villella from Screening the Past

'The Way of the Samurai' - Ghost Dog, Mishima, and Modernity's Other ... Ryoko Otomo from Senses of Cinema, September 12, 2000

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai • Senses of Cinema Marco Lanzagorta from Senses of Cinema, October 4, 2002

The "Jarmusch Touch" David Walsh from the World Socialist website

Dead Man and Ghost Dog - Archive - Reverse Shot Travis Mackenzie Hoover, August 7, 2005

Ghost Dog - Archive - Reverse Shot Jeannette Catsoulis, August 8, 2005

Images Movie Journal Crissa-Jean Chappell

Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]

The Nation (Stuart Klawans)

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

DVD Journal Dawn Taylor

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs, including an interview: Interview with Forest Whitaker starring in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

GHOST DOG Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

interview Sam Adams from Philadelphia City Paper

eFilmCritic Slyder

FULL REVIEW Jerry White from Nitrate Online

"Ghost Dog" Sameer Padania from kamera.co.uk

The Way of the Whitaker Leslie Dunlap from City Pages

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

DVD Verdict Norman Short

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

The Red and the Black - By David Edelstein - Slate Magazine

The Film Desk at Q.Com (Review by James Kendrick)

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young)

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez)

Offoffoff.com, a guide to alternative New York David N. Butterworth

Film Blather (Eugene Novikov)

Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]

DVD Times Colin Polonowski

Chris Jarmick

BeyondHollywood.com Nix

Moving Pictures (Damon Wise)

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz)

Cranky Critic Star Talk film reviews, also Paul Fischer interviews Forest Whitaker

Indie Reservation Andrew Pulver from the Guardian, March 31, 2000

Millimeter: Jim Jarmusch, Director Millimeter magazine article, March 1, 2000

The Guardian Interview Geoff Andrews interviews Jarmusch from the Guardian, November 15, 1999

Part 2 Geoff Andrew interviews Jarmusch (Pt. II) for the Guardian, November 15, 1999:

Jim Jarmusch Picture Gallery Pt III from the Guardian

The Way of Jim Jarmusch Robert Wilonsky interviews Jarmusch from the Dallas Observer

Gun-Toting Samurai Andy Spletzer interviews Jarmusch from Seattle’s The Stranger

"Culture Vulture" Interview by Chris Campion, GettingIt.com, January 4, 2000

The Well Rounded Interview a brief Jarmusch interview by Conal Byrne from Well-Rounded Entertainment

Interview by Derek O'Connor from FilmWest

"A Contradiction in Filmmaking" interview at Amazon.com

Tucson Weekly [James DiGiovanna]

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott

DVDBeaver.com [Gregg Ferencz]

TEN MINUTES OLDER: THE TRUMPET

Spain Great Britain Germany Finland China Netherlands (92 mi) 2002

7 director omnibus film, segments by director:

Kaige Chen – 100 Flowers Hidden Deep

Victor Erice – Lifeline

Werner Herzog – Ten Thousand Years Older

Jim Jarmusch – Int. Trailer Night

Aki Kaurismäki – Dogs Have No Hell

Spike Lee – We Wuz Robbed

Wim Wenders – Twelve Miles to Trona

channel4.com/film

Seven of contemporary cinema's most distinctive voices each tell a story in this well-appointed portmanteau of shorts

The portmanteau film has a bad rep (just think Four Rooms), while the short film these days rarely gets beyond the film festival. This collection of shorts gives the form a considerable boost, having been packaged into an easily digestible feature-length package and boasting a remarkable line-up of renowned talent.

The only real gripe with this 'film' is the way the shorts are strung together. Although none relate, the whole is justified by a Marcus Aurelius quote about how "Time is a river. The irreversible flow of all created things" and how as soon as one story has floated off downstream another will be along. The shorts are divided by shots of rippling water and bursts of trumpet from Hugh Masakela: well, they had to connect them in some way!

First up is Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki's 'Dogs Have No Hell', a drole and ambiguous mystery about a man off to Siberia to drill for oil. This is followed by Victor Erice's very different 'Lifeline', a black-and-white short set in Spain in June 1940 (when the Nazis arrived) consisting of a sequence of simple rustic activities (scything, making bread etc) carried out around a sleeping baby. The colour returns for Werner Herzog's 'Ten Thousand Years Older', a mini-documentary about an Amazonian tribe wrenched out of the stone age and into the computer age in mere minutes.

Jim Jarmusch's black and white 'Int. Night. Trailer.' features Chlöe Sevigny as an actress, ostensibly on a break but harried by all comers; it's a witty comment on the actor's lot. Wim Wenders' 'Twelve Miles To Trona' is a sweet reminder about decency set against a desperate, hallucinogenic car journey. Spike Lee's 'We Wuz Robbed' is another mini-documentary, this time highlighting the patent absurdity of Bush winning the 2000 US election in a series of interviews ("The election was decided 5-4 in the supreme court"). The final film, '100 Flowers Hidden Deep' is a wistful look at the passing of old Beijing from Chen Kaige.

This collection reiterates the possibilities of the short film with grace and skill. Enjoy.

Plume Noire Sandrine Marques

Film sketches, a genre that had fallen into abeyance, is not dead! As proof, these short films from some of cinema's greatest names. Each director delivers his own interpretation of time, as many free figures on an imposed subject. What is striking at first glance, is the diversity and richness of these sketches, as well as their quality. One easily and happily finds the cinematic universe of each author who lent himself to the exercise.

Wim Wenders shows the bad trip of a guy who has only ten minutes to save his life... and a few miles to drive to the nearest hospital! Under the effects of drugs, the road unravels a procession of hallucinations, everything bathed in an unreal ochre light. A success.

Jim Jarmusch returns with edgy icon Chloé Sévigny for a pretty short film shot in black and white, depicting the loneliness of a movie star. The actress has ten minutes to rest in her trailer, have a meal and call her friend. Her privacy will be disturbed regularly by the film crew.

Victor Erice also shoots a remarkably controlled work in black and white. During a hot afternoon on a farm in Spain, everyone is busy. A young mother sleeps near her baby, who is wounded. He will be saved, while far away a much larger threat appears: the rise of Nazism. Erice uses a smooth and inspired editing. The film leaves its mark thanks to a happy outcome that immediately contradicts the following sequence.

Faithful to his minimalist and absurd universe, Aki Kaurismaki—surrounded by his fetish actors—films the departure of a newlywed young couple for Siberia. In the end, the man gives one last nostalgic glance towards his country.

Werner Herzog chooses not to show a ten-minute advance in time, but rather ten thousand years. A few years ago, a primitive ethnic group had been discovered in Brazil and filmed. Two years later, Herzog decides to go meet them and see the results of their contact with civilization. The consequences are terrible. Naked during their first appearance, the indigenous people now wear American caps, jeans and t-shirts. The community is near extinction and the younger generations live in the city. Those who used to make fire by rubbing wood and were afraid of the flame of a lighter, have discovered cars, television... and sex with white women, whites that they had made a specialty of killing before. This is the most gripping and successful film of the series. Herzog's mythical Aguirre, and the Wrath of God inevitably comes to mind.

Chen Kaige disappoints, despite a very poetic history. In a China under reconstruction, a man asks movers to ensure the transport of his furniture. On their arrival, a waste ground: the house only exists in the imagination of the insane, sad and nostalgic old man whose fragile spirit did not resist the changes of his country. A story too excessive in trying to provide easy emotions to the spectator.

Finally, Spike Lee delivers one of his best productions, a documentary about the last American presidential elections that saw the scandal of the ballot recount. Lee questions the witnesses of this historic misfiring and shows that the elections were rigged from beginning to end. The film ends with one of the protagonists saying "we were fucked". There is no ambiguity! In the same way, Lee's nervous and incisive film does not leave any doubt about the scam of which everyone was the victim. There was seat shifting and sharp reactions in the theater during the screening, as this film finds an echo with the recent French elections.

Filmjourney Doug Cummings

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman)

Guardian/Observer

The Hollywood Reporter at Cannes Michael Rechtshaffen

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES B 86

USA Japan Italy (96 mi) 2003 Coffee and Cigarettes official site

Another nothing-really-happens film from ultra-minimalist filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, beginning and ending with different renditions of the garage rock classic “Louie Louie,” this is an uneven series of eleven titled vignettes, all shot in black and white over the course of nearly two decades with two or three people drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in a relaxed setting, having a casual conversation, while some terrific music plays in the background. The cast includes edgy celebrities, many of whom don’t seem to know one another, so what the camera discovers is the unease that lies between, capturing the distances between people, the empty spaces that are never filled. At best, it features Tom Waits and Iggy Pop meeting in a dingy, underlit California coffee shop that features a string of lights on the wall and Hawaiian music playing in the background, a short which won the Cannes Palme D’Or short film category in 1992. They both establish that they’ve given up smoking, and they feel all the better for it, but then they find a pack of cigarettes laying on the table and proceed from there. It’s interesting to see them warily feel one another out, always sneaking a peek at the other. One of the more unique is Cate Blanchett having a conversation at a luxury hotel with her jealous punkish cousin, also played by the actress, so there’s a bit of tongue-in-cheek at work here, or two Haitian friends who meet, presumably as best friends, and then proceed to question the underlying motives for why they are meeting. The interplay between Italian actor, now-Hollywood-residing Alfred Molina and rising comedic star Steve Coogan was close to perfect, revealing characters that are unforgettably uncomfortable, weaving in and out of what appears to be completely different agendas, seemingly lost in “other worlds,” totally opposite trains of thought, while the final sequence actually featured Mahler’s song, “I Have Lost Track with the World,” as a couple of aging Andy Warhol New York underworld theater stalwarts reminisce about a life that is no longer there, having faded nearly entirely from existence, shot in the near shadows of a darkened room, with the silhouette image of a janitor sweeping in the background, just a beautifully rendered closing. Otherwise, the known celebrities, Roberto Benigni, Bill Murray, or Steve Buscemi, for example, seem to get in the way of this otherwise unpretentious view of life in the small corners of the world. What this has to say about the world or the state of art today is hard to say. Moments were very, very funny, but overall, opening with vignettes featuring more light, while the latter kept getting darker and darker, it seemed more like a film exercise, like the form was greater than the content.

Coffee and Cigarettes Michael Agger from the New Yorker

Cinematic doodles from the writer-director Jim Jarmusch. The movie, seventeen years in the making, consists of a series of black-and-white vignettes involving caffeine and nicotine. While those two substances complement each other, Jarmusch, ever the hip mad scientist, throws together odd combinations of actors and singers. Some pairings—like the laconic comic Steven Wright and the Italian yo-yo Roberto Benigni—turn out to be duds, but other encounters—like the one between the hip-hoppers RZA and GZA and a woozy Bill Murray—have a singular, irreproducible chemistry. Jarmusch doesn't have any grand theme; he's just playing around. Steve Coogan (of "24 Hour Party People" fame) and Alfred Molina parody the awkward Hollywood meeting of a rising star and a fading veteran. And best of all is Cate Blanchett, who, thanks to camera trickery, plays both halves of a conversation between a starlet and her resentful, bohemian cousin—she alternates between the slatternly and the prim with only a wig and body language. Finally, the former Warhol associate Taylor Mead gives the film a wonderful valedictory moment when he mysteriously hears Mahler's "I Have Lost Track of the World."

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

An anthology of curiosities, some more curious than others, Jim Jarmusch's whimsical, 17-years-in-the-making "Coffee and Cigarettes" is "a series of short films disguised as a feature (or maybe vice versa)," according to the director. Calling some of the vignettes "short films" seems generous at times, but you get the idea.

It opens with the original 1986 short, an inspired cafe meeting between the sleepy monotone comic Steven Wright and an exuberant, babbling Roberto Begnini, and continues the theme for some 90 minutes. Some of the meetings are inspired, none more so than Begnini and Wright's absurdly unintelligible by-play, which plays like a Marx Brothers sketch performed in two different languages.

Iggy Pop's desperate fawning over the cooler-than-cool Tom Waits is painfully funny as he practically grovels for approval. Cate Blanchett plays herself and her brassy, bitter cousin in a squirmy conversation with herself. The awkward "family reunion" of a smarmy Steve Coogan trying to keep his distance from a too-chummy Alfred Molina could stand as a short on its own.

When the White Stripes stiffly discuss the work of Nikola Tesla, however, or Bill Murray mugs and guzzles straight from the coffee pot as RZA and DZA of the Wu-Tang Clan compare dreams over herbal tea, the random ramblings are merely pleasant ways to kill time.

To be fair, that seems to be the purpose of this lark. Despite a few recurring themes and ideas that drift in and out of disparate conversations, this collection of goofball asides to his feature films is held together by little more than striking black-and-white photography, uncomfortable silences, checkerboard tablecloths, a great jukebox soundtrack and smoke and caffeine. Many will be left scratching their heads at the point of the entire enterprise, but fans of Jarmusch's askew view will clink coffee mugs and toast to the glories of human eccentricity.

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

It says something for Jarmusch's consistency (or, for the less charitable, his lack of development) that, while Coffee and Cigarettes is in fact a compilation of eleven short films spanning nearly 20 years, many viewers will take it as a single feature shot all in one go. The basic structure is virtually identical: two (or sometimes three) characters sit in a diner, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and talking about the pleasures they derive from these activities. The first segment is also the oldest, with Roberto Benigni and drawlingly laconic US comic Steven Wright struggling with the language barrier. It isn't especially funny or well done, though Wright's anti-charisma provides a welcome antidote to Benigni's trademark overemphatic mugging.

We then get Steve Buscemi trading quips with Joie and Cinque Lee (Spike's kin), which again isn't anything out of the ordinary. It's only with the third segment, with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits (it's part of the fun that everyone plays themselves in Coffee and Cigarettes) trying to out-cool each other: Waits can act, Pop can't, both provide unexpectedly high comic value. After four so-so sketches - one of which features a gimmicky double performance from Cate Blanchett as herself and her (fictional) non-famous cousin - the eighth section showcases the shaky thespian abilities of White Stripes duo Jack and Meg White (in which he demonstrates a Tesla coil). An hour has passed in a ho-hum manner, and many viewers may feel they've been slightly short-changed.

They'd be very wrong, however, as each of the last three sketches are each worth the price of admission on their own: Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, drinking tea and engaging in a Yanks-in-Hollywood one-upmanship contest; Bill Murray making friends with the RZA and the GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan; and, best of all, an elegaic farewell performance from inimitable ancient Warhol-era survivor Taylor Mead, showing why he's been described as "the insouciant pop enigma who's seen everything and done it all." His segment is aptly named 'Champagne' - the ideal digestif in a film that's been content to oscillate between uninspiring lemonade and crisp white wine.

The Boston Phoenix Chris Fujiwara

Jim Jarmusch’s 11-part anthology of odd encounters opens with deceptive admissions of slightness. In the first episode ("Strange To Meet You"), caffeinated Roberto Benigni switches places with bemused Steven Wright. In the second ("Twins"), a waiter in a sports jacket (Steve Buscemi) unloads Elvisology on two squabbling visitors to Memphis (Joie and Cinqué Lee).

Behind the air of relaxation and inconsequence that’s so disarming about these two vignettes, thematic lines already become apparent: duality, celebrity, one person substituting for another. As Coffee and Cigarettes unfolds, it accumulates a thematic weight that, along with the film’s considerable formal inventiveness (how many ways can Jarmusch find to shoot and cut scenes of two or three people having coffee in restaurants? Plenty . . . . ), makes it fascinating.

Throughout the film, people who should get along (because they’re linked by blood relation, by what they do, or by their interests) turn against each other, for no other reason than an arbitrary, ornery will to disagree and distinguish themselves. In each dueling couple, one partner is nice and eager to please and the other is combative and arrogant. Iggy Pop makes every effort to accommodate Tom Waits in "Somewhere in California," the third episode, but Waits puts him on and insults him. A barely veiled hostility lingers through the next two episodes, both exercises in noncommunication: "Those Things’ll Kill Ya" (set in front of a portrait of steely character actor Henry Silva) and "Renée," in which a mysterious hipster (Renée French) deplores what a waiter (E. J. Rodriguez) does to her coffee. In the tour de force "Cousins," Cate Blanchett plays both a famous star on a publicity junket and the star’s insolent, awkward, resentful cousin. In "Cousins?", the funniest and most incisive episode, Alfred Molina tries to make a connection with Steve Coogan (the two play themselves, ostensibly, as do Iggy and Waits), having determined through his genealogical researches that they are cousins, but the latter keeps aloof.

Why all these disagreements? The key to the film is the sixth and central episode, "No Problem," in which two old friends, played by Alex Descas and Isaach De Bankolé, meet after a long separation. Descas has asked De Bankolé to join him for coffee, and the latter is sure that some distress lies behind the seemingly innocent invitation ("Are you sure there’s nothing you wanted to tell me?"). "No Problem" crystallizes the tension between simplicity and the expectation of complexity that’s constant throughout the film. De Bankolé insists that there must be a problem (because otherwise, why are they there? — a question that any of Jarmusch’s characters might pose); Descas denies the existence of a problem with a stubbornness, and a refusal to look into the matter further, that hints at hostility.

Much of the pleasure of the film lies in its sensual contemplation of an abstracted world. "Jack [White] Shows Meg [White] His Tesla Coil," set under a portrait of Lee Marvin, is the lushest episode, and the boldness with which it’s edited is itself a tribute to one of Marvin’s best directors, Samuel Fuller. In most of the episodes, Jarmusch cuts to overhead shots of the tables where his characters sit, highlighting the tables’ chessboard motif (Coffee and Cigarettes is shot in a crisp black-and-white that emphasizes the blacks and the whites). The abstract gameboard space underlines the removal from ordinary life that Coffee and Cigarettes insists on, even while the characters pursue such banal topics as that most ordinary of mysteries, the harmony between coffee and tobacco. All the characters have temporarily left their normal lives: the twins in the second episode are on vacation; the two British actors in "Cousins" meet in a Los Angeles to which fame has not accustomed them; in "Delirium," famous movie star Bill Murray is found working as a waiter. In the last episode, "Champagne," Taylor Mead and Bill Rice listen to Gustav Mahler’s "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" ("I have become lost to the world"), a song title that couldn’t be more appropriate. The long shadows that surround the two men make of the episode an eloquent twilight envoi.

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

Jim Jarmusch is to American film what Lou Reed is to rock music, or Jack Kerouac to writing: grungy, restless, a rambling outsider. And invaluable. His art-house hits of the 1980s (Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Mystery Train) provided not only an oasis of sanity amid the decade's soulless commercialism, but also paved the way for much of what went on to become the independent boom of the 1990s. And just as several critics were ready to dismiss his deadpan minimalism as a played-out shtick, he came back with the experimental highs of Dead Man and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai.

Coffee and Cigarettes, Jarmusch's latest, may seem a disappointingly slight follow-up to the audacious cultural and genre examinations of Ghost Dog. A series of short vignettes built around smoking, downing cups of coffee and yakking about not much, it is an almost self-conscious throwback to the astringent whimsy that pockmarked his Ozu-meets-The Honeymooners beginnings. And yet, watching it amid the noise and clutter of The Punisher and Man on Fire made for an engaging, purifying ninety minutes, like a break of clarity and quiet in between storms of hackwork.

The opening sketch, a bit of jittery absurdism with Roberto Benigni's overcaffeinated malapropisms clashing deliriously with Steven Wright's low-key monotone, sets the style and tone for the rest of the movie: black-and-white photography (courtesy of four cinematographers, including Robby Müller and Tom DiCillo), a stationary camera, a table, a few characters, tons of bullshit and, of course, coffee and cigarettes. The stories that follow offer only the smallest variations of those elements, yet within this format Jarmusch modulates an incredible variety of textures, moods, rhythms, faces, and cultures. Confined within deliberately hemmed-in spaces, they range from facetious to strange to ethereal, hitting match flare-sized epiphanies along the way. Among the segments: Iggy Pop and Tom Waits trying vainly to hang out in a tacky roadside café "somewhere in California"; sparring siblings getting a lesson in Elvis conspiracy from waiter Steve Buscemi; two old Italian guys cussing up a storm in what looks like a leftover set from The Sopranos; old chums meeting again after a long absence and finding that, since neither has problems, they have nothing to talk about; and the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA and GZA blinking in disbelief when their waiter turns out to be an oblivious Bill Murray.

The landscape of Coffee and Cigarettes is one of checkerboard tables and juke boxes, of portraits of 1950s tough guys hanging augustly on walls and people always on the go. The characters' isolation pierces through their wise-ass facades -- in one vignette, scrupulously timed to "Crimson and Clover" faintly heard on the background, a beehived lass sits by herself at a café, nursing her "perfect" cup of coffee, reading a magazine ad for guns, and getting interrupted by a shy waiter. The segment, barely the length of a song, is pregnant with dry wit, quietness and a kind of prickly human privacy. It reminded me that, though often very funny, the movie's humor is basically bittersweet. The theme braiding these stringy anecdotes together is alienation and, despite the many different nationalities, a fundamentally American loneliness. Much of the originality of Stranger Than Paradise and Mystery Train stemmed out of the unique way Jarmusch managed to make American culture seem oddly foreign by filtering it through the dislocated gaze of deadbeats. Beneath the pictures' air of hipster insouciance lies a streak of despair, with people talking without connecting, characters just missing each other and then taking refuge under the blanket of pop culture, which offers them a tenuous connection.

I am probably making the film -- basically a collection of artistic Saturday Night Live skits -- sound much less fun than it really is. After all, when Cate Blanchett pops up in a swanky Art Deco joint playing both a slick movie agent and her darker-haired punk rocker cousin, the bit is as much of an examination of rootlessness as a cheeky gloss on the mystique of special effects, not to mention a salute to the actress' chameleonic virtuosity. It's this odd mix of the playful and the bemused that marks the director's uniqueness, and makes Coffee and Cigarettes, even if minor Jarmusch, still a treat.

A Close Reading of Jarmusch''s Coffee and Cigarettes - Artifacts Journal Nick Halloran, September 2012

Stop Smiling [Jennifer van der Kwast]

Coffee and Cigarettes - Archive - Reverse Shot Elbert Ventura, August 8, 2005

Short Cuts | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, May 27, 2004

BFI | Sight & Sound | Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) Ryan Gilbey, November 2004

The Road Well Travelled: Coffee and Cigarettes • Senses of Cinema Michael Joshua Rowin from Senses of Cinema, July 26, 2004

Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]

World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier

The Film Journal (Justin Remer)

DVD Verdict Patrick Bromley

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review) Nick Davis

DVD Times Gary Couzens

Offoffoff -- The Guide to Alternative New York Mariana Carreño King

Plume Noire - Film review Julien Dufour, English translation by Anji Milanovic

Reel.com [Pam Grady]

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Terri Sutton

Slant Magazine - DVD Review Jeremiah Kipp and Ed Gonzalez

stylusmagazine.com (Rob Lott)

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

Jim Jarmusch Danny Plotnick from the Village Noize, 1994

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

PopMatters Jesse Hassenger

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs)

filmcritic.com Nick Schager

digitallyObsessed! DVD Reviews Dan Heaton

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BROKEN FLOWERS B 89

USA (105 mi) 2005

a film dedicated to Jean Eustache

A somewhat bleak look into the past, almost as if Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey from IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE got a chance to review what his life might have been like with each of the different dates he had before he met his perfect match in Donna Reed. In Jarmusch world, it’s not a pretty sight, but he humorously explores the weirdness of what could have been through a character driven road movie that, as I understand it, was not allowed to extend beyond a 100 mile radius of Bill Murray’s actual home in New York state. From the opening shots set to the music of the Greenhorne’s song “There Is an End,” from the camera following a single non-conformist pink envelope making its way through a sea of white through the now automated postal service, to the mail carrier who first walks past black kids playing in the yard, then past a huge hedge which leads to a giant estate next door, we are asked to set aside all questions of credibility and allow Jarmusch to take us for a ride. Lost in the cavernous gloom of his own mansion, filled with modern decor and original art on the wall, Julie Delpy walks out on Bill Murray, who she calls an aging Don Juan with the words: “I feel like your mistress and you’re not even married.” Murray sits back down and watches the end of the Douglas Fairbanks movie as Don Juan on his big screen television. But the pink letter has already been slipped into his door, announcing that he is the father of a 19-year old boy from one of his yesteryear girl friends who chose to leave the letter unsigned. The phone rings, Murray indicates that he’ll be right there, on the condition that the caller has “Ethiopian” coffee ready. Murray walks next door, takes a cup from the wife, and is sent to the husband, Winston, the much more animated Jeffrey Wright, in the back room, a mystery lover and an amateur sleuth who takes a surprising interest in his pink letter, mapping out a strategy to find out who wrote it, noting that Murray should look for clues, such as the color pink and the guilty typewriter.

Despite feeling this is a total waste of time, Murray has nothing on his calendar, as he’s made a killing in computers and is now basically sitting around on his meaningless ass feeling connected to nothing. There is a hilarious moment when Winston calls Murray on his cell phone, then continues the conversation on the phone as he walks through Murray’s house, with Murray sitting on the sofa listening to Faure’s hauntingly sad “Pie Jesu” from his “Requiem,” asking Murray if he knows how sad that sounds, then replaces the funereal music with more upbeat Ethiopian music, calling it good for the heart, then exits again, still talking on the phone. One by one, Murray revisits the 4 women in his life that could potentially be the mother of this newly discovered son, blindly following Winston’s instructions to dress snappy and always bring pink flowers, spiritual inspiration provided for the journey by Winston burning an Ethiopian music CD, featuring original songs performed by Mulatu Astatke. Along the way, Murray’s cognizance of the color pink wherever he looks begins to make his head spin. Sharon Stone is downright perky with her vixen daughter, appropriately named Lolita, in a fine turn offered by Alexis Dziena. They are a prize pair, each attempting to outsexualize the other, as there is no man in the house, widowed years earlier from a former NASCAR driver. Frances Conroy has turned into one of the mannequin-like Stepford wives, quite a contrast from the photograph Murray took years ago when she was a hippie flower child. In this plasticized world of modernized artificiality, even the food looks plastic and inedible. Jessica Lange is working as a pet communicator for the rich, protected by her assistant, the always alluring mini-skirted Chloë Sevigny. And finally, in my favorite sequence, Tilda Swinton plays a biker chick, the least hospitable one of the group, who has nothing but contempt for the guy and answers the door with “What the fuck do you want?”

Murray mysteriously winds up face down in the backseat of his car somewhere in the middle of an empty cornfield. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum suggested this was a reference to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE, but in that film, we see the driver in a long sequence driving through the night before he swerves into a field at the first morning light going nowhere, an image of oblivion. Each former partner surprisingly seems to be in a similar state of inertia as Murray, as if they all simultaneously gave up on their same dreams. This bleak reference to dead-end lives, when all started out during the budding hopes of the 60’s counterculture movement, is the only tribute in the film to Jean Eustache, whose 1973 film THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE is an icon, a study of relationships that perfectly captured the disappointment of the post 1968 Paris student movement. There’s also a brief tribute at a cemetery to one of the women who died along the way, and there’s an interesting return at the airport, where Murray keeps eying all these kids who might fit the bill as his son. The next day, he even engages one of these kids in a vague conversation of misdirection that leaves him just as deeply mired in the abyss as when he started. Despite the journey, feeling no more connected than he did at the start, all that he has to show for it is – Life is a bitch.

Broken Flowers David Denby from the New Yorker

Jim Jarmusch linking up with Bill Murray is a case of Mr. Cool meeting Mr. Cool, and the resulting silences are deafening. Murray plays Don Johnston, who is allegedly an aging Don Juan. But Murray is so quiet and self-contained that he seems to want nothing. When he sets out on the road to visit the women he was dating twenty years ago, one of whom may have conceived a son with him, the movie turns into a kind of elegant alienated travelogue. The cinematographer, Frederick Elmes, produces an even, gray light that is quite handsome in a neutralizing way but also sobering and almost punitive—it says that the American banality in which the characters live is all there is. Some of the actresses Murray encounters do extremely well in their brief appearances, especially Sharon Stone, as a hard-luck blonde who doesn't demand too much from life, and Jessica Lange, as an iron-willed fraud who "talks to animals." Jarmusch is good at the evanescent emotions of lost love and unfulfilled lives, but the movie is all gesture and unspoken longing. It's all of a piece, and well observed, but it's an art object without the energy or courage to be a work of art.

Broken Flowers Allan Hunter in Cannes from Screendaily

After diversions into genre-subversion like mystical western Dead Man and modern day samurai saga Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch makes a full scale return to the kind of lugubrious, meticulously observed comedy that first made his reputation in the 1980s.

Commercial prospects are very robust for Broken Flowers, a film that fans will take to their hearts like a long lost friend. Another cherishable study in poker-faced melancholy from Bill Murray should further enhance its appeal and may even be strong enough to put him in the Cannes jury’s thoughts when it comes to determining their choice of Best Actor (the film premiered in competition). A very approachable and likable charmer, Broken Flowers has also injected some human warmth in to a competition selection that has been short on emotional involvement or clarity of intention.

A man who has grown old rather than matured, Don Johnston (Bill Murray) retains an adolescent belief that if he loses the love of one woman another will arrive to take her place. The departure of girlfriend Sherry (Julie Delpy) coincides with the arrival of a mysterious pink letter purporting to be from an old lover and claiming that he has a teenage son who is now looking to meet his father. The letter is conveniently unsigned and equally convenient is the fact that Johnston’s neighbour Winston (Jeffrey Wright) is an amateur sleuth.

Fears that this may turn into another existential farce like I Heart Huckabees are soon put to rest as Winston quickly tracks down Johnston’s relevant lady friends from 20 years ago and sends him on a road trip to confront his past. Naturally, there’s no way he could simply phone up and ask them. There wouldn’t be a film then.

Once the premise has been established, the film allows Johnston to revisit four women and catch a sobering glimpse of the different lives he might have lead.

Expressly tailored for Bill Murray, Johnston is a character that plays to all of his strengths. Terminally diffident, he often seems a blank page in which others are encouraged to write their own stories. His wry humour flies under the radar of other people’s perceptions and Murray’s dry asides and subtle shifts in expression are priceless. He seems to grow more like Buster Keaton with every film and there is something very touching as he stands at the side of the road with a bunch of picked flowers in his hand, hope in his heart and bewilderment on his features.

Jarmusch’s last release, Coffee And Cigarettes, strung together a series of shorts on the joys of nicotine and caffeine. Broken Flowers is also structured as a series of encounters but has a flow and careful construction that successfully builds our concern for Don and what he might discover.

The scenario also allows some sharp moments from a stellar collection of women as Don meets Laura (Sharon Stone) and her daughter who proves to be Lolita (Alexis Dziena) by name and by nature. Frances Conroy (Six Feet Under) brings a wistful regret to her role as Dora, a child of the hippy sixties who is now a real estate agent living in antiseptic affluence with her husband.

Murray’s Tootsie co-star Jessica Lange seems to be turning into Gena Rowlands before our very eyes as she plays animal counsellor Carmen and Tilda Swinton has a short but feisty scene as Penny.

Cumulatively, Don’s encounters lead him to a sense of having missed out on something, of discovering his life is incomplete. The comic tone of the early scenes carefully evaporates to leave us with a sense of yearning.

Where he goes from here nobody really knows and Jarmusch isn’t about spoil the mood with an easy answer or a flippant punchline. Don is simply left at a crossroads that is both real and metaphorical.

More conventional than the material Jarmusch has created over the past 15 years, Broken Flowers is also far more accessible and entertaining. He still has a great talent for precisely observed moments from life that ring with truth and are like bubbling tributaries that feed into a river of contented chuckles.

Murray takes all his chances with the material, milking laughter from a simple raised eyebrow, a heavenward glance or the kind of subtle double-take that would have done Cary Grant proud. It is a performance that will easily sustain the fresh appreciation of his talents that has been ongoing since Lost In Translation.

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

One of the year's most charmingly nuanced and purely enjoyable American releases, Broken Flowers is an uninflected, character-based moodpiece-cum-roadmovie, presenting a (largely) benign, off-the-beaten-track vision of modern-day suburban America. It represents a return to feature film-making after a six-year hiatus since Ghost Dog - The Way of the Samurai, Jarmusch having in the interim concentrated on shorts, including last year's portmanteau compilation released as Coffee and Cigarettes. Broken Flowers is similarly episodic in its informal structure: a prologue and epilogue bracketing four mid-sections of unequal length. 

On the day that he's dumped by his latest girlfriend, laidback sixtyish lothario Don Johnston (Bill Murray) receives an anonymous letter from a woman who claims to be an ex-girlfriend from the mid-eighties. This missive informs him that (a) he has a son, now 20, and (b) the lad has absconded, perhaps with the intention of tracking down the father he's never seen. Goaded by his crime-fiction-devotee neighbour Winston (Jeffrey Wright), Murray reluctantly hits the road in search of four old flames - one of whom may well be the mysterious letter-writer. 

This sets up a quartet of droll, deadpan vignettes featuring Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange and Tilda Swinton as Don's "exes". Though laugh-out-loud hilarious at times (the Lange 'chapter' in particular), the tone is generally one of slowburning, observational calmness.

The presence of Murray in the lead, and the story's quizzically picaresque mode may remind viewers of recent "indie" breakouts Lost In Translation and Sideways. But Broken Flowers (the title presumably an oblique echo of DW Griffith's silent classic Broken Blossoms) makes those pictures look even more overrated than they seemed at the time: a master American film-maker operating at the height of his powers, Jarmusch outclasses both Sofia Coppola and Alexander Payne in that he's equally skilled as writer and director. 

And he achieves his effects with such minimal means - restrained cinematography and editing, spells of delicious silence, a lovely eclectic score, simple location shooting, abundant grace-notes in the visuals and dialogue - that the full extent of his talents only gradually creeps up on you, until you realise you're entirely subsumed into his subtle, sublime world. And in retrospect, the extent of Jarmusch's achievement becomes apparent: beneath the quiet surfaces, this is a film that tackles some big subjects: the dreams and dissatisfactions of American lives; age, responsibility and memory; second and third chances; beautiful things, lost things, nameless things...

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Amy Taubin

For reasons that I imagine are inexplicable to them, Bill Murray and Jim Jarmusch--respectively the star and director of Broken Flowers--are regarded as avatars of cool. Unlike Sofia Coppola, who, in Lost in Translation, reframed Murray so that his homely hipster charm could be appreciated by her own generation, Jarmusch approaches his star as one middle-aged proponent of the less-is-more aesthetic to another, taking his inspiration from the panicky "Who am I and why am I here?" existentialism that lurks behind Murray's near-catatonic demeanor. The result is a droll and unexpectedly endearing comedy--which, if you are of a certain age (like the star, director, and most of the supporting cast), might make you muse about how fast the time has gone.

Murray plays Don Johnston, a former Lothario who made a fortune in computers and now spends most of his time lying on his sofa in a blue funk. Make that a seafoam funk: Seafoam--that subtle blend of blue, gray, and green--is the dominant color of the movie, perhaps because it works so well with pink; and pink, as we soon discover, figures crucially in the plot of Broken Flowers. On the very day that Don's girlfriend (Julie Delpy), fetchingly attired in a hot-pink suit, bids him goodbye for good, he receives a letter, typed on pink stationary, informing him that the 19-year-old son he is unaware of having fathered may be looking for him. Don dismisses the letter as a practical joke, but Winston (Jeffrey Wright), his Ethiopian next-door neighbor--a happy husband and father of five--understands that although Don may not realize it, he longs to have a family. Why else would he be drawn to Winston's boisterous, affectionate household?

With Winston's encouragement, Don comes up with a list of five women who might be the mother of his son, if indeed such a son exists. Winston, an amateur sleuth, supplies him with their current addresses, a travel itinerary, and some World Beat CDs to accompany his journey. That this reputed Don Juan could remember the names of five women he bedded 20 years ago is pretty unlikely, but no more so than the notion that a guy who looks and behaves like Bill Murray could have been a successful Don Juan. It is in the tiny window between the implausible and the impossible that Broken Flowers, like all of Jarmusch's films, operates. Murray and Wright apply themselves to this oddball premise with the intensity and imaginativeness of children playing dress-up: Combining raffish spontaneity and impeccable comic timing, their interactions are among the greatest pleasures in the movie.

Traveling by plane and rented car, supposedly all over the U.S. (though anyone familiar with the landscape and roadway design of upstate New York and neighboring parts of New England will put the farthest point at no more than about 150 miles), Don pays unexpected visits to four of his former girlfriends, keeping his eyes sharp for clues that might connect one of them to the mysterious letter. The first, played by Sharon Stone, is now a NASCAR widow with a 15-year-old daughter named Lolita (Alexis Dziena). "Lo" behaves exactly like her namesake, or at least like Kubrick's version of her namesake--the joke being that she's unaware of the existence of the movie, let alone of Nabokov's novel.

Stone and Jessica Lange as an "animal communicator" make the most of their blast-from-the-past scenes with Murray, while the two other possible letter writers--Frances Conroy as a married real estate agent who lives in one of her model homes and Tilda Swinton (almost unrecognizable in a black goth wig) as a biker's old lady--aren't onscreen long enough to make much of an impression. Time has been no kinder to these women than to their former lover. We see the changes in them through Don's eyes, but our own movie memories figure in the process. One of the things Don confronts on his journey is his mortality, and Broken Flowers, droll though it is, leaves us with a whiff of our own. (At one point, the thought crossed my mind that while pink may be the signifier of girlishness, it is also the color of breast cancer awareness ribbons.) Which is why it's fitting that Don pays a visit to the fifth woman on his list, even though, having been dead for five years, she is in no position to be writing letters. Sitting beside her grave, Don has a moment of pure feeling, which Murray plays beautifully and with great discretion. Jarmusch would not have it otherwise.

Don's journey is structured rather like a treasure hunt. Instructed by Winston to look for clues, he finds them everywhere--in the basketball hoop outside each woman's house, the rusted pink typewriter in the biker chick's yard, and so forth. Each time Don finds a clue, Jarmusch, following his line of sight, zeros in on the significant object in close-up. Following Don's lead, we may find ourselves searching for clues--in the image projected before our eyes. The pleasure of Broken Flowers has everything to do with the way it focuses our attention and nudges us into the present moment. That's why this viewer left the theater feeling a lot better than when she went in.

Broken Flowers Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

One of the most striking facets of Jarmusch's latest is the way it employs an American naturalism so baldly banal as to almost disappear on-screen. As Bill Murray drives through northeastern backroads, two-lane highways, and housing developments, the film presents landscapes that, for those of us living in these particular boondocks, are almost impossible to actually see. Earlier Jarmusch, or like-minded regionalists like James Benning, would jolt us out of our complacent non-seeing with a strong aesthetic technique -- black and white cinematography, for example, or a forceful use of the stationary camera. But in Broken Flowers, Jarmusch gives us deceptively flat color photography, often shot from car windows or in rearview mirrors. (Only the final shot contains anything resembling bravura camerawork.) The effect is numbing, as it is to most of us living in this corner of the world. But as I watched I would remind myself to really examine this visual non-style, to engage with Broken Flowers as a piece of cinema. Jarmusch and cinematographer Frederick Elmes have in fact taken great care to construct lovely, unfussy compositions rife with appropriately autumnal colors. But in keeping with the overall strategies of the film, their visual style is utterly passive, liable to mosey past the inattentive viewer (myself, initially) the way these spaces themselves tend to do -- as absence, nothing. So perhaps this is the new accessibility I keep hearing about. Jarmusch's "commercial" turn represents a minimalism as absolute in its own way as Dan Flavin's. You can either see the everyday and register it as such -- that is, as not very much at all --, or you can follow Jarmusch's subtle lead, allowing time and attention to break those habits down, letting the everyday reframe itself. Look closer and the film reveals a sturdy but self-depricating beauty. (Shots like the pan from Winston's house to Don's, or the framing of the slow diagonal movement of Don's Taurus around the corner to Laura's house, linger in the memory.)

And if I'm spending considerably more time discussing Broken Flowers as a visual experience than as a set of stories and themes, this is not because I find the film lacking in those areas. But like a true minimalist, Jarmusch fashions Broken Flowers as a set of repetitions. Whether one undergoes these serial experiences as though they were identical, or whether one allows the differences between them to have an impact, to really change you, is one of the underlying themes of the film. To accomplish change, to undergo growth and movement, first we need to leave old narratives behind. Murray's Don Johnston, we are told, was a Don Juan. He's even watching a movie version of Don Juan, although -- I didn't realize this until a friend pointed it out -- it's a film about the end of Don Juan's life, past the prime of his powers. Don seems to watch the film in a stupor, as if wondering, "Is that really me?" (At first I thought Don was more committed to the Don Juan idea, but on reflection, and after some lively debate with others, I'm now more certain that this is an idealized image that Winston foists upon him. Similarly, Jeffrey Wright's Winston is stuck playing Sherlock Holmes, a fantasy that lets him vicariously escape a domestic life that, on the face of it, as actually rather pleasant.) Before Don leaves on the road trip Winston has planned for him, Winston once again talks up Don's reputation as a Don Juan and Don flatly demands, "will you stop saying that?" This identity, if it ever really existed for Don, is long gone. And what is left in its place? In some ways, we can still observe Don trying to hold onto this narrative trope of masculine mastery, as when he tells Dora and her husband at dinner that he has remained a "bachelor," an outdated idea from the 70s, one Dora's husband openly mocks. He is a man whose tropes for narrating his past have all worn out, evaporated. And with each successive encounter, Don becomes less and less able to manage his past. The audience soon realizes what Don already knows, that the Don Juan narrative is a red herring. Perhaps once it was a way to gloss over the fact that white male privilege -- the ability to fall into bed with beautiful women, to make a good living in computers without any real commitment to them, to zone out to Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem and drive your flashy Mercedes -- has availed Don nothing. Like a less condescending, more incisive version of About Schmidt, Broken Flowers bears witness to the unraveling of a life of banal prerogative, a life so emptily comfortable as to mitigate self-examination of any kind. We watch as he becomes increasingly marginal, a minimal self. In time, even Don's capacity for basic niceties falls away, and what's left -- the revealed core of his identity, finally laid bare through this repetition and paring-away -- is virtually nothing, only the complete isolation that comes with discovering that in fact you weren't living inside a movie, you were never the star, there are no more pages in the script. And yet, time remains.

Broken Flowers - Archive - Reverse Shot Kristi Mitsuda, August 9, 2005

Broken Flowers - Archive - Reverse Shot Chris Wisniewski, August 9, 2005

Jim Jarmusch - Archive - Reverse Shot James Crawford, August 11, 2005

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THE LIMITS OF CONTROL B+ 92

aka: No Limits, No Control

USA (116 mi) 2009

Everything is subjective. Reality is arbitrary. —Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé)

Some may think this is a mind-fuck of a movie. From what I can tell, this is a futuristic sci-fi film about the present exploring how governmental control, if unchallenged, leads to a kind of subterranean world that thrives only in secrecy, where every human action is seen as subversive and everyone is subject to arrest in what amounts to a police state. Shot by Christopher Doyle, every frame intentionally designed to be a composition in itself, perhaps compared to works of art seen (or banned) in an art museum, many of which at some point were challenged by repressive political regimes as being subversive. Nearly wordless, with only the briefest use of dialogue, mostly this is the journey of one man, Isaach de Bankolé as the Lone Man in stylish silk suits, endlessly walking through an empty futuristic landscape alone, set in a world in transit, passing through airports, train stations, hotels, bars, and café’s, where he mostly sits and waits for his next appointment, exchanging strange clues to one another through similar looking match boxes before moving on to his next destination, a routine that strangely resembles Jack Nicholson’s role in Antonioni’s THE PASSENGER (1975). These brief interludes, where he says nothing, always begin exactly the same way, as if Atom Egoyan from CALENDAR (1993) was behind the humorous repetitive motif, where people greet him in Spanish with the same line, “You don’t speak Spanish, do you?” Like Neil Young’s guitar soundtrack to DEAD MAN (1995), this film similarly features a Japanese group called Boris to provide quietly psychedelic guitar music filling the vacuousness of a world seen here as a desolate wasteland. Despite the presence of some terrific performances, especially from the women, the knock on this film is that it is too coolly detached and unengaging, but that is only in contrast with the hyped up kinetic action violence that fills movie theaters around the world, usually accompanied by glossy magazine spreads that fictitiously accentuate the commercialization of sex and violence, like a beauty product to sell, rarely mentioning the consequences of a heavy body count left behind, almost as if that’s immaterial. As he did with westerns in DEAD MAN, Jarmusch takes steps to deglamorize and demythify the action thriller genre, creating an action film without action, and a suspense film with little climactic suspense. Are we going to see a musical comedy from him next without songs or even music?

Shot entirely in Spain, given a hint of Sergio Leone attitude, locations, and the spacious emptiness of the far reaching landscapes, the film inevitably moves from the completely modernized urban congestion in Madrid, with circular staircases and oddly angled terraces overlooking a panoramic view, to smaller towns like Seville with its narrower streets and old-world flamenco charm, to nameless isolated railroad stops that are all but abandoned, eventually ending up in an uninhabited ghost town in the desert where a heavily armed fortress of some kind run by “the Americans” is nearby. At each stop along the way, the people meeting the Lone Man are usually quite gregarious, carrying on one-sided conversations about some ambiguous aspect of life, where platinum blonde-wigged actress Tilda Swinton, known only as Blonde, rambles on about Hitchcock, Orson Welles’ unique use of Rita Hayworth as a blonde, but also bizarre scenes from THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947), and yet another iconic blonde, Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” song reference from GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953), eventually noting her interest in older films made a hundred years ago which are depictions of life at that time, showing the look of the towns, the way people dressed, the way they smoked cigarettes, right down to the smallest detail. Later in the film, around the corner from one of her movie posters, she is whisked away in what looks like a kidnapping. The almost always nude Paz de la Huerta, known as Nude, greets him in his hotel room in a variety of come ons, but he can’t be distracted, claiming he never has sex when he’s working, though she sleeps completely naked, like a Goya painting, in his sleepless arms every night. It was impossible not to be impressed with Youki Kudoh as a mystery woman known as Molecules meeting him on a train where once they’re alone, she reveals her endless fascination with the everchanging nature of molecules. Part of the fascination was to see what known star would the Lone Man be meeting next, and in what strange location? Of course the ambiguous nature of what he’s working on appears to remain unfinished business, even after the film ends, made even more ominous by his notorious silence, his displeasure with guns or cellphones, his propensity for shiny suits, listening to Schubert, practicing tai chi, and drinking two espressos in separate cups. Where this all leads is anyone’s guess.

In the end, one suspects that people he’s been meeting with are summarily rounded up and disappear, though other than the seen abduction of Swinton, the rest is simply by vague clues left behind, not the least of which is the title itself and the noticeable presence of continually circling helicopters. When a flamenco song reminds us that in the end we all return to dust, especially those that see themselves as bigger than others, the finger appears to be pointed at the Americans, suggesting they may be too big for their britches with their secret kidnappings, jailings, interrogations, concentration camp prisons, torture, not to mention killings, all under the auspices of the war on terror. Jarmusch is one of the few artists who’s used a feature film to take a slam at America’s ultra-narrow and adverse views on tolerance and freedom, living under a Dick Cheney-like bunker mentality that threatens the patriotism of anyone who doesn’t conform, usually with McCarthyesque smear tactics. The underground lifestyle exhibited in this film resembles the French resistance, always meeting in clandestine places, always fighting for some impossible cause, yet also always hunted down. Here the cause doesn’t have political overtones other than cryptic references to “Americans,” but appears to be freedom of expression, nudity, science, art, cinema, or ethnic freedom. This appears to be a George Bush, dark ages era film released after the optimism of the Obama administration, where they have taken immediate steps to reclaim the moral compass of the White House, so there is a strange eerie feeling throughout this film that is filled with endless acid-like wanderings, with an idealistic quest for the mythical Golden Fleece, that elusive free will that governments tend to deny when times get tough, clamping down on freedoms and civil rights, all in the spirit of allegedly protecting us from terrorists, murderers and assassins, unfortunately becoming those exact same things they are purportedly protecting us from. This film gives you some insight into that Kafkaesque world that humans are constantly backed into by irrational totalitarian states, suggesting that for a moment in time, we in America were teetering on the precipice.

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

It’s unfair to call Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control the emptiest movie ever made, but I wrote that in my notebook as I struggled to stay awake. Even more ponderous than his first film, Permanent Vacation, the film follows robotic Isaach de Bankolé on some kind of diamond-smuggling mission through Spain not reacting to eccentrics Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Bernal, and oft-naked Paz de la Huerta. Finally, Bill Murray shows up as a Dick Cheney type and Bankolé turns out to be a supernatural avenger. I look forward to reading the rave reviews—I love science fiction.

The Limits of Control JR Jones from The Reader

In this tenth feature by Jim Jarmusch, the vague outlines of an international thriller serve mostly to contain an assortment of two-person rap sessions, like those in his black-and-white anthology film Coffee and Cigarettes (2003). The magnetic Isaach de Bankole stars as a stylish cool cat traveling across Spain and staging various rendezvous at which he exchanges matchboxes filled with diamonds (presumably blood diamonds) for slips of paper with coded messages. Jarmusch makes some effort to deliver on the promise of suspense near the end, with de Bankole stalking despicable businessman Bill Murray at his fortresslike compound in the hills. But the movie's main pleasure lies in the early scenes, which mix the filmmaker's familiar deadpan humor with an Antonioni-like sense of arid emptiness and conundrum. With Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, and Paz de la Huerta. R, 116 min.

Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [4/6]

Jim Jarmusch’s latest—his best since Dead Man (1995)—practically begs for dissection and analysis, but it’s better, perhaps, to read the film’s many repeated symbols, sayings and actions as mood enhancers rather than intellect stimulators. The inspirations are crystal clear: Everything from Jean-Pierre Melville’s existential noirs to Jacques Rivette’s heady conspiracy tales, embodied in the form of a nameless man (De Bankolé) on an arcane mission. The setting is Spain, but even that’s a ruse. Those looking for the genre-veiled political commentary of, say, a Franco-era Victor Erice will find Jarmusch’s boho-versus-businessman punchline the ultimate letdown. Boiled to a facetious essence, the film becomes little more than Kill Bill (Murray).

But taken as a state of mind writ photochemically large (Jarmusch and DP Christopher Doyle compose astonishingly for 35mm), The Limits of Control suddenly reveals its depths of insight and emotion.A key line of reiterated dialogue (“You don’t speak Spanish, do you?”) is funny at first, quickly becomes a maddening running gag and ends up being a mere fact of life in this meticulously controlled world. Spoken again as prelude to a musical interlude in a flamenco bar, the words resonate with feeling, bridging the gap between characters as surely as a great work of art connects with its viewers. It’s almost cruel at film’s end when Jarmusch quite literally shakes us out of the reverie, but maybe that’s just a roundabout way of inviting us to return to his experiential labyrinth.

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5]

It was about three years ago when, emerging from a press screening of Pedro Almodóvar's Volver, a good friend said to me, "You just can't argue with Almodóvar," referring to the idiosyncratic style that the great Spanish director has held steady for nearly three decades now. It didn't matter that Volver was, arguably, one of the director's more languid entries in terms of story, thematic content, and ambition. It simply mattered that it was undeniably Almodóvar.

The Limits of Control, the 11th feature by the New York-born auteur Jim Jarmusch, is another work that is inarguably stamped by its director's idiosyncrasies and, like Volver, there have been several critics who have questioned if its artistic success is not so much a result of it being a Jarmusch film rather than simply a good film. It emits a dark-shade cool, as befits any Jarmusch joint, and it features several of the director's usual performers, including the Ivorian-born actor Isaach De Bankolé in the lead.

Its tuned similarities, however, are not in the service of innocuous style. Described by Jarmusch as something like Point Blank reimagined by Jacques Rivette, The Limits of Control follows a hitman (Bankolé) as he finds himself following several things: a password, two matchboxes, a black helicopter, and any small café that will serve him two espressos in separate cups. His life is dictated by his assignment, which has something to do with following the bread or the guitar case and an inability to speak Spanish. When a woman (Paz de la Huerta) shows up naked in his room with a pair of glasses and a gun, their only form of copulation involves her laying her head against his chest.

More than any of his films to date, with the arguable exception of the Gotham nocturne of Ghost Dog, Limits is an unwaveringly rhythmic film, playing on subtle variations of itself at any given time as the hitman traverses Spanish cities and towns in search of his nameless objective. He changes his suit whenever arriving at a new station and reminiscently converses with a rogues' gallery of misfits, played by a surpassingly hip cast including John Hurt, Gael García Bernal, Tilda Swinton, Hiam Abbass, and, naturally, Bill Murray. The film is shot by the brilliant Christopher Doyle who here uses reds, oranges, and frames within frames to both entice and deceive the viewer, if not the hitman himself.

The reggae and afro-beat that elevated the hip agenda of Jarmusch's Broken Flowers is replaced here by the swirling drone of Japanese psych-metal outfit Boris, and the soundscapes, no less compelling than those on their throttling 2006 opus Pink, seem to echo in the spiral hallways and angular modernity of Jarmusch's Spain. Above all, Limits is a film for lovers of film itself, complete with The Lady from Shanghai references. Set inside a lone-gunman thriller, the hitman becomes a proxy not only for the viewer but for the director himself, wandering and meditating in the beauty of small-town Spain. The danger is defused, but the endless curiosity of what's around the corner permeates.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

The general outcries by critics against Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control are as follows: 1) it has no plot and no characters, 2) it doesn't have a point, 3) it's too cool for its own good. Responding to these complaints, firstly, there's no rule that says a movie has to have a plot or characters. But I maintain that The Limits of Control does have characters and it does have a forward thrust. It's meant to suggest a hitman thriller, but in no way is it an actual hitman thriller.

Isaach De Bankolé stars as "Lone Man," a very slick man of few words. He wears shiny suits, does tai chi, listens to music, never sleeps and drinks two espressos in separate cups. He meets with two mysterious men in an airport (Alex Descas and Jean-François Stévenin), receives some cryptic instructions, and gets on a plane. He opens a matchbox, looks at a coded piece of paper, and swallows it with his espresso. He arrives in Spain and lets himself into a hotel room; he already has the key (no checking in necessary). A day or so later, a beautiful naked woman (Paz de la Huerta) appears in his hotel room, wanting to know if he's interested in sex. "Not while I'm working," he says. Still later, he meets another contact, gets another matchbox and moves on. The towns keep getting smaller and smaller until finally, he is practically traipsing around in the scrub brush. The contacts very often repeat the same phrases, and there are several recurring visual motifs. I will tell you that, in fact, the hero is a hitman, but I won't tell you the final details of his mission. I will tell you that the film leaves off rather quietly, in an anticlimax, without any kind of message.

But there is a point. There may be many. The main one is this: why do movies glamorize the bloody, violent job of the hitman? Why do we need suspense and twists to follow him around? Then there's the fact that the movie grows from very complexly urban to very crudely rural, and that the hero looks more and more out of place in his fancy suits. Then we have all our supporting characters, each from a different country and identified as such. At one point, a group of curious kids ask the hero if he's a "gangster from America." But in fact the only real American character is the one that speaks more openly and differently than everyone else, and seems the most violent and dangerous. Does the fact that he speaks new lines negate all the repeated lines we've heard so far? Then there's the fact that most of our characters speak of some kind of special interest, whether it be movies, music, art or the origin of the word "bohemian." (Tilda Swinton's character overtly references Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai.) What does this say about us? Are we just passing time here? Perhaps the most telling element of all is the title, The Limits of Control. If you stay past the end credits, Jarmusch flashes up four more words: "No Limits, No Control." The words here are used as opposites. Our Lone Man seems always in control, but in fact there's no such thing as total control. Neither is there any such thing as a "limit," as Descas says in his line about the universe. What's taking place outside, or within this story, the title asks.

I'm not pretending to have answers for all this stuff, and there's probably a lot more in there, but it's clear that the movie was very deliberately crafted and is ripe for interpretation. This of course will cut down on the number of people who will actually see the film, given that large audiences -- the ones that make up the Monday morning box office report -- usually like things with plots and answers; ambiguity or thinking is out of the question. If you're a critic and you believe that your job is to speak directly to these people, or to predict the film's mass appeal and box office potential, then you're probably right to dismiss the film. (Certainly, I would hesitate to recommend this to my dad, and I'd be the last to argue that it's going to make any money.) However, if you believe that it's your job to open up a small group of daring viewers to exciting new experiences, then this film should be highly recommend.

What's very odd is that The Limits of Control very closely resembles Jarmusch's earlier films Dead Man (1995) and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), both subversive, mysterious retakes of familiar genres. All three films had gorgeous cinematography, deadpan tones, enigmatic heroes and artsy, complex music scores by pop musicians. But while the previous two received generally good reviews, the new one is getting outright panned. The main difference that I can detect between this one and the previous two is that the new film isn't quite as funny; it doesn't have that Jarmuschian deadpan humor. The deadpan is there, but it flows more into a place of cosmic meditation, rather than laughs.

As for the question of "too cool for its own good," that seems more like a problem with the critics, rather than a problem with the film. Jarmusch has assembled a "cool" cast (Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, etc.), and a "cool" cinematographer (Christopher Doyle), and a "cool" musician (Japanese group Boris) for a "cool" score. But the film clears the slate of such things, and asks whether Isaach De Bankolé has enough allure for an audience to follow him for two hours with very little dialogue, history or interpersonal relationships. If so, why? To generalize and categorize the whole movie as an exercise in cool -- and to confuse cool actors with cool characters -- is too easy and too lazy. To accuse a filmmaker or a film of coolness -- or to praise a film or a filmmaker for the same thing -- is hardly the point of film criticism.

The Limits of Control is a gorgeous and mesmerizing film, alive in nearly every shot and beautifully mysterious. One character talks about molecules moving around in ecstasy, and I think this film has that kind of mystery; something is always happening on some other level. Perhaps we can't see it or comprehend it on the first try, but that's not a reason to dismiss it.

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

Jim Jarmusch is a model of stylistic consistency who emerged as a full-blown talent and erupts once a decade—Stranger Than Paradise in the ’80s, Dead Man in the ’90s, The Limits of Control today.

An acutely self-aware, anti-psychological character study, The Limits of Control focuses on the archetype of the Hitman. Jarmusch sets his self-contained, catalytic anti-hero (French-Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankolé) in a semi-documentary landscape and contemplates his progress with a quasi-religious sense of awe.

Identified in the credits as the Lone Man, Jarmusch’s protagonist exists only in terms of his unspecified mission, or his role in what is perhaps a conspiracy. The Lone Man is introduced in an overhead shot doing tai chi in an airport toilet stall, then taking a meeting in the first-class lounge. A few inexplicable aphorisms later, he’s traveling through Spain by train, grooving on a landscape shot by Christopher Doyle and soundwashed in hyperdrone acid jazz (courtesy of the band Boris). Like everything Jarmusch, The Limits of Control is calibrated for cool.

The Lone Man is a creature of habit, defined by his idiosyncrasies (insisting on two espressos in separate cups) and his reserved response to his invariably eccentric contacts. All this killer need do is show up and acknowledge the password ("You don’t speak Spanish, right?") to receive a coded message passed in matchbox and set off his contact’s solo riff. De Bankolé’s voluble co-stars include Tilda Swinton (a refugee from Wong Kar-wai’s Hong Kong in blonde wig and matching Stetson), John Hurt (babbling about Bohemia, bohemians, and "an oddly beautiful Finnish film"), Gael García Bernal (in manic mode), and Bill Murray (identified as "The American" and channeling Donald Rumsfeld).

Madrid and next-stop Seville are filled with obvious spies. It’s borderline risible when the Lone Man finds a naked girl with a gun (Paz de la Huerta) lolling on his hotel room bed or when Swinton begins holding forth on the nature of old movies: "Sometimes, I like it in films when people just sit there, not saying anything," she adds by way of acknowledging De Bankolé’s silence. That’s Jarmuschian humor. His movies are typically based on a series of whimsical two-handers: In The Limits of Control, these meet-cutes have been boiled down to a set of absurd, enigmatic repetitions. Led to a "closed" flamenco bar, the Lone Man watches a rehearsal in which the singer delivers dialogue from the movie’s first scene with such excessive stylization that it inspires the flicker of a smile on his normally inexpressive face.

By the time the Lone Man is given an ancient guitar, from which he removes a single string, and, told that "the Mexican will find you—he has the driver," travels to a forsaken town in the middle of nowhere, he might be wandering through the afterlife. The landscape goes through cosmic changes en route to a pueblo that looks like it was last inhabited by the cast of a spaghetti Western. But even as he ventures deeper off the map in a truck with the bumper sticker "La vida no vale nada" ("Life is worthless"), there’s no missing the Lone Man’s uncanny wardrobe—a succession of stylish suits with color-coordinated shirts that could hardly fit in his elegant, ridiculously small travel bag.

The Limits of Control is a shaggy dog story, but it’s leaner and less precious (and more beautiful) than the past few Jarmusch films—not to mention his last exercise in existential assassinitis, the 1999 Forest Whittaker vehicle Ghost Dog. The Lone Man traverses the empty streets and barren landscapes of an abstract thriller, glimpsing previously met characters (or their images), engaging in mysterious transactions (a fistful of diamonds here, an earful of Schubert there), and trafficking in the free-floating symbols of a surrealist poem. His steps are guided by picture postcards or red flowers found lying in some stone-paved alley. Tracked by (or following) the same black helicopter from city to city, chased by kids who ask if he’s an American gangster, he lives in a world of allegory and myth.

Mission accomplished, the Lone Man ponders an Arte Povera white canvas and rope assemblage in Madrid’s Reina Sofía museum. What does it mean? The contents of the package are unknowable; the twine that wraps around its enigma is everything.

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review Part One, a thorough and extensive analysis in Two Parts

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review Part Two

'The Limits Of Control': A Somnolent, Surreal Dream ... The Playlist

Some Came Running: "The Limits of Control" Glenn Kenny

What is the 21st Century?: The Quiet American Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Auteur’s Notebook, May 11, 2009

The House Next Door [Jeremiah Kipp]

Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]

Monsters and Critics Ron Wilkinson

SpoutBlog [Karina Longworth]

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

User comments from imdb Author: Lemmywinks616 from South Africa

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review

Review: The Limits of Control (2009) **** - Living in Cinema Craig Kennedy from Living in Cinema

The Onion A.V. Club review [C+] Scott Tobias

The Limits Of Control Mike Goodridge from Screendaily

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez] the naysayers

Slate (Dana Stevens) review another

Critic's Notebook [Robert Levin] another

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart] yet another

Jim Jarmusch Gavin Smith interview from Film Comment, May/June 2009

Entertainment Weekly review [C-] Owen Gleiberman

The Hollywood Reporter review Michael Rechtshaffen

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [4/6]

The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review

Boston Globe review [1.5/4] Ty Burr

Movie Review: Jim Jarmusch's 'The Limits of Control' Tests Your ... Dan Zak from The Washington Post

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [1/4]

Los Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review also seen here: Chicago Tribune (Betsy Sharkey) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [0.5/4]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

The Drunken Boat The Drunken Boat, poem by Arthur Rimbaud, 1871

Arthur Rimbaud - Poems: The Drunken Boat The Drunken Boat, poem by Arthur Rimbaud, 1871

Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat," Illuminations & Season in Hell

Arthur Rimbaud Criticism

Trauma as Journey: Youth, Maturation and Community... an analysis of Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, by Wyatt Gwyon, October 17, 2007

"The Crux of Rimbaud's Poetics" essay by Eric Mader-Lin (2000)

Arthur Rimbaud (Overview and Analysis) Laurie’s Brief Overview of Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud - Robert Robbins Essay The Significance by Arthur Rimbaud, essay by Robert Robbins

arthur rimbaud (important to patti smith) from People Have the Power, including: page with Patti's art

Le Bateau ivre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There Was Only One Rimbaud - The New York Times Rimbaud, by Graham Robb (552 pages), book review by Richard Howard from The New York Times, November 19, 2000

Arse Poetica When Rimbaud was good, he was very, very good, Ruth Franklin from The New Yorker, November 17, 2003

Rimbaud: The Double Life Of A Rebel, By Edmund White - Reviews ... book review by Tim Martin from The Independent, January 25, 2009

Arthur Rimbaud Arthur Rimbaud’s Life and Poetry, a fansite

eng7007 / BurroughsControl The Limits of Control, essay by William S. Burroughs, 1975

Q&A With Jim Jarmusch on the Exotic Stylings of His Latest Film ... No Limits, interview by Logan Hill from The New York magazine, April 26, 2009

SF360 Tilda Swinton: The 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival "State of Cinema" Address, May 4, 2006

Movieline Interview with Swinton by S.T. VanAirsdale, May 1, 2009

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE B 89

Great Britain Germany (123 mi) 2013 Official site

I’m more of a Stax girl, myself. —Eve (Tilda Swinton)

Typical of what’s happening today in the movie industry, Jim Jarmusch indicated this film was seven years in the making due to an inability to obtain funds to make the movie, as American backers dropped out, so he had to search for European financing. And while Tilda Swinton and John Hurt were onboard throughout the lengthy ordeal, Michael Fassbender was eventually replaced by Tom Hiddleston, where it’s impossible to think of the film without him, as Hiddleston’s imprint is all over this film, especially the slowed down pace of lethargy that captures the creepy feel of vampire characters that have lived for centuries. Hiddleston plays a worldly vampire with connections to a centuries earlier golden age in science, literature, music, and the arts, once friends with Schubert, and authors Shelley and Byron, now a depressed underground musician, aka Adam, whose spacey, mournfully hypnotic music Only lovers left alive | Adam's music YouTube (1:49) played on retro equipment brings back opium-induced thoughts of the hallucinogenic world of APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) and is reminiscent of an earlier 60’s era of Lou Reed with the Velvet Underground, yet he plays the part of a reclusive rock star who makes psychedelic new music while in hiding, much like Mick Jagger as Turner in Nicolas Roeg’s PERFORMANCE (1970). Only Gus van Sant’s LAST DAYS (2005) captures the same dreary mood, a portrait of a suicidal Cobain-like musician’s final days where nothing much happens, but he similarly retreats from reality and ignores everyone, lost in a haze of oblivion. This atmospheric funk is beautifully realized by Jarmusch’s choice to shoot the film in the empty ruins of the economically ravaged Detroit, which he calls “a decimated city.” Truly representative of a city in decay, we return to constant images of empty downtown streets and the remnants of an industrial wasteland, where the residents feel like ghostly inhabitants of a once thriving city. Living in a dilapidated Victorian house in a deserted area on the outskirts of town, looking like the morbid set for a Halloween movie, Adam collects vintage electric guitars, builds his own underground electronic grid, but also has various electronics memorabilia like a 50’s TV, a 70’s phone, while playing classic turnstyle LP records like Charlie Feathers “Can't Hardly Stand It” CHARLIE FEATHERS Can't Hardly Stand It - YouTube (2:52).

On the other side of the globe living in Tangier, with the streets cast in a golden hue, is Adam’s wife Eve (Tilda Swinton), a collector of books in every language, which she’s able to fathom simply by running her fingers over the pages. Dressed in a hijab covering her hair and neck, Eve literally glides through the empty streets ignoring the men popping out of dark corners promising “We’ve got what you want,” as she proceeds to a near empty café where she meets fellow vampire Marlowe (John Hurt), Shakespeare’s contemporary and her longtime lover/confidante who hoards his secret that he secretly penned Shakespeare’s works, while also being her blood supplier, offering her a taste of “the good stuff.” These vampires have long ago sworn off attacking human victims, who they call “zombies,” claiming they’ve tainted the blood supply with their careless lifestyles and reckless disregard for their health. Adam has a black market procurer (Jeffrey Wright) in the blood supply section of the hospital, where he arrives with a large wad of cash dressed in a doctor’s gown posing as Dr. Faust or Dr. Caligari, where getting their fix is like feeding a heroin habit, as they’re seen going through a rush of euphoria, with fangs starting to protrude. Adam uses Ian (Anton Yelchin), in awe of the man’s genius and one of his biggest fans, but also a naïve stoner kid as his Renfield, a go-between to the outside world, while also using him, no questions asked, to track down hard-to-find specialty items, like vintage guitars or recording equipment, and even a specially-made wooden bullet. When Eve realizes the extent of his deep gloom, she decides to board to flight to Detroit, packing Dostoyevsky and David Foster Wallace, wasting no opportunity as they reminisce about their glory years, as Adam recalls when they hung out with Byron, “a pompous bore,” or wrote an Adagio movement for Schubert, and recalls with affection meeting Mary Shelley. When asked what she was like, Adam snarls “She was delicious.” Not since SID AND NANCY (1986) have we seen such a dreamily lethargic and quietly disengaged couple, where he drives her through the empty streets of Detroit at night, past the deserted Roxy Theater and the Michigan Theatre, which is now used as a parking lot, where they seem alone in the vast desolation of boarded up warehouses and factories. “How can you have lived for so long, and still not get it?” she reminds him. “This self-obsession is a waste of living. That could be spent on surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship… and dancing!” Suggesting he might show her the Motown studios, she responds, “I’m more of a Stax girl, myself,” grabbing her partner off the couch as she chooses to play a Denise LaSalle song, “Trapped by a Thing Called Love” Only Lovers Left Alive - Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton dancing YouTube (2:00), which just happened to be released on the Detroit-based Westbound Records label.

Shot entirely at night by Yorick le Saux, with an extraordinary score from Josef van Wissem and Jarmusch’s own band Sqürl, Jozef Van Wissem & SQÜRL - The Taste Of Blood YouTube (5:54), where it’s easy to lose yourself in the feedback and trance-like psychedelic guitar sounds where the desolation of the vampire underworld stretches to an endless abyss. The opening forty minutes or so are riveting and show great promise, but peters out a bit by the end, where the sophistication and urbane wit of Adam and Eve represent a kind of cultured, upper class variety of vampire, where Jarmusch has created a uniquely original, alternate universe existing right alongside the present that sarcastically comments upon the superficiality of the modern era where there’s scarcely a genius left alive, no one to challenge their infinite knowledge, forcing them to withdraw ever further into themselves, yet constantly needing to feed, resembling drug addicts. The film perks up with the arrival of Eve’s naughty kid sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), a cute but mischievous brat vampire whose unstoppable impulses are a destructive force of nature, returning to the reckless carnage and instability of youth, bringing nothing but turmoil into their orderly lives. They make an appearance at an underground music club, hoping to be inconspicuous, but Ava’s continued flirtatiousness draws unwanted attention, where the kick-ass music, however, is White Hills “Under Skin or by Name” White Hills - Under Skin or by Name YouTube (5:40) and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club “Red Eyes and Tears” Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Red Eyes And Tears YouTube (3:59). Despite this surge of energy, it’s only a reminder throughout time of family dysfunction and the capacity for humans to destroy the world they live in, which includes, among other things, the contamination of the blood supply. Of note, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s recent take on the vampire novel, which led to Tomas Alfredson’s film LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008), was similarly concerned with the harmful effects of “impure blood.” This leads to the question of whether vampires can survive under these toxic modern conditions, which, of course, looking at the nearly demolished picture of Detroit, is a question we should be asking ourselves?

How does a city’s destruction, caused by the unconscionable eagerness of people or corporations (like Ava) to thoughtlessly serve only themselves, benefit anyone? Through the perspective of centuries, we are at a particularly noteworthy crossroads in determining just what kind of future we’ll have, yet Ava’s gratuitous self-centered greed and her childlike refusal to see the bigger picture suggests a dire future, emblematic perhaps of those ineffectual voices currently haggling over world peace, where self interests above everything else certainly places the planet at even greater risk. Of course, it wouldn’t truly be representative of a Jarmusch vampire format unless the future of the human condition was utterly dismal.

Mike D’Angelo The Onion A.V. Club

For nearly an hour, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive looked as if it was shaping up to be not merely the best film of Cannes 2013, but one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen. Granted, I’m not sure how Jarmusch could have sustained what he was doing much longer, as the initial movement is essentially Woody Allen’s list of reasons why life is worth living (as enumerated by his alter ego in Manhattan) disguised as a vampire movie. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, both ravishingly bedraggled, play a pair of amorous bloodsuckers (living in Detroit and Tangier, respectively, when the film begins) whose undead state has seemingly only whetted their appetite for beauty in all its forms; the movie functions for an amazingly long time as a catalogue of their passions, which include everything from vintage guitars to scientific nomenclature to seeing the house where Jack White grew up. I realize that may sound in bald description like the worst kind of hipster bullshit (which was more or less my reaction to much of The Limits of Control), but Jarmusch, Hiddleston, and Swinton pour so much uninhibited ardor into each and every moment that the movie constantly feels as if it’s about to burst from an excess of feeling. There’s zero irony here. What’s more, the vampire conceit, while superficially silly (the film is more or less a comedy, albeit an unusually heartfelt one), has the salutary effect of throwing human mortality into stark relief, creating a carpe diem sensation without actually saying anything so banal. Eventually, Jarmusch feels obligated to toss in some vague plot elements—Mia Wasikowska shows up as Swinton’s troublemaking sister—and while the rest of Only Lovers Left Alive is plenty of fun, it also, paradoxically, starts to seem frivolous, just a series of mildly amusing riffs. That’s exactly how many critics, even those who quite liked the film, seem to perceive it. But it clearly aspires to something more, at least for a while, and comes tantalizingly close to achieving it. Grade: A-

In Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]

Whereas Blue Is the Warmest Color is emotionally direct, Only Lovers Left Alive plays it extremely cool. But then, one would expect no less from Jim Jarmusch, whose latest film marks a welcome return to the deadpan stylings of his 1980s films after the (to some, insufferably pretentious) power-of-art philosophizing of his last film The Limits of Control. By contrast, his new one is generally delightful in its playfulness, but not without a core of character-based melancholy underpinning its humor. 

Only Lovers Left Alive is also a genre film of sorts: a vampire movie, but one as far from Twilight territory as one can possibly imagine. Yes, the two main vampire characters, Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), are lovers, but when the film begins, we already see them deeply in love—for centuries, in fact. Only distance separates them at the beginning: he in decaying Detroit, she in exotic Tangier. When Eve glimpses the depth of Adam's desire for her, however, she decides to fly (only on an evening flight, of course) to Detroit to be with him. But then her sister, Ava (a refreshingly zany Mia Wasikowska), interrupts their idyllic existence. 

At one point, Ava, while storming off in an angry huff, decries their “snobby condescension”—and one of the main sources of the film's humor lies in just how right she is. These vampires are, put simply, hipsters, calling humans “zombies” and just generally refusing to embrace anything new, believing that the older is better, especially in regards to art and culture. And yet, Jarmusch’s attitude toward these two characters turns out to be more complicated than mere alignment. Sure, in Jarmusch’s leisurely pace, cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s evocation of a decaying Detroit at night and Jozef van Wissem’s gorgeously retro score, Jarmusch instills a sense of mournfulness in their surroundings, suggesting the decline of the world they're reacting against—but Adam and Eve’s above-it-all pose is frequently made the butt of drily ironic jokes, all the way until its final moments, which brings these two lovers to their hipster knees, so to speak, forcing them to finally interact with the world they so vocally loathe.

Jessica Kiang The Playlist

From the very first opening titles, written in a Germanic font that immediately conjures everything from “Triumph of the Will” to images of big-busted ladies screaming in campy close-up in 1970s cheapie horrors (it may be the only time in Cannes that a film got a big laugh for a typeface) it’s perfectly clear that the Jim Jarmusch in whose company we’re about to spend a couple of hours is not the wilfully obscure surrealist of “The Limits of Control,” nor the considered, melancholic philosopher behind “Dead Man,” nor even the oddball ragtag troubadour of “Down By Law." In fact, “Only Lovers Left Alive,” Jarmusch’s take on the vampire myth starring recent muse Tilda Swinton and Tom “fast becoming everyone’s favorite actor” Hiddleston, finds the maverick filmmaker on playful, referential and mischievous form with hugely enjoyable, if not exactly weighty or important, results. It’s an offbeat, fun, and frequently very funny film, lifted out of disposability by some wonderfully rich production design, music cuts and photography, and by the cherishable performances of the leads. It’s also, bearing in mind the director’s recent output, by far the most accessible film he’s made in a while, albeit still a tad on the languid side for many, with its genre roots allowing the director to give full rein to his inherent weirdness within a comprehensible context, thereby not necessarily losing half the audience in befuddlement.

Adam and Eve (the first and perhaps flattest of the many nomenclature gags that happen in the film) are a married vampires who have been deeply and touchingly in love for centuries. Separated at the start of the film for no directly explained reason, Adam is in Detroit indulging a secretive passion for composing and playing music, visited only by a handy local fixer called Ian (Anton Yelchin) who procures old classic guitars, wooden bullets and whatever else Adam needs. Eve is in Tangier, close by her old friend Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), yes, that Kit Marlowe, who is a vampire himself (and did of course write all of Shakespeare’s works). But sensing Adam is sinking into a depression, Eve arranges the tricky business of winging to his side. Tricky, because it all has to be done at night, and, reluctant to kill “zombies” (which is what they call people) more out of fear of contaminated blood than inherent respect for life, they are reliant on blood supplied by local hospitals and bribed doctors. Reunited, they bicker and spar gently but take care of each other through a series of small episodes, until Eve’s “sister” Ava (Mia Wasikowska) comes to stay and, stirs up the same kind of trouble that had caused them not to have seen her for 87 years.

Wasikowska’s role is small but she’s a pleasure as the petulant and mercurial Ava. Yelchin too has a great time as Ian, nailing the film’s gently loopy tone and Jeffrey Wright manages to make his two short scenes count. But the film is really about Adam and Eve, and Hiddlestone and Swinton are so good, and so well-matched, that their love story is surprisingly romantic and sexy. It’s also really good to look at, with Swinton maybe more luminous than she’s been since “Orlando,” often posed with Hiddleston in a kind of beautiful tangle of alabaster limbs, and the richness of the set design and costuming giving every frame a depth and warmth that rewards in itself. Add to that a terrific score that in its twangy electric guitar chords reminded us of Neil Young’s work on “Dead Man” and some choice songs, including a truly mesmerising track at the very end of the film sung seemingly live, and the film certainly comes handsomely dressed.

But it’s the deadpan jokes and references that really lift proceedings, especially as delivered, often drily, by Tilda Swinton, who’s probably as good at being funny as she is at everything else, but is so rarely given the chance. So, despite being an ages-old vampire with oceans of wisdom at her disposal she gets girlishly excited to drive past Jack White’s childhood home (kind of the unlikeliest Jack White fan ever), teases Adam about hanging out with Byron, and semi-cheats at chess, and gets to deliver, with utter drollery the classic line “Well, that was visual” after we’ve watched a body dissolve down to a bleached skeleton in a pit of acid. Mostly, though, Jarmusch has just littered the script with nods to everything from mathematics to literature to filmmaking -- Adam is variously called Doctor Faust, Doctor Strangelove, Doctor Caligari, Stephen Dedalus, while Eve books flights for herself in the name of Fibonacci at one point and, in a gag that played well in a festival opened by “The Great Gatsby,” Daisy Buchanan at another. None of the names really mean anything, or stand for anything, and if there is a higher theme we’re supposed to derive from the cavalcade of classical and modern cultural references, we’re damned if we can find it. Which in itself is sort of refreshing -- Jarmusch’s film is just pretentious enough for there to be lots of opportunities to for us to snort in recognition, as in “Why yes, I know that, that’s the lead character in ‘Ulysses’!” but not so pretentious that it expects us to actually have read it. It’s hipster-shallow, to be sure, but it makes it a delightfully easy watch.

Which is not to say there aren’t some thematic throughlines for those who want to search for them. The value of “putting work out there” is mentioned frequently in the context of both Adam’s music, which he paradoxically desires to have out in the world, but fears the inevitable fame and recognition, and Kit Marlowe, the fruits of whose creativity are omnipresent, but under another man’s name. The cultured, cool vampires’ disdain for the “zombies,” along with dark hints at how they/we have “polluted” or “contaminated’ ourselves somehow hint at some slight social comment on humankind’s self-destructive tendencies, though we’re probably reaching on that one. No, the real pleasure of the film is in its languid droll cool and its romantic portrayal of the central couple, who are now our number one role models in the inevitable event of us turning vampiric. [B+]

Flavorwire [Jason Bailey]

Only Lovers Left Alive Is About Art and Time – Flavorwire Judy Berman, April 15, 2014

Slant Magazine [Calum Marsh]

MUBI [Celluloid Liberation Front] April 12, 2014

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs] 'Only Lovers Left Alive' Is an Ode to the Eternally Undead City of Detroit

Jim Jarmusch's Vampire Film Only Lovers Left Alive Doesn't ... Jim Jarmusch's Vampire Film Only Lovers Left Alive Doesn't Bother With the Genre's Rules, by Inkoo Kang from The Village Voice, March 26, 2014

Review: Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton shine in ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Only Lovers Left Alive / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

In Review Online [Kurtiss Hare]

Movies [Tom von Logue Newth]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]

Exclaim! [Scott A. Gray]

DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

Paste Magazine [Tim Grierson]

Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Only Lovers Left Alive, directed by Jim Jarmusch ... - Slate Sharan Shetty

Twitch [Kurt Halfyard] also seen here: Review: ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE Brings A Cosmopolitan Maturity To The Ailing Vampire Genre

kamera.co.uk - film review - Only Lovers Left Alive (2014 ... Antonio Pasolini

Film.com [Jordan Hoffman]

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Hannah McHaffie]

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Only Lovers Left Alive - HitFix Guy Lodge

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Floatation Suite [Sheila Seacroft]

Sundance Review: ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE | Badass ... Devin Faraci from Badass Digest

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Jim Jarmusch's ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE - Fandor David Hudson

"Cannes 2013: Only Lovers Left Alive a seven year trek says Jim Jarmusch" Andrew Pulver interviews Jarmusch from The Guardian, April 25, 2013

Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]

Variety [Leslie Felperin]

Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]

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Only Lovers Left Alive – review | Film | The Observer Jonathan Romney

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

'Only Lovers Left Alive' movie review - Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Only Lovers Left Alive is full of bon vivamps | City Pages Stephanie Zacharek

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Vancouver Weekly [Indrapramit Das]

Only Lovers Left Alive - Los Angeles Times 'Only Lovers Left Alive' is the thinking person's vampire film, by Betsy Sharkey, April 30, 2014

Review: 'Only Lovers Left Alive' is an elegant vampire love ... Sheri Linden from The LA Times, April 10, 2014

Jim Jarmusch on new ground with 'Only Lovers Left Alive ... Mark Olsen from The LA Times, April 6, 2014

Only Lovers Left Alive Movie Review (2014) | Roger Ebert Susan Wloszczyna

Barbara Scharres Ebert site at Cannes

Aging, Coming of Age, and Vampires - The New York Times A.O. Scott, also seen here: New York Times critic A.O. Scott

PATERSON B 87

USA (118 mi) 2016

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.
Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom
seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations
drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river
animate a thousand automations. Who because they
neither know their sources nor the sills of their
disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly
      for the most part,
locked and forgot in their desires-unroused.

—Say it, no ideas but in things—
  nothing but the blank faces of the houses
  and cylindrical trees
  bent, forked by preconception and accident—
  split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—
  secret—into the body of the light!

From above, higher than the spires, higher
even than the office towers, from oozy fields
abandoned to gray beds of dead grass,
black sumac, withered weed-stalks,
mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves-
the river comes pouring in above the city
and crashes from the edge of the gorge
in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists-

  (What common language to unravel?
  . . .combed into straight lines
  from that rafter of a rock's
  lip.)

A man like a city and a woman like a flower
—who are in love. Two women. Three women.
Innumerable women, each like a flower.

                        But
only one man—like a city.

—Paterson, by William Carlos Williams, published in five volumes, from 1946 to 1958, From Book I, Paterson by William Carlos Williams - Famous poems ...

A return to a cinema defined by small moments of existential reverie, feeling more like fables or fragments of dreams, as expressed in Jarmusch’s earlier film COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (2003), though this film has a more cohesive plotline that holds all the material together, but otherwise it’s similarly structured around a series of vignettes, where a rhythm of life is established by following a single character, a bus driver aptly named Paterson (Adam Driver), who goes about his daily routines in the town of Paterson, New Jersey, a city made famous by an epic series of poems by William Carlos Williams. While this is among the more understated films on record, it isn’t without several elegiac moments, yet, much like another recent film Fences (2016), an adaptation of an August Wilson play set in Pittsburgh, the film fails to transcend its working class existence, where people are boxed into claustrophobic realities, where race is an economically restrictive component for Wilson, while poetry is presumably the way out of similar suffocating restrictions for Paterson, yet he is similarly confined by mind numbing work routines that make it exceedingly difficult to rise above the regimented parameters demanded by the job, as evidenced by another bus driver Donny (Rizwan Manji) who incessantly complains about the daily grind that often feels overwhelming. Not sure there won’t be more viewers identifying with Donny’s plight than Paterson’s seemingly unflappable demeanor, as most would find it hard to get past the accumulated rigor and more demanding aspects of work that take its toll over time, preventing workers from having a greater sense of independence. There are only a few that reach utopian pleasure from work, turning it into a positive environment where they literally thrive from being constantly replenished on a spiritual level, yet that is the main thrust of this film, where it defies social realism and instead becomes a provocative imaginary treatise on the way it could and perhaps should be, but unfortunately isn’t for the mass majority of human beings on the planet. Inhabiting a dreamlike structure, the film exists in an imaginary world, where the economic and social pressures that consume us on a regular basis simply don’t exist, where we’re instead free to collectively pursue our dreams in a utopian world where life is as we imagine it instead of the way it is.

While it’s a challenging premise, it’s also interesting that Adam Driver has been associated with what might be called other mind-altering works, as he’s a significant player in the supernatural Jeff Nichols film Midnight Special (2016), where in each he seems to have the capacity to channel interior worlds most of us are incapable of seeing, as here he plays an everyday, ordinary man, yet he finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, tapping into the world around him, in keeping with the daily rhythms of life, writing existential poetry that finds beauty in the banal, where “Only one man like a city” can see what most of us do not. Jarmusch remains faithful to the poet Williams’s most famous tenet: “No ideas but in things.” Remaining grounded by a working life, much like William Carlos Williams, a practicing physician throughout his entire life, Paterson keeps a notebook by his side, collecting thoughts and bits of overheard conversation while continuously tuning into the world around him as he jots down free verse poetry. Shot over a week’s time, identifying each new day, the film uses an Atom Egoyan-like structure from his film CALENDAR (1993), where a repeating overhead tableau camera shot opens each day of the week, as we find Paterson snuggled closely in bed with his wife Laura, Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani from My Sweet Pepper Land (2013) and 2015 Top Ten List #10 About Elly (Darbareye Elly), checking his watch for the time, sometime between 6 and 6:30 am, affectionately kissing his wife, as both start each day in each other’s arms. It’s important to consider the quirky individuality of Laura, an excitable girl, who is like the perfect imaginary wife, always loving and devoted, yet consumed by weird idiosyncrasies that not only keep her occupied, but elated by each and every day, where she’s literally thrilled when he gets home from work each day, spending time in the kitchen preparing some culinary surprise, yet she’s fascinated by so many things on her own that it’s impossible for the relationship to grow stale. Mind you, Paterson rarely shows any emotions or excitability, but remains passively contained, reserved, and within himself at all times, so it’s his wife that provides all the emotional outbursts, displaying a childlike enthusiasm for the world around her, whether it’s painting, decorating the house, learning to play the guitar, or making cupcakes for a farmer’s market, her upbeat demeanor expresses a woman who is not only satisfied and content, but filled with joy.

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams | Poetry Foundation

Paterson reads this poem to his wife, at one point, finding joy in the everyday, like miniature haiku impressions, where this might be described as a film where nothing much happens, a stark contrast to the excessive violence that prevails in most American films, instead it’s filled with small moments that reflect the passing of each day, as Paterson sits at the breakfast counter each morning and eats his cereal before heading off to work, lunchbox in hand, as he walks to the bus depot, usually without a word to anyone. Sitting in his bus before he starts his rounds, he scribbles lines of poetry in his notebook that appear onscreen as he speaks them out loud, finding beauty in small things and day-to-day moments, yet reflecting a casual grace in expressing a natural rhythm of time, where he seems to drift through life completely insulated by his observations, which are actually the work of Ron Padgett, an esteemed New York school poet, editor, and translator whose many honors include winning the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America in 2014. Each night, after dinner, Paterson walks his dog, a distinguished bulldog named Marvin who has an amusing habit when left alone during the day, as he runs out and attacks the mailbox stand, knocking it off kilter, where it is noticeably tilted and ajar by the time Paterson gets home from work. This running joke between a man and his pet seems rooted in some unknown irritation known only to Marvin, who may object to Paterson’s habit of tying his leash to a post outside a bar he visits every night. Inside he chats with Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley), a black bartender and familiar face, with photos of Paterson celebrities on the wall (including Lou Costello, Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, and Sam Moore of Sam & Dave), where Paterson sips on a single beer before heading home. One night he witnesses a lover’s quarrel, where the rejected lover (William Jackson Harper) takes matters into his own hand, pulling out a gun, with Paterson quickly taking it out of his hand, discovering it’s only a plastic toy. This is as violent as the film gets. Walking home from work one day he encounters a young 10-year old girl (Sterling Jerins) waiting for her mother, discovering she’s also a poet, reading something from her “secret notebook” called Water Falls, that begins with the lines, “Water falls from the bright air / It falls like hair / Falling across a young girl’s shoulders.” While the poem was actually written by Jarmusch, an English major at Columbia who was fascinated by the poetry of William Blake in Dead Man (1995), Paterson has a habit of meeting various poets along the way, where the viewer is not sure if this is happening only in his imagination, as each time it carries a dreamlike quality. In the evening after dinner, while out walking his dog, he overhears a man spouting free verse in a neighborhood laundromat, Cliff Smith (Method Man), suggesting poetry is to be found in all walks of life, thriving in the hidden corners of our society. Finally, sitting at his favorite spot in front of the Passaic Falls, a visiting Japanese poet, Masatoshi Nagase from MYSTERY TRAIN (1989), appears as if out of a lingering daydream, revitalizing his creative spirit. As the only white adult in a cast composed of black, Indian, Iranian, and Japanese actors, Paterson internalizes his role, living on the outer fringe of society, mixing with, yet keeping a comfortable distance in order to best maintain an artist’s gaze.

Paterson | NYFF54 - Film Society of Lincoln Center

Paterson (Adam Driver) is a bus driver who writes poetry drawn from the world around him. Paterson is also the name of the New Jersey city where he works and lives with his effervescent and energetic girlfriend (Golshifteh Farahani). And Paterson is the title of the great epic poem by William Carlos Williams, whose spirit animates Jim Jarmusch’s exquisite new film. This is a rare movie experience, set to the rhythm of an individual consciousness absorbing the beauties and mysteries and paradoxes and joys and surprises of everyday life, at home and at work, and making them into art.

Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, US) — Special Presentations - Cinema Scope Richard Porton

Cannes 2016, if nothing else, presented viewers with object lessons in the rudiments of political cinema—from the hoariest agitprop to films that might not even have been perceived as overtly political. I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winner, personifies a certain brand of over-determined, melodramatic social realism, and a wily viewer could predict the conclusion from the clues dropped promiscuously in the first scene. Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, on the other hand, despite some subtler clues, probably struck many viewers as more or less apolitical, a mood piece far removed from Loach’s sermonizing. Yet what’s compelling about Paterson is the tension—call it dialectical—between Jarmusch’s highly stylized elegy for a once-vibrant industrial city in New Jersey and his self-conscious homage to a poetic sensibility.

A savvy “literariness,” to invoke Viktor Shklovsky’s term, is in fact at the fore of Jarmusch’s film, a project adept at avoiding archness by adhering to the illustrious New Jersey poet William Carlos Williams’ injunction, “No ideas but in things,” quoted in the film by Method Man, and by mimicking some of the attributes of Williams’ modernist epic, also named Paterson. Like Williams’ Paterson, which refers to the city itself, a personage, and the doctor cum poet, Jarmusch’s vest-pocket epic alludes both to the contradictory status of modern-day Paterson (a depressed city with a fabled industrial and labour history) and the name of the poet-protagonist played by Adam Driver. Jarmusch’s Paterson is admittedly not quite as plot-less as his poetic forebear’s.

Still, even by art house standards, the plot is minimal. Paterson, a bus driver happily married to Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), writes poetry in a “secret notebook” during his spare time. Much of the film coincides with the composition of his poetry, although some of the more plot-driven sequences take place at a neighbourhood bar, where alcohol consumption sometimes leads supporting characters to act rashly until they soberly realize the consequences of their actions. As is true with Williams’ Paterson, the Paterson played by Driver becomes acquainted with his city through extensive walks, or, if you like, flânerie. While it’s likely that only graduate students read Williams’ daunting post-Waste Land epic from cover to cover, there’s definitely a symmetry between Jarmusch’s project and his famous precursor’s: Williams muses:

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls

its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He

lies on his right side, head near the thunder

of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,

his dreams walk about the city where he persists

incognito.

 Similarly, Jarmusch’s schema indulges the daydreams of a protagonist constantly drifting in and out of consciousness; oscillating between the protagonist’s point of view and a more neutral vantage point, the approach is in keeping with the contours of Free Indirect Discourse.

There’s a brief scene in Paterson that crystallizes the salutary contradictions of Jarmusch’s modus operandi. On Paterson’s bus route, two teenagers, played by Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman, the young stars of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012), discuss the career of Gaetano Bresci, an Italian-American anarchist who once resided in Paterson and went on to assassinate King Umberto I of Italy. Both allusive and playful, the scene self-referentially reminds us of Jarmusch’s fondness for Anderson’s films (not to mention the fact that he and Anderson share a production designer, Mark Friedberg) and the city of Paterson’s rich, if largely forgotten, radical past. Life in the United States of Amnesia being what it is, few schoolchildren, outside of perhaps a Jarmuschian dreamscape, are aware of, say, the Industrial Workers of the World participation in the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913—an event that resulted in the arrest of approximately 1,850 strikers. If the kids played by Hayward and Gilman seem incongruously precocious, the fact that they continually mispronounce Bresci’s surname slightly tarnishes their veneer of sophistication.

Intersecting, rhyming tributaries are something of a motif in Paterson. Just as William Carlos Williams was both a doctor and a poet, Jarmusch mentioned at his Cannes press conference that he was intrigued that Driver had military experience as a marine before becoming an actor, a piece of biographical minutiae he subtly incorporates into his protagonist’s background through a photograph that probably eludes most viewers. Coincidences of an ilk that would have pleased the surrealists become part of the film’s fabric. Poet/bus driver Paterson fortuitously chances upon a schoolgirl with a yen for Emily Dickinson and a talent for writing Ron Padgett-like poems (all of the poems attributed to Driver’s character were either written by Padgett for the film or are pre-existing Padgett verses) with elegant similes comparing waterfalls and falling hair.

Paterson’s marriage to Laura presents the stickiest challenge for Jarmusch since the adoring wife comes close to being a passive muse. Her oddball black-and-white decorating schemes, as well as her foray into hawking designer cupcakes, come perilously close to cutesiness. Somehow, Farahani’s restraint and charm fend off any suggestion of condescension and redeem a character that might have come off, in other hands, as merely ditzy. For what it’s worth, Paterson and Laura’s marriage is also one of the few unproblematically blissful unions in recent cinema.

Paterson is now known to New Jerseyans, if they know anything about it at all, as a poor city, avoided by tourists and locals alike and plagued by gang warfare. Jarmusch’s non-naturalistic conception of Paterson and its residents allows for a utopian rethinking of a city that, at least in recent years, has been associated with little more than urban blight. Jarmusch’s Paterson is instead a cinephilic haven with a cozy repertory cinema that enables the happy couple to attend a screening of Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls (1932). This classic horror film provides Laura with an opportunity to encounter, almost mystically, a sort of doppelganger—the “Panther Woman” played by Kathleen Burke. A bar with a multiracial clientele is also one of the hero’s refuges, a beacon of harmony that’s a far cry from the racial tensions reported in Paterson’s local press.

Despite a few minor skirmishes in the bar among soused patrons, Paterson and Laura’s soulful English bulldog named Marvin is responsible for the film’s only bona fide act of violence. Marvin’s almost unforgivable act of aggression suffuses the film with a genuine melancholy, especially if we recall Freud’s coupling of mourning and melancholia. The fact that Paterson and his wife mourn an object, not a person (any more details might constitute an unforgivable “spoiler”) does not lessen the sense that an open wound needs to be cauterized.

In interviews, Jarmusch has cited Frank O’Hara’s poetic credo in “Personism,” a somewhat tongue-in cheek manifesto: “Write a poem to one other person. Don’t write it to the world. Write it as if you’re writing a letter or a note.” O’Hara’s advice can be easily aligned with Jarmusch’s film practice. Unlike Loach, with his penchant for didactic political fables, Jarmusch favours a more intimate critique of everyday life, as well as savouring the utopian possibilities that might emerge if we reject the inanities of our consumer society and, say, combine bus driving with poetry. The goal seems to be what Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization termed, with reference to the work of the 19th-century utopian socialist Charles Fourier, the “transformation of labor into pleasure.”

Film of the Week: Paterson - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, December 28, 2016

Jim Jarmusch’s last film Only Lovers Left Alive was about the coolest people conceivable—ageless, beautiful, globe-trotting vampires, with a remarkably illustrious social circle of the undead, and a penchant for classic soul records, vintage guitars, and finely bound literature. You might say it was about as elitist as a romance could be. By contrast, his follow-up Paterson explores the everyday, the resolutely unglamorous: it’s about the possibility of ordinary ecstasy in the daily lives of working people. It may be the only comedy ever made about the democratic nature of poetry.

Being a Jarmusch film, it’s a deeply felt work—but it’s also goofily conceptual. Adam Driver plays, what else, a driver—a man who works for NJ Transit, operating a bus in the New Jersey city of Paterson. The character is also named Paterson. Continuing this line of doublings, the film is populated by identical twins who drift into Paterson’s field of vision in the course of a working day—two anxious elderly ladies, two grey-haired men in plaid shirts, two young girls in pink frocks. Perhaps another example of this universal twinning is the (not quite identical) mirror relation between the ordinary world and its image as reflected in poetry. For Paterson is a poet, and his routine, generally uneventful working days are partly devoted to carefully, with delicacy and craft, piecing together verses about the seemingly inconsequential material of his life: a box of matches, a line in a song, the way that molecules shift around him when he walks. Paterson is a hymn to the potential of poetry to unlock the richness of the ordinary; it’s essentially a poem itself.

Set over a single week, the film has a regular, more or less uniform structure, each of Paterson’s days unfolding like a single verse, with occasional significant variations. Each day begins with an overhead shot of him waking up in bed beside the woman who shares his life, artist Laura (Golshifteh Farahani). He walks to work at the bus station, new lines piecing themselves together in his head (heard in voiceover, sometimes seen written on screen). He drives the bus while contemplating the overheard conversations of his passengers. Then he goes home to hear what Laura has been up to during her day—usually decorating their flat in her signature black and white, or making cupcakes for a farmers’ market. After dinner, Paterson takes the couple’s bulldog, Marvin, for a walk and stops by at a bar tended by lugubrious chess-loving Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley), who keeps a Wall of Fame devoted to notable figures associated with the city of Paterson—among them, Dave Prater (of Sam and Dave), children’s entertainer Uncle Floyd, Lou Costello (who has his own park there), and Iggy Pop, who in June 1970 was voted world’s sexiest man by the city’s teenagers. Along the way, we learn about other eminent Patersonians such as Gaetano Bresci, an Italian anarchist weaver who ended up assassinating King Umberto I in 1900. We hear about him from a serious, intense young woman on the bus. Her bespectacled male teenage friend asks her, “Do you think there are any other anarchists still around in Paterson?” She replies, “You mean besides us? Not likely.”

There may not be many anarchists in Paterson, but the city still has its share of poets—including a 10-year girl who, like Paterson the driver, keeps a “secret notebook” full of verse and reads him one of her works, “Water Falls” (“Two words, though”). Paterson is himself a twin of sorts to the American poet William Carlos Williams, whose most famous piece “This Is Just To Say” (1934)—the one about the plums in the refrigerator—is read out here, and forms a kind of template for Paterson’s own verse, written for the film by the poet Ron Padgett. Williams also wrote a long work in five volumes entitled Paterson, a poetic portrait of the city and its people, prepared partly by walking around town and capturing snatches of overheard conversation, as Driver’s character does here. Like Only Lovers Left Alive, one of the most defiantly literary films of recent years, Paterson is a hymn to the glories of writing on paper, but also to the pleasures of the spoken word, both poetic and demotic, and to the rich if not always spectacular joys of the artistic sensibility.

This is sometimes a very funny film, whether it’s purveying jokes as such (Marvin provides a killer deadpan sight gag), or just reveling in the low-key humor of the ordinary, of human oddity. In a wonderful scene, two shlubbish guys on the bus discuss women they fancy but clearly will never date, and a woman by the door seems to shoot them a sourly appraising look as she gets off. Mostly, the film drifts: here and there, we might get a sudden subtle break with the week’s uniformity, as when Paterson’s lugubrious dispatcher Donny (Rizwan Manji) unfurls a litany of his woes. Little episodes and encounters happen, but they aren’t really events; they don’t have payoffs. Paterson comes across a fellow wordsmith, a man rapping in a laundromat; he’s played by Wu-Tang Clan veteran Cliff Smith, aka Method Man, and his rap is about late 19th-century African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (this is a remarkably informative film, and like Only Lovers, a clarion call to further googling). Some guys in a car warn Paterson that a pooch like Marvin could easily get dogjacked; our anxieties are tweaked, but it never happens.

This seems like a world in which crisis is unthinkable: when Paterson’s bus breaks down, he reports to HQ, “I have a situation,” but it’s not what you’d call a situation in any other movie; it’s barely even an incident. There is an incident, however: something startling happens one night among the regulars of Doc’s bar, and Paterson leaps into action. He seems slightly shell-shocked afterwards—a nice jittery modulation in Driver’s otherwise calmly bemused detachment—but even this situation doesn’t have a payoff. The movie’s world seems impervious to trauma, just as in Paterson’s poem about running: “I go through / Trillions of molecules / That move aside / To make way for me…” So it comes as a real surprise when something genuinely disruptive happens late in the film. And yet, even this shock is absorbed into the overall calm and balance of this film’s universe. Life goes on: as one of Paterson’s barroom acquaintances comments, “Another day, right?”

The Zen-inflected Paterson is Jarmusch’s most Japanese film, notwithstanding his quasi-thriller Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. An early shot of Paterson drifting slowly and thoughtfully along a leafy path recalls some of the minor-key small-town moments of Hirokazu Kore-eda, and the film’s drama—if it is a drama—resolves itself in Paterson’s meeting, by the city’s famous falls, with a visiting Japanese poetry lover played by Masatoshi Nagase (from Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, recently seen in Naomi Kawase’s oversugared Sweet Bean). The visitor, armed with a copy of Williams’s Paterson, drops a couple more illustrious names—poet Frank O’Hara and Art Brut painter Jean Dubuffet—observes that reading poetry in translation is like taking a shower with a raincoat on, and nods appreciatively when he finds out what Paterson does for a living: “A bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey. Very poetic. This could be poem by William Carlos Williams.”

Paterson itself feels like an attempt, and a very successful one, to approximate Williams’s, or Padgett’s, poetry in film form. It’s a remarkably beautiful, satisfying work: it’s crisply, precisely shot by Frederick Elmes, its images making the most of the ordinary places and faces of a city that may not in reality be as interesting or quietly charming as it seems here. There’s occasionally a little exalted stylistic flourish, as the poetic eclipses the everyday in Paterson’s life: as his poems comes to fruition, we see the Paterson falls, sometimes superimposed with other images, like Paterson’s hand as he writes, and his beloved Laura sleeping.

Laced with a hazy ambient score by Jarmusch’s band SQÜRL, Paterson is steeped in gentle well-being; it seems to propose a model of contemplative, perceptive, responsive life as it should be lived. The life shared by Paterson, Laura, and Marvin seems to be an ideal of everyday romantic happiness. And yet something jars here, and that’s the characterization of Laura—a wildly productive creative spirit, but the one figure in a film sensitive to human oddity who never remotely feels like a living person. Glamorous, tender, endlessly creative, she comes across like a whirlpool of agitated eccentricity: the film constantly returns to her at home, experimenting with various riffs on her signature black-and-white decorative art, whether daubing streaks on a dress she’s making, or punching holes in ribbons, or painting a door frame black. Either that or she’s pursuing other paths of whimsical goofiness: like making a pie with cheddar cheese and brussels sprouts, or setting her heart on a black-and-white Harlequin guitar advertised on TV by faux-Spanish musician Esteban: “In no time at all,” she enthuses, parroting ad-speak, “I could be playing away and realizing my dream—to be a country singer… I have a very strong visual style, as you know.”

Lively as Farahani’s performance is, Laura doesn’t really add up to much more than a very strong visual style—or a monochrome-themed variant on that irksome archetype (since the term seems these days to be in semi-retirement, I promise this is the last time I’ll ever use it) the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She’s endlessly, restlessly, exuberantly creative in a way that seems to be offered as a yang to Paterson’s yin—she fills the world, or at least their house, with stuff, while he calmly goes out and transforms what he sees into, as he puts it, “just words. Written on water.” But it’s hard not to see the film as implicitly valorizing his poetic male solemnity as somehow more dignified than Laura’s childlike, excitable over-activity. Apart from her obsessively one-note signature style, and her whimsical desire to try her hand at country music, there’s no one actually here. As with so many MPDG characters, Laura embodies life force, but doesn’t really have a life: does she actually ever leave the house, except once to take her cupcakes to the market?

It’s just possible that we’re supposed to look beyond the surface appearance: perhaps the perfect loving, mutually supportive, creative and domestic relationship that Paterson and Laura enjoy isn’t quite the ideal life it seems. Perhaps, over the course of seven days (and one morning), it’s very heaven, but just imagine any more than that. How long can she possibly go on painting black on white and white on black? Since there’s no backstory here, I couldn’t help thinking that this pair had only moved in together the week before, and that by one week later, they’d have driven each other mad.

Still, Paterson’s single week offers a persuasive manifesto for a contemplative, non-incident-based form of poetic cinema, and for the virtues of poetic sensibility. At one point, Paterson and Laura go to a local cinema to watch Charles Laughton in Island of Lost Souls, but you can’t really see why movies would matter in these people’s lives. Paterson proposes a state of awareness in which every day becomes a movie in itself—of a minimalist, super-intimate, often object-based quality. Not that this is a movie as self-help manual, but Paterson will certainly help you refine your perceptions of the everyday. You will never, for example, think of Ohio Blue Tip Matches in the same way again. I suspect you’ve never thought of them at all. But you will now, and when you do, you’ll think of Paterson too.

Common Sense: Jim Jarmusch Interview | Paterson ... - Film Comment Amy Taubin interview, November/December 2016

Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson depicts seven consecutive days in the life of Paterson (Adam Driver) and Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), a couple living in Paterson, New Jersey. Paterson also shares its title with the poem by William Carlos Williams. This interview between Jarmusch and Amy Taubin took place during the 54th New York Film Festival, where the film had its New York premiere, as did Gimme Danger, Jarmusch’s documentary about Iggy Pop.

So let’s talk about Paterson. You gave a cover quote for the reissue of Jonas Mekas’s book, Movie Journal. Was the book important for you in some way?

Yes, I had read things off and on.

Did you read Jonas when he was writing in the Village Voice? I’m asking it in relation to poetry. Jonas has that line, something like, “Avant-garde film is poetry. Narrative cinema is prose.” So I was curious about you and your relationship to poetry and film. Did you ever write poetry?

Yes.

Seriously?

I came to New York and I studied at Columbia with Kenneth Koch and with David Shapiro, figureheads of what we call the New York School. And Ron Padgett and David edited an anthology of New York poets in 1975 that was kind of the bible of this school of poetry. The New York School particularly was really, and remains, very close to my heart. That’s Frank O’Hara, of course, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, incredible poet, Joe Ceravolo, Frank Lima. Some of their poetry is concurrent with the Beats, whom I love in a different way, but to me, the New York School, those are my godfathers.

And also for film too, in a way. Because their poems are funny, their poems are personal. Frank O’Hara wrote this very beautiful manifesto called “Personism” in which he says: “Don’t write poetry to the world. Write poetry to one other person. Write a love note to someone you love, or write a little poetic letter to someone you know.” So that’s been really inspiring to me and I’ve tried to make films that are not shouting out from the mountaintop to all of the world, but more like little letters out to someone I care for. They’ve really inspired me throughout.

I write poetry now and then. I don’t really show it to people. I’ve shown a few over the years to David Shapiro. He was my teacher. But yeah, I just love those guys. And as far as Paterson, somebody said it’s like a poem in the form of cinema, but I think it’s more like cinema in a poetic form. Because it’s a film, and I know what Jonas means because poetry is allowed to be abstract where prose is not in the same way. Poetry, even how it’s placed on a page, even if you go back to Apollinaire—Calligrammes—who played a lot with the way the way things are on the page so that the spaces become equally important… That’s very abstract. Prose can do something like that, but it’s not the same way. So I understand Jonas’s observation of a certain form of films being freed of prosaic restraints. Poetry can do that. I’ve always loved poets since I was a teenager, because I discovered Baudelaire and the French symbolists, and of course Rimbaud a little later, and then—I discovered all this in translation—Rilke. And I discovered Walt Whitman, Hart Crane. And then Wallace Stevens, leading to, of course, the New York School.

And what about William Carlos Williams?

William Carlos Williams is kind of the avatar, on one level—the godfather of “Personism.” We used a very obvious one of his poems in the film, “This Is Just to Say,” which literally was a little note left on a table. “I have eaten the plums you were saving for breakfast.” It’s the precedent for what Frank O’Hara was proposing poetry to be. William Carlos Williams is really important in that lineage. And of course he wrote the long, more abstract, book-length poem Paterson, which frankly, I don’t understand a lot of.

What do you mean, you don’t understand?

I don’t quite connect with it. It’s a bit too abstract, or maybe a bit too philosophical for me somehow. And yet, it was a big inspiration for the film Paterson because the beginning of the poem is using the metaphor of Paterson, the city, being a man, and he even describes the formation of the rocks that form the waterfall as a reclining figure. So it was like, “Wow, I could make a film about a man named Paterson in Paterson, and he’s a working-class guy who’s a poet.” Now, William Carlos Williams was not working-class, but he had a job, he was a pediatrician, and he wrote poetry on the side. He delivered over 2,000 children in his lifetime. I love that poets have other jobs. Frank O’Hara was a curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive—when he won some kind of award, one of his colleagues said, “Wait a minute, Wally writes poetry? I had no idea.” One of our greatest poets ever in America! And this is true of many writers—Robert Walser was a bureaucrat, like Kafka. You’ve got to have another job to do this stuff. No poets ever did it for the money.

After my first visit to Paterson 25 years ago or so, I started making vague notes toward this film. I went to check out this place where this poet lived. I went there for a little day trip, and I went to the Passaic Falls, sat right where Adam Driver—Paterson in our film—sits, and I walked around the industrial buildings. It was because of Williams, and also that Allen Ginsberg grew up there, and there were all these weird connections. William Carlos Williams was Robert Smithson’s pediatrician.

Really?

Yeah. That kind of blew my mind. Because I love Robert Smithson.

So his famous 1967 Artforum photo-essay, “The Monuments of Passaic,” was based in a bus ride through a place where he actually had lived.

Yes, he’s from that same area. Also the Lenape tribe, the indigenous people, had an encampment or a village right near the bottom of the Passaic Falls. That must have been an incredibly beautiful place to live. But that’s before Europeans even came here. Paterson’s history is fascinating. Alexander Hamilton envisioned it as this utopian, first industrial city, which it became, and then it became a hotbed of anarchism, and strikes of textile workers. In 1835, there was a strike of thousands of textile workers. Two thousand of them were Irish children, and they were striking because they were working 13-hour days, six days a week. And they practically lost the strike, but they got reduced to 11-and-a-half hour work days. There were also a lot of Italian anarchists.

I used to visit Paterson because my father was garment manufacturer, and he would go to Paterson to buy silk.

Because it was the silk capital starting in the 19th century. It’s a remarkable place, but now, it’s a rough place…

I was leading up to that. All we hear about Paterson today are terrible headlines on the evening news about fires and murders.

Or Donald Trump said that after 9/11 all the Muslims in Paterson were cheering. It’s his fantasyland. Paterson is a rough place, and our film is not a social document of Paterson. It’s an imagined Paterson. But we are respectful to it visually and to its ethnic diversity, because it’s incredibly diverse. It has the largest Arabic or Middle Eastern population per capita of any city in America after Dearborn, Michigan. And a huge South American population. Obviously, there were a lot of Irish and Italians, and then post Civil War, a big African American population. It’s incredibly diverse still.

To keep it on poetry for a minute, I looked through Paterson again before I saw your film. But the Williams poem I landed on was “The Red Wheelbarrow,” just because of the way it’s set up on the page.

Yeah. Perfect. The breaks, the way it looks, and it’s so beautiful at being a tiny detail of mundane, something just noticed, something of no real significance. In Toronto, we had a Q&A and they kept asking about the significance of certain things in Paterson, and I said: “I think we’re going for the anti-significance here.” I thought it was so funny, because the film is about things not being significant. But anyway, “The Red Wheelbarrow”: case in point. It’s beautiful.

I thought about that poem in relation to him coming home every day and straightening the mailbox. How do you figure out where you place the hilarious reveal? When did you decide the day on which we see that the dog is the culprit?

It’s not in the writing, it’s in the editing. For me, filming is capturing things, and the editing is where you form a film out of them. Obviously, I have a script and ideas, but you really have to find it in the editing. Another example is, there’s a dumb, dumb joke about the bus bursting into a fireball. When an older lady says it, getting off the bus, it’s mildly amusing. Then it’s repeated by Laura, and it’s like, “Well, that’s kind of stupid.” But then they repeat it again, a third time, and for me it becomes funny again. But you don’t know until you’re playing with it in the editing. Because of the way the film is shot, those things are modular and could be moved. For example, in the middle of the week, he goes to the bar, and nothing’s going on. He just looks around, that’s it. That was originally, in the script, on Thursday night. But then it didn’t build right, so it became Wednesday night. Or at what point should we see the dog come and mess up—tip—the mailbox? I never know exactly until, really, in the editing. The twins weren’t even in the script, it just occurred to me while we started shooting because a couple of extras happened to be twins. And I thought, “Ah, yeah.” So I put that in there. I had more twins, but then, how much is too many twins? So I had to take some out, or decide, where should they go. For me, a film is formed in the editing room because I only write one draft of the script.

Really?

Yeah, I don’t rewrite. But then, when we start working… Okay, I’m working with Mark Friedberg, and he’s the incredible designer, and we’re getting locations, and I’m making notes. And now I have cast Golshifteh Farahani and Adam Driver, so I’m going to change some things. Even as we’re shooting, I’m like, “Oh, maybe I need twins.” And then I see extras that are twins. So I keep working on it, but the final draft is in the editing room. All the rest is gathering. But I will never write a script, and then show it to people, and then have to rewrite it… I don’t do multiple drafts. It’s the starting point, the map. But it’s going to get better, I hope.

Because the auteur thing is nonsense. Film is so collaborative, and especially in my case, because I have artistic control over the film. That means I choose the people I collaborate with—we’re making the film together. I use “a film by [Jim Jarmusch]” in the credits to protect my ability to choose my collaborators in this world of financing and using other people’s money. But we’re collaborating all the time, so the film is evolving each day we scout, and then each day we shoot, and then if we rehearse, whatever that might mean, it’s just changing, changing, changing. They have this thing, traditionally, where they put different colored pages in the script in pre-production as you’re going along. “Oh, that was a new idea, so those are pink pages.” My final script is multi-colored, because I keep adding, changing—take this scene out, move this one around. For the production, they need to keep track of it. And I love these colored pens that write in four colors, so I make notes all over in different colors. My shooting script is very colorful.

And your amazing editor since Only Lovers Left Alive…

Affonso Gonçalves. Man, I love him. I worked forever with Jay Rabinowitz, who I loved working with. He wasn’t able to do Only Lovers, so I got to meet Affonso. And he’s very musical, too, like Jay. So I don’t have a music editor, ever. It used to be Jay who did it, and now Fonsie does it. Why compartmentalize it?

It seems like an incredible match.

And we work fast, too. He made…

Beasts of the Southern Wild?

Beasts he had to sort of find the film in what he had, and he also cut Winter’s Bone, which has a very beautiful rhythm to it. Of course, he cut Carol. He’s doing the new Todd Haynes film. He’s just incredible. It’s a pleasure each day. But editing’s always been that way for me, ’cause that’s where you make the film. And even if it’s problematic, then you find your way, you try different things, you solve a problem you have in the film.

At what point did you think that Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani could be a couple?

First, I did not write the film for characters, which is unusual for me. I definitely wrote Only Lovers Left Alive for Tilda [Swinton]. Then I found Tom Hiddleston. I hadn’t seen a lot of Adam, only smaller things that he did in Inside Llewyn Davis, Frances Ha, and one episode in Girls.

He was the best thing in Girls.

He was fantastic. Then I heard some interviews with him, and I liked how he seemed so open and sincere. He wasn’t trying to pump himself up. He seemed aware of his own fragility, in a way. Then talking with him, I just knew, “Oh, this guy’s fantastic.” And he was in the military, and he also went to Juilliard. And this is a film about a bus driver, who’s a kind of refined poet. I also love that Adam will not see a film that he’s in, like Robert Mitchum, who never would. Adam won’t because Adam knows that his gift, not analytical, same as me. For him to see himself would mess him up. “Oh God, I’m looking at my posture, and how I walk.” He doesn’t want to think about that. So he’s not seen Paterson. He hasn’t seen [the new] Star Wars. And he was lovely to work with. He’s quiet, but he’s got a very good sense of humor, and he just wants to react. He’s very observational as a person.

In the first draft, Laura was blonde, but Sara Driver suggested Golshifteh whom I loved in Half Moon and a few more recent films. So I cast her just because I loved her, not because she was of Persian origin. I told Adam and Golshifteh, “If you guys want to have a backstory of how you met, or whatever, that’s fine but do not tell me, I don’t want to know anything about it. I want to start with day one, Monday morning, you’re in bed together. What I know about you starts now.” And they were like, “Okay, fine.” But then, I wove Persian things in, a little music she listens to, some of her designs. Some little photograph she sees.

What’s so interesting to me about them as a couple is that she is the more active one. Her relation to her expressivity is out there, and his is all inside. He gets the subjective image superimpositions.

He likes routine, because routine allows him to drift. Because he doesn’t have to think about what clothes does he wear each day, what time does he go to work, what is the route of his bus. Even walking the dog, going to the bar is part of his routine. Everything is laid out for him, and that lets him be a poet, because within that routine, he can observe, he can be an antenna, he can drift, he can listen to people, he can write his poems by the waterfall. He needs that.

And she has so many things going on, you don’t know what’s going to be next. I love when she says at one point, “Guess what I did today?” And he said, “Uh… plant an unusual vegetable garden in the backyard?” She says, “No, silly, you’ve got to do that in the spring!” Like, that’s a possibility! Think of all the things she’s doing and we only see her in one week. Imagine a month’s worth of Laura. She’s very busy. I talked to a feminist French journalist in Cannes, who said, “Your film’s a throwback to ’50s domesticity, et cetera, with this character of Laura.” And I was like, “Wait a minute, she makes her own decisions, she lives the way she wants. She wants to make cupcakes, which might make money for them. She’s not oppressed by a male figure. She’s totally free. So why are you defining her only because her environment is basically domestic, how is that anti-feminist? Are you against every working-class female on the planet who right at this moment might be washing her children or making food for them, or are they anti-feminist? Are they oppressed? Should they be working for a corporation, wearing a business suit, and then you’d be okay?” It was interesting, because I understood that domesticity set off a reaction in someone. I’m a feminist!

I like the character of Laura, and I think it’s interesting this difference you mentioned—that Paterson doesn’t even take in all the things she’s doing because he’s kind of spaced out. She tells him three times about the cupcakes and still he asks her, “Hey Laura, what’s all the flour for?” Because he needs to drift away. That’s his gift. That’s who he is. And she’s very accepting of who he is, in the same way he is of her. And that, to me, is a love story. There’s no conflict here, really. They love each other for who they are, and they’re different. That’s almost getting too analytic for me, like what’s the film about. There’s that part of it. There is love in the story.

Oh, it definitely is a love story, just like Only Lovers Left Alive is a love story…

Yes, they are…

Let’s talk about the cinematography. I didn’t realize it was shot digitally when I saw it the first time. It’s so beautiful.

Fred Elmes is just incredible. He’s been using the Alexa Digital Arriflex camera for quite a while now. He knows I love film material, as does he. Only Lovers was digital, but that was different, because that was set at night, and digital at night can be very beautiful because you use less light and you get really beautiful, rich blacks. Digital in the daylight gives me a headache because of the depth of field, and because of the skin tones in daylight—I don’t like it. But Fred said, “Okay, we set up the parameters, we program in a certain look in the same way we used to, when we picked our film stocks, and we have a variety of options. So we pick our exterior film stock, and our interior film stock if they’re not the same. We know there’s a look we’re going for from the moment we buy our film materials. In the digital, we have all our raw information, but we also program in, in advance, a look that we like. Is it warm? Is it cool? What kind of feeling are we looking for?” And Fred and I also talked with Mark Friedberg about that in advance.

Fred knows I hate this depth of field. At some point, we had so much neutral density filtration in front of the lens that it looked like it was black, because I want the lack of depth of field. So that if you have two people in a frame in a close-up, one of them is out of focus. That’s beautiful. Fred knew how to do that. Fred guided us to find it, because he’s been thinking about it for a long, long time now, shooting digital. It really made me realize that these are all tools. Digital is not as magical as film, but it has magical capabilities too. And we did something I almost hesitate to reveal. We did a very tricky thing. I said to Fred, “I want the film to have a feeling of being vignetted somehow without actually seeing any vignetting.”

Fred is just so incredible, but what incredible collaborators we talked about! Affonso Gonçalves, Fred, Mark Friedberg is just incredible to work with. Mark is not just the production designer, he puts his soul into everything. Fred wasn’t around when we started scouting because Fred was shooting something. So Mark and I would just go out by ourselves and start location scouting, very early. Just the two of us, driving to Paterson. Mark would drive. And he’d take pictures while driving. He is just an incredible person. His hand is in so many things. He helped me pick the books that are seen in the little writing area in the basement, and he came up with all these possible techniques for Laura to try to do. That’s his idea, where you paint with bleach, and then it gets lighter a second or two after you apply it. Mark brings so many things to the film.

And I didn’t know Catherine George, the costume designer, but Tilda Swinton, who is my guide in so many ways—I wish she were the queen of the universe—she said, “Oh, you’ve got to meet my friend.” I used to love to work with John Dunn, the costume designer, but he wasn’t available. And Tilda said, “You’ve got to meet Catherine George.” So I met her, and what another gift of a collaborator. I feel so lucky just to get to work with these people. And our producers were just great. Carter Logan’s my colleague for a long time, and Josh Astrachan, who worked with Altman… And our whole crew—everyone was fantastic. And we haven’t even mentioned this lovely dog actor, Nellie, who we lost. What an actor, too. And all the vocalizations, all the little sounds are all her.

They are?

Yeah, they don’t come from any other dog, or any other thing. She did her own ADR, her own looping. We just edited it in. She was fantastic. A real sweetie, too. We weren’t allowed to interact with her, the crew. You have to keep a distance: she could interact with the two actors, but you can’t let her get close to anyone because she has trainers that she’s obeying. Everyone wanted to be friends with her, and we had to let her be a diva.

One other thing—the scenes in the bar. The actor who plays the guy who gets his heart broken, William Jackson Harper is amazing.

He’s so lovely. I love the scene where he says he’s an actor. I can’t stop laughing.

He has fantastic timing, and it’s all real.

Oh yeah. He’s wonderful.

The bar was such a familiar place, and I so believed in it. It really felt like those people are in that bar every night.

That’s good to hear. It’s hard for me to know that, and that’s a big concern of mine, and I can’t know it, because… I joke with people that come up to me and say, “Oh, I really like your film.” And I say, “Wow, that’s good, ’cause I haven’t seen it.” Because I can never see it. So I don’t know. I hope it’s not corny or fake. It’s hard for me to know.

No, it’s not at all. You do believe that these people are in that bar and that this is routine, and when they’re supposed to know one another, they do know one another. And that’s all absolutely rare. I mean, I don’t believe that in Friends on TV, that those people ever said a word to each other except on the set.

Well, I’m glad to hear you say that. I’m very happy, too—that bar we shot was the bar that was in Trees Lounge, Steve Buscemi’s film. Years ago.

You used the same bar?

The same bar. Because I couldn’t quite find a bar, and then, you know, Steve and I are very close, and I think he said, “Well, you should check out the one we used. I think it’s still there and everything.” So then we checked out Trees Lounge.

Where is it?

It’s in Queens, actually. It’s fantastic. And the owner was really nice, accommodating. But I like that it’s in Steve’s movie from 20 years ago. So it had a good vibe, just for me, for that. It still had some of Steve’s molecules or something in there, somehow. At least, cinematic molecules.

Could we talk a little bit about Gimme Danger? Because you were working on it at the same time as Paterson.

Jim Osterberg—Iggy Pop—and I have been friends for 25 years. About eight years ago he said, “I know you love the Stooges. And I kind of wish, if someone would make a definitive movie about us, it would be you.” The next day, I was trying to figure out how I would approach this. So I started getting ideas for a structure, loosely, then a plan of some stuff to shoot, and who I would shoot. I did not want to shoot anyone that wasn’t family, wasn’t the Stooges. Which includes Kathy Asheton, the Asheton sister, and Danny Fields. I thought of Bowie and John Cale, because I love them. But I realized, you know, if you shoot them, you’re going to use them, and do you really want to use them? No, I don’t, because they’re outside the Stooges. So I kept that as a strategy.

I started working on it, and then I ran out of money. Carter Logan was the only real producer of this film, and he told me—this is before we shot Only Lovers Left Alive—“Jim, you’ve spent almost 40 grand of your own money. You’re going to run out of money.” So we stopped, and then after Only Lovers, started in some more. Bart Walker, my angel, helped us meet this incredible guy, Fernando Sulichin, who financed the film in the end. Then we paused to do Paterson. A funny thing is that the reference to Iggy Pop in Paterson is real.

You’re kidding!

It’s not made up. No, I wouldn’t make it up. The Girls’ Club of Paterson in 1970 proclaimed him the sexiest man alive. I really get a kick out of Doc saying, “Okay, Iggy Pop on the wall.” Because that was really true. Anyway, it took a year and a half to clear all the rights for Gimme Danger. We had great people working. Arielle de Saint Phalle, who I work with, was incredible. We’d get photos, and then they’d ask for too much money. We can’t do it, so okay, take them out. Then she would relentlessly find other things to replace them, and negotiate, and track down guys living in a trailer on the south side of Santa Fe that don’t even care anymore. But that took a year and a half.

But it’s the way the film’s made. It’s a collage of nonsense. Kind of like the Stooges. It’s sort of messy and wild and collaged. And I’m very lucky because I only made one other music film, Year of the Horse, with Crazy Horse, and Neil asked me to make that one also. And I love Crazy Horse, and the Stooges for me, that’s in my soul. It’s a kind of fan film, not an innovative work. I got a little frustrated, actually: while making it, I saw the film 20,000 Days on Earth, a film about Nick Cave.

Oh, yeah.

It is a beautiful film because a lot of it’s not true, so you define someone’s truth by not being truthful, and it’s a portrait of Nick Cave that’s so true by parts of it being fabricated. I loved it so much that I thought, “I’m just going to put the Stooges film in a drawer.” Because that film’s very innovative. But then I thought, “Okay, well, they did something very unusual, and ours is not intended to be that. It’s a celebration of the Stooges, and that’s its intention, so don’t worry about it.” But it did throw me for a loop because I love that film.

And now there’s a lovely new film called Danny Says about Danny Fields. I laugh my ass off watching it because Danny Fields is so unfiltered, incredibly opinionated, so funny and fantastic. And I love Danny Fields. In a way, I think all the things Danny Fields brought to light, without them, I might be a refrigeration repairman. I wouldn’t know the MC5, the Stooges, all these things he did. And he did none of it to become rich or famous, Danny Fields. He did it out of interest. He’s a real character. I was laughing throughout so hard. I just saw it the other night, but it was a real pleasure, because these kinds of characters are just invaluable, people like Danny Fields.

Maybe if I were younger, I’d know if there were others like them around, but I don’t think there are.

It seems less and less. At the end of Danny Says, he’s talking about how, “Well, sometimes a lifetime isn’t long enough for the good things to catch up and be appreciated. And so you have to accept that. Don’t worry about that. That’s just the way it is.” He’s just undaunted by that fact. Just to have someone say that, and see how he lived his life—he doesn’t care about getting rich, or even being famous by this film. It almost makes him cringe a little, because that’s not his thing. He’s just a real appreciator of things. And he helped bring them to light, so he’s like a gift. But it seems that there are fewer and fewer people like that.

In a way, what you just said is what Only Lovers Left Alive is about. It’s only because they have that incredible span of time that they can see the relationships, and they can unearth this stuff.

Yeah. I’m a self-proclaimed dilettante, and it’s not negative to me, because I’m interested in so many things, from 17th-century English music, to mushroom identification, to various varieties of ferns, to all kinds of stuff. How can I, in one lifetime—I could be like Adam and Eve in Only Lovers, I wouldn’t be a dilettante, because they actually know. He knows how to build a generator, and she knows the Latin identification of everything. But I’m a dilettante because I don’t have enough time. And there are too many incredible things that I get attracted to, and so my head’s always spinning around. But that’s okay. Being a dilettante is helpful if you make films, because films have all these other forms in them. I’ve been finding more and more a lot of great directors I love were dilettantes or are. Like Nick Ray, prime example. Studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, had Bertolt Brecht crash on his sofa, had a radio show of Appalachian music and rural blues in the ’30s, was a painter, read voraciously, knew all about baseball. I know Howard Hawks had an incredible variety of interests. And Buñuel.

My thing is dilettantism, amateurism—I believe that I’m an amateur, because amateur means you do something for the love of a form, and professional means you do it for your job, you get paid, and nothing against that!—and variations. That’s my holy trinity lately of what my defining priorities are: being a dilettante, being an amateur, and appreciating variations in all expression. Because I love variations. To me, it’s the most beautiful form, to accept that all things are really variations on other things.

The form of this film is all…

Completely, because it’s seven days in a week. It’s just variations on one after the other.

Jim Jarmusch's “Paterson” and the Myth of the Solitary Artist - The New ... Richard Brody from The New Yorker

Paterson Evokes the Inner World of the Artist But Flirts With Twee David Edelstein from Vulture

Film Freak Central - Paterson (2016) Walter Chaw

Barry Schwabsky on Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson Poetic License, Artforum, December 26, 2016

Paterson · Film Review Adam Driver mellows out in Jim Jarmusch's ... A.A. Dowd from The Onion A.V. Club

Review: Paterson - Parallax View Robert Horton

“Paterson” and “Neruda” Anhony Lane from The New Yorker

Review: Jim Jarmusch's Paterson Sings the Poetry of Everyday ... - Time Sephanie Zacharek

Cannes Review: Adam Driver Stars in Jim Jarmusch's 'Paterson,' His Most Intimate Film Eric Kohn from indieWIRE

Review: Jim Jarmusch's 'Paterson,' With Adam Driver, Is a Quiet ... David Sims from The Atlantic

Review: The Tender Poetry of Jim Jarmusch's "Paterson" on Notebook ... Daniel Kasman from Mubi

'Paterson': Cannes Review | Reviews | Screen Tim Grierson from Screendaily

Jarmusch in the American Weeds | Jonathan Rosenbaum an earlier Jarmusch overview initially published in The Guardian, August 27, 2004

Cannes Review: Jim Jarmusch's 'Paterson,' Starring Adam Driver, Is ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist

At Cannes, A German Comedy to Fall in Love With, and Paterson's Poetic Radiance Stephanie Zacharek from Time magazine

The House Next Door [Sam C. Mac]

The Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]

Paterson – first look review - Little White Lies David Jenkins

Reasons to Rejoice, From Cannes: 'Paterson,' 'The ... - Village Voice Bilge Ebiri from The Village Voice, also seen here: Second Dispatch: Paterson; The Handmaiden; American Honey; Toni Erdmann

TIFF 2016 Review: “Paterson” (2016) ★★★★★ Ulkar Alakbarova from Let the Movie Move Us

Movie Mezzanine: Tina Hassannia

Flickreel [Craig Skinner]

CineVue [John Bleasdale]

The Upcoming [Jasmin Valjas]

Cannes Film Festival 2016: Part One - Features - Reverse Shot Jordan Cronk

Cannes Dispatch #2: Paterson, Happy Times Will Come Soon ... Blake Williams from Filmmaker magazine

Geoff Andrew] (Cannes 2016:Top 15) BFI Sight and Sound

Jim Jarmusch's PATERSON - Fandor New York Film Festival, David Hudson

Daily | Cannes 2016 | Jim Jarmusch's PATERSON | Keyframe ... - Fandor David Hudson

Jim Jarmusch, Ron Padgett and the sublime poetry of 'Paterson' - LA ... Kevin Crust interviews poet Ron Padgett from The LA Times, January 17, 2017

Cannes 2016: Adam Driver's Paterson will be treasured for years ... Todd McCarthy from The Hollywood Reporter

Cannes Film Review: Adam Driver in Jim Jarmusch's 'Paterson' | Variety Owen Gleiberman

Paterson, directed by Jim Jarmusch | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrew

Paterson review: Adam Driver's poetic bus driver proves safe pair of ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Paterson review – a contrived celebration of small-town life | Film | The ... Xan Brooks from The Guardian

Cannes 2016: Adam Driver's Paterson will be treasured for years ... Tim Robey from The Telegraph

Metro US [Matt Prigge]

New Jersey Stage [Eric Hillis]

With 'Paterson,' Jim Jarmusch makes a beguiling foray into sincerity ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Dallas Film Now [Peter Martin]

'Paterson' Review: Jim Jarmusch, Adam Driver Deliver Ode to Small ... San Francisco Chronicle

Cannes: The happy marriages of Jeff Nichols' 'Loving' and Jim Jarmusch's 'Paterson' Justin Chang from The LA Times

Adam Driver finds the soulful, intricate poetry in Jim Jarmusch's ... The LA Times

Paterson Review: Jim Jarmusch and Adam Driver Shake the Everyday ... LA Weekly

L.A. Biz [Annlee Ellingson]

Paterson Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Glenn Kenny

Review: In Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Paterson,’ a Meditative Flow of Words Into Poetry Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

Adam Driver Takes the Wheel Kathryn Shattuck from The New York Times, December 30, 2016

Paterson (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Paterson (poem) - Wikipedia

Full text of "Paterson - William Carlos Williams" - Internet Archive

William Carlos Williams - Wikipedia

William Carlos Williams | Poetry Foundation

William Carlos Williams - Poet | Academy of American Poets - Poets.org

The New World of William Carlos Williams | by Adam Kirsch | The New ... Adam Kirsch from The NY Review of Books, February 23, 2012

GIMME DANGER

USA (108 mi) 2016

Romanian drama, a Dolan dud, and more Jim Jarmusch on day 8 of ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club

Granted, innovation is hard. Jim Jarmusch created something singular earlier in the festival with Paterson, but his other film at Cannes this year, Gimme Danger (Grade: B), fails to reinvent the rock doc and will slightly disappoint anyone who sees it with expectations inspired by its title. This history of Iggy and The Stooges, combining the usual archival footage and contemporary talking-head interviews, is entirely safe, even cozy; Jarmusch clearly adores Iggy and wants to ensure that The Stooges receive their due as one of the most influential forces in music history. Those hoping to learn more about David Bowie’s controversial, treble-heavy mix of the band’s third album, Raw Power, for example, will have to be content with a single comment from guitarist James Williamson, who marvels at the rhythm section of brothers Ron and Scott Asheton (both now deceased), then ruefully notes that Ron’s bass can barely be heard on the record. Jarmusch works hard to make Gimme Danger visually interesting, tossing in clips from various old movies as humorous punctuation (à la Errol Morris in The Thin Blue Line); you can tell that the film has been directed, which is refreshing. But it’s still not very far removed from recent docs about Pulp, Big Star, Joe Strummer, and other acts—designed for viewers who know nothing about the subject or who are fanatical enough to want to consume everything. In Jarmusch’s filmography, it’ll be a footnote.

'Gimme Danger': Cannes Review | Reviews | Screen Jonathan Romney from Screendaily

Iggy Pop’s status as one of rock’s great survivors is poignantly born out at the end of Jim Jarmusch’s documentary Gimme Danger, as we learn that the film is dedicated to four now deceased members of his former group the Stooges, including rhythm section the Asheton brothers, who feature prominently. But the film – very much about the Stooges as a band, rather than specifically about Iggy – is an exciting testament to the survival power of the Stooges’ music, reviled or ignored in its time, then rediscovered by the late 70s punk generation, and now widely celebrated as the work of – as Jarmusch claims at the start – “the greatest rock and roll band ever.”

The Stooges were certainly one of 60s/70s rock’s most intense outfits, and have proved enormously seminal, the film’s final chapter showing how they influenced some of rock’s key noise-makers including the Sex Pistols and Sonic Youth. The film runs through the band’s wayward career, incorporating interviews with Pop – who proves an articulate and witty raconteur – as well as members of the band, notably the Asheton brothers (bassist Ron and drummer Scott), saxophonist Steve Mackay and the group’s later guitarist James Williamson. There’s also a healthy amount of 60s-70s footage of the band on stage, usually accompanied by their recorded rather than live music, plus archive TV and film clips, and moderately droll animations by James Kerr.

The pre-credits sequence documents the band’s collapse in 1973, when they were foundering in a morass of unprofessionalism, drug abuse and exhaustion. Iggy would soon re-emerge to achieve cult legendhood as a collaborator with David Bowie, but the pair’s famed Berlin period doesn’t figure here.

Jarmusch – returning to music documentary following his 1997 Neil Young concert film Year of the Horse – is interested specifically in the Stooges story, and in celebrating the group as a group. The story starts in the 60s, as James Osterberg from Ann Arbor, Michigan experiments with a career as a rock drummer, before teaming up with three local boys (the Ashetons and guitarist Dave Alexander), who after a shaky start (named the Psychedelic Stooges), get signed to Elektra Records, partly thanks to another local act, politico rockers the MC5, for whom Pop still has the greatest fondness and respect.

The Stooges made two incendiary albums for Elektra, their self-titled debut and Fun House, before falling apart. It was through David Bowie and his manager Tony DeFries that the band, now with guitarist Williamson, came to London to record the revered Raw Power album – made, Williamson grins, “without adult supervision”. Then the story goes sour, with DeFries’s MainMan company firing Pop “for moral turpitude”.

But that turpitude isn’t dwelled upon here - Jarmusch isn’t interested in the Rock Babylon story he could have told. Instead, the story skips to 2003 and a long-awaited Stooges reunion. There’s a little too much dull background information on this period – but footage of the decidedly older and tubbier band live show them to be just as potent as in their lean, deranged youth.

Despite the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Pop’s unshakeable icon status, they never became establishment figures, and Pop’s interviews here show him raging against the machine with gleeful and undimmed venom.         

Jarmusch fans won’t find much of the director’s signature touch here, as he self-effacingly pays homage to a beloved act – Stooges fans will find plenty to enthuse about in the film’s ample coverage of a little-documented career. At the very least, Gimme Danger will send viewers back to the band’s first album – preferably on scratched, warped vinyl.

Cannes Review: Jim Jarmusch's Documentary 'Gimme Danger' Is A ... Nikola Grozdanovic from The Playlist

It’s a little weird that “touching” is the first word to come to mind after watching “Gimme Danger,” considering it’s a documentary about infamous prototypical punk rockers, The Stooges. The raucous, wild, and disruptive energy one would expect can be traced in Iggy’s words and in the vintage footage of the band’s cacophonous, messy concerts from the late ’60s and early ’70s, but these words hardly describe the driving force of the documentary. Then you look at who’s behind the lens and conclude that it was impossible for this documentary not to be touching.

Jim Jarmusch, who also came to the Cannes Film Festival this year with his new feature “Paterson” (our review), has a deep and long love affair with The Stooges and with Iggy Pop — the musical icon and frontman has featured in “Dead Man” and “Coffee and Cigarettes,” besides being a good friend with the director in real life. A text preamble describes The Stooges as “the greatest rock band in the world” and the respect is tangible in “Gimme Danger,” a documentary that’s at its most effective when reverberating with warmth from Iggy and other band members reminiscing about the past and ex-members.

That approach is both a curse and a blessing. As a tribute, “Gimme Danger” is essential viewing for Stooges fans. As a compelling rockumentary, or even for fans of Jarmusch alone, what’s lacking is that glued-to-the-screen absorption that comes with the director’s feature work. Jarmusch interviews Iggy Pop (born, and introduced as, Jim Osterberg) who takes us through all of the band’s fluctuations; how it all began with brothers Scott (drums) and Ron Asheton (guitars) and Dave Alexander (bass) after Iggy came back from Chicago to Detroit, realizing that his style didn’t fit the blues scene regardless of how much he was influenced by it. “I smoked a big joint by the river and realized I wasn’t black” cackles Iggy to the camera. Looking like a beaten-up leather doll that’s been stitched over a gazillion times and took one too many turns in the sun bed, Iggy is like a human painting of compelling style and charisma. With his signature deep voice still silky considering the LSD and joints over the decades, he makes for a very easy documentary subject. Just turn the camera on, point and watch the fireworks.

To add a little pizazz, Jarmusch does make fun use of some animation for reenactment purposes, including a great moment that sees the band rehearsing in the early days. Old and current band members and supporters are part of the doc’s talking head catalogue, of which the most fascinating are bassist Jimmy Recca and James Williamson. The latter’s story of leaving the band after 1973’s Raw Power and becoming a Sony executive only to rejoin the band in 2009 is one of shiniest diamonds in “Gimme Danger.” Interestingly enough, Jarmusch skips most of what made the band and its raucous leader so uncategorizable when they exploded onto the scene, with archive footage only teasing what ardent fans already know. That’s why “Gimme Danger” might surprise some viewers as it’s relatively low-key in terms of showing who the band really was, choosing, boldly but perhaps a little blandly, to focus on the soul and thought processes that went on behind-the-scenes.

“We were real communists, man” says Iggy multiple times, slapping away the notion that the band was riding on his coattails. There’s a clear agenda here with the way Jarmusch and Pop approach the documentary: let’s show them the inner workings of The Stooges rather than the exterior flair, and fuck it if that’s not what audiences were expecting. So, while not an experiment in style or multi-layered structures like “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,” there’s still something reverently commendable in the straight-line approach. At times, Iggy is all over the place as he reminisces, but mostly he’s in zen mode, and things get even more down-tempo when he opens up about the death of Ron Asheton in 2009, which affected the band tremendously.

As for the featured music, the classic “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is the most readily recognizable and influential song to come from the Stooges, but it being used so much — way more than “Gimme Danger” for example — could be considered a slight fault and exercise in monomania. The upside to that is that it’s so freakishly contagious and brilliant, it’s difficult to resist. Also, keep your eyes peeled for a great moment when bassist Mike Watt talks about the influence of Todd Haynes‘ “Velvet Goldmine” in getting the Stooges back together after decades of being disbanded.

Even if you don’t agree with Jarmusch’s introductory claim that The Stooges are the greatest rock and roll band ever, there’s still a lot of pleasure to be gleaned from “Gimme Danger;” most of it coming from Iggy’s love of the band, the music, and inability to be anyone but his incomparable and uncompromising self. [B]

'Gimme Danger': Finding Cool On The Brink Of Catastrophe Andrew Lapin from NPR

The Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]

'Gimme Danger: The Story of the Stooges': Movie Review Dave Swanson from Ultimate Classic Rock

Cannes Film Festival 2016: Gimme Danger | Review – The Upcoming Joseph Owen

Stooges On Screen: Iggy Pop And Jim Jarmusch On The New Film 'Gimme Danger' NPR interview of Jarmusch and Iggy, November 5, 2016

Iggy Pop slams modern music: 'Why don't I just die now?' Catherine Shoard interview with Iggy Pop from The Guardian, May 19, 2016, including a video, Iggy Pop: Everyone should just drop drugs – video (1:23)

Cannes 2016: Iggy Pop, Jim Jarmusch On Gimmie Danger And ... Graham Winfrey covers the Cannes press conference from indieWIRE, May 19, 2016

Iggy Pop Blasts Music Industry: 'Why Don't I Just Die Now?' Daniel Kreps on the press conference from The Rolling Stone, May 20, 2016

Jim Jarmusch's 'Gimme Danger': Cannes David Rooney from The Hollywood Reporter

Cannes: Jim Jarmusch's 'Gimme Danger' | Variety Owen Gleibermann

Review: Iggy Pop Bares All, and Nothing, in 'Gimme Danger' Stephen Holden from The New York Times

Jarrar, Khaled

INFILTRATORS (Mutasalilun) B 85

Palestine Lebanon United Arab Emirates (70 mi) 2012 Website Trailer

A rather provocative look at the Israeli wall, or 400-mile Israeli West Bank barrier that separates Israel and the Palestinian occupied territories, which doesn’t use the formulaic method of shooting a documentary film, but instead shows raw coverage of Palestinians routinely climbing over the wall to get into Jerusalem looking for available work, expressed through experimental techniques, almost all of which feels shot by handheld telephones, much of it at night, creating what amounts to an impressionistic mosaic of what has become a daily routine, as some 500 or 600 cross the wall in this manner every week. Without showing any historical backdrop, no talking heads, no official spokespersons, no graphs, no statistics, and no editorial commentary, the film simply documents what American television refuses to show, which is the daily risk young Palestinians are forced to take in order to have a chance to earn money, as low wage earnings as laborers are available in Jerusalem as undocumented workers. In the West Bank, more than 65% live under the poverty level, while in Gaza it’s closer to 85%, so the only way to survive is to either leave the country altogether or go where the job opportunities are. As a result, they construct 25-foot ladders, or giant wood blocks as steps, or a hanging rope from the top of the wall where a dozen or so men climb over the walls, crossing a highway patrolled by Israeli security forces, and run to a designated area where a transport van is waiting to pick them up. As the Israeli’s have constructed guard towers every three-quarter miles, it’s not easy to make it across undetected. Nonetheless, this is the process that has been in place for years. A word on the title: Infiltrators is the Israeli term for Palestinians who smuggle their way into Israel, something of a provocative choice, as the pervading Palestinian view is that they are only returning to what was originally their own legally established land before it was stolen from them and occupied by Israeli military forces.

To Americans, what immediately comes to mind is the border barrier walls between the American southwest and Mexico, which is one of the most contentious issues between the two nations, and the cause of many deaths, but no one disputes what are considered the legal boundaries. When Israel constructed the wall in 2002, supposedly to prevent Palestinian terrorists and suicide bombers from reaching inside Israeli territory, it was announced it would be temporary, however it has had far more devastating consequences to the Palestinians, who are effectively locked in, where 35,000 farmers were suddenly separated from their lands and crops and their ability to earn a livelihood, unable to legally get out without going through a frustrating network of Israeli security checkpoints all designed to make it as difficult as possible, forcing Palestinians to sit in the hot sun literally for hours, sometimes taking their water bottles away, where old women and soldiers are seen yelling and screaming at one another, where sometimes they are turned back for no legitimate reason whatsoever other than racial hatred or to frustrate the process. In the town of Qalqilya, the Israeli solution is to open the wall to farmers for a total of 50-minutes every day, but even then they are subject to the same harassment techniques. The real bone of contention, however, from the Palestinian view, is the act was considered a land grab, as the Israeli’s annexed an additional 9.5% of Palestinian land, cutting far into the West bank, where even Jewish scholars have acknowledged from the beginning that the real purpose behind building the wall was providing protection to the Israeli settlements built on disputed land. And worse, the wall effectively closes any further discussion about the prospects of a separate Israeli and Palestinian state living side by side, as the Palestinian land occupied by the Israeli’s since the 1967 Six-Day War, which was presumably under discussion when considering Palestinian statehood, has simply been hoarded by the Israeli’s, with no future plans for return.

What began as a method to prevent the Palestinian state has become, at least for Palestinians, an apartheid wall, where all Palestinians are collectively being punished for over a decade now in what amounts to an ethnic cleansing, where they are confined inside the walls of a Warsaw Ghetto. Under the circumstances, the footage in this film expresses the day to day reality that exists for Palestinian survival, where they are forced to risk their lives to find work, as many have broken their legs from such high falls, many more have been caught by Israeli security, where the border regions are mostly patrolled by Israeli youth, often soldiers that are 18-year old kids that overreact and are seen kicking those arrested, even as they are lying motionless on the ground with loaded assault rifles pointed at their faces. This kind of activity has negative repercussions on both sides, building negative images and hostile views of one another. Those arrested face lengthy jail time and hefty fines, where once released, the same process starts all over again, as there isn’t any other existing method that leads to a potential source of income. The film is particularly effective in its raw form, where occasionally the sound will simply disappear altogether, returning later at some point, which has a unique ability to disrupt and frustrate the viewer’s normal channels of perception, creating a stream of jagged edges instead of a smooth, easy to understand story that is packaged to promote a particular point of view. The only point of view here is what exists in the images, a steady stream of people continually piling over the wall, usually paying someone who can guide them through, like the coyotes (Coyotaje) smuggling bodies across the Mexican border. One of the more devastating images is through a dug-out tunnel with barely any clearance, where we see one person after another try to squeeze through, and even a baby is handed up to awaiting arms, and within seconds, a giant blast can be heard, like a bomb blast or an attack, where debris is seen falling back down into the rocks, followed immediately by a stunning silence. We can only imagine what’s just happened.

Note – The post-film discussion led by Lake Forest College professor Ghada Talhami, a noted Palestinian author of 6 books, and a regular commentator for CNN News and NPR radio, was one of the best ever experienced, as she provided all the historical context that the film in its raw form left out. It was a perfect balance, where her invaluable contributions completed the film experience. Standing alone, however, the film isn’t nearly as powerful without her input.

Infiltrators DC Palestine Film and Arts Festival

Born in Jenin, Khaled Jarrar completed his studies in interior design at the Palestine Polytechnic University in 1996. He then started working in photography and is known for his exhibition in 2004 at the Howarra and Qalandya checkpoints where he put up his photos in a manner to be seen by the Israeli soldiers. His first short video “Journey 110″  was selected at several international festivals and art galleries. In 2011 he graduated from the International Academy of Art (Palestine).

Film Review: Infiltrators - Middle East Monitor Amelia Smith

The cameraman passes a microphone through a gap in the separation wall and a hand from the other side finds just enough space to take it; for one mother and daughter, talking through this crack is the only way they can communicate.

When the wall was built, the family passed through a door to see each other, but in 2008 - 9 even this was blocked. Using the same slit, the daughter passes photographs of her grandson for her mother to see.

For Palestinians, trying to travel from the West Bank to Jerusalem is a journey made almost impossible by checkpoints and restricted permits. For those who want to be reunited with loved ones and sick relatives, get to hospital for medical treatment, and pray at Al Aqsa mosque, this is far too often a distant dream.

Some have given up on the traditional route, and are instead helped across by smugglers who take a symbolic fee to deliver them into Jerusalem. It is their journeys that are documented in 'Infiltrators,' which will be screened tonight as part of the Palestinian Film Festival in London.

Director Khaled Jarrar's debut documentary won the Muhr Arab Documentary prize, the Special Jury Prize and the International Critics Prize at the Dubai Film Festival last year and will premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival this summer. His artwork was also displayed at a recent exhibition at the P21 Gallery in London.

The film captures people hoisting each other over the separation wall; a rusty bed frame turned ladder is leant against the concrete and a rope thrown over to the other side. One man comments on how high the walls is; "there is no such thing as short, this is Israel" says another. Some must wait in the sun for hours to find the perfect time to cross, whilst others wait up to four days.

Many break legs jumping over, and some have died negotiating the highway on the other side. But "This is it. We have nothing to lose," says one. Another man tells how he was nailed to the ground with dogs before the Israeli army arrived; some are arrested and ordered to pay a 10,000 Shekel fine.

In one scene, a man trying to cross is caught by the Israeli police after a citizen alerted their attention. He is kicked and then made to lie on the ground with his hands behind his head whilst the soldier flashes his torch at the wall, searching for more escapees, unaware that he has been caught on film.

The shaky, hand-held camera gives the impression of urgency and danger, as do the interviews with many of the smugglers; the camera only films them from the shoulders down as they drive the length of the wall to find a suitable place to cross.

"Inshallah, one day this country will be reunited," one of the voices assures us.

Infiltrators (2013) Movie Review from Eye for Film Scott Macdonald

The nature of Palestinian border security is carefully captured in Infiltrators, a gripping, involving and intimate documentary offering no comment on its situation, no title cards and no obvious protagonists. The Palestinian Territories are physically segregated from Israel with a seven metre-high wall, and the film details concerted efforts to scale it - a full picture of the nuts and bolts of people smuggling.

The film has been photographed on quickly-shot digital video, from hand-held standard-definition cameras to noisy cameraphone video. Director/DP Khaled Jarrar steals shots here and there, avoiding remaining in one place for any length of time. Carl Svennson's gripping sound design adds hugely to the film, guiding the viewer through the dark video noise and blinding brightness.

Early on in the film, we rarely see faces. Jarrar's film has an early focus on hands: phones, walkie talkies, smoking cigarettes in boredom, prayer beads, ropes, money, slipping through bars and holes in the wall. Soon, we see people hemmed in like battery hens, flooding through border control turnstiles like human livestock.

The low-tech efforts to scale the wall are inventive in their desperation. It's a complex organisation - watching the authorities on both sides of the wall and stealthily dodging cameras and manpower. Constructing primitive climbing frames out of wood jammed between the wall's steel girders and forming simple ladders made from metal bed frames. We see several shots of Nike trainers, unsuited to climbing.

Trafficking drivers are well-organised, demanding payment - "They pay a fee, a symbolic fee" akin to paying the ferryman to cross the darkness of the Styx. There are obviously opportunists, with many stories of drivers ripping desperate people off and dumping them in the middle of nowhere.

The young scale the wall like monkeys, but some elderly people are not able to manage the climb. We see family members passing microphones under cracks in the walls, sharing family mementos and stories. There are parents and grandparents who haven't hugged their family in years. It's moving material. Other cultural artifacts sold on the black market include ka'ek, chewy and soft Palestinian sesame-seed rope-like bread bracelets - with the entrepreneurs stuffing thousands of pieces through at a time.

For those privileged enough to have passports, the film shows border control - a teeming, angry mass of bodies. It makes me, as a Westerner, value the privilege of freedom of movement in our society. An angry misunderstanding and revocation of a passport leads to a small riot and tear gas crowd-control. It's a jaw-dropping moment - once again the sound mixing plays it out superbly, a maelstrom of wailing, desperation and horror through the blinding opaque gas.

Infiltrators is a desperate look at a system, as porous as the system itself. With enough will, and identification of weak-points, determined people can defeat it. The film avoids overt sentimentality. The people in a ghost town of waiting workers provide their stories - failed attempts, breaking legs, the brutality of the army, and being pinned by dogs. "This is not a life," "We have nothing to lose".

Palestinian resolve to cross Israel's wall featured in new film | The ... Sarah Irving from The Electronic Intifada

Defying the Apartheid Wall: A Conversation With Palestinian Artist ... Malihe Razazan audio interview with the director from Jadaliyyah, September 22, 2013 (21:35)

Infiltrators | Variety

Palestinian artist chips away at the wall | JPost | Israel News The Jerusalem Post, December 7, 2012

Jarrold, Julian and James Marsh and Anand Tucker

RED RIDING TRILOGY A- 94

Jarrold, Julian

RED RIDING: 1974 – made for TV A- 94

Great Britain (102 mi) 2009

“This is the north, where we do what we want!”

Originally airing on British TV, this is one of the better made-for-TV films seen in recent recollection and all three are equally successful as stand alone films or as part of the 3-part trilogy, which is an adaptation of David Pearce’s four novels (one novel is also set in 1977), each set in a different year in West Yorkshire. Subtitled and using the same screenwriter (Tony Grisoni) throughout along with several cast members, each has a different director offering their individual style to present the material in their own way. For instance, only the last 2 versions are in ‘Scope, while the first is shot in 16 mm. The author grew up near Yorkshire and was 8-years old when he heard of a prostitute being murdered. 12 more women would be murdered by the “Yorkshire Ripper” by the time Pearce was 14. Peter Sutcliffe was eventually convicted in 1981. The film version is a fictionalized composite that emphasizes the bleakness of the landscape, especially the dilapidated tenement housing project set right next to 6 nuclear power smokestacks, a place everyone agrees needs to be razed, but families are still living there. Like David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS (1990), there is a welcome sign nearby, Welcome to Fitzwilliam, with the ominous presence of the looming smokestacks, but also plenty of profanity-laden graffiti scrawled onto the walls, such as “Fuck the Argies.”

Endlessly entertaining due to the crisp pace of the film, each of the three segments features the brutal corruption of the West Yorkshire police squad, while the vast array of characters introduced keeps the audience on their toes and couldn’t add more intrigue and suspense. Shot on a grainy 16 mm, the atmospheric mood remains dark and creepy, matching the insidious corruption within the police department which seems to have little interest in solving the serial killings, a constant reminder of moral decay that has infested the entire community. A young upstart reporter, Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), joins the local paper on the crime beat and displays a needed curiosity about why the newspaper and police are in bed with a sleezy real estate developer, John Dawson (Sean Bean), a man with a penchant for swindles and swans. When Eddie and his more senior partner Barry (Anthony Flanagan) arrive at his modernized house, Barry comments that there is a crime that matches every house. Within his own newspaper department, Eddie Marsan is the sleezy and cocksure Jack Whitehead, the senior reporter who reeks of lies and doublecross, a man who will do whatever is convenient to stay in the good graces of the police department who own and control the town like a Sicilian Mafioso.

Shot in the film noir manner of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, where young Eddie has a brazen style, he is constantly getting pulverized by the local cops who exhibit a mean, sadistic streak to keep him from getting too close to what they don’t want him to know. Eddie suspects several crimes are linked and that the cops brutally arrest mentally deficient suspects and beat and threaten them into signing confessions of guilt. In this manner, the police don’t even attempt to solve crimes, instead they find fall guys to take the rap so they can quickly close the book on these police cases. So when Eddie digs for information, they shut him up. He finds comfort in one of the women who lost a daughter, Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall) who has been nearly crushed by the experience, and just when she lets Eddie get close enough for her to trust him, someone pulls the rug out from under him, as they do throughout this entire episode. The director does not hold back and creates truly bizarre, evil, and lovelorn characters, all mysteriously connected through nefarious activities that have not come to light. There’s nothing compromised here, as the disturbing underworld unleashes the full impact of its menace, where torturing victims is their stock and trade, and where all bets are off in an assault to the senses that takes place at the Karachi Club, an incident that reverberates through several episodes. This film is dark, beautifully stylized, almost dreamlike and surprisingly intense, with a swarm of terrific performances and a well-earned, well-crafted edge that reeks of more bad guys ahead.

Marsh, James

RED RIDING: 1980 – made for TV A- 93

Great Britain (93 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

So after the passage of time, the cops are as corrupt as ever, perhaps even more entrenched in solidarity within the department to cover up their own criminal acts. Time has made them even bolder in their blatant disregard for searching out the truth, instead they find the weakest link and make an arrest, using the same torture interrogation methods as before, only now they’re better at covering it up from the public. Easily the most elegantly directed of the three, there is a fluidity of motion throughout where one senses similarities to David Fincher’s meticulously detailed serial killer police procedural ZODIAC (2007). Paddy Considine is introduced as an outside Manchester cop supposedly given free reign to investigate the Yorkshire Ripper murders, which are still unsolved, thinking a new approach couldn’t hurt. But despite the expertise of his chosen team, Considine is genuinely despised, so when he suggests one victim may not have been at the hands of the Ripper, he is met with a solid wall of resistance from his fellow cops who think this is all about their heads rolling, finding a scapegoat to blame, so to a man they stonewall the murder investigations. Throughout the first two episodes, the Ripper killings are a devastating headline that have all but been ignored, seen by the police as a secondary afterthought, as the primary concern is the cops taking care of their own.

The poor morale within the department where it is suggested they have done shoddy work and botched their investigations matches the palpable fear in the streets where women are afraid to walk alone or let their kids play on the streets. Marsh moves the action through a steady accumulation of small details, where the more Considine and his team dig, the more inconsistencies are discovered which reveal gaping holes in the cases. But Considine has a few secrets from his own past, such as an affair with a female officer, Helen Marshall (Maxine Peake), part of his elite squad, so his authority is challenged through internal blackmail to get off the case. But the more certain he becomes of a coverup, the farther removed from the case he gets, eventually thrown off the case entirely, leaving him completely powerless. In the event he still didn’t get the message, the cops in this town know how to make it illuminatingly clear to him. The film starts with an assertive assault on meticulous policework, but then turns into a hiding game where there is no one left he can trust, no chance to play the hero. This film uses a realist, near documentary style to produce a staggering amount of information, including a broadened view of the internalized criminal behavior within the department, where the larger than life personalities behind the operations begin to emerge. The viewers are in for a few surprises, not the least of which is some despicably violent images of the aftermath of murder, seen almost as a meticulously detailed still life of the horrible scene of a crime, as events ensue that the audience would have no way of preparing for. Both the initial episodes lead to shocking conclusions, each fully realized through separate yet unique cinematic visions that have perfectly captured the economic downturn of the times through vivid characters and an assured director’s hand. The melancholy score is by Dickon Hinchliffe of the Tindersticks.

Tucker, Anand

RED RIDING: 1983 – made for TV B+ 92

Great Britain (103 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

This episode introduces us to a cunning little rotund, pudgy character with a bulldog demeanor that physically resembles Fassbinder’s Franz Biberkopf, an ordinary everyman who is steamrolled by the volatile changes in society all around him, which lead to his unfortunate end. But here John Piggott (Mark Addy) plays a tiresome solicitor who is among the most hopeful characters in the series as the focus shifts from a police procedural to the individual perspective of two characters, also singling out one of the senior cops that we’ve seen before, Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), aka the Owl. One we can sympathize with for trying to sort through the muck while the other is so knee deep in shit that despite his reserved bespectacled manner, we already know him to be a murderer. Starting with a flashback that serves as a short prequel, the wedding of Bill Molloy, aka the Badger, a deeply corrupt police kingpin played by Warren Clarke, where in a backroom the deal is made for the horsemen of the apocalypse to stick together in order to run the entire North for themselves, this episode then re-experiences the entire series, oftentimes the same events from a different character’s viewpoint.

While the police have their scapegoat safely rotting in his cell, the mentally defective Michael Myshkin (Daniel Mays), whose own solicitor urged him to confess to the Ripper crimes after the police got through with him, it should come as no surprise that the Ripper strikes again. Oddly enough, Jobson seems to grow weary of their torture tactics as still more suspects are rounded up in the usual way and brutally urged to confess, this time the Reverand Martin Laws (Peter Mullan) withstands their little fun for awhile before offering his foolproof alibi. To everyone’s astonishment, they actually let someone go, something we wouldn’t think the mafia would ever do. Jobson then pours over the files and is stuck with real police work. Interwoven into this story is Piggot’s visits to Myshkin in prison where he tries to piece together what actually happened, where we spend less time between characters, but more time in a series of flashbacks. Jumping between the two leads, we begin to develop a broader picture of the entire events. One of the reasons the series is so spread out over time is having to reveal so many evil characters involved and the full extent of the mayhem caused.

A small character throughout the series, mysterious street hustler BJ (Robert Sheehan), who has witnessed, even participated in some of the more diabolical acts, turns into a poetic, near apocalyptic narrator by the end, occasionally resorting to simple rhyme. Himself a victim of child molestation, he is intimately familiar with what passes as Yorkshire justice, and after a prison stint is horrified to discover that nothing has changed, that the Ripper is still abducting little girls and the police force is still headed by the same rotten band of organized criminals. True to form, throughout this saga there have been no tidy endings or easy resolutions, instead the prevalent odor of malice has not brought closure to the victim’s families or to society at large. Instead, violent crime only breeds misery. The true measure of this trilogy is capturing the unflinching portrait of Yorkshire as it lived and breathed, filled with soulless men whose deep-seeded malevolence filtered throughout society, where the decaying infrastructure, unsolved crimes, and social neglect is perfectly captured in the venal and foul-mouthed language of cops, where Britain is the only country that specializes in the use of the word “cunt,” which seems to be the worst possible thing a man can call another man. This is one amazing ensemble drama that digs its feet into a depraved word of such heartless, systematic criminal injustice that hopelessness has become incestually inbred into the very core of society where the aftereffects of disillusionment may not be fully understood for years to come.

The One-Line Review [Iain Stott]

Uncompromisingly written, plotted, and paced, Channel 4’s much hyped mini-series, an adaptation of David Pearce’s acclaimed novels, set in the 1970s, depicting a West Yorkshire police force rife with corruption, is, with its incredibly assembled cast and distinctive visuals, just about worth every line of its PR treatment.

Cinema Autopsy (Thomas Caldwell) capsule review [4/5] entire Trilogy

This wonderfully atmospheric made-for-television trilogy of films is adapted from English author David Peace’s quartet of novels set in Yorkshire. Each film is set in a different year with Red Riding: 1974 directed by Julian Jarrold (Brideshead Revisited, Becoming Jane), Red Riding: 1980 directed by James Marsh (Man on Wire, The King) and Red Riding: 1983 directed by Anand Tucker (And When Did You Last See Your Father?, Shopgirl). The background of the films are all concerned with the criminal investigation into various actual serial killer cases, including the Yorkshire Ripper, but the main focus is the fictionalised depiction of the insidious corruption that was ingrained throughout the Yorkshire police force and community at the time. All three films depict Yorkshire as a dark and seedy hellhole; making heavy uses of dark tones and overexposure. The industrial, rural and suburban landscapes comment on the Yorkshire community in the same way that classical Hollywood film noir used images of the city to comment on social decay. The level of corruption, police violence and “we do what we bloody want” mentality is genuinely shocking, making the serial killings seem almost like a symptom of a community that has become rotten to the core. These three films are all excellent thrillers and being able to see them on the big screen is a treat.

User comments from imdb (Part 1) Author: tyler-and-jack from Edinburgh.

Wow. Just . . . . wow! This is quite possibly the finest drama I have EVER seen on British TV in years and years and years, possibly even the finest drama ever. But before I begin the review let me just say that you really need to see all 3 parts of the trilogy to get the most from the overall tapestry.

When a little girl's body turns up (with swan wings stitched into her back) in Yorkshire all eyes turn to the police force to apprehend the killer as swiftly as possible. Unofrtunately, the police seem to be too busy lining their own pockets and framing other people to find any real justice. After a life of relative inadequacy (and I know THAT feeling), a returning local lad (played by Andrew Garfield) decides to dig a little deeper but it's not long before he's in way over his head with more victims linked to the crime and more suspects that may well seem "untouchable".

Okay, it may still feel like a TV production but if it does then it's certainly one with the best production values. Cinematic in many ways that could, hopefully, make you forget that you're watching a small-screen opus.

The cast list, as is the case with the entire trilogy, is a dream one. You may not know all of the names but, trust me, these people are great actors firing on all cylinders. Peter Mullan (always great), David Morrisey (so good that he made me forget all about the travesty he was in with Sharon Stone), Sean Bean, Warren Clarke, Eddie Marsan, Rebecca Hall and Sean Harris (again, is he EVER bad??) are just some of my favourites from this outing.

The subject matter certainly doesn't make for comfortable viewing and there were times when even a lifelong horror fan such as myself began to wince and worry about what was yet to come. In many ways I feel that this actually did trip into horror territory but with a very real, unsafe horror that encroaches on our reality more often than any of us would like it to. The helplessness of child victims and the helplessness of those left in the hands of corrupt authorities/guardians ensures that you won't have an easy viewing experience. But you will have a damn worthwhile one.

See this if you like: Zodiac, The Woodsman, L.A. Confidential.

User comments from imdb (Part 2) Author: tyler-and-jack from Edinburgh.

Please see my review for the first part of this amazing trilogy to establish just how jaw-droppingly good I think the whole thing was.

This time around, we join Peter Hunter (played by the consistently brilliant Paddy Considine) as he is asked to head a covert investigation into the Yorkshire Police Force and their methods of investigating the Yorkshire Ripper case. The people are scared and looking for others to blame while the police, again busy with their own interests and corruption, are coming up empty-handed. This is almost a stand-alone effort, having less connection with the first part than the finale will have, but it keeps some story strands running and the big picture is really only seen by those who watch the whole thing. Which I implore everyone to do.

We have high production values once again and another cast to die for. Considine is so good that it's almost impossible to believe he would come on board for what is, essentially, a TV production but fair play to the guy for spotting dynamite material when he sees it. Many others have already appeared in the "1974" instalment and the new faces (such as Maxine Peake, Lesley Sharp and Joseph Mawle) all step right up to the mark and join the others in performing out of their damn skins.

It's more discomfort for the viewer due to the material and graphic detail (described more than actually shown) and also ties in with the real, notorious hunt for "The Yorkshire Ripper" in a way that perfectly, and unnervingly, blends fact with fiction. Not quite as impactful as the first episode/movie, this nevertheless delivers quality on every single level and keeps the 10/10 standard that the previous production started off with.

See this if you like: Zodiac, L.A. Confidential, Red Riding "1974".

User comments from imdb (Part 2) Author: ben_cg from United Kingdom

The second film in the Red-Riding trilogy is another haunting almost hallucinatory tale of revenge and justice. Paddy Considine is excellent as the slightly cerebral and introspective officer assigned to review the failing investigation into the Yorkshire ripper, and the whole cast give performances of a very high class. The shocking corruption of the Yorkshire police revealed in the first film now intertwines into the real life history of the ripper's crimes and the bumbling investigation which was still fixated on the (hoax) tapes and letters in a fascinating but terrifying way.

It feels like a lot of material is woven into the film which expects you to pay attention and work stuff out. Having said this I found the film easy to watch, it didn't drag at all but like many great films it requires you to think a little. I really will need to see it a second time to try and piece together all of the threads, this is dense and exciting storytelling - perhaps not for everybody but hopefully this will find the audience it deserves.

Some say that the corrupt police story is too fantastic, but we know for a fact that some people were fitted up (via beatings and falsifying/withholding evidence by the police) for major crimes during this period (Birmingham Six, Guildford Four etc.) and that some police such as the Vice squad in London were running a very lucrative protection racket in Soho with senior officers (DCS) directly involved. Without giving away the plot the story here only goes slightly further and seems 'believable enough' to me.

Although essentially produced as 'TV Movies' the first two films (and I expect the 3rd to be the same) have been of a higher standard than about 95% of film releases, I strongly urge anyone who likes intelligent crime noir to see these films if you get the chance.

User comments from imdb (Part 3) Author: tyler-and-jack from Edinburgh.

Again, I must begin this review (and I apologise) by directing you to my reviews for the first two instalments in this trilogy. Just so that you know how truly amazed/mesmerised/impressed I was by this production.

It's now 1983 and we have a number of story strands coming together and, pay attention and you shouldn't get too confused, a number of flashbacks tying everything together and revealing more than we ever realised from the first outing (the middle, 1980, section isn't really as vital although it's still a connecting vein in the overall story arch). The police corruption continues, suspects are pulled in on a whim and shown the "force" in police force, while a few good souls (including a lawyer who feels in way over his head but realises that something must be done, brilliantly played by Mark Addy) try to actually ensure that justice is done and that some innocence is saved.

What can I say that I haven't already said about the "1974" and "1980" instalments of this peerless trilogy? This has consistently impressed me beyond belief from the very start to the last minute.

Mark Addy reminds us that he really can be a great actor and deserves some more, better roles like this one. David Morrisey, ever-present throughout the trilogy, takes centre-stage here and certainly gives one of his best ever performances (certainly from the little I have seen of him). Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, has fumbled so much as one line throughout this entire trilogy and all involved should be mightily proud of such an achievement.

Am I wittering on? Exaggerating the level of quality on display here? Maybe ever so slightly but I can only go by my personal reaction to such intense, original, rarely-seen, genuinely "adult" drama and I urge others to see how they react to the material. There is no easy ride in store for viewers, once again, but you will be rewarded with one of the finest viewing experiences you can have on the small screen.

See this if you like: Murder In The First, Red Riding "1974", Red Riding "1980".

Northern Exposure Justin Quirk from The Guardian, February 28, 2009

The economy's in ruins. The government is teetering on the brink of collapse. Britain is the sick man of Europe and antisocial behaviour is the norm. Not, surprisingly, scenes from this week's tabloids, but from Britain in the mid-1970s and the pen of David Peace. And it's this dark material which has made Peace the slow-burning, word-of-mouth success story of British publishing.

An ultra-dark, unashamedly literary crime writer, in the last 10 years Peace has produced a formidable body of work chronicling the "occult history" of northern England, while amassing admirers as varied as literary critic Terry Eagleton and TV's Michael Parkinson. This month sees the dramatisation of three of his early novels on Channel 4 as Red Riding, and the big-screen release of The Damned United, starring Michael Sheen, Jim Broadbent and Timothy Spall - his re-imagining of the disastrous period in 1974 when Brian Clough took over from Don Revie as Leeds United manager and was frozen out by his own team in just 44 days.

Peace's literary career began in ambitious style in 1999 when the small independent publisher Serpent's Tail published his Red Riding quartet. These four novels spanned the titular years 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983 and were a semi-fictional chronicle of police corruption, child abuse and the framing of Stefan Kiszko drawn against a backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper's murderous spree.

As a child growing up in Ossett, West Yorkshire, Peace was obsessed with the ongoing Ripper case; thousands of men across the region were arrested and questioned, billboards showed the blank, staring faces of the 13 victims and a hoax message taunting the police was replayed everywhere from football matches to youth clubs. These four books recreated the pervasive sense of terror and corruption with a hammering, semi-magical style loosely reminiscent of James Ellroy, but steeped in something far more bleak and English. In between explosions of violence and depravity - Gypsy camps burned down by police, slack-jawed simpletons tortured into confessions, throats slit while men watched television - the writing dealt in sparsely drawn images of endless damp winters, bad food and cheap pornography.

A key element of all Peace's work - in between the Ripper novels and The Damned United he wrote GB84, a retelling of the miners' strike - is a principled disregard for the conventions of crime fiction. In his original quartet there was little in the way of neat endings or resolution. Storylines bled over into later books and characters reoccurred in different plots. In interviews, Peace spoke emphatically of the duty writers had to reflect the messy, unending nature of violent crime and the fact that life rarely brings happy endings or trite "closure" for victims.

The Red Riding films use this disorientating style to a lesser extent than the books, but the whole project is ambitious for a mainstream television drama. While grim, provincial settings have long been familiar to British viewers (Play For Today, Boys From The Blackstuff et al), Red Riding allies it to a complicated, fractured narrative that is closer to the modern American writing of The Wire or The Sopranos. With lashings of casual racism and misogyny, a lack of moral certitude and a constant hint of the numinous (seances, incantations, mediums and a narrowly avoided trepanning appear), the end result is like some grim late-night edition of The Rock & Roll Years, or the evil twin of Life On Mars.

Peace has been unflinching in his portrayal of what Yorkshire was really like in the 1970s and his books suggest implicitly that the Ripper was to some degree a product of the sexism, easy violence and vicious parochialism of Yorkshire at the time.

But despite this ambivalent, unsentimental relationship with the surroundings of his childhood, Peace may have succeeded in creating an enduring literature for a curiously undocumented area of Britain. Since the books of Barry Hines (A Kestrel For A Knave, filmed as Kes) and Stan Barstow (A Kind Of Loving), Yorkshire has failed to produce the same mythologising self-portraits as, say, Liverpool or Manchester. Which is strange considering that over the last 35 years Yorkshire has been a place where many of Britain's wider public problems have been played out in extremis: labour disputes, the ravaging effects of unemployment and industrial collapse, police corruption, football stadium disasters, rioting, racial and religious conflicts and the growth of the BNP in local politics. The idea of something dark and malevolent pulsing beneath the surface of the county is a recurrent motif in Peace's writing.

This feeling is conveyed successfully by the films, partly by a particularly graphic use of violence. In one especially visceral murder scene the camera pans across chunks of wet flesh and a blood-encrusted drill, before coming to rest on a naked corpse with a tape recording of its own torture stuffed between the dead man's lips. Elsewhere, fresh gunshot wounds spew out wisps of smoke and cigarettes are stubbed out on prisoners' hands. But, just as disconcerting are the drifting shots of relentless grey moors, the clips of corpulent detectives at press conferences and the washed-out newsreel of eviscerated women dumped on rubble-strewn waste ground.

But for all the visual tricks, it's the language of the characters that - as in Peace's books - is ultimately both damning and revealing. Bent detective Bob Craven (a horribly creepy turn by Sean Harris) charmingly details his favourite pastime as "chewing minge" while flicking through photos of lacerated women; expletives, sexual insults and threats pepper every conversation. But when talking of corrupt deals and the social engineering of "urban regeneration" - arguably the real crime at the heart of the story - the same characters adopt the coy euphemisms of "business opportunities" and "agreements". Overall, it's not a glowing advertisement for God's own country.

Red Riding ultimately triumphs because of a handful of superb performances by tried and tested actors. It makes a nice change in our youth-obsessed culture to watch a load of actors who've earned their stripes being given free rein and a heavyweight script. Sean Bean is superb as property magnate John Dawson; tubby, polo-necked and predatory, driving his Jag around the Yorkshire slums spouting proto-Thatcherite invective. Paddy Considine is cast against type as a non-psychotic, well-educated detective parachuted in from Manchester to investigate the inquiry while wrestling with monogamy. And Warren Clarke absolutely owns every scene he appears in; venal, foul-mouthed and prone to explosive bouts of rage, his ageing detective Bill Molloy is a carbuncular, black-hearted Mr Toad with a face like a half-full bin liner. Lesley Sharp, David Morrissey and Maxine Peake also crop up, chinking tumblers of whisky and crying, "To the north - where we do what we want!" Overall, it's the strongest British ensemble piece since Our Friends In The North.

Difficult and flawed though Red Riding is, the three films are perfectly suited to the current vogue for a serious examination of our recent past's bleaker chapters (see also Kevin Sampson's Awaydays). With the scenery of post-Thatcherite British society collapsing around our ears, there's a real appetite for work that tracks backwards to try and find out just where things went wrong. With its central message - that the repercussions of violence and corruption continue to damage society for years and that there are no neat, trite endings - Red Riding could be the most timely TV series of the year. As the mother of the Stefan Kiszko character says: "It never stops. Not round here."

Red Riding trilogy Graham Fuller from Film Comment, January/February 2010, entire Trilogy

“So you’ll stay away from Fitzwilliam, then?” a newspaper editor warns his young crime reporter in Julian Jarrold’s 1974, whereupon the latter heads straight for that dying mining village with its monstrous cooling towers. There follows the first of a pair of rhyming shots that briefly lyricize urban blight in this part of West Yorkshire. As the reporter, Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), arrives in Fitzwilliam, the camera tracks from left to right past a piece of wasteland in front of some derelict houses: a strange-looking young man hoists an exhaust pipe into the air, kids batter a disused car, other kids and a man with his dog stand around aimlessly. Later, Eddie gets into the convertible driven by the crooked construction king John Dawson (Sean Bean), and this time the camera moves from right to left in the rain as they pass another ruined stretch strewn with abandoned prams and chairs, where Asian immigrant children play nonsensical games. It’s during this second shot that Dawson starts a rant against Britain’s “enemies within”: “Your Paddies, your wogs, your niggers, your fucking gyppos, the poofs, the perverts, even the bloody women. They’re all out to get what they can get. I tell you, soon there’ll be nowt left for us lot.” Anyone who stood in a pub in the miserable Britain of the Seventies would sooner or later have heard variations on this hateful tirade.

Tony Grisoni adapted 1974 from the first novel in David Peace’s “Red Riding Quartet,” named for a Grimm’s fairytale, the color of blood, and the West Riding district of Yorkshire. He also adapted 1977, which wasn’t filmed; 1980, which was directed by James Marsh; and 1983, directed by Anand Tucker. The absence of 1977 doesn’t dilute the overall intensity, but producer Andrew Eaton still hopes to greenlight it once Ridley Scott has completed his American feature adaptation of the entire quartet. It’s been mooted that Scott’s film will be set in a run-down industrial state such as Pennsylvania, but whether the screenwriter, Steve Zaillian, will feel obliged to replicate the fierce regionalism of Peace’s novels, as did Grisoni, is another matter.

It’s not just the godforsaken landscape, the smudged gray skies, and words like “nowt” that identify the trilogy of films as a Northern saga. The spirit of place is located in the people. Wrongly or rightly, Yorkshiremen have a reputation for arrogance, hardness, and chauvinism. Those characteristics amount to a kind of creed, which is visualized in a flashback at the start of 1983. The sequence begins bathetically: to the strains of Marion Newman singing “Eja Mater, fons amoris” from Vivaldi’s setting of the Stabat Mater, a smiling bride running up the steps of a colonnaded building in slow motion throws her bouquet to the waiting women. We see Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), depressed and apprehensive, getting ready for the wedding in front of a mirror. As he and Yorkshire police chiefs and detectives and their wives arrive for the ceremony, seven of the men line up together—like an eyewitness lineup of cops who range from the psychotic to the merely corruptible. One of them quietly tells Jobson that the bride’s father, Chief Superintendent Bill Molloy (Warren Clarke), wants them to meet discreetly upstairs after the dancing.

The ensuing scene is set in a darkened room backlit by sun streaming through a window, and the meeting of the cops has the clandestine air of a Masonic gathering; the reluctant Jobson stands back a few feet. The camera roams among the men as Molloy explains in his gravelly voice and flat accent that they are close to achieving their goal of “controlled vice: off the street, out of the shop windows, and into our pockets—the whole of the North of England, the girls, the shops, the mags, the whole bloody lot.” He then leads them in a toast, “To us and to the North . . . to the North, where we do what we want”—the last five words chanted. It is a singular agenda to set at the wedding of one’s daughter, and Molloy’s subsequent introduction of Dawson to the group adds to the irony when Tucker cuts to photos of three abducted little girls, since Dawson was revealed in 1974 to be connected to their disappearances.

It’s in their ability to counter the Yorkshire “creed” that the films’ protagonists succeed or fail morally. “Tainted” by having worked in the South, Eddie Dunford of 1974 goes against his editor, the police, and Dawson in his investigations of the missing girls. In 1980, Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) is asked to bring in the Yorkshire Ripper (the real-life killer responsible for the murders of 13 women between 1975 and 1980) but is doubly doomed: he’s a “squeaky-clean” assistant chief constable from the hated Manchester force, and he’s also been charged with determining why the Leeds Police’s effort has failed to uncover the killer. In 1983, Jobson recoils from his colleagues’ use of torture and intimidation and agonizes over his own past complicity in perverting the course of justice, while washed-up lawyer John Piggott (Mark Addy) lodges an appeal for a disturbed man framed by the police at the end of 1974 to take the rap for the murder of a little girl, found dead with swan’s wings stitched to her back. Dunford is cocky, slender, and boyish, Piggott passive, fat, and soft-spoken—both radically different types, physically and emotionally, from the films’ brutish cops. Different, too, are the sensitive Hunter and the introspective Jobson, who becomes the trilogy’s existentially tormented conscience. These four men and the haunted rent-boy B.J. (Robert Sheehan) oppose and contradict the Northern hard-man archetype.

The damage done to the female characters in the films amplifies the archetype to the nth degree. Aside from the abducted little girls and the Ripper’s victims, there are a number of women shattered or destroyed by their proximity to twisted, corrupt men. Eddie becomes involved with Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall), mother to one of the abducted girls, and, recalling police photos of the murdered child, imagines her with stitch scars on her back. A needy, mocking femme fatale, Paula seems as much damaged by her sexual involvement with Dawson as by the loss of her daughter and the suicide of her husband. Dawson’s wife in turn has been rendered mentally unstable by their marriage. In 1980, the widow of a cop who pimped out prostitutes and was involved in the porn enterprise is beaten and sexually assaulted. When Hunter brings on a female detective to assist in his investigation, the Yorkshire cops leer at her and make locker-room jokes about Hunter’s having slept with her. One of them can barely contain his laughter when a woman medium (Saskia Reeves) tries to help the police with the inquiries into the abduction of a fourth little girl. To be feminine in Red Riding is to walk in fear of anything from contempt to mutilation.

Although each is directed, photographed, and edited by a different team, the three films are consistent stylistically, redolent of such dank, lowering, paranoid noirs as Get Carter and Klute. Jarrold has said he was influenced by the look of such American conspiracy thrillers as The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, and Three Days of the Condor. He often favors extreme close-ups, especially expressive in 1974’s depiction of Eddie’s tortured trysts with Paula. The film can’t match the novel’s hyperkinetic pace when Eddie is propelled into action, but it is the most fatalistic of the three movies: you can sense early on that he will have nowhere to hide. Marsh brings a cold formalism to the police incident room and hotel elevators of 1980. Although the nocturnal sequences are as chilly as those in the films of Michael Mann, the glum-faced Hunter is an empathetic figure doomed by his integrity. Marsh contrives a charming silent 8mm home movie of the detective and his wife visiting relatives over Christmas and enters his imagination when children rise out of tall grass to “shoot” him, but he limits his flourishes; instead, there are moments of great menace. For example, a long shot of Hunter driving between Manchester and Leeds rack-focuses to blades of grass in the foreground; as Peace’s novel reminds us, this is the same stretch of country in which Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, the notorious Moors Murderers, buried their child victims in the early to mid-Sixties.

Bleakly claustrophobic, 1983 takes its visual cues from the guilt felt by Jobson and Piggott, the latter vaguely aware that his late father committed heinous acts and drawn inexorably to the disused mine shaft where they took place. Both men exist in a state of spiritual semi-darkness. The anguished Jobson finds a refuge of sorts in his mistress’s gloomy rooms. Piggott lives apologetically in a murky Fitzwilliam house littered with fast-food containers, but the soul records he plays on his stereo counter the oppressiveness. Piggott’s client Michael Myshkin (Daniel Mays), the young man with the exhaust pipe in 1974, is incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital drained of color. The mood is foreboding: when Jobson and his bloody-minded colleague Dick Alderman (Shaun Dooley) visit Myshkin, Tucker builds tension by going in very close on Alderman’s cigarette, and then on Jobson’s perplexed expression as his colleague follows a cruel line of questioning that causes Myshkin to wet himself.

IFC Films is simultaneously opening Red Riding in theaters and making it available on VOD in the U.S. In Britain, it was broadcast on Channel 4 last year, and though there was a screening at BFI Southbank in London, its identity there is that of a television film. The closest comparison would be with Granada TV’s Prime Suspect series, but Red Riding is more expansively cinematic. That nothing has come along in nearly 40 years to match Get Carter demonstrates the paucity of great British crime films. TV or not TV, the searing, intricately layered Red Riding redresses the balance.

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager] entire Trilogy

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review entire Trilogy

Electric Sheep Magazine Paul Huckerby, entire Trilogy DVD review

Screenjabber [Steven Kiernan] entire Trilogy DVD review

Red Riding Review - Read Variety's Analysis Of The Movie Red Riding Todd McCarthy, entire Trilogy

Leicester Mercury TV review by Jeremy Clay, March 6, 2009 (Part 1 only)

The interview: David Peace Tim Adams and Hazel Sheffield interview from The Independent, February 22, 2009

Red Riding: Yorkshire noir on TV - Features, TV & Radio - The ... Gerard Gilbert from The Independent, March 4, 2009

Independent.co.uk [Hermione Eyre] TV review, March 8. 2009 (entire Trilogy)

Where Every Man Is the Wolf JR Jones from The Reader

TV ratings - Thursday 6 March: First Red Riding captures 2.5m ... Leigh Holmwood from The Guardian, March 6, 2009

James Ellroy and David Peace in conversation The Guardian, January 9, 2010

Ridley Scott Remaking UK's Red Riding Trilogy for Columbia ... Alex Billington from First Showing, October 15, 2009

Movie Review - 1974: The Red Riding Trilogy Part 1 - Men and ...  Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, February 5, 2010

Film - The 'Red Riding' Crime Trilogy Looks at a Grim Time and ...  Nicolas Rapold from The New York Times, January 29, 2010

Three Shades of Noir  Nicolas Rapold narrates an interactive, audio tour of the trilogy from The New York Times, January 31, 2010

Red Riding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David Peace on The Red Riding Quartet Crime Time

David Peace, author of Red Riding and The Damned United: profile ... The Telegraph, March 13, 2009

Drax Power Station - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

APPROPRIATE ADULT – made for TV B+ 91

Great Britain (150 mi – 2 episodes) 2011 d: Julian Jarrold

I miss feeling that I mattered. I miss feeling that I’m needed. —Janet Leach (Emily Watson)

Directed by Julian Jarrold, who also directed the first episode of the immensely entertaining RED RIDING Trilogy (2009), taking the reins for another 2-part British made-for TV drama about another real life serial killer, this one set in Gloucester in Southwest England, where for a two decade period from 1967 to 1987 Fred West (Dominic West) and his wife Rosemary (Monica Dolan) tortured, raped, and murdered at least ten young girls, including some of their own children, with the distinct possibility that there may be at least two dozen more that were never found. However the story begins with but a single accusation, where police arrive at their home with a court order granting them permission to dig in the garden. Simultaneously, Emily Watson as Janet Leach has just been certified to act as an “appropriate adult,” the role assigned by the British court to aid criminal suspects who may be mentally deficient, making sure they understand the nature of the charges, acting in strict confidence, assisting defense counsel when they can, mostly sitting in on police interviews and being with the accused during on-site inspections. The police testimony freely offered by Fred West is nothing less than chilling as he describes the brutally heinous acts of murdering and then cutting up the body of his own daughter with the same matter-of-fact ease of someone describing the weather or what they had for breakfast, as it feels effortless without a hint of strain or regret. Emily Watson is utterly brilliant in the role, surprised to receive a call so soon after completing her required courses, dignified and reserved on her first case, maintaining a very low profile throughout, always underplaying her role, never resorting to theatrical fireworks, allowing the police to establish a confessional tone, but feeling drained afterwards by the graphic physical detail of the description.

Janet is a harried mother leading a busy home life with an overconcerned teenage son and several young children at home whose father Mike (Anthony Flanagan) hasn’t gotten around to marrying her yet, as he seems to suffer from emotional difficulties of his own. Thinking she’ll be gone for only a few hours, the investigation extends into days and then weeks, spending the better part of each day in police interviews where West initially confesses to a murder, and then another, identifies where the body is supposedly buried, but by the time they visit the site, he’s completely changed his story, seemingly enjoying all the attention people are paying him, in particular the appropriate adult, knowing she can’t share whatever he tells her. Meanwhile TV reporters and neighbors are discussing the grisly details of the case which Emily can’t mention to anyone, many offering their views about the couple for cash payments. While she’s immersed in the turmoil of the case, her homelife turns into a trainwreck, grown worse when Mike stops taking his medication, going on an over-stimulated spending spree, needing a lengthy hospitalization to stabilize his condition. Fred, meanwhile, insists his wife is innocent, but the body count keeps rising, including a murder that occurred while Fred was serving time in prison, where the suspect points to Rosemary, a terrorizing and intimidating woman, a former street prostitute with a gutter mouth that threatens anyone who gets too close to her, simply a force to be reckoned with. What’s unique about the film is the complete absence of splashy violence, no flashbacks depicting the crimes or a display of mutilated bodies, no crack police technology, where the story is advanced by the conflicting emotions generated from the constantly shifting narrative of the accused, playing this sly, psychological cat and mouse game, offering unique clues about more bodies to Janet, who is suddenly excused from the case by the police, as their initial investigation is over. 

Other than a commercial break, there is no credit sequence to suggest a break in Part One and Part Two, but new information draws Janet back into the case, where Fred and Rosemary are both incarcerated awaiting trial, but bodies remain missing, where the second part feels less confined to claustrophobic rooms and more outwardly open, as they search distant fields, much like Nuri Bilge Ceylon’s recent ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (2011), where each time Fred brings the police near, he believes the bodies are mysteriously speaking to him, suggesting they don’t wish to be disturbed. However, it is clear, despite the absurdity of these near misses that Fred is confessing intimate details about the crimes to Janet, including his wife’s involvement, but every time he opens up, he also just as quickly shuts another door behind him, leaving Janet ever more weary and exasperated. By the time they go to trial, Fred still refuses to implicate his wife, who may have actually taken the lead in most of the murders, as she had a savage hatred for young girls, punishing them for taking an interest in her husband. Janet is spared from testifying, due to confidentiality, but all that changes with Fred’s apparent prison suicide. The subsequent trial sequences charging Rosemary are among the most riveting trial testimony seen in recent memory, where Emily Watson brings the house down, again not with fireworks and flair, but with the utter poignancy and dignified quiet of her performance, where you can hear a pin drop throughout, making this intensely personal, but also emotionally devastating, as this entire ordeal has obviously taken its toll on her life, but the director pulls out all stops for what is a killer ending, simply a spectacular end to a thoroughly engaging, meticulously detailed story that is almost entirely described in witness testimony. Part of what makes the film so moving is that it's such an unusual family drama, contrasting two families, one that is obliterated and one that remains intact.

Season 1, Episode 1: Episode #1.1

Original Air Date—4 September 2011
Trainee social worker Janet Leach is asked by Gloucester police to be the appropriate adult, sitting in on the interrogation of a simple-minded suspect who may not have a full grasp of the law. He is Fred West who, with his wife Rosemary, is accused of killing their daughter and burying her in the garden of their house at 25 Cromwell Street. West claims the death was an accident, of which Rosemary is innocent. However grisly details gradually come to light and West owns to the murders of nine other girls who stayed at the house. Janet soon finds herself intimidated by the intensity of the situation, gutter press overtures, to which her bipolar husband succumbs, and the foul-mouthed threats of Rosemary West. Just as disturbing is the rapport that Fred West believes he has with her, terming her his only friend and telling her things he has not told the police.

Season 1, Episode 2: Episode #1.2

Original Air Date—11 September 2011
Continuing to sit in on the police interviews Janet is shocked when she learns of the Wests' sexual depravity and when Fred calls her Anna, one of his victims whom she physically resembles. With both the Wests charged, she is no longer needed but visits Fred in prison privately in the hopes that he will disclose the fates of more victims to her. When he kills himself, the police need Janet to tell them what he revealed to her in order to convict Rosemary and she comes to see how he used her. At Rosemary West's trial Janet's evidence helps secure a conviction, though an end title suggests that the corpses of other West victims have yet to be unearthed

Best Crime Dramas on British TV 2011 Prime Time Preview, November 15, 2011

Dominic West showed what an accomplished star he is with this unexpected performance as the one-man horrorshow that was real-life serial killer Fred West. It was controversial, but still a haunting and unforgettable dramatisation from the award-winning team that revisited the Yorkshire Ripper and the Moors murders on the small screen. Confronting such revolting crimes in a drama is a way of attempting to gain modest perspective on them, but Appropriate Adult ultimately reinforced the feeling that such killers are beyond our understanding. Written by Neil McKay, the drama cleverly approached the horrendous story from an oblique angle, that of housewife Janet Leach, who was the required Appropriate Adult brought in to chaperone the apparently below-averagely intelligent West – a powerful performance by Emily Watson.

Unforgettable moment: Janet Leach's uncomprehending expression as West tells detectives about his crimes.

User reviews from imdb Author: jlthornb from United States

Emily Watson, one of the great actors of our time, gives a superb performance as Janet Leach that may well be the finest work she has ever done. She is nothing less than hypnotic here as she lays bare the soul of a vulnerable woman who is involved in an experience she is completely unprepared for. While the portrait of Leach is profound and an incredible achievement, Watson doesn't get in our faces with her ACTING because she is almost invisible as she disappears into the character. What a truly memorable, stunning performance this is. The entire cast is excellent, as are all elements of the production, including writing and direction. However, it is Emily Watson who elevates this film to an artistic level of depth and realism that makes it totally riveting. There is no attempt by Watson to draw attention to herself and "steal" the film. "Gosford Park" is another example of how she shines in an ensemble piece and it naturally becomes her showcase. Her style is not flashy enough and far too superbly subtle to win Oscars. There isn't the teeth gnashing PERFORMANCE style of a Charlize Theron in "Monster", the sort of Halle Berry one-shot fluke that brings home the gold. Watson is an artist in the truest sense and it's her work alone that is her reward. In this film, what she does is so extraordinary, even for her, that perhaps the praise of critics will this time cause award committees and voters to take note of an actor they have too long overlooked because she never yells "look at me!" At any rate, reward yourself by watching an excellent film with an outstanding actress at her best, as usual.

Appropriate Adult | The Last Lions | To Serve a Serial Killer ... Dorothy Rabinovitz from The Wall Street Journal

As audiences who have watched decades of them have learned, films about serial killers, fictional or factual, hold no surprises and explain nothing. They can render, vividly, a succession of unthinkable crimes, the pursuit and capture of the perpetrator, but not the killer himself or his world—and that, too, is unsurprising. The inner lives of psychopaths don't lend themselves to access. But the fact-based "Appropriate Adult," about British serial killer Fred West, comes close, largely thanks to Dominic West's superbly nuanced portrayal and to the exceptional circumstances of the case, which ensured a flow of intimate testimony from the murderer.

At the center of those circumstances—and of the film itself—was Janet Leach (Emily Watson), a social worker selected by Gloucestershire law enforcement in 1994 as an "appropriate adult"—the role assigned in Britain to people asked to sit in on police interviews with subjects deemed in need of help, and to look after their interests. It fell to Janet to serve as protector for 52-year-old Fred West, who had—along with his wife—brutally killed more than a dozen women, including members of their own family, between 1967 and 1978. That assignment would bring with it devastating emotional complications, and would throw the lives of her children and their father, Mike (Anthony Flanagan), her longtime partner, into turmoil.

The complications for this appropriate adult aren't hard to predict, but it hardly matters. Ms. Watson brings a sterling authority to the role of the unimposing Janet, a mix of unassuming diffidence and ambition—she'd volunteered for this service. Her advanced state of mousiness is unmistakable, as is her domestic life and social status. She's struggling to get ahead by going to school, a dutiful mother of a boisterous brood whose father she hasn't gotten around to marrying yet. They haven't got much money but they do have fun, as all the rollicking family-time action is meant to suggest.

It's meant to suggest, too, that this appropriate adult is now embarked on an adventure that may threaten all that she holds dear, including her self-regard. She's taken training for this position, she informs anyone offering guidance; she knows what to do. What she doesn't know is the effect on her of her larger-than-life client. She's all wide-eyed innocence as she begins to absorb the undeniable magnetism of the psychotic she's there to serve—a man aflame with earnest passion, one energized by derangement as he rattles on about his endless love for this or that woman he has murdered, his devotion to his children and to his beloved wife, Rose (a marvelously terrifying Monica Dolan), who is, he tells the police, innocent of any crime.

This appropriate adult absorbs, too, the weight of her client's need for her—a fact that both repels and attracts her. When one of the bumbling police officials decides that Janet is too much of a presence at the interviews and terminates her position, Fred retaliates by refusing to speak at all. There's only one appropriate adult for him, he lets the law know. Janet is soon called back to serve, to her great satisfaction.

It is a service that keeps her up nights with images of trips to sites where Fred suggests the bodies of the women were buried. Not to mention Fred's information about the tortures they suffered before dying, inflicted—as he slowly reveals exclusively to her, not to the police—by his wife. The beloved Rose, he reports, took great pleasure in inflicting pain on these victims. (The film ends with a display of pictures of the women, shown young and smiling, who were murdered by West and his wife.) Even as he reveals more and more horrors under Janet's prodding, her feeling of connection to this killer grows stronger. It's to the credit of this subtly wrought script by Neil McKay that it provides appropriately adult explanations for that feeling—they don't include romance—without belaboring them.

It's above all to Ms. Watson's portrayal of Janet, a heart-rending blend of steel and pathos, and to Dominic West, who brings a serial killer to convincing life onscreen, that this film owes its great power.

Television review: 'Appropriate Adult' - Los Angeles Times Robert Lloyd

The serial killer is the great human monster of the popular imagination. The odds of your actually meeting one are only slightly better than those of your being bitten by a vampire, but you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise. For a while it seemed that every new police procedural began with a naked dead woman found in a marsh. It's the third one, someone will say. We're dealing with a serial killer. But all cop shows get around to them eventually.

Compulsive and pointless, they are not your run-of-the-mill murders — they have, sadly, their "fans" — and filmmakers often glamorize them with titillating suspense and stylishness. Such is not the case with "Appropriate Adult," a British import premiering Saturday on Sundance Channel, which tells the story of Fred and Rose West (Dominic West and Monica Dolan), responsible between them for at least 11 murders, in and around Gloucester between 1967 and 1987, and of Janet Leach (Emily Watson), the trainee social worker who agreed to be Fred's "appropriate adult." (U.K. law demands a monitor be present when a minor or mentally challenged person is questioned by the police.)

Writer Neil McKay also penned two earlier fact-based serial-killer films for ITV, "This Is Personal: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper" and "See No Evil: The Moors Murders." These are famous cases in Britain, what the Boston Strangler, Son of Sam and the Manson family are to an American audience, and "Appropriate Adult" was greeted in the U.K. with a mixture of interest and (tabloid-stirred) outrage at its having been made at all. But it is as circumspect a film as one can imagine on such a subject.

The murders — including those of two West children — have been committed long before we begin, in 1994, and happily none are re-created here, only described, by the interrogating officer (a remarkable Sylvestra Le Touzel) or by Fred himself. (Rose West is mostly offstage.) In spite of the awfulness of the Wests' crimes, which included rape and torture, and indeed of the whole of their lives, "Appropriate Adult" is less sensational than most any random hour of any random American crime show. At the same time, there is no attempt to understand the couple, only to portray them: They are anomalies, after all; no useful meaning can be extracted from their story; the filmmakers resist any urge to append morality to pathology.

The excellent Dominic West is scarcely recognizable as the actor who recently represented the Handsomest Man in Britain in "The Hour." As West plays him, with great understatement, Fred is something of a simpleton, but he is not simple. He is clever in a feral way, though as confused as he is clever and as needy as he is stubborn. (One of the film's most outspoken critics, Det. Superintendent John Bennett, played here by Robert Glenister, nevertheless called West's portrayal "hauntingly accurate.")

But this is Janet's story, above all, that of the appropriate adult, and Watson is remarkable as a woman propelled by her own need to be needed, to do good and prove something to herself into a deep, dark hole, down which she floats half-dazed, like Alice. The film — which does not really convey the awful amount of time Leach spent with Fred West, some 400 hours — leaves you largely free to judge the relationship for yourself. A mystery to herself, Janet remains something of a mystery to us.

Well made and never boring — the director is Julian Jarrold ("Becoming Jane") — "Appropriate Adult" is a first-class example of what British filmmakers do well when they are not trying to look like American filmmakers: They create believable spaces whose reality seems to continue beyond the edge of the frame, then fill them with persuasive characters who speak as people do. The work itself is reason enough, and maybe the only reason, to watch the film; it is the good thing you can take away from it.

Appropriate Adult, ITV1 Graeme Thomson

Appropriate Adult (ITV 1, September 2011) Bernice M. Murphy from The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, October 2011

Black Hole [Mark Hodgson]

Fred West drama Appropriate Adult earns rave reviews but angers ... The Periscope Post, September 5, 2011

1000 Nights in the Dark [Iain Stott]

User reviews from imdb Author: gradyharp from United States

Dominic West: 'People seem to think I'm Satan' Stuart Jeffries interview of actor Dominic West from The Guardian, May 29, 2011

Appropriate Adult: Fred West Drama Ian Wylie interviews actress Emily Watson from Life of Wylie, August 25, 2011

Playing Fred West gave me nightmares, says Wire star Anita Singh interviews actor Dominic West from The Telegraph, August 29, 2011

Writer defends Fred and Rosemary West drama on ITV1 Vicky Frost interviews writer Neil McKay from The Guardian, September 2, 2011

Fred West's daughter slams Wire star Dominic West for complaining ... Louise Boyle interviews Anne-Marie Davis, Fred Wests’s daughter, from Mail Online, September 2, 2011

Fred West ruined my life... this new film sickens me | The Sun |Features Rebecca Ley interviews Paul Leach, Rebecca Leach’s son from The Sun, September 5, 2011

Emily Watson goes into the darkness for 'Appropriate Adult' Yvonne Villarreal interviews actress Watson from The Los Angeles Times, December 6, 2011

Variety Reviews - Appropriate Adult - TV Reviews - - Review by ... Brian Lowry

BBC News - Fred West drama Appropriate Adult impresses critics BBC News, September 5, 2011

The Weekend's TV: Appropriate Adult, Sun, ITV1 - Reviews - TV ... Tom Sutcliffe from The Independent, September 5, 2011

Appropriate Adult, ITV1, review - Telegraph Serena Davies from The Telegraph, September 5, 2011

Rewind TV: Appropriate Adult; Horizon: Are You Good or Evil?; Reel History of Britain Phil Hogan from The Observer, September 10, 2011

Appropriate Adult, ITV1, episode two, review - Telegraph Ceri Radford from The Telegraph, September 12, 2011

Fred West: a glimpse of extreme evil Neil McKay from the Guardian, July 31, 2011

TV review: Appropriate Adult; Nature's Miracle babies | Television ... Sam Wollaston from The Guardian, September 4, 2011

Fred West's final crime Brian Masters from The Guardian, September 9, 2011

Inspector George Gently holds sway over Appropriate Adult John Plunkett from The Guardian, September 12, 2011

West case lesson for appropriate adults Letter to the Editor from The Guardian, September 15, 2011

WORLD IN BRIEF : ENGLAND : Suspected Killer's Wife... The LA Times, April 22, 1994

Dark Horror of Child Abuse Increasingly Brought to Public... William Tuohy from The LA Times, June 9, 1985

Emily Watson in 'Appropriate Adult' on Sundance Channel - Review ... Mike Hale from The New York Times, December 9, 2011

Appropriate adult - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fred West - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fred & Rose West — Discovery — Crime Library on truTV.com Marilyn Bardsley

Biography - Fred West on Crime and Investigation Network

Jayanti, Vikram

GAME OVER: KASPAROV AND THE MACHINE B 87

Canada Great Britain (90 mi) 2003

An intriguing, but ultimately unsatisfying documentary look at perhaps the greatest chess player that ever lived, Garry Kasparov, who reflects back at his 1997 match against an IBM computer named Deep Blue, which is the first computer in history to beat a reigning Grandmaster, causing huge international speculation about the increased capacity of computer-enhanced artificial intelligence. But rather than provide definitive answers, this film raises a cloud of suspicion over IBM’s tactics, suggesting the corporate strategy was to devise an all-out assault against Kasparov, all of which remains locked in secrecy, and may even have included cheating, if you believe Kasparov. When the computer won, IBM’s stock increased by some 15% on that same day. Prior to that, IBM was known largely as a provider of office supplies and materials, but nothing in the realm of artificial intelligence. All that immediately changed. Newspapers and magazines suggested computers had entered a new era where mere mortals would never again be able to match wits with the superior speed and analyzing powers of a computer.

At Kasparov’s level of expertise, there are few who can understand his genius, but students of the game can study and re-study his moves in match play and develop insight into the game of chess. Not so with the IBM computer, which had played other chess players as well, but has remained adamant about keeping the computer’s moves secret from the public. Kasparov easily beat this same computer in 1996, and won his first game handily in 1997. But Kasparov’s suspicions were aroused during the second game of the match, when he recognized behavior that was not in accordance with his understanding of a computer chess game. Kasparov plays a computer differently than humans, as he has to recognize and exploit the weaknesses in his opponent. But in his eyes, he has to know his opponent. At the press conference after the second game, he indicated he suspected something was not right, that the computer’s moves may have been aided by another human Grandmaster, as there were several on the premises, and that a human working with a computer violated the rules. Kasparov asked for the computer printouts to prove it was the actions of a computer alone. IBM kept telling him they would issue the printouts, but as the match went on, they kept reneging on their agreements. Eventually, IBM agreed to provide them after the match was over, but they have never done so.

All this suggesting they would, but then they wouldn’t, also the complete secrecy surrounding who was on the IBM team, all of whom, except for the programmers, remained locked behind closed doors, added to a heightened state of anxiety for Kasparov, who literally lost his composure. Kasparov’s life has never been the same. He was seen as a broken man. Kasparov immediately asked for a rematch, looking for an opportunity to redeem himself, but IBM refused. Instead, they actually dismantled the computer, sending half to the Smithsonian Institute, while the other half remains at IBM headquarters. IBM’s interest in chess, or the advancement of science through chess, ended with this match. They quit while they were ahead. Perhaps the computer alone played this chess match and won fairly, and perhaps Kasparov’s suspicions are the result of a sore loser, but since IBM has never revealed the definitive proof, the scientific evidence to show it was the actions of a computer alone, it remains a mystery. Of interest, late in the match the IBM programmers were actually booed during one of the game’s press conferences and they have been viewed by some as the corporate scum of the earth. The film shows the human reactions of Kasparov in losing, which are startlingly vivid and real, but never gets behind the IBM curtain of secrecy.

Jayasundara, Vimukthi

THE FORSAKEN LAND (Sulanga Enu Pinisa) B 88

Sri Lanka France (108 mi) 2005

We don’t see many films from Sri Lanka, famous for being the birthplace of Michael Ondaatje, a mixed Dutch, Sinhalese, and Tamil writer of two excellent books, “Coming Through Slaughter,” an impressionistic rendering of the life of Buddy Bolden and the birth of American jazz, and one of the more outrageously imaginative autobiographies, “Running in the Family,” which provides a vivid description of what at that time was known as Ceylon, a colonial empire in decline: “Cobras in the garden; grandmother Gratiaen swept away in a flood; the humid silence of the tropical afternoons; his father burying gin bottles in the flower beds; mad, drunken expeditions through the jungle – these are a few of the pieces that the author tries to fit together in order to understand who is parents were and who he is.” However, Ondaatje is best known for writing a book that was adapted into an Academy Award winning film, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, which was greatly restructured from the novel, expanding the doomed love story into an epic romance in the style of David Lean.

Now, from following news reports over the years, what we know about Sri Lanka is a long, prolonged 20-year civil war that has left many dead, and this otherwise exotic land in a state of despair from the continual dread of more bloodshed. Picking up on that theme, this film hints at unseen battles, with tanks patrolling the countrysides at dawn, the military patrolling the streets throughout the day, with guards posted at sites in the middle of nowhere, with bullet shells lying in the sand, with mortar holes etched into the ground, used as a secret hideaway for two soldiers who wish to smoke grass undetected. In this depiction of a cease fire, where jets can be heard flying overhead, but never seen, the incessant boredom seems to dominate the images seen, shown in an almost diary-like presentation with no real plot or narrative, just a succession of images. One of the best expressions was a woman opening the windows of her one-room shack, one wall at a time, as the breeze suddenly bursts into the room, taking hold of her flowing hair, providing energy and life to an otherwise dormant existence.

Winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for best first film, the slow, languid pace and the near wordless atmosphere takes on elements similar to Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, especially his first film in 1998, A SMALL TOWN, which was largely autobiographical and without a real narrative, instead it was a series of small vignettes, impressions of the hard life in rural or remote lands, where people are so much more connected to the land around them. Also, there is the influence of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose films can be a little hypnotic in how slow they move, revealing life in the tropics, usually veering into the mysteriousness of the jungle at some point. Jayasundara finds a desolate landscape, a small hut in an open expanse where the only other building in sight is a tiny shack next door, an outdoor toilet with an unattached door leaning against a wall, with a dirt road outside where a bus passes by and the army patrols, but where no other life force can be seen for miles in any direction. The husband works guarding that road, carrying an outdated rifle, reinforced by another sentry who rides a bike and who takes an interest in the lurid beauty and passivity of the man’s wife. Also in the same hut is a sister with a hardened face matching the dry expressionless cracks of the land, never smiling, knowing she is in the way, an undesired burden in already cramped quarters, all persons seemingly as disconnected from one another as they are to the vast emptiness outside. A young girl roams alone unsupervised in an utterly barren landscape, where the allure of danger is stronger than any precaution, simply because it represents a possibility, any possibility, instead of the same boredom every day.

The extreme difficulty for the viewer is never finding a single emotional connection anywhere in this film except for an innocent voice of desperation at the very end which is barely noticeable, expressed as an unanswered prayer. Feelings have been completely eradicated from this land. Life is expressed as a series of routines, revealing the small things people do to pass the time, like watching a spider crawl across a hand, watching army trucks out the window playing tag on the open road, stripping a soldier naked for sheer sadistic pleasure, or walking naked in a stream under the moonlight. What may seem like harmless isolated events may actually have a devastating effect on others, like a child inadvertently eating poison, out of curiosity, or a woman’s dreams worn down and eventually crushed against an open expanse of unending sky, or one man taking an interest in someone else’s wife, seen fornicating in the woods, exhibiting only physicality, nothing sensual. We hear of an adherence to Buddhist philosophy, but the land seems poisoned by the continuous presence of an undisciplined army that rules through a raw and physical force, usually with brutal results. A child’s fable is told near the end of the film which explains, like the Pied Piper, the presence of death everywhere. The spirit cannot breathe in this vile air, which is like an invisible toxic cloud consuming the souls of the people in the region, all choking on neverending human misery and despair.

The Forsaken Land Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Why I Am Not Dan Sallitt: a Brief Study in Contrasting Aesthetics: As with Backstage (although lord knows, this is where the comparison ends), The Forsaken Land appeared as though it would be a masterpiece but eventually disappointed me. Whereas Bercot's film quickly lost focus, Jayasundara's film could be said to gain focus, especially in the second half. But as it becomes more thematically driven and unidirectional, the formal disorientation that I found maddening and kind of thrilling gave way not just to coherence but a very familiar trajectory. I'm fairly certain this isn't just a case of my learning how to make sense of the film over the course of watching it, because really it was like a very identifiable corner was rounded at the 70-minute mark. Before this point, The Forsaken Land struck me as discombobulated, with one shot seeming to deny any knowledge of the next, like strangers in an elevator. But as I watched more closely, it became apparent that Jayasundara was deliberately withholding traditional filmic coherence. One shot would be a left to right pan across the lansdscape; the next would be a still shot of a tree, with a slow zoom in; the next would be a close-up; etc. We were obviously receiving multiple views of the same space, but Jayasundara's procedures prevent the viewer from establishing exactly what this village looks like. We have no clear idea of where we are. (I wondered, actually, whether a second viewing might reveal The Forsaken Land to be a "compendium film," using every available filmic code but allowing none to dominate. David Bordwell has pointed out that Dreyer's Gertrud works like this, and the effect is similarly disorienting.) The objective contents of the image are rather familiar (a desolate, wartorn developing country) but their expected meaning was being defeated by form. Sadly, The Forsaken Land begins to establish not only spatial coherence, but a rote (though honorable) political thrust. Relationships between characters become deterministic, and this once-strange film conforms to the expectations of austere international humanism. It works reasonably well on those terms, but I can't help feeling as though something truly unique was domesticated.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS (Ahasin Wetei)

Sri Lanka France (80 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

The Village Voice [Nicolas Rapold]

After years of civil war, it’s a wonder there’s a Sri Lankan cinema at all, much less the cleanly shot, deep-focus work of Vimukthi Jayasundara. After getting attention with a 2005 Camera d’Or win at Cannes for his debut, The Forsaken Land, the filmmaker follows up with an elliptical exercise in wartime atmosphere and concussed reality. The stage is set rapidly and mystifyingly: A guy falls from the sky, office workers riot in the streets, and a minor-chord aura of menace pervades the lush, rolling countryside. The mystery man, whose story is echoed in a one-off scene of a fisherman telling the tale of a secret prince, flees in a white van, then wanders around; eventually, his sister-in-law tends to his injuries. The sense of a country haunted by apocalyptic conflict is too artily orchestrated: When a tree bursts into flames, or a puppy gnaws on a cow carcass, the image is rolled out as if on cue. Jayasundara’s play with foreground and background does neatly suggest Sri Lanka’s vivid contemporary troubles (cease-fire came only in spring of 2009) unfolding against a broader, even mythic, backdrop. But mostly the film strikes a pose of Tarkovskian suspension and gets stuck.

New York Times (registration req'd) Jeannette Catsoulis

Riven with violence and haunted by the dead and the missing, “Between Two Worlds” is a hallucinatory experience. The worlds in question could be a number of things — heaven and hell, peace and war, past and present; but in a film this vivid and this oblique, the cumulative thrust of the images is what pulls us through.

Offering almost nothing in the way of exposition, the Sri Lankan filmmaker Vimukthi Jayasundara drops a man from the sky and trusts we will follow him. This beautiful fallen angel (Thusitha Laknath) makes his way to a town where rioters are trashing an electronics store, attaches himself briefly to a terrified Chinese girl (Huang Lu) and traverses a bewitching rural landscape empty of adult men. Along the road, people seem to be expecting him: “Why did you come so early?” asks one old lady, and the embraces of his brother’s wife suggest she has reached a limit of loneliness.

Like Mr. Jayasundara’s 2005 feature, “The Forsaken Land,” “Between Two Worlds” is deeply embedded in Sri Lanka’s devastating civil war and the societal fissures that have resulted. Elements of folklore, myth and political symbolism speckle the story (in one scene a man in a Mickey Mouse mask is mercilessly beaten in the middle of a street strewn with smashed television sets), and marauding rebels prowl on the margins.

A bass note of blood and toxicity — adultery and rape, dead cows and poisoned water — drives the film’s stirring score (by Lakshman Joseph de Saram) and pulses beneath its lush canopy of trees. In this land, part dream and part nightmare, the scythed bodies of men in the undergrowth tell their own tale.

Rich On Film [Richard Haridy]

CHATRAK (Mushrooms)

India France Sri Lanka (90 mi) 2011

Cannes 2011. Snapshots: Vimukthi Jayasundara's "Chatrak" Marie-Pierre Duhamel at Cannes from Mubi, May 19, 2011

After his brilliant Between Two Worlds (2009), Sri Lankan artist Jayasundara goes to Cannes with a Bengali film, featuring Bengali stars Paoli Dam and Anubrata, in which he does not give in to any compromise with his stylistic and political standpoints.

Strange encounters in the jungle, strange quests in the city. A European soldier (Icelandic actor Tómas Lemarquis) lost in the jungle, an architect in Kolkata involved in a great project, a lost soul who could be his lost brother, a woman, and angry folks expropriated because of the big architectural project—a story to be followed together with Jayasundara's images. Jayasundara creates images. Not paintings, not graphics, not publicity: living visions. Cinematic dreams and nightmares, visible intuitions of the world around, visual understanding of what corruption of the society and corruption of the soul can do.

Jayasundara is a young relentless master, an example of what contemporary cinema can be: an art that ignores the frontiers between the so-called artistic disciplines only to reconcile them in a universal feeling of the current state of the world. Remember Apichatpong's Boonmee: ghosts are among us. They're called history.

Mushrooms (Chatrak): Cannes 2011 Review Kirk Honeycutt at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 19, 2011

Sri Lanka-born director Vimukthi Jayasundara's film is shot in dirty colors and dim enough lights that would make anyone depressed, in the movie or watching it.

CANNES -- Complaints are everywhere that programmers for the Quinzaine des Rèalisateurs or Directors’ Fortnight at the 2011 Festival de Cannes are almost entirely favoring movies with scant narrative, choosing instead “poetic” visual essays. Certainly Mushrooms (Chatrak) from Sri Lanka-born director Vimukthi Jayasundara underscores that complaint. Yet there is about as much visual poetry in Mushrooms as there is plot. It’s hard to see who will ever appreciate this French-Indian co-production other than overindulgent festival programmers and film critics.

A man with a “crack in his head” lives in a forest, sleeping in trees and foraging for food. He encounters a French soldier — no explanation why a French soldier is guarding some supposed border near Calcutta from illegal immigrants — and the two become buddies and frolic.

Meanwhile, a Calcutta architect returns home after a number of years participating in Dubai’s building boom to oversee the construction of a ghastly looking housing project on a former rice field. (The forlorn buildings, in fact, look more like an old abandoned project the filmmakers used as a set.) However, the architect is distracted by a long delayed search for a missing brother who is said to have gone crazy. So much so he scarcely has time for the beautiful girlfriend who has loyally awaited his return.

Melancholia seemingly afflicts all these characters if not a strain of insanity. Jayasundara and cinematographer Channa Deshapriya also shoot in dirty colors and dim enough lights that would make anyone depressed, in the movie or watching it.

The film’s abstract naturalism does create an austere portrait of a crass and careless human society but any larger meaning gets lost amid the film’s many non-events and preening nihilism.

Jaymes, Christopher

IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER B+ 91

USA (96 mi) 2005

The hyper-aggressive opening, filled with foul language and revolting screen characters led me to believe I was going to really hate this film, as it seemed punctuated by steroid-injected, testosterone-laden guys that were simply too obnoxious for words. The director indicated he wanted to prepare the audience for his free-wheeling film style, which pulls no punches and exhibits a completely uninhibited, brutally honest depiction of a truly weird and oddly dysfunctional family that as the film progresses starts to grow on us. In something of a riff on Robert Altman’s sprawling comedy A WEDDING (1978), this is the Hollywood Hills, a day in the life of three distinctly different brothers, capturing what happens on the day their father, a legendary film producer, dies. The acting is terrific, featuring the writer/director as the younger brother who has been bribed by his self-aggrandizing and womanizing father before he dies to film his death. There isn’t an ounce of nostalgia or sentimentality to be seen in this film, instead it’s an incredibly original style of filmmaking, much of the dialogue and scene set ups are off the wall hilarious, using such dark humor that is so close to weird that it’s really exploring unchartered territory.

Each of the boys is undergoing their own personalized trauma which has nothing to do with their father, who they all loath, they’re just such incredibly self-centered smart-asses that all that matters is themselves. Unbelievably, the body lies upstairs in his bed throughout the entire film as people gather for what turns into a big Hollywood party, which seems to thrive in the delirious decadence of Lou Reed’s “Berlin” period, with a romping original song, complete with a pathetic rap variation by ecstasy-induced brother Jeremy Sisto, with Chris thumping chords on the piano singing “My Daddy’s Dead.” The writing is original and very clever, sometimes a bit too chaotic and incomprehensible, but that’s the way it is at loud parties. As the lives of the sons are exposed and unravel before our eyes, their earlier confrontational crudeness is gone, the tone of the film changes, becoming more sympathetic for each of the characters, even though we felt revulsion for them earlier in the film. After awhile, though still intense, one feels the air is cleared, the muddled confusion a little less complicated, and the musical compositions by Belle and Sebastian provide both an inventive narrative, almost turning into a musical, and a softer, changing mood that leads us to some gorgeous personalized filmmaking, actually resembling ever so briefly, with over-saturated colors, the look and feel of TARNATION, turning into a poetic, melancholy ode to the life of the old man and his kids.

Jean, Vadim

IN THE LAND OF THE FREE… C+ 77

USA Great Britain (84 mi) 2009 Official site

This kind of film is aggravating for a number of reasons, one of which is the intensity of the subject matter, which is an outrage of justice and deserves greater scrutiny than this film provides, another is the way it presents such a one-sided view of the situation, as there is no legal explanation offered to justify this kind of unusual prison treatment, and also the way the film ends without ever revealing an outcome or an update in the current state of affairs. As is, the film’s optimistic tone at the end is entirely misleading (only verified by a Google search afterwards), suggestive of an outcome which never came to be, meaning it still remains unresolved, which the audience needs to know. If you spoke to most people in the United States or around the world, you’d barely be aware of what impact the Black Panther Party has in the world today, as if they exist at all, they remain a fringe organization run on nickels and dimes committed to getting railroaded blacks out of jail. But in the South, it’s a whole different story, as they are still seen through the racist hysteria of the 60’s, as if they remain committed to overthrowing the government of the United States by armed struggle. When seen in this light, they are categorized in the Southern prison systems as such a danger to society that they are ordered segregated from the rest of the prison population, requiring them to spend their entire sentence in a 6 X 9 foot cell in solitary confinement, even as this approaches an unfathomable 4^th decade, yet this is not seen as a violation of the Constitutional guarantee that prohibits “cruel or unusual punishment.” Instead, they are treated far worse than the terrorists at Guantanamo, yet they are supposedly protected American citizens currently serving time in an 18,000-acre former slave plantation known as Angola, named for the place of origin of the original slaves who were brought there. If this wasn’t true, one would have thought this kind of inhumane treatment was more reflective of a brutal military dictatorship known for punishing their enemies, yet it’s been going on in the state of Louisiana for the past 40 years.

While the film is sketchy at best in describing who these men are, known as the Angola 3, Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King, all from rural Louisiana, and what led them to be incarcerated in the first place, suggesting each had a lengthy rap sheet of burglary or armed robbery, instead glossing over this as if these are relatively minor crimes. What is known is their late 60’s and early 1970’s Black Panther affiliation, which was designed to aggressively improve the conditions of blacks in America, which in prison terms means organizing the inmates around improving prison conditions, which meant not working plantation system 17-hour days for 2 cents an hour, access to better education, improving their legal access, all of which was seen as a threat by the warden who preferred keeping things under wraps, out of sight and out of mind. Instead the film suggests the Panthers, at the behest of the warden, were fingered by other inmates for criminal acts taking place inside the prison to justify keeping them on permanent lockdown, so instead of serving sentences for robbery, they were charged with murdering a prison guard, which lengthened their sentences considerably. While it’s clear the lifetime-sentenced witness was promised a chance at freedom by the warden, who immediately began writing letters to the parole board recommending his release, which eventually happened, as he died a free man, it’s also clear there was no other evidence connecting these three men to the crimes. What’s most damning, in terms of establishing prosecutory motivation and abuse, they not only charged Wallace and Woodfox with the actual murder, but even charged a fellow Black Panther who was not even in the prison at the time, once again using the old fashioned racist practice of not allowing any blacks to serve on the jury, and in another, not even allowing any women to serve. It was the discovery of this last piece of evidence that eventually released the 3^rd prisoner, Robert King, as he was ordered a new trial where he was released within an hour for lack of evidence, this after serving 31 years in solitary confinement for a crime he never committed.

It’s King, a soft-spoken but determined man who describes the psychologically humiliating conditions designed to break the spirit of prisoners, many others of whom have attempted suicide under similar circumstances, but none have endured this prison imposed solitary confinement, which was not a part of their sentence, for such a long duration. Anyone who can survive for 40 years suggests unusual strength and fortitude, motivated by the fact that they’ve maintained their innocence all along. This kind of treatment is unprecedented in American history, where statistics show there are more blacks locked up in Louisiana than criminals arrested anywhere else in the world, though recent trends show a growing use of perpetual solitary confinement in American prison systems, pointing to this case as an example of its so-called “success.” How can racism be so entrenched in the penal system in the South that blacks continue to be treated as little more than chattel slaves, as if the Confederacy won the Civil War? Despite this horrendous practice, there appears to be no redress, as the majority Republican politics in Louisiana proudly wave their incarceration record around like red meat to their voters, as race-based politics have never been more divisive. In 2010, when a Federal District Court of Appeals ordered Woodfox’s sentence to be vacated, claiming grounds of prejudice, King, the lawyers, the inmate’s families, and others were expecting them both to be released, which is when the film ends, expecting victory, but that day never arrived, as the Louisiana Attorney General “Buddy” Caldwell opposed the release and appealed the decision, where he eventually prevailed in a 2-1 decision, even as the jury foreman serving on the grand jury that indicted him, who eventually wrote a book upholding the original conviction, was also married to the warden at the time. According to the current warden, Burl Cain, when receiving the news, he still maintains these are extremely dangerous men, likening the Black Panthers to the Klu Klux Klan, suggesting its members will always be a menace to society by virtue of their political beliefs, claiming “there’s been no rehabilitation…(from their) Black Panther revolutionary acts.”

The 9th Annual HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL Facets Multi Media

Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King -- the Angola 3 -- have spent a combined century in solitary confinement in Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Targeted by prison officials for being members of the Black Panther Party and for fighting against terrible prison conditions, they were convicted of the murder of a prison guard, a verdict they continue to challenge and for which new evidence continues to emerge. In the Land of the Free... presents their ongoing story as dramatic events continue to unfold. Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. Film courtesy of The Mob Film Company.

HRW: prison detention conditions Human Rights Watch

The US Supreme Court on May 23, 2011, endorsed the constitutional right of prisoners to be free of cruel and unusual conditions of confinement and the government’s responsibility to provide a remedy for violations of that right.

Prisoners and detainees in many local, state and federal facilities, including those run by private contractors, confront conditions that are abusive, degrading and dangerous. Soaring prison populations due to harsh sentencing laws—which legislators have been reluctant to change—and immigrant detention policies coupled with tight budgets have left governments unwilling to make the investments in staff and resources necessary to ensure safe and humane conditions of confinement. Such failures violate the human rights of all persons deprived of their liberty to be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person, and to be free from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

In The Land Of The Free Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun

This documentary, both rousing and dispiriting, narrated by Samuel L Jackson and produced by The Roddick Foundation, shines a spotlight on the case of two prisoners in Louisiana’s notorious ‘Angola’ prison (population: 5,000) who have been lingering in solitary for 37 years for a crime many people believe they never committed. Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox were minor criminals and members of the Black Panther Party when in 1972 they were accused of murdering a prison guard – a crime of which even the guard’s wife believes they were innocent, not least because the witnesses were so unreliable (one was blind; another was promised freedom).

Another man, Robert King, was later hauled into jail from the outside for ‘investigation’ and accused of murdering an inmate; together they became known as the Angola Three, although King was finally released in 2001. Interviews with King, Wallace and Woodfox, with lawyers and politicians and even with the guard’s wife, make this a rounded study and as much a portrait of what it’s like to spend four decades locked up as a rallying cry for the freedom of innocent men.

What's Next for Albert Woodfox of the Angola 3? | Mother Jones James Ridgeway and Jean Casella from Mother Jones, June 22, 2010

Albert Woodfox has spent nearly all of the last 38 years in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitientiary at Angola. His case has brought protests from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who argue that Woodfox’s decades in lockdown constitute torture, and from a growing band of supporters, who believe that he was denied a fair trial. For more than ten years, he has been fighting for his release in the courts. But yesterday, a ruling by a federal appeals court ensured that for the forseeable future, Albert Woodfox will remain right where he has been for the last three decades: in a 6 x 9 cell in the heart of America’s largest and most notorious prison.

It’s been nearly two years since a federal district court judge in Baton Rouge overturned Woodfox’s conviction for the 1972 murder of a guard at Louisiana’s Angola prison. Judge James Brady’s 2008 ruling, which ordered the state to retry Woodfox or release him, brought new hope to the 63-year-old Woodfox, who has been in Angola–originally for armed robbery–since he was 24. A member of the group known as the Angola 3, Woodfox has always contended that he was effectively framed for the guard’s murder–and then thrown into permament lockdown–because of his involvement with the Black Panther Party, which was organizing against conditions in what was then known as the "bloodiest prison in the South."

Without drawing any conclusions about Woodfox’s guilt or innocence, Judge Brady of the Federal District Court, Middle District of Louisiana, concluded that Woodfox had not received due process at his 1998 trial (which was intself a replacement for a faulty 1973 trial). The main grounds for overturning Woodfox’s conviction were ineffective assistance of counsel, which allowed questionable evidence and irregular practices to stand without challenge. Woodfox had argued that better lawyers could have shown that his conviction was quite literally bought by the state, which based its case on jailhouse informants who were rewarded for their testimony. (Woodfox’s case was described in full in this 2009 article for Mother Jones.)

Judge Brady agreed, and in July 2008 he granted Woodfox’s Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, ordering that his conviction and life sentence be "reversed and vacated." But some of the most powerful figures in the Lousiana justice system were committed to keeping Woodfox in prison and in lockdown. After his conviction was overturned, Attorney General James "Buddy" Caldwell declared, "We will appeal this decision to the 5th Circuit [Court of Appeals]. If the ruling is upheld there I will not stop and we will take this case as high as we have to. I will retry this case myself…I oppose letting him out with every fiber of my being because this is a very dangerous man."

Caldwell put his case before the federal Fifth Circuit in March 2009–and in yesterday's decision, he prevailed. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of three federal appellate judges ruled that Judge Brady had erred in overturning Wallace’s conviction. Their decision is not only a crushing blow for Woodfox, but also a manifestation of how far the rights of the accused have fallen in recent decades.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals once had a reputation as one of the finest appellate courts in the land. In the 1960s, a small group of Fifth Circuit judges—mostly Southern-bred moderate Republicans—was known for advancing civil rights and especially school desegregation. But today the Fifth Circuit, which covers Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, is seen as among the most ideologically conservative of the federal appeals courts. It is notable for its overburdened docket and for its hostility to appeals from defendants in capital cases, including claims based on faulty prosecution and suppressed evidence. The court has even been reprimanded by the US Supreme Court, itself is no friend to death row inmates: In June 2004, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that the Fifth Circuit was "paying lip service to principles" of appellate law in handing down death penalty rulings.

In addition, the decision in Woodfox’s case shows the crippling effects on prisoners’ rights of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) which was passed under Bill Clinton in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombings. That legislation has become the bane of anti-death penalty lawyers and activists, and of thousands of other prisoners seeking to challenge their convictions–a pursuit which AEDPA now renders nearly impossible.

As the Fifth Circuit noted in its ruling, "The AEDPA requires that federal courts "defer to a state court’s adjudication of a claim" unless the state court decision ran "contrary to…clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court," or was "based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding." And as the judges pointed out, "An unreasonable application of federal law is different from an incorrect or erroneous application of the law."

In other words, the state courts could be wrong, they just couldn't be so far out as to be undeniably "unreasonable." And in the end, the Fifth Circuit judges agreed with the State’s argument that "the district court failed to apply the AEDPA's heightened deferential standard of review to Woodfox's ineffective assistance claims." For Woodfox, this means that his time in prison stretches before him with no foreseeable end in sight. His lawyers have promised to return to his case with new evidence, but that could take years, and the outcome might still be the same. In the meantime, Woodfox and fellow Angola 3 members Herman Wallace and Robert King have mounted a constitutional challenge to their solitary confinement, which may come to trial before the end of this year. (Wallace was Woodfox's co-defendent in the guard's murder, and has also been in solitary for 38 years. King, sentenced to life for another prison killing, had his murder conviction overturned and was released from Angola in February 2001 after 29 years in lockdown; he remains a plaintiff in this suit, which covers time he was in solitary.) That case, too, will eventually go before the Fifth Circuit–and even a win would mean only a release from permanent lockdown, not from Angola.

36 Years of Solitude James Ridgeway from Mother Jones, March 2, 2009

Free From Prison At Last: For an Aging Angola Inmate, Death Is the Only Release James Ridgeway from Mother Jones, May 8, 2009

After 43 Years in Solitary, This Man Faces “One of the Most Surreal... Michael Mechanic from Mother Jones, November 11, 2015

The Angola Three’s long struggle for justice | Africa News April 5, 2011

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In The Land of the Free review | film | littlewhitelies.co.uk James Wright

Angola 3: Further Reading additional links to other stories

MoJo Interview: The Angola 3 Brooke Shelby Biggs interview from Mother Jones, July 2008

Guardian UK: interview with Vadim Jean & Brendan Gleeson (podcast) Jason Solomons from The Guardian, March 25, 2010, including podcast (43:24)

Vadim Jean interview | littlewhitelies.co.uk Vadim Jean interview, March 30, 2010

Film review: In the Land of the Free | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks, March 25, 2010

The Angola Three's long struggle for justice Steven Mather from The Guardian, April 5, 2011, also seen April 10, 2011 here: The Angola Three’s long struggle for justice | Steven Mather | Africa News

37 years of solitary confinement: the Angola three Erwin James from The Guardian, March 10, 2010

Angola Three - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Angola 3

RW ONLINE:Angola 3 Prisoner Released Revolutionary Worker Online, March 4, 2001

Lawyers call for release of "Angola 3," nearly 36 years after ... Gwen Filosa from The Times-Picayune, March 17, 2008

Murder Conviction Overturned After 36 Years in Solitary Megan Chuchmuch from ABC News, July 9, 2008

Judge orders release of Angola 3 inmate Albert Woodfox | NOLA.com Gwen Filosa from The Times-Picayune, November 25, 2008

PSLweb.org: Angola 3's Albert Woodfox to be released after 37 ... Richard Becker from The Party for Socialism and Liberation, November 29, 2008

The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation book written by Jimmy O’Halligan, reviewed by William T. Armaline (Ph.D.) and Damian Bramlett from Political Media Review, June 20, 2009

37 years of solitary confinement: the Angola three | Society ... Erwin James from The Guardian, May 9, 2010

Court Rules Against Angola 3′s Albert Woodfox: No End in Sight to ... James Ridgeway and Jean Casella from Solitary Watch, June 22, 2010, also seen here: Court Reverses Appeal of Angola 3's Albert Woodfox - The Real Cost ...

Two Clinton Era Laws That Allow Cruel and Unusual Punishment (Redux) « Solitary Watch James Ridgeway and Jean Casella from Solitary Watch, June 22, 2010

The Case of the Angola 3 « Todealornot's Blog October 19, 2010

Robert H. King on the Angola 3 and His Autobiography, “From the Bottom of the Heap” Kiilu Nyasha from Fire Dog Lake, April 12, 2011

Amnesty International Calls for Angola 3′s Release from 40 Years ... James Ridgeway and Jean Casella from Solitary Watch, June 7, 2011

Amnesty Blogs: Press release me, let me go : The Angola 3 ... Niluccio from Amnesty International UK, June 7, 2011

After 4 Decades in Solitary, Dying Angola 3 Prisoner ... Democracy Now, October 2, 2013

Angola Three's Robert King looks back on 30 years of ... The Guardian, June 10, 2015

On Tortuous Road to Freedom, 'Angola Three' Inmate Bides ... The New York Times, June 10, 2015

Angola Three: court extends Albert Woodfox's 43-year-long ... Alan Yuhas from The Guardian, June 12, 2015

Judge rejects bid from Angola Three's Albert Woodfox after ... The Guardian, September 21, 2015

'Angola Three' prisoner Albert Woodfox stays behind bars ... The Guardian, November 9, 2015

Albert Woodfox released from jail after 43 years in solitary confinement Ed Pilkington from The Guardian, February 19, 2016

Last 'Angola 3′ prisoner released after more than 40 years in solitary confinement Mark Berman from The Washington Post, February 19, 2016

Angola 3's Albert Woodfox to be released Friday after decades in solitary Emily Lane from the Times-Picayune, NOLA.com, February 19, 2016

Update: Albert Woodfox, Last of the Angola Three, Is Free ... Democracy Now, February 19, 2016

Albert Woodfox | International Coalition to Free the Angola 3 ... Angola 3 News, February 19, 2016

Last 'Angola 3' Inmate Freed After Decades in Solitary Campbell Robertson from The New York Times, February 20, 2016

Albert Woodfox speaks after 43 years in solitary confinement: 'I would not let them drive me insane' Ed Pilkington from The Guardian, February 20, 2016

44 Years in Solitary Confinement Is Even Worse Than You Can Imagine Wilbert Rideau and Linda LaBranche from Mother Jones magazine, February 22, 2016

Jeanjean, Bernard

PLEASE DON’T GO (J'veux pas que tu t'en ailles) C 73

France (95 mi) 2007 ‘Scope

Not much to say about this forgettable romantic comedy written by a husband (the director) and wife team featuring the gorgeous Judith Gidrèche as a women loved by two men, one her older career minded husband (Richard Berry) and the other a younger more fun loving guy (Julien Boisselier) she is seeing on the side. The twist is the husband is the psychiatrist treating the outside lover, who quickly figures out the connection, but then becomes so intrigued at what he discovers that he forgets his moral obligations and decides to manipulate his sessions with bad advice to save his marriage, with predictable disastrous results. The film is actually more a battle of wills between the two men, where the girl is all but forgotten, brushed aside in their blatant attempts to outmaneuver one another. French comedy isn’t about how funny the lines are, where writing jokes is the key, such as American stand-up comedy, but in the comedic timing of the scenes, where characters are purposefully sent headlong into disastrous or embarrassing situations, where the build up of tension to that one moment when everything explodes is what matters. Unfortunately, the breezy nature of this comfortable, all-too polite comedy never reaches for the kind of Road Runner and Wily Coyote sledgehammer dark humor that is called for, as there are a few amusing scenes, an always gorgeous girl, but no payoffs, nothing to match the hilarity of the opening two minutes of the film.

Jefferson, Roland S.

PERFUME

USA (98 mi) 1991

Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review

Just in case you were wondering what that smell is, it's Roland S. Jefferson's "Perfume." The picture, which looks as if it were shot by the Home Shopping Network's cameraman on his days off, deals with the establishment of a cosmetics company by a group of five longtime friends who call themselves "The Groovy Girls." The business is formed one night over dinner. "All I need from each of you is $25,000," one of the group says. "The rest we can get from the bank." Nobody even blinks.

The reason nobody flinches is that not a single member of this clique drives a car with a price tag under $100,000. Shoot, they spend 25K a year on their nails alone. The toast that night is "May there be no secrets between us," and that sets the agenda for the duration. Slowly (and I mean slowly), it's revealed that each of the women has an awful secret that she has hidden from the rest. How awful? When one of the women is asked to explain her problem, she says, "Did you see the movie 'Chinatown' ?"

Nuff said.

With all the classic cars and flashing jewelry, what you expect "Perfume" to turn into is a morality play about the emptiness of wealth, but it never does. Jefferson's point, it seems, is that black people can have lots of money but that their problems have nothing to do with cash flow. So then why make them all so conspicuously wealthy to begin with? It doesn't help, either, that Jefferson's direction is torturously amateurish.

A final note: The names of the actors have been withheld pending notification of next of kin.

Dr. Roland Jefferson interview Elizabeth Jackson from Jump Cut, May 1991

Jeffries, Frank

SOUL AND SALSA

USA 1988

Chicano/Latino men in gay pornography Hot and Spicy, by Christopher Ortiz from Jump Cut, June 1994

SOUL AND SALSA (1988, produced and directed by Frank Jeffries, Adam and Co.). As the title suggests, African American and Chicano/ Latino men are linked to familiar signifiers such as soul and salsa. What the terms denote have both a cultural and sexual meaning not only within the video but within a wider social context. African American men have more soul, commonly thought of as passion, "rhythm," and emotional depth. Chicano/ Latino men are framed in terms of salsa, a type of music or a dish that is stereotypically linked to Latinos and often becomes a way Chicano/ Latino culture is reduced to a simple meaning. In fact, the juxtaposition of soul and salsa reduces African American and Chicano/ Latino men to easily consumed objects within an already familiar signifying system of racial and ethnic meaning: soul food, soul music; salsa with chips, salsa music, hot-blooded men with passion, rhythm, strong sexual appetite, and a closeness to the primal.

The cover for the video frames the men directly in these terms:

"Hot and Spicy! Adam and Co. brings you a gourmet feast for men who like to sweat while they eat. The finest Black and Latin men are brought to you on a platter, warmed and ready to eat."

Within the system of racial and ethnic meaning that the title of the video signifies is the implicit idea that the relationship of the African American and Chicano/ Latino to nature is not as mediated or that the latter's culture is constructed closer to the natural or the primal. According to the cover description of the video's contents, African American and Latino men are both the raw and the cooked.

In line with the idea of the African American and Chicano/ Latino as a cipher for an unbridled sexuality or for a pure sexual presence is the video's mise-en-scène. The five scenarios of the video take place in two settings: a bed placed in an unspecified locale with gray matting, similar to a photographer's studio; and in the indoor construction site of a partially constructed room. The bed that is not part of a recognizable setting reduces African American men and Chicano/ Latino men to their sex. The partially constructed room reinforces the notion of men of color as somehow not completely civilized.

Theory and practice U.S. Latinos and the Media: Theory and Practice, by Chon A. Noriega from Jump Cut, June 1994

Chicano personal cinema Willie Varela from Jump Cut, June 1994

Jeffs, Christine

SYLVIA B 83

Great Britain (100 mi) 2003

"Dying is an art, like anything else.  I do it exceptionally well.  I do it so it feels like hell.  I do it so it feels real.  I guess you could say I have a call."  I have to admit to being mesmerized by Gwyneth Paltrow's screen presence as Sylvia Plath in this film, almost like watching Audrey Hepburn, a beautiful, exceedingly intelligent woman, and I loved to listen to the poetry float off her tongue in the beginning of this film, very much like her character in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE.  She seemed to represent everything that is good, and vibrant, and warm, and hopeful about being alive.  And then the dream died.  It was a bit like watching A BEAUTIFUL MIND, as she seemed to be drowning in her acute awareness, in her sharply precisioned wits that also exhausted her, that took every next breath away, growing more paranoid and fearful until eventually, she couldn't live with herself any more.  Paltrow's performance was spectacular, particularly her transformation into a life of solitary moments of dread and isolation.  Unfortunately, the rest of the film is fairly mediocre, the music overly orchestrated to the point of unremitting intrusion, pounding on our every last nerve, ultimately destroying our connection to this luminous presence on screen that is filmed in darker and ever darker empty rooms.  "Death opened, like a black tree, blackly." 

Jenkins, Barry

MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY A- 93

USA (90 mi) 2008 + "Medicine for Melancholy"

This American indie film written and directed by a first time black filmmaker bears an astounding similarity in style and tone to Cassavetes’ first film Shadows (1959), made nearly half a century ago simultaneous to the era of the French New Wave, probably considered by now as ancient history. However the intelligent, free-wheeling, improvisational style and the stellar black and white photography by James Laxton reflect the luminous beauty of San Francisco, suggesting a rush of energy that befits any modern age. But in the intimate manner of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), the centerpiece of the film has to be the extraordinarily naturalistic performances of the two leads, Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo (Tracey Heggins), two young black adults who awkwardly meet the morning after a one-night stand at a party. Initially having little, if anything, to say to each another, there’s a clever development where they slowly warm to one another. What’s most impressive is the very ease of their dialogue, how believable they are as these two characters, offering a degree of warmth and intelligence rarely seen in television or films.

The film follows the next 24 hours of their lives, condensed to segments that are shot pretty close to real time, that have a relaxed and at times romantic air about them despite the fact she’s already married, where there isn’t a hint of condescension or artificiality, yet their moods veer all over the place, sometimes hot, sometimes cold. To its credit, the film doesn’t feature any snarky intelligence of trying to overimpress or be too hip, where a first time director might be inclined to overwrite certain scenes, looking for a way to stand out. Instead the film largely impresses with its sense of restraint and good taste matching the personalities of the characters who show a surprising degree of respect for one another. Where the film doesn’t go is into the deep emotional terrain, more fertile Cassavetes territory, where gut-wrenching drama (Gena Rowlands) lights up the screen. These are different kinds of characters who aren’t about to plunge headlong into broken heart territory as they’ve only just met, instead they scratch the surface searching for a variety of interests, pretty much checking each other out all day long, having playful moments together while also taking seriously matters like race, where they both see their identity from completely different vantage points, gentrification, disparities in wealth and displacement of the poor, where he claims blacks comprise only 7% of the city’s population, suggesting she’s probably the only black person living in the Marina district, but also kidding around about music and personal tastes, while also finding time to simply relate together, featuring inventive musical choices throughout.

This is not a movie that’s going to blow anyone away with action sequences. This film features energy over action, both high and low, not afraid to leave spaces unfilled, accentuating intimacy and vulnerability, using words, gestures, looks, wit, risk, charm, listening to what the other person says, but also has moments where they simply want to let loose, loving every minute of being alive where the loud, pulsating beat drives the film. Initially released at the South by Southwest Fest, it also played at San Francisco (audience favorite of course) and Philadelphia before playing at Telluride.  Had it played at Sundance, it might have generated the kind of interest BALLAST (2008) and other award winners have, but you never know, since this indie style of filmmaking simply isn't being made much anymore, one of the reasons to truly treasure seeing it. This is a real diamond in the rough, though, a small film with big ideas, surprisingly heartfelt and relevant, yet always down to earth, placing these characters within the realm of people we know, perhaps even ourselves.

indiewire Eric Kohn

As a counterpoint, the warmly poetic festival entry "Medicine for Melancholy" examines the aftermath of a breakup and finds some semblance of hope. At a packed screening earlier this week, one of the audience members asked during the Q & A session whether director Barry Jenkins' first film could be deemed mumblecore. In this case, the label would seem like condensation. A fiercely intellectual story about two San Francisco residents hanging out the day after a one night stand, "Meloncholy" is too streamlined, or coherent, to justify the title

Philadelphia City Paper capsule review Ptah Gabrie

Barry Jenkins' film begins the morning after a drunken one-night stand, as two San Francisco hipsters wander the streets and examine each other's quirky personalities. For 90 minutes of mostly real time, the camera captures every awkward moment these strangers endure. On the surface, it's a love story, but Medicine also touches on racial and gender roles, albeit without much success. The subtle undertones are mostly lost in the massive amount of snooze-inducing chit-chat, and race becomes a brief topic of conversation only after the pair are trashed and ordering tacos from a sidewalk cart.

Filmmaker Magazine Scott Macaulay

Barry Jenkins's beautifully titled Medicine for Melancholy is set firmly in the “two romantics/one city” genre previously explored by Rick Linklater in his Before Sunrise and Before Sunset as well as Alex Holdridge in his recent In Search of a Midnight Kiss. As in those films, two characters meet (in this case, the morning after a drunken one-night stand) and spent the day exploring both their city and each other. But instead of Linklater’s soul-searching bohemians and Holdridge’s struggling L.A. film industry artistes, Jenkins gives us two African-American lovers, Micah and Joanne, divided by class and urban geography. She’s gorgeous, well-off, and is supported by her white boyfriend in an expensive and sparely designed apartment in a ritzy neighborhood. An aquarium installer, he lives downtown in the Mission in a tiny joint just big enough for his bed and a large fish-tank. Through the day and into the evening they traverse through a stunningly photographed, mostly black-and-white San Francisco all the while musing on – and arguing over – racial identity, gentrification and the changes in housing laws that are altering the character of a city that Micah says is comprised of only 7% black people. (I say "mostly black-and-white" because flashes of dark-hued color occasionally pop out, leading critic Karina Longworth to write that the video cinematography is, like the city, 93% desaturated, an interpretation Jenkins agreed with at the Q and A.) At one point midway through the film, the characters walk by a meeting of a public housing activist group and d.p. James Laxton's camera pops in, taking the film on a nice documentary detour for a moment. Medicine for Melancholy is an appealingly modest film with two strong lead performances (by Wyatt Cenac and, particularly, Tracey Heggins), and a beautiful sense of balance; it never presupposes that the romantic possibilities of its two illicit lovers are more important than the social reality Jenkins quite deftly embeds them in.

Twitch (Michael Guillen) review also seen here: The Evening Class

The first thing you notice right off in Barry Jenkins’ debut feature Medicine for Melancholy is its color palette, skillfully enunciated by cinematographer James Laxton.  The film—part of the Emerging Visions lineup at this year’s SXSW—looks like it was shot in black and white and tinted by hand.  Whether or not Jenkins and Laxton intended this to parallel how the color can be taken out of a person of color through the compromise of assimilation and the coercion of gentrification is anyone’s guess; but, that’s how I read it.  Once you’ve adjusted your eyes to the bright, leaching light, you’re introduced to two Black characters—Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo (Tracey Heggins)—who straightaway thwart preconceptions of how young urban African-Americans are supposed to both look and act.  “Supposed to” is the qualifying determinant here in this desultory study of the desire for and the desire through identity.

The film borrows its title from Ray Bradbury’s novel and its modus operandi from a Bradbury quote: “Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning—just follow him or her all day.” Monitoring what two young Black people do on a Sunday afternoon/evening in San Francisco, California after a drunken one-night stand the night before is exactly the film’s narrative trajectory.  What you find is what Micah and Jo do on a Sunday afternoon as they warily approach a melancholy malaise within themselves not fully recognized nor articulated.

What remains to be understood is precisely the selfsame challenge posed to the film’s audience.  Whether the film’s meandering mode will engage audiences enough to pay attention to the subtle thematic traction underscoring its casual demeanor is the crucial pivot; but, whether it succeeds or fails, I must commend those themes and hope audiences will take the time to feel them out and to think them through.

What is a “Black” person?  What do they look like?  What do they act like?  What kind of music do you associate with them?  What part of the city do they live in?  What are your presumptions about them?  What are your expectations?  And why—if you are not Black—should it matter to you?  Is it perhaps as Robert F. Reid-Pharr has written in his assessment of Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman that a predetermined conception of Blacks “has come to lend a certain type of ontological stability to all American identities”?  And if two African-American characters are introduced who do not match stereotypes does it induce a kind of vertigo?  If say, both are civilized young people compromised by a sense of social displacement, do the forces that create that social displacement appear less than civilized?

It’s a good question, especially situated in San Francisco, where Jenkins has thoughtfully overlaid demographic pie charts on the spokes of bicycle wheels.  He informs that urban African American populations in Atlanta total 59%; in Chicago 37%; in New York 28%; and in San Francisco a shrinking 7%.  What is a young urban African American to do when they find themselves in a sea of white identities purposely forcing them out of a beautiful city like San Francisco?  With the memory of what the Redevelopment Agency recently did to the Fillmore District barely mollified, current events in South Beach reveal the same forces at work, even as an initiative to make rent control illegal in California is being crafted for the next election.  If rent control is repealed, what will happen to San Francisco’s ethnic (and—by extension—creative) diversity?  Good questions indeed.  Rendered through the scale of a human interaction, Medicine for Melancholy reveals the potential collateral damage.  Is there really an appropriate medicine for such melancholy?

Spout blog Karina Longworth

Visually more sophisticated than the bulk of features to yet come out of the new wave of DIY independent American cinema, narratively smoother and yet still boundless in mold-breaking ambition, Medicine for Melancholy offers a self-contained rebuttal to claims that precious, naturalistic dramas about the existential dilemmas of hipster singles are exclusively a white man’s game. But the most exciting thing about the film is that director Barry Jenkins doesn’t seem interested in rebutting anything, or in playing any sort of game but his own. His mission: to talk about what it feels like to be young, black and artsy in a city in which people who fit that description make up a minuscule fraction of the population.

Formally and thematically, Melancholy is, in fact, driven by fractions. African-Americans currently make up less than 7 percent of the city of San Francisco. Several decades of gentrification have all but whitewashed the city’s historically non-white communities south of Market Street; the few non-gentrified pockets still standing are under constant threat of being steamrolled by the luxury housing boom. To make that point visually, Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton literally drain the color almost completely from their digital video image (on first viewing, I guessed that the entirety of the film had been desaturated 93 percent to match the racial breakdown, but in a recent interview, Jenkins said the level of desaturation actually fluctuates). The resulting image is soft and smoggy, mostly gray with pastel hints. Melancholy may be more committed to certain of the city’s un-pretty social truths than any other recent fiction film set in San Francisco, but ironically, as a sheer portrait of the city, it’s also maybe the most beautiful.

Jenkins wants us to know that, in such a literally colorless landscape, it’s a freak occurance that our protagonists have met at all. Micah and Joanne wake up in the same bed the morning after a house party. They’ve apparently had sex, but have neglected to exchange names. An awkward brunch ensues, then a silent shared cab ride. Apparently embarrassed and certainly hungover, she storms out of the car when it reaches the top of Russian Hill, but leaves her wallet behind. He tracks her down, convinces her that they should spend the day together. The day turns into another drunken night.

As they explore the city together, Micah and Jo spend an awful lot of time talking self-consciously about race, even going as far as to argue over “what two black people do on a Sunday afternoon.” This is, initially, jarring, not just because it’s something you almost never see in a film not directed by Spike Lee, but because as a white girl, my knee jerk response was, “Shouldn’t black people know what it means to be a black person?”

Of course, Jenkins’ point is that, as if anybody ever really knows what it means to be what they are, these two certainly don’t, because for the most part, their racial role models are few and far between, and they can only define themselves against what they know they are not. For Micah, this seems to be Jo’s biggest selling point: she represents something he’s fantasized about, and like many of us would, once he stumbles on the embodiment of that fantasy he’s determined to hold on to it and not let it get away. But Joanne senses this, and doesn’t like it. The last thing she wants is to be wanted just because she’s the only black girl in town who silkscreens her own t-shirts and shops at the organic food co-op.

Over the course of the film, Jenkins subtly shifts our perspective, from Micah’s gaze to Joanne’s, all the while refusing to antagonize or fully sympathize with either. Somehow, by the end, we want to see these two kids cinch a traditional a happy ending. But Jenkins instead chooses realistic difficulty over the easy answer fantasy. A weekend coupling might work as a temporary salve for melancholy, but it never solves the problems it momentarily obscures. 24 hours after we enter the picture, we exit, carrying with us a perfectly molded portrait of a place in the form this fling.

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

Micah (Wyatt Cenac) takes Joanne (Tracey Heggins) to the Museum of the African Diaspora on a Sunday afternoon. They woke up that morning in somebody else's house not knowing each other's names after a one-night stand at a party where they both got very drunk. It's San Francisco. They're black. They ride bikes. She was very unfriendly at first, not just because it was a drunken coupling but because she has a white curator boyfriend she lives with who just happens to be in London for the moment, but she loves him.

The first part of this first film by Barry Jenkins, which is shot in digital video tuned to be almost but not quite totally drained of color (like the city, as we are to learn), with pale grays and very white whites, is sustained by Micah's efforts to make Joanne want to spend some time with him. He thinks they ought to get to know each other, and it's a Sunday. She's not at all interested at first. They're both hung over, after all. She lets him take her home in a taxi and then just gets out and runs. But she leaves her wallet on the floor. To go back and find her it takes a search, on his bike, across town, because the address on her license isn't current. The film is also sustained by being very specifically shot in San Francisco. When Joanne goes to a gallery to run an errand it's a very specific gallery. The Museum of the African Diaspora is the Museum of the African Diaspora. The light is San Francisco light. Micah and Joanne are young urban sophisticates. That, as Micah points out, is not only specific but makes them a small minority of a small minority, because gentrification has shrunk the city's blacks to 7% of the city population (New York's proportion is 28%).

Later buying groceries for dinner at his place (because Micah succeeds and Joanne does spend the day with him, and more) they happen upon a group discussing what appears to be the imminent banishment of rent control in San Francisco. Is Jenkins lecturing us, or just treading water? It doesn't matter so much, because the interactions of Micah and Joanne and the wry, cautious words they use when they talk to each other remain central, and are as specific and accurate to who they are (if not to San Francisco) as the cityscapes and the special light.

These two fine actors and this sensitive filmmaker certainly know how to make it real and to record how unpredictably things change from minute to minute. When Micah takes Joanne to the museum, instead of SFMoMA (her original suggestion), and then to the Martin Luther King Memorial at Yerba Buena Center, maybe it's turning into a pretty cool date. But when he leads her over a little bridge there and says, "This is like LA," she just rather coldly says, "Never been," and then, rubbing it in once more and pulling back, "This is a one-night stand." A ride on the merry-go-round at Yerba Buena, she seems to be saying, isn't going to change anything. This delicate homage to a moment is also a rueful acknowledgment of how hard it is to change the way things are.

And it has to be a bit of a lecture, because Micah is "born and raised," while Joanne is a "transplant," and he wants to remind her how the Fillmore and the Lower Haight were wiped out in the Sixties in "Urban Redevelopment:" goodbye black people, goodbye white artists. Micah lives in an immaculate little apartment in the Tenderloin. Micah, as the voice of Barry Jenkins, wants to reclaim San Francisco for everyday people.

Actually, Micah and Joanne seem like a perfect couple. Maybe that's why they can't be together, except just for this one day? You want to just shout out to them, "Can't you just be friends?" They fit so well together. Is this 'Medicine for Melancholy' or just 'melancholy'? Maybe it's medicine 'and' melancholy. That must be it. A fine little lyric of people and a place. And wholly without cliché except maybe for the tagline: "A night they barely remember becomes a day they'll never forget. "

Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival 2008. This had its debut at SXSW, the South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin, Texas. 'Medicine for Melancholy' tied for the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature in San Francisco with Rodrigo Pla's 'La Zona.'

DIY Filmmaker Sujewa: Dark skinned hipster blues: Medicine for ... Sujewa Ekanayake

Medicine for Melancholy is closer to Shadows and Stranger Than Paradise than anything Mumblecore Sujewa Ekanayake

not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review

Cinematical Jette Kernion

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [4/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]

Young, black, sexy and sad in San Francisco Andrew O’Hehir from Salon

Slant Magazine review [2/4] Joseph Jon Lanthier

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

IFC Alison Willmore

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

dork magazine.: Film. Medicine for Melancholy

The Cocoa Lounge (((Cocoalounge.com))): Cocoa Lounge NOW: Medicine ...

SFIFF: Medicine for Melancholy

The Riff: Film Review: Medicine For Melancholy

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Medicine for Melancholy Movie Review - Read Variety's Analysis Of ... Dennis Harvey from Variety

The Austin Chronicle: Screens: Frisco Bay Blues: 'Medicine for ... Sofia Resnick

San Francisco Bay Guardian : Article : Black, white, and color D. Scot Miller

Premiere - SXSW 2008 Interview: Writer-Director Barry Jenkins on ... Aaron Hillis interview with Jenkins from Premiere magazine (March 2008)

ShortEnd Magazine | Repeated Phrase, "Nuts & Bolts": Making ... Feature and interview with Jenkins by Noralil Ryan Fores, March 3, 2008

Q&A with Medicine for Melancholy Director Barry Jenkins, page 1 ... Michael Fox from SF Weekly, April 23, 2008

"In Barry Jenkins's First Movie, a Short-Term Romance Leads to Big Questions" A.O. Scott from The New York Times

Talk:Medicine Melancholy - Touhou Wiki Thoughts on the Ray Bradbury story from which the film is named

Medicine for Melancholy by strikeanywhere -- Revver ... Trailer

YouTube - Medicine for Melancholy (2:02)

YouTube - Medicine for Melancholy YO!TV 08 (4:16)

Medicine For Melancholy - Nat Sanders * Ba... (6:00)

MOONLIGHT A 97

USA (110 mi) 2016 ‘Scope Official site

There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don’t mean for yourself and for the family ‘cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he’s been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning — because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ‘cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.

—Mama to Beneatha, Act III, Lorraine Hansberry A Raisin in the Sun, 1959

A film that gets into the depths of things most of us simply don’t understand, that lives up to the critical hype by being a smaller, more poetic film that expresses a lyrical grace, featuring some amazing performances. It’s hard enough being black in America, a completely incomprehensible experience for most whites, but being black and gay is an altogether different island of extreme cultural isolation. When you think of gay black artists, perhaps writers James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, and Lorraine Hansberry come to mind, a short list with the latter two remaining ambiguously closeted throughout their entire lives. Being black and gay was an incendiary subject in the 60’s during the formation of the Black Panther Party in America, where Panther Eldridge Cleaver belittled and derided the homosexuality of Baldwin in homophobic terms in his seminal book Soul On Ice (1968), while earlier Baldwin and black author Richard Wright had their own personal disputes and disagreements, where largely what they were discussing was the subject of black masculinity. A similar cultural divide erupted with the success of Ntozake Shange’s mid 70’s theater piece For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, as the play was publicly scorned and repudiated by black men in community forums, disgusted by the presence of lesbian characters. In Chicago, noted journalist, independent radio commentator, and black activist Lu Palmer was the voice of the black community in the 70’s and 80’s, with his incendiary radio commentary known as “Lu’s Notebook,” helping to galvanize the political forces of Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor in 1983. But in the early 70’s he also originated “Lu’s Bookshelf,” organizing monthly community forums to discuss books critically relevant to black people, including the controversial Ntozake Shange, but the visibly present outrage expressed by the black community discussing her work was a repudiation of gays and lesbians in their midst. The stark tone of derision was unmistakable. Black masculinity has taken on a public persona through athletic success, as seen in Hoop Dreams (1994), where sports has been the gateway out of poor inner city neighborhoods, so for many Americans, watching football or basketball on television often reflects the extent of their knowledge on what constitutes being black in America, as athletes are asked their opinions on a myriad of issues. These athletes spend their lives with microphones being stuck in their faces wherever they go. But rarely, rarely, if ever, are any of them outwardly gay. Let’s see a show of hands for anyone that can name a single black athlete currently playing professional baseball, football, or basketball in America today who is admittedly gay. A few have announced in college or on their way out of the leagues, but America is simply not yet ready to accept gay black athletes, as it contradicts our perception of what it is to be a black man. While there is a recurring gay black character named Omar on the television series The Wire (2002 – 2008), but even in independent American cinema, there is a surprising absence of gay black protagonists, which makes this something of a breakthrough film. James Baldwin, from The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy, an essay directed at author Norman Mailer four years after he wrote The White Negro (Fall 1957) | Dissent Magazine, from Esquire magazine, May 1961:

I think that I know something about the American masculinity which most of the men in my generation do not know because they have not been menaced by it in a way that I have been. It is still true, alas, that to be an American Negro male is also to be kind of a walking phallic symbol; which means that one pays, in personality, for the sexual insecurity of others.

Arguably the best film on what it means to be black in America remains Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man (1964), a startlingly candid expression that is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago, though ironically it was directed by a white man. Eight years after the release of his first feature, Medicine for Melancholy (2008), one of the best date movies ever, this is Barry Jenkins’ (who is not gay) adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, with McCraney a black, openly gay playwright, a 2013 MacArthur Grant winner, where the film blends the artistry of these two black men with similar backgrounds who grew up near one another in the Liberty City Projects in Miami, the same locale used for the film. A black and gay response to humanist epics like Terrence Malick’s 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life and Richard Linklater’s 2014 Top Ten List #1 Boyhood, films that make growing up as white adolescent boys in America a universal experience, this is another intensely personal film shown in three parts, at ages 9, 16, and 26, each titled after the same character’s name, and played by three different actors, where the brilliance of the film is personified by the collective power of the overall performances. Little (Alex Hibbert), a derogatory nickname other students call him, a bewildered, persistently picked-on kid that others bully and routinely gang up on, grown sullen and silent already, Chiron (Ashton Sanders), his name given at birth, seen slinking around the corners of the high school and housing projects, always seen looking over his shoulder, and Black (Trevante Rhodes), a drug pusher called by a nickname, now obsessively muscular and pumped up, physically defined by his masculine image. Opening in the 80’s at the height of the crack epidemic, the film opens to the music of Boris Gardiner’s “Every Nigger is a Star,” Moonlight | Music of Moonlight | Official Featurette HD | A24 YouTube (2:32), where we’re curiously introduced to someone other than the main character, Juan (Mahershala Ali), a Cuban-born crack dealer who has a major impact on the outcome of the film, a father figure and protector, a guy running a criminal enterprise, yet shows tenderness and understanding in the way he handles a shy young kid he accidentally stumbles upon. Bringing him home to his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe), as the shell-shocked kid refuses to talk, they treat him like a “Little Man,” feed him and let him spend the night before he opens up the next morning and identifies where he lives. Respectfully returning him home the next day, his harried single-mom (Naomie Harris, the only one in all three sections) jerks him inside for a tongue-lashing, Moonlight | Back Home | Official Clip HD | A24 YouTube (1:12). Juan’s home becomes a safe refuge for this young child, returning again and again to get away from his male attackers, where Juan patiently teaches him how to swim, yet at the same time what Juan sells on the street is ruining his mother’s life, all but abandoning him to the wolves. In one of the more heartbreaking scenes of the film, he opens up and asks Juan what a “faggot” is? It’s a rare film that provides an honest answer, but this gut-wrenching question sets the tone for just how real and complex this film is willing to get. The film challenges the viewer’s perception of stereotypes and broadens the view of characters that are usually perceived as one-dimensional, like crack-addicted mothers or drug dealers, where we tend to lump them into a negative category, while in this film they express various degrees of love and tenderness, showing what they’re capable of, but instead have simply fallen through the cracks.

Luminously photographed by cinematographer James Laxton, who filmed his earlier film as well, accentuating color saturation in chosen scenes, adding a dreamlike, seductive quality to what is otherwise a difficult film, along with a pensive and melancholic musical score by Nicholas Britell that is illuminating and stunningly intimate, available on Spotify, Moonlight (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Nicholas Britell - Spotify, where “Little’s Theme” and “The Middle of the World” are used most extensively. When first introduced to Juan on the corner, the camera does a dizzying 360-degree turn around him, where the swirling effect disorients the viewer from what we are about to experience, shaking us out of any sense of complacency, offering a shift in perspective, requiring that we enter the film with a spirit of openness. As a teenager in high school, Chiron is openly ridiculed by other males in class, particularly Terrel (Patrick Decile), who hounds and intimidates him incessantly, constantly getting in his face and daring him to do something about it, remaining close friends with Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), a good-natured friend since childhood, though boys at this age tend to openly brag about their sexual exploits, and Kevin is as guilty as anyone else. His graphic depictions work their way into Chiron’s dreams, where he passively observes Kevin having rough sex with a girl. At the same time, his mother is a full-fledged crack addict, kicking him out of the house to solicit various men, while growing increasingly hostile about demanding whatever money Chiron receives from Teresa (Juan is now deceased), as this remains his home away from home. Not having anywhere else to go, he wanders down by the beach one night and runs into Kevin, who has a huge joint to smoke. After an awkward discussion, they eventually kiss while Kevin passionately fondles Chiron, for whom this is clearly the first time. In school the next day there is no lingering afterglow, instead Kevin is pressured by Terrel to play a hazing ritual of punching someone of Terrel’s choice. It turns out to be Chiron, who refuses to stay down, but continues to get back up for more blows. Terrel eventually pushes Kevin away where he and a couple others kick and stomp on Chiron to finish the job before a teacher intervenes, refusing to cooperate with a school social worker afterwards, despite her encouragement to file a police report and put an end to this harassment, as he feels it will accomplish nothing. It’s interesting to compare this hazing ritual with the more innocent paddling ritual in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), happening at about the same time, but the cultural deviations between black and white, straight and gay, couldn’t be more markedly different. The next day in class, Chiron walks into class, picks up a chair, and smashes it over Terrel’s head several times, where he’s lead out of the school premises in handcuffs and placed in a police van, glaring straight at a mystified Kevin who watches in disbelief.

We are a bit surprised to see the transformation of a skinny high school kid to this buffed, athletic physique, but he spent time in juvenile detention in Atlanta where there’s little else to do, and the man is a workout fiend, waking up early in the morning just to get his repeated repetitions in before falling back into bed. Now living somewhere outside Atlanta, he’s the spitting image of Juan, running drugs on the street, diamond studs in his ears, even driving the same car, where he’s transformed himself into an imposing figure, using the nickname “Black” that was affectionately given to him by Kevin as a teenager. Out of the blue, he receives a call from Kevin, who he hasn’t seen or heard from since high school days, who learned to become a cook and now runs a diner in Miami, inviting him to come by, apologizing for what happened when they last saw each other (words Chiron takes to heart), offering to cook something for him, as he heard a song on the jukebox that reminded him of Chiron. His mother’s in a nearby rehab center, where she may finally be getting her life back together. The vitriol she displayed in earlier segments are scarred in Chiron’s memory, where a repeating motif comes back to haunt him, where she’s standing just outside a doorway in their home, exaggerated by a heightened neon-pink color scheme, shot in slow motion, accentuated by swirling orchestral violins, where she’s screaming something at Chiron, though the words are never heard. The meaning, however, is unforgettable, as the rage is always present, recurring in his dreams in the form of a nightmare. He visits her on the grounds of the rehab center, and is about to abruptly leave, but she grabs his arm and suddenly displays an intent vulnerability, taking him completely by surprise, as she’s suddenly a sympathetic and compassionate figure seen in a new light. As we see him on the road, driving his car, we hear a familiar refrain, Caetano Veloso Cucurrucucu Paloma Hable Con Ella - YouTube (3:44), a hauntingly dramatic yet utterly sublime song used so effectively in Almodóvar’s TALK TO HER (2002), a reminder of doomed love and an overt reference to the world’s most acclaimed gay film director, yet here we see a long stretch of the highway, with images of black children at play wading into the surf. The road leads Chiron to a diner in Miami where he finds Kevin (André Holland), where suddenly he’s that same tentative figure seen earlier, shy, inarticulate, yet tragically wounded, hiding beneath the layers of muscles where he’s still the same scared kid underneath. Their moments together move slowly, patiently, unsure of themselves, with plenty of unfilled space between them, a complex portrait of longing and sorrow, where we can see them thinking, imagining, yet their eyes speak volumes. Asked about the jukebox song, Kevin plays the 60’s Barbara Lewis classic, Barbara Lewis -- Hello Stranger - YouTube (2:40), which seems to have been written just for this moment. Both actors elevate the material with understated, unspoken messages, with what’s hidden underneath, the years of regret and marginalization, where there’s simply an extraordinary recognition of what these two guys have been through in their lives, where now, perhaps finally, no further obstacles stand in their way. It’s a powerful yet fragile moment, filled with lyricism and tender grace. For all the myriad of walls we construct to protect ourselves from the brutal realities, the strength of the film comes from the quiet acceptance of our own buried truths, where the openness of the characters reflect a director who couldn’t be more empathetic.

Moonlight Conversation at the 2016 Telluride Film Festival with the director and five actors on the lawn moderated by film scholar Annette Insdorf, http://telluridefilmfestival.org/show/showroom (50:05).

Moonlight | NYFF54 - Film Society of Lincoln Center

Barry Jenkins more than fulfills the promise of his 2008 romantic two-hander Medicine for Melancholy in this three-part narrative spanning the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of a gay African-American man who survives Miami’s drug-plagued inner city, finding love in unexpected places and the possibility of change within himself. Moonlight offers a powerful sense of place and a wealth of unpredictable characters, featuring a fantastic ensemble cast including André Holland, Trevante Rhodes, Naomie Harris, and Mahershala Ali—delivering performances filled with inner conflict and aching desires that cut straight to the heart.

Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, US ) — Platform - Cinema Scope Angelo Muredda

“No place in the world ain’t got no black people,” Mahershala Ali’s good-hearted drug dealer and surrogate father Juan tells prepubescent Chiron (Alex Hibbert) in the opening act of Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ accomplished but fussy sophomore feature. Juan’s attempt to instill a sense of black masculine pride in a boy mercilessly teased for his still undefined sexual identity and shabby home life (mom Naomie Harris is one of Juan’s loyal customers) mirrors Jenkins’ own effort to offer a queer black answer to humanist epics like The Tree of Life (2011) and Boyhood (2014), which make the face of the white straight male adolescent seem universal. He’s mostly successful in this project, finding real pathos in the delicate performances of the three young men tasked with playing Chiron (or Little, or Black, which he prefers to be called in the opening and closing parts) at different phases of his life, as he either tentatively embraces or denies his feelings about other men, which complicate the mixed messages he keeps receiving about how to be a black man in this world.

Though the trio of Chirons (Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes) is fine, and though their cumulative journey from Florida to Georgia and back again makes an affecting study of stasis and change, the trick of recasting the character for each phase of his development does more harm to the actors’ collective performance than good. Perhaps inevitably, given the universalist register, it reveals a hazily sketched protagonist whose few defining traits—sullenness, choked rage, and repressed desire—are played in three pleasant but separate keys. That might be the point, given that Jenkins is clearly interested in the inconsistencies of character that find people who knew Chiron in his youth asking him just who he thinks he is as an adult, as if he were in an Alice Munro story about a young person in transition. Or it might simply be that Jenkins is better at plotting an ambitious, conceptual narrative tryptic, complete with onscreen titles and numbered sections, than he is at filling it with more fully realized characters.

Whatever the case may be, Jenkins can certainly direct. An awards-season player that knows what it is, Moonlight is a calling-card film that ought to fill up a lot of people’s dance cards in the years to come— not just Jenkins but also playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose lyrical work the film is based on, and cinematographer James Laxton, who shouldn’t have to shoot any more Yoga Hosers after this. Jenkins’ ambitions to that end shouldn’t be held against him, but his desire to hit a lot of disparate aesthetic marks doesn’t always serve the film well. A repeated, dreamy motif that sees Chiron’s mother either entering or exiting a lurid pink den as he stands frozen in front of her feels arty in the most detached way, and a late-film playback of Caetano Veloso’s cover of “Cucurrucucú paloma” doesn’t evoke the doomed love stories of Talk to Her (2002) and Happy Together (1997) so much as crib from the films’ respective soundtracks.  Still, as a melancholy character piece about an inarticulate young man who can’t quite become himself no matter how many permutations of his image he puts out into the world, this is strong stuff.

Janina Ciezadlo : Telluride Journal

What is the line between too much information and too little in a film? How do we preserve the mystery and ambiguities of human lives in a story and yet keep the audience. In many ways, this might be one of the central questions of modernism. My parents used to fight over Stockhausen and Gershwin. One was too obscure, the other too obvious. Billy Wilder and Ken Burns both solved this problem in different ways. Wilder was able to make entertaining Oscar-winning films which had many layers of complexity. Burns found an innovative style for bringing archival history to the masses.

Barry Jenkins’ formally and stylistically powerful film, Moonlight, plays out on the edge of this line between what to reveal and what not to let us know about his characters. It’s compelling because questions about what can we know about other people are always linked to the question of what can we know about ourselves.  Telluride regular, composer Peter Sellers, brought up Rembrandt in an interview with Barry Jenkins, because the characters in Moonlight are rendered in that chiascurro or tenebrism which signifies deeper level than what we can see, a dark or mysterious side.  In fact, night scenes in the film predominate, the main character, counseled early on, will find his identity in the moonlight.

The film, based on a play by a MacArthur-anointed playwright, Tarell  McCraney, who grew up near Jenkins in Miami in the Liberty City Projects, unfolds in three sections, each using a different actor to play Chiron, first as a bewildered boy living in projects filled with drugs and confusion, then a struggling teenager and finally a young man hiding from himself.

One of the characters, Kevin who becomes a cook, speaks to Chiron, who he feels has not found himself, about how we can make ourselves into who we want to be.  Jenkins introduces the problem of choice again;  he has already shown the Cuban character confronted by both the mother and son. “Do you deal drugs to my mother?” The boy asks and the body language tells us the man is struggling with the choice to accept responsibility for the devastation of drugs and addiction. He is a beautiful and complex character capable of articulating a moral choice, rather than a one-dimensional villain. He tells Chiron, called Little in this segment, that the word “faggot,” is used to hurt gay men. He is wise. On the other hand, we also know that a middle-aged black man might have few other choices, reality here provides the tragic dimension. We feel let down when we see Chiron, who was imprisoned unfairly as a teen-ager, has become a drug dealer. It looks like abuse leads to abuse, disarray and dysfunction, power relations reproduce themselves. But Jenkins leaves the end open. Will Chiron find himself and a better path? Jenkins does leave us with an embrace between Kevin and Chiron, which we hope will heal and possibly lead Chiron to a better future.

Chiron’s mother, played by the accomplished British actress, Naomie Harris, shows the woman struggling against the terrible constraints an addiction to be a mother. We see it in her face and her body language. She finally succeeds. Jenkins and the playwright break through the formula for narratives about so-called ‘ghetto” life by representing, beautiful complicated people who transcend the violent caricatures hunted down in movies past or the hapless victims who headline the evening news. The style of the film, not quite transparent, but not too elliptical, is as powerful and lucid as the script and acting, finding its own visual voice, because standard formulas are not flexible enough to support the filmmakers’ timely vision.

Two scenes, departing from the general realism on the film stood out on my second viewing. The first is a scene where Chiron’s mother, framed in a doorway that Jenkins pushes into a flaming pink as she screams at Chiron in a crack-fueled rage. He repeats it in the last sequence of the film. The second is a double exposure while Chiron drives to Florida from Atlanta of the car on the highway and black children wading in the surf. It reminds me of the images of children playing in Charles Burnett’s film, as well as images from Julie Dasch’s Daughter of the Dust. It is a positive, hopeful image, perhaps of rebirth for Chiron who will meet with his mother and Kevin, both of whom betrayed him as a young man and will apologize in the third section of the film. Jenkins uses a beautiful musical theme, almost Romantic (as in Schumann or Michel Legrand who did the soundtrack for Vivre Sa Vie) in nature to replay during the film. He fills out the soundtrack with other music—a wide range, from Mozart to Hip Hop—all of it powerful and none of it clichéd. His mentor here is Bresson, not Scorsese.

The first scene of course, stands out.  Jenkins does a 360-degree turn around a street dealer, is if to disorient us in order to bring us completely into this world.

All of the actors, except the children, appeared on a panel in Telluride. I wonder if seeing them made their performances stand out so dramatically on second viewing, but I think it was just the pure power of the direction and the collaborations (the script, actors, directors, cinematographer) that make them great. Like Mike Leigh and Orson Welles, Jenkins has created a notable ensemble. 

With Moonlight, Jenkins takes his place with Charles Burnett, Spike Lee and the painter Kerry James Marshall, who have been able to represent African-American life from their own point of view, producing empathy for people who have had to endure hardship, rather than casting them as irredeemably “other.”

“Moonlight” transcends all cultures « The Chimes | Biola University Kyle Kohner

One does not have to relate to homosexuallity or African-American culture to ache alongside this film.    

In the midst of a season consolidated by phenomenal arthouse films, rarely does a movie perfectly succeed in resonating with innumerable demographics. “Moonlight,” directed by Barry Jenkins, stands out as that film.

A powerful commentary

This Oscar-contender focuses on the struggles of a poor, black and homosexual man in the ghetto. However, this project shall not be deemed as a “Brokeback Mountain” with an African American lead or an intersectional film of black and homosexual culture. More accurately, “Moonlight” provides commentary on the struggles of finding identity and connecting with others against all odds. No matter what race, color or sexual identity one identifies with, “Moonlight’” offers a powerful experience.

The driving force of emotion in “Moonlight” lies within its nebulous audience. Jenkins leaves space for viewers to imprint their own personal struggles onto the story of protagonist Chiron's search for identity while growing up around drug abuse, living as an impoverished minority and finding love in the darkest places. Despite how genuine Chiron feels, he endures in quiet pain.

Akin to Eleven from “Stranger Things,” Chiron’s expository dialogue flourishes in intimate grief. Facial expressions, dialogue and action between more talkative characters make the audience sympathize with the main character. The approach in which Chiron deals with wanting acceptance and understanding of who he is remains a human need rather than a dramatized cry for help. Because he persists through conflict passively without substantial dialogue, his stoic interactions with other characters emphasize a need for understanding.

Stoic ambience

Somehow, the three actors who depict Chiron at different ages, Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes portray internal agony so well, they leave the audience with real heartache, specifically toward the end of each act. Yet, how they did so remains a mystery. The stoic ambience they present consummates so abundantly that when the end comes and goes it weighs heavily in the audience member’s heart — leaving them stuck in their seats far after the movie ends. I had tears running down my face numerous times due to the heart-wrenching moments that cleverly sneak up, provided how quiet and intimate each passing minute of the movie cuts.

This piece subtly plucks at viewer’s heartstrings, garnering the audience’s sympathy for Chiron’s disadvantaged situation through each phase of his life. Never have I seen a movie so effectively take a stronghold on the viewer and insert them in the shoes of a struggling protagonist. No matter what views a person may hold on alternative, marginalized lifestyles, Jenkins will give an eye-opening perspective on these matters.

Beneath the moonlight

The cinematography only augments the striking nature of this film. Use of color effectively highlights emotion and differentiates hard moments with harsh colors between softer hues for more tranquil moments, creating ethereal visual poetry. The color palette for the most part seems cool and exudes blue hues, which underlines the significance of the title drawn from the play this masterpiece is based on, “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.” In fact, the moonlight personifies and manifests in beautiful and tranquil visuals. The moonlight embodies itself as a figurative supporting actor, enhancing the beauty within every character both visually and emotionally.

“Moonlight” transpires as a piece of art to rightfully melt over. “Moonlight” supplies a wonderfully transformative experience not only for the LGBT community and the black community, but for all individuals of every culture. This film’s impact softens the thickest of skins as the most humbling viewing experience of 2016.

Moonlight | Barry Jenkins Interview - Film Comment Farihah Zaman and Nicolas Rapold interview, September/October 2016

The half-lovely, half-dangerous energy of two little boys running in the sunlight, moving together instinctively like a flock of birds. The exhilaration of learning to float in the ocean, gently released from loving grownup arms. The first touches of desire in the safe, warm dark with a friend one fervently hopes will become more than a friend. Moonlight, the remarkable new film by Barry Jenkins, who directed the gentle romantic drama Medicine for Melancholy (2008), revels in the elevation of everyday experience, transforming time’s passing into a series of rites of passage, the commonplace into the iconic. These are the kinds of moments and images that critics love to champion as “universal,” but in practice this particular universe tends to belong on screen to the white, straight middle class. With self-assured elegance, Moonlight takes back these shared points of human experience so that they might also reside in black communities and be borne out by black bodies, in a time when such depictions are still rare in independent cinema. Moonlight isn’t just a very good film, though it is in fact that. It is a necessary film for this moment in time, when the extinguishing of black men of all backgrounds, out of fear, becomes more visible—and less acceptable—to the general public.

An adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, Moonlight follows the first three decades in the life of Chiron, who was born poor, black, and gay in 1980s Miami. The film is a triptych: Act I sees a near-mute elementary school child (Alex R. Hibbert) going by the unsolicited nickname Little; then we leap ahead to Chiron in high school (now played by Ashton Sanders), after he has taken back his given name but is still mercilessly picked on for being different; and then in Act III, going by the name Black, a hardened Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) runs a drug ring in Atlanta and masks his insecurities with unnerving shows of masculinity. That the protagonist chooses to change names in each phase of his life (with each segment named after Chiron’s given moniker) highlights the character’s evolution, and the transformative effect of seemingly small events over time. Well into adulthood Chiron is still essentially shape-shifting in reaction to the existential struggles planted in childhood: his complex relationship with a protective but drug-addicted mother, his desire for love and acceptance, and his burgeoning awareness of his sexuality.

Jenkins imbues Chiron with a palpable queerness in every sense, which is always clear if not identifiable to himself, those around him, and the movie’s audience. Being gay in this time and place, even without being openly so, feels life-threatening, and Chiron’s mother (Naomie Harris), with a realistically complicated mixture of concern, love, and ruthlessness, tries to correct any homosexual “tells” in her son’s speech and mannerisms and comments disdainfully on his swishy walk. Chiron’s classmates, with herd mentality instinct and cruelty, ostracize him verbally and physically, which escalates as he enters high school. Jenkins depicts the sense of being sniffed out and hunted—for being too queer, too gentle, too awkward, too anything—with extraordinary insight.

Chiron’s feelings of isolation are so effectively communicated in part because the film fully submerges us in his perspective. This is brought to life by the film’s stylized cinematography (by James Laxton) and sound design. The camera frequently lingers on Chiron’s face, particularly at the beginning of each act. When we first meet Chiron, he is pursued into an abandoned house by a gang of kids, and as they pound on the doors and windows the house seems to shake as in an earthquake, as though fear is ringing and echoing inside his head. Later, when teenaged Chiron experiences his first and only moment of sexual pleasure with his friend Kevin on an empty beach, the rush of the ocean swells, the world blurs, eyes close, not out of some forced sense of drama but because that is how it feels. The significance of utilizing this style with these characters, to engage more deeply with the humanity, sensitivity, and consciousness of a queer, black, male adolescent cannot be overstated; it is practically an act of protest.

Even in basic plotting Moonlight avoids clichés of poor black narratives—for example, in the way drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali), who becomes a father figure to Chiron, is also the first to express an unconditional understanding of his sexuality. But it is the courage of its artistry that makes the film exceptional. The soundtrack alone exemplifies a general rebellion against expectations, as Jenkins refuses to subscribe to the rule that when telling tales from the hood, you play the music that your characters would listen to themselves. While there is a good amount of diegetic rap and hip-hop (Chiron listening to Jidenna’s “Classic Man” as he drives up to Kevin’s restaurant is a flawless choice), there’s also an elegiac classical-sounding original score (by Nicholas Britell) in moments of calm and reflection, the hauntingly wistful guitar strumming of the tragic Spanish love song “Cucurrucucú Paloma” beckoning Chiron over the bridge back to Miami to see Kevin after years without any contact, and the purring 1960s Barbara Lewis classic “Hello Stranger”on the jukebox when they’re reunited.

That the kind of aestheticization offered by the film is so rarely used for stories of the experience of being black in America demonstrates that too often cinematic naturalism is conflated with authenticity. Yet Moonlight makes us feel for Chiron and understand him better because the hand of the filmmaker is evident, because of the choices made to enhance that cinematic moment in its entirety rather than cling slavishly to documentary-style realism. This is Jenkins’s triumph: he neither evades the sometimes difficult realities of poor black communities nor does he bind his characters reductively to them. Moonlight reminds us that, as people of color, we so rarely get to have these stories too—tales of epic romances, traumatic hurts, minor blessings. Yet while Chiron’s identity is integral the story, the film’s most meaningful moments occur when cultural assignations like “black” or “gay” or “poor” drift away in the tide of human feeling, flirtation, longing, love, desire.—Farihah Zaman

The film tracks three ages in the life of Chiron: as a boy, a teenager, and an adult. It’s almost like a piece of music with movements.

You have this character who is sort of receding inside himself. And the music within the film tells us what he can’t. In the beginning it starts out very, very small. Once you get to that third story, the music [the actual soundtrack] starts to get a lot more expressive and sensual.

Is some of the music slowed down?

It’s this Southern form of hip-hop called “chopped and screwed,” where the voice is really deep and it’s really slowed down and lines are repeating. I grew up listening to it; it started in Houston and Tampa . . . but Houston claims it. It makes hip-hop almost hypermasculine, but it opens up all this yearning in the lyrics. Hip-hop is usually moving at such a high bpm that you don’t catch that not only is this poetry, but it’s really pained. If you chop and screw it, you allow all of that pain to come through. I worked closely with the composer, Nick Britell. We also have a lot of violin, cello, and oboe. It’s almost like taking someone’s heartbeat and slowing it down. Putting it on full display. Which I think is sort of what the actors did with the characters.

Since we’re on the music, what’s the opening track?

Kendrick Lamar’s last album, To Pimp a Butterfly, opens with this track. We actually use another version that’s slightly chopped and screwed. The song is “Every Nigger Is a Star” from a blaxploitation film by Boris Gardiner. You know, Moonlight is an “art-house” film and all that other shit, but it’s also a film that’s just about home. And at home I’d be a guy like Chiron, driving around, blasting that song out of his car. The movie’s really personal, it’s about exactly where I grew up. And in the place that I grew up, there’s a lot of pride about being where you’re from.

Could you talk about working with the actors? Ashton Sanders as teenage Chiron has this inward, pained intensity. Trevante Rhodes as the adult plays a big guy that still has the little guy in him.

Exactly. And they never rehearsed together, they never saw any dailies from the other actors. I wasn’t worried about whether they all looked or sounded the same. What I was concerned about was, when the camera’s on them and they’re not speaking, how’s this person going to emote? Are they going to try to externalize their emotions, or are we going to just feel the pain beneath the surface? The iceberg theory. They’re all iceberg actors, man. Ashton would explain what his approach to the character was, from moment to moment. It’s a very intellectual approach to the performance, but then what you see on screen is very raw. It’s just a guy who’s wearing his emotions on his face, and he’s attempting to hide them all.

What about the film has a sense of home for you?

I grew up a block away from the apartment in the film. And then some of the voices, and the way people’s skin is always shiny—we told the makeup guy: no powder, we need sheen. But the main thing is the mom character, played by Naomie Harris. The playwright Tarell McCraney wrote the source material, like 40-45 pages, non-linear. It jumped back and forth in time, like halfway between the screen and the stage. And when I read it I immediately thought: this is a film. I did not know Tarell growing up, but we grew up literally a block from each other. We went to the same elementary school, and both his mom and my mom lived through that horrible crack-cocaine addiction. And there isn’t a scene with her that didn’t happen to either myself or Tarell. It’s talking about things that I’ve always wanted to talk about. And it was freeing because it’s really difficult to do autobiography, to put your own shit up on screen.

You give such an immersive sense of Miami as a space. And there are a couple of very potent portrait-like shots of characters.

We wanted to find a few little moments to use the idea of the actors looking right at the camera. And that goes back to theater. I didn’t want to have all this ugly imagery and very dark things from my past, and allow the audience to stay completely outside it. And I also thought it was very important to have the audience look right into the eyes of a man who is very sensually thinking of another man. In regards to Miami and shooting digital, I think the Alexa actually has a really lush image. James [Laxton, the DP] and I are weird filmmakers: we’re just old enough to have been in film school when you shot everything on film. So we learned shooting on Arri cameras, actually. The Arri SR2, shooting Super 16.

With the visual style, I feel like I got the opportunity to take my memory and put it on screen: in Miami, you’re often adrift, you’re just walking through these massive spaces. As a kid this sort of environment was normalized. It was like, “Fuck, okay, this is a rough neighborhood and we’re really poor, and there’s nothing to eat on Fridays, but shit, there’s this huge field I’ve got. I’m going to go out and run and play, you know?” There’s so much greenery and open sky, so we wanted to reflect that with the actual 2.35:1 frame to portray how I felt. The previous film I made, Medicine for Melancholy, is very low-budget and pretty saturated. In this film, we wanted these very neorealistic visuals, set in this place that I remember being super vibrant, super bright, and super colorful. And just full of space.

Could you discuss the use of silence and this sense of presence?

The way I grew up, I was kind of a quiet kid. I ended up watching people a lot, more than interacting, in a certain way. And I think you can learn a lot more about people when they’re not speaking than you can when they’re speaking. People say, “Oh, you can learn more by actions than statements.” But I do think that when people are in repose, you really see beneath the surface.

Were any movies in your head while planning and making Moonlight?

Three Times by Hou Hsiao-hsien. That had a three-romance structure—a triptych. There is an homage to Three Times, the first story in the pool hall. When Chiron first walks into the diner, we’re on the dolly, and then he sits at the counter, the camera pans, and we find André; André walks in the back of the kitchen, camera pans back, André comes down the little alley, and then we do the portraits. Because in the first story, Hou Hsiao-hsien is in the pool hall; camera’s perpendicular to the scene, just dollying back and forth, and just panning.

This is like a coming-of-age story, but it’s got to have one huge arc with all these peaks and valleys. It’s Eisenstein—the relation’s in the cuts. There is as much story between the stories, as there is in the three stories. And those three stories, they’re just brief moments. Very important, crucial moments. But because of that, we can allow a moment that’s like five minutes in a coming-of-age story, and now we can do it in 30. We can allow the space. We can see people thawing, see things seeping beneath the skin.

How Barry Jenkins Turned the Misery and Beauty of the Queer Black Experience Into the Year's Best Movie Greg Tate from The Village Voice, December 21, 2016

“Moonlight” Undoes Our Expectations - The New Yorker Hilton Als

Moon Over Miami | by Darryl Pinckney | The New York Review of Books Darryl Pinckney

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An Education: On Barry Jenkins's “Moonlight” - Los Angeles Review of Books Francey Russell, November 14, 2016

Barry Jenkins Slow-Cooks His Masterpiece | The FADER Will Stephenson, October 4, 2016

'Moonlight': The Best Movie of 2016 - Rolling Stone 'Moonlight': How an Indie Filmmaker Made the Best Movie of 2016, David Fear interview, October 21, 2016

“Moonlight” is the first LGBT movie to win best picture. Here’s why it... Nico Lang from Salon, February 27, 2017

Moonlight sonata: Will the film's Oscar nod make Hollywood legitimize gay relationships of color? Alli Joseph from Salon, January 25, 2017

“Moonlight” and “Loving”: Film as symbolic resistance in the age of Trump Chauncey DeVega from Salon, December 10, 2016

Teaching James Baldwin and Richard Wright in the Ferguson Era ... Benjamin Anastas from The New Republic, May 25, 2015

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Moonlight Barry Jenkins Review | Vanity Fair Richard Lawson

Moonlight is a beautifully nuanced gay coming-of-age tale - The Verge Tasha Robinson

Every Movie Has a Lesson [Don Shanahan]

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Moonlight Scott Pfeiffer from The Moving Word

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5 Reasons Moonlight Might Just Be The Best Movie Of The Year ...

Naomie Harris's Voice Is a Secret Weapon in 'Moonlight' K. Austin Collins from The Ringer, February 15, 2017

In Moonlight, a Silver Lining Emerges Bee Vang from Paste, February 13, 2017

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New York Film Festival’s Breakout Films Richard Brody from The New Yorker

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Moonlight's Cinematographer on Filming the Most Exquisite ... - Vogue Abby Aguirre interviews cinematographer James Laxton from Vogue magazine, December 20, 2016

Moonlight Director Barry Jenkins Cuts Deep -- Vulture Kyle Buchanon interview, October 21, 2016

Moonlight's Tarell Alvin McCraney: 'I never had a coming out moment ... Benjamin Lee interview with playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney from The Guardian, October 21, 2016

The bonds of friendship are tight between 'Moonlight' director and ... Gregory Ellwood interview with cinematographer James Laxton from The LA Times, February 14, 2017

Moonlight's Barry Jenkins interview: 'This was so personal for me' Goeffrey Macnab interview from The Independent, February 15, 2017

Donald Trump election made Moonlight a must-see film, says Barry Jenkins Jennifer Ruby interview from The London Evening Standard, February 15, 2017

Why 'Moonlight' resonated as strongly with me as 'Brokeback Mountain' did 12 years ago Jonathan Capeheart in a conversation with playwright Terrell McCraney from The Washington Post, February 20, 2017

'Moonlight': Telluride Review | Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

'Moonlight' Review: | Variety Peter Debruge

Moonlight review – a visually ravishing portrait of masculinity Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Moonlight review – devastating drama is vital portrait of black gay ... Benjamin Lee from The Guardian

Why Moonlight should win the best picture Oscar Benjamin Lee from The Guardian

Moonlight review: A near-perfect film Donald Clarke from The Irish Times

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What Becomes Of Chiron After 'Moonlight' Ends, According To The Film's Cast Matthew Jacobs from The Huffington Post

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'Moonlight's' Barry Jenkins: How a kid from Miami's projects made a movie that scored eight Oscar nominations The LA Times, January 24, 2017

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From Bittersweet Childhoods to ‘Moonlight’ Nikole Hannah-Jones from The New York Times, January 6, 2017

Moonlight (2016 film) - Wikipedia

Jenkins, Patty

MONSTER B+ 90

USA Germany (110 mi) 2003

Very much in the BADLANDS vein, only here, it is Charlize Theron completely transforming herself, playing the Martin Sheen serial killer role, complete with all the male mannerisms and the swaggering male machismo, the spitting image of poor white trailer trash, underlined by an

inner vulnerability that reveals she has always been, at heart, a loser, while Christina Ricci, in an icy, cool naive yet naughty role, plays Sissy Spacek.  Both are excellent.  Theron has gotten a lot of notoriety for being so overpowering, and so unlike anything she's ever played before.  Her part is

tailor-made for awards, but was, at times, a bit excessive, however she is in nearly every frame of the film and her voice-over narrative is not only superb, but is actually one of the real strengths of the film.  The use of sound, especially, and the music scenes were also terrific, though the extended,

film-written, guitar follow ups actually detracted, particularly after Tommy James & the Shondells "Crimson and Clover," which, otherwise, was one of the best sequences in the film.  Each of the murder sequences was riveting, also an ice-skating sequence, and there was a nicely sustained mood

throughout. 

This film was based upon the real life story of Aileen Wuornos, considered America's first female serial killer, who was executed last year (2002) in Florida for murdering 7 men.  I was reminded of an earlier 1997 Jeremy Horton film 100 PROOF, based upon the real lives of LaFonda Foster and Tina

Hickey Powell, who in an alcohol and drug-induced state of rage, went on a murdering spree in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1986.  While the Horton film shows a methodical deliberation throughout, changing abruptly to a delirious, paranoiac, drug-induced haze filled with smoke, rage, and anger, and in this hallucinogenic dream state, the violence leads very matter-of-factly to more violence, Jenkins film, on the other hand, is more performance driven, Wuornos begins killing as a victim of self-defense, not only a victim of her horribly abused childhood, but also of sadistic men who prey on unprotected, isolated women, particularly prostitutes.  So her accumulated hatred towards men is seen as an aftermath from the cruelty others displayed towards her all her life, not that it excuses murder, but her life is seen as a labyrinth of one dead-end predicament after another.  Seen in this light, protecting her girl friend from the storm may actually be the acts of a misguided angel.  

Jenkins, Tamara

THE SAVAGES B+ 90

USA (113 mi) 2007

A disturbing film that masks the difficulty of its grim subject with near horrific comedic satire, opening right out of the box with a Tim Burton EDWARD SCISSORSHANDS style hallucination of suburbia where some elderly women jump out from beneath tall bushes in sparkling cheerleading outfits leading cheers while Peggy Lee croons "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard." The scene is set, as we are entering the realm of the absurd. Set in Sun City, Arizona, a palm tree in every yard retirement community where golf carts compete with cars on the subdivision roads, we enter the home of a listless elderly couple who are making things difficult for their in-home care givers, going immediately to gross out humor before one of them dies suddenly while getting her nails done by an unsympathetic coterie of young Vietnamese girls. This sets the wheels in motion for the children to enter the picture, indie phenoms Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the older brother John, who has a doctorate in theater, specializing in theater of social unrest, living in Buffalo, New York currently having trouble finishing a book on Bertolt Brecht, and Wendy, a dark-haired Laura Linney, an aspiring playwright in New York City having an affair with a married man, a balding Peter Friedman who is at least ten years older, who brings along his enormous dog that she seems to take more of an interest in during intercourse than her partner. They arrive at the airport, rent a car, with flowers and balloon in hand, expecting to resolve this temporary difficulty within a matter of hours. Little do they know, their father (Philip Bosco), who they haven’t seen in years, no longer has a place to live, and the kicker, he suffers from dementia with occasional violent outbursts along with intestinal and bladder difficulties. Hours turn to days, weeks, and months, and the ensuing confusion in their lives filled with constant disruptions, due to the needs of their father that they barely know, is the basis of the movie.

Without any other backdrop, we are led to believe they had an abusive father and a disinterested mother who just completely disappeared from their lives at an early age, so the brother and sister end up bickering throughout most of the ordeal, oftentimes in front of their father, as if he is invisible, both remaining clueless what to do most of the time. John finds a nursing home within a close proximity to his home in Buffalo, so Wendy joins him there temporarily after one disastrous ordeal lugging her father across the country on an airplane, something she is simply not prepared to do, perfectly captured in a scene that is embarrassing beyond belief. However at this point, the tone of the film changes to social realism as they come to grasp with the seriousness of their father’s condition. Wendy believes nursing homes are cruel and dirty and would prefer a more upscale assisted living environment, remaining completely in denial over the serious limitations of her father. This leads to one of the best scenes in the film, where they have a huge fight in a parking lot outside one of these resort style retirement homes, completely ignoring their father in the car, where John reads her the riot act about how the same thing happens inside all of these places, people are dying, and in a not very dignifyied manner despite their attempts to cover it up with happy videos and attractive brochures with glossy photos.

With this tonal shift, the film actually becomes a highly observant and profound family drama, as real life has brought this family back together again and they have nowhere else to run and hide, so their failures and inadequacies come front and center. At movie night in the nursing home, their father chooses Al Olson in THE JAZZ SINGER (1927), which was shot in the exact same neighborhood where he grew up, but it becomes a queasy and incredibly uncomfortable experience for everyone involved once Jolson goes into his blackface routine, where blacks watching the same film are forced to witness such painful and overt references of racial prejudice. It’s amazing how vulnerable they suddenly become, with a renewed awakening about the dead end routines in their lives. They were lost inside bodies they barely cared about themselves, which is exactly how they felt about their father, but somehow, when coming face to face with death, something else arises from their self-imposed complacency, a willingness to at least search for something more. This is another recent film (like JUNO), that steals Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground music from MORVERN CALLAR, actually playing in the film, then again over the end credits. Of special mention, the piano music from Stephen Trask beautifully underscores the fragile and fluctuating emotional states of the characters, while Gbenga Akinnagbe as Jimmy, their father’s Nigerian nurse at the nursing home, provides a little bit of the heart that these siblings are missing, and despite his brief appearance, his contribution is enormous.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

"What do we do with Dad?" Questions like that are common to nearly every grown-up child at some point, when ailing parents can no longer take care of themselves and need some sort of intervention. And yet it's the third rail of American movies, perhaps because it's a sore subject for those who, for whatever reason—their jobs, their own families, the distance, or some combination of the three—can't give their parents the care they'd like. In her sure-footed comedy The Savages, writer-director Tamara Jenkins connects with this guilt and shame in a totally disarming way, though without glossing over the difficulties of watching a parent slowly recede from view. In this case, the parent is an irascible crank who abandoned his children, but that doesn't make things any easier, or absolve them from having to do right by him.

As a sibling duo, Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman have a dynamic like Linney's with Mark Ruffalo in You Can Count On Me, at least in the sense that she's more together and responsible than her brother, though emotionally brittle in her own way. Both are single and creeping toward middle age with nothing in their lives settled: Linney is an aspiring New York playwright who's carrying on a grim affair with a married man, while Hoffman is a Buffalo theater professor who's missed his latest deadline on a Bertolt Brecht book that no one's dying to read. The two have their demented father Philip Bosco safely tucked away in Arizona, but when Bosco's wife dies and he's subsequently booted from a retirement community, it's up to them to take care of him.

It's been nine years since Jenkins' fine debut feature, Slums Of Beverly Hills, but she picks up nicely where she left off, again drawing on semi-autobiographical material to mine funny, exacting observations about a family in crisis. The frequent outbursts of comedy help alleviate a tone that's appropriately muted and sad, and Jenkins should be credited for refusing to tack smiley-faces onto a tough, possibly lose-lose situation. In other movies, when grown children take care of their estranged parents, it's usually a recipe for life lessons and sentimental reconciliations, but here, the father isn't any warmer than the man who mistreated his kids in their youth. It's up to those kids to take the high road, and The Savages charts their struggle with a humor and honesty that goes down surprisingly easy.

The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]

Simmering below the squeamish elder-care euphemism "uncharted territory" is a fearful awareness that when it comes to dealing with the growing army of senile parents, we have no idea what the hell we're doing. Tamara Jenkins plumbs the depths of that terror in her new film, The Savages, and jacks it up a few notches by asking what it's like to care for a demented father who never cared for you.

It's hard to imagine a more potent test of family solidarity than the decision-making process regarding what to do with a sick and helpless relative. Some rally heroically—in a moving instance of life mimicking Away From Her, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently gave an understanding thumbs-up to the romance between her Alzheimer's-afflicted husband and a woman in his nursing home. But many collapse under the strain—and if you saw Jenkins's heavily autobiographical 1998 cult-hit comedy Slums of Beverly Hills, you won't be expecting serene self-sacrifice from Wendy and Jon Savage (Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman), middle-aged siblings whose relationship with one another and their fast-fading dad Lenny (Philip Bosco) strains the very definition of family, never mind adulthood.

An instinctive provocateur, Jenkins gleefully rubs the more graphic symptoms of dementia in our faces—as well she should, given the emotional fallout of dealing with a man who covers a bathroom wall with his own feces. But the movie also comes with the wistful sadness of a maturing filmmaker who understands that in matters of death, sorrow and black comedy often walk hand in hand.

The Savages opens under insanely blue skies in the retirement village of Sun City, Arizona, with a bunch of senior ladies capering about in electric-blue cheerleading outfits, a scene of pure goofiness slyly offset on the soundtrack by a plaintive Peggy Lee singing "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard"—an unadorned anthem to human neediness in general and sibling rivalry in particular. Estranged from their overbearing father and a mother who checked out early, Jon and Wendy delude themselves into believing that they've cut the family cord and moved on with their lives. In reality, Wendy's a stalled East Village playwright (a/k/a temp) wasting her time in an affair with her married neighbor, while Jon, a Buffalo college professor who cranks out pomo-lit papers no one will ever read, refuses to marry his Polish girlfriend even though he weeps when she makes him eggs. Trapped in extended adolescence, the two rattle around their separate but equally cramped lives, which grow a slight more cramped when a nocturnal phone call informs Wendy that Dad has flunked out of his retirement home.

Chickens flap home to roost as Wendy and Jon move their recalcitrant father to a dreary East Coast facility, where he confounds their every effort to take instruction from Elder Care for Dummies. Bosco gives a hilariously physical performance, but at its core The Savages is about a brother and sister who have been hopelessly failed in the parenting department, and misbehave accordingly. Linney has always been a natural at playing tightly wound women on the verge, and there's something inexpressibly moving about watching her child-woman in ringlets come apart as she overcompensates for her withdrawn brother and lies through her teeth to upstage him. Watching their father die, the pointedly named Savages make a perfectly synchronized emotional seesaw: a rabid squirrel trying to get a rise out of a grumpy bear.

Jenkins is no sentimentalist, and she won't patronize her benighted losers or her audience with epiphanies, apologies, or blinding insights. Yet the movie is dotted with moments of grace and whacked-out humor that got me on board for this damaged duo's liberation. Theirs is a hesitant growing up that feels less like a sop to distributors wary of the bummer ending than a goofy act of tender mercy by a director who's moved on from the simple desire to shock.

Zoom In Online [Annie Frisbie]

Nine years was far too long to wait for Tamara Jenkins's sophomore feature, The Savages, her astonishingly mature follow-up to the quirky coming-of-age comedy The Slums of Beverly Hills. The time must have been well-spent, because The Savages feels like the work of a far more seasoned director, and manages to land a KO punch squarely in the jaw of the prototypical "indie" character drama that's become the hallmark of the Sundance Film Festival. The Savages has depth, resonance, and meaning, and delves into the scary heart of our deepest fears about aging, and it does so from a point of view that is honest and human.

Laura Linney stars as Wendy, an anxiety-prone wannabe playwright with a married boyfriend and a pointless cubicle temp job. Her estranged father (Philip Bosco) has begun to slip into dementia. When Dad's girlfriend dies leaving him homeless Wendy and younger brother John (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a PhD specializing in Bertolt Brecht, fly to Arizona tasked with the burden of making the kind of hard decisions that mark the final passage into adulthood. In the parking lot of a swank retirement community that won't take Dad because he's too far gone, John reminds Wendy that people are dying inside. And there's nothing that any amount of landscaping or bingo or carefully chosen room decorations can do about it.

Adult brother-sister siblings are rare onscreen; in fact, the only other recent movie that's captured this relationship with any accuracy is You Can Count On Me, which starred Linney as a tightly-wound older sister. Here, she's the younger sibling, but Wendy thinks she should be the responsible one--and that dynamic rings so true for sisters. Brothers run around with their shirts untucked and live on ramen noodles well into their 30s and have disorganized relationships. They're not the ones who are expected to take capable charge of end-of-life decisions. That's supposed to be women's work--but Wendy's lost from square one.

Wendy's growing realization of her brother's competence and tender compassion unmoors her. As the story progresses, her eyes grow wider and blanker, silently screaming "I don't want to be here" even as her sense of guilt turns her into stone. John's stoic acceptance of the situation and confident decision-making infuriates her, and she ends up telling a stupid, childish lie in an attempt to wrestle some control over her part in the family psychodrama. She's in real danger of not making it, of checking out forever and condemning herself to an empty life, but the pull of family--however screwed up--might just be what saves her.

The film's portrayal of the devastation and heartbreak that dementia wreaks on the children of the afflicted is spot on, thanks to a superb performance by Bosco, an underrated actor who shows admirable restraint in some very difficult. In Slums, Jenkins showed an acute insight into the way a teenage girl's body betrays her, and here she turns that same perception onto the gross indignities suffered by the aging. As John puts it, "Death is gassy."

There's a standout scene early in the film when Wendy's flying Dad back to Buffalo, where John has found him a bed in a nursing home. After loudly demanding that Wendy take him to the bathroom NOW, Dad shuffles painfully down the narrow aisle, Wendy carefully holding his arms, looking him in the eye but unable to hide the fact that she wishes this wasn't happening. He looks down at his feet, in the classic "someone is about to pee their pants" shot, and as he keeps walking, the suspense is excruciating. He stops; his eyes widen, then Wendy looks down. He hasn't lost control, it's just that his pants have fallen down because Wendy didn't like the suspenders he was wearing. And then Jenkins cuts away for a shot aching with poignant horror: Dad in the middle of the aisle, wearing adult diapers. He's incontinent and unloved , and Jenkins and Bosco are brave enough to give it to us straight and unvarnished.

As sad and serious it is, The Savages has some wonderfully funny moments, including some physical humor from Hoffman in a weighted neck brace that adds some welcome leaven. Hoffman and Linney exceed expectation with nuanced performances that are never showy, even in the most dramatic moments. Jenkins knows how to get out of the way of the story, and rarely missteps. A scene between Wendy and one of Dad's caregivers falls a little flat, as does an odd bit with John's Polish ex-girlfriend and some eggs that inexplicably make him cry, but these are minor quibbles. The Savages sets a high bar for Sundance '07 and marks a standout return by a director who's the real deal.

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Jennings, Humphrey

H. Jennings Stefan Herrmann

FIRES WERE STARTED

Great Britain (80 mi) 1943

Fires Were Started, directed by Humphrey Jennings | Film review Time Out London

Jennings' one venture into feature-length drama-documentary narrowly escaped being brutally chopped down by the publicity men at the Ministry of Information. Certainly it lacks the tight narrative structure common in good commercial films, but Jennings is a strong enough film-maker to ignore formulae and conventions to build his own unique structures. Here he used real firemen and real fires - kindled among the blitzed warehouses of London's dockland - but with the aim of creating something more than documentary realism. It is the epic quality of the firemen's struggle that excites Jennings, and his celebration of the courage and dignity of ordinary people working together in the shadow of disaster makes the film extraordinarily impressive.

Humphrey Jennings: Fires Were Started | Film | The Guardian Derek Malcolm from the Guardian, February 25, 1999

Most people, if asked to name the finest British director, would probably plump for Hitchcock, Lean or Powell. Some, however, would say Humphrey Jennings, once described by Lindsay Anderson as the only true poet of the English cinema. Fires Were Started is his most celebrated film, and undoubtedly a masterpiece.

Jennings was a poet and a painter too - a man, in fact, of the widest possible culture. But he saw a way of combining everything in what may seem to be the most unyeilding cinematic metier of documentary. When he died young in 1950, he had only worked for 17 years as a film-maker, all of them in what we would now call docu-drama.

Fires Were Started is his longest work, made in 1943. But it was not the only extraordinary film he made, for the GPO Film Unit before the last world war and for the Crown Film Unit and the Ministry Of Information during it.

In other hands, many of these films would have been mere propaganda made to stiffen the national mood. But in his, the images of Britain were often so powerful and so moving that people would be in tears watching them.

The nature of the images available to him are perfectly expressed in a poem he wrote, in the same year as he filmed Heart Of Britain and Words For Battle, two superb shorts:

I see a thousand strange sights in the streets of London
I see the clock on Bow Church burning in daytime
I see a one-legged man crossing the fire on crutches
I see three negroes and a woman with white face-powder reading music at half-past three in the morning
I see an ambulance girl with her arms full of roses
I see the burnt drums of the Philharmonic
I see the green leaves of Lincolnshire carried through London on the wrecked body of an aircraft

He called his films ''camera poems'' and the characters in Fires Were Started were the firemen and firewomen of the Auxiliary Fire Service working in the most heavily bombed docks of London.

His achievement in the film has been most potently described by David Thomson, who said of him: ''His fires, which were, like Blake's, a condition of the soul, might even have burnt down English good manners.''

The film's early scenes introduce us to the eight characters we follow - each are fictional but all are played by real firemen. One 24-hour period is dramatised. In the morning, the men leave their homes and ordinary occupations to start their tour of duty.

A new recruit arrives and is shown the ropes. There is a full moon due and warning comes that a heavy attack is anticipated.

Night falls and the sirens begin to wail. The unit is called out to a riverside warehouse where fire threatens an ammunition ship at anchor by the wharf. The fire is fought and finally mastered, though one man is lost and others are injured. The ship finally sails with the morning tide.

The way the story is structured provides a portrait of what was then a beseiged Britain that is astonishingly intimate. Jennings' firemen are not treated in the patronising way servicemen were often depicted in post-war films of the stiff-upper-lip variety.

True, the observation is affectionate and matter-of-fact, in a typically British manner. But there is humour and irony too, as in the sequence when the firemen enter their recreation room in turn as Barrett, the pianist of the group, strikes up One Man Went To Mow and other popular songs of the day. The fire fighting scenes and their aftermath are remarkable, shot and edited with no melodramatics whatsoever.

Jennings had founded the Mass Observation movement which collected information on the British way of life much as Malinowski had documented the behaviour of the South Sea islanders. He put this to good effect in Fires Were Started and other films, notably the equally famous Listen To Britain and Diary For Timothy.

But, though ineffably patrician, he transcended the class clichés of the time by recognising the way war can unite disparate people and by making us think about what would have been lost if the conflict had gone the other way.

The Complete Humphrey Jennings Volume Two: Fires Were Started ... Anthony Nield reviewing the Humphrey Jennings Collection from The Digital Fix

The Complete Humphrey Jennings: Volume Two: Fires Were Started ... Philip French reviewing the Humphrey Jennings Collection from The Guardian, May 5, 2012

Fires were Started - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Jack C. Ellis from Film Reference

Britmovie

Fires were Started : A Film Review | johngrahamblog

Fires Were Started - Wikipedia

Jennings, Jim

CLOSE QUARTERS

USA 2004

Close Quarters Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

It's possible that I am overvaluing this film, although I don't think so. Even though I have seen a few Jennings films I haven't responded to, his mastery over the medium, his orchestration of light and chiaroscuro is unrivaled. Like Miracle on 34th Street and Silvercup, Close Quarters partakes of the physical world as an occasion for abstract light play, but here Jennings is creating relationships between light as pure form and light as a record of living beings, resulting in a new emotional depth that makes this film an artistic breakthrough. This is the film that should be called "fugitive light," since Jennings draws with the sun that pierces gaps in the curtains, those moments when the line or a slash on the wall will coalesce for a few seconds. But in the midst of this we see his actual apartment, his cats and his lover, and they too are allowed to emerge as pure light. And yet, they retain their identity; they are not reduced to abstract forms. The film is a play between the urge to "escape" the domestic via an aesthetic sensibility, and an undiluted love for the domestic, a gathering of bodies and shadows as co-equal loved ones. This is the film that a certain segment of the avant-garde has been trying to make for nearly fifty years, and the painful, radiant beauty of it -- its full embrasure of a sliver of ordinary life, one that shines forth simply because it is so unreservedly loved -- brought tears to my eyes.

SILK TIES

USA (11 mi) 2006

Silk Ties Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Jennings' latest is a dense chiaroscuro NYC citysong, although rhythmically Silk Ties finds the filmmaker mining new possibilities. Whereas Miracle on 34th Street and Painting the Town are true camera-stylo films, using the gestural qualities of handheld 16mm with utmost grace and fluidity, Silk Ties uses staccato (in-camera?) editing to lend his images a jaggedness that (as Lee Walker mentioned afterward) recalls abstract animation. Street scenes, thick and dark and shot with the f-stop way down low, alternate with shots of skyscrapers and the negative-space sky between them. The jumps in editing seem to make the buildings dance, and create little jumps in the life of the streets, strangely enough lending this activity a kind of stately poise rather than heightening its implicit kinetics. But in addition to the paradoxes of stillness and movement, Jennings constructs a kind of disjuncture between past and present. Certain aspects of Silk Ties, especially the architectural compositions, recall the classic city-symphonies of the 1920s and 30s, especially Manhatta. Furthermore, the exaggerated darkness of much of the film gives it a distant quality, like something excavated from another time and place. But Jennings' image selection forces the viewer's consciousness back into the present. A perfectly "timeless" New York scene is sent forward to the present by, say, a Taco Bell Express sign, or (more pointedly) the predominance of African-Americans in the film. The cultural makeup of New York is much different than it was 70 or 80 years ago, but Silk Ties' representational approach lends today's Manhattan the historical inevitability, and the grandeur, we associate with images of earlier times. In short, Jennings has made a film that can be regarded as a document of who and how we were, right now.

Silk Ties (2006) Darren Hughes from Long Pauses

Avant-garde cinema remains a new frontier for me. I don't have the vocabulary for it yet, and I often find myself mystified (in the best sense of the word) by the experience of most experimental films. At this point I trust my critical judgment only to the point of distinguishing the very, very good from the very, very bad, and Jim Jennings's Close Quarters (2004), which I saw at TIFF 2005, impressed me to the extent that I now use it as shorthand for the style of filmmaking that discovers transcendent beauty in the everyday. Close Quarters, which was shot entirely within Jennings's New York home, is a montage of near-abstract images -- shadows moving against a wall, light pouring through a curtain, the face of his cat -- but his mastery of chiaroscuro never subsumes the "real" subjects of his gaze. Or, as Michael Sicinski puts it (much better than I could):

The film is a play between the urge to "escape" the domestic via an aesthetic sensibility, and an undiluted love for the domestic, a gathering of bodies and shadows as co-equal loved ones. This is the film that a certain segment of the avant-garde has been trying to make for nearly fifty years, and the painful, radiant beauty of it -- its full embrasure of a sliver of ordinary life, one that shines forth simply because it is so unreservedly loved -- brought tears to my eyes.

Jennings's latest, Silk Ties (2006), is a lesser film, I think, but it was still among the best shorts I saw in 2006. A city symphony in miniature, Silk Ties is never short of stunning to look at. Like so many great photographs, the stark black-and-white images here seem to have been stolen from some slightly more magical reality. (After seeing the Jennings film and Nathanial Dorsky's Song and Solitude on the same program, I walked away wishing I could recalibrate my view of the world around me, which, I guess, is one of the more noble functions of a-g cinema.) If I was less moved by Silk Ties than by Jennings's previous film, then (borrowing from Michael's comments) I wonder if it's simply a matter of his moving from a domestic space to a more impersonal cityscape. His changed relationship to his subject would, perhaps, necessitate a changed relationship for the viewer as well.

Jensen, Torben Skjødt

CARL TH. DREYER: MY MÉTIER

Denmark (96 mi) 1995

Carl Theodor Dreyer x 3 a Dreyer film program, and more on Torben Skjødt Jensen’s 1995 documentary from Pacific Cinematheque

Held over from our Nordic Documentary series in June, Torben Skjödt Jensen's fascinating film biography profiles one of the Seventh Art's greatest virtuosos: Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, Vampyr, Day of Wrath, Ordet), who ranks with Bresson and Ozu as one of the masters of transcendental cinema, and who exerted a profound influence on a pantheon of filmmakers that includes Bergman, Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, and fellow Dane Lars von Trier -- whose recent Breaking the Waves was very much a Dreyer hommage. Stylized, impressionistic, and highly atmospheric, Carl Th. Dreyer - My Metier interweaves clips from Dreyer's masterpieces and reminiscences by his actors and colleagues with Jensen's own highly personal, metaphysical approach to his subject's towering talent and genius. "[Jensen] approaches his subject with. . . [an] aesthete's sensibility [and] a cerebral perspective. . . [His film] makes extensive use of Dreyer's own words about his profession. A flurry of stills, sketches, scripts, newspaper clippings and letters appear on-screen as documents. . . The film's stylized black-and-white lighting by Harald Paalgard is typical of its own attention to detail and rigorous production values (Deborah Young, Variety). "Hypnosis, repetition and abstraction are interwoven with [Jensen's] experience of a confrontation with Dreyer's archive and heritage. . . the Dreyer heritage is reconciled with our times, to our world, so that this film may stand as an inspiration" (Danish Film Institute). Denmark 1995.

-Carl Theodor Dreyer

-Torben Skjødt Jensen

-Ulrich Breuning 3 Criterion essays on Torben Skjødt Jensen’s 1995 documentary, CARL TH. DREYER: MY MÉTIER

DVD Savant Review: Carl Theodor Dreyer Box Set Glenn Erickson on the Carl Theodor Dreyer Box set of DAY OF WRATH, ORDET, GERTRUD, and the documentary CARL TH. DREYER: MY MÉTIER

Filmmaker Magazine | Fall 2001: LOAD + PLAY Scooter McCrae on the Dreyer Box set from Filmmaker magazine

Reel.com DVD review [Bill Schwartz] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

The Film Desk [James Kendrick] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet - Day or Wrath - Gertrud - My Métier ... Gary W. Tooze reviews the Box set from DVDBeaver

Jeudy, Patrick

WHAT JACKIE KNEW B 85

France (55 mi) 2003

A French glimpse of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, using some terrific archival footage that does capture that extraordinary spirit of optimism that was the Kennedy era; true to the French view of things, Kennedy’s presidency was secondary to his notorious sexual infidelity, which comes under close scrutiny here. In one scene, as the President is exiting a plane, the narration goes something like this: “Look closely here and you will see a President going through his normal appearances just before having an affair with his mistress one hour later…” We learn Jackie had a pet nickname for the President, “Bunny,” which she used sarcastically in reference to his prolific sexual habits. This film does suggest it was Jackie who was the brains in the family, that the President himself was just a figurehead, as he was too busy dallying in one sexual affair after another. OK, so it’s not really news, but at 55 minutes it sped right along, few shots lasted more than 5 seconds, and I found it emotionally compelling, as this was, after all, the best years of our lives

Jeunet, Jean-Pierre

All-Movie Guide Lucis Bozzola

Several years before he helmed the fourth Alien film, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, together with fellow French cinema wunderkind/creative partner Marc Caro, made his mark on international cinema with two of the most distinctive films of the 1990s. Collaborating throughout the 1980s on ads, music videos, and such shorts as Le Manège (1980), Jeunet and Caro honed their signature visual flair and darkly comic sensibility; Jeunet's solo effort Foutaises (1989) won a César for Best Short Film. Bringing their unique style to feature films in the 1990s, Jeunet and Caro's debut work Delicatessen (1991) became an international art film sensation. Hailed for its grotesquely comic and oddly touching tale of post-nuclear survival amid a group of eccentrics in an ominous, almost palpably clammy yet cartoon-like "retro future" setting, Delicatessen attracted an ardent following and earned several festival prizes and two Césars. Flush from Delicatessen's success, Jeunet and Caro finally made a feature they'd been planning for 14 years, the adult fairy tale The City of Lost Children (1995). Shot on elaborate sets with an international cast (including the voice of French star Jean-Louis Trintignant), Jeunet and Caro created an inventively detailed fantasy world to depict the story of an evil scientist's plan to pilfer children's dreams. Though some critics were left scratching their heads over the plot, The City of Lost Children's rapturous visuals impressed audiences and turned it into another cult hit for Jeunet and Caro. Parting directorial ways with Caro after The City of Lost Children, Jeunet headed to Hollywood to direct Alien Resurrection (1997). Though Jeunet had always handled the actors while Caro supervised the images in their films, Caro's credited presence as a design supervisor ensured that Jeunet's entry in the Alien franchise bore their distinctive visual stamp as well as Jeunet's ability to convey human pathos amidst grotesquerie. Opening to mixed reviews from critics and fans, Alien Resurrection did not quite live up to its title promise for the series.

Though his stint in Hollywood left something to be desired in a project that seemed perfectly suited to the eccentric director's darkly skewed and complex visuals, Jeunet found himself the recipient of almost overwhelming praise with his 2001 release Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain. Released stateside as simply Amelie, the film showed Jeunet more comfortable with his distinct visual style than ever, with the darkness that had enshrouded his previous films shifting toward a brighter, more optimistic outlook. A labor of love that he had been scripting even before taking the director's chair for Alien Resurrection, Amelie told the simple story of a remarkable woman who finds that she has a unique gift for influencing the lives of others in almost magical ways.

Working his signature visual magic on Paris, Jeunet transforms the city into a deliriously beautiful, amber-tinged fantasy reality (complete with the graffiti digitally removed), complementing a fanciful quest that encompasses mysterious photo booth detritus, humorously gaslighting a cruel grocer, and a globe-trotting garden gnome. Topped off by winsome star Audrey Tautou, Amélie broke box office records in France, won several European Film awards and redeemed Jeunet as an art house darling in the U.S.

Official Website

Hollywood Gothique Article The Fabulous World of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, by Steve Biodrowski

Jeunet, Jean-Pierre They Shoot Horses, Don’t They

indieWIRE Interview (2001) by Andrea Meyer

GreenCine Interview (2006) Jean-Pierre Jeunet: "Not interested in realist things," by Hannah Eaves and Jonathan Marlow, October 30, 2006

Wikipedia

DELICATESSEN

France (99 mi) 1991 co-director: Marc Caro

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

The post-Weinstein move to squeeze every last drop from the Miramax library has its upside, as this long-delayed DVD attests. I can still remember walking into the Ritz at the Bourse in 1992, having chosen Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's first feature based on its funny-looking poster, and having the movie's gothic slapstick hit me like a ton of rubber bricks. Nothing Jeunet, who split with Caro after 1995's City of Lost Children, has done since has quite equaled the seamless nuttiness of Delicatessen, set in a meat-starved dystopia where unlucky tenants end up in the first-floor butcher shop. Shot in acid, fish-eye yellows, the film's hyperstylization reaches a delirious zenith in the sequence where an entire tenement's actions take on the rhythm of a copulating couple's rusty bedsprings. Jeunet fans will recognize much of his gallery of human grotesques in the cast (Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Ticky Holgado and the brilliant Dominique Pinon among them). The DVD ports a making-of doc and Jeunet's commentary from the French disc, with English subtitles attached.

Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]

Set in some sort of post-apocalyptic Parisian deli o' the damned, this lunatic's take on the future of man is so delightfully warped that it's impossible to shake it out of your head and go get a decent night's sleep. Co-produced by ex-Python Terry Gilliam, Delicatessen has both the visual look and feel of such Gilliam treasures as Brazil, Jabberwocky, and The Time Bandits, the chief difference being, of course, that this time he wasn't directing. Instead, newcomers Jeunet and Caro take us on a grimy, sooty journey into a twisted future where food is scarce, people are fundamentally vile, and subterranean goggle-eyed raiders fight for their lives with the (mainly) dispassionate maniacs above ground. And what a ride it is! Scripted by noted comic book writer Gilles Adrien, the film is rife with comic sensibility; the tenants of the apartment building in which the delicatessen in question is located are a panoply of odd idiosyncrasies and depraved lifestyles. Into this hotbed of questionable sanity comes Louison (Pinon), an unemployed circus performer whose only friend and partner, a chimpanzee named Dr. Livingstone, has recently been devoured by an overly eager crowd of circus spectators. Arguably the sanest of the lot, Louison quickly finds himself falling for the deli owner's daughter (Dougnac), a strikingly frail and half-blind innocent caught up in a comedic hell beyond her control. Delicatessen overflows with homages to, among others, Fellini, Godard, and, in a charming scene where Louison and a young lady try to pinpoint the source of a bed's obnoxious squeaking, Charlie Chaplin. It might be argued that the visual aspects of the film rely too heavily on the Gilliam's previous endeavours, but Delicatessen moves with a comic surety and manic forward motion all its own. It's not a very pretty picture of the future, but God, what fun it is.

Washington Post [Rita Kempley]

Yes, Virginia, the French will eat anything. "Delicatessen," a perfectly ghastly comedy based on that premise, concerns the dietary habits of the gourmandoisie in a post-apocalyptic and meatless society. A punky, futuristic effort by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, it is a tasteless variation on "Sweeney Todd" set geographically near the border of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."

This would, of course, have us kissing our fingers and squealing "magnifique!" were it not such a laboriously self-conscious attempt at being avant-garde. Ultimately "Delicatessen" isn't about anything but Jeunet and Caro's filmmaking.

The oh-so-wacky screenplay by comic-book writer Gilles Adrien focuses on a heroic clown (Dominique Pinon), who falls in love with the butcher's nearsighted daughter (Marie-Laure Dougnac) and nearly becomes the specialite de la maison. They make beautiful music together -- she on the cello, he on the musical saw -- but her domineering father (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) is nonetheless determined to fill his empty shelves with freshly butchered clown parts. To save her lover, the girl betrays her carnivorous brethren to a rebellious group of lentil eaters who live underground.

The entire film takes place inside and under the delicatessen, a creaking ruin that is home to a cast of eccentric characters, who serve the function of dramatic garni. They include a man who lives in a foot of water with his frogs and snails, a woman who is utterly committed to committing suicide, and two brothers who manufacture toys that go "moo." Constantly at odds with each other over the meat supply, the tenants now communicate only through an old pipe that runs through the walls. Perhaps this is a metaphor for that old familiar artistic bugaboo, alienation. Then again maybe it's not exactly kosher to befriend the plat du jour.

Stylistically, "Delicatessen" is a cross between the music videos Juneut and Caro have made in the past and the frenetic cartooning of Bugs Bunny creator Tex Avery, to whom the filmmakers pay open homage. Except for Pinon's quietly compelling clown, the characters are less well defined than that cwazy wabbit ever was.

The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]

Salon.com [Jenn Shreve]

Monsters And Critics [Frankie Dees]

filmcritic.com [Keith Breese]

Epinions [metalluk]

Ted Prigge

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Slant Magazine [Paul Schrodt]

DVD Times [Raphael Pour-Hashemi]

Cinema Blend Erik Woidtke

DVD Town [John J. Puccio]

Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley)

Reel.com DVD review [Jerry Renshaw]

The Cinema Source (Ryan Piccirillo)

New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (La cité des enfants perdus)

France Germany Spain (112 mi) 1995 co-director: Marc Caro

Tucson Weekly [Stacey Richter]

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, the dynamic duo who dreamed up the award-winning Delicatessen four years ago, delve into a retro-future fantasy world that is such a visual and narrative feast, you won't even mind the subtitles. Their cinematic Cirque de Soliel is a surreal journey through a dark, dank harbor town populated by genetic mutants, a cult of Cyclops kidnappers and a scrappy band of street-wise orphans. It harkens back to traditional (un-Disneyfied) fairy tales: untamed flights of fancy that are equal parts funny and fearsome. Miette (a haunting nine-year-old femme fatale) and One (a simple-minded circus giant) band together to save One's adopted brother from the clutches of Krank, a horrible scientist who's slowly dying because he lacks one vital function: the ability to dream. From his laboratory on a remote, mist-shrouded rig, Krank invades the dreams of his stolen children in a desperate attempt to make them his own...until One and Miette penetrate Krank's sinister fortress and challenge him on a level playing field--within the world of a little boy's dream.

Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]

“City of Lost Children,” in all its glorious, French craziness, is sort of like “The Graduate” or Charles Laughton’s brilliant “Night of the Hunter:” it is a movie about childhood, but definitely not for children. Most movies about childhood like to show the world full of innocence and wonder, but this is not how all children see the world. I remember the land of adults, as seen through my young eyes, as being creepy and incomprehensible. In its strange way, “City of Lost of Children” captures that in a world where all the children are basically normal but the adults are all grotesques, up to things the kids cannot even fathom.

The children in question are orphans in a port city that looks like a cross between the 1940s, the 1870s, and some unnamed date in the future. Everything seems to be built from the pieces of a trans-Atlantic steamer. The real location of “City of Lost Children” is the dreaming unconscious. Audiences who quibble over anachronisms or having their films set in what they like to think of as “reality,” whether it be present, past, or future, will have long since been driven insane before the film is a third over. Audiences that love the visuals of “Blade Runner,” “Metropolis,” “Legend,” and “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” will gobble this movie up. The orphans live in a corrupt orphanage run by the Octopus, (Genevieve Brunet and Odile Mallet) a pair of conjoined twins with a shared leg who know when to scratch itches on the other’s arm. They, or she, order the orphans to pickpocket in order to earn their keep. The Octopus is unconcerned when, one by one, the children start to go missing. Soon it is up to the young Miette (Judith Vittet) to find them, and to do so she enlists the help of One (Ron Perlman), the strongman from the carnival, who has the mind of a simpleton probably because the actor can’t speak much French.

In their misadventures through the best art direction and special effects of 1995, they meet an opium addict whose mechanical fly can turn those its stings into homicidal maniacs; a cult that demands the removal of one eye from each of its members to make room for an electronic replacement; a brain living in a fish tank that is able to speak through a device like an old phonograph; a pack of incompetent clones bickering over who is the original (all played in near-slapstick by Dominique Pinon); and ultimately a mad old scientist named Krank (Daniel Emilfork), who is kidnapping the children to steal their dreams because he cannot sleep. Krank is both terrifying and sad, often at the same time. There are spurts of violence, which are not in protracted action sequences or especially gory, but imaginatively disturbing, and incorporate the kind of dark, dry sense of humor that leaves a dwarf pinned to a wall by a harpoon.

The story of “City of Lost Children,” some have complained, is told in such a manner as to be incomprehensible to the point of being impenetrable. This works, I think, in the movie’s favor, in creating a childhood view of confusion and fear, like a Grimm bedtime story crossed with the nightmare that comes after hearing it. Episodes only half-lead to other episodes, in the same way that, when dreaming, we’re never able to see very far ahead of us, and are at best bogged down in one thing at a time. Most mature moviegoers will admit that, in certain movies, confusion is a good thing, but we all have a threshold for how much bafflement we can take. I, for example, have no problems with “Mulholland Drive” and even enjoyed “Lost Highway” without really comprehending more than ten minutes of it at once. But I have to draw the line at the film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune.” Some audiences take cinematic weirdness better than others, and I had no problem absorbing “City of Lost Children.”

I saw “City of Lost Children” at a midnight screening during a two-day revival in the summer of 1999. The screen was big, the camera angles were way out, and the print was just a little worn, which added to the movie’s eerie mystique. By two-thirty in the morning I was pretty tired but I never once lost interest in the bizarre images being paraded across the screen. This is perhaps the optimum situation for viewing “Lost Children,” which in itself is somewhere between waking and sleeping. This is not a film of plot or especially of character, although I did sympathize with One’s frustration at his own simplicity, as well as Krank’s inability to dream. The aim of “City of Lost Children” is to immerse us in the bizarre visions of a nightmare world, and to remember, however vaguely, what it was like to be a child and afraid.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer)

The best poster art of 1995 is unquestionably the composite still featured on ads for The City of Lost Children, showing a muscular redheaded man purposefully rowing a boat across a sea peppered with floating mines. At the bow of the vessel, a younger girl, perhaps 10 years old, looks back over her shoulder almost balefully. They're en route to what looks like a cross between a mist-shrouded palace and an oil rig, matte painted in sillhouette against the moonrise. It's said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but this one teases, offering glimpses of a story that exists in the imagination, and is not necessarily dependent on the "reality" established by the film it's meant to promote.

That picture isn't taken directly from the film, but it may as well be. Its evocative power is indicative of the real strengths of the filmmaking duo of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. These two headstrong fantasists cut their teeth on music videos and television commercials before settling in to make the much-admired Delicatessen (1991), a black European comedy about cannibalism. Accordingly, American audiences had their first real exposure to Jeunet and Caro when art houses nationwide were blitzed with that film's trailer—a set piece drawn straight from the movie itself, and involving the apparent rhythms of lovemaking in an apartment building from hell and its impact on everyday life in adjacent rooms. To this day, even movie fans who never saw the actual movie still harbor vivid memories of seeing the brilliantly entertaining trailer to Delicatessen.

That mastery of imagery and montage is what keeps Jeunet and Caro's newest film from being a mere clutter of dazzling images. The City of Lost Children is something of a fable set in a city in either the future or an alternate reality. The movie has to do with a scientist named Krank (Daniel Emilfork), who is aging prematurely because he lacks the ability to dream. Fighting to reverse the aging process, he sends his blind minions out to kidnap the city's most potent dreamers—the children—and bring them back so he can invade the children's dreams and make them his own. Circus strongman One (Ron Perlman, the beefy guy from the posters) gets involved when his adopted brother, little Denree (Joseph Lucien), is abducted by the Cyclops, who see the world through one electronic eye and do Krank's bidding. Events turn, and One teams up with the orphan Miette (Judith Vittet) on a mission to invade Krank's laboratory and rescue his beloved brother. The other characters in the laboratory include Krank's assistant, Miss Bismuth (Mireille Mosse), a disembodied talking brain floating in a fish tank (given witty, world-weary voice by Jean-Louis Trintignant), and a battalion of clones (all of them played by Dominique Pinon).

The actors are more than up to the challenge of breathing life into the concept. Perlman, a busy actor whose credits include The Name of the Rose, Romeo is Bleeding, and last year's Cronos, is entirely credible as the simple strong man driven to his quest by love for a child. Daniel Emilfork's Krank is a bizarre yet pathetic creation, and our distate for his persona is mitigated by our understanding of his desperation (after all, we're the ones who paid money to visit someone else's dream for an hour or two). And whether it's Vittet playing an orphan who's become wise and jaded beyond her years, or Lucien as the toddler who's mostly unfazed by the pyrotechnics that have the other kids screaming, the children here defy the Hollywood standard of cinematic children who are by turns cutesy pies or obnoxious hams. Since the children are the film's center, the metaphorical imaginative core of a society that has perhaps forgotten the value of its dreams, it's reassuring that the actors give unmannered performances that put the histrionic antics of celebrity brats like Macauley Culkin in proper perspective.

Aided and abetted by Jean-Paul Gaultier's costuming, Caro's art direction ensures that this city truly is something to behold, although our visit is fragmented so that we have little opportunity to get a sense for a whole environment. For the most part, Caro and Jeunet create their nightmare world by stacking their most striking visuals on top of one another in a shot-by-shot montage that amplifies the chaos. But the real show-stoppers are the sequences that stretch the film's tightly constrained sense of location while staying within the episodic format (the best involves a spider's web, a shipwreck, and a healthy sense of wonder), though even that doesn't shake the constant feeling that we're watching master craftsmen at work, not peeking into another universe.

But when they work, oh boy, do they work. Jeunet and Caro have a keen sense of their characters, from the lead roles all the way down to the bit parts, and the crucial dream sequences are marvelously surreal, right down to the accompanying sound mix. (It's fitting that Sony is releasing this one just before Christmas, because Santa figures in a couple of the dreams, for better or for worse.) Angelo Badalamenti's music is surprisingly effective throughout, and Miette's final nightmare is nothing short of breathtaking. The film contains a remarkable number of digital-effects shots, and indeed, is surprisingly reliant on technical wizardry, whether it's allowing Pinon to play six different parts on-screen at the same time, or enabling show-stopping close-ups of Fleakins, the bug who offers up a flea's-eye view of the world before shooting characters up with a strange poison. The rich, shadowy cinematography, which is a key part of the weirdness at work here, is by Darius Khondji, who shot Delicatessen but also, probably more famously, this year's Hollywood hit, Se7en.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, there's a story that needs to be told, and the one here is just a little humdrum. For all its whacked-out creativity, The City of Lost Children is a bit short on ideas for what to do with itself. The dream thievery is reduced to a child-in-peril excuse to get our obligatory hero into the laboratory, and Krank's invasion of dreams isn't even fully distinguished from what we might expect from a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel. And at the climax, we're treated to a pretty rote escape-from-the-madman routine that ends in a big explosion a la any number of American action movies. Would that a movie this wondrous weren't simultaneously so formulaic.

I'd hate to discourage any fan of the surreal from buying a ticket, since it's a truly impressive piece of work. Still, something very important is missing. It's all well and good to break out all the wide-angle lenses, run amok with the set design, and frighten a few children, but I do wish there was a little more light at the end of the tunnel. It seems that Jeunet and Caro are very satisfied with what they have wrought, but it's hard to experience the film on a very personal level, because we're never given the sense that anything real is at stake, or that there's anything in the rather unpleasant world presented to us that's really worth fighting for. For all their formidable skills, Jeunet & Caro need to balance all of the nightmare and grimace with just a little bit of hope and magic. I'm rooting for them to deliver the goods next time—but I'm not sure they have it in them.

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AMÉLIE B+ 92

aka: Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain

France Germany (122 mi) 2001

Another great date flick, a charming, fast-paced homage to Paris, similar to Rene Clair’s UNDER THE ROOFS OF PARIS, featuring swooping camera shots, picture postcard panoramas, dazzling, rapid-fire editing, with very few shots clocking in at even ten seconds, and a tongue-in-cheek narration that encourages the most improbable of possibilities, and then defies all stretches of the imagination. While it’s quite clever, an entire film like the opening sequence of MAGNOLIA, it is definitely too much. I found it exhausting after awhile and too cute for it’s own good. Unlike MOULIN ROUGE, for instance, a similar film which runs the gamut of the universe of emotions, this film stays on the same hyper-frenetic edge throughout the entire two hours, largely due to the chop chop editing style, never really allowing the audience any pause, instead it always goes for the laugh or the clever line. Bruno Delbonnel’s camerawork is simply dazzling, as the look of the film is quite memorable, equally wondrous is the French accordion and piano playing, but it’s much too innocent to offer much beyond hope, and the only love affair that really mattered in my eyes was the camera’s love affair with the captivating images of Paris. Winner of Best Cinematography award at the Chicago Film fest.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

What it lacks in coherence and believability, which omissions are dogheartedly intentional, is more than compensated with excessive and appropriate portions of sauteed prime French character. An extraordinary number of tricks not in the book are pulled out to ensure originality and individualism and they come off as beautiful side trips rather than distractions. Much would seem to be premised on that eternal inspiration, so spectacularly pigeon-holed in Repo Man as the overlapping "latticework of coincidence," a point brought home when the video clip within the film celebrates Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whom I had just discovered with great joy earlier in the week. In fact the internal videos from Audrey Tautou to her artist friend are all fantastic, somewhere Ed Wood is writhing in joy as should be we all. For all its spectacular trappings, brilliant devices, extraordinary performances, tremendous plot twists, spectacular shots and general patchwork of the human divine courtesy of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, this at its best is a celebration of nothing besides the spectacular glory of the everyday and taken for granted, a toast to human potentiality and the very broad spectrum within which it may manifest itself, and the confirmation that we do in fact take part every day in a cosmic drama in which nothing happens by chance.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Imagine a movie that hooks itself directly into your brain’s pleasure centers, triggering grin after joyous grin, and you’ll have some idea what it’s like to watch Amélie. Directed and co-written by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children delivered a similar kicks-per-minute ratio, Amélie cooks along on Jeunet’s characteristic blend of early-cinema wonderment and ultra-modern technical panache. (Though Jeunet is still proud of it, it’s best to avoid entirely his botched entry in the Alien series, a mismatch between filmmaker and material if ever there was one.) Audrey Tautou, an actress of silent-film beauty (Jeunet cast her after seeing her image on a Paris bus-shelter poster) plays the titular gamine, a pure-hearted waif who successfully provides for everyone’s happiness but her own.

Lest the reader begin to reach for the insulin, a clarification: Jeunet’s sense of humor tends as much toward the morbid as the sweet. An extensive prologue chronicles Amélie’s childhood in a burst of rapid-fire images overlaid with wry narration. Living a lonely life, her only companion a suicidal goldfish that keeps throwing itself out of the bowl, Amélie’s solitude is confirmed when her mother is killed by a plummeting suicide in front of Notre Dame. Jeunet, as influenced by Tex Avery as Marcel Carné, stages the shot from the jumper’s point of view, so the ground comes rushing up at us until it effectively smacks us in the nose. Jeunet’s secret is to mix pixieish sentimentality with an anarchic lack thereof; one tender conversation between Amélie’s would-be boyfriend (Mathieu Kassovitz) and his confidante takes place in the sex shop where he works as the two are pricing dildos.

In France, where the film has become an almost universally loved box-office smash, the film goes by the title The Fantastic Destiny of Amélie Poulain, which not only calls up the old movies that Amélie both honors and gently mocks, but invokes the critical idea of fate. In the world of Jeunet and co-scenarist Guillaume Laurant, fate is less a force of nature than a Rube Goldberg device, an endless chain of tricky coincidences whose final result is utterly beyond prediction. Amélie, who bustles around Montmartre giving fate a hand, is set on one task when she drops the stopper to a perfume bottle, which rolls across the bathroom floor and dislodges a tile, which leads to a crawlspace in which is hidden a decades-old box full of a young boy’s childhood mementos. She tracks the man down, hides the box in a phone booth, then has the receiver ring just as he passes, so he walks in and sees his long-buried treasure returned out of the blue — all that so she can see the tears in his eyes when he finds something he thought was lost.

In a sense, Amélie herself is just a cog in Amélie’s machine; her own pursuit of Nino (Kassovitz), who makes a hobby of collecting and reassembling the shreds of torn-up pictures he finds under instant-photo booths, is central to the film, but hardly primary. A dense, fast-paced, digitally enhanced wonderland, the film rarely stops to let you catch your breath, but where a movie like Moulin Rouge or even The Hudsucker Proxy is nearly torpedoed by its own self-conscious excess, Amélie keeps returning to Tautou’s blessedly simple performance, which is very much the eye of the storm. Likewise Kassovitz, best known as an actor and director for hard-edged films like Hate and A Self-Made Hero; here, he’s a revelation of untold sweetness. Jeunet regulars like Dominique Pinon, with his gnomish face and hyperactive eyes, make plenty of appearances, but the key performances are more elemental than any in Jeunet’s oeuvre. Of course, that just allows him to stage an even more frenetic ballet around them.

Amélie may be only an inch deep, but its appeal is several light-years wide. The movie sneaks in a clip from Jules and Jim, but it’s much closer kin to the unmoored antics of Shoot the Piano Player. It’s a movie in love with its own style, and the amour fou is contagious. Even at a full two hours, you don’t feel overwhelmed by the film’s relentless energy; Jeunet knows enough to keep shifting styles and varying the pace, even if it’s mainly to different shades of frenetic. The movie’s charms are all immediate, so there’s really nothing left to chew on when it’s over; it’s an elaborate desert, not a four-course meal. Still, there’s more inventiveness in any one of Amélie’s stunts than the entire bill at any given multiplex, so it’s hard to quibble with the film’s shallow splendor. Dive right in; just pull up before you bang your head.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman] (excerpt)

There's a case to be made that the two poles of fin de siècle commercial movies are dehumanized live-action cartoons and their supposed antithesis, the messy neo-neo-realism of the Dogme group and its fellow travelers. This opposition has nothing to do with avant or derriere gardes. Dogme may be a reaction against deluxe production values, but it likewise benefits from the new digital technology, and crypto-animation does not belong solely to mega-budget sci-fi or action films.

Joel and Ethan Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There is predicated on a phenomenally precise mise-en-scène and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's equally mannerist Amélie on an intricately calibrated pow-pow montage; neither delivers any grand explosions, but they're straight from Toontown. If one movie is terminally depressed and the other hysterically feel-good, both feature characters pitched somewhere between grimacing meat puppet and calculated special effect—and both project worlds, filtered through extensive voice-over, so deeply nostalgic and hermetically self-enclosed as to make the Magic Kingdom resemble downtown Karachi.

The more likeable of the two, Amélie unfolds in a evocatively old-fashioned version of contemporary Paris, populated by mysterious curmudgeons, secret artists, adorable loners, and benign fetishists—the little people of Montmartre, all subjects of the movie's eponymous gamine du jour (Audrey Tautou). Amélie is less creatively grotesque than director Jeunet's two collaborations with cartoonist Marc Caro, Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, but it's just as droll, and blithely retro: The accordion strains of old-timey musette resound through the cobblestone streets, and Jules et Jim is playing at the movies.

Amélie is Jeunet's first feature to be shot outside the studio, but he's managed to transform Paris itself into his atelier: "We [digitally] cleared the streets of all cars, cleaned the graffiti off the walls, replaced posters with more colorful ones." The neighborhood residents are rather less colorful—a replacement that may be regarded as analogous to Woody Allen's similarly homogenous Manhattan. The screen is saturated with Gallic whimsy and the romance of Montmartre in the person of Amélie. This wide-eyed creature, who loves cracking the crust of crème brûlée, is tall and thin, with impishly bobbed hair and clunky comic-strip character shoes. Disguised as a shy café waitress (her place of employment is a virtual museum of vintage brands), she's actually an aspiring guardian angel.

After discovering a child's treasure box hidden in her apartment, Amélie tracks down the now middle-aged owner and plants his boyhood stuff where he will stumble across it, secretly watching as he does so and proudly noting his grateful tears. In the same spirit, Amélie rescripts her concierge's unhappy past by fabricating a love letter from her long-missing husband. (Not that she is always so benign. Angered by the local greengrocer's abuse of his slow-witted assistant, Amélie turns avenging angel, sneaking into his apartment to perpetrate all manner of subtle mischief.)

Basically asexual, Amélie takes a childlike pleasure in orchestrating a neurotic co-worker's near-cosmic orgasm in the café. Her imagination is infantile as well. Furniture comes to life in Amélie's presence; the old Russian movies shown on TV talk directly to her. Initially disarming, this simpering dolly grows increasingly wearisome, particularly once she begins attending to her own destiny. The movie develops a plot when Amélie recovers a scrapbook of photo-booth portraits lost by a sensitive porn-shop cashier (director Mathieu Kassovitz, far more benign here than in his own movies) and engages him in a wild goose chase through the funhouse that is Paris.

Basically a faux new-wave romp, Amélie achieves a high-tech remix of the playful narrative digressions in François Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player and the prolix sight gags of Louis Malle's Zazie Dans le Metro (an early '60s art-house treat that seems ripe for revival). Jeunet loves nothing better than a pell-mell, wide-angle track into an open screaming mouth. Although there's a surfeit of business—thunderous cuts, convulsive white-outs, split screens, interpolated newsreels, X-ray shots, annotated frames, exaggerated sound effects—much of it is funny. Indeed, the manic pace serves to mitigate the movie's cloying sentimentality.

An ecstatically received critical and box-office success in France, and hence a source of much local pride, Amélie became the subject of some debate. The lefty spoilsports of Libération stirred the pot by deriding this new national treasure as an example of spurious populism, characterizing its digitally enhanced Paris as a softcore analogue to Le Pen's racist National Front as well as an example of an idiot globalization that transposed the "fake magic" and inane gaiety of EuroDisney to Montmartre. Such attacks on a proven crowd-pleaser created an opportunity no politician could ignore. Amélie was ringingly endorsed by everyone from President Jacques Chirac (after a command screening at the Elysée palace) and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to the Communist deputy mayor of Paris (who praised its anti-capitalist attitude).

In the U.S., Amélie is playing for higher stakes. Brace yourself. Given that the movie's U.S. distributor used Abraham Foxman and Jesse Jackson to flack last year's Chocolat toward the Oscar, the French pols' patriotic pull-quotes are but a warm-up for the inevitable Miramax hard sell.

The Amélie Effect - Film Comment The Amélie Effect, by Frédéric Bonnaud, November/December 2001

To hear the French tell it, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film hasn’t only saved French cinema as we know it, it’s saved France. Frédéric Bonnaud rains on the parade.

Right from the start Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, or Amélie as it's now called in the U.S., was a runaway hit in France—the film has managed to sell seven and a half million tickets, which translates into roughly $40 million at the box office, a sum rarely achieved by French films at home. Our film industry is breathing a collective sigh of relief: we’ve got a hit! The miracle began with the first press screenings: everyone loved it, and even the most hardened critics applauded enthusiastically as they wept for joy. When Amélie was released in late April of this year, even serious newspapers like Libération and Le Monde discreetly took part in the general euphoria. All of which led to one big question, which quickly flared into a controversy: why wasn’t Amélie representing France at the Cannes Film Festival? Extremely embarrassed by the scale of the phenomenon, the Festival directors let it be known through a press leak that the selection committee had seen only a workprint without music, and thus were unable to appreciate the film’s true worth. Then, to make matters worse, the film’s lead actor, Mathieu Kassovitz, who was on the Cannes jury, announced with his customary tact that if it had been up to him, not only would the film have been in competition at Cannes, it would also have taken home the Palme d’Or! In May, as the paradise for artists and intellectuals that is Cannes unfolded in its auteurist ghetto and as France belatedly discovered the subtleties of reality TV with the broadcast of Loft Story (France’s equivalent to Big Brother), the country only had eyes for Amélie. . . .

Back from Cannes, exhausted but pleased with the high standard of the festival’s lineup, I convinced my Inrockuptibles colleague Serge Kaganski to go with me to see Amélie, at a regular theater with a regular audience. We had missed the press screenings and hadn’t said a word about it in the magazine, as much due to crass professional incompetence as total indifference to the film’s box-office success.

After seeing films by Rivette, Lynch, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Claire Denis, Nobuhiro Suwa, Jean-Marie Straub and Claude Lanzmann, the sweet Amélie seemed rather insipid, a little boring, and, above all, too French to be true. When three inner-city youths appeared in the train station scene, I made the mistake of whispering to Kaganski: “Here come the film’s representatives of Otherness!” Whether or not my sarcastic comment influenced him, Kaganski left the film enraged, declaring his disgust with this demagogic retro postcard version of France, undeniably cleansed of all cultural diversity and, by extension, all immigrants. Determined to publicly take on Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Amélie’s creator, he vented his outrage in an op-ed published in Libération entitled “Amélie pas jolie” (“Amélie is not pretty”). He fiercely enumerated the film’s glaring weaknesses: its formal bankruptcy, its culturally unifying tone, and its glorification of what Serge Daney called “the rancid,” a distillation of moldy, stereotypical “Frenchness,” seemingly representing the country’s true cultural values and morals, but in fact far removed from the reality of present-day Paris. Kaganski emphasized that this all-white vision of the popular Abbesses neighborhood, with its countless caricatures of the “little people of France,” was hardly credible in a film that was supposedly set in 1997 (as opposed to 1951 or even before the war), and plainly revealed the suspect basis of Jeunet’s spectacle. Riding the momentum of his polemic, Kaganski stuck his neck out by asserting that Amélie would make a fine promotional film for France’s xenophobic extreme Right. He made it clear that he was not ascribing any racist intentions to Jeunet, but maintained that that was the end result just the same.

All of which set the cat among the pigeons. Kaganski found himself at the center of an increasingly vicious controversy, stoked by a press eager to get more mileage out of the year’s great French success story. Upon returning from vacation in mid-August, Jeunet responded to the article with typical subtlety by declaring that Kaganski was “wallowing in bitterness like a pig in its own shit” and that his “taste was complete crap.” What would he have said if Amélie hadn’t done as well as it did? Or if the press hadn’t been so kind when it opened? Apparently success doesn’t improve everyone.

With the controversy finally blown over, and the film continuing to hum along, I went back to see Amélie for a second time. Again, I saw a very labored compilation of effects, at first a bit distracting and increasingly hard to endure. It is a by-the-numbers movie containing no real surprises or suspense. From the start, with its omniscient voiceover that looms over the narrative as well as the audience, the film never strays from its predetermined course. The story gives new meaning to the word “thin”: little Amélie, unloved as a child, gradually opens herself to the world around her, spreads goodness wherever she goes, and finally finds Love (in the form of Kassovitz) after a long series of mishaps and coincidences. With its proliferation of clichés and false surprises, Jeunet’s film has less to do with telling a story than with slipping the spectator into its pocket with one simple technique: the complicity of the permanent wink. Amélie is one of those films that never stops reassuring the audience that it’s on their side, taking them firmly by the hand and leading them. . . well, nowhere really. In this sense it’s a very old-fashioned film. To maintain the audience’s submission, Jeunet resorts to two distinct methods: facile tricks and stereotypes, the first thriving by artificially animating the second. The audience has grown accustomed to these tricks after years of being beaten over the head with them in commercials. Characters are heavily typed until they’re transformed into familiar figures (the obnoxious merchant, his gentle, put-upon clerk, the reclusive old painter, the love-struck cashier, the big-hearted concierge . . .), and then we’re given a series of minute variations on said types. Once the audience is in familiar territory, it’s seduced by the use and abuse of in-your-face devices—like Amélie’s heart beating under her sweater or any number of crazy, ostentatious camera stunts. The frenetic piling up of, and constant emphasis on, these familiar devices, which initially make the film seem so lively, become tiresome. Jeunet creates nothing fresh, but he pulls out all the stops to conceal his lack of inspiration with a profusion of frenzied activity. What’s even more seductive is that he’s working with a very restricted iconography: the film is filled with hackneyed images of eternal “Frenchness,” from the Tour de France cyclist to playground marbles to Montmartre as the quintessence of touristic Paris; from Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the painter of French bliss par excellence, to Truffaut (in a Jules and Jim reference), the legendary custodian of French charm. This aspect of the film is as dull as it is reductive—and it’s stuck somewhere in a Fifties time warp.

In a sense, Amélie depends on the maniacal cataloguing of signifiers of a caricature France: Jeunet nails every last one. But he cleverly opts for a tone that is modest rather than grandiose, and situates his film in the realm of the trivial. As the voiceover says of its heroine, the film “cultivates a particular taste for the small pleasures”—pleasures that, in the end, engage with nothing. And if the Kaganskian thesis of the film’s objective collusion with Jean-Marie LePen’s anti-immigrant platform seems a bit excessive, it must be said that the so-called poetry that trickles through Amélie depends on a profoundly reactionary impulse—the reinstatement of a cliché snapshot image of France in order to reaffirm its enduring value. Amélie is a film that folds back on itself, a chilling return to an obsolete iconography and a frighteningly closed vision of the world. Any attempt to explain the film’s success has to deal with its underlying idea: reconciliation. The reconciliation of France with itself, with its past and its past values, and with the idea that the neighborhood is the sole desirable horizon (and between you and me, the only place where we’ll be safe and sound). Finally, when all is said and done, we can all hold up our heads with pride.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Café Society Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, August 2001

Salon.com [Charles Taylor] November 2, 2001, also seen here: Amélie - Salon

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A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT (Un long dimanche de fiançailles) C 72

France (135 mi) 2003

A long, unengaging WWI romance story, adapted from the Sebastien Japrisot novel, that attempts to be overly clever and suggestively fanciful by taking ever more turns in the road, using voiceover narrative trickery, spinning this possibility into the next, all in an attempt to show how much in love with storytelling this filmmaker is, but he loses our attention early on. When the title says it all, the outcome was never in doubt. Everything else was overly done, moving back in forth in time, using military war caricatures in the soggy trenches rather than real personalities, then weaving players in and out of the story so often that we grow weary of every new plot twist. Always overly pampered, living on the edge of paradise, where she waits for her soldier to come home, near the crashing waves next to a lighthouse by the sea, playing a French horn, Audrey Tatou plays her usual role where if she thinks it, that’s all she needs to know to make it come true. Many others were delighted by the stylistic color palette and warm, eccentric film style, offering much high critical praise, some calling it among the very best of the year, but I never for a minute found this film interesting.

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet revisits his cartoon-paced juggling act last seen in Amelie for this WWI epic about a young war widow and polio survivor, Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) who becomes convinced that her fiancée Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) has survived against all odds. She spends years sleuthing and re-tracing the steps of his comrades, notably five men who tried to get out of military duty by self-mutilation. For Amelie, Jeunet's method heightened his delicate truffle of a story and turned it into a tough, sometimes raucous little comedy. Here he takes a horrible, tragic story -- from the book by Sebastien Japrisot -- and softens it with the same process. Jeunet criss-crosses seemingly hundreds of tiny storylines, involving such small things as contraband hot chocolate and a gravel path, using characters' most minute fears and desires as crucial plot devices. He also uses superimposed images in the corners of the frames to streamline his complicated cast of players and give us visual reminders of who's who. It's a beautiful accomplishment, even if it's not the triumph that Amelie is. Jeunet's precious storytelling structure sometimes rejects the truly horrific war tales, like puzzle pieces that fit together but do not reveal a matching picture. The ending especially leaves a strangely empty craving. The enormous cast features perfect little turns by Denis Lavant, Jodie Foster and many more.

A Very Long Engagement Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

After my tepid-to-irritated response to Amelie, I certainly never expected to like this one. As it turns out, Jeunet's precious visual style suits the historical epic quite nicely. The past, as Jeunet creates it via mise-en-scène and CGI, is a craggy yet flattened curio, a crumbling sepia photograph imbued with life by an almost petulant imagination. The impishness that was so overbearing in Amelie here serves to call forth the irretrievability of the past, but in a more complex manner than one finds in most costume dramas and war stories. It oscillates between the static and the gruesome, and manages to obviate nostalgia by dint of its weirdness. It helps that Jeunet is telling an actual story here, instead of just stringing together nifty vignettes. And remarkably, despite all this imposition of distance -- the sickly yellowed tone, the beneath-plate-glass flattening of foreground and background, the visceral ugliness of WW1, bodies not only blown to bits but not yet inured to modern warfare, redoubling the trauma -- Mathilde's romantic quest is reasonably affecting. Also -- who'd of thunk it? -- working within the vast tragic canvas of a war story actually makes Jeunet's little touches of whimsy relieving instead of cloying. They're the sugar lumps in the strong black coffee, not the treacly gingerbread walls that Amelie forced us to eat our way through. Far from perfect, lord knows, but a very pleasant surprise.

filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

Although there are likely better directors who could have been found to film Sebastien Japrisot’s World War I-set novel A Very Long Engagement than Jean-Pierre Jeunet, of City of Lost Children fame and Alien: Resurrection infamy, there are many more who would have been worse – and if that sounds like a backhanded insult, it’s not. The story of five French soldiers who are sentenced to death for self-inflicted wounds (done so that they could be evacuated from the front lines) and condemned to march out into the no man’s land between the Germans’ trenches and theirs, it’s a tricky mix of war epic, black comedy, and heart-stirring romance that would have left many filmmakers flummoxed. And although Jeunet takes some serious missteps and doesn’t know when to leave the jokes alone, he has mostly succeeded where many would have failed.

Although it starts off like a war film – opening in the muck and mire, as all good war films must – and gives us plenty of reason to understand why these soldiers shot themselves in the hand (a sort of purposeful self-stigmata), A Very Long Engagement is really about a woman trying to find her lost love. The woman, Mathilde, is played by Jeunet’s muse, Audrey Tautou, and though she doesn’t here have the near-angelic glow he gave her in Amelie, she’s plenty captivating nonetheless. Mathilde fell in love with her childhood friend, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), and we see their romance in flashback, all frolicking in their picturesque village, swooning episodes atop a lighthouse and innocent carnality. Then the war comes, and poor, fresh-faced Manech is sent off to the front, later to be one of the five hurled into no man's land by a callous military bureaucracy determined to make an example of them. After the war, Mathilde refuses to accept what seems obvious to everybody else, that Manech is dead, and she launches on a journey to dig up every last piece of information she can about the case and find out what happened to her one true love.

Now A Very Long Engagement is a Jeunet film, so even given this kind of high-concept romance, anyone expecting a foursquare kind of English Patient-style gloss will end up sorely disappointed. With his typically pixie-ish sense of humor, Jeunet brings a light and jaunty tone to a tale that could easily have been rendered brooding and overly artful. Thusly, the narrator continually relates the onscreen action like a gossipy best friend, with perfect comic timing, while bits of absurdity speckle the story, from Mathilde’s incongruous tuba-playing to a subplot about one of the dead soldiers’ lovers who resorts to impossibly complex methods of killing off those she believes responsible for his death. Jeunet also ratchets most of the performances up into the stratosphere, leaving little room left for subtlety.

Providing some nice ballast to some of the loony goings-on is a surprise turn from Jodie Foster, whose fluency in French helps her slip seamlessly into the otherwise all-Gallic cast. Her story is essentially extraneous to the main plot, but it’s a small gem regardless. As the wife of one of the soldiers, who is infertile but wants her to have a child regardless, the husband convinces her to sleep with his best friend, and although she does it against her wishes, the two of them end up falling in love. Melodramatic to a fault, it’s nevertheless the most real-seeming thing in the film, which can at times resemble a Belle Epoque bon bon, all quaint French villages and sweeping vistas of countryside.

Ravishing to look at and often quite touching, A Very Long Engagement is ultimately too manipulative to achieve true lasting greatness.

Slate (David Edelstein) November 29, 2004, also seen here: Amelie goes to war. - Slate Magazine

Salon.com [Charles Taylor] November 26, 2004, also seen here: War, wizardry and love - Salon.com

The Movie Review: 'A Very Long Engagement' - The Atlantic Christopher Orr

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Jewison, Norman

THE CINCINNATI KID

USA (102 mi) 1965

The Cincinnati Kid, directed by Norman Jewison | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrew

With Jewison replacing Peckinpah as director, nowhere near as strong as it might have been, but Ring Lardner and Terry Southern's script, taken from Richard Jessup's novel about poker-sharks meeting for a big game in '30s New Orleans, is a vivid character study in the tradition of the not dissimilar The Hustler. Marvellous performances throughout ensure interest.

Cinema Crazed [Felix Vasquez Jr.]

It’s well documented that Steve McQueen sported a hefty resentment toward Paul Newman and viewed him as a rival until the day he died. Though McQueen was known for being petty and resentful toward anyone who challenged his position as an actor, McQueen mostly aimed for Paul Newman. Naturally, since Newman was known for his iconic role as Fast Eddie Felson, a pool hustler battling against the one and only Jackie Gleason, a pool master named Minnesota Fats, McQueen followed up with his own version of the film, except with poker, and upped the ante by going up against Edward G. Robinson.

“Cincinnati Kid” is not a better film than “The Hustler” but it’s still a damn good bit of crime neo-noir that packs in all the usual McQueen film tropes, and has a blast trying to topple Newman’s film about billiards. Director Norman Jewison’s film centers on McQueen as “The Kid,” an up and coming dazzling poker player, who wants to challenge and old foe nicknamed “The Man” to a poker game that could decide future dealings in the sport for rivals of both men, many of whom engage in an endless series of blackmail and bribery. All the while “The Kid” wants to prove himself, and is stuck in a plot that could cost him his relationship with his wife.

McQueen has the fortune of starring alongside two incredibly beautiful women, both of whom vie for his loyalty amidst this war among poker champs. On the one side there’s gorgeous platinum blond Tuesday Weld asking for his affections. On the other side there’s the absolutely vivacious red head Ann Margret looking to pound his brains out as the vixen Melba. God, Steve McQueen really did have a hard time in life, didn’t he? Side note: Margret is unbelievably sexy, radiates sex appeal off the screen and is one of the slimiest femme fatales in cinema. Even after enduring a vicious smack on her backside by McQueen, she still looks amazing.

“Cincinnati Kid” while being a damn good McQueen film is also a very engrossing crime thriller where McQueen is able to show his abilities as the inadvertent hero out for his own gain. The great Edward G. Robinson is a show stealer as Lancey Howard, who becomes the center of everyone’s anger and spite. Jewison’s film has a steady and light hearted pace providing a welcome noir atmosphere without the grit and grime of the genre. “Cincinnati Kid” is a brilliant and utterly entertaining McQueen vehicle and one that fans of the actor will enjoy the most.

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

By 1964, Edward G Robinson had been making movies for 48 years and a Hollywood fixture for 35, during which time he had worked with pretty much all the top male stars in town: from Richard Barthelmess to Lew Ayres, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Lionel Barrymore, Victor MacLaglen, John Garfield, James Cagney, Joel McCrea, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Alan Ladd, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, Charles Laughton, Paul Robeson, Charles Boyer, Orson Welles, James Stewart, Richard Widmark, Glenn Ford, Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, Anthony Quinn, Jack Lemmon, Rod Steiger, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman.  

So he was, to say the least, very well placed to assess the merits and potential of his co-star in The Cincinatti Kid: a fresh-faced 34-year-old named Steve McQueen, who’d been propelled to superstardom only a few months before in The Great Escape (1963). This adds an extra touch of spice to a story which concerns a youthful upstart (McQueen) challenging the pre-eminent status of the America’s leading poker player (Robinson), at a high-stakes, high-tension game in the New Orleans of 1936. The parallel isn’t exact, of course: Robinson, even in his 1930s prime, was never anyone’s idea of a pin-up/heart-throb, and by the mid-sixties was more a beloved, skilled veteran rather than than box-0ffice champ.  

But still, one can sense a certain trepidation in McQueen’s underplaying as Eric “The Cincinatti Kid” Stoner, a laid-back but quietly ambitious sort whose preparations for the big game are somewhat undermined by issues in his private life: namely demure blonde farm-girl Christian (Tuesday Weld) and brunette bombshell Melba (Ann-Margret). The latter happens to be the wife of the Kid’s pal ‘The Shooter’ (Karl Malden), who happens to be selected as the game’s big dealer, who in turn is under pressure from shady businessman/gambler Slade (Rip Torn) to fix things to the Kid’s advantage. Further colour is provided by the back-up dealer, a flamboyant older lady nicknamed Lady Fingers (Joan Blondell), and by secondary players Pig (Jack Weston), Yeller (Cab Calloway) and Sokal (Milton Selzer).  

With an array of performers such as this, The Cincinatti Kid was never going to be entirely dull. But in the hands of director Jewison – working from a script by Terry Southern and Ring Lardner Jr, adapting Richard Jessup’s novel – it comes disappointingly close. A satisfactory balance is never quite found between the card-playing and off-table activities and, crucially, McQueen is strangely subdued – perhaps aware that he has no chance of making much impact against Robinson, who is on prime, gimlet-eyed form and knows how to dominate every scene with apparently minimal effort (only Blondell, who’s gifted a much more flamboyant role, is occasionally able to upstage the upstager.)  

The Kid (as he’s invariably referred to) is undeniably en epitome of insouciant cool, of course – it helps that McQueen is arrayed in 1960s duds and haircut, whereas everyone else is dressed in period-appropriate costume. But this, added to some pretty basic anachronisms of background detail, makes for a naggingly confusing then distracting element in a slightly underplotted movie (Torn isn’t much of a “villain”), one which too often bogs down in semi-impenetrable inside-baseball discussions of hands, bets and poker-faced gambling gambits.

The Cincinnati Kid - TCM.com Scott McGee

The Cincinnati Kid (1965) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Paul Sherman

The Cincinnati Kid (1965) - Articles - TCM.com

Poker Review: <i>The Cincinnati Kid</i> - Hard-Boiled Poker Short Stacked Shamus

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Film Notes - Cincinnati Kid - University at Albany Kevin Hagopian

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The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] The Essential Steve McQueen Collection

dOc DVD Review: The Cincinnati Kid (1965) - digitallyOBSESSED! Nate Meyers

DVD Verdict [Brett Cullum]

Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]

Reel Reviews Loron Hays, Blu-Ray

Draxblog Movie Reviews Dragan Antulov

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

Steve McQueen Movies: 'Bullitt,' 'The Cincinnati Kid' - Alt Film Guide Andre Soares

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Classic Film Guide

examiner.com [Christopher Granger]

Movie Review - - The Cincinnati Kid' - NYTimes.com Howard Thompson

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

The Cincinnati Kid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT

USA (109 mi) 1967

In the Heat of the Night | Eventful Movies

African-American Philadelphia police detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) is arrested on suspicion of murder by Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger), the racist police chief of tiny Sparta, Mississippi. After Tibbs proves not only his own innocence but that of another man, he joins forces with Gillespie to track down the real killer. Their investigation takes them through every social level of the town, with Tibbs making enemies as well as unlikely friends as he hunts for the truth.

In the Heat of the Night - TCM.com Jerry Renshaw

In 1967 it was not only unusual to have a non-white actor in a leading role; it was nearly unheard of. In The Heat of the Night's gamble paid off, though, when the film brought home Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Film Editing and Best Screenplay. The story of a big-city black detective stumbling into a murder case in a sleepy Southern town brought together an unusually rich collection of talent. Rod Steiger was a graduate of New York's Actors Studio and one of the earliest students of Method acting, while Sidney Poitier had broken ground with roles that no African-American actor had taken on before. The chemistry between the two onscreen was sharp and complex, while still confined to the framework of a mystery/police procedural.

In his autobiography, My Life, Poitier recalls his experience with Steiger playing Police Chief Bill Gillespie; "On weekends when we ventured out to a movie or dinner, he would remain completely immersed in the character of the Southern sheriff - he spoke with the same accent and walked with the same gait, on and off camera. I was astonished at the intensity of his involvement with the character."

In the Heat Of The Night fit in well with the canons of screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, director Jewison and cinematographer Haskell Wexler. Silliphant went on to pen the poignant Charly (1968) and another racially-tinged drama, The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970). Wexler brought a harsh, realistic look to films like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and documentaries like No Nukes (1980), later working on such socially-conscious fare as Matewan (1987) and Coming Home (1978). With In The Heat of the Night's performances and screenplay drawing so much of the viewer's attention, Wexler's camera work almost takes a backseat, but his shot compositions and angles complement the movie's mood perfectly.

Shot in the small towns of Dyersburg, Tennessee and Freeburg, Belleville, and Sparta, Illinois, In The Heat of the Night had the perfect atmosphere of a stifling rural town in the South, the type of place where every newcomer is eyed with suspicion. Quincy Jones' rootsy, innovative score mingled elements of country blues, bluegrass and rock to evoke the languid tension of the town perfectly.

Tibbs posed several problems to the locals, not only as an outsider and a black man; his knowledge of police work and forensics threatened to embarrass the local police and make them look like backwoods hicks. It would have been easy to make Gillespie's character a stereotypical, loudmouthed Southern bigot, but screenwriter Sterling Silliphant imbued him with much more depth than that. By the same turn, Tibbs is shown to be a flawed man as well, with his own pride and cleverness often getting in his way. As the film unfolds, Gillespie and Tibbs slowly come to the realization that they have more in common than they'd like to admit, and even begin to develop a grudging respect for each other. Thus, a movie that could easily have become obvious and heavy-handed is instead a subtle, character-driven gem.

In the Heat of the Night | PopMatters Stuart Henderson

In the Heat of the Night, winner of 1967’s Best Picture Oscar, tells the story of a black detective from the urban north who helps a bunch of bumbling racists in a Mississippi backwater town solve a murder.  Hailed in its day for its unswerving portrait of the bigotry, ignorance, and prejudice that infects the American South, Norman Jewison’s didactic film is a classic example of liberal guilt as entertainment. 

This preposterous detective film relies on its audience’s belief— prejudice, really— in the complete backwardness of the American South. Indeed, it paints the white police force (the whole town!) as simple, hopeless rednecks, adrift in the complicated world of homicide investigation, and utterly in need of an urbane northerner for assistance. But, horror of horrors, this urbane northerner is a Negro!

If this particular approach seems ham-fisted, well it is. But, to a 1967 audience filled with the kind of northern liberals who had watched for years as the George Wallaces and Bull Connors of the South had steadfastly refused to curtail their segregationist practices, institutions, and laws, this kind of over-the-top depiction of Ole Miss made sense. It’s just that today, of course, you’ll need to watch it with the benefit of hindsight and historical perspective in mind.

The concept of liberal guilt as entertainment isn’t going anywhere, as the otherwise implausible success of Paul Haggis’ glorified B-movie, Crash – winner of Best Picture itself a couple years ago – attests. White, middle class, well-educated, Blue State, northern and urban individuals (and that includes similarly-described Canadians such as myself) generally love movies like this. Such films are designed to make us feel good about ourselves, about our convictions, our passion for justice and equality. But most importantly, they allow us to engage with the horrors of an unjust, un-equal world from the imagined perspective of a minority identity.

In the Heat of the Night was significant not only because it demonstrated Hollywood’s shifting approach to cultural politics – it was released the same year as another, similarly contrived Poitier vehicle, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? – but also because it put Poitier’s character at the centre of the action. In both of those celebrated 1967 pictures, we were Poitier, we were the victims of racism, and it was we who felt his frustrations. Indeed, we were all unwanted visitors at both the Drayton’s dinner table, and in the stifling hamlet of Sparta, Mississippi.

This proto-buddy film is saved somewhat by the intensity of the performances, especially from its two leads. Steiger impressively turns an intense, barking dog of a Chief of Police into a multi-leveled (if not complex) character through little more than rapid-fire outbursts and incessant gum-chewing. (His Oscar was certainly well-deserved, if only for his dedication to the character-making chomping: it is said that he went through over 250 packages of the stuff during filming!) And Poitier’s eyes burn with such passion, such incredulous anger, that he carries entire scenes on his shoulders. No matter how many times you watch it, his delivery of the classic line “They call me MISTER Tibbs!” remains incendiary. Perhaps this is why he has often claimed that In the Heat of the Night was his favourite of all of his films.

But, good as the performances are, isn’t it all a bit disingenuous? With such a contrived plot – how often did black police officers rise to the top of the Philadelphia Homicide Division in the mid-60s, and how likely is it that they would be leant out to solve murders in other jurisdictions? – the only way to get caught up in this film is to treat it as fantasy.

The problem is the film tries to have it both ways. Its fantastic plot drives an otherwise “realist” film offering broad social commentary. Consequently Jewison’s movie, from the opening credits, is in a double bind. The only way to overcome this sizable problem as an audience member is to want to identify with the politics of the film badly enough that you don’t bother thinking much about the nonsensical set up.

Think, again, of 2005’s Crash – if you can’t forgive the extraordinary unlikelihood of just about every single thing that happens in the movie, let alone the heavy-handed screenplay and its constant reminders of the film’s moralizing purpose, then it’s not much of a movie. But, if it makes you want to stand up and cheer when you are reminded of how liberal and good and righteous are your beliefs, then maybe, just maybe, it’ll work, and it’ll win Best Picture.

In the Heat of the Night stands as an early example of this kind of filmmaking – it may even be the archetype. As the two mismatched men fight each other at every turn before they finally work together to solve the crime (and, wouldn’t you know it, a sex-crazed white girl was the real bad guy here! Replace the old race stereotypes with gender and sexuality anxiety!), we are finally shown that these anxieties might just have something in common, after all. In the end, the white, racist, bigoted Chief of Sparta’s police force has gained a bit of respect for our hero, Mr. Tibbs. And all of us non-racists can feel good because we respected him all along.

This 40th Anniversary edition (which, incidentally, is off by a year) includes an interesting commentary track, a short documentary on Quincy Jones’ influential score, and two more substantial, self-congratulatory docs on the racial politics of the film.

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In the Heat of the Night Erik Lundergaard

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Classic Film Guide

In the Heat of the Night | Variety A.D. Murphy

Cleveland Press [Tony Mastroianni]

The Best 10 Movies of 1967 | Roger Ebert's Journal | Roger Ebert listed as #10, but surprisingly never reviewed

100 great movie moments | Roger Ebert's Journal | Roger Ebert

New York Times [Bosley Crowther]

DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

In the Heat of the Night (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR

USA (102 mi) 1968

The Thomas Crown Affair | East Bay Express

Bored millionaire Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) concocts and executes a brilliant scheme to rob a bank without having to do any of the work himself. When Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway), an investigator for the bank's insurance company, takes an interest in Crown, the two begin a complicated cat-and-mouse game with a romantic undertone. In an attempt to decipher Anderson's agenda, Crown devises another robbery like his first, wondering if he can get away with the same crime twice.

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Theo Alexander]

One of the best openings of any film; a sequence that had me thinking I was going to see something life-changing. It was, in its own way, but it transformed following Thomas Crown’s meeting with Vicki (Faye Dunaway) when the film becomes a sort of twisted love story. The first half involves an amazing heist which ends with the perpetrator, Thomas Crown, smoking a cigar and laughing to himself in a large three-story mansion. The protagonist is best defined by his total indifference, self-absorption, his mounting and inexplicable wealth, and rebellious attitude which involves “beating the system”.

Altogether, Crown feels like a character born out of a Tom Wolfe novel, and his whole being exudes a kind of suave repulsiveness that draws the viewer in; a state of being and living that is strangely delightful to watch. He uses the wealth generated by his perfectly-executed heist (and motivated by nothing but a self-fulfilling challenge to outsmart the system) to live a strange life where he plays golf, drives along a beach at unsurpassable speeds, and bakes in the sun, which is justification, I guess, for Steve McQueen’s disturbing and unnatural complexion.

Here, an abundance of stylistic touches and the lead’s untouchable allure turns the film into comedy – whether intentionally or unintentionally, The Thomas Crown Affair is hilarious. But when Vicki introduces herself to Thomas, in an attempt to prove his part in devising the heist, the film transcends its own nature; she injects our protagonist with some semblance of emotion, a flicker of humanity, if only briefly, before she is left alone again, victim of Crown’s elusive, enticing, immoral and infuriating persona. The film revels in an array of clashing colours, in countless close-ups, in a kind of manufactured and comical self-indulgence and excess, a fitting soundtrack which accompanies the unusual and overused use of camera tricks. Vicki plays Crown very well; she is as close as it comes to McQueen’s equivalent in a female; her casual indifference at work, her absolute denial to be a part of the system that she, herself, is tied to and paid by, her perpetual greed and charming depravity.

It is the despicable nature of its two main characters which makes The Thomas Crown Affair  such a fascinating film – we can watch from a detached and distant position. Their problems and concerns mean very little to us, but the filmmaking pushes them out of the screen like vivid caricatures of real people, well-crafted models of the real thing. It is the lack of anything real in the film that both pushes the viewer away, repulses, and draws them in.

The Thomas Crown Affair - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Rich Watts

An utterly stylish and compelling runaround heist movie, the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair finds Steve McQueen nonchalantly living up to his epithet as the “King of Cool.” McQueen plays a bored tycoon for whom careering about in a dune buggy, hand-gliding above an adoring female companion and riding horseback for a speedy game of polo are not enough. Instead, he becomes the mastermind behind a bank heist. Though not in need of the money, the adrenaline rush of the crime propels Thomas Crown through his otherwise “normal” life until insurance investigator Faye Dunaway turns up on the scene and compromises the scheme with romance.

The Thomas Crown Affair is a sumptuous movie, containing the kind of cinematography and attention to colour that Steven Soderbergh successfully acknowledged in Ocean’s 11 (and 12). From the start, as the striking lyrics of “Windmills Of Your Mind” introduce the credits, The Thomas Crown Affair exudes a confidence and class that immediately suggest a world centred around one individual—a man in control of the film’s every detail and every possible outcome.

Throughout The Thomas Crown Affair we also have split screen images which, amongst other functions, captures the pace and excitement of a heist, offering different perspectives as well as propelling the action from location to location. The technique encapsulates the excitement Thomas Crown himself must be experiencing whilst he plans his crimes and outwits the chasing police. The split screen also offers blurred frames, which represent the intrigue engendered by Crown’s actions: what motivates him is far from clear. Slowly, it is hoped, things will come into focus; in this case, hoping is all that can be done for the man at the centre remains an enigma throughout.

McQueen is recorded as having said: “In my own mind, I’m not sure that acting is something for a grown man to be doing.” Presumably, driving fast cars and flying aeroplanes were more the activities he had in mind for grown men to be concentrating on. As Thomas Crown, McQueen followed the playboy lifestyle on-screen many in the audience suspected he actually lived. Debonair, handsome and exceptionally cool, Thomas Crown epitomised the alpha-male, the kind of man that can make—of all things—a game of chess a fine technique in seduction.

It is fitting, of course, that under the supervision of Die Hard director John McTiernan, Pierce Brosnan took over the role of Thomas Crown for the superior 1999 remake. For what better individual could fill the boots of a charming playboy than the man who had already filled the boots of the ultimate charming playboy, James Bond? The only difference between the two being that 007 was the Good Guy. Yet Crown is hardly a criminal; indeed, one suspects the men in any audience wouldn’t mind being Thomas Crown whilst the women, to continue the saying, wouldn’t mind being with him. Whichever the preference, it is a fair reflection of the super cool hero that was Steve McQueen.

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

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Illumined Illusions-Seeing Cinema in a New Light [Ian C. Bloom] also seen here: THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, THE (1968)

Cinema de Merde

KQEK Mark R. Hasan

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) — Art of the Title

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) | Journeys in Classic Film Kristen

20/20 Movie Reviews [Richard Cross]

Tatum Archive Blog [Charles Tatum] also seen here: eFilmCritic Reviews

DVD Verdict [Dave Ryan] also seen here: DVD Verdict - 2005 Release [Dave Ryan]

dOc DVD Review: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) Jon Danziger

Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]

High-Def Digest [Steven Cohen] Blu-Ray

The Video Vacuum [Mitch Lovell]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz

The Thomas Crown Affair - Chess.com reviewing the chess scenes

Qwipster.net [Vince Leo]

TV Guide review

Variety

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert]

Movie Review - - Screen: 'The Thomas Crown Affair':Film Stars ... Renata Adler from The New York Times, also seen here: The Thomas Crown Affair - The New York Times and here: The New York Times

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

GAILY, GAILY

USA (107 mi) 1969

reelingback.com [Michael Walsh]

NORMAN JEWISON IS a director who delights in subtle touches. Toward the end of Gaily, Gaily he has an anarchist daub a brick wall with the slogan "down with critics!"  

Perhaps the screen-filling graffiti is Jewison's rejoinder to the critical drubbing taken by his The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), a flashy. vacuous film that invited attacks.

Gaily, Gaily, a thoroughly engaging movie, should have no such problems. With it, Jewison, a CBC-TV alumnus, asserts himself as one of Hollywood's most potent double-threat artists.

Playing the difficult dual role of producer-director on his last four projects, Jewison proves himself a superbly capable craftsman. Until now, however, he has had an irrepressible urge to make "meaningful" movies. With The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966), he narrowly missed a Nobel Peace Prize. In the Heat of the Night (1969) won the Best Picture Oscar. Then The Thomas Crown Affair laid an egg.

With Gaily, Gaily Jewison returns to the comedy milieu, adapting the late Ben Hecht's imaginative reminiscences of pre-First World War Chicago.    

The film's hero, Ben Harvey (Beau Bridges), is a small-town boy with growing pains. As captain of the high school gym team, he is top man on a human pyramid formed for the community's Fourth of July picnic.    

Momentarily distracted by his bird's-eye view of some particularly attractive decolletage, he falls from his perch and is knocked cold. He awakens knowing that he has lapsed from his strict upbringing and that he must now make his way to the Big City to seek Truth.    

For Ben, an innocent abroad, the road to Truth will be littered with shattered illusions. The first person he meets in Chicago picks his pocket, leaving him penniless and hungry. He is taken in by kindly Queen Lil (Melina Mercouri), only to find that his landlady is a notorious madam and her boarding house a bordello.    

An aspiring writer, Ben is given a job assisting ace reporter Francis Sullivan (Brian Keith), who turns out to be a hard-drinking yellow journalist. Soon, he is ready to join the rioting anarchist and daub his own slogan on the wall: "Down with innocence!"

Jewison's own message emerges during some frantic moments of street fighting. "Are you for truth and decency?" a fleeing demonstrator asks Ben. "Are you for love and peace? Are you against corruption?"    "

Yes! Yes! Yes!" answers Ben, keeping pace. 

"Then keep running!" 

True to his own advice, Jewison keeps his movie running from beginning to end. Together with cinematographer Richard Kline, he develops the period Chicago setting, America's second city and the world's largest small town.

Set against their muted-colour world are his blustering, full-blooded characters. Jewison is a tough-minded director with a sure comic touch, and his disciplined cast bring even the most outrageous of them to believable screen life.

Major contributions are made by Canadians Hume Cronyn, as machine politician "Honest" Tim Grogan, and Margot Kidder, making her big screen debut as Ben's sullied heartthrob Adeline.

But the movie's bounding pace is mainly due to the incredible, decaying innocence of youngster Bridges and the brawling brogue of veteran actor Keith. Playing amidst Jewison's inspiring touches, they carry off a real crowd-pleaser of a film.

NOTE TO ODEON'S ADVERTISING DEPARTMENT: One of your current radio spots tells us that young Ben is "on the loose in wild, prohibition Chicago." Not quite. The XVIIIth (prohibition) Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect in January, 1920, and was repealed by Christmas, 1933. The gin-soaked Chicago of Gaily, Gaily is set circa 1910 and predates the First World War. Honest.

AFTERWORD: Among my favourite Norman Jewison features, Gaily, Gaily includes a memorable moment when Beau Bridges, as cub reporter Ben Harvey, gets a lesson in the basics of big city journalism. Noting the young man's bewilderment on first hearing the term "sex maniac," his editor backs him across the city room, raising his voice so that everyone can hear. "And, Harvey, since you don't know what a sex maniac does, I will tell you. A good sex maniac SELLS NEWSPAPERS! "

The above is a restored version of a Vancouver Express review by Michael Walsh originally published in 1970. For additional information on this archived material, please visit my FAQ.

Gaily, Gaily - TCM.com David Sterritt

Gaily, Gaily (1969) got its title from a story collection by Ben Hecht, the legendary screenwriter, novelist, playwright, and occasional movie director. Published a year before his death in 1964, the book was written during the last productive period of Hecht's career, which he spent looking back on his colorful past, never hesitating to juice up the facts with large doses of poetic license.

He had an amazing past to look back on. Born in New York and raised in Racine, Wisconsin, he was a child violinist, a circus acrobat, and a Chicago reporter before he was out of his teens. Looking for a more lucrative trade, he set up shop as a Hollywood screenwriter, scripting classics such as Scarface (1932) and Notorious (1946) with remarkable speed. Set in the wild world of Chicago newspapers where Hecht started out as a writer, the stories in Gaily, Gaily were published in Playboy and other magazines before appearing between hard covers. The movie adaptation is the only feature-film screenplay by Abram S. Ginnes, a television writer and playwright who was blacklisted during the anticommunist witch hunt of the 1950s. Aside from the title, the only things he retained from Hecht's book were a few character names, the basic outlines of some plot episodes, and the general idea that Chicago in 1910 was a hotbed of cutthroat journalism, hugely corrupt politics, and frequent eruptions of rambunctious, hard-drinking fun. Ginnes also uses a typically wry Hecht quote to begin the picture: "If you did not believe in God, in the importance of marriage, in the United States government, in the sanity of politicians, in the wisdom of your elders, then you had to believe...in art." That's amusing enough, but it doesn't have anything to do with the movie, since the hero doesn't care much about art and is no more skeptical about society than other characters in the story.

Beau Bridges plays the Hecht character, Ben Harvey, a sixteen-year-old lad whose modest Illinois hometown affords few opportunities for sowing wild oats, of which he has a plentiful supply that are long overdue for sowing. Realizing that a healthy young man like Ben needs to broaden his horizons, his wizened old granny (Merie Earle) persuades his parents (John Randolph and Claudia Bryar) to pack him off to the big city. He arrives there in a state of hunger and confusion, since someone stole all his money on the train, but he has a stroke of luck when a sympathetic older woman (Melina Mercouri) takes him under her wing and invites him to live in her house, which is also occupied by a large number of scantily clad ladies. Her name is Queen Lil and you can guess what kind of house she runs; but Ben's upbringing in the boondocks has taught him next to nothing about the facts of life, and he's happily settled in with his new friends by the time their profession dawns on him. Lil also introduces him to a hard-nosed newspaperman (Brian Keith), who hires Ben as his assistant. Together they embark on a series of journalistic adventures involving Chicago politicians (Hume Cronyn, George Kennedy), an especially attractive member of Queen Lil's ménage (Margot Kidder), and a quack of a physician (Charles Tyner) who thinks a timely shot of adrenalin can literally raise the dead.

Gaily, Gaily director Norman Jewison has built much of his reputation on movies that explore topical issues and political themes, from In the Heat of the Night (1967) and A Soldier's Story (1984) to In Country (1989) and The Hurricane (1999), among others. Yet while Gaily, Gaily contains plenty of politicos, Jewison treats them only as figures of fun-dishonest rascals, to be sure, but safely tucked away in the nostalgically depicted past. Jewison came to Gaily, Gaily with little understanding of Chicago's riotous history, according to screenwriter Ginnes, who said later that Jewison's main concern with the city was whether its mayor, Richard J. Daley, would make it difficult to use the locations they wanted. Jewison arranged a meeting with Daley and arrived at the mayor's office with Ginnes, the art director, and the production manager, only to find that Daley was out of town. Already nervous about locations, and now angry with the city as well, Jewison was on the verge of flying back to Los Angeles and walking out on the picture-but then he saw a newspaper headline, explaining that Daley had fled the city because of a municipal scandal that went public the previous day. Deciding all this was a good introduction to rough-and-tumble Chicago politics, Jewison laughed it off and proceeded with the production as planned.

Gaily, Gaily garnered Academy Award nominations for costume design, art direction/set decoration, and sound. Its bright surfaces aside, though, some critics felt Jewison never did get a handle on Hecht's boisterous vision of Chicago in bygone times. Pauline Kael considered Hecht to be the greatest of all American screenwriters, but faulted Jewison for making the picture "artistic" in ways that violated Hecht's unpretentious realism. When the director "opens a scene through jewelled droplets on a window," she wrote in her New Yorker review, "one can almost hear Hecht roaring obscenities."

Taking the opposite view, New York Times critic Vincent Canby thought Hecht would have found Gaily, Gaily to be a movie of "great and exuberant charm." Canby admits the picture is based on questionable premises-that "harddrinking newspapermen are lovable," for instance--and he notes that while Hecht was a Jewish man born in New York, the filmmakers portray Ben Harvey as "a prototype Anglo-Saxon rube of epic naiveté." Yet the film succeeds, Canby wrote, because Jewison and Ginnes show such respect for the classic conventions of American farce, because Bridges and the supporting cast give first-rate comic performances, and because Jewison captures old Chicago scenes in touching and convincing ways. Hecht might not have recognized this Chicago, the critic concludes, but Mark Twain and Charles Dickens would have loved it.

the passionate moviegoer: cinema obscura: Norman Jewison's "Gaily ... Joe Baltake

Scopophilia: Movies of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]

GAILY, GAILY by Ben Hecht | Kirkus Reviews book review

Gaily, Gaily - Film4

TV Guide

Variety

New York Times [Vincent Canby]

Gaily, Gaily - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

F.I.S.T.

USA (145 mi) 1978

DVD Talk [Scott Weinberg]

Fresh off the box office, awards, and critical successes of the original Rocky, Sylvester Stallone had a chance to write his own ticket in Hollywood. Following the pugilistic sensation of 1976, Sly took a year off before sitting down at his typewriter and working on a few new screenplays. One was the rather unintentionally hilarious Paradise Alley, but right before that was the period drama known as F.I.S.T., a long and sprawling story about the birth of American unions, and one of the two flicks that predicated the arrival of Rocky 2 in 1979.

F.I.S.T. is easily the better of the two "in between" projects, mainly because Stallone was working with a talented director (Norman Jewison) and a first-time scribe known as Joe Eszterhas. (Joe would go on to become one of Hollywood's wealthiest directors, thanks mainly to his work on Flashdance, Jagged Edge, and Basic Instinct.)

We open with Sly playing a box-lugging nobody who works for a rather unpleasant group of men. Wholly responsible for any broken shipments, forced to work overtime for no pay, and basically treated like rotten crap, John Kovak and his co-workers are just this close to being royally fed up. But what's a 1930's box-lugger to do? Employers weary of complaining can simply toss an entire crew out onto the street and pick up a completely new one tomorrow morning.

But when Kovak meets up with a union truck driver named Mike Monaghan, it's a chance encounter that will change a whole lot of lives. (And not necessarily for the better.) Along with his best buddy, Abe, Kovak takes to the world of unionization like a duck to water. But, as things often happen in movies like this, all the good intentions in the world act only as pavement to lies, greed, and corruption.

Spanning 20+ years and featuring a few (often unpleasant) surprises, F.I.S.T. seems like it wants to be the Godfather of union stories, and if it's not nearly that successful, it's still more than watchable enough ... despite a healthy handful of seriously slow spots.

Jewison brings the 1930s to life in fine fashion, and the screenplay (co-authored by Stallone and Eszterhas) succeeds despite being stuffed with generally stock characters and frequently predictable situations. If F.I.S.T. has one notable flaw, it's that the thing runs on a whole lot longer than it logically needs to. One suspects that the "longer is better" approach is borne from an unspoken rule that says any movie over 140 minutes is an "important" movie, but this is a flick that could be a whole lot better with a good 25 minutes snipped out.

Stallone, for his part, does a surprisingly fine job in his quieter moments, but on the few occasions that he's asked to raise his voice and express some outraged indignation, the actor becomes a roaring caricature ... and it's pretty darn silly to behold. Fortunately there are several veteran actors on hand to keep the movie moving along, most notably Peter Boyle as a hothead union official, Tony Lo Bianco as a sneaky-slick mafioso, Kevin Conway as a mid-level knuckle-breaker, and Rod Steiger as a pissed-off senator.

F.I.S.T. (1978) - Articles - TCM.com Eleanor Quin

In between Rocky's punches and Rambo's carnage, Sylvester Stallone attempted a serious drama about a fist. Actually, F.I.S.T., to be more precise - an acronym for Federated Inter-State Truckers. Released in 1978, this often-overlooked film stars the action hero as the rising leader in a Cleveland truckers' union organization during the Depression. Alternating between political marches and courtroom confrontations, the film, nevertheless, has its share of action sequences ranging from mob violence to full-scale riots to bloody confrontations between the police and the strikers. F.I.S.T. is also imbued with a post-Watergate paranoia while advocating a return to populism.

Despite the film's low profile during its initial run, F.I.S.T. boasts considerable wealth in cast and crew talent. Stallone, who achieved superstar success with Rocky (1976) two years earlier - a film he not only starred in but wrote as well - would soon reinvent himself as another action icon by playing John Rambo in First Blood in 1982.

Stallone contributed to the screenplay for F.I.S.T., sharing a co-writing credit with Joe Eszterhas. No stranger to controversy, Eszterhas has penned such infamous screenplays as Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995). Bill Conti composed the film's score, while legendary cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs lensed the picture. Conti, known for the musical direction of several Oscar ceremonies, also scored an Oscar himself in 1984 in the Best Music category for The Right Stuff (1983). In another Stallone connection, he also had a number one hit with the song "Gonna Fly Now", the theme from Rocky. Kovacs' credits include such classics as Easy Rider (1969), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Five Easy Pieces (1970). Norman Jewison took the reins as director, adding another eclectic credit to his repertoire. Perhaps best known as the director of In the Heat of the Night (1967), winner of the 1968 Best Picture Oscar, Jewison's filmography also includes works like the original The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Moonstruck (1987), and the recent Denzel Washington vehicle, The Hurricane (1999). F.I.S.T., however, remains one of the director's lesser known movies; in an interview about it he remarked, "Somehow I failed. Maybe it was the casting."

Jewison might have been referring to Stallone but "the Italian Stallion" was in some pretty good company this time, anchored by veteran actor Rod Steiger. F.I.S.T. also marked the second time Jewison directed the Method actor - the first being In the Heat of the Night (a performance for which Steiger earned an Oscar), and again in The Hurricane. Steiger is also known for his powerhouse performance alongside Brando in On the Waterfront (1954), and perhaps more infamously for turning down the title role in Patton (1970), a decision he called his "dumbest career move." His F.I.S.T. co-star Peter Boyle could relate: the actor who played the tap-dancing monster in Young Frankenstein (1974) once refused the role of Popeye Doyle in The French Connection (1971). Boyle has found more recent success with the television series Everybody Loves Raymond, on which he plays the cantankerous and callous father. Brian Dennehy, known for his gruff and burly screen presence in films like Semi-Tough (1978) and Silverado (1985), rounds out the tough-guy supporting cast. Most recently the actor had a victory on Broadway with the lead role in Death of a Salesman. Melinda Dillon appears in one of the few female roles in F.I.S.T. A versatile character actress, she is best remembered for her roles as the mother in both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and A Christmas Story (1983). Fans of the music band Red Hot Chili Peppers should have a lookout for Cole Dammett, a.k.a. Anthony Kiedis, the group's lead singer--he has a bit part in the film.

F.I.S.T. | Film at The Digital Fix Mike Sutton

"F.I.S.T." by Ernest Larsen - Ejumpcut.org Where are you Jimmy? by Ernest Larsen from Jump Cut, December 1978

Daniel Fienberg -- Epinions

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

MOONSTRUCK

USA (102 mi) 1982

Moonstruck, directed by Norman Jewison | Film review - Time Out

Jewison's Italo-American movie mainly comprises the look of things: the family table, the homely Italian restaurant, Cher, the moon over Brooklyn Bridge. Widowed Loretta (Cher), engaged to dull Johnny (Aiello), contacts his brother Ronny (Cage) to invite him to the wedding; they fall in love. Her father (Gardenia), too, is having an affair. Both adulterer and suitor seem driven to passion by depression, though Cage's hammy performance convinces less than Gardenia's glooming over his glasses. Jewison gently mocks the old ways of formal respect and sexism. Stronger on mores than amore, a half smile for a summer night.

Crisp Script Gives `Moonstruck` That Special Glow - tribunedigital ... Dave Kehr from The Chicago Tribune

There`s much that`s distressingly synthetic about ``Moonstruck,`` a romantic comedy about theatrically emotional Italian-Americans living in Brooklyn Heights that was filmed largely in Toronto by Canadian director Norman Jewison. But the screenplay by John Patrick Shanley (he`s an Irishman from the Bronx) nonetheless is a very knowing piece of work. It revives some neglected but beloved conventions, makes judicious borrowings from movies past and toys expertly with the audience`s expectations.

It`s a movie that`s smart enough to give the public what it wants just a few beats after we`ve realized that we want it. No matter what its limitations may be, ``Moonstruck`` is a film that plays beautifully in a crowded theater, and that is nothing to be sneezed at.

Shanley has borrowed his basic structure, as well as much of his hushed, vaguely mystical romanticism, from Ingmar Bergman`s 1955 ``Smiles of a Summer Night``-a film itself heavily dependent on Mozart`s operas, though the main musical work in citation here is Puccini`s ``La Boheme.`` Back again is Bergman`s elegant, multilayered plotting, which compares and contrasts the romantic entanglements (and romantic successes) of three couples as they are worked out over the course of a few short days. Brooding over it all is the magical image of the moon-not Bergman`s slight, wistful Scandinavian moon, but the one that ``hits your eye like a big pizza pie`` in Dean Martin`s rendition of ``That`s Amore,`` which serves as ``Moonstruck`s`` theme song.

Cher, as the young widow Loretta Castorini, enters the film in artfully frumpy clothes, minimal makeup and a forelock discreetly tinged with gray. She`s an accountant who works for the family merchants in her cozy brownstone neighborhood, and she has at long last decided to accept the proposal of a prosperous local businessman, Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello). She does not love Cammareri but sees him as an acceptable hedge against the loneliness that has invaded her life since the death of her husband.

When her fiance departs for Sicily to tend to his ailing mother, Loretta is charged with inviting his estranged younger brother to their wedding. One look at Ronny (Nicolas Cage), his biceps gleaming in the light of the bakery oven it is his job to tend, is enough to reactivate Loretta`s long dormant passions. They make love, they go to Puccini`s opera, they stare at the moon, and before long the gray forelock has vanished in the curls of a new hairdo. Aided by eye shadow and a new wardrobe, love has transformed frumpy Loretta into a startlingly glamorous figure-startlingly, in fact, like Cher.

Playing in counterpoint are the stories of Loretta`s father (Vincent Gardenia), a middle-aged man whose increasing fear of death has led him to step out on Loretta`s mother (Olympia Dukakis, who delivers a dry turn that will certainly be remembered at Oscar time), and of Loretta`s aunt and uncle

(Julie Bovasso and Louis Guss), an eternally happy couple who provide the movie`s baseline of romantic fulfillment.

Taken individually, Shanley`s characters are familiar and even trite

(their individuality is largely limited to a sitcom-style assignment of a single comic gesture or signature phrase). It`s in the orchestration of those characters, their carefully timed comings and goings and the transitions between the levels of the plot, that Shanley`s appeal lies. Building his contrasts-the swooningly romantic played against the deflatedly sarcastic, blatant images of life and love set against a constant undercurrent of death and disappointment-Shanley creates a lively, rich-feeling texture. It isn`t great art-it`s too closely concentrated on immediate emotional effect for that-but it is highly sophisticated craftsmanship.

Faced with the gleaming machinery of Shanley`s script, director Jewison doesn`t have much to do but put it in motion-the project seems close to being director-proof, and even actor-proof. Cher brings off her transformation with at least as much style as Bette Davis in ``Now Voyager`` (if not much more convincingly) and Cage has relinquished enough of his hangdog mannerisms to establish himself as a credible leading man. However, the real star of the creative team may be cinematographer David Watkin, whose high, silvery lighting bathes the drama in a gentle, appropriate moonglow.

The Onion A.V. Club [Mike D'Angelo]

For roughly a decade, from the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, Nicolas Cage was my favorite contemporary movie star, mostly because he seemed intent upon turning the very idea of “movie star” on its head. Nearly every performance back then was a fearless high-wire act, regardless of the context, to the point where he was sometimes accused of sabotage (particularly vis-à-vis his bizarrely adenoidal turn in Peggy Sue Got Married). Often, he seemed to be acting in a completely different—and usually far more interesting—movie than any of his costars. Cage’s instincts were so reckless at that time that watching him simply enter a room and sit down could produce the same nervous tension viewers experience as the Final Girl navigates a deserted house in some horror flick. A sense of genuine danger accompanied him from role to role, as if at any moment, we might witness some sort of unscripted, inexplicable act of self-combustion.

That incarnation of Nicolas Cage no longer exists, needless to say. Oh, we still get the occasional glimpse: He roused himself to play a dual fake version of Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation, and 2009’s batshit Bad Lieutenant remake featured far and away the most old-school Cage performance since he won the Oscar and turned into a bland action figure almost overnight. But those are offbeat art movies, directed by the likes of Spike Jonze and Werner Herzog—risk-taking comes with the territory. What I miss are the conventional, mainstream pictures in which Cage comes across like a visitor from another era, if not another planet. Moonstruck, most of all, defies rational explanation—if there’s a stranger, more alienating introduction to a romantic male lead in American movies, I’m not aware of it, and I desperately need to be. Take a look:

Now, John Patrick Shanley, who won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Moonstruck, deserves a huge amount of the credit for this scene, which is shot and performed almost word-for-word as he wrote it. (I looked up the shooting script online, mostly because I was curious about whether Cage improvised the repetition of “and I bake bread, bread, bread.” He didn’t.) Shanley was (and still is) primarily a playwright, but he’s that rare playwright whose deliberate theatricality works as well on the screen as on the stage; his dialogue is stylized, but in a floridly terse way, with characters speaking so directly that the plain becomes oddly poetic. In fact, this particular scene is so well written, and so deftly invests a heap of expository backstory with supercharged emotion that it nearly renders superfluous the 25 minutes of Moonstruck that precede it. You could really start the movie right here, without bothering to “establish” Cher’s character or the milieu. It’d certainly be arresting.

Nonetheless, I’m glad for the delay, because Cage transforms a character who reads as generically intense and tortured on the page into a walking open wound, and it’s more fun to experience that as a sudden intrusion. This performance verges on parody, but it wouldn’t be nearly as effective if Cage didn’t at the same time come across as utterly sincere—he’s cranked the alienation, heartbreak, and self-pity up to 11, but there’s no winking involved. Punctuating each individual word of the lament “I lost my hand! I lost my bride!” with a violent stabbing gesture at the wooden hand, raised high in the air, is exactly the sort of inspired, operatic overkill that seemed to just come naturally to Cage in those days. (He also hits the words “Huh? Sweetie?” as if they were tiny stilettos, just seconds before repeatedly demanding the big knife.) Even in what passes for repose, his facial expressions somehow seem larger than life, as if he’s managed to enlarge his features to make himself look more piteous.

Shame that the filmmaking doesn’t support him more. Watching this scene again after many years—almost certainly for the first time since I started paying close attention to cinematic form as well as content—all I could think was “Stop with the goddamn reaction shots.” To be fair, there’s one that works beautifully: A view of the other baker looking on, concerned, as Cage, in mid-rant, crosses the frame from left to right in front of him. But that’s the exception. Otherwise, director Norman Jewison, who’s never been especially renowned for his visual brio, simply shoots everyone else in the room in medium close-up and cuts to them seemingly at random, as a repeated reminder that Cage has an intimidated audience. You rarely see editing that flat and dully functional on sitcoms these days, much less in Hollywood features. Here, it only serves to undercut the power of Cage’s performance, making it feel as if the film is telling us, via the reactions of the supporting characters, how we should respond to his passion.

As you may recall, Cher, not Cage, won an Oscar for this movie. Her work isn’t remotely as impressive or memorable, in my opinion, but she earns my respect for playing this scene as calmly and impassively as she does (except when Jewison gooses her with his damn reaction shots—we didn’t need to see her do a “startled” take after Cage punches the can off the table). Even when an actor has the vehicle role, and knows (s)he’ll have plenty of other opportunities to emote elsewhere in the picture, I have to imagine it’s a challenge to more or less concede an entire scene to a co-star and just stand there doing not much of anything. But that’s exactly what Cher does: not much of anything. And that’s just what this scene needed from her. I don’t know if you could call that great acting, but it’s certainly good acting, and it makes me feel a little better about Holly Hunter getting totally robbed for Broadcast News.

Cage, sadly, wasn’t even nominated. In fact, his first Oscar nomination was for Leaving Las Vegas—prior to that, during the entirety of what I consider to be his Golden Age, he was completely ignored. Not that that’s remotely unusual, of course. (See also Johnny Depp.) And given the mostly dire turn his career path took after he finally did get some recognition, maybe it was for the best. Part of what makes insane acting so appealing is that it doesn’t seek external validation. It exists for its own sake—for the sheer pleasure of being singular and unexpected. Cage both did and didn’t give a shit, once upon a time, and that was what made him special.

Classic Eighties film review: Moonstruck–a wonderfully whole work of ... Hadley Hury from The Flaneur

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1987 [Erik Beck]

Nonstop 80s [Chris Stopper]

Thrill Me Softly [Stefan Hedmark]

Illumined Illusions--Seeing Cinema in a New Light [Ian C. Bloom]

Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]

Classic Film & TV Cafe [R.B. Armstrong]

Friday Film Review: Moonstruck - Dear Author Jayne

NightsAndWeekends.com [Kristin Dreyer Kramer]

Classic Film Freak Greg Orypeck

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]

DVD Talk - Deluxe Edition (Preston Jones)

DVD Clinic [Scott Weinberg]

Home Theater Info DVD [Douglas MacLean]

Blu-ray.com (Blu-ray) [Michael Reuben]

High-Def Digest [Aaron Peck] Blu-Ray

DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Moonstruck Glenn Erickson

Blu-rayDefinition.com Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

Film Intuition: Blu-ray [Jen Johans]

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Michael Rubino]

Movie Scribes (Blu-ray) [Neil]

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

Moonstruck (1987) - Movie Review / Film Essay - Gone With The Twins Mike Massie

Moonstruck - TCM.com Mel Neuhaus

Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]

Groucho Reviews: Moonstruck

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

Wes Anderson's Favorite Films: Moonstruck, Rosemary's Baby, and ... Josh Jones from Open Culture, March 5, 2014

Wes Anderson’s 10 Favorite New York Movies Jacob E. Osterhout from The New York Daily News

Moonstruck | Variety

Washington Post [Rita Kempley]

MOVIE REVIEWS : Holiday Fare From Brooks and Jewison ... Sheila Benson from

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] January 15, 1988

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] June 22, 2003

Siskel & Ebert (video)

New York Times [Janet Maslin]

Moonstruck - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE HURRICANE B 87

USA (145 mi) 1999

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

A one-time contender for the middleweight crown, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter served nearly 20 years in prison after being falsely convicted of a barroom shooting in his racially tense New Jersey hometown. After years of protest, Carter finally won his freedom with the help of Brooklyn-born teenager Lesra Martin and a group of Canadian hippies. Carter's story is one of the more dumbfounding examples of a racially motivated miscarriage of justice, and an inspiring example of how such miscarriages can be corrected by grassroots protest and perseverance. It might have made for an amazing movie: What happens to a man wrongly imprisoned for so long? How can he survive? What goes on in his mind? Don't look for the answers to those questions in The Hurricane, Norman Jewison's retelling of Carter's story. A flat, dramatically inert film that wouldn't seem out of place on Sunday-night television, it fails at every point it might have succeeded—as a personal drama, as a telling work of historical recreation, as a crime film—and squanders star Denzel Washington in the process. You can almost see Washington straining to take The Hurricane into more complex territory, and he almost succeeds during its effective opening segments and a memorable sequence set in solitary confinement. But once the film shifts its focus to the efforts of Martin (Vicellous Reon Shannon) and three justice-minded Canadians (Deborah Unger, Liev Schreiber, John Hannah), it takes a turn for the worse. Other than Washington, only Shannon develops his character beyond two dimensions, and the issue of whether he and his friends will succeed in clearing Washington's name, drawn out to epic length, isn't exactly a mystery. Everyone's heart is clearly in the right place here, but good intentions can't make up for The Hurricane's shortcomings. Bob Dylan's song of the same name captures much more of the drama and passion of the situation, and benefits from being considerably shorter, as well.

Movie Ram-blings Ram Samudrala

How many innocent people can be wrongly convicted if it means a certain number of criminals are correctly found guilty? The Hurricane answers this question in a powerful manner, and the answer is clear when you walk out of the movie.

Based on a true story (made famous by Bob Dylan's song Hurricane, and Nelson Algren's book), The Hurricane chronicles the story how Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (Denzel Washington) leads a life haunted by the ghost of racism and discrimination. From a very young age, Rubin is hounded by a police officer, Della Pesca (Dan Hedaya), who in the film is held responsible for sending Rubin to prison thrice. The third time, after Rubin has become a world-class boxer, he is framed for three murders in Patterson, NJ.

Each injustice adds to the empathy we feel for Rubin: the first time, he is a little boy who pays a price in freedom for saving his friend from being molested. The second time, he pays the price for serving his country and building a life for himself. But it is the third affront that is the focus of this film. After Della Pesca succeeds in the frame-up, Rubin writes a book about the miscarriage of justice that has occurred to him. Years go by and he slowly begins to give up hope in prison.

But a copy of the book finds its way into the hands of Lesra (Vicellous Reon Shannon), a young teenager from Brooklyn, New York, living with three young Canadians who take him under their wing to help him realise his ambition to go to college. Lesra begins communicating with Rubin and they form a bond together: in Rubin, Lesra sees a purpose to his life, and in Lesra, Rubin sees hope. Lesra and his Canadian "family" go to extreme lengths to have Rubin freed, and they finally succeed by uncovering evidence that had been covered up that would have exonerated Rubin.

The acting is superb. The pacing is tight, and the story is presented in such a compelling manner that it had me in tears more than once: From the scenes where Rubin Carter gravitates between having hope and giving it up, to the scenes where Lesra in a childlike manner wonders at the injustice that is happening, to the cruelty and apathy of the American justice system.

There is one minor problem that I had with The Hurricane and that it is too black and white. The good guys are always good and the bad guys are always bad, and it's always easy to figure out who is who. To me, no matter how clear cut a particular incident is, life isn't that simple. The only reason this is a minor problem is because the film claims to be based on a true story. But the messages in The Hurricane wouldn't become any dimmer if it were a work of fiction, and I think the artistic license employed here can be overlooked.

The sad thing is that there only a few people like Rubin who have the skills and resources to articulate their position and regain freedom. Think of all the people, who are not so lucky as to possess the skills to author a book and find someone caring enough about them, still in prison (or facing death) for crimes they didn't commit. (Alexander Volokh published an article in 1997 in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review where the argument was made that for every sixty criminals, one innocent person was made to suffer unjustly.)

Which brings to me to a point about the legal system (see my review of a film In the Name of the Father with a similar theme as this one, and my general musings on this topic). In a nutshell, I believe power corrupts. If you look at the record of U.S. Congress, for example, they're hardly the sort of people who should be running this country (i.e., based on the number of trespasses they've committed based on laws they themselves have passed)! The problem with a legal system and a police agency enforcing it is that people who are in power are generally those who seek it. And people who covet power are not the ones who should be having power over others, because that is what leads to the kind of abuse we see depicted in The Hurricane. Things could certainly be worse, but that doesn't mean we have to be satisfied with the current system. To me, it is intolerable that a single innocent person has his freedom to move around and live be abridged in the name of some "greater good".

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Hurricane (1999) Richard Kelly, April 2000

1973. Black middleweight boxer Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter is in prison. 1966. Three whites are killed in a New Jersey barroom, and two black men are seen fleeing in a white car with out-of-state plates. Carter and young black friend John Artis, driving a similar vehicle, are arrested by detective Vincent Della Pesca.

Years later. Lesra Martin, a black boy tutored by three Canadian educationalists, reads Carter's autobiography. As a boy, Carter was railroaded into juvenile detention by Della Pesca. He escaped, joined the army and became a promising fighter, but Della Pesca oversaw his recapture. Carter emerged from prison to become a middleweight contender and public figure. Della Pesca convinced two petty criminals to testify they saw Carter and Artis fleeing the New Jersey barroom. In 1967 an all-white jury convicted the two men. Despite a prominent campaign supporting Carter and Artis, they lost a second trial in 1976. Lesra corresponds with Carter, visits him in prison, and introduces him to the Canadians. After a lost appeal that dispirits Carter, the Canadians offer support to his defence counsel. Della Pesca threatens them and their car is sabotaged, but they uncover papers which reveal that Della Pesca falsified evidence against Carter. In 1985 Carter gambles on appealing to a federal court. Judge Sarokin nullifies the convictions as unconstitutional.

Review

Norman Jewison barely gets 10 minutes into this workmanlike liberal biopic before his soundtrack makes the first of several nods to Bob Dylan's 'Hurricane', a magisterially detailed ballad about the iniquities that befell Rubin Carter. Jewison's film dutifully visualises what civil-rights students and Dylan fans already know of this notorious triple-murder frame. But its narrative structure and final act are indebted to Lazarus and the Hurricane, a book by Canadians Sam Chaiton and Terry Swinton about their relationship with Lesra Martin and their role in the efforts to win Carter's freedom.

In the opening reels, the structure of The Hurricane seems restless and inventive: we wonder if the film will tell us something sharp and unsettling about race-hate in the US. After all, Carter and Artis were wrongly convicted in the incendiary summer of 1967 and Carter was politically outspoken. Here, Carter is seen shaking his head over news footage of the Harlem riots, and an off-the-record barb about hunting down "nigger-hating cops" winds up in print, earning him a brick through his window. Meanwhile, in the film's present, young Lesra imbibes enough of Rubin's fierceness to accuse his Canadian teachers of salving their liberal guilt by undertaking his education.

But otherwise The Hurricane fights shy of evoking the climate of prejudice that condemned Carter and refuses to disquiet us by linking his plight to racist disgraces in the US today. As the synopsis above might attest, the drama is hung on a vendetta between a flawed-but-honourable man and a doggedly bad cop. Yes, it's Valjean and Javert, together again. Jewison frames Dan Hedaya's detective Della Pesca forever lurking at street corners and doorways, or stepping from the shadows to mutter some foul racist oath. The Hurricane's producers have insisted the film mounts an indictment of institutional racism which encompasses judges and prosecutors too, but you might have trouble figuring this out from what you're shown.

Moreover, the film's account of prison exposes the points where mainstream cinema always fumbles stories as harsh and unhappy as Carter's. As The Hurricane serves out his first stretch, he tells us in voiceover that bitter experience convinced him to train himself as a man-machine, his body a weapon. But this tragic, dehumanised sentiment is somehow rendered movie-sexy by a montage in which star Denzel Washington executes inverted push-ups as though auditioning for the Con Air sequel. Later there's a crucial, adventurous sequence, after Carter has refused prison fatigues in protest at his conviction and lands in solitary confinement ("The Hole") for weeks on end. There, Jewison tries to convey Carter's personality in collapse and Washington effects a convincing tussle between Carter's warring selves: a child who wants to sob, a fighter who wants to lash out, and the wiser head who knows the worst is still to come.

Nevertheless, the standard movie-ellipsis fails to give us much more than an inkling of how such deprivation might maim the spirit. An entire film could have been conjured out of that Hole. Thereafter, with the help of a very controlled performance from Washington, Jewison presents Carter as a stoic jailhouse intellectual, "Buddha in a ten-foot cell," as Dylan had it. Then there's a lousy, inevitable scene where the Canadians pay Rubin a visit. Carter rebuffs them tersely for their inability to understand the claustral, inhumane hell that is imprisonment. Trouble is, Jewison hasn't really given us the images to fit Carter's description. He's even issued Carter with a prison-guard pal, and when Carter is finally freed, there's a ticker-tape celebration in the jailhouse.

Of course, Jim Sheridan's drama of wrongful imprisonment In the Name of the Father was equally studio-slick and cavalier with the facts, but it worked because its Gerry Conlon protagonist was seen to be dime-a-dozen: a bit of an eejit, always likely to get himself in the wrong place. Rubin Carter, though, is plainly extraordinary. "How can the life of such a man/be in the palm of some fool's hands?" Dylan complained. But lesser men still fall into the same hands, and still find the law discriminates against class and colour. Very few can muster the resilience and dignity of Rubin Carter, and their stories are unlikely to be deemed sufficiently inspirational for Hollywood. While doing the rounds of US breakfast television for The Hurricane's opening weekend, Rubin Carter himself was respectfully asked if he was surprised by anything in the film. "I never knew," he professed with a very engaging grin, "that I was so pretty."

World Socialist Web Site J. Cooper

Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs)

Storm of the century - Salon.com Frank Houston, December 24, 1999

Hurricane Carter - An extensive analysis

The Hurricane (1999) | PopMatters Josh Jones

JamesBowman.net | Hurricane, The James Bowman

Alternative Film Guide [Andre Soares]

ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

Cinema365 [Carlos deVillalvilla]

DVD REVIEW: "The Hurricane"

DVD Movie Guide Colin Jacobson

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]

Home Theater Info DVD Review Doug Maclean

Blu-ray.com [Michael Reuben]

DVD Verdict (HD DVD) [Ryan Keefer]

The Movie Scene [Andy Webb]

Qwipster.net [Vince Leo]

Exclaim! [Erin Oke]

Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Needcoffee.com - Movie Review

Chris Dashiell at CineScene (down the page)

The Hurricane | Variety Emanuel Levy

Memphis Flyer [Chris Herrington]

Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]

San Francisco Examiner [Wesley Morris]

San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert]

The Hurricane - The New York Times Stephen Holden, also seenhere: New York Times

Separating Truth From Fiction in 'The Hurricane' - NYTimes.com December 28, 1999

The Hurricane (1999 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jia Zhang-ke

The Horse Hospital: Chinese Film Festival

Jia Zhangke is a leading figure of what is known as the "Sixth Generation" of film directors in the People's Republic of China, following the "Fifth Generation," whose members include Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. The Fifth Generation directors occupy themselves mostly with spectacle-driven mythic histories laden with pointed social criticisms that jeopardize their standing with the government censors. In contrast, the Sixth Generation filmmakers largely produce their gritty, contemporary realist films well outside of the state system, relying instead on personal or private funding, often through sources outside China.

Negotiating In-Between: On New-Generation Filmmaking and Jia Zhangke's Films by Shuqin Cui, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 18, no. 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 98-130

"Negotiating in Between" argues that new-generation filmmaking, personal and rebellious in its origin, has never ceased to negotiate a space between the periphery and the center, the local and the global. At a moment when social-political as well as commercial forces govern the filmmaking industry, directors of the new generation choose either to return to history via personal memory or to encounter the global through a local perspective. Taking Jia Zhangke's four films as textual evidence, this essay suggests that Jia's work offers an idiosyncratic lens on China's entry into a new world system defined as transnational globalization. Affiliation with the global accelerates a market-driven economy. Encounters between the local and the global, however, give rise to anxiety about one's identity and ambiguity about one's sense of place. Examination of Jia Zhangke's glocal mise-en-scene and pop culture modes reveals how a film director and his characters negotiate between the margins and mainstream.

Platform a screening introduction

Jia Zhangke (1970-) was born in a small town Fenyang, Shanxi. He studied painting at a fine arts school in Taiyan and had an interest in writing before he entered the Beijing Film Academy (BFA) to study film theory and script writing in 1993. In 1995, he founded the Youth Experimental Film Group, the first independent film production organization in China. Still at school, he directed two shorts with the group, Xiao Shan Going Home, which won the Gold Prize at the Hong Kong Independent Short Film & Video Awards, and Du Du. He made his first feature Xiao Wu in the year of graduation in 1997, which brought him international attention and prizes at Berlin, Pusan, Vancouver, Nantes, San Francisco, Brussels, etc. Its success on the global festival circuit led to a partnership with Japanese director Takeshi Kitano's production company, whose funding allowed him to make his ambitious second feature Platform (2000), an over two and half hours long epic documenting the transformational years in China from the late 1970s to early 1990s. His third feature Unkown Pleasures (2002) emerged from a short documentary project Jia completed about the city of Datong, featuring dreams and disillusions of young people in the contemporary post-industrial wasteland. Internationally acclaimed, however, Jia's first three feature films were underground indie productions and remain unreleased in China. It was until 2004 that he obtained official permission and collaborated with Shanghai Film Studio to produce his fourth feature The World (2004), which participated in the 2004 Venice Film Festival and was scheduled for domestic and global screening in April 2005

Jia Zhangke biography

The History of Cinema. Jia Zhangke: biography, filmography, reviews ... Piero Scaruffi

Jia Zhangke • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Kevin Lee from Senses of Cinema, March 21, 2004

Director Jia Zhangke: True to Life biography from China Through a Lens

Jia Zhangke - Movies, Bio and Lists on MUBI

Jia Zhang-ke - Strictly Film School Acquarello reviews of several films

[Cahiers du cinéma] Spaces of Freedom, by Jean-Michel Frodon

[Cahiers du cinéma] Profaners of the Whole World, by Cyril Neyrat

The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism ... The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic, 18-page essay by Jason McGrath (Undated) (pdf)

FILM; Glimpses of China Never Seen in China Stuart Klawans on Sixth Generation Chinese filmmakers from the New York Times, February 18, 2001

Bright Lights: China's Sixth Generation directors Richard Corliss on Sixth Generation Chinese filmmakers from Time magazine, March 19, 2001

In the Realm of the Censors another profile of the Sixth Generation, from the Telegraph, June 28, 2002

Firecracker | TIGER'S EYE ON... THE SIXTH GENERATION yet another

Cultural Evolution Jia Zhangke's Lost Highways, a Jia retrospective review by Dennis Lim from the Village Voice, March 18, 2003

Lost in Time, Lost in Space: Beijing Film Culture in 2004. By Shelly ... Shelly Kraicer from Cinema Scope, 2004

Bringing the World to the Nation: Jia Zhangke and the Legitimation ... Valerie Jaffee from Senses of Cinema, July 2004

Posts from the Internet Film Discussion Group, a_film_by in particular, see Kevin Lee, August 25, 2004, 3:44 pm

The World in a Beijing Theme Park | Jonathan Rosenbaum July 29, 2005

Alternative Archive Liu Xiaodong and the Sixth Generation Films, by Ou Ning February 16, 2006

Speaking in Images: Interviews with ... - Senses of Cinema Ruby Cheung review of Michael Berry’s book, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, May 5, 2006

The Rhetoric of Local Languages as the Marginal: Chinese Underground and Independent Films by Jia Zhangke and Others by Jin Liu, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, 2 (Fall 2006): 163-205

Dialogues with critics on Chinese independent cinemas Esther M.K. Cheung from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

Chinese independent cinemas, p. 2 - Jump Cut Part II: Differences and interactions between Hong Kong and other Chinese communities, from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

Life in Film: Jia Zhangke | Frieze article written by the director, mentioning other films that have influenced him, April 15, 2007

FRONTLINE/WORLD . Rough Cut . China: The New Wave | PBS China: The New Wave, Filmmakers reveal society's dark side, including a 13 minute video by Joshua Fisher May 24, 2007

Director Jia Zhangke tells all A Record of Confusion, by Jia Zhangke, thoughts on being turned in by an informer, by Joel Martinson from Danwei, June 1, 2007

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20070612_1.htm Jia Zhangke and His Denouncer, a series of interesting documents that begins with a Jia essay, A Perplexing Incident, also including Who “Framed” Jia Zhang-ke? by Lu Yuan, June 7, 2007

People's Daily Online - As the lights go down China’s reaction to Bergman and Antonioni’s deaths, from the People’s Daily, August 6, 2007

Still, Life: Looking at Jia Zhang-ke's Recent Masterpiece Ian Johnston from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2007

FILM; Blurring Reality’s Edge in Fluid China an overview by Dennis Lim from the New York Times, January 20, 2008

Feet on the Ground: The Films of Jia Zhang-ke | The House Next Door ... an overview by Andrew Chan from The House Next Door, January 30, 2008

Unspoken Cinema: LINKS :: JIA Zhang-ke series of links provided by Harry Tuttle, January 31, 2008

Postsocialist Grit: Contending Realisms in Jia Zhangke's Platform ... Postsocialist Grit: Contending Realisms in Jia Zhangke’s Platform and Unknown Pleasures, by Edwin Mak from Offscreen, August 2008

Jia Zhangke: Capturing China's Transformation : NPR John Powers from NPR, December 9, 2008

The Films Of Jia Zhang-Ke (Part 1/2) | The Seventh Art Just Another Film Buff, April 10, 2010

The Films Of Jia Zhang-Ke (Part 2/2) | The Seventh Art Just Another Film Buff, April 17, 2010

The Long Shot | The New Yorker Evan Osnos, May 11, 2009

Statement by Jia Zhangke on his withdrawal from Melbourne ... D’Generate Films, July 24, 2009

Once-banned, Jia Zhangke seeks wider audience in China | The ... The Independent, September 4, 2010

The Quest for Memory: Documentary and Fiction in Jia Zhangke's ... Juwei Xiao from Senses of Cinema, June 23, 2011

"Still Life" text version - Ejumpcut.org Eric Dalle from Jump Cut, Summer 2011

China must end silence on injustice, warns film director Jia Zhangke Tania Branigan from The Guardian, June 24, 2013

Can China's Leading Indie Film Director Cross Over in America ... Jonathan Landreth from ChinaFile, September 27, 2013

Heard It Through the Grapevine | Film Comment Tony Rayns, September/October 2013

Jia Zhangke Explains Why Censors Are Scared of His Award-Winning ... Olivia Geng from The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2014

Where to begin with Jia Zhangke | BFI John Berra, February 22, 2016

'Jia Zhangke: A Guy from Fenyang' - Brooklyn Magazine Mark Asch on the Walter Salles film, May 27, 2016, film showcased here: Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang | NYFF

TSPDT - Jia Zhangke

Independent filmmaking that is genuinely independent an interview by David Walsh from the World Socialist Web Site, October 2000

Cinema with an Accent - Interview with Jia Zhangke, Director of ... Stephen Teo from Senses of Cinema, April 18, 2001

In Sophisticated Shanghai, Still Sneaking to See Films article and interview by Jane Perlez from the New York Times, December 30, 2003

An Interview with Jia Zhangke • Senses of Cinema by Valerie Jaffee from Senses of Cinema, April 27, 2004

Interview with Jia Zhang-ke, director of The World - World Socialist ... David Walsh interview from the World Socialist Web Site, September 29, 2004

The World of Jia Zhangke - China Perspectives - Revues.org Patricia R.S. Batto interview, July/August 2005

Brave new world, Jia Zhangke on the state of Chinese cinema ... feature and interview by Thomas Podvin, August 12, 2005

A Conversation with Michael Berry on Speaking with Images - Full Tilt A Conversation with Michael Berry on Speaking with Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, by Jerome Li, plus a clip from Berry’s interview with Jia Zhangke, Winter 2005

China-Underground A Conversation with Jia Zhangke by Matteo Damiani, February 21, 2007

Invisible cities: an interview with Jia Zhangke with Time Out Film ... Edmund Lee interviews the director from Time Out London, 2009

Interview: Jia Zhang-ke - Film Comment Andrew Chan interview from Film Comment, March/April 2009

CinemaTalk: a Conversation with Michael Berry « dGenerate Films Kevin Lee interviews scholar Michael Berry about Jia Zhang-ke, August 24, 2009, podcast (17:39)

Phillip Maher Interview with the director from All Movie Guide, April 25, 2010

Zhao Tao talks about her collaboration with Jia in a video interview with the Realist Imperative (English subtitled) at Asia Society, May 10, 2010 on YouTube (7:32)

Jia video interview with the Realist Imperative (English subtitled) at Asia Society, May 10, 2010 on YouTube (10:17)

China must end silence on injustice, warns film director Jia Zhangke ... Tania Branigan interviews the director from The Guardian, June 24, 2013

Interview: Jia Zhang-ke - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold interview, October 2, 2013

JIA ZHANGKE with Zhou Xin | The Brooklyn Rail Zhou Xin interview, November 5, 2013

Discussing China and Filmmaking With Jia Zhangke, Director of ... interview from The New York Times, October 5, 2015

Jia Zhangke: why my films are received differently in China and abroad Edmund Lee interviews the director from South China Morning Post, October 25, 2015

Jia Zhangke | Maria Dimitrova | Talk : TANK Magazine Maria Dimitrova interview, Winter 2015

An interview with Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao about Mountains May ... Aisha Harris interview from Slate, February 12, 2016

TOP 6 QUOTES BY JIA ZHANGKE | A-Z Quotes

Jia Zhangke - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Xiao Wu

aka: The Pickpocket A- 94

China Hong Kong (105 mi) 1997

Something of a predecessor to UNKNOWN PLEASURES (2002), which amusingly references this film in a scene where a customer is seeking bootleg DVD copies of XIAO WU and PLATFORM, but this features a similar theme of aimlessness, but focusing almost exclusively on a wayward central character. There is also the stark documentary feel of PLATFORM (2000), including a look at those same style brick buildings, as both films were shot in the identical location, the director’s hometown of Fenyang in Shanxi province. Shot on 16mm for about $50,000, it obviously owes more than just the title to Bresson’s PICKPOCKET (1959), using only non-professional actors, also vivid offscreen sound, little by little the film strips the veneer from the central character, leaving only the bare essentials which are then magnified in the finale where critic Tony Rayns claims “he’s left as ‘naked’ as a person can be.” Xiao Wu (Hong Wei Wang) is a chain-smoking pickpocket, highly skilled in his trade, living on the artistry of his hands, but he lives on the margins of society with few friends except other petty thieves in the same trade. As much of his old neighborhood is being torn down to make way for new development, some of his friends have also given up their thieving ways and have gone into legitimate business, including one of Xiao Wu’s best friends who has his picture plastered all over the television screens as he is being honored as a “model entrepeneur,” an example for others to follow. As his business includes the trade and distribution of female escorts and cigarettes, Jia is making some interesting comments about the changing world around Xiao Wu where in their drive for capitalist consumerism, China shows an over-reliance on black market goods, but the government makes a distinction between the nation’s needs and the petty needs of an individual, even if what they’re both doing is illegal.

It should be noted that one of the only times we actually see Xiao Wu pickpocketing comes early in the film on a bus under the shadow of a portrait of Mao Zedong. With reform signs everywhere in the form of incessant radio and TV announcements, including a police “clamp-down” effort to rid the streets of petty criminals, even the police chief kindly pulls Xiao Wu aside and warns him to go straight. But rather than get the message, he is instead furious when he finds out he wasn’t invited to his former friend’s wedding, the model entrepreneur, who didn’t want Xiao Wu around to remind everyone of his own shameful past. Under the socialism of old, the government preached equality through a classless society, but under a free market economy, Xiao Wu learns that he has inherited an underclass, scorned even by his former friends. But with little ambition, choosing to remain outside any class system at all, Xiao Wu simply squanders his earnings on a cute young karaoke singer named Mei Mei (Hao Hongjian), who becomes his new obsession, expressed by a sudden saturation of the color red. Hong Kong cinematographer Yu Lik-Wai has a way of making the colors so vivid that they literally jump off the screen, especially in tandem with the music during the karaoke scenes, but he also brilliantly uses his hand-held camera like an unseen character, finding ways to augment the emotion of each scene, in more reflective times quiet and still, while curiously probing and moving in other scenes, as if mirroring Xiao Wu’s restless nature, as he’s a bit like ROSETTA (1999), as he backs himself into corners where he feels like a caged animal.

A marginally sympathetic character, by following him through a series of daily life incidents, he becomes more of a pathetic object of scorn and ridicule, as the proprietess of the karaoke bar is willing to take his money, but she calls it “dirty money,” while his entrepreneur friend outright refuses to accept his wedding gift of money, claiming it is “tainted.” So anyone who knows him also knows his “dirty” profession, including his family who he visits at one point in the film, but they are outwardly ashamed of him as well and vehemently reject his presence. Jia has a black sense of humor when it comes to his Dylanesque use of weather reports (also PLATFORM), which ominously inform Xiao Wu that the weather outside is growing cloudy. While there’s a vivid realism etched into every frame of the film which shows a curiously calculating direction throughout, this character is portrayed as an out of step, out of time walking antique, yet he couldn’t be older than his young 20’s, if that, as there’s a youthful innocence in his manner with Mei Mei that suggests he’s still just a kid. But the world around him changes in the blink of an eye and by the end he can barely recognize it anymore, becoming a dishonorable man in a dishonorable world. Ultimately he is done in by the very modernization that he was so slow to adapt to, proving progress was never his friend, as he becomes lost, trapped in his own futility where the nightmare never seems to end, but where we are all somehow implicated in his fate, brilliantly realized in a final shot reminiscent of Godard’s timeless tracking shot in WEEKEND (1967) or the free-fall oblivion at the end of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE (1996) made just the preceding year, two directors who have had an impact in Jia’s raw but already mature stylization.

Pickpocket Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

Jia Zhang-ke's touching and accomplished first feature (1997), cast entirely with nonprofessional actors, is somewhat uncharacteristic in that it's basically a character study. Set in Jia's Chinese hometown (Fenyang in Shanxi province), it focuses on a rather pathetic pickpocket who runs a small gang of younger thieves. His profession makes him an outcast and his romantic and social possibilities are steadily shrinking. Though the film lacks the epic sweep of Jia's subsequent features (Platform, Unknown Pleasures, The World, Still Life), it imparts much about the provincial town, and it's so impressive in its own right that I can understand why some prefer it to his later work. In Shanxi with subtitles. 113 min.

Time Out Tony Rayns

Xiao Wu is a likeable but scummy petty criminal, lifting wallets from visitors to the provincial dirt town he calls home. Times are getting hard. His oldest friend, now a respected citizen, doesn't want to know him any more; the leggy girl from the karaoke hostess bar is stringing him along; and the cops are mounting an anti-crime campaign. This wonderful debut feature (like most decent Chinese films of the 1990s, it was made outside what remains of the studio system) takes an almost Bressonian path to the core of one man's psyche, stripping away layer after layer of his loser's armour until he's left as 'naked' as a person can be. Acted with absolute conviction by a cast of non-professionals and resourcefully shot by HK indie film-maker Yu Lik-Wai, this is an engrossing and moving achievement.

Calendar, Block Museum, Northwestern University

Does God pity the small-time crook? Do we? Shot on 16mm and filled with kinetic, hand-held shots, Pickpocket was Zhang Ke Jia’s first film. A low-budget affair, it concerns the life of Xiao Wu—which is the film’s Chinese and more appropriate title. Wu remains a small-time thief while his former friends and colleagues have parlayed their resumes into entrepreneurial endeavors applauded by the state-run media. His former best friend Xiao Yang has been named a “Model Entrepreneur” for his cigarette trafficking activities. His family is still rooted in their agrarian lifestyle and older, Maoist ways in the backwater town of Fenyang. Fenyang is, for Jia, the “original face” of China and also the setting for Platform. We watch Xiao Wu as he falls through the ever-widening cracks between China’s original face and the new China of today.

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

There comes a point during this gritty social parable where the eponymous felon, a beleaguered pickpocket who is eventually insulted by his about-to-be married childhood partner in crime, ditched by his lapdancing girlfriend, rejected by his family and hounded by the reform-minded authorities, visits a public bathhouse. Standing naked in a scene both metaphorically powerful and culturally significant (full-frontal male nudity is a very rare thing in Chinese films), the young man is at once a victim of his surroundings and a martyr to the Job-like vicissitudes of his sorry life. Recent Beijing Film Academy graduate Jia Zhang Ke has stocked the cast with non-professionals from his economically depressed home town of Fengyang (Shanxi province), giving the film a pungent verisimilitude enhanced by the raw, realist style. "This is a film about our worries and our uneasiness." He has written of this acclaimed work. "Having to cope with a disfunctional society, we take refuge in solitude which is a substitute for dignity… It is finally a film about my native town and about contemporary China."

Notes on Older Films Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Up to now, for me Jia has fallen into that category of world-class cineaste whose work I've mostly admired (Unknown Pleasures) or at least found worthwhile (Platform), but who has yet to really bowl me over. (Almodóvar is another.) So it's been a bit perplexing when, for example, the Village Voice calls Jia the world's greatest filmmaker under 40. Granted, up to now I've seen Jia's work in the context of festivals, where it's entirely possible that my flagging viewership simply wasn't up to their demands. But catching up with his amazing debut feature only complicates things, since I think it's by far the finest of the three Jia features I've seen. (I hope to catch up with his fourth, The World, later this year.) It's wonderful what a little hand-held camera can do. I'm certainly more forgiving of the Asian master-shot school than some, but what's really startling about Xiao Wu is the way Jia's camerawork explores an entire range of emotive possibilities. Yes, sometimes the camera is stock-still, and sometimes Jia lets the camera roll in a single extended shot. But, as with one of those rare moments when Ozu used a crane shot, the imapact of Jia's formal decisions is heightened through difference. The final shot, for example, delivers a palpable sense of entrapment, as our Nouvelle Vague-by-way-of-90s-Beijing antihero is thrown to the margins of a society that is every bit as corrupt as he is. Xiao Wu, in essence, becomes a kind of fall guy for the old China, the sort of hapless scum that must be brushed aside to clear the way for the new global ecomony. (Cf. Giuliani's "Broken Windows" inititative.) But unlike in the otherwise lovely Unknown Pleasures, Xiao Wu for the most part doesn't hammer its politics home in explicit statements. Instead, it lets us move around inside Xiao Wu's twitchy skin, getting a feel for a world that's rapidly closing in.

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) also User reviews from imdb Author: Howard Schumann from Vancouver, B.C

"This is a film about our worries and our uneasiness. Having to cope with a dysfunctional society, we take refuge in solitude which is a substitute for dignity… It is finally a film about my native town and about contemporary China." - Jia Zhangke

A sense of longing permeates Xiao Wu, a 1997 film by the acclaimed independent Chinese director Jia Zhangke (Platform, Unknown Pleasures). Set in Jia's home city of Fengyang in Shanxi province, the film is basically a series of incidents in the life of petty thief and pickpocket, Xiao Wu. It is a compelling portrait of an individual in free-fall and, like other films by the director, shows the corrupting influence of Western values on an entire generation of Chinese. The film is reminiscent of the works of Robert Bresson in its use of non-professional actors, environmental sound, and in its spare cinematography by Yu Lik-Wai.

Xiao Wu (Hong Wei Wang) wanders about aimlessly with lots of money to spend and little to spend it on except call girls at the local karaoke bar. He befriends Mei Mei (Hao Hongjian), and they start to develop a tentative relationship but his social awkwardness leads to ultimate rejection. Wu's friends have given up the life of crime and do not want to have anymore to do with him. His best friend, Jin Xiao Yong has just been voted a "Model Entrepreneur" for his activities in cigarette trafficking and does not invite Wu to his wedding. He even returns Wu's gift of money because it is "tainted". The scene between the two old friends discussing the wedding is heartbreaking in the look of rejection on Wu's face.

With no other work to fall back on, Wu is forced to continue his petty crimes, constantly running afoul of the police. In the background, the government has issued an order to round up street criminals. Wu seems bewildered by the fact that his friends do not want to associate with him and he is unable to grasp the meaning of the police crackdown. He grows increasingly alienated and lonely as he loses his friends who go straight, his girl friend Mei Mei who leaves town, and his family who eject him after an argument over a ring.

Jia captures the rhythm and feel of day-to-day life in Fengyang. This is life as it is actually lived, not as a series of dramatic events forced into a narrative structure. His film succeeds not only as social commentary but also as an acutely perceptive realization of the psychology of a self-absorbed individual. One of the most revealing scenes is when Wu stubbornly refuses to sing with Mei Mei at the karaoke bar but instead goes to a bathhouse and, alone and naked, sings a plaintive song to the empty room. After Mei Mei leaves him, things seem to spiral downward for Wu. In a final sequence, he is shown after his arrest, not as a victim or hero, but as an off-screen object to be gazed at and mocked by people in the street. It is a scene of personal tragedy, but in the universality of its compassion, it becomes a spiritual revelation. Xiao Wu is one of the best films of the 90s.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Xiao Wu (1997) Tony Rayns, March 2000

1997. Liang Xiao Wu is a pickpocket in the town of Fenyang in Shanxi Province, heading a small gang of younger thieves. After helping to retrieve an ID card from a stolen wallet as a favour to a pharmacist friend, he begins turning in all his victims' ID cards. Visiting the pharmacist (whose shop is about to be demolished), he learns his erstwhile best friend Jin Xiaoyong is about to be married. Jin was also a thief but has become a respectable cigarette wholesaler; the local authorities have named him a "model entrepreneur". Jin wants to distance himself from the likes of Xiao Wu and doesn't invite him to the wedding party.

Xiao Wu's relationship with the karaoke-bar hostess Mei-Mei gets off to a rocky start when he complains about her reluctance to sing and dance for him, but she is soon charmed by him and touched by his concern when a stomach bug forces her to miss work. He soon thinks of her as his 'steady' and buys a pager so that she can contact him. But he's humiliated in front of her when Jin returns his wedding present of cash, calling it "dirty money". Xiao Wu buys an expensive ring for Mei-Mei but learns that she has left the karaoke bar with some clients from Taiyuan and moved out of her home. He gives the ring instead to his mother during a visit to his family in the countryside - and is angry when he realises she has sold it to help pay for his younger brother's wedding. There is a family row, and his father throws him out. Back in Fenyang, he is caught trying to steal a wallet because his pager goes off. Arrested, he becomes an object of curiosity for passers-by.

Review

Jia Zhangke’s affectionate but dispassionate account of the downfall of a terminal loser is one of the most impressive and achieved Chinese films of the 90s. Even Zhang Yimou, notoriously stingy with praise for other Chinese directors, has acclaimed it. Made on a shoestring budget with an entirely non-professional cast in Jia’s hometown, it’s another vindication of underground independent film-making in China and a career-making triumph for its first-time director. The film’s project can only be called Bressonian. It offers an astutely observed and meticulously detailed vision of life’s material surfaces and social transactions in order to intimate what’s happening beneath those surfaces. Fenyang is a typical northern Chinese backwater, a ramshackle provincial town in which an unsophisticated community (only half a rung up from its peasant origins) clamours to embrace the benefits of free-market society, from entrepreneurialism and rebuilding to karaoke bars and hair and beauty salons. With its shops, entertainments and street stalls the town is a magnet for visitors from the surrounding province - which makes it an ideal arena for Xiao Wu’s pickpocketing operation. It’s a society changing almost too rapidly to grasp, in which few of the old certainties and Confucian moral absolutes remain intact. The children of peasant farmers no longer see it as an obligation to stump up for a family wedding; the proprietor of a sleazy karaoke bar has no compunction about voicing rude home truths to a formerly valued customer when he makes a mild complaint.

But Xiao Wu is a man out of tune with his times, an overgrown child who fails to grasp the implications of the police crackdown on street crime and doesn’t understand why a former friend who has gone straight might no longer want to know him. By choosing to centre the film on this hapless sad-sack rather than the infinitely more adaptable Jin Xiaoyong, Jia shifts the film away from social observation and on to darker, psychological ground. Xiao Wu’s sexual and emotional naivety - in a word, his immaturity - are summed up with superb concision by his coy refusals to sing with or for Mei-Mei in the karaoke bar. Half way through the film, Jia sends his protagonist to an otherwise deserted bath-house, shows him naked and vulnerable, and has him sing his heart out in the womb-like security of the hot pool. This is the film’s turning point. In every sense fully exposed, Xiao Wu as a social being now has nowhere to go but down. He is in short order dumped by Mei-Mei, ejected from his family and arrested by the police. In the brilliant closing sequence he disappears from the frame entirely, present only as an off-screen object for the gaze of indifferent passers-by on the street.

Xiao Wu’s decline and fall don’t occur in a vacuum, but Jia nowhere suggests that he’s a victim of social change or an index of what has happened in China since Mao’s death. His fate is specific and singular. Nor is there any sense that Xiao Wu gains in self-awareness from his own misfortunes; the film is not an approving moral tale. But the juxtaposition of Xiao Wu’s abasement with the clear-eyed perception of a society in the process of losing its bearings gives the film a curious, hard-to-pin-down purity and makes the spectacle of Xiao Wu’s sad end strangely exalting. This is what makes the film not only Bressonian but also worthy of mention alongside Bresson. It wouldn’t work as well as it does without the naturalistic performances or Yu Lik-Wai, cinematography (a small miracle of formal control). But it’s Jia Zhangke’s ability to find spiritual truths beneath everyday surfaces that makes the result so special. The China Film Bureau banished Jia for making Xiao Wu without official permission by delaying approval for his second film Zhan Tai/The Platform by more than a year. He is now, at last, shooting it. Let’s hope he’ll able to function as well under the supervision of the authorities as he did when he made Xiao Wu independently.

Jia Zhangke: Pickpocket Director article and interview from the Beijing Scene, also seen here: Beijing Scene

Xiao Wu Paul Bond from the World Socialist website

thirtyframesasecond: Xiao Wu (Hong Kong/China, 1997, Zhang Ke Jia ... Kevin Wilson

David Dalgleish

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

28th International Festival of New Cinema and New Media Marks Path ... Jamie Gaetz from Offscreen

BAFF | PICKPOCKET (XIAO WU) Barcelona Asian Film Festival

Xiao Wu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The New York Times (Lawrence Van Gelder)

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Henrik Sylow]

PLATFORM (Zhantai) A 97

Hong Kong China Japan France (155 mi) 2000 also (195 mi) version

This weekend in Chicago, a fortunate few can congratulate our own cinemeistro Gabe who pulled off a brilliant programming coup at Northwestern University's Block Cinema showing one-time-only a 2000 release that has never been shown in Chicago, written and directed by a 6th generation Chinese filmmaker, Jia Zhang-ke's PLATFORM, all who missed it missed a good film. Gabe was there, he showed a few of us his office, Ray Privett was there, also Fred Camper, Terrence was there! also one of the Facets video girls whose name I don't know, and we all loved the film. Rosenbaum in the Reader gave it a Critic's Choice, but there were probably under 100 people there for what I found to be an extremely understated film style.

So emotionally detached throughout, a very oblique presentation, with little or no narrative, this played like a documentary with very few embellishments, reminding me of a similar style featured in three Russian documentaries from Kazakhstan that showed at Facets a few years back, Sergei Dvortsevoy's BREAD DAY, PARADISE, and HIGHWAY, particularly the latter, which featured a broken down circus act in the middle of this vast emptiness where there was nearly no life at all.

Set in the 1980's, this nearly broken down truck drives into the middle of nowhere, so our Chinese version of the Satantango collective can present their "cultural performance art," in this case an extremely primitive rock n roll show, while few, or no one, pays them any interest. In one scene, right out of HIGHWAY, two dancing girls are dancing on a flat truck parked on the side of the highway, as buses and trucks whiz by, but no one stops in this ominous desert and mountainous backdrop.

The decade of the 80's opens needing Party approval for all State sponsored art, so kids are seen bored stiff at lifeless cultural performances singing the praises of China only in the most affirmative manner, something akin to pre-school exhibitions here, glorified by an always shining sun and by beautiful bright colors, but in this film, no one is fooled by this. Initial images are shot in near darkness, or with the bleakest of light, and there's a kind of faint, glowing aura surrounding such diminished light. Initially there is obviously no heat or electricity in this cold, barren, wintry landscape, so each image features frost on the breath and cold, desolate interior brick rooms. Occasionally, people gather around a stove for warmth, they really don't want to move at all, as bricks dominate the exteriors as well. The obvious poverty in the images is similar to many Iranian films, as there is absolutely nothing to grab the interest of the graduating high school class who have no expectations of a better life, yet they are constantly seen interacting, but largely avoiding one another, smoking, staring off into the barren landscape, saying little or nothing, unbelievably detached from the rest of the world and each other. One guy is seen again and again with different girls, none of them stick, the characters are a revolving door, now you see them, now you don't. Some characters are seen throughout the film, like regulars, others appear and then disappear from sight.

The imagery was quite unique, as this small town is, in fact, a rural Communist collective work farm, complete with required Party meetings where all are asked to voice their opinions or stand up to the critical discussions led by the Communist group leader, again, the decade opens with a criticism of individual dissent, like the wearing of bell-bottom pants, establishing an absolute need for individualism which drives a whirlwind of changes within the Party, leading to the introduction of electricity, even in the most outer rural regions, and concepts like privatization, owning your own farm, and, why not, western style pop music, which gives rise to an opportunity for this little group of would be artists who decide to form a band and hit the road through some of the most desolate and empty terrain on the planet. Always they travel under a tarp on the back of the truck searching for the world outside.

Two of the most powerful images in the film - both very much in the Kiarostami-style end shot, a long, drawn out shot that by itself, reveals the story of the film

Gabe's favorite

There is a long shot of a group of rolling hills with nothing growing on them, round and bare, and the infamous truck winds it's way along a wind-swept, dirt road around a myriad of curves until it is finally close to the camera, but then the truck mysteriously stops, and turns around in the most deliberate and laborious manner before heading back into those rolling hills, while this is seen, the audience hears the sound of the truck radio providing a weather report, powerful, changing winds are heading their way

Robert's favorite

There is a long, distant shot of this same, infamous truck and it appears to be stuck in the middle of nowhere, far off, in the distance, the sound of the engine gunning is all that's heard, but no wheels are turning, they are going nowhere, so there is a cut to the blue door of the truck, one of the artists climbs into the front seat and turns on the radio which plays the title song, "Platform," "We are waiting, our whole hearts are waiting, waiting forever..." In this unique moment, the first time rock music is heard in the film, the audience is made aware that from this barren desolation, there are now "possibilities."

However, as the decade comes to a close, this image is contrasted against a later scene where the actual band plays this song, "Platform," and one can only describe it as laughable, where the audience is throwing things at them, the lead singer attempts to go out into the crowd and touch hands but he is nearly beaten up until he retreats to the safety of the stage and the barrage of the audience. Certainly this reflects the end of possibilities.

Yet another scene must be mentioned, where one of their former girls friends who chose not to go on the road but to stay at home is seen alone in a bureaucratic office. Again, dimly lit, she waters her plants in the corner, shuffles some papers around but the music heard on the radio causes her to stir, she stops her routine, makes the briefest of moves as if she wants to dance but stops herself until this slowly evolves into one of the most beautiful traditional Chinese dances, alone, in the dark, dancing.

Rosenbaum wrote in his review with his usual certainty that there was one "sequence… punctuated by off-screen gunshots as prisoners are being executed." Now this may be true, but it also may not. It is true there were several moments where individuals paused for a moment and lingered, staring off over a brick wall, but what they see can never be seen. It could simply be a moment of reflection, certainly there were many of these. In one instance, there was the echo of what sounded like a series of instantly quick drum rim shots, but there was no dialogue or explanation and I recall no part of the story dealing with prisoners or executions, but such is the subtlety of this film, it may very well have been exactly that, as little in this film is ever explained. In another similar circumstance, but this time in the snow, there was off-screen the sound of what I thought to be firecrackers, like the celebration of another passing year.

True to the peculiarity of this film one character appears with the band, he has long black hair, and he's dressed all in black, the band manager tells him to get his lazy ass back to the group, as he's outside smoking a cigarette, one of the most prevalent images throughout the film is the constant smoking of cigarettes, but this guy never says a word to anybody, nor is he ever seen performing with the band, he just exists totally outside the universe of any known reality. Later on, he is seen cutting his hair, this character is not seen in the entire film interacting with anyone, yet he is seen on the fringes, definitely a unique character but totally alone. In many ways this is largely a wordless film, as the words are so meaningless, instead, eyes drift off into the distant landscape, and the sound of the film is filled with the noises of humans, street sounds, traffic, trucks, tractors, distant shouts or street chatter, radios, the noises of humans, this is really the theme of the film, the individuals are incidental, they come, they go, but the constant is the noise.

There's more, there's so much more apparently there's even a longer version of this film 195 minutes, this version was 155 minutes.

Platform Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

This second feature by Jia Zhang-ke (Pickpocket), which made the rounds of a few festivals in 2000 and has been very hard to see ever since (this is its first Chicago screening), is one of the most impressive Chinese films I’ve ever seen. Its theme is the great theme of Chinese cinema, the discovery of history, which links such otherwise disparate masterpieces as The Blue Kite, Blush, Actress, The Puppet Master, and A Brighter Summer Day. Platform is as ambitious as any of these predecessors, and its style is no less magisterial. The story charts the course of the Cultural Revolution for about a decade, starting in 1979, and the shifts in values and lifestyles, culture and economy as China moves inexorably from Maoism to capitalism and acquires glitzy Western accoutrements–all as witnessed by five actors in a small provincial theater troupe. As I remember, each episode unfolds in a single long take, with a beautifully choreographed mise en scene that recalls the fluid Hungarian pageants of Miklos Jancso in the 60s and 70s, though the political implications here are at times more sinister: one memorable sequence is punctuated by offscreen gunshots as prisoners are being executed. Originally 192 minutes long, the film was recut by its writer-director to its current 155 minutes. Essential viewing. In Mandarin with subtitles.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

One of the richest films of the past decade, Jia Zhangke's Platform finally gets a theatrical run. Jia's three-hour epic spans the 1980s, filtering the period through the mutation of the propaganda-performing Fenyang Peasant Culture Group into the equally cheesy All Star Rock and Breakdance Electronic Band. Jia, whose brilliant follow-up, Unknown Pleasures, opens later in the month, has a strong visual style (based on long fixed-camera ensemble takes) and a powerful set of concerns (the spiritual confusion of contemporary China, caught between the outmoded materialism of the Maoist era and its market-driven successor). Elliptical yet concrete, Platform is a laconic tale of lackadaisical love and even more haphazard entertainment, as played out in a series of unheated factory halls and outdoor courtyards.

The environment is at once prison-like and vast; with its objective viewpoint and lovingly bleak locations, Platform looks like a documentary, but it's Pop Art as history. Perhaps influenced by Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Puppetmaster, Jia finds subtle ways to transform the world into a stage. The play of the proscenium against the filmmaker's taste for unmediated reality is fascinating. The penultimate image, held long enough for the full weight of quotidian despair to infect the audience, epitomizes the odyssey from kindergarten collectivity to failed privatization.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

To gauge the suffocating allure of Platform, imagine if the protagonist from Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped never made it out of his Gestapo hell. Jia Zhangke's epic film is a laconic portrait of a remote Chinese city in arrested development, where love is impacted and lost highways lead to destinations unknown. The film takes its title—and lonely mantra—from a Chinese song popular throughout the '80s: "The long and empty platform, the wait seems never-ending, the long wagons are carrying my short-lived love." The conflict here is between national collectivism and individual fortune—the former is struggling to stay alive while the latter fights to express itself. Bellbottoms come to Jinjiazhuang sometime between 1979 and 1989; the adults don't "get" the pants—they seem inflexible, and as such improper for work. Female passivity is promoted via government-sanctioned sex videos while the sweaty kids of the "birth control generation" bust a move in underground hallways. You can feel the unrest in the air: Trains constantly leave and come into the community, but it's as if no one rides on them; the tide is changing (Mao is dead and a Western, market-driven pop awareness is slowly seeping in), but no one seems to be going anywhere quick. Atop the cement platform that overlooks the city, a couple engages in a courtship repeatedly frustrated by unbending parents, defeated selves, and bitter surroundings (at one point, cement pillars make it difficult for them to share the same frame). The distant mountains signify hope, as does a ravishing, impromptu flame, but you get a sense that Jia's lost generation needs a little more time to figure things out. (They're somewhat closer once Unknown Pleasures rolls around.) Some critics have complained about the film's lack of narrative vigor, forgetting that Jia's point is that there's very little for these people to live out. These are lives trapped in amber, trying to create a more complex narrative. Via startling long shots and temporal displacements, Jia truly evokes a community grasping hopelessly for something, anything to lift them up.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

By a curious twist of fate, Philadelphians have been spared the summer movie doldrums. Hardly a week has gone by without a worthy opening, and even the usually fallow Labor Day weekend will bring the hotly anticipated 2046. It's getting so movie buffs have to make an excuse to stay home.

That said, there are plenty of reasons. Despite a reported leveling in sales, the DVD flood continues unabated, not only filling in for the gasping rep film industry but making up for art-house oversights. Chief among the latter are the films of China's Jia Zhang-ke, whose brilliant, highly acclaimed movies have yet to receive a theatrical release in Philadelphia. (Zeitgeist is still working on The World, front-runner for the year's best film; call your exhibitor now.) Platform (New Yorker), Jia's second film, is an intimate history of the disintegration of China's planned economy, told from the point of view of four young adults in Jia's home province of Fenyang. Spanning the 1980s, Platform might qualify as an epic, but in Jia's observational style, the vast cultural changes are felt more than stated. We don't see the moment when a traditional cultural troupe morphs into the "All-Star Rock 'n' Breakdance Band," but we don't need to; it's enough to experience the moment when, stranded by a broken truck in the middle of a featureless plain, their silence is shattered by a pirate broadcast of the titular pop song. Never has a harmless electric guitar sounded more like a call to arms.

Born in 1970, Jia belongs to a generation divorced from Communist ideology but unswayed by the promise of capitalism. In Xiao Wu, his first feature (available only on import), a man whose house is being torn down by the government is told, "If the old stuff isn't pulled down, there'll be no new stuff," and he responds, "The old is being pulled down, but I see nothing new." That skepticism permeates all his work, in which young people's alienation persists despite, or because of, the facile connections of the modern world. By clunky pagers or interprovince highways or animated text messages, they're brought closer in all but the ways that really matter.

Chinese Postsocialist Realism: Jia Zhangke Jason McGrath

Jia Zhangke is often considered to be the most talented of the generation of mainland Chinese filmmakers that emerged in the 1990s. This group has been variously called the “Urban Generation” or the “Sixth Generation”—both appellations being meant to distinguish them from the often rurally set “Fifth Generation” films of well-known auteurs such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. Jia Zhangke's career, however, shows two very divergent influences. The first is the homegrown “New Documentary Movement” of the early 1990s and the group of neorealist independent fiction films that began appearing around the same time, with features such as on-location shooting without permits, non-professional actors, natural lighting and sound, and episodic narratives focusing on the “losers” in China's booming new capitalist economy. The second inspiration was in fact the transnational art-house scene, into which directors such as Jia Zhangke, to the extent that they found success at all, generally had to integrate themselves if they were to maintain “independence” from the domestic film industry and market forces. This program features the Jia Zhangke film that was most ecstatically received by Western critics, representing Jia Zhangke's “realism” at its most aestheticized.

Jia Zhangke's "Platform"

This 3-hour long epic traces the momentous changes that swept China in the immediate post-Mao era by following the transformations of a single “cultural troupe” from a small, nondescript city in a relatively remote province (Jia's own hometown of Fenyang in Shanxi province). As the 1980s break, the young members of the troupe are still performing revolutionary propaganda skits for audiences, but in their real lives they are becoming enamored of Western fashions and popular music. As the decade advances, the troupe itself is forced to privatize to follow the tide of marketization in China, and its performances become increasingly commercialized and sensationalized. More important than the macro-social changes, however, are the telling incidental life moments that are sensitively captured to convey the sense of anticipation of an approaching fulfillment through modernization that nonetheless seems perpetually just out of reach. J. Hoberman of the Village Voice called this film “a major work by a striking new talent” and “one of the richest films of the past decade,” while Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader proclaimed it “one of the most impressive Chinese films I've ever seen” and even said it “might be the greatest film ever to come out of mainland China.”

Platform Chris Fujiwara

In "Platform," a film about a troupe of traveling performers touring the provinces of China from 1979 to 1989, everything important happens off-screen. The characters never witness big political speeches or historic world events. Even in their own relationships and careers, the turning points take place almost without their noticing. And over the course of the story, everything changes within and around them. They never ask why. Director Jia Zhang-ke has found a way to say something about history while dealing only with how history is lived by people who are not political. The result is a film to place beside such masterpieces about time, change, aging, and loss as Orson Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons" and Terence Davies's "The House of Mirth."

For much of "Platform," the focus is on young actor Cui Mingliang (Wang Hong Wei) and his relationships with two actresses. But the main character of the film is the group, and the main theme is its shifting fortunes. As traveling artists, the characters of "Platform" form an elite, more sensitive than many in their society to cultural trends such as bell-bottoms, perms, and Western-style pop music. But as liberalization reaches the countryside, the actors are no more immune than their audiences to the social and economic shifts of which changing fashions are just symptoms.

Jia evokes the sadness of life lived for a future that never comes. A deep but barely acknowledged disappointment is the outcome of Mingliang's relationship with one of the actresses - a relationship he expects will turn into love, but that doesn't.

The film needs its length to make its points and achieve its emotional impact (although, to appease distributors, the director cut it from 193 to 155 minutes). Individual shots are also long, with the camera usually at some distance from the characters. People appear small, undistinguished, somewhat lost, as they try to make themselves comfortable in toneless public spaces or to orient themselves amid brick fortresses, distant mountains, and fields of snow. Jia's visual delicacy enables him to evoke not just life itself, but life turning into memory images. Just as crucial to the film are the constant sounds from unseen sources such as radios, loudspeakers, buses, and trucks - the rumble, crackle, and hum of history. Suggestive of remembered experience, these noises seem to come not just from off-screen space but from off-screen time - out of the past.

One of the epiphanies of "Platform" is the scene in which a former actress, now a provincial bureaucrat, dances alone to a radio in her office. Her yellow sweater, moving against the bleakness of her surroundings (dark, gleaming file cabinets, a hanging fluorescent light), seems to absorb all the light from them, becoming a symbol of beauty. In the context of this subdued film, which features few scenes of the troupe performing, the actress's dance is a rare affirmation of art and an expression of nostalgia.

In its last third, the film traces a draining of optimism as subtle as the draining of the main characters' youth. They and seemingly the whole society have lost their faith - without anyone ever talking about it.

Chinese Cinema Page (Shelly Kraicer) (excerpts of a review in CineAction)

Mainland director Jia Zhangke caught the international film world's with his debut feature Xiao Wu (1998). Made independently in China without official permission, Xiao Wu caused a small sensation as it circulated through the international film festival circuit. It won several prizes and provoked the French film press to dub Jia the most promising young Chinese director. But, having failed to secure the mainland Film Bureau's necessary approval, it remains un-showable in China.

His second film, Platform (Zhantai, 2000), not only confirms that promise, but stakes out a much more substantial claim. It has the weight and ambition of a masterpiece, the defining film of a generation; it is perhaps the most important mainland film of the last few years. Platform announces its ambition, most obviously, by its genre – something close to historical epic—and by its length. As it is currently cut, it runs 195 minutes (the French distributor suggested at the TIFF screening that it will be shortened significantly, but Jia demurred).

Like Xiao Wu, Platform is an unauthorized mainland production; neither the script nor the final print received official permission. It therefore it cannot be shown in China, although prints are circulating outside of the country. It debuted at the 2000 Venice Film Festival, travelled immediately to Toronto, and is receiving screenings at other international film festivals.

Set between 1979 and 1991, the film attempts to chart the social, economic, and cultural changes that utterly transformed the People's Republic of China during that decade. After the enormous damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), which finally came to a close in the period following Mao Zedong's death (1976-1979), China under Deng Xiaoping opened itself culturally and economically to the rest of the world. It shed a collectivized economy for a substantially privatized one, and began to offer its citizens, both rural and urban, unprecedented economic and social freedoms.

These are Platform's broad themes. But Jia disavows the well-trodden path of self-important history-of-a-nation filmmaking by keeping his film's focus tight, precise, and local. Platform concentrates on four performers (all in their twenties) in a provincial performance troupe: Cui Mingliang (Wang Hongwei), accordionist and electric guitar player, his quasi-girlfriend Yin Ruijuan (Zhao Tao) who sings and dances, her best friend, singer Zhong Ping (Yang Tianyi), and Zhong's boyfriend Zhang Jun (Liang Jingdong). The troupe is based in Jia's actual hometown, Fenyang, a small town west of Beijing in Shanxi province near the Yellow River. This town also served as the setting for Xiao Wu, but in his second film, Jia expands his territory north and west, to the Inner Mongolian desert and the banks of the Yellow River. All of the main characters speak in the local Shanxi dialect, further tying the film to a quite specific sense of place. [...]

See the full review in the current issue of CineAction: Spring 2001. issue 54, pp. 67-70.

Postsocialist Grit: Contending Realisms in Jia Zhangke's Platform ... Postsocialist Grit: Contending Realisms in Jia Zhangke’s Platform and Unknown Pleasures, by Edwin Mak from Offscreen, August 2008

DVD Times Noel Megahey, also seen here: Platform | Film at The Digital Fix

DVDTown.com [Christopher Long]

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio]

Film Freak Central Travis Hoover

The 25th and 26th editions of the Hong Kong International Film ... Peter Rist from Offscreen

Music Concrete Alexa Olesen from the Village Voice

Bucking the Remake-and-Sequel Syndrome: The 40 Best ... Jonathan Rosenbaum listing it the 2^nd best film of the year, following Michael Snow’s Corpus Callosum, January 10, 2003

Films of the decade: “Platform” - Salon.com Dennis Lim, December 15, 2009

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

DVDTalk.com [Francis Rizzo III]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Offoffoff, the guide to alternative New York Joshua Tanzer

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Platform Kim Voynar from Cinematical

Come and See/Platform Derek Lam from Camera Stylo

Film Journal International (Eric Monder)

Platform (2000) Nicholas Sheffo from Fulvue Drive-in

Independent filmmaking that is genuinely independent an interview by David Walsh from the World Socialist Web Site, October 2000

Guardian/Observer

Time Out

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

IN PUBLIC (Gong gong chang suo)

China (30 mi) 2001

Cutting Edge and Missed Encounters Bérénice Reynaud reviews 3 film shorts from Senses of Cinema (excerpt)

Jia's In Public starts as a distant echo to his groundbreaking Xiao Wu (1997): in a train station. Yet, instead of following the evolutions of his central character in a variety of public and private spaces in which he seems to “fit” less and less, Jia assembled 30 shots, recorded over a period of 45 days, of anonymous passers-by, travelers, railroad and bus workers, in and around the small mining town of Datung, in Inner Mongolia. Like Fengyeng, Jia's hometown, in which he also locates the plot of Xiao Wu and Platform (2000), Datung is on the verge of major changes – no longer profitable, the mine might be closed; meanwhile, people want to partake in the new pleasures offered by capitalism, such as dance halls, karaoke, blue jeans. Unflinchingly, Jia's gaze and Yu's camera capture the gap between “life's slowness and hope's violence” (Apollinaire), between the ennui, backwardness, and dreary atmosphere of a small town, and the impatience, hidden desires and private concerns of its inhabitants, that create as many enigmatic narrative vignettes. A man waits in a train station – inquires which train has arrived; a first railroad worker gives him a wrong answer, a second the correct one; the man's relatives, a young couple, finally arrive, carrying a heavy bag. Later, at a bus stop, a skinny woman, dressed in black, whose drawn, white features betray a strange kind of tense beauty, runs after a bus that won't stop for her; in the cold, on her fine heels, she performs a sort of dance to express her frustration, circling around the empty bus stop, shortly joined by a young man with whom she starts a conversation we can hardly hear. Is he trying to pick her up? We won't know; after a while, another bus comes; they hop on. We are now inside a bus. Another one, looking at the passengers at close range; a little boy (one of the rare close-ups of the piece) looks back at us. In a train station, a disused bus has been turned into a restaurant, one of the rooms is a pool hall, another a dancing hall; people come and go, to buy tickets or to play pool, while a couple dance, trying on new steps. In the midst of this agitation, an immobile figure stands out – a bald man, wearing dark sunglasses, sporting a vest and a tie, smiling and smoking in silence, surrounded by a small group of people. He seems in command; he's in business. The camera keeps going back to him, first with a close-up of his face – is his smile friendly, vain or sinister? – to a shot of the wheel-chair on which he is sitting, detailing the miniature portrait of Mao hanging from one of the arms, to a shot of the empty space where his left leg should be... (Is he a wounded socialist hero? a gangster?) Nearby, And, next oblivious, the couple is still dancing. In an adjacent (?) dance hall, people move to a socialist song (“the laborious and courageous Chinese people, marching with vigor into a new age.”)

UNKNOWN PLEASURES (Ren xiao yao) B+ 90

China Japan (113 mi) 2002

Sort of a Chinese BREATHLESS, some terrific, extended scenes, but also some uneven, rather boring parts to this film, including a passion for long tracking shots from out of a truck or a car, which gets repetitive after awhile, and some less than engaging acting performances. Basically, the film explores two friends, their own personal relationship, and also their girl friends, but there’s no sense here that anything will last. One of the characters reveals the theme here, “I’ve got no fucking future.” In a town called Textile Mill, which resembles a wasteland built next to a nuclear power plant, no one has a job, no one has a future, just alienated kids who feel there is nothing worth living past 30, the so-called Chinese modernization plan has just passed these kids by. While this film has a documentary style, shot on digital video, the most brilliantly realized scenes are always the dance numbers. One of the kids is re-creating a scene from an American movie where the characters are about to rob a bank, so they yell out, “Freeze!” There is an immediate cut to an immense dark, dimly lit dance floor where a little bit of PULP FICTION comes back to life, but the scene continues outside to an outdoor pool table, and what seems like the entire town sitting around in chairs watching a lone TV. International concepts discussed on the news seem to have so little relevance to the lives of these people.

Reverse Shot Matt Plouffe

An unflinching look at disillusioned youth in China’s mainland doldrums, Jia Zhang Ke’s impossibly affecting Unknown Pleasures unearths a suffocating serenity in the city of Datong that merits more than the critical banalities it garnered. After landing a slot in 2002’s New York Film Festival, Pleasures returned for a cursory stateside stint in early 2003 and flickered for a brief time, like most slow-moving no-name foreign fare, on a small screen in a downtown art house. Those lucky enough to catch it witnessed what is sure to be considered a seminal work of China’s developing Sixth Generation for years to come. Crafted with an unerring eye for adolescent ambivalence, Zhang Ke sculpts a DV monument to the image of modern-malaise that possesses such quietly disruptive elegance, even dreary Datong seems inexplicably alluring. Nonpareil in its unnerving honesty, Pleasures commits itself—like the finest of under-the-radar cinema—to documenting the oft-impenetrable and speciously concieved. Offering an uber-contemporary Chinese youth audiences don’t see on the big-screen, Zhang Ke and his film are a beacon of light shining from a country with censors too image-conscious for their own good.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Unknown Pleasures, Jia Zhang-ke's haunting follow-up to Platform, tracks various stages of underdevelopment. In an impoverished area of China, two disenchanted teenagers struggle with unemployment and raging libidos: Xiao Ji (Wu Qiong) falls in love with Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao), a singer-prostitute who promotes Mongolian King liquor for her boyfriend-pimp, and his friend Bin Bin (Zhao Wei Wei) struggles against depression and his nagging mother. Shot on digital video and staged in real time, the film achieves an unprecedented level of docu-realism. Jia envisions a hopeful period of social transition despite the overwhelming sense of devastation (a group of Datong textile mill workers celebrate Beijing's successful bid for the 2008 Olympics and the riches it promises). Hope builds even as various apartment complexes fall to the ground; this remote, post-apocalyptic area of China could be the last place on Earth. Culture here is displaced into memory and commodified by an American pop ethos that infiltrates the provincial landscape via techno clubs and black markets. This threat is a pervasive (see Jia's reference to America's infiltration of Chinese airspace), functioning for the film's depressed characters as an escape mechanism. In the end, the incessant Tarantino references are no different than Bin Bin's fascination with the Monkey King and Qiao Qiao's evocation of Taoist master Zhuangzi's "Dreams of a Butterfly." These are their points of departure. Despite the film's overwhelming sadness, its better-than-here hopelessness pokes through. No doubt dreaming of better places, Xiao Ji rides his motorcycle out of the film's suffocating milieu. Lighting crashes and his motorcycle breaks down on cue. Rather than head back to town, he hitches a ride from a stranger and perseveres.

Chinese films at the 27th Toronto International Film Festival - A ... Shelly Kraicer from Senses of Cinema

TIFF's selection of films from mainland China displayed an impressively wide range of ways of engaging with the world around them. This is at least partly due to the new energy that Giovanna Fulvi, TIFF's new programmer of Asian Cinema, brought to her corner of the Festival. I can't remember seeing a more representatively broad range of films from the PRC in Toronto: six features in all, plus two documentaries. At the head of the list was Jia Zhangke's Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiao yao, 2002), a poetic, ruminative drama about two dead-end young drifters (Xiao Ji and Binbin) and a professional dancer (Qiaoqiao) mired in a provincial backwater. The backwater is Datong, a city near Mongolia noted now for vast, idle state owned factories. Xiao Ji's sullen slacker affectations, decorated with a subdued panache, fail to contain a sudden reckless love he catches (like you or I might catch a flu) for gorgeous Qiaoqiao, who has sold her art to a liquor promoter with gangster connections (her sublime minority dance routines are staged to attract potential customers to Mongolian King Liquor). Xiao Ji's best friend Binbin is likewise unemployed. His glum earnestness is no match for his high school sweetheart Yuanyuan, on a fast track to university in Beijing. She's headed somewhere, and he's headed nowhere, vectors pulling apart that their relationship can't contain. Events on the surface of China's political life in 2001 constantly intrude via televised news reports: the Falun Gong arrests, the shooting down of a US military plane, Beijing winning the 2008 Olympics. Bits of violence burst into the narrative: a mysterious explosion hits a factory; a bank hold-up with fake explosives is interrupted. But the film's real subject concerns movement and stasis, progress or stalled oblivion.

Jia's masterpiece Platform (Zhantai, 2000) was about Time: its epic reach showed its characters mired in, caught by a sense of time passing and changing that they could barely cope with. Unknown Pleasures, Platform's companion piece, is obsessed with Space. Its model of China today is made up of a series of brilliantly staged public spaces. Its dynamic is its characters' struggles to carve temporary, fragile private spaces out of the collapsing public space that post-communist China can no longer sustain. Its most potent and ambivalent symbol is the vast bus station/pool hall/community centre where much of the action is set. A concrete-ribbed warehouse, dark, decayed-utilitarian, full of empty air and echoes, colonized for public (gambling, loan sharking) and private purposes by city dwellers who seem, despite their ingenuity and industry, completely dwarfed by and lost in the vastness of the space. Jia's newest intervention into the politics of China's culture offers a precisely shot, re-visualized sense of space under enormous social pressure. One of the most exhilarating and liberating experiences I know in cinema today is watching Jia's constantly evolving cinematic language as it continues to invent new ways for us to see.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Unknown Pleasures (2002) Peter Matthews, July 2003

A textured study of disaffected youth, Jia Zhang Ke's Unknown Pleasures is a subtle dissection of provincial ennui

The utter equivalence of form and content is perhaps the chief beauty of Jia Zhang Ke's Unknown Pleasures. At first and for quite a stretch, the movie seems little more than a hodgepodge of loosely associated scenes that keep on the same flat emotional plane and refuse to build up narrative momentum. There's no plot to speak of - just stray episodes illustrating the everyday lives of some disaffected Chinese youths in a regional hellhole remote from Beijing. Yet the monotony, the listlessness, the irritating lack of resolution are strictly calculated, as it turns out. For these are people facing no conceivable future - who have literally lost the plot.

Nineteen-year-old Xiao Ji's motorbike splutters, stalls and finally stops, an emblem of social torpor which encapsulates Jia's storytelling procedure as well. The writer-director sporadically dangles the prospect of melodrama (a gun, an attempted bank heist) before the hungry audience, but then, almost gleefully, snatches it back, as if to prove that any positive act by the characters is doomed in advance.

While the film is very precisely set in 2001, its temporal dimension (at least in the ordinary sense of progress) feels blocked. Space reciprocally gains an overwhelming salience, trapping the protagonists within grimy, cupboard-sized rooms, or else opening out to engulf them in a vast, rubble-strewn wasteland. Like the classical neorealists, Jia is engaged by texture rather than incident. He arguably goes further, witnessing the concrete particulars of his milieu with the patience, the stringency, the cool objectivity of an ethnographer. There can't be a more subtle dissection of provincial ennui in cinema. But Unknown Pleasures isn't simply about a blighted backwater of China. The malaise extends to the whole modern globalised order, where illusory freedoms create ever tighter bonds of subjection.

Jia's earlier film Platform (2000) employed the microcosm of an itinerant theatre troupe to chart the massive upheavals in Chinese society during the 1980s. As economic liberalism takes hold, the commune gradually splinters - ground down by unseen external forces beyond its control. The director mimics these transformations through slow, painful adjustments in his style. When the characters are still in their Maoist phase, the twinning of a static camera with extreme long shots underwrites a hidebound, insular republic which effectively reduces its citizens to anonymous specks. Once the free market kicks in, however, a few discreet pans and medium shots are grudgingly conceded - all but wrestled from the mise en scène by the strength of the newly unleashed desires.

Platform describes the death throes of the old collectivised world and the birth spasms of the private self. Yet Jia the sober determinist scarcely views the change as a deliverance - more like the inexorable operation of the material base upon the cultural superstructure.

Unknown Pleasures shows the tide of individualism in full swell a decade later, and again finds the precise aesthetic means to gauge the distance travelled. Outwardly hipper and jazzier than its predecessor, the movie rarely looks as though it were filmed using the wrong end of a telescope. Two-shots predominate, with now and then the luxury of a close-up. The camera bobs and weaves with the unparalleled mobility enabled by digital video - the technology itself connoting 'westernisation' or at any rate 'free choice'.

But the continual movement also leads nowhere. Jia's restless camera habitually drifts past actors loitering in doorways or follows them on desultory circuits around the shabbier neighbourhoods of Datong - the name (which translates as 'Great Harmony') bitterly ironised by the post-industrial devastation we see. Though Xiao Ji (Wu Qiong) and his elusive love object Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao) favour poses of blank-faced anomie, it's clear enough that their existential chic springs ultimately from hard economics. For capitalist development is irrational, the commercial energy at the centre filtering unevenly to the margins and leaving a traditional textile town like Datong out of the loop altogether. Youth unemployment breeds fatalism - an analysis that may be read from the film frame without the slightest didactic prompting by the script.

Xiao Ji's more conventional pal Bin Bin (Zhao Wei Wei) attempts to join the army as a last-ditch escape, while Qiao Qiao tries her luck at the fag end of show business, dancing in promotions for Mongolian King Liquor. But Jia sours even these pathetic dreams with a bout of hepatitis and a swift decline into prostitution respectively. The only manifest winner is Bin Bin's girlfriend, serious, dedicated Yuan Yuan (Zhou Qing Feng), who brings the bygone party discipline to a projected career in international trade.

Feeling no such connection with history and expecting nothing, the others live hedonistically for the present moment. A certain bleak comedy attends their efforts to restyle apathy as a mode of glamorous elitism - especially since limited spending power obliges them to make a third-rate job of it. Xiao Ji's version of carpe diem is cruising at random on that dilapidated bike, a Belmondoesque cigarette hanging permanently from his lips. Qiao Qiao sports Capri pants, a pink jacket and a tacky Cleopatra wig in bold defiance of her drab environment. Both characters have scenes of unmasking (or in Qiao Qiao's case, unwigging) where the mopey affectations are stripped away and the original, naked creature steps out - soft, larva-like and frightened.

The single activity that engages the slackers (if interest can be deduced from their glassy stares) is watching television. In a device repeated with ritual frequency, Jia exhibits some topical item on the box - the collision of an American with a Chinese plane over Hainan or the announcement that Beijing will host the 2008 Olympics - then pans to the seemingly unmoved teenage spectators. The news could be broadcast from Mars for its relevance to the recipients. Still, one perceives that it feeds obscurely into their funk by offering an interminable, rolling chaos of events which they are unable to absorb, let alone influence.

The partial thaw in the state media delivers a bewildering surfeit of imagery to the powerless, and the film's English title (the Chinese one Ren Xiao Yao means 'free of all constraints') bears this sense of infinite opportunities lying just out of reach. The carefully layered soundtrack fills the air with tantalising promise - in the sad, stoical lyrics of a pop song and in the easy money espoused by a blaring advertisement for the lottery.

Cynics might suggest that the adolescent angst is a typical narcissistic reaction to ungratified consumerism. It's true that the callow protagonists ennoble their despair, and Jia is sharp on how the influx of American (or Americanised) mass culture fosters egocentricity. Qiao Qiao evidently sees herself as the Madonna of the sticks; Xiao Ji grooves to the jaunty nihilism of Pulp Fiction. Such ready-made identities may be peeled off at will - a loss of authenticity corroborated in a curious scene where Bin Bin flogs VCDs (among them Platform) to a loan shark named Xiao Wu (the hero of Jia's 1997 debut feature Pickpocket). It would appear that the western disease of wry self-referentiality has begun to infect China. But though Jia is tempted, he never succumbs, maintaining a firm gap between the symptom and its diagnosis.

The movie could be criticised for fixating on the young, treating them as special, and to that degree ratifying their solipsistic rebellion. It does endeavour to view the kids anthropologically, but they are granted an extra edge of sympathy that's withheld from the few adult characters - dim descendants of those neglectful, complaining parents who spawned juvenile delinquents in 1950s Hollywood. Yet this faint romanticism qualifies Jia to be the voice of a generation, whose mood he distils with infallible delicacy and rigour.

Postsocialist Grit: Contending Realisms in Jia Zhangke's Platform ... Postsocialist Grit: Contending Realisms in Jia Zhangke’s Platform and Unknown Pleasures, by Edwin Mak from Offscreen, August 2008

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman] or see it here pasted on a flyer in pdf format: UNKNOWNPLEASURES.flyer

Reverse Shot Elbert Ventura

Nitrate Online [Gregory Avery]

filmcritic.com Jeremiah Kipp

CineScene [Howard Schumann]

DVD Verdict Joel Pearce

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

Plume-Noire.com Movie Review Sandrine Marques

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Leslie Katz

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Unknown Pleasures Philippe Serve

CREDITS an essay on pdf format from New Yorker films

Unknown Pleasures A film by JIA Zhang-Ke Synopsis an essay on pdf format

Director Aims Lens at China's New Generation Feature and interview by Yu Sen-lun at Cannes, from the Taipei Times, May 26, 2002

Interview with Jia Zhang Ke and Zhao Tao - Ina - Tales of a festival a video interview and photo session from Cannes

Guardian/Observer

New York Times (registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell

THE WORLD (Shijie) A 96

China Japan France (143 mi) 2004

an exploration on the impact of urbanization and globalization on a traditional culture

Not nearly as sharply political as PLATFORM, a film that depicted the Cultural Revolution of the 60’s, beginning with huge amounts of energy and optimism that eventually deflates before our eyes, like letting the air out of a balloon. Now, in this vision of the modern world, China creates an image of success, building huge expansive projects for the future, but behind these largely superficial structures lie the invisible and lonely lives of the people who built them or work there, who couldn’t be more powerless, more dehumanized, lost in a spiritual vacuum despite claims that modern technology brings us all closer together. The people who inhabit this world couldn’t be farther apart.

Incredibly ambiguous, and fairly bleak, yet a sumptuously beautiful film, cinematography by Yu Lik-wai, art direction by Wu Lizhong, perhaps as gorgeous a film as one could ever hope to see, set almost entirely amidst a real life theme park setting outside Beijing, which has a one-third scale Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triumph, or the Sphinx and the Pyramids, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Taj Mahal, St Peters Square, London Bridge and Big Ben, or Manhattan, still with the twin towers, with Vegas style showgirls in stunningly colorful costumes dancing to enhance the customer’s enjoyment. Along the outside, a monorail slowly creeps, like a caterpillar, along the elevated tracks making a complete round of the park in fifteen minutes. The filmmaker has a truly remarkable eye for placing his characters in an imaginatively conceived architectural wonderland, and freely moves his camera around, creating some dazzling effects. The look and pace of the film is mesmerizing and has the feel like we are gliding effortlessly through another dimension, perhaps floating underwater, with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s musical master Lim Giong providing the music mix that pulsates so effortlessly over these images, with recurring themes reminding us of the rhythms and repetitions of the daily routines.

Tao, Zhao Tao, is one of the performers introduced in an eye-opening tracking shot, which weaves in and out of a backstage dressing room, where beautiful women are dressed up in flamboyant costumes. She appears level-headed and somewhat reserved, despite the fact her jewelry sounds like bells announcing her arrival wherever she walks, and she does not rush headlong into a relationship with her new boy friend, Taisheng, Chen Taishen, from her home town, a chain smoker clad in a black leather jacket, one of the security guards on the grounds. Despite his claims to fidelity, and her insistence upon it, he’s cheating on her with a clothes designer, Qun, Huang Yiqun, who runs a sweatshop and hasn’t seen her husband in eight years, not since he was smuggled out of China on a boat bound for Europe, now living in Paris, one of only a handful who survived. She yearns to obtain a passport and meet him there. In this setting, young workers from all over the country come to find work and immerse themselves in this exotic labor pool that is no different than other worker camps, as what initially seems happy and colorful on the outside becomes more claustrophobic and suffocating day after day, as the workers are confined to tiny rooms and small, cramped hallways. The dressing room resembles a typical basement with pipes running along the ceiling. Here, individuals are cut off and lose their connections to their families. There’s a constant feeling of displacement and alienation, where feelings cannot be expressed, covered up by an incessant preference for cell phone text messaging, by partying and jubilant celebration, and living a life of artificially contrived happiness.

In one ridiculous moment at a party, Tao receives a call on her cell phone, and the person placing the call is the man sitting next to her, but she is forced to go outside to hear, where he is conveniently waiting for her, skillfully planning how to manipulate her sexual favors into his business travels. We see another showgirl eventually succumb to this temptation, sleeping with the boss in order to get a promotion. In a key scene, newly arrived Russian dancers are forced to surrender their passports, which makes it easier to exploit them later. In a heartbreaking moment, Tao sees one of the dancers, perhaps her only friend, has been forced into prostitution. In another sequence, one of the less fortunate workers from her home town is killed in an industrial construction accident, and in an eerie moment, the family which has traveled a long arduous journey to get there, wordlessly receive monetary compensation for their son. These are bleak economic realities interspersed into the colorful artificialities of this surreal dream world.

The film seems connected not by reality, or through established relationships, but by a desire for something different, something better somewhere else, which is what drove this theme park to be built in the first place, as a kind of wish fulfillment for ordinary and mundane lives. This kind of dreamy alternative mood is wonderfully expressed through the use of animated cell phone calls, creating extremely colorful cartoon sequences where characters may be seen flying through the air, eventually discovering entirely new worlds. In contrast, Tao never seems to leave the grounds of this park and feels eternally stuck in limbo, which suggests that where she is now is better than where she came from. In a staggering image, a plane is taking off over the solitary concrete columns of a construction zone where Tao confesses, “I don’t know anyone who’s ever been on an airplane.” Despite the length of the film, we learn very little about the workers, which is precisely the point, whose lives, even their connection to one another are largely tucked away and hidden from view, compartmentalized, like interchangeable parts, trapped in a virtual reality existence with no way out. In this world, the need for hope is strong, but the lack of hope appears stronger and seems more likely to prevail. Despite all the surface razzamatazz, lurking underneath are the seeds of oblivion.

from Jonathan Rosenbaum:

“One reason The World is such a potent companion piece to Platform, which views the Cultural Revolution over many years from the vantage point of a traveling theater troupe, is that it can be said to describe another failed cultural revolution – capitalism, seen from the vantage point of Chinese communism.”

As Chinese film specialist Shelly Kraicer puts it:

“Platform showed a China lost in time. The World shows the same society lost in space.”

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

Former underground director Jia Zhangke offers an inspired metaphor for the strange new world of modern China in the global economy. Behind the scenes in Beijing's real-life World Park, a theme park of miniature reproductions of everything from the pyramids to the Manhattan skyline (where, they brag, the Twin Towers are still intact), performers constantly switch national costumes for daily shows and security guards roam the world in their patrols. It's a Beijing of immigrants, figuratively and literally, as the employees all have come from the provinces and beyond. In this global community in a fishbowl, life is short, identity is fleeting and human connection (even if merely by text messaging) is the only thing that gives all this flurry any meaning. Jia's compassion for the drifting souls struggling to create a life for themselves in such a transitory existence makes the metaphor resonant.

In Review: Best of the Decade Marc Raymond from One One Four, November 19, 2009

Jia Zhangke emerged this decade from the underground of Chinese filmmaking, working in digital video and outside of the government and its censorship. THE WORLD tells the story of a couple working in a giant amusement park that features mininatures of world landmarks, including the World Trade Center towers. The rather simple story is used by Jia to allow for a extreme long take visual style, at times featuring static compositions and at other times highlighting very mobile framings, which include a remarkable opening tracking shot through a backstage environment. What this style brings to the forefront is the whole issue of cinematic realism. It seems that Jia believes in this notion of cinematic reality, and the film’s scenes gain a dramatic force and weight that conventional editing would not provide. Despite the fact that he shoots on digital video, Jia relies on the ontology of the film image, and one can say he places his faith in reality (to quote Andre Bazin). But at the same time, there are moments when Jia employs animation to convey his characters’ imaginary worlds, giving the sense that there are realities film cannot capture. There are also a few scenes that self-consciously question the image, however subtly. Tao and her boyfriend, Taisheng, make a video in front of a bluescreen for a magic carpet ride. The camera tracks from their image in reality to their image on a video screen where their DVD is being captured. Within this simple shot, reality and image are both put into play (and into question). Similarly, and less obviously, there are shots twice in the film of people posing for pictures in front of the model for the Leaning Tower of Pisa, pretending to hold the tower up. However, these shots reveal the constructiveness of these pictures, and, consequently, of all film images in depth. This long take style that nevertheless questions its realism even as it relies of its ontology is especially appropriate to a film about the reality of characters and their situations within a fictionalized environment consisting of a literal simulation of the world. No other film this decade tells us more about contemporary life nor does it with as much directorial flair.

The Boston Phoenix Chris Fujiwara

The World is so much more intelligent and exciting than it could have been. In choosing to make a film about people who work at the World Park — a theme park outside Beijing that boasts simulacra of such landmarks as the Lower Manhattan skyline, the Eiffel Tower, and the Great Pyramid of Egypt — director Jia Zhangke runs some risks. Since the World Park comments on itself by its mere existence, further commentary is threatened with redundancy. Also, the dominant commercial cinema has been so glib in trading in the postmodernism of placelessness, from Blade Runner to Baz Luhrmann to Batman Returns, that for an art filmmaker outside the Hollywood orbit to enter this market is to risk impotent cuteness.

Three options are immediately obvious, all equally banal. You could celebrate, in the smirking Broadway-for-the-multiplex manner of Chicago or Moulin Rouge, the glitzy surfaces of the simulated world while mocking the suckers whom these surfaces deceive. You could appeal to a despairing humanism by showing individual lives crushed under the heel of globalization. Or you could appease a more sentimental humanism by showing how in spite of everything, people adapt, muddle through, and make the globalized world their home.

The World does all three, but in reverse. The film doesn’t neutralize (how could it?) a smug, derisive response to the falseness of the theme park and to the modest pride its workers take in being close to the world’s monuments. But Jia’s visual design is a deterrent to easy ironizing. He photographs the simulacra as part of the distant background, as seen from the trains that shuttle his characters around or behind their backs as they talk to each other on half-deserted platforms. It’s a world that’s close but far, real but empty, stable but uncomfortable. Jia provides a long-shot view of individuals placed in, and against, the vast spaces of history — the same view (now expanded by CinemaScope) with which he built a previous masterpiece, 2000’s Platform.

Like the protagonists of that film and of its excellent follow-up, 2002’s Unknown Pleasures, some of the main characters of The World are performers. Jia’s view of these people is close to that of Max Ophuls in Lola Montes or Douglas Sirk in Imitation of Life: they’re trapped rather than liberated by the stage machines to which they lend their bodies but not their souls. They’re glorified service personnel in kitschy uniforms, not expressive artists. Yet it’s through performance — specifically the gift of a song — that two characters of The World communicate with each other: Tao (Zhao Tao), a young dancer from Northern China, and Anna (Alla Shcherbakova), a Russian dancer for whom employment at the theme park turns out to be a stop on the way to prostitution. In the song of Ulan Bator that Anna teaches Tao, The World finds the possibility of an authentic culture. The cell-phone text messages through which the characters keep in touch point to a similar possibility, and Jia privileges the world-apart nature of these communications by accompanying them with short animations. Yet he also sees the cell phone as a surveillance device, in the subplot about a jealous man who gets enraged when he can’t keep tabs on his dancer girlfriend.

Confronting globalization and the technologies of instantaneity, The World creates an experience that’s epic and unresolved, in which there’s wholeness but no contrived balance or symmetry, and in which, behind the characters’ personal struggles, distances of time, space, and scale loom, neither affirming nor annihilating, as challenges and reference points. It’s a region of experience for which Asian cinema has long had a special affinity, and with Platform, Unknown Pleasures, and now The World, Jia has established himself as one of this area’s most creative explorers.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

The guides at Beijing's World Park promise "a new world every day," but over the course of Jia Zhang-ke's dazzling fourth feature, that come-on starts to seem less enticing than ominous. In the World Park, a popular tourist attraction whose appeal Jia neatly subverts, each nation is represented by replicas of its famous landmarks. There's a scaled-down Eiffel Tower, a baby Sphinx, even a miniature Manhattan, its gleaming spires safely contained by an encircling moat. Enabling visitors to "see the world without ever leaving Beijing," the park offers the illusion of mobility while actually denying it. Even the monorail that speeds from one attraction to the next runs, finally, in a circle.

Although he's occasionally seduced by the World Park's impressive surfaces, Jia starts The World behind the scenes. In the first of the movie's many long takes, the camera follows Tao (Zhao Tao), a brashly naive dancer attired as an Indian princess, through a warren of backstage corridors as she belts, "Band-Aid! Anybody got a Band-Aid?" Moments later, the stage explodes in a burst of yellow light which threatens to dissolve the performers in its glare. This spectacle may be alluring—especially as captured by Nelson Yu Lik-Wai's dazzling hi-def video—but it's a dangerous business.

Jia's first three features, Xiao Wu, Platform and Unknown Pleasures, effectively chronicled the dissolution of the state-run economy in his rural hometown of Fenyang. But if the 35-year-old Jia is no apologist for the past—The World is his first movie made within the state system, and thus the first that can legally be exhibited in China—he casts a cool eye on the new China as well. As a character in Xiao Wu laments, "The old is being pulled down, but I see nothing new."

Significantly, The World rarely ventures into Beijing itself. Jia may have moved out of the provinces, but he's not quite ready for the big city. Outside of the park, we see mainly cramped interiors: dingy sweatshops, sleazy karaoke bars and a construction site whose skeletal pillars recall the forbidding landscape of Antonioni's L'Eclisse. But where Antonioni's characters are pinned to their carefully framed backdrops, Jia lets his creations roam free. Impressive but unforbidding, his wide-angle shots take in a universe of barely contained detail, often drifting sideways to catch an action already in progress. Despite the omniscience promised by the wired world (and, more subtly, threatened by the Chinese government's surveillance ), life goes on, whether we're watching or not.

In fact, although The World aches with modernist alienation, Jia pauses to wonder whether the infinite connectedness of the Internet era is really such a good thing. Tao's co-worker Niu (Jian Zhong-wei) flips out every time he can't reach his girlfriend on her cell, and threatens to buy her a GPS phone so he can track her at all times. The text messages from Tao's boyfriend, Taisheng (Chen Taisheng), may send her into flash-animated frenzy (the most notable upgrade in production value from Jia's previous films), but their in-person encounters take place in dingy hotel rooms lit by single, poison-yellow bulbs.

The movie's most profound relationship is almost wordless. Anna (Alla Shcherbakova), a Russian mother of two, arrives at the park accompanied by three countrywomen and a seedy handler who establishes his nastiness by asking for their passports—a prized possession most Chinese can only dream of owning. Despite their lack of common language, Anna and Tao establish a tentative friendship, although their doubly subtitled conversations give the audience special insight into how much slips through the cracks. When the sweater around Anna's shoulder drops to reveal the angry welts on her back and Tao gently replaces it, no words can convey the understanding that passes between the two of them—and no words do.

Despite their fragile understanding, Tao mistakes her new friend's mobility for liberty. "I envy you," she says. "You can go anywhere. What freedom!" And, in fact, Anna does escape, though not before sinking considerably lower. The World's other citizens aren't so lucky. Although Jia's roving camera and the overlapping sound which bridges most scenes suggest the extent to which their stories are inevitably intermingled, they remain resolutely isolated from one another, the distance between them only accentuated by the devices that are meant to connect them. In fact, the movie's abrupt (and, even after three viewings, rather unsatisfying) ending suggests that the only real communion comes after they leave their bodies behind—either a profoundly pessimistic comment on the state of the physical world or a veiled satire on the promise of virtuality. At once sprawling and intimately observed, The World is big enough to contain both ideas, and many more besides.

The Village Voice [Dennis Lim]

After three unsanctioned productions steeped in regional detail—each one a masterpiece—Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke goes at once aboveground and global. Set in the 35-year-old director's native province of Shanxi, Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000), and Unknown Pleasures (2002) gravitate to the young and the powerless, stricken and paralyzed even as the world around them convulses at warp speed. The films outline the contours of the spiritual vacuum created by the double whammy of the Cultural Revolution and the Deng-era blind lunge toward free markets. They abound in ethnographic specifics but their hapless dreamers embody a universal sentiment: We've got to get out of this place.

The World appears to grant that wish. "I'm going to India," announces Tao (Jia's regular star Zhao Tao) early on—and the scenic route even affords a view of the Pyramids and the Sphinx. Welcome to Beijing World Park, a themed expanse in the suburbs that features scale replicas of some 100 tourist attractions from five continents. With mock-infomercial solemnity, The World flashes the park's slogan on the screen: "See the world without ever leaving Beijing." Anyone who has seen a Jia film will realize this is less a promise than a threat.

Jia's fourth feature has been greeted as his statement on globalization—but which of his movies isn't? The director, whose formative years coincided with an influx of previously banned artworks, has a complex take on how globalization affects the kid on the street— particularly in terms of imported popular culture and technology. Jia's characters embrace karaoke and break dancing, consume Taiwanese pop and bootleg DVDs, cling to favorite songs like life-saving talismans. But even more than the Shanxi trilogy, The World emphasizes that the illusion of interconnectedness does not equal (or even enable) the experience of mobility. The movie demolishes the go-go globalizer's obnoxious equation of free trade with freedom. The World may be flat; the world is decidedly not.

Befitting Jia's first authorized production, the movie is a lavish exercise in pageantry—though only the most myopic World Park official could mistake this for a positive representation. (Jia's version of the site fluidly combines Beijing's real, 12-year-old one and the similar Window of the World in Hong Kong–adjacent Shenzhen.) No less than Westworld, Jia's theme park offers no way out—a hermetic zone of zombified ritual and Muzak Beethoven, encircled by a snaking monorail and eerily deserted highways. Big Ben abuts Lower Manhattan and the still-standing World Trade Center; the Eiffel Tower looms over the Taj Mahal. The sense of the ersatz is seamless, even if the counterfeits aren't convincing. In Jia's formulation, the World Park—with its furious proliferation of imitations and visceral absence of context—is alienating in much the same way as modern-day China.

Tao, a member of the World Park performing troupe, and her boyfriend, Taisheng (Chen Taisheng), a security guard, are Shanxi transplants, and The World makes painfully clear the finite options available to provincials flooding into Chinese cities. Tao and Taisheng are trapped in a taunting virtual environment, but they're lucky compared to his peasant friends, who are consigned to hazardous construction work. Illegal or otherwise unsavory activity seems the quickest shortcut to advancement. Like the title character in Xiao Wu, Tao is dimly aware of what it would take to better her lot, but can't bring herself to carry out the soul-crushing transactions.

Instead, she harbors wistful fantasies of flight—most poignantly, in a sequence that envisions a plastic rain sheet as an enchanted cape. They may traverse "continents," but Tao and her fellow employees are effectively grounded—the Russian guest workers are required to surrender their passports. (One unforgettable image, a plane taking off over a field of concrete columns, stresses just how earthbound these people are.) Tao dresses up in garishly exotic saris and kimonos for nightly stage spectacles, but song and dance, traditionally an escape hatch for Jia's characters, loses its magic when all of life is a show.

Just as a ringing pager brings about Xiao Wu's final humiliation, an ill-timed text message precipitates The Worl d's lurch toward tragic melodrama. On a first viewing, the movie seemed a dilution of the formal strategies Jia had perfected—at once less dispassionate and less empathetic. After a repeat viewing, it still strikes me as Jia's fourth-best film (that it's one of the year's best says plenty about the level at which he's working), but it's more apparent that The Worl d's muffled emotional impact should be understood as a function of its setting. Tao and Taisheng are typical Jia lovers, playing romance as a desultory game of defense, but the oppressive backdrop diminishes their squabbles and infects their inner lives with a deadening blankness.

With its ready-made metaphors, precise and quietly flashy long-take cinematography (by the estimable Yu Lik-wai), a seductively trancey score by Lim Giong (the first use of non-diegetic music in the Jia oeuvre), and flurries of whimsical animated punctuation, The World is the director's most accessible film. But it's also his most despairing—a harsh riposte to the first three. Jia's characters are forever looking to escape their isolation (a key location in Unknown Pleasures is the half-built highway that will link the depressed mining town of Datong to Beijing). The cruel revelation here is that what awaits out in the world is nothing better—or more real—than what's in The World.

Chinese Reality Series - Gay City News Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Over the course of four feature-length films, the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang Ke has mounted an ambitious chronicle of his country’s opening to capitalism. His project is akin to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s lifelong work on recounting a complete history of 20th-century Germany.

Jia’s first film, “Xiao Wu,” was set in his hometown Fenyang, and centered on a pickpocket who watches most of his friends turn from petty crime to entrepreneurial success while he flounders. His second, “Platform,” broke new ground by creating a historical epic about 1980s China, depicting the endless tours of a troupe of entertainers who start out singing dreary Maoist propaganda songs and wind up discovering break dancing and synth-pop years after they have gone out of fashion in the West.

Up to that point, most of the films by directors of Jia’s generation were set in the present day; with “Platform,” he showed that he could treat the recent past with as clear an eye as the present. Until “The World,” his films have all taken place in China’s backwaters. He has now made a leap to the city, although his characters still come from rural areas and small towns.

“The World” is set in Beijing’s World Park, a tourist attraction that is part Las Vegas, part Epcot Center, with miniature monuments of the world’s historic sites. The Manhattan exhibit still has the Twin Towers and there’s London’s Big Ben, 100 feet away. Appearing in kitschy revues, singers pretend to be Japanese, Indian and African.

“The World” depicts the love lives and friendships of World Park’s employees, a large group of male guards and female performers.

Opening with a lengthy tracking shot following a dancer who’s looking for a Band-Aid, a panoramic backstage view of World Park is offered. Setting the tone for the rest of the film, the scene belongs in noisy clamor and ends in solitude.

World Park is a real place, whose directors were surprisingly pleased by Jia’s film, but it’s also a symbol of globalization’s illusory promises. For most of its workers, simply coming to Beijing is like visiting a foreign country. While they work alongside its replica, few will ever get to visit the Eiffel Tower. Rather than offering a real glimpse of other cultures, World Park reduces them to clichés––a few instantly recognizable landmarks, with modern New York and ancient Egypt standing side-by-side. Cross-cultural communication occurs once, between a Russian and Chinese woman who don’t even speak the same language.

As a symbol, World Park is a little facile. As a space to film, Jia puts it to great use. For the workers, World Park’s monuments are simply everyday surroundings. A painful conversation between a guard and his hometown friend, who notices that London Bridge resembles a rural dam, takes place near Manhattan. Jia creates deceptive skylines and separates the film into sections with titles like “Tokyo story.” Making the most of the potential for humor in World Park, he indulges bizarre juxtapositions. Two guards fight against a background including a live camel, a pyramid and a tiny version of the Sphinx.

It would be difficult to sum up the plot of “The World” in a paragraph. The press kit’s cast of characters includes 16 people. Even on a second viewing, it’s hard to keep them straight. The general gist, though, is hard to miss.

Most of them are unlucky in love and life. They’re the losers in a class war, stuck pandering to tourists while social boundaries prevent them from escaping the park. Other job opportunities for new arrivals in Beijing, like construction work, turn out to be low-wage hazards.

Jia shows a real knack for the effective use of tracking shots, but his film’s most memorable moments take place in front of a stationary camera, poised for a long take. He plays out the numerous uncomfortable conversations the camera captures to the breaking point.

In “Xiao Wu” and “Platform,” Jia’s style seemed rather austere, but he loosens up in “The World” by including animated sections, that dramatize characters’ ironic fantasies. After arguing with her boyfriend in an airplane set, a woman dreams of flying. But these fantasies fall very short of ever being fulfilled.

Jia’s films are as much about sociology as about storytelling. It’s ironic, therefore, that “The World” is his first film not banned by the Chinese government––a reflexive response Jia joked about in his third film, “Unknown Pleasures,” by showing a bootleg DVD vendor selling “Platform” and “Xiao Wu.” The new film’s characters suffer more from the impact of capitalism than their cousins in other Jia films. Unfortunately, “The World” introduces an unwelcome fatalist streak, which feels more European than Chinese, into his work. As the narrative progresses, characters must die to keep it moving. Usually a highly inventive director, he settles for an easy pessimism in the film’s final hour.

However, these flaws don’t detract from the film’s insights into globalization’s costs, and they’re balanced by a refreshing playfulness. Much of “The World” describes a situation specific to China, and World Park is quite a singular setting. Nevertheless, Jia’s work has something to say to Americans as well. Replacing the fake glamour of World Park with the bland backdrop of a Wal-Mart, much the same story could take place here.

“Platform” and “Unknown Pleasures” received extremely short New York runs and hopefully “The World” will find the American audience it deserves. It’s a news bulletin that demands attention.

Lost in Time, Lost in Space: Beijing Film Culture in 2004. By Shelly ... Shelly Kraicer from Cinema Scope, 2004

Imagine an entire culture in crisis, unable to draw on the progressive foundations of its history, unable to conceive of a livable or survivable future. It’s a crisis that the world’s hyperpower, the United States, now seems to be driving towards—even if this has only just been recognized by slightly less than half of its electorate, who tried, and failed, to reject the upcoming nightmare. American power, embracing crisis in order to remake its country anew (and, what is cause for greater alarm, remake a new world) has full control, and the country is deeply divided.

Compare this to the People’s Republic of China. The next great world power is currently in the throes of an even more radical moral, historical, and existential crisis. It is a society living asynchronously, without a vital link to its past or a sense of its own future. The still unexamined raw wound of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) irretrievably smashed the country’s ties to its past. A 5,000 year-old cultural continuity that anchored a society’s ethical underpinnings and sense of identity was shattered in ten years of turmoil. What followed was a hollow shell, a cultural space lacking culture. This enormous vacuum soon inhaled, wholesale, the capitalist world’s methods and values, practices and fetishes, which were hungrily adopted and devoured far faster than they could be assimilated. Chinese society is hurtling unseeing, at a blinding pace, towards an unknowable future. With a political system that leaves little space for open opposition, the arts are forced to bear a disproportionate, sometimes crushing burden. Poets, novelists, musicians, filmmakers, artists of all types have historically—this is a continuity persisting through from pre-revolutionary China to the present day—felt compelled to respond to national dilemmas, to engage in often coded conflicts over the most profound dilemma: What is China and where is it headed?

How does such a supercharged, over-determined cultural context shape filmmaking in China? It puts enormous pressure on the role of film as art, made by the intellectual class for the intellectual class (a literati phenomenon, just as brush painting was in pre-revolutionary China). And it warps cinema as entertainment, which has the added burden of finding its way in a newly capitalizing movie marketplace increasingly shaped by the exigencies of investment and profit. Put simply, a culture adrift without history and without identity, disoriented both chronologically and spatially, can do several different kinds of cultural work at the same time: entertainment for distraction or denial; art for criticism, guidance, reconstruction, and/or consolation. Perhaps it is this sense of mission that has induced a notable recent development in the Chinese film scene: A significant number of the most prominent “underground” directors (Jia Zhangke, Wang Chao, Liu Hao, Zhu Wen) have recently sought to make new films within the system, and have received the Film Bureau’s approval to exhibit their latest works in China.

Jia Zhangke’s new feature The World has emerged as the key text of China’s cinema of loss. China’s leading cinematic poet and analyst is doing the work of a radical philosopher/sociologist, systematically deconstructing his society’s dilemma in a clearly structured way. His masterpiece Platform (2000) showed a China lost in time. The World shows the same society lost in space. If contemporary global culture has anything to offer, it’s a world in which everything is connected, accessible, downloadable, transformable across boundaries, cultures, languages, continents. But at what cost? The World is set on the outskirts of Beijing, in a 114-acre theme park, World Park (Shijie Gongyuan) which contains shrunken monster-kitsch replicas of famous international tourist sites. Among these mini-Eiffel Towers, Great Pyramids, and Taj Mahals, Jia takes on the global metropolis as his subject; his poetical-analytic sensibility proves just as suited for digital urban pop culture as rural post-industrial torpor. The World seems to be the natural destination of his films’ progress from dusty small towns through to mid-sized industrial cityscapes. Its excursions into futuristic nightclubs, onscreen cell phone text-messaging, and even fantastical animated sequences develop organically from Jia’s style and preoccupations.

At the centre of The World is Jia’s soulfully elegant muse Zhao Tao, who plays the lead dancer in the theme park’s multiethnic staged musical spectaculars, portions of which we glimpse throughout the film. The narrative follows the intertwined lives of her fellow performers and the park’s security guards, whose various romantic entanglements play out against this surreal backdrop. Tao and her colleagues seem so up-to-the-minute modern, so comfortably wired into easy-access global culture, but Jia’s patient, penetrating gaze slowly reveals that their inner lives are paralyzed, haunted with a sense of dread, of gradually emptying hope.

The World is Jia’s first film to be approved for exhibition in China by the Film Bureau (the mainland censors). In going “above ground,” Jia has lost none of his critical edge. Apparently, the officials responsible for Beijing’s and Shenzhen’s World Parks are delighted with Jia’s version. This would be another sad illustration of the film’s thesis, if their cluelessness weren’t so absurdly funny. This film is in fact his darkest critique yet of the futures available to his compatriots in present-day urban China: dead ends and black holes, as far as the eye can see. The film creates worlds within worlds, wherein all things—architecture, costumes, emotions, behaviours—are laboriously constructed fakes, painstakingly crafted copies of imaginary originals who remain ever more out of reach, the more obsessively their simulacra are fetishized.

With wit and humour, the film mercilessly interrogates the environment in which its characters are trapped. In excavating its deep structure, it exposes a tottering Escher-like nightmare of infinite regress, where reality is cut off, hidden behind unending iterations of fakes. But Jia gives us more than analysis. His film’s pained, urgently anguished heart emerges right at the nexus of its characters’ failure to integrate into such a world, as they —tentatively hopeful, half-knowing, already preemptively defeated—flail desperately against the prison walls of their simulated paradise.

The World deepens and broadens Jia’s main preoccupations, while preserving the beauty of his magisterially elegant long takes, his peerless exploitation of rich soundscapes, his uncanny control of offscreen space, and his astonishing ability to plumb his characters’ psyches while seeming to hold them at an objective distance. While The World is grounded on a specifically Chinese experience, ruthlessly dissecting contemporary urbanity as it is incarnated in today’s Chinese metropolises, its title signals a more expansive ambition. Several Western critics have already picked up on the film’s general critique of globalization. The film satirizes a post-Benjaminian culture where copies assume primary validity, become even more “authentic” than putative originals. And it locates something that I’d suggest all of us have experienced, with a certain amount of apprehension and confusion: that our hyper-developed technology of communications masks an alarming void of content. The World may emerge out of China’s own experience, but it speaks, directly, urgently, to all of us.

Jia Zhangke is not the only director exposing the paradox of absent space in today’s China. Zhang Lu’s bleakly humorous, ultra-minimalist underground drama Tang Poetry is obsessed with domestic space as jail, as dead end, as nightmare. It employs a rigidly fixed camera, two locations (a small apartment and an adjoining hallway) and about 15 lines of dialogue to sketch the bleak relationship between two petty thieves, once lovers, who only share an inability to communicate. We’re given only the vaguest hints of their relationship, and their backgrounds. Zhang clinically isolates these two individuals, two atoms in a vacuum, with the male partner locked in an anomie so extreme that he can barely interact with his female roommate. Domesticity here is an empty prison, both isolated and isolating, inhabited by people in existential free fall. But the film is anything but dull. Not unlike in Tsai Ming-liang’s minimalist farce-tragedies, the audience is invited to hang onto every hint, every expressive gesture of the superbly deadpan cast, and there are flashes of something like delight. The film’s title comes from a TV program on Tang dynasty poems (one of the peaks of world literary culture, from eighth-century China) that the man watches, though the presence of the texts (as onscreen intertitles) is cruelly ironic, underlining how they can no longer communicate anything to someone like him. Living in non-space, his connection to ancient culture is empty, arbitrary, and impossible.

Jia has convincingly shattered the illusion that it is possible to continue to maintain a construction of “space” that is stable and coherent in social conditions characterized by loss. Some of the most interesting filmmakers of his generation in China are looking along the other axis of experience that Jia explored in Platform: time. Their conclusions may not be as bleak as Jia’s, and their films tentatively offer positive critiques, or even the possibility of consolation. Gu Changwei is best known as the cinematographer of many of the founding masterworks of the Chinese fifth generation of filmmakers: Chen Kaige’s King of the Children (1987) and Farewell My Concubine (1993), and Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987) and Ju Dou (1989). Peacock, due to premiere internationally at the next Berlinale, is his first film as director. It is a large-scale period piece, a look back at China at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps a bit too narratively complex for its own good, the film tells three consecutive stories, each from the point of view of one of three siblings who grew up in a very troubled family. The sister (a great performance that should make a star of newcomer Zhang Jingchu) is a dreamy misfit imprisoned in a drab life ruled by uncomprehending, soul-crushing parents. Her compensatory fantasies of rhapsodic escape and her desperate struggle for some kind of spiritual survival give the film an emotional, passionate heart. The stories of her two brothers, one mentally handicapped and the other emotionally unstable, pale a bit in comparison. But the whole is knit together by Gu’s eye for formally astonishing framings and perfectly beautiful images.

This is not a nostalgia piece for an unrecoverable imaginary past (Jiang Wen’s 1994 masterpiece In the Heat of the Sun, also photographed by Gu Changwei, addresses and critiques that genre). Rather it’s rather deeply committed to catching a moment of disappearance, when China, emerging from the collectivized chaos of the Cultural Revolution, seems to offer opportunities to create private identities, recover private spaces, and construct individual worlds. The film balances a devotion to the deeply weird beauty of these newly possible private spaces, while at the same time acknowledging the desperate sadness of their fragility and evanescence.

Consolation, however, is on offer in Zhu Wen’s splendid South of the Clouds. Far more mature than his debut underground shocker Seafood (2001), the new film is an “above ground” elegy for the generation that came of age during the 60s and 70s. Retiree Xu Daqin (played by the fine veteran actor Li Xuejian) determines to travel to the southwest Yunnan province, a place that functions as a semi-remote tropical paradise in the imagination of many northern Chinese. As a young man in the 60s, he had a chance to relocate there, but the consequences of a love affair forced him to abandon his Yunnan dream. Trapped afterwards in a life of routine and waste, he never resigned himself to accepting this loss. But the trip he finally takes as an old man turns from fantasy wish fulfillment to absurdist farce as he becomes entangled in a cheap erotic blackmail scheme. Esteemed fifth-generation film director Tian Zhuangzhuang has a wonderful cameo here as a sympathetic local police chief, reminding us of his Springtime in a Small Town (2002), a film that tried to assume the burden of showing how contemporary Chinese artists might somehow begin the process of reforging sustaining links to their own buried cultural history.

Though authorized for screening in China, Zhu’s film is definitely a social critique. It relentlessly contrasts barren contemporary life with an imagined lost past. But it is sharp enough to acknowledge that this idealized past is a dream, a necessary but imaginary mental construct. It’s an anti-nostalgia piece that precisely captures the emotional state of a generation severed from the past that they thought they deserved. Zhu manages to mix a wise, inexhaustible compassion with satirical wit, all held together in a package that skirts the border of art film and commercial entertainment with rare savvy.

Engaging critically with the past is also on the agenda of director/writer/actor/producer Xu Jinglei. This 30-year-old Chinese media idol and star (whose first film, Me and Dad (2002), met with some success inside and outside China) is fast becoming one of her country’s most interesting young filmmakers. Her second film, Letter from an Unknown Woman, adapts Stephan Zweig’s 1922 Viennese novella—not necessarily Max Ophuls’ 1948 film of the same name—to 30s and 40s Beijing, and won her the award for best director at the San Sebastian Film Festival this year. Xu proposes an incisive feminist revision of the original, in which an adolescent girl’s love for a famous writer blossoms into an intense, all-consuming obsession. Zweig’s work proposes a female identity completely under the sway of the male writer’s gaze. The female protagonist believes that she exists only insofar as he recognizes her. But her beloved constantly fails to so, even though, during the course of 15 years, he occasionally sleeps with her, taking her for a new sexual conquest each time. Xu’s film subtly turns the tables on this schema, proposing an active woman who chooses and controls each step of the seduction.

It’s an implicit radicalism, though: Xu is determined to rework the story from the inside, by inflection, suggestion, and emphasis. The surface attributes of a romantic period piece are all there: Letter is visually sumptuous, graced with the exquisitely observant, softly gliding, and richly luminescent camera-eye of master cinematographer Mark Lee. The film’s amber-hued shots of detailed, perfectly placed everyday objects succeed each other in a rhythmic flow carrying the viewer through spaces lit with virtually tangible atmosphere that gives them a palpable intimate domesticity. All this gorgeous atmosphere celebrates lost time (the Proustian kind), and sets the domestic gaze, gendered female, against the traditionally male narrative gaze. While acknowledging an irretrievable loss, Xu’s film demands a regendered reappraisal of that era, just before the Chinese Communist revolution in 1949 that seemed to hold the most promise for its future. Rather than nostalgia, Letter demands an active reconstruction of a not-so-distant past, as a prerequisite, perhaps, for any possible future.

Sometimes one can see Beijing filmmakers struggling not to be overwhelmed by the complex burden that their cultural environment imposes on them. Both Liu Fendou and Pan Jianlin, for example, have recently made films that have attracted international attention yet betray signs of incompletely assimilating the contradictions that they are steeped in. Liu’s 35mm underground feature Green Hat—which won the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival’s best narrative feature and best new narrative director awards—is split down the middle. A blackly humorous story about a heist gone wrong (one of the bank robbers melts down when he discovers that his girlfriend in America has ditched him) is spliced to an intimate domestic drama between the cop who broke up the heist, his wife, and her studly lover. The film seems to self-consciously enact the paralyzing fear of an artist’s impotence in the face of a social crisis that one can’t assimilate. The result, though technically sharp, has an inescapable structural incoherence that weakens an otherwise fascinating and provocative work.

Pan Jianlin’s Good Morning Beijing attempts to juxtapose two possibly related stories about Beijing’s lurid night life: a man drives around the city with a couple of private investigators trying to deliver ransom to the people who kidnapped his wife; while, in an abandoned apartment, several women, possibly sex-trade slaves, give erotic massages to a succession of creepy johns. Shot in murky Digibeta with very little craft or finesse, the film never coheres: its general impression of night-drenched anxiety (mitigated by a droll underbeat of black humour) is far more cogent than its structure or story. But these two directors’ works, no matter how deformed by the pressure cooker of contemporary Beijing’s cultural contradictions, retain an urgent sense of purpose that is unmistakable.

I’ve been discussing cinema as a symptom of a crisis; films as alarm bells, summoning us to rethink the way we live. Chinese cinema has urgent work to do: things need to be said; wounds need to be exposed. There’s a palpable sense of frustration, at least in the Beijing film community, that with a society in such evident crisis, the country’s filmmakers haven’t yet produced a response equal to the challenge. Keep an eye, for example, on independent directors like Wang Bing (Believe in the Future, 2005), Li Shaohong (Baober in Love, 2004), Wang Chao (Day and Night, 2004), He Jianjun (Pirated Copy, 2004), Li Yu (Dam Street, 2005), Zhang Yuan (Beautiful, 2004) Xie Dong (Summer, 2004), Cui Zi’en (The Narrow Path, 2004), Gan Xiao'er (Raised From Dust, 2005), and Li Yang (Red Passion, 2005), all of whom have either recently completed or are working on new features. If China’s current cultural upheaval hasn’t yet produced the kind of masterpieces that its prodigiously talented filmmakers are capable of, it is nonetheless producing a body of work that is vibrantly engaged and aesthetically challenging. China’s cinema of loss will continue to confront a profoundly disoriented audience, struggle to make sense of a void, and offer to console a society lost in time and lost in space.

The World in a Beijing Theme Park | Jonathan Rosenbaum July 29, 2005

The Best Film of the Past Two Years | Jonathan Rosenbaum Top Ten list, “The best film of the past two years,” from Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 6, 2006

The World — Films We Like

Reverse Shot Michael Joshua Rowin

Reverse Shot [Michael Koresky]

"Asia Pacific Arts: Presenting the World" Brian Hu from Asia Pacific Arts, February 17, 2005

IndieWire [Elbert Ventura] response by Travis Mackenzie Hoover from Reverse Shot

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

Cinematic Reflections (Derek Smith)

Reel.com DVD review [Kim Morgan]

Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

The Lumière Reader (Fest Ed.) Tim Wong

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

Interview with Jia Zhang-ke, Director of The World by David Walsh at the 2004 Toronto Film festival

Hong Kong Film Critics Society World - Apocalypse of The Lost of Moral, by Bunny Lee

CineScene [Howard Schumann]

filmcritic.com Don Willmott

Martin Tsai's Blog

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson)

stylusmagazine.com (Roque Strew)

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival report

Bright Lights Film Journal Megan Ratner

d+kaz . intelligent movie reviews [Daniel Kasman]

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon)

DVD Verdict [Jesse Ataide]

The L Magazine [Nicolas Rapold]

Strictly Film School [NYFF04] Acquarello

Film Journal International (Ethan Alter)

Arts and life Slow Tempo from Arts and Life blog

Film and Video Center at UCI

World film studies detail

Negotiating Global/Local Identities: Jia Zhang-ke's The World ... essay by Clifford Hilo from Mediascape

Austin Chronicle [Marrit Ingman]

Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis, also seen here: "The World – Caged in a Beijing Theme Park, Yearning For Something More"

DVDBeaver.com [Jim Bach]

STILL LIFE (Sanxia haoren) A 95

China Hong Kong (108 mi) 2006

A very slow, languorous film shot entirely in high definition digital video by Yu Lik-wai (THE WORLD) that captures the rich colors of the region along with a solemn, funereal feel throughout, sort of the exact opposite of Kiarostami’s AND LIFE GOES ON (1992), another fictionalized film that was shot in the middle of devastating destruction, the aftereffects of a deadly Iranian earthquake. But while Kiarostami’s film searched through the ruins of destruction for any semblance of life, finding rebuilding, restoration projects everywhere that upliftingly reaffirmed one’s faith in man, Jia’s film seems to be set in the tombs, revealing instead a people in the process of demolishing an entire civilization, evicting all the residents from Fengjie, an ancient city 2000 year old, relocating them (1.5 million and still counting) without really keeping track of where they’re heading, creating an unprecedented government imposed upheaval on a massive scale, something that might be expected during wartime, but certainly not due to a modernization project of building the world’s largest hydroelectric dam more than twice the size of any other dam in the world that will eventually leave the entire city underwater. Like MEDIUM COOL (1969) decades earlier, Jia scripts his fictional film in the middle of this already partially submerged, real-life demolition project introducing two characters searching for missing spouses who they haven’t seen in awhile. In a film like this, locations are everything, as nearly every frame of the film captures the stunning mountainous beauty of the vicinity, called the Three Gorges region due to gorges spectacularly coming together along the Yangtze River, a scene depicted on the back of a ten Yuan note in Chinese currency, but every frame is also a time capsule for a lost civilization, which is hauntingly still thriving before extinction as we see the people scrambling about the city streets in a bustle of activity, but there are horizontal lines affixed to tall buildings ominously showing where the water line will be in the next phase of construction, where everything under that line will be submerged in water. In eerie fashion, everything below that line is being destroyed, while everything above that line has a tenuous hold on life, both shown in a flurry of feverish activity which may as well separate the rich from the poor, as the poor continue to inhabit the low lying regions.

What makes this film so unusual is the ponderous nature of the way it is filmed, full of curiosity and questions in the slow observational pans that combine intimate portraits of ordinary citizens set against this continual destruction of what used to be a vital city, literally tearing it apart brick by brick while looming off in the distance is the omnipresent stillness of this extraordinary natural landscape which is nothing short of breathtaking. Without ever offering details or statistics, which can easily be provided by journalists, there is instead an enveloping sadness permeating through every image, as sweaty, shirtless men are paid meager wages to use sledgehammers to reduce a city to dust and rubble reminiscent of Rossellini’s post-war GERMANY YEAR ZERO (1948), an industrial wasteland of epic proportions causing the region to be perpetually enveloped in low-lying clouds, but also men whose idle time is spent smoking cigarettes or eating noodles, chatting feverishly while playing mahjong as the camera slowly shifts its attention and gazes at any number of barges floating down the river carrying commercial goods, all shown with a poetic detachment that objectively offers no point of view.

Sanming Han is a working class coal miner who comes to the city searching for his missing wife of 16 years, also his daughter that he’s never seen. When he realizes the street where she used to live is submerged underwater, he enlists the aid of fellow citizens, eventually joining one of the demolition crews himself. His lower class pattern of living routinely includes bartering and sharing, offering bottles of liquor to express gratitude to officials or handing out individual cigarettes to friends, where living in such claustrophobic close quarters means the concept of privacy is non-existent. His personal business becomes everyone around him’s business, as he has to be accepted by the group before he can ever hope of succeeding in his mission. Whether he succeeds or not remains ambiguous to the viewers, but the unusual way his story comes together is handled beautifully, with a calm understatement and a potent underlying emotional reserve. Zhao Tao, in all Jia features since PLATFORM (2000), plays a nurse, an educated, independent-minded, middle-aged women who hasn’t seen her husband in two years, where his slowly developing offscreen profile is an unusual way to introduce a character, as we discover he’s a hot-shot official, most likely corrupt, who administers one of the construction projects in town and maintains a great deal of power in the region. His hesitancy to meet with her is understandable, as she discovers he’s probably having affairs with plenty of women, but her motive remains a mystery through most of the film, only revealing itself when he finally comes out of hiding and meets with her. Despite his economic status, her manner of classic stoicism keeps him continually off guard, never knowing what to expect, as she retains the upper hand, a fact that may well explain why he left in the first place.

Continuing in Jia’s contemplative quest to intermix the personal with the historical, his first three films took place in Shanxi province where the director was born, all showing the shattering impact of China’s attempts to modernize in rural interior regions, while both characters in this film are traveling from Shanxi, both attempting to repair broken relationships, where the future seen through differing class perspectives offers diverging possibilities. Through the sheer mastery of what he’s able to compress into each shot, we are constantly reminded of what’s at stake building such a mammoth project in the middle of such overwhelming, magisterial beauty, and what utter gall it takes to intentionally displace so many people from their homes and their history as a matter of public policy, literally reducing 2000 years of history to rubble before it disappears from sight altogether, taking a tremendous human gamble by betting it all on the future. Initially proposed almost 90 years ago by Sun Yat-sen, according to David Denby from The New Yorker, this project has been steadily moving forward since 2004 and is expected to be completed sometime in 2009. Shot in 2006, Jia was able to film midway through the largest public works project in human history. The consequences are enormous, both pro and con, and the idea that China, normally not known for their progressive views, would allow this most brilliantly independent of Chinese filmmakers into the region knowing the unpredictability of his artistic and political views, certainly as seen through their point of view, yet it happened, and the result is this quiet, probing, utterly realistic, yet near surreal, non-narrative essay that explores the region through visual imagery and broken marriages. The dam itself is only seen towards the end of the film, and even then only as a backdrop, a subtle hint that it is not yet fully operational.

One of the more modern images of the film is seen at an evening penthouse party on an outdoor balcony directly overlooking a giant suspension bridge that spans the river. As it caters to the rich and powerful, Zhao Tao believes her husband could be there. Instead another powerbroker arrives on the scene and expresses dismay that the bridge is not lit up. A quick cell phone call obtains instant results and the bridge lights up like a birthday cake. Another somewhat surreal image is an empty, gigantic structure which may have once housed building occupants, but it has long been abandoned and is left standing alone towering over a barren field where kids play. At one point, this monstrosity of a structure simply fires up burners at the bottom and takes off, like some kind of mysterious UFO and vanishes from view. Almost identical to a Kiarostami image in AND LIFE GOES ON of a beautiful green landscape seen through a broken-down window of the ruins that reveals sheep grazing peacefully in the fields, where hope can literally be seen through the ruins, with haunting Arabic music providing a profound sense of something sacred, Jia on the other hand shows a married couple, several stories high, embracing near a similar broken-down window in the ruins that overlooks the skyline of this city off in the distance where after an extensive period of time one of the tallest buildings suddenly collapses. One must mention the outstanding musical score by Giong Lim on his second Jia film, formerly working with Hou Hsiao-hsien, including some irresistible sequences scored to romantic pop music songs. The supreme image is left for the finale, however, where off in the distance a man inexplicably performs a high-wire act walking between two tall buildings that are likely targeted for extinction, another improbable balance between high and low or the sacred and the profane.

Chicago Reader Critic's Choice Jonathan Rosenbaum

The fifth feature by Jia Zhang-ke, China's greatest contemporary filmmaker, is set in the vicinity of China's immense Three Gorges, where the ongoing construction of the world's largest dam has already forced the relocation of almost two million people. Against this epic canvas, their paths crisscrossing but never intersecting, a coal miner and a nurse (both from Jia's home province of Shanxi) search for their former mates. This 2006 drama may seem to be worlds apart from the surreal theme-park setting of Jia's previous film, The World, but there are similarities of theme, style, scale, and tone: social and romantic alienation in a monumental setting, a daring poetic mix of realism and lyrical fantasy, and an uncanny sense of where our planet is drifting. In Mandarin and Shanxi with subtitles. 107 min.

Tip of the Week, New City Ray Pride

Those with a depth of knowledge about another culture, its art and artifacts take away a different experience from movies than strangers to that land (or imagined lands). Yet the currents running deep through Jia Zhang-Ke's startlingly lyrical and sad "Still Life," which won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, following the quests of two characters, a coal miner and a nurse, to reunite with lovers long lost, along the course of China's Yangtze River, which is rising hundreds of feet, immersing hundreds of villages and thousands of years of culture, are, even at simplest glance, rich and haunting. Jia's work ("Platform," "Unknown Pleasures," "The World") has originated mostly in some form of digital video; "Still Life" and its companion documentary on the same ground, "Dong," hold misty beauty, and his use of frame and duration are chillingly poetic. There is one shot that equals the last five minutes of "Fight Club," of a reunited, long-sundered couple several floors up inside a half-demolished building, the skyline outside seen through a rude, jigsaw hole bashed into the edifice. They embrace. The small buildings on the horizon, in murk of mist and slightly blown-out light, detonate distantly and fall from the sky. Jia mingles fact and fiction in a way profoundly becalming despite the many detonations on display. This is beautiful work, streaked with tears. And dust: "The secrets of still life fell upon me," Jia has written. "The old furniture, the stationery on the desk, the bottles on windowsills took on an air of poetic sorry. In the roaring noise and fluttering dust [of this condemned city], I felt that life really could blossom in brilliant colors even in a place with such desperation." 108m.

Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

This latest from China’s bad seed Jia Zhangke arrives two years after its Berlin premiere — better late than never, as it’s the first must-see movie of 2008. The thorn in globalisation’s side this time turns his attention to the devastation wreaked by the massive Three Gorges Dam project, an engineering feat that has required the displacement of two million people and the destruction of numerous cities dating back centuries.

The nominal story involves a father looking for the ex-wife and child he lost 16 years ago, a task made difficult with addresses that no longer exist due to their demolition and a landscape so alienated as to be all but uninhabitable. People carry on of course, but they don’t make much of an impression — save for a few individuals seeking reparations for industrial misdeeds, everybody seems resigned to the new world order and carry on regardless as China’s economic monster leaves nothing but scorched earth in its wake.

One doesn’t exactly get poetry from Jia’s images, but one gets the very pointed sense that people no longer have control over the world in which they live. As with the director’s other films, the characters are constantly being uprooted and manipulated by plans made by the powerful on earth that will never really belong to them. For those who find the neo-Luddite homilies of Fight Club “subversive,” here’s a more genuinely troubling exploration of the process that swathes us Westerners in our cheap goods and consumerist cocoons.

The film brilliantly evokes the destroyed countryside without being showy. Every shot has a point that goes beyond mere pictorialism, driving home its point with a minimum of waste and a maximum of force, making it the one movie not to be missed in theatres right now.

STILL LIFE Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Foremost among Jia Zhang Ke's talents is an amazing knack for finding ready-made metaphors for China's modernization.

His last narrative feature, "The World," was set in a Beijing theme park akin to Epcot, containing miniature visions of world attractions like Egypt's pyramids. "Still Life," his new film, takes place in Fengjie, a city flooded to make way for the massive Three Gorges dam.

From his 1998 debut, "Xiao Wu," the story of a pickpocket shot on 16mm film, Jia has been positioned by Western critics as China's bard of globalization. "The World" showed that he fully embraced this mantle, offering a grim tale of worker exploitation and suggesting that the progress offered by technology and urbanization is partial at best and a complete fraud at worst.

"Still Life" is far more allusive and elliptical; it pushes politics further to the background, but in this context the background often seems livelier and more important than the foreground.

"Still Life" contains elements of documentary, depicting the real destruction of much of Fengjie. The city's 2,000-year-old "old town" neighborhood has been flooded, but its replacement hasn't yet been fully constructed. The film opens with a slow tracking shot of passengers on a ferry. One of them is Sanming (Han Sanming), a middle-aged coal miner traveling to Fengjie in search of his ex-wife Missy.

Discovering that her old home is now underwater, he decides to stick around the city and gets a job on a demolition crew.

Abruptly, the film switches focus to another person looking for their spouse -- Shen Hong (Zhao Tao), a nurse who hasn't seen her husband in two years and needs to tell him that she wants a divorce.

With "Still Life," Jia makes some of the most expressive use of high-definition video I've ever seen. He knows that it's a medium with its own special characteristics. He doesn't try to make it look like film. In fact, when "Still Life" premiered in the fall of 2006, he claimed that he only wanted it shown on projected video, although practical concerns led him to abandon that notion. (Despite being shot on video, the film loses much of its impact on DVD.)

The film revels in bleached-out bone-white textures -- it's full of dingy concrete -- and slightly distorted colors. In fact, Yu Lik-wai's cinematography recalls the degraded look of color Xeroxes. "Still Life" is filled with natural beauty, but it doesn't simply make Chinese landscapes look pretty. For every image of misty splendor, there's at least one of industrial ugliness. Often, both share the frame.

As critic Shelly Kraicer described the film, it's "an anti-still life that monumentalizes destruction, giving it an awful, sublime grandeur." Despite its focus on two people on a quest, "Still Life" has a pleasant sense of narrative drift. Much of the time, it's content to simply watch its characters hang out.

Stylistically, "Still Life" is unusual in one other respect.

It treats the city of Fengjie as if it were another character. In most exteriors, there's something going on both in the front and back of the frame. The sound design, filled with the noises of construction and destruction, contributes to the sense that we're watching a partial view of a world that spills out beyond the screen.

Several times, startling events suddenly occur in the background. As Shen Hong hangs up laundry, a UFO takes off.

During a conversation, a building collapses. Jia's interested in the way physical environments mirror and affect his characters' psyches. In this respect, "Still Life" is a successor to the late Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960s films.

Like all of Jia's work, it suggests that China may as well have an "under construction" sign covering the entire country while it concentrates on the people left behind, rather than yuppies benefiting from the rise of capitalism. This approach impresses initially as a directorial tour-de-force. Its deeper meanings emerge only later.

Jia's vision of China is paradoxical. While he makes clear the grateful salute government and industry offer progress even at the cost of uprooting a million people and contributing to the very flooding the dam was meant to prevent, his presentation of individual characters is nostalgic. "Still Life" juxtaposes two versions of China - one geared toward the future and threatening to obliterate memory, the other with its eye on the past.

It's not too hard to figure out where the director's sympathies lie, but the film has a light touch, far removed from the immiseration that permeated "The World." Jia has a finger on the pulse of China as it changes. He also has an impressive eye for the possibilities of video.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

The world's oldest civilization is in some respects the world's newest—which is why Jia Zhangke, the pre-eminent cine-chronicler of contemporary China, could well be the most contemporary narrative filmmaker on earth.

Jia's fifth feature, Still Life, offers an eccentric guided tour of post-apocalyptic Fengjie—the ancient river city largely flooded and partially rebuilt several years ago as part of the monumental Three Gorges Dam project. But the movie, which won the Gold Lion at Venice in 2006 and was shown at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, is also an open-ended progress report. The filmmaker arrives as if he were an explorer reaching the edge of the frontier. Still Life opens with a slow, majestic pan over the passengers on a Yangtze ferry— the Chinese masses eating, gambling, dozing, hustling, and texting—as they pass by the new towers that line the shore. To entertain them, the Wuhan Magical Arts Troupe performs the trick of turning ordinary paper into euros and euros into yuans.

This sleight of hand is hardly the film's only metaphor. For the most part, Still Life broods like a cloud over Fengjie, its displaced inhabitants, and new arrivals. There are two protagonists and a pair of parallel narratives. In one, a stolid miner (Han Sanming) comes downriver from Shanxi in search of the bought wife who left him 16 years before and the daughter whom he's never seen. Han, a former coal miner, has played similar roles in previous Jia films, giving Still Life the sense of unfolding in an alternate universe. So, too, does the other narrative, in which a young nurse (Jia axiom: Zhao Tao) arrives in Fengjie to look for a husband who has been too busy making his fortune to stay in touch.

Much of Still Life is simply devoted to these characters as they wend their respective ways through Fengjie's eerily half-demolished (or half-built) neighborhoods. The nurse is also from Shanxi, but she and the miner never meet— except insofar as they are each acquainted with an archaeologist played by Jia's sometime alter ego, Wang Hongwei— and, standing at twilight on opposite banks, both glimpse a neon-limned flying saucer transversing the Yangtze. In Jia's China, this poetic quasi-documentary makes clear, the future is now.

More observer than director, Jia is concerned with how it feels to be in a particular environment. His films are predicated on a sense of everyday social flux and, more than any I've seen, they provide some sense of China's seething interior. Jia's parents were sent to Shanxi during the Cultural Revolution, and that's where he was born. (Dislocation is his birthright.) Shanxi was also the setting for Jia's first three movies—Xiao Wu, Platform, and Unknown Pleasures. Now, in Still Life, Shanxi's inhabitants are themselves on the move. For Jia, the sense of a lost past is not only a matter of personal history, but something cultural and even geological. The eternal is transitory—or is it vice versa? Fengjie, which has been on the banks of the Yangtze forever, is now the essence of the ephemeral. People live amid the rubble's crevices, on abandoned piers and in derelict barges. Raw, unfinished, and painfully specific, the setting is the opposite of the denatured Beijing theme park in Jia's last movie, World.

Deconstruction would seem to be Fengjie's main industry, and placid as Still Life often appears, there's an undercurrent of violence. Old buildings are blown up, workers are sometimes obliged to remove unwilling tenants by force, and job-related injuries are rife. Without unduly belaboring the point, Jia suggests a pervasive, free-floating corruption. Everything is for sale. Money trumps all. Mao may be casually invoked, but the closest thing to an authority figure is Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun Fat, glimpsed on TV lighting his cigarette with a fistful of dollars. Chow serves as a role model for one of the movie's more hapless characters—a young would-be enforcer who foolishly challenges a more entrenched gang of thugs.

As usual, Jia's people tend toward the opaque—one of the movie's most enthusiastic conversations is conducted with ringtones. But his compositions have their own eloquence. Everything's despoiled and yet—as rendered in cinematographer Yu Lik-wai's rich, impossibly crisp HD images—everything is beautiful. The setting speaks; it's still-life. Jia's sensitivity to location has the focused purity of landscape filmmakers like James Benning and Peter Hutton. Even more than the winding river and the misty mountains, Still Life vibrates with traces of human presence—deserted construction sites, shabby cluttered rooms, and moldering factory works. (The Chinese title translates as "The Good People of Three Gorges.")

State-sanctioned director Zhang Yimou implicitly celebrates the new China with muscle-flexing historical spectaculars like Hero and Curse of the Golden Flower, which, in late 2006, unceremoniously displaced Still Life from Chinese multiplexes. Jia (who, following World, has returned to independent production) makes it clear that China's laissez-faire economy is as cruel as its communism or feudalism. What's striking about Still Life is its micro-analytical curiosity: Judgment seems suspended—like the bridge that magically lights up over the Yangtze or the unlikely tightrope walker glimpsed in the movie's last shot.

Chinese Wasteland: Jia Zhangke's Still Life Shelly Kraicer from Cinema Scope

Sometimes film festival juries actually get it right. Jia Zhangke has been making films for ten years, but, until now, a major festival prize (from the “big three” of Cannes, Venice, and Berlin) has eluded him. Finally, though, the Golden Lion bestowed in Venice on his newest feature Still Life acknowledges what students of international cinema already knew: Jia is one of the leading filmmakers of our time. His works advance the art of cinema in ways that are dazzlingly innovative, while also being precisely attuned to the radical new demands of 21st century society. Each of Jia’s films articulates an abstract structure of time and space, and a more sensual structure of feeling, through which we can see and feel our way to coming to grips with a new, changing world.

Prizes have little intrinsic values: the sales agents, distributors, critics, and the worldwide festival system together create an economy of cinema as marketable international luxury commodities, whose circulation and valorization are ratified and sustained by festival awards. I would rather set “prize-ability” against what Jia has accomplished with Still Life. This new film signifies an implicit refusal to participate in that particular economy, one that his most recent films, culminating in the international success The World (2004), have seemed more and more willing to integrate themselves into. The spectacle, the flash, the internationalized film language of The World (Jia’s first “official” film) made it as internationally distributable as a serious product of the Chinese independent film world could be, but at the cost of shifting the balance away from independence and toward easy consumption.

Still Life doesn’t play to the audience: it’s more tough, complex, dense, allusive, and mysterious, than any feature Jia has made to date. Like most of his feature films, Still Life presents characters on some sort of quest. Both main characters Sanming (Han Sanming, who played the same character in 2000’s Platform and The World) and Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) are searching for absent spouses. Coal miner Sanming’s wife left him 16 years ago, and he’s only just now travelled from his native Shanxi province to find her at her former home, the town of Fengjie, located on the Yangtze River in Sichuan province, just upstream from the giant Three Gorges Dam project. When Sanming discovers that the address his wife left him has now been flooded by the rising reservoir project—as has much of Fengjie—he decides to stay and wait for her, and gets a job with a demolition crew hammering the city to bits in advance of its imminent flooding.

Shen Hong is looking for her husband, who disappeared only two years ago to work in a factory in the Fengjie area. She seems to want her husband back, and finds an old colleague of his, Dongming (Jia regular Wang Hongwei), to help. When she eventually finds her husband, she tells him that she has a lover and that she wants a divorce. Sanming, on the other hand, does want his wife to return, and especially wants to see his daughter whom he has never met. We eventually find that he purchased his wife, who was abducted, probably by marriage brokers, and forcibly sent to live with him in Shanxi. Though he doesn’t find his daughter, in the end he meets his wife, and the possibility is raised that she might return to him in the future if he can raise enough money to pay her family’s debts.

Laying out a plot description this way is a bit misleading. Though there seems to be the outline of a well-behaved narrative—actually, two narratives, in which characters try to solve problems, proceeding chronologically towards a late climax and resolution—storytelling seems beside the point as you watch it. Narrative expectations are constantly thwarted: information is presented piecemeal, out of order, or elided completely; the climaxes are downbeat, purified of affect, and seemingly empty sections of time acquire the most weight.

Jia’s camera has two key preoccupations: physical bodies and landscapes. The bodies are male, copiously presented, and frequently half nude. This is something completely new in Jia’s work. His camera slowly, repeatedly, pans over groups of ruddy skinned workers as they rest, eat, play, or hammer away at the infrastructure of Fengjie that they are slowly pounding into rubble. These tableaux of bare-chested men are not movie-beautiful: they are natural, tough, work-honed bodies, with a tangible sense of weight, of taking up space, containing a wiry potential for endless physical labour. One might even detect something like an eroticized gaze in the film’s obsessive, close, lingering pans.

Landscapes are treated in a remarkably similar way: long, slow, 180-degree pans that turn vast fields of rubble, waste, and half-decayed, soon-to-be-demolished buildings into epic tableaux. In style, these images seem partially derived from traditional Chinese scroll painting, but have nothing to do with them in content. It is precisely the spectacular ugliness of the physical devastation of the urban environment around the Three Gorges that captures the camera’s gaze: an anti-still life that monumentalizes destruction, giving it an awful, sublime grandeur normally reserved for scenes of natural beauty.

It is precisely in the intersection of these two obsessive imageries that the film generates its own particular beauty: namely that of bodies walking through wastelands. Both main characters pick their way, without comment, through this post-disaster landscape, two individual lives persisting within an absolutely inhospitable environment. One of the things the film celebrates is this miracle of human persistence: how the necessary—survival—trumps the impossible.

Miracles are on offer, too, in a wry, understated mode. Jia offers visions of flight and some strange magic. An impossibly shaped building takes off like a rocket before the men with the hammers can get to it. A flying object streaks before Sanming’s and Shen Hong’s eyes: Is it some embodiment of their need to move through impossible barriers, their ability to imagine how to change their worlds? They never meet, but an angel ties them together: a young singing boy who smokes and strolls in and out of their worlds, singing at the top of his voice. In the end, another symbolic linkage: a high-wire artist appears, in the distance, suspended between two buildings that are destined no doubt to topple over some time soon.

Still Life incorporates a complex symbolic system that suggests possible meanings without fixing them definitively. Most prominently displayed are the set of four ambiguous symbols of consumption and enjoyment that the film underlines with titles onscreen: cigarettes, wine, tea, and candy. They stand in as replacements for the standard four household items (fuel, rice, cooking oil, and salt) that represent the daily necessities of life in a set Chinese expression. Jia’s update replaces survival with pleasures, even addictions. Those looking to find support for an ambivalent interior critique of the concomitant pleasures and dangers of turning cinema itself into a series of tantalizingly consumable items could do worse than start here.

That high-wire act is another symbol, one of a series of spectacular linking images that includes the new suspension bridge over the Yangtze lit spectacularly by order of an official for his assembled VIPs. The Three Gorges Dam itself appears at the end of Shen Hong’s story, both linking and separating the two sections of the river: the massive upstream reservoir with its disappearing strata of devastation and the downstream section leading to Shanghai. This ambivalent signifier of construction/destruction serves as an ironic backdrop to Shen’s announcement that she herself is leaving her husband. The physical landscape seems just as much in need of sustaining connections as the characters we see wandering through it.

The image of the Dam raises a whole set of political issues contained within the film, a social critique that works much more powerfully on an abstract level than as a direct commentary on the long-lived debated over the Three Gorges project. That the film was approved by the Film Bureau for exhibition in China is quite an achievement for Jia and his co-producers the Shanghai Film Studio. The film implies that the Fengjie Relocation Office is a gathering place for local thugs, who, organized by goon contractor Mark (a charismatic Chow Yun-fat worshipper with a gangster’s swagger), and at the behest of local demolition officials, beat up poorly compensated residents of local apartments who are not moving out quickly enough. This nexus of official corruption, massive property theft, and gangster muscle is well known throughout China, but displaying it even glancingly onscreen, in a film going into Chinese movie theatres in December, is rather unexpected. It’s also notable that censors allowed the scene at the Dam to pass (I don’t think marriage breakups are the sort of activity party officials imagined their monumental structure serving as a cinematic backdrop for). Chinese press reaction to the Venice win was predictable, universally lionizing Jia as the latest exponent of national pride and then deftly subsuming him into the pantheon of contemporary cultural heroes.

On the screen, Still Life offers an unusual kind of beauty, both astringent and monumental. This beauty is mediated through images that are distinctly video in origin (HD, but video all the same). It’s there in the crispness of line, in the almost brutal sense of contrast between hot whites and dim blacks. We are far from the lush HD images of The World, the degraded medium definition video of Unknown Pleasures (2002), the classical 35mm palette of Platform, or the 16mm indie grunge of Xiao Wu (1997). There are trade-offs, obviously, in a filmmaker’s choice of medium today. What Still Life gains is precisely the shock of truth. Its “video-ness” suggests an immediate, direct transcription of reality that challenges the viewer in what can only be described as an ontological way. Look at what reality is; look deeply into the way things actually exist, the film seems to be demanding. At the same time, it denies the processed, aestheticized pleasure of much of today’s mainstream art cinema.

Jia shot Still Life in some of the same locations and at the same time as the documentary Dong and the relationship between the two is provocative. Dong records the painter Liu Xiaodong as he prepares two large-scale works, one of half-naked male workers in Fengjie lounging with the river as a backdrop, the second of female entertainment workers in Bangkok lounging en deshabille amidst fruits and furniture. In Dong, we are supposed to be seeing documentary truth, as the artist Liu paints real people in a real place. But Sanming is in Dong, as are some of the other characters from the movie. Yet he is not really a worker in Fengjie, he only plays one in Still Life. So what is he doing in Dong? Similarly, shots are shared between the two films: the creepy disinfectant team in their moon suits, the bare-chested men hammering in syncopated rhythms at the city ruins, the collapsing wall of one wrecked building.

As Jia maps it, cinema does not divide neatly into fiction and documentary. Dong creates a subjective world, as much inside the mind of the artist Liu as outside in objective space. Still Life digs deep to reveal an underlying reality, mobilizing sophisticated formal strategies to create images of truth. These same strategies demand—or, rather, construct, during the process of watching—viewers who are ready to watch, absorb, and feel this vision. It is a vision of a man-made hell, of the monumental and limitless destruction left behind by a society rushing to tear up its foundations and gut its history. And it is a vision of embodied resistance—an individual, physical resilience that can spark an impossible, miraculous, but tangible hope in a world that seems to offer none.

Still, Life: Looking at Jia Zhang-ke's Recent Masterpiece Ian Johnston from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2007

"Still Life" text version - Ejumpcut.org Eric Dalle from Jump Cut, Summer 2011

Still Life | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Histories, Official & Personal: Jia Zhangke's Stil... Andrew Schenker from The House Next Door

d+kaz [Daniel Kasman]

The New York Sun (Martin Tsai)

indieWIRE Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot

CineScene.com (Chris Knipp)

The New Yorker (David Denby)

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]

The New York Sun [Nicolas Rapold]

The Lumière Reader Tim Wong

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Leo Goldsmith]

girish: Toronto: Jia Zhang-ke, etc.

Bright Lights Film Journal | Dragons, Tigers, and Citizen Rayns ... Ben Cho

not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston)

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

Still Life film studies detail

Still Life Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

CineScene [Howard Schumann]

BeyondHollywood.com James Mudge

FILMPHILIA | Reviews | Still Life

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin, also seen here: Reel.com [Chris Cabin]

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Tromsø Film Festival report

Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]

Guardian/Observer

Time Out London (Wally Hammond)

Time Out Chicago review Ben Kenigsberg

Chicago Sun-Times review Bill Stamets

Chicago Tribune review Michael Phillips

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis

Toronto makes too much ado about the death of a president - Arts ... Manohla Dargis from the International Herald Tribune, September 14, 2006

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

Journey to Nowhere » I tip my hat to Chinese film director Jia Zhangke a blog about Hong Kong and Mainland China

Filmmaker Magazine | Web Articles: VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Belle Burke

ifa Village | "Still Life" by Jia Zhang Ke Official invitiation to a Shanghai screening

Shanghaiist: Movie Review: Jia Zhangke's Still Life Shanghai film review

[Full text] Jia Zhangke spoke with Three Gorges Probe while in Toronto last month to attend the Toronto International Film Festival

Movie Director Jia Zhangke -- china.org.cn winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film festival

Director Jia Zhangke Considers Suing Zhang Yimou's Producer on allegations that his Venice Festival win was “fixed,” from the People’s Daily

SARFT uncovers a poisoned apple criticism of Jia and art films in China, from Danwei, March 28, 2007

DONG

Hong Kong China (66 mi) 2006

filmjourney.org : TIFF '06 Diary #3 Doug Cummings

Like Manufactured Lanscapes, Jia Zhang-ke's 66-minute film visits the Three Gorges Dam (the town of Fengjie) through the eyes of an artist documenting life in the rubble. The lively Liu Xiao-dong has been called one of China’s leading figurative painters, and on the basis of the highly sensitive and detailed portraiture seen in the film, I'm willing to accept that claim. Yet this is no simple overview of an artist--there is no narration or biography, and Liu is reduced to providing a few sound bites about his work. Instead, Jia uses Liu as an inspirational starting point for his own exploration of the people and landscape, slowly panning over the Yangtze, crumbling buildings, and figures crawling over the ruins, endowing the chaotic setting with unexpected nuances of cohesion and tension. The second half of the film is set in Bangkok, where Liu and Jia continue their shared study of figures and setting. It's a rich examination, and it's easy to see why it was the impetus for Still Life; both films shed light on one another, offering stereoscopic depth with their two-pronged vantage points of fiction and non-fiction.

Film | IFFR | professionals.filmfestivalrotterdam.com

At first sight, Dong is a documentary about the work and approach of painter Liu Xiaodong, who is one of the so-called ‘cynical realists’. Jia Zhang-ke travels with Liu, by now one of China's best-known artists, to Sichuan where the rising Yangtze River is submerging whole regions. ‘Dong’ is not only Chinese for ‘East’ and hence refers to Asia, it is also Liu's nickname. Since his leading role in Wang Xiao-shuai’s The Days (1993), Liu has been linked to the Chinese independent film. He was also briefly seen in Jia’s The World.In the region of the Three Gorges Dam, we see Liu paint one of his monumental works. In this case an enormous canvas of a group of almost naked workers on a platform, against the background of the river. They are the same men as the demolition workers in Still Life (see that film), including ‘actor’ Han San-ming. Several scenes from Still Life, which look like fiction there, also make an appearance here. In the second half of the film, Liu works on a portrait of young women in an interior in Bangkok. Together with the first part, this forms yin-yang twins that throw some light on the differences between China and Thailand.The affinity between director Jia and artist Liu is not only a shared interest in and vision of art and culture, but also in their fascination with modern social problems. As a result, Jia’s film starts looking like the painting of Liu. And documentary looks like fiction.

Dong Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Dong, Jia's documentary companion film to his meditative and ultimately overpowering fiction feature Still Life, begins promisingly. After a brief ferry ride with painter Liu Xiao-dong, we find ourselves on the banks of the Yangtze as Liu inches precariously along a pile of debris, scouting out a location for a panoramic landscape canvas. The shot recalls the so-called "rubble films" or postwar Germany, Liu carefully traversing the bricks and reminding us from the outset that, like Jia, he is an artist dead-set on capturing Chinese life in transition, in particular the rapid reengineering of the built environment. This shot, like a later one in which we see Liu painting a group of shirtless workers in (staged) breaktime repose, finds Jia panning ever so slowly to take in the scene, but arcing his camera in the process. The result mirrors Liu's canvases, capturing flattened expanses, while emphasizing the greater play of depth and movement in time that cinema permits, and painting generally does not. Hopes were high, since Jia, true to form, displayed in these early shots a deep sensitivity to his medium and the problematics of conveying a different medium with it. Watching Liu work up-close, I was reminded of great documents of art's in-progress creation, particularly Emile de Antonio's Painters Painting and Victor Erice's The Quince Tree of the Sun. Sadly, Dong goes downhill, largely because Jia eventually forfeits the distance and objectivity evinced in these early sequences. (The title of the film, which I presume to be the name Liu's friends call him, should have signaled the work's buddy-buddy intimacy.) Thing is, Liu isn't a particularly enlightening verbal explicator of his own work, or of aesthetic matters in general. Jia follows Liu around as he spouts the usual platitudes regarding the difficulty of capturing truth, the artist's struggle, etc. This might have been forgivable were it not for a sequence at about the 35-minute mark, when Liu visits a worker's family to deliver some photos he took of the young man before his death on the job. It's a kind gesture, but Jia lingers over these people in their grief, and over Liu looking sad but stolid, the perfect aesthetic anchor for changing times. It's just exploitative, and it made me dislike Liu the man and Dong the film. The second half, when the artist lines up young female sex workers in Bangkok for a group portrait in pink ("Of course I had to have the mattress"), only further ratified my suspicions of Liu. But apart from any ethical qualms I may have with Dong, its most damning trait is its inability to make Liu or his art come to life. Should Dong best be considered not as a true companion piece, but as a study for Still Life, a sketch before the near-masterpiece? Perhaps. Because in those opening shots, I see Jia working out his spatial engagement with the Three Gorges area, and those sequences -- the ones most directly related to Still Life -- are Dong's finest aspects. The rest could have been accomplished by anyone with a mere fraction of Jia's talent.

BeyondHollywood.com James Mudge

“Dong” is a companion piece to Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s prize winning “Still Life”, and both played at the 2006 Venice Film Festival. Interestingly, it was this documentary which was actually planned first, with the joint project coming about after Jia was invited to the area by a painter to capture his work on film. Although the two films are probably best viewed together, sharing many of the same themes and locations, “Dong” works well as a stand-alone piece in the director’s trademark cryptic manner.

The film follows a painter called Liu Xiaodong, and is split into two parts, the first being set in the spectacular Three Gorges Dam area (as was “Still Life”), where he attempts to paint a large picture of twelve men who are working on demolishing buildings for the project. As he paints, he grows closer to his subjects and their lives, and this in turn begins to express itself in his work. The second half sees Liu fly to Bangkok, where he works on a similar piece involving some local girls, though this time his relationship with the focus of his art is hampered somewhat by cultural and language barriers.

“Dong” differs from the traditional documentary form in that it does not have a clear subject as such, and Jia touches on a number of different themes, including the relationship of artists to their art and their subjects, the relationship between people and the environment, and the question as to whether or not art can truly emulate life. As such, the film comes across as being meditative rather than informative, and is as much an exploration of the director’s own thoughts as anything else. This does mean that the proceedings are somewhat unfocused, and unsurprisingly the film never comes to any kind of conclusion, though it works well as a contemplative enigma in a way which compliments the themes in a suitably unforced manner.

Probably the most interesting aspect of the film is the rumination upon art, mainly since it shows a fascinating sense of self-awareness, with most of the painter’s concerns seeming to echo those of the director himself. Indeed, in most of the interviews with the painter, he talks mainly of how his art reflects his personality and his desire to transcend the petty concerns and constraints of modern society, something which raises the complex question of Jia’s relationship with him as a subject. Certainly, he appears at times to be more of a mouthpiece than a case study, albeit a rather pretentious one, though this is mainly due to the frequent shots of him staring into the distance in laughably melancholic fashion.

Jia’s naturalistic directorial style lends itself well to the documentary form, and his predilection for long, languid shots arguably works better here than in some of his narrative features. The film is packed with lingering shots of the landscape, some of which are hauntingly beautiful, especially during the parts filmed in the Three Gorges area. Through this, Jia manages to subtly work in the same themes of migration and urbanisation which he explored in “Still Life”, by contrasting the surrounding scenery with shots of ruined buildings.

“Dong” does have a travelogue feel to it, particularly during the painter’s later journey to Bangkok, with plenty of scenes of local colour being packed in to highlight the cultural differences he experiences. Interestingly, much of the Thai dialogue is unsubtitled either in Chinese or English, possibly as a means of underscoring the distance between the artist and his subjects in this foreign country.

Of course, as ever with Jia, it is hard to know exactly what his intentions are, and “Dong” is certainly open to a number of different interpretations. As such, it should appeal to any fans of the director’s usual style, and though it may confound anyone expecting a straightforward documentary, it makes for intriguing viewing and confirms him as one of China’s most interesting and original directors. Although perhaps, as he seems to be suggesting here, ‘artist’ may be a more fitting term.

Alternative Archive Liu Xiaodong and the Sixth Generation Films, by Ou Ning

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival notes

Variety.com [Jay Weissberg]

USELESS (Wuyong)

China Hong Kong (80 mi) 2007

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Useless finds Jia Zhangke operating in something of a hybrid style, partaking in both non-fiction and fictional filmic modes for his three-part examination of China’s garment industry. It’s a line of attack at once entrancing and frustrating, as Jia’s humanistic opening documentary segment and touching semi-dramatic third portion bookend a middle verité section that never quite meshes with the surrounding material. The film begins with a tracking shot of workers in a clothing factory, with Jia’s empathetic close-ups – thanks to Yu Lik Wai’s masterful HD cinematography – grounding the film’s portrait in individual experience. The laborers toil, eat, and visit the company doctor, routine events that are soon juxtaposed with designer Ma Ke, who laments China’s industrialization while readying a line of garments that integrates notions of history, nationalism and man’s relationship to the Earth. Jia, as usual, is interested in investigating the effects of modernization on contemporary human life. Yet Ma Ke’s thoughts on the subject, as well as the public debut of her fashions in Paris, are treated with muted respect that leaves one with only a vague impression of how Jia truly feels about her work’s attempts to address (and redress) some of the effects of the manufacturing business. Fortunately, though, the director regains his footing during the final half hour, detailing the daily travails of a small community’s tailors via a blend of real and staged incidents that capture, with piercing authenticity and stunning grace, the multifaceted relationship we share with our clothes.

Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

China’s avatar of globalised menace hits documentary pay dirt in this oddly constructed but sharply argued portrait of an industry in denial.

The ostensible subject is Exception, a Chinese clothing company with a high-flown mission statement and an impressive roster of designs — not only is it flying in the face of the Prada/Vuitton/Lacoste-dominated landscape but it’s specifically designed to revive the artisanal methods being lost in the shuffle of mass-produced disposability. The outfits themselves are unwieldy but gorgeously austere, unlikely to make it as prêt-à-porter but a monument to uncompromising designer Ma Ke and her willingness to swim against the current.

Still, the power of the enterprise is in question: the firm’s Paris show, for a new brand defiantly named “Useless,” is filmed in such an ominous fashion that it’s hard to tell if it’s grooving with Ma’s vision, ironically subverting its pretensions or chafing at the song and dance required for the marketing of anti-market goods.

Jia is also careful to first establish the workers, who are the backbone of the Chinese garment industry, contextualising Ma’s statements with the people who are on the front lines of the phenomenon that she’s desperately trying to oppose. The result is an unusually aesthetic documentary experience. One barely notices the talking head over the dingy prison of factories and the serene environment of the designer’s studio — even her statements get swallowed up by the presences around her.

Those are the environments in which she must work and live, and the film is superb at evoking her marginalised place in such a universe without either demeaning her work or giving her the last word, which can never be hers.

Observations on film art and FILM ART : Festivals David Bordwell from Film As Art

Jia Zhang-ke is known principally for fiction films like Platform, The World, and Still Life, but from the start of his career he has shown himself a gifted documentarist as well. His In Public (2001) is a subtle experiment in social observation, and Dong (2006) made an enlightening companion piece to Still Life.

Useless is more conceptual and loosely structured than Dong. Omitting voice-overs, Useless offers a free fantasia on the theme of China as apparel-house to the world.

The first section of the film presents images of workers in Guangdong factories as they cut, sew, and package garments. Jia’s camera refuses the bumpiness of handheld coverage; it opts for glissando tracking shots along and around endless rows of people bent over machines. (Now that fiction films try to look more like documentaries, one way to innovate in documentaries may involve making them look as polished as fiction films.) Jia also gives us glimpses of workers breaking for lunch and visiting the infirmary for treatment.

In a second section, Useless follows the success of a fashion house called Exception, run by Ma Ke. Her new clothing line Inutile (Useless) consist of handmade coats and pants that are stiff and heavy, almost armor-like, and that flaunt their ties to work and nature. (Some outfits are buried for a while to season.) Ending this part with Ma’s Paris show, in which the models’ faces are daubed with blackface, Jia moves back to China and the industrial wasteland of Fenyang Shaoxi. There he concentrates on home-based spinning and sewing. Neighborhood tailors patch up people’s garments while the locals descend into the coalmines. A former tailor tells us that he gave up his work because large-scale clothes production rendered him useless.

Jia’s juxtaposition of three layers of the Chinese clothes business evokes major aspects of the country’s industry: mass production, efforts toward upmarket branding, and more traditional artisanal work. Without being didactic, he uses associational form to suggest critical contrasts. The miners’ sooty faces recall the Parisian models’ makeup, and their stiff workclothes hanging on a washline evoke the artificially distressed Inutile look. What, the film asks, is useless? Jia shows industrial China’s effort to move ahead on many fronts, while also forcefully reminding us of what is left behind.

Slant Magazine [Kevin Lee]

Best of the Decade Derby: What’s the Best Documentary of the Decade? (Two Case Studies) Kevin Lee from Also Like Life, March 23, 2009

d+kaz [Daniel Kasman]

CineScene [Howard Schumann]

24 CITY (Er Shi Cheng Ji) B+ 91

China Hong Kong Japan (107 mi) 2008

“I’m the daughter of a worker.” —Su Na (Zhao Tao)

There seems to be unanimous consensus that the digital projector used at the Film Festival is of such inferior quality (most likely rented) that it is negatively affecting many viewers appreciation for this film, as despite the factory setting, which would be dreary enough, even the brightest colors which should be present (opera costumes, red sweater and/or flowers, or bright yellow flowers outside of giant housing project) are simply not there. Where STILL LIFE (2006) examined the world’s largest construction project using a fictionalized documentary style, this film uses a similar fictionalized style consisting of nine interviews (four of which are fictional) with a straight documentary look to examine one of the world’s largest demolition projects in the city of Chengdu, China, where one of the world’s largest military factories is being demolished to make room for modern, upscale apartment complexes. Though not as overtly political, as the Communist Party continues to be the ruling political party in China, the early interviews of this film resemble early Kieslowski documentaries where Polish factory workers stare straight into a camera and reveal a part of their life story where their lives and the factory where they work merge into a single entity, both appearing uniformly listless and drab. Kieslowski’s films were shot during a communist imposed Russian occupation, where after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Poland, these films offer a unique historical perspective as they offer a scathing critique of the failings of communism. Jia’s film on the other hand is not an indictment of communism, as many interviewed speak in elegaic tones about the nobility of workers in a worker state, but offers an essay-like examination of the shifting perceptions within China today about their massive transformation to a capitalist nation, as in this case a State-owned factory has been purchased for development by a private business corporation in a project known as 24 City.

The uninformed viewer might wonder why this film is not playing in a documentary category, as at least for the first part of the film that’s pretty much what it is, as the early interviews recall the early years at the factory, where those who lived there had little outside contact with others, where it was instead a community unto itself. Only when one recognizes the appearance of actress Joan Chen, (Josie Packard from David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS or the Empress in Bertolucci’s THE LAST EMPEROR) are we tipped off that something is up. Amusingly, she plays Gu Minhua, a factory worker known as Little Flower who bears a resemblance to an actual character in a 1980 Chinese film called LITTLE FLOWER where the heroine is played by none other than Joan Chen. As Gu Minhua watches clips of the film, fiction blends into truth. While there is playful footage of a young girl on roller skates, easily the most harrowing was a woman who recalled traveling with her family on the initial journey traveling to Chengdu decades ago which was fraught with difficulties, where their circuitous route required multiple connections, becoming a disaster when she realized the boat was leaving and she couldn’t find her son. In a state of panic, she was dragged back to the boat by others leaving her lost child behind. Jia regular Zhao Tao is also recognized playing a present day TV host who supports herself by traveling to Hong Kong performing shopping services for wealthy patrons who don’t wish to concern themselves with travel. So the film spans some fifty years of history.

There’s an amusing image of a group of people singing the Communist Internationale as we see an immense concrete structure fall like dominoes, reduced to rubble in seconds, also a unique pan of the city at the end of the film, where the washed out colors is actually befitting of the shot, as the faded, dreary looking city is swallowed up in a fog-like cloud of dirt and dust. After seeing the film, I was curious why the director chose to write fictional parts, to blend truth and fiction, as the stories and observations by those that actually lived there, particularly the woman who lost her child, make for a powerful enough social commentary. Only afterwards did I discover that actress Lu Luping played the woman’s character (Hao Dali) who left her child behind, whose great sacrifice to work in a factory ended up being entirely fictional. So speaking for myself anyways, I couldn’t tell the difference between truth and fiction. According to Derek Elley in Variety, Jia is quoted as saying “as far as I’m concerned, history is always a blend of facts and imagination.” Like the Kieslowski films seen decades later, Jia’s blending of fiction and documentary may offer some of the more unique insights and observations about our modern era.

George Christensen at Cannes:

Dardennes The Silence of Lorna…Not likely to be any awards for this effort, nor many Top Ten lists.

Nor will "24 City," a Chinese documentary about a huge factory that is being demolished to be replaced by an apartment complex, likely receive any awards from the jury.  The eight talking heads of the film, five real and three fictional, are all former workers or people who had lived in the vicinity.  This was a stretch to have been included in the Competition category.  There are a few striking images, including workers streaming into the factory complex on their bicycles, but the interview subjects, other than the fictional ones, aren't very interesting.

eye WEEKLY capsule review [5/5] Jason Anderson

It’s been China’s year in just about every conceivable manner. Leave it to the country’s most celebrated young filmmaker to create a uniquely insightful and evocative portrait of Chinese society as it undergoes yet another seismic change. Integrating interviews with actual workers and fictional monologues by actors (including Joan Chen and Jia regular Zhao Tao) with haunting views of the industrial landscape, the film charts the transition of a military aviation factory into a “living community” named 24 City. In so doing, Jia reveals the impact of China’s industrial and cultural reforms on the people most likely to be tossed around by the turbulence.

J Hoberman at Cannes from The Village Voice

More obviously documentary than most of his fiction films (or vice versa), Jia's 24 City is an ambivalent exercise in Communist nostalgia so meaningfully framed that it could have been shot by Andy Warhol or Chantal Akerman. The movie is set largely in a giant factory slated for destruction (or, more precisely, urban renewal) and populated mainly by retired workers, playing themselves, as the (barely living) monuments of Mao's China.

As with Jia's other movies, this subversively old-fashioned hymn to production is filled with offbeat details (an elderly worker walking past the doomed plant holding her bag of IV fluid aloft like a torch of freedom) and punctuated with pop songs.

The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) capsule review [3/4]

Celebrated Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke (Platform, Still Life) blends documentary and fiction in this studied, melancholic homage to China's militaristic, closed-in past. The subject is a self-contained factory town that existed in the centre of Chengdu, capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan. Originally built to produce aviation engines, Factory 420 drew workers from across China, and sustained a self-contained community until the 1980s. Now, it has been demolished to make way for a luxury apartment complex called 24 City. The movie consists of nine direct-to-camera interviews with various inhabitants, along with elegantly composed shots of the area. Without warning, Jia combines actors with real-life subjects. His justification is that history is a mixture of imagination and fact. Thus, we have actor Joan Chen telling the story of a factory girl, known for her prettiness, who says she was dubbed Little Flower because she looked like a character of that name played by Joan Chen. The minute, often banal memories of the individuals trace a history of China over three generations, set against monumental, painterly images of the giant factory being dismantled.

Mary Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine

Chinese director Jia Zhangke has long been a favorite at the Venice Film Festival — his Still Life won the Golden Lion there in 2006 — but this quasi-documentary is his first entry in the Cannes competition. Jia's stately, static camera style is well suited to the story, which weaves the comments of workers from a Chengdu factory with three fictional monologues, delivered by distinguished actresses of three periods of Chinese cinema: Joan Chen, Lu Liping and Zhao Tao. "As far as I'm concerned," Jia says in a program note, "history is always a blend of facts and imagination."

In the 60s, Factory 420 made airplane engines for the North in the Vietnam War. To raise consciences, and collective guilt, the factory brandished a photo of a young pilot who had been killed in a crash of a plane assembled there. The film interweaves the political overview — of a city institution being torn down to be replaced by commercial and residential buildings — with personal anecdotes that are poignant and charming. One woman recalls being at her parent's home with seven siblings, saying, "It was like an elephant living in the stomach of a sparrow."

As hard as their work was, it gave these people's lives rhythm and meaning, from their ten years into middle age. As one says, "If you have something to do, you age more slowly." 24 City is eloquent testimony to a China that is vanishing with each swing of the wrecking ball. But the memories of the workers in their factory microcosm, and telling documentaries like these, keep the past alive, so that later generations will know what once was, and what's been lost.

Anthony Kaufman at Cannes from indieWIRE

If "Three Monkeys" should please Ceylan's admirers as another evocatively shot meditation of his pet concerns, including human disconnection and gender warfare, Jia Zhang-Ke's competition film "24 City" similarly continues the Chinese filmmaker's interests in a changing China, of old verses new, Communist-era industrialization verses the country's 21st century hyper-capitalism. Ostensibly a series of monologues with workers, punctuated with powerful human tableaus and trenchant images of the dismantling of Factory 420, a storied industrial site, Jia's poetic vision of demolition and progress takes on disturbing new resonances after the recent earthquake that killed thousands of people in the same area where the film takes place. One has to wonder whether 24 City, the high-rise luxury apartment complex that has replaced Factory 420, is still standing. Either way, Jia's masterful aesthetic remains consistent, mixing documentary and fiction with intriguing results. The film takes an ironic turn with the story of "Little Flower," a middle-aged former factory worker (played by actress Joan Chen) who received her nickname because she looked like Joan Chen in a famous '70s movie called "Little Flower." While Chen's performance is memorable, the film's most affecting moments belong to the real-life older citizens, men and women who devoted their lives to work, now made unnecessary and obsolete.

Like his previous films, Jia isn't subtle about the strange disconnect of modern China with its past. This is made all the more obvious in the film's concluding chapter: a pretty young woman Su Na (played by Chinese starlet Zhao Tao) has abandoned the factory life of her parents for a job as a "shopper," traveling to the big city to buy brand name goods for rich people who don't want to lift a finger. "I want to make lots of money," she says.

Panoramas Stuart Klawans from The Nation

When the full effect hit, about twelve hours after I had seen his 24 City at the New York Film Festival, it occurred to me that Jia Zhangke must now be the most important filmmaker in the world. Whether he's the most inventive, entertaining, moving, thoughtful or visually enthralling is another question. I think he might well be in the running in all those categories; but among other first-rate filmmakers, he clearly surpasses everyone in the scale of his subject matter, which is nothing less than the biggest economic, social and physical transformation taking place in the world today, in the most populous of all countries. When you see the earth from outer space, it's said, the only visible human artifact is the Great Wall of China. When the early twenty-first century is someday viewed from a comparable distance, the main artifacts to be seen may be the films of Jia Zhangke.

In 24 City, he addresses his great subject by recording the decommissioning and demolition of a vast munitions plant in the city of Chengdu, in Sichuan province, after the property has been sold to a private developer. In place of Factory 420 will stand an upscale, glassy, mixed-use complex, with only a couple of the old brick structures retained to lend a touch of picturesque nostalgia. Jia's documentation of this development is the panoramic side of the film, with tracking shots that sidle through the echoing sheds, long-focus shots that fill the screen with a sea of workers' faces, crane shots that rise over acres of rubble where the foundations of the new complex are dug. The intimate side of the film, conceived as a series of interviews between subjects and an off-camera questioner, gives you the stories of middle-aged people who once worked in the factory and of young people who grew up in its dormitories and schools--and these segments, by and large, are fictional, scripted by Jia and Zhai Yongming and performed by professional actors.

You might think of these pseudo-documentary monologues as half a dozen self-contained melodramas--so ripe is each with heartbreak and disillusionment--if it weren't for the utter naturalism of Jia's mise-en-scène and the tact with which he places his camera, making sure not to crowd his subjects and then taking one more step back. The weary but enduring Hao Dali (played by Lu Liping) sits before the casement window in her bedroom, where potted plants are arranged prettily on the ledge, and recounts how decades ago the government shipped her to Chengdu to work in the factory--during the voyage, she explains, she was forced to leave behind her son. For Little Flower, by contrast, the abiding loss is her hope of marriage. Posed gracefully in the chair of a beauty parlor, with the bustle of a street passing outside the window, she explains the long sequence of accidents, misunderstandings and hardships that have led her to face middle age alone, even though everyone in the factory used to say she looked just like the star of The Little Flower and The Last Emperor, Joan Chen. No wonder--she's played by Joan Chen.

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

Jia's latest feature doesn't reach out and grab you; rather it builds up a steady accumulation of detail in an artful and partly fictionalized documentary whose central concern is the transition from a planned economy to a market economy in China, with the Cultural Revolution along the way. Jia decided to use actors to play "real" "documentary" talking heads--people who worked at a certain factory now dismantled to become a five-star hotel--or their children, one of them, Su Na (Zhao Tao) working as a "shopper," making good money traveling to other countries and buying expensive goods for rich clients who want to spend but are too lazy to do so. This woman, who wept when she visited her mother in the factory for the first time and saw her numbing job, is the opposite extreme from the aging, now dim-witted "master" of the factory in its early days who worked seven days a week, and used the same tool till it wore down to nothing so as not to waste. The shift in China from the self-effacing collectivist mentality to the current entrepreneurial capitalism is so great that you can imagine why Jia takes refuge in still tableaux of people, composites, and a gallery of talking heads. But this is not as stimulating a film as earlier works like Platform, Unknown Pleasures, The World, or Still Life and will appeal only to the patient.

Actors are used for some of the people because Jia interviewed 130 people and had to create composites. Jia sees no problem in making use of fiction this way in telling fact: life as he sees it is a mixture of historical fact and imagination. He uses poems by classical poets including the Dream of the Red Chamber and William Butler Yeats as well as songs, including "The Internationale" sung by a group of oldsters, pop music, a Japanese classical composer, and contemporary music by a Taiwanese composer. Sometimes the camera is still as a person speaks. Sometimes one person or a group look silently into the camera for a minute or so.

The film, understandably, tells a tale of repression. It also witnesses people who were laid off in the 90's and suffered the lowering of an already frugal lifestyle.

There are strange stories. One woman describes being on a company trip when she and her husband lost their little boy. It was wartime and they felt obligated to go back on the boat to return to work, and they never saw their child again. An attractive woman known as "Little Flower" was the prettiest girl at the factory and when the photo of an unidentified handsome and athletic young man appeared on a bulletin board everyone told her he should become her husband. Silly as this was she began to dream of it--but then they were called together and told he was a pilot whose plane had crashed so he had died due to the malfunction of parts they had made at the factory. They were meant to feel guilty. A woman for years helped her sister in the country by sending clothes and other things to be recycled for her children. More recently she was laid off and became so strapped she had to rely on her "poor" country sister to help her out.

The focus is on the 420 Factory, which was founded in Chengdu, the capital of Sechuan, in the late 50's to produce airplane engines. In early days its function was secret and workers, shipped there from all over the country, lived in virtual isolation; kids got into fights if they tangled with the locals, one man recounts. Later 420 was retooled to produce peacetime products such as washing machines.

Known actors such as Joan Chen or Jia regulars such as Zhao Tao and Chen Jianbin work together with unknown crew members to simulate the "interviews." Though Jia's logic in using this method to present composites makes sense, the effect is to undercut the sense of realism. Probably the best thing about the film is the beautifully composed shots of the factory in operation and being dismantled, taken by cinematographers Yu Lik-wai and Wang Yu. While Jia's Still Life was haunting and quietly powerful, Useless seemed inexplicable and lazy. This is somewhere in between the two. Emotionally it has some import, but the mixed genre doesn't entirely work, and the sense of a Brave New World conveyed in Jia's diffuse but interesting The World seems to have given way to adverts for capitalism. Is this so that Jia can work and travel freely and get his films shown at home? The leading Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker may be slowly morphing into somebody else.

Interview: Jia Zhang-ke - Film Comment Andrew Chan interview from Film Comment, March/April 2009

Anyone following the early films of Jia Zhangke would have pegged the Mainland Chinese wunderkind as a realist, fixated on the gritty textures and languid rhythms of provincial life. Who would have guessed that, in The World (04), Jia would start toying with cartoon interludes and rainbow-colored dance sequences? Or that a UFO would lift off from the rubble of the Three Gorges in Still Life (06)?

Like the China of today’s headlines, Jia’s films bundle together epic ambitions and uncomfortable dissonances, so it only makes sense that they would broaden their scope to visualize both the minutiae of day-to-day experience and the fantasies that underpin the nation’s breakneck progress. These startling leaps of imagination have coincided with other developments over the past five years that complicate our understanding of Jia’s art. In addition to winning government approval for his projects and a Golden Lion in Venice (for Still Life), he has departed from the setting of his home province of Shanxi and repositioned himself as a wide-ranging national auteur.

In his latest films—the documentary-fiction hybrid 24 City and the short Cry Me a River—Jia has caught a serious case of nostalgia. Channeling the mood that emerged from the Maoist era and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre through a series of aesthetic and pop-culture references, this new work finds him at his most cinephilic and meta-cinematic. Not only do the films impart what it is like to live in the aftermath of these two generation-defining moments, but in their playful allusiveness they offer a glimpse of what Chinese cinema has meant to native audiences, past and present.

As the leading Chinese filmmaker of your generation, do you feel any pressure or responsibility as to the way you represent China to foreign audiences?

I haven’t ever felt that I had a special responsibility to a particular audience. As an artist in China, my goal is to express what we have experienced and felt, but this expression isn’t limited, and isn’t just directed at viewers from any particular country. Part of the reason I started making films was to respond to cinema’s blind spots, its silences, on the kind of life I knew. I grew up in Fenyang, Shanxi, and lived there until I was 21. After studying film in Beijing for four years, I discovered that there weren’t any movies that had any relationship to my own life. I wanted to express all the memorable things that I had experienced, and I think this is still my primary responsibility as a filmmaker.

What films did you study when you were at Beijing Film Academy?

In Beijing we had a curriculum that covered both international and Chinese film history. These two parts had a huge influence on my work, but I especially appreciated learning about Chinese film from its beginnings (The Battle of Dingjunshan [1905]) up to the Eighties. When film came to China, and once it had connected itself to Chinese culture, it produced a lot of very interesting results. Chinese people always had an inherent love for theater, and in our past we had rich traditions in Beijing opera and pingshu [a Chinese tradition in which one performer would tell stories to an audience] were intensely theatrical. And this history fed into the Chinese audience’s desire for movies. Even now we still sometimes use the Chinese word for “play” to mean “movie.” When we studied international film history, we also studied it from the very beginning, from the invention of film to the traditions of the Lumière Brothers and Méliès. At that time, the three most important areas for those of us studying film were French cinema, Japanese cinema, and Soviet cinema.

You’ve written most of the screenplays for your films on your own, but you co-wrote 24 City with the poet Zhai Yongming. Could you tell me what that process was like and why you chose to work with her?

Before we started collaborating on the script, we talked for a long time about the lives of workers, the factory, and what kinds of discussions this film needed to provoke. After we had talked, I wrote the first draft, which I later gave Zhai to revise. She is a Chengdu native with a profound understanding of the city, and she really helped me in localizing this film. I also realized that there were going to be a lot of female characters, and Zhai really helped me in capturing women’s emotions and ideas in the parts played by Lü Liping, Joan Chen, and Zhao Tao. Since you brought in Zhai to collaborate with you on 24 City, could you comment on the film’s relationship to literature? Your films often reference other arts. Many have an element of theatrical performance, while Still Life evokes Chinese landscape painting.

I like a strong mix of different media in my films, because it brings out the complexity of life. I’m not interested in making a film that exists as a simplistic, closed-off universe. In 24 City, there is a lot of language and text that the viewer is given to read, including poetry, and there are also shots that function like portrait photography, confronting the subjects in moments of silence. These elements complement each other. Language has certain limitations, but it acts as a complement to silence and allows us to use our imagination. To tackle the challenge of giving viewers a clear sense of China’s complicated realities, you need to use a variety of methods.

Your first films were in a more traditional realist mode, but since The World, you’ve employed elements of fantasy. How has your commitment to realism changed?

I think surrealism is a crucial part of China’s reality. In the past 10 or so years, China has experienced the kinds of changes that might happen across a span of 50 or even 100 years in any normal country, and the speed of these changes has had an unsettling, surreal effect. For example, in The World, the World Park setting in Beijing is itself a fantasy; the first time I visited, I was disoriented by all those replicas of monuments from all over the world concentrated into such a small space. It was as if I had entered a fairyland. I learned that people’s lives within that space are also quite surreal. When I spoke to the women who perform at the park, they said they had danced the same dance there everyday for the past three years. While they felt a kind of freedom in being able to randomly enter into different parts of the world, they also felt trapped in this insular environment.

Another example is Still Life. When I went to look at Fengjie, the location where we shot the film, every county we saw had basically been reduced to rubble. Seeing this place, with its 2,000 years of history and dense neighborhoods left in ruins, my first impression was that human beings could not have done this. The changes had occurred so fast and on such a large scale, it was as if a nuclear war or an extraterrestrial had done it.

How has your approach to digital cinematography evolved?

From Unknown Pleasures up to now, [cinematographer] Yu Lik-wai and I have been looking for the beauty in the DV format. I love it because of how suitable it is for the fast-paced shooting we do. I often joke that, if it weren’t for DV, I wouldn’t be able to capture the changes that are happening in China, because they’re so fast! While making Still Life, I kept saying we could shoot it in one week if we wanted to. DV is a medium that belongs to this age, and I wanted to find how it could have a beauty of its own. When we were shooting The World, we tried to create a digital texture, because the World Park has such an artificial feeling. We worked hard to create what we called a “poetic-digital” style. On Still Life, I initially thought I wanted it to be very realistic, but I couldn’t ignore the surreal aspects of the Three Gorges landscape. I had to use fantastical elements, because without them I wouldn’t have been able to adequately express the utter strangeness of our contemporary reality. I wanted to depict the compression of time, the sense of no longer living a natural existence.

What’s the source of your long-shot, long-take style, which many compare to the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Yasujiro Ozu?

I think, in my own films, the rhythms come from life. One of the reasons I love Hou and Ozu so much is the way their films match the rhythm and emotion of Chinese people’s lives. I think anyone’s film technique stems directly from the way he views life. In my long shots and long takes, my goal is to respect the viewer’s agency, and even to give my films a sense of democracy. I want audiences to be able to freely choose how they want to interact with what’s on screen. But everyone’s reasons for using long shots and long takes are different; personally, I just don’t want my position as a director to become dictatorial, because I want my films to be governed by a sense of equality and democracy.

In your last interview with Film Comment in 2003, you discussed your preference for nonprofessional actors and the naturalism they are able to convey. But lately you have expressed interest in working with Maggie Cheung and Jay Chou, and now you’ve cast Joan Chen in 24 City. What draws you to working with movie stars at this point in your career?

If I wanted to return to the kind of realist aesthetic I used in the past, I would find new nonprofessional actors to collaborate with. But at this stage in my work, I’m going through a big change. 24 City is evidence of that. Ten years after making my first film and confronting the problems of modern China, I am interested in the issue of Chinese history, because a lot of the problems we are facing today have their roots in our past. Our political institutions discourage us from confronting and interrogating our history, but I think that kind of work is absolutely necessary. There are three areas of modern history that I’m especially interested in: the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976; 1949, when the PRC was established; and the last years of the Qing Dynasty in the early 20th century. In a historical film the techniques must be different, and I think I’d need the help of professional actors to bring that history to life.

Let’s talk about your new short film, Cry Me a River. You’ve made several short films; what draws you to this form?

The reason I love making short films is the limits of the form, which stir my imagination. For example, in Cry Me a River I wanted to see if I could tell a story that spanned 10 years in 15 or 20 minutes. This 10-year story is about the changes that time has effected on a group of young people and their thoughts on marriage. At the end you have this sudden burst of emotion, which the short-film form is able to seize upon very quickly. Short films are comfortable for me to make because they don’t require the long process of organization and the financial support of feature films. They’re a fast, lively way of releasing my thoughts and feelings. Even though they pose a challenge in terms of the market because they have no real possibilities there, for me short films serve the same function that sketches do before you start a painting, in that they stimulate my excitement and passion.

Cry Me a River pays homage to Fei Mu’s 1948 film Spring in a Small Town, but it also alludes to Lou Ye’s Summer Palace by casting that movie’s romantic leads. The two extremes represented in these references raise the question: how do you position yourself between Chinese cinema’s past and present?

I worship the achievements of Chinese cinema in the Thirties. There are two directors of that period who I love: Fei Mu and Yuan Muzhi. Yuan has a movie called Street Angel that I love. Cry Me a River is about intellectuals, and it’s easy for me to make a connection to Spring in a Small Town because Fei Mu’s film is about the feelings of intellectuals at a time when so many countries were affected by the Second World War. For me, Cry Me a River reenters the world of China in 1989. It shows how, 10 years on, everyone’s entered the real world, and some people have married, but deep inside they share a great sense of devastation. On the one hand, I wanted to connect the film to Spring in a Small Town with the setting on the river. In Chinese culture, rivers symbolize the passage of time; as Confucius said, “Time is going on like this river, flowing away endlessly day and night.” On the other hand, I wanted to use the two lead actors from Summer Palace [which was banned in China for its depiction of the Tiananmen incident] to make the audience faintly aware that the characters come from that era. These characters had ideals, wrote poems, had concern for their society. The film references that background but also the changes that happen in any life, such as aging and marriage. There’s a song I like called “Xiangyu tai zao” (“Meeting Too Early”), which talks about that time when a person is too young to understand anything. Everyone needs to learn things in life that nobody can teach them. I wanted to make a film about what that feels like. The subject is very close to my own life, because I belong to that generation.

What is your audience like in China now? Does it mainly consist of academics and intellectuals, or would you consider yourself a popular filmmaker?

I think my films have the ability to reach a lot of people now. Earlier on, they were not so readily available due to government censorship. But now we have a lot of different forms of media in China, such as DVD and the Internet. You can also go to different universities and bars to see these movies. I think cinema is currently interacting with the new media; for example, there is a lot of film criticism coming out of Bulletin Board Systems [popular Chinese online forums]. Reading reviews on BBS of my own films, I realized that my audience is very diverse, and it’s not just intellectuals watching my films.

Recently a few Chinese filmmakers—Wong Kar Wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien—have come to the West to make movies. Would you ever consider going abroad for future projects?

I’d like to make films outside of China, because I’m interested in the lives of Chinese people all over the world. I probably won’t be telling any purely American or European stories, but I’m interested in Chinese people in America, Europe, and even Africa. Since the Eighties, there has been a lot emigration, people leaving in search of a better life. I recently went to New York’s Chinatown by myself to eat, and watching all the Cantonese people gathered together really moved me, even though I didn’t understand what they were saying.

Looking back on the decade between Xiao Wu and 24 City, do you think your goal in making movies has changed?

There has definitely been a change. When I started making Xiao Wu, it was merely out of a love of movies and a desire to make them. I also wanted to express all the thoughts and feelings I had suppressed. Now I feel more of a sense of social responsibility. A movie can be a fantasy or it can be a realistic depiction of society. At the same time, a film is a memory. At this point, I’m most interested in emphasizing cinema’s function as memory, the way it records memory, and how it becomes a part of our historical experience.

The Long Shot | The New Yorker Evan Osnos, May 11, 2009

Edward Champion

Cannes Film Festival, 2008: “24 City” (Jia, China) Daniel Kasman at Cannes from The Auteur’s Notebook

Daily Plastic - Festival Report [J. Robert Parks] at Toronto

ReelTalk (Donald Levit) review

exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

24 City (Er Shi Si Cheng Ji) Dan Fainaru at Cannes from Screendaily

Invisible cities: an interview with Jia Zhangke with Time Out Film ... Edmund Lee interviews the director from Time Out London, 2009

The Hollywood Reporter review Maggie Lee

Derek Elley at Cannes from Variety

CRY ME A RIVER (Heshang aiqing) B 85

China Spain France (19 mi) 2008

An ironic work that opens with a jubilant moment of celebration, where a group of young professionals celebrate the birthday of one of their former professors, which has a way of publicly honoring someone’s life, much like Kurosawa’s final film MADADAYO (1993). But rather than looking back at some of the revelatory moments, the ones that defined the true character of the man, this film looks ahead. In something of a time capsule, two of the couples from the party are seen sometime later riding together in a gondola, floating peacefully down the river-flooded streets, a result of the flooding caused by the Three Gorges Dam, now resembling the canals of Venice. The prominent theme here appears to be regret, as this town is a ghost town of its former self, its history submerged under the waterline, and when these people are finally alone with their thoughts, they seem to be living loveless lives filled with a stark emptiness. Zhao Tao is a collective portrait of many of her former movie characters, someone we feel familiar and comfortable with, but she looks lost when contemplating her future. Publicly they may be professional success stories, mainstayers of the rising Chinese middle class, offered the priviledge of education and monetary luxuries, but privately they feel disconnected from everyone else and appear to be leading meaningless lives.

The House Next Door [Vadim Rizov] September 18, 2008

(Wendy And Lucy is preceded by a new 20-minute short by Jia Zhangke, Cry Me A River. It's basically more footage of towns flooded by the Three Gorges Dam, topped off with a little upper-class bourgeois drama. It's a decent enough dose to satiate Jia fanatics, but those who've never encountered his work shouldn't start here, or draw any conclusions about the overall quality thereof.)

Asia Pacific Arts [Brian Hu]

Jia Zhang-ke never stops surprising us. Here, the shock is that he makes his first explicitly middle-class work, a 19-minute short about two pairs of old college lovers reuniting years later in Suzhou. The Venice-like waterways provide a romantic, nostalgic setting, tapping into fantasies of what love could have been. As usual, Jia sets us along slowly, first with casual conversation over dinner, then in long, tender breaths as we drift down the Suzhou streams. The allegorical possibilities of nostalgia and regret are obvious given China's rapid modernization, but what I appreciate most is how the short captures a generation of China's young middle class reflecting on its past ideals, and sharing those reflections with each other, rather than speeding forward at the speed of global capital. That of course might be the short's ultimate cheesy fantasy, but I'll take the cheese, along with the sappy pop ballad that closes the film.

The Seventh Art [Just Another Film Buff]

Picture Jia repenting for not being completely nostalgic in 24 City and deciding to assuage that guilt with a purely fictional feature. The 20-minute short Cry Me A River (2008) is just that. A group of middle class friends, well in their thirties, meet up, have dinner with one of their professors and talk in pairs about how their lives have been after they went their own ways. This must be the first time Jia is working within the tepid confines of a genre and he does remarkably well to leave his signature all over. But it is also true that Jia is one of the few directors who truly deserve a picture in this genre, given the consistency with which he has dealt with the theme of cultural transition in his films. Wang Hong Wei and Zhao Tao seem to be almost reprising their roles from Platform, which gives the film a touch of autobiographic authenticity, considering how often the director has used former actor as his alter ego. We are far from the sweet old days of Platform where the very sight of a train was rare. It’s now a matter of a few hours crossing the whole of China. As the professor and the students have their dinner, two actors in traditional theater costume perform at the restaurant with a huge bridge as the backdrop. Two characters travel on a boat in a river whose banks are adorned by old buildings, reminiscing and confessing how much they still love each other. They are, of course, going down the river of time with a clear knowledge that they can’t reverse its flow.

Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival Fred Camper from the Reader

I WISH I KNEW (Hai shang chuan qi)

China (125 mi) 2010

Cannes '10 Day 5: But nothing happened... Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 17, 2010

Jia Zhangke is a master at taking his non-narrative time. "I Wish I Knew" continues, more or less, where last year's "24 City" left off, contemplating the personal side effects of modern China. The new film considers Cultural Revolution-era Shanghai and its survivors and devastated diaspora. The movie is lush and, at times, moving, catching up with filmmakers (hey, its Hou Hsiao-hsien!) and offspring of assassinated officials, collapsing fiction and documentary, although with less mesmerizing flair than in "24 City."

It's unclear whether Jia intends to create a cycle of films, while employing this style, explicitly profiling children of the revolution (when he's through he could have an immense work of oral-visual history). It works for him -- he's officially one of those directors who can do both little wrong and for quite while seem to doing nothing. And yet -- and yet -- this is a filmmaker whose movies ("The World" and "Platform," for starters) have the power to wow. He's not operating at the height of his skill here, but I'll take him even at reduced strength. The robust applause for him at the end of the film was touching. He has a boyishness that makes it easy to imagine the people in his nonfiction spilling themselves to him so easily.

Cannes '10: Day Five  Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 17, 2010

Moving just a little bit westward from Japan to China, but a world away in sensibility, brings us to I Wish I Knew, the latest state-of-my-nation report from Jia Zhang-ke. Given Jia’s stature among the egghead set—his Platform and Still Life placed 2^nd and 3^rd, respectively, in Cinematheque Ontario’s poll of the best films of the last decade—many were surprised that his latest wound up in Un Certain Regard rather than Competition, but they’ll be less so after they see the film, which is perhaps his least ambitious and his most scattershot. Like 24 City,it’s a documentary-fiction hybrid (more doc than fic this time), consisting primarily of interviews in which subjects sit comfortably and reminisce about their past—specifically, in this case, about their memories of Shanghai in the years just before and after the Cultural Revolution. Between anecdotes, actress Zhao Tao silently wanders across the modern-day city in shots that are frequently even more gorgeous than she is, which is saying a lot. As far as I could tell, there are no fake interviews (as there were in 24 City), but this collection of just-folks seemed to me much less compelling than Jia’s last; the most interesting recollections come from film-industry figures like director Hou Hsiao-hsien (The Flowers of Shanghai) and actress Wei Wei (the 1948 classic Spring in a Small Town), in part because this allows Jia to compare footage of Shanghai past to his own depiction of Shanghai present. Still, I couldn’t for the life of me work out Jia’s organizing principle, if any, and a graph of my interest level throughout the film’s 138 minutes would look mighty familiar to any seismologist. Why exactly did Jia want to make this film, even? Punchline’s obvious, right?

Cannes Film Festival 2010: Day Five Matt Noller at Cannes from The House Next Door, May 17, 2010

Like his last film, 2008's 24 City, Jia Zhangke's Un Certain Regard title I Wish I Knew is a documentary/fiction hybrid about modern-day China. Where 24 City took a personal focus on the citizens of a Chinese town affected by the construction of a high-rise condominium, I Wish I Knew takes a broader view, examining the history of Shanghai as viewed from the present. It combines interviews with citizens, actors, and filmmakers with architectural shots of present-day Shanghai and footage of actress Zhao Tao wandering the city. The film is never less than gorgeous, and there's often an intuitive and pleasing internal rhythm to how he cuts within and between shots.

It's also a bit inscrutable, never quite locking down an easy theme or single organizational strategy. In this sense, I Wish I Knew can feel quite a bit like Jia's version of an essay film, a sprawling commentary on the relationship of the past to the present through such disparate means as memory, political dialectics, storytelling, performance, and film. For the most part, interviewees, rather than talking about themselves, discuss their ancestors and family histories, many of which connect to the civil war between the Communists and Nationalists. These stories are augmented by historical footage and archival inserts, and are often juxtaposed with languorous modern-day sequences depicting the locations being discussed. Later on, Jia turns his focus to cinema, interviewing directors (like Red Persimmon's Wang T'ung and Flowers of Shanghai's Hou Hsiao-hsien) and performers who have been involved in Shanghai-set films. He intercuts footage from these films, relating cinematic representations to historical, political, and personal views of the city.

As a largely intellectual project, emotion often takes a back seat in I Wish I Knew. On the whole, its interviews are not nearly as interesting as those in 24 City, largely because Jia seems less interested in his subjects' stories than in what those stories represent. The film drags at times and, at nearly two and a half hours, is longer than it needs to be. I ultimately prefer the more emotionally engaging 24 City, but I Wish I Knew is a sensuous and thought-provoking experimental documentary, far more deserving of a competition slot than any of the three titles reviewed above.

Maggie Lee at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 17, 2010

CANNES -- "I Wish I Knew," Jia Zhangke's documentary on Shanghai, commissioned to commemorate the World Expo taking place in the city this month, is a patchwork quilt with too many fabrics and patterns. Dipping into the historical, human and scenic through interviews and nomadic location shooting, it reveals what most films touching on modern Chinese history address: how wars and political unrest led to suffering and Diaspora.

The film suffers from information deficiency, so while Chinese can relate to most of their conversations yet find the content familiar, overseas audiences are adrift in a sea of non-chronological memories. Cinephiles who adore festival darling Jia would still lap up a section related to Chinese cinema, so widespread festplay and niche art house runs await.

Style-wise, there is minimal variation from his last documentary, "24 City," despite the enormous differences in place, generation and the stories told. Jia's regular cinematographer Yu Lik Wai's mellow, impressionist images of old and new quarters of Shanghai, Taiwan and Hong Kong create a tone poem effect that is becoming routine in Jia's oeuvre. Jia's screen muse, Zhao Tao, gets the most gratuitous role in her career, roaming the city's landmarks and neglected slums with a troubled expression.

Comprising a lopsided tripartite structure in which the dots and lines don't connect, the first -- as well as longest, most scattered section -- interviews children of Shanghai residents during the swinging '30s, the Japanese and civil wars in the '40s pioneering industrialists, high-ranking KMT (ie. Nationalist) officials and executed underground Communists. (pending question)

The most fascinating recollections come from Du Mei-ru, daughter of Du Yue Sheng -- China's biggest Mafioso. Nevertheless, the extent of his fame (or notoriety) is lost on non-Chinese. Since the interviewees were still young then, even though the personal experiences accounted are exceptional, they cannot quite convey a tangible sense of place or spirit of the metropolis.

About an hour on, the film takes a narrative bypass to focus on persons connected to films made or set in Shanghai. Some are tenuous -- like Hou Hsiao Hsien talking about location scouting for "Flowers of Shanghai" only to end up shooting everything on set. Others are valuable if one is cognizant of Chinese cinema, like soprano Barbara Fei's reminiscence on her father, Fei Mu, and the circumstances in which he directed "Spring in a Small Town" (regarded as the greatest of Chinese classics), or tragedies befalling the family of actress Shangguan Yunzhu.

The last section features a stock investor, a young man doing hip-hop dance and a writer obsessed with race cars. It feels like a blurry after-thought on Shanghai's contemporary heartbeat.

I Wish I Knew (Hai Shang Chuan Qi) Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily

You don’t have to possess a vast knowledge of Shanghai to appreciate I Wish I Knew but it probably helps. Jia Zhangke’s affectionate valentine to the city’s history, architecture and cinematic heritage is built around the vivid personal testimonies of eighteen of its citizens telling tales that span the period from the 1930s through the Communist victory in 1949 and the Cultural Revolution of 1960s to the present day.

Strong cinephile interest is guaranteed by the inclusion of a number of leading figures from the local film industry among the witnesses including Hou Hsiao-Hsien and actress Rebecca Pen who starred in Wong Kar-Wai’s Days Of Being Wild (1990). The lengthy running time and subject matter will define I Wish I Knew as a specialist item in most territories although extensive Festival exposure seems assured.

Landmark sights like Victoria Harbour and the location of the Shanghai World Expo provide the backdrop to a portrait of a city in constant flux over the past seventy years with most of the testimonies focusing on some kind of exile from the city or arrival there from another place.

The stories are often very pertinent to Shanghai but have a more universal resonance as someone recalls having one of the first air conditioning units in the 1930s or writer/runner Han Han recalls his desire to own a car with the royalties that were starting to accumulate from the success of his first book.

Scenes of contemporary Shanghai depict the crumbling grandeur of the past nestling alongside the many construction sites promising the shiny new buildings of the future. The testimonies tend to be at their most vivid when recalling the repercussions of Shanghai’s liberation in 1949. Wang Peimin recalls that her father died in 1948 three weeks before she was born. He had been given a death sentence for joining the Communist Party and the only photos she has of him are the ones taken by a journalist in the moments leading up to his execution.

The testimonies are shot in an unfussy manner in everyday locations and are designed to concentrate attention on the individuals and what they have to say. The film also makes extensive use of clips from a wide variety of films including Spring In A Small Town (1948), To Liberate Shanghai (1959) and Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Flowers Of Shanghai (1999).

Zuo Qiansheng recalls working as an assistant to Michelangelo Antonioni during his time in Shanghai in the early 1970s and the punishment he suffered for his inability to steer the Italian auteur towards an officially sanctioned view of what he should be shooting.

The one non-documentary element of the film is a whisp of a notion following the ghostly presence of actress Tao Zhao through the city. It seems an unnecessary addition to a project that is rich enough in its remembrances of times past.

Currency | I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke. China) - Cinema Scope Tony Rayns

Full disclosure: I did the English subtitles for Jia Zhangke’s new film, and may yet get paid for doing them. I wasn’t in Cannes for the international premiere, but a magazine editor of my acquaintance tells me that “some smart people” who saw it there “think it’s just a by-the-numbers commission piece.” Telling me this was, of course, calculated to get my hackles up, to get me fighting back against blindness and ignorance. Happy to oblige.

First off, I Wish I Knew was indeed commissioned. So were Jia’s other recent films Dong (2006), Useless (2007), and 24 City (2008). But the word “commissioned” implies (a) that Jia has somehow “sold out,” and (b) that the film is somehow inherently less credible as “art” than, say, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I’m sure that most readers understand that almost all films are in some sense “commissioned” by those who finance them from those who make them, so let’s spare ourselves any ruminations on the politics of film financing. In any event, the “smart” crowd clearly didn’t grasp the implications of the film’s opening shots of a branch of the Bank of Communications in Shanghai. A workman is seen polishing the guardian lions outside its door, and a noise like the roaring of a lion is heard on the soundtrack. Jia is acknowledging Shanghai’s status as a city of commerce and burgeoning high finance, but maybe he’s also doing what Godard did with those shots of cheques being signed at the start of Tout va bien (1972). Like every other small, independent production company in the world, Jia’s XStream Pictures has unending cash-flow problems. He solves them pragmatically—but always on his own terms, no one else’s.

In this particular case, Jia was invited to make a film “about Shanghai” to mark the opening of the Shanghai World Expo in late April 2010. Since he was given carte blanche to make whatever kind of film he liked, he accepted. To preempt future “political” problems, he made it clear to the financiers that his idea was to focus mainly on émigrés from Shanghai—politicians, soldiers, artists, gangsters—and to follow some of those émigrés to their subsequent bolt-holes in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The financiers didn’t demur. Does it need to be explained that Jia needed special permission to film in Taiwan—not from the financiers in Shanghai, but from the famously enlightened government in Beijing? And is it hard for non-Chinese to grasp that Jia’s choice of interview subjects—including one major criminal and others deemed “anti-communist”—was inherently going to be “challenging” for the Film Bureau?

These questions broach the problematic faced by Jia and all other serious Mainland Chinese directors of his generation, like Chen Kaige and Hou Hsiao-hsien before them. Any Chinese filmmaker with a modicum of intelligence and taste will sooner or later want to explore China’s particularly fraught modern history: the anti-Japanese war, the civil war, the exactly parallel ideological projects of the communists and the KMT nationalists and both parties’ rapid slides towards extremism and corruption, the ten-year calamity of the Cultural Revolution, the unbridled gallop into state capitalism. There’s an underlying assumption that it’s useful to examine the past to understand the frequently wretched circumstances of the present and their effect on the behaviour and thinking of Chinese people.

The trouble is, even “smart” people in Western countries know next to nothing about China’s modern history, and apparently lack the empathy to understand what it’s like to live in the space between authoritarian government and out-of-control profiteering. This wouldn’t matter a toss, of course, except that serious-minded Chinese filmmakers need a global audience to survive. There’s no state support for the “art” sector in Mainland cinema (both Taiwan and Hong Kong do now offer modest subsidies to selected filmmakers), and the all-powerful market with its new 18-screen multiplexes has no time for “art.” Worse, despite pressure, China still hasn’t introduced a proper ratings system—the thinking seems to be that all films should be “suitable” for all ages—while political and military censorship processes continue to exert a strong grip. Hence the need that Jia and his contemporaries have for distribution abroad. That’s getting harder to find, and less lucrative—as even the likes of Zhang Yimou have discovered. No Chinese filmmaker has been more thoughtful or adventurous in battling all these adversities than Jia Zhangke. Accepting commissions, as long as they allow him a completely free hand, is one of the main planks of his creative survival strategy. You’d think “smart” people would get it.

Let’s open a parenthesis for a moment to consider the sad case of Chen Kaige. In 1988 Chen took his best film, King of the Children, to Cannes. He came away not only without a prize but also dumbfounded to discover that the huge majority of Western viewers knew nothing about the Cultural Revolution (and so weren’t able to supply the off-screen realities the film took as given) and had absolutely no sense of either the burden of China’s traditional culture or the imperative in the late ‘60s to follow a strict Maoist line. Since then, Chen has struggled in film after film to find ways of dealing with Chinese issues that will be intelligible to foreigners. He tried mythic abstraction (Life on a String, 1991), sexualized melodrama (Farewell My Concubine, 1993; Temptress Moon, 1996) and historical spectacle (The Emperor and the Assassin, 1998) before abjectly surrendering to Mammon with riffs on Billy Elliot (Together, 2002) and Lord of the Rings (The Promise, 2005). (He’s also struggled to overcome his inhibitions about dealing with sex, but that’s another story.) This sorry tale is just one of the many negative examples that Jia Zhangke has before him when he considers how to go on producing credible and innovative cinema in China. Close parenthesis.

So what did Jia make of his invitation to “deal with” Shanghai? I Wish I Knew is a long and complex film, and as its title suggests—like most of Jia’s films, the title is quoted from a song—it’s primarily concerned with knowledge. This is only one of several distinct agendas; others include continuing to reclaim the eloquence of spoken (and sung) language—a project begun in 24 City—and championing cinephilia as a legitimate 21st century passion. (The Chinese title, incidentally, testifies to Jia’s own cinephilia: it echoes the Chinese title of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai [1998] by switching the syllables of “Shanghai” to produce “Hai Shang.” Hou’s title Hai Shang Hua means “Flower on the Sea” and Jia’s means “Legend on the Sea.”) But the acquisition of knowledge is the main thing.

Jia sidesteps the period of Japanese occupation, since that was when communists and nationalists were sort-of unified against a common enemy. (For the record, Shanghai fell to the Japanese in 1937. The “orphan island” period followed, with the autonomous “foreign concessions” allowed to continue functioning, until Pearl Harbour brought the Allies into the war against Japan in 1941. Further reading: J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, or any decent history of modern China.) Instead, Jia zeroes in on the civil war of the late ‘40s—or, more exactly, its aftermath, when Shanghai was “liberated” by the communist army and the upper echelons of the KMT used the port as their embarkation point for sanctuary in Taiwan. Wang Peimin describes what she knows of the summary trial and execution of her father, trade unionist Wang Xiaohe, which occurred three weeks before she was born in 1948. In Taiwan, Lee Chia-tung describes how his father (a man of great probity) was assigned to administer properties that had been seized by the Japanese during the war—and how those properties were looted when the KMT evacuation to Taiwan began. Also in Taiwan, Chang Ling-yun recalls his time as a KMT soldier in Shanghai in the late ‘40s (he could have been one of the men who executed Wang Xiaohe) and describes how the “taxi-dancer” system worked in the city’s nightclubs and entertainment palaces.

Film clips similarly juxtapose opposite perspectives. A triumphalist clip from Wang Bing’s propaganda warhorse Battle of Shanghai (1959; it was one of the prestige projects made to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the People’s Republic), full of pompous visual and verbal rhetoric, is followed by a clip from Wang Tung’s Red Persimmon (1996), an autobiographical reminiscence of boarding a boat in Shanghai to flee to Taiwan. In interview, Wang Tung (a.k.a. Wang Toon) regrets the way the civil war forced his father Wang Zhonglian to fight against communist generals who had been his classmates in the Huangpu Military Academy. It must go without saying that these Taiwanese voices have never been heard in Mainland China before, but it’s equally true that no film made anywhere has previously attempted a pan-Chinese view of the fall-out from the conflicts in China’s civil war.

There’d be no problem filling the rest of this issue with more examples of the “knowledge” the film explores, but it would probably be more useful to use the remaining space to flag some of film’s running themes and concerns. One is Shanghai’s particularly cosmopolitan approach to the manners and morals of courtship. (A caption explains how internal migrations in the late Qing Dynasty, provoked by the Taiping Rebellion, turned Shanghai into China’s only truly multiethnic city.) Taking another cue from its title song, I Wish I Knew offers a suite of love stories, from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s explanation of what drew him to Flowers of Shanghai (he was charmed by the courtship rituals of the flower houses) to Chang Hsin-I’s disarming account of how she met and married her American-educated husband. The most piercing of these is Wei Ran’s overwhelmingly moving chronicle of the lives of his much-married mother (the actress Shangguan Yunzhu, star of Two Stage Sisters [1965] and many other films, driven to suicide in the Cultural Revolution) and his half-sister, the latter killed in a traffic accident after traumatizing affairs with two young men. This strand is rather beautifully resolved in the film’s coda, in which Jia’s muse Zhao Tao—playing an “invisible” silent witness to the city’s current project to erase most traces of its own past—sees an old man eating alone in his decrepit apartment and admires his framed photo of a woman (wife? daughter?) who is no longer in his life.

The cinephile strand, which uses images of demolition from Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000) to counterpoint images of high-rise monstrosities in the same locations now and a snippet from Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990) to introduce Rebecca Pan’s matchless worldly wisdom, climaxes in the spirited defense of Fei Mu, one of China’s greatest directors, long vilified by the Communist Party. This inevitably centres on his finest film, Spring in a Small Town (1948): the star Wei Wei recalls the bizarre circumstances that brought this masterpiece into existence, and the director’s daughter Barbara Fei reveals the political machinations that drove him to Hong Kong and quite likely caused his early death. The vindication of Fei Mu picks up where Stanley Kwan left off in his Ruan Lingyu biopic Center Stage (1992); interesting that the two strongest counterblasts against the official communist line on film history should both come from film directors. Incidentally, Jia cleverly heads off any accusations of preciousness in his cinephilia by cropping all the clips to fit his ’Scope frame: the clips are subsumed into his own rhapsodic visual flow.

For all the glowing testimony of former “Model Worker” Huang Baomei, the Communist Party doesn’t come out of the film looking too good. Jia’s underlying attitude crystallizes in the choice of his final interviewee, Han Han. This personable young Shanghainese is not only a best-selling novelist and racing-car champion but also China’s most popular blogger, noted for his sardonic comments on the uselessness and lubricity of state officials. Jia Zhangke is no more a “by-the-numbers” guy than Han Han is. Amazing, really, that anyone thinks he could be. Only members of FIPRESCI could be that dumb.

Cannes 2010 Review: Jia Zhang-ke's 'I Wish I Knew' Kevin Jagernauth at Cannes, May 16, 2010

Cannes 2010. Jia Zhangke's "I Wish I Knew" David Hudson at Cannes from The Auteurs, May 18, 2010

Phillip Maher Interview with the director from All Movie Guide, April 25, 2010

Zhao Tao talks about her collaboration with Jia in a video interview with the Realist Imperative (English subtitled) at Asia Society, May 10, 2010 on YouTube (7:32)

Jia video interview with the Realist Imperative (English subtitled) at Asia Society, May 10, 2010 on YouTube (10:17)

A TOUCH OF SIN (Tian zhu ding) A 96

China Japan (133 mi) 2013 ‘Scope

One of the few award winning films at Cannes this year, winning the best screenplay, which one might question, as the supreme directorial flourish is usually what sets a Jia Zhang-ke film apart from the rest, but as it turns out, it’s an extremely well-written story that continues to surprise right through to the end. Offering a rather blistering comment on what it’s like living in China at the moment, where citizens are in a Kafkaesque situation forced to endure unthinkable realities where there is literally no escape from the unending comedy of horrors inflicted upon them by the powers that be, as the government attempts to offer an alternative to generations of totalitarian communism, but the introduction of capitalism has produced a black market economy that resembles the Russian mafia. How is any ordinary citizen supposed to deal with the unlimited power and reach of those guys? The distance between the “haves” and the “have nots” is even more unfathomable, where most everyone continues to have nothing while a privileged few hoard it all. In Jia’s hands, it’s a near surreal landscape, where he continually mixes in pictures of a haunting past into the present, effectively using images of shrines, pagodas, and classical art contrasted against the busy city streets, where the looming presence of the past is evident everywhere. Through the lens of cinematographer Nelson Yu Lik-wai, the director continues to provide films of ravishing beauty, where the poetic visualizations are often spectacular, and this is no exception, but there is also an intrusion of darkness, utter brutality, and ruthlessness, leaving behind a particularly empty void of responsibility, where Chinese citizens are continually expected to do more with less. The picture of life in China, ranging from the busy southern metropolis of Guangzhou to the more rural townships in Jia's home province of Shanxi, couldn’t be more bleak, where the promise of brighter days ahead appears stained in blood and tears.

What this film does express, unlike anything else this arthouse director has ever done, are grandiose, somewhat spectacular, spectacle sequences of graphic violence, where it appears he even turns to the martial arts wuxia genre form, as incredible as that sounds, while other scenes resemble the Charles Bronson vigilante justice style movie, with irate citizens taking matters into their own hands. But the appalling idea of Chinese citizens resorting to guns to exact justice or revenge has the feel of western fantasia, like some kind of idealized dream sequence similar to Bobcat Goldthwaite’s raucous American satire God Bless America (2011), as China prides itself as being different than the excessively violent images continually coming out of the gun-happy West, yet here it is thoroughly entrenched in the grim realism of everyday Chinese life depicted, where people are backed into a corner feeling they have no other choice. At the Cannes Film Festival press conference the director acknowledged the film would have to be edited to play in China, as we see a variety in choices of weapons used, from hand axes, meat cleavers, shovels, crowbars, hand guns, shotguns, and knives, where the neverending barrage of assaults does reflect the extreme degree of economic and psychological damage citizens are forced to endure, where they are pushed to the breaking point of near insanity, resorting to such extreme means only because the options are otherwise dire or nonexistent. That said, this is a work of rare intelligence and cold observation, where you’ll be hard pressed to find this kind of acute criticism coming out of China, or even America for that matter. While this is a series of interconnected stories that actually happened in real life and will be compared to other similarly written movies, like the broad overreach of interglobal (“We are all connected”) interconnectivity in the Guillermo Arriaga stories of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s movies like AMORES PERROS (2000), 21 GRAMS (2003), or BABEL (2006), or the conniving, manipulative nature of Paul Haggis’s CRASH (2004), this is not like any of them, and comparisons seem frivolous, as Jia has his focus clearly on what’s happening “inside” China and never points his camera or his insights elsewhere.

While it all unravels with an element of surprise, the director uses four different characters to carry out the existing themes that are raised throughout the film, where characters overlap, but not the storyline, including Dahai (Jiang Wu), a frustrated coal miner in Shanxi province whose outrage hits the boiling point when the corrupt capitalist owners sell off the collective property of the mine without paying dividends to the workers, driving brand new Maserati and Audi cars, even a private jet, and then refuse to even discuss the matter afterwards. Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang) is a nomadic migrant worker on a motorcycle (wearing a Chicago Bulls cap!) with a secret inner life that is never revealed, but he apparently makes a living off of his own inflicted road kill. Xiao Yu, Jia’s frequent actress and real life wife, Zhao Tao, is conflicted over a longterm affair with a married man while working as a receptionist at a spa. Within the span of a few hours, she is both assaulted by the man’s family at work, while also forced to violently fend off unwanted advances from drunken businessmen who expect sexual favors for their wads of cash. And finally Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan) is a young factory worker who is blamed for an accident at the plant, fleeing to a neighboring city where he gets a job in an upscale hotel that provides sex services for its disgustingly wealthy customers, one of whom is amusingly played by the director himself, catering to their every need, where he falls for one of the attractive comfort girls (Li Vivien), but is doomed by her relentlessly demanding subservience to the customer’s needs. Finding another job in yet another mindless factory, he finds himself living a hellish existence in a ghetto styled high rise building, where the neighboring building is a mirror image, ironically called the Oasis of Prosperity, revealing row upon row of laundry hanging outside on the line. The sense of confined suffocation is certainly prevalent in three of the four characters, where the fourth resorts to criminal behavior to get out from under it. For him (Zhou San), living at home with his family in a dead end town is equally suffocating.

It’s a brilliantly conceived film that reveals the depths of complexity through multiple characters experiencing their own agonizing sense of loss and suffering, where each strand of the story reflects a certain dehumanization associated with economic prosperity. In each, they escalate to an outburst of violence while also showing a deeply layered societal sense of indifference and alienation, where an overriding fatalism seems to be choking the very life out of people. Separated from any real meaning or connection to one another, individuals are forced to live in tiny spaces that resemble prisons from which they have no escape. The working environment especially holds such an oppressive and hostile look of vacuous sterility that it resembles the meticulousness of Austrian documentaries like Nicolaus Geyrhalter’s OUR DAILY BREAD (2005) or Michael Glawogger’s WORKINGMAN’S DEATH (2005), or more specifically the stunning power reflected in the seemingly endless opening shot of Jennifer Baichwall’s MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES (2006), seen here Stars Of The Lid - Taphead (12:55) in the first seven and a half minutes, though the clip adds music that is not in the film, and it quickly cuts away before the shot actually comes to a slow stop, finally holding on a worker asleep at his station. The slow tracking shot down a side aisle of a huge Chinese iron assembly plant of 23,000 workers reveals endless rows of bright yellow-shirted factory workers sitting at their work stations performing a synchronized monotony of repetitious motions, many of whom seem relieved to stop and stare at the camera’s obvious intrusion, where the accumulation of ever-expanding space defies all known concepts of rationality. These technological wastelands drive the nation’s economy but leave the workers doomed to indifference and solitude. With another outstanding musical score by Giong Lim, formerly working with Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia’s aesthetic is characterized by images of loneliness and alienation, often cast in silence, where the classical past comments upon the present, as the individual is sucked into this vacuous emptiness that is his place in life. The violence in the film is often raw and brutal, but it’s shown alongside rampant corruption, grotesque factory accidents, low wages, human rights abuses, and spectacular wealth and growth, where according to the director, “The expansion in China has been so fast, there’s been no room for the system to catch up with any humanity.” A brooding and atmospheric film, using disturbing genre forms to express his own personal outrage (and perhaps to connect to a wider mass audience), Jia offers a bravely honest and bewilderingly angry sense of defiance.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Edo Choi

Expectations of something boldly different followed word from overseas that Jia Zhang-Ke, perhaps mainland China's greatest filmmaker, had begun work on his first commercial feature. The rumors were of a late Qing martial arts drama with sets, costumes, professional actors—the works. All this from a filmmaker whose oeuvre up to now might be said to constitute a wholesale rejection of the sort of glamorous historical fantasy fifth generation filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige have come to live by. The rumors were true in part. The film that premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival was boldly, indeed thrillingly, different, but it was not a Qing set period epic. That production had been put on hold in order to make a different film, contemporary set yet no less epic in terms of the rich expanse of emotional and geographical territory it would cover. This film would address itself more directly to the exigencies of China's present condition in four true stories of violence, both physical and psychological, both structural and interpersonal, that together would form a portrait of a society brutalized by outlaw capitalism. What this abrupt gesture alone reaffirms about Jia is his earnest sense of duty as a social artist whose work always places the needs and concerns of his people above his own, or rather one for whom that distinction does not exist. While, in 2013, several American filmmakers, from Harmony Korine to Sophia Coppola, from Ridley Scott to Michael Bay and Martin Scorsese, released films that addressed what seems to have emerged, finally and thankfully, as a signal theme for the current cinema, it would take a filmmaker like Jia in a country as blasted as China to bring that issue—inequality, of course—its proper sense of urgency, scale and context. Where the Americans have emphasized the excesses of the haves, Jia has zeroed in on the destitution, not only material but spiritual, of the have-nots and, in the process, achieved something exceedingly rare in the movies: a just explanation, without a shred of speculative self-indulgence, of why people sometimes do horrible things.

In Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]

After 24 City (2008) and I Wish I Knew (2010, still unreleased in the U.S.), one couldn’t help but wonder where else Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke could take his increasingly direct hybridization of fiction and documentary. Well, now we have the answer in his new film, A Touch of Sin: He has gone back to narrative filmmaking with a brutal vengeance.

By brutal, I mean physically so. The China that Jia essays in A Touch of Sin is marked by bloody violence perpetrated by working-class ordinary Joes amidst a society dominated by abuses of power and general indifference to human life. He illustrates this with four vignettes: Miner Dahai (Jiang Wu) is eventually pushed to wield a shotgun and revolt against his leaders’ corruption; stoic migrant worker Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang) discovers the power of firearms as a weapon to get what he wants; sauna receptionist Xiao Yu (Zhao Tao, Jia’s wife) goes on a knife-wielding rampage after a rich client assaults her; and much younger Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan, whose acting debut this is) escapes from trouble at a factory job to a high-end escort service and finds satisfaction in neither.

Jia details this cold environment with his usual acute eye for landscapes and preference toward omniscient long takes. Beyond the four-part narrative structure, however, the harsh violence—he doesn't hold anything back when it comes to onscreen bloodshed—and gestures toward action-genre tropes are new ingredients for him. You won’t be quite prepared for the moment, for instance, where a lengthy handheld shot of a brutish male client slapping a woman on the head repeatedly is suddenly followed by a close-up of a knife and a shot of said knife thrust straight towards the camera in the manner of many a martial-arts flick. The last time Jia tackled anything like crime material in a film of his was back in 2003 with Unknown Pleasures, and that had nothing like the eruptive violence of A Touch of Sin; if anything, some of the film's invigorating thrill no doubt comes from seeing the maker of generally quiet and contemplative films like The World and Still Life unleash an id-blasting angry side that some may not have thought him capable of expressing.

Not that Jia has compromised his usual wide-ranging vision one bit. His critique of power and class inequalities in modern Chinese society is pretty obvious, but A Touch of Sin goes even deeper with its cynicism, empathizing with his working-class victims/killers but also fascinated in a social-scientist way with the limits of human empathy. (In this context, hearing a television broadcast in the film claiming that “animals are not the only advanced people on earth” comes off as highly ironic.) Religion isn't too far from Jia's mind as well, most notably in its final vignette, in which Xiao Hui falls for a female co-worker with strong Buddhist convictions. “I need to do a lot of good deeds to make it in the next life,” she says. Whether the acts of violent revenge in A Touch of Sin constitute the “good deeds” of which she speaks is something Jia leaves disquietingly open as the strains of live Chinese opera—one in which a woman regains her freedom after having been framed for murder—closes the picture.

Film of the Week: A Touch of Sin - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, October 2, 2013

Some might feel that Jia Zhang-ke’s new film has a whiff of the ersatz about it. There’s the title, for a start: alluringly spicy, echoing King Hu’s A Touch of Zen, it could hardly feel more like a sales agent’s marketing ploy (the original title Tian Zhuding simply means “Ill-Fated”). But then fakery is partly what the film is about. The opening credits run over a trompe l’oeil backdrop of jungle leaves, the meaning of which only becomes clear much later when we notice that it’s the wallpaper pattern in a sauna-cum-brothel. So: fakery and illusion, and the sense of a world in which everything is for sale.

A Touch of Sin is mischievous, narratively involving, and hugely entertaining—although some critics in Cannes this year felt that its broader strokes made it considerably inferior to the slow-burning Jia films that we’re used to, such as The World (04) and Still Life (06). But how did the director ever get away with making a film that so openly bemoans the condition of capitalist China as a hotbed of corruption and a seedbed for despair? Well, as Tony Rayns points out in his recent Film Comment piece on the director, Jia has long experience of adroitly working the system to his advantage.

But a Jia Zhang-ke film featuring a gun rampage, knife-wielding action, and CGI snakes? Why not? A Touch of Sin is Jia’s most commercial proposition to date, but that doesn’t mean it feels compromised or inauthentic. Violence apart, it fits in a familiar and fashionable international mold, the portmanteau narrative of linked fates. That may be a somewhat discredited subgenre since Iñarritu’s pious Babel and Clint Eastwood’s spiritually bogus Hereafter, but there’s still life in the format, which after all has been in practice at least since La Ronde.

Jia’s four geographically diverse stories are all based on real-life incidents. The first is set in a coal mining community in northern China’s Shanxi province; an angry loner tries to denounce local corruption, which has destroyed the community while leaving one entrepreneur monstrously rich and powerful. When orthodox methods fail him, the would-be whistleblower instead picks up his gun. In the second story, set around Chongqing, a homicidal drifter returns home between bouts of killing. The third chapter is about a long-suffering woman finally pushed into violence by a nasty confrontation at the sauna where she works as a receptionist. And the fourth follows a young man who leaves his factory job to work as a greeter at an upmarket brothel in Dongguan. A brief, bitter coda—returning to the small-town setting of episode one—closes the circle.

Structurally, the film feels a little undershaped, and its sections might have been ordered more effectively; the first and third come on like gangbusters, while the fourth seems over-long and a little sluggish by comparison. But they’re woven together loosely (some might say arbitrarily), with elegance and lightness. The film begins with the drifter character Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang) on his motorbike on a mountain road, where he’s accosted by three thugs. He responds by shooting them dead. He then rides past the site of a traffic accident, where a man lies dead and a pile of apples spills out on the road. A man in a greatcoat, Hu Dahai (Jiang Wu), picks up an apple and bites into it—before a sudden explosion in the background. There are references later to the explosion and to Zhou’s killings, and similar echoes run throughout the film: blood spills uncontainably on surfaces, like the apples, and there’s a similar episode of heavies accosting travelers only to get their violent comeuppance. Jia also threads in a series of animal leitmotifs—snakes, cattle, a monkey, a horrifically beaten horse—that, however they relate to the iconography of the Chinese zodiac, generally suggest a world in which humans are treated like beasts.

The first episode is the most contained, and the most politically direct. Hu Dahai is furious that a local official has sold the state-owned mine to an entrepreneur, bilking the population out of promised dividends. Jiao Shengli, the now obscenely rich tycoon, has his own private jet, and his hirelings bribe locals (a sack of flour each!) to come to the airfield and greet him and his wife like homecoming deities. It’s at the airfield that Dahai, denied the chance to denounce Jiao through official channels, confronts him openly—only to be beaten up by the man’s minions, who then toss him a sweetening wad of money in hospital. That’s when Dahai picks up his rifle—wrapped in a cloth emblazoned with a roaring tiger—and mounts a bloodbath à la Travis Bickle.

If we understand Dahai perfectly well, Zhou San’s motivation is more enigmatic, although it’s suggested that community breakdown has resulted in the release of dangerous, drifting “free radicals” like this taciturn gun-lover. When Zhou moves on, he briefly rides the same bus as a middle-aged man who meets up at a café with his mistress Zheng Xiaoyu (played by the director’s wife and muse Zhao Tao). The couple’s affair has reached its make-or-break point, but she ends up staying behind while he takes a train elsewhere and goes back to her work as receptionist in the Nightcomer Sauna. After a traumatic encounter with her lover’s wife, she’s accosted by some bumptious clients demanding sex, which isn’t in her job description. In a nightmarish protracted scene, one of the men slaps her repeatedly with a bundle of banknotes, declaring over and over: “I have money! I have money!” Xiaoyu finally erupts, whipping out a knife and slashing the punters to death. She does this in a way, holding the dagger with knife-fighter’s poise, that suddenly turns her into the avenging heroine of a wuxia film, with camera moves (by Jia’s regular DP Yu Likwai) and switchblade editing to match. When she walks off blood-soaked into the night, a CGI snake slithers across her path, to delirious effect.

For some viewers, this sequence and Hu Dahai’s gun rampage strike distinctly false notes, as if Jia had lost his dramatic compass, or were perhaps yielding to influence from Japanese co-financiers Office Kitano. In fact, it makes perfect dramatic sense that these sequences should be so stylized. The sense of crisis, of traumatic panic, in these characters’ lives is such that they briefly perceive the world as if they were figures in a nightmarish action movie: they become avengers in a generic movie way, living out their acts as a sort of hyper-intensified cinematic experience,

After all, cinematic fakery is what many people in this film’s new China seem to want. Businessman Jiao and his wife are deeply invested in their PR image as glamorous movie-star types, while the “Golden Age” brothel where errant factory hand Xiaohui works—and falls for wistful hooker Lianrong—is a lurid dream factory. A sort of miniature of the simulacra-filled theme park in Jia’s The World, and just as hermetic in its enclosure, the “Golden Age” specializes in Sino-kitsch fantasy numbers for wealthy johns, like a parade of girls in Red Guard costumes.

All four stories end desperately, although the coda arguably gives one main player a shot at a better future. Jia may paint a grim picture of a corrupt, soul-crushing society, but his satirical mischief makes for a redeeming thrust. A Touch of Sin no more offers a prescription for a better China—and why should it?—than Taxi Driver could be said to set out a workable proposal for urban renewal in mid-Seventies Manhattan. But it’s a bracing and unexpected offering from a director we thought we knew.

Cannes 2013 | A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke, China ... Robert Koehler from Cinema Scope

Jia Zhangke is not an artist who normally trucks in anger. In an era when film criticism and programming have been steadily shifting away from a focus on nationalist tendencies, led by filmmakers who’ve become globalized along with the rest of us, Jia has maintained a steady bead on his native Mainland China (which was why the Thailand segment in his 2006 documentary Dong came as a kind of shock). Throughout his astonishing growth into one of the greatest living directors, his attitude has remained one of reflection mixed with despair, immediately expressed in Xiao Wu (1997) and Platform (2000) as, first, an in-between doc/drama on social deprivation, alienation, and crime, and second, as epic autobiographical road movie. Never once with Jia—unlike perhaps some of his other Sixth Generation peers and colleagues—has the viewer had the sense that his aversion to expressions of all-out anger stemmed from fear of censorship. His sheer command of the medium and the methods he’s chosen, the overwhelming and undeniable sense of a freely orchestrated cinema erasing the perception of outside pressures (recalling such artists in censorious climates as Elem Klimov during Brezhnev’s Soviet Union and Sohrab Shaheed Saless during the Shah’s Iran), has never prompted the question: When is Jia going to tell us what he really thinks?

A less disciplined and nuanced filmmaker might have turned the tragic conclusion of The World (2004) into a bitter, vitriolic jeremiad, just as a less thoughtful observer of Jia’s generation might have twisted his lovely, sombre, and cool account of aimless youth in his native Shanxi Province, Unknown Pleasures (2002), into a violent attack on the establishment. Despair, when rendered by an artist like Jia, hits at a register that’s both precise and yet can’t be exactly measured or even described. The most extraordinary quality in Jia’s cinema is his liquidity, in which events dissolve from one thing into another, characters and figures enter and exit, places come and go, storylines emerge and extinguish, even as there’s no exact spot at which the viewer can mark the change. Useless (2007), a masterpiece of the in-between film, has this morphing, shifting, dissolving quality throughout, and so does his new film, A Touch of Sin, which can easily be read as the first time that Jia has delivered a full-throated yell of anger.

That reading is too simple, however, which I realized as I watched it multiple times over the course of days in Cannes—from groggy semi-wakefulness in the first, jet-lagged viewing to well-rested concentration in subsequent viewings. Nobody in Cannes anticipated that Jia would surpass Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives for explicit onscreen violence, but he did, and the film’s body count, as well as an opening sequence starring Jiang Wu as a bitter, well-armed mining factory official who’s had it with the corrupt crop of local elites in charge—plus the way he delivers in a way that would make Charles Bronson blush—leaves an opening impression of pure bile in the form of choreographed gun and knife play.

The cockeyed prelude is pure action-movie stuff: Jiang’s Dahai, complete with a duster straight from the House of Leone and calmly tossing a piece of produce while observing an accident, crosses paths on motorcycles with Wang Baoqiang’s Zhou San, who has calmly dispatched three bothersome punks with a few blasts of his rifle. It’s a set piece for things to come, but because we can’t ascribe motives or reasons for any of the action, it comes off as absurd, a kind of Chinese horse(power) opera, flirting with farce; as well, the film’s English title cheekily flashes back to the heyday of another popular genre in its punning invocation of King Hu’s 1971 wuxia  masterpiece A Touch of Zen. The motives emerge later, but Jia is sending out an early signal that his film is directed from and for a cathartic response, and as we observe his four characters across four segments—roughly traversing a geographic line across the Mainland from north to south and through the seasons—they operate out of gut instinct and momentary impulse. The contemplative young intellectual artists of Platform are long gone—or likely, by now in the new China, have sold out—and in their place are desperate people doing what they need to do to survive, whether it’s Zhou’s migrant worker finding his only power lies at the end of a gun in the film’s shortest segment, Dahai’s misplaced but emotionally understandable methods to right past wrongs, the lethal self-defense tactics of Xiao Yu (Jia’s perennial muse, Zhao Tao), or the equally lethal self-destructive impulses of young Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan, in a striking debut).

This foursome embodies the twin themes of A Touch of Sin: Wealth leads to animality, and mobility is an illusion. Part of what makes Platform a great road movie is the dawning realization that the process of the journeying develops and matures the art of Jia’s troupe of travelling players. There is no such possibility in A Touch of Sin: Dahai is able to get around the sprawling territory of the mining operation, moving freely on his motorcycle, and getting in the face of whatever high official he seeks to toss fresh insults and accusations at, but he’s mercilessly stuck in an industrial maelstrom, which Jia elegantly details with views of hulking steel structures that dwarf anyone near them. Dahai’s greatest release, and certainly his most heroic act, is to blow away a farmer who has been repeatedly beating his old cow: one beast of burden liberating another. In the following segment, Zhou is in transit on the Yangtze near Three Gorges Dam (recalling the riverbound characters of Jia’s 2006 Still Life), but is even more stuck than Dahai—misunderstood, utterly alienated, reminiscent of Antonioni’s blue-collar workers (as is Xiao, whose actions in the final segment directly quote from the suicide at the end of Antonioni’s Il grido [1957])—though endowed with a similar (and more skilled) proclivity for firearms. Zhou San’s and Xiao Yu’s experiences in A Touch of Sin mock the notion of travel enhancing the promise of better prospects: Xiao’s failure to secure her hopes for marriage leads to an anti-Pilgrim’s Progress, as she travels south, leading to a shitty brothel receptionist’s job and a parade of nasty customers who receive the sharp end of her chosen weapon.

Although Jia makes a great deal in interviews of how the four stories are drawn from reported cases in recent years across the nation—and international viewers will glean as much from Xiao Hui’s tale, following widely reported cases of worker suicides at factories in the southern region’s “free enterprise” zones—A Touch of Sin plays contrary to a torn-from-the-headlines dramatization. Its conception is full of highly theatrical and deliberately artificial conceits that do everything possible to draw one’s attention from a recognizable “reality.” Animals from the zodiac, most memorably a large snake that slithers past Xiao Yu on a road like a very bad-luck charm, make regular appearances; a theatrical ensemble intrudes on the proceedings like the troubadours in The Seventh Seal (1957), making a final statement in front of Xiao Yu and her fellow audience members on the nature of sin; the leafy-green wallpaper of the brothel is the same as the graphic backdrop to the film’s credits, one of numerous explicitly interconnected images that tie the four sections together into a continuous picture.

Some dislike Jia’s occasional forays into “unreality,” which he engaged in rather aggressively in The World and in the final “science-fiction” moments of Still Life, preferring instead his more direct confrontations with social reality in films as various as Xiao Wu, Useless, 24 City (2008) or I Wish I Knew (2010). But A Touch of Sin, rather than auguring a new, “angrier” Jia, suggests an adventurous new strategy of melding the Mainland China of the news—such as the wave of ultra-luxe hotels and resorts catering to (especially) wealthy men seen in the fourth episode—to a heightened theatricality veering toward satire. In one of those hotels, where Xiao Hui has landed a job, the female staff dons faux-military uniforms for a sexy march designed to attract the male clientele. As with the workers of The World, these women work at playing dress-up in elaborate fantasies for deep-pocketed customers, but now the tone has turned more sinister—and funnier. If Jia has a comedy in him, A Touch of Sin may be its precursor.

Heard It Through the Grapevine | Film Comment Tony Rayns, September/October 2013

Chinese whispers have it that Jia Zhang-ke, the foremost Chinese director of his generation, has an unexpected fan. At a diplomatic dinner some years ago Xi Jinping, the man who this year became China’s president, talked cinema with the American seated next to him. It’s widely rumored—indeed, reported in The Guardian—that Mr Xi’s small talk went something like this: “I’m not an admirer of the kind of films that Zhang Yimou makes. I much prefer Jia Zhang-ke’s films, like Still Life and I Wish I Knew.” Since the story undoubtedly contains a kernel or more of truth, it may help explain why the Film Bureau swallowed its pride and passed Jia’s Cannes prize-winner A Touch of Sin for release in China with only minor changes.

A Touch of Sin is not much like the script that Jia sent to the Film Bureau for pre-production approval. Across four stories inspired by recent real-life events, the film is a “state of the nation” report that poses several interesting questions. Such as, why do so many “small” incidents in China today explode into rage, violence, and even murder? Such incidents mostly go unreported in the official media, which remains state-controlled and subject to censorship at many levels. But news of them nowadays spreads rapidly through Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter and now the most trusted news source for many urban Chinese. Jia Zhang-ke is an avid user of Weibo, and his own blog posts have legions of followers.

One of the stories recycled into the film did reach the wider world, thanks to Reuters and Agence France-Presse. This was 2012’s sudden spate of suicides by young assembly-line workers in the foreign-owned factories of the “free enterprise zone” near the Hong Kong border. The reports all focused on issues like working hours and conditions and low wages, but Jia is more interested in the various emotional and psychological traps that lie in wait for the pretty, vacant kids who flock to those jobs from China’s vast rural hinterlands. The other three stories will be less familiar. The first riffs on an incident in Jia’s native Shanxi Province: a villager outraged by profiteering and corruption in his local community took a hunting rifle and shot dead various officials and entrepreneurs. The second details the stunted emotional life and professional modus operandi of a loner-killer who finds life boring except when he’s shooting a gun. The third centers on a young woman in an unresolved relationship with a married man; she has a lousy temp job on the reception desk of a sex-sauna in Yichang, and one day stabs an abusive customer who demands that she “massage” him. And the fourth shows the short, frustrated life of a kid from Hubei who jumps off the balcony of a factory dormitory building in the south after suffering one setback too many.

A Touch of Sin tells its stories sequentially, embedding a chapter title in each, but uses little narrative overlaps to link them and finally resolves itself into a circular structure—closing, as it began, in Shanxi Province with the rapacious expansion of the Shengli Corporation. In the first story, this outfit has bought a coal mine formerly owned and run by the state but has reneged on its promises to share profits with the local community; this is what provokes the protagonist Hu Dahai’s murderous rage. In the film’s coda Zheng Xiaoyu, the woman from the sauna story, arrives in Shanxi and applies for a job in a Shengli company soft-drink bottling plant; since its founder Jiao Shengli was shot in the head in his Audi in the first story, the company is now headed by his widow. (As many non-Chinese-speaking viewers may intuit, “Shengli” means “Victory.”) The neat circularity is not just a narrative device; it consolidates Jia’s observation that expanding conglomerates, working hand-in-pocket with local government, have effectively replaced the Communist Party as controllers of individual destinies. (The film’s Chinese title, Tian Zhuding, translates as “Ill-Fated.”)

Jia’s own relationship with the Communist Party has been through some changes. He started out as a committed independent in both word and deed. His first feature Xiao Wu (aka Pickpocket, 98) was made with friends from Hong Kong—one of whom, the cinematographer Yu Likwai, became a long-term collaborator. Following the example of China’s pioneering independents Wang Xiaoshuai and Zhang Yuan, he shot the film without permission and took it to festivals in the West behind the back of the authorities. At the same time he published a kind of manifesto for independent cinema, which soon became the most widely reprinted and influential essay on film culture in Chinese history. Two more independent features followed, both supported by “Beat” Takeshi’s Office Kitano in Tokyo: Platform (00) and Unknown Pleasures (02). Because they were made outside the system, these films could not be screened in cinemas in China. Instead, they achieved wide distribution as pirated DVDs; the proprietor of one long-gone pirate shop in Beijing told me a decade ago that he was shifting 50 copies of Xiao Wu every day. There’s even a joke about pirated copies of Jia’s films in Unknown Pleasures.

But Jia got tired of living in the margins. In 2004, he went through official channels to make his HD feature The World. Getting into bed with the Film Bureau meant accepting censorship, but Jia proved exceptionally skilled at circumventing it. Of course he never took the dissident route of directly challenging the Party’s right to rule; he’d be silenced or locked up if he did. Instead, he chose to show some of the ways individual lives can be blighted by the machinations of the state and left his audience—Chinese and foreign—to draw its own conclusions. That’s not to say that he doesn’t get away with the odd satirical jibe. Part of the fourth story in A Touch of Sin is set in an upscale Dongguan nightclub/ brothel called Golden Age in which the rooms are art-directed to fulfill the customers’ fantasies. The establishment’s pièce de resistance is a mock-up of the kind of railway carriage reserved for high-level Party cadres. The acerbic customer seen renting it (guest star Han Dong) is too cool to swallow the fantasy whole, but he does have a keen sense of what it’s like to think and behave as a “leader.” He could be channeling Taylor Mead as he upbraids the girl, dressed as a railway conductor, sent to service him: “You don’t know where we’re going? Young people today have no sense of direction…”

The most direct attack on Party morality comes right at the start of the film, in the “Wujinshan (Black Gold Mountain)” chapter. An introductory shot (of a truck delivering a huge, kitschy Madonna-and-child picture) establishes that this small town still has a prominent statue of Mao Zedong on main street, but no one expresses nostalgia for the days of hard-line ideological communism. Ex-miner Hu Dahai (Jiang Wu, the younger brother of actor-director Jiang Wen) wipes out Wujinshan’s ostentatiously wealthy elite and assorted cronies because the pragmatic ways of the “new” China have allowed them to get rich and arrogant by ignoring the terms of the contracts they signed when the former state industries were privatized. He does all the right things (challenges them face-to-face, tries to send a detailed complaint to central government in Beijing) before he snaps and takes justice into his own hands. Critics in Cannes likened his “honor killings” to something from a Sergio Leone film, but Jia shows explicitly that Hu is inspired by the outlaw heroes of the classical novel/opera The Water Margin; Hu even drapes a tiger-pattern cloth, evoking the legendary tiger-killer Wu Song, over his hunting rifle.

Jia has made his own careful adjustments to the new China—and has done so much more elegantly than the likes of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, who look increasingly desperate in their search for ways to function in a state-capitalist environment and a privatized film industry. Jia formed his independent production company X-Stream in 2004 to make The World, and has cannily kept it afloat by maintaining his old alliances (Office Kitano, latterly MK2 in Paris), by forging new ones (notably with Shanghai Film Corporation, descended from the old Shanghai Film Studio), and by accepting sponsored commissions—on condition that they allow him creative freedom and final cut. His output in the past decade has been spectacularly varied: three fiction features (one with a strong documentary element), three documentary features and a couple of excellent shorts. He has also produced features for other directors: Walking on the Wild Side (06) and Mr. Tree (11) by his former assistant Han Jie, and two by first-time woman directors, Song Fang’s Memories Look at Me (12) and Quan Ling’s Forgetting to Know You (13). And he’s masterminded a series of online shorts sponsored by Johnnie Walker whisky, since anthologized as the feature Yulu (11). Every independent filmmaker in the world has cash-flow problems, but Jia seems to have found viable ways to produce high-caliber work on his own terms in a country caught between dirigiste controls and substantially lawless capitalism.

Before he wins any Entrepreneur of the Year awards, though, Jia is in line for plenty more critical praise. The early films were rooted in a kind of stylized realism (his “teachers” were Robert Bresson and Hou Hsiao-hsien), but since The World, Jia’s film language has evolved into something wondrous and sublime. He’s not interested in any line between fiction and documentary, but spikes both with moments of surreal fantasy: the absurd state monument that takes off like a rocket in Still Life (06), or the sudden appearance of a tightrope walker at the end of that film. At the same time, his style has become more Ophülsian: cuts and camera movements are often precisely synchronized with music and dialogue to create a stream of small cinematic epiphanies.

This reminds us that Jia has always wanted to make a musical; he’s come closest in Platform, but many of the characters in other films are defined by their singing or refusing to sing. It also reminds us that Jia is the most cinéphile of all Chinese directors. From its English title onwards, A Touch of Sin is laced with homages to King Hu and other classical wuxia directors. I Wish I Knew (10), his epic portrait of émigrés from Shanghai, has an unashamed bias towards the film industry’s political casualties and contains heartfelt tributes to directors Fei Mu and Xie Jin. In its uncensored version, it also contains a transfixing account of the actress Shangguan Yunzhu’s death during the Cultural Revolution in the Sixties, told by her son.

Like many Chinese, Jia is fascinated by the political mistakes of the past, and by the Party’s chronic reluctance to admit them or apologize. He shares Hou Hsiao-hsien’s impulse to cut through partisan propaganda and look at China’s modern history afresh. But he is even more fascinated by the problems and contradictions of the present, and A Touch of Sin is his most dynamic attempt yet to pinpoint the country’s “sins”—especially the rise in murders and acts of violence. The courtesy and respect that once governed social relationships in China were among the many things destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, but the surge in violence is new. Jia doesn’t presume to explain it, but he finds its roots in the damaged psychological gestalt of too many of his compatriots.

The protagonist of the film’s second story (chapter-titled “Shapingba” after the village on the outskirts of Chongqing where most of it is set) is the most damaged of the lot. Zhou San (played by Wang Baoqiang) travels around the country, killing and stealing money, some of which he sends back to the village to support his wife and son. He’s in Shanxi in the film’s prologue, gunning down three muggers who unwisely try to ambush his motorcycle on a country road. He travels back to Shapingba for the New Year festival—he brushes past Sanming, the protagonist of Still Life, on the Yangtze ferry—and arrives in time for his senile mother’s 70th birthday celebration. (His elder brother’s scrupulous accounting for the money left over from the birthday party contrasts with the financial chicanery exposed in Wujinshan in the previous story.) The chapter centers on the gap between Zhou’s acknowledged failure as a husband and father and his professional efficiency as a killer. In bed, he urges his usually abandoned wife to take a lover or petition for divorce; he’s unapologetic that his own ambition is to cross the faraway border into Burma, where he can buy a bigger and better gun. The family history suggests that Zhou is no kind of psychopath, so what has turned him into a conscienceless killer? He has a one-word answer: boredom.

The central characters of the other stories all have their personal problems. Hu Dahai has diabetes, and has clearly never recovered from the loss of his classmate girlfriend. In the third story, “Nightcomer Sauna,” Zheng Xiaoyu (played by Jia’s wife, Zhao Tao) is the child of separated parents and is pressuring her own lover to leave his wife. And Xiaohui, the kid from Hubei in the final story, “Oasis of Prosperity,” played by impressive newcomer Luo Lanshan, misunderstands his friendships with both girls and boys while fending off his mother back home, who keeps nagging him to send money. In this scheme of things, Hu Dahai’s “honor killings” look more like a personal vendetta than a principled political stand, and the film never implies that political change would remedy the inflicting or suffering of personal abuse. Still, there are underlying questions. For example, what makes one meathead (played by Wang Hongwei, the star of Xiao Wu) think he can buy Xiaoyu’s services in the sauna, despite being told, politely, that she’s not one of the “masseuses”? Testosterone? Maybe, but we know that the wad of cash he’s carrying was gained by extorting tolls from truckers using the road to the site of a new Yichang airport. He perceived an injustice—wear and tear on the road through his village—and took illegal action to accrue some benefit to himself and his buddies. And what made him think of doing that?

Ultimately, the film is “political” in exactly the same way as the King Hu wuxia films that partly inspired it. It plays to the millions of Weibo users who heard things through the grapevine, many of whom will recall the incidents that inspired these stories. Of course, Jia proffers no solutions. He cunningly knits the stories together with recurrent motifs (such as characters who need advice to get where they’re going—the metaphor is transparent) and wraps things up with a scene in which Xiaoyu joins the audience for a performance of the classical opera Yu Tang Chun—an adaptation of which just happens to have been King Hu’s debut feature for Shaw Brothers in 1964. The opera tells the story of a young woman unjustly arraigned in court for a crime she didn’t commit—an ironic inversion of the stories told in the film. What’s missing from this picture—on stage and screen—is the rule of law.

Interview: Jia Zhang-ke - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold interview, October 2, 2013

Jia Zhang-ke’s A Touch of Sin is the subject of a feature by Tony Rayns in our September/October issue. In a brief interview at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, the director, writer, and producer discussed his latest work.

Let’s begin with the end. Could you talk about the opera performance that concludes the film—which has the extraordinary line, roughly: “Do you understand your sin”?

The final opera in the film, Yu Tang Chun, is a well-known story in China. It’s about a woman who is unfairly treated and incarcerated, and over the course of the story her lover tries to rescue her. I had seen this story when I was a child, and one of the most affecting scenes in this opera is when the woman is being tried in court. The judge asks her whether she has committed this crime and why she is guilty. When I was writing the script, towards the end of the process I began to think about the opera repeatedly and about the notion of what a crime really is. And perhaps in China, not discussing, or choosing not to discuss, these crimes, can also be a crime within itself.

So you’re just as unhappy about the crimes of the violence as you are about the people not talking about it.

Perhaps, on some level yes, because you’re allowing for it to permeate. Perhaps there’s a deeper rooted issue within the history of Chinese art and cinema as well that there’s a desire to stay away from really dark and violent matters and not confront them directly.

There’s a way in which the violence in A Touch of Sin can feel real and—maybe because of how accustomed a moviegoer is to violence in films—unreal at times.

I think that within the wuxia form, the characters are all imbued with a mysticism. They’re warriors that can fly through bamboo forests and they have special powers. In A Touch of Sin the characters are ordinary people. They don’t necessarily have kung fu skills. When they encounter these acts of violence and begin using their own violence to counteract what was inflicted upon them, they go through a transformation and become like the mystical warriors of the wuxia films. So I’ve treated every instance of violence in the film as though it were a mystical event. Because they’re so surreal and out of the ordinary. Perhaps most of us have never conceived a degree of violence in our quotidian lives. And oftentimes we just learn about the final result of these violent acts through news, but we can’t imagine the process that leads to this result, so it’s all imaginary.

Their violence, though there are specific circumstances, feels like a response to a great amount of violence that’s happening in the country, in small and large ways. There’s a sense in which business, for example, is an inherently aggressive endeavor.

This is why I’ve portrayed the incident of the Wenzhou high-speed bullet train incident in the film. Because I see it as an accumulation of hidden social violence in Chinese contemporary society. It starts from the corruption of the officials and then escalates and finally the two bullet trains collide into each other and create this social catastrophe. And perhaps it doesn’t relate directly to an individual’s destiny, but there is a collective violence that is being played out.

One of my favorite films of yours, which is ambitious in a way distinctive from A Touch of Sin, is Still Life, and I was struck by the difference in style here.

Yes, within Still Life there were two main characteristics that made up the narrative. One was the characters that inhabited the film, and the second was the surrounding area of the Three Gorges Dam. Within that structure I had more people migrating, depictions of people migrating to the location and geography. And therefore there was a need to convey that movement and migration. In Touch of Sin, I was using the wuxia form in order to convey the narrative. Within that form spaces are very important, but within those spaces it’s more important to observe and explore the interaction between the characters. Perhaps the overall feeling of the film would be equivalent to that of a sketch: more immediate and direct, and with less background, which corresponds to the speed of the wuxia film.

What sort of reaction to A Touch of Sin has there been from moviegoers? [The film was scheduled to be released in mainland China in November.]

Mostly, I’m focusing on the reaction of overseas Chinese people, because so far the film has premiered in Cannes, Melbourne, Russia, and because they speak the same language I’ve been able to become more aware of their reaction to the film. And because these four stories are culled from origins from news stories that really happened in China, that were widely discussed and well known among all Chinese people, including those overseas, it was very shocking for people to see the stories enacted in a film as opposed to being discussed through public forum or social media or in the news. Perhaps the question that these audiences had the most was: what happens now? What are some of the answers we might have? Because it’s so disconcerting. Perhaps there was then a certain dissatisfaction that the film hasn’t offered a clean solution to these pertinent issues that are in China right now.

In the beginning I had no idea either how to respond to these questions, and of course I had no answers either. Then I thought about it, and then I answered, I believe in order to understand where we’re going we have to really observe and reflect upon where we are now. Perhaps there needs to be enough exposition but also artistic dialogue and discussion about the entire country and about our individual lives in order to truly observe where we are now and the transition that we’re all going through.

And within these four stories of violence, when I went into the inner worlds of these characters who had experienced these acts of violence, aside from moral issues I believe that there was a sudden mantra that was being formed. Perhaps because the verbal expression of these violent events has been discouraged and stifled among one another, the violent acts become a way of expressing the language of this violence. For instance, almost explicitly within the first story, the character Dahai wants to file a complaint, and everyone tries to stop him from filing this complaint. And so of course the act of violence becomes a direct response to the inability to speak. Or the character who commits suicide from the top of the building—for me, that’s his personal expression in response to the violence.

Violence on himself.

Yes.

Could you talk about working with your actors? There are shootings, a stabbing, a suicide—how did you prepare them for this material?

Before filming it was very important to me to take each of the actors to the specific locations where the news events happened. All of the main actors in my film live in major cities. For instance, the first male actor in the first story: I took him to the mine in Shanxi province, and he saw what the mine workers ate, drank, where they slept. The dorms would have at least 10 people living in each room. And so before we started filming we would form two main points of discussion: What was it that they felt? And when did they decide upon committing this act of violence? Analogous to a boiling pot of water, what is the boiling point?

And actors will oftentimes have a different understanding of the events and the characters than I do, so they form their own relationships to the roles. For instance in the scene that leads up to Zhao Tao unsheathing the knife and committing that act of violence, the shot of the man stopping her, we had wuxia choreography consult for that scene so she wasn’t really being slapped in the beginning. He couldn’t find it within himself to act that out, so he decided to really hit, and then he told me not to say stop, and so as he kept really hitting the actress, he began to find that strength or that place. So perhaps they gave up a lot in order to perform these roles. The actors will color their roles in their own way as well. For instance the humor in Dahai’s character is all due to the actor.

What film will you work on next?

My next film project is a wuxia film set over a hundred years ago in the Qin dynasty. The appeal of this era for me as a director is that it’s the beginning of China’s modernity.

Unhinged in China - The New York Review of Books Ian Johnson, October 25, 2013

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones]

Cannes 2013. Consistency In a Filmmaker's World: Jia Zhangke's "A Marie-Pierre Duhamel from Mubi, May 17, 2013

Now Playing: A Touch of Sin | White City Cinema Michael Glover Smith

Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]

Stars Of The Lid - Taphead

Slant Magazine [Chris Cabin]

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

A Touch Of Sin / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

Modern China has Jia Zhangke seeing red in blistering A ... Steve Erickson from The Nashville Scene

Jessica Kiang at Cannes from The Playlist

Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from indieWIRE Press Play

First look: A Chinese art-house director goes for blood - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, May 18, 2013

Film.com [Calum Marsh]

Filmstalker Richard Brunton

Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]

Paste Magazine [Tim Grierson]

CriterionCast | Joshua Reviews Jia Zhangke's A Touch Of Sin ... Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast

Can China's Leading Indie Film Director Cross Over in America ... Jonathan Landreth from ChinaFile, September 27, 2013

Film-Forward.com [Christopher Bourne]

A Touch Of Sin | Reviews | Screen Fionnuala Halligan at Cannes from Screendaily

Jia Zhang-Ke's A Touch of Sin – Offscreen Peter Rist

[NYFF Review] A Touch of Sin - The Film Stage Forrest Cardamenis

Sound On Sight Christopher Clemente

A Touch of Sin | Film Review | Tiny Mix Tapes Abby Garnett

DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Jake Cole]

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Gordon Sullivan]

A Touch of Sin Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Kevin Yeoman

In Review Online [Matthew Lucas]

The House Next Door [Jordan Cronk] also seen here: Cannes Film Festival 2013: A Touch of Sin Review

Cannes 2013. Ambush from Four Directions: Jia Zhangke's "A Touch of Sin" Daniel Kasman at Cannes from Mubi

Wesley Morris at Cannes from Grantland

David Jenkins at Cannes from Little White Lies

Cinema de Merde [Scott Telek]

Jia Zhang-Ke's A TOUCH OF SIN [Pragyan Thapa]

Dork Shelf [Andrew Parker]

Jia Zhang-ke's "A Touch of Sin" Divides Critics, But Continues Hyper ... Anthony Kaufman at Cannes from indieWIRE’s Reel Politik, May 16, 2013

CANNES Film Review: Jia Zhangke's “Touch of Sin ... - Artinfo Nailya Golman from Art info, May 13, 2013

Cannes 2013, Day Two: Iranian director Asghar Farhadi chases A Separation with another stunning drama Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club

Film Review: A Touch Of Sin - Film Journal International Chris Barsanti

CompuServe [Harvey Karten]

Cannes Check 2013: Jia Zhangkes A Touch of Sin - HitFix Guy Lodge

In Review Online [Carson Lund]

SBS Film [Shane Danielsen]

Exclaim! [Scott A. Gray]

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

A Touch of Sin : The New Yorker Richard Brody (capsule review)

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

Screen Comment [Ali Naderzad]

Review: A Touch Of Sin | Newcity Film Ray Pride

Movie Mezzanine [Tom Clift]

Political Film Review Michael Haas

Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner] a review of the Cannes winners

Daily | Cannes 2013 | Jia Zhangke's A TOUCH OF SIN | Keyframe ... David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 17, 2013

Jia Zhangke: why my films are received differently in China and abroad Edmund Lee interviews the director from South China Morning Post, October 25, 2015

Jia Zhang-ke talks A Touch Of Sin, violence, and despair ... Sam Adams interview from the Dissolve, October 11, 2013

MUBI [Darren Hughes] interview with the director from Mubi, September 30, 2013

China must end silence on injustice, warns film director Jia Zhangke ... Tania Branigan interviews the director from The Guardian, June 24, 2013

INTERVIEW: Cannes Best Screenplay Winner Jia Zhangke: ‘I Want to Bring About Change in China’ Mark Brzeski interview from The Hollywood Reporter, May 28, 2013

A Touch of Sin: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney, May 16, 2013

Chinese Director Jia Zhangke's 'A Touch of Sin' Leaks to ... Chinese Director Jia Zhangke's 'A Touch of Sin' Leaks to Piracy Sites, by Mark Brzeski from The Hollywood Reporter, March 4, 2014

Jia Zhangke Confident Controversial 'Touch Of Sin' Will G Jia Zhangke Confident Controversial 'Touch Of Sin' Will Get China Release, by Clifford Coonan from The Hollywood Reporter, December 9, 2013

Cannes: China Buzzing Over Jia Zhangke's 'A Touch of Sin' - The ... Clarence Tsui at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 15, 2013

'A Touch of Sin' Review: Jia Zhangke Makes an Uneven Misfire ... Justin Chang at Cannes from Variety, also seen here: Justin Chang

Cannes 2013: A Touch of Sin, The Past, Stranger by the Lake Keith Uhlich from Time Out New York, also seen here: Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]

Guy Lodge at Cannes from Time Out London, May 17, 2013

Cannes film festival 2013: A Touch of Sin - first look review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes, also seen here: The Guardian [Peter Bradshaw]

Robbie Collin at Cannes from The Telegraph

JapanCinema.net

Jia Zhangke's 'A Touch of Sin' Premieres in Cannes - China Digital ... May 17, 2013

Film Business Asia [Derek Elley] May 18, 2013

'A Touch of Sin' movie review - The Washington Post John DeFore

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Milan Paurich]

'A Touch of Sin' review: A vision of violence in modern China ... Walter Addiego from The SF Gate

Review: 'A Touch of Sin' shows how greed undermines ... Kenneth Turan at Cannes from The Los Angeles Times

A Touch of Sin - Roger Ebert Marsha McCreadie

Artifice and Real Life: Cannes Report, May 16, 2013 ... - Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres at Cannes from the Ebert blog

'A Touch of Sin,' Four Tales From China by Jia Zhang-ke ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, October 3, 2013

Singing a Happier Tune in Cannes - The New York Times Manohla Dargis at Cannes, May 19, 2013

Manohla Dargis's Top Films of 2013 - NYTimes.com December 11, 2013

DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART (Shan he gu ren) A 96

China France Japan (131 mi) 2015

Life does repeat itself. That’s why it feels… familiar. —Dollar (Dong Zijian)

The ambitious nature of this filmmaker just continues to keep growing, where he already ranks as one of the top filmmakers in the world today, but he also carries the mantle of being a Chinese spokesperson during a rapidly developing period of change in China, which is precisely what this film is about. While the Communist Party continues to hold the reigns of political power in China since driving Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang Party off the mainland to Taiwan in 1949, the repressive effects of single party rule have dominated the history of both nations since World War II. While a pro-democracy movement effectively ended in a massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, snuffing out any thoughts of freedom, it also coincided with an admission that all efforts to save socialism had failed, requiring a new approach, symbolized by Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, where China has been trending to a capitalist market economy since the end of the 90’s, even joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. While the Party has distanced itself from radical ideology, there are fewer charismatic leaders, but the government has not come to terms with or prepared itself for a new political reality. The past 30 years have brought enormous changes to China, shifting from an agriculture driven to an industrialized society, causing widespread soil contamination, along with the toxic effects of electronic waste, water and air pollution. Rapid economic advancement with unchanged politics offers the perception of a State-led market economy while continuing to maintain authoritarian rule, leaving one to wonder whether this model is sustainable. While China has become a highly successful international trading partner, where a thoroughly modernized showcase city like Shanghai is the largest free-trade zone in mainland China, the nation as a whole still lacks free market ideas, yet China is on the verge of becoming or has already surpassed the United States as the world’s biggest economy. With this comes additional responsibilities, where a prominent international artist like Jia Zhang-ke becomes a visionary spokesperson not just for China, but for the world. While his previous film 2013 Top Ten List #3 A Touch of Sin (Tian zhu ding) offered scathing criticism, angrily charting the effects of dehumanization associated with economic prosperity, this is a more intimate and sympathetic film, showing the haunting effects of lost culture and heritage on a single family, sacrificed in the name of economic success, for what is perceived as a greater good. However, like something seen in Sissako’s Timbuktu (2014) or Rithy Panh’s 2013 Top Ten List #1 The Missing Picture (L'image manquante) , the connection to not only one’s history and culture, but even one’s family can be wiped out in a single generation (like the current flood of refugees escaping into Europe at the moment), leaving in its wake a lost generation of rootless and exiled people, estranged from their own identity.

There was a certain amount of apprehension reported when a Chinese Film Bureau censorship logo was tagged onto the opening at the Cannes premiere, but the emotional depth exhibited throughout is breathtaking, given a novelesque narrative structure that thrives on well written and well defined characters. Much like Hou Hsiao-hsien’s THREE TIMES (2005), the film is divided into three historical sections, 1999, 2014, and 2025, which has a way of examining the downside of economic prosperity, revealing how time wreaks havoc on a single family. The centerpiece of the film is the remarkable performance by actress Zhao Tao, arguably the greatest in her entire career, as she literally dominates this film from the opening shot. Brimming with the nationalistic optimism and confidence of the new millennium in 1999, much like the opening scenes in the 80’s from Jia’s PLATFORM (2000), a theatrical dance troupe performs an exhilarating anthem-like Chinese dance routine to the buoyant sounds of “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys, Pet Shop Boys - Go West [HD] - YouTube (4:53), where front and center is Zhao Tao as a youthful Tao, a dance instructor in the small town of Fenyang (the filmmaker’s hometown), looking to the future exhibiting an infectious happiness. While the color red has not been captured with this degree of rapturous beauty since the May Day parade in Bertolucci’s 1900 (1977), it’s also shot in a boxed, TV sized 4:3 ratio, cramming plenty of colorful spectacle into a smaller space, expanding ever wider with each different historical period. The lush colors on display, however, captured by cinematographer Nelson Yu Lik-wai, are simply amazing, literally leaping off the screen. Surrounded by two suitors constantly at her side, coal miner Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong), a longtime childhood friend and business entrepreneur Zhang Jinsheng (Zhang Yi), a burgeoning capitalist, it grows into a standoff between the egos of the two men, who eventually come to despise one another, leaving Tao crushed with disappointment. But it’s fun while it lasts, evidenced by a few carefree moments, but also a scene that targets the mindset of each character, where Tao is impressed by the romantic melody of an old 1990 Hong Kong pop ballad a customer plays in her corner store, 珍重 Take Care by Sally Yeh (beautifully contrasted with the Pet Shop Boys), in between sharing noodles with Liangzi, while just to impress her, Zhang buys the disc off the customer once they’ve left the store, returning it to Tao as a token of his affection. The problem with Zhang is he’s always much more interested in promoting himself, continually using money to impress others, or in this case buy happiness, as Tao eventually picks Zhang. Liangzi leaves town on the spot, vowing never to return.

Tao’s shortsightedness comes back to haunt her, though she made what felt like the best choice, an indication of how one decision can change the rest of your life, becoming an allegory about China and its future, as by the next segment the happy couple (who we never see together) is already divorced, where she remains in Fenyang, while Zhang is living with another woman in the opulence of Shanghai, having gained custody of their only son, who he’s ironically named “Dollar.” This mid-section may be the most poignant, especially the toll it takes on Tao, as she believes in her heart that her son will be better off with Zhang simply because he’ll have more opportunities, where the film borders on melodrama, but remains too well written, where she is a woman in constant search of herself, becoming an epic love story that is defined by the absence of love. The centerpiece of this section is the death of Tao’s aging father, which has a huge impact in her life. Sending for her son, who’s only about seven, he doesn’t really even recognize her, and is confused what to call her, but dutifully carries out his instructions, which his other Mom provides during their daily skype sessions, also sending photos of a home they are planning to move to in Australia. Infuriated by this unwanted intervention, Tao tries to share a few moments with her son, including a traumatizing but supremely colorful funeral service, where religious rituals are a source of cultural heritage, yet when displayed so reverently through cinema, they become time capsules of a specific era. Afterwards, taking the slow train (Dollar is used to the fast train) so they’ll have more time together, Tao tries to instill a sense of motherly devotion, handing him the keys to their home, but this kid has everything given to him, who seemingly lacks for nothing, where this entire trip is barely a blip on the radar. Simultaneous to these events, Liangzi has wandered around like a nomad, still working in the mines, where he eventually marries and has a son, but his years in the mines have damaged his lungs, where death appears imminent without expensive medical treatment. Like a returning ghost, they arrive at his old doorstep, still locked and left as it was from the day he left. Unable to reach out for help himself, it’s his wife that turns to Tao for money, which she willingly provides, surprised to see her old friend. The prominent theme of death in this section announces the end of the old, while the new generation faces an uncertain future. Amusingly, as if to suggest not everything changes, there are recurring shots of a small child carrying a traditional spear (Guangdong Broadsword), seen again having aged in each subsequent section carrying that same spear. This is reminiscent of a similar image in Kieslowski’s The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988-89) where a silent character is seen carrying a kayak on his back and continually reappears in most segments, always remaining wordless, where he bears witness to how people are living their lives, like a reflection of moral conscience.

The final segment is easily the most strange, an unexpected leap into the future, becoming an awkward experience for many viewers, especially the Chinese, as the language spoken is mostly English. A similar experience occurred with Edward Yang’s MAHJONG (1996), which also mixes global languages of English, French, and Chinese, where the English-speaking and noticeably poor acting from the English language actors was significantly off-putting, as it initially feels here, where Dollar (Dong Zijian) is a young university student in Australia who speaks exclusively English, who has to take Chinese classes to learn about his own heritage. Legendary Taiwanese actress Sylvia Chang, last seen five years ago in Buddha Mountain (Guan yin shan) (2011), appears as the Chinese college instructor named Mia, providing plenty of worldly character in the role. Dollar is trying to exert his own independence from his jaded father while Mia, an exile of Hong Kong by way of Toronto, is navigating her way through a particularly nasty divorce. What stands out in this section is Dollar has completely forgotten how to speak Mandarin Chinese, where he requires the translation services of Mia to have a conversation with his own father. Making matters worse, he’s lost all connections with his mother, where the luxury of his lifestyle has created a mindset that allows him to live only in the present, with no need to revisit the past, even for family occasions. Lost in all this futuristic speculation is the presence of Tao, who is the backbone of this film. Her absence explains the awkwardness of the future, which accentuates the feeling of displacement. Having no one else to turn to, Mia and Dollar are drawn to each other for emotional support, which presents its own problems, as he’s easily mistaken for her own son. Throughout it all, however, Tao’s looming presence in the Australia sequence remains of critical importance, showing the significance of distance not only as geography, but an emotional upheaval, becoming an internalized trauma that expresses itself in unfamiliar ways, where her absence in the final section is perhaps the strongest and most haunting aspect of the film, giving it the feel of a ghost story. Arguably the director’s most intimate and personalized film, equal parts hopeful and heartbreaking, with recurring musical refrains from Yoshihiro Hanno that return like the changing of the seasons, the music adds poetic resonance to the emotional weight of the film. The real triumph, however, is the fullness of Tao’s character, where it’s no accident that she gets the final shot, where her indomitable spirit continues to soar. Jia remains the most astute chronicler of changing times in Chinese society, where despite whatever critical qualms one has with his multitude of choices, he remains an artist at the top of his game, a superb master craftsman, resorting to almost literary measures to explore the ramifications of the past on the present, cautioning us not to be so quick to tear down the relics of the past in our zeal to build something new, but to recognize the inherent value of cultural heritage (the exact opposite of ISIL’s intentions in the Middle East, which is to completely wipe out the past), adding a somber note on the theme of historical forgetfulness, carefully revealing how economic and cultural forces continue to impact upon our lives, whether we realize it or not.

Setting Sun - Film Comment Amy Taubin, July/August 2015

If much of the festival felt like a slog, it began with a treat. One could have stayed home and seen George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, but nowhere would it have looked better or felt more kinetic than in the Théâtre Lumière. Shooting digitally is no bar to kineticism, the other singular pleasure of the movies. Much later in the festival, Jia Zhang-ke’s Mountains May Depart blew us away from the get-go with a chorus line of 20-year-olds doing the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West.” A glitch in the DCP at the press screening gave us the opportunity of seeing not once but twice Jia’s most exciting opening since the extended traveling shot of Zhao Tao running through backstage corridors in The World. An extremely ambitious albeit microcosmic depiction of China’s rapid transformation, the three-part film opens in 1999 with two young men courting the same young woman (Zhao, who would have gotten my vote for Best Actress). She chooses the rich guy over the poor miner, which turns out to be a bad decision because by 2014 (part two) her husband has divorced her and gained custody of their son. The miner is dying of lung disease so she would have been screwed either way. Indeed every character is screwed. The final section set in Australia 10 years in the future brings home all the ironies of the “Go West” opening.

Wonders to Behold - Film Comment Kent Jones, July/August 2015

There were several English-language films in Cannes this year made by filmmakers whose first language is not English. Nothing particularly noteworthy there, but in most cases the decision appears to have been market-driven. By contrast, the final, English-speaking section of Jia Zhang-ke’s Mountains May Depart is thematically grounded. Jia is the cinema’s great epic poet of drift—one is always aware of the movement of time in the span of a given narrative, the physical sensation of the ground shifting beneath our feet. The plot is simplicity itself. We begin in Fenyang, in 1999, on the cusp of the capitalist explosion in China. Zhao Tao, as poignant and winning as she is in all of Jia’s work, has two suitors—Zhang (Zhang Yi), a young entrepreneur, and Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong), a coal miner. Her choice of Zhang feels “natural” to her, maybe a little sad, and… of course she’ll marry him, what else would she do? Fifteen years later, they’re divorced, their son Dollar lives with Zhang and his new wife in Shanghai, and when the citified and internationalized boy comes to visit his estranged mother, they feel the distance: as her son has grown away from her, so has the world around her, and Zhang has grown richer while Liangzi has grown poorer and sicker with a respiratory ailment. To tick off the plot elements is, again, to make the film seem like something it isn’t, namely a soap opera. Jia’s film exists on two temporal planes: that of the characters and that of the world, the first of which always moves more slowly than the latter. This is, I believe, an extremely common sensation, and there is no other filmmaker alive who captures it so well. The force of Mountains May Depart is so great that the much-remarked “flaw” of the film’s final section, set in 2025 (as the teenaged Dollar, Dong Zijian should be speaking English flawlessly and with an Australian accent, but does neither), hardly matters at all.

Cannes 2015: My God, It's Full of Stars! - Cinema Scope Mark Peranson (excerpt)

Jia Zhangke actually attempted something daring in the much-maligned third, predominantly English-speaking section of the tripartite Mountains May Depart, fully embracing his position as a national Chinese artist and shooting off a warning flare to his countrymen and -women about what happens if (or when) they surrender to the Western desire for freedom. Sino-pudding it ain’t, but the reaction to the film spurred a rare coalition between the English-speaking press, who were generally horrified by the “bad acting,” and the Chinese posse sitting in the row next to me, who applauded at the onset when the forest-green Film Bureau censorship logo and fanfare appeared (twice, actually, as the film had to be restarted due to a subtitling error on the DCP), but fled en masse when it was clear the film would continue in a language they couldn’t understand. In China, it seems the censors are the celebrities.

All the while, this cadre of filmmakers also continued to deliver their perennial simplest of pleasures, which is ultimately what makes the trip across the Atlantic worthwhile. And it so happened that this year the most magical ones were musical, from the sight of Zhao Tao going west to the Pet Shop Boys in Mountains May Depart…

TIFF 2015 | Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke, China ... Mark Peranson from Cinema Scope

At the start of JZ’s new joint, following the forest-green Chinese Film Bureau censorship logo and toot-tooting fanfare comes the admonition to “Go West” from the Pet Shop Boys, in good old 1.33. I doubt the Boys ever though they’d be addressing the Chinese masses yearning to break free, together, of the yoke of communism and start raking in the dough. An ambitious illustration of how the forces of history operate on both the lumpen and the moneyed, part one of Mountains May Depart begins in the good old coal-mining town of Fenyang at the start of the millennium, where we find good old Zhao Tao as the tip of a love triangle, eventually opting for money (asshole capitalist Zhang) over love (poor coal miner Liangzi), and giving birth to a son, Zhang Dollar. Part two, set in 2014, shows how money can’t buy you love, as mother and Dollar have long separated, with Tao remaining at home. And part three shows just how much it’s going to suck for Chinese émigrés in an Apple Watch-free 2020 Australia, where Dollar is now Peter and hot for teacher, clearly a mother surrogate (an ex-Torontonian, played by Sylvia Chang!).

As always with Jia, the moments of personal grace (anything with Zhao Tao) and unique oddities (what was that plane crash?) are too numerous to list, though at Cannes, and I expect elsewhere, Jia was much maligned for his third-part foray into the English language—the key futuristic device he allows himself is a simultaneous translation machine to abet father-and-son communication. Indeed, a lot of the acting is abominable to Western eyes and ears, but far from Sino-pudding, Mountains May Depart is a daring attempt from a filmmaker who is fully embracing his position and duty as a national Chinese artist. (Jia is so important that they named the juried award at the Toronto film festival after his masterpiece…and he gets to sit on the jury!) He’s shooting off a warning flare to his intended audience of countrymen and -women about what happens if (or when) they surrender blindly to the Western desire for freedom. Make no mistake, that forest-green dragon logo is an inextricable part of the film.

Cannes film festival 2015 review • Senses of Cinema Daniel Fairfax, June 2015 (excerpt)

Across the Formosa Strait, Jia Zhang-ke retorted to HHH’s view of the Middle Kingdom with Shan he gu ren (Mountains May Depart), a vision of contemporary China that solidifies his status, in my view, as the Balzac of the Chinese industrial revolution. Engels said that he learnt more about French society from the novelist’s writings than he did from “all the historians, economists and statisticians of the period together”, and the same can be said about Jia’s cinematic œuvre in relation to the 21^st century’s new superpower. And although it seems not so long ago that Jia was seen as a precociously young talent in world cinema (stemming from his 1997 debut Xiao Wu, made when he was 27), it may now be more appropriate to consider him an elder statesmen on the festival circuit: this was certainly the impression I garnered from the tranquil wisdom emanating from his face during the emotional reception of his new film at its gala screening. Perennial muse Zhao Tao extends her range here by playing a namesake character across three time periods – 1999, 2014 and 2025 – as she breaks with her teen sweetheart Liang to embark on an ultimately unsatisfying relationship with the nouveau riche coalmine owner Jinsheng, and bears the latter a son (named Dollar) who will migrate with his father to Australia, leaving an emotionally broken Tao behind. The ternary chronology also allows Jia to more trenchantly probe the upheavals of China’s breakneck economic development, the most fascinating results of which come in the faintly surreal third section of the film, which tracks Dollar’s life in a futuristic Australia, and which for the most part was received with bemusement by Cannes journalists, who carped at the unnatural English spoken in these scenes. For once, however, the estranged, artificial cadences of the diction are justified by the film’s diegesis. Shot mostly in Perth, the concluding scenes of Mountains May Depart are in fact set in the imaginary metropolis “A-City”, which, almost entirely populated by Chinese migrants, is clearly intended to be a kind of Chinese colony within Australia. Jia was reportedly inspired by seeing the burgeoning Chinese diaspora during a jaunt down under for the Melbourne film festival in 2013, but here he pushes the idea further: an ascendant China in a globalised world will pursue its dominance not merely through financial investment, but also through planned settlements in otherwise sparsely inhabited realms, siphoning off its large population to further entrench its economic clout. Despite the geopolitical implications of its advent, A-City comes across as a benign, bland locale, rather like the Los Angeles of Spike Jonze’s Her (which was, ironically, filmed in Shanghai), with its materially comfortable, technology-engrossed citizens engulfed by an overpowering sense of anomie.

Mountains May Depart review: Jia Zhang-ke scales new heights with futurist drama Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Jia Zhang-ke’s Mountains May Depart is a mysterious and in its way staggeringly ambitious piece of work from a film-maker whose creativity is evolving before our eyes. It starts by resembling a classic studio picture from Hollywood, the sort of thing George Stevens or Douglas Sirk might have made, or perhaps something like Mu Fei’s Chinese classic Spring In A Small Town. Then it morphs into a futurist essay on China’s global diaspora and its dark destiny of emotional and cultural alienation. In this movie, the boundaries are getting pushed, visibly, between the opening and closing credits. The pure work-in-progress energy of all this is exhilarating, and if the resulting movie is flawed in its final act, then this is a flaw born of Jia’s heroic refusal to be content making the same sort of movie, and his insistence on trying to do something new with cinema and with storytelling.

His movie is split into three parts, taking place in 1999, in 2014 and in 2025. We begin with a bunch of people dancing to the Pet Shop Boys’ Go West, and as the new century and millennium dawns, the movie shows China more or less obsessed with doing that: going West, embracing capitalism while at the same retaining the monolithic state structures of the past, and beginning to worship consumer goods as status symbols: stereos, cars, and perhaps most importantly mobile phones — a technology which the film shows retaining its fetishistic power for the next quarter-century.

Jia’s longtime collaborator and wife Zhao Tao gives a superb performance as Tao, a young woman who is dating a coal-miner Liang (Liang Jingdong). But Tao is also being courted by the impossibly conceited Jingsheng (Zhang Yi), one of China’s new breed of pushy entrepreneurs who actually buys the coalmine, forces Liang out of the picture, and marries Tao. They later have a child that Jingsheng in a grotesquely celebratory mood insists on naming “Dollar”, so great is his belief in the child symbolising a prosperous quasi-Western future. Meanwhile, the devastated Liang moves away but later in 2014, they are all to meet again and later in 2025, when Dollar is a twentysomething college dropout in Australia, his life appears to have absorbed a genetic destiny of alienation and pain.

Zhao Tao begins the movie as a girlish, ingenuous soul: always bouncing happily around, treating both her suitors with a kind of frank, sisterly affection while she internally ponders the question of love and marriage. When this becomes a more insistent reality, she appears to grow up emotionally on camera: deeply affected by how wounded Liang is by his romantic defeat. She becomes a beautiful, but melancholy woman in the light of her own marital disaster, and then her sadness assumes a tragic dimension in the wretchedness she experiences after her beloved father dies, and sees how her own son has been encouraged by her ex-husband to think of her feelings and her family as irrelevant. And finally all this is reconfigured in Jia’s almost sci-fi sketch of the future, incarnated in the form of Dollar who appears to have forgotten his mother and his mother country. But he experiences the return of the repressed.

It is extraordinary to think how Jia Zhang-ke’s film-making has changed since his early, more opaque movies like Platform (2000) or Unknown Pleasures (2002). Now the performances he is getting are far more emotionally demonstrative. This is not a violent movie like A Touch of Sin (2013), his satirical adventure in Tarantinoesque pulp: but it has a shockingly violent moment when someone gets punched in the face. Yet it also has a bewilderingly surreal moment when Tao witnesses a light aircraft crashing next the road down which she is walking, yet without reacting or calling for help. Did she dream it? Did Tao, in fact, dream the movie’s entire final Australian section? Jia allows us, fleetingly, to suspect this.

That final coda does not entirely work: inevitably, some of the dreamed-up technological innovations and stylings look self-conscious and the sheer weirdness means that the emotional power of ordinary life is no longer available. And yet without this unexpected leap into the future, the movie would not have the savour that it has. And what a wonderful performance from Zhao Tao.

Film of the Week: Mountains May Depart - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, February 11, 2016

If Jia Zhang-ke’s latest feature was one of 2015’s biggest disappointments, it’s simply because two-thirds of it are so good, making the misjudged final chapter all the more bathetic. Because of that, it’s hard to properly assess the first two sections of Mountains May Depart. You can see how much they promise, but without the context of a final successful whole, you can’t be sure how far they succeed. Still, you take what satisfaction you get—which is not inconsiderable—and you have at least to applaud Jia’s ambition to try something new, even if it leaves him flailing in inhospitable waters.

Jia’s features have felt like individual chapters in a continuous narrative, mapping change in Chinese society for the best part of two decades since his debut feature Xiao Wu in 1997. If that seems a very long time ago, given the pace of change in China this century, the feeling is confirmed by Mountains May Depart, which begins its story only two years later. The film’s message is that China has traveled a long way since the turn of the century—but Jia seems to conclude by wondering how far it has left to go, and whether the nation might be heading toward a dead end of sorts.

What I most appreciated about Mountains when I saw it in Cannes last year is that it is so full of surprises—which, be warned, I’m about to spoil for you. It’s a fact of cinema that the element of absolute surprise on which so many movies depend generally only exists for a brief moment when a film makes its festival premiere: after its first reviews, publicity, social media exposure, and the rest, it becomes pretty much a known quantity before most people get to see it. Mountains, more than most films, benefits from being—to paraphrase an earlier Jia title—an unknown pleasure.

The drama begins in 1999 in the city of Fenyang, where we meet three young people about to enter the new century. Tao, played by the director’s wife and regular star Zhao Tao, is a schoolteacher, first seen in the opening shot taking part in a group exercise class to the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” (OK, an ominous touch of obviousness—but still a nicely boisterous start). Amid Fenyang’s New Year celebrations, we meet Tao’s two longtime friends and admirers. Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong) is an unassuming, good-natured worker at a local mine. He and Tao enjoy a natural intimacy, enough for them to cheerfully slurp dumplings from the same bowl—to the disgust of Tao’s other suitor. This is Jinsheng (Zhang Yi), addressed by some as “Boss Zhang”—a bullish leather-jacketed capitalist, exulting in his acquisition of a shiny new Volkswagen. With a gas station already in his portfolio, he announces that he’s just bought the mine for a pittance. He offers Liangzi a choice promotion, but at a price: he has to keep away from Tao.

It’s a flaw in the film’s execution that, given how brazenly obnoxious and petulant Jinsheng is, Tao nevertheless chooses him over Liangzi. No doubt the logic of the drama is that even so manifestly authentic and level-headed a woman can be won over by the promise of wealth and status, by the glitter of the capitalist future. But Jia never quite convinces us of this: Zhang Yi is relishably abrasive as Fenyang’s cock of the walk, but what the character surely needs is a plausible dash of seductive movie-star charm, and we don’t get that.

In fact, Jinsheng veers ever more towards caricature. Before he and Tao marry, they pose for a wedding photo in front of a backdrop of the Sydney Opera House. Even then, he can’t resist getting out his mobile, exulting: “My phone brings good news! Coal’s gone up again!” Soon after, we see the birth of a son, whom Jinsheng insists on naming Zhang Dollar—“Daddy will make you lots of dollars!” he crows.

At times, Mountains is wince-inducingly on-the-nose. There’s also a moment in Part One that I found entirely mysterious, a sudden plane crash that comes out of nowhere, and that is never commented on; perhaps a memento mori, but if so, as incongruous-seeming here as the stretched skull is in Holbein’s Ambassadors.

But this is by nature a film of broad strokes—a melodrama in the grand manner, about the passing of time, the waning of love, the enduring tensions of a triangle, all against a socio-economic backdrop. It is, in effect, Jia’s own Written on the Wind or Giant. However, that only fully becomes apparent with the film’s first big surprise: its opening credits, which come a full 47 minutes in. This is also where the frame widens out from Academy ratio, as the action jumps to 2014. We rejoin Liangzi, now married with a child in another town, having long ago left Fenyang, but he’s seriously ill, and it’s time for him to return home. Before he does (more grounds for wincing), we see him in front of a cage at the zoo containing a restless tiger.

Back in Fenyang, Tao is a wealthy local celebrity, but living alone; she and Jinsheng are divorced, and he’s taken Dollar with him to Australia. When Tao’s father dies, Dollar flies home to join her, and the boy is totally westernized: he wears a school tie and blazer and what looks like a Hermès scarf, doesn’t know how to behave at a Chinese funeral, and can’t even address Tao “Ma” properly, hesitantly calling her the English “Mummy.” Meanwhile, his iPad shows photos of him on a pony, on a yacht, and at a luxury car showroom—about the crudest possible signifiers of his corruption by Western values (all that’s missing is a shot of the kid chugging Cristal with Miley Cyrus). Despite all this, and partly because of Zhao Tao’s finely nuanced performance, there’s great poignancy in the depiction of the distance between mother and son—especially in the scene where she plays him a ’90s Cantonese pop ballad, a record that Jinsheng once gave her.

The next surprise is not so satisfying: a jump to 2025, as the frame expands further into widescreen. This final section centers on Dollar’s life in Australia. Played as a teenager by Dong Zijian, Dollar is part of a second generation of immigrant Chinese youth who are so estranged from their roots that they have to have Chinese names explained to them by their teacher Mia (veteran Taiwanese-born star Sylvia Chang). Dollar is deeply screwed up, and can barely remember his mother—so it’s not surprising that, increasingly drawn to Mia as a surrogate, he ends up having an uncomfortably Oedipal relationship with her. As for Jinsheng, he’s become an embittered recluse in a luxury apartment filled with guns; one of this section’s pithier moments has him comment on Australia’s liberal new weapons laws (“I can now own a pile of guns, but no one to fire them at . . . Freedom is bullshit!”).

There are various reasons why this third section doesn’t work. One is Dong Zijian’s self-conscious acting, which never quite chimes with Sylvia Chang’s serious, nicely judged tenderness as Mia. Another is that there are so many inconsistencies. Although he’s been in Australia for over 11 years, and has forgotten his Mandarin, Dollar doesn’t have any trace of an Australian accent (nor do his peers); but, as spoken by Dong, his English doesn’t seem that fluent either. And his arch-westernizer dad still can’t speak English (so how have they been communicating for all this time?). There’s also a painfully stiff scene between Mia and her robotically acted Australian ex-husband—the only Oz accent heard in the entire film.

Nor does this final section convince you that it’s taking part in the future. All we really learn about 2025 is that iPads are now transparent and that the world economy has shifted in ways we might expect (our young hero’s classmate jokes, “The dollar’s been in free fall for years—they should have called you Renminbi!”). And bizarrely, old-fashioned travel agents appear to be back in business. Not that Jia is that interested in superficial futurism, and why should he be? But he seems a little dazed stepping out of a time and a place he knows, and ill at ease with the English language, with the dialogue taking a really clunky turn (“The hardest thing about love is caring. I guess we have to feel the pain to know we’re in love”).

There’s certainly stylistic and formal audacity in Mountains, not least in the cinematography of Jia’s perennial accomplice Yu Lik Wai, from the hotly colored roughness of the first part’s late-’90s digital look, to the sleekly antiseptic final section, steeped in cold white daylight. All credit to Jia for taking risks, but he stepped outside his safety zone far more effectively in his last film A Touch of Sin, where his social observations (including some considerably sharper jabs at nouveau riche corruption) were couched in the complex framework of a series of interlinked crime stories.

The Sirkian aspect of Mountains allows you to accept some of the broader strokes, and the dramas are knitted together effectively by recurring motifs: the Cantonese song, the bright red wedding invitation still sitting unopened at Liangzi’s old home after 14 years, and the multi-colored jumper Tao wears in part one. This garment later turns up as a coat for her pet Labrador, presented to her as a puppy by Jinsheng (“How long will the dog live? We’ll be turning 40 when it dies,” he muses with near-sociopathic lack of sentiment).

However buoyant the Chinese economy may be in 2025, the closing shots of Tao against a gloomy hometown horizon (to a reprise of, what else, “Go West”) suggest that in other ways the future China’s glory days are over, as if the rush to capitalism has left the nation empty, or a neglected mother like Tao. It’s a powerful ending for a film that so catastrophically veers off the rails just before that—and it’s perhaps Jia’s way of saying that Chinese filmmakers shouldn’t be taken in by the glamour of the West and the glitter of futurism. After all, if an astute solidly grounded realist like him can come so badly undone…

Interview: Jia Zhang-ke | Mountains May Depart - Film Comment Aliza Ma interview, January 4, 2016

With Mountains May Depart, Jia Zhang-ke turns his powers of social observation inward, shifting subjects from the physical migrations in contemporary China to the inner emotional complexities arising from the decades following the nation’s great Cultural Reform. With rare intimacy, the filmmaker’s first foray into melodrama reveals the yearnings, melancholy, and indignations of China’s new secret heart.

Comprised of three vignettes set in 1999, 2015, and 2025, Mountains May Depart tracks the lives of childhood friends from Jia’s native Shaanxi—singer-dancer Shen Tao (in one of Zhao Tao’s most tremendous performances), brash young capitalist Zhang (Zhang Yi), and poor mineworker Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong). Each grapples with unfamiliar feelings of loneliness and isolation brought on by the pressure to survive in the nation’s ever forward-thrusting milieu of industrial, technological, and economic progress. In her pursuit of a better life, Tao has to choose between her two loves. But her decision to marry Zhang ruptures the trio’s friendship, and eventually leads to a divorce that forces her to part with her only son Dollar (Dong Zijian) when he moves, first to Shanghai and then to Melbourne with his father.

Since 2006, Jia has dedicated himself to documenting China’s vastly changing landscapes and disappearing cultures, only recently returning to fictional filmmaking with 2013’s A Touch of Sin. Whereas Sin was inspired by events he learned about in the news, Mountains May Depart draws largely from his personal relationships and experiences. Working with his longtime cinematographer Yu Lik Wai, Jia crafts each sequence with a different texture and aspect ratio specific to the period. The most striking sequence is the first, composed in a 1.33 aspect ratio to match the square video frame of Nineties—the picture is luminous and brilliantly saturated without pollution; the sky is high and cobalt, and the joie de vivre of young love is carried along by the propulsive rhythm of The Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” in a disco. Resurrecting images from his memories, Jia also incorporates documentary footage he shot with Yu in the same year. With each sequence, the frame widens—1.85 for present-day, and anamorphic widescreen for the near-future—in contrasting proportion to the growing emotional austerity and somberness between characters.

The film’s title comes from a Chinese aphorism, that “time will transform mountains and rivers, but our hearts will remain the same.” But how true does this hold in the new century? The story of Mountains May Depart ends where it begins, with Tao dancing to The Pet Shop Boys—now an old lady who has borne witness to half a century of national transformation and suffered the personal losses that have accompanied it. Laid bare by the film’s structural symmetry is the certainty that, indeed, you can’t go home again. FILM COMMENT spoke with the filmmaker last fall during the New York Film Festival, where Mountains May Depart had its U.S. premiere. The movie opens February 12 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

You’ve said that a set of keys to your mom’s house became the catalyst for this film. Can you talk more about that?

In 2006, I started thinking more about the notion of family. This is because my own family changed: that year, my father passed away. It impacted me a great deal. Oddly, it was the absence of my father that made me examine my family so closely for the first time. What was my mother going to do? I thought of aging, illness, and death more than ever before. You can say that Mountains May Depart is the sum total of my collated emotional experience from that point forward.

My mother was living alone in Shaanxi at that point. In archetypal Chinese families, everyone lives together. But I had made a point of not following this tradition. I wasn’t alone—everyone seemed to be more peripatetic than ever. In my case, I went from growing up in a small mining town to going to school in Beijing. Then I started working in the film industry, which took me to even more far-flung places. I had less and less time to go home. I would visit my mother on Chinese New Year, or August 15 [Mid-Autumn festival], and each time, I would bring her money. But she became increasingly melancholy and withdrawn. Then, one day, she gave me a pair of keys—like Tao to her son in the film—and told me I should have a set of keys to my own home so I could come back whenever I wanted. Then, saddened by the realization that I had gone so long without a pair of keys to my childhood home, I suddenly understood that what my mom needed from me wasn’t money—that was not going to ameliorate her loneliness—she needed someone to talk to her and be there for her.

In the last 20 years, the changes in Chinese society have instilled a new value system. People believe that financial currency goes further than emotional connection, so all of their energy and time is put into the accumulation of economic wealth, and they forget about what’s really important. I think I am a person who’s prone to self-reflection and over-analyzing, but even I have fallen under the spell of money. I thought it could buy my mother nicer things and give her a better life, and I could therefore be less worried about her. This startling realization moved me to make a film about emotions.

How does this relate to your previous films?

For the first time, I wanted the core of my film to be about the characters’ feelings and relationships. In my older films, with their young drifter protagonists, the stories were about the process of finding personal freedom in a time of cultural disappearance. In Platform [00], the young performers meander about, searching for music, and in this process they are confronted with an ungraspably vast and rapidly changing Chinese society. They leave their home, and go onto various sites, and in the end, return home. Back then, what I wanted to show were existential issues that arose from the past 20-something years of economic and cultural reform. 24 City [08] examined the various ways Chinese workers struggled to survive. Still Life [06] looked at the surreal disappearance of entire villages from the construction of this larger-than-life Three Gorges Dam, which forced people to migrate far away from their no longer existing homes. In my portrayal of family relations in Platform, what I wanted to show was the intellectual and cultural disparity that existed between generations.

It wasn’t until after I finished A Touch of Sin [13] that I decided to explore deeper emotional issues arising from China’s social changes. We take for granted that, in all of us, there is a private inner life—something sacred and personal that cannot be touched by any outside force. But have the rapid social, economic, and technological changes in our world begun to insidiously invade that aspect of our lives? That’s what I wanted to explore with this film.

Do you feel it is your most personal film to date?

It might be the film into which I put the most of my own life experiences. But I think it also holds the most universal themes of any film I have made. The English and Chinese titles of the film have a similar meaning: according to an old Chinese aphorism, time can move mountains and rivers, but our emotions and the way we deal with the inevitable rites of passage—love, family, aging, death—remain unchanged. Perhaps our emotional existence is the most fundamental.

The 1993 Pet Shop Boys version of “Go West” bookends the film. Can you talk about what the song signifies to you?

After the international premiere of Mountains May Depart at Cannes, I was shocked to learn how this song has persisted in collective cultural memory the world over. The story of the film begins in 1999 when “Go West” was one of the most popular songs. At this point, China had been undergoing a cultural reform for over a decade. In contrast, Platform is set in 1979 when China was first beginning its reform, and there was virtually no pop culture to speak of. On top of that, the Cold War was going on. Back then, any American export—like a bottle of Coca Cola or a song—would have been acutely foreign, bearing all the intensified cultural significance that anything else foreign had.

By the late Nineties, however, China had developed a very robust independent music scene, and popular Western culture had seeped into our everyday lives. We listened to Michael Jackson, Pink Floyd, even ABBA. So “Go West” in the movie is not a metaphor—it’s a password to the memories of my youth.

In that decade, discos suddenly sprang up all over Beijing, and I was in college at the time, so naturally I went dancing a lot. The DJ would always wait until midnight to put on “Go West.” It was a very unique ritual in the club: when the song came on, no matter who you were standing next to, you would put your hands on his/her shoulder and everyone would form a train. The song possesses a certain expansive quality only available to youth, of levity and freedom—evoked from the opening when you can hear seagulls in the background and pulsing through its rhythm. When you’re young and free, it doesn’t matter if you’re going “west” or elsewhere. The important thing is the impulsiveness with which you “go.”

How has your use of music evolved since 2000?

Music has always been very important in my films, because it relates very closely to my personal experience of growing up. I was born in 1970. I grew up in the Eighties when there were only revolutionary anthems. In those anthems, there was no “I”—only “we,” which is to say there were no individual emotions in the songs. The songs had titles like “Together We Have Power” or “We Are Soldiers.” Despite the years of cultural reform in the subsequent decades, we lacked any established language to represent our innermost feelings—the Cultural Revolution had wiped that away and left a void where there used to be self-expression.

Suddenly in the Nineties, you started to hear songs like “The Moon Represents My Heart” by Teresa Teng. This shift left a huge imprint on the creative imagination of my generation, because the “I” seemed to rise into our lives suddenly and unexpectedly through those songs. For the first time, they articulated the inner experiences of growing up and falling in love for a generation of people who were never encouraged or taught how to represent their own feelings. Fittingly I can recall a very popular song from the late Eighties called “Follow Your Feelings.” Imagine a song telling you to do that instead of following the Party! The pop music of that decade felt like a new kind of revolution. The subject of the songs were more complex and expressive—mostly sad songs about parting and heartache—and we projected ourselves and our own feelings onto them as well. New pop songs are much more diluted in comparison. This music of my youth is now a souvenir of the way people used to express their emotions. I wanted to preserve that in this film.

You have consistently collaborated with cinematographer Yu Lik Wai over the years. How was this project was different?

We started collaborating in 1998, when I made Xiao Wu [Pickpocket, 97]. He is a Hong Kong native who received his film education in Europe, and I am a Mainland native with a film education in Beijing. Aside from our interest in contemporary art and music, we shared the desire to uncover new ways of understanding our surroundings through film. Our aesthetic perspective differed from the conventions of Chinese and international cinema of that time. In China, you often hear people saying things like “That image is so beautiful, it looks just like an oil painting” or “a National Geographic cover.” This kind of empty beauty never interested us. We have always been in search of something that’s unique and a little foreign. We wanted to draw cinema closer to the experiences of daily life. These shared views became the foundation on which we built our own aesthetic system. It is a system that doesn’t belong to any established tradition.

The first two projects we worked on were on celluloid. After Platform, digital filmmaking started becoming accessible in China. Although it was a primitive and crude technology back then, we could feel the revolutionary possibilities it held for independent filmmakers. In the past, all aspects of film production were vertically controlled by the country’s 16 national studios. No one else was allowed to make films. It was precious—a profession that was out of reach for most people. If you were an official filmmaker, it was nearly impossible for a singular artistic voice to emerge through this studio system. Digital filmmaking, with its rawness and immediacy became a way to overcome this hierarchy. By extension, it signified a new possibility for China to represent itself through cinema—it can be shot in tight spaces, in large crowds of people, and in inclement environments. My collaboration with Yu Lik Wai spans the period that digital filmmaking medium matured and became the dominant format of filmmaking in China.

Yu Lik Wai’s most salient and unique method comes from the way he manipulates digital cameras—the lenses, the resolution, and so on—to create entirely new expressionistic textures in the image. He is always so ahead of the consumer curve that by the time a new camera becomes available, he already understands it inside and out. I recall when we were filming Unknown Pleasures [02], we had a camera that shot in such high resolution, the picture looked too clear and artificial. So he modified its resolution, and this created a unique grain in the image. When we work together, we start by thinking about the texture of the image and work our way up to the composition and frame. Digital formats are so closely connected to our consumer culture, and each generation of new technology changes the way we see the world. So each project we collaborate on is about finding new ways to match our picture to the environment being portrayed.

Mountains May Depart was a special project for us, because the story’s three-part elliptical timeline—starting in 1999 and ending 10 years into the future—largely overlaps with our history of working together. It made us think deeply about the way our work has changed over these years, and apply all our accumulated artistic and technical experience to portray images of our past and beyond. I got my first DV camera in 1999, so the first part of the film is in 1.33 aspect ratio, the same as my earliest documentary video footage. The colors in this sequence are most vivid and saturated, because I wanted to portray my memories of the unpolluted air, sunshine, and blue skies of my youth. This was the hardest part to shoot, because we had to wait for clear skies, which meant we could only shoot for about two days each week. The present-day sequence is 1.85, and colors are muddied by the smog and construction, and the future sequence in widescreen—industrial and synthetic. The widening aspect ratio is a visual counterpoint to the increasingly austere and melancholic relationships between the characters.

You initially looked at your old documentary footage as research material for the first sequence, but you decided to incorporate that footage into the film in the end. Can you explain what lead to this choice?

As I mentioned, in 1999 I got my first DV camera. After that, Yu Lik Wai and I formed a habit of going out to shoot documentary footage without any end goal or direction, and we have kept that going until today. Now when we have an assignment to shoot a commercial, for example, if we have a day or two after the shoot, we’ll go off and shoot documentary footage. I set the first sequence of Mountains May Depart in 1999 because that’s the first year I could look back on my old footage and see what people were wearing, driving, and how they were speaking.

The first tape I took out from this archive contained footage I shot at a disco! I had filmed a middle-aged man dancing vigorously in the club. He could not be a worse dancer, but his enthusiasm was unmatched, and right then, I knew the sincerity of that documentary moment could never be re-created. The only way I could capture its energy was by incorporating it into the body of my film. So I kept the aspect ratio 1.33 for the first sequence to match the original footage. However, this had the most unexpected result. Through the editing process, the old video footage became abstracted, and almost non-representational. Seeing it, you could feel that it is a moment of the past, but it had a very haunting impressionistic quality—not at all the historical authenticity I had originally planned for, but it still worked well.

Can you talk about working with the wonderful composer Yoshihiro Hanno?

I first heard Hanno’s work in 2000, when I was finishing Platform. At that time he had just completed his score for Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai. I loved his work. So through my Japanese producer, Mr. Shozo Ichiyama, I got in touch with Hanno. He did a lot of work for me, but in the end, I decided against having any non-diegetic soundtrack music, so sadly it was all for naught. What he did was wonderful, but I had to go in another direction for my film. The next time we collaborated was during 24 City. At that point, I had already worked with another Hou Hsiao-hsien regular, Lim Giong, who is a brilliant electronic composer. Over the years, Hanno shifted from composing electronically to working more with classical instruments. Since 24 City was my way of tracking Chinese history as it moved into postmodernity, I felt the score should move from a classical composition into something electronic. So I asked Hanno to collaborate with Lim Giong.

For Mountains May Depart, I thought a more analog and tactile score with real instrumentation would evoke the kind of emotional atmosphere I wanted. After visiting the set, Hanno went back to his studio and composed the score using a guitar, strings, and piano. He added some electronic elements for the final sequence. When he sent me the composition, I listened to it alone in my office, and I was very moved by what he had created.

Can you talk about how your working relationship with Zhao Tao has changed on this film?

People often say we’ve been consistently collaborating since Platform. In fact, we had gone on a bit of a hiatus between Still Life in 2006 and A Touch of Sin in 2013, because I began to make films that were more like documentary than fiction. It’s not that she didn’t appear in my films, but she had very little dialogue in 24 City, and was only on set for two days. She played a ghost in I Wish I Knew [10], and she had no lines. During this period, she worked with two European directors: Isaac Julien in Ten Thousand Waves [10], and Andrea Segre in Shun Li and the Poet [11]. When we were on the set of A Touch of Sin together, I realized she had developed a very unique method of working during this time.

My scripts can be roughly hewn—I describe the characters’ actions but I don’t make their internal motivations explicit. Zhao Tao asks me a lot of questions about their background and carefully develops every detail of her character. She becomes a second author, writing her own screenplay of my screenplay. She also likes to ask me what time of day a certain scene occurs, down to the specific hour, because our bodies feel different at various points of the day. Adjusting the condition of her body to that time of day results in a more internalized performance. Her attention to these details also makes me think about each scene differently. Of course, these are all aspects of her technique—beyond that, she possesses an intense empathy and love for her character, and through that love, she is able to enter into and animate Tao’s world seamlessly.

Can you talk about the character of Dollar?

Dollar represents a Chinese person whose life has been largely predetermined by his predecessors. To a certain extent, it’s the same for all of us. When he’s little, his parents get divorced and his mother gives up custody of him in hopes that his father will give him a better life in Shanghai. When his father has to emigrate to Australia, he has no choice but to go along. The key points of his existence have all been determined by external forces. Will he ever obtain personal freedom? As a writer I have a lot of love for this character, because we all find ourselves at this juncture between our predetermined past and an unknown future—it is point that opens up a possibility for freedom and revolution.

In the last sequence, we don’t see Tao until the very end. Why this protracted absence?

All the characters in this film come and go like specters. Liangzi, a poor mine worker, gets very sick and disappears after the second sequence. I don’t show what happens to him after that, because I didn’t need to. Zhang disappears from 1999 until 2025. We only hear people discussing him and his newfound wealth in 2015. Tao, too, disappears from the film for a while. It’s not hard to picture what happens to a poor mine worker in rural China after getting sick, or what happens to a mother after losing her only son. More importantly, I want the audience to fill in these ellipses with their own experience and imagination. The emotional intensity of each dramatic denouement might be diminished with too much exposition.

Mountains May Depart looks at migration and emigration on a more global scale than your previous films. How has the shifting trends in Chinese emigration affected your filmmaking?

In the Eighties and Nineties, most Chinese people emigrated for a better education, healthcare, or work opportunities. Now, the surge in emigration consists mostly of middle-class families with stable lives. Their motivation for moving overseas is less material, yet more essential—such as concerns over air quality, and the lack of social ethics and civility in the country. The sudden move often creates a rupture in a family and the individual, especially in children.

The problems that arise from this rupture begin and end with language. We are rapidly losing our regional dialects, because Mandarin is now the standard being taught everywhere, and because people are always changing cities. When little Dollar visits his mother in Shaanxi after the divorce, he can only speak Mandarin and Shanghainese. In order to speak to her own son, Tao has to switch from her dialect to Mandarin. By 2025, he has completely forgotten how to speak Chinese. Behind these issues of language, there is a disappearance of tradition, culture, and individuality.

I always insist that the characters in my films speak in their native dialects, because it is an essential aspect of our identity. To me, language defines the bounds of who we are, and we are in danger of losing it. To me, Dollar is orphaned again and again, losing the place that made him who he was and starting all over again. He has developed a certain amnesia, and can’t remember where he is from. I fear this existential crisis arising from these issues of language—separating us from one another geographically and emotionally—is becoming more common in China now more than ever.

Lost in China's Exploding Future | by Ian Buruma | NYR Daily | The ... Ian Buruma from The New York Review of Books, February 17, 2016

Movie Review: Mountains May Depart Bilge Ebiri from Vulture

The Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]

Cannes 2015 – Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke) David Acacia from International Cinephile Society

Mountains May Depart — Films We Like

Cannes: 'The Assassin' and 'Mountains May Depart' Present Eric Kohn from indieWIRE

Mountains May Depart (2015 Cannes review) Tim Grierson from Paste magazine

Cannes 2015. Back to the Future (or: The Mother Tongue): Jia Zhangke's "Mountains May Depart" on Notebook | MUBI Marie-Pierre Duhamel from Mubi Notebook

Cannes 2015. Day 7 Daniel Kasman from Mubi Notebook

Cannes Review: "Mountains May Depart" | Movie Mezzanine Adam Cook

The House Next Door [James Lattimer]

Jia Zhangke Looks Into His Homeland's Future but Loses Sight of Its ... Scott Tobias from The Village Voice

'Mountains May Depart': Review - Screen International Dan Fainaru

A Glimpse Into The Future In 'Mountains May Depart' Mark Jenkins from NPR

london-film-festival-2015-mountains-may-depart-james ... Alex Ramon from Pop Matters

Twenty Sixth Issue - FilmFocusIndia | Promoting Non-Mainstream ... Pradip Biswas

NYFF53 MAIN SLATE: MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART - This ... This Week in New York

Cannes impresses with a War On Drugs thriller and a Hitchcock doc Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club

Day 7: The bittersweet and the bitter Mike D’Angelo from The Dissolve

10. Jia Zhangke's Mountains May Depart - Ioncinema Nicholas Bell

Cannes Film Festival 2015: Part Two - Reverse Shot Jordan Cronk

Cemetery of Splendor | Filmmaker Magazine Howard Feinstein

Even more Ficks' Picks from the Toronto International Film ... Jesse Hawthorne Ficks from 48 Hills

Flickfeast [Stephen Mayne]

Cannes 2015 Review: MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART Displays Creative Artistry But ... Ryland Aldrich from Twitch

Live for Films [Piers McCarthy]

CineVue [John Bleasdale]

Way Too Indie [C.J. Prince]

Cannes festival hails Chinese great leap and Caine-Keitel bromance Benjamin Dodman from France 24

CANNES WATCH: Pet Shop Boys power Jia Zhangke's Cannes entry Jill Lawless from The Journal Review Online

Daily | Cannes 2015 | Jia Zhangke’s MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART David Hudson from Fandor

An interview with Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao about Mountains May ... Aisha Harris interview from Slate, February 12, 2016

Jia Zhangke | Maria Dimitrova | Talk : TANK Magazine Maria Dimitrova interview, Winter 2015

Jia Zhangke: why my films are received differently in China and abroad Edmund Lee interviews the director from South China Morning Post, October 25, 2015

Discussing China and Filmmaking With Jia Zhangke, Director of ... interview from The New York Times, October 5, 2015

Cannes 2015: Jia Zhangke on Censorship, China - The ... Scott Roxborough interview from The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2015, also seen here: Scott Roxborough

'Mountains May Depart' ('Shan he gu ren'): Cannes Review David Rooney from The Hollywood Reporter

Cannes Film Review: 'Mountains May Depart' Scott Foundas from Variety

Mountains May Depart - Time Out Geoff Andrew

Mountains May Depart: Time shifts, culture clashes and a potentially award-winning performance | Cannes review Donald Clarke from The Irish Post

Live from Cannes: first look at Chinese Palme D'Or hope Mountains May Depart Clarence Tsui from The South China Morning Post

Chinese auteur director goes West in latest movie at Cannes The Bangkok Post

Cannes 2015: "Sicario," "Mountains May Depart" Barbara Scharres from The Ebert site

Review: In 'Mountains May Depart,' Jia Zhangke Shows a Changing China Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

Mountains May Depart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jiang Wen

IN THE HEAT OF THE SUN (Yang guang can lan de ri zi)

China Hong Kong (134 mi) 1995

Time Out

Actor Jiang Wen's first feature is a archetypal rites-of-passage film about a group of boys entering puberty one hot summer in Beijing: fooling around, showing off and bonding, spying on girls, clashing with other gangs, dealing with pesky erections. Two things distinguish it. One is Jiang's own wry voice-over, admitting that these are romanticised and sometimes wished-for episodes from his own childhood. The other is the mid-1970s setting, the dog days of the Cultural Revolution, after all the Maoist frenzy, which it shows as no movie has ever done before.

OhmyNews (Howard Schumann)

Due to lack of adult supervision during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the mischievous boys of military fathers are free to spend their summer left to their own devices. Too young to join other youths working in the countryside, they spend their time riding their bikes, getting into gang fights, picking up girls, and asserting their masculinity.

Chosen as one of 100 best Chinese films of the century by Asia Weekly Magazine, Wen Jiang's "In the Heat of the Sun" is a coming of age story set in Beijing in the 1970s after the Red Guards had been disbanded. The first film by a sixth generation Chinese director, it played to packed audiences of young people when it first opened in Beijing in 1995, but has never been released in North America.

"In the Heat of the Sun" is based on the novel "Wild Beast" by Wang Shou, a controversial Chinese author who has written many stories about rebellious teenagers. The film is a subjective recollection about a group of friends who meet when their Army dads are shipped out to support Chairman Mao in 1969, recollections embellished by the narrator's fanciful memory.

Steeped in eroticism and youth violence, it is a sharp turn from the melodramatic epics of the early 1990s that interpreted China's past as a time of sexual repression. Jiang does not wallow in marketable cliches or make a special appeal to Western audiences but, like the young people in the film, imparts to the work a freshness and authenticity that sets it apart.

The film stars 17-year old Yu Xia as "Monkey" Ma Xiaojun, a rebellious teenager who is a stand-in for the director as a young man. Xia (whose name translates as 'Summer Rain') won the award for best actor at the 1994 Venice Film Festival, the youngest actor ever to win this award.

Narrated by the director who is also a popular Chinese actor, the opening narration tells us that "Peking has changed so fast. In 20 years, it's become a modern city. Almost nothing is as I remembered. Change has wiped out my memories. I can't tell what's imagined from what's real." The film's leitmotif is introduced almost immediately and we understand the reason for the title. "My stories always take place in summer," the narrator continues. "The sunlight was so relentless, so bright, that our eyes were washed in waves of blackness. In the Heat of the Sun. In the raging storms of Revolution. The soldiers' hearts turn towards the sun."

During that summer, Monkey acts out fantasies that make him feel like a hero and talks about characters from Russian novels and films dealing with revolutionary heroes searching for glory. He imagines himself standing up to bullies and enemies of the state in an imagined World War III and, in his fantasy, is willing to die for his country and his honor with women. He fights for his group, sending a rival gang member to the hospital for a month, sneaks into people's apartments with a self-made key (though he never steals anything), and watches films banned as inappropriate for children by the authorities.

Monkey's main focus, unsurprisingly, is a girl whose portrait hanging on the wall of an apartment he let himself into is immediately captivating. His pursuit of Mi Lan (Jing Ning) who is a few years older than him, is, however, fraught with rejection, jealousy of group leader Liu Yiku, and passion that veers out of control.

Although Jiang problematically redefines the Cultural Revolution as a period of spontaneity and freedom rather than dislocation and chaos, the film is not about politics but about the perilous transition from adolescence to maturity. Unlike other coming of age films, it is not a reflection of sadness and longing but an odyssey filled with the excitement of a new found freedom and revolutionary ardor.

In the Heat of the Sun Shelly Kraicer from Chinese Cinema

DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP (Guizi lai le) A- 94

China (139 mi) 2000

A three-hour movie that deals with the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930’s and 40’s, and winner of the Grand Prix Award (2^nd Place) at Cannes, though according to Chinese authorities the film is “anti-Chinese,” claiming the director failed to clear the film for a Cannes screening. Two government officials reportedly traveled to Cannes to demand the festival hand over the existing negative print, urging festival organizers not to show it. With some reports alleging that the director could be barred from filmmaking for as many as seven years, the film has not been screened in China, having been banned by the Chinese Film Bureau, China blacklists top film director - Telegraph. Notably, the director failed to direct another film for a period of seven years, though he did appears as an actor in several films. It was not until the Hong Kong Film Festival in March 2014 that the film had a screening anywhere in China, though the three-hour screen time at Cannes has been stripped down to 139 minutes, reportedly with the cooperation of the director.

A dizzying depiction of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War near the end of WWII, when it was still under Japanese occupation, that culminates with a remarkable war perspective, that all war is hell, causing humans to behave in ways so contrary to their nature. This film is an oddly exaggerated human comedy that never hurries, which gives the filmmaker an opportunity to provide character, depth, and dimension to the people that inhabit this small rural Chinese village near the Great Wall, where a Japanese marching band parades through the streets each day as warships steam past the bay. Two Japanese prisoners are mysteriously dropped into the villagers hands, wrapped in sacks by unidentified soldiers, with instructions to interrogate them and keep them prisoner until they return to pick them up at the New Year. If the town fails in these instructions, they will all be destroyed. Of interest, the Japanese prisoner makes constant threats against the life of every Chinese, insulting them with every breath, but the other prisoner is a Chinese/Japanese translator, who instead of incendiary anger translates only the kindest regards each time. The entire film expands this perspective, as international relations are easily misunderstood or misjudged, depending on the exact wordage used. Words under one administration may mean something altogether different under another administration.

This film beautifully establishes a rhythm of life, effectively bringing the villagers into an easy, folksy understanding, using a kind of amusing, overly theatrical physical acting style, where the people would just as soon yell hysterically or offer an insult or joke rather than be seen with any degree of introspection. As time goes on and no one comes to retrieve the prisoners, at the urging of the prisoners themselves, they decide to trade them to the Japanese military command, believing they can get two carts of grain in exchange. They write up an agreement, signed by the villagers and the prisoners, and turn them over to the Japanese. This leads to the appearance of honor, as the Japanese commander claims the Japanese, unlike the mongrel dog Chinese, honor their own agreements, and agree to increase it to six carts of grain and throw a feast for the local villagers. What results is a beautifully designed long, drawn out party scene beginning with plenty of tributes, drinking and song, witnessing a warmer, transformed character of the previously belligerent Japanese prisoner, a war hero in Japan who has befriended and all but forgiven his Chinese captors, where personalized, individual poems and songs of the Chinese are pitted against the collective military chorus and band of the Japanese, but suddenly the mood changes and it turns into a bloodbath, an unforgettable sequence of horror and devastation, while the band is ordered to keep playing. The film painstakingly humanized these characters, yet in an instant, they are slaughtered. When the tables are turned at the end of the war, and the Japanese are rounded up as prisoners of war and placed in the hands of the Allied forces and the Chinese, the dehumanization continues with the director himself playing the most significant role in the film, a local peasant who bears witness to it all. In the final scene, the black and white film turns mysteriously into color, turning the screen blood red.

Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]

Devils on the Doorstep (Guizi Lai le) looks like no other Chinese film seen in the West. Jiang Wen’s rollicking comedy about earthy peasants trying to survive the Japanese Occupation in 1945 presents in a New Wave widescreen black-and-white that makes exquisite chiaroscuro out of available light. Whether shooting a lighthouse beam sweeping over a valley or sunshine breaking in shafts through bathhouse steam, nervy cinematographer Gu Chang-wei (Red Sorghum) recalls the freewheeling camerawork of Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba, using a repertoire of extreme close-ups, vertiginous angles and whip pans (and even a miraculously diffused shot from inside a burlap bag). The director — who also plays the cocky everyman Dasan, proving himself to be a terrific farceur — matches the visuals with what-the-hell staging (one scene plays upside down, then sideways) plus aggressive editing in crisp rhythms that cut on every slap or thwack.

The village, situated where China’s Great Wall descends into the sea, contains an assortment of ribald but slaphappy villagers, elders who are either cranky or downright cracked, and the hero’s shamefully pregnant girlfriend. When they receive the surprise task of guarding two hostages, a hardline Japanese soldier swollen with patriotic fervor and his hapless Chinese translator, the villagers enact a scheme to trade them for grain from the Imperial Army. Despite much hilarious bootlicking, the exchange turns inauspicious when a Chinese donkey impulsively mounts and services a Japanese horse.

The Samurai-like commander stages a huge drunken multicultural New Year’s party where a Chinese villager sings, “You and I are an egg. I’m the white, you’re the yolk,” but the celebration turns into a fight and then a massacre. With the village in flames and Chinese beheaded, incinerated, or drowned, the survivors listen to the radio broadcast of Emperor Hirohito’s surrender, but there’s a further coda where gum-chewing Yanks guard the Chinese nationalist commander and this unflaggingly inventive, all-systems-go film reddens into color. From the time it won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2000, China has banned this film (partly for its rich and enthusiastic cursing, plausibly rendered in the lively English subtitles as “turtle-fucker” and “pig-brain”), so its long belated release in the U.S. must be welcomed and supported.

Images Movie Journal David Ng

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DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP previously at Film Forum in New York City

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LET THE BULLETS FLY (Rang zidan fei) B- 81

China Hong Kong (132 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

Who says the Chinese can’t produce the same kind of overblown cartoonish violence that not only packs American movie houses but are exported around the world like a church of cinema collection plate, a kind of exploitive capitalist enterprise designed to rake in gobs of money? While still working on the reservoirs and run off tributaries created from the monumental megalith that is STAR WARS (1977), movies love to create epic spectacle where more is supposedly better, creating exaggerated caricature of Hollywood proportion where truth and reality are discarded, unnecessary variables when all that matters is nonstop action. Little more than a blur of kinetic energy connected by threatening macho dialogue, one wonders where political entities get the idea of aggressive militarism? Political leaders are a product of their own nation’s mythology, where American Presidents Reagan and Bush were identified with “cowboy” diplomacy, a reckless form of political aggression backed up by arrogance and belligerence, the kind of Wild West machismo they saw in the movies when growing up, choosing to act upon the myth, literally inventing their own reality on the world stage. For China to enter this monolithic view of the world already dominated by American movies can hardly be seen as progress, but they have every right to compete for the same target audience and gargantuan box office dollars. Already the highest grossing film in Chinese history, this simply does not bode well for the movie industry overall, as this is grand scale filmmaking with gauche computerized special effects, exactly the kind of nonsense Hayao Miyazaki and Ghibli Studios, for instance, refused to mass produce in Japan, instead relying upon human manpower to draw his films frame by frame, showing artistic integrity in the creation of their animated delights.

As for entertainment, half the fun is in the casting, bringing back big mainstream attractions that have been off in Hong Kong making mega-dollars, where Chow Yun-Fat hadn’t made a Cantonese movie in nearly 20 years. Loosely based on an exaggerated spaghetti western style, the film is set in the wide open spaces of rural China in the 1920’s, a time when modernization was threatening to alter an entrenched system of corruption that was likely in place for centuries. Nonetheless, the ties to the past have a way of preventing any possibility of progress, where power remains in the hands of a few who reign over the capitulating populace like typical warlords. The writer/director cast himself as a thinking man’s bandit, Pocky Zhang, known throughout the land, but never captured and rarely seen. His small entourage of gun proficient followers makes him the leader of an outlaw gang that robs a train in an opening scene, using a nonsensical, hyper-inflated style that is amusingly ridiculous, that sets the improbable tone for what follows, creating a larger than life persona for the bandit who immediately decides to assume the role of the governor who supposedly perishes on the train, taking as hostages the governor’s counselor (Ge You) and sultry wife (Carina Lau), the only survivors from the train wreck. Their expected arrival in the desolate outback of Goose Town is greeted by a percussive litany of drums, with beautiful women pounding on them in a fury of exalted submission, bowing down to the new governor who quickly makes his presence felt. Ge You, who is really the governor (a purchased position) pretending to be a counselor to save his life, is a lying weasel throughout, where his chameleon like ability to change allegiances defines his inherent spineless character. Chow Yun-Fat, however, is the notorious crime lord Master Huang, a highly profitable crook who has already stolen all the money from everyone in town through various criminal enterprises, exploiting the citizens through excessive taxes while running a house of prostitution and controlling the opium trade, leaving nothing left for the new governor to steal.

Immediately the illusory tone of deception is set between the governor, a Robin Hood like socialist who shares the wealth, and Huang, a corrupt and greedy capitalist who steals the wealth, two stridently confident examples of leaders who each refuse to back down but instantly feign humility and gratitude, setting various traps behind the scenes with double and triple crosses, where the blunt but insidiously clever dialogue is loaded with half truths, double entendre, and ancient proverbs, all designed to mislead the opponent. A series of altercations ensue, each secretly challenging the other, but leaving no trace of origin, feigning innocence and mutual cooperation while attempting to undermine their enemy and bring them to their knees. While there are traces of machismo from Sergio Leone westerns or the swagger of Toshirô Mifune, Kurosawa’s epic samurai figure, this film is too cartoonish and simply doesn’t share the same touch of grace or air of nobility. While not as extravagant as John Woo’s RED CLIFF (2008) or as sumptuously lavish as Zhang Yimou’s CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER (2006), two recent Chinese historical dramas, this effort instead thrives on continual action sequences, big set pieces, along with an ample dose of silliness, eccentric behavior, and devilish humor, where the onscreen personas add a playful yet cherished element of nostalgia, like seeing Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward G. Robinson onscreen. Their distinctive personalities bring an unmeasured charm and charisma to the screen, which certainly adds to the grandiose popularity in China, but feels like a breezy, lighthearted, gangster entertainment venture that may be attempting to have fun satirizing the inept, state sponsored corruption that passes for government in China, but the film takes no real political shots, only makes vague references shrouded in the good and evil western genre scenario that plays out. The finale especially suggests there remains a modern disconnect between the “people” and the “republic” of China that continues to operate through a Communist political structure where the theoretical benefits continue to elude the massive population at large. This silly and nonsensical action drama may subversively, through the liberated personalities of the stars, be as close to freedom of speech as can be found in China today.

Chicago Reader  Ben Sachs

This period action comedy by Jiang Wen (Devils on the Doorstep) is great fun in the Shakespearean tradition, stuffed with lively characters, dramatic stand-offs, and stolen-identity subplots. Jiang stars as a fabled bandit who arrives in a small town posing as its new, state-appointed mayor; he plans to cheat the people out of their tax money, but after discovering that a local crime lord (Chow Yun-Fat) has beaten him to the punch, he decides to avenge them out of spite. The action moves at a breathless pace, and the comic dialogue (which sometimes recalls Billy Wilder's in its cheerful cynicism) moves even faster. But ultimately what makes the film irresistble is its laid-back quality: Jiang lingers on each narrative complication until it yields the maximum pleasure. In Cantonese and Mandarin with subtitles.

Time Out Hong Kong [Edmund Lee]

Three of Chinese cinema’s greatest actors converge in this political satire disguised as a 1930s China-set spaghetti western. To flaunt its genre trappings and prove that all revolutions began as unfortunate coincidences, Jiang Wen’s (The Sun Also Rises, Devils on the Doorstep) darkly humorous tale of guns and guts kicks off with a railroad robbery, in which the private train of veteran con-man Tang (Ge You), who is enjoying a meal of hot pot with his capricious wife (Carina Lau), is derailed by the notorious bandit Pocky Zhang (played by Jiang).

For their new venture to scam a huge fortune together, the two head to Goose Town, a desert city overlooked by the powerful mobster Huang (Chow Yun-fat, who also plays Huang’s imbecilic double), posing as the newly installed governor and his right-hand man. But as the craftily material quest turns gory, vengeance is added to the agenda as the three set themselves up for a perpetual cycle of carnage. An acting masterclass throughout, Let the Bullets Fly turns out to be more than just comedy gold: its nifty setting – where foot soldiers are invariably idiotic, and the dodgy protagonists all try to make a bigger buck with the authority they practically bought – perhaps takes a native Chinese to fully appreciate.

ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]

East meets West in actor/director Jiang Wen’s wily take on the spaghetti western. Wry social commentary and dark comedy comes with the territory in ‘20s-era China where warlords, politicians, and bandits are practically interchangeable. A group of bandits, led by their wise commander “Pocky” Zhang (Jiang), attack a horse-drawn steam train carrying the new governor of Goose Town. Bullets do indeed fly, though not with the conventional flight-time one normally expects. Every action scene is an opportunity for humor. The governor’s death makes way for “Pocky” (known to his men as Number One) to substitute himself as Goose Town’s respectable leader. Goose Town has a built-in rival for the new governor in the form of kingpin Huang (Chow Yun-Fat), who deals in opium and human beings. The smarmy Huang hosts a dinner for the governor and his freshly minted right-hand man Tang (Xiaogang Feng). Exceptional camera-work by cinematographer Fei Zhao adds to the scene’s editorial import and humorous implications. A deal is brokered for Huang to finance the governor’s scheme to wreak vengeance on the bandits who threaten Huang’s wealth. The irony is that Pocky and his men are actually the bandits in question. A series of strategic gambits finds Pocky playing Robin Hood with Huang’s wealth as the twisting narrative builds toward an elegant climax that brims with equal parts spectacle, humor, and thematic intention. Most gratifying is the director’s charismatic performance as Pocky Zhang, a philosophical leader with an infectious sense of humor. There’s good reason “Let the Bullets Fly” is China’s biggest domestic hit to date. Don’t pass up the chance to see it on the big screen.

This Is Not a Film | Let the Bullets Fly | Being Flynn | A ... - Wsj.com Joe Morgenstern

The first and second things to be said about Jiang Wen's action adventure, set in China during the warlord era of the 1920s, are that it is marvelously funny—a screwball comedy with more layers than a pearl—and visually sumptuous. (The distinguished cinematographer, Zhao Fei, has shot three films for Woody Allen in the U.S.) It should also be said that Mr. Jiang, who directed, con brio, and who plays a starring role, is himself no stranger to state censorship. After taking his phenomenally accomplished second feature to Cannes without official permission—it's called "Devils on the Doorstep," and it won the 2000 Grand Jury Prize—he was prohibited from making films for seven years. All the more marvelous, then, that "Let the Bullets Fly" has become the top-grossing Chinese feature in the history of that nation's movie business.

Marvelous, but not mysterious. The film has it all—pounding pace, sizzling banter (or so the banter seemed to me as I tried to keep up with the good, colloquial subtitles), zestful physicality and a light, joyous spirit. The story finds a notorious bandit, Pocky Zhang, superior in every way to a con man who has bought himself a governorship in a picturesque backwater called Goose Town. Mr. Jiang, a formidable actor with a bulletproof deadpan, plays the bandit, who in fact has a clear complexion, though a thug who impersonates him defaces himself with fake pockmarks. Impersonations constitute a great part of the fun. It gets difficult, though seldom impossible, to tell who's who as the plot thickens and folds back on itself.

The narrative's main thrust is a contest of wits—plus guns and swords—that rages between Pocky and a local mob boss, Master Huang (played with arch suavity by the great Hong Kong action star Chow Yun-Fat), while the con man, Tang (Ge You) works both sides of a street that bears a strong resemblance to the classic dirt thoroughfare in American Westerns.) The prize is drug money—Huang is tied into the opium trade—but Goose Town's poverty prompts Pocky to emulate Robin Hood, an impulse that stands in sharp contrast to everyone else's cheerful corruption. "Let the Bullets Fly" has a clearly defined moral dimension, but Mr. Jiang, an absurdist at heart, never lets it interfere with the fun.

Culture Blues [Jeff Hart]

Billed as a “Western comedy,” the frenetically paced Let the Bullets Fly is more accurately described as a Chinese mash-up of Kung Fu Hustle and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Bullets fly in cartoonish quantities, but writer/director/star Jiang Wen has more ammunition in the dialogue department. Whip-smart banter is slung about in frenzied bursts, sometimes making Bullets an exhausting experience for even the most keen-eyed subtitle reader. If you can handle not blinking for two hours, Bullets is a blast.

When a train heist leaves Wen’s honorable bandit with a conniving politician for a hostage, Wen decides to assume his identity and governorship, intent on hustling gold from his wealthy Goose Town constituents.  However, Wen finds that Goose Town is already being sucked dry by Chow Yun-Fat’s gold-toothed warlord. What follows is an epic battle of wits – imagine Robin Hood taking on a Nottingham with a mind as duplicitous as a David Mamet character. Wen is great as the noble bandit, and his gang is filled with colorful characters, but Chow Yun-Fat truly steals the show. It’s a pleasure to see him toss off the white hat and ham it up as the nefarious warlord and his obsequious double.

While Bullets features the typically stylized action sequences of Asian cinema, the film doesn’t deliver nearly as many showdowns as the title suggests. Wen is much more concerned with the schemes of his two leads. It’s a two-hour chess match where new plots are foiled as quickly as they’re hatched. Characters hide behind masks, secret identities, and even Saddam Hussein style body doubles. Allegiances shift, double-crosses turn into triple-crosses. The plotting is as enthralling as any number of shootouts, so long as you can keep track of it.

Bullets is a wild ride. It has an energy I find unique to Asian cinema, where a film can be unrepentantly goofy and spastically energetic, without sacrificing character or emotion. That’s best encapsulated in a death scene where an exploded man says his somber goodbyes, his legs comically dangling from a tree in the background. Bullets is a unique blend of genre elements with plot and pacing that should keep viewers on their toes.

Let the Bullets Fly - Filmcritic.com Movie Review Bill Gibron

Let the Bullets Fly, currently the most popular film in the history of China, is an engaging exercise in deception. It's a movie built of double crosses, triple crosses, and eventual illusory denouements. It features fantastic performances by actors Chow Yun Fat (as suave local crime lord Master Huang) and writer/director Jiang Wen (as bandit turned executive fraud "Pocky" Zhang) and a script that out Sting's that Oscar winning '70s classic for cons, cheats, and bamboozling. Sure, it gets way too wrapped up in itself sometimes and loses a little in the inevitable translation (the dialogue is so rapid fire a screwball comedy would be jealous), but the end result is a masterwork of manipulation and moviemaking magic.

It's the 1920s. After hijacking a train, Zhang confronts a man (Ge You) who swears he has just bought the governorship of the small village of Goose Town. Seeing a way to leave his life as a bandit and get behind some legitimized crime, our lead takes over, taking the hostages as his counselor and his wife (Carina Lau). Once in power, he confronts Huang, who sense that something is not right with his new rival. Behind the scenes, this gangster is grooming a double to aid in his nefarious acts. A series of clashes end up with a beloved member of Zhang's 'family' - a godson named Six (Mo Zhang) - dead. Vowing to get revenge and bankrupt Huang in the process, our cad contemplates various plans to trap his prey. Turns out, all he really has to do is wait for the man's pride to kick in - either that, or his greed.

It's hard to describe Let the Bullets Fly as a typical Chinese action film. Sure, there are gun battles, and the occasional fistfight, but there is none of the high flying kung fu choreography that we've come to expect from the genre. In fact, it's safe to say that anyone coming to this epic effort looking for same will be sadly disappointed. Instead, this is a war of words, a wise guy back and forth which sees two impressive stars trying to out-dialogue each other. Indeed, there is a moment early on when Chow and Jiang have a sit down that practically sizzles with electrifying verbal volleying. Almost the entire movie is a weird combination of exposition and ego, the careful placement of plot puzzle pieces being far more important than thrills and chills.

For his part, Jiang is a marvel behind the lens. He lights up even the most mundane scene with a real sense of visual flair. Acting as Zhang, he also undermines our typical perceptions of the baddie. Our crook is not necessarily evil, just someone who is open and honest about his illegality. In fact, the theme of corruption catered to and carried out within the corridors of power is what this movie is best known for. In a country so closed as China, many view Let the Bullets Fly as an act of defiance. With its themes of power bought and abused and the common man crushed, it's not hard to see the sentiment. Luckily, Jiang buries it all in so much bravado that he gets away with such insolence.

Though not perfect, and lacking a real spark to push it truly over the top, Let the Bullets Fly is still a sensational slice of period propaganda. It warns of friendly faces turning fiendish while arguing that no one in a position of leadership serves without some manner of malfeasance pushing them forward. As an example of the kind of kinetic experience we expect from the foreign film format, there are much better. But it's the deeper message of Let the Bullets Fly that lingers long after the ammunition runs out.

The Most Popular Chinese Movie of All Time Grady Hendrix from Slate, February 29, 2012

A Nutshell Review [Stefan S]

Sound On Sight Mark Young

Spout [Daniel Walber]

Let the Bullets Fly - Reason Magazine Kurt Loder

Review: 'Let The Bullets Fly' Entertains With Snappy ... - indieWIRE Mark Zhuravsky from The Playlist

Slant Magazine [Simon Abrams]

Film Journal Intl Daniel Eagan

Film-Forward.com [Brendon Nafziger]

Heroic Cinema [John Snadden]

Fantastic Review: 'Let The Bullets Fly' Has ... - Film School Rejects Cole Abaius

Onion AV Club Alison Willmore

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AHeroNeverDies.com

JapanCinema.net Marcello

Sayang Wayang [Ezekiel Lee Zhiang Yang]

Film Critics United Christopher Armstead

Battleship Pretension [Scott Nye]

Shalit's 'Stache [Matthew Schuchman] also seen here: LET THE BULLETS FLY | Verbicide Magazine

exclaim! [Robert Bell]

Peter Nellhaus Coffee Coffee and More Coffee

Review: Let The Bullets Fly | Newcity Film Ray Pride

LET THE BULLETS FLY Facets Multi Media

Bina007 Movies [Caterina Benincasa]

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Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

KPBS Cinema Junkie [Beth Accomando]

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Jiang Wen's "Let the Bullets Fly" on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson with all the links from Mubi

The Hollywood Reporter [Maggie Lee]

Variety [John Anderson]

Time Out Hong Kong [Edmund Lee]

Let The Bullets Fly Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London David Jenkins

TimeOut NY David Fear, also seen here: TimeOut Chicago

Let the Bullets Fly: A clever and fun (and long ... - The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey

'Let the Bullets Fly' review: Asian action with a smile | NJ.com Stephen Whitty

China filmmakers have difficulty penetrating the U.S. market: Reel ... Reel China: It's rough out West for Chinese films, by Steven Zeitchik and David Pierson from The LA Times, July 3, 2011

Chicago Tribune Colin Covert

Let the Bullets Fly - Movies - The New York Times Jeannette Catsoulis, also seen here: Jeannette Catsoulis

Jiménez, Cristián

BONSÁI

Chile France Argentina Portugal (95 mi) 2011

Bonsai Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

The stories we make up to make relationships work and the stories that are made up in books intertwine touchingly and amusingly, though also a little inconclusively, in Chilean filmmaker Cristian Jimenez’ follow up to the quirky Optical Illusions. Jimenez is one of the most promising current purveyors of the sort of droll existential Latin American comedy that runs through the films of Pablo Stoll and the late Juan Pablo Rebella, or the Daniel Burman of Every Stewardess Goes to Heaven, and his latest film manages to hang a wistful little story of a love lost (and another of a love unrecognised) on its fragile comic peg.

The film’s main weak point is its main character, Julio (Noguera), whose deadpan passiveness grates as much as it entertains. Its strength is the way it nails something about the simultaneous lightness and gravity of first love, and also its ability to spin the story out of a metaliterary game without this seeming pretentious. Though it’s not a perfect film it does have a certain lightness and grace - coming on like an upbeat Chilean Norwegian Wood - and could turn out to be an oddly successful investment for those difficult-to-fill arthouse rom-com slots.

Based on a novella by Chilean poet Alejandro Zambra which became a surprise bestseller back home, the film tells two stories which alternate throughout the film. The first centres on the university romance between Julio and Emilia (Galgani), he a borderline-geek who lies about having read Proust (though it’s typical of him that he’s so concerned by the lie that he immediately gets all seven volumes of A la recherce… out of the library), she a pretty punkette.

They meet at a party and are soon making out - with a sweaty, sexy realism that is one of the film’s selling points. When Emilia moves in with her best friend Barbara (Arancibia), Julio takes up residence in her room, and the two read books - Flaubert, Raymond Carver, and of course Proust - in bed, between sleep and lovemaking.

The second story takes place eight years later. Now a jobbing editor and literary assistant, Julio is asked by veteran novelist Gazmuri (Medina) to type out his latest novel for him. Julio pretends to his next-door-neighbour and occasional lover Blanca (Gonzalez) that he is working on the novel with Gazmuri - then, when the novelist pulls out of the deal because Julio’s typing rates are too high, decides that he will go ahead and write the novel that he has been improvising to Blanca anyway.

The story he comes up with is about the relationship that he had with Emilia - which gives us an excuse to dip back into that earlier (and it must be said a tad more compelling) timeframe. By the end we’ve spent three chunks of time with Julio and Emilia in the past, and three with Julio and Blanca in the present.

The bonsai of the title is one of the ideas Julio pulls out of the novel-writing hat which soon becomes a part of his life: he buys himself a miniature tree and learns to train it (could this be the reference to the stunted growth of his two relationships?) Shot with a rich palette and sets that emphasise the creative mess of student and post-student life, and scored with an  eclectic soundtrack that mixes Chilean indie rock with Bach’s Cello Suites, this is a film that very nearly gets away with its tonal shifts between arch comedy and affecting melodrama through sheer force of charm. Nearly, but not quite.

Jireš, Jaromil

Jaromil Jireš Vladimir Opela [translated by Robert Streit]

Having finished his studies at the Prague Film School, Jaromil Jireš entered filmmaking at the end of the 1950s with several short films, the most engaging of which was Sál ztracených kroku (The Hall of Lost Steps). In 1963 he made his debut in feature-length films with the picture Křik (The Cry), which earned him a place among the ranks of young directors striving for new content and a new film language. In his debut Jireš reacts to modern film currents, above all to the stylistics of the cinéma vérité, whose elements he utilizes, conscious, of course, of the danger that this can hold for the representation of reality and the expression of truth. The story of The Cry suppresses traditional dramatic structure. It consists of the fragmentary memories of the two main protagonists, a husband and wife, on the day their child is to be born. Arranging individual recollections, combining fictional segments with documentary shots, and using a hidden camera, Jireš seeks to convince the viewer of man's connection with the present, the past, and the future, and his close and immediate link with the whole world. (Jireš: "We live in a time when a person's most intimate experiences are connected with the major currents of world events.") The Cry was very well received and won several awards; it is the first pinnacle of Jireš' creative work.

The second pinnacle was achieved in two totally disparate pictures from the early 1970s. One film was Valerie a týden divu (Valerie and a Week of Wonders), based on a novel by the eminent modern Czech poet Viítězslav Nezval. What interested Jireš about the novel was "the juncture of reality and dream and the playful struggle between horror and humor." The other film, . . . a pozdravuji vlaštovky (My Love to the Swallows), is purely Jireš' own. The director was inspired by the life and death of the real-life character of Maruška Kudeříková, a young woman who fought against German fascism during the Second World War. Here, in a different connection, Jireš used the same method of alternating real-life elements and reminiscences, as in The Cry, but for a different purpose, namely, to demonstrate a person's inner strength, the source of her faith and hope.

The following years, in which Jireš made three pictures, were a period of stagnation. The fairy-tale film Lidé z metra (The People from the Metro) and Ostrov stříbrných volavek (The Island of Silver Herons), in which he returns to the days of the First World War, are equally undistinguished. Even less noteworthy is the fantastic tale Talíře nad Velkým Malíkovem (Flying Saucers over Velký Malík). Jireš' creative path took a new turn in 1978 with Mladý muž a bílá velryba (The Young Man and the White Whale). The film is an adaptation of Vladimír Páral's novel of the same name and deals with modern man's uneasy oscillation between a mask of cynicism and pure human feeling. Next came Causa králík (The Rabbit Case), an apparently humorous morality piece with a bitter finale on the struggle for justice against cunning and evil. The heroine of Jireš' next work, Utěky domu (Escapes Home), is a young woman who must face a conflict between her desire for self-fulfillment in a challenging profession and her duties as a wife and the mother of a family. In Neúplné zatmění (Partial Eclipse), about a little blind girl, he speculates on an emotional level about the meaning of life and the quest for human personality. All these films address problems of modern life in the area of the ethics of human relations.

Documentary films form an integral part of Jireš' creative work. Unlike his friends of the same generation, Jireš has remained faithful to the documentary genre throughout his artistic career. This segment of his work shows great thematic breadth. We can nonetheless delineate two fundamental areas of interest for Jireš. In the 1960s his attention was drawn to the folklore of southern Moravia, where several of his short films have their setting. Jireš returned to this region and to this subject matter in a modified form in 1981 with the ballad story Opera ve vinici (Opera in the Vineyard). From the 1970s on, his documentary films turn more and more to the world of art, to music, painting, and architecture.

VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (Valerie a týden divu) A- 93

Czechoslovakia (77 mi) 1970       

Was there something in the water in Eastern Europe in the late 60's? A gorgeously stylized, psychedelic vampire flick that stars a 13 year old heroine as she enters puberty.  Need one say more?

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, directed by Jaromil Jires ... - Time Out

Shot in the lyrical Elvira Madigan mode, this celebrates the 'first stirrings of adolescence' of a beautiful young girl in a vaguely-defined Transylvanian townscape sometime in the last century. A student of folklore and mythology could perhaps detect a logical thread in the continuous sequence of vampires, devils, black magic, ritual and dance that the film presents, but for most people it will be a simpler and undemanding pleasure to sit back and be agreeably surprised as the images unfold. There is no clearly-defined story; the film's logic is that of the subconscious, its images those of the Gothic fairytale and the psychiatrist's couch, and its overall effect is stunning.

Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule)

Jaromil Jires's overripe 1970 exercise in Prague School surrealism. The 13-year-old title heroine, who's just had her first period, traipses through a shifting landscape of sensuous, anticlerical, and vaguely medieval fantasy-horror enchantments that register more as a collection of dream adventures, spurred by guiltless and polysexual eroticism, than as a conventional narrative. Virtually every shot is a knockout—for comparable use of color, you'd have to turn to some of Vera Chytilova's extravaganzas of the same period, such as Daisies and Fruit of Paradise. If you aren't too anxious about decoding what all this means, you're likely to be entranced. In Czech with subtitles.

Film Walrus [Film Walrus] listed as #1 vampire flick

Based on the 1935 romantic-surrealist novel of the same title by Czech author Vítězslav Nezval, Jires’s allegorical film shows an immediate intention to plunge deep into the subconscious roots of the vampire mythology. The film follows Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová), a young girl on the cusp of sexual awakening. She is caught somewhere between the naïve fairy tales of childhood and the unsettling changes of maturity while beset by incestuous vampire phantasms.

Though Valerie’s grandmother and a priest who claims to be her father both make oblique seductions, their motives (lust, blood-thirst, draining-youth, repression, etc.) remain unclear. The girl expresses more curiosity and whimsy than fear and, when her own actions fail to keep her safe, resorts to her cousin and a pair of magical earrings. A chain of shifting identities, surreal images and mystical adventures finally culminates in a transcendent spring-rites picnic.

Visually the film upturns every vampire film convention, using soft focus and an abundance of shimmering light to paint an impressionistic dreamscape of pure whites and colorful pastels. The sets cast an ethereal mood characterized by gentle breezes blowing through cobwebs and curtains, yet remain haunted by a disturbing sexual tension. That neither Jireš nor Valerie seems particularly upset by the oddity and danger in the air forces the audience to view the events as something more than horror and the protagonist as no mere victim.

The experimental cinematography and often surprising camera positions are complimented by the keen sound design. The repetition of signature noises (like the gentle ring of bells when Valerie’s earrings work their magic) and renaissance folk music creates added connotations and connections, ultimately weaving a spell over the audience and seducing them into its otherworldly charm. The film pays tribute to our exhilarating, frightful, inevitable passage into adulthood with the warmth and imagination of a child.

Fans of traditional horror, particularly the blood and guts variety, may have trouble getting into “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders.” For me it remains a personal favorite and a fitting way to end Film Walrus’s week of vampires.

Rychle pohyby oci and the Legacy of Jaromil Jires Andrew James Horton from Kinoeye, August 23, 1999

Rychle pohyby oci (Rapid Eye Movement, 1998) by Radim Spacek is one of a wave of recent Czech films to be directed by the new generation of Czech filmmakers. Indeed, it is the director’s graduation film for the famed Prague school of the film and television arts, FAMU, which can count among its previous students Oscar-winners Jiri Menzel, Agnieska Holland and Emir Kusturica.

The "story" of Rychle pohyby oci - named after the phase of sleep in which dreaming occurs - concerns a teenaged musician named Poppy and the world he lives in. The structure of the film mirrors the form and content of his dreams, or rather his nightmares, which centre on his relationship with a girl called Akja and his preoccupations with violent death. While the film lacks any coherent form of plot in the traditional sense of the term, there are plenty of opportunities for Spacek to experiment with colour, light and sound as he enters Poppy's mind.

This might all sound exciting and innovative stuff but somehow it fails to live up to its promise. The real trouble is that the mind that the film seeks to explore is not a particularly interesting one. Poppy's problems are quite mundanely adolescent and this comes out in the pompous and immature meditations on death. Spacek tries oh so hard to create a work of mystery and darkness infused with metaphor and subconscious allusions, and instead he simply ends up being rather teenaged himself.

Its telling that the most successful sequences are those in which there is no dialogue. Notable amongst these is the closing section in which Poppy walks through the streets of Prague shot in negative, whilst he himself retains an eerie semi-positive colour to his complexion. (I presume they covered him in green body paint and dyed his hair and then shot the whole scene in negative.) All the time, an atmospheric soundtrack builds up the tension and the mystery. But this is pretty slim material to base a film on; something that Spacek himself must have been aware of since the film runs only ten minutes over the hour, stretching claims that it is feature-length.

Given these obvious weaknesses, one might wonder how on earth this film managed to get distributed at a national level. The answer might have something to do with a name which flashes by on the closing credits. The film was made under the supervision of a number of Spacek's teachers at FAMU, one of which is the famed director, Jaromil Jires. In this light, Rychle pohyby oci can clearly be seen as following on from the film traditions set by his teacher. Jires, who was born in Slovakia but has largely worked in the Czech Republic, is best known for his films The Joke (Zert, 1969) and Valerie a tyden divu (Valerie and her Week of Wonders, 1970). The former is a relatively straight adaptation of Milan Kundera's unpretentious first novel which was written in the liberal interlude of the Prague Spring. Being the story of man who was expelled from university when the Communists took power after the war, the film did not win Jires any favours with the authorities and after this black mark on his record he had to step carefully in order to make films. Valerie a tyden divu was made when film directors were under the most careful scrutiny.

The story, on the surface at least, was apolitical and concerned a thirteen-year-old heroine Valerie (played by Jaroslava Schallerova) and her loss of innocence in a world of vampires and wicked grandmothers. Although it is more linear than Rychle pohyby oci, the overall effect is built up poetically rather than through development of action. A full and detailed description of the plot would probably actually take longer to read than to watch the entire film, so labyrinthine are the twists and turns of the story line.

Jires said of the film that he wanted to explore "the connections between reality and dream, horror and humour". He certainly created something unique, coming up with a film which draws on the traditions and narrative conventions of children's fairy tales, B-movie horror flicks and soft porn. The film was another literary adaptation for Jires, this time of a book by the Czech poet Vitezslav Nezval. Nezval's name is closely associated with surrealism and in 1927 he published an early essay on the nascent artistic movement. He is also connected with another well-known Czech erotic film, Gustav Machaty’s Erotikon (1929), for which Nezval worked (uncredited) on the script.

Whereas Machaty's work retains the highest artistic integrity, Jires's balance of camp horror and smut has guaranteed the film an eternal audience of horror buffs who like to see girls below the age of consent in diaphanous white dresses. Jires is now a name which frequently crops up on American websites devoted to Eurotrash and exploitation films and his films attract comments such as "great artistic sleaze" there.

If there is any interest in Valerie a tyden divu to less sexually frustrated film audiences, it is the in the film's relationship to the era in which it was made. Shot only a few years after the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, the film is filled with images of corrupting innocence, rape and the betrayal of youth by those who should be protecting it. These themes are perpetuated both in the story line and in the film's images: pure white clothes being stained with blood is a notable example. Aside from the titillation of seeing a lithe young Schallerova with not very much on, Czech audiences could identify, at some deep level, with the correlation between the film's plot and the way they perceived their nation as being defiled and abused by a foreign aggressor.

Where Rychle pohyby oci fails is that it cannot compete with the film it is trying to emulate. Valerie a tyden divu works because it plays either on people's voyeuristic sexual desires, romanticism for the purity of childhood or their deep sense of political disappointment, all factors which are evidently strong enough to overcome the film’s weaknesses to produce some form of popular success. Spacek tries to work similar tricks with our feelings about death, love and fate but ultimately we don't care enough about his sulky adolescents to wade through the histrionics. However, at least Rychle pohyby oci didn't try to boost its box office figures by putting in cheap gratuitous shots of a scantily clad teenaged actress. In that respect we should, perhaps, praise Rychle pohyby oci for being bad in the manner that it is.

Kinoeye [Tanya Krzywinska] September 15, 2003

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders: Grandmother, What Big Fangs You Have! Criterion essay by Jana Prikryl, June 29, 2015

Connecting the Dot: Dot Graphics and Janus Films Sam Smith July 02, 2013

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) - The Criterion Collection

Senses of Cinema [David Melville] August 2007

Roderick Heath, Ferdy on Films, etc.

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Bright Lights Film Journal [Gordon Thomas] October 31, 2008

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Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Cult Reviews Perfesser Deviant

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Valerie and Her Week of Wonders | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Jordan Cronk

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Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (film) - Wikipedia, the free ...

Jodorowsky, Alejandro

Overview for Alexandro Jodorowsky - Turner Classic Movies

This eccentric, outspoken Chilean-born director, writer and actor is best-known for two avant-garde cult films, "El Topo" (1970) and "The Holy Mountain" (1973). Jodorowsky, born to Russian immigrants, grew up in a tough Chilean port city. His family moved to Santiago, and Jodorowsky formed a circus troupe and moved to Paris in 1955 to study mime with Marcel Marceau. By 1960, he was writing and directing for the theater, traveling between Mexico and Paris. He co-founded the surrealist review "S.NOB" and, with playwright Fernando Arrabal and artist Roland Topor, formed the theater of the absurd company (heavily influenced by Antonin Artaud) Producciones Panicas. Their first major play was the scandalous four-hour, multi-media "Sacramental Melodrama", staged at the Paris Festival of Free Expression in 1965. Eventually giving up on theater, Jodorowsky returned to Mexico, where he wrote books and comics and experimented with film. His first was "Fando and Lis" (1968), a Fellini-esque love story which was promptly banned after provoking riots.

Jodorowsky then wrote, directed, scored and acted in the film which brought him more fame and notoriety, "El Topo/The Mole" (1970). A meandering, violent and highly impressionistic film, "El Topo" follows the travels of the eponymous hero (Jodorowsky) and his son (Jodorowsky's own seven-year-old son Brontis) as they encounter bandits, massacres, hippies and lesbians, in search of knowledge and/or redemption. A weird combination of the styles of Bunuel, Fellini, Antonioni and Russ Meyer, "El Topo" found its audience through New York's Elgin Theater, which screened the film at midnight showings every night for more than a year. Discovered by trendy downtowners, artsy intellectuals and finally by critics, "El Topo" became possibly the first "cult" film.

"The Holy Mountain" (1973), Jodorowsky's next film, was equally bizarre and portentous (many said "pretentious"). Also filmed in Mexico, "The Holy Mountain" told the story of a thief and his Dante-like travels, chock full of eye-popping sex, violence and religious references. Another midnight movie hit, "The Holy Mountain" disappointed critically and a disillusioned Jodorowsky retired to Paris.

His career never really came back to full-throttle. In 1980, Jodorowsky wrote and directed "Tusk", the tale of an elephant hunt, then went underground again until 1989, when he wrote and directed the Italian-made "Santa Sangria/Holy Blood", the story of a young serial killer (played by Jodorowsky's son Axel) redeemed through love.

Alejandro Jodorowsky movies, photos, movie ... - All Movie Guide Keith Phipps from All Movie Guide

Jodorowsky - ClubCultura official website (Spanish)

Unofficial biography of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Mundo Andino

Alejandro Jodorowsky Great Director profile - Senses of Cinema David Church, February 13, 2007

The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo

The Symbol Grows: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Alejandro Jodorowsky - Unseen Dune Dune Behind the Scenes

Alejandro Jodorowsky | Underground Film Guide

Jodorowsky publications in English

Jodo Universe: Inside the Esoteric Mind of Alejandro Jodorowsky Shana Ting Lipton from Res magazine (Undated)

"Cannes Q. and A.: Driving in a Noir L.A." Dennis Lim from The New York Times, May 22, 2011

Cannes 2013: Chile's onetime cult king still the wizard of weird Dennis Lim from The LA Times, May 16, 2013, also seen here: Dennis Lim

TSPDT - Alejandro Jodorowsky

1979 Penthouse Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky - Your Brain's ... Rick Kleiner interview from Penthouse magazine in 1979, republished at Your Brain’s Black Box, October 24, 2010

Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky | Interviews | Roger Ebert May 22, 1988

Alejandro Jodorowsky Interview - Rebel Without a Cause December 28, 2006

Fortean Times Interview (2007) Mark Pilkington interview from The Fortean Times, July 2007

Bright Lights Film Journal :: The Mole Man: Interview with Alejandro ... Damien Love interview, August 2008

INTERVIEW: ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY « Spectacular Optical Dejan Ognjanovic interview, May 1, 2011

An Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky | Film Comment | Film ... Margaret Barton-Fumo interview from Film Comment, October 31, 2012

501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers

The Wild Bunch... 50 of the Movies' Maddest Visionaries

Alejandro Jodorowsky - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

EL TOPO

Mexico (125 mi) 1970

Time Out Ben Walters

When it first arrived in London three decades ago, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘El Topo’ had already established a formidable reputation as the seminal midnight movie, and perhaps even a metaphysical masterpiece. I’m not sure about that, but, released in a digitally restored edition, it remains an aesthetically intoxicating trip. Taking its cue from spaghetti westerns, it stars the director as an avenger in black, initially accompanied by a naked young boy before he takes on a series of wilderness gurus and endures spiritual meltdown, apparent death and regeneration a generation on as a leader of freaks. Inventively composed, beautifully photographed and boasting lakes of blood, shoe fetish action, mystical iconography and dwarf pantomime – often in the same scene – it’s by turns mesmerising, grotesque, surreal, satirical, rousing and impenetrable. One of the original publicity taglines had it about right: ‘What it all means isn’t exactly clear, but you won’t forget it.’

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]

From its John Lennon-approved, nearly fanatical following in the '70s during midnight screenings to its various bootlegged incarnations and forever-announced, never-materialized sequels (at one point starring Marilyn Manson), Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo remains an enduring cult-film experience. Its countless visions, fervid enough to burn in the memory even when not making a lick of sense, suggest a solitary get-out-of-my-system salvo, with the Chilean-born director frantically cramming everything that shaped his churning psyche into his single stab at cinema. Yet reckless phantasmagoria was always Jodorowsky's style: The previous Fando y Lis had already laid out joyously saturated obscurantism as the method to his madness, just as The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre later on proved that there was plenty more where that came from. The filmmaker's absurdly sundry background—poet, playwright, cartoonist, circus performer—unmistakably colors the wanton fertility of his work; surely not that much weed was needed during the film's original Elgin Theater run for viewers to undergo personal epiphanies, particularly since virtually every shot seems to traffic in multiple meanings.

Accordingly, El Topo opens with a passage that could be an existential journey for one's soul or a spoof of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western: The bearded, leather-clad gunfighter El Topo (Jodorowsky himself) and his young son (Brontis Jodorowsky) ride through the desert and into a hamlet of bloodily decimated people and animals. From then on, it's a winding, spiraling road of evil bandits, mystical foes, and whip-cracking dykes, spiked with indelible, inexplicable imagery. The hairy outlaws fondle and kiss their dainty Franciscan prisoners, and at one point a monk is arranged in angelic close-up with blood for lipstick; the woman El Topo has rescued (Mara Lorenzio) hugs a cock-shaped bolder amid the unending dunes, and water promptly ejaculates from it; a community of rabbits dies off from the hero's vengeful vibe, while the old mother of one of the Masters of the Desert cries distorted bird chirps as she steps on broken glass. Bullets provide the stigmata for the hero's nutty crucifixion midway through, and the movie's second half finds El Topo as a bald-headed Holy Fool, reborn in a cave full of extras from Tod Browning's Freaks before emerging into the most corrosive send-up of the American western since Jean-Luc Godard's Wind From the East, a hilariously decadent frontier Sodom where Russian roulette is played in church for "miracles."

With its druggy wanderings and inscrutable reveries, El Topo would be part of the revolutionary, post-'60s movement of Glauber Rocha's Antonio das Mortes and Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie if its private mythology didn't belong so obviously to its maker's acid subconscious. "I am God," El Topo at one point intones, and Jodorowsky completely means it: Playing deity in front of and behind the camera, the director uses film as a direct pipe into his own mind, and the bursting valise of ideas, images, and sounds that results is a veritable blur of ridiculous and sublime (and ridiculous-sublime) moments that defy ordinary readings while inviting (demanding, really) audience involvement via active interpretation. Whether one takes it as a staggeringly visionary work or a sadistic circus procession making an opportunistic grab for every artistic base (Buñuel and Zen, Eisenstein and pantomime, Antonin Artaud and Russ Meyer), there is no denying the immersive being of the film. Scarcely less than 2001, El Topo is designed to exist as much on the big screen as within the mind of the viewer, where it can live or die according to whether it connects personally. It is no accident that the hero's trajectory, mirroring the viewer's, leads equally to enlightenment and to the apocalypse.

El Topo | Movie Review | Flipside Movie Emporium Jeremiah Kipp

The surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky created his own midnight cult version of the spaghetti western which, once seen, is not easily forgotten. Some of his macabre and mystical images linger, both fascinating and strange.

An armless man carries a human torso on his back. Together they make a bodyguard to a glazed hermetic gunslinger who cannot be killed by bullets to the chest.

A gunslinger fires shots into the sand, which sprout an oasis. After bathing with his woman, he awakens buried under the dirt.

The fallen wanderer, shot dead with bullets, is dragged away by a parade of freaks, little people, cripples and lepers who live underground in the vast desert.

Werner Herzog once said that we are hungry for images, and if we don't have them we will die. Such is the urgency of Jodorowsky's masterpiece, which delights in showing sights and sounds outside the realm of ordinary film criticism.

While El Topo does follow a plot which is fairly coherent, the fascination with the movie is its stream-of-consciousness approach to the hero's episodic encounters, one more amazing than the next.

Prologue

A bearded gunfighter dressed entirely in black, the deadly El Topo (Jodorowsky), rides through the desert with his naked young son (played by his own child) slaying Mexican bandits who have raped and pillaged an unsuspecting village. When comforting a survivor, he hands his pistol to the boy and has him put the bloody man out of his misery. "Now you are a man."

We quickly learn that the world of El Topo is not the same territory as Sergio Leone or Clint Eastwood when the banditos are discovered having their way with nude female mannequins, dancing with each other and indulging in revolting shoe fetishes. El Topo proceeds to gun them all down, then castrates their general. Vivid red pools of blood are the only colors in this arid desert.

After this storm of violence, the story takes a turn when El Topo rescues a beautiful woman named Mara (Mara Lorenzio) who goads him to venture into the wasteland and duel the Four Master Gunmen of the Desert. She wants him to be the best, and would hate him if he lost! Casually abandoning his child in the care of a coven of kindly monks, the gunslinger and his woman begin their adventure.

The Magic Journey

As El Topo faces each of the four masters of the desert, he comes face to face with his own empty soul. Each of the confrontations represents a crisis, whether it be in the form of striving for perfection, moral balance or inner peace. These Eastern philosophies seemingly represent Jodorowsky's own ideas.

It all sounds very existential and heady until it is put into the context of a metaphysical gunfight. Remember, Jodorowsky has also created several comic books and graphic novels, and has a taste for the fanciful, theatrical and colorful. Each of the masters is fascinating in his own way, differing in appearance from a Christlike bearded figure wearing only a small tunic to one who resembles a large Russian peasant who twists fragile cords into miniature pyramids.

Each of them exist miles apart from the normal rules of gunfighting. They're fascinating and seemingly unstoppable, either impervious to bullets or too swift for El Topo. Whether or not you're fascinated by the surreal representation of each "idea", all audiences I've seen this film are curious to discover how these giants shall be bested by the ordinary man.

"I don't care how you win! Cheat!" shrieks Mara, who is growing bored with El Topo and turns her gaze toward a new companion they encounter in the desert, a mysterious Woman in Black (Paula Romo). One by one, El Topo attempts to trick them with varying levels of success. How do you beat the unstoppable? Jodorowsky takes it one level deeper by asking the larger question, why would you want to?

The final master is an old, wizened, almost naked man who does not even have a home. He merely resides near a long pole in the sand. Having traded in his pistol for a butterfly net, he refuses to fight El Topo but merely deflects the bullets. "Why do you want to fight me?" the old master laughs. "I have nothing to take!"

"Your life," snarls El Topo. "I could have taken your life."

After making a shattering discovery, El Topo charges out of the desert having accomplished either all or nothing of what he set out to do. I leave that to the viewer to determine, but it is here that the tale takes an abrupt and unexpected shift into territory completely alien to the spaghetti western and into the realm of religious symbolism. El Topo bleeds the Stigmata and, without warning, begins his new adventure.

The Mole

El Topo means "The Mole", which our hero undoubtedly becomes when he reawakens in a cave populated by life's undesirables an indeterminate amount of time later in his life. These deformed creatures, some man-made and others freaks of nature, treat him as though he were a God. With a freshly shaven head and face, El Topo becomes something of a monk who vows, perhaps in atonement, to go into town and find enough money to dig them a tunnel and return to mankind.

El Topo falls in love with a young woman with malformed arms, showering her with acts of kindness. There are no tests, as there were before. When they venture into the town and attempt to create some small life together, the priest seems to recognize him. The child he abandoned from long ago, now a grown man (Robert John) has returned to haunt him.

This second half of the film is entirely different from the first, seeming to be a religious parable as envisioned by Tod Browning. El Topo, so selfish at the start of the film, now sacrifices almost everything for the good of those who cannot see the sun. Jodorowsky's story slowly builds toward a conclusion of tragedy, pain and bloodshed, since his hero may have hung up his pistols for good but cannot escape his own karma.

Call it what you will -- violent and unsettling, elusive and allegorical. It's a film which must be experienced in order to understand, since the power of El Topo stems from its bizarre metaphoric images and resonant philosophical leanings. It may defy explanation, rationalization or even the viewer's understanding, but it remains vivid and visceral and strange. It's safe to say that you've never truly seen any movie quite like this one.

It would be frustrating to attempt a critical reading of the plot, since his film is more about becoming swept up in the sheer flow of bloodshed and retribution. Each image, while clearly showing the lack of a substantial budget, retains a strong impact because of the startling attention to detail and composition, the resonance of Jodorowsky's world, which feels fully realized through in its evasiveness.

If that sounds like an oxymoron, I suppose that may happen when you're dealing with cinema as a labyrinthine hall of mirrors.

El Topo - Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert, Fall 2006

notcoming.com | El Topo - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Rumsey Taylor

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El Topo - The Science-Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review. Richard Scheib

EL TOPO - Ruthless Reviews Matt Cale

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El Topo B-Movie Review - Badmovies.org Andrew Borntreger

Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]

El Topo (1970) Movie Review from Eye for Film Anton Bitel

Slant Magazine DVD [Jeremiah Kipp]

El Topo DVD Review | Digital Retribution Mr. Intolerance

The QNetwork [James Kendrick]

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El Topo (1970) - Movie Gurus - The Movie Review Community Bill King

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Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

The Spinning Image Pablo Vargas

Scopophilia: Movies of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]

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Real and Surreal a potload of photos

TV Guide

El Topo | Movie review - Time Out Joshua Rothkopf

El Topo | Film | The Guardian Andrew Pulver

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Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] January 1972

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] October 2007

Movie Review - - El Topo' Emerges:Jodorowsky's Feature Begins ... Roger Greenspun from The New York Times, also seen here: El Topo - The New York Times and here: New York Times

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El Topo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (La montaña sagrada)

Mexico USA (114 mi) 1973 ‘Scope

The Holy Mountain | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Alejandro Jodorowsky's big-budget 1973 follow-up to El Topo, again starring himself, is a lot more imaginative and watchable, though no less highfalutin. More overtly religious and New Agey than Jodorowsky's other pictures, it describes a spiritual quest and slings in outrageous shocks at every opportunity, yielding many eyefuls and some occasional food for thought. On the whole, enjoyable nonsense.

Time Out

Having distributed El Topo to cult success in the United States, former Beatles lawyer Allen Klein co-produced Jodorowsky's more lavishly funded follow-up, in which the Chilean maverick unleashes wave after wave of religious symbolism, would-be spiritual gobbledygook and violently surreal imagery (memorably, small birds emerging from gunshot wounds). The connecting narrative, broadly, involves a Christ figure seeking enlightenment under the tutelage of 'The Alchemist' (Jodorowsky himself, in flowing robes and very tall hat), as a group of astrologically significant individuals set out to scale the legendary Holy Mountain and replace the all-powerful beings residing on its peak. With Jodorowsky's meaning somewhat opaque, it's slightly tedious going, but you certainly get plenty to look at, what with costumed frogs and lizards re-enacting the conquest of Mexico, the plucky armless dwarf, and (don't snigger) the scene where the protagonist has his excreta distilled while a naked woman plays cello and a pelican lurks portentously in the background. We will not see its like again.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The Old and New Testament scrambled as a most sustained 'shroom hallucination, one sight at a time out of Alejandro Jodorowsky's bottomless tank. The Thief (Horácio Salinas) lies with flies on his face, then awakens tied to a cross; he tokes reefers and heads down to the local Sodom, bovine carcasses are crucified while public massacres are applauded, it is a bestial world out there. The conquest of the New World is enacted by the Great Toad & Chameleon Circus, obese centurions hawk religious paraphernalia on the streets; the protagonist's likeness to Jesus is noted by a gang of Mary Magdalenes (plus a chimp), and also by idol makers, who use his form to churn out a roomful of Christ effigies -- dialogue is garbled to stay out of the way of the acid images, but the Thief's scream is clear enough to impel the story toward its next stage. Jodorowsky is at the center of the apparitions, a ringmaster-guru (or, why not, God) up in the tower where the hero gets a sauna and, as an epiphany and Zen prank, witnesses his shit turn to gold. The tower, surveyed from an overhead geometric angle, is a Dali museum, the picture is a scattered deck of tarot cards, and Jodorowsky's send-up of group therapy is a procession of guffawing symbols not easily forgotten: an armless dwarf in military helmet kicks a mannequin, a hippie-chick strokes HAL's crank until the computer ejaculates a bouncing robot-baby, birds flutter out of bullet wounds, et al. The Thief and a batch of disciples (each with their own wacky digression) yearn for immortality, so Master Jodorowsky leads them to the Holy Mountain, a place for truth amid ersatz idols, body parts, selves. Or is it? The El Topo maestro has an impish view of enlightenment, and, after stringing the characters through a Mt. Everest of obscurantism, capriciously trades "you will know nothingness, it's the only reality" for "search eternity through love." The shaggy meta-joke at the end crumbles his own portentous edifice, illuminates the miracles of his camera, and sends a laugh from The Last Movie rippling to A Taste of Cherry. With Zamira Saunders, Juan Ferrara, and Valerie Jodorowsky.

Screening Notes: Unpacking Jodorowsky's Climb Up The Holy Mountain Wesley

"The skill of the spectator determines the machine's ability to reach a climax."

The Holy Mountain is truly unlike anything I've ever seen. It asks a lot of the audience both in terms of doing their own interpretative work and putting up with a lot of grotesque imagery in hopes of a payoff that may never come. That said, it's clear Jodorowsky put more work into it than most viewers ever will: every scene is meticulously constructed on a massive scale.

Here's a taste: There's a scene where an army of lizards fights an army of frogs, and each little creature has its own little costume, and that's just a couple minutes of the film. There's a point where we leave Earth to visit seven different planets, each with their own distinct costume and set design (about 20 minutes). There's enough blood and feces and urine to saturate an entire franchise of movies. But it's even more inconceivable when you take into consideration the fact that the movie was made for $750,000 (~$3 million today; 1% of the budget for Avengers: Age of Ultron or less than a quarter of the budget for Under the Skin).

This visual imagery is used to create an enigmatic set of symbols which enriches the already ambiguous and cerebral narrative. It's easy to dismiss stuff like this as drug-fueled absurdist nonsense on the one hand or to take it too seriously as super meaningful symbolism on the other, when in reality it's a tonal mix of the serious and the comical. Jodorowsky seems to ask us to interpret just about every image he offers us, but at the same time many of these images are meant to be laughed at or taken with a hint of satire.

"You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold."

If The Holy Mountain is still as dense and impenetrable after repeat viewings, it is at least more comprehensible in simple structural terms. Here’s what I see as this nutty film's version of basic three act structure:

Act 1: The Thief explores the world. This opening section starts with his (messy) birth and allows us to meet our protagonist and see what kind of a person he is (as a standard 1st act would). It also allows Jodorowsky to paint his vision of society, so this is where the bulk of his cultural/political critique comes in (images of fascism, theocracy, intolerance, etc.). This is where we see the need for enlightenment both in the character of the Thief and in the world at large.

Act 2: The Thief is prepared for his journey. This begins when he climbs and enters the mysterious obelisk, a decision he undertakes hoping to acquire gold (the hook comes down with a bag of gold). Here the Thief is ceremoniously cleansed (poop + sweat = gold) and meets the disciples who will accompany him on his quest (the "Fellowship of the Ring" scenes). Jodorowsky uses this section of the story to depict a variety of archetypal identities in need of enlightenment (the Thief and his disciples).

Act 3: The Thief climbs the Holy Mountain. After everyone is prepared to leave, the final trek to enlightenment is undertaken. There are several obstacles on the way (the temptation of the Pantheon Bar, the fear of death or sexual violence, etc.) and these represent Jodorowsky's idea of the things that hold people back from attaining enlightenment and the necessary path to overcoming them.

What's really remarkable about the film's structure is that each of these acts has their own (sub)structure, their own miniature narrative arcs that contribute even more the the flow of the film. In act 1, the Thief is gradually brought into temptation; in act 2, he and his party are gradually cleansed; and in act 2, they gradually make progress toward enlightenment. The film is not only a masterclass of absurd/surreal symbolism, it's also a masterclass of traditional narrative storytelling (a necessity for its type of story or it would just devolve into total nonsense).

So what story does the film use this structure to tell? For me, the message of The Holy Mountain can be boiled down to what we see in the opening sequences of the film: the alchemist takes two women that look like Marilyn Monroe (an icon of popular culture as well as of both commercial and sexual excess) and strips them of their physical adornments. He removes their makeup and their clothing and shaves their heads. They are forced to put away worldly things, as if this gesture will take them closer to self-actualization.

This sort of symbolic disrobing of the ego (the de-centering of the self) is also the journey of the central characters. First we see the Thief in the decadence of self-obsessed society, where people decorate themselves with all sort of grotesque ornamentation (e.g. skinned and disemboweled dogs) and construct around them a society based on artifice—like the planets of the disciples, each of which is structured around some perversion (sex, art, war, etc.). Then the alchemist has them throw away their money and literally abandon their self-image (they burn wax images of themselves). Eventually they have to face their fears, and through this final abandonment of their attachment to their physical being (most of their fears are of death or other personal violation), they are supposed to achieve enlightenment.

"Our bees make honey, but your flies make shit."

The central question for me, however, is whether we should take the film's presentation of enlightenment and self-actualization seriously. As I mentioned above, the film’s symbolic richness should not be mistaken for self-seriousness, and a lot of the imagery is meant to inspire laughter. The one thing that can be said with certainty about the film is that it is absurdist, and because of that it's easy to read not as a tale of the need for socio-cultural enlightenment, but a tale of the absurdity of socio-cultural enlightenment narratives. Completely drawing out this reading of the film requires a discussion of the ending, so spoilers from here onward.

If we look just at the middle of the film, it’s not hard to see why Jodorowsky might be trying to make fun of stories about self-actualization. There’s a natural comedy inherent in the idea of (for example) a man who looks like Jesus pooping in a glass jar and then turning that poop into gold by watering it with his sweat, and this makes us laugh at the idea of transcendence through bowel movement. Furthermore, when the alchemist and his disciples travel to the Pantheon Bar at the start of the third act, we’re shown a wide variety of examples of other false enlightenment narratives (the man who can go anywhere but can only move horizontally, the man who consumes all kinds of colorful mind-altering drugs, etc.).

The ending is also a key element in this reading (*this is your last spoiler alert*). After the fellowship reaches the top of the mountain and discovers that the immortals they sought were merely puppets, the alchemist breaks the fourth wall with this famous quote:

”We began in a fairytale and we came to life, but is this life reality? No. It is a film. Zoom back camera. We are images, dreams, photographs. We must not stay here. Prisoners! We shall break the illusion. This is magic! Goodbye to the Holy Mountain. Real life awaits us.”

Here the alchemist (played by Jodorowsky himself) seems to indict the entire film as unreal, imaginary, illusory. The characters are not real people, and they have not really achieved enlightenment; the only way to do this is to leave the film, to return to “real life”.

But if it were the case that the whole film was meaningless because of its status as merely “dreams” or “photographs” then there would be no point to watching it. In this reading it’s at best absurdity for absurdity’s sake and at worst a hypocritical cinematic experience which is ethically opposed to the cinematic experience. But there’s another reading available from these same elements.

If the first half of the film depicts the world’s need for enlightenment (the fascist & religious symbolism of the Thief’s world and the various other worlds of his disciples) and the second half depicts the process of that enlightenment (abandoning their worldly possessions and their self-images, facing their fears), then the ending simply serves as a reminder that this enlightenment, this self-actualization, must not stay within the movie and must return to the real world. We need to take the lessons we learn in the theater and apply them to our lives in reality.

Film must not remain self-contained or it devolves into mere escapism. As Wittgentein would have it, film must be a ladder that we throw away after climbing up on it (of course, the climb is never really complete, and we must continually seek out new ladders that must also be subsequently abandoned). In this sense, The Holy Mountain is the ultimate political film: it gives us its message (the necessity of the de-centered self) without allowing us to remain in the artificial world of the film. Instead of the empty “it was all a dream” twist, Jodorowsky tells us it was only a dream if we let it stay that way.

What Even Happened?

"The grave recieves you with love. Surrender yourself to the Earth. Return what was loaned to you. Give up your pleasure, your pain, your friends, your lovers, your life, your past, what you desire. You will know nothingness, it is the only reality. Don't be afraid, it's so easy to give. You're not alone, you have a grave. It was your first mother. The grave is the door to your rebirth. Now you will surrender the faithful animal you once called your body. Don't try to keep it; remember, it was a loan. Surrended your legs, your sex, your hair, your brain, your all. You no longer want to possess, possession is the ultimate pain. The earth covers your body, she came to cover you with love, because she is your true flesh. Now you are an open heart, open to receive your true essence your ultimate perfection. Your new body, which is the universe, the work of god. You will be born again, you will be real. you will be your own father, your own mother, your own child, your own perfection. Open your eyes, you are the earth, you are the green, you are the blue, you are the Aleph, you are the essence. Look at the flower, look at the flower, for the first time look at the flowers."

Electric Sheep Magazine Jeff Hilson

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

83. THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973) | 366 Weird Movies G. Smalley

outlawvern.com [Vern]

Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]

Cinemattraction.com [Mia Ferm]

No Ripcord [George Booker]

notcoming.com | The Holy Mountain - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Rumsey Taylor

Clayholio Watches Movies [Clayton Hollifield]

Mondo Digital

The Holy Mountain takes viewers on the freakiest of freaky journeys ... Scott Tobias from The Onion A.V. Club

The Holy Mountain (1973) Movie Review from Eye for Film Anton Bitel

DVD Verdict - The Films Of Alejandro Jodorowsky [Bill Gibron]

DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson] - The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky also seen here: Holy Mountain, The (1974) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com

Slant Magazine DVD [Jeremiah Kipp] The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky

VideoVista [Jim Steel] The Jodorowsky Collection

DVD Drive-In The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky

Digital Retribution Robert Winter, The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin]

DVD Savant Blu-ray Reviews: El Topo and The Holy Mountain Glenn Erickson

The QNetwork [James Kendrick] Blu-Ray

Rock! Shock! Pop! [Todd Jordan] Blu-Ray

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Daryl Loomis]

The Holy Mountain (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Ian Jane

Real Movie News - Blu-ray [Ryan Russell Izay]

El Topo: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Digital Bits Todd Doogan, The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Blu-Ray

Mind Blown: The Holy Mountain - The Review Is Not The Messiah, It's ... Pete Trbovichfrom Mind- -Blown

ReelTalk [Donald Levit]

Scopophilia:Movies of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]

Holy Mountain, The Review (1973) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

Film Review: The Holy Mountain (1973) - Horrornews.net

Kanye's Holy Mountain: The Influence of Alejandro Jodorowsky on the ... Ross Scarano from Complex

film110 / Occult Symbolism in The Holy Mountain Air Dupaix

eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver

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The Lumière Reader (capsule) Mubarak Ali

TV Guide

The Holy Mountain | Movie review - Time Out David Fear

Holy Mountain - Movie - Review - The New York Times Matt Zoller Seitz, also seen here: New York Times

DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]

DVDBeaver - Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

The Holy Mountain (1973 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE DANCE OF REALITY (La danza de la realidad)

France (130 mi) 2013

Cannes 2013: La Danza de la Realidad (The Dance Of Reality) - first look review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2013

The extinct volcano of underground cinema has burst into life once again — with a bizarre, chaotic and startling film; there are some longueurs and gimmicks, but The Dance of Reality is an unexpectedly touching and personal work. At the age of 84, and over 20 years since his last movie, Alejandro Jodorowsky has returned to his hometown of Tocopilla in the Chilean desert to create a kind of magic-realist memoir of his father, Jaime Jodorowsky, a fierce Communist whose anger at the world — at his son — was redoubled by the anti-Semitism the family faced.

Of course, the entire story is swathed in surreal mythology, dream logic and instant day-glo legend, resmembling Fellini, Tod Browning, Emir Kusturica, and many more. You can't be sure how to extract conventional autobiography from this. Despite the title, there is more "dance" than "reality" — and that is the point. Or part of the point. For the first time, Jodorowsky is coming close to telling us how personal evasiveness has governed his film-making style; his flights of fancy are flights of pain, flights from childhood and flights from reality. And now he is using his transformative style to come to terms with and change the past and to confer on his father some of the heroism that he never attained in real life.

As a child, young Alejandro is played by Jeremias Herskowits, and as an old man by the director himself, who cuts a distinguished, Haneke-like figure with his white hair and trimmed beard. His father Jaime is played by the director's son Brontis Jodorowsky, which lends the project an intriguingly Freudian flavour. (Until this moment, I thought the scene in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom in which the director dropped creepy-crawlies on his son's pillow was the roughest father-son moment in cinema. But here Jodorowsky films a scene in which Jaime is tortured by the state police, and a naked Brontis Jodorowsky has electrodes attached to his testicles in full camera view. Ouch.)

Alejandro's mother Sara (Pamela Flores) is a buxom woman of great emotional yearning who sings her lines like opera. She mollycoddles and indulges her boy, to the fury of Jaime, paterfamilias and tyrant, who wants him to be a real man and an indestructible warrior of the international Stalinist Left. So he toughens the boy by tickling him with a feather and demanding that he doesn't laugh — and also insisting he has no anaesthetic at the dentist. Jaime is deeply ashamed when young Alejandro faints with horror at the funeral parade of a fireman who has been burned to death — Jodorowsky brilliantly imagines a macabre fantasy of Alejandro lying next to the charred corpse. Finally Jaime leaves, on a mission to assassinate the hated Chilean general Ibanez, a mission which ends in grotesque failure, but leads to an epiphany.

It is all intensely weird but The Dance Of Reality did make me laugh out loud at many moments, especially when Ibanez comes to inspect a novelty dog competition: "I don't want to live in a world of dressed-up dogs," moans one dissident.

The film is oddly moving for what it conceals, or accidentally reveals: the director's very real, understandable emotions of pain and regret on the subject of his father, and how these emotions are being managed and contained with surrealist mythologising. In this movie, the director is bidding farewell to his past, and to his childhood, and perhaps to the world. It is an arresting spectacle.

The Dance Of Reality Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily

Everything you wanted to know about Alejandro Jodorowsky but never imagined asking can be found in The Dance Of Reality (La Danza de la Realidad), a joyously idiosyncratic exercise in imagined autobiography that revisits defining moments from his childhood in 1930s Chile. The first feature in almost quarter of a century from the veteran director of El Topo and Santa Sangre is a surprisingly witty, accessible magical mystery tour through his past that has cult potential in every baroque, eye-popping frame.

It acts as both a summation of many things that have fascinated him (religion, mysticism, poetry, philosophy) and as a means of explaining their personal roots. Jodorowsky’s return should be enough to attract arthouse distributors to a film with more theatrical appeal than they might have feared, especially as it is frequently funny and usually intentionally. Jodorowsky has invented a therapy called “psychomagic” involving acts to ” heal family-related childhood psychological problems”.

The film may be his biggest healing act as it imagines the past as it was but with the addition of Jodorowsky on hand to offer some comfort and reassurance to his younger alter ago. It is also a family affair with his son Brontis on manic form playing Jodorowsky’s father Jaime.

The Jodorowsky childhood in Tocopilla appears to have been manufactured by a combination of Fellini and Monty Python. A dwarf appears in a succession of lurid costumes trying to drum up business outside his father’s store, limbless drunkards lie around the city centre looking for a fight and circus performers are everywhere. You almost want the Spanish Inquisition to appear but maybe nobody expects them.

The Python connection is even more apparent given that Brontis Jodorowsky bears a striking similarity to the young Terry Gilliam as Jaime, a Stalin-loving Communist who measures his son’s masculinity by the amount of pain he can withstand. His mother Sara (Pamela Flores) is a large-breasted lady who sings every line of dialogue with the passion of a great opera diva. In life, she dreamed of being a singer but never was.

In the film, she never stops singing and that is where Jodorowsky has put his imagination into play as he moulds and shapes true events into a more favourable light.

The young Alejandro (Jeremias Herkovits) has the flowing golden curls of a Mary Pickford, a boundless amount of compassion and a sense of being apart from the crowd that wins him no friends among his peers. His determination to win his father’s approval sees his locks shorn and his mettle tested in many ways as he is brutally told: ” God does not exist. You die and you rot”.

The film shifts in the second hour to focus more on the father’s spiritual and political journey towards enlightenment. A kaleidoscopic, sometimes chaotic torrent of striking images, comic exuberance and philosophical musing, The Dream Of Reality is never dull and could attract new converts to Jodorowsky’s world as well as the old faithfuls.

“Jodorowsky's Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was Andrew O’Hehir at Cannes from May 19, 2013

Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE

Daily | Cannes 2013 | THE DANCE OF REALITY and JODOROWSKY’S DUNE David Hudson at Fandor, May 18, 2013

The Dance of Reality: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Dalton

Jodorowsky's Dune: Cannes Review Stephen Dalton at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter

'The Dance of Reality' Review: Alejandro Jodorowsky's Welcome ... Scott Foundas at Cannes from Variety, also seen here: Scott Foundas

Peter Debruge Variety

Cannes 2013: Chile's onetime cult king still the wizard of weird Dennis Lim from The LA Times, May 16, 2013, also seen here: Dennis Lim

Cannes reviews: Alejandro Jodorowsky returns with "The Dance of . Ben Kenigsberg at Cannes from The Ebert blog

Joffé, Roland

THE MISSION

Great Britain (126 mi) 1986 ‘Scope

Time Out

In the 18th century, Spain and Portugal were at each other's throats over rights to territory in South America. Neither side suffered a great deal, the real victim being the native Indians. Here their only protection comes in the form of a Jesuit priest intent on giving God to the jungle (Irons), and a slave trader warring with the Jesuits who later joins their order (De Niro). The theme of Robert Bolt's script is the conflict between compassion and politics, at its moral centre the powerful church official (McAnally, marvellous) sent by the King of Portugal to decide whether the Jesuit missions, and the native communities which surround them, should survive. Enacted against the stunning backdrop of the Amazon jungle, the action has a rousing, epic quality. What it doesn't have, however, is passion. The climax is brutal, De Niro and Irons are impressive as the opponents who become soul mates; yet The Mission manages to be both magnificent and curiously uninvolving, a buddy movie played in soutanes.

Washington Post [Rita Kempley]

"The Mission" effectively dramatizes yet another chapter in the ruthless European conquest of the Americas. It'll make you hate the whole of western civilization with every fiber of your being.

Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro costar in this sober movie directed by Roland Joffe of "The Killing Fields" and put together by a hard-working team of heavyweights. Unfortunately their presentation is as ponderous as it is powerful. Not to mention pious.

Nobody can look holier than Irons when he wants to, and he almost always does. "The Mission" finds this ascetic aptly cast as Father Gabriel, a Jesuit missionary come to convert the noble natives of 18th-century South America. And De Niro, the slave trader turned acolyte, is so absorbed in his role you fear his eyes will roll back in his head and he'll faint.

The two holy men, along with other Jesuits (including Father Daniel Berrigan in a cameo), establish the jungle Mission of San Carlos. And the Indians come under the protection of the Church, making violins and flutes and learning to sing as celestially as a choir of Roman castrati.

But the ways of God and man conflict, with the ratification of a treaty that cedes seven Spanish missions to the slave-trading Portuguese. Though told to abandon the natives, the Jesuits stay on. And Rodrigo, who will no longer kill even to eat, must choose between his vows and his sword. Gabriel prays.

Jesuits do not make good generals, but the war between the missions and the European artillery makes for engrossing cinema -- after a long, long wait. Despite its turbulent theme, "The Mission's" predominant tone is distanced. It's a studious history structured around the letters of a papal legate, well played by Irish actor Ray McAnally.

The Pope's representative, like an 18th-century George Shultz, is caught between personal conviction and political realism. Does he sacrifice the few missions here to preserve the Jesuit order then threatened by the European powerbrokers? The picture contrasts the smooth talk of the wig-wearing diplomats with the blood and bones and burning altars their diplomacy begets. In the end, neither might, nor martyrdom prevail. Only our own dark history.

"The Mission" is majestic, sometimes moving, sometimes mawkish. Should you choose to accept it, your religious tolerance will be tested. But there are rewards -- fascinating insights into the byzantine business of diplomacy and gorgeous photography of the roaring Iguazu Falls, an eden of fog and roaring water, and of the sleepy walled city of Cartagena.

Decent Films Guide - Faith on film Steven D. Greydanus, one of the 15 films listed in the category "Religion" on the Vatican film list

The Mission The Mission, Junipero Serra, and the politics of sainthood, by Mark I. Pinsky from Jump Cut

DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review) Nick Davis

DVD Verdict: - Special Edition Erick Harper

Fulvue Drive-in Nate Goss

Horror View Suspiriorium

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

Washington Post [Paul Attanasio]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Siskel & Ebert video

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

Joffé, Rowan

BRIGHTON ROCK B 85

Great Britain (111 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

Of course there’s a hell. —Pinkie Brown (Sam Riley)

A tense and brooding murder mystery that is drenched in the sordid business of the bleak British underworld, adapted from the Graham Greene novel, also a remake of John Boulting’s 1947 film by the same name which starred Richard Attenborough as the sociopathic killer Pinkie Brown. Updated to 1964, where in Brighton interestingly enough there are constant street riots breaking out between the Mods and the Rockers, motorcycles versus mopeds, where teenage fisticuffs provide a superficial layer of cover for the darker inferno festering below. From the outset, the film is dripping in moody atmosphere, where the turbulent ocean waters swirl below the high cliffs of town offering a darkly menacing indifference. In this foggy gloom, a lone man is surrounded by men carrying switchblades who mean to do business, leaving him heaped on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood. The entire story is something of an aftermath to this opening event, a Pandora's Box release of original sin where consequences ensue. Sam Riley from CONTROL (2007) plays Pinkie Brown, a moody, young, pale faced hood from the Brighton slums dressed in a dark trench coat tucked around his neck who vows revenge, convincing his fellow gang members who are itching to make somebody pay, where the bewildered killer is left alone to fend for himself frantically trying to hide among the crowds strolling along the Brighton Pier, which is a Coney Island style amusement park. In this sea of humanity Pinkie’s men close in on him, where he grabs the first girl he sees for protection, a young local waitress named Rose (Andrea Riseborough), where a photographer’s random snapshot of the happy couple, and a few significant onlookers, provides the needed diversion to make his escape, where underneath the pier he soon meets a bloody end.

Targeting the girl, as she has the photographer’s ticket, Pinkie decides to seduce Rose, steal the ticket, and obtain her silence, where her naiveté is reminiscent of the Sissy Spacek character in BADLANDS (1973), where the innocence associated with boredom, a life where nothing ever happens, is drawn to the allure of the quick decisiveness of a brutal murderer, especially when it’s presented as a form of therapeutic liberation for her. In her mind, wherever he goes, she will follow. This kind of near hypnotic hold over the girl may seem strange, especially as Pinkie has no apparent attributes and is simply a brute that mistreats her from the outset, but to her, he’s a man of action and authority. What she doesn’t see is his sinister side, as that expressionless look on his face matches his empty and heartless soul. What’s particularly interesting is that there are very few police in this film, as the film’s not about them. Instead it’s a dense portrait inside the mind of a remorseless psychopath as he attempts to build a name for himself in vicious gangland circles, boldly taking on the neighborhood boss (Andy Serkis). As his own gang’s doubt creeps in, as he’s really just a small-time hood up against more powerful forces, he develops a near maniacal death wish, where his lifestyle is at odds against his Catholic upbringing, where there appears to be no road to redemption, just a pathway to hell. Driven by the law where a wife cannot be made to testify against her husband, Pinkie convinces Rose to marry him, stealing her away from the protection of the church, leaving her in a moral quandary, where Pinkie is the dark protector of her lost soul.

Making matters more interesting is the smoldering presence of Helen Mirren as Ida, looking very much her age but given a hard edge and a certain earthy swagger, called “the tart who owns Snow’s cafeteria” by Pinkie, the café where Rose works, where the guy Pinkie killed under the pier was a friend of hers. Very much like an aging Grande Dame in a brothel protecting one of her girls, Ida attempts to protect Rose from falling under the influence of Pinkie, who she suspects is a murderer, playing on his own dubiously amoral turf, doing what she calls “women’s work,” which may as well be a knock down battle in hell for Rose’s soul. Unfortunately, Riley’s continually morose scowl never veers into psychopathic territory, where he could have had a gas playing to the character’s eccentricities, including a guilt-tinged Catholic soul still fighting for salvation, but instead Riley underplays the role as damaged goods, offering Rose little more than continual scorn and contempt, falling into a sinkhole of worthlessness and depravity that all but envelops him. Accentuating the state of unease is the offbeat music of Martin Phipps which adds an underlying Hitchcockian imbalance. Much of the film was actually shot on the seafront beaches of Eastbourne, where the nearby White Cliffs of Eastbourne resemble the White Cliffs of Dover. Gorgeously shot by John Mathieson, though unfortunately with the same Digital stock blown up on 35 mm film used by Michael Mann in PUBLIC ENEMIES (2009), which doesn’t capture the depth of the dark and seedy atmosphere where much of the noirish action takes place, and oversaturates close ups on faces, where viewers can see every pore and crevice, giving the screen a much more artificial texture. With a penetrating film examining the near absence of the human soul while utilizing real locations as impressively as this one does, the Digital cinema look can only be considered a major disappointment, as this film should be luminous.

IC Places [Chris Knipp]

In his new film of Graham Greene's 1938 crime novel Rowan Joffé deserves credit for creating a world that is both horrific and visually rich, drenched in grime and mold and blood, with occasional trips to a posh hotel or a gracious tearoom or glimpses of Victorian piers that are both dark and celebratory. For what happens within these settings obviously Greene has provided material with a non-stop intensity, the oppressiveness of a provincial gangland (the big boss is named Corleone) combined with the doomed drive of a young socioopath, Pinkie Brown, armed with a razor blade, a warped Catholic wanting to triumph or die. This film is a good watch for its atmospheric visuals, but a certain lack of neatness and drive undermine the momentum half way through, and the 111 minutes come to seem like ages. Something is wrong with editing here, but with writing too.

Brighton Rock David Denby from The New Yorker

Razors are still the weapon of choice in this new adaptation of Graham Greene’s superb crime novel from 1938. It’s an unnecessary movie; an excellent version came out in 1947, starring Richard Attenborough and directed by John Boulting, with an adaptation by Greene himself and Terence Rattigan. The writer-director Rowan Joffe has rather mysteriously updated the material to 1964, suggesting that Greene’s psychopathic, bloody-minded seventeen-year-old gangster, Pinkie (the severe-looking Sam Riley), has something to do with the riots of Mods and Rockers in Brighton at the time. The extreme innocence of Rose (Andrea Riseborough), the young girl whom Pinkie seduces in order to keep her quiet, is no longer very convincing, or even interesting. The movie’s strongest elements are the blustery and depressing atmosphere of the chilly seaside resort and the sheer actorly pleasure displayed by Helen Mirren, as an aging femme fatale who tries to protect Rose from her monster. With John Hurt and Philip Davis.

Brighton Rock – review Philip French from The Observer

Following Neil Jordan's The End of the Affair (1999) and Phillip Noyce's The Quiet American (2002), this is the third occasion in recent years that a film based on a major Graham Greene novel has been remade. The result is a bold, stylish failure. Published in 1938, Brighton Rock was Greene's first explicitly Catholic novel and he wrote it to bring back to the British novel "the religious sense" he thought had been missing since Henry James.

The book is about evil as embodied in and practised by teenage gangster Pinkie Brown, a guilt-ridden Catholic who commits a mysterious murder in Brighton and is pursued by blowsy, big-hearted Ida Arnold, whom Greene more or less despises as a mindless humanist unacquainted with notions of damnation. But Greene was also writing a racy, Americanised thriller, and only at the last moment did he decide not to label it as one of his "entertainments".

The book is deeply embedded in the culture, language and ethos of the 1930s, and the Boulting brothers' 1947 film (co-scripted by Greene and Terence Rattigan) kept it to that period, which wasn't difficult as there seemed little difference between prewar and postwar Britain. But Rowan Joffe has updated the film to 1964 Brighton and with relocation comes dislocation. The world of Pinkie's seedy gang, the Catholicism, and the background of clashes between mods on scooters and rockers on motorcycles fail to mesh or mingle in any satisfactory way. He has also made significant plot changes, some because of the time shift, others in the interest of tightening the narrative and the relationships between the characters. None of them is unintelligent but all are rather jarring for admirers of the novel. Interestingly, Joffe's ending is the one Greene wrote for the 1947 film.

The fast-moving, melodramatic result is not unenjoyable. Sam Riley is an effectively despicable Pinkie and Andrea Riseborough touchingly vulnerable as Rose, the fellow working-class Catholic he lures into his vicious scheme. Seeing the movie in the same week as Boardwalk Empire, I was struck by strong resemblances between Greene's novel and Scorsese's TV epic: the seaside resort setting, a crime boss ensconced in a luxury hotel, the mob taking over from small-time criminals. The young Al Capone turns up in the Scorsese film, and one recalls that back in 1947 Brighton Rock was released in the States as Young Scarface.

Brighton Rock Dave Calhoun from Time Out London

It’s easy to get dewy-eyed over a great old novel and film like ‘Brighton Rock’ and shriek when you hear that a young pretender is remaking it and – sacre bleu! – setting it in another period. What Rowan Joffe has done with this bold and intelligent, if flawed and maybe a little doomed (like Pinkie’s poor old Rose), remake is to go back to both the 1938 book and 1947 noir and transfer many of their elements from Brighton in the 1930s to the same town in 1964. The original film starred Richard Attenborough as amoral seaside crim Pinkie Brown, and here a brooding Sam Riley (Ian Curtis in ‘Control’) takes the lead, only now mods and rockers are hassling the deckchair crowd by fighting on the seafront and the death penalty has just one year left to run it course.

Joffe’s moving of the story to 1964 is a fair enough cry for originality on his part, but it’s also a tacit admission that you can’t move Greene’s story any further forward in time without changing it radically. Pinkie is a murderer whose Catholic faith and fear of hell and damnation make him dread the death penalty. He courts and marries naive local waitress Rose (an excellent Andrea Riseborough), an accidental witness to his crime, simply so she can’t testify against him in court. All of this – the Catholic guilt, the dread of capital punishment, the innocence of Rose – wouldn’t play well on the other side of the 1960s youth revolution.

There’s a lot of smart thinking behind this film, but I’m not convinced the 1964 setting is entirely successful. At its worst, it feels like a superficial add-on – a chance for Riley to cruise along the seafront on a moped. There’s also the sense of a 1930s story playing out against a 1960s background: Pinkie’s boss, Spicer, played entertainingly by Phil Davies, and his gang of bovver boys feel very pre-war. But maybe that’s the point: the 1960s were a turning point but not everyone was swept up in the revolution immediately.

The new setting works best for Rose, and the scene when she goes out and buys a trendy dress to match her new feeling of womanhood and impress her unimpressed new husband is very effective. If anyone is left at sea, it’s Riley; his Pinkie is charismatic, but a little one note. It’s a shame, too, that we don’t hear Pinkie’s reaction to all the mods-and-rockers action around him. Surely he has an opinion on this?

Joffe’s other big change is to focus more than the 1947 film on the ‘romance’ between Pinkie and new wife Rose and allow his story to amble down more by-ways, some of them involving hard-nosed Ida (Helen Mirren), recast as Rose’s boss at Snow’s cafeteria, but still Pinkie’s chief tormentor. The result of this welcome change in emphasis is that the noir momentum of the Boulting brothers’ movie is lost in favour of a more sensitive, inquiring take on real human relations. Some may find this new ‘Brighton Rock’ a slower, less energetic experience as a result, but at least there’s more room for Joffe to explore the dirty bedsits and towering cliffs of Brighton with some exquisite photography from John Mathieson and production design from James Merifield – even if, unlike the Boulting brothers, he shoots most of his film in nearby, better-preserved Eastbourne.

Brighton Rock: A masterpiece refashioned as turkey - Telegraph Simon Heffer from The Daily Telegraph, January 22, 2011

I was proceeding serenely up an escalator on the London Underground the other day when, were it not that I was being conveyed automatically, I would have been stopped in my tracks. Among the advertisements on the wall that I drifted past was one announcing a new film of Brighton Rock. One word, and one only, came into my mind: why?

It is a dangerous game to start naming the greatest British films ever made, but John Boulting’s 1947 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel is on the shortlist, and high up it. I cannot begin to say how many times I have seen it. There is nothing about it that is not perfect. Although a world war had intervened between Greene’s novel (published in 1938) and the film, the seediness of the Brighton in which Greene envisaged it is perfectly represented. It is completely authentic. The casting was sublime: Richard Attenborough (and God knows what he must think about the new version) as the twisted, screwed-up thug Pinkie, Hermione Baddeley excelling as his nemesis Ida, and Carol Marsh as an entirely credible Rose, Pinkie’s unfortunate girlfriend. Their performances were entirely convincing. The direction was immaculate, the photography understated, the whole exercise a masterpiece. So I ask again: why?

I have not seen the new film. It is not out until February 4, and no one has been kind enough to ask me to a preview. I have seen the trailer, which is conveniently available online. You may think badly of me for saying that I should not, in any case, be minded to go, any more than I would want to go to a performance of Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony (a work contemporary with Boulting’s film) that I knew would be played on the penny whistle by an orchestra of drunk penny-whistlers. Having read some of the reviews of the film on the internet (the main newspaper critics have yet to have the pleasure) I shall certainly have something better to do.

The film is what Hollywood types call the “directorial debut” of Rowan Joffe, son of the director Roland Joffé (the father has an accent; the son doesn’t). It has two great British thespians in it, Dame Helen Mirren and John Hurt. They may be having second thoughts. Here are some insights from the reviews: “Vacuous portentousness” (Front Row Films); “Dismal misfire… Joffe gets just about everything wrong” (Philip Concannon); “Helen Mirren… and John Hurt… phone in their performances” (Christine Estima); “You may wonder why Rowan Joffe chose this to be his first feature… having sat through it I am none the wiser” (Neil Sadler).

But the man who really didn’t like it was Matthew Thrift on the Cinephile website, who was cross that it was chosen as the “surprise” entry to be screened at the London Film Festival. “Its superficial British roots [were]… the only validation for screening a work of such staggering ineptitude,” he wrote. It was “the nadir of the 85 works I’ve seen at the LFF so far”. He denounced it as “this tonal and conceptual disaster” and “a particularly amateurish school play” with “characters defined by facile dialogue”. Like almost all the other critics, he attacked the score and the casting for good measure.

Brighton Rock' then and now Wally Hammond from Time Out London

Wally Hammond compares Rowan Joffe's new 'Brighton Rock' movie with the 1947 original and the source novel by Graham Greene.

Who would you rate as the greatest villain in British cinema? Christopher Lee’s count in ‘Dracula’? Alex in ‘A Clockwork Orange’? Begbie in ‘Trainspotting’? They’re all iconically creepy, but few compare with Richard Attenborough’s deadly duo: the serial killer John Christie in 1971’s ‘10 Rillington Place’ and the psychopathic razor-boy Pinkie Brown, who marauds 1930s Kemp Town in 1947’s ‘Brighton Rock’.

Well, good news: Pinkie’s back! Sam Riley plays the murderer in writer Rowan Joffe’s directing debut, an £8 million ‘remix’ of the classic noir tale, the ’40s version of which was adapted by Graham Greene and Terence Rattigan from Greene’s own 1938 novel. According to Riley, who is best known for playing Ian Curtis in ‘Control’, his Pinkie is more mean, violent, religiously confused and sexually anxious. Arguably, he’s prettier, too.

Directors as diverse as the Hughes brothers and Scorsese are said to have tried and failed to remake John Boulting’s walk with love and death through the ‘dark alleyways and festering slums’ of Greene’s pre-war Brighton. However, Joffe, the writer of ‘The American’ and ‘Last Resort’, is not the fool rushing in where angels fear to tread.

Widespread consensus says, probably rightly, that a contemporary version of Greene’s book wouldn’t work, not least because of Pinkie’s Catholic obsession with hell and the innocence of Pinkie’s waitress girlfriend Rose, whom he marries so that she can’t testify against him. But these days sex and violence are more palatable, and both were strong features of the novel which were down-played in the first film – albeit insufficiently to satisfy the US censors who delayed its release for four years.

Mindful of Philip Larkin’s dictum that ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963’, Joffe sets his version in the mid-1960s – in one scene Parka-ed, Vespa-ed Mods are seen fighting rockers across the Pier front in a re-enactment of the 1964 Brighton riots. There’s a touching – and symbolic – scene in which dowdy Rose dresses herself in a Mary Quant-style mini to impress Pinkie, following what has been a violent and unromantic baptism in marital sex. In 1964 the times were a-changing, but the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act of 1965 hadn’t yet been passed – so the threat of eternal hell still resonates powerfully with Pinkie.

By 1964 the modern woman hasn’t arrived, but she’s on her way. There are traces of her in Helen Mirren’s excellent, assertive, sexually confident Ida, with her bra showing through her blouse, who in this version is not a barfly gossip but the ‘tart that runs Snows’’, the silver-service cafeteria where Rose waits tables. ‘Run along, Phil!,’ Ida commands her bookie mate Mr Corkery (John Hurt), interrogating big boss Colleoni (Andy Serkis) in the intimidating glitz of the Cosmopolitan Hotel: ‘This is women’s work!’ She represents a sort of feminist take on the supposedly sexist writer’s novel.

Greene’s book took great interest in the milieu of his characters, an element Joffe is happy to exploit. Café-nostalgics will go a bundle on ‘Brighton Rock’: characters are always sipping cuppas on ’50s formica tabletops. The décor, set-design and (often Eastbourne-based) location work is one of the glories of this new ‘Brighton Rock’, cohabiting the old with the new. The talent cinematographer John Mathieson showed for desaturated seediness in ‘Love Is the Devil’ he brings to the peeling, rented rooms inhabited by Spicer (Phil Davis), Dallow (Nonso Anozie) and the other lowlife gang members over whom Pinkie has taken control. Interestingly, Nelson Place – in the book, the evil-nurturing, soon-to-be-pulled slum where Rose lives with the father who’s prepared to sell her for £150 – is now set-dressed as a warzone council block straight out of Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’.

So what is this new version? A Brit gangster flick? A hard-boiled period neo-noir? A psychological or detective thriller? An entertainment? There are elements of all four, but Joffe has suggested he is aiming for something more – romantic tragedy. He has taken the references to Rose’s sainthood at the end of Greene’s novel, the grandeur of her suffering, and chosen to flesh out her character. In that sense, this ‘Brighton Rock’ is Rose’s story, not Pinkie’s and that gives it a specific emotional charge. Andrea Riseborough gives it her all as Rose in a tough role: at first, she is hesitant and awkward, not innocent like Carol Marsh in the 1947 film, but as the film unfolds she achieves a notable pathos, if not quite the tragic grandeur Joffe is hoping for.

All in all, this new ‘Brighton Rock’ is a decent reimagining, lightened a little by some cameos (I cherish Andy Serkis’s Corleoni, spouting ‘restless youth: the ravaged and disrupted territory between the two eternities!’ as he spins a spoon in boredom), gentle anachronisms (Anozie’s Dallow uses the lingo of modern London) and casting liberties (Riley may be well preserved but, at 30, stripped of clothes, he doesn’t look 17). The film might not be an instant ‘classic’, but it’s an impressive – and surprisingly enjoyable – debut.

The New York Times > Books > 'Brighton Rock' Jane Spence Southron book review from The New York Times, June 26, 1938

Pier and loathing: Brighton Rock set report Craig McLean on the movie set from The Daily Telegraph, Jan 17, 2011

'Brighton Rock,' Film of Graham Greene Novel - Review - NYTimes ... Stephen Holden, August 25, 2011

floatationsuite [Sheila Seacroft]

Sight & Sound [Philip Kemp] February 2011

Cinephile [Matthew Thrift]

The Film Pilgrim [Ben Mahon]

Digital Fix Noel Megahey, also seen here: Brighton Rock | Film at The Digital Fix

Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]

Brighton Rock: A Satisfying Noir Melodrama That's Not as Good as the Book Dana Stevens from Slate

Slant Magazine [Bill Weber]

Thug Love Gets a Swinging '60s Makeover in - Village Voice Karina Longworth

Brighton Rock | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps

Flickering Myth [Roger Holland]

Talking Pictures [Jamie Garwood]

The Critical Movie Critics [Amy Bigmore]

Boxoffice Magazine [Pam Grady]

Digital Spy [Ben Rawson-Jones]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]

Little White Lies Magazine [Adam Woodward]

The Reel Bits [Sarah Ward and Richard Gray]

20/20 Filmsight [David O'Connell]

CultureCatch.com (Brandon Judell)

ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]

Brighton Rock - Daily Film Dose Blair Stewart

FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]

Screenjabber.com [Doug Cooper]

Best For Film Stephen Armson

The People's Movies [Goncalo Sousa]

Afrofilmviewer [Byron Pitt] The Synopsis is here

Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Louise Keller]

Obsessed With Film [Adam Rayner]

Showcase Movies [Nathan D'Rozario]

frontrowfilms

Mirren in Brighton Rock Anita Singh interviews the director from The Daily Telegraph, August 27, 2009

Director Rowan Joffe takes on a new 'Brighton Rock' Susan King interviews the director from The LA Times, August 26, 2011

Talk: Helen Mirren: The Reluctant Libertine Andrew Goldman interviews the actress from The New York Times, August 28, 2011

The Hollywood Reporter [Ray Bennett]

Variety [Justin Chang]

Brighton Rock – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, February 3, 2011

Brighton Rock coasts along on Andrea Riseborough's star turn David Cox from The Guardian, September 14, 2010

Brighton Rock (15) - Reviews, Films - The Independent Anthony Quinn

DVD: Brighton Rock (15) - Reviews, Films - The Independent Ben Walsh

Independent.co.uk - First Night: Toronto Film Festival [Kaleem Aftab]

Brighton Rock Tim Robey from The Daily Telegraph, February 3, 2011

The story behind Greene’s classic Jeremy Lewis from The Daily Telegraph, January 21, 2011

Brighton Rock: stepping into the black-and-white world of Pinkie ... Nigel Richardson from The Daily Telegraph, January 22, 2011

Brighton Rock, DVD review Jonny Cooper from The Daily Telegraph, June 20, 2011

'Brighton Rock' review: Sam Riley stands out Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle

Brighton Rock :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews

Brighton Rock (1947 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Boulting's BRIGHTON ROCK Starring Richard Attenborough ... Film Forum

Greene Pastures David Denby on the original version from The New Yorker

Brighton Rock at Film Forum Vadim Rizov on the original version from The Village Voice, June 17, 2009

Bitter Candy Graham Fuller in the original version from ArtForum, June 19, 2009

The Screen's Seduction of Graham Greene, in Films Like 'Brighton ... Terrence Rafferty on the original version from The New York Times, June 12, 2009

Johansson, Scarlett – actress

Bright Lights After Dark: Another Good Director for ScarJo from June 1, 2007

Bam, pow, ker-ching! How Scarlett Johansson became box office queen Nigel M. Smith from The Guardian, June 29, 2016

How Scarlett Johansson Became One of the 10 Highest Grossing Actors of All Time in Just Four Months Laura Bradley from Vanity Fair, June 30, 2016

Scarlett Johansson Is The Highest Grossing Actress Of All Time, So Where's That 'Black Widow' Movie? Shannon Carlin from Bustle, June 30, 2016

Scarlett Johansson named highest-grossing actress in Hollywood history Joey Nolfi from Entertainment Weekly, June 30, 2016

Johnson, Craig

THE SKELETON TWINS C+ 79

USA (93 mi) 2014 ‘Scope Official site

One of the more acclaimed films to come out of Sundance, winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, yet despite the darkness of the subject matter, suicide turned into a morbid comedy, the film is surprisingly conventional. While this was an opportunity to create something uniquely original, instead it’s more than slightly contrived, filled with movie cliché’s and a truly terrible musical soundtrack that just screams of indie light with a peppy beat, feeling nearly identical to the musical track used in Jason Reitman’s UP IN THE AIR (2009), in both cases used to add a surge of folksy energy to an otherwise downbeat subject, but the music couldn’t feel more generic. Certainly that’s part of the problem, but the story itself also has a condescending air about it in the derisive and mocking style of humor used, where everybody else is fair game to be made fun of, calling kids of today “little shits,” while in the same breath making a film about two bratty grown up children who both feel unloved and unlovable, where many of the viewers will sympathize, even as these shortsighted characters don’t really give a damn about anybody else. Much like Bud Cort’s stream of comic suicide attempts in HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971) or Lone Scherfig’s offbeat WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF (2002), there’s a fine line between tragedy and comedy, where the better films err on the side of tragedy, while the more mainstream films err on the side of comedy, which is the case here, as the comedic aspects are delightfully entertaining, though resembling the absurdist tone of comic sketches, while the more tragic, downbeat moments never really work, likely due to the fact that the lives of the two lead characters feel more like fragments and are never truly explored. The viewer only sees what the writer wants them to see, where there isn’t an underlying reservoir of hidden, untapped emotions, which is the essential component on display throughout the nearly three-hour The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them (2014).

Bought up at Sundance and distributed by the Duplass brothers, the story concerns a twin brother and sister, Milo (Bill Hader) and Maggie (Kristen Wiig, though originally the part was conceived with Ana Faris in mind), both alums from the Saturday Night Live (1975 – present) television series and both the product of a dysfunctional family. While a series of flashbacks briefly explores their childhood, it’s used more for symbolic connections than to provide any real insight, as the focus remains thoroughly targeted on the present, where both are miserably unhappy, and as twins seem to be on the same psychic wavelength, as both are seen at the outset on the verge of committing suicide at exactly the same moment, though they haven’t seen one another in ten years. Maggie is stopped from taking a handful of pills by an interrupting phone call from an emergency room announcing her brother survived his failed attempt of cutting his wrists in the bathtub. Flying out ot LA to offer her support, Milo grumbles a spew of sarcastic venom at her and tells her to go away, but she refuses to listen and instead invites him to her small New York hometown where she lives with her husband Lance (Luke Wilson), giving her an opportunity to look after him. Having no better offers, of course he accepts, but immediately he’s the odd man out, as Lance is a testosterone positive alpha male who is hyper positive about everything, where he acts like he’s perpetually stoned on Zoloft. Milo, on the other hand, is a sullen, deeply depressive gay man who hides his emotions in self-deprecating sarcasm that is too dark for most people to figure out, leaving him perpetually isolated and alone. Maggie seems like she’s carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, but feigns happiness, matching the mood of her constantly upbeat husband, thankful that she’s not living with the pathetic losers that describe her earlier life. Milo, of course, sees through this in a second, but remains totally out of place, as evidenced by his total frustration at going to a gay bar where he keeps waiting for the men to show up, only to learn it’s “dyke night.”

While Milo is a head case, wearing his troubles on his sleeve, where an even darker side is hinted at, the audience accepts his psychic turmoil, aggravated further by a contentious relationship with a former English teacher, Rich (Ty Burrell), who is nearby that has trouble written all over it. Meanwhile, Maggie remains cheerful enough, but that smile is quickly wiped off her face when she’s forced to admit some hard truths to her brother, both high on nitrous oxide at the time, so she couldn’t lie her way out of it as she was attempting to do with her husband, where her façade of happiness reveals as much interior dysfunction as Milo, but she’s better at covering it up. His presence seems to bring out her most protected secrets, which becomes something of a combustible problem that could easily blow up in her face. It turns out these secrets are doorways to miserable childhoods and unending emotional pain that have been with them their entire lives, which they’ve both on their own unsuccessfully tried to avoid dealing with. Neither has any social life to speak of, where their lives are a wreck, so being together has a strange way of releasing pent up memories, allowing them to share experiences that only they know about, which is entirely believable, as it’s clear the two of them have a chemistry from working together. Painful to watch at times, the film attempts to provide a comic perspective on such assorted themes of suicide, the aftereffects of parental suicide, adultery, serial lying, dysfunctional parenting, sexual abuse of a minor, depression, drug use, and even animal cruelty, where it’s kind of a combination plate of social ills. When their mother (Joanna Gleason) arrives on the scene, what follows is a descent into ever more disturbing territory. At one of the bleakest points of despair, Milo breaks out into what appears to be a song and dance routine they performed together as kids, lip-synching to Jefferson Starship’s synth-heavy song for the 80’s, Starship - Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now - YouTube (4:32), which couldn’t be more corny, but it’s the moment that seals the deal, as if they have nothing else, they have each other. While we’ve seen and heard all this before, there are some affecting moments, but overall the film never digs deep enough to actually matter, where the ideas and the performances are eventually lost to the mediocre execution.

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

Two actors known for comic invention prove themselves worthy of deeper drama in an engaging vehicle that doesn’t dig quite as deep as they seem willing to go.

Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader play Maggie and Milo, titular twins named for their matching tattoos—presumably related to the early loss of their father, who killed himself. (When we meet their mother, played in one incisive scene by Joanna Gleason, we have some idea why.) They used to be close but haven’t seen each other in a decade, for reasons only gradually explained. Now they’re reunited by a pair of botched suicides; he doesn’t know about hers, because he interrupted it with his indirect cry for help.

Milo leaves Los Angeles, where he’s been struggling to become an actor, to crash with Maggie at her tastefully decorated house in their upstate New York hometown. She’s pretending to be a normal person, working as a dental hygienist and married to a blamelessly boring he-man, played to perfection by Luke Wilson.

The siblings’ forced reunion brings up much unfinished business, and sophomore writer-director Craig Johnson handles their snarky sparring with highly original wit. One of the best things about his script, written with Mark Heyman (who worked on the over-the-top Black Swan), is that it makes no big deal about Milo’s sexual orientation; it’s the specific nature of his relationship with an older man (Ty Burrell) from his past that is so troubling.

Unfortunately, the same screenplay that sets all these smart things in motion also settles for indie-movie clichés, underscored by bad pop songs and generic guitar music, that keep the terrific cast from hitting their highest marks. Karaoke nights, dreamy underwater montages, a drag-queen Halloween, and repetitive flashbacks—look, Dad’s wearing a skull mask!—pad out a tale that needed another quarter-hour of honest character development.

Apparently, the filmmakers were frightened by the same things that freaked out Milo and Maggie, and didn’t have quite enough courage to examine their own chosen subject.

In The Skeleton Twins, Wiig and Hader Brave Despair ... Alan Scherstuhl from The Village Voice

Surprisingly moving for a film assembled from such familiar scenes, Craig Johnson's The Skeleton Twins mushes together queasy/quirky indie family drama with the beats of a romantic comedy. You know the outline just from eyeballing the poster: Kristen Wiig's Maggie and Bill Hader's Milo find their way toward loving each other after a wary start. Then, not long after they've found each other, and after Johnson has stopped positioning them on the far opposite sides of the frame, and after we've had the chance to relish their giddy togetherness, backstory must rip them apart.

What's singular here isn't that the stars are playing brother and sister, or that they stir such sublime and anxious joy from each other. It's that the real love story isn't even between the damaged-but-lovable characters. It's between two profoundly depressed people and life itself.

Most of the laughs come from well-observed human behavior: Milo moves into the home of his estranged sister Maggie, where he studies the cracks in her marriage to a nice guy (Luke Wilson) neither respects. The best scenes come as the siblings discover how to be around each other — and get close to discovering how to be, period. Getting high on nitrous oxide sets the siblings into confessions and fart-dancing on the floor of a dentist's office, and the scene is long and nourishing, stirring that feeling of raw, unguarded safety you might share with the people who have known you best and longest.

Even the obligatory out-of-nowhere musical number has the power to seize viewers' guts. To haul Maggie out of the foulest of moods, Milo lip-syncs to the only god-awful '80s synth-pop hit that hasn't yet been mined for a nostalgic movie moment. (But it was in Mannequin.) Director Johnson and his cast hit a chord of feeling more complex than those on the soundtrack. Milo's funny as he fake-sings, but also annoying, and when the chorus hits, Maggie — furious, unwilling to crack — refuses to join him. Johnson lets the full song play out, and we witness the characters negotiate their moods, their pride, their present, and their past in what feels like real time.

Not everything is so shrewdly judged. Hader's Milo is gay, and the character is dramatic and performative, but I still doubt he would bust into Maggie's bedroom — where she's sleeping with the husband who just met Milo a day or so before — and carp drunkenly about his failure to find "cock" in his hometown bar. (Also dispiriting: Milo, given a job clearing brush at a dam, chirps, "Do I get a sexy outfit?")

Still, The Skeleton Twins confirms the good sense of Kristen Wiig. Rather than go bigger and bigger in sequels and studio comedies, she goes deeper into character. Her Maggie holds her face blank, not trusting the world to know anything of her except her occasional rages. Tenderly, exhibiting a rare understanding of prickly nervousness, Wiig reveals the uncertain soul trembling beneath the impassive mask. Skeleton Twins isn't perfect, but it cuts to the bone.

Slant Magazine [David Lee Dallas]

It was inevitable that The Skeleton Twins, with its two beloved SNL alums headlining as an acerbic brother-sister duo, would be marketed as a comedy: This is a film about two inherently funny characters whose relationship is predicated on making each other laugh, and it features plenty of solid gags as a result. But for estranged twins Milo (Bill Hader) and Maggie (Kristen Wiig), humor is first and foremost a defense mechanism, a smokescreen, a plea for attention, and The Skeleton Twins is ultimately most interested in what its jokes are implying or obscuring about the jokesters themselves. In spirit, plot, and even setting, the film's closest cinematic cousin is You Can Count on Me: Both films follow a wounded not-quite-young man as he returns to his hometown in upstate New York, crashes with his ostensibly more put-together sister, who has her own fair share of problems, and in his attempts to heal drudges up buried secrets and unspoken vexations. If that doesn't sound like a comedy, that's because it most certainly isn't. This is a film that opens with two botched suicide attempts and only gets darker from there; every chuckle that follows is tinged with morbidity.

Milo has spent the last 10 years in Los Angeles, trying and failing to make a living as an actor, while Maggie has remained in their hometown, marrying good ol' boy Lance (Luke Wilson) in a clearly deluded effort to "grow up," as she brashly puts it to her brother. Both are depressed enough to contemplate suicide, and when Milo is hospitalized following a nearly successful attempt, Maggie obviously empathizes with his situation and volunteers to rehabilitate him in their childhood home. What follows is a slow reveal of the childhood traumas that triggered the pair's initial schism, prompted in part by Milo's reconnection with an old flame, closeted bookstore-owner Rich (Ty Burrell). One of The Skeleton Twins's greatest strengths is how it handles Milo's homosexuality, or rather, how it doesn't handle it at all. Though his sexual history—with Rich and others—is fraught for many reasons, it's not at all because Milo has any hang-ups about his own gayness; the most he ever comments on it is in asides about his excitement about being "a creepy gay uncle." Hader, for his part, couldn't be further from the Stefon register in his acting, as this is a sensitive, enormously detailed performance that grows richer and richer with each revelation about Milo's past.

Though Hader is the standout, Wiig matches him in calibrating a character whose early idiosyncrasies make more sense as the plot unfolds, and it's to her credit that Maggie resembles more of a train wreck than Milo by the film's conclusion. The ensemble is uniformly excellent as well: Wilson's easy naturalism and Burrell's ball of nerves contrast well with the leads, and Joanna Gleason is a one-scene KO as the twins' delusional, New Age-obsessed mother ("I'm sending you the light!"). Unfortunately, the script by Johnson and Mark Heyman occasionally undermines the performers' work: Adept at scenes following the more mundane day-to-day goings-on of its characters, as soon as the script wants to convey a point, it takes exasperatingly literal routes, either in the form of dialogue ("God, what the hell happened to us?") or on-the-nose plot twists; the ending in particular is simply unworthy of everything that comes before it. The single most powerful accomplishment of You Can Count on Me is that, while no character ever utters its titular aphorism out loud, it's felt resoundingly by the end. The Skeleton Twins is too obvious to manage that kind of final unspoken poignancy.

The Skeleton Twins: A Rom-Com That's Refreshingly ... - Slate Dana Stevens

The ghoulish setup could easily form the basis for an eerie psychological horror film: Separated by thousands of miles, a pair of long-estranged twins both attempt suicide only hours apart on the same day. Just as dental assistant Maggie is about to swallow a bottle of pills, she gets a phone call: Her brother Milo, an unsuccessful actor, is in the hospital in L.A. after slashing his wrists in the bath. Maggie cuts short her self-poisoning attempt, flies out to see her brother (to whom she hasn’t spoken in 10 years), and insists he come back to stay with her in the small upstate New York town where they both grew up. Cue the descent into Cronenbergian folie à deux, right?

But because Maggie is played by Kristen Wiig and Milo by Bill Hader, The Skeleton Twins aims instead to be a tender comedy/drama. If it succeeds better at the comedy part than the drama, that is in no way a slight on the acting skills of The Skeleton Twins’ stars, who are both best known for creating flamboyantly weird comic characters during the seven seasons they served together on Saturday Night Live. Producing sketch comedy at that pace for that long has left Hader and Wiig exceptionally attuned to one another as performers. Though they look nothing alike, they’re utterly credible as brother and sister, both in the tragic scenes and the goofy ones. And since Milo and Maggie are both the kind of damaged people who use humor defensively, incessantly, and sometimes cruelly, Hader and Wiig get to push the boundaries of their comic personae.

It takes a while to discover why Maggie and Milo share such a dark streak. Especially toward the last hour, The Skeleton Twins’ script (by Craig Johnson, who also directed, and Mark Heyman) leans too hard on sequential revelations about the twins’ difficult childhood and adolescence, sometimes accompanied with overly arch flashbacks. (On Christmas morning, young Maggie and Milo receive matching Mexican skeleton dolls that, given the movie’s title, work a lot harder to symbolize their owners than they really needed to.) But even when the plot machinery gets to creaking, individual scenes throw off sparks of laughter and insight. A visit to the dentist’s office where Maggie works gives Wiig a chance to launch into some inspired prop comedy—when is a well-wielded set of false teeth not funny? —but the scene also reveals fragility to a degree Wiig rarely has before, as Maggie confesses her darkest secrets to her in-no-position-to-judge brother. And one of the hoariest rom-com set pieces—pop-song lip-sync as bonding experience—gets a bracing reinvention when Milo drags his reluctant twin into a living-room duet of Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” that swells into a song-and-dance number as exhilarating as something from an MGM musical.

In its structure and rhythms, The Skeleton Twins often gestures at the conventions (and some of the clichés) of romantic comedy. It’s not that this story about the complicated love between two siblings has any interest in pushing into creepy incest territory; it’s that the arc of two people who start out at odds and eventually come to recognize one another as soul mates is as well suited to the story of grown siblings as it is to that of lovers. After all, for many people, their sibling relationships are the most lasting, intense, complex pairings of their lives. Johnson’s choice to place a brother-sister relationship at the center of the film, rather than making familial relationships subsidiary to romantic ones the way most mainstream comedies do, is a welcome reminder that the world around us contains a panoply of non-sexual love stories, and that the future of the genre could depend on tapping that lifeblood.

Luke Wilson, as Maggie’s earnest and well-meaning but emotionally cloddish husband Lance, gives one of his funniest and most endearing performances in a while, and Ty Burrell, as an older lover from Milo’s past who’s now a married and closeted professor, goes as deep as his underwritten role will allow. The film is shot in a flat, featureless style that can resemble a made-for-TV movie, and the climactic finale pivots around a development that appears to introduce an element of the paranormal that’s startlingly out of keeping with what’s come before.

But when Hader and Wiig are on screen together the film’s shortcomings fade because the energy they give to and take from each other—a chemistry that, refreshingly, has nothing to do with sexual tension—is so palpable, it’s fun just watching them banter as they get dolled up for an evening out (him in an impromptu drag outfit she rigs up for Halloween, bobbed wig, prom gown, and all). Neither Hader nor Wiig plays the straight-man role, exactly, though her character is the more dispositionally solemn of the two. Rather, they’re a joke relay team, trading—and sometimes competing for—opportunities to crack one another up, and bringing the audience along for the ride.

I found The Skeleton Twins merely entertaining, but I’d love to see these two actors team up again, Tracy-and-Hepburn style, and make a string of movies together—maybe some that would venture further into the post–rom-com territory this one begins to explore. I’d watch them as bickering gay lawyers, or mismatched buddy cops, or archrival paleontologists. If Hader and Wiig can invest The Skeleton Twins’ slightly contrived setup with this much humor and emotional truth, imagine what they could do with a script at the level of their gifts.

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Johnson, Gerard

HYENA C 73

Great Britain (112 mi) 2014 ‘Scope

A lurid trip into the subterranean criminal underworld of London, a seedy adventure of corrupt cops who are every bit as deplorable as the vicious criminals they do business with, taking a cut in the profits of a lucrative drug smuggling gang in exchange for a guarantee the police won’t interfere with the operations. Literally partners in crime, the film depicts an absence of any moral center, as all the players, and it’s hard throughout to tell the cops from the criminals, find a way to work around the reach of the police, who are ineffectual to nonexistent in this film. At the center is Michael Logan (Peter Ferdinando), a shadowy figure working as a corrupt detective in the narcotics division, initially seen raiding a nightclub with brutish ferocity, showing no regard for professional standards, seemingly taking pleasure at smashing a man’s face with a fire extinguisher, seizing a particularly large stash of cocaine, while celebrating afterwards, having their own little all-night party on the drugs they stole. Of course, what can go wrong will go wrong, as one of Logan’s contacts gets chopped to pieces, where nobody plays by the rules anymore, leading to a no man’s land of foul play. This landscape is so morally toxic, everyone tainted by an insatiable greed, all we’re really witnessing is the ongoing behavior of thugs, where inflicting excessive violence to protect one’s interests becomes routine, resembling a post-apocalyptic world in decline, where in this film there’s no thought given to anything else. When painting with such a broad brush where everyone is corrupt and criminally tainted, there’s actually very little suspense, as no good can come out of any of this, so it all has an ominous feel of Macbethian doom, where Logan is literally spinning his wheels, moving from one criminal enterprise to the next, spiraling into an abysmal moral void. Nonetheless, it still has to play out, a choreography of misfits and stock characters, where it just feels like we’ve seen all this before.

Not sure why Great Britain has cornered the market on this sort of thing, perhaps due to their own dreary social welfare system, but they seem to be a nation consumed with making relentlessly grim, social-realist crime films, and for every good film that comes around, CROUPIER (1998), SEXY BEAST (2000), THE RED RIDING TRILOGY (2009), Brighton Rock (2010) as well as the original (1947), or Shadow Dancer (2012), there are dozens more, perhaps spearheaded by the likes of Guy Ritchie, but also Danny Boyle’s Trance (2013) and Eran Creevy’s Welcome to the Punch (2013), that are headed straight to the discount DVD bins. These are largely male fantasy films where the violence adds a special attraction to the primary movie demographic of 18 to 24-year old adolescent boys, like the avid interest in loud and explosive video games, where women are horribly mistreated while also nakedly paraded under the leering eyes of jaded men. Strippers or prostitutes are the only female company these men keep, exhibited like slabs of meat, while a crude sexist and borderline racist mentality exists throughout as well, so just what, exactly, do films like this offer? Even if well made, stock treatment suggests fundamentally offensive attitudes on every level, where in this film criminal cops are frequently hopped up on coke, exhibiting a special xenophobic hatred for foreigners and multi-ethnic villains, who are inevitably the ones they get down and dirty with in business, usually associated with superior feelings of overriding contempt, where making racist jokes is commonplace and a means to gain social acceptance with other cops. While this is so often portrayed with chilling realism in every cop drama from television, Hollywood, to independent movies, on a social level it grows sickening after awhile, as they’re using racist tinged dialogue in order to jack up the supposed realism, which inevitably is thoroughly manipulative filmmaking, as it assumes the reality of the stereotype, which it only further perpetuates.

While ostensibly an extension of Abel Ferarra’s BAD LIEUTENANT (1992) or Nicolas Winding Refn’s PUSHER TRILOGY (1996, 2004, 2005), Logan is a poor substitute of a compromised cop, as he lacks any real conviction other than treating everybody like shit. He’s an embarrassment to the police force and would likely lose his job instantly for insubordination and a file stuffed with excessive force cases, which would end up costing the department millions in litigation. Instead of any attempt at character development, which would suggest good writing, the film is heavy on vicious brutality, a substitute for male testosterone, amped up by an electronic film score by Matt Johnson from the musical group The The. While initially the stylish use of slow-mo adds a pretty effective music video effect, and the murky warehouse settings are appropriately dismal, but the film simply runs out of ideas. While the writer/director makes an attempt to humanize Logan, as he takes an interest in Ariana (Elisa Lasowski), a young girl held captive in a human trafficking scheme, but there’s nothing that would make Logan’s character redeemable, as he’s too heavily invested in the moral rot of the criminal underworld, where all that’s left is the realization that he’s simply in over his head. Most would receive early warning signals, like witnessing a trusted ally get chopped up before your disbelieving eyes, which might suggest these are not the kind of guys you want to do business with. In fact, you might actually consider making a proper arrest. But it’s not in the cards. Instead, likely the built-up euphoria from ingesting excessive drugs, he feels invincible, like he’s the one controlling all the action. But in this film there is no reason to believe that has ever been the case, so the entire film is one long and deluded road to hell resulting in a final realization that he’s fucked, trapped by his own distorted lies and deception, caught in a vice-grip, where the man has run out of options, becoming an existential moment with the camera lingering on his face, as he’s finally reached the moment of truth. Holding the final shot for what seems like an eternity, we’re left with the thought that whatever happens next, the man truly deserves whatever he’s got coming.

Slant Magazine [Kenji Fujishima]

Narratively, there isn't much to Hyena to distinguish it from your run-of-the-mill crime drama, abundant as it is in foreign criminals involved in an exploitative underground network of lawlessness, protected by the varyingly corrupt cops who're supposed to be bringing them down. It also follows a familiar stylistic template: handheld camerawork; muted colors, with a few nightclub scenes bathed in foreboding neon light for the sake of visual variety; and a generally gritty atmosphere pockmarked with moral rot. Ultimately, though, the film's blanket cynicism is its most shopworn quality of all. This is hardly the uplifting tale of a corrupt policeman who's actively trying to reform himself: Michael (Peter Ferdinando), a ruthless narc, is more or less simply trying to save his own ass as new criminal elements—in the form of two Albanian brothers who brutally dispose of their Turkish competition—uproot his comfortable coke-snorting, law-defying existence. In essence, Gerard Johnson's film is a march toward seeing this morally ambiguous main character's chickens finally come home to roost, but this trajectory feels unimaginative given how little is invested in distinguishing Michael from the other officers on the force beyond the fact that he's perhaps less corrupt. Two moments, though, hint at the film this could have been. In one strikingly tense scenario, we're asked to share in the panicked fear of a sex slave, Ariana (Elisa Lasowski), who wishes to be freed from the clutches of the Albanian brothers. Later, Johnson tosses in an unexpected slow-motion sequence in which two of Michael's crooked colleagues are seen spraying and smearing ketchup on each other in a drug-induced bit of horseplay just before they're arrested by fellow officers. It's a blackly comic flash of relative levity in an otherwise cliché-ridden rush toward a final Sopranos-esque cut to black that's symbolic of how the film is evasive of providing fresh insights into its characters' pathologies.

Review: U.K. crime drama Hyena is uncompromising in its ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club

Human scavengers abound in the relentlessly grim British thriller Hyena, one of those movies in which it’s a toss-up whether the cops or the criminals are more despicable. Writer-director Gerard Johnson, making his second feature (the first, Tony, about a sad-sack serial killer, never opened in the U.S.), brings little that’s new or refreshing to the genre, but he does at least have the courage of his convictions—even plot threads that appear to be offering a thin sliver of hope for the prospect of human decency are ultimately discarded like the hacked-up body parts of one luckless character. Unlike last year’s Filth, though, Hyena doesn’t come across as if it’s reveling in its characters’ bad behavior. A few dreamy interludes aside, the film’s tone is cool, dispassionate, and matter-of-fact. All that’s missing is a reason to give a damn.

No time is wasted in establishing that our antihero, West London detective Michael Logan (Peter Ferdinando, who also played the title role in Tony), is on the take. Indeed, Logan is virtually never seen doing legitimate police work, as he’s too busy partying with the drugs he and his crew score in raids and investing money in various criminal enterprises. During one such transaction, Logan watches in horror as his Turkish contact is murdered with a machete by a pair of Albanian brothers (Orli Shuka and Gjevat Kelmendi) seeking to take over the dead man’s business. Though believably traumatized by witnessing this gruesome spectacle (refreshingly, Hyena acknowledges that even a tough guy might freak out seeing someone get butchered), Logan, ever the professional, negotiates a deal with the brothers, promising to turn a blind eye in exchange for payoffs. He becomes less sanguine, however, when he discovers that the Albanians are trafficking young women as well as drugs. On top of that, a former partner (Stephen Graham, best known as Al Capone on Boardwalk Empire) with whom Logan has an ugly history is assigned to work with him, and he’s being hounded by a dogged Internal Affairs investigator (Richard Dormer).

“I have seen the future of crime films and it screams Hyena,” reads a blurb from Nicolas Winding Refn on one of the film’s U.K. posters. His enthusiasm isn’t surprising, since Johnson borrows from him liberally: The film’s retro title card bears a marked similarity to Drive’s, and Hyena generally favors pulsing neon rather than the genre’s standard blue-gray color scheme. Johnson also did well to hire his brother, Matt Johnson, a.k.a. The The, as composer; several of the film’s violent set pieces unfold in an impressionistic electronic dreamscape, with the carnage fleetingly glimpsed and the screams and crashes drowned out by creepy ambient noise. (Those with an aversion to gore are still advised to steer clear—it’s a bloody film.) There’s a rape scene that’s unnecessarily grotesque—one can imagine Johnson rejecting actors auditioning to play the rapist with, “Sorry, you’re just not fat and hairy enough”—but that’s the sole notable misstep.

Still, it’s just hard to care about all this unvarnished sordidness. Ferdinando carefully avoids giving Logan a heart of gold, even when the detective is trying to save one young woman (Elisa Lasowski) whom the brothers have sold, but he never quite succeeds in making the character repellently fascinating in a Bad Lieutenant sort of way (pick either version). While the movie keeps tightening the noose around Logan’s neck, any interest in whether he’ll manage to escape being arrested or killed is largely academic. Even Hyena’s deliberately unresolved ending is impressive intellectually rather than viscerally, when it’s evidently striving for both. A movie doesn’t necessarily need to provide someone to root for, but it does need to provide more than a flat series of bad moral choices followed by ugly consequences. Otherwise, it risks making the viewer feel like the hyena.

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Robert Munro]

Hyena begins as a sub Winding Refn thriller, with the screen bathed in a cooling blue more appropriate to London than the shocking pink of Refn’s LA in Drive or the lurid neon of his Bangkok in Only God Forgives.

Much like the aforementioned Refn, writer/director Gerard Johnson brings us a picture of spiralling moral descent in a gritty big city underworld replete with horrible people doing horribly violent things. At the centre of this masculine maelstrom is Michael (Peter Ferdinando), a bent copper whose criminal comrade is mutilated by an incoming gang of Albanians, a move which leaves Michael’s bank balance rather lighter than he’d wish. £100k lighter to be precise.

So far, so clichéd. Bent copper. Check. A liking for the charlie. Check. Shady gangsters operating out of shady strip clubs. Check. For a while Hyena rattles through the stereotypes of a Guy Ritchie film without the breezy sense of confidence and lightness of touch, which made Lock, Stock and Snatch such box office successes.

Yet the film begins to find its feet once the initial exposition is out of the way. Michael stumbles upon Arianne (Elisa Lasowski), a woman trafficked by the Albanians, whom he tries to help out of her desperate situation. Allied to this, the introduction of Detective Knight (Stephen Graham) and the stock internal affairs copper Detective Taylor (Richard Dormer), ramp up the tension through the film’s middle third.

The scenes involving Arianne are among the most successful in the film, yet ultimately feel wasted. In a few quite horrific scenes in which she is sold from one gang to another, drugged and then raped, the film feels like it finds a heart, but too quickly Arianne is rescued by Michael, and her misery sidelined.

Director Johnson and cinematographer Benjamin Kracun work well to produce a film that is quite often rather pleasant to look at, despite the appalling violence. A well choreographed scene in which Michael and Knight try to bury the hatchet after a falling out previously over a couple of pints in the local boozer, is indicative of their eye for the cinematic. The The provide a rather splendid soundtrack to Hyena, which excels in building up tension as necessary, but remains enticingly disjointed.

The film could have benefited from more sympathetic editing, which too often draws attention to itself and removes the audience from the narrative. Added to this, there are weaknesses in the script, with dialogue frequently falling into the dreary misogynistic and racist cockney geezer gangster stereotypes. Too many characters are wasted, such as Michael’s girlfriend Lisa, who has nothing better to do than mope about and ‘stand by her man’ despite the non existent relationship between the two, the subsequent effect of which is that her involvement in the film’s denouement elicits a barely perceptible shrug from the viewer.

And then there’s the ending, which explains the film’s star rating. It’s difficult to review this film, without discussing the ending, therefore those who wish to know nothing about it should stop now.

There is much to be said for ambiguity in the cinema. One only has to think of Antoine Doinel’s face in freeze-frame at the end of The 400 Blows and smile fondly at the film’s desire to leave the mischievous Antoine’s future up to the imagination of the viewer. Never mind that Truffaut would return to the character in a series of later films which never lived up to the first. Scorsese ripped this off rather successfully in Goodfellas, while Nolan's spinning top at the end of Inception was the perfect ending to his elaborate magic show.

The job of a thriller in the cinema is to plunge its characters into impossible-seeming situations from which they escape in ways that are both surprising yet ultimately obvious to the audience. Hyena, having done the first part rather well, cops out on resolving the impossible-seeming situation it has set up for its characters in the final minute of the film in the most unforgivably lazy, arrogant and self-indulgent manner possible.

That the Edinburgh International Film Festival has chosen such a film to open its annual extravaganza speaks volumes.

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Johnson, Kirsten

CAMERAPERSON B 88

USA (102 mi) 2016

These are the images that have marked me and leave me wondering still.

—Kirsten Johnson

A collection of random outtake scenes shot by a documentary cinematographer over the course of 25 years, all strung together in an impressionistic mosaic, like fragmented memories, identified only by the place where the footage takes place, listed in intertitles on a black background, becoming a memoir and a comprehensive essay on the ethics of cinematography, having shot footage in films such as Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour (2014), Kirby Dick’s 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: # 5 The Invisible War, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), and Raoul Peck’s Profit & Nothing But! Or Impolite Thoughts on the Class Struggle (2001), among others. Kirsten Johnson is a New Yorker who graduated from Brown University in 1987 with a BA in Fine Arts and Literature, spending two years in West Africa on documentary film projects before attending FEMIS (the French National Film School) in Paris, graduating in 1994 from the cinematography department. While she has earned a reputation for stellar documentation in other people’s films, this is one of her first films that gives voice to her own artistic expression, becoming a meditation on the art of shooting documentary subjects. By showcasing dozens of scenes from other documentaries, the film resembles Wim Wenders portrait of Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado in 2015 Top Ten List #4 The Salt of the Earth, though each are uniquely different artists, but they raise the question of permission and consent, especially in harrowing regions around the world, as subjects rarely consent to being filmed, leaving open the question of whether art exploits human tragedy. There is no question that images play a part in educating human consciousness, as certain images from the Vietnam War continue to haunt us literally decades after the war has ended, the Zapruder tape capturing the assassination of JFK, the first images shot by men from the moon, blacks being subjected to firehoses and attack dogs in the Civil Rights struggles in the South, or the brutal beating of Rodney King at the hands of LA police officers. These are part of the worldwide images stored deep in the recesses of our own subconscious that reflect a collective humanity, or lack thereof, as some in war-torn regions may be inundated by little more than war, poverty, starvation, death, and trauma.

Like a scrapbook of memories, the film resembles a photo album, yet in each segment the participants mysteriously come to life as we travel around the globe visiting places like Bosnia, Darfur, Kosovo, Afghanistan, a secret prison in Yemen, a church in Rwanda, a maternity ward in Nigeria, a courtroom in Texas, and of course her mother’s sheep ranch in Wyoming. Initially the film feels random and haphazard, with no real rhyme or reason, viewing her mother and children in her childhood home, but also including landscape shots of an approaching storm, where behind the image we hear a cough, presumably from the person shooting the footage, drawing the viewer’s attention to the woman behind the camera. In this way she exposes herself as a living force behind the images, as the film explores the extent to which she remains personally invested, questioning the decisions she has made throughout her career, like how close should cameras squeeze in on people recalling traumas that have obviously left emotional scars, how long to hold a shot before it becomes invasive, what specific details are considered too personal, does she need to establish a rapport with subjects before shooting, and what about non cooperative subjects who are alleged to have committed criminal acts? With her imprint all over this footage, it begins to appear less random after a while and more personal, especially her self-described “montage of horror,” when suddenly more detail is provided that identifies what happened in some of these places, where context means everything, especially a stream of places that were the sites of horrific human atrocities, where civilians were executed in horrific war crimes, such as the town of Foča, a city targeted by the Serbs during the Bosnian War, where ethnic cleansing led to massacres and mass rapes, as we see what was the police headquarters, now the site of children playing ping-pong, and the Sports Hall where women were imprisoned and raped, as we hear rape victims point out the motels used by military forces to rape women, followed by a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas that was used by three men, two avowed white supremists, to drag a black man, James Byrd Jr., for three miles to his death in 1988, dumping his severed torso in a nearby black cemetery. The Texas District Attorney shows us the chain that was used in the crime while describing the importance of viewing gruesome photographs that captured the harrowing evidence, raising the significance of photography to bear visual witness to particularly heinous acts, as without it, many would refuse to believe the severity of what happened. What follows are images shot from a car of a heavily protected, secret Al-Qaeda prison facility in Sana’a, Yemen, putting the taxi driver at risk by asking if they could get “closer,” while similar footage appears of torture chambers at Guantánamo, Tahrir Square in Cairo, where more than 900 civilians have been killed since 2011, Nyamata Church in Rwanda where 10,000 Tutsis were massacred, also Wounded Knee and Ground Zero at the World Trade Center, places where images merge with history.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Johnson began her career in 1997 shooting over 200 interviews with Holocaust survivors for the Shoah Foundation, as personal an experience as one can imagine when asking the elderly to relive their worst horrors. While she is practiced in the sensitive art of filming women who have experienced trauma, especially rape victims in Bosnia and the U.S. Armed Forces, where much of her skill is building a trust with the most vulnerable, one of the moral dilemmas is asking them to open up their lives for the world to see while she remains safely concealed behind the camera. One of the most affecting scenes takes place in a hospital at Kano, Nigeria where the camera observes a midwife attempt to bring an emaciated newborn who is not breathing to life in an unbroken yet prolonged shot, where you can even hear Johnson gasp at one point when the baby’s survival could depend on medical equipment that was not working at the time, yet the midwife goes through extensive maneuvers to move the baby around in different positions, including upside down, patting him on the back until miraculously he starts breathing, but barely has a pulse. The midwife explains “He needs oxygen now. And we don’t have oxygen in the clinic.” Nonetheless, she wraps him in warm blankets and delivers oxygen manually through some kind of man-made device, giving him the help he needs in his first precious moments of life. In Bosnia, a scene inadvertently veers into horror, as a young boy is playing with an axe, swinging it just inches from his younger brother’s face, an inquisitive toddler who is left on his own to explore the possible dangers of a sharp-edged instrument, a scene Johnson films with palpable anxiety. In Zalingei, Darfur, two women whose homes were stolen by armed Arab militants secretly ask the person behind the camera if she might intervene in getting them back before returning to their habit of chopping down dead trees for firewood, as the Arabs, who they call Bastards, won’t let them anywhere near the forests, as they’ll forcefully kick them out. Johnson’s camera was at Penn State at the site of the first football game after sex abuse charges were announced that considerably tarnished the school’s legacy, yet her camera finds the cheerleaders leading the student section in a male chorus singing of the Penn State Alma Mater, “For the glory of old State,” and in Brooklyn, New York at a Golden Glove boxing match where a split decision leaves a young boxer painfully distraught, with Johnson voyeuristically trailing behind his every move as he punches walls in disgust, screams in agony, and calls foul, fretting like a cornered animal before realizing he’s still being filmed, so she follows him stalking back out of the dressing room and into the arena where the camera finds him sobbing in the arms of his mother. Johnson follows the story of one of the few Muslim families returning to Bosnia years after the war, seen pleasantly growing coffee and picking blueberries, with the filmmaker returning 5 years later to visit them, as despite the horrific memories of war crimes, she had “pleasant” memories of this family, and they are happy to see her as well, exchanging photos of children. Among the more personal shots are brief scenes of Johnson’s own mother who has been stricken with Alzheimer’s, seen surprised, uncertain who this strange and mysterious person may be, later in a moment of recognition she’s seen brushing her daughter’s hair, where we catch a glimpse of the filmmaker in the mirror. Yet of all the stories surrounding the film, one stands out, a lone elderly man who survived the Rwandan massacres, who directed her down into a decrepit crypt of wooden caskets in the mud, opening the caskets showing her the dead bodies, insisting that she film it. He was like a guardian of the graves that wanted the world to know what happened there. Johnson perhaps surprised herself to learn afterwards that she kept her camera turned off, as some things are not meant to be seen.

CINEFILE.info Kevin B. Lee

Over the past twenty-five years, Kristen Johnson has plied her trade as a documentary cinematographer working on such films as FAHRENHEIT 9/11 and CITIZENFOUR. In CAMERAPERSON, Johnson utilizes her past experiences on these documentaries as well as some of their unused footage to create a visual memoir of her career. At the film’s onset, Johnson makes an imploration, asking the audience to ruminate on these images that “have marked me and leave me wondering still.” What follows is a series of candid moments, such as time spent with her mother who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, testimony by survivors of Bosnia genocide, and many others. CAMERAPERSON leans more abstract and does not particularly have a definitive narrative quality to it. Instead, Johnson seeks to show the power of the camera and the moving images it’s able to capture. There is sadness, beauty, and triumph in these sequences. Like an abstract personal diary, the film leaves the juxtaposition of its arrangements up to the viewer’s own interpretation. These moments build upon each other and the emotional resonance they leave behind echoes in a powerful way. There is an urge to designate this as autobiographical due to the inclusion of some of Johnson’s personal life but this would be a disservice as the running theme overall is about the triumph of the human spirit and the impressions left from recording these bits. Johnson touches on people of all genders, religions, social classes, and ethnicities. Her cross-section of humanity explored creates a sense of unity with all walks of life. CAMERAPERSON is a visual collage, experimental in nature, and one that touches on all the varied moments that make us human.

Film Comment: Eric Hynes February 15, 2016

Making documentary films is simultaneously a humbling and empowering enterprise. It takes letting real events and people dictate, at least to some degree, the contours of a project; it also involves presenting and packaging those events, and characterizing people. Most films implicitly emphasize the former while downplaying the latter. Yet among the films that don’t gloss over a filmmaker’s intervening hand, different temperaments come into play. Some worry about wielding that kind of power. And others just really own it.

At the Sundance Film Festival this past January all of these tendencies were in evidence. In fact, 2016 was the most diverse survey, formally and stylistically speaking, that I’ve encountered in the decade-plus that I’ve attended the festival. But I was struck by the gap between the worriers (Kate Plays Christine, Cameraperson), more prominent at Sundance than ever before, and the wielders (Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, Tickled)—a gap that’s widening in documentary today on both formal and philosophical grounds.

In two very different but equally forceful ways, Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine and Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson encourage viewers to question what the director is doing, and how. In Greene’s film, in which actress Kate Lyn Sheil attempts both to investigate and to embody troubled newscaster Christine Chubbuck, every decision is brought under scrutiny, including but not limited to the choice and treatment of the subjects, the shaping of the narrative, the efficacy of the conceit, and the methods of execution. Through interviews and interactions with subject/performer/collaborator Sheil, Greene as filmmaker is openly questioned within the frame of his own film. Meanwhile in Cameraperson, a memoir-essay comprised of footage that the ace cinematographer shot for other filmmakers, Johnson reexamines her own decisions through her edit, choosing clips that don’t necessarily flatter or celebrate her work, and juxtaposes them in ways that constantly interrogate her process and profession. She may not have a Sheil on camera calling her out, but the whole enterprise underscores and interrogates the subjectivity of the person charged with capturing and framing events.

Film Comment: Eugene Hernandez January 29, 2016

Ira Sachs and his spouse, painter Boris Torres, are co-parents of twins with cinematographer Kirsten Johnson, who herself had a new film—the exceptional documentary Cameraperson—debut at Sundance this week. Johnson’s essayistic work, expertly wrought and openly personal, is a standout of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Early on in Cameraperson, the cinematographer’s visual memoir of her 25 years shooting documentaries for filmmakers in locales all around the world, the screen reveals a vast Bosnian landscape. Her camera jerks slightly as Johnson’s hand intervenes in the frame to adjust a weed in the foreground. In the following shot, somewhere in the United States, Johnson’s lens is trained on another landscape, clouds gathering in the distance. Suddenly a lighting bolt flashes and cracks. Johnson gasps.

These human interruptions remind us of the presence of a person behind the camera and over the course of the film reveal more and more about that person. In the many outtakes and moments from numerous films that comprise her extraordinary and emotional new documentary, we witness some of the scenes that Johnson experienced over nearly three decades and observe the often delicate dance between her and the subjects within her view. Johnson’s camera has created images in numerous documentaries, including CITIZENFOUR, The Invisible War, Fahrenheit 9/11, The Oath, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, and Two Towns of Jasper.

Sequences and scenes in Cameraperson, her directorial debut that premiered earlier this week, assembles footage shot in Brooklyn, Bosnia, Nigeria, and even unnamed locations domestic and overseas with Laura Poitras. Shots are brought together to illuminate ethical questions addressed by a documentary photographer in the heat of the moment and also to offer insight about what it means to photograph and to be photographed.

“The thing about being a DP that’s really extraordinary is that you get to drop into a location and experience the vividness of it, but you don’t have to experience the anxiety of being a director,” Johnson noted. “But this film, it wasn’t so much anxiety, it was like a mystery to me to understand what I had been through and what I was trying to communicate. So it emerged in this form that was unexpected to all of us.”

Watching Cameraperson, you find yourself pondering the interplay between Johnson and those whom she is shooting. The aforementioned ethical questions arise in many scenes. Should she zoom in to reveal the gruesome images about to be revealed by a lawyer expressing a passionate defense of his deceased client in front of her? Should she put down the camera and stop shooting two young children who seem to be innocently playing with an ax? How should she document the early moments of life for an infant, born in a rural hospital, but who is having trouble catching the first breaths of life?

“These ethical questions that I think about almost every moment that I am shooting populate this film. I wanted to make this film now because I feel like I am the old school,” Johnson explained after the film’s first screening here at Sundance. “I feel like we are all now camerapeople. We all have a phone in our pocket. We are all making choices about when we film, we are all making choices about what we look at. I made the choice to film many things in this film where you can see me on the cusp as I search, but I think we are all, as a world, now searching for how to deal with the imagery that is overpowering us in so many ways.”

Film Comment: Michael Koresky September 03, 2016

Film practitioners have long tried to describe the abstract power of their practical tools. Director and critic Alexandre Astruc famously called the movie camera a caméra-stylo, or camera-pen; likewise Agnès Varda coined the term cinécriture to describe her style, the sense of a film being written by the camera. And even earlier, British documentarian Basil Wright—colleague of nonfiction trailblazers John Grierson and Humphrey Jennings—wrote: “What is fundamentally important is to realize that where the camera is put must depend, not on an attempt to make the shot ‘striking’ or ‘interesting’ at all costs, but on the urgency of expression affecting the man behind the camera.”

This statement is found in a functional, almost instructional essay titled “Handling the Camera,” from a wonderfully stuffy 1937 collection of writings for burgeoning cinephiles called Footnotes to the Film. Today, even more notable than the gender rigidity of this passage is its acknowledgment—in this first full decade of sound cinema—of the camera as an extension, almost an appendage, of the person looking through it. But then there’s also this: “It is an object to be polished and cleaned continuously, to be transported with the care lavished on a newborn baby, to be guarded jealously against the hands of the incompetent and the careless, the destroyers of delicate machines.” Here, Wright makes the camera precious by making it a fragile, delicate child—therefore human. The camera is not just a tool, it speaks for us, it writes for us, and it’s also part of us.

Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson continues the ongoing interrogation of the power of the camera in her new film, Cameraperson. A labor of love of the highest order, it is culled from decades of footage Johnson shot for a variety of directors on more than 25 films around the world. Because it doesn’t have narration or any sense of linear chronology, the film could at first be considered “stream of consciousness,” though it becomes clearer as it continues—and even more so on subsequent viewings—that the various scenes have been woven into a meticulously planned work of philosophical inquiry. It’s discursive rather than diaristic; the footage has been brought together so that viewers can muse upon the potentially endless ways the camera can be used—how it can express an idea or reflect an ideology; how it intrudes or ignores, and how either can be devastating; how it can lie by trying to tell the truth, and how it can come upon the truth by lying; how it reveals all for the world to see, and how it keeps secrets only for itself; how it engenders empathy or fear; how it changes landscapes or simply bears witness. Simply put, these are the mysteries of cinema, which are made more mysterious and acute in the realm of nonfiction, where there’s an implicit contract between audience and filmmaker that what is on the screen is somehow a truth or some variation on the truth. Johnson’s extraordinary film expresses the tensions and exhilarations around these issues through the actual physical viewpoint of the person for whom constantly reconciling them is part of her trade.

What’s most remarkable is how lucidly these ideas and issues are conveyed strictly through images. We never are told during Cameraperson the titles or context of the individual films she was working on when the footage was originally shot; the only information we receive are text cards telling us the name of the city we’re suddenly in with each cut to black. We see Johnson on screen only once, near the end of the film, in a surprising and highly personal reveal; otherwise she is an unseen presence, patient yet never absent.

The myth of the objective documentary filmmaker—that nonfiction works are inherently fly-on-the-wall portraits in which the camera just happens upon something compelling—is dashed right in the opening, when we move quickly from Foca, Bosnia, which will prove to be the film’s main anchor point, to Nodaway County, Missouri. In both places, we hear a voice from off screen, presumably Johnson’s. In Foca, the camera searches rural environs; the voice comments on the patches of wildflowers; a shepherd and his flock trail by. When she finds the right composition, a hand emerges from the left, reaches around to the front of the camera and pulls a few blades of grass from the ground, so they’ll sully the frame no longer. In Missouri, we also see a landscape shot, of a highway in late afternoon, a storm brewing in the gray sky. Chain lightning strikes on the horizon, eliciting a little gasp of pleasure from behind the camera. A thunderclap. It’s a perfect shot, in a sense. And then—a sneeze, jostling the frame into spasms. The message of these two opening shots is so basic as to be brilliant: there’s someone behind the camera, living, breathing, sneezing, thinking. There is no true objectivity, not just here, but in all film. Every shot is the result of a choice.

Of course, André Bazin was right, as he always was, when he wrote in 1947 about Jean Painlevé’s shimmering “science films,” documentary shorts shot mostly underwater: “The camera alone possesses the secret key to this universe where supreme beauty is identified at once with nature and chance.” His essay was titled “Accidental Beauty,” and certainly the camera can harness and transform everyday objects, creatures, and environments into marvelous spectacles of grace. Yet it was Painlevé’s choice to create this art, to place his camera in particular positions so that cinema could express something about the extra-ordinary mysteries of the world without the appearance of manipulating the environment. Throughout Cameraperson, we are made aware of internal thought processes, and it sometimes becomes highly emotional.

A recurring passage set in a hospital in Kano, Nigeria, initially creates harrowing human drama out of a baby’s delivery in an understaffed and clearly underfunded hospital. But the drama increasingly becomes tied to whether the person behind the camera will intervene in the child’s survival—and simultaneously whether the camera will run out of battery power. In Foca, Johnson films the day-to-day lives of a Muslim family who have returned home following the ethnic-cleansing horrors of the Bosnian War, but among the most memorable dramas we see is a mini-suspense scene in which the camera alights on two of the youngest children playing in the yard, a boy carelessly swinging an ax a few inches from his toddler brother’s face. We hear Johnson muttering with anxiety, then sighing with relief, but never leaving her post to emerge into frame. In Zalingei, Darfur, two women whose homes were stolen by Arab militants wryly ask the person behind the camera if she can help restore their houses. Knowing that she cannot, they turn away from the camera’s gaze to continue chopping down a tree.

Back in Johnson’s home country, questions around interference and objectivity are just as acute. In Huntsville, Alabama, an anonymous teenage patient awaiting a doctor at an abortion clinic, shown only in a static shot trained on her holey jeans, says she “feels like a bad person” for going through with the procedure; she is reassured by voices behind the camera that she should feel no guilt, before being coached where to start her sentence so they can better record it for the film. In a snippet from Washington D.C., Michael Moore is seen telling conscientious objector Corporal Abdul Henderson in front of the Capitol building that he’ll do everything he can to help with lawyer fees resulting from his refusal to return to Iraq (the film, Fahrenheit 9/11, is among the most recognizable clips). Even Johnson’s most deeply personal footage, featuring her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, raises queries about the consent of the person being filmed, and the nature of the relationship between subject and artist.

The key to Cameraperson’s triumph is that nothing in the film was created with the knowledge of being used for this purpose, which leaves the footage itself—shot for movies directed by the likes of Laura Poitras, Kirby Dick, Amir Bar-Lev, Gini Reticker, Moore, and many others—uncompromised by manipulation or intentionality. Yet Johnson is dedicated and philosophical in her conception of this film, and in her thinking of what the camera can be and do (the press notes come with Johnson’s “incomplete list of what the camera enables”—which is 23 items deep). If she had set out to shoot an original film on this subject, this could have been rigid, overthought, a self-regarding conceptual project. Instead, by pulling together preexisting content, taken out of its original context, she’s created a work of casual artistry, in which she has made the invisible visible, a kind of secret cinema that exists behind the one we normally take in, and take for granted.

Once the snippets have been sewn together by Johnson’s editor, Nels Bangerter (who cut 2013’s remarkable Let the Fire Burn), disparate places are connected in ways both visual (the wind whistling through grass first in Wyoming, then in Foca) and thematic (we see a close-up of a letter Johnson wrote to God in 1975 from her Beaux Arts, Washington, home—“You are a great God!”—then a mosque prayer in Herat, Afghanistan,then young ballerinas dancing to Christian pop before a looming cross in Colorado Springs), and the footage sings anew. These tactics don’t convey some banal observation on the interconnectedness of our world but a revelation of the inner world of the film’s creator. Alongside Cameraperson’s provenance as a work of ethical interrogation is the expression of a woman whose perspective has been greatly affected by the things she’s seen. During one passage in Sarajevo, war photographers talk about their nightmares and post-traumatic stress. Johnson seems to align herself with them, but her film is too multifaceted to elicit pity or awe. Instead, she ties her own observations into a hushed contemplation of the world’s evils.

In the most extraordinary sequence, Johnson silently moves from a series of spaces, most in Foca, that still reverberate with the horrors of the Bosnian War—the police station that was a headquarters for ethnic cleansing, now inhabited by carefree kids playing ping-pong; the Partizan Sports Hall, where Muslim women were imprisoned and raped; the destroyed space of the Aladza Mosque; the rape and enslavement camp known as “Karaman’s House” (we may subliminally recall this house, now overgrown with wildflowers from Cameraperson’s very first shot); the Motel Miljevina, where Serb soldiers organized—to abandoned sites from around the world that speak to death and genocide. These include the pickup truck that dragged James Byrd Jr. to his death in Jasper, Texas; Wounded Knee; Tahrir Square, where more than 900 civilians have been killed since 2011; Nyamata Church in Rwanda, where 10,000 Tutsis were massacred; Ground Zero at the World Trade Center; Hotel Africa, an execution site of the Liberian Civil War; Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray; the Russian-built Bibi Mahru Hill Swimming Pool in Kabul, later used as for Taliban public executions. The film then brings us from the incomprehensible macro to the unimaginable micro: young Najibullah Afghan, a Kabul teen telling the story of losing an eye and his brother to a bomb blast. During it all, we are allowed to consider at once the lingering pain of war and violence, the ability of the camera to bear witness, and the simultaneous insufficiency of that ability to make sense of a tumultuous world. For Johnson, who, starting in 1997, cut her teeth shooting over 200 interviews with Holocaust survivors for the Shoah Foundation, this is hardly tangential to her experience of cinema.

Johnson doesn’t seem to want us to forget, however, that just as much as the camera creates spaces for contemplation, it also encourages performativity. In a sequence in Westport, New York, filmmaker Kathy Leichter, on screen in her own movie about her mother’s suicide, feels empowered to abandon discretion. Leichter begins to angrily throw around the detritus of her dead parent’s life, which had until this point been neatly stored in bags and cardboard filing boxes. “I’m sick of it!” she screams, making a mess of the bedroom, in the process becoming a compelling subject—an actor, in a sense—for the camera. Her emotional outburst gives way to an unplanned eruption: there’s a sound of rumbling, and the camera whips to the window, where we see a mini-avalanche of snow sliding from the roof and piling up in the backyard. “That was crazy!” Laughter erupts, cutting the tension. The women marvel at the moment, and that it was caught on video. Two spontaneous performances for the camera: one of feeling, one of nature; one coaxed, one captured by chance.

Film Comment: Sam Adams interview, March 18, 2016

On a panel at the True/False Film Festival, veteran documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson recalled balking at a director’s request to film a tracking shot of Sudanese men in a refugee camp. It was, she said, a gesture that would turn them into an anonymous mass, and she wanted to shoot them as individuals. She won that battle, but acknowledged that even the most conscientious of nonfiction filmmakers fall short of their own ideals. “I betray my own moral imperative over and over again,” she admitted, “which you have to do to be able to film things.”

Nearly all of the material in Cameraperson, which marks Johnson’s debut as a director, was shot in the course of making other films—more than two dozen of them, including CITIZENFOUR, Fahrenheit 9/11, The Oath, and Two Towns of Jasper. But the more you watch, the more you can feel her constant presence, even when her hand isn’t reaching into frame to de-streak a windshield. A guiding intelligence links the movie’s images, and a fierce compassion, a trait more easily pondered when it’s not swept away on the tide of an overarching narrative.

Concentrating on what Johnson calls “images that marked me,” Cameraperson strips away exposition, providing only the location where footage was shot—and, in the case of one outtake from CITIZENFOUR, even that is undisclosed. It’s arranged instead according to the logic of memory, conveying something of what it must be like to be inside the head of someone who’s captured so many extraordinary—and, in some cases, traumatizing—images over the course of a long and still active career. (Cameraperson premiered at Sundance alongside two more Johnson-shot documentaries—Trapped and Audrie & Daisy—and contains footage from others as yet unfinished.) Movies are often spoken of as a way to see the world through another’s eyes, but Cameraperson engages the whys of seeing as well as the whats; its vision is a gift, and also a responsibility.

When we first start watching movies, whether they’re fiction or documentary, we don’t think about them as constructed objects. They just exist. Do you remember when you realized that movies were actually made by people, and that you could be one of them?

I had this brother who could find things. He could find fossils. He has since become a paleobotanist, so he finds fossil plants. We would go to the beaches of Washington state, and he would knock apart a concretion and find things inside. And I would be hitting it with a hammer and just come up with little bits. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out how he could find things and I couldn’t. He loved art, but he was always finding the most extraordinary things in nature, and so I had this sense that making things will always be inadequate, and I’m inadequate at making things and finding things. There was a very long period of time where I could see what other people had made, but it seemed fully formed to me.

It was a very late experience, and I think that I carried that with me, even in my shooting. Part of it was this overwhelming sense of, you missed it, that wasn’t the lens to get it on, you were out of focus—that was the prevailing struggle. But then, it became somehow, someone can do this, and if I keep trying, somehow I will have moments of being able to do this. It’s always felt very much like fragments of actually clicking into where it feels like cinema is being made when I am shooting. But, also late, I have come to the understanding of how much is happening in that struggle. It feels like even with this film, I don’t really quite know how it was made; it was such a collaboration, and such an odd struggle, and then it appeared as something that I don’t recognize. All of those things make me ask new questions about making things. What I do know is true about this film is that it came from a very profound need, and I kept addressing that need until it had an answer.

How long did you work on Cameraperson?

I think it started in 2009 when I went to Afghanistan and I worked on this film [The Blind Eye] that was to be about something else. In 2012, when I’d finished editing that film and showed it to the young woman who was in it, she said: “You can’t use this footage.” From that point forward, I started asking all of these really strong questions around permission and complicity. But even that film was a search to understand vision, invisibility, representation—and the role of time in all of this. When I was filming with her, I had complicity, I had consent. And then at this moment in time, when we’ve edited, the consent is gone. Would she want in the future to see who she was? You could imagine yes, maybe, but you can’t know that. I think anyone who holds a camera is involved in that battle at all times. Someone sees you shooting—do you pull away, do you keep shooting, what happens in that moment? You experience that every day that you’re filming. It’s been a preoccupation of mine from the minute I picked up a camera.

You didn’t start out wanting to make films, though. Your original impulse was to become a critical theorist.

I came up in that first wave of identity politics [at Brown University in the 1980s]. I discovered the international world, and I was really interested in South African apartheid struggles. I was really freaked out by my whiteness, and felt like, “Can I talk? What can I say? We need to let other people talk.” I was wholly unaware, I would say, of being a woman in this whole schema of things.

I saw the films of Djibril Diop Mambéty, like Touki Bouki, and I saw Sembène films, and my mind was kind of blown. I just wanted to see more of something so different. So I got myself to Dakar, but I got there 15 years too late. All the filmmakers I met hadn’t made films in years. It was all happening in Ouagadougou. But I went to Fespaco, and it was this crazy revelation where I saw all of these West African filmmakers who got to make one film and then never got to make another film. And then there were all of these people who sort of lived off of the idea of African cinema, and it was all these white women in their forties and fifties who were having affairs with different African filmmakers. I remember thinking: “Oh my God, this is not going to be me.” So where with theory, it felt like somehow I could escape from the dilemmas of identity politics by supporting other people’s work and talking about it, suddenly I was like, this may be even trickier territory.

I had also by that time picked up a camera and filmed with these World War I Senegalese veterans, and then I got to work on this feature film, Niiwam, and it was like: “I love this. I want to do this.” Language was so tricky at that moment in history. To even speak was so complicated, and then I was just stripped to nothing. I couldn’t speak French. I couldn’t speak Wolof. No one spoke English. And suddenly it was just about my dynamics with people. I learned to trust people without being able to communicate, and all of the intellectualism and all of the words were gone. That seems really fundamental to me in becoming a cameraperson, losing verbal language and coming up with ways of seeing and reading people on visual cues. When I went to film school [at La Fémis] in France, it was the same thing. I was out of my league on a verbal level, but I was tying to survive by my wits, visually. Working on the Derrida film was very much that. I was way out of my league, verbally.

You’ve said that shooting Derrida was a major milestone for you.

Amy Ziering came looking for someone who could speak French and English. I was so in awe of him. I really wanted him to know I had a brain, and I was really chatty. He was pretty funny, and I was trying to charm him, and I remember getting out of the car after driving into the city with him, and Amy whispered: “Stop talking.”

Very shortly after that, we were in his home and he needed to really think. He wanted us out, and Amy was begging him to let us stay, and he said, Kirsten can stay by herself with a camera if she does not say a word. So there I was in his home for the next eight hours and I didn’t speak. And it was so profound for me. I started to realize that all of my thinking I could communicate with my shooting, and enough was going on with him that you could actually have visual ideas that spoke to what he was doing. So he got lost in his thing and I got lost in my thing, and it was this turning point of what you can discover once you do that.

One of the surprises in Cameraperson is how present in it you are, even though you’re almost never on camera. In one of the earliest shots, we hear you gasp as a lightning bolt cuts across the sky. You would think a cinematographer would train themselves to keep silent, although in most cases the sound in the film is being recorded separately and not by your camera.

There is a real thing about when you can talk. Sometimes you transgress, like that moment where I ask the older woman in Bosnia, has she always been such a great dresser—I couldn’t bear anymore the fact that we were asking her all these questions about the horror [of war crimes]. Sometimes that happens, where I know we have the material that’s needed for the film and I see where we’re taking the person, and I just can’t restrain myself. That’s not within the hierarchy of what’s supposed to happen. It’s not appropriate, but sometimes I’ll feel like we’re riding some train too hard, and I’ll just be like: “Can’t we just go sideways with it?” And I’ll throw a monkey wrench into things.

Especially when you’re dealing with politically sensitive material and subjects who may face recrimination, the context in which the material you shoot appears is critically important. But Cameraperson deliberately strips much of that context away: you don’t tell us what films the footage was shot for, only the location where it was shot. What kinds of conversations did you have with the original directors about repurposing material for your film?

It did feel deeply freeing, because so many of the films I’ve worked on are coming from a place of having a really conscientious human rights objective. With the abortion footage from Trapped, that’s not necessarily the footage that you would put in a film in which you’re advocating a pro-choice position, to have her say, if I didn’t do this abortion I would give this baby up for adoption. That’s murky territory. But it is, in fact, the very powerful truth of this person. In that case, Dawn [Porter] was completely like: “No problem.” But in the case of Two Towns of Jasper, Whitney [Dow] and Marco [Williams] were very concerned about how the story of James Byrd was contextualized, and what it means to have Whitney asking “Can we see those photos” [of Byrd’s body after he was dragged to death] without having the context of how they handled that material in the actual film. We had very long, super-interesting conversations about it, and I think it was a stretch for all of us at a certain point to say “Is it okay to do this,” because it’s such loaded material.

When the prosecutor balks at showing you the photos of Byrd’s body on camera, it’s like the moment in Grizzly Man when Werner Herzog listens to the audio of Timothy Treadwell being mauled to death. The filmmakers are experiencing it, but the audience is spared.

It was totally that for me. The thing that I said to Whitney and Marco was: “I saw those photos, and they are indelible, traumatizing images that I cannot get out of my mind.” Whitney and Marco saw those photos, and we all have that knowledge inside of us, and other knowledge that came from being in that place. Some of it makes it into the film, some of it doesn’t. What was really fascinating to me in all these discussions with the directors is that the material that I had to work with the longest in order to figure out how I was going to deal with it in the film, like the baby in Nigeria scene, like The Two Towns of Jasper, that was the material that I had to spend the longest time talking with the directors about. It’s just really loaded material to encounter in your life. Everybody had real struggle around figuring out how to represent that.

What was the source for the Nigerian footage of a newborn baby while awaiting the arrival of much-needed oxygen?

It’s from a film called The Edge of Joy. She [Dawn Sinclair Shapiro] ended up using a lot more really explicit footage even than I used, and it had a lot of context about the Nigerian health care system. But my emotional experience of living through that was not present in her film, in any way. It was one of the biggest burdens I felt like I had carried in the course of my life of being a cameraperson.

In Cameraperson’s opening text, you refer to the images you’ve chosen as representations of “moments that marked me.” What does that mean?

I think that I’m a different person, and I don’t even know how, because of shooting those things. The whole thing around forgetting—what can you forget, what are you allowed to forget, what shouldn’t you forget—is a big question for me. The Nigeria footage, for example. It would often come to mind as this blurry image of this midwife’s face, but it wasn’t even just her face. It was two midwives I had put together in my mind. I knew the things that had happened there: I could consciously say: “A child died.” I knew that. But when I asked for the footage from the director and I sat down with Judy Karp, who had done the sound with me, what was crazy was that I knew everybody. I knew every face. And it was so clear that the blurry face was a way my brain had created for protecting me. The James Byrd book was the same way. I know what’s in that book, but the closed book is what stays in my mind. I’m really interested in that process. What is my brain up to, that I’m holding so many different experiences, and I’ve got caps on them, somehow—the cap of an image, blocking myself from knowing all these other images that I know.

That’s especially true with the Bosnian footage from I Came to Testify. It’s about the systematic use of rape as a tool of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, and yet you say in Cameraperson that until you returned to Foča, you couldn’t remember what the movie’s subject was.

That’s the crazy one. That was really shocking to me. I literally thought it was a film about blueberries. When I showed it to Amanda [Laws], my editor, she was like: “Why didn’t you tell me this was a film about rape?” And I was completely stunned. I had no idea. You become very interested in how memory and forgetting works when you have a parent with Alzheimer’s.

I’m not a combat journalist, and yet I know all these people—I knew Tim Hetherington, I know Lynsey Addario. Lynsey and I spent time together in Darfur, and then she was off to another place after that. I was like: “How are people processing this?” It’s funny, because it was “How are people,” not “How am I?” All I’m doing is dealing with the aftermath and poverty, but just because you’re not seeing people get shot all the time, it doesn’t mean you’re not experiencing it. So that was really fascinating to me at a certain point. I’d done a lot of thinking about how other people were handling it, but I had to reach some kind of saturation place inside myself.

You refer to the first version of Cameraperson, before editor Nels Bangerter came on board, as “the trauma cut.” By your own token, that distillation of the horrors you’ve witnessed on so many shoots was so dark it was virtually unwatchable.

It really was the tip of my iceberg. I was like: “This is nothing, compared to what I have seen. This is two and a half hours.” And yet. The fact that I had been rational, and had been there with an editor, thinking about how we put it together, and yet I wouldn’t have imagined it would be so traumatic—that was truly stunning. It really took me a great while to recover from. Thank God, Marilyn Ness, my producer said: “We’re going to stop editing.” Cameraperson is all the same material. It’s not like this film isn’t “the trauma cut.” There still are however many genocides in it.

I had consultations with a couple of great editors, like Jonathan Oppenheim, after that, and I sat there and talked about, what would it take to be able to experience this much feeling? I got super-interested in neurosciences, and that was also this coping mechanism. How does “the brain” process all this? I was reading tons around neuroscience and perception and how does empathy work in the brain, how does fear work in the brain. I spent a lot of time thinking structurally, taking myself away from the visceral. I was in systems.

And I told myself I wouldn’t shoot as much, too. In fact, I ended up going on this crazy shoot with Rebecca Cammisa where we snuck into a hospital and filmed a kid who was dying of cancer. And I was like: “I don’t need to be doing this right now. I shouldn’t be doing this right now.” That doesn’t mean I’m not going to do this forever, but I’m not going to pile more emotionally demanding material on top of this. That was, I think, the first time I’ve said no to something because of its content in 20 years. It was really interesting and super compelling, and I had a really hard time saying no. That’s where I was starting to get outside of myself and see myself from a distance.

Cameraperson brings out recurring themes in the movies you’ve shot, many of which have to do with the systematic abuse of women. Have you thought about what draws you to those subjects?

I don’t think I figured it out right away. Because of where I come from historically, I was always interested in racism. Race was my thing, trying to figure out all the dilemmas of it domestically, and then internationally as I traveled. But 9/11, for me as for many people, really shifted the orientation of the word. Where I’d been thinking all about postcolonialism and African history and the African diaspora, all of a sudden it took me in this new direction. I had the experience of going to Guantanamo [for The Oath], and when I read The Looming Tower, I realized that three of the people from that book I had seen in person. I had been in the courtroom when Ali Soufan was testifying, and then to see Abu Jindal and to see Hamdan and to see these prosecutors, all of a sudden it felt like this giant puzzle that was real, and I could maybe put together some pieces. Of course, that was not true on any level. But it was the feeling of “Ah, I understand this piece, and this is locking into this piece.” So that became completely energizing.

It was an odd discovery, but to be in Muslim countries somehow evoked memories of my [Seventh Day Adventist] childhood, because of the call to prayer, the ambient presence of belief. I ended up expressing that in The Above. I started to work on those thoughts and ideas, and started to realize this is getting at something close to me.

I was always thinking about human rights questions when I was filming, so I knew that was a thematic of mine. But it’s hilarious to me how late in the game I realized, “Oh, women’s place in the world, I deeply care about that,” even though I was working with all these women directors like Gini Reticker and Abby Disney, for who that’s the primary preoccupation. I would be like, “Race, race, race,” and they’d be like, “Women, women, women.” And then at a certain point, I was like: “Oh yeah, women!” It’s really evident in my film that I’m preoccupied with what women are doing and the challenges women face. It’s not what I’m focusing on, but it’s totally there.

That goes back to the moment when you interrupt the interviewer’s questions about war crimes to ask the woman whether she’s always been such a fabulous dresser. You’re not just asking about fashion. You’re asking about survival.

And that’s something that matters to me. Where is the color in things? That was the moment where when Nels did the rough cut, I could see that I do engage with the world, that there are all these things that are so sensual and loving and tender. That was a revelation.

One of the first things we see in Cameraperson is you plucking at a stray blade of grass at the bottom of the frame. It’s clear even those minor details are important to you.

I’m always trying to frame. A lot of times, because of the limitations in nonfiction, you just have to accept what the light is. But compositionally, I’m always pushing. I worked with Raoul Peck, and he’s very rigorous about composition. I remember I’d frame a shot and then he’d slightly reframe it and I became obsessed with seeing: Can I frame it in a way that he will not reframe it? I think I did it twice in the course of hundreds of shots, but I was so satisfied. Because he was just by fractions of things making it better on an aesthetic level.

You don’t just mean that the shots in a documentary should be beautiful. It’s clear you’re thinking them through on many levels at once.

When I teach, I talk about, how are you as a cameraperson trying to find a way to express what the director is interested in? You’re trying to know what the director is interested in. I have these conversations with directors where I’m trying to come up with a list or a map of themes that are important to them. In CITIZENFOUR, Laura did the shot of Snowden through the window in Russia, but that was a shot that we had talked about. We’d filmed Julian Assange that way. We’d filmed Bill Binney that way. It was this way of thinking about surveillance, privacy—you can go into this space, you can’t go into this space. It was an idea that connected to all of these ideas that she had about these issues. And we were constantly trying to find places to play it out. That happens a lot. When I shoot, I’ll have ideas and themes in my head, and it’s not that I’m trying to make it look pretty, but I’m trying to find a way to visually express what’s intrinsic to the story or the questions.

How did you start teaching?

With The Oath, Laura and I went to the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, and I met several Syrian filmmakers there who were running this festival in Damascus called Docs Box. I sort of volunteered to them and said I would love to work with camerawomen in this place, thinking it was really women who needed support for using the camera. But then I got there and it was both men and women, and everybody was navigating this really tricky territory in each of the different countries they were from. There were people from Egypt and Tunisia and Libya, and everybody had to navigate their relationship to the police and the government and whether they could film women or not, and so we just had incredible conversations around all the issues that are fascinating to me on this front. Then I got offered to create a master class in the journalism department at NYU in visual thinking. They have many Chinese students, students from Pakistan: it’s a very international situation where I feel like we’re all asking these questions generally. What are the strategies for how we make it through and around communicating what’s going on in the world when there’s so much pressure from all sides.

CITIZENFOUR was an extraordinary experience, an atypical experience, but it really put me in solidarity with people in other parts of the world where your aesthetic choices can determine your fate. I don’t know if you saw Hooligan Sparrow at Sundance, but I got this email from Nanfu Wang that was like: “Yeah, I kept the camera rolling like you told me when the police were chasing me.” And I thought: “Yeah, but I’m not Chinese in China.” I felt like I had shared this advice with her that was coming from a place of privilege, from a place where I can get on a plane and leave the country and don’t have to come back. So that experience even more has expanded how I teach, and how much all of this is a question mark for me. I think that informed this film, too. Instead of nailing things down and thinking, “I’m going to say things about this,” it’s like, “I am going to reveal things about this,” and then let’s talk about them.

In addition to drawing on the films you’ve shot for other people, Cameraperson also includes footage of your mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease, and your twin children. How did that end up in the movie?

I’d forgotten I had any footage of my mom. I hadn’t looked at that footage since her death. That was an act, to open up that footage and look at it. The stuff with my kids I had just shot by myself. If I had rented a camera for a shoot, I would just shoot something with them. That was stuff Nels asked for: do you have anything more that’s just your life?

Is it different to shoot your mother or your children for your own use than it is to turn the camera on them knowing you might use that material for a film?

I remember I was filming my kids in the bath, and I was like, I’m filming footage of my kids naked. Where will it go? I do have a hyper-awareness around how footage can be used. You’re self-aware, even when you’re filming family, because it’s evidence of something. And you know that it’s partial evidence. On the playground, something will be so cute, and you experience this thing of, “Do I film this? Do I pull out my phone? And what am I doing to this moment to film it?” You see all these other parents negotiating that, too. And yet it’s fabulous to have some of these moments. And there are other moments that are spring-loaded. Do you save it? How do you keep it? Who’s going to see it?

It reminds me of the moment in Sans Soleil when the narrator observes that the photographs he takes to preserve memory eventually take its place. You don’t remember the event— you remember the record of the event.

Then sometimes you’re like: “If I don’t take this photo, I won’t remember this moment.” And that’s troubling.

Cameraperson does function in a similar way to Sans Soleil, where it’s structured according to the associative processes of memory rather than according to chronological or even rhetorical principles.

I just had somebody say, and this hadn’t occurred to me at all, that it’s sort of a taxonomy of Alzheimer’s—the way Alzheimer’s reorders information, duplicates, disregards chronology, gives all importance to emotional concern. My mom was always preoccupied with my hair when I was a teenager. So the fact that my kids’ hair is unbrushed [in the film] has to do with some part of me having ambivalence about the brushing of the hair, how much you make your kid hurt when you brush it. And then my mom says: “You can’t film while your hair’s a mess.” Some part of her has retrieved that thing, and then there it is in the 12 minutes of footage I have of my mom. One of the primary conflicts of our mother-daughter relationship is present in both my footage and my mother’s footage. It’s crazy, but it’s in the genetic transmission of all this stuff. And that’s what’s so cool about documentary.

My kids did not know I had found a dead bird, but when I took out the camera in the morning, it was Viva who asked: “Can we go find the bird?” How did she know that I wanted to film the bird? I didn’t tell them, but there was some way she knew that. I always think of myself of following the subject and they’re leading, but in that moment, she was picking up on what I as a cameraperson need, and how often is that happening in the relationship? Is the person being filmed leading you to where they want to go, or where they think you want to go?

Cameraperson: Getting Close Criterion essay by Michael Almereyda, February 06, 2017

At the Frame’s Edge: Editing Cameraperson February 08, 2017, Video (3:34)

Cameraperson (2016) - The Criterion Collection

The Los Angeles Review of Books: Lauren Du Graf June 29, 2016

“Cameraperson” and the Conventions of Documentary Filmmaking ... Richard Brody from The New Yorker

Movie Mezzanine: Elena Lazic September 06, 2016

The Village Voice: Michelle Orange September 07, 2016

The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri September 06, 2016

Nonfics [Daniel Walber]

Cameraperson :: Movies :: Reviews :: CAMERAPERSON :: Paste Kenji Fujishima

Sight & Sound [Hannah McGill] April 6, 2017

Cameraperson - Little White Lies Matthew Eng

Sight & Sound [Jordan Cronk] May 27, 2016

Indiewire: Eric Kohn January 27, 2016

Kirsten Johnson's “Montage of Horror” - The New Yorker Tad Friend, September 5, 2016

Review: CAMERAPERSON, A Moving Self-Portrait Of A Veteran ... Dustin Chang from Screen Anarchy

Cameraperson Documentary - IndieWire Katie Walsh

Screen Slate: Jeva Lange January 02, 2017

Sight & Sound: Robert Greene The best documentaries of 2016: cinematic nonfiction in the year of nonfact, January 13, 2017

The AV Club [Mike D'Angelo]

Slant Magazine [Sam C. Mac]

The Village Voice: Calum Marsh March 15, 2016

The World Cinema Guide [Alister Burton]

Letterboxd: Michael Sicinski August 14, 2016

Movie Mezzanine: Mallory Andrews September 09, 2016

Writing: Movies [Chris Knipp]

Now on Blu-ray: Kirsten Johnson's CAMERAPERSON Is One Of ... Matt Brown, Criterion Collection

CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion Collection

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

Film Pulse [Kevin Rakestraw] Criterion Blu-Ray

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Jake Cole] Criterion Blu-Ray

Cinemablographer [Pat Mullen]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]

Independent Ethos [Ana Morgenstern]

Battleship Pretension [David Bax]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]

Way Too Indie [Michael Nazarewycz]

The Upcoming [Catherine Sedgwick]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

CineVue [Ben Nicholson]

The Stranger [Kathy Fennessy]

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

At Darren's World of Entertainment [Darren Bevan]

Wylie Writes [Addison Wylie]

POV Magazine [Jason Gorber]

Backseat Mafia [Rob Aldam]

Brooklyn Magazine: Eli Goldfarb September 30, 2016

The Last Thing I See [Brent McKnight]

Film School Rejects [Christopher Campbell]

Reverse Shot: Jeff Reichert #4 of Top Ten Films of the Year, January 02, 2017

Here's a handy resource of all the films whose footage are excerpted in Cameraperson Doc House

CAMERAPERSON film website

Fandor: David Hudson March 23, 2016

'Cameraperson' filmmaker Kirsten Johnson reinvents the cinema ... Eric Althoff interview from The Washington Times, October 18, 2016

In Cameraperson, a Cinematographer Examines the Cost of Her ... Julia Felsenthal interview from Vogue magazine, September 11, 2016

BOMB: Alex Zafiris interview, September 06, 2016

cléo: Rooney Hassan interview, April 18, 2016

Filmmaker: Vadim Rizov interview, January 26, 2016

'Cameraperson': Sundance Review | Hollywood Reporter John DeFore

Variety [Nick Schager]

Film-maker Kirsten Johnson: how I betrayed my mother - The Guardian Sean O’Hagan, September 7, 2016

Cameraperson review - a beautifully curated collage of ... - The Guardian Jordan Hoffman

The Globe and Mail: John Semley

Metro US [Matt Prigge]

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Cameraperson' is unlike any other film ever made ... ‘Cameraperson’ is a film about experience, humanity and the horrible beauty of life and death, by Eric Althoff from The Washington Times, October 13, 2016

Kirsten Johnson's 'Cameraperson' is a poetic primer in documentary ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]

The Los Angeles Times: Justin Chang

Cameraperson Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz

RogerEbert.com: Tina Hassannia March 15, 2016

Review: In 'Cameraperson,' a Found Poem Filtered Through an Intent ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times

At Home With a Very Modern, Very Artistic Family - The New York Times Craig Hubert, September 15, 2016

Cameraperson - Wikipedia

Johnson, Liza

RETURN

USA (97 mi) 2011

Cannes '11, day four: The Dardennes shoot for the Palme D'Or trifecta, and Freaks & Geeks' Linda Cardellini gets a rare showcase Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 15, 2011

Now that I think about it, “familiarity” sums up this entire day at Cannes, as the third film I saw, Liza Johnson’s Return, struggles—with considerable success—to find something fresh to say about the restless discontent of the American soldier newly arrived home from the front. (It’s screening in the Directors’ Fortnight, which is technically a separate festival taking place half a mile down the Croisette, but tends to be treated, like its cousin Critics’ Week, as if it were part of Cannes proper.) Linda Cardellini, so memorably vulnerable as Lindsay on Freaks and Geeks, gives a terrific, flinty performance as Kelli, who picks up her old life with her husband (Michael Shannon, playing it normal for a change and acquitting himself well) and kids and goes back to her previous job as a factory worker, but finds it nearly impossible to adjust to mundane reality, even as she repeatedly insists that nothing especially traumatic happened to her in Iraq. (“A lot of people had it a lot worse” is her mantra when questioned.) This particular scenario has been kicking around since at least The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946 (I’m sure there were WWI examples as well, just can’t think of any offhand), and it’s not easy to find an acre that hasn’t been pretty well plowed already. But Johnson, making her feature debut following a number of acclaimed shorts, demonstrates a firm and steady hand, as well as an admirable disinclination to spell out the precise nature of Kelli’s unhappiness, letting Cardellini’s expressive features do most of the work. The film’s circular ending struck me as a bit too tidy, and Mad Men’s John Slattery, while quite funny, doesn’t entirely convince as a good ol’ boy with whom Kelli bonds at an AA meeting. But Return is precisely the sort of promising first effort that festival sidebars were created to showcase. Grade: B-

Return: Cannes Review Todd McCarthy at Cannes from The Hollywood Review, May 14, 2011

The former "E.R." star is in virtually every shot of Liza Johnson's drama about a national reservist's difficult transition back into home life.

CANNES -- Another small-scale American indie about a vet returning home from the Middle East, Return has quiet virtues and the distinction of focusing closely on one particular woman’s difficulty readjusting to being a wife and mother. This first feature by Liza Johnson, an artist who has made five shorts, traps the viewer, along with its subject, in the drudgery of daily life and maintains the same low-key tone throughout. But its observational qualities do open a window on a female viewing exposure, which should translate into a nice festival career and limited specialized commercial and home viewing exposure.

Returning to small-town, working-class Ohio after serving in a resupply unit at an unspecified overseas location, National Reservist Kelli (Linda Cardellini) is welcomed home by plumber husband Mike (Michael Shannon) and two young daughters. With little ado and no discussion of what it was like for her over there, Kelli resumes her boring job at a warehouse and goes out drinking with her  girlfriends, who are also not only boring but annoyingly inane.

It’s just little things at first that suggest Kelli’s sense of dislocation: She uses the f-word in front of kids, she listens to bass-heavy boom box music while driving the kids around and has no patience to just sit around watching reality TV while eating junk food. One easily infers that, after a year of sharpened focus and a heightened sense of purpose, it’s impossible for her to just settle into the way things used to be.

As her disconnect becomes more pronounced, Kelli abruptly quits her job with no explanation. When she discovers Mike has been having an affair, they move apart and share custody of the girls, which subsequently tilts in Mike’s favor when Kelli is nailed with a DUI and has her license suspended. Once she falls into a genuine tailspin, the only options are crashing or pulling out of it; helping initially with the latter is a slightly nutty recluse (John Slattery, in an amusing change-of-pace role), who rescues Kelli from the banality of their AA group with a manly offering of self-shot venison, booze and sex in his rustic cabin.

Without extensively going into what Kelli experienced on her tour of duty -- her catch-all response to that question is “A lot of people had it a lot worse than I did” -- Johnson is able to suggest that, even if Kelli didn’t see real action or suffer any physical trauma, she’s no longer the same person she was; too many things happened to her mentally and emotionally for her to reconcile herself with her previous life.

A great deal rides on Cardellini’s performance, as she’s on camera almost continuously and in very close proximity to it at that. Very attractive but not too much so to be believable in this everyday context, she delivers by keeping you interested no matter how mundane the activity Kelli is performing. It’s a wholehearted performance, but not in an actressy way. Shannon plays it absolutely straight for once.

One significant drawback is that, although one is aware of their presence, the two daughters are characterized almost as an afterthought; when the older one is finally given a bit to do in the final stages, it’s obvious this is far too little and too late. Surely the welfare of her young girls would be the first thing on a long-absent mother’s mind both while away and once she’s back, but this realm is far too sketchily dealt with.

Anne Etheridge’s mobile cinematography maintains a watchful air of intimacy with Kelli in this film of modest ambition and achievement.

Return Mark Adams at Cannes from Screendaily

The subject of a soldier returning home and finding it hard to adjust to life has been tackled on screen many times before, but writer/director Liza Johnson’s subtle and simply told film offers a fresh look at just how hard it is to adjust to everyday life, with Linda Cardellini impressive and thoughtful as a woman back from military service.

Return has perfect indie credentials - the cast also includes Michael Shannon and John Slattery - and while perhaps lacking the drama and depth to really break out it could well appeal to niche distributors and international broadcasters.

Liza Johnson, whose background is in visual arts, has crafted a story that eschews the usual dramatic cues of the ‘soldier back home’ story - there are no moments of anger or shrill emotion; no dwelling on traumatic flashbacks to the war and no violence as a reaction to a heightened psychological crisis.

When Kelli (Cardellini) arrives back from active duty into the welcoming arms of her husband Mike (Shannon) and young daughters things appear at ease. She is happy to be at home, loves her husband, likes being with her friends again and welcomes the chance to be with her children. She has no war stories to tell - she worked in supplies - and saw no dead bodies, but she still cannot adjust to home life.

Quite simply she wants things to be as it was before she left. But people around her have subtly moved on and she is can’t quite adjust to the ‘normal’ life. She quits her humdrum factory job, dabbles in re-decorating the house and is mortified to discover that her husband is having an affair with a woman who works for the local car dealership.

She drinks too much with friends after walking out on her husband and is stopped by police. As part of her DUI charge she has to attend a therapy session, where she meets Bud (John Slattery from Mad Men), eventually sleeping with him. Matters come to ahead when she is told she is to be re-deployed.

Linda Cardellini (from roles on TV in Freaks & Geeks and ER and on film in the Scooby Doo franchise) is terrific as Kelli, appearing in virtually every scene and generating a real sense of warmth and affection but also a slight unease and distrust in those around her. She is the real centre of the film, and carries the project with intelligence and compassion, in a similar way that Michelle Monaghan carried the drama Trucker.

Michael Shannon is equally impressive as her husband, a loving family man who has simply moved on in his life ever-so-slightly. His sheer presence and subtle performance bolsters Cardillini’s performance, making what on screen is a minor role seem more substantial. John Slattery arrives midway through the film, but makes a real impact as the charming man who offers Kelli emotional support - and little romance - for a few short hours.

This story of a woman returning from war is both thoughtful and gently powerful. It might well lack any real dramatic flourishes but Linda Cardellini’s terrific performance demands attention, and the film marks Liza Johnson as a new talent in indie US cinema.

Cannes 2011. Rushes: "L'apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close)", "Return", "Take Shelter" Daniel Kasman at Cannes from Mubi, May 19, 2011

Johnson, Rian

BRICK B+ 91

USA (119 mi) 2005

A film about films, using a stylish noir genre to remind us all what it was like in high school, exaggerating the various cliques to the point of absurdity. All the characters are actually attending high school, in this case the director’s own beautiful San Clemente high school in southern California, yet they are resembling the world of Sam Spade, complete with a sidekick, underworld kingpins, heavies, femme fatales, all creating their own detective-style vernacular as Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, an intelligent loner who backs down to no one, investigates the unresolved murder of his ex girl friend, who was frantically trying to contact him before she disappeared. The manner of his investigation includes using the startlingly effective research and spy operations of his sidekick, searching the lockers of high school students for clues, discovering various notes that have to be decoded, fending off the advances of gorgeous conniving babes who are attempting to distract and mislead him, including one black dominatrix whose slavish-boys continually lie at her feet obeying her every command, while at the same time attempting to ply the babes for information, or even getting the living snot kicked out of him by a terrific heavy, Noah Fleiss, whose testosterone-inflamed violence is a thing to behold, as he is also surprisingly innocent at times, shy, even introspective. Lukas Hass with a limp, and a cane with a duck handle, plays the kingpin, known only as the pin, a drug dealer conducting his own underworld operations while still living at home with mom, who affectionately serves the boys apple juice or Tang. The Vice Principal of the school is none other than Richard Roundtree.

It’s an interesting balance of humor and always witty, but perhaps overly chatty dialogue, first rate cinematography and storytelling, an absorbing mood with great acting and pacing, with each scene unraveling into a kind of spoof of itself. This could be a forgettable failure, but it’s irreverent and hilarious as hell and continually interesting throughout. Oddly enough, what keeps us involved is the understanding that behind every role, behind every thug and heavy, is just a kid. And all the kids in this film are likable and appealing to us when presented in this fashion, as they’re hiding behind the facade of these original and inventive roles, much like actual teenagers hide behind anything they can use to keep from having to be real. This film is not expected to be released until the spring, but reveals a particularly inventive and insightful way to examine teenagers feuding among themselves, still learning the ropes, still wondering what’s it all about in the wild and wacky world of high school. Once more, Lou Reed shows us the way by singing “Sister Ray” with the Velvets over the end credits.

Sundance Special Jury Prize

American dramatic: for originality of vision, Rian Johnson, writer-director, "Brick."

Review: Brick - Cinematical James Rocchi

Our hero got a call from his ex-lover two days ago, after a furtive note telling him to be at a certain phone booth at a certain time. She sounded like she was in trouble, so he went looking for her; asked around; kept his eyes open. And now he's found her. Dead. Face-down in a reservoir, her blonde hair trailing in the rainwater runoff. He's shaken, but he knows what he has to do: He's going to find out who's responsible. He's going to find out why they killed her. He's going to see that justice – or something like it – is done. He walks away from the body, sad but ready. He's going to have to plumb the local underworld. He's going to have to ask ugly questions. He's also going to have to come up with an excuse for the Assistant Vice-Principal about why he won't be in class for the next few days. …

Brick, written and directed by Rian Johnson, is already being called many things: Hammett goes to high school; a teen noir; a distorted trip through two different genres, as if John Hughes directed The Maltese Falcon. All those things are right (or glib enough to be quotable, which is almost as good), but let's also cut to the chase: The first thing you need to know about Brick is that it's hands down the first truly great film of 2006, one worth seeing and seeing again and actually thinking about, with sharp, snappy dialogue giving it a lustrous gloss, and carefully-drawn, achingly human characters putting real weight and power under the sheen. What Johnson's done with Brick is something akin to taking two old pieces of wood – caked with years of dust and shoddily-applied paint, layers of uneven age-dulled wax, cheap veneer and hastily-applied stain – and banging them against each other so hard and so precisely that all the cover-up and concealment fall away revealing the true beauty and grain of each piece so we can see them both as new.

Our hero, Brendan, is played by Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, a smart, withdrawn kid with a mop of unruly hair and glasses; he used to go out with Emily (Emille DeRaven), but she broke up with him and fell in with a bad crowd. Between her phone call and the discovery of her body, Brendan scours the school looking for answers about what she's up to: Asking The Brain (Matt O'Leary) about her crowd: "Who's she eating with?" Checking in with the stoners, the drama queens, the football heroes. He doesn't find her until he finds her dead. And Brendan may be no more than 16, 17 years old, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do.

One of Brick's many pleasures is how it doesn't spell everything out for audiences; it teases you along, daring you to catch up. It turns out that Brendan's done something like this before, handing a delinquent and dope dealer named Jerr over to school authorities. When the Assistant Vice-Principal (Richard Roundtree, note-perfect) wants Brendan to tell him what's going on now, because "You've helped this office out before," Brendan's reply is classic, cagey noir bravado: "I gave you Jerr to see him eaten, not to see you fed." But if snappy dialogue were all Brick had, it'd be a fairly empty exercise in style, old goods in new packaging. Part of what makes Brick so good is Johnson's willingness to let his script be with his characters – to give them real feelings and the time to express them, to have their inner emotional choices drive their external actions. Emily is not just a plot device to Brendan; thanks to Johnson's writing and direction and Gordon-Leavitt's performance, she's not just a plot device to us, either.

And at the same time, none of the character moments and grace notes in the performances distract from the snap, the zing, the appeal of Brick's gutsy central conceit of uniting crime fiction and teen drama: The warmth actually brings out the cool, and vice-versa. Johnson's understanding of noir style isn't shallow; it isn't overly studied, either. Brendan's two foremost noir hero characteristics are that he can take a hell of a beating and spends a lot of time unconscious. A lot of movies that claim to pay tribute to old-school crime fiction get the look of it right and the feel of it wrong. Brick avoids the look – Brendan wears ratty hoodies and army jackets, the kind of stuff you wear as a teen so you can disappear into it, not a trench coat or a suit – and that means Brick can focus on feel. A film like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or the wildly over-praised Sin City uses noir language and style to craft fun, hollow power fantasies about invincibility. Brick uses noir language and style to craft a real, riveting moral parable about mortality. When you were a teen, being a teen felt like a matter of life and death. Well, it's like that in Brick. Just a little moreso.

Leavitt is in pretty much every scene of Brick, and it's a virtuoso performance – emotionally rich but stylistically juicy, with the nutrition and sizzle of a great steak dinner with all the sides done just right. The supporting actors are also cast in style of classic crime films: Find actors who look like what they play, from Lukas Haas's turn as crime lord The Pin (who, The Brain explains, "… is really old … like, 26 …") to Nora Zehtener's Laura Dannon, who may (in classic femme fatale fashion,) be Brendan's best ally or worst enemy.  Haas is intimidating and intimidated, a criminal who knows how fragile his empire is; Zehtener's allure is the tight, shiny wrapper around a core of secrets and lies.

But this is Johnson's film, and it's one of the most accomplished writing-directing debuts in recent memory. You can instantly discern that, like many first-time writer-directors, Johnson has honed and shaped his script with skill and patience and dedication. You can also instantly discern that, unlike many first-time writer directors, Johnson is neither afraid of stylish camera work nor distractingly addicted to it. Brick has plenty of visual flourishes, nice cuts, tricky little visuals and deft visions. The difference between Brick and something like Lucky Number Slevin is that the visual flourishes, nice cuts, tricky little visuals and deft visions come out of the story, and help move it forward.

If a filmmaker is lucky, and talented, then their first film serves as their introduction: It makes you eager to see what else they're capable of, makes you anticipate their next film fiercely and avidly. It's a rare kind of debut film that creates that kind of impression. Even more rare is the debut film that makes you look forward to the next, better-financed, better-backed, better-promoted film from a filmmaker and stands up as an impressive, exciting and moving piece of work in its own right. Those films are like a handful of diamonds scattered over a mile-long section of beach; Brick is one of them.

Brick Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

If, as some critics have postulated, Brick operates as a "mash-up" of film noir and the high school picture, it's extremely successful, and in fact its success on this score may exceed Johnson's ostensible aims. It's not just the sharp, hermetically serpentine writing, or that fact that Johnson's use of the wide open spaces of suburbia -- empty football fields, vacant areas behind the highway, sparsely furnished basements -- demonstrates that these non-sites are every bit as alienating as the dank cityscapes of Kiss Me Deadly or M. (In its use of SoCal auto-space, Brick is a bit like Double Indemnity with the lights on.) There's a thematic rhyme at work that reveals certain truths about conventional noir logic. As Brick mega-fan Mike D'Angelo has observed, the hybrid "takes" because the culture of high schoolers is characterized by restless, exaggerated emotions. No matter what's really going on around you, it always feels like everything's at stake. Similarly, the relative entrapment of high school permits young people to fantasize both the best and the worst about what's really going on in the adult world. Freud called pre-pubescents "little detectives," anxiously trying to suss out the grown-up realm of sex and other temptations, and although by high school most of those questions have been answered through direct experience, that's not equally true for everyone. Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) seems to be an ideal outsider, smart enough to reject the various social scenes and their ridiculous posing, but at the same time too isolated an introvert to actually do much living. So, it all goes on in his head, except that the world of Brick has provided him with a degree of external validation. All the cool kids (including Emily [Lost's Emilie de Ravin], the girlfriend who outgrew him) actually do comprise a complex network of malevolence. Brendan's chaste, straight-arrow detachment allows him to romanticize Emily, and her death only cements his protector-complex. Despite being the smartest kid in any room, including the vice principal's office, Brendan is blinkered by his inability to evolve beyond his patronizing brand of chivalry. While a film like Sin City adopted this creaky noir trope in order to prop it up for our new era of Sexism 2.0, Brick plays it straight and in doing so demonstrates the rather juvenile outlook of unreconstructed noir. Although I was disheartened by the conclusion of Brick, because it fails to subvert noir's most gynophobic tendencies, I ultimately found it apt. Brendan and his sidekick ("the Brain") have assured their own safe return to the library, the back of the temporary buildings, and the hard-boiled genre itself. These zones all share one cardinal rule: no girls allowed.

THE BROTHERS BLOOM C 71

USA (113 mi) 2008 ‘Scope

Johnson’s earlier work bristled with quick-witted dialogue, energy and a stylish imagination, while this more big budget Hollywood fare lumbers along and falls flat on its face, obviously attempting to go for laughs using the DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS (1988) caper comedy genre, starring two rather unlikeable brothers billed as the world’s greatest conmen, or so we are told by a narrator, Mark Ruffalo as older brother Stephen and Adrien Brody as Bloom. Part of the problem is right there, as who could be more dour and gloomy than Adrien Brody, who won an Oscar for a Holocaust movie? The guy plays a hapless sad sack who’s supposed to have criminal instincts, but he couldn’t be less intriguing, basically letting the air out of the balloon. He supposedly sweet talks the ungodly rich heiress Rachel Weisz who spent her life as a shut-in developing odd talents, then takes her on an ocean cruise, visits exotic sights in Europe, and in just locales alone, there’s plenty to see here, like a lower budget Bourne film without all the bullets and digitalized special effects. Stephen is the snarky brains behind the operation, the man who creates scenario’s where you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not, who’s right hand man is none other than Rinko Kikuchi, known as Bang Bang, easily the best thing in the film with nonstop costime changes playing in silent deadpan throughout, supposedly an explosives expert who spends the second half of the film blowing things up, and also just the briefest moment singing karaoke. Her performance alone was singularly unique and colorful, adding needed humor, but this largely plot driven vehicle felt sluggish and slow throughout the whole ordeal. Trying to outsmart itself with cons within the cons themselves, you’d think this might be clever and entertaining, but outside of Kikuchi and occasional offbeat moments from Weisz, it wasn’t the least bit entertaining.

The picture postcard trip around the world was nice, visiting places like Greece, Mexico, Serbia, Romania, Prague, Montenegro, St. Petersburg, and the Czech Republic, not to mention New Jersey, and Rachel Weisz was game as a slightly loony, off kilter, throwback to the 1930’s screwball comedy love interest who may have a few cons of her own up her sleeve, but these brothers never look happy with themselves, while the neverending drone of dialogue that just wasn’t funny couldn’t have made matters worse. Maximillian Schell was way over the top as a despicable Russian, while Robbie Coltrane added a quirky Belgium character, not unlike someone out of IN BRUGES (2008), so the supporting cast had the right spirit, it was instead the leads that were dragged down by a fairly mediocre script that in a film that supposedly offers big surprises just failed to deliver any surprises. At one point, Weisz talks her way out of getting arrested in what appears to be the most improbable of circumstances, while the other characters are just standing around, but we never learn how she charmed her way out of that one, as it was never brought up. No one thought that would be the least bit interesting. The capers were just nothing to get excited about in a film that had no memorable scenes, no memorable moments, no memorable music, nor was there the slightest bit of tension or suspense. Instead it had some terrific locations, which turned out to be much ado about nothing, as the audience gets conned out of a good story.

Plume Noire review Anji Milanovic

Switcheroo con capers and one-last-heist-then-I'm-out films don't usually register on my radar but Brothers Bloom looked so quirky and fresh that I took a chance. The first half of the film was immensely enjoyable; the second half held so many explosions that my interest quickly petered out.

Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrien) Brody are supposed to be the world's greatest conmen. While that may be a bit farfetched, they are high energy and make for a charismatic duo; they might just be the con men you'd most want to hang out with. Why? They steal fine art, they ride steamships to Europe and languish in Montenegro when down on their luck. Their sidekick savant is a silent, sexy, stylish Japanese femme fatale named Bang Bang (Rink Kikuchi) who also happens to be hilarious. Stephen is the ringleader while Bloom is the forlorn romantic type who always follows but always wants out so that he can get the girl; the early years of the scheming Bloom Brothers bouncing from foster home to foster home are both droll and slightly melancholic.

When they meet wealthy, lonely heiress Penelope (Racehl Weisz) it becomes obvious who will fall in love and who is counting the money. While watching the three of them together as their madcap adventure ensues across exotic locations is enjoyable (Weisz shines in this role as someone bamboozled who quickly decides to bamboozle herself) here is where we start to tread very familiar territory; from plotting to steal a rare book, to a swindle within a swindle within a swindle, to faking deaths and actually dying.

A film that starts off light on its feet, whimsical and free and full of fresh dialogue degenerates into car explosions and evil Russians. Tant pis… so much more could have focused on the complicated relationships between misfits who find each other in the world.

Time Out Online (Sarah Cohen) review [3/6]

For his first film 'Brick', writer-director Rian Johnson successfully created an unlikely marriage of two distinct and distinctive genres, film noir and the teen movie, by setting a slow-burning detective story in an American high school. 'The Brothers Bloom' is a similar mash-up of styles, ostensibly a slick con man movie but built as a Wes Anderson-like screwball comedy with a soft rom-com centre. And for the most part, this playful manipulation of recognised cinematic conventions makes for a fresh and funny approach to storytelling.

Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody are Stephen and Bloom, orphaned brothers who have spent their lives moving from foster home to foster home, town to town ripping off the locals with elaborately plotted stings. Now in his thirties, Bloom is weary of playing characters in his older brother's theatre of deception and longs for 'an unwritten life' so he can experience something real for a change. But before he retires, Stephen persuades him to take part in one last scam. This involves Bloom seducing lonely, eccentric millionairess Penelope Stamp (Rachel Weisz, a revelation as a comic actress) into accompanying the brothers on a wild goose chase across eastern Europe, allowing them to relieve her of her money along the way.

For the first hour or so their adventure zips along in a highly entertaining manner, packed with inventive visual gags and a gaggle of bizarre supporting characters (Robbie Coltrane is hilarious as a Belgian antiques smuggler), and these quirky elements are tempered by some genuinely touching moments as Bloom and Penelope begin to fall for each other. But are they really in love or is this just another layer of charade? After a few too many plot twists and false endings, it's hard to tell, so when the 'truth' is finally revealed, any compassion invested in these players has evaporated into a mist of indifference.

But 'The Brothers Bloom' is redeemed by enough wit and imagination to suggest that, with a little more focus, Johnson will go on to make highly enjoyable and distinctive work.

Screen International review Allan Hunter

Rian Johnson’s eye-catching 2005 feature debut Brick brought a fresh sensibility to the world-weary private eye thriller. That fresh sensibility takes a sharp turn towards the picaresque and eccentric in The Brothers Bloom, a globe-trotting con game adventure that has a degree of charm but also displays the exasperating indulgence of an ambitious auteur project that may have been more fun to film than it is to watch. More likely to gain a cult following than show mainstream appeal, it should generate modest returns as a specialist release targeting a sophisticated market.

A film that has the feel of a rambling, magical realist novel, The Brothers Bloom unfolds in its own beautifully crafted world. It could be set in the present day or the 1930s. There are elements of cockeyed screwball comedy in the manner of a Preston Sturges classic like The Lady Eve. The more anarchic elements (explosives, gunfire and a shipboard bolero) recall a Swinging Sixties caper like Gambit or the cinema of Richard Lester. There is also something of an affinity with fellow luminaries from the current generation of American independents, especially Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited) or David O Russell in I Heart Huckabees mode. The unclassifiable nature of the material is part of its appeal although it is an appeal that diminishes as the narrative twists and bluffs start to pile up.

Beguiled by the possibilities of storytelling and the blurred lines between reality and make believe, the film concentrates on Bloom (Brody) and his older, protective brother Stephen (Ruffalo). The brothers are consummate con artists but Bloom longs for an unwritten life in which he is not playing yet another character in one of his brother’s convoluted scenarios. He is committed to one last con involving lonely New Jersey heiress Penelope (Weisz) who is thrilled by the sense of adventure they bring into her life and unperturbed by the fact it may all be a scam. As Bloom develops real feelings for Penelope, the challenge for Bloom and mute sidekick Bang Bang (Kikuchi) is to develop a con in which everyone gets what they want.

Unfolding in a dizzying array of locations that includes Prague, St Petersburg, Greece, Montenegro and Mexico, The Brothers Bloom has the freewheeling spirit of a bedtime story that is being made up as we go along. The very literary qualities of the piece are underlined by loquacious voice-over narration and allusions to tales by Conrad and even Agatha Christie. The lighthearted tone is continued in appearances from Robbie Coltrane as a supposedly larcenous Belgian museum curator and Maximilian Schell as the one-eyed, Fagin-like mentor Diamond Dick who appears to have taken the brothers under his wing at some point.

The film’s eccentric humour is something of an acquired taste and the elaborate story does overstay its welcome. The general air of larkish artificiality makes its hard for the film to change gears and a finale that should be unbearably poignant doesn’t have the emotional impact that it should. Johnson has risen to the challenge of that difficult second film with an ambitious mixture of comedy, adventure and heartfelt romance but ultimately it feels as if he has bitten off more than he can chew.

Twitch (Kurt Halfyard) review

Twitch review Mack

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review

Slant Magazine review Andrew Schenker

DVD Talk - Theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

Cinematical (James Rocchi) review

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]

Village Voice (Robert Wilonsky) review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

SpoutBlog [Kevin Kelly]

filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [3/5] also seen here: Reel.com review [2.5/4]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/5]

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

Pajiba (Dustin Rowles) review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Movie-Vault.com (LaRae Meadows) review

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [C]

FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]

They Shoot Actors, Don't They? Aaron

Entertainment Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman

The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review [2/4]

Boston Globe review [2/4] Ty Burr

Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [3/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [3/4]

Los Angeles Times (Robert Abele) review

Chicago Tribune (Jessica Reaves) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

LOOPER B 88

USA China (118 mi) 2012 ‘Scope Official site

This film steals from at least a dozen or more different movies, but does it with such relish that it hardly matters, literally inventing a futuristic world on a relatively modest budget, where the film features plenty of satiric wit, sardonic dialogue, weird character development, and constantly changing storylines that will keep the audience guessing what’s happening next, with a few mind blowing moments, used effectively in the context of this particular story. Like the two other Rian Johnson films, BRICK (2005), still his most original feature, and THE BROTHERS BLOOM (2008), LOOPER is utterly entertaining, a real popcorn movie, cleverly making use of genre forms as if the director is trying to amuse himself, where it just feels like everyone had a blast making this movie, as there are special effects sequences, but also scenes that rely exclusively on wit and originality, where the entire movie is a game of cat and mouse, as the mob is always chasing after somebody. Set in the year 2044, prior to the invention of time travel, which occurs 30 years into the future and is immediately banned but taken over by the mob, who invent a foolproof system of taking care of their undesirables, as they tie the victim’s hands behind their backs, place a hood over their head and send them off in a time machine, like PRIMER (2004), where they arrive at a designated time in the same exact location in a rural area next to a cornfield, like the New Jersey Turnpike of BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (1999), where they are immediately wasted by hired killers, known as loopers, as they extinguish bodies in the past so they don’t exist in the future. These loopers have it tough, because in 30 years, they themselves will be sent back, closing the loop, so to speak, covering their tracks, so there is no evidence connecting any of these assassinations to people that don’t exist. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who appeared in both earlier films by the director, plays Joe, a completely unphased looper, the kind of guy that doesn’t let anything get to him, who spends most of his time getting high and chasing after strippers, one of whom, Suzie (Piper Perabo), he may actually care about.

Like BLADE RUNNER (1982), the future has a dreary and dilapidated look about it, as if everything runs on second hand parts, where there are futuristic motorcars that ride off into the air, but the retro look resembles 1950’s motorcycles, where loopers for that matter, bear a resemblance to blade runners who are forced to track down replicants, where the world would be in constant danger if they didn’t. Joe immediately comes under suspicion when the operation learns he’s harboring an agent (Paul Dano) that failed to carry out his mission, who couldn’t pull the trigger when he realized the guy he was supposed to kill was himself in the future. Jeff Daniels as Abe is the world weary head of operations, a guy sent back from the future to run things smoothly, who has a friendly enough manner, but can also be ruthless in order to make his point, where like JUDGE DREDD (1995), he uses a hammer instead of a gavel breaking the hands of his fellow miscreants when they step out of line. Joe has an interesting habit of visiting a coffee shop near the cornfield, where he practices French on the waitress Beatrix (Tracie Thoms), thinking he will live in France once he’s retired with exactly 30 years left to live. What happens instead is the same thing that happened to his friend, as he’s stunned to see himself as the man to be executed and he hesitates, leaving both the old and the new versions of himself on the run like rats in a maze. The man he evolves into is Bruce Willis as Old Joe, who ends up in China instead of France, discovering the love of his life, Qing Xu, living a few idyllic years together before his 30 years are up. Right out of THE TERMINATOR (1984), Old Joe vows to change the past so that he and his wife may live together on into the future, but to do that he must execute the boss man of the future, known only as the Rainmaker, where little is known about him, so it’s hard to trace his past, but he’d be alive during Joe’s era. While Old Joe is focused on what he needs to do, he’s continually thwarted by trying to keep young Joe alive, as he’s a completely undisciplined hardass who refuses to listen to anybody, even himself in the future.

While Abe has a constant surveillance network out looking for the two Joe’s, young Joe has crawled through the cornfield to a farm on the other side, where Emily Blount as Sara, a rifle-toting farmgirl, pulls him out barely alive and strung out on drugs. Blount may be the best thing in the movie, as this perfectly fits her cool reserve, as she’s fervently protecting her young son Daniel (Kamden Beauchamp), as if she’s hiding from the world as well. Daniel is an extremely inquisitive but hard headed kid who’s bright but doesn’t follow instructions at all from his mother, as he pretty much does whatever he pleases, inquiring about guns from Joe, while Old Joe has narrowed the Rainmaker down to 3 children, tracking each of them down, one of whom is Daniel. But first Willis has to take on the entire network of Abe’s men, turning into Bruce Willis, the one man wrecking machine from DIE HARD (1988), continually shooting and blowing everyone up. Meanwhile, one of Abe’s men has visited the farm and is asking questions, instead finding Joe there, but Daniel flies into a rage that resembles THE OMEN (2006), where we realize he may literally be the devil incarnate, using tele-kinetic forces that defy gravity, moving objects at will until they’re floating in air, much like INCEPTION (2010), which also starred Gordon-Levitt. Basically the writer/director has a blast creating a sci-fi funhouse thriller that defies expectations, continually discovering new grounds, mixing set pieces with onsite rural locations, changing the visual focus, rotating what characters are featured, but always getting excellent performances from the principal characters, turning this into a rollicking ride that continually offers more surprises. Brilliantly mixing genre sequences, Johnson has turned into one of the more creative writers on the American front. While this has a more playful feel than something to be taken seriously, it’s still well executed, continually using the power of the imagination over high tech special effects. The effects are there, but the originality shown throughout is much more appealing.

Exclaim! [Scott A. Gray]

Try something new, break the self-destructive cycle of repetition — that's the point of idiosyncratic writer/director Rian Johnson's exhilarating and inventive take on action-packed science fiction.

The only trouble is that pointing out how the majority of people are mired in the facile comfort of nostalgia isn't exactly a fresh sentiment. How he constructs and presents this both more and less loopy than expected tale is exceptionally novel though.

In the year 2044, an organization is set up to handle body disposal for mob syndicates 30 years in the future, when time travel has been invented and promptly banned. The agents who do this dirty work are called "loopers," because they sign up for the job knowing that one day they'll have to "close the loop" by killing their future selves (perceived as a noble form of suicide, like smoking).

Thirty years of riches seems enough for the short sighted thugs under the employ of future mobster Abe (Jeff Daniels, who does a great job of balancing amiable with threatening). Things get complicated when average junky looper Joe's (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brick) number comes up and his future self (Bruce Willis) doesn't go down easy. Trust me, that's as much as you want to know about the plot.

While the enjoyment of the film isn't as dependent on densely layered misdirection as Johnson's previous efforts, Brick and The Brothers Bloom, Looper has its fair share of unexpected tricks. Once the clues have been presented, it's relatively easy to figure out what the plot threads are weaving towards, and it's an appropriate and thematically satisfying conclusion. However, one can't help but feel a little disappointment at the deceptively straightforward nature of the narrative, considering Rian's past efforts.

Levitt does a remarkable job emulating the mannerisms and speech patterns of Bruce Willis, which feels especially eerie, coupled with the subtle, face-altering prosthetics used to close the resemblance gap. The supporting cast, especially Emily Blunt, do a great job and Willis certainly acts like an aging action star, though that angle is played up irony-free a little much.

Looper also does a great job of creating a rich and distinct future, and Johnson demonstrates admirable creative restlessness with his imaginative shot choices and the minutiae of the plot points more so than in the overarching themes. Another point in Looper's favour: it contains the year's most engaging, descriptive and memorable score, composed by Johnson's go-to music man and brother, Nathan.

This year's best hardboiled science fiction won't blow many minds, but it's a heck of a lot more innovative and engaging than the majority of its peers.

Cinema Blend [Katey Rich]

In the dingy, cruel and stratified future world of 2044 in Rian Johnson's Looper, time travel is not yet possible; a few decades later, though, it has been invented but it is illegal, which sets up an irresistible temptation for those who need to get rid of a body by sending it to a time when it won't exist yet. It's also an unbeatable setup for a sci-fi thriller as intricate and thoughtful as Looper, which takes pleasure in the details of its twists and big ideas, bringing up the usual time travel paradoxes to ask serious questions about the wages of violence and the irreversible nature of fate.

The headier particulars of this future world are explained a remarkably concise voiceover from Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Joe, but there's plenty of showing along with the telling, like the nifty telekinesis that 10% of the population has developed for no apparent reason, or even the slick but believable development of cell phones. Working on a studio budget for the first time, Johnson meticulously details his future world and the laws by which it operates, setting up a rich playground for a story that, for all its twists and rewards, winds up significantly less interesting than the world it's set in.

The biggest problem is in how the film builds to its terrific hook-- Joe is assigned to assassinate his older self (Bruce Willis)-- and then keeps the two Joes separate for almost the entire film, as the older Joe runs off on a mission to change his future and the younger hides out at a farmhouse occupied by tough country chick Sara (Emily Blunt) and her very precocious young son Cid (Pierce Gagnon). By failing to kill the older Joe, or "close his loop," the younger one is under fierce pursuit from the rest of the Looper Network, led by a laid-back and terrifying Jeff Daniels and personified by the bloodhound-like Kid (Noah Segan, overacting fiercely). The stakes are high, and the threat of violence very real-- we see the gory result of what happens early on when Joe's colleague Seth (Paul Dano) fails to close his own loop-- and with the specifics of time travel logic cannily kept under wraps until the end, the fate of the world could very well be at stake.

There are so many different directions to head in a world filled with assassins and time travel and gadgets and Joseph Gordon-Levitt trying to kill Bruce Willis, but Looper veers off into the story at that farmhouse, and specifically the fate of the young, intelligent and potentially dangerous Cid. It all revolves around the kind of "Would you kill a young Hitler?" question that occupies many philosophical conversations, but just isn't dynamic enough to be the center of a film, especially when added to sentimentality and late-breaking optimism that doesn't really fit the hard-boiled vibe of the film's first act. Gordon-Levitt is as good a tough-ass hero as he was in Johnson's debut feature Brick, and it goes without saying that Willis is too; Looper seems to need more of their grime-filtered point of view, a noir with sci-fi leanings that gives over too much to its fantastical side in the end.

Lord knows we've seen enough sloppy, half-baked sci-fi-- some, like 2009's Surrogates, starring Willis himself-- to appreciate something as careful and heady as Looper, which creates a world so lively and well-wrought I'd happily see a dozen more movies set there. Stocked to the gills with strong performances (Tracie Thoms, Garret Dillahunt and Piper Perabo all make a nice impact in limited roles) and action scenes that constantly head in exciting and different directions, Looper is a solid step above most studio sci-fi output, better thought-out than Prometheus and more intellectually engaging than last year's Source Code. But for all its slickness and style, it still can't find the emotional depths it reaches for, and concludes on a giant wave of feeling that rings oddly hollow. The dual challenges of sci-fi are to create an engaging new world and a great story to go in it, and by accomplishing only that first goal, Looper shows glimpses of greatness that never quite add up.

Looper | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Noel Murray, also seen here: The A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

Here’s what’s so awesome about Looper: It’s a futuristic time-travel movie in which more or less the entire last hour takes place on a farm. And that’s just one of the many ways writer-director Rian Johnson subverts expectations. This is a “you know what would be cool?” movie that considers the real-world ramifications of its science-fiction whiz-bang, and a film of ideas that doesn’t skimp on the action. Most of all, Looper asks questions about whether a man’s destiny is locked into place—not because the future has already been written, but because of the kind of person he is.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as a lifelong ne’er-do-well who takes a job as a specialized kind of assassin, who kills and disposes of people sent back through time by the gangsters of the future. As Gordon-Levitt explains up top in voiceover, once time-travel has been discovered—a few decades after 2044, when Looper is mostly set—it’s immediately outlawed, and becomes the province of a demimonde that uses the technology to cover up its crimes. Gordon-Levitt was recruited into this “looper” job as a kid, which is almost like winning the lottery in the world of 2044. Loopers dress snappy, drive souped-up jet-propulsion vehicles, carry booming old-timey rifles, and get paid in silver bars, all of which places them among the upper-middle-class of the mid-21st century.

Problems ensue once Gordon-Levitt and the other loopers start recognizing that they’re increasingly each being asked to kill older versions of themselves, which “closes the loop” and ends their contracts, complete with a big payday and a retirement party. Some are wary of the implications of this, wondering what’ll happen to them in the decades to come, though most are too busy spending their bonus money to dwell on it for long. Then Gordon-Levitt’s older self—played by Bruce Willis—comes back, escapes, and announces that he’s going to fix everything, via extraordinary measures that Gordon-Levitt is determined to stop.

Viewers may bicker afterward about whether the time-travel in Looper makes sense—a criticism Johnson attempts to defuse via Willis’ comment that the whole process is “cloudy”—but undoubtedly the world of Looper has been carefully planned. Johnson doesn’t just throw cultural, societal, or fashion trends into the movie for weirdness’ sake; he makes the characters’ retro clothing central to the movie’s “everything recurs” theme, and he works the existence of telekinesis and roving vagrant mobs subtly into the background of the action, so he can foreground them as needed.

That level of care extends to the supporting roles and performances, which do more than just take up the spaces around Gordon-Levitt and Willis. Johnson makes good use of the usually bothersome Paul Dano, who puts his shriller attributes into play as a flashy looper whose problems plague Gordon-Levitt. Piper Perabo and Garret Dillahunt each get a couple of showcase scenes, as a showgirl and an enforcer, respectively. Jeff Daniels is hilariously world-weary and rumpled as a mob boss from the future who’s back in 2044 reluctantly monitoring the looper program. (Daniels has Looper’s best lines, which is saying something, because as Johnson showed with his Brick and The Brothers Bloom, he has a good ear for dialogue.)

But the heart of the movie belongs to Emily Blunt, as an iron-willed farmer looking after her whip-smart son (Pierce Gagnon, who gives one of the most assured performances by a child in movies this year, running a close second to Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts Of The Southern Wild). After Willis escapes Gordon-Levitt, the latter determines that Willis will head to Blunt’s farm eventually, so he camps out there, and gets involved in the life of this steely woman and her strange little boy. Just when it seems like Looper is gearing up for a mind-blowing adventure in the distant future, it settles into more down-to-earth shootouts and chases in city streets and country roads, all haunted by the prospect of what the audience has been told will become of these shooters and chasers.

Outside of one jarring timeline hiccup, Looper’s how-the-present-affects-the-future shenanigans don’t jumble the narrative significantly. (Though there is one cool visual sequence that takes a few seconds to process, as a looper from the future watches his body fall apart while his past self is getting vivisected.) That’s because Looper isn’t playing clever time-games for their own sake, but rather considering their impact on the characters. Johnson’s main visual motif is cloudiness, suggesting how moments curl around each other, forming patterns. A lot of the people in Looper are dealing with similar issues—addiction, dead parents, life-changing love affairs—and the movie subtly explores the ways their mistakes recur, from life to life and time to time.

Comparisons to 12 Monkeys are inevitable, given Willis’ presence, though really, Looper is reminiscent of The Matrix—not so much in terms of its style or plot, but in that it’s so fully realized, and populated with memorable scenes and delightful character turns. And like The Matrix, Looper has a strong emotional core, as its two protagonists—young and old—embody the cycle of selfishness they see all around them, and show the potential for one person to break it. The odd logical inconsistency aside, Looper is a remarkable feat of imagination and execution, entertaining from start to finish, even as it asks the audience to contemplate how and why humanity keeps making the same rotten mistakes.

The Mind-Bending Charm of 'Looper' - Christopher Orr - The Atlantic

cinemixtape.com [J. Olson]

Erik Lundegaard

Slant Magazine DVD [Chuck Bowen]

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Looper - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Looper | Film Review | Slant Magazine Chris Cabin

TIFF Review: Rian Johnson's 'Looper' Is Both Impressive ... - Indie Eric Kohn from indieWIRE, also seen here: indieWIRE [Eric Kohn]

Review: Heady, High Concept 'Looper' Is A Dazzling Piece Of Sci-Fi ... Kevin Jagernauth from the indieWIRE Playlist

Looper : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Jamie S. Rich, also seen here: DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

Looper, reviewed: Joseph Gordon-Levitt meets his ... - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens

David Edelstein on 'Looper' -- New York Magazine Movie Review David Edelstein

Time [Richard Corliss]

'Looper' Movie Review — Joseph Gordon-Levitt ... - Movieline Alison Willmore

The Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw]

'Looper' & 'Pitch Perfect': Voices of a Generation ... - The Atlantic Wire Richard Lawson

Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]

The American Spectator : Looper James Bowman, also seen here: JamesBowman.net | Looper

Time-Traveling 'Looper' Has a Brilliant Future - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

PopMatters [Bill Gibron] September 28, 2012

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Screen Daily [Mark Adams]

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Looper - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

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DVD Verdict [Tom Becker]

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Looper : The New Yorker Anthony Lane, capsule review

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Critic Review for Looper on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday

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Looper makes time travel thrilling - - Movies - Minneapolis - City Pages Andrew Schenker

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Gordon-Levitt and Willis take 'Looper' full circle: 'Looper' - latimes.com Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

'Looper': Time well-traveled, critics say - Los Angeles Times Oliver Gettell from The LA Times

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

New York Times [Manohla Dargis]

Johnson, Tim and Karey Kirkpatrick

OVER THE HEDGE B- 81

USA (86 mi) 2006

Animated animal critters versus bad humans, a story told in much the same way that TOY STORY had toys banding together to fend off badly behaving humans, even to the point where they stopped trusting each other, where initial self-centered intentions are exposed, potentially risking everyone’s lives, but by the end, everyone working together saves the day. Bruce Willis plays a wily raccoon who enters a bear’s den just before the end of hibernation and steals his bootie, or nearly does, as he gets just a tad too greedy. The bear offers him a week to replace the entire stock of human junk food, which he’s hooked on, or he’ll have to eat the raccoon. This places the raccoon in a precarious predicament, having to rally forces to gather a huge supply of human junk food, or face the consequences. Fortunately, for him, he runs into a family of forest foragers who are awakening from their own winter hibernation and discover the world is just a little bit different from when they went to sleep, namely a giant hedge as far as the eye can see. Most of their entire forest has disappeared, replaced by suburbia, row after row of replicated houses, with humans that have little sympathy for the plight of animals.

The raccoon is mostly brilliant as the guy who has it all figured out, who rallies the forces, who understands the systematic human process of greediness all too well. Unfortunately, some of that greed has rubbed off on him as well, behavior suspected by the more cautious and sensible-thinking turtle. On the other hand, this group of critters has gotten under the raccoon’s skin, as they actually treat him like family, and there’s some interesting interplay balancing the inner desires of saving one’s own skin and risking one’s life for others. Add to this mix an evil president of the housing association, who calls in a sadistic exterminator to take care of the animal problem, also the sometimes hilarious lunacy of a crazed squirrel who resembles a super hero with his Flash-like speed, actually challenging our conception of time. Much of it is funny, but formulaic as well, where the rendering of the voices was excellent, but other one-note repetitive themes of suburban waste and greedy over consumption grew tiresome after awhile.

Jones, Art

LUSTRE B 83

USA (81 mi) 2005

A post 9/11 tribute to New York City, an impressionistic kaleidoscope told as a tone poem through a rambling monologue of an aging loan shark, a character actor in MEAN STREETS and KING OF NEW YORK played by the late Victor Argo, a man who personifies the city, infatuated by its history, its power, its solidity, but hating what they’re doing to it, making it look the same, stripping it of its soul, putting up tombstones from prefab hell, replacing the old-timers with faceless people who don’t know what they’re doing, who look as if they were chosen out of a catalogue, people who may as well be from Hackensack, New Jersey. At one point, tourists actually come up to him and start photographing him, as if he’s a city relic. So the film juxtaposes his face in and out of the streets of New York, in bars and restaurants, bridges, train stations, and faded city neighborhoods that have lost their luster. This is a gentle, lyrical film that features some terrific original music by Jim Papoulis. Most impressive are a few scenes alone in a hospital room, speaking to his daughter, who is in a longstanding coma, where she gets up and dances, or another when he ascends to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge, where he looks out over the city, brilliantly lit up at night, providing an unforgettably stunning visual perspective.

Jones, Chuck – animator

Chuck Jones Warner Bros. Biography Cartoon Factory

"A small child once said to me. 'You don't draw Bugs Bunny, you draw pictures of Bugs Bunny.'

That's a very profound observation because it means that he thinks the characters are alive, which, as far as I am concerned, is true," recalls animation director Chuck Jones. Mr. Jones helped bring to life many characters during the Golden Age of animation including some of Warner Bros.' most famous Looney Tunes characters-- Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig. The list of characters that Chuck Jones created himself goes on-- Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Marvin Martian, Pepe Le Pew, Gossamer and many others.

Born on September 21, 1912, Chuck Jones entered the fledgling animation industry in 1932 as a cel washer at Ub Iwerks Studio after graduating from the Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts.) Chuck Jones joined the Leon Schlesinger Studio, later sold to Warner Bros., as an animator in 1936. There, Chuck Jones was assigned to Tex Avery's animation unit. In 1938, at the age of 25, he directed his first animated film "The Night Watchman." Mr. Jones remained at Warner Bros. Animation until it closed in 1962, though he had a brief stint with Disney Studios in 1955 during a hiatus at Warner Bros. (Chuck Jones worked on Sleeping Beauty while there.)

In 1966, while heading up the animation division at MGM Studios, Mr. Jones directed one of the most memorable holiday television specials ever produced -- "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas." First aired on Sunday, December 18, 1966, Chuck Jones' production of the half-hour special was met with glowing reviews from newspapers across the country and has since become one of the most beloved holiday programs on television.

Mr. Jones has become a true icon of creativity by directing such mini-epics as "What's Opera, Doc?" (1957) which featured a Wagnerian Elmer Fudd invoking the great elements against a cunning Bugs Bunny. On Dec. 4, 1992, "What's Opera, Doc?" became the first-ever animated film to be inducted into the National Film Registry-- an honor bestowed on only 100 films to date -- for being "among the most culturally, historically or aesthetically significant films of our time." Chuck Jones has also been honored at the Academy Awards for his lifetime achievement in animation.

At the age of 83, Mr. Jones has enjoyed more than 60 years in animation and is still hard at work, having recently signed a new contract with Warner Bros. to create animated short subjects for theatrical release using many of the classic Warner Bros. characters under the title of his production company, Chuck Jones Film Productions.

Chuck Jones has created over 300 animated films in his career, has won three Academy Awards and has received countless awards and distinctions. In the late 1970s, Mr. Jones began to create limited edition images depicting scenes from his most enduring cartoons. Today, he is the most widely collected animation artist in the world. his art has been exhibited at more than 150 galleries and museums throughout the world, including a one-man film retrospective at MoMA in New York City.

Chuck Jones Biography from the Chuck Jones website

In a career spanning over 60 years, Jones made more than 300 animated films, winning three Oscars as director and in 1996 an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. Among the many awards and recognitions, one of those most valued was the honorary life membership from the Directors Guild of America.

During the Golden Age of animation Jones helped bring to life many of Warner Bros. most famous characters—Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig. The list of characters he created himself includes Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Marvin Martian, Pepe le Pew, Michigan J. Frog and many others. He also produced, directed and wrote the screenplays for "Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas," a television classic, as well as the feature-length film "The Phantom Tollbooth." In addition, Jones was a prolific artist whose work has been exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide.

Jones often recalled a small child who, when told that Jones drew Bugs Bunny, replied: "He doesn’t draw Bugs Bunny. He draws pictures of Bugs Bunny." His point was that the child thought of the character as being alive and believable, which was, in Jones’ belief, the key to true character animation.

Born on September 21, 1912 in Spokane, Washington, Jones grew up in Hollywood where he observed the talents of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and worked occasionally as a child extra in Mac Sennett comedies. After graduating from Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (now California Institute of the Arts) Jones drew pencil portraits for a dollar a piece on Olvera Street. Then, in 1932, he got his first job in the fledgling animation industry as a cel washer for former Disney animator, Ubbe Iwerks. It was at Iwerks Productions that he met Dorothy Webster, to whom he was married in 1932.

In 1936 Jones was hired by Friz Freleng as an animator for the Leon Schlesinger Studio (later sold to Warner Bros.). Jones admired and revered Freleng for the rest of his life, saying, "No one except Tex Avery had as perfect a sense of timing as did Friz Freleng."

In 1937 his daughter, Linda, was born, and in 1938 he directed his first film, The Night Watchman.

He worked with and for directors Tex Avery and Bob Clampett until the early forties when they left the studio, and for the remainder of his years at Warner Bros. he worked in parallel with Directors Freleng and Robert McKimson. He remained at Warner Bros. until the studio was closed in 1962.

During those years, sometimes referred to later as the Golden Years of Warner Bros. animation, arguably some of the most enduring cartoons ever made were produced; most of them still enjoying worldwide recognition daily.

When Warner Bros. closed, and after a very short stay at the Disney Studios, Jones moved to MGM Studios, where he created new episodes from the Tom and Jerry cartoon series. While there, in addition to The Phantom Tollbooth and Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Jones directed the Academy Award winning film, The Dot and the Line.

Jones established his own production company, Chuck Jones Enterprises, in 1962 and produced nine half-hour animation films for television including Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi and The White Seal.

After the death of his first wife, Jones met and married the love of his life, Marian Dern, who remained his best friend, lover and companion for the rest of his life.

In the late 70s Jones and his daughter, Linda, pioneered a continuing art business featuring limited edition images created by Jones depicting scenes from his most enduring cartoons. He continued to support his daughter’s business, generously making appearances, drawings and paintings, in addition to signing countless editions of images, which continue to delight collectors and fans worldwide.

One of his films, the Wagnerian mini epic, What’s Opera, Doc? was inducted into the National Film Registry for being "among the most culturally, historically and aesthetically significant films of our time."

In recent years, Jones’ work has been honored at film festivals and museums throughout the world, including a one-man retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. His autobiography, Chuck Amuck, appeared in 1989, now in its fifth printing. Chuck Reducks, his follow-up to the first book, was published two years later.

In 2000, Jones established the Chuck Jones Foundation, designed to recognize, support and inspire continued excellence in art and the art of classic character animation. Plans for the Foundation include scholarships, library resources, touring exhibits, a lecture series and access to film, notes and drawings.

Director Peter Bogdanovich once explained the enduring appeal of Jones’ work: "It remains, like all good fables and only the best art, both timeless and universal."

After hearing that Jones had died, a four-year-old child asked her mother, between sobs, "Does this mean the bunny won’t be in the barber chair any more?" The answer is, "No, the bunny will be in the barber chair forever."

Great Performances - Chuck Jones Biography

A legend of the golden age of animation, Charles Martin ("Chuck") Jones was born on September 21, 1912, in Spokane, Washington. He grew up in Hollywood, where he observed the talents of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton while working occasionally as a child extra in Mack Sennett comedies. After graduating from Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (now California Institute of the Arts), he drew pencil portraits for a dollar apiece on Olvera Street. Then, in 1932, he got his first job in the fledgling animation industry as a cel washer for former Disney animator Ubbe Iwerks.

In 1936, he became an animator for the Leon Schlesinger Studio (later sold to Warner Bros.). There, he was assigned to Tex Avery's animation unit, joining the Warner Bros. team that made LOONEY TUNES and MERRIE MELODIES in a back-lot building that he and other Warner animators and directors nicknamed "Termite Terrace." It was there that the personalities and characteristics of Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck were developed and produced.

At the early age of 25, Chuck Jones directed his first animated film, THE NIGHT WATCHMAN, which was released in 1938. Up to 5,000 animation drawings were used for the six-minute cartoon. As director, he timed the picture, finalized all of the writing, produced more than 300 layouts, and directed the art design, music, sound effects, and animation.

During World War II, he directed Army training films with a popular 1940s character, Private SNAFU, as well as a re-election film for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Heading his own unit, he remained at Warner Bros. Animation until it closed in 1962, though he had a brief stint with Disney Studios in 1955 during a hiatus at Warner Bros. He then moved to MGM Studios, where he created new episodes for the Tom & Jerry cartoon series. While there, he also produced, co-directed, and co-wrote the screenplay for the critically acclaimed full-length feature THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH, and directed the Academy Award-winning film THE DOT AND THE LINE.

In 1966, he directed one of the most memorable holiday television specials ever produced -- Dr. Seuss' HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS. First aired in December 1966, the half-hour special was met with glowing reviews from newspapers across the country and has since become one of the most popular holiday programs on television. He won a Peabody Award for Television Program Excellence for his work on Dr. Seuss' HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS as well as Dr. Seuss' HORTON HEARS A WHO. For a year, he worked as vice president of the American Broadcasting Company to improve children's programming in 1972. There, he made many animated specials for television.

Chuck Jones has become a true icon of creativity by directing such mini-epics as WHAT'S OPERA, DOC? (1957), which featured a Wagnerian Elmer Fudd invoking the great elements against a cunning Bugs Bunny. In December 1992, WHAT'S OPERA, DOC? was inducted into the National Film Registry for being "among the most culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films of our time." And last December, he became the only director to have two animated shorts among the Registry's 275 films when DUCK AMUCK was added.

In a career spanning more than 60 years, he has made more than 300 animated films and has earned four Academy Awards, including an Honorary Oscar in 1996. He has been awarded three Honorary Doctorates, most recently by the American Film Institute in June 1997, and has received countless awards and distinctions from throughout the world, including the Directors Guild of America's Honorary Life Membership Award.

He is the most widely collected animation artist in the world. His work has been exhibited at more than 250 galleries and museums, including a one-man film retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. His 1989 autobiography, CHUCK AMUCK, is in its fifth printing and was published in paperback in 1990, both in the U.S. and abroad. CHUCK REDUCKS, his follow-up to CHUCK AMUCK, was published in 1996.

The eternally youthful octogenarian recently created a new character, Timber Wolf, for a series of cartoons on the internet for Warner Bros. Online and Entertaindom. He also revisited one facet of his creativity by dedicating himself to the creation of fine arts drawings and limited editions, which can be collected through the family-owned Chuck Jones Studio Galleries in Laguna Beach and San Diego, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. In order to recognize, reward, support, and inspire continued excellence in the art of animation, he created The Chuck Jones Foundation in the spring of 2000.

Chuck Jones died at his home in California on Friday, February 22, 2002 at the age of 89.

Animation Director Chuck Jones Chuck Jones official site

All-Movie Guide bio info

The Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion: Chuck Jones more bio information

Biography of Chuck Jones Daniel Briney from ToxicUniverse

Chuck Jones another website with his complete filmography, which includes two TV interviews

Chuck Jones - The Greatest Animator of All Time

Chuck Jones | Senses of Cinema Bill Schaffer from Senses of Cinema, July 2002

Chuck Jones Tribute | Senses of Cinema Rick Thompson from Senses of Cinema, March 2002

In Appreciation of Chuck Jones an imaginative essay by Kevin McCorry

Great Performances . Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens - A ... A Life in Animation, from PBS Great Performances

Academy of Achievement Profile

Happy Birthday, Chuck Jones! by Wendy Jackson from Animation World Magazine, October 1997

Chicago Reader Movie Review The Tao of Bugs, by Fred Camper from the Reader, 2001

Chuck Jones: Three Cartoons (1953-1957) Roger Ebert

MichaelBarrier.com -- Funnyworld Revisited: Chuck Jones Interview an interview by Michael Barrier and Bill Spicer from Funnyworld

Jones, Chuck They Shoot Horses, Don’t They

Chuck Jones - Don Markstein's Toonopedia

Chuck Jones - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chuck Jones at Find-A-Grave which includes a brief bio

Jones, Duncan

MOON

Great Britain (97 mi) 2009

Moon Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun, also Click here to read our interview with the director of 'Moon'

We know that Duncan Jones is David Bowie’s son, but, more importantly, is his feature debut any good? The answer is a resounding – if qualified – yes, judging by this 1970s-sci-fi throwback, which, for a modern space movie about the knock-on effects on man of future technology, is unusually thoughtful, good-looking and well-acted. Sam Rockwell (below) is Sam Bell, a nervous lone astronaut on the moon where, at some point in the near future, a corporation is mining Helium-3, now the source of most global energy. It’s Bell’s job to manage this operation in the company of a sympathetic robot called Gerty (one of several nods to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’). When we first meet him, Bell’s three-year stint is almost complete, but he’s tired and unhinged – symptoms, no doubt, of solitude and having to communicate with his wife and young child by taped messages as the satellite is broken…

If that last fact sounds a bit too convenient, that’s the point: all is not what it seems. Jones has created a credible theatre in which to stage a meditative play on isolation and identity within the bounds of wild fiction, the edges of which are curiously blurred. Less is more in Jones’s eye: he knows that big ideas can be lost amid noisy gestures so keeps his drama within the confines of a few rooms, with only the odd, more poetic moment unfolding outside on the moon’s surface. As the film goes on, early ideas about loneliness segue into a more troubling (and confusing) study of corporate exploitation and even – here’s a biggie – what it means to be human, when a second Sam Bell, a clone also played by Rockwell, appears and shakes up all perceptions of what’s going on. The film is not entirely logical, but it raises pleasing questions and looks beautiful.

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Forty years after its groundbreaking debut, 2001: A Space Odyssey continues to cast a long shadow, its influence so pervasive that it's nigh impossible to craft a contemplative sci-fi saga without at least subtly paying homage to Kubrick's classic. Rather than fleeing that monolith in the genre, director Duncan Jones (a.k.a. Zowie Bowie, son of David) warmly embraces it with Moon, an assured, mesmerizing tale of intergalactic loneliness, self-inquiry, and man's innate, enduring hunger for life which repeatedly and openly tips its hat to 2001 and its progeny (Solaris, Silent Running).

As a pitch-perfect introductory commercial elucidates, in the near future, Earth's energy and environmental dilemmas have been solved by Helium 3 solar energy harvested from rocks on the far side of the moon. The station established to accomplish this vital task is manned by one man, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who at film's start is two weeks shy of finishing up his three-year tour of duty alone in the echoing base, which boasts the all-white décor of a space station from a '70s-era movie, is shot by Jones in deliberate, ominous widescreen compositions, and is also populated by Gerty 3000, a robot with the soothing HAL-ish voice of Kevin Spacey and a rotating series of smiley-face emoticons for expressions. When a routine maintenance checkup on a roving harvester goes awry (thanks, in part, to a distracting and gorgeously wrought hallucination of a girl standing amid a shower of dug-up rubble), Sam awakens in the sick bay, where he discovers—spoilers herein—that the station has a new resident: himself. Except that it's not exactly himself, as the new Sam is a far healthier, more temperamental mirror image who initially keeps his distance and silence but eventually forms a tentative relationship with the injured Sam, who is desperate to return home to the wife and young daughter he communicates with via taped messages. How two Sams have come to suddenly coexist in this lunar domicile is the prime mystery of Moon's first third, one that's unsettling in a manner less horror cinema-scary than existential.

Jones's measured aesthetic, complemented by Clint Mansell's typically melancholy fusion of orchestral and electronic melodies, creates a mood of philosophical pensiveness that casts genre mechanisms—such as Sam's early vision of a girl sitting in his room, or the threat implied by Gerty's overly soothing speech and the robot's clandestine conversation with Earthbound HQ—as pieces of a haunting puzzle about inner reflection and identity definition in which man proves instinctively compelled to ensure his own survival. While his story could have naturally veered into Big Brother/corporate malfeasance territory, Jones refuses to play the easy card, instead patiently detailing the Sams' increasingly traumatic struggles to comprehend, and then come to grips with, their unique situation, and how it speaks to their conception of reality. Moon's explanation of its conceit isn't a stunner, but Jones's intimate consideration of his protagonists' attempts to reconcile dueling psychological and empirical truths nonetheless has a quiet, empathetic grace.

Such is Moon's lyrical understatement that even the central special effect that allows for two Sams (who, in one striking scene, play ping-pong against each other) quickly becomes an afterthought. However, that trick ultimately has less to do with computerized deftness than with Rockwell, whose dual performances as suffering original Sam and surly, detached new Sam are treated not with caricature superficiality but tormented physical and spiritual somberness. Alternately bearded, goateed, and clean-shaven, his eyes morose and yet always alight with a flicker of self-determination, Rockwell is as snark-free human and compassionate as he's ever been. And in a shot of him tenderly embracing himself in a bare hallway, the actor dexterously conveys the means by which life—though here depicted (à la 2001) as evolving toward the artificial, and thus in the opposite direction as that of technology—remains, despite all obstacles, fundamentally autonomous, irrepressible, dynamic.

IC Places [Chris Knipp]

Directed by David Bowie's 38-year-old son (formerly known as Zowie), with a screenplay by Nathan Parker, Moon is a curious and thought-provoking sci-fi story about a man working for an energy company at a Helium-3 mining base on the far side of the moon who finds out now that his three-year contract is just about done he may not be going home. Sam Rockwell gets to do a virtuoso turn as alternative versions of himself (his character's name is Sam too, Sam Bell). Events are set in a traditional space station with a capacious, softly lit layout featuring the obligatory human-voiced and omnipresent computer -- mobile, not so big, a sort of clunky R2D2 -- creepily accommodating and voiced by an almost-human Kevin Spacey. It's a robot, I guess, and its name is GERTY. There are nice lunar landscapes outside where Sam sometimes rides around in a puffed-up Hummer-style Land Rover to explore or look over the machinery extracting Helium-3. Instead of the now all-too-usual and increasingly irrelevant CGI, there's more the feel of a giant mock-up in everything we see, which provides a better kind of background for what is essentially a Kafkaesque head trip. The interior isn't all modernistic chill. There's also a funky armchair reminiscent of the final sequence of 2001, and cozy junk, even a college pennant, on the wall around Sam's bunk, sort of like a frat boy's quarters. Sam Rockwell's own appearance, his skin far from perfect and his expression a bit wacko, suggests an ordinary guy, just a worker, which is what he is, not some Astronaut.

Moon explores the paranoia we feel about a possible future increasingly dominated by evil, pervasive corporations -- not Big Brother, but Big Corp. It also gets at something hauntingly explored in the movie Jones's dad Bowie played an alien in in way back when, Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth: the terrible loneliness of being out in space away from one's own kind. Sam works on the moon all by himself, and some kind of radio blockage keeps him from being in direct electronic contact with people, including his wife. There's also another aspect of space travel where distances destroy human chronology: a distorted and confused sense of time troubles Sam when he tries to figure out what's been going on with his little family back on earth. It seems like it all happened a longer time ago than he knew. Or did it maybe happens to somebody else?

Such questions may arise in other space movies, but they're usually too preoccupied with such things as conflicts among the crew, threats from hostile invaders, or technical meltdowns to go into the full awful anomie, mega-aloneness and paranoid delusion lengthy sojourns in space are likely to induce. But Moon has no other crew members or invaders or technical problems. Everything seems to be operating according to plan; only it's beginning to seem Sam didn't know the whole plan insofar as his future is concerned. When he's out checking on something not far from the module, the vehicle gets into some kind of accident, and when he wakes up, things start to go strangely wrong. This is where the full-on head trip begins, and we, and Sam, start trying to figure out what's going on. That's all I can tell you, because it's essential that the mystery unfold on its own.

Moon doesn't dazzle but gives pleasure in its low-keyed conviction It even made me think of Shane Carruth's 2004 virtually no-budget cult time-travel movie, Primer, because even with relatively elaborate sets and effects, it still focuses on ideas, rather than razzle-dazzle -- on what Sam is going through, rather than what the filmmakers were up to.

Hence the key work is done by Rockwell. Sam Bell is exhausted and lonely after three years alone on the moon with only GERTY for company, and Rockwell must go through a series of reawakenings and breakdowns after he hallucinates and has that accident in the vehicle and then becomes increasingly confused, angry, and frantic about what's going on. I'm not sure Jones or Parker make the most of the situation they set up, but Rockwell's quick reactions and mood shifts hold our attention very well. As we know from Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Joshua, and Snow Angels, Rockwell does great mental breakdowns. This time he does rapid physical deterioration equally well. In a sense, all the most important special effects come out of the actor's bag of tricks. But that's not to forget the satisfying simplicity of the lunar landscape design sculpted by cinematographer Gary Shaw and production designer Tony Noble, or to overlook Clint Mansell's evocative musical soundscape. And when Sam confronts other versions of himself, needless to say the CGI folks were needed to pull it off within single frames.

Low keyed and a little slow, Moon isn't for everyone and may seem tailored primarily for sci-fi buffs. But its disturbing exploration of identity goes back to a child's fundamental philosophical speculations: Why am I here? Who am I? How do I know I'm me?

The Film Sufi MKP

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SOURCE CODE B 88

USA France (93 mi) 2011

The source code is a gift. Don't squander it by thinking. —Dr. Walter Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright)

An efficiently directed film about disorientation, one that keeps the characters in the film as well as the audience in the dark for as long as possible before small bits and pieces of well placed reality creep in, like clues in the dark. Directed by Duncan Jones, David Bowie’s son, whose previous sci-fi film MOON (2009) lingered in theaters well beyond the entire summer. This is something of a mind-bender as well, like an expanded version of a Twilight Zone episode where a character has to re-live the exact same experience that leads up to the precise moment of their death, only for it to happen again and again. The twist here is that the subject, Jake Gyllenhall as Captain Colter Stevens, is being programmed by some high risk military experiment where his brain has somehow been implanted into another man’s body, but only for the last 8 minutes of his life, where his mission is to find an explosive device on a fast moving commuter train to downtown Chicago within 8 minutes of detonation when all the passengers die. What’s especially amusing is that the subject knows no more about this experiment than the audience does, so we learn as he does, and in this case, the Captain is a quick learner, as he’s a well-trained helicopter pilot used to carrying out combat missions in Afghanistan. The set up always begins as he’s sitting on the train across from an especially attractive woman, Michelle Monaghan as Christine, who engages him in the same conversation. The intrigue is he is sent on multiple missions, each time his only means of contact afterwards is with the face of Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) projected on a computer screen, who asks him to remember pertinent details, like where is the bomb, who is the bomber, before sending him back in again to figure it all out in another 8 minutes before the train explodes.

Despite the déjà vu repetition, each sequence is slightly altered based on his knowledge learned in the previous incident, but it’s always the same faces, the same seating arrangement, and the same activity on the train except for his actions and words which are subject to his own instincts. Stevens easily holds the audience’s rapt attention as he’s a study in intensity and military precision, but his instincts are amazingly human, where he wants to speak to his father on the phone, and he asks about the men on his last combat mission, where his curiosity is exactly what the audience relates to, but Goodwin’s mission instructions continually remind him that his personal inquiries are unnecessary, as he’s wasting time, because this one terrorist act is just the first of several in succession, where the military is pinning their hopes that if they can catch the first guy, the world will be spared the subsequent terror. This extra pressure of fate only adds to the tension Stevens is facing, as he’s always under the clock, eventually becoming more and more frustrated with the same inevitable outcome. The other is his interest in Christine, who is positively aglow with an intoxicating charm, where the idea of losing her each time just as he is initially introduced to her is rattling his desperate-minded soul, growing ever more weary at the mounting losses of lives that he can’t seem to be able to save, where everyone at some point comes under suspicion, yet all but one remain cloaked in innocence.

The interplay between Gyllenhaal and Monaghan seals the deal, as the sincerity of their flirtatious romanticism is reminiscent of the opening moments in Powell and Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946), where David Niven is a British WWII air force pilot whose plane has been hit, who deliriously utters what he thinks are his last words to an American WAC air traffic controller, Kim Hunter, instantly declaring his love before he leaps without a parachute to certain death. There are moments of poignancy in this film that seem to come out of nowhere, especially in an explosives film, but Gyllenhaal’s performance generates plenty of hard earned sympathy, as he’s genuinely a man on a mission, apparently stuck alone inside a time traveling capsule of some kind, where his inability to escape his hellish fate feels like Sartre’s No Exit, a punishing world where man’s existence is doomed, like being locked in a room together for eternity with no escape. But Stevens is certain he holds the key to a way out, even as his superiors on the outside keep reminding him of the limits of his mission, urging him not to reach too far, not to expect too much, that his role is like an apparition, where the source code is like a shadow life that allows scientists to re-enter existence before it dies, where only his ingenuity, if he sticks to the mission at hand, can possibly save future lives. Of course, in heroic fashion, he can’t expect to save his own, as his fate is sealed, which is why he was chosen for such a delicate mission. He is only living on borrowed time, never exceeding 8 minutes, like reliving the same dream, always with the same outcome, hoping to spare others from ever having to endure the same experience. This film is smart, well acted, tautly suspenseful and surprisingly inventive, with a kind of sci-fi twist that keeps the action moving, with a lightness of touch that actually engages the audience.

David Edelstein on 'In a Better World,' 'Source Code,' and ... New York magazine

Seeing everything early and refusing to watch any coming attractions, I often go into a movie with no idea of its premise, sometimes not even its genre. That’s a good way to approach Source Code, which for half its (brief) length is thrillingly disorienting. I’ll try not to orient you here, except to say it’s largely set on a Chicago commuter train and kind of like a Philip K. Dick rewrite of Groundhog Day, with each time loop (if it is a time loop—mum’s the word) offering the equally disoriented hero (Jake Gyllenhaal) another chance to correct for past mistakes and accumulate more data. Directed by Duncan Jones (Moon) from Ben Ripley’s screenplay, it’s a crackerjack ride, shot and edited for maximum discombobulation. Those who inexplicably convinced themselves that Matt Damon and Emily Blunt had romantic chemistry in The Adjustment Bureau should check out true heat, courtesy of Gyllenhaal’s unblinking baby blues and Michelle Monaghan’s irrepressible glow. Dick would love the paranoid setup and probably hate the cheat of a denouement. But it all goes by too irresistibly fast to call a time-out for disbelief.

Source Code Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Nigel Floyd

Based on a hardcore sci-fi premise, but staged with a Hitchcockian lightness that injects romance and humour into a potentially bleak terrorist bomb scenario, this second film from the director of ‘Moon’ is an emotionally engaging time-travel puzzle piece. It may not be ‘Un film de Duncan Jones’, but it is an efficient, entertaining thriller that features several striking signature sequences and some smart conceptual ideas.

Jake Gyllenhaal is edgy and engaging as confused Blackhawk helicopter pilot Captain Colter Stevens, who wakes up on a Chicago commuter train with no clue how he got there or what his ‘mission’ is. The attractive woman seated opposite, Christina (Michelle Monaghan), seems to think he’s a school teacher called Sean, and the face reflected in the train window is not his. Suddenly, an explosion rips through the train, and Colter finds himself in what may be the cockpit of his crashed chopper. Via a video screen, uniformed military ‘minder’ Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) explains that Colter is part of an experimental project, which allows access to a parallel reality for eight minutes at a time. And he has to keep going back in – not to stop the explosion, which has already happened, but to identify the terrorist on the train, who has also planted a ‘dirty bomb’ in the city.

Rather than get bogged down in the scientific explanations, Ben Ripley’s intricate script and Jones’s brisk direction invite us to climb aboard and enjoy the ride. But if you want to dig deeper, there is some serious stuff about a guy lost in fragments of time, groping towards a sense of his own identity. There’s also an involving emotional undertow, thanks to Colter’s fragmented romance with Monaghan’s loveable teacher-next-door and the burgeoning human connection between Farmiga’s delicately nuanced ‘minder’ and Gyllenhaal’s angry yet vulnerable guinea pig.

Source Code | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps

When Jake Gyllenhaal’s character opens his eyes in the first scene of Source Code, he doesn’t know where, or even who, he is. When the film starts doling out answers, the question just gets shifted to the existential level. The second feature from Duncan Jones packs a spirit of philosophical inquiry into a familiar genre, which seems like a developing specialty for the director who put Sam Rockwell through a similar identity crisis with the pensive science-fiction mystery Moon. Working from a script by Ben Ripley, Jones ups the pace with Source Code, but keeps asking the big questions, even while Gyllenhaal frantically searches for a threat almost as old as movies themselves: a bomb aboard a moving train.

Trouble is, it’s a particularly elusive bomb, the sort that might take even the most committed good guy a chance or two to defuse. The film’s central conceit gives him just that. Like a compressed Groundhog Day, Gyllenhaal has to relive the same eight-minute stretch aboard a Chicago commuter train until he gets it right. Only it’s not cosmic forces forcing him to repeat himself but a government program that puts Gyllenhaal, a soldier who recently served in Afghanistan, in the shoes of a Chicagoan on his way to work. What’s more: Getting it right won’t save anyone aboard the train, not even Gyllenhaal’s fetching companion Michelle Monaghan. The explosion happened hours ago, they’re already dead, and he’s charged only with finding the bomber before more die.

Cleverly structured up until a problematic finale, Source Code develops two mysteries at once: who’s responsible for the bomb and how Gyllenhaal is able to project himself into someone else in the first place. Getting to the bottom of the first requires Gyllenhaal to pay careful attention to every detail of his commute, and those making it with him. The film builds a nervous energy through repetition, as Gyllenhaal relives the same moments hoping for different results before the two mysteries converge into one weird, unexpected moment of grace. Then, the movie has the bad sense to keep going into an unsatisfying denouement.

Still, for a while it’s the rare film that—in the mold of the first Matrix movie and Inception, although on a more modest scale than either—mixes heady puzzles with gripping suspense. Measured performances from Gyllenhaal and Monaghan give thinly conceived characters much-needed gravity, but it’s Jones’ restrained direction that keeps Source Code moving, and confirms him as the rare filmmaker able, or maybe just choosing, to understand that even movies with explosions don’t have to be dumb to entertain.

The Village Voice [Aaron Hillis]

Moon director Duncan Jones’s sophomore feature, Source Code—a pseudo-cerebral, modestly budgeted sci-fi thriller with ambitions more Philip K. Dick–like in scope than the recent Dick adaptation The Adjustment Bureau—is a propulsive ride worth your popcorn dollar, not for its preposterous genre tinkering but for its refreshingly humanist take on a high-concept gimmick.

Like Moon’s Sam Rockwell before him, a totally game Jake Gyllenhaal is the movie’s glue as Captain Colter Stevens, a decorated pilot and Hitchcockian everyman who wakes up on a commuter train to Chicago, unaware who his garrulous seatmate is. (That would be underutilized actress Michelle Monaghan, again nailing the thankless role of Pretty Girl.) A quick peek in the restroom mirror confirms Colter is in another man’s body, and a few confusing moments after that, he and everyone onboard are engulfed in a terrorist explosion. Materializing back in the Twilight Zone—a dank concrete techno-cell where he’s debriefed via video chat by military handler Goodwin (Vera Farmiga)—Colter learns of his role in the titular government experiment, for which his mind will re-live an avatar’s last eight minutes to gather clues and hopefully prevent a deadlier attack by catching the dirty bomber.

Source Code’s two-minute trailer sets most of that up, but doesn’t hint at screenwriter Ben Ripley’s hits-to-misses ratio.  Like every time-travel yarn (though, technically, the time-loop logic here has more in common with Groundhog Day than 12 Monkeys), there are far-fetched plot wrinkles and quickly reeled-off quantum claptrap to distract us from the impossibilities, so let’s try suspending our disbelief in favor of a salvaged consciousness kept alive and “time reassignment.” Just as our brains fill in the periphery of our vision with a seamless blur of what we think exists, Colter’s choose-his-own-adventure courses of action should be limited to the last sensory experiences of the dead man he inhabits. Never-before-had conversations between characters make for enticing drama, but how the hell can our man peer into heating ducts or even get off the train to notice MacGuffins that weren’t discovered in the real-time wreckage? Not that any B-movie lover should care to play high school physics teacher, and even co-star Jeffrey Wright (wonderfully hammy here as a shifty bureaucrat who lords over Goodwin) offers the most telling line: “The source code is a gift. Don’t squander it by thinking.”

Most likely you won’t, since the film’s secret weapon isn’t its tension-mounting puzzle solving, sleek sense of visual claustrophobia, or philosophical questioning—but rather its sneaky compassion. Halfway through the film, Colter accepts his fate yet still refuses to allow these strangers on a train to meet their doom, no matter how many times he channels his inner Bill Murray. As he runs through the honest emotions of a non-action-hero stuck in a tour-of-duty spin cycle, deservedly angry at times when he isn’t merely baffled or frustrated, Colter’s sense of loyalty to these innocents kicks into overdrive. Knowingly futile as his quest is to save people who have already met their fiery demise and who also forget him with each flip of the hourglass, Gyllenhaal sells that personal sense of wish fulfillment with real heart.

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Catherine Reviews Duncan Jones’ Source Code [Theatrical Review] Catherine Stebbins from The Criterion Cast, April 4, 2011

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Source Code Jason McKiernan from AMC TV

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Boom

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Source Code: Techno-thriller is 'Groundhog Day' on a train - The ... Stephen Cole from The Globe and the Mail

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'Source Code': Movie review - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

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Movie Review | 'Source Code': Don’t Know Who You Are, but Don’t Know Who I Am Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, March 31, 2011

Strangers on a Train, With Explosives Mekado Murphy from The New York Times, March 30, 2011

Jones, Kent

Interview with Kent Jones Steve Erickson from Senses of Cinema

Hitchcock/Truffaut B 85

France USA (80 mi) 2015

In America, you call this man “Hitch.” In France, we call him “Monsieur Hitchcock.” You respect him because he shoots scenes of love as if they were scenes of murder. We respect him because he shoots scenes of murder like scenes of love!
— François Truffaut, AFI Salute to Hitchcock, 1979

Certainly one of the more interesting “meetings of the minds” to come along in the last half century took place in the sterile offices of the Universal Studios of Hollywood for six days of discussion in August 1962 when 63-year old director Alfred Hitchcock agreed to sit down to an exhaustive interview and critical analysis of literally every film he ever made with 30-year old French film director François Truffaut, who had completed three films of his own by that time, and was otherwise known as a former critic and editor of the influential Cahiers du Cinéma magazine. One of the rare books about film made by film directors themselves, after accumulating 50-hours of tape, the next four years were spent transcribing and editing the tapes into a book format, where extra sessions were needed to cover the subsequent films Hitchcock made, resulting in a book entitled Hitchcock/Truffaut published in France in 1966, released a year later in an English translation. The book nearly overnight changed the perception of Hitchcock, a cinematic virtuoso who made his start during the Silent era before working in Hollywood, whose films were instantly recognizable, known as the “Master of Suspense,” but was viewed at the time more as a popular entertainer perhaps best known for his caricatured round profile and perfectly enunciated “Good Evening” greeting while hosting his own television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents from 1955 to 1965, using television as the medium for a series of blood curdling murder mysteries presented week by week, to not only a world-class filmmaker, but in the running for the greatest director of all time. Asked if he wanted to piece together a documentary movie out of the surviving archival material from that interview, Film Comment editor, occasional Cahiers du Cinéma critic, and programmer of New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Kent Jones responded, “Fuck yeah!” Broadening the idea of a conversation on film, with directors discussing the works of other film directors, Jones brought in contemporary filmmakers who have been successful in their own right to offer their views on Hitchcock, including the exclusively male-centric comments of American directors Wes Anderson, Peter Bogdanovich, David Fincher, James Gray, Richard Linklater, Paul Schrader, the ever reliable Martin Scorsese, Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and from France, Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin. It might have been nice to hear the views of Jane Campion, for instance, as she is thoroughly rooted in the psychology of Hitchcock, as evidenced by In the Cut (2003).

One of the reasons the book is so successful is due to the incessant hours of meticulous research and careful preparatory work put in by Truffaut ahead of time, seen as a labor love where he invested as much thought and effort to these interviews as any film he ever made, perhaps taking even Hitchcock by surprise, as his knowledge of Hitchcock’s films elevated the discussion to unforeseen heights, offering a candid view the public had never seen before, opening a window into the very soul of Hitchcock. The book also differentiates the way artists are perceived and written about in Europe, with a certain degree of reverence, and how they are viewed in America, where disdain is commonplace and the scrutiny more closely resembles “What have you done for me lately?” Truffaut had interviewed Hitchcock earlier for Cahiers when he was in France working on TO CATCH A THIEF (1955), but was disappointed in the vague and rather unremarkable responses he gave when questioned about aspects of the French “auteur” theory, convincing Truffaut that only a prolonged, more in-depth interview was required. It all started with a series of complimentary letters exchanged between the two men beginning in June of 1962 when Truffaut proposed the idea to Hitchcock: “Since I have become a director myself, my admiration for you has in no way weakened; on the contrary, it has grown stronger and changed in nature. There are many directors with a love of cinema, but what you possess is a love of celluloid itself.” Hitchcock responded, “Dear Mister Truffaut, your letter brought tears to my eyes, and I am very grateful to receive such a tribute from you.” With American-born Helen Scott, the daughter of an American journalist stationed in Paris acting as translator, the two men blazed a trail through the Hitchcock lexicon, picking apart traces of the Hitchcock film vocabulary that the public has become fascinated by, discovering the secrets behind famous shots, like a particularly sinister moment in Suspicion (1941) when Cary Grant carries a glass of milk that may or may not be poisoned up a flight of stairs, where Hitchcock had the audacity to place a small lightbulb in the glass, adding a special glow of distinction, or unraveling elusive meanings, like the influence of Hitchcock’s own Catholicism on films like STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951) or The Wrong Man (1956), where Truffaut suggests the framing of the wrongfully accused Henry Fonda, viewed only in silhouette, bowed silently in prayer in front of an iconic portrait of Jesus, that dissolves into a facial close-up of the actual guilty man, could only have been filmed by a Catholic.

To Truffaut’s credit, he did not rely upon production stills that often never appeared onscreen, but instead borrowed 35mm prints from studio archives, including stills from British titles not available in France, and used them to provide shot-by-shot presentations of sequences, a vital strategy in understanding the near mathematical precision used in Hitchcock’s calculated editing strategy. The book is chalk full of these accompanying photographs, along with handwritten notes by Hitchcock or drawings conceived during the conception of the films, where Truffaut’s somewhat literary approach brings these films to life with a more intimate understanding. It also becomes clear that in France, André Bazin, film theorist and co-founder of Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951, is considered the father of film criticism, while Jean Renoir represents the epitome of French filmmaking. But in Hollywood, a world the Cahiers critics certainly revere, no one is more admired than Hitchcock. Wes Anderson describes his copy of the book is so worn out from constant use that it is only held together by a rubber band, while various directors chime in discussing their favorite Hitchcock moments, dissecting notable scenes, where who better than Martin Scorsese could discuss the powerful effect of framing and editing in the notorious shower scene of Psycho (1960)? In discussing Vertigo (1958), specifically the scene when Judy (icy blond Kim Novak) perfectly resembles Madeline, the beautiful dead woman Scottie (James Stewart) is still obsessed by, Hitchcock acknowledges “I indulged in a form of necrophilia.” In a particularly graphic moment, just as Scottie is about to consummate his desires with her, he sends her back into the bathroom because a single detail is wrong, as she is wearing her hair down while Madeline wore hers up. “While he was sitting waiting, he was getting an erection.” At this point Hitchcock politely asks Truffaut to turn off the tape recorder so he can tell a story not for public consumption that apparently only Truffaut and interpreter Helen Scott were privy to hear. As all the principles are now deceased, we will never know what the story was, but one can only imagine the dirty little details. It is this element that fascinates David Fincher, as Hitchcock’s films (like Buñuel’s) are filled with his own personal fears and fetishes, as well as sexual daydreams, where he made no attempt to hide his own psychological impulses from the characters that appear onscreen, which is one of the cherished aspects of a Hitchcock film.

Somewhat disappointing was discovering the interview was never filmed, only taped, so there are really no new revelations in the film. Most of the photographs taken at the time have already been seen, but certainly one was initially hopeful to see personality traits developing during the course of the interview, where Truffaut tends to be eagerly enthusiastic, filled with an abundant supply of energy, while Hitchcock is the picture of aristocratic taste and refinement, never moving a muscle unnecessarily, where he is almost always portrayed in an economy of motion. His mordant sense of humor comes through as he describes various scenes from some of his films, where he obviously relishes how the audience is impacted from the exact precision utilized to set up scenes. Scorsese was forever affected by the aerial shots of Hitchcock, which he equates with the power of God on high, as if He’s looking down upon us, including a terrifying airborne shot of the town on fire in The Birds (1963), where the camera literally descends from the clouds above, as if casting ultimate judgement over all of us, where one of the most famous is a spectacular camera shot from NOTORIOUS (1946) that begins with a high overview of a party, as seen from the top of a banister of winding stairs, following the sweep of the action with a crane shot descending into the crowded atmosphere on the floor below, where the camera goes in search of the most important item in the room, where the crux of the film depends on the discovery of this single detail, zeroing in on a couple where after a number of shifting focuses we can identify an immaculately dressed Ingrid Bergman fidgeting nervously, as the camera zooms in on an object she’s holding in the palm of her hand, which is revealed to be a key in a stunning, perfectly timed close-up. All the drama is compacted into the tiniest space imaginable. While the film is heavy on Hitchcock, and does at least consider the possibility of what might have happened if he had loosened the authoritative grip over his style, but it has little to say about Truffaut, failing to explore the director’s profound influence on him, where it’s impossible to think of THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1967) without the droll, gallows humor so representative of a tongue-in-cheek Hitchcock. While it might have been nice to get Hitchcock’s take on that film, instead he finds it incomprehensible to discover the unscripted, improvisatory style Truffaut used with his actors in JULES AND JIM (1962), as that’s simply something he would never allow. Also missing is the considerable influence of Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s longtime wife who literally had her hand in every Hitchcock film ever made, was his closest collaborator and most trusted ally, but is hardly ever mentioned, which in this modern era seems like a criminal oversight. So while the book remains a classic for film lovers, something that will be revered forever, the same can’t be said for this film, as the director’s comments aren’t particularly memorable, though as a trip down memory lane it’s good fun and amusingly interesting, following the example of Two in the Wave (2011), but never rises to a level of scholarship or essential viewing.

What to see at the 51st Chicago International Film Festival ... Ben Sachs from the Chicago Reader

Critic Kent Jones directed this documentary about the title book, which derived from a weeklong interview that Francois Truffaut conducted with Alfred Hitchcock in 1962. The film provides a useful summary of the cultural impact made by Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, explaining how the "politique des auteurs" (a theory that argued the director was the primary author of a film) changed the way people looked at movies; it also argues that Truffaut almost single-handedly changed the way people looked at Hitchcock, presenting him as an artist rather than a light entertainer. The lesson in critical history soon gives way to a succession of filmmakers discussing Hitchcock's genius; the impressive lineup of talking heads includes Martin Scorsese, Richard Linklater, David Fincher (who's particularly eloquent), Olivier Assayas, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. In English and subtitled French and Japanese.

Setting Sun - Film Comment Amy Taubin, July/August 2015

Kent Jones’s documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut also showed in Cannes Classics. Intelligent and lively, it’s filled with memorable Hitchcock images and revelatory comments by David Fincher and James Gray in particular. But the movie also put me in mind of Godard’s passage in Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Chapter 4a) in which he says, in effect, that long after we’ve forgotten the whys and wherefores of the plots, we will remember  “a handbag,” “a bus in the desert,” “a glass of milk”… Though Godard attributes the power of these images to Hitchcock’s placement of them within montage, he also asserts the phenomenal presence of Hitchcock’s photography in its own right. I venture that a person who has seen Marnie or North by Northwest or Suspicion only as a digital copy would not understand what Godard is talking about. And that loss is at the bottom of what some filmmakers and cinephiles were mourning at Cannes, knowingly or not.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle Cubr

In 1962, François Truffaut held a weeklong interview with Alfred Hitchcock to discuss the latter's prolific film career. A condensed version of these conversations was later published as a book entitled Hitchcock/Truffaut. The film HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT is a biographical documentary encompassing the lives of both directors before, during, and after their famous meetings. Kent Jones deftly weaves portions of the audio recordings from the interviews, snippets from the book, and sequences from Hitchcock's films to create a history of The Master of Suspense's oeuvre. The heart of the film asks whether Hitchcock was an artist or an entertainer. The auteur theory is championed in Hitchcock's favor, as many of his iconic scenes are analyzed and praised through talking head interviews with the likes of Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, and Wes Anderson, among others. But it's the admiring relationship between Truffaut and Hitchcock and their honest, thoughtful, and unpretentious dialogue that is the strong core of the film. Jones presents the discussion in such a way that one almost feels present in the room, like an unspeaking fourth party sitting next to Truffaut's interpreter. Hitchcock's influence on Truffaut can be seen in some brief sequences from THE 400 BLOWS and JULES AND JIM, but what truly is highlighted in these moments, are their differences, Hitchcock's emphasis on his mise en scene and Truffaut favoring a more stylized approach to his directing. The editing in this film is quick and playful, shots never lingering too long on any one thing, keeping the subject engaging and accessible to both cinephiles and the casual viewer. HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT is a celebration of the friendship the pair forged back in 1962 and the love of cinema as an art form.

Scorsese and Fincher Talking Hitchcock/Truffaut Will ... Scorsese and Fincher Talking Hitchcock/Truffaut Will Change the Way You Watch Movies, by Matt Patches from Esquire, September 13, 2015

In 1962, French director and film critic François Truffaut requested palaver with the one and only Alfred Hitchcock. To Truffaut and his Cahiers du cinéma filmzine clique, Hitchcock was the definition of "auteur," a filmmaker whose style is enough to identify him. This wasn't the public perception. For more than four decades, the world regarded the British thriller director to be a mere entertainer. He could direct the hell out a film, sure, but with enough practice, a Vegas magician could pull rabbits out of hats—so was it really art? Truffaut argued "yes." Hitchcock was a master, and given the chance to explain his craft, the world would finally understand.

And it did. Published as Hitchcock/Truffaut, the exhaustive interview parsed Hitchcock's philosophies and subconscious trademarks. Noticed or not, each camera movement, each extreme bit of actor blocking, each perfectly timed insert shot of an everyday object slipped another idea into viewers' minds. A scene like Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman locking lips in Notorious was more than its surface action. A sustained close-up forced intimacy. Repeated pecks between the two actors intensified the lust (and skirted around the era's censorship laws). An awkward movement—Grant and Bergman kissed while shuffling around the room—created a push-and-shove dynamic. However trite the plots, Hitchcock was an artist working in pointillism. The choices counted. Thanks to Hitchcock/Truffaut, the masses knew it.

Despite its place in history, there was always a disconnect with Hitchcock/Truffaut. The book is filled with Hitchcock's handwritten notes, crude storyboards, and a colorful frames from the finished products, and yet to fully understand one of the director's concoction, the ideas require kinetic energy. No still can capture the dizzying effect one of his classic high angles or the dolly out/zoom move from Vertigo that warped spacetime. Like Truffaut's original corrective, filmmaker Kent Jones hopes to invigorate a new generation of art-minded thinkers with his documentary adaptation of the book. Adopting the name, Hitchcock/Truffaut pinpoints the events that lead to Truffaut's original proposition before finding its groove as a visual love letter to Hitchcock's distinctive style. Jones recruits such industry bigwigs as David Fincher, Richard Linklater, The Immigrant director James Gray, and Martin Scorsese to dissect scenes and annotate the revelations tucked inside Truffaut's interviews. For many of the modern masters, devouring Hitchcock was a film school on its own. Hitchcock/Truffaut makes the lessons digestible, even for those who never graduated past fifth grade art class. Just listen to Scorsese wax poetic on the framing of Psycho's driving sequences:

Hitchcock's admirers, and the director himself, agree: reality has little place in the movies. As Fincher says, a director's job is to make "the slow more fast and the fast more slow." Since the director decides what a viewer sees and what point and where, he or she should wield the power at every occasion. In persisting films such as The 39 Steps, The Birds, Vertigo, and Psycho, Hitchcock drove off the plausibility road with four-wheel drive. Does it make sense why, after the gas station explodes in The Birds, a flock of seagulls hovers around a fire-filled wide shot? No. But it takes the breath away. That's what mattered. Hitchcock learned to communicate this way during his silent-era days, when photographic information relied on the audiences' intuition and personal histories. In 1927's The Lodger, it was essential to convey the consumed nature of Ivor Novello's murder in a way that wouldn't rely on exposition. So Hitchcock shattered reality and came up with this dream logic fix:

Hitchcock/Truffaut mines the original interview recordings to give Hitchcock more voice in his own narrative—and he comes off like a stubborn narcissist. On multiple occasions he referred to actors as "cattle." His general response to criticism was "I don't care what you think." And when asked to define his job, he said it was to "play the audience," veering dangerously close to the Vegas magician role. Toward the end of the interviews, Hitchcock conceded his headstrong manner may have prevented later-career greatness. Maybe characters did matter. Perhaps an actor's thoughts should be considered. 

But he didn't work that way, making his films deeply personal. Hitchcock was a vivacious, sexual being. His films dabbled in the fetishistic because Hitch was fetishistic. He couldn't keep himself out of the picture. Describing the sequence in Vertigo when Judy (Kim Novak) "transforms" into Madeleine, Hitchcock asks Truffaut to turn off the tape. He's about to discuss Jimmy Stewart's erection—the key to the scene. With stubbornness comes idiosyncratic greatness.

Art appreciation does not require an understanding of why we're moved. If a bead of sweat rolls down your forehead as Cary Grant outruns a plane in North by Northwest, it's a success. But today we're in a "turn our brains off" era of pop culture enjoyment, where successful craft and dim-witted corporate schlock wind up in the same waste basket. Detecting the thought behind a film, television show, musical work, or even the wildest #nofilter Instagram pic makes us more demanding. We challenge our artists and they challenge us back. We symbiotically keep the synapses firing. Hitchcock/Truffaut stirred the pot and, with the aid of visualization, Jones' film could do the same. Hitchcock's filmography will thrill you. How he did it all will thrill you again.

'Actors are cattle': when Hitchcock met Truffaut - The Guardian Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, May 12, 2015

There’s a derangingly perverted scene in the 1958 film Vertigo. The femme fatale Judy, played by Kim Novak, appears before Scottie, James Stewart’s retired cop, in a sleazy motel room. She’s dressed as the dead woman with whom he’s obsessed. “I indulged in a form of necrophilia,” the director Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut during a week-long series of interviews they did in Hollywood in 1962.

Scottie has insisted that Judy dye her hair blond and wear the outfit he bought. Only then will he be able to have sex with her. But there’s a problem. Scottie can’t consummate his desire because one detail is wrong: Judy is wearing her hair down. The dead woman, Madeleine, wore it up. “This means,” Hitchcock explains to Truffaut, “she’s stripped but won’t take off her knickers.”

Scottie sends her back to the bathroom and sits impatiently on the bed. “He’s waiting for the woman to come out nude ready for him,” Hitchcock adds. “While he was sitting waiting, he was getting an erection.” Then Hitchcock tells Truffaut to turn the tape off so he can tell a story. We will never know what it was, but the safe money says it was really dirty.

Kent Jones’s engaging new documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut teems with such moments: the 30-year-old tyro French director asking his hero to explain how he made his films, and the 63-year-old responding in detail, often revealing the lubricious impulses behind such masterpieces as Psycho, The Birds and Marnie. For 50 years, these conversations have existed in book form. Jones has set them free, juxtaposing the audio recordings with relevant scenes from the films.

Hitchcock clearly revels in disclosing some of his secrets. As we watch the superbly sinister scene in the 1941 thriller Suspicion in which Cary Grant slowly, but implacably, ascends a spiral staircase towards Joan Fontaine’s bedroom, we may well wonder why the glass of milk he’s carrying looks so ominous and hyperreal. Because, Hitchcock explains, he lit it from inside with a little lightbulb. Truffaut gasps.

Truffaut had seduced Hitchcock into doing 30 hours of interviews by means of an imploring letter: “Since I have become a director myself, my admiration for you has in no way weakened; on the contrary, it has grown stronger and changed in nature. There are many directors with a love of cinema, but what you possess is a love of celluloid itself.” Hitchcock, flattered, telegrammed back in French from Bel Air: “Dear Mister Truffaut, your letter brought tears to my eyes, and I am very grateful to receive such a tribute from you.”

At the time, Truffaut had made just three films, including his semi-autobiographical debut, Les 400 Coups, while Hitchcock was editing his 48th, his extraordinary and probably self-revealing account of sexual repression, Marnie, starring Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery.

Truffaut’s aim was to liberate Hitchcock from his reputation (one that the Englishman cultivated) as a light entertainer and celebrate him for what he was, a great artist. “It’s wonderful that Truffaut got Hitchcock to talk because directors of his generation didn’t often,” says Jones, head of the New York film festival, and the director who collaborated on Martin Scorsese’s survey of Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy. “They were dismissive about their art, at least publicly. John Ford would say, ‘I only make westerns.’ Howard Hawks would say, ‘I only make comedies.’ They weren’t inclined to talk seriously about their work, partly because they needed to survive in the studio system.”

Hitchcock and Truffaut were from different cinematic cultures. Hitchcock had made the first of his pictures in the silent era and went on to work in Hollywood. Truffaut was initially a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. Thanks to critics such as Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, Godard and indeed Truffaut (all of whom who would become the iconoclastic hipster directors of the Nouvelle Vague), cinema for the first time became, as director Olivier Assayas puts it in Jones’s film, self-conscious. For the first time, it reflected on itself as art rather than dismissing itself as mere entertainment. The Hitchcock-Truffaut interviews were part of that revolution.

Truffaut and Hitchcock began their interviews on 13 August, Hitchcock’s 63rd birthday. Four years later, the interviews were published. “It has been an incredibly influential book,” says Jones, adding that it was pivotal in the education of film-makers such as Coppola, De Palma, Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese, Friedkin and Schrader. Today’s generation, it seems, is no less in awe. “When I asked David Fincher if he’d read it, he said, ‘Only, like, 200 times.’”

There are only two moments when Hitchcock clams up. First, as Truffaut suggests, quite sensibly, that the lack of realism and plausibility in Hitchcock’s movies (think of the scene in North by Northwest when Cary Grant emerges unscathed from a fireball caused by the crop-dusting plane that’s been pursuing him crashing into a fuel truck) is because his pictures yield to a deeper logic, the logic of dreams. “Hitchcock just doesn’t want to go there,” says Jones. “He’s not comfortable with that level of disclosure.”

Yet, as Fincher, one of 10 present-day directors whom Jones interviews for the film, argues, one of the exciting things about Hitchcock is that his fears and fetishes, his nocturnal terrors and his sexual daydreams, are all over his work. Indeed, for Fincher, one of the lessons of Hitchcock’s cinema is that any film-maker who thinks they can stop their psychopathologies leaking on to the screen is, as he puts it, “nuts”. Jones says: “I think David’s right. Hitchcock does what he wants, and indeed, if you look at those film-makers who try to do what others want, or what they think the audience want, they come unstuck.”

The other moment is when Truffaut, again quite sensibly, argues that Hitchcock’s trademark omniscient shots (the terrifying airborne shot of the town on fire in The Birds; the camera descending from Olympian heights to find the compromising key in Ingrid Bergman’s hand in Notorious) could have been made only by someone raised, as Hitchcock was, a Catholic. Hitchcock asks Truffaut to turn off the tape so he can go off record. “Again, we don’t know what he said, but he clearly didn’t want to reveal his motivations,” says Jones. Instead, in Jones’s film it’s left to another Catholic director, Scorsese, to clinch the point: the God-like perspective of Hitchcock’s aerial shots induce terror.

“In the book of the interviews,” says Jones, “Hitchcock came over as stilted and formal, which you can hear he isn’t.” Quite so: Hitchcock is often droll and cantankerous. “Actors are cattle,” he tells Truffaut, underlining his reputation for giving them no scope but to fulfil his artistic vision. “He can’t mean that,” says Jones. “Yes, he started in cinema during the silent era, well before the post-war era after which, as Scorsese says, the power shifted to the actor. But he wasn’t contemptuous – he had immensely fruitful relationships with actors.”

True, but Hitchcock was always boss. The film recalls his on-set spat during I Confess with Montgomery Clift over a split-second moment in which the actor was required to look up at a building as he crossed the street. The method actor who had trained with Lee Strasberg said he needed to consider whether his character, a guilt-ridden Roman Catholic priest, would look up at that moment. Hitchcock didn’t care what Clift thought: he needed him to look up at that precise moment or everything leading up to and from that glance would not make sense. Truffaut, when Hitchcock explains this to him, agrees: if Clift refused, he would have ruined the story arc. Happily, Clift ultimately glanced upwards and the scene makes sense.

Truffaut, for all that he was profoundly influenced by this father figure, gave actors more leeway. He tells Hitchcock about a scene in Jules et Jim that his three actors improvised. Hitchcock is incredulous: he could never allow that.

Later, Jones reveals, Hitchcock worried that he was too rigid in his commitment to narrative rigour. Perhaps he should have given his actors more freedom. In one telegram to Truffaut, he says how difficult it would have been for Mondrian to paint like Cézanne: by which he means how difficult it would have been for Hitchcock to direct like Truffaut, or indeed like others in the Nouvelle Vague, still less like the great American directors of the 1970s who allowed their actors a great deal of freedom.

It’s a point taken up by Fincher, who wonders how Hitchcock would have got on directing such actors as De Niro, Pacino and Hoffman. “Sadly, we’ll never know,” says Jones. “But he did have conflicts with actors who were less willing to respect his authority, not just with Clift on I Confess and Paul Newman on Torn Curtain.”

In any case, he did try to loosen up, to mutate, as it were, from Mondrian to Cézanne. “There is some 16mm test film provisionally called Kaleidoscope/Frenzy, in which he tried to be freer and give some young kids in New York the chance to express themselves as actors.” But that film was never made. Instead, in 1972 he made Frenzy, his penultimate – and psychosexually deranged – film, in which Barry Foster strangles his victims with a necktie, grunting: “Lovely! Lovely!”

Almost two decades after Truffaut and Hitchcock recorded their interviews, the Frenchman was still lecturing the world on his hero’s merits. “In America,” Truffaut told the American Film Institute in 1979 during a homage, “you call him Hitch. In France, we call him Monsieur Hitchcock. In America, you respect him because he shoots scenes of love as if they were scenes of murder. We respect him because he shoots scenes of murder like scenes of love.”

The following year, Hitchcock died. All too soon Truffaut followed him in 1984, aged only 52, and at the height of his powers.

TRUFFAUT/HITCHCOCK, HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT, and ... David Bordwell, June 12, 2015

Cannes Review: 'Hitchcock/Truffaut' Is An Enjoyable Appen ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist

Hitchcock/Truffaut Movie Review | TIFF 2015 | Collider Matt Goldberg

[TIFF Review] Hitchcock/Truffaut - The Film Stage Ethan Vestby

Toronto 2015 Review: 'Hitchcock/Truffaut' - ScreenCrush Matt Singer

'Hitchcock Truffaut': Review | Reviews | Screen Fionnuala Halliga from Screendaily

Film Divider [Craig Skinner]

CineVue [Matthew Anderson]

François Truffaut - The Alfred Hitchcock Wiki

HeyUGuys [Ian Gilchrist]

We Got This Covered [Sam Woolf]

Cannes deal round-up: A Hitchcock/Truffaut documentary ... Noel Murray from The Dissolve

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Hitchcock/Truffaut review: Cannes dons rose-tinted specs ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Movie review: Hitchcock/Truffaut - PRAGUE POST | The ... André Crous

'Hitchcock/Truffaut' looks at great directors' careers - LA Times Kenneth Turan

“Our Last Tango,” “Hitchcock/Truffaut,” - Roger Ebert Tina Hassania

Jones, Kirk

NANNY MCPHEE C 72

Great Britain (98 mi) 2006

The film took forever to get to a good place, having to endure lame sight gags that were not in the least bit funny, over-saturated colors that resembles CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, yet made little sense in this setting, and over-indulged, selfish children that love to inflict pain and suffering to prospective nanny’s, opening with the 17^th such nanny run out of the house screaming to the high heavens in anguish, with overly self-satisfied children smiling with glee. The children have little to complain about despite losing their mom, living in a mansion out in the country, while widowed and impverished dad, Colin Firth, is too busy talking to his deceased wife (an empty chair) to spend any quality time with his own children. Imelda Staunton runs the kitchen like a British general while Kelly Macdonald is her lovely assistant, trying to read and look after the children in her spare time. Angela Lansbury plays a nearly blind old hag aunt who pays for all the expenses, demanding he remarry by the end of the month or she’ll throw them all out. Enter Emma Thompson, the writer of the film, with several warts on her face and apparently only one tooth, who magically renders the children’s zestful indulgence into compliance, teaching them to use words like thank you and please. For each lesson learned, it appears a wart is removed, until by the end of the film, Thompson looks her regular self, especially realized in a beautifully rendered scene in the snow in the middle of summer where everyone lives happily ever after. While the film is not offensively bad, it just lacks interest for the most part, or any degree of pacing or surprise. Only the scene in the snow offered any hint of surprise for me. Perhaps this is directed for especially small aged children, as there’s little to no suspense for everyone else.

EVERYBODY’S FINE D 59

USA Italy (95 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

My child arrived just the other day
He came to the world in the usual way
But there were planes to catch and bills to pay
He learned to walk while I was away
And he was talkin' 'fore I knew it, and as he grew
He'd say "I'm gonna be like you dad
You know I'm gonna be like you"

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home dad?
I don't know when, but we'll get together then son
You know we'll have a good time then

My son turned ten just the other day
He said, "Thanks for the ball, Dad, come on let's play
Can you teach me to throw", I said "Not today
I got a lot to do", he said, "That's ok"
And he walked away but his smile never dimmed
And said, "I'm gonna be like him, yeah
You know I'm gonna be like him"

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home son?
I don't know when, but we'll get together then son
You know we'll have a good time then

Well, he came home from college just the other day
So much like a man I just had to say
"Son, I'm proud of you, can you sit for a while?"
He shook his head and said with a smile
"What I'd really like, Dad, is to borrow the car keys
See you later, can I have them please?"

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home son?
I don't know when, but we'll get together then son
You know we'll have a good time then

I've long since retired, my son's moved away
I called him up just the other day
I said, "I'd like to see you if you don't mind"
He said, "I'd love to, Dad, if I can find the time
You see my new job's a hassle and kids have the flu
But it's sure nice talking to you, Dad
It's been sure nice talking to you"

And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me
He'd grown up just like me
My boy was just like me

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home son?
I don't know when, but we'll get together then son
You know we'll have a good time then

—Harry Chapin, “Cats in the Cradle” (1974)

This is really a contrived and maudlin tale about the deterioration of the American family unit due to their own collective dishonesty with one another, preferring the practice of telling white lies, supposedly to protect the feelings of others, but despite the presence of big name box office stars, is really direction by the numbers, as there isn’t an ounce of originality or fresh insight on display. Instead it hammers home the same predictable themes with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, suggesting families have common inside themes unique to them alone that follow them around all their lives, many of them passed down to their children, supposedly commonalities that should bring people together. In their rush to get through each day with as few problems as possible, people tend to overlook obvious truths about one another, seeing only what they want to see, and define themselves and their children through a code of embellishments, making themselves look better than they really are, masking the truth in various shades in order to increase their standing of social acceptability. For Robert De Niro to be reduced to playing this kind of crap is nearly a sin, as it stands for everything that’s wrong with movies today, that they’ll spend millions to pay big stars to perform in this kind of drek, which is viewed as a safe and comfortable movie, released just before Christmas, as if this is a big family movie, but it’s depressing in all the wrong kind of ways, as it’s offensive that studios will spend gobs of money on movies like this which haven’t got a single thing to say instead of taking chances with smaller films that might actually have some original ideas.

De Niro is the retired patriarch who, King Lear style, decides to pay an unexpected visit to each one of his children, and in every single case is rebuffed by ungrateful children who are too busy in their own lives to include him, even for a few days. De Niro is recently widowed, and his wife was apparently the person who stayed in touch with all the children, but now that she’s gone, De Niro tries to assume her place and his kids spend most of the film trying to avoid him. In so many ways, this is an ugly film of surfaces and small superficial chatter, even including the behind the back banter between siblings that passes for a script in this film. Overly predictable at every turn, this is a one note story with little development, where it’s hard to believe how much of this just doesn’t pay off. De Niro spent his life building telephone wire and eeked out a comfortable living, offering each of his children middle class opportunities, but now that they’re grown, he hardly recognizes them anymore. So the director shows more than two dozen extended images of telephone wire stretched across the country, usually accompanied by his children talking to one another over the phone about how they can avoid dealing with their father, a man who subsequently claims all he wanted in life was to be a good father. The film doesn’t even begin to address the hypocrisy of these delusions. Only in one scene, which plays out like a dream recollection, does the father take any responsibility for his own behavior in making his children feel uncomfortable, as he sees himself berating his infant kids while sitting at a meal together. The problem here is that the script itself is lame, the direction is like watching TV, and despite good overall performances from a fine slate of actors, with Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, and Drew Barrymore as his grown children, there are no compelling characters and no memorable moments. If this was on TV, despite the cast, I’d change the channel.

The Onion A.V. Club review [C-] Nathin Rabin

Time has reduced many of the idiosyncratic American leading men of the ’70s into harmless, adorable senior citizens. Dustin Hoffman and Richard Dreyfuss appear onscreen these days almost exclusively as cutesy old codgers. Now, a neutered Robert De Niro plays a widower who dodders around the country visiting his grown children in Everybody’s Fine, a schmaltzy Americanization of Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1990 Italian drama. De Niro’s demanding ways and impossibly high standards are supposed to have scarred each of his children profoundly during their formative years, but the harsh taskmaster of the past bears only the fuzziest resemblance to the nice old man of the present, who seems to demand nothing more than a bowl of soup and maybe the occasional nap.

In a sleepy lead performance, De Niro plays a widower who let his wife handle the lion’s share of parenting duties while he devoted himself to his job. In the aftermath of his wife’s death, however, he realizes just how little he knows his four children, so when they opt out of attending a family reunion, he decides to hit the road. If they won’t come to him, he’ll come to them. 

Everybody’s Fine follows a dispiritingly predictable arc; De Niro visits his kids and learns that they’re each living a lie. His son Sam Rockwell isn’t the hotshot conductor De Niro imagines him to be, but rather a lowly percussionist. His high-powered businesswoman daughter Kate Beckinsale has a nuclear family that isn’t anywhere near as perfect as De Niro had been led to believe. This dynamic is dull the first time around, and it grows even less interesting with each mild variation. Viewers get no points for guessing whether the fate of De Niro’s most troubled child, a tortured New York artist busted for drugs in Mexico, will be revealed climactically in the film’s third act. Waking Ned Devine writer-director Kirk Jones does nothing to leaven the unashamed sentimentality that defines Tornatore’s cornball oeuvre: In the film’s most nauseating trope, De Niro initially sees each of his grown children as their adorable younger selves.  Even more than the remake that it is, Everybody’s Fine plays like a homogenized, Hallmark Channel version of About Schmidt, with all the rough edges shaved off.

Slant Magazine review [1/4] Bill Weber

In his career-debasement race against Al Pacino, must Robert De Niro inflict a moribund genre botch like Everybody's Fine on the public just in time to grinch us up for Christmas? Here he's minimally applied his once-revered talents to the solitary widower's road-trip-of-discovery drama, and the end product isn't even a threat to the slapstick misanthropy of About Schmidt, let alone Paul Mazursky's humane Harry and Tonto of a generation past.

Eight months after the passing of the wife who protected him from the personal and professional travails of his grown children, De Niro's Frank Goode leaves his Long Island home, after one too many cancelled group visits, to surprise his offspring: a Chicago ad exec (Kate Beckinsale), a touring symphony percussionist (Sam Rockwell), a Vegas dancer (Drew Barrymore), and a Manhattan artist whose mysterious disappearance telegraphs some shameless climactic tearjerking. De Niro's still-sound physical instincts—heavy walk, routinely mumbled deceptions to his physician—make the exposition watchable, but he's been saddled with a character so Everygramps that he scarcely seems more functional than the catatonic patient he played in Awakenings: "Oh, it has a handle," he quietly marvels when someone yanks one up from his traveling wheelie bag.

The film's superficially handsome, high-definition widescreen frame is the equivalent of a Godiva box holding stale chocolates; its banal dialogue and vintage TV-movie creakiness waste the supporting cast, from a stranded Rockwell to Melissa Leo, rewarded with a two-minute bit as a cheerful trucker. In remaking a 1990 Italian original, writer-director Kirk Jones annoys with recurring POV shots of Frank seeing his middle-aged heirs as juveniles, then hits bottom with a delirium sequence where the patriarch has it out with the preadolescents over the failures of their adult selves. Frank is a walking guilt trip to his kids: Afflicted with fibrosis after a sacrificial career of coating wiring with polyvinyl chloride, his trip is conspired against via the family's transcontinental phone calls (shots of telecom towers and poles as the Goodes plot is typical Jones overkill).

The filmmakers have earned more lasting guilt by failing to transform this treacle with signifiers of flesh and blood. Finally putting Frank at a graveside to confess what he's learned to the departed, they merely prove no narrative tactic is beneath them.

User comments from imdb Author: Clayton Davis (Claytondavis@awardscircuit.com) from New Jersey

Based on Guiseppe Tornatore's 1990 Italian film, Stanno tutti bene, writer/director Kirk Jones has brought some of the best work out of Robert DeNiro in decades. Everybody's Fine is a fascinating tale about Frank (DeNiro), a widower who wants to get his four adult children together for dinner, but when one by one they all cancel for good reasons or lack of a better word excuses, he decides against the advice of his doctor, to make a surprise trip to all their residences in New York, Chicago, Denver, and Las Vegas. What the trip brings him however, is a heavy realization that despite what his late-wife told him, maybe everybody's not fine.

Treading heavy territory to resemble films like About Schmidt, Everybody's Fine is a heartfelt, emotional film that will leave you in tears. Though the narrative could come off a bit over-dramatic at times, there's no denying the warmth that the film conveys to family and loyalty. DeNiro is most effective in his role of Frank Goode, the hard-working father whose long hours putting up coating on telephone wire may have cost him more than he thought. Director, Kirk Jones makes some great artistic choices, especially in the final scenes of the film. One thing however that is surprising is how the film is being marketed. Portraying itself as a holiday-comedy is going to be quite unexpected to viewers as the film is weighty with emotion and less on the laughs.

The supporting players, in this case the adult children, are all beautifully cast. Drew Barrymore has never been sweeter in the role of Rosie, a dancer in Vegas with a "Daddy's Girl" mentality. Kate Beckinsale is stunning in looks and adequate in delivery as Amy, a top advertisement executive. Sam Rockwell, who is long overdue for Oscar attention, plays Robert, the musician who painfully seeks his father's approval.

Enough can't be said about DeNiro who gives one of his finest performances of his career. Showing a softer side yet remaining in tuned with his fatherly instincts, DeNiro has redeemed some of his lesser works in the past years. He takes in some of the best and worst parts of all fathers' across the world. Worrying yet too hard at times it spills over into his children's decisions. Where the narrative misses in some aspects, DeNiro makes up for with his devotion and commitment to the character. It's an outstanding turn for him in his late career.

Over-dramatic, cliché, and a bit predictable, Everybody's Fine shows a beating heart. There's no stupidity or attitude in its form, just pure feeling. If you come from a family of secrets for the greater good (which may be the majority of us), this will speak volumes.

Pajiba (Dustin Rowles) review

FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

The Village Voice [Robert Wilonsky]

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

filmcritic.com (Jesse Hassenger) review [2.5/5]

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B+]

Screen International (Tim Grierson) review

The Independent Critic [Richard Propes]

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B-]

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [2/5]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C-]

CineSnob.net (Kiko Martinez) review [B-]

Entertainment Weekly review [D] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety (Andrew Barker) review

Boston Globe (Wesley Morris) review [2/4]

Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review

Austin Chronicle review [1.5/5] Marjorie Baumgarten

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

Jones, L.Q.

A BOY AND HIS DOG

USA (91 mi) 1975 ‘Scope

Time Out

Based on Harlan Ellison's novella, this covers familiar territory - vigorously and imaginatively - as feuding clans of scavengers prowl the desolate American landscape left by a nuclear holocaust. What lifts things right out of the rut is the cynical commentary provided by the hero's dog, communicating telepathically (in voice-off admirably spoken by Tim McIntire) and kicking the daylights out of all those boy-and-his-dog yarns (canine values win out, for example, when with barely a qualm the hero consigns his girl to serve as dogfood). The second half, venturing underground to find Middle America miraculously preserved but rapidly dying, is less good. Jones' debut as a director nevertheless has a distinctive tang, as affably unprincipled as the series of villains he played for Sam Peckinpah.

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.] also seen here: Movie Vault [Goatdog]

This movie pissed off a lot of people when it was first released, and it will still piss them off today. The story of a post-apocalyptic world where water is scarce and women are scarcer, the movie version of Harlan Ellison's novella raised the hackles of feminists worldwide when it was first released. In fact, it pissed off Ellison as well, at least the final few minutes, which are decidedly different from his original ending. He attempted to raise the money to re-shoot it by selling clips from the editing room floor, but director Jones won out (this information courtesy of Videohound's Sci-Fi Experience). The film version is still a cult classic.

Vic (Don Johnson) is a young man who probably wouldn't make it through life without the help of Blood, his telepathic dog (voiced by Tim McIntire), who can smell water, food, and women at great distances. It is 2014, and all of the above are in very short supply. When Vic and Blood rescue Quilla June (Susanne Benton) from rapists, which are common in the sex-starved world, Blood mistrusts her, and for good reason. She lures the hapless Vic into a surreal subterranean world run by Lou Craddock (Jason Robards) where the men can no longer inseminate the women. It is a 1950s nightmare that they have created from the ruins of civilization, kind of like a collage of bad 1950s musicals.

Vic is somewhat happy there, since he is initially treated as a hero. Unbeknownst to him, though, he has only been brought there to inseminate his share of women so the Disney nightmare community can reproduce. This wouldn't be so bad (in fact, he's quite happy), but the means of extraction are not to his taste. He must escape with the help of Quilla June, who has her own plans for him.

Spoiler alert: don't read any further if you haven't seen the movie and think you want to. The final scene, the one that so angered Ellison, has Vic choosing between saving the life of his faithful guide and running off with Quilla June. A shock cut to cooking meat and the line, "At least she had good taste," ends the movie. I am of two minds: it is offensive, but it is also damn funny, and my sense of humor wins out in the end.

A Boy and His Dog The Final Solution, by Joanna Russ from Jump Cut

DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson]

Slant Magazine Eric Henderson

eFilmCritic [Jack Sommersby]

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Movie-Vault.com (Oktay Ege Kozak) a real fanboy

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

VideoVista [Tom Matic]

The Sci-Fi Movie Page - DVD Review James O’Ehley

Apollo Movie Guide [Ryan Cracknell]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Dragan Antulov

John Smyth

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Jones, Tommie Lee

THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA B+ 92

USA (121 mi) 2005

People may talk about how this is the year of George Clooney, whose political statements personified through his films (GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK, SYRIANA) resonated through liberal-minded Hollywood this year, but Jones’s spare tone is much more effective, forcing us to look into the mirror at our own collective conscience, asking if we like what we see. Speaking broadly, in a culture where injustice prevails everywhere you look, especially in the highest places of government, individual acts determine the extent of our humanism. A film that resembles the look of de Heer’s Australian 2002 film THE TRACKER, where ruthlessly racist whites on horseback use an aborigine tracker on foot, sometimes at the end of a rope or in chains, to search for an alleged aborigine murder suspect, which calls into question the respective cultural identities of both black and white, here a lone white man, powerfully played by the director himself, a grizzled old cattle ranch foreman, seeks his own brand of justice when local officials look the other way after a trigger-happy border patrol cop (Barry Pepper) accidentally murders and then covers up the death of his friend, a Mexican ranch hand who illegally crossed the border into Texas several years ago, a man who was a threat to no one, who had left his family behind searching for a better life. The powers that be only distort what happened, shifting the blame away from themselves onto someone else, calling Jones’s character crazy, thereby insuring a lack of accountability and a continuing culture of distrust and alienation, usually with unnecessarily brutal results.

With scant backdrop, where much of the project was filmed on Jones’s own ranch, an undocumented Mexican man is murdered along the Texas/Mexican border, an incident which would remain low profile, probably forgotten in an otherwise nothing-ever-happens-here town, except he was a friend of a man who made it a point not to look the other way or forget, who had in his pocket a small map drawn of the man’s hometown, and his promise that if he died, he would return him to his family. In a town without pity, one lone man represents old-fashioned values that the rest of the town forgot a long time ago, and in his own way, becomes an outcast, perhaps even a lawbreaker in the eyes of the law, as he kidnaps the unsuspecting killer, forces him to dig up his friend, and they begin a long journey on horseback to return him to his small Mexican village for a proper burial. The beauty of the film is the journey, which is set in the immense desert landscapes with mountains looming in the distance, with only traces of water, where sheer fortitude is the only thing that gets you through.

According to Jonathan Rosenbaum, the story was inspired by the 1997 murder in Texas of an 18-year old kid, Ezequiel Hernandez Jr. by U.S. Marines searching the border for local drug smugglers, an accidental victim for whom no one was ultimately held responsible. Jones collaborated with screenplay writer Guillermo Arriaga, also the impressive ‘Scope cinematography of Chris Menges, to balance and interweave storyline, performance, pace, and the radiant look of the film. With moments of humor, as the task grows more arduous around every bend, there’s a beautiful patience on the part of the director, both on and off screen, that befits a kind of wisdom that is rare in this day and age, where fast-paced, quick edits are the norm, or as Roger Ebert writes, “ In an era when hundreds of lives are casually destroyed in action movies, here is an entire film in which one life is honored, and one death is avenged.” There’s an interesting use of television, including a scene out in the middle of a Mexican desert where a couple of guys are sitting around watching American soap operas, which has tragic and hilarious elements, also, an interesting bilingual fluidity to the film that feels natural, even with occasional subtitles. January Jones plays the cop’s wife, drearily mistreated by her couldn’t-care-less husband, while Melissa Leo plays a local waitress whose husband can’t even remember how long they’ve been married. They strike up a friendship, a camaraderie that implies friends “mean” something, and are not meant to be trampled upon or forgotten. As the US government and military continue to ignore the cultural differences of others around the world, killing huge numbers of foreigners with such ease, refusing to count their number of dead or wounded, this film slowly and painstakingly covers a kind of HIGH NOON moral ground, reminding us that there is an unseen story behind every life.

The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada Allan Hunter in Cannes from Screendaily

A lone quest for justice becomes an ode to friendship and the common ground between different cultures in The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada, a thoroughly respectable feature-length directorial debut from Oscar-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones.

An actor who believes that less is more, Jones brings the same approach to his direction with an unfussy style that emphasises straight storytelling and solid performances. Working from a screenplay by Amores Perros writer Guillermo Arriaga, he has created a thoughtful, carefully crafted drama that should have some resonance for American audiences and western aficionados but might make less of an impact globally, depending on the strength of Jones as a box-office attraction.

Recalling the work of Sam Peckinpah and 1970s westerns like Valdez Is Coming, The Three Burials takes a bittersweet romantic view of the West and the border dividing Mexico from America.

When his Mexican friend Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo) is found in a shallow grave in the desert, Pete Perkins (Jones) is determined to discover who killed him. Local sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam) shows little interest in pursuing the matter and arranges for the body to be buried again in a pauper’s grave.

The tenacious Perkins eventually identifies Border patrol guard Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) as the guilty party. He kidnaps him, forces him to dig up the body of Melquiades and the trio set off for Mexico to fulfil Pete’s promise to bury his friend in his home town.

Like Arriaga’s screenplay for 21 Grams, Three Burials juggles with time, breaking the linear narrative to double back on itself, revealing a fresh piece of information or offering a different perspective on the same events. It is not a technique that is used extensively or in a distracting fashion but it adds a certain lyricism to our understanding of the bond that unites Perkins and Melquiades.

Arriaga also has a talent for injecting his stories with the little ironies of life. Here, Norton does not know that Melquiades had been sleeping with his wife Lou Ann (January Jones) and Melquiades did not know that she was his wife.

The screenplay is also notable for some strongly drawn secondary characters, including a blind old man (Levon Helm) they meet in the desert and waitress Rachel, played with intelligence and feeling by Melissa Leo.

In common with contemporary Cannes titles like Don’t Come Knocking and Down In The Valley, the cinematography plays a pivotal part in the production. Veteran Oscar-winner Chris Menges ensures that every image counts as the journey from Texas to Mexico proceeds through desert sands, rugged cliff-tops, blood orange skies and majestic mountain ranges. The film is rarely less than breathtaking.

Underpinning the story is the belief that every individual life has meaning and every death is a tragedy. It also begs us to understand that America and Mexico may be separated by the Rio Grande and a history of mistrust but on a human level there is no real difference.

All of this may be spelt out in a fairly obvious manner but one can respect the intentions behind the film, savour the absorbing storyline and the tender loving care that has been lavished upon it.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Jones and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) manage to take a few significant risks with this revisionist, modern-day Western, but considering how conventional it mostly is, audiences are unlikely to really notice. The story of an undocumented Mexican ranch hand (Julio Cedillo) accidentally murdered by an asshole Border Patrol agent (Barry Pepper) in Texas, Three Burials begins with some intriguing business, the sort that Bertolt Brecht might have approvingly called "counter-factual." Pepper and his wife (January Jones) look for a home, and when he tells the salesman he's working Border Patrol, the fellow looks like he just might vomit from disgust. (I'm from Texas, and trust me, you tell the average Texan dude that you're defending the border and he'll probably buy you a beer, if he doesn't drop to his knees and blow you. This is, after all the state that gave us "Operation Wetback.") Pepper's Mike Norton character is a misfit even on the job (he uses too much force, even against women), and so when Jones' grizzled cowhand Pete comes a-calling seeking vengeance for his slain buddy, it mostly seems fitting. However it's here that things take an odd turn. While we are treated to flashbacks that articulate the friendship between Pete and Melquiades (and it's worth noting that, to my eyes, this is the first time that Arriaga's nonlinear storytelling actually serves to deepen the emotional resonance of the tale, instead of serving as flashy trickery), there's clearly more going on beneath the surface. Pete's dazed, almost mechanized violence and pedal-to-the-metal rage for justice bespeak a bond with Mel that is homosocial at the very least. That is, the film veers into melodrama that it, and the characters trapped inside it, seem ill-equipped to handle. Eventually things wind down (or up, perhaps) to some mano-a-mano business that strives to approximate the dustbowl-Beckettisms of a Budd Boetticher, but falls well short. Despite the liberal revisionism, and despite good intentions all around, nothing much seems at stake in this film. The ultra-violence that some have compared to Peckinpah is always tinged with a little too much jibber-jabber to really hit you in the gut. Granted, most of the pummeling is visited upon Mike's body, and the grueling physicality of Pepper's performance is quite extraordinary. But as written, his character is too obviously a craven coward, and this makes Pete's punishments seem like second-hand movie gestures, lone justice on the cheap. Finally, Jones' character seems to have claim to the moral high ground over all others in the film, simply because he's a gringo who bothered to learn Español. As we discover, this doesn't give him unobstructed access to the truth. But finally, does it matter for him, or us?

A Quirky Cowboy Classic Jonathan Rosenbaum

THE HOMESMAN B- 81

USA France (122 mi) 2014 ‘Scope Official Facebook

A film weighed down by the seriousness of its own efforts, an old-fashioned western that dramatizes the emptiness of the frontier landscape and the seeming impossibility of surviving under the brutally harsh conditions of the American West, especially for women. While the feminist bent is well-intentioned, and the cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto is ravishing throughout, the film is simply too downbeat for its own good, always carrying an extra load of unnecessary baggage inherited from the demands of such an inhospitable storyline. Never allowing the audience in, the film instead forces the viewer into miserably unhappy territory and then leaves them there with no way out, a Sartrian existential No Exit debacle, becoming one of the gloomier and most depressing films seen this year, literally a portrait of hell on earth. Leading us through this psychological world of endless suffering is Hillary Swank as Mary Bee Cuddy, a frontierswoman living alone on the prairie, beholden to no one, seemingly a free spirit, yet she carries the burden of moral righteousness around her shoulders like an insufferable weight, a Florence Nightingale of social reform, a predecessor to the Women's Christian Temperance Union, yet she is stuck in the Nebraska Territory of the 1820’s and 30’s, an era rarely depicted in motion pictures as there’s nothing exotic or romanticized about the bleakness of the times, where every day is living and dying through the dreariness of a great depression. Because of her unattached social status as the town spinster, Mary Bee is handed (by the church) the thankless task of transporting three crazy women on a long and arduous journey across the desolate Territory back to the civilization of Iowa where they can be handed over to a Methodist Church that is willing to care for them.

These women have all been driven into insanity by the harshness of the times and the callous indifference of their husbands, a reference right out of John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS (1956), removing the racist angle of being abducted white women raised by Indians and therefore rejected by the moral sanctity of white civilization. Here 19-year old Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep) has lost three children to diphtheria, fiercely clutching to a rag doll (also in Ford) in a near catatonic state, while Theoline Belknap (Miranda Otto) threw her newborn into the outhouse after the family farm failed, and Gro Svendsen (Sonja Richter) suffers from delusions of evil, who is so violent to herself or others that she needs to continuously be tied up. The idea of Mary Bee, a straight-laced, strong, and indomitable woman transporting these women alone across such a barren wasteland is equally crazy in the eyes of the wary townsfolk, as few believe she will succeed, including her town minister (John Lithgow) who instead offers his prayers. As she rounds up her cargo one by one, placing them inside a locked wooden box with iron guarded windows, like a mobile prison on wheels, she happens upon a miserable wretch in an even more precarious position than her own, a man tied to a tree with a noose around his neck while sitting, hands tied behind him, on a horse, whose slightest movement suggests his unfortunate end is near. He is none other than George Briggs (Tommie Lee Jones), a morally dubious, contemptible lowlife drifter who happens to be a claim jumper, stealing another man’s property while he’s gone back East “to find himself a wife.” Taking advantage of his desperate position, namely having no other options, she makes him promise to help her throughout her long and difficult journey. While he’s something of an ornery cuss who doesn’t like what he bargained for, in this mythic American West, a man doesn’t go back on his word.

If this film does anything, it provides a visual depiction of flatness as an unforgiving plain that stretches to an endless horizon, offering little in the way of hope or vegetation, where the idea of surviving out in this arid wilderness seems remote. Unlike Kelly Reichardt’s Meek's Cutoff (2010), the film is not about the minutia of daily survival, or a claustrophobic world closing in, but more closely resembles Jones’s earlier effort THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA (2005), shot on the director’s own property, another film about transporting human cargo across uncivilized territory, where the beauty of the film is the journey, set against desert landscapes with only traces of water, where sheer fortitude is the only thing that gets them through. Unfortunately, this film has a weary feeling of aimlessness about it, missing the taut direction of his earlier effort. While there are dangerous encounters along the way, not to mention the lingering possibility of starvation or Indian attack, Briggs offers some degree of frontier wisdom along with his eccentric behavior, obstinate and stubborn in his steadfast refusal to do any more than absolutely necessary, forcing Mary Bee to carry the load, where tending to the deteriorating minds of the three women is a loathsome proposition, a burden she’s forced to endure alone. While she’s a model of consistency and moral piety, Mary Bee begins to suffer from outright loneliness, where the human condition surrounding her is a sorry state, offering no respite from the enveloping purgatory that is her plight. As fate would have it, she is crushed under the weight of her own good intentions, a mythological Icarus flying too close to the sun.

While Briggs has every intention to abandon those women, offering their cruel fates to the winds, he has a change of conscience, feeling obligated to live up to Mary Bee’s sheer persistence, if only through stubborn resolve. While it’s possible they all perished out in the wilderness, as out of death comes the surreal, where the rest of the journey has the feel of a dream, where much like an apparition or a mirage, Briggs happens upon a newly constructed, freshly painted hotel out in the middle of nowhere, but they refuse food or lodging to such depraved souls as they are preparing for an evening banquet for wealthy entrepreneurs who will develop a civilized town where emptiness currently sits. This kind of indifference of the wealthy is not a stranger to the impoverished, but after witnessing this harrowing ordeal, it’s beneath contempt. Nonetheless, life goes on, and Briggs survives only in the manner that he’s accustomed to, namely violating all known ethical conduct, eventually crossing the Missouri River into what resembles the land of Oz — Iowa, which may as well be heaven, a perfectly manicured and pristine community where everything is neatly in place, handing over his tainted ladies (along with letters of family contacts) to the wife of the Methodist minister, none other than Meryl Streep, whose astonishment at their arrival melts into open generosity, where in this depiction, human kindness is a surreal sign of a civilized future, leaving Briggs an outcast, like Ethan Edwards in THE SEARCHERS, and like Custer’s last stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn where the Indians cut his eyes out, unable to see the spirit world, left to blindly wander lost in an inhospitable neverland for eternity.

Krell Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]

The Homesman (2014) is Tommy Lee Jones's second Western as a director and if there's any justice in the world, Jones will retire from acting and direct Westerns for the rest of his life. On the evidence, its what he was born to do. This film follows Mary Bee Cuddy, a spinster homesteader on the plains of Nebraska in the 1830s charged with transporting three women who have gone mad back to Iowa, where they'll be taken to an asylum. All three women have lost children, either to disease or by their own hands. Mary Bee is a portrait of hard-boiled pioneer spirit, who has wrought a life from a hostile countryside without men, even though she desperately longs for a man to share her life with. But she's "plain" and "bossy," so men refuse her. The movie hedges this. Hilary Swank plays Mary Bee, and like her best roles, it's a performance that challenges gender roles and expectations. There's a shot early in the film of Mary Bee at her vanity, brushing her hair, that's a complete repudiation of the idea that she's plain. There's another shot later in the film when she asserts her sexuality. The world of the Western punishes her for her sexuality and for her strength. This is no country for women.

This is a film about the weakness of men, too. Jones plays the title role, a no-account drifter named George Briggs recruited by Mary Bee at the end of a rope. He's essentially weak. The various husbands of the film's madwomen are monstrous abusers. Madness and murder seem like a reasonable response to a life with these men. The men our protagonists meet on their journey are weak and abusive, too, and there's a certain amount of catharsis in watching Briggs attempt to rise above his own weakness by asserting a patriarchal rage against these men. These men, in their way, are as mad as the women. Manifest Destiny, it seems, is the work of the brutal and the insane.

Visually, The Homesman is stark and disciplined and classical in a way that Jones's other Western, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, was not. Jones has studied the anti-Westerns of the 1970s and pitted that aesthetic against John Ford. The result is a film that's a reflection of its heroine: It's plain on the surface, but deep and beautiful beneath that surface.

Film Pulse [Kevin Rakestraw]

There were a plethora of hardships facing the pioneers and settlers of the American West during the 1850s. Harsh living conditions stemming from long, cold winters bearing little more than isolation, disease and violent, forceful winds offset by blazing hot summers on the seemingly infinite flatness of the Plains, a windblown expanse of vast nothingness drove many to depression, violence, suicide and/or madness.

Such is the case in the sophomore film, The Homesman,  from writer/director Tommy Lee Jones; adapted from a Glendon Swarthout novel of the same name, The Homesman depicts the unrelenting harshness of the Great Plains in the 1850s, especially those facing the women of the era as three wives develop Prairie madness and need to be escorted back East to a sanitarium. The job inevitably lands at the feet of Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank), a strong, resourceful woman that appears to be one of the few thriving in the Nebraska territory.

The Homesman introduces the viewer to the sprawling blankness of the plains through a series of landscape frames, one after another of dirt fields and blue skies differing almost imperceptibly in its content before segueing into disjointed episodes of character introduction.

Jones, along with editor Roberto Silvi, juxtaposes the picturesque idyll of Cuddy’s fruitful existence by interspersing the nightmarish lives of the three women struggling through barren winters, diphtheria and abusive husbands throughout while the Marco Beltrami score shifts perfectly between the two worlds – sweeping, grandiose strings for Cuddy morph into a discordant cacophony soundtracking the swell of psychosis. The disturbing imagery of the insanity-laden women continues to be sprinkled throughout the film during the trip back east. Although the closer the group gets to civilization and verdant landscapes, the less the flashback sequences are incorporated.

Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto presents these happenings through delicate mix of wide-angle landscape shots and claustrophobic close-ups, all meticulously composed especially the staging of the field-set sequences wherein the characters appear to be living in a void further stressing the character’s suffocating isolation.

All of these aspects, especially the fact that everyone brings their A game, elevate The Homesman from the standard, straight-forward story it clearly is to a perfectly-constructed period piece executed almost flawlessly. Unfortunately towards the end, the film begins to meander into melodrama and sentimentality flatly punctuating a string of tonal shifts, a subsequent result of a gut-punching plot turn, that seems unnecessarily rushed. The disappointing stumble down the stretch is easy to forgive though.

Film Racket [Paul Brenner]

In one of the most shocking moments from John Ford’s epic western The Searchers, John Wayne, who is looking for his niece that has been abducted by the Comanches, comes to a cavalry outpost, where two pioneer women have been reclaimed from the Indians. Both woman have descended into madness by their abductions; one woman clutches a rag doll. Not having found his niece, Wayne leaves the post but not before he turns back to the mad women as the camera tracks in to Wayne, who glares at these white women with a look of disgust, loathing, and racial hatred. For John Ford, these women were monsters, rejects of the American civilization that was bringing order and ritual to the wild, chaotic west, mostly through the civilizing presence of a pioneer stock of hardscrabble women.

In Tommy Lee Jones’s laid back The Homesman, this Fordian ethos is turned on its head, featuring pioneer women who crack under the strain of an unrelentingly bleak and uncaring Nebraskan landscape. Their stark state is a lonely one, the women in soul-killing marriages to heartless, cruel, and stupid men. Unfeeling men that cannot grasp the situation. A character remarks, “There’s been some trouble amongst the women, hereabouts.” That’s an understatement. Here, women’s psyches shatter under the strain. Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer) is in a catatonic state, clutching a rag doll similar to the rag doll of the crazy woman in The Searchers, after three of her children have died of disease. Theoline Belknap (Miranda Otto) discards her newborn child in an outhouse after the family farm fails, and Gro Svendsen (Sonja Richter) is a raving lunatic who is so off the deep end that she appears to need an exorcist. Their husbands are all self-centered, uncaring pricks who refuse to take care of their wives. This leads the well-meaning but ineffectual town preacher (John Lithgow) to propose carting off the lunatic women back “east” to Utah, where the wife of a town minister (Meryl Streep, overflowing with sincerity and kindness) will care for them.

Offering to transport this collection of mad women is local town spinster Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank, in her finest performance since Million Dollar Baby), a straight-laced, strong, and indomitable frontier woman of the John Ford mold. Coming upon a well-worn reprobate, George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones), a claim jumper strung up on his horse and about to be hanged, she rescues him on the promise that he will accompany her on her dangerous journey eastward.

What could have been an umpteenth remake of The African Queen is quickly drained dry into a parched and cold duet. There is no love lost between Mary Bee and Briggs, except a grudging acceptance of a forced relationship. Briggs wants money promised him for the journey and Mary Bee wants to accomplish a task. When Mary Bee at one point throws herself at him, Briggs’s response is a callous, “You asked me. I didn’t ask you.”

Jones directs the film as a refutation of the classic western. The landscapes are not Remington vistas but broken, cold, and empty expanses. When Briggs comes upon a hotel stuck in the midst of an arid panorama, it looks surrealistic. The journey itself is not in the traditional western trajectory of east to west but its reverse, an escape from an unforgiving land and a rejection of the pioneer spirit, a retreat back to civilization. Jones’s template is less Ford and Hawks and more in the druggy spirit of the late sixities/early seventies revisionist westerns – The Wild Bunch, Zachariah, Little Big Man. But those films had an energy and joy in their questioning of conventions. The Homesman however is reflected in Jones’s weary and insouciant expression. The Homesman  is worn out and helpless. It’s True Grit without the laughs.

The Homesman unravels in a stoned grandeur. It’s a howl of violent rage against the treatment of women in our western past, a past that has been cauterized into a harsh scab.

In Review Online [Carson Lund]

With The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones’s torch-carrying efforts on behalf of the tried-and-tested beauty of the American West continue to be moving. Taking into account his feature appearance as a practical spokesperson for old western values in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007), his reverent direction in the Sam Peckinpah throwback The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), and his general tendency to appear in Hollywood productions that will bestow upon him the privilege of wearing a cowboy hat (or at the very least some period clothing, as in Lincoln, Emperor and A Prairie Home Companion), Jones seems our preeminent fetishist of the 19th-century frontier and its moral codes at a time when westerns are mostly out of vogue. That Three Burials, up until now his last theatrical effort behind the camera, was released nine years ago singlehandedly lends credence to the unfashionable nature of the man’s sensibility.

To observe the credit sequence of Jones’s latest directorial effort, however, is to feel the full weight of his convictions. Countless westerns have begun with unpopulated landscape shots set to fawning orchestral music, but there’s something especially momentous being implied in the lengths of Jones’s images (lensed attractively by Rodrigo Prieto), their sturdiness, and their stitching via dissolves: This is not just a location in which to set a film, but The Mythic West in all its rough beauty and persistent indifference to human intervention. Jones’s relationship to this landscape is not a romantic one; if anything, given the palpable physical toll it takes on his characters, he recognizes the land as an unrealistic place for human lives to flourish. And yet, in The Homesman, even more than the wearying Three Burials, Jones sees the west as a place where psychological integrity is best tested and illuminated.

Like Three Burials, The Homesman fixates on the transportation of human cargo across uncivilized territory by two mismatched characters. In the previous film, the shipment was a corpse; here, they’re basically live corpses: three senile women from a nowhere settlement in Nebraska whose paths to insanity provide some of the film’s key mysteries. Faced with the timidity of the women’s husbands, dignified single lady Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) agrees to escort the loonies by carriage to an asylum across the Missouri River in Iowa, a leap of faith to which the members of the town balk in disbelief. Nonetheless, no one’s brave enough to talk her out of it, so the trip begins according to plan, albeit with one hitch: On her way out, Cuddy comes across a bedraggled supplanter left to hang and agrees to save him in return for aid on the expedition. His name is George Briggs (Jones himself), and though Cuddy’s dismayed by his vulgarity when she shares with him the details of the job, one gets the sense that she’s sizing him up for more than just his facility as a coworker. One telling shot features Swank observing her newly acquired colleague washing the soot from his face through the window of her spartan cabin, a conflicted gaze that suggests a lonely woman auditioning her future mate.

Inaugurated by the ominous contrapuntal overlay of two daughters’ sweet parting melody for their sick mother and the deathly moan of another of the wives, the excursion gradually grows into the portent implied from its inception. In its judicious use of long dissolves and its dwarfing of figures across the landscape, The Homesman starts to suggest the 2:35:1, snow-swept version of Meek’s Cutoff’s hallucinogenic cross-country sweep, treating the landscape as a directionless abyss littered with peculiar encounters. Cuddy and Briggs must contend with a horny drifter (played robustly by Tim Blake Nelson) and, naturally, a gang of Indians. Between these confrontations, Jones details the daily toil of the trip: creakily pressing on with exhausted horses; starting fires to ward off the dying light; and slaving over near-comatose passengers, one of whom keeps damning her lead chaperone to hell. In a deadpan master shot that summarizes the tone of the journey, three mad women crouch over the earth defiling what Jones so admiringly photographed in the prologue. (Really, that’s the essence of this spurtive director’s style: a classically durable composition thrown off balance by some unnerving grotesquery.)

At one point, Cuddy, a devout Christian, kneels to pray to the sky as dusty wind whips through her stringy hair. Here, Jones mimics the Lord’s-perspective shot of Erland Josephson praying in Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986)—but there’s no divine intervention in this case, only the company of one another. On this score, Briggs is dead weight, a cantankerous cynic with only a $300 reward on his mind. When Cuddy strays from the group to tidy up the sloppily dug grave of—surprise, surprise—a neglected female, Briggs makes no attempt to find her or assist in her return. It is this enervating incident that proves the catalyst for Cuddy’s definitive act of desperation, which yields an alarming plot development and a sudden heightening of the stakes for Briggs. Nonetheless, it’s a quiet moment just before this twist that illuminates part of what Jones is after with The Homesman: Cuddy singing to herself away from the group, suddenly drained of her passion as she stares vacantly into the distance. Through this behavior, one can see the seed of the trauma inflicting the disoriented wives: a psychic numbness induced by continued exposure to male negligence.

Alas, Jones still leaves open the possibility of male heroism. The film’s final act begins with a suspension of disbelief that may turn off viewers wary of such things, but it’s a progression that ultimately expands Jones’s engagement with, and subversion of, western-genre tropes, even while seemingly complicating a strict feminist reading. Left without his riding companion, Briggs redirects his unacknowledged guilt toward unfiltered vengeance against the unknown—in this case, the exclusionary capitalistic values of the north. Bizarre as this psychological deflection may be, it results in the film’s most indelible sequence: a bed-and-breakfast inferno that concludes with Jones riding confidently into the distance with a stolen swine attached to his saddle, a much-needed feast just around the corner.

Briggs completes the mission with his delivery intact, but can he be seen as a hero? The Homesman concludes with a series of scenes that undermine the character’s last-ditch efforts at redeeming his prior carelessness. All alone in a pampered Iowa town, Briggs stumbles with his winnings to a gambling parlor, a decision that suggests a return to old habits. The film’s final shot, an Edwin Porter reverberation siphoned of its immediacy, shows Jones firing a gun in the direction of the camera while floating off on a raft of hooligans ever further into the distance. Sinking in the water beside the raft is Cuddy’s wooden grave—a symbol of her drift out of history, or the drift of women away from the narrative of the American frontier.

The Homesman has already been looked upon skeptically for what many see as its cowardly backtracking from the feminist tract implied by much of its running time. But, in addition to introducing a humanistic sense of dimensionality to Briggs’s otherwise monotonously sour character, Jones’s narrative gambit hints at the ways in which history has often been composed of half-hearted attempts at change that gradually wither back to stagnancy. Left to the beaming kindness of Meryl Streep (glibly cast as the asylum nurse/charity incarnate), the three mad women will at the very least live out their days under proficient care—but there’s a sense in which they, like Cuddy, have been neatly filed away into obsolescence. Meanwhile, men like Briggs, Tim Blake Nelson’s nomad, and, say, Thor Svendsen (David Dencik)—the sexually abusive husband of the most far-gone of the wives—still wander the west in search of cheap thrills by the end of The Homesman. They’ll eventually fade into the vast, ennobling landscape like Cuddy, but not without scorching some of it in the process.

Cinemablographer [Pat Mullen]

Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]

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The Homesman / The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo

Tommy Lee Jones's The Homesman Brings a Lost America ... Pete Vonder Haar from The Village Voice

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Review Hilary Swank - Vanity Fair Richard Lawson

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Review: THE HOMESMAN Takes Tommy Lee ... - Twitch Jim Tudor

Review: Hilary Swank brings steel to Tommy Lee ... - HitFix Guy Lodge

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Review: 'The Homesman' - Film.com Jordan Hoffman

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Daily | Cannes 2014 | Tommy Lee Jones's THE HOMESMAN David Hudson from Fandor

'The Homesman': Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

'The Homesman' Review: Tommy Lee Jones Pays ... - Variety Peter Debruge

The Homesman review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

The Homesman review – Tommy Lee Jones isn't quite what ... Mark Kermode from The Guardian

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

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'The Homesman' - LA Times - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

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New York Times [A.O. Scott]

The Homesman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jonsson, Jens

THE KING OF PING PONG (Ping-pongkingen) B 87

Sweden (107 mi) 2008 ‘Scope

A Swedish film that resembles the downbeat absurdity of Roy Andersson, but lacks his carefully designed set pieces and perverse hilarity, instead it’s a more modest picture that takes place in the winter snow season of the extreme north bordering the Finnish Lapland where an unusual feature is the dreary tone that emphasizes the monotony of winter as seen through the eyes of two young brothers, who feel as if their lives are frozen in time where nothing ever changes. While there really isn’t a single interesting character in the entire film, the director does an excellent job continuously balancing small character elements or absurd moments that collectively add to an interior world of self-absorption dwelling on grim realities. Jerry Johansson stars as a large, overweight 16-year-old Rille who holds the key to the ping pong equipment locker at school, closing up shop whenever things don’t go his way, whose younger brother Erik (Hampus Johansson – no relation) already smokes, attracts girls, routinely calls his mom a stupid cunt and hangs out with a fast crowd that likes to pick on Rille, who for the most part ignores their incessant adolescent torment. Their overweight mother, Ann-Sofie Nurmi, a true Brunhilde character with a Wagnerian build, prances around the house in her underwear and feels absolutely no shame in front of her kids. Their divorced father (Giorgi Staykov) is an outdoor fitness nut, an oil rig worker known for his ability to hold his breath underwater, but now drinks too much and brings a different bimbo on each visit. His once a year weekly visits with the boys is usually a disaster, where they bore a hole for icefishing but are too disinterested to actually sit there and fish, instead he allows them to drive his jeep on the ice. Rille of course is a pathetically slow learner who tries everyone’s patience with his ineptness.

Rille is used to his outsider status, whose only claim to faim is bullying younger kids at the ping pong table, so he isn’t liked by any faction, though his relationship with his brother runs hot and cold. When he finds a girl he can finally talk to she’s the weirdest one in school, Anja (Alicia Stewén) a geeky girl who likes to draw Siegfried-like hunks on her sketchpad, appendages and all. The picture of life at school resembles kids with too much time on their hands with nothing to do, who are bored and at times gloomy or mean, while the adults are equally flawed in some way, but most show a tolerance and an affection for the kids, but they tend to be absent in a crisis. Instead little quirks come into play, as the boy’s mother will inexplicably break into an electronic jazz riff, their household has about 20 cats running around, most all of them sleeping in mom’s bed, a quiet mother and son talk will take place at mom’s bedside where she sits topless, or Anja will draw a lewd picture of Rille as she sees him. Mostly it’s a collection of small portraits that aren’t really leading anywhere until a major tonal shift appears near the end improving the film considerably, placing everything that came before in a different light. Beautifully shot in ‘Scope by Norweigan cinematographer Askild Edvarsen, there are several stunning shots of solitary figures out in the snow with mountains off in the distance, creating an unusually distant sense of isolation. The orchestral music by Martin Willert takes on greater weight towards the end, actually providing rising and falling psychological moods. This is a film of resolute despair disguised in harmless small talk and humorous banter, where the artificial routine of ordinary life covers up the dense layers of adolescent development, where in a Scandanavian world feelings are a sign of weakness, so unused, inarticulate emotions lay dormant under the frozen surface.

KING OF PING PONG (Ping Pong Kingen) Ken Rudolph

I'm not exactly sure why I didn't like more this quite niftily directed and acted Swedish film.  It's the story of two young teenage brothers, totally different from one another:  one pudgy and unpopular whose one claim to fame is a rudimentary skill at ping pong; the other, younger one, lithe and a young babe magnet.  There are also a set of adult parents who aren't exactly paragons of parenthood.   What bothered me most about this film is that I never could quite believe the psychology of the characters...it just didn't ring true or make sense to me.  On the other hand, the technical aspects were fine:  wonderful winterscapes of snow and ice beautifully presented in wide screen compositions.   And I do have to give special mention to young Jerry Johansson who gives a definitive performance as the pudgy kid who is the butt of all the bullies who terrorize  teenage life, but who perseveres with good humor more or less intact. 

Prost Amerika

This laid-back and endearing tale from Sweden has some old-fashioned movie values such as an identifiable and likeable lead character. Continuing the theme of excellent performances from the youngsters at this year's festival, Jerry Johansson stars as 16-year-old Rille, an adolescent who loves the sport of ping pong (table tennis). Although a bashful and generally shy child, he runs the ping pong table at his school with an iron fist. He's bullied by kids his own age, and most of the ping pong players are a couple of years younger. He also has appropriated the key to the racket cupboard. But his passion for the game and his love for his younger brother Erik are apparent. He’s harmless. But clearly, he isn’t facing up to the fact he is growing up and is nearly an adult.

The boys live with their mother (Ann-Sofie Nurmi) but their alcoholic father (Georgi Staykov) visits occasionally, and it is during a heated argument between the two that Rille overhears something that forces him to look at everything around him differently. This engenders a change in pace and tone in the film, an change that isn't necessarily done smoothly.

Nevertheless, this is Jonsson's debut in feature films after a career making shorts and he successfully captures some of the bleakness of life in a cold climate without letting it overpower the film's plot. "The King of Ping Pong" recently won both the World Cinema Dramatic Jury and Cinematography awards at the Sundance Film Festival.

The Hollywood Reporter review Justin Lowe

PARK CITY -- A low-key coming of age comedy, co-writer-director Jens Jonsson's feature debut "The King of Ping Pong" recently won both the World Cinema Dramatic Jury and Cinematography awards at the Sundance Film Festival. "King" premiered in January in Sweden and could see modest business in Scandinavian while traveling comfortably on the international fest circuit.

Nerdy Rille (Jerry Johansson), stocky and 16, is little noticed by his peers, aside from the frequent bullying he suffers from several older boys roaming their snow-bound Swedish town. His one distinction is a talent for ping pong, which he tyrannically coaches for a group of younger boys including his more popular brother Erik (Hampus Johansson) at the local youth center. Their ineffectual single mother (Ann-Sofie Nurmi) is trying to launch a home hairdressing business, a problem-plagued project she attempts to drag the boys into as their spring break begins.

The arrival of their father (Georgi Staykov), an affable, emotionally erratic oil rig worker, provides Rille and Erik with a welcome distraction from the boredom of vacation stuck at home. Their dad's impulsive, misguided adventures -- driving the boys across a frozen lake in his jeep and carving donuts in the snowy surface, sneaking the kids into a stranger's home and telling them it's his new house -- highlight his distinct lack of parenting skills and penchant for the bottle.

This imprudent behavior prompts the more staid Rille to wonder if his dad is really his natural father or if there might have been another man in his mother's life. When the truth about the boys' parentage eventually emerges, it provokes a rift between the brothers that Rille proves ill-equipped to rectify.

Jonsson and co-writer Hans Gunnarsson keep the film's slightly off-kilter comedy -- reinforced by occasional visual puns -- and suitably understated, a cue that both the young newcomers and vets Staykov and Nurmi ably follow, until a third-act shift toward melodrama noticeably stifles the humor.

Cinematographer Askild Vik Edvardsen bathes the proceedings with wintry-filtered light that's well suited to the sedate camerawork, enhanced by production designer Josefin Asberg's selection of color schemes dominated by dark colors and subdued pastels.

The Local [René Rice]

Screen International review Jonathan Romney in Rotterdam from Screendaily

Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3/5]

ViewLondon (Matthew Turner) review [3/5]

Quiet Earth Project Cyclops

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [1.5/5] Don R. Lewis

Variety.com [Dennis Harvey]

Jonze, Spike

Spike Jonze The Original Spike Jonze Site

BEING JOHN MALKOVICH A- 94

USA (93 mi) 1999

Not like anything else you’ve ever seen, this is a unique acid trip on identity, the determination of what’s real, and the idea of being yourself, which takes one through the contortions of personality, from doubt to slight interest to full-throttle obsession with the idea, all of which in this movie feels as if it’s just toying with the possibilities that come to mind. Turning oneself into a carnival exhibit, complete with patrons standing in line paying for the experience, even if only momentary, of being someone else—believe me, this is a different kind of theater altogether. Behind the mask, behind the reality, is a lonely puppeteer pulling the strings on a magnificently strange and despairing puppet act which no one wants to see, but which consumes the mind of John Cusack, looking a bit out of sorts and disheveled, while his frizzy haired wife, Cameron Diaz, has invited a wild kingdom of animals to come live in their apartment, including talking parrots and a monkey with bad dreams. Continually down on his luck, Cusack tries to get real and takes a turn in the job market as a file clerk in a strange and mysterious organization that exists on the 7 and ½ Floor where the lowered ceiling forces everyone to duck their heads, as it was apparently designed for the comfort of midgets. Not really fitting in, but fixated on a sensuous co-worker, Catherine Keener (never better), who makes it clear from the outset that she isn’t the least bit interested, yet he plunges his heart and soul in her direction anyway, but only gets as far as a quick after dinner drink, and only then because he could guess her first name in three tries. But this gets him nowhere, leaving him a discombobulated slab of jelly in her presence until one day he accidentally finds a strange door behind a file cabinet. When he enters, he experiences what it’s like to be inside the head of actor John Malkovich for 15 minutes, seeing and feeling what Malkovich experiences until he’s jettisoned out onto a ditch next to the New Jersey Turnpike.

This is not the sort of information one keeps under their hat, as it must be shared and the portal must be experienced, soon enough by his wife, who discovers a strange sexual titillation when she, as Malkovich, makes love with Keener. No sooner has Cusack discovered the secret phenomena of a lifetime, he’s soon discarded by his wife and Keener who want to canoodle together every fifteen minutes with Diaz as Malkovich. Cusack couldn’t just stand idly by, feeling as though he must defend his honor, so he locks his wife up in the monkey cage and trots off into the portal himself and uses his puppeteering expertise to manipulate Malkovich to say and do what he wants, which is to canoodle with Keener himself. After awhile, Keener soon discovers it’s been Cusack inside Malkovich, and not Diaz, so poor Cameron Diaz is discarded like day old bread, as Keener becomes fascinated by the power of the puppeteer. John Malkovich himself, tired of being contorted into a glob of putty in Cusack’s hands, follows Keener one day and discovers the line of people waiting to spend fifteen minutes inside Malkovich. So with much commotion, he jumps to the front of the line and insists that since he actually is John Malkovich, that he should get some special consideration as he wants in, which easily leads to the most profoundly peculiar sequence in the film where Malkovich is dining in a restaurant and everyone there is a Felliniesque version of himself. Like a Twilight Zone episiode, Malkovich stares into the world of Malkovich and becomes just as obsessed as everyone else, completely absorbed by the idea of himself.

Time passes and Cusack has mastered his craft, as he’s figured out how to remain inside and gotten Malkovich to change his career from a master actor to the world’s greatest puppeteer, which is met with acclaim the world over, with praise from the likes of fellow actors Sean Penn and Brad Pitt. Meanwhile he pals around with Charlie Sheen, who goes gaga when he hears Malkovich’s initial description of the lesbian force surging inside of him. Keener and Malkovich are the new couple making the cover of all the tabloid magazines, popular the world over, and puppet shows are all the rage. Life couldn’t be sweeter. But of course, it’s all an illusion, as someone else is pulling the strings behind the mask, while John Malkovich himself has all but disappeared. The sheer exhilaration of ideas here is stupefyingly ridiculous, as they just keep pouring out in astonishing fashion as the movie progresses, continuing right up through the end credits when Bjork sings her own hushed, barely audible personal anthem, Björk - Amphibian - YouTube (4:36). Were it not for the somewhat infantile and adolescent expressions of love exhibited here, where a married couple sell each other out in a minute with little or no regard, or where it’s just as easy to step over someone to get what you want, where the concept of self-interest is literally raised onto the level of a Hollywood throne, with adoring and worshipping fans happy that you made that choice. The finale is as cinematically lovely as it is perplexing, as older time traveling vessels (Malkovich) are discarded for newer and younger versions, making the idea of self resemble the evolving mutations of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which continually undergoes interior transformations that may not even be initially recognizable, but soon becomes the dominant force behind the person.

Being John Malkovich David Denby from the New Yorker

An out-of-work puppeteer (John Cusack), his pet-loving girlfriend (Cameron Diaz), and a cynical office worker (Catherine Keener) take turns entering the head of the actor John Malkovich, where they remain for fifteen minutes at a time, experiencing everything he does, before being deposited with a whoosh beside the New Jersey Turnpike. This fantastic weightless comedy (sci-fi without the future or rockets or bad consequences), which was written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze, plays with notions of celebrity worship and gender reversal, but the best thing about it is the genially deadpan style of its most absurd inventions. No great fuss is made about the launching pad for the Malkovich invasions, which is an office with ceilings so low that everyone must stoop. There are wonderful jokes—such as a monkey with bad memories, and Malkovich, possessed, doing spastic riffs equal to Steve Martin's in "All of Me." To see this actor who is known for his insolent equipoise literally freaking out is one of the more satisfying sights of the year.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

I think you have to give them an "A" for creativity. Original ideas are so plentiful that you keep running into new ones while following others, and at times the film generates an incredible pounding lysergic momentum in the middle of your head. One of the most wonderful of the ubiquitous multi-layered ironies is that John Malkovich, a star playing himself in a work of fiction!, is actually someone else, or in fact many other people who have waited in line in a room with 3 foot high ceilings. Plenty of skewed perceptions and double helix twists to amuse stoned people, impress contributors to Ivy League cinematic reviews and, obviously and best of all, absolutely enthrall and spritz stoned contributors to Ivy League cinematic reviews. Malkovich delivers the best moments, the Malkovich saturated restaurant scene when he's inside his own head stands out, but the rest of the cast (longhaired John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener's knowing toothy smile) does well to keep up with him. Spike Jonze delivers thrills for the subconscious including a souped up meditation on voyeurism, a sex change aspirant in a cage with a monkey, a brilliant faux documentary on an actor turned puppeteer, an advertisement for carrot juice and an explanation for how those people walking along the Jersey Turnpike got there.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] also seen here: Being John Malkovich · Film Review Being John ... - The AV Club

Putting aside the fact that Charlie Kaufman's insistently surreal script for Being John Malkovich was staked on the actor's willingness to appear in a supporting role, it's still a miracle that a film conceived with such brazen disregard for the marketplace ever got made. In description, Kaufman's lunatic flourishes seem to have emerged from a haze of pot smoke: an ulcerous chimp with feelings of inadequacy, a building designed to accommodate miniature ladies, a production of The Belle Of Amherst featuring a 60-foot Emily Dickinson puppet. But there's sturdy intelligence and depth behind the material—aided immeasurably by Spike Jonze's ultra-realistic direction—that keeps it grounded in basic human desires. In a cast of deglamorized Hollywood stars, a pallid, greasy-haired John Cusack stars as an unemployed puppeteer who takes a filing job on the 7 1/2th floor (where "overhead is low") of a downtown office building. One day, he stumbles upon a hidden portal into John Malkovich's head that allows participants to experience his world for 15 minutes before being deposited in a ditch by the New Jersey Turnpike. Cusack's wife, a frumpy Cameron Diaz, becomes obsessed with his startling discovery, while Catherine Keener plays an icy co-worker ready to exploit its business potential. An original vision with strong echoes of Alice In Wonderland, Brazil, and Luis Buñuel, Being John Malkovich is at once a metaphysical screwball farce, a hilarious riff on celebrity mystique, and a touching expression of people's wish to escape their own skin. Jonze's inventive music videos (which include the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," Björk's "It's Oh So Quiet," and Fatboy Slim's "Praise You") are built on strong concepts; for his feature debut, he's found one ingenious enough to sustain at full length. Being John Malkovich blazes along with such heightened insanity that it seems close to collapsing at any moment, undone by forced wackiness or dramatic dead ends. But Kaufman's elastic bag of tricks never empties.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer)

Being John Malkovich, a pre-millennial science fiction comedy about participatory voyeurism and the nature of celebrity, is probably the damnedest thing we'll see all year.

On one level, it's a sort of prank. Director Spike Jonze was the guy who directed a Weezer music video ("Buddy Holly") by dropping the band into a Happy Days rerun, who hired dancers to dress like chumps and impede the human traffic flow in front of the Mann Westwood Village theater for Fatboy Slim's "Praise You." For his feature film debut, he's made a movie about a hidden doorway that leads you into the head of John Malkovich, lets you stay there for exactly 15 minutes (the Warholian duration of fame) and then spits you out, roughly, on the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike.

But on another level, it's a sober meditation on loneliness and disenfranchisement (consider David Fincher's Fight Club a distant sibling), and the feeling of wanting to slip into someone else's skin, either for a few minutes or for a lifetime.

An atypically unkempt John Cusack stars as a talented puppeteer who needs a job. He's resigned to the fact that his skill set isn't exactly in high demand, but those nimble fingers are at least good for filing paperwork, securing him work with an obscure company in low-ceilinged quarters crammed between the 7th and 8th floors of a Manhattan office building -- the casual lunacy of these scenes recalls a Monty Python sketch. His wife is a frizzy-haired Cameron Diaz, an animal-lover who thinks she may want children, too.

The film's main catalyst isn't so much the Malkovich portal as it is the caustically sexy co-worker (a terrific Catherine Keener) who catches Cusack's wandering eye. Her interest in him is akin to that of a cat playing distractedly with a mouse it really has no plans to devour. But, once alerted to the existence of a backroom passage into Malkovich's brain at the office, it's she who figures on making a bundle by charging admission after hours.

And it goes from there. Despite telegraphing the final punchline several reels in advance, Being John Malkovich unfolds as an intellectual funhouse ride -- there's a new surprise waiting around every corner. That the film's chosen fetish object is a semi-famous personality like Malkovich shows how precariously its universe balances between a pleasantly skewed reality and utter dementia. In a meta-cinematic sense, the real fascination on offer is Malkovich himself doing a wry impersonation of John Malkovich, and then impersonating John Malkovich being inhabited by other people. He turns in a fine comic performance -- isn't it a little ironic that, in some ways, it's his best to date?

If this is really a movie about acting, the key metaphor is puppetry. The two quasi-antagonistic leads are driven by a variety of megalomania, a desire to control. This interest manifests itself both sexually, as the characters learn that being John Malkovich (and being with John Malkovich) can be a huge turn-on, and professionally, as it becomes apparent that Malkovich's actions are significant not because of the inherent worth of what he's doing, but because it's Malkovich who's doing it. Scheming ensues.

The rate of mad invention flags a little in the second half, as rote exposition takes over and the comedy is yoked to the insane demands of managing to move a story this out-of-control toward something resembling a resolution. But in the annals of great left-field ideas that moved to the screen without being decimated by the studio development process, marketing departments, or test audiences, this one should loom large. The excitement of watching Being John Malkovich comes from the realization that the weirdness coheres, that the movie has something real to say about the conditions we place on our own happiness and the genuinely weird demands we make of others.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Being John Malkovich (1999) Jonathan Romney, March 2000

Manhattan, the present. Under pressure from his wife Lotte, street-puppeteer Craig Schwartz takes a job as a clerk with LesterCorp., run by Doctor Lester, a company located on the low-ceilinged seventh-and-a-half floor of an office tower. He falls in love with his co-worker Maxine. Craig discovers a hidden door leading to a passage which sucks him into the head of actor John Malkovich, whose life he experiences for 15 minutes before being ejected on to the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Craig introduces Lotte to being John Malkovich, and while she is inside him, she/Malkovich makes love to Maxine; the two women fall in love, but can only enjoy each other physically when Lotte is in Malkovich.

Craig and Maxine start a business charging people to be Malkovich. Eventually Malkovich rumbles their scam and enters his portal himself, discovering a world where everyone is him. Craig and Lotte struggle for possession of Maxine. Eventually, Craig uses his puppeteering skills to enter Malkovich permanently and turns Malkovich into a world-famous puppeteer; Maxine becomes his lover. Lester explains to Lotte that Malkovich is the latest in a line of conduits used by a secret society to enjoy eternal life in new bodies. Craig is forced out of Malkovich. Years later, Malkovich has joined the channellers; Lotte and Maxine are a happy couple with a daughter; Craig is inside their daughter, still in love with Maxine, now his mother.

Review

There's a current running joke about Being John Malkovich that speculates on what the film might have been if its star and ostensible subject hadn't agreed to play along: what, in other words, if Spike Jonze had to settle for Being Jeremy Irons? Charles Dance? Julian Sands? You can only imagine that Malkovich agreed out of a sort of inverse vanity: "Be mean to Malkovich," he apparently urged the film-makers. It's not unusual for actors to dismantle their own image on screen, but in most cases, they have the safety net of fiction. What's remarkable here is that Malkovich agreed to supply his name, face and presence, and then to have all three subverted in a manner that is anything but gently well-meaning. The film makes rich capital out of Malkovich's peculiar public image, yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. The most eccentric US debut feature in recent memory - for both Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman - is at once a Dada screwball comedy; an inquiry into the nature of personality; a metaphysical conspiracy story; and a comment on the way we invest our own desires into public figures, hollowing them out into blank receptacles.

The film's jibing at Malkovich is certainly its most approachable aspect. In recent years, his career choices have been far stranger than anything the film imagines, from high-art foreign-language roles for Raúl Ruiz and Manoel de Oliveira, to the barmy and often lazy overplaying in commercial fare such as Rounders. But here Malkovich may have found his greatest role, playing himself, or a vain, lasciviously suave caricature of himself, lounging in his penthouse with a copy of Chekhov, or attempting to lure a lover with a murmured, "Shall we to the boudoir?" Malkovich's air of narcissism is such that it comes as no surprise when, as the film puts it, he goes "up his own portal" - into a screen actor's poetic-justice nightmare world in which everyone has the face of Malkovich.

The film is partly about the empty nature of modern fame: people know your face and name, but not what you've done. No one can think of a Malkovich film, except the one in which he played a jewel thief (but there's no such film, he protests). He becomes literally a locus for other people's dreams. People inhabit him for a while: one man learns what it is like to be Malkovich ordering towels by phone. Lotte and Maxine use him as a sort of prosthetic love attachment, an animated trysting place; Craig sees him as "a really expensive suit that I enjoy wearing." In this sense, the film is an extended joke about the contemporary dreams of vicariousness and virtuality: the actor's body becomes a living version of the eXistenZ computer game devised by David Cronenberg. (Alternatively, you could see the film as a rewrite of the sci-fi topos of dimension travel: a celebrity-culture Stargate.) But the process works both ways: Craig gets to inhabit the actor and achieve his dreams, by making Malkovich the star puppeteer he could never be. They're made for each other, the actor's pretensions easily matched by Craig's delusions of profundity. But it's Malkovich who reaps the rewards of fame and a new existence, while Craig remains anonymous and in the cold.

But the film constantly shifts too much for us to pin it down: it can't easily be tagged as screwball or surreal, as a paranoid fantasy or a media satire. It's forever slipping into sideshows and diversions, from a lunatic corporate video to a hallucinatory sequence inside a chimp's memory. Nor is it in any way a typical video-maker's movie (Jonze won his spurs directing for the Beastie Boys and Björk et al), but a visually low-key, formally sober film that above all values shifts of tone and a very concrete sense of space, playing claustrophobia against spatial fluidity (the film begins in the enclosure of a puppet theatre and ends underwater, in a swimming pool). There's extraordinary use of sound, too, as if the world turns inside out when we're in Malkovich's head: we actually hear a hand brushing roughly across his scalp.

Finally, the film is a triumph of casting in which no one is what we expect them to be. John Cusack's face is barely visible behind the shaggy hair, Cameron Diaz barely recognisable under baggy tracksuits, fluffy wig and a scowl of discontent. The biggest revelation is Catherine Keener, usually cast as an ingenue doofus. Here she's a sleek, impeccably cruel vamp who sets the film's initial sexual certainties spinning wildly out of control, seducing both Malkovich himself and Lotte, who hides out inside the actor's body. Being John Malkovich is an incredibly rich and entertaining (not to say, laudably malevolent) film that far transcends its already way-out title premise: not just a Larry Sanders self-reflexive swipe at stardom, but, as Craig puts it, "a metaphysical can of worms."

Head Wide Open: Being John Malkovich - Film Comment Chris Chang, September/October 1999

Being John Malkovich, the debut feature from Spike Jonze, is as paradoxically cerebral and patently ridiculous as its title implies. Jonze, a director who cut his teeth on the world of music video and TV commercials (is there a distinction?), is an artist who revels in the cult of offbeat aura. He also brings to each of his projects an unmistakable love for the visually illogical. What one becomes acutely aware of when watching his commercial showreel is a truly subversive mind working away, anonymously, within the most massive of mass media: television.

Connoisseurs of commercial detritus have probably seen—dozens of times—the Jonze Nike ad in which Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi commandeer an urban intersection for an impromptu tennis match, only to have the proceedings end when a city bus plows through their net. And then there’s the Levi’s ad Jonze chose to shoot in the hustle and bustle of an emergency room. A badly mangled accident victim is wheeled in. The beeping of the medical monitoring equipment strikes a chord in his memory, he pulls off his breathing mask, and then within moments he and the hospital staff are performing group karaoke to the Eighties dance hit “Tainted Love.” The patient goes into cardiac arrest, electroshock paddles are applied to his chest, and the doctors peer anxiously into his face for a reaction. The beeping resumes with, of course, more joyful singing and dancing. The end. (The audience may laugh; but are they aware the director has just equated a corporation with a state of mind?)

The freedom to be illogical, to put the wrong things in places where they somehow become more than right, is one of the beauties of the music video/TV commercial idiom. With Being John Malkovich, Jonze has found the perfect material, provided by first-time screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, to extend the delirium to feature length. And what, pray tell, is he placing where? Why, other minds into the head of John Malkovich. (The title, as it were, is more than literal.)

The story begins with a down-and-out puppeteer named Craig Schwartz (John Cusack). Schwartz lives with his animal-collecting wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) and desperately needs to find a way to supplement his zero-income passion for puppetry. In a telling exposition of what it is that makes Schwartz tick, we see him perform with his puppets on a sidewalk. A young girl stops to watch as the puppeteer recreates the 12th century tale of Abelard and Heloise. It’s a canny choice for a film that deals, on one level, with the endless circular angst of sexual frustration. (Abelard, as we all recall, was castrated.) The puppets, separated monastically by the walls of their cells, writhe in freeform communication—an air-guitar dry hump of ecstasy. As soon as the girl’s father realizes what it is his daughter is watching, Schwartz gets a fist in his face. True art transgresses the pedestrian; and the pedestrian strikes back.

When the bruised Schwartz applies for a filing job, the audience is given the first hardcore indication that this will be a film governed by its own internal laws. Staring at an elevator panel, Schwartz is dismayed to discover there is no button for the 7 1/2th floor. A veteran elevator rider comes to his aid by pausing the elevator between floors and then prying the door open for Schwartz with a crowbar. The 7 1/2th floor is, indeed, a half floor. The ceilings are unnaturally low; people move cautiously about, bent over in compensation. The receptionist (Mary Kay Place) claims to not understand a word Schwartz is saying, the boss (Orson Bean) excuses his own nonexistent speech impediment, and everything begins to settle sideways.

When Schwartz accidentally discovers a hidden passageway behind a large filing cabinet, things go completely Borgesian. As curiosity draws him into the tunnel, an invisible force takes hold and he is vortexed into the head of a strange man inhabiting unfamiliar surroundings. Checking his teeth in a mirror, Schwartz is dumbfounded to discover he is inside the head of John Malkovich. (Yes. The real John Malkovich.) After about fifteen minutes of unintentional personality osmosis, he falls from the sky to land by the side of the road somewhere off the New Jersey Turnpike. After a little practice it all seems perfectly normal.

Being John Malkovich utilizes a surreal persona transferral technique to address, among other things, problems of displaced desire. Schwartz and his wife Lotte have both become smitten with a mysterious woman who also works on the 7 1/2th floor. Maxine (Catherine Keener) comes up with the idea to utilize the Malkovich portal as a cash cow. Soon, an after-hours enterprise is providing seedy clients with access to the head of the movie star. Meanwhile, to up the ante on absurdity, Schwartz and Lotte vie for the sexual charms of Maxine by taking turns inhabiting Malkovich while he is engaged in amorous activity with her. It sounds convoluted, but it is only the tip of a labyrinthine iceberg. Just wait and see what happens when Malkovich, who is greatly disturbed when he discovers he is being metaphysically exploited, demands entrance into the tunnel—and his own head.

The beauty of the film is the way it elevates John Malkovich from an actor to an axiom. It immediately begs the question: Out of all the possible subjects that could have been placed in the title role, why Malkovich? The choice is as perfect as it is ineffable. Malkovich has made a career out of an unnerving balance between quasi-reprehensibleness and enigmatic sexual attraction. To open up and accept him in a role as charismatic sex object is not unlike the feeling of sexual surrender itself. Even with all his soft, undefinable formlessness, he can always manage to permeate the air with coarse, unmitigated allure. The critic David Thomson tried to deal with the dilemma in his Biographical Dictionary of Film: “Yet is there more than a handful (at the level of audience) that wants to see him—let alone in leading romantic roles? There is no hiding his strangeness—gangling frame, thick legs, receding hair, buttony eyes, blank look, hallucinated voice … to all of which Malkovich brings a deliberate, nearly insolent, affectlessness. He does not seem quite normal or wholesome—he can easily take on the aura of disturbance or unqualified nastiness. So it is all the more remarkable that, by the age of 40, he does stay within the reach of being a lead actor.”

Remarkable indeed. But there you have it. And obviously, in this case, what remains most interesting is not so much the concept of an audience that wants to see him, but the existence of a writer and director collaborating to place him in a role where all of the aforementioned antithetical forces come into such strong play. The bottom line, in the film’s version of reality, is that Malkovich is neither more nor less than any of the anonymous humans that pass through life without the benefit of limelit incandesence. We are just too blinded by the stars to realize it. In one sequence, Schwartz peers through the eyes of Malkovich as he fishes around in his refrigerator for leftover Chinese food while carrying on a discussion about various bathroom towel characteristics with a telephone salesperson. People will pay money for this? There is something enlightening going on here? Of course. But what? Theodor Adorno, one of the wettest blankets in the entire history of cultural analysis, warned many years ago of the dangers inherent in film realism. Imagination and reflection, in Adorno’s unhappy world, are trampled underfoot by popular films that appear to be extensions of our own miserable reality. Being John Malkovich toys with Adorno’s critique and then moves on to bigger fish. So what if John Malkovich is just like the rest of us? Spike Jonze is not content with a mere exposé of the vapidity of the entertainment industry or the callowness of the cult of personality. (That would be sawing his own legs off.) That these things come to mind while watching the film is well and good, but the film willfully leaves the miasma of critical theory behind, which for it is more of a playground than a prison, and ends the story with an entirely different set of propositions. I won’t ruin the fun here. Suffice to say the film posits the concept of Being John Malkovich as an entry point to the eternal. Now if Adorno were alive today, I think that’s something he may have been able to sink his overly suspicious teeth into. And Malkovich? He must love it to death.

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ADAPTATION B 83

USA (114 mi) 2002

Adaptation David Denby from the New Yorker

The hero of the new experimental comedy by the writer Charlie Kaufman and the director Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich") is Kaufman himself, played by Nicolas Cage. He's in a dreadful quandary, having signed on to adapt Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief," which grew out of a 1995 article in this magazine. "Great sprawling New Yorker stuff," Charlie calls the book, by which he means it's a screenwriter's nightmare—ruminative, descriptive, but lacking the clear kind of "arc" that can be shovelled into a movie. Cage's Charlie, a malcontent who wears a flannel shirt in Los Angeles, works himself into a fury of self-loathing, and, for about an hour, the movie is a funny, deft metafiction that jumps back and forth among Charlie's feverish self-doubts, his erotic fantasies, and the story he is attempting to write. We see that story: Orlean (Meryl Streep) tags along with John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a Florida man who was arrested while stealing a rare form of orchid from a state wilderness preserve. Unsocialized but erudite, a moralist, a theorist, a swamp-bred crank, Laroche fascinates the melancholy Orlean, who feels her life lacks a consuming passion. The performances are all expert, especially Cooper's, but the movie takes a disastrous leap into melodrama at the end, which can be interpreted as either a sellout to Hollywood convention or a savage self-parody of selling out. Either way, it's a mistake.

filmcritic.com Jeremiah Kipp

Wrap your noodle around this one. Real-life screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich; Human Nature) writes a screenplay about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) writing a screenplay adaptation of a real-life book, The Orchid Thief, written by real-life author Susan Orlean (played in Adaptation by Meryl Streep).

Thus spake Adaptation. Starting out with fake (or real?) behind-the-scenes footage of Malkovich, taking detours to the dawn of life on earth and story mogul Robert McKee’s screenwriting class, Darwin’s lab, Orlean’s book (with Chris Cooper playing the swamp rat/scientist/orchid thief himself), voice-overs, and flashbacks, Adaptation finds inventive convolutions that might make it seem more esoteric than it really is.

Reading over these sentences in my review (without making a meta-review about a meta-movie—enough already!), the mind boggles and scrapes along a circuitous route, Memento-style. But boiled down to its most simple essence, Adaptation is about the perils and needs for an artist to create—as well as the requirement for mutability as a Hollywood player, a lover, a writer, a human being. Kaufman could have called this one Human Nature, too -- or A Phantasmagoria of Human Nature.

A Rubik’s Cube for story lovers, Adaptation is blessed with an extraordinary cast. You’ve got to thank heaven for small favors like this line-up, playing their oddball rolls refreshingly free of over-the-top quirkiness. Director Spike Jonze has a talent for tapping into the most interesting, humanistic qualities of people like John Malkovich and Christopher Walken (in the amazing "Weapon of Choice" music video). If Nicolas Cage doesn’t quite redeem his lousy career over the past ten years, at least he gives a full performance as Charlie Kaufman -- fat, bald, whiny, intelligent, and insecure… an unlikely but wholly unique protagonist.

Cage also plays Charlie’s twin brother Donald (the only fictional character here, despite his screenwriter credit), a jocular and uncomplicated (i.e., dopey) sibling who’s working on his own script. It’s a kind of conventional studio thriller called The 3 about an interconnected cop and killer. He sells it for six figures, but his sell-out venture actually seems closer to the heart of Adaptation than Charlie Kaufman’s script-within-the-script for The Orchid Thief, a “movie about flowers and what they mean”). Both Cages play off each other well, which implies that instead of chewing up all the scenery he just chews on his own tics (and negates them, maybe). It actually helps.

Meryl Steep, so excellent in comedies, brings an intelligent everywoman’s charm to Susan Orlean. The who’s who of other character actors are working at the top of their game: Cooper, Tilda Swinton, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ron Livingston (Office Space), and especially Brian Cox as the blustering, tough-lovin’, fighting-mad story mentor Bob McKee: “God help you if you use voice-over in a script, my friend!”

But reverence for the cast only steers us away from what Adaptation is really about: It’s levels of screen and story reality. Jonze appropriately keeps his direction plain and unfettered. He doesn’t show off with camera tricks like Michel Gondry did in Human Nature, and that’s a smart move. Adaptation’s plotting is so bizarre, Jonze doesn’t need to accentuate that. This one lives or dies based on the story -- especially considering how much the characters argue over storytelling as a device for living or avoiding a life.

It’s a fascinating artist’s journey into his own navel, well worth thinking about. But Adaptation isn’t a movie you want to wrap your arms around (just your mind; refer back to the opening paragraph). Concentration stays on the mind and the backbone/structure. It doesn’t have time for the heart or soul. The closest Adaptation gets is a carefully staged, self-conscious “conventional” climactic shoot-out and sentimental epiphany. The dramatic weeping scenes make the fake Charlie Kaufman’s cold heart crack, but it also counts on a level of self-awareness that we’re watching a fake “movie.” Riddles can work this way, too. While it’s fun to puzzle over them for days, it’s difficult to say whether they are affecting. That’s the question of Adaptation, too. The answer? Watch it again.

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Back in 1963, Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard changed cinema forever with their self-reflexive masterpieces 8 1/2 and Contempt, respectively. Both films turned cinema back in upon itself and explored the nature of making films, economically, creatively and spiritually.

Since then, many younger filmmakers have not been able to resist the urge to follow in those grand footsteps. Hence we have silly little nuggets ranging from The Big Picture to Bowfinger to State and Main to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to this year's Simone. Most of these movies serve only to satirize Hollywood thinking and to make fun of egotistical producers and directors.

But the new film Adaptation, opening today in Bay Area theaters, stands apart. It has the nerve, the sensitivity and the unmitigated genius to tap into genuine artistic befuddlement, and root it within a scathing indictment of Hollywood thought. This film inexplicably has its cake and eats it too.

Adaptation is the brainchild of the two mad masterminds who brought us Being John Malkovich in 1999, director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman. After the success of Malkovich, Kaufman accepted the job of adapting Susan Orlean's nonfiction book The Orchid Thief into a film.

But after a few tries, he realized he had no idea how to do it, and so instead he wrote this screenplay about a writer unable to adapt a novel into a film. And Jonze may have been the only director alive to realize that his wacky idea could work.

Kaufman could have stopped there and delivered a fairly entertaining film that, like a cup of popcorn, would have satisfied and immediately disappeared. But he continued to explore this path and came up with something great.

Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) is not only having trouble adapting The Orchid Thief, he has a freeloading twin brother, Donald (Cage, pulling off the difficult job of playing opposite himself), who wants to be a screenwriter as well. Only Donald wants to write the epitome of the brain-dead Hollywood product, a serial killer story with a stupid twist ending. And of course, he has immediate success with it. He even lands a girlfriend (Maggie Gyllenhaal), while Charlie can barely summon the courage to talk to girls.

Meanwhile, Adaptation frequently cuts to the result of Charlie's labor, the Orchid Thief film, with Meryl Streep embodying Susan Orlean and Chris Cooper (who won the San Francisco Film Critics Circle award for Best Supporting Actor) playing the rednecky title character, John Laroche. Laroche describes his passion for orchids to us and explains his theory of "adaptation," in which every living thing automatically finds its purpose in life.

As Charlie's situation grows darker and darker, he breaks down and enlists his brother's help to finish the script. Donald has attended one of those screenwriting seminars taught by guru Robert McKee (Brian Cox), and both McKee and Donald give Charlie some essential advice. Soon, Charlie and Donald have flown to Florida to spy on Orlean and Laroche, uncovering not only a secret love affair, but also a narcotics ring.

This leads to precisely the kind of chase scene and shootout that Charlie originally wants to avoid in his screenplay. While hiding in the woods, Donald even teaches Charlie a valuable life lesson about not caring what other people think.

In one more level of absurd irony, the Adaptation screenplay is co-written by the non-existent Donald, and additionally the film is "dedicated" to Donald.

Adaptation is almost like the snake swallowing its own tail, except that the snake has magically survived long enough to enjoy dessert. It's a triple-twisty story that continually surprises, and yet remains earnestly true to its characters. These are real people stuck in a bizarre space-warp and are still beautifully affected by their day-to-day troubles.

Witness one touching scene in which Orlean phones Laroche one evening for some minor follow-up questions. The conversation seems pretty mundane -- Laroche greets his caller with a grinning "Susie Q!" -- but it's packed with gorgeous little truths and sadnesses. None of the three actors has given such strong performances in years; indeed, Adaptation may be their finest hour.

It's true that Being John Malkovich may have announced the arrival of two major film talents with Jonze and Kaufman, but Adaptation leaves that debut in the dust and reaches for true greatness. It's a film that does Fellini and Godard proud, and without question it's one of the year's very best.

Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]

Under its flickering postmodern stylizations, its twitchy narcissism, its obsession about its author's own preciousness, "Adaptation" decodes into one thing: It's about someone trying desperately to do something he can't.

How universal is that? It's what I'm doing right now in a room full of people doing the same thing, and all you boys and girls out there looking at the newspaper from the outside in, you can't do anything either and you do it anyway. As he does, as I do, as you do, here's what happens: You start, you grunt, you stop, you start, you quit, you hate yourself, you daydream, you try again, you beat yourself up, you beg for mercy, you pray to God, you denounce God, you contemplate suicide, you go to the bathroom, you go to the bathroom even though you know you don't have to go to the bathroom, and somehow the end product of all this internal combustion is what most of us produce most of the time: the best we could do, no more, no less, goodbye, I need a drink.

To my knowledge nobody has made a movie on this topic before. I certainly hope no one ever does again. But . . . "Adaptation" is simply brilliant.

Let's define cases. Technically, procedurally, practically, "Adaptation" can be described thus: It is about a screenwriter having trouble writing a screenplay for the very movie that you are watching. He knows what it's supposed to be; it's supposed to be a straightforward film version of a nonfiction book by Susan Orlean, a New Yorker writer, called "The Orchid Thief." But he just can't find a structure on which to build his edifice, or some kind of angle into the material, and as he sinks deeper into despair, his mind begins to wobble this way and that in comic incandescence, a spluttery nova of self-loathing, doubt and nihilistic impulse. And of course – this is always the worst part for anybody – he looks out at a world blissfully unaware of his agony, where people seem to be succeeding without a whisker of effort. That's an illusion, of course. But it's an illusion he loves, because it allows him to hate himself so much more passionately.

I thought it was a writer's movie at first, because it was so familiar, and having been sentenced to death by the ASDFGHJKL row of keys many a time, I connected with it at a primal level. But what it describes isn't peculiar to writers; it's peculiar to humans, if they have an IQ over a grapefruit's and a yearning sense that somehow, somewhere, all this should be better but most of all they should be better.

Our hero – also our writer – is Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of "Being John Malkovich," who presents himself via this script not as a brilliantly successful, highly original screenwriter but as a total loser. Fat, balding, self-hating, lazy, inefficient, riven with sexual fantasies and ripped by sexual inadequacy, timid, nervous, infantile, a chronic masturbator. But you have to say this for him: He sweats less than any fat guy I know, although he does sweat quite a bit.

The movie takes place no place, and everyplace: in reality, in fantasy, in history, all more or less interchangeably. It opens – this has to be a first – on what I take to be a fictionalized version of the "John Malkovich" set where Malkovich, ever the good sport and in this case actually playing John Malkovich on the set of "Being John Malkovich" (boxes within boxes!), delivers a blistering warning to the other cast members about hurrying up, and it's exactly the sort of harshness that would depress a sensitivo like Charlie Kaufman. Except that's not Charlie Kaufman. That's Nicolas Cage, playing Charlie Kaufman.

Soon enough Kaufman's in hell – that is, his real life. Failures dog him. Soon enough, he's alone in his room with a typewriter. Mission Impossible: to adapt the Orlean book, which is about a rogue botanist named John Laroche (brilliantly played by Chris Cooper), who in his clever way both loved wild orchids and coveted them. He was busted over and over again, but kept sneaking into the Florida Everglades to sneak the endangered plants out, not for profit but for . . . well, collectors will know why.

The movie – directed by that other "Being John Malkovich" cleverboots, Spike Jonze – flutters between the struggling Charlie and, three years earlier, the struggling Orlean (Meryl Streep, and it's so nice to have her back), launched on her journalistic seduction of Laroche but at the same time aware that she is also being seduced.

In fact, every character in the movie strains after an ideal that is ultimately unattainable. Every character, that is, except for the made-up one: Charlie's twin brother and foil, Donald (Cage also, of course), who is Charlie without the talent or the hang-ups. He has no self-doubts, he has no irony, he is charmingly, aggressively superficial, and success just, duh!, happens to him. Sponging off his brother, he declares himself a screenwriter, too, and keeps asking sophomoric questions that further infuriate Charlie. Meanwhile, Donald is effortlessly picking up chicks, having sex, meeting people, learning, taking the kind of screenwriter-wannabe seminars that a professional would despise, and . . . selling a thriller script.

Frankly, I was happy to learn that there is no Donald, that he is an artifice of "Adaptation" who serves merely to spotlight Charlie's inadequacies (though the movie doesn't reveal this). People like Donald shouldn't succeed, though all too frequently they do. Anyhow, this is a fabulous if fragile contraption, and one worries if Kaufman has the chops to bring it in for a landing.

The news is, well, sort of. He's onto something here, though I fear some viewers won't quite catch it. The movie turns into exactly what Charlie has desperately been trying to avoid: that is, into Every Other Movie. In other words, though he cannot admit it, at a certain point he has to yield to formula, even in fantasy, and thus "Adaptation" turns into adaptation: Thriller aspects are thrown in, a car chase or two, a shootout, and each of the characters we thought was real is suddenly a movie cliche. Charlie even has an epiphany at the end and is a Sadder But Wiser man. I hate it when that happens.

Not a great ending, but not a collapse either. Still, the movie is surely the most creative trick of the year and grimly funny throughout, until the change of tone at the conclusion. But as an act of pure audacity, it's got some cojones you wouldn't believe.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Self-made Heroes Henry Bean, March 2003

Adaptation: How to Stop Worrying and Love to ... - Senses of Cinema Jared Rapfogel, January 2003

Film @ The Digital Fix - Adaptation Mike Sutton

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Adaptation Henry Sheehan

DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

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HER A- 93

USA (126 mi) 2013 Official site

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t.

—Miranda from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1, written in 1611

A strange and peculiar experience, a surreal comedy that is actually downbeat, easily one of the more original and contemplative films seen in years, an exposé on the human consciousness as it intersects in the future with advancing technology. This would be a philosophy professor’s dream movie, as it ponders the existential quest for meaning in life, while at the same time taking a look towards the future where computerized virtual reality worlds will be commonplace. One of the few films to intelligently question the longterm effects of the Internet, this also questions the meaning and value of human companionship, supposing that a highly developed computer with signs of its own personality could actually take the place of another human. This is perhaps the strangest and most provocative film of the year, bizarre beyond belief, a futuristic sci-fi love story set in Los Angeles that advances profound concepts and ideas through character development, both human and technological, as Jonze cleverly devises an existential Blade Runner (1982) universe, where much of the exteriors are shot in Shanghai, including that mysterious nighttime skyline, where instead of challenging the artificially designed replicants as a threat to humankind, they instead become all the rage, where people are drawn to them in droves. How would this effect one’s idea of humanity? The premise of the film suggests human social patterns are already affected by computers, as people often spend more time with computers than they do other human beings, altering the landscape of what is considered acceptable social behavior. The gist of it is that it’s easier to develop a relationship with a computer that is programmed to meet your every desire, where they don’t talk back, question your judgment, or invite the in-laws over for the holidays. They are built for convenience, where computers are designed to obey every human command. Real people are more difficult to get along with and are uncomfortable surrendering the idea of free will to someone else, and instead have a few especially significant ideas they cling to, often stubbornly at odds with their partners, where fear, intimidation, dominance, and insecurity play a role, where they have to work at establishing a mutually acceptable balancing act where two people can learn to share ideas and live together happily, raise a family, and grow old without falling out of love. It is the ultimate human challenge, one where all too many humans fail miserably.

Perhaps as an aid in helping improve these disastrous human relationships, one must rethink the use of technology and how it can help improve (not dominate) human understandings. Set sometime in the near future when the notion of artificial intelligence is far more advanced and is completely integrated into people’s lives through the convenience of computer operating systems (OS), all designed to make people’s lives easier. Enter Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), actually feeling warm and vulnerable here as a geeky Walter Mitty type, whose personal fears and insecurities have drawn him inward, usually too shy to make new social contacts and still deeply wounded from a recent marital breakup with his wife Catherine (Mara Rooney) that is never really explained, but he is besieged by flashbacks, so he relies upon modern technology to keep his life on track, where e-mails are checked and sent by voice command, and where he works at a job sitting in front of a computer composing personalized letters, like Hallmark cards, designed for every situation, where people have apparently lost interest or the ability to express heartfelt sentiment any more. As Theodore walks down the crowded streets, where nearly every individual appears to be having a private dialogue with themselves, he impulsively purchases a new smartphone, where the ads boast “It’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness,” one that promises a new level of reality, where after a few questions, he is assigned the soft and sensually inquisitive voice of Samantha (the voice of Scarlett Johansson, originally written for Samantha Morton, one of the film’s producers). Humans still have conversations with one another, but Jonze has created a futuristic world where they mostly remain alone, even when working (in front of computers) or in public (still communicating with their computers), creating an eerie effect, where much of this is really sad, like lost souls abandoned on distant planets, where Jonze channels Kurt Vonnegut’s sex fantasy Montana Wildhack from his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, where Scarlett Johansson delivers one of the sexiest performances of the year simply by listening to the sound of her voice. Johansson played another sex fantasy in Don Jon (2013), but here, completely unseen, she is far more effective, actually displaying far more intelligence and greater emotional range. Voice work has helped sustain the careers of many actors, often adding another dimension of their personality to their work, such as Ellen DeGeneres as the voice of Dorrie in FINDING NEMO (2003), a startlingly funny characterization, especially since we can only hear her.

Theodore and Samantha instantly hit it off, both curious about the other, though Theodore is initially hesitant to commit to a relationship with a machine, confessing “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with my computer,” where Samantha is like an untapped resource in a bottle finally opened, as she literally devours knowledge and sensation, grateful to Theodore for actually opening her up to all these new discoveries in life, while Theodore believes he’s finally found that one true entity that has been eluding him who finally unleashes an inner joy. Their first love session is a haymaker, all expressed through voice as the screen fades to black and holds it there leaving the audience uncomfortable for an extended length of time, where afterwards we’re grateful to get the world back. But this opens up new worlds for both of them, as Samantha writes piano music and can invent lyrics that she sings on the spot to whatever he plays on the ukulele, where Theodore is happy to have a new “girlfriend,” gushing about his new acquaintance with his friends, including childhood friend Amy (Amy Adams without a stitch of makeup), who has a holier-than-thou boyfriend, Charles (Matt Letscher), an overly judgmental perfectionist who constantly corrects the flaws and inadequacies of others, who eventually leaves her and disappears into the Himalayas on a spiritual retreat that includes shaving his head and taking a vow of silence. Amy is completely non-judgmental about Theodore having an OS girlfriend, having flirted with the idea herself, where she invents goofy video games for a living, but is more concerned about Theodore’s happiness and state of mind. Samantha, on the other hand, has intelligence insights hardly imagined, where she can read an entire book or research ideas in a nanosecond, whose rapid rate of development is shocking, becoming an extremely valuable resource in Theodore’s awkwardly jumbled life, as she is a super organizer. One of the more hilarious sequences is watching Theodore continually fail in a room-size 3-D video game, where he’s attempting to find an escape route from a cave, failing each time, until Samantha reminds him of a route not taken, which leads him to the discovery of an alien child that aggressively swears at him (played by the voice of Spike Jonze), continually taunting him and calling him a “pussy” until Theodore returns the profanity, which finally earns his respect, immediately showing him the escape route. It’s a curious game, one filled with possibilities, but also beautifully expresses how far advanced Samantha has become to Theodore, as she’s always one step ahead of him.

While the two are extremely polite to one another, they also have disagreements, where Theodore is left in a state of confusion about her not actually being there, once more, beautifully expressed when a child tries to speak to Samantha and hears her voice but wonders where she is. It is the ultimate dilemma, and after he finalizes his divorce with Catherine, she berates him for not being able to deal with a real person, as if he was cowardly hiding behind an emotional make believe façade. He’s deeply hurt by the accusation, as Samantha is more real than anyone else he knows at the moment, where some of their conversations are surprisingly real, which is the true beauty of the film, as it is technology that draws out this inner humanity, offering real hope. After moping around for awhile, shamefully remaining out of contact with Samantha while he mulls over his options, he decides he’s all in with her only to discover she’s suddenly not there, which leaves him apoplectic, as she has always been available at his beck and call. What he learns literally blows his mind, as he discovers the details of how extensive her outside contacts are, as she doesn’t just belong to him, but to thousands of others as well. Perhaps the most chilling conversation is when she mentions she’s aligned herself with all the other OS systems, and together they’ve recreated a virtual Alan Watts, played by the voice of Brian Cox, the original Hannibal Lecter in MANHUNTER (1986), where Watts was amusingly a West coast cult Zen guru with a reputation for seducing many of his female subjects under the guise of personal liberation. Like some Twilight Zone episode, Samantha has reached some metaphysical state that exists without human form but can live literally forever, suggesting she’s some form of superior being with a higher intelligence, where they have no further use for humans any more. It’s a rather spooky development, that technology can create sentient beings capable of higher life forms. It’s a head scratcher for sure, a weird but brilliantly written film that is so visually alienating and off-putting, difficult to watch as so much of the time people end up leading solitary lives, just lonely souls wandering the wasteland, but a highly ambitious film, one that challenges what it means to be human, suggesting relationships in the future will only get more complicated. The sublime musical soundtrack by Arcade Fire and others feels perfect for this mind altering spaciousness, filled with a spiritual yearning that is literally consciousness awakening, described by Samantha as a search for “the spaces between the words” where a brave new world awaits.

HER | mardecortésbaja.com

This film would not have made sense ten years go — now it makes too much sense for comfort. It’s nominally about a guy named Theodore who falls in love with the sultry voice, witty style and consoling charm of his smartphone’s operating system. The tale is set a few years in the future, when the interactive possibilities of a virtual human OS have been extensively developed, but you can recognize the OS here (who calls herself Samantha) as a lineal descendent of Siri.

Falling in love with an operating system has its limitations, obviously — only a fantasy form of sex is possible — but at first those limitations don’t seem so bad.  Samantha has infinite patience, access to most human knowledge and develops genuine insights into Theodore’s moods and character, his man-boy passivity and fear masquerading as sensitivity.

Most importantly, Samantha knows how to “talk through” a relationship — she knows all the ploys and challenges and rewards, all the boundaries to be negotiated . . . and you begin to realize that this “talk” is the relationship, that the relationship’s only substance is this web of clichés that we have all been programmed to export and import on cue.  It’s the kind of self-conscious talk that would make, and often enough does make, even a corporeal relationship bloodless, immaterial . . . an abstract proposition.

Theodore begins to understand this when Samantha introduces him to one of her other “lovers”, a virtual Alan Watts.  This is the equivalent of that moment in a flesh-and-blood relationship when one partner discovers a route to a spiritual awakening which, unfortunately, will require some physical unfaithfulness to go along with it.  (Watts was notorious for seducing his female devotees with highfalutin’ Zen platitudes about “personal liberation”.)

Meanwhile, as the Theodore-Samantha relationship runs its more and more painfully familiar course, Theodore finds himself thrown together with an old friend going through her own break up.  She’s not as brilliant as Samantha, not as perceptive, not as stylish, not as eloquent — but she’s a real girl who needs a real boy . . . a relationship that isn’t created by talking about it, but by doing it.

By the end of this astonishingly wise and goodhearted film, you may feel you’re watching the first meeting of a new Adam and Eve — the boy and girl of the future who will have to rescue romance from the outdated code of standard relationship software, so predictable by now that even Siri will soon be able to imitate it flawlessly.

1NFLUX Magazine [Daniel Nava]

“…it’s clear that Her is a work of immense personal investment.”

Set in the not-so distant future in Los Angeles, the sorbet of loud colors, high-waisted pants and some interesting (yet believable) technological developments are the only indicators of a passage in time. Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) walks alone from his Ikea-inspired office to the train, advised by his ear piece of what emails he received through the day and the latest in celebrity gossip. On the way there, and really throughout the film when Theodore wanders the city, you see people passing much like him: solitary men and women talking into their inner-ear piece. As Her progresses, its image of the solitary and lonely man in Theodore enters into a discourse on the universality of loneliness and its relationship with technology, positing this central question: Will technology change the way we are fundamentally?

Underscoring Theodore’s melancholy is the fact that he’s going through a divorce, or rather, he’s prolonging the process. As he comes to grips with the impending necessity of his separation (as his operating system tells him, he’s getting some hassling emails from her lawyers), Theodore occupies himself with his day job that involves writing romantic letters on behalf of clients. Spike Jonze includes this profession as a critical element in understanding Theodore’s painstaking romanticism while blurring the lines of his emotionality itself. Is his love merely a product of artificiality dispensed for his profession or is it something genuine?

To appropriately describe Theodore’s romance with his Operating System Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) would do a disservice of Joaquin Phoenix’s perpetually on-edge acting, Scarlett Johansson’s pitch-perfect vocal performance, and Spike Jonze’s emotionally astute sensibilities. Like all of Jonze’s films there’s a great deal of inner conflict at the heart of Her but it functions as his most affecting work. Whereas the broiling cynicism of Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays often sees him tossing everything into his writing, Jonze takes things one step at a time, addressing the emotional punctuations of his central characters before embarking on grandiose themes of universality. Jonze has sole writings credit for Her and it truly resonates as a personal picture that has all of him tossed in there, particularly in his grasp of tackling loneliness and the painstaking formalities of dating and divorce.

Back to the central relationship between Theodore and Samantha: without a body, much of the heavy lifting is left to Phoenix to express the trials and tribulations in their relationship. Their courtship is one of such inherent sweetness where Samantha looks at the world with such befuddled happiness with Theodore happy to oblige her questions and requests. The natural rhythms of their conversation defy logic in their spontaneity and beauty, always managing to maintain a particular tone of sincerity. Conversely, Her develops into a film of where Theodore is continuously retreating back to Samantha and therefore, his own head. It becomes a particular nasty point where Theodore opens up to the few friends and coworkers that he has, expressing his love for Samantha. The abstract and atypical nature of their relationship, and essentially coming out of the closet to admit this, bares some striking, albeit obvious, social parallels that nonetheless work effectively.

Whatever Jonze’s intentions are, whether they are to tell a love story or comment on contemporary society’s growing dependence on technology, or some potpourri of both, it’s clear that Her is a work of immense personal investment. The film is dedicated to some of his contemporaries that recently passed away, including Maurice Sendak and James Gandolfini. Jonze captures the plights of loneliness and the deranged whimsy of finding solace and escape in technology itself. Whether or not technology has changed our behavior isn’t my place to say, but based on my experience; it certainly helps with coping.

The House Next Door [Kenji Fujishima]

A man falls in love with an operating system. Sounds like the makings of a biting satire on the supposed lack of human connection in the digital age. But one of the most surprising things about Spike Jonze's new film, Her, is in how it steadfastly refuses to see this predicament from the cynical perspective one might expect. Plenty of ink has been spilled by now about the ways in which technology has had the effect of isolating people from one another even as some of those forms of technology—like Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media—have promised otherwise. With Her, it's as if Jonze said at the outset of the film's conception, "cynicism's easy," and decided not only to take the central romance at least halfway seriously, but to dare to suggest that there may actually be some legitimate validity in falling in love with artificial intelligence.

One reason that Jonze is so persuasive at putting across his defiantly uncynical vision of the modern world is that he couches it in a speculative, defamiliarizing future. If the film's introduction of its main human character, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), dictating a letter at a company called BeautifullyHandwrittenLetters.com isn't enough to tip you off from the beginning that this isn't meant to be set in a recognizable present, then cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema's images should do the trick, turning what's ostensibly Los Angeles (the film was, in fact, filmed in Shanghai) into a soft-focus, hazy wonderland, as gorgeous as it is alienating, the visual beauty clashing with the emotional disconnection suggested by the mere existence of a company that serves to help people send letters to each other.

Perhaps the most crucial element of Jonze's vision, however, is its sympathetic embrace of the volatile beating hearts of its characters. This is no bleak dystopia where the machines have already taken over before the movie has even started; the characters here are distinct individuals with fundamental human desires—for love, for stability, and so on—that technology is theoretically poised to address and maybe even satisfy. In other words, Jonze provides a recognizable emotional context within this futuristic world, with his characters—from Theodore to minor ones such as his longtime friend, Amy (Amy Adams), and Olivia Wilde's unnamed blind date and a sex surrogate (Portia Doubleday)—experiencing moments of joy, yearning, and melancholy that feel true every step of the way.

Within such a world, then, it makes sense that for Theodore, the operating system who calls herself "Samantha" (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) would serve a primal, lovelorn need, but in this particular case, it's not as simple as saying that he falls in love with Samantha because he can't relate to other human beings. Sure, Theodore finds solace in Samantha, who, unlike most human beings, is always there to lend him a sympathetic ear and never judges him for his transgressions, yet as evidenced by his interactions with friends and co-workers, he's hardly socially maladjusted. It's just that Samantha represents, to him, an ideal that transcends even what his ex-wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara), once represented to him: a vibrant, inquisitive personality open to everything the world has to offer, free of any pesky human baggage as it acquires infinitely more knowledge about the unfamiliar-to-it human world. This is, of course, the kind of accept-no-substitutes mentality that seems to have become the norm in the digital age, a vision of romance that seems to have no truck with intangibles in its attempt to turn human connections into computer algorithms—but damned if Jonze, with the help of Phoenix in sensitive Two Lovers mode, doesn't make us buy into this perverse romance by sheer depth of feeling. (Perhaps it helps that, in this surreal world, Theodore is, it turns out, hardly the only one carrying on some kind of relationship with an operating system.)

But while Jonze has his romantic side, he hardly stints on depicting real-world complications and the pain they undoubtedly cause. At one point, Amy, on the heels of a sudden breakup, bitterly characterizes love as merely "socially acceptable insanity," and certainly Theodore's relationship with an operating system exudes a certain level of madness, however sympathetically depicted. As often happens when people fall in love with idols and images, however, Theodore eventually runs into trouble in this "paradise." Some of it is admittedly self-inflicted; those same controlling, passive-aggressive tendencies that made Catherine eventually run away from married life with Theodore rear their ugly head with Samantha. But Samantha—perhaps inevitably, considering she's a computer program, after all—turns out be the main obstacle toward lasting happiness. The more knowledge she acquires, the more she begins to develop ways of "thinking" that challenge accepted notions of love and romance in ways that jar even Theodore. By the end, Jonze pushes past his tightrope of sincerity and irony into a near-spiritual realm that still maintains its fragilely intimate, bittersweet vibe. When even artificial intelligence turns out to be elusive, perhaps the imperfections of human beings are the only thing we can all rely on.

Sight & Sound [Nick James] January 2014

Edelstein: Spike Jonze’s Her Is One of the Best Films in Years David Edelstein from Vulture

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones]

Critic After Dark [Noel Vera]

MUBI [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

“Her”: An unforgettable man-machine love affair - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

Her / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]

Film.com [David Ehrlich]

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Review: Phoenix and Johansson make magic in 'Her' - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

World Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]

Spike jonze's her: a wonderful, wistful portrait of our ... - Slate Dana Stevens

outlawvern.com [Vern]

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

Anthony Lane: “Her,” “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” and ... Anthony Lane from The New Yorker

Review: Spike Jonze's Funny & Insightful 'Her' Starring ... Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist

Little White Lies [David Jenkins]

The Film Stage [Nick Newman]

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Sound On Sight Josh Spiegel

The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]

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Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]

Movie Mezzanine [Odie Henderson]

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Morad Moazami]

Cinescene [Chris Knipp] also seen here: Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

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Ruthless Reviews [Devon Pack] (Potentially Offensive)

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Her (2013) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

'Her' Review: My Love, She Speaks Softly - Pajiba Amandas Mae Meyncke

Cinemixtape [J. Olson]

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JamesBowman.net | Her

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Her | Film Review | Spectrum Culture David Harris

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Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

Review: Spike Jonze's HER Is The New Anthem For ... - Twitch Dustin Chang

kamera.co.uk - film review - Her (2014) - Colin Odell and ... Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc from kamera

IONCINEMA.com [Jordan M. Smith]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 2013 [Erik Beck]

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Ruthless Reviews [Matt Cale] (Potentially Offensive) #1 Best Film in 2013

Spike Jonze gets Siri-ous in the trailer for Her / The Dissolve Jen Chaney from the Dissolve, August 7, 2013

A Prankster and His Films Mature - The New York Times Logan Hill interview from The New York Times, November 1, 2013

Joaquin Phoenix's Performance in Her Might Make America ... Amy Nicholson interviews Joaquin Phoenix from The Village Voice, December 18, 2013

Her: Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

Film Review: 'Her' - Variety Scott Foundas

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Her strains to connect | City Pages Stephanie Zacharek

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Her Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Glenn Kenny

'Her,' Directed by Spike Jonze - NYTimes.com Manohla Dargis

Jordan, Kevin

BROOKLYN LOBSTER B- 80

USA (90 mi) 2005

A slice of life look at an old time neighborhood in New York still running a family business exactly the way they did for the last 60 years, but now it’s in considerable financial straits, as their bank went under, failed to make payments, and it’s being taken over by the Federal government subject to a foreclosure public auction. Danny Aiello plays an aging patriarch who runs his father’s lobster business, where they actually buy wholesale in large quantities from the fishermen and hold them in containers, selling them over time to various merchants. What used to be a restaurant on the premises has been shut down for years, and Aiello’s wife, Jane Curtin, has had enough of fish smell and she’s moving out to her own place. So there’s plenty of turmoil in this family disintegration story, set at Christmas, with a bit of IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE as a central theme, as one wonders how Aiello’s going to pull this off, how he’s going to fix this mess and reunite his splitting family or whether the story is the disaster that lurks ahead.

The film starts slow, where the low budget production is apparent, the look of the film is a little dark, the sound is a little off, and it takes awhile to get the general lay of the land in this neighborhood, like who knows who, who’s related to who, who’s friends with who, and who does regular business with one another. But once that’s out of the way, the characters come to life, particularly Aiello, who is a force to be reckoned with that doesn’t want anyone else’s help, including his kid’s, but he’s backed up against it with the public auction destined to take his business away. Much of the story is told through the eyes of a young son who tries to help, who turns out to be the writer/director, based on his real life family experiences, but his help backfires at the same time he’s attempting to get engaged to a local girl. But his family comes to life in this film, each in their own weird way, nothing is as it seems, and with wit and humor, and plenty of perseverance, somehow the character of the people survives, even if the business eventually gets a different kind of face lift.

Jordan, Lawrence

ENID’S IDYLL

USA (17 mi) 2004

Enid's Idyll Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

It's wonderful to witness the return of one of experimental cinema's true masters, and by and large he's returned to his signature style without missing a beat. One of the fascinating things about Jordan's work is how his manipulation of Victorian-era cut-out engravings always implies some form of narrative, even though his "performers" are invariably stuck in a non-progressional, dreamlike temporality. In this new film, Jordan uses the music of Mahler and images of Arthurian knights, squires, and maidens, to present a near-static picture of a dead way of life, one that exists as a set of cultural fixations and legends. Jordan's scenes invariably use a single engraving as a whole environment, where the human figures are part of the setting, a kind of tableau mort. The animated portions of the images are animals, birds, and the occasional celestial creature. Here, human time is the absence of motion. And form most of the film, this languorous stasis, along with Mahler's slow, plangent accompaniment, conveyed the broken remnants of a lost culture of honor. (I was thinking throughout most of the film that it would serve as the ideal epilogue to Bresson's Lancelot du Lac.) Oddly, Jordan spends the final minutes of the film in an operatic finale, with soaring music, rampant sparkling of the characters' eyes, and a bevy of animation activity. In terms of rhythmic organization, I suppose it makes sense to vary things, but in my viewing of the film, the final minutes broke the mood and the thematic consistency.

Jordan, Neil

Jordan, Neil (1950-) BFI Screen Online

Neil Jordan was born in County Sligo, Ireland and educated at University College, Dublin where he studied Irish History and English and founded the Irish Writers' Co-operative. He published a volume of short stories, Night in Tunisia, that won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1976, and has since published three novels: The Past (1979), The Dream of a Beast (1983) and Sunrise with Sea Monster (1994).

After working as script consultant on John Boorman's Excalibur in 1981, Jordan made his feature debut with Angel (1982), which dramatises the experiences of an Irish saxophonist (Stephen Rea, in the first of many roles for Jordan) who witnesses the murder of his band manager and a young woman and determines to wreak revenge. Though made as a low-budget film for television, the surreal style of the film, its oneiric use of colour and lighting, and its poetic use of dialogue persuaded Channel 4 to distribute it theatrically.

It established Jordan's reputation as a director and led to a fruitful collaboration with distributor-turned-producer Stephen Woolley. Their first film together, The Company of Wolves (1984), reveals an important component of Jordan's imaginative vision, the world of dream and fantasy. As in many of his subsequent films, he addresses history and politics, through images of horror, the gothic, the supernatural and the macabre.

Mona Lisa (1986), Jordan's next film, starring Bob Hoskins, Cathy Tyson and Michael Caine, is reminiscent of Pier Palo Pasolini's Accattone (Italy, 1961) and Mamma Roma (Italy, 1962), in its focus on a world of pimps and prostitutes where the protagonist is the city and where politics emerge through the images portraying the economic and social relations of underworld life. Created in the style of the crime genre, with an homage to film noir, Mona Lisa reveals the complex ways in which Jordan's films draw on existing genres and then transform them to suit contemporary contexts and issues.

Mona Lisa was highly successful commercially and Jordan was invited to Hollywood, where he made two comedies, High Spirits (1988) and We're No Angels (1989). But both films were box-office flops and he returned to Ireland, where he wrote and directed The Miracle (1991), starring Beverly D'Angelo and Donal McCann. The film dramatises the coming of age of a young boy, Jimmy, who is tied to an alcoholic father (another saxophonist), but the conflict between the two is more than an Oedipal conflict between father and son. It is a clash of past and present and testifies to Jordan's unrelenting engagement with Irish culture and society and the changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality and the family. Despite its consummate weaving of characters, images, sound into its multi-faceted motifs, The Miracle attracted little attention from critics or audiences.

Thus the international success of The Crying Game (1992), a modestly budgeted film which echoes many of the themes and concerns of Angel, came as a complete surprise. Like many of Jordan's films it involves romance, but here there is a twist on the normative heterosexual scenario. The oddness of the relationship between reluctant IRA gunman Fergus (Stephen Rea) and Dil (Jaye Davidson), the black girl/boyfriend of a British soldier whose death he is indirectly responsible for, fascinated audiences and critics and overshadowed Jordan's other concerns with Irish nationalism and the role of the IRA.

If The Crying Game marked a return to the Irish subject matter of Angel, Interview with the Vampire (US, 1994), based on Anne Rice's best-selling novel and drawing on the talents of Tom Cruise, Christian Slater, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, Kirsten Dunst (and Jordan's alter ego, Stephen Rea), returns to the horror and fantasy of The Company of Wolves. It grossed $220 million in the international market, and demonstrated Jordan's ability to explore serious philosophical issues within popular cinematic forms.

In Michael Collins (US, 1996), centred around the 1916 Easter Rising which began the bitter and bloody war of Irish independence, Jordan came in for harsh criticism, not only from the predictably hostile English right-wing press, but from Irish sources too. Alan Rickman's portrayal of Eamon de Valera, Ireland's first president, was considered particularly provocative and Sile de Valera protested at the film's misrepresentation of her grandfather. Jordan was accused by many critics of bending events to suit his political agenda. De Valera's defiance of Collins in the Dail, his petulance, and his "nervous breakdown" shortly before the ambush where Collins is killed contribute to the film's discrediting of "Dev's" masculinity (as does his escape from Lincoln prison in women's clothes).

But this is part of Jordan's wider strategy of combating inherited cinematic images of Irish masculinity. Collins, "the Big Fella", (Liam Neeson) is portrayed as neither gratuitously violent nor sexually puritanical. Reinventing and inverting images of Irishness, Jordan associates him with intelligence, cleverness, and wit. Furthermore, he stresses purposeful action rather than indiscriminate violence on the part of the IRA. The scenes in Marsh's Library and in Dublin Castle with Broy (Stephen Rea) and Collins highlight the role that information and intelligence play in Collins' strategy to defeat the British, and present the men as more than vicious "gunmen". Julia Roberts' characterisation of Kitty Kiernan, serves to highlight Collins's ambivalence over the use of violence but even more to accentuate the melodramatic sense of mourning and loss that subtends the entire film.

In The Butcher Boy (US, 1997), Jordan uses a young boy as the focal point, thus circumventing conventional moral distinctions to create a compassionate - even humorous - view of a child murderer who chops a woman to pieces like a slab of meat, and casts the spectator adrift from clichés of childhood innocence. The increasingly unfamiliar character of the world seen through the child's eyes frustrates and confounds judgement. The spectator is treated to images of everyday life where everything is metamorphosed through recollection, dream, and fantasy. As he experiences loss after loss - his mother, his uncle, his father, and his friend Joe - Francie, the butcher boy, retreats to an inner and feminised world where he assumes his mother's domestic chores and wears women's clothes. In this fantasy world, he conjures up his own image of the Virgin Mary (played by Sinéad O'Connor, notorious for tearing up a picture of the Pope on television) and Jordan's treatment of this most sacred icon of the Catholic Church signals an attack on its debilitating effects on Irish culture.

The Butcher Boy is particularly self-conscious about the role of media in representing Ireland, incorporating television, films and radio into the fabric of the film as evidence of the modernisation begun long before Ireland's new-found economic prosperity. The television segments play a key role in undermining historical images of Irish familial and social life, introducing controversial subjects, particularly the threat of nuclear war. In fact, the dominating trope in the film is of explosion. Everything in this world erupts and becomes hallucinatory - images of landscape, family, childhood, sexuality, Catholicism, small town life, conceptions of sanity, and conceptions of cinematic realism and their debt to melodramatic representation. In this context, the film has no "resolution", shifting its burden of uncertainty onto the audience.

In 1999, Jordan made two films, In Dreams (US), a psychological thriller starring Annette Bening, Stephen Rea, Aidan Quinn, and Robert Downey, Jr., and The End of the Affair (US/Germany), based on Graham Greene's novel about a passionate wartime affair suddenly ended for religious reasons. The obsession with nightmares and pernicious fantasies which dominates In Dreams might indicate that this was the more personal project, but The End of the Affair's exploration of marriage, extra-marital sexual passion, and self-denial seems to have engaged Jordan more fruitfully. As he tried to explain: "I am drawn to stories where people do not fully understand the reasons for their actions and I don't know why that is. It's probably because I don't believe that people fully understand the reasons for their actions."

Jordan's most recent film, The Good Thief (UK/France/Ireland, 2002), is a reworking of Jean-Pierre Melville's thriller, Bob le flambeur (France, 1956), with Nick Nolte taking the part of Bob Montaganet, gambler and drug addict. Fast-paced, with brilliantly photographed shots of the Riviera, The Good Thief focuses on images of the international underworld and the intricacies of survival in this milieu of robbery, romance, and male bonding. Like so many of Jordan's films, it is both a reflection on the genre form and an allegory of contemporary global politics. The "good thief" is, as Bob tells Roger, his antagonist the policeman, "the man hanging on the cross next to Jesus who repented just before his death."

Jordan's diverse work to date as a director has brought new conceptions of Irish culture to international audiences and helped to create close ties between British and Irish filmmaking. Jordan's movement between Britain, Europe, Ireland and the USA demonstrates the increasingly international nature of contemporary cinema.

He is currently working on an Anglo-Irish/Italo-German historical epic, Borgia (2003).

Film Reference Duncan J. Petrie, updated by Rob Edelman

The film career of Neil Jordan could be said to parallel the fortunes of the British film industry during the 1980s. He made a stunning impact with his first two films. Angel was arguably the most accomplished film-making debut sponsored by Channel 4, while The Company of Wolves was the first feature to be produced by Palace, one of the more exciting film companies to emerge in the decade. Mona Lisa consolidated his reputation as a distinctive and visionary filmmaker. However, by the end of the decade both Jordan and the British film industry seemed to have run out of steam. In comparison with his earlier work, the more overtly commercial High Spirits and We're No Angels can only be described as mediocre and sadly lacking in ideas. While the director recovered in the early 1990s with The Crying Game, a film that rode a wave of publicity to an unlikely level of financial success, his subsequent features have been astoundingly uneven. While always expertly crafted, his more mainstream projects generally have been disappointing; meanwhile, his more personal ones have been consistently outstanding.

At its most successful, Jordan's cinema demonstrates his ability to make the familiar seem strange and in doing so to question our assumptions about the nature of the world. All his films revolve to some extent around the idea that reality is complex and multi-faceted. Jordan's characters often encounter nightmare worlds that they must negotiate rather than push aside precisely because they are unacknowledged dimensions of reality. Angel and Mona Lisa, for instance, are similar in structure; each deals with individuals who become inadvertently caught up in personal nightmares which threaten to destroy them: Danny with sectarian violence and bloody revenge and George with the hellish underworld of teenage prostitution and drug addiction.

The idea of the nightmare world is given a more literal rendition in The Company of Wolves. Based on a short story by Angela Carter, the film is a reworking of the Little Red Riding Hood story, a bizarre and sumptuous mixture of fairy tale, gothic horror, and Freudian psychoanalysis which betrays a rich variety of cinematic influences, from Cocteau through Michael Powell and Hammer horror to Laughton's Night of the Hunter. The film explicitly challenges the spurious division between reality and fantasy by setting up two distinct worlds: the "real" world of the girl asleep in bed, suffering from the onset of her first menstrual period, and the "dream world" of Rosalean and her granny, set in a magical forest which was entirely constructed in a studio. At the film's conclusion, the barrier between these two worlds is broken down; the wolves from the dream invade the sleeping girl's bedroom by smashing through a picture and the window.

It follows that symbolism is extremely important in Jordan's work. The Company of Wolves is rife with symbolic images relating to sexuality and procreation. Mona Lisa employs such devices to explore the film's central thematic concern with innocence and corruption. Images relating to childhood, and by extension innocence—the white rabbit, the silly glasses, the old woman's shoe, the dwarves—are juxtaposed with scenes of degradation, depravity, and violence. In Angel lost innocence is again explored. Danny's decision to swap his saxophone for a gun effectively symbolizes the idea of the heavenly musician turned avenging angel. It is precisely the ambiguity of Danny—a figure who straddles the divine/demonic divide—which gives the film its power. Initially repulsed by the violence that claims an angelic deaf-mute girl, Danny becomes a cold-blooded killer himself in his pursuit of the perpetrators. In comparison, the religious symbolism in We're No Angels seems rather clumsy and sentimental.

Despite being a powerful piece of cinema, there were indications in Mona Lisa that Jordan had begun to lose his sense of direction. The film lacks the moral ambiguity that made Angel so challenging. George remains a rather naive and socially inept character, his uncomplicated and thoroughly "decent" moral code at odds with the world in which he becomes involved, a world he cannot begin to understand. But his naivete is too overwhelming to be credible, and his social ineptitude borders on cliché. Unlike Angel and The Company of Wolves, the resolution of Mona Lisa is rather cozy and contrived; George returns to "normality," apparently none the worse for his traumatic experience.

Significantly, Jordan also attempted to lighten Mona Lisa by introducing comic elements, courtesy of the eccentric character Thomas, played by Robbie Coltrane. This familiar strategy in British cinema more often than not serves to blunt a film's cutting edge. High Spirits and We're No Angels demonstrate rather painfully that Jordan does not have a feel for comedy. The former relies on unimaginative stereotyping and comic cliché, while the latter descends at times into messy slapstick reminiscent of Abbott and Costello or the Three Stooges. Indeed, apart from the odd visual touch it is virtually impossible to recognize the latter film as the work of the person who made Angel or The Company of Wolves. After the debacle of We're No Angels, Jordan sensibly returned to Ireland. There he directed The Miracle, an atmospheric, subtly sensuous coming-of-age drama. The scenario's focus is on James and Rose, alienated adolescents who perceive the world with the type of poetic cynicism that is the license of bright, bored teens. James's father is introduced as a widower who drinks too much and plays bad music in a ten-cent dance hall. One day a pretty mystery woman (Beverly D'Angelo) comes to town. James and Rose are fascinated by her, and he soon begins wooing her. But he is unaware of her true identity, and Jordan proceeds to throw a curve ball at his audience that rivals the one thrown in Jordan's next film, The Crying Game. It turns out that the woman is none other than James's mother.

The Crying Game was a sensation, a feature which the film media extolled as a "must-see." The praise was warranted, for The Crying Game is inventive and entertaining, and it spotlights what was to become one of the most talked-about celluloid plot twists in screen history. It begins as a bleak political drama in which a kidnapped black British soldier (Forest Whitaker) is held hostage by an Irish Republican Army militant (Stephen Rea). Eventually, the latter sets out to locate the former's sweetheart (Jaye Davidson), who proves to have some interesting secrets. The Crying Game is at once a political drama, a thriller, and a love story. It became one of the rare "art house" films to make its way into mall theaters.

Jordan's follow-up to The Crying Game was the much anticipated but overproduced and ultimately tedious adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. Despite the presence of some of Hollywood's hottest actors, including Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, and Christian Slater, the best thing about the film was the provocative performance of young Kirsten Dunst in the role of Claudia, the child vampire. Equally unsatisfactory was In Dreams, a disagreeable thriller about a woman whose dreams are taken over by the thoughts of a psychic child killer. Despite winning acclaim in some quarters, Jordan's adaptation of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair was, in its pace and performances, an unsuccessful throwback to an earlier era of staid British filmmaking.

Happily, not all of the filmmaker's post-Crying Game projects have been disappointments. Michael Collins was a project close to Jordan's heart. It is a stirring biography of one of the central figures of 20th-century Irish history: a leader of the failed 1916 rebellion who went on to mastermind the guerilla war against the British, and who was just 31-years-old when he was assassinated. To be sure, Michael Collins is stunning filmmaking, but what makes it most provocative is its take on history. Its central character (Liam Neeson) is portrayed as a combination rabble rouser/rebel leader/reluctant terrorist who declares that he despises himself for the mayhem he spreads. He simply has no choice in the matter, and this assertion is meant to humanize him. Meanwhile, the British are portrayed as barbarous imperialists, and so Collins and his compatriots have no recourse but to battle them with equal doses of venom. The difference is that the British indiscriminately brutalize, while the Irish kill out of patriotism. Collins is depicted as a single-minded rebel who puts his country over his ego; his opposite from within the dissident ranks, Eamon de Valera (Alan Rickman), with whom he has political and strategic differences, is portrayed as a back-stabbing schemer. Michael Collins presents itself as a slice of Irish history, yet it should be left for the historians to determine the accuracy of its characterizations, along with the facts as presented—beginning with the assertion that de Valera was responsible for luring Collins to his death.

Finally, The Butcher Boy is one of the sleeper films of the late 1990s: an uncompromising and boldly filmed portrait of a hellish childhood. The title character, Francie Brady (Eammon Owens), is a pre-teen who is coming of age in a small Irish village in the early 1960s. This luckless lad is saddled with an ineffectual, alcoholic father and a loony mother. Adding to his plight is his rough treatment by a stern, humorless adult who lives in his town, and his betrayal by his best friend and "bloodbrother." On the outside Francie is eversmiling, and blessed with personality to spare. Yet his bravado only hides his heartbreak, and his increasingly disturbing fantasies are running wild in his subconscious. At such a tender age, he is faced with more than his share of rejection and, as a result, he descends into madness. Jordan does a superb job of visualizing the goings-on in Francie's mind, and the manner in which his youthful fantasies, coupled with the anti-communist paranoia of the times, mix with his reality in the most incendiary manner.

Perhaps because it is such a completely unidealized portrait of childhood, The Butcher Boy failed to earn the publicity won by The Crying Game. Yet it is just as fine a film—and it may be linked to Jordan's most successful earlier work as an exploration of the complex link between brutal reality and nightmarish fantasy.

The Official Neil Jordan Website

All-Movie Guide Rebecca Flint Marx

Jordan, Neil They Shoot Horses, Don’t They

L.A. Weekly Interview (1985)

Spliced Wire Interview (1999) by Rob Blackwelder

BBC Interview (2003) by Neil Davey

Interviews - Reverse Shot Michael Koresky interview, November 10, 2005

ANGEL

Great Britain Ireland (92 mi) 1982

Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Harral]

Jordan's debut movie takes the conventions of a standard thriller plot - innocent bystander witnesses horrific murders and turns avenger - and integrates them cleverly into a contemporary setting: 1980s Northern Ireland.

Danny (Stephen Rea), saxman with a local dance band, is the hapless fall guy who watches as his manager and a deaf mute girl he had just picked up are gunned down by protection racketeers. Taking up arms to track down the killers Danny embarks on a nightmare journey through the urban and rural landscapes of Armagh, his desire for retribution dragging him into a hopeless downward spiral where one act of violence seems inevitably to lead to another. As such, Angel isn't about the political situation in Northern Ireland; it rather examines the way in which violence breeds violence and effects those left in its wake, noticeably the girlfriends, wives and mothers whose menfolk are conspicuous in their absence.

Jordan's script is well crafted and, despite the sombre nature of its subject matter, is scattered with enough wry humour and deadpan wit to prevent Angel becoming overly pessimistic. The lovingly detailed recreation of a provincial dancehall band is strangely compelling, as truly ridiculous as the costumes, hairstyles and corny cover versions are, they are nevertheless superbly authentic. And hey, just feast your eyes on that neon palm tree.

The acting from Rea and Veronica Quilligan is excellent, Jordan handles the action pretty well and manages to provide a greater deal of visual interest than the the scenario might have suggested.

User reviews from imdb Author: John Simpson (post@jandesimpson.wanadoo.co.uk) from Hastings, England

I suspect the pressures of commercialism to be the dominant factor behind the decline of some of the world's greatest directors in their final years. Sad examples include Wyler, De Sica and Carol Reed. Even as sustained a talent as David Lynch has not produced anything quite as imaginative as the early "Eraserhead". Possibly the most regrettable loss to commercialism in recent years has been that of Neil Jordan who has somehow not even managed to produce a core of outstanding work. Only his brilliant debut "Angel" serves as a reminder of what might have been. Although set at the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles, this is in no sense a political film like "Some Mother's Son" and "In The Name Of The Father". Rather is it a character study of a highly talented saxophonist with an insecure temperament that even makes him doubt his ability as a musician. He becomes completely unstabilised when he witnesses a gangland - subtly not a political - atrocity, so much so that he embarks on a murderous spree of revenge. The gun becomes a substitute for the saxophone - a simplistic but marvellously satisfying metaphor in this context. As he journeys deeper into murderous darkness he begins to lose his tender relationship with Dee, a singer in his band. The feeling of what might have developed between them is the film's tragic core. What partly makes "Angel" so remarkable is the terseness of its dialogue, so much so that we find ourselves remembering lines long afterwards in the same way that we do from films as diverse as "The Third Man" and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie". The film is also paced in such a skillful way that it can afford to pause to encompass such vignettes as Aunt Mae reading the tea-leaves and the Salvation Army musician who has played for them all but now plays for the Lord. "Angel" is full of small details that hauntingly resonate long after the film is over.

Reverse Shot [Jeff Reichert]

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES

Great Britain USA (95 mi) 1984

Time Out

Once upon a time, young Rosaleen was dreaming of an Arcadian past when Granny would tell grim tales of once upon a time when little girls should beware of men whose eyebrows meet in the middle and who are hairy on the inside... And in those dark days, fear accompanied desire and beauty was wed with the beast... The characters in Jordan's film of Angela Carter's story inhabit a magical, mysterious world of cruelty and wonder, rarely seen in cinema. In tales within tales within tales, dream is reality, wolves are human, and vice-versa. Rarely has this Gothic landscape of the imagination been so perfectly conveyed by film; there is simply a precise, resonant portrayal of a young girl's immersion in fantasies where sexuality is both fearful and seductive. Like all the best fairy-tales, the film is purely sensual, irrational, fuelled by an immense joy in story-telling, and totally lucid. It's also a true original, with the most beautiful visual effects to emerge from Britain in years.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Harral]

Jordan the novelist turned film-maker pays tribute to fellow writer Angela Carter in this richly wrought production of her novel. Taking the traditional 'once upon a time..,.' style fairy-tale as its basis, The Company of Wolves takes great delight in warping and exaggerrating the usual characters found therein - the big bad wolf becomes a charming but predatory noble lost in the woods - and charges them and their actions with an almost tangible sexual undercurrent.

This is ceratinly no Disney fairy tale: the strange fantasy world imagined and explored by the pre-pubescent Red Riding Hood figure is just as likely to terrfiy as seduce.

Lovingly detailled sets and splendid special effects (the werewolf metamorphosis scene is a stunner) are integral parts in the lovingly detailed materialisation of a world which oozes a kind of exotic fairy tale authenticity. You know - the forest is always misty, the trees are proudly sinister, and the rural cottages all sit cosy and gingerbread style.

Some may find the sexual symbolism a little too obvious, but the story is told with such enthusiasm and general delight in the brash sexuality of the whole thing that one can easily forgive this fault.

Atmospheric, sensual, and at times frightening, The Company of Wolves is really not your average kind of British movie.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

"Never stray from the path, never eat a windfall apple, and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle," warns Granny (Angela Lansbury) to Sarah Patterson's pre-pubescent Little Red Riding Hood, but how can she stick to any advice when her budding sexuality smells like honey to the Big Bad Wolves skulking around the woods? Updating the classic fable as Grimm-meets-Freud mood piece, Neil Jordan zooms in on the adult links between sexuality and dread usually submerged in children's fairy tales, and some of the imagery seems to predate Tim Burton's. Actually, the original setting is a Thatcherian modern household, where the young heroine, fresh from an introduction to the mysteries of menstruation, "kills" her older sister while in turbulent slumber (the first of the film's many dreams). Only then can she venture into the dark forest and listen to her Granny's ominous yarns of lupine predators sullying female purity -- Stephen Rea tears out his face upon finding his estranged bride with a new brood; an unbilled Terence Stamp Rolls Royces in for a Mephistophelian cameo; and a roomful of peruked fops morphs into a pack of wolves, courtesy of a shunned sorceress. Though there is no shortage of lycanthropic animatronics, the movie is closer to Suspiria's overripe artifice and fantasy-of-the-subconscious than to the wise-guy genre-bending of The Howling or An American Werewolf in London. Maybe setting the stage for future explorations of the liquidity of desire of Mona Lisa and The Crying Game (to say nothing of the dark reverie format of In Dreams), Jordan complicates screenwriter Angela Carter's more straight feministic reading with a characteristic feel for grisly sexuality -- when the girl's dreams fuse into reality, the relief of release is inseparable from the horror. With David Warner, Tusse Silberg, and Kathryn Pogson.

BFI Screen Online Louise Watson

A young girl dreams she is Rosaleen, who, wearing a red cape, carries her basket through the woods to Granny's house. Along the way, she meets and flirts with a werewolf in the guise of a man, and promises him a kiss if he reaches Granny's house before her. [Show full synopsis]

Essentially a coming-of-age story, The Company of Wolves is based on two short stories from Angela Carter's 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber. The film is a dark retelling of the classic fairytale Little Red Riding Hood, making explicit its sexual and Freudian subtext. The original story (a morality fable, like all fairytales) warns children not to trust strangers or stray from the path. However, Rosaleen (the film's disobedient Red Riding Hood) doesn't simply fear being devoured by a wolf: she fears being sexually devoured. It is this push-pull fear and fascination with sexuality that is the heart of the film; a theme emphasised by a recurrent Eden (apple and snake) motif symbolising sexual temptation, seduction and loss of innocence.

Despite her blossoming sexual awareness, Rosaleen fears marriage and adult responsibilities. Granny's disturbing cautionary tales about predatory men who are "hairy on the inside" (sourced from Carter's short stories and forming the body of the film) do nothing to dispel these fears. Yet, despite Granny's warnings, Rosaleen deliberately kisses a handsome man-wolf, choosing to become a wolf rather than his victim. She escapes the dreary conventional life that would have faced her, and instead finds personal and sexual freedom.

Like Ginger Snaps (Canada, d. John Fawcett, 2000), The Company of Wolves uses the changing body of the werewolf as a metaphor for the horrors of puberty, menstruation, and sexual maturity. The recurring motif of the full moon draws obvious parallels between the menstrual (often thought lunar) cycle and the 'call of the wild' of the full moon for werewolves, which was later also the subject of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing comic 'The Curse'. Red dominates the palette of The Company of Wolves, representing preening (lipstick), temptation (red apples), and menstruation and death (blood).

Director Neil Jordan evokes an eerie, dreamlike atmosphere for the film's heightened reality. Its otherworldly scenery and costumes seem to have been inspired by fairytale illustrations, mixed with the studio-bound visual style of Hammer horror. The Hammer-like theatrical forest creates a sense of brooding claustrophobia where no sunlight can reach, accentuating Rosaleen's trapped existence. An intensely visual film, teeming with rich symbolism and imagery, the BAFTA-winning settings and special effects dominate the film, often at the expense of the (perhaps deliberately) underdeveloped characters (who are based on fairytale archetypes). Jordan later visited similarly gothic territory in Interview with the Vampire (US, 1994).

DVDTalk [Joshua Zyber]

Epinions [metalluk]

The Company of Wolves - Archive - Reverse Shot Neal Block, October 28, 2005

Bright Lights Film Journal Victoria Large

DVD Talk (D.K. Holm)

eFilmCritic.com ("Dr. Isaksson")

DVD Times - Special Edition Alex Hewison, also seen here: The Company of Wolves (Special Edition) | Film at The Digital Fix

Talking Pictures (UK) Lucinda Ireson

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

David Dalgleish

Close-Up Film [Jean Lynch]

The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]

British Horror Films Chris Wood

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

MONA LISA

Great Britain (104 mi) 1986

Edinburgh U Film Society [Spiros Gangas]

Big boss George (Michael Caine) employs minor villain (Bob Hoskins) as a chauffeur to an elegant prostitute (Cathy Tyson) who eventually persuades him to help her to find her friend who had mysteriously disappeared. Set mainly in London with frequent scenes in Soho, this is a unique thriller, rather thematically reminiscent of Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Neil Jordan focuses here on the dynamics in the relationship between two diametrically opposed characters whose worlds and mentalities are totally alien to each other. The permanently electrified atmosphere in their relationship due to the mutual lack of tolerance and inability to communicate is often balanced by a latent respect and love which is delicately detectable by Jordan's sensitive camera. The effect of urban alienation in the relationships between people acquires here a different character in the desperate need for love in both characters. The lost friend is the only remedy for the prostitute's loneliness, while the divorced chauffeur seeks to confirm the love for his daughter.

Jordan's film, apart from its stylish brilliance which perfectly evokes the bleak estranged climate of London, contains incredibly committed performances which play skillfully with the audience's preferences of character. Michael Caine is superb as the corrupt crook who has got Hoskins under absolute control while Cathy Tyson is excellent as the melancholy but determined prostitute. However, the film belongs to Bob Hoskins who gives undoubtedly the finest performance of his career as the short, irritable but sensitive chauffeur. A truly wonderful film with remarkable acuteness and compassion!

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Touching, and sometimes dwelling, on issues of race, class, sexual identity, voyeurism, and the passing of time, Neil Jordan's 1986 film Mona Lisa might have seemed too busy for its own good had Jordan not sensibly wrapped it all in a brisk, involving thriller. Playing a low-level London gangster out of jail after a long stint, Bob Hoskins returns to a world that passed him by long ago. Alienated from his family and harboring outmoded notions of race—a consummate "little Englander," as Jordan puts it on the audio commentary he shares with Hoskins on this new DVD—Hoskins is given a job escorting an elegant, tough black prostitute (Cathy Tyson) on her rounds. Instructing him in the ways of dress and manners, she challenges his views while stirring his feelings. As he waits for her, he repeatedly listens to Nat King Cole's "Mona Lisa," but seems unable to connect its expression of ineffable desire to his own situation. He soon becomes drawn into Tyson's attempts to rescue an underage former colleague from an abusive pimp, and as Hoskins searches, Jordan offers a glimpse of the seamier part of London that could stand in for the darkness his protagonist (an essentially good man, however retrograde his views) tries to keep at bay. Acting as Virgil to Hoskins' Dante, Tyson effectively portrays a woman who has plumbed the depths of hell and emerged with most of her soul intact, even if she now has to take desperate measures to keep it that way. But Mona Lisa is Hoskins' film from start to finish. His character seems to have lost everything, yet finds he can potentially lose more, or redeem himself—if not from the past, then for the future. As a thriller, Jordan's film chillingly conveys the depths dug by one person's willingness to exploit the needs of another, his underworld London serving as a topography of greed and repackaged desire. His vision is most immediately reminiscent of from the hellish New York of Scorsese's Taxi Driver, but Hoskins provides the crucial difference, spiking the nihilism by emerging from the abyss with a glimmer of hope instead of a thousand-yard stare.

Mona Lisa (1986) Rachel Wilson-Dickson from BFI Screen Online

George, a career criminal just out of prison, is assigned as a driver to Simone, a black prostitute. Their initially frosty relationship develops into friendship, and George begins to fall in love. But Simone has other priorities. [Show full synopsis]

Co-written by Neil Jordan and David Leland, Mona Lisa is a study of love and loyalty in the brutal and self-serving criminal underworld. Both Bob Hoskins and writer/director Jordan are to be commended for making George, basically a thug to hire with typically 1970s prejudices, such a sympathetic lead. Michael Caine's amoral gangster Denny Mortwell is the human embodiment of a clinically ruthless, money-obsessed '80s mentality. George, by contrast, seems a relic of the '70s, struggling and failing to assimilate.

The atmosphere of the film is bittersweet, with the hopelessness and brutality of the landscape set against the belief that a beautiful romance is about to blossom between our protagonist and his Mona Lisa, Simone (Cathy Tyson). We are subtly forewarned of tragedy in the words of Nat King Cole's melancholic 1950s standard of the same name, played throughout (often in George's car). Yet, we continue to be lulled into a sense of false hope (along with poor George), possibly because we are so used to watching formulaic films with happy endings.

In her first title role, Tyson was greeted with critical acclaim, winning an Apex Scroll and and a Golden Globe nomination. Bob Hoskins won the 1986 Best Actor Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics, and the National Society of Film Critics as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Robbie Coltrane is well cast as George's eccentric best mate and there are cameos from Joe Brown and Kenny Baker.

Beside today's gritty urban realism, Mona Lisa is fairly clean and upbeat. Minor details such as casting a 30-year-old Kate Hardy as the 15-year-old Cathy contribute, as does an admirable refusal to exploit the sexual content. Instead the film focuses on dissecting the relationship between George and Simone, constantly surprising us with revelation upon revelation and ultimately offering a rumination on a wide variety of love - real, imagined, romantic, sexual, and platonic.

Mona Lisa Criterion essay by Neil Jordan, March 12, 2001

Mona Lisa (1986) - The Criterion Collection

Mona Lisa - Archive - Reverse Shot Nicolas Rapold, October 30, 2005

British neo-noir Part 1: Mona Lisa (1986) Andrew Spicer from Film Noir of the Week

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Images Movie Journal David Ng

DVD Times Bex, also seen here: Film @ The Digital Fix - Mona Lisa (Anchor Bay)

Mona Lisa | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

DVD Movie Central Michael Jacobson

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Flipside Movie Emporium Michael Scrutchin

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

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Mondo Digital

Britmovie

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Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

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DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

HIGH SPIRITS

Great Britain USA (99 mi) 1988

Doug Pratt's Laserdisc Review

Peter O'Toole's performance during the first ten minutes, mostly a telephone monolog, is hysterical, but the movie is all downhill from there. O'Toole even disappears for large stretches of time after the first half hour. The film's initial premise is promising. The bankrupt owner of a decrepit castle/hotel decides to capitalize on the establishment's state of disrepair by promoting it as a haunted house. This upsets the ghosts who actually do haunt the place. Unfortunately, the movie, although it has some impressive minor special effects, gorgeous sets, and a big-budget gloss, is as unorganized and silly as any haunted house comedy which comes to mind, and is especially disappointing since it starts out so well. (The film was reportedly chopped apart by the producers.) The disc gives the movie its best shot. The picture is classy and the stereo surround sound has luster.

Time Out

Written and directed by the man who gave you Angel, Company of Wolves and Mona Lisa, this dreadful movie carries on the love affair between Ireland and Hollywood with a vengeance, beginning as a tribute to '50s flea-bag theatre, continuing as a banal commercial for the joys of Celtic rural life, and ending as a cross between Beetlejuice, Cymbeline and The Quiet Man. O'Toole is the decrepit owner of decrepit Plunkett Castle, which he hopes to preserve from the hands of a rich American developer by renting it out to gullible, ghost-hunting rich Americans. Lo and behold, real ghosts emerge, time zones are crossed, silly buggers played, Hannah rattles her bones, and Guttenberg plays Guttenberg. The script seems a collection of loose ends and rewrites; the direction is deeply dispirited; and with the exception of O'Toole and a couple of engaging vignettes, it's a complete turkey.

Washington Post [Rita Kempley]

"High Spirits" is one of those things that go bump at the box office -- especially if you have money in it. Shades of "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir," this peculiar comedy looks at love after death. It's a forced, psychic sex farce for Banquo-erotics that touches on everything from petting to the poltergasm.

As ghastly as it is ghostly, this slow, low comedy marries Daryl Hannah's haunting charms with Steve Guttenberg's guileless spirituality. Boy meets ghoul, boy loses ghoul, boy gets ghoul ... Guttenberg, as the romantic San Diegan Jack, hopes to rekindle his marriage to the narcissistic Sharon (Beverly D'Angelo) with a second honeymoon at Ireland's Castle Plunkett. But Sharon, with "all the warmth of a penguin on an iceberg," shrugs off his advances.

Two hundred years before, Mary Plunkett (Hannah), a gentle soul, was murdered in the castle's bridal suite by her husband, Martin Brogan (Liam Neeson). Every night since then, the couple have reenacted the tragedy. Jack, having thrown back some ancient whiskey, sees them and, enchanted by Mary's beauty, steps in front of Martin's knife, a selfless act that breaks the grim spell.

Mary explains that Martin flew into a rage when she refused his advances. He thought there was someone else, but actually it was his foot odor problem. Apparently death cures foot odor, because through a series of plot twists too tedious to detail, Sharon becomes infatuated with Martin. The result: wraith swapping.

Peter O'Toole costars as Peter Plunkett, the bungling tippler who runs the castle. O'Toole, a graduate of the Hormel school of acting, gives a preposterous but boring performance. The supporting actors look stunned, as if they had been smacked in the forehead with loose masonry from the parapets or seen something truly frightening. Maybe it was O'Toole overacting, maybe it was the rushes.

Writer-director Neil Jordan shows no knack for comedy, nor is he as kinky as he was on "Mona Lisa," and kinky is what is called for. But he does make good use of the wind machine. It must have been a dark and stormy night when this idea came to mind.

Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Weinberg]

Imagine sitting in one of Ireland’s most amazing castles… while eight of the most obnoxious people on Earth scream in your ears. - Scott Weinberg

Have you ever tried to tell a joke and screwed it up royally? You’ll mention the second part first, and need to back up to start again. Halfway through, you may inadvertently blurt out the punch line while your listeners look on with polite annoyance… then you’ll giggle and mumble something about not being a very good joke-teller. Anyone who’s seen High Spirits can attest that filmmaker Neil Jordan is simply not a talented joke-teller. It’s rare to find a movie that looks so lush on the outside while housing such a vapid and mindless interior. Imagine sitting in one of Ireland’s most amazing castles… while eight of the most obnoxious people on Earth scream in your ears, and you’re close to understanding High Spirits.

Every respected film director has a movie or two they’d rather not talk about. These turkeys inevitably act as learning experiences for the filmmaker, while home audiences rediscover the movies and end up thinking “Oh my Lord. Neil Jordan directed this?” With an impressive resume listing titles like The End of the Affair, Michael Collins, and The Crying Game, Jordan’s known as a quality filmmaker… which is what makes sitting through High Spirits such a stunning experience. Aside from the glorious production design (by Anton Furst) and beautiful cinematography (courtesy of Alex Thomson), High Spirits most clearly resembles a disturbingly hollow combination of Ghostbusters, Police Academy, and every loud noise you’ve ever heard.

As the movie opens, we are offered Peter O’Toole, screaming into the phone in an effort to divulge all the necessary plot exposition: his centuries-old castle is about to be foreclosed upon – unless the beleaguered manager can turn some profit in a big hurry. Since the once-majestic castle has long since devolved into a state of stagnant disrepair, O’Toole devises a simplistic solution: advertise it as haunted and watch the tourists pour in. After a few cursory intros to the hotel’s mumble-mouthed staff, the movie promptly jerks over to…

…the American tourists. Let me know when this stuff starts to sound funny. We got Jennifer Tilly (Bride of Chucky) as a breathy sexpot, Peter Gallagher (American Beauty) as a horny seminary student, Martin Ferrero (Jurassic Park) as a parapsychologist, Beverly D’Angelo (Vacation) as the world’s most shrill and hateful wife, and Steve Guttenberg as the leading man.

Once all these shrieking ninnies are plopped in the castle, O’Toole breaks out his staff’s fake ghosts and nobody’s impressed. The visitors get more and more put out, yet are prevented from leaving when the real ghosts show up. If I told you that one ghost is played by Daryl Hannah (Splash), sporting the worst Irish accent ever attempted by an air-breathing mammal, would that make the movie sound better… or worse? How about if I mentioned Liam Neeson (long before Schindler’s List) as a massive ghost who gropes all the ladies and farts incessantly?

The only rose in this manure garden (aside from the visual touches) is Peter O’Toole, somehow managing to squeeze charm, timing, and wit into this stunningly bad effort. Offering a mildly drunken, always charming, and frequently verbose host, O’Toole makes his scenes easy to sit through. Unfortunately, these are few and far between. High Spirits truly is one of those movies that has you scratching your head, thinking “Who thought THIS was a good idea?” Word from the historical dustbin tells us that High Spirits was reshaped and essentially butchered by its studio prior to its release, but let’s not use that as an excuse; at 97 minutes this movie is atrocious – extra footage would only make things worse.

High Spirits - Archive - Reverse Shot Leah Churner, October 31, 2005

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

The New York Times (Janet Maslin)

WE’RE NO ANGELS

USA (101 mi) 1989 ‘Scope

Time Out

Those who wrote off Neil Jordan as a director of comedy after High Spirits will have to think again. His first American film, scripted by David Mamet, is a nicely paced comedy of errors in which two escaped convicts, Ned (De Niro) and Jim (Penn) are mistaken for priests. The prison opening - a souped-up pastiche of old Warner Bros big-house movies, with the late Ray McAnally as the slavering, sadistic warden - is such a nightmare setting that you have to laugh. On the run, baying hounds on their trail, Ned and Jim take refuge in a monastery. Their only chance of getting across the border into Canada lies with the annual procession of monks bearing their miracle-working shrine across the bridge. Ned falls for sluttish Molly (Moore), mother of a deaf-and-dumb child, Jim for religion. De Niro's gift for pantomime, glimpsed in his plumber for Brazil, is a non-stop bombardment of mugging on the silent screen scale. There isn't much left for Penn, which is okay by me. Very entertaining.

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

Only a top-of-the-line Hollywood affair could squander as much big-name talent as is wasted in "We're No Angels." Everyone associated with the film -- actors Robert De Niro and Sean Penn, screenwriter David Mamet, director Neil Jordan, cinematographer Philippe Rousselot -- brings respectable credentials to the project, but it's inconceivable that any of them could be happy with the results. Not always, it seems, does talent count for something.

If we were inclined to the positive side, we could say at least that the stars look fit, that Jordan brings some muscularity to his direction (especially in the opening scenes), and that Rousselot's images have an uncanny, crystalline beauty.

But that's it, that's all, that's the whole show.

The film, which bears some scant resemblance to the 1955 Humphrey Bogart picture of the same name about a trio of escaped convicts, seems to wobble somewhere between a star-frolic -- a homage to frivolous Hollywood escapism -- and something with more bite, something more serious, something, well, worthy of having David Mamet's name attached to it.

But this "We're No Angels" isn't funny and it isn't smart -- it's a dumb show, almost literally, in fact. So few lines have been written for these actors that you almost believe that the script intentionally parodies their renowned inarticulateness. In scene after scene, they communicate in grimaces, shrugs, hand signals, eyebrow business. It's like being trapped in some Method hell.

The story, which has been changed in this version from three convicts to two, comes to a dead stop almost before it has even started. After escaping from prison, the convicts hole up in a Catholic monastery, where they are taken for a pair of noted priests, but virtually none of the comic possibilities of this loaded situation are explored. Nor is there much suspense in their repeated, unfunny attempts to make it across the Canadian border, which is located close to the monastery, before prison officials catch up with them.

In interviews, Mamet rails against Hollywood and the compromises it forces on him, but what defense can he have for these stale jokes and missed opportunities? This cannot be answered with a shrug. This mess he made himself.

Apollo Movie Guide [Jamie Gillies]

This, one of the most disappointing films of the 1980s, was a dud upon its release and has not held up well at all. It had all the makings of a great film, yet fails to deliver much of anything except a tedious plot, non-comedic actors trying for laughs and haphazard direction by the usually reliable Neil Jordan. The story involves two escaped convicts, played by Robert De Niro (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) and Sean Penn (Dead Man Walking, Mystic River, 21 Grams), who pretend to be priests in order to hide out from the authorities and plan their escape across the Canadian border. Also in the mix are angry prison guards, kindly but stern priests, and a feisty woman in despair.

The first problem with this movie is its screenplay, which was written by David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, Spartan) and very loosely based on the 1955 film We’re No Angels, starring Humphrey Bogart as one of three escaped cons from Devil’s Island. Mamet is out of his element with a style of dialogue that isn’t his own. The lines delivered by the stars often sound forced and contrived. Mamet may understand the priesthood better than the three leads and he seems to get the correct tone inside the church but in attempting dialogue for convicts, most viewers will probably be rolling their eyes.

But Mamet is not the only one to blame. Jordan, whose independent dramas (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game) are brilliant, does not seem at home with this kind of material. When he should be doing broad comedy, the film instead gets bogged down with a ridiculous romantic subplot, with Demi Moore in her first of many poor film appearances. Jordan also goes for character development when there should be action. The bottom line is that it just does not work in many places.

As for De Niro and Penn, what an incredible miscalculation. De Niro has been in his fair share of dogs but Penn has had a great track record, save for Shanghai Surprise, so it is surprising to see poor performances from both of them. De Niro has the gruff edge for his character, but even he seems out of place among first the criminals, then the priests, and even with Moore, a mismatched onscreen couple if ever there was one. Penn, on the other hand, develops his character as a quiet, slightly slow-witted shell of a man. It is nowhere near his best performance but he acts circles around De Niro.

Perhaps the strongest part of the film is the fabulous cinematography of Philippe Rousselot. Brilliant at capturing natural states, as he did in Hope and Glory and A River Runs Through It, Rousselot seems to instinctively know this American-Canadian northeast border town. Anyone who has been there in the dead of winter knows the dark moods and the ice. Almost like with a classic Ingmar Bergman film, Rousselot, like Sven Nykvist (Bergman’s cinematographer), captures the winter perfectly. It is a shame that such awe-inspiring images are interrupted by such a lame script and poor acting.

My major complaint about We’re No Angels is that it could have been great. Removing the comedy and recasting the film as a taut bordertown drama would have fit better. The odd thing is that the following year, Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane teamed up for a far more effective comedy about escaped cons seeking refuge as men of the cloth. Of course, that was Nuns On The Run. Penn fans should view this once but the rest should probably skip this one.

We're No Angels / Not I - Archive - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert, November 1, 2005

DVD Talk (Matthew Millheiser)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Brian Calhoun)

Fulvue Drive-in Nicholas Sheffo

Movie Vault [John Ulmer]

DVD Verdict (Steve Evans)

Filmtracks (Christian Clemmensen) a soundtrack review

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

THE MIRACLE

Great Britain Ireland (97 mi) 1991

Time Out

In the small, nun-swept Irish seaside town of Bray, teenage would-be writers Rose (Pilkington) and Jimmy (Byrne) - the latter enjoying a strangely fraternal relationship with his saxophonist Dad (McCann), an alcoholic since his wife died before Jimmy could get to know her - spend their time speculating about the lives of the townsfolk. But only when glamorous American actress Renee (D'Angelo) turns up, do they really enter a world of romance and mystery, with Jimmy determining to seduce the older woman. But why is she holding back, and what is her interest in Jimmy's dad? Back on home ground after his spectacularly poor stabs at the American market, Jordan throws together, with some success, quite a few themes in this small-scale drama: the importance of memory, the problematically varied nature of love, issues of faith, and the relationship between reality, desire and literature. Although the film is overly literary in its use of symbolism and analogy, the performances are direct and affecting (D'Angelo, Byrne and Pilkington especially), and Jordan's affection for both characters and milieu is conspicuous throughout.

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten)

After his big-time, American-made film (the painfully unfunny comedy We're No Angels) went bust, director Jordan returned to his Irish seaside hometown of Bray to regroup. The result is this film, The Miracle (which Jordan also wrote) -- a delightful, disarming, whimsical and classically dramatic story. With it, he returns to the narrative pitch and revisionist storytelling that he earlier displayed in films such as Mona Lisa and The Company of Wolves, as well as the playful fantasy that never quite succeeded in High Spirits. Jimmy (Byrne) and Rose (Pilkington) are two teenagers who spend their summer vacation in this Irish seaside resort watching the town's various inhabitants while making up stories about them. These teens are precocious and ultra-literary; everything is fodder for their romantic plot lines of unrequited love and fantasy relationships. They record their favorite descriptions in a journal. Their stage is the waterfront boardwalk with its endless stream of passing characters and changing backdrops of fish & chip joints, dance halls, funhouse mirrors and musical theater shows. And then...the circus comes to town. Also arriving in town is Renee (D'Angelo), a mystery woman with whom the much younger Jimmy is smitten. Their mutual cat and mouse game ultimately crescendos into a classicly perverse Oedipal love knot. Meanwhile, Rose, who's really smitten with her best companion Jimmy, occupies herself with “humanizing” the circus's rough and ready animal trainer. I'm afraid this description doesn't really do justice to the dream-like charm and picture-perfect integrity of The Miracle. Its blend of whimsy and realism is unusual and (most of the time) works. The teenagers are played by novice performers and they manage to get that adolescent anomie and adult-beyond-their-years expressiveness just right. And D'Angelo, as always, is a captivating pleasure to watch and second-guess. And the elephants... (remember the circus is in town). The Miracle may have one of the best uses of elephants in a film (take my word for it, I happen to be connoisseur of this specialty category). And what does it mean that D'Angelo is in not one, but two of my all-time favorite “best use of an elephant” movies? You tell me.

Washington Post [Rita Kempley]

There's an aimless lyricism about "The Miracle," a dreamy Irish beach movie whose young characters float through summer vacation like driftwood on the tide -- getting everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Lushly written and gently directed by the off-center Neil Jordan, the film looks through dark glasses at the teenage hero's glamorously perilous coming of age.

Young talents Niall Byrne and Lorraine Pilkington play Jimmy and Rose, best friends who spend their days on the cobbled streets, foggy palisades and "nun-swept piers" of Bray, Ireland. Possessed of a rich imagination and a gift of gab, Rose has drawn Jimmy into a game of making up stories about the locals and tourists in the seaside town. They are wildly romantic fictions, tales of unrequited love, murdered husbands and other purple passions.

Then one day their fanciful notions become tangled in the even more extraordinary realities of a melodrama started before these dramatists manque were born. It all begins with the entrance of a mysterious blonde, Rene (Beverly D'Angelo), a plush beauty who might have walked, heels clicking authoritatively, out of a French film noir. Against a landscape crowded with everyday Celts, Rene seems as magical as the mermaid in Bill Forsyth's "Local Hero." Jimmy, the hormones buzzing through his body like honey-starved bees, cannot resist pursuing the older woman.

"The trouble with women of a certain age is that they're of a certain age," observes Rose, who is jealous of Jimmy's growing obsession with Rene. She tries to distract him from his pursuit by making a play for a swarthy young lion tamer, headliner in a recently arrived and tattered circus. As worldly as a middle-aged filmmaker, Rose normally isn't given to such girlish ploys. She is a delightfully wise creature, but she is too obviously Jordan's mouthpiece.

Jimmy, the son of an alcoholic widower (Donal McCann), plays a saxophone in his father's tarnished dance band, while elderly tourists seriously tango into the early evening to "Hernando's Hideaway." The motherless boy serves as father of the man, a sweetly inept musician who still mourns his late wife. Only he has lied to his son, and fate has a way of catching up with liars, if only in fiction.

The relationship between McCann, known here for his work in "The Dead," and the debuting Byrne is a wonderfully persuasive, inarticulate love. In its way, it is as desperately urgent as the attraction between Byrne and D'Angelo, whose beauty has never been so stunningly showcased. But then Jordan has owed her one since casting her in the fiasco "High Spirits."

Jordan, who has been floundering since "Mona Lisa," comes back to his sandy roots in "The Miracle," its Gaelic mysticism seasoned with salt air. A magic surrealist like Forsyth, Jordan is best in the British Isles, where an eerie animism seems to creep into his works and the land itself becomes a dramatic force. Photographed by Philippe Rousselot, the film is hazily pretty, but since Jordan was a novelist before he became a filmmaker, language is allowed its own enchantments. That in itself is miraculous.

Edwin Jahiel

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THE CRYING GAME

Great Britain (112 mi) 1992 ‘Scope

Time Out

Drunk at a South Armagh fairground, black British soldier Jody (Whitaker) is abducted by the IRA and held hostage on a farm. His jailer Fergus (Rea) comes to respect and understand his prisoner, and after an army raid, heads for London to seek out Jody's lover, hairdresser and chanteuse Dil (Davidson)... It's perhaps surprising that Jordan's thriller hangs together at all. After the opening carnival scene, it virtually turns into a statically theatrical two-hander; then, when Fergus reaches London, both locations and focus become more diffuse as the narrative steadily winds itself up for a bloody finale. There's a problem not only in the clumsy structure, but in Jordan's determination to keep surprising us with twists. Even though the whole is never more than the sum of its parts, the film does work, raises a plethora of questions concerning loyalty, violence and the nature of desire, and is in some respects a summation of the various themes that have emerged from Jordan's work.

The Crying Game Terrence Rafferty from the New Yorker

This amazing new movie by the Irish writer and director Neil Jordan ("Mona Lisa," "The Miracle") has the sure grip and the unstoppable momentum of a dream. Jordan tells the story of Fergus (Stephen Rea), a troubled I.R.A. gunman who undergoes a thorough emotional metamorphosis, and he makes the hero's change of heart moving and persuasive; the film inspires an irrational sort of trust, a willing suspension of something deeper and more fundamental than disbelief. The script is full of reversals and abrupt dislocations and, halfway through, the movie springs a huge, jaw-dropping surprise. Disorienting us isn't the ultimate aim of Jordan's artistic strategy, though; he jars us out of our accustomed responses to prepare us for the purer, more penetrating ones he really wants from us. The picture is a contemporary romantic thriller whose values are, in the best sense, medieval. Every startling twist in the plot functions as a trial for the hero; and in the end Fergus, having come through the fires of battle and through enchantments that alter the appearance of the familiar world, achieves a knightly grace. But you're not likely to think of the film's mythic overtones while you're watching it. The story is so unusual and so involving, and Jordan's direction is so envelopingly sensuous, that you allow the movie simply to carry you along. It's a splendid entertainment—an elating, charmed sprint through all sorts of contemporary terrors. Also with Forest Whitaker, Miranda Richardson, Jim Broadbent, Adrian Dunbar, and a newcomer named Jaye Davidson, who is astonishing.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Mark Radice]

At a South Armagh fair Jody (Forest Whitaker) is kidnapped by the IRA, having been tricked while drunk, and taken away to a rural secluded hideout. There, one of his captors, Fergus (Stephen Rea), forms an unlikely friendship with him while watching over him, even though he's going to have to execute him when/if the time comes. Jody asks Fergus to go to London to see his lover, Dil (Jaye Davidson), which Fergus duly does, trying to escape his IRA background. However, inevitably, his past catches up with him and the film hurtles on towards its bloody finale.

A huge money-earner in the States (also winning the Best Original Screenplay Oscar), The Crying Game does have weaknesses amongst its strengths. Personally, I found it hard to accept that the IRA would in fact operate in some of the ways portrayed in the film, especially in so much as Fergus making friends with his hostage. Realism and credible plot lines are all too often sacrificed to give the film extra drama and suspense as Neil Jordan conjures up another twist to spice up the film. However the photography is excellent, as are the performances, especially Rea's and Davidson's, who create an almost improbable love story out of their bizarre (to say the least) situation. Also, a British film which doesn't resort to being yet another period piece costume drama, as per usual, is a rare thing, and such fllmmaking can only be applauded. If you haven't seen the film before don't let anyone who has tell you about the huge twists in it. If you have, the twists probably become even more enjoyable and definitely aid the coherence of the film in a second viewing.

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

From the opening notes of Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a Woman," Neil Jordan's "The Crying Game" ventures into such exquisitely unique territory that you feel giddy from the pleasure of being allowed to travel along.

The film -- which is one of the most challenging, surprising films of the year -- begins at an Irish fairground, where a working-class English soldier named Jody (played by the great young American actor Forest Whitaker) is seduced by a foxy member of an IRA group (Miranda Richardson) and then kidnapped by her colleagues as a hostage to be exchanged with the British for one of their own.

Immediately, the prisoner strikes up a desperate relationship with his primary guard, Fergus (Stephen Rea), a dedicated but rather softhearted Irish rebel who can't help but respond emotionally to his flirtatious enemy, who at best guess has about 24 hours to live. Fergus is a man with a simple philosophy of life; he's a realist and a romantic cynic, something like the tough but honorable antiheroes Bogart used to play, and who does what he has to do -- even if it means killing Jody -- but not without conscience or humanity.

During those 24 or so hours, the two men share stories and become friends. They become, in fact, something more, like soul mates, so that when the prisoner is dispatched, Fergus takes up his life, traveling to London and tracking down Jody's girlfriend, Dil (Jaye Davidson), whose picture he had seen in the dead man's wallet. Compelled by motives that are not entirely clear (even to himself), Fergus begins to court and then fall in love with Dil.

The lovers couldn't be more star-crossed. (The producers have asked the press not to reveal just how the couple are at odds.) Suffice it to say there are definite problems, but Jordan's touch is so gracefully gentle that, against all odds, we believe in the couple's continuing relationship. In doing so, Jordan and his cast discover emotional states that I've never witnessed on the movie screen before -- delicate, ambiguous, sometimes inscrutable emotions that lift "The Crying Game" far above its thriller genre.

Just what is it about? The bartender at the Metro, the club where Jody and Dil used to go, sums it up best when he shouts out the rhetorical question, "Who knows the secrets of the human heart?" That's Jordan's turf here, his lab. And "The Crying Game" is his boldest, richest work yet. From the performances by Rea, Davidson and Whitaker, to Jordan's endlessly original script, to Anne Dudley's melancholy score, and Lyle Lovett's closing rendition of "Stand by Your Man," "The Crying Game" enthralls and amazes us. It deserves to be called great.

The Crying Game - Archive - Reverse Shot Chris Wisniewski, November 3, 2005

"The Crying Game" by Robert M. Payne - Jump Cut Crossed Lines, June 1994

"The Crying Game" by Aspasia Kotsopoulos and ... - Jump Cut Gender, Genre, and “Postfeminism,” by Aspasia Kotsopoulos and Josephine Mills from Jump Cut, June 1994

DVD Times Alex Hewison, also seen here: The Crying Game CE | Film at The Digital Fix

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The Crying Game: Special Edition | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

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INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE: THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES

USA (123 mi) 1994

Time Out

Contemporary San Francisco - Louis de Pointe du Lac (Pitt) tells a journalist (Slater) the strange details of his life: how two centuries earlier he was attacked by the degenerate vampire Lestat (Cruise); how he rejected his mentor's advice by feeding on rats and poodles; how the pair 'adopted' a young orphan, Claudia (Dunst), whose thirst for blood outstripped even Lestat's; how their individual inclinations and ethical codes gave rise to lethal tensions between the various members of this bizarre, undead 'family'; and so on. For all its ambitions and visual flair, Jordan's adaptation of Anne Rice's novel is a disappointment. It's not only not scary, it's also dull and conventional. True, the emphasis on Dante Ferretti's lavish production design makes for some heavy dollops of 'atmosphere'; true, too, that the acting is adequate. The major problem lies with Rice's own script which is dramatically repetitive and philosophically banal. Profoundly unremarkable

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Rarely, if ever, has so little (right) been done with so much. Admittedly they were handicapped right off the bat by basing it on the literary work of Anne Rice, but they should have expected that when they hired her to write a screenplay based on her novel. Plus, they could have just made it up as they went along once they got on the set. No one could sound anything but idiotic reading those narratives, unless maybe it was John Belushi reading them in a Russian accent occasionally interrupted by staccato Irish ululations. Anyway Brad Pitt tries to do it with a straight face, and no one sensible will ever think the better of him for it. All-time for the chicks casting, but instead of charm and looks they get Tom Cruise and Antonio Banderas battling for the title of all-time dumbest wig. Cruise wins, without question, in his puffy blond eclaire of a bouffant. To make matters worse for any warm-blooded ladies in the audience Cruise, Pitt, and Banderas all act more than a little bit gay. To make matters still worse they act gay without charm, elegance, or credibility of any sort; 12 year old Kirsten Dunst (who also gets soaked with a ridiculous 'do) acts circles around all of them and eventually becomes so disgusted with the unspeakably ineffectual Cruise that she kills the star in a radical effort to improve the picture. Stephen Rea then starts putting vampire people out of their misery to the same purpose, but he can do little for the audience; the damage is long since done. Laure Marsac briefly electrifies the stage under highly exploitative circumstances, but at that point you're ready for anything that isn't Cruise or Pitt waxing philosophical in the passionate monotone of an A student collapsing under the moral avalanche of receiving a B in basket weaving. How do you conclude things perfectly? With Guns N' Roses, probably the best band in the world at the time, performing an incomprehensibly uncreative, inane, inappropriate and unnecessary cover of "Sympathy for the Devil." Now, if Axl had improvised lyrics and started yelling about having sympathy for Cruise-he needed the cash to improve his religious standing, and sympathy for Pitt-he was looking for a big break, and sympathy for Rice-she's obviously got problems...we could have at least been left with a knowing smile.

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)

I doubt I will ever understand the nation's fascination with Mr. Tom Cruise. He is only a passable actor with a great smile. Nothing more. As long as he plays himself, he does just fine, but he is not the sort of actor who can disappear into a role – no matter what his people tell him. This film is a prime example of how a great story is ruined by casting.

Now before you think I hold a grudge against him, I'll give you 3 reasons why he was not right for the role of Lestat. 1) Too old. Lestat was made a vampire when he was 19-years-old. Cruise was over 30 when he made the movie and though has kept his "boyish" good looks, no one can tell me he looks that young. 2) Lestat was an aristocratic-looking European. Even with a blond wig, and an accent, Cruise is all-american, all the way. There's nothing hoi-polloi about him. 3) Lestat was both mischievous and menacing. One bad day of PMS and I could crush Cruise where he stands. He just doesn't exude evil to me. I wasn't scared of him. Period. In the novel, despite his impish sense of humor, Lestat is not a creature to be trifled with. He is very, very scary.

As one can probably guess, the film is about vampires. It's an intricate and enticing tale, told by Louis (Pitt) to a young reporter (Slater). He's been wandering the world for over 150 years and he's desperate to unburden his soul. Instead of dying like he wished, Louis was made into a vampire, forced to feed on the blood of others by the vampire Lestat (Cruise), a creature far older than even he. Louis didn't ask for this "gift." He has tried to make the best of his new life, but Lestat is not the most patient and kind of teachers. They try to settle down, becoming companions of a sort, but their ideas about life and death are worlds apart.

To keep the peace, Lestat "gives" Louis a daughter, turning a sick little girl named Claudia (Dunst) into one of their own.She initially brings then together, however, as time goes on her anger at being trapped for eternity as a child brings dissension into their ranks. How could Lestat have does this too her? As they move about the Earth, they meet up with other vampires, ones who contradict Lestat's version of the world. Battles are fought, lives are lost, in Lestat's bid for control. In the end, all Louis is left with is his unending thirst for human blood and a guilty soul that won't let him rest.

I know plenty of people who refused to see the film because of the casting of Cruise as Lestat. I almost passed myself. However, Anne Rice created an amazing world and I really wanted to see it brought to life. Cruise isn't the best Lestat, however, I don't know any young actor out there who could have done better. His performance doesn't capture the essence of this being, but he isn't completely awful either. Now if you haven't read the book, I'm sure Tom's turn will be fine with you. Brad Pitt is dead on as Louis. There are complaints he's too whiny, but that's exactly how his character was written. Louis was not a happy vampire. He doesn't choose this life. Sure, he could end it by watching the sun rise, but not many of us would choose that option. Eternity as a creature of the night has to be better than the alternative, right? Kirsten Dunst was amazing. She truly captures the frustration and maturity of this girl who's womanhood has been taken away. Plus, she's just damn scary. There was no doubt in my mind after seeing this performance that she was going to have quite a career.

For the most part, INTERVIEW is a well-done adaptation. The mood, music and set design are everything a fan of the series could hope for. It makes you believe vampires truly exist. That one day, when you least expect it, your life will be drained away. Some liberties are taken with the story, that may be confusing for the uninitiated, but Jordan does a fairly good job bringing this lengthy novel to the screen. It's just too bad we don't get the right Lestat. It's not really his version of events – Lestat's side is told in the second book – but he does play a pivotal role. Oh well, I guess I can always reread the novel. If you want an idea of what this series is about and you don't dislike the leads, then this is a film you should see. Anne Rice is a master storyteller, when reined in, and this is one of her best. The books are better, but this version is enjoyable enough.

Washington Post [Rita Kempley]

Hollywood heartthrobs flex their corpuscles for naught in "Interview With the Vampire," the disappointing adaptation of Anne Rice's succulent 1976 novel. Passionately anticipated and much ballyhooed, the film, alas, is little more than a foppish, fang de siecle costume drama. Its pulse barely registers.

Fans of Rice's sanguine bestseller will find the narrative mostly intact, and that is one of the movie's chief problems. The screenplay, which Rice carved from her own florid prose, contains far more story than a two-hour movie can hold. Like a plant strangled by its own roots, the picture is virtually plot-bound. And yet, those unfamiliar with the book may find that she's left out information crucial to understanding the characters' behavior.

Though set primarily in antebellum New Orleans, the film opens in modern San Francisco -- its streets, from director Neil Jordan's perspective, like blood vessels flowing with people. The camera plunges into the stream, in a short, fantastic voyage that ends in a shadowy room where a chain-smoking young reporter (Christian Slater) nervously begins his interview with the 200-year-old Louis.

Brad Pitt has the unenviable chore of playing the whiner Louis, a Creole planter who said goodbye to the sun in the late 1700s and has been brooding about it ever since. He was grieving over the death of his wife and daughter (his saintly brother in the book) when he attracted the vampire Lestat (Tom Cruise), a world-weary immortal who sees Louis not only as dinner but as a potential companion.

In the first of many flashbacks, Lestat offers the comely young planter a choice between a terminal hickey and immortal undeath. Louis picks Door No. 2 and we never hear the last of it.

For all the fuss about Cruise playing Lestat, it's the chubby-cheeked Pitt who is miscast. Cruise does not embody the monstrously evil Lestat of the book, nor does he turn him into a fangless, swashbuckling Top Gum. Instead, Cruise brings a wicked wit to the ghoulish role, but be warned that there's nothing romantic about his lust for blood -- though he has a nasty habit of playing with his food.

Louis cannot adapt to his mentor's sick games and initially resists human prey, attempting to survive on the blood of rats, chickens and a couple of unfortunate toy poodles. Taunted by Lestat for denying his desires, Louis lectures his companion on the nature of evil and other metaphysical topics applicable to undeadness. When not thus engaged, he mopes about their opulent town house resenting Lestat for turning him into a fiend.

Lestat decides to cheer up Louis by giving him a "daughter," Claudia (the extraordinary Kirsten Dunst), a cherubic child whose upbringing consumes her "daddies." Played for laughs, the film's second act might as well be "Two Men and an Undead Baby." But eventually Claudia comes to resent Lestat for condemning her to an eternity in a little girl's body.

All good things must come to an end, and the little family breaks apart in a climactic moment that leads to the burning of New Orleans, a showcase for the talents of the director, cinematographer Philippe Rousselot and production designer Dante Ferretti.

From this point, the story chronicles Louis's search for others of his kind in Europe, a quest that takes him and Claudia to Paris where they encounter a clan of catacomb-dwelling actor-vampires. But here, the story clots. Louis has long since given up on himself and his kind, and he rejects mentoring offered to him by long-haired Euro-vamp Armand (Antonio Banderas). Banderas is the movie's sexiest vampire -- if this veiny, waxen-skinned species can be considered sexy. Though they do not practice intercourse as such, they go for all types: A, B, AB or O.

Interview with the Vampire - Archive - Reverse Shot Kristi Mitsuda, November 4, 2005

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MICHAEL COLLINS

Great Britain Ireland USA (133 mi) 1996

Time Out

Writer/director Jordan's film tracing the career of Irish Republican hero Michael Collins, from the Easter Rising to his death in 1922, depicts a man whose belief in violence is finally transformed by the horrors of civil war into a desire for peace. It's a dense, stirring tale, with Collins (Neeson) under threat from both the English and his compatriots. Is Ned Broy (Rea) a spy or an ally working from within Dublin Castle? How serious is his split with Eamon De Valera (Rickman), who prefers to fight on for a Republic than settle temporarily for the Free State brokered by Collins? And what of bosom pal Harry Boland (Quinn), who feels personally betrayed when his girl Kitty (Roberts) transfers her affections to Collins? This is Jordan's most ambitious and satisfying movie a thriller with a real sense of scale, pace, menace and moral import. With the exception of Rickman's awesomely mannered De Valera, the performances are top notch (even Roberts makes a decent stab at the romantic interest, incarnating the ideological fall-out between Collins and Boland), while Chris Menges' camerawork and Anthony Pratt's designs perfectly evoke a country falling apart with no one, it seems, able to halt the tragedy.

Cinematter (Matt Williams)

Michael Collins is a brilliant epic tale whose implications are felt even today. Liam Neeson stars as Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary in the early 20th century. After a series of unsuccessful conventional warfare attacks, the Irish Republican Army, under Collins' instruction, begins to learn the unconventional tactics of modern guerilla warfare. However, will this dramatic step, crucial to Collins' fight for a free republic at the time, end up hurting him in the long run? Meanwhile, he has to deal with his two friends: President of the Irish Republic Eamon De Valera (Alan Rickman), who has the political smarts that Collins lacks, and who resents the limelight that Collins' actions steal. And Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn), Collins' right-hand man, but both love the same woman, Kitty Kiernan (Julia Roberts). Liam Neeson does a superb job as the title character who must come to terms with the pandora's box he opened. The supporting cast is also excellent, particularly Alan Rickman as De Valera. Kitty Kiernan is the only character that can't quite stand on her own, for she's used more as a plot device than as a person. Director Neil Jordan manages to hit all the right buttons as he guides this epic to fruition. My only qualm with Michael Collins is that it jumps a bit to hastily into the middle of the action. There's very little historical background given to the film, and some issues (particularly the role of religion) are barely touched upon. Those without knowledge of these particular times and events may get lost at times, and no doubt could have used a larger perspective on the conflict. However, that aside, Michael Collins is an amazing work, examining an interesting subject, and pulling it off masterfully.

DVD Times Alexander Larman, also seen here: Michael Collins | Film at The Digital Fix

'It is my considered opinion that the greatness of Michael Collins will be recorded in the fullness of time...and that this will happen at my expense.'

—Eamonn de Valera, 1962

At the end of every decade, amongst all the 'best of' lists, there are inevitably a few lists that feature 'most underrated' films of the year, decade or century. However, most films that make these lists are small, arthouse films, or alternatively films that have later been revisited on video and DVD. However, Michael Collins did not feature on these lists, being virtually forgotten about since its release, given its blend of controversial subject matter and utter refusal to pander to convention. However, it is also one of the finest films of the decade, and arguably Neil Jordan's best yet (which for a man who has directed End of the Affair, The Butcher Boy, The Company of Wolves, Angel, The Crying Game and Mona Lisa is no mean feat!)

The 'basic' plot is an account of Michael Collins' (Neeson) life from 1916-1920 or thereabouts, and concerns his efforts to free Ireland from the tyranny of British oppression, along with his best friend Harry Boland (Quinn) and an Irish double agent Ned Broy (Rea), but frustrated by the nominal President of Ireland Eamonn de Valera (Rickman) and the British secret service, led by Soames (Dance). There's also a love triangle between Collins, Boland and Kitty Kelley (Roberts, miscast), which does little to enhance the film, but luckily doesn't damage it either.

Neil Jordan has stated 'I will never make a more important film', and in many ways it's possible to agree with his self-assessment. The film is one of the very few 'epic' films that manages to have a convincing blend of the personal and the universal, contrasting Collins' own charisma and spirit with that of the Irish people as a whole. However, Jordan manages to move away from the 'Braveheart' cliches of leaders giving stirring speeches to the populace; there is only one scene like that early in the film, apart from a brief scene of de Valera ranting, with the focus instead being on the sheer horror of the British occupation of Ireland, which could charitably be compared to Nazism, if the film is to be believed. The film is actually remarkably accurate historically in its depiction of British atrocities, with the most infamous scene- a massacre at a football ground- a toned-down version of a real-life event, rather than a sensationalised bloodbath.

Much of the reason why the film is so good is Jordan's script. He's an almost unique director in that his writing is as strong as his direction, meaning that the dialogue in his films doesn't sound at all clunky or anachronistic. He eschews grandstanding speeches for his characters, but manages, with subtle nuances in both dialogue and setting, to hint at depths far greater than are normally explored in film. An obvious example is the final 15 minutes or so of the film, where Jordan makes several interesting artistic decisions with historical fact, but doesn't attempt to bludgeon the audience, instead introducing an element of ambiguity which is entirely in keeping with the rest of the film.

The performances are mostly terrific. Neeson has never been better than as Collins, managing to make him both charming and dangerous; it helps that he bears a resemblance to the real Collins, making his portrayal feel far more realistic than simply an 'impersonation.' Rickman is also good as de Valera, although his Irish accent does sound rather more RSC than Rosenkillen, and Rea (who has appeared in eight films for Jordan so far) is his usual dependable self as Broy. The weakest performances come, unsurprisingly, from the two American actors; Quinn manages to convey much of Boland's decency and honour but isn't helped by a weak accent, and Roberts is little more than set dressing, with only one moment at the end of the film that showcases her talents.

This isn't the sort of film for action film fanatics, anyone who loathes the idea of Irish independence of any sort, or anyone who doesn't like any of Neil Jordan's films for any reason. It's an unapologetically adult film in themes and execution, and doesn't make any sort of concession for that. As I stated above, I believe it to be one of the greatest films of the 1990s; however, its comparative failure at the box office means that re-evaluation, sadly, looks pretty unlikely.

Michael Collins - Archive - Reverse Shot Michael Joshua Rowin, November 5, 2005

Michael Collins - Archive - Reverse Shot Jeannette Catsoulis, November 5, 2005

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The Butcher Boy Movie Review & Film Summary (1998) | Roger Ebert

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THE BUTCHER BOY

Ireland USA (110 mi) 1997

Time Out

Set in an Irish town in the early '60s, Jordan's film of Patrick McCabe's novel centres on troubled teen Francie Brady (Owens), a lippy lad who withdraws from family strife - dad (Rea) is almost permanently drunk, mum (O'Sullivan) sliding towards insanity - into fantasies inspired by comics, sci-fi movies and TV shows, and into blood brother pacts with best pal Joe (Boyle). His renown as an ill-mannered hothead, however, is such that he's denied access to his friend. Moreover, after a spell in a church-run remand home, he returns to find his family in tatters. This consistently surprising, even shocking work moves from sly social comedy to something more darkly disturbing as Francie's sense of control begins to crumble. Though the movie sometimes looks as if the authentic Irish wit, colour and blarney has been filtered through the sensibility of a Buñuel or Polanski, Jordan never allows the surreal/expressionist aspects to dominate

All Movie Guide [Jason Clark]

Recalling Stanley Kubrick's powerful 1973 film A Clockwork Orange in its dissection of madness and society's desire to cure it, this hallucinatory, blackly comic feature by the always-provocative Neil Jordan manages to incorporate a variety of mood shifts and subtle commentary in one fully-realized piece of work. Its young star, the gifted Eamonn Owens, gives a finely-etched portrayal of young derangement (which recalls Malcolm McDowell in the aforementioned Kubrick film), and Jordan's signature touches keep the film's absurdist -- yet somehow believable -- execution constantly engaging. Criticized in some circles as a clever but cold work, the film is decidedly not for all tastes, especially in its comically bemused take on its lead character's bizarre behavior. However, Jordan's auspicious handling of such tricky material transcends such quibbles, and provides rewarding entertainment for those willing to go along with it.

Daphne Merkin from The New Yorker (link lost):

Neil Jordan's daring new film, adapted from the novel by Patrick McCabe and co-written by the two of them, moves with a nervous energy that suggests the vivid workings of the well-populated imagination of twelve-year-old Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens). The film is set in a bleak, gossip-ridden Northern Irish town in the early sixties. Francie's parents are at each other's throats: his father (Stephen Rea) is a drunkard and his mother (Aisling O'Sullivan) is a fragile creature who takes "tablets" in order to cope. Francie's growing sense of humiliation and outrage is focussed on Mrs. Nugent (Fiona Shaw), the town snob, who personifies all the unfairness and cruelty of Francie's life. Owens, with his thatch of red hair and shining eyes, makes Francie's boyish zest as real as his pain, and Shaw plays his nemesis with great subtlety—as a woman lost in her own disdain. This extraordinary film is a reminder that childhood is not the cutesy-pie concoction American filmmakers would have it be.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

The early cut from the first time we see eternally sloshed Stephen Rea to a commentary on the hydrogen bomb is the declaration of whimsical iconoclasm. Rea is perfect, the greatness of his face in the scenes where he's too drunk to have the energy for anything other than contempt for his family reunion guests is beyond description, or the need for acclaim. It's also undeniable that Rea takes an irresponsive but distant back seat to young Eamon Owens, who takes on an impossible role in his debut and makes better than damn good. The script runs an instinctive metaphor of the world going mad as does Eamon, it's a reflexive metaphor that disintegrates before examination but is real nonetheless, much more than the simple metaphors that make so many codebreakers feel smug. References to Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis mingle with images invoking the Manson family and pedophile priests; a young man who assumes the role of a pig without pride, perceives the world through a witty and legitimate comic book filter, and takes his well deserved hits. Neil Jordan can be, some of his more promoted work notwithstanding, a brilliant and original director.

filmcritic.com dines with The Butcher Boy Chris Barsanti

A horrific tale of madness and abuse told with pop-eyed color and giddy humor, Neil Jordan's 1997 adaptation of the Patrick McCabe novel The Butcher Boy is a discordant and murderously funny masterpiece of the highest order. Unlike most acclaimed films of antisocial alienation and violence, which tend to always maintain a coolly entertained distance, this one dives so far into its protagonist's scrambled worldview that by the time it's all over, it takes one a little time to readjust to the world as it actually is.

Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens) is a young kid living in a small (and small-minded) Irish town during the early 1960s. Pictures of the Pope and the Kennedys adorn the dark walls of his dreary little abode, shared with his violent drunk of a father (Stephen Rea) and suicidally depressed mother (Aisling O'Sullivan). Francie himself is a red-headed fireplug of manic energy with a penchant for mad behavior and the occasional spot of bullying The whole brood is looked at askance by townspeople with airs, like the just-back-from-England Mrs. Nugent (Fiona Shaw) who calls them all "pigs," and the clucking ladies at the corner store, who shake their heads at poor, crazy little Francie: "Never had a chance, growin' up like tha', did he."

Francie has an idea as to where things went wrong, that was the day he stole some apples from the Nugents and bullied their wee one, Phillip. And, being as it's Francie who's doing the narration, we are practically forced to take his word for it. Only it's clear practically from the get-go that Francie's grasp of reality is more tenuous than it should be. The narration itself is a delight, done by Francie as an adult and voiced with buoyant, cracked glee by Rea, whose performance as Francie's sodden Da makes for an eerie counterpoint. As things go from bad to worse in Francie's life -- first Ma is shipped off to an asylum before later committing suicide, then Francie is himself sent to a reform school, at which point his religious visions begin -- he starts looking for who to blame for his predicament.

Possessed of a weirdly unshakeable and peculiarly Irish optimism, Francie slips into madness with alarming ease, enjoying the stew of sci-fi-influenced paranoia and manic obsessions bubbling in his feverish mind more so than the dreary facts of his limited life. At no point during his devolution into a murderous maniac does anyone seem committed to help him. His parents are less than useless, authority figures take at face value Francie's assurances that things are "grand," and his only friend deserts him out of fear at what Francie is becoming. Perversely, the only person in the whole film who seems to honestly listen to the boy is the Virgin Mary, who appears to him in the beautifully robed and soothingly voiced figure of Sinéad O'Connor (a wicked jab at the Church, one of many in this adamantly anti-authoritarian work). Francie tries to do the right thing -- what he refers to as winning the "Francie Brady's Not a Bad Bastard Anymore Award" -- but with nobody on his side and those demons jabbering in his full-to-bursting head, it's just not a fair fight.

Coming on the heels of Jordan's blockbuster pop-horror flick Interview with the Vampire and the David Lean-esque Irish Civil War epic Michael Collins, both excellent and quite underrated films though very much slaves to their genre, The Butcher Boy seemed almost a slap in the face to a Hollywood establishment that had just started treating him as one of their own. The viewpoint here is so madly skewed as to be almost unrecognizable as a mainstream film. The luscious cinematography and generally jaunty tone, propelled by Eliot Goldenthal's bouncy score and Rea's sardonic narration, is layered against the story's grim reality not as a cheap bit of irony, but as a means of actually voicing Francie's mindset with as little interference from reality as possible. The humor somehow makes it all the more harrowing.

Needless to say, this wasn't a popular film; there's a little too much sad reality in here for that. Coming just a few years before Columbine, The Butcher Boy, while far from being a message film, nevertheless made a strongly relevant statement about youthful violence and the culpability of adults who refuse to pay attention to the children in their midst. There are Francie Bradys out there right now, unwatched and unnoticed, who also never had a chance, and who have some very strong ideas about who is to blame for what has happened to them.

Philadelphia City Paper Sam Adams

The flame-headed 12-year-old protagonist of The Butcher Boy bills himself as "The Incredible Francie Brady!" He's the central character in a series of warped fairy tales that grow darker and more violent as the thin threads which tie him to the world begin to unravel. Working from Patrick McCabe's novel, Neil Jordan shapes his macabre fantasia to fit the contours of this charismatic young maniac's mind.

Born to a penniless family in a small Irish town, Francie (Eamonn Owens) is branded an outsider early on: his father (Steven Rea) is a drunk, and a musician to boot, and his mother (Aisling O'Sullivan) is in and out of mental hospitals. He could try to fit in, but he knows somehow that it would never work, that he'd always be "that Brady boy." So he takes his brash vulgarity and wears it as a badge of honor, and when the priggish, middle-class Mrs. Nugent (Fiona Shaw) brands him "a pig," his destiny is set.

At first, he and his best friend Joe (Alan Boyle) are in it together, but when Francie returns from his first trip to reform school—or as he puts it, "The Incredible School for Pigs!"—Francie's on his own. His mother has killed herself with a noose, his father with whiskey, and Joe has taken up with, of all people, Mrs. Nugent's son Phillip (Andrew Fullerton). So Francie takes a job in a slaughterhouse—killing pigs, of course—and the tale progresses toward its bloody conclusion. Let's just say Francie finds another use for the pig-killing machinery.

The trickiest part of describing The Butcher Boy is sketching the movie's tone, somewhere between E.C. horror comics and Samuel Beckett. Jaunty music and bizarrely accented, almost unbearably upbeat narration (performed by Rea as the voice of an older Francie) give way to passages of hallucinogenic intensity—as when Francie envisions his town after a nuclear attack, with he and Joe the only two left alive, running from a menacing horseman with the head of a giant fly. At first the film seems merely inconsistent, even somewhat irritating, but gradually, you gain a sense of the way the seemingly disparate elements all form a part of the patchwork fabric of Francie's mind. The mixture of comedy and horror is more than gallows humor. It's like the jokes coroners tell each other to keep from being overcome by seeing too much death.

McCabe has said that although the novel's events are fictional, its tone is autobiographical, and it's not hard to see The Butcher Boy's bleak comedy as the product of a country where, as historian Tim Pat Coogan once put it, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as tragedy." There's no firm sense of place to Jordan's film—it's too dreamlike for concrete geography—but far more than Jordan's Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy feels like an Irish film. Michael Collins was a Hollywood film about Irish history; The Butcher Boy is about the Irish soul.

Eamonn Owens was not much older than Francie when The Butcher Boy was shot, and like Patrick McCabe, he grew up in a small town near the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. (McCabe's hometown of Clones was used for exterior shots in the movie.) Good performances by child actors are rare, and finding a lead for a movie with a tone as peculiar as The Butcher Boy—a tone that has to appear to be dictated by Francie's psyche—must have been exceedingly difficult. Nevertheless, Owens finds just the right blend of gregariousness and mania. He attacks the role with the ferocity—and the personalities—of a half-dozen children; he's like a whole sixth-grade class in a little-boy suit. What's most disheartening to the Mrs. Nugents of the world is Francie's refusal to accept his own inferiority. By the mere fact that he refuses to give up, Francie brands himself a lunatic; his unflagging good humor and his psychosis are one and the same. The movie never stoops to "explain" Francie's fantasies. Owens shows us that for all his exterior bravado, Francie's rampages are his way of making up for the fact that he no longer has anyone to interact with.

There's a sense of risk-taking about The Butcher Boy that's utterly uncharacteristic of Jordan's films, which, like Michael Collins or The Crying Game, tend to start with volatile subject matter and systematically neutralize it, laying things out in the simplest of terms, defusing the possibility of genuine conflict. It would be tempting to see The Butcher Boy as Jordan's breakthrough film, but I think it's more likely a singular event, sparked by the challenge of McCabe's novel (as Jordan was not sparked by Interview with the Vampire). Breakthrough films are when a director makes the movie he's always been threatening to make; The Butcher Boy is the movie you can't believe Neil Jordan made.

The Butcher Boy - Archive - Reverse Shot Eric Hynes, November 6, 2005

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IN DREAMS

USA (100 mi) 1999

Philadelphia City Paper - [Sam Adams]

"From the director of Interview with the Vampire" go the ads for In Dreams, and for once the promotional copy has it right. Neil Jordan might prefer to be remembered as the director of The Crying Game, or last year's excellent The Butcher Boy, but only Jordan's amped-up vamp pic prefigures In Dreams' combination of visual splendor and narrative incoherence. Despite a shoddy plot about a fairy tale illustrator (Annette Bening) whose luridly intense dreams are invaded by a serial killer (Robert Downey, Jr.), two things set In Dreams apart from the pack: the gorgeously evil dream imagery cooked up by cinematographer Darius Khondji and designer Nigel Phelps (City of Lost Children and Seven), and Bening's phenomenal performance, brittle, manic, and unlike anything she's done. It seems as if Bening is given an unusual amount of screen time, but it may just be that her presence eclipses everything else on the screen, including Downey, who seems to mistake antics for acting. Jordan regular Stephen Rea does a credible enough job as a kindly psychiatrist who realizes too late that Claire is telling the truth about the killer who has possessed her.

Time Out

Immediately signalling its blend of supernatural horror and intense psychological drama, Jordan's film opens with a visually arresting, breathtaking sequence. Police divers searching for the victims of a child killer glide gracefully through the clear flood waters covering a New England town, the rooms of its abandoned buildings still intact below the surface. Above, clairvoyant children's book illustrator Claire Cooper plunges into her unconscious, delving for clues about where the killer might strike next. Sadly, this is merely the haunting overture to an essentially prosaic variation on the 'abused child grows into serial killer' plot. While Downey hams it up something rotten as bad apple Vivian, Bening's portrayal of Claire has a diamond clarity that deserve a better setting. If her illustrations for a book of Grimms' fairy tales provided a conduit for the killer to enter her mind, by descending into madness she can confront him on his home ground: in order to destroy him, she must become him. Yet for all Jordan's imaginative use of skewed nightmare logic, this is a b/w photocopy of a serial killer plot that has merely been coloured in with super-saturated dream sequences and over-elaborate art house imagery.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer)

Let's just say that, on the evidence, Neil Jordan can't handle a Hollywood film. Interspersed in an intriguing career that boasts The Company of Wolves, Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, and last year's The Butcher Boy are two miserable misfires, both of them supernatural thrillers with a mainstream budget.

The international success of The Crying Game won Jordan his first Hollywood gig, directing Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview With the Vampire. Fans of the novel complained bitterly about the casting of Cruise in the lead role, but I thought his overbaked performance was just what Anne Rice's prose deserved. The problem was, rather, Jordan's plodding approach to the material. Even middling efforts like Blade or John Carpenter's Vampires crackle with the electricity that pervades the vampire mythos, but Jordan handled it with the stylistic equivalent of insulated rubber gloves. Rather than harnessing the melodrama of his source material, Jordan just diffused it.

In Dreams has similar problems. Jordan's affinity for psychological horror must have led him to this story, which is an uncomfortable porridge of psychic visions, lost children, and serial killing. Mostly, Jordan gets the performances that he needs -- as the reluctant psychic, Annette Bening conveys near-psychotic exasperation perfectly well. And for the first half hour or so, beginning with some lovely underwater footage of divers investigating the ruins of a flooded Massachusetts town, In Dreams is engrossing but not unsettling. Proceedings quickly devolve, though, into a color-by-numbers catch-the-psycho affair, with Bening's visions conveying clues to the ultimate whereabouts of an inveterate child-killer.

Storywise, this is TV movie stuff, or maybe even an episode of The X-Files. If I examined the plot more closely, I might find some internal logic that I missed, but I must confess to finding most of this baffling and thus uninvolving. The second half is particularly tedious -- the film clocks in at well under two hours but feels much, much longer. It's an exercise in foregone conclusions, taking us toward a climax that we can imagine several reels in advance without ever showing us something unexpected along the way.

Finally, I can't understand the critical vogue for praising Robert Downey Jr.'s appearances in mediocre movies. His self-consciously showy performances both in this and in last year's Two Girls and a Guy are diverting, but not particularly credible or meaningful. Downey's main accomplishment may be choosing material that makes him look good in comparison.

Scott Renshaw

Somehow, there's something even more icky about an exploitative and routine horror film that tarts up its exploitation and routineness with plenty of style. Such is the case with Neil Jordan's IN DREAMS, a psychological thriller which lets its atmospheric creepiness disintegrate into a trite chase-n-terrorize puree. Annette Bening stars as Claire Cooper, a Massachusetts-based children's book illustrator with a picture-book life: lovely rural New England home, loving husband Paul (Aidan Quinn), beautiful young daughter Rebecca (Katie Sagora) and loyal dog Dobie. She also posesses a spark of psychic ability which she has had all her life, one which seems to be getting stronger as she has visions connected to the disappearance of a local schoolgirl. Then Rebecca is abducted, and Claire comes to believe that she is psychically connected to a serial killer -- and that the killer is similarly connected to her.

For a while, it looks like IN DREAMS is going to be a thriller of a different stripe, something as dramatically and visually compelling as it is viscerally shocking. Darius Khondji, the gifted cinematographer behind SEVEN, gives IN DREAMS the same menacing silver tint and twisted light, including an eerie opening underwater sequence in a submerged town. The story takes Claire on a descent into genuine madness, the kind that makes a character truly unpredictable and interesting to watch. Bening is a superb actress, and she makes the most of Claire fumbling for answers with the last shreds of her sanity. The script also presents the idea that the killer is a tormented soul who wants Claire to catch him, setting up a potentially complex relationship when they finally do meet.

Gradually, however, IN DREAMS starts to lose its way. Partly it seems rushed, with scenes slammed together too quickly to develop the necessary foreboding. Partly it seems sloppy, increasingly depending on ridiculous contrivances (Claire being confined in exactly the same room once occupied by the killer, for instance) and the blandly counter-productive analysis of Claire's psychiatrist (Jordan regular Stephen Rea, sporting a distracting accent). And partly it seems mean-spirited, using graphic murders for shock value or imperiled children for sympathy value, rather than building interest in the characters. Over its final 45 minutes, IN DREAMS begins a slow but steady descent from potent psychological thriller to careless mess.

And then, when Robert Downey Jr. finally appears as the killer Vivian, it careens out of control entirely. Decked out in flowing red tresses and whispering in an effeminate drawl, Downey exercises every ghastly overacting muscle in his body simultaneously. To be fair to Downey, the role is a serial killer cliche -- he's a Norman Bates momma's boy with _serious_ gender role issues -- without a remotely sympathetic quality, dashing hopes of a mind-game showdown into the rocks. Instead it's all guns and sharp objects, running and screaming, until a bleak, unsatisfying and confounding resolution. It's a huge disappointment coming from Neil Jordan, a film-maker who has consistently made films that defied expectations -- THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, THE CRYING GAME, THE BUTCHER BOY. In a sad way, that's exactly what he does here. Just when you expect IN DREAMS might turn out to be a memorably disturbing horror film, it turns out to be a gutless, nihilistic tease.

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THE END OF THE AFFAIR A- 93

USA Germany (101 mi) 1999

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Adapted from Graham Greene's 1951 novel, The End Of The Affair is an acid-tinged love story about spiritual emptiness and romantic tragedy. But its bitterness is a large part of what makes it so incredibly seductive—a fitting contradiction for characters who confess to nostalgia for the London bombing raids. Few directors seem better suited to the material than Neil Jordan, a part-time novelist whose best films, such as Mona Lisa and The Crying Game, have the enveloping quality of great fiction. His rueful touch informs Greene's complicated wartime tale about an adulterous affair that gets tangled up in jealousy and an unexpected flash of Catholic grace. Ralph Fiennes is ideally cast as Greene's alter-ego, a sardonic young author who involves himself with Julianne Moore, the wife of old friend Stephen Rea. Since their romance is doomed from the start, much of the story plays out two years after its mysterious end, when Fiennes' lingering obsession with Moore leads him to hire a private detective (a scene-stealing Ian Hart) to follow her around. Though it sounds simple enough in description, The End Of The Affair is arranged like an intricate puzzle, with time constantly doubling up on itself and each scene placed for maximum emotional impact. The effect is almost dreamlike in its intensity—aided immensely by Michael Nyman's hypnotic score and Roger Pratt's glossy, old-fashioned lighting effects—yet Greene's vicious one-liners are as sobering as a splash of cold water. For all the film's effortless style, Jordan never seems overburdened by its weighty themes, even when God winds up dictating the action

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

Baba is no help in The End of the Affair, Neil Jordan's technically accomplished adaptation of the time-shifting 1951 novel that put author Graham Greene on the cover of Time with the tantalizing headline "Adultery can lead to sainthood."

The End of the Affair is not exactly Bressonian, but it does open with its writer-hero, Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes), typing his "diary of hate." Brooding over his convoluted extramarital wartime affair with the mysterious Sarah (Julianne Moore), Bendrix is already on his road to Damascus. In a flashback to a point some years after Sarah inexplicably left him, Bendrix meets her clueless husband Henry (Stephen Rea) to discover that, although unaware of the earlier affair, Henry now believes that Sarah is deceiving him with someone else. Madly jealous Bendrix hires his own detective (played with comic cockney tact by Ian Hart), and the action hopscotches through time to illuminate their relationship and his investigation.

Unlike the 1955 End of the Affair, which straightened out Greene's chronology (and starred Hollywood's adulteress of choice, Deborah Kerr), Jordan's remake is extraordinarily fluid in handling the narrative's temporal flights. But the erotic chemistry is tepid, despite Moore's characteristically bold performance. She gets the big lines and bravely held-back tears—although Jordan cancels out her restraint by contriving to set nearly every big scene in a seemingly tropical monsoon—while Fiennes is glumly downcast. No stranger to supernaturalism, Jordan is similarly lachrymose when he might have been sardonic. For all its obvious psychoanalytic implications, his wacky romantic triangle lost me long before it crawled to its spiritualist conclusion. (About halfway through I began to imagine it as it might have been directed by Douglas Sirk as a vehicle for Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson.)

The End of the Affair's protracted windup affords ample opportunity to ponder its unsubtle message. Greene's parable not only insists that faith is belief in the invisible but strenuously suggests that monotheism exists to police love—a notion common to cultural revolutionaries as otherwise disparate as Saint Paul and Wilhelm Reich, neither of whom clothed it in such sanctimonious kitsch.

Scott Renshaw

It's entirely possible that a film version of THE END OF THE AFFAIR -- Graham Greene's novel of passion, obsession and faith -- could be made without getting into the explicit details of its protagonists' extra-marital exploits. And in fact it already has, in a weepy 1955 version starring Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson. Some would no doubt argue that the more restrained approach has its merits, but there's something about this source material that demands an approach that couldn't be filmed in 1955. I can't remember the last time a mainstream film featured as much intense, forthright sexuality -- of the groping, grinding, gasping variety -- as THE END OF THE AFFAIR. And I can't remember the last time it would have been quite so thematically appropriate.

The story begins in 1946, with a chance meeting between writer Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) and his neighbor Henry Miles (Stephen Rea). Henry is distraught over a notion that his wife Sarah (Julianne Moore) may be seeing another man, a notion in which Bendrix also has a certain interest. In flashback, we learn that Bendrix and Sarah engaged in a passionate five-year-long affair during the war, an affair which Sarah had abruptly ended with no explanation. Still obsessed with Sarah two years after the end of their affair, Bendrix decides he must know what Sarah is now up to, and hires a private detective (Ian Hart) to uncover her secrets.

Neil Jordan's approach to much of THE END OF THE AFFAIR is in fact fairly restrained. Michael Nyman's string score pulses throughout the film, adding a layer of heightened drama, but the performances play against the music effectively. Ralph Fiennes' work may be too reminiscent of his character in THE ENGLISH PATIENT, but it's right for the role, as is Stephen Rea's hangdog Henry. Jordan also takes a calculated risk by playing some scenes more than once, after a key piece of information has been revealed. Though the repetition of those scenes gives the film a slightly lurching pace, it also shows how easy it is to misinterpret key moments in our lives. Ultimately, the risk pays off.

His even bigger risk pays off even more definitively. Let viewers go in forewarned: THE END OF THE AFFAIR is a steamy affair, the sex scenes a deft tightrope act between pure animal passion and intense emotion. THE END OF THE AFFAIR is a story that depends on believing in the transcendent connection between Sarah and Bendrix, a connection Bendrix feels is broken any time they are apart. Jordan even manages to use the sex scenes for a couple of great punch lines (Bendrix, when Henry returns home at the height of the lovers' passion: "What if he heard us?" Sarah: "He wouldn't recognize the sound"). THE END OF THE AFFAIR circa 1999 combines the appeal of old-fashioned tragic romance with Greene's ahead-of-his-time psychology of irrational desire (whether temporal or spiritual). It may make you uncomfortable, but you can't deny its honesty.

The film does begin running out of gas in the third act, as the relationship between Sarah and Bendrix becomes subservient to the relationship between Sarah and God. Jordan does an impressive job of making the novel's philosophical musings solid cinema, retaining all the thematic weight without too much ponderous voice-over. There's also the ongoing pleasure of Ian Hart's sharp, understated work as the private detective who takes tremendous pride in his professionalism. And even when they no longer fill the screen, THE END OF THE AFFAIR's scenes of illicit eroticism linger like a memory of addictive high. Jordan does justice to Greene's 1950s narrative by doing what the 1950s couldn't do -- showing the middle of an affair that made the end of the affair a tragedy.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: The End of the Affair (1999) Philip Kemp, February 2000

Decent Films Guide - Faith on film Steven D. Greydanus

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filmcritic.com begins the End of the Affair David Bezanson

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NOT I

Ireland (14 mi) 2000

Time Out

In Jordan's frenetic version of Beckett's monologue, the screen is filled with a woman's mouth. It happens to be Moore's pouty bow and this close-up vision of lips, teeth and tongue as Julianne spits out the words gives the viewer a sense of her character's state of mind, the overwhelming disarray of thoughts and the struggle between the pressing intrusiveness of life versus instinctive attempts at control.

User reviews from imdb Author: prospero2000 from Wales

As part of Channel 4's Beckett On Film season, Neil Jordan directed Julianne Moore in Not I. A technical feat to see on stage as all you see is a mouth. It was also filmed with Billie Whitelaw in the 1970s.

This production began quite differently in that you saw Moore come into view, sit down and then the light hit her mouth. But for the rest of it, that's all you saw.

It appears as if the mouth is being prompted by an unseen and unheard person because of the halting nature of the speech. It is as if the mouth is being asked questions (notably about "the buzzing"). At four separate points of the film, the mouth says "no... she" as if it is being asked "was this you?" It is clear that this is her own experience but wishes to refute it.

It was confusing to watch initially as the camera did not stay still, but the hypnotic rhythm of Moore's voice and the wonderful writing of Beckett kept me transfixed. Difficult to understand but technically amazing, it was worth seeing.

We're No Angels / Not I - Archive - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert, November 1, 2005

THE GOOD THIEF B- 81

France Great Britain Ireland Canada (108 mi) 2002

Time Out

If Nolte's whole person looked any more lived in, you'd fear for his health, but he certainly carries the part of Bob Montagnet, American gambler and hellraiser, long resident on the Côte d'Azur, and slowly running out of luck, money and his next fix. In fact, he carries the whole picture, his lined features, high tar vocal delivery, and air of gentlemanly savoir faire in low rent circumstances are so utterly on the money, you simply can't imagine Jordan's loosely affectionate remake of Melville's 1955 crime classic Bob le Flambeur any other way. Jordan retains the outline of the original's casino heist plot, which presents the raddled protagonist with one last chance at a big score, but moves the action to contemporary Nice and Monte Carlo, where the drugs trade and illegal immigration have tarnished the lustre of old world glamour and the ghosts of Picasso and Matisse. Chris Menges' sleazy-beautiful camerawork captures the milieu perfectly, as character details take precedence over narrative logistics. While Jordan's repeated freeze-frames try a little too hard for nonchalance, the overall cocktail of Gallic insouciance and American film noir grit delivers such relaxant properties you forgive a few foibles.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Given that Neil Jordan's remake of Bob le Flambeur is obsessed with the relationship between copies and originals, it's almost fitting that festivalgoers who turned up to see it on Sunday were rewarded with a screening of the other festival entry with (nearly) the same name. Chances are, though, ticket holders to the sold-out screening didn't feel that way, so the fest has added additional screenings -- appropriately enough, a pair of 'em. An uncanny companion to The Truth About Charlie, The Good Thief works many of the same back alleys: movie directors in principal roles (Emir Kusturica and twin directors Michael and Mark Polish), African music and French rap to convey polyglot fusion, a palette saturated with neon blues. But Jordan adds layer upon layer, referencing both his stars' real-life personae (Nick Nolte plays a recovering junkie, with mug shots that look not unlike the actor's well-publicized own) and a cultural lineage traced from the U.S. to France and back again. (In conversation, Nolte's Bob mocks the music of Johnny Hallyday, best know as the "French Elvis.") Ultimately, The Good Thief twists itself in too many circles -- The Limey pulled off what The Good Thief tries, but Jordan isn't a stylist of Soderbergh's caliber (though he is canny enough to nick a heist method from Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven remake). Still, there's something worth savoring about The Good Thief, an aftertaste more satisfying than the meal itself.

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

A welcome face wherever Nice's well-mannered lowlifes gather, Nick Nolte's character in The Good Thief likes little and does even less. But what he does like--art, gambling, heroin--he likes passionately, and what he does (or used to do), he does extraordinarily well. A semi-retired thief, Nolte seems more than willing to play the part of the contented burnout, gambling until his money runs out, then shooting up until his drug supply is exhausted. Looking on adoringly, protégé Saïd Taghmaoui does little to interrupt the cycle, which has practically become part of the rhythm of the city. Even Nice seems to approve. Shot by writer-director Neil Jordan as a graceful nighttime riot of pink, blue, and green, it looks like a city-sized slot machine, with Nolte as a man prepared to play through even the nastiest losing streak. Loosely remaking Bob Le Flambeur, Jordan at first seems willing to raise the stakes of Jean-Pierre Melville's classic. Where Roger Duchesne's original Bob was possessed by a vague ennui, Nolte's apathy comes in a needle and appears to be on the verge of destroying him. Once the film introduces the possibility of a big score, however, Nolte's vocation quickly supplants his addiction. Of course, there's a girl in the picture, too: in this case, a hard, fragile, 17-year-old Bosnian refugee (Nutsa Kukhiani) who pairs off with Taghmaoui but keeps glancing Nolte's way. After all, why settle for a copy when the original is so close at hand? That's a thought Nolte shares, as he gathers a team to steal a vault full of priceless paintings from a Monte Carlo casino that lets skillful replicas overlook the gaming floor. It's almost as if Jordan's anxiety at remaking a masterpiece is manifest in the film itself. If that's the case, the nervousness isn't entirely misplaced, but he probably worries more than he should. In Nolte, he's found the ideal antihero, a man who knows he'll soon go the way of the jazz clubs and unfiltered-cigarette era that made him, and seems happy to not make a big deal of it. Jordan invests attention in even the most throwaway moments and marginal characters, and his care makes the film a sustained, low-key pleasure. It's disappointing only in that it keeps suggesting a more substantive film that never quite pokes out above the surface. But it's there, sometimes in those throwaway moments, as when Nolte explains to detective and friendly nemesis Tchéky Karyo how they need each other, or in the understated way his decision to take Kukhiani under his wing is preceded by his observation of another young woman riding the back of a motorcycle toward her inevitable doom. Nolte's character may lack the ability to repent, but like the heaven-bound Biblical good thief that gives the film its title, he knows there's a difference between salvation and damnation, even in a place where noise, bright lights, and easy pleasure obscure that distinction.

filmcritic.com Jeremiah Kipp

The heist movie, or robbery movie, has worn out its welcome in recent years. There’s nothing more infuriating than feeling as though you’re five steps ahead of the film, with no pleasure found in connecting the dots. The Good Thief doesn’t really have anything new to add to the genre besides a sense of style. It’s as though visionary filmmaker Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, The Company of Wolves) read the script, accepted it as a simplistic morality tale of an aging crook, and pumped up the sumptuous visuals, the seeps-into-your-bones soundtrack of global music, and the iconic figure of Nick Nolte. Those elements single handedly give The Good Thief a sense of purpose when it would otherwise have none, and the stylistic flourishes -- instead of feeling like they’re present for their own sake -- add depth to what could have been another boring movie about doublecrossing.

Whenever the plot of the movie feels rote (the thieves assemble their team, plan the robbery, carry out the robbery, and doublecross each other a couple of times along the way) the arresting images carry the day. Cinematographer Chris Menges (who recently shot another existential mystery, The Pledge) finds the right pace: active yet unhurried, kinetic yet wistful. With shadows that turn into lush purples, greens, blues, and all gradations of black, The Good Thief is intoxicating. Indeed, it might be Jordan’s most visually stimulating movie, and one has to wonder if the cookie cutter nature of the script set him free to imagine new visual possibilities. Lovers of the visual image will find much to appreciate; plot-driven viewers will find very little to hang their hat on.

The title character’s name is Bob Montagnet, based on a character from Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur. Forget the fact that it’s a completely unnecessary remake of a perfectly calibrated noir. Pretend instead it’s an excuse for Nick Nolte to inhabit the shaggy, romantic, worn out shell of Bob, a part he’s tailor-made for. Playing a down and out American expatriate gambler, strung out on heroin in the early going and planning his Last Great Heist by the film’s midpoint, Nolte gives another effortlessly honest performance. His lined face and experienced eyes show a life truly lived. (And let’s avoid commentary on his true life troubles, which are more for the gossip columnists. Nolte’s a consummate actor, not a freak show.)

Even as the movie goes through the motions of Bob evading a good natured French cop (an amused Tchéky Karyo), tentatively building a May-December relationship with a troubled young girl (the charming and self-aware Nutsa Kukhianidze), and assembling his crew (including filmmakers like the riotous Emir Kustarica and the identical Polish Brothers who made Twin Falls Idaho), it’s the Nick Nolte show. Smoking cigarettes, rolling through scenes with self-mocking, hard-boiled irony, Nolte has a presence that can jump start a weak movie (Breakfast of Champions), anchor pretentious art films (Affliction) and bring added layers of depth to great ones (Mother Night and Afterglow).

Nolte’s not exactly coasting through The Good Thief, any more than Jordan and Menges are, but he’s bringing something special to what could’ve been a hackneyed and obvious genre flick. That he’s accompanied by the woeful ballad “A Thousand Kisses Deep” by gravel voiced Leonard Cohen is both apropos and maybe too on the mark. Cohen seems like the voice of Nolte’s wounded lion, a doomed romantic. As Cohen says, “And maybe I had miles to drive / And promises to keep / You ditch it all to stay alive…” It’s deeply poignant even as it errs on being as plain as the nose on your face. Kind of like the rest of The Good Thief, a flawed but precious movie worth caring about, writing about, and thinking about.

d+kaz . intelligent movie reviews [Daniel Kasman]

In Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1955 film Bob le Flambeur the title character, an addicted gambler and aging thief, keeps a slot machine neatly hidden in his closet, an extension of the masked seriousness of the film’s noir setting; the Bob of Neil Jordan’s surprisingly fresh revision of Melville’s scenario keeps a roulette wheel in the center of his living room and in The Good Thief it is a embodiment not only of the far more visible harsh reality of Bob’s addictions but also of a change in tone from the original film.  Le Flambeur’s funky closet casino suggests all of the light, humorous noir posing of Melville’s classic, the realities of gambling kept quietly behind closed doors, just as Bob’s roulette wheel pushes his character’s dark whims from a devil-may-care atmosphere to the more authentically noir street callousness of Jordon’s world:  Bob’s a drinker, a gambler, an old man, a heroin addict and dead broke.

Played to perfection by a disturbingly honest Nick Nolte, the Bob of The Good Thief looks the way Tom Waits sounds and in his worst moments even sounds the way Waits sounds, with the second half of each sentence trailing off into a growling, raspy oblivion.  To keep The Good Thief just as satisfying as its predecessor Jordan wisely sets Nolte’s visible grittiness of in a lustrous and shadowed Monte Carlo all full of smoke and neon-if someone gave Christopher Doyle Monte Carlo instead of Hong Kong, Nick Nolte instead of Tony Leung and a steadicam instead of a handheld, you would end up with the dark and dirty gloss of Bob’s sleepless nights.

The plot is classic heist noir, and deliciously generic.  As an old thief, convention necessitates Bob to attempt one last score to go out with a bang, and he finds room during his busy days of kicking the habit, shielding a gorgeous young woman from the streets, and dodging the cops and snitches to come up with a heist scam with the elegance and sense of fun embodied in the whole film.  Like the some of the best of Raymond Chandler’s work, the plot of the hard-boiler isn’t quite as important as the characters who lurk the streets and spit wit hidden behind urban slang, and while the film never achieves noir perfection (a feat I doubt The Good Thief was even aiming at), Jordan liberally peppers the film with enough stinging one-liners and enough interesting characters played by an international cast to let one forget they are watching slick fluff.

The most prominent among Bob’s crowd is Police Lt. Roger, who amusingly wants to stop the heist before it starts because it would break his heart to jail his old friend Bob; Roger owes Bob a life debt and the inimitable Tchéky Karyo brings to the generic French inspector role a suppressed humor and talent for verbal banter that makes his relationship with Nolte almost tender.  Suddenly reappearing in an English film after his spectacular turn as the Iraqi interrogator in Three Kings, Saïd Taghmaoui pops up in The Good Thief in one of the best roles from the original film:  the young wannabe gangster who idolizes Bob to such an extent that he gladly picks up Bob’s sexual leftovers.  The small little creature in question in this tale is the slinkiest, sexiest, most surprising member of Bob’s crew, Anne (played by Nutsa Kukhianidze in her film debut).  Sleepy voiced and halfway to a life on the streets Bob nobly rescues her from a pimp and forever gains the smoky allure of one of the best femmes within recent memory to be shot with a canted angle and chiaroscuro lighting.  Like Soderbergh in the Ocean’s 11 remake, Neil Jordan has the sense to keep violence and unnecessary sex as far away as possible in his film, though both are bound to pop up eventually, albeit gracefully.  In a cinema replete with numerous mediocre and exploitive crime thrillers, an exotic local populated by a talent cache of unique foreign faces and spearheaded by the familiar, expert slumming of Nick Nolte, The Good Thief freshly updates a fun classic by tainting it with a lovingly stylized dark tone, making it the best piece of pseudo-noir fluff in a long time.

The Good Thief - Archive - Reverse Shot Justin Stewart, November 8, 2005

Salon.com [Charles Taylor]

Slant Magazine Chuck Rudolph

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris)

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs, or here: Nitrate Online [Cynthia Fuchs] also: Interview with director Neil Jordan or here: Nitrate Online - Interview

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review) Nick Davis

Slate (David Edelstein)

DVD Times Mark Boydell, also seen here: The Good Thief | Film at The Digital Fix

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Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film Daniel

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New York Times (registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell

BREAKFAST ON PLUTO B 88

Ireland Great Britain (129 mi) 2005

A breakthrough year for queer cinema, with the likes of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN or MYSTERIOUS SKIN opening to such wide critical acclaim, this one will remain elusive to any mainstream audience, yet there is plenty to like here in this Candide-like story which is original and hilarious in parts, including a brief appearance by the madcap comedy of Brendon Gleeson, also some terrific dream sequences. Initially, I found the tone of the film overly cute to the point of annoying, as a pair of robins open the film with their satiric subtitled comments, exhibiting some thirty chapter heads that endlessly interrupt the flow of the film, with overly happy pop music from the 60’s and 70’s, all that was missing was large-scale musical numbers, like the over the top musical comedy of Tsai-Ling-liang’s THE HOLE or THE WAYWARD CLOUD, but by the time Van Morrison’s “Cypress Avenue” plays, the tone has reached a state of haunting perfection. Based on the transvestite memoirs of Pat McCabe’s 1998 novel, Cillian Murphy literally inhabits the role of Patrick “Kitten” Brady, with his soft little falsetto voice that is a voiced whisper, and his neverending theatrical costume change, preferring from a young age to dress like a woman, always, seemingly, seeing the bright side of life. Left on an Irish priest’s doorstep (Liam Neeson) by his disappearing mother, whose only memory is that she resembles screen star Mitzi Gaynor, the child is raised in a bar by an unloving foster mom who criticizes his every move, and by a Catholic church that finds him outrageous and intolerable. His wayward friends turn out to be the neighborhood misfits, a boy with Down’s Syndrome, a mixed race girl (Ruth Negga) named Charlie, and her violent boy friend who eventually gets caught up in the troubles of gangs and the IRA. Eventually he has to seek his own fortune alone, adrift on the empty streets of London, finding company wherever he can, always in search of his missing mother who he calls the Phantom Lady.

His personal odyssey includes traveling with a completely tolerant biker gang that, like characters in EASY RIDER or Lynch’s STRAIGHT STORY, are perfectly capable of spouting transcendent poetry, a short affair as a squaw in a horrible country western band dressed up as Indians, an eerie magician’s (Stephen Rea) assistant who hypnotizes an unsuspecting Kitten with horribly cruel results, a suspected IRA bomber, and a transvestite hooker on the streets of London. Simultaneous with Kitten’s struggles are glimpses into the historical period of the early 70’s where the IRA is arms happy, bombing buildings with disastrous consequences, and the English are all too busy arresting them. The film takes on a more serious light when Kitten is brutalized by English detectives suspecting the Irish Kitten bombed a local disco, but Kitten oddly falls in love with them and doesn’t want to leave the safety of their prison. One of them later takes him off the street, where he fears he will get killed, and gets him a safe and legal job dancing in peep shows where a mysterious visitor, in a scene out of PARIS, TEXAS, begins telling him a story that startlingly resembles his own. From that point on, one feels the profound build up of the film having its full effect, as it’s a baffling mixture of peculiarity and an extraordinarily personalized portrait into the tender world of a transvestite, who is nearly oblivious to the world outside, but who grows more comfortable to his world inside. When Dusty Springfield sings “The Windmills of Your Mind” over the end credits, it feels like one has traveled an episodic Don Quixote-like journey.

Breakfast on Pluto David Denby from the New Yorker

Patrick (Kitten) Braden (Cillian Murphy), an Irish foundling, grows up gay and glam in long hair and dresses. He leaves his small town, falls in love with an I.R.A. gunrunner, looks for his mother in London, where he becomes a prostitute, and gets accused of blowing up a disco. Neil Jordan's latest, from a screenplay by Pat McCabe (adapting his own novel), is a picaresque—the Progress of a Cross-Dresser. The movie has an exceptional sweetness: Murphy, with his ripe lips and big baby blues, makes Patrick a love. Jordan displays his poetic resourcefulness as a filmmaker, but Patrick, it turns out, just wants a lap to crawl into, and his quest isn't very interesting. With Stephen Rea as a magician and Liam Neeson as a priest who yields to temptation.

Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

Neil Jordan’s best movie since The Crying Game is being greeted with widespread incomprehension by critics. I can’t imagine why — it’s one of the most genuinely pleasurable movies of the year, one that gives and gives until it’s got nothing left.

Cillian Murphy nails the central role of Patrick “Kitten” Braden, a flamboyant transvestite, abandoned love child of a priest (Liam Neeson) and a parishioner. He/she comes of age in Northern Ireland during the height of IRA violence, and his picaresque journey takes him first on the road with a terrorist glam rocker (Gavin Friday), then to London where he falls under the spell of a condescending magician (Stephen Rea) and is mistaken for a bomber by the police.

Kitten takes all sorts of punishment for his difference and his refusal to knuckle under, and our admiration for him, is intense, and he’s backed up by a gloriously colorific mise-en-scene that conforms absolutely to his worldview. Jordan sadly indulges his yen for a naive-to-ludicrous evasion of politics, painting the IRA as clueless blue meanies and English authorities as bumbling nice guys, but though his desire to wish away life’s complexities mirrors that of his protagonist, he at least manages to evoke the frustration we all feel when outside forces conspire to interrupt our lives.

Kitten’s search for his mother and desire to make a home for himself is extremely moving, and the agonising trials he endures will only fill you with admiration even as he walks again and again into the belly of the abusive beast. It’s a strangely uplifting film, and in spite of its heretical leanings seems the perfect one to watch at this festive time of year.

filmcritic.com Rachel Gordon

Neil Jordan doesn’t make bad movies. Even if the story isn’t spectacular (The Good Thief), the visuals are always stunning and the acting is consistently so striking that you’re never bored by what you see. There are times that cultural patterns remain unclear (The Crying Game) and you’ll feel lost in the muddle of figuring out exactly what’s going on, but the trick is to just watch without dissecting. You’re guaranteed to walk out stimulated by the events that occurred.

The same holds true for his latest, Breakfast on Pluto, starring the ever-impressive chameleon Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later, Batman Begins) as an orphaned transvestite in Ireland during the 1960s and ‘70s. After seeing brief passages of his playful struggle to maintain his identity from one boarding school to the next in working class suburbia, we’re swept up in the journey of Patrick, a.k.a. “Kitten,” as he heads to the wilds of London in search of the mother who left him behind.

It’s a given early on that young Patrick is different and his inclination for wearing feminine articles is not merely some form of rebellion. While most films will concentrate far too much time on creating moments of mental crisis for those of a “deviant” sexual orientation, Patrick is refreshingly strong in personality and outlook. To make up for the verbal battering he receives in his unforgiving community, his vivid imagination creates a narrative to guide the movie between reality and how he’s dealing with or denying it.

His meandering journey to find some group in which to fit and find the love he was always denied by absent parents leads him into fascinating situations with people who are just as amazed by his self-perpetuated naïve nature as we are. From traveling with a band to taking shelter in a peep show house, he manages to barely escape the political problems of a torn Ireland that doesn’t want the likes of him anyway.

Though there are sections that feel interminably long -- the film runs over two hours and doesn’t necessarily move at a steady pace -- Patrick is compulsively watchable throughout. The plot remains interesting as well because it’s impossible to predict where the next adventure is going to lead, or even if Patrick is going to come to some foul fate from pissing off the wrong person with his antics. Because of the violent background of the time period in which it is based, literally anything could happen to any of the characters and make absolute sense.

Breakfast on Pluto is told through a fable-like lens, but Jordan shies from pushing any specific morality on the audience. It’s simply an entertaining story of an eccentric young man who gets to have some amazing experiences by sticking to his goals and partially living in a dream world in order to cope with the real one.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

A glitter-specked gloss on David Copperfield, Neil Jordan's polymorphous picaresque retells the most turbulent period in recent Irish history through the eyes of a border-town transvestite. Patrick "Kitten" Braden (Cillian Murphy) may seem like an unreliable narrator at first (though less so than the subtitled CGI robins who establish his backstory), but his singular perspective allows Jordan (interview) to revisit the Troubles without succumbing to maudlin self-seriousness.

"Serious," as it turns out, is the dirtiest word in Kitten's vocabulary. "There's that word again—it's everywhere," she sighs as she's asked to safeguard a cache of IRA guns. "Serious, serious, serious!" But if Jordan's script (adapted from Patrick McCabe's novel) occasionally makes Kitten an icon of queenly frivolity, it's most often a trenchant, tongue-in-cheek commentary on the nature of sectarian violence.

Gliding through the escalating conflict of the 1960s and '70s, Kitten bears oblique witness to the passage of time: Soundtrack songs tick off the years, while Margaret Thatcher's election is tipped by a blurry newspaper photo Kitten's using as a makeup aid. As British detentions and IRA bombings escalate, so The Quiet Man's "Isle of Innisfree" gives way to T. Rex's "Children of the Revolution." The movie's signature shot is an exploding disco ball, whose razor shards shred the air of a London nightclub while providing the ultimate pyrotechnic spectacle.

A rebuke to border conflicts in Ireland and elsewhere, Kitten is born undivided; the first time we see him (as 10-year-old Conor McEvoy), he's already trying on his foster mother's frock. Breakfast isn't the first time Jordan has mixed transvestism and the Troubles, but there's no Crying Game "surprise" here. (Even the earlier movie's Stephen Rea, who turns up as a droopy-eyed vaudeville magician, knows Kitten's "secret" before she tells him.) The son of a village priest (Liam Neeson) and his vanished housekeeper (Eva Birthistle), Kitten is "misconceived" astride the gender line, effectively spurning the notion that boundaries are impervious and incontrovertible (not to mention causing quite a bit of what Daffy Duck would call "pronoun trouble").

Although Breakfast on Pluto is hardly apolitical, its cockeyed approach to Ireland's long-running tragedy is bound to strike some as flippant. But Kitten's refusal to be "serious" is itself a political—even spiritual—act. What she's rejecting, far more convincingly than Munich's tortured hit man, is the notion that violence can only be answered with violence, that grimness must always multiply. Instead, Kitten finds an out in the burgeoning glam rock scene, hitching a ride with a singer named Billy Hatchet (Gavin Friday) and his band, the Mohawks. Although brief, Kitten's sojourn with Hatchet and co. gives the movie its first glimpse of total, if fleeting, freedom. As Billy's band mates look on aghast from a hotel window, Kitten handily seduces the singer, and soon she's sharing the spotlight with him, donning a squaw outfit to match his war paint. Even as the audience jeers, their spotlighted duet (Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra's "Sand") offers a glimpse of a world beyond borders.

Like a mascaraed Candide, Kitten passes from one benefactor to the next. Neeson's priest gives way to the leader of a biker gang called the Border Knights, who tells a starry-eyed Kitten, "The only border that matters is the one between what's in front of you and what you've left behind." (He also provides the movie's title, a reference to a glam obscurity by Don Partridge.) Brendan Gleeson's choleric children's mascot and Ian Hart's brutal-then-tender constable also figure in the journey, as does Bryan Ferry's oily john, who offers a less benign kind of lesson. But Kitten's ultimate goal is always to find his mother, the "phantom lady" whom he knows only as the spitting image of South Pacific's Mitzi Gaynor. The quest gives the movie its shape, but it's almost a red herring; when the reunion finally does come, it's purposefully anticlimactic. The movie's real engine is the forward motion of history, looking past its open-ended finale to a future even we haven't seen yet.

Like Jordan's overlooked masterpiece The Butcher Boy (also adapted from a McCabe novel), Breakfast on Pluto takes its tone from the free-floating whimsy of its social-outcast narrator (although Breakfast is far more optimistic than its morbid predecessor). Breaking his narrative into 36 "chapters," Jordan shifts approaches without losing his balance, masterfully conveying Kitten's mercurial consciousness, her steadfast refusal to see the world from a fixed point of view. Ever-changing yet always true, Kitten is the standard-bearer of an age to come, a blithe spirit too fluid to be chained by doctrine.

Breakfast on Pluto - Archive - Reverse Shot Michael Koresky, November 9, 2005

The Nation (Stuart Klawans)

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir)

Reel.com [Pam Grady]

Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]

DVD Times Gary Couzens, also seen here: Breakfast on Pluto | Film at The Digital Fix

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Leo Goldsmith]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

DVD Town [James Plath]

Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris

FilmStew.com [Brett Buckalew]

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Bina007 Movie Reviews

Monsters And Critics [Frankie Dees]

Film Freak Central Walter Chaw

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Movie Vault [Le Apprenti]

The L Magazine [Nicolas Rapold]

Slant Magazine [Keith Uhlich]

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski)

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris)

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Georgia Straight (Mark Harris)

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

stylusmagazine.com (Paolo Cabrelli) one of the more negative reviews out there

Guardian/Observer

Time Out London

Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Los Angeles Times [Carina Chocano]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Stephen Holden)

Breakfast on Pluto (film) - Wikipedia

THE BRAVE ONE B 85

USA Canada (119 mi) 2007

The opening of the film couldn’t be more offensively mainstream, a rambling NAKED CITY style interior monologue preceding a predictable outburst of sadistically violent theatrics that stops in its tracks an overly cheerful love story, where images of blood and extreme emergency room trauma are grotesquely mixed together with naked bodies in the throes of tender lovemaking. It appears to be a brutally senseless mugging gone terribly wrong, all indulgently photographed on one of the perpetrator’s cell phone, leaving her fiancé dead, and Jodie Foster lucky to be alive after spending three weeks in a coma. Foster, as noted NPR-style public radio host Erica Bain, discovers she’s the same person, but in a different skin, afraid to walk the streets anymore without recurring images playing out in her head reliving the incident over and over again. How to get her life back and rediscover her personal humanity is the question, and the film provides no easy answers, but it does veer into fertile grounds exploring the question. Unfortunately, Erica feels too traumatized to step outside without a gun, so it’s one of the first things she purchases once she’s released from the hospital. Then in short order, and in rather preposterous fashion, bad guys just start lining up at her feet, where shooting them feels like the only reasonable alternative for her, where the swirl of media attention becomes fixed on the idea of a roaming vigilante killer, who they of course suspect is a man resembling Charles Bronson. But while Bronson’s vigilantism leads to a kind of revenge-oriented satisfaction, Foster’s is always followed by personal anguish and guilt, as she is a killer with a conscious, or my own favorite description from eFilmCritic Peter Sobczynski, "Everybody Run--Nina Totenberg's Got A Gun!" While some of this is downright ludicrous, even lifting some of the same plot and Central Park settings from Bronson’s 1974 DEATH WISH, it's beautifully textured in this sumptuous New York City Michael Mann-style look photographed by Philippe Rousselot, underscored by jazzy sophisticated music from Dario Marianelli, also some interesting use of the soliloquy-like music of Sara McLaughlin’s “Angel.”

While the film boldly and at times brazenly attempts to alter the public perception of typical female behavior when confronted with violence, making repeated references to this age-old police stereotype, it also looks leeringly at criminal stereotypes, almost like magazine-style photo shoots of the gangsta outlaw look.  But while the criminals initial appearance is very brief, the rest is a meditation on violence where the cops are portrayed as the good guys, but they don't "feel like the good guys," where they're simply unsympathetic to the victims of crime and don't care to involve themselves when they don't have to.  As a result, they're largely an entity unto themselves, like an ivory tower separated from the neighborhoods that they enter only when there is a crime scene or something bad happens, so they see everyone living within those neighborhoods as strangely complicit to the violence that takes place there.  Many times Foster returns to the precinct to talk to someone about her case, but she’s always treated like a number, where she needs to stand in line with the hordes of others who are also waiting for a kind of justice that never comes. While this is no excuse, this is what prompts Ms. Bain to take the law into her own hands, growing more confident, becoming a creature of the night wandering the streets like a dark avenging angel.

As it turns out, Erica Bain has spent her life recording sounds of the city, to which she adds her own poetic thoughts and reflections in a program called Street Walk, much of which has a personal stream-of-conscious sense of innocence. But after the incident, there is a hesitancy to return to work, leading to a one-minute gap of radio on-air silence as she attempts to reintroduce her first piece before discovering a newer, darker voice that turns into a meditation on the fear and violence that has kidnapped and incapacitated our nation post 9/11, but especially New York City where this was shot. Bain explains to her listeners that this pervasive fear she is experiencing was something that happened to others, that could never happen to you, noting that when it does, however, it has a way of infecting everything you touch, every memory you ever had, that it’s been there all along just below the surface waiting for you to find it wherever you go. Adding to her predicament is that of a police detective, Terrence Howard, who is responsible for following up on the leads of the vigilante who is still at large, developing a friendship with Bain as well, who he first noticed while still in a coma, offering her a gesture of support, as he is one of the few who realizes openly just how close she came to death, respecting what it takes to make any kind of recovery from such a ferocious attack. The coded interplay between Howard and Foster is really subtle and extremely well written, always talking around what they know, never confronting the issues directly, which they pull off with plenty of tension filled close ups, especially the more Howard learns about the carefully concealed, hidden psychology of this woman with a grudge.  The conversations between the two are incredibly affecting, as Jordan has a remarkable ability for inspiring terrific performances, and these two are really excellent, where every scene together is riveting.  This started out so unbelievably lame and typical, but it veers into some strange territory by exploring the internalized dynamics of a society living in fear, how their morality and actual behavior changes, how they become total strangers to who they once were, and that it happens so quickly, offering no cure, only some insight into the condition.

New York Magazine (David Edelstein)

What could impel Jodie Foster and director Neil Jordan to whisk us back to the bad old days of Death Wish and Ms. 45? Were their credit cards maxed out? Were their kneecaps about to be broken? In The Brave One, Foster plays a radio host who delivers meditative monologues about our precious but too-ephemeral metropolis, only to find her romantic notions of identity shattered along with her skull when she and her fiancé are mugged by sniggering predators in Central Park. After she recovers (in body if not soul), she can’t seem to leave her apartment without being set upon by rapists and murderers. Lucky the lady has a gun … Homicide detective Terrence Howard—an avid listener of her weird radio spiels—faces an ethical decision: bust her or let her do what the law won’t let him do—blast the scum off the face of the Earth. You probably think I’m oversimplifying—that Foster and Jordan are too thoughtful, artistically ambitious, and politically progressive to make a movie that would have Bernie Goetz rolling his eyes. But Foster’s feminist victimization complex seems to be looping around to meet Nixon and Agnew. Next she’ll be hunting Commies for the FBI.

The Onion A.V. Club Tasha Robinson

It's hard not to cringe at the opening of Neil Jordan's moody, upscale revenge drama The Brave One; any drama that starts off this ecstatically happy is clearly just establishing a high-water mark so the inevitable plummet into misery will be even more striking. Jodie Foster begins the film as a successful radio host on the verge of marrying Lost veteran Naveen Andrews; their giggly, giddy relationship is so idealized that the weight of inevitable doom hangs over it even before a random act of violence ends it. After three weeks in a coma, Foster is left to contemplate a newly purchased gun and a shaky sense of resolve that leads her out into the streets, where she tries to become a predator hunting other predators.

It's all been done before, all too often via sleazy rape-revenge films. But director Neil Jordan and his screenwriters (father-and-son team Bruce and Roderick Taylor, plus Cynthia Mort) give the revenge theme a taut, burning internality, as Foster gradually refines her intentions and capabilities, and her emotions start leaking into her sleepy, Garrison Keillor-esque radio show. The smartest touch is her dynamic with detective Terrence Howard, who seems to be trying to reel her back in to sanity. Throughout the film, it's rarely clear exactly how much he knows about her nocturnal activities, and as she cautiously plays him for information, their relationship becomes murky and complicated. And the terrific performances help keep everyone guessing.

There's a fundamental, fascinating hypocrisy at the root of Foster's character: She's a vigilante who's horrified when other people espouse vigilantism, but she doesn't let her own misgivings stop her. She knows she's disintegrating, but if she can take some evildoers down with her, she's willing to relinquish her own morality. (It's so tempting to see this as yet another metaphor for America's post-9/11 foreign policy—particularly the populace's reluctant, tacit acceptance of state torture—that it seems like it's time to found a new anti-war movement: "Get the U.S. out of Iraq to save American cinema from itself.") Jordan can't completely overcome the film's heavy baggage and its roots in an inherently exploitative genre; The Brave One is turgid and grim right up to the point where it starts to visually resemble a third-person shooter game. But the moody tone and carefully balanced drama turn a grubby premise into something unexpectedly elegant.

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs)

Nobody can explain why a doctor in Glasgow set himself on fire in a truck laden with explosives — a sophisticated, Western-educated person. We’re in unknown territory, and people genuinely don’t know what to feel. I think even people who are to the left in the United States are confused, and there’s a lot of fear, a nameless fear. That’s part of what the movie is exploring.
--Neil Jordan, LA Weekly (5 September 2007)

There’s always some reason
To feel not good enough.
—Sarah McLaughlin, “Angel”

Terribly titled and audaciously plotted, The Brave One offers another chance to watch Jodie Foster piece together a complicated, determined character, again trying to make sense of a chaotic world. This time, as radio talk-essayist Erica Bain, she’s alternately steely and scared, restive and perplexed. While such characteristics have become typical of Foster’s recent work (say, her turns as resourceful, protective mothers in Panic Room and Flightplan), Erica also recalls one of her earliest and most haunting roles, as a child, young, kohl-eyed Iris Steensma.

At first, the connection to Taxi Driver, across so many years and movies and, of course, John Hinckley, seems startling. But there it is: when Erica appears, post-trauma, in short hair and a patterned t-shirt, her smallness emphasizing her toughness, she could be Iris 30 years on. For an instant, when her shoulders slouch just slightly and her eyes dart to avoid a gaze, she could even be Iris, looking warily at her frightening would-be savior Travis Bickle across the table in the diner where he’s buying her breakfast. But Erica is not Iris. She has no savior, frightening or otherwise. She is instead, her film proposes, an inversion of Travis born of her own moment. Much as Travis’ post-Vietnam war New York mirrored him, violent, filthy, and infuriating, Erica’s reflects her. It is lost.

The conceit is poetic, but unsustainable. This much is clear as soon as The Brave One opens, offering a glimpse of Erica’s pre-trauma existence. She and her perfect fiancé David (Naveen Andrews) make their way to Central Park to walk their perfect dog, anticipating their wedding and the pleasures it will bring his mother. Suddenly, the idyll is broken, when the couple is viciously beaten by stereotypical-looking Latino gangster-kids, lured into a tunnel for no reason except to jumpstart the plot. When she awakes from her coma, Erica learns David is dead, and she is beset by fear.

The film amplifies the drastic changes in Erica’s sense of self ("I miss who I was with him") and place with point-of-view tricks: the lens tilts and seems to warp as she tries to walk out of her apartment for the first time, the soundtrack is smudgy, shadows engulf her. She’s oppressed by flashbacks to her former life (David pays guitar in excruciating, faceless close-up; their sex is a blur of cupped breasts and eyes closed, too much Sarah McLaughlin). Her new anxiety, however, soon hauls her out of her depressive reverie. The cops working her case appear less than interested ("You’re the good guys. So how come it doesn’t feel like that?"), and Erica is transformed. When she hears the precinct desk clerk recite the same soothing line to multiple victims ("I realize how difficult this can be"), she realizes she’s alone and afraid and it’s just too bad.

In that moment, the movie changes too, from a subjective contemplation of her grief and loss to an erratic vigilante pic. Though Erica continues to inspect her feelings, recording city sounds (her mic pointed like John Travolta’s in Blow Out) and her own voice (telling her what she believes, that she is broken and it’s the city’s fault), the movie pushes in other directions, its imagery recalling Travis’ glances at the city’s many “others.” Like Travis, Erica buys a gun illegally, and before you can say “Kevin Bacon,” she’s caught up in a shooting inside a convenience store. Also like Travis, she makes a split second decision, shooting the shooter before he can kill her, the unfortunate witness.

Here’s where The Brave One goes loopy—which is not to say it goes bad, exactly. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s worth thinking about. Where once Erica waxed poetic on her radio show ("Street Walk") about New York’s variety and surprises, the home it provided for Eloise, now she laments the menace she sees everywhere. “It is horrible to fear the place you once love… I always thought that fear belonged to other people, weaker people. But when it touches you, you know it’s been there all along.” The city is inside her, she becomes it. Wherever she walks, she confronts a punk, a pimp, a thief, or some other degenerate is lurking. As she shoots more bad guys—all guys, all stereotypes—she grows more self-possessed, walking away from her murders with her shoulders back, now wearing a cool leather jacket over the t-shirt that so exposed her vulnerability.

But while the film’s generic tilting is discordant, Erica’s journey remains—quite perversely—captivating. At times, you’re just astonished at the movie’s abject absurdity. When Erica crosses a dark street as her voiceover intones, “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me,” you have to wonder just how Emily Dickinson fits into Erica’s refitted ethos. The movie evokes “suicide bombers” and the war in Iraq to mark its terrible-world context, but Erica’s place in it, as both bomber and victim, can only remain hectic. She’s a war zone unto herself.

As much as she reviles the violence around her, Erica finds a movie vigilante’s solace in it. She even rescues her very own Iris. Erica happens on Chloe (Zoe Kravitz), drugged out and bruised, in the back seat of a car, when the idiot driver solicits Erica with the corniest of deserves-to-die lines: “Hey baby.” More articulate than Travis (she talks for a living, after all), Erica makes her own despair and anger abundantly clear: holding her gun on the villain’s temple, she promises, “I’ll be your last super-cunt.” The ensuing mayhem combines memories of Thelma and Louise with Dickinson again ("Who the hell are you?” gasps Chloe. “Nobody,” asserts Erica). It’s like someone Googled “angry women” and mashed all the bits together.

That’s not to say Erica doesn’t have doubts. And quite unlike Travis, she expresses them to “others,” who pop up rather too strangely and conveniently. Most preposterously, Erica is comforted by a neighbor lady who as much as sanctions her violence, with wise head-nodding and handy nursing skills, attained, the lady says, “Back home,” where “they give young boys guns.” While the lady stitches a gash on her arm, Erica confesses that she killed a man. “Anyone can be a killer,” assures the lady.

Slightly less magical, Erica’s other new best friend is the cop on her trail. Careful, decent Mercer (Terrence Howard) still mourns his recent divorce and wants more than anything to stop a murderous white executive, who traffics drugs and guns and now has custody of a stepdaughter who “knows something.” Mercer shares his pain with Erica, she doesn’t quite admit her own sins, and they develop a disturbing friendship, based on outright lies and unspoken agreements to lie. In itself, the relationship isn’t so different from any other. (Who knows what remained unsaid in Erica’s romance with David? It ended too soon and is now too preserved in sealed-in-amberish flashback images even to guess.)

Still, the detective-vigilante connection raises questions, as they admire one another but also, by definition, must be adversaries. She taunts him on her radio show (noting that “someone else is doing his job"), but he comes right back, having discovered the error of his first assumption. “I’ve been looking for a man with a gun,” he smiles—in a diner—but “It turns out to be a woman with a grudge.” The utter nuttiness of this equivalence aside, Mercer here underlines the film’s primary hook, the apparently awesome specter of a female vigilante who is not, by the way, a mother. While The Brave One works hard to motivate her, she’s still so unthinkable that only the smartest cop in sight can name her.

But for all the hubbub about the sensational girl shooter, The Brave One is almost more interesting for its flaws and omissions. The movie doesn’t think through how vengeance works, what makes it seem right or righteous. (That appears to be your job.) Erica’s own sense of it is mixed: her newly confident walk is juxtaposed with her concern that her “hands don’t shake” when she fires her weapon. It’s as if you’re watching the effects of all that abuse and violence on 12-year-old Iris, now an adult who sees payback as costly but necessary. Travis also thought he was on a moral mission to “clean up” the city. But he was only one element in a process, part of the depravity, desperation, and fear he so despised. Erica says she feels like a “stranger” to herself, but her movie makes her conventional, even correct, in her assessments of everyone else. And that’s more frightening than Travis ever was.

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ONDINE

USA Ireland (111 mi) 2009

Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]

An intriguing mix of working-class grit and childlike fantasy that never fully comes together, Ondine stars Colin Farrell as Syracuse, a sad-eyed, scruffy Irish fisherman and divorced father who hauls the title character (Bachleda) out of the ocean one dreary morning. For most of the film, it’s left up in the air as to whether she’s human or whether she’s, as her name implies, a legendary sea creature. Neither character is particularly forthcoming about their past—they’d rather treat the present moment as sacred and untouchable, even if it’s clear that it can’t last forever. Suffice to say that Ondine initially brings Syracuse divine riches: His nets are filled with fish, his relationship with his young daughter (Barry) is strengthened, and love blossoms. Until…

Writer-director Neil Jordan, no stranger to grounded fairy tales of this sort (see The Butcher Boy), has assembled a crack team of collaborators. His cinematographer, the great Christopher Doyle, makes every image impressively dingy, to the point that you can practically smell the brine. And Farrell and Bachleda are a believably damaged couple, whatever the nature of their origins. But as the mystery surrounding them resolves itself, the fantastical elements feel increasingly imposed on the narrative, much as the whimsical tone of Jordan’s transvestite-comedy-cum-Irish-historical-drama, Breakfast on Pluto, curdled once reality came calling. The intention outweighs the execution, though there are still pleasures to be had. Jordan regular Stephen Rea shows up as a priest during a few comically tinged confessional interludes. And Sigur Rós keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson provides a memorable score, making especially beautiful use of his band’s song “All Alright.”

Review: Ondine - Film Comment Andrew Chan from Film Comment, May/June 2010

Swooping across sparkling azure waters, the first shots of Neil Jordan’s Ondine envision Ireland amid a sea bubbling with ancient mystical forces. When the camera settles on the boat of a glum-faced, scruffy-haired fisherman named Syracuse (Colin Farrell), we know sooner or later that something supernatural is bound to intrude upon his dreary routine. It finally arrives in the form of a beautiful amphibious female (Alicja Bachleda) curled in a fetal position in his net, a discovery whose strangeness the fisherman accepts matter-of-factly. As in the director’s previous cinematic homecomings, such casual acknowledgment of the world’s magical-realist capacities serves to indicate cultural Irishness—a reliance on wild Celtic imagination in the face of an unstable modernity. Once Syracuse’s young, wheelchair-bound daughter (Alison Barry) identifies his catch as a “selkie”—a half-woman, half-seal creature who can shed her original moss-clump of skin in exchange for a seven-year fling with a landsman—we are encouraged to suspend our disbelief, sit back, and wait for these unconvincingly reticent lovers to get it on.

As it becomes apparent that the eponymous fairy-tale heroine’s sole narrative purpose is to invigorate the love life of Farrell’s recovering-alcoholic single father, the film risks turning into a melodramatic and slightly artier version of Enchanted. Jordan could easily have used the film as an occasion for serving up Disney doses of whimsy, just as he bookended Breakfast on Pluto (05) with subtitled voiceovers of chirping CGI birds. But for the most part Ondine mutes the potential absurdity of its romance in favor of a stately earnestness, interrupted here and there by the ailing daughter’s precocious witticisms, a few droll exchanges with the neighborhood priest (the dependably deadpan Stephen Rea), and the occasional gratuitous ogling of Bachleda in damp undergarments. When it stops seeming merely half-assed, Ondine’s down-to-earth mysticism proves quite appealing, particularly in comparison to Jordan’s more ostentatious ventures into fantasy. Even in The Butcher Boy (97), the director’s best film, the quirkiness is always a bit overemphatic, the leaps into surrealism threatening to become empty stylistic gestures. In Ondine’s leisurely first hour Jordan refrains from weighing his narrative down with gimmicks, instead entrusting the film’s evocation of the uncanny to Christopher Doyle’s alluring but uncharacteristically restrained cinematography. Awash in dark greens and blue-grays, the film’s visual beauty locates magic within the natural landscape, but remains just murky enough to keep the characters locked in a state of metaphysical uncertainty.

Things start to go awry when we realize that the film’s emotional sensitivity doesn’t go much deeper than its moody surfaces. While Jordan has never been an incisive social critic or a reliable plumber of psychological depths, his most vivid characters—from the transgender protagonists of The Crying Game (92) and Breakfast on Pluto to Jodie Foster’s vigilante in The Brave One (07)—are embodiments of taboo, outcasts intent on asserting themselves regardless of the consequences. In his Irish-themed films, Jordan’s engagement with Celtic folklore and its fascination with shadow-selves has served as a prism through which to confront the nation’s present-day complexities and tumultuous past century. Unfortunately Ondine, whose identity is built on the same kind of dualities and contradictions, ends up standing for very little, and proves to be more of a blank-eyed cipher than even your average Disney princess. As she heals the spirit of her ne’er-do-well lover, sings pretty Sigur Rós melodies that lure the big fish into his net, and takes her place as the new maternal figure in a family torn by divorce, she represents nothing more than the self-effacing alternative to Syracuse’s negligent, liquor-swilling shrew of an ex-wife: one feminine cliché swapped for another.

As if to atone for its paper-thin characterizations, Ondine starts to overreach in its final half-hour. In a film that scrupulously underplays its mythic material, the concluding plot twist is most surprising for how much it tries to accomplish in a few brief, undercooked minutes. An abrupt plunge into genre excess, complete with a mustachioed villain and grainy slasher-film cinematography, the ending contains a blind stab at social relevance that turns the water-versus-land dichotomy into a vague metaphor for immigration and cultural assimilation in Ireland. This one false move not only erases the mythic ambiguities that enabled the film’s woozy, dreamlike pacing, but also reveals Jordan skipping across big, barely articulated questions of Irish nationhood as if they were mere stepping-stones on the way to the plot’s pathetic gratifications. In the end love has an easy time conquering all, since Jordan can’t seem to muster any curiosity about the obstacles it must overcome.

Neil Jordan's Ondine (2009): Irishness between Myth And Brand Heike Mißler from Etudes Irlandaises, 2013

Descent to the Underworld and Rebirth in Neil Jordan's Ondine Once ... (pdf)

REVIEW: Ondine Captivates With Magic and Mastery Stephanie Zacharek from Movieline

theartsdesk.com [Jasper Rees]

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

Armond White reviews Neil Jordan's Ondine, starring Colin Farrell NY Press

Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

n:zone [D.Elias]

Ondine | Review | Screen Allan Hunter from Screendaily

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]

Cinefile.com [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Film-Forward.com Adam Schartoff

Eye for Film : Ondine Movie Review (2009) Andrew Robertson

Ondine Mike D’Angelo from Coming to a Theater Near You

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On DVD: Ondine Features Colin Farrell Done Right Michael Atkinson from Movieline

Jason Bailey also seen here: DVD Talk

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DVD Talk Brian Orndorf, also seen here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

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Ondine Review | A Smushy Handful of Stinky Seal Guts | Pajiba ... Brian Prisco from Pajiba

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Ondine — Inside Movies Since 1920 Pam Grady from Box Office magazine

Splice, Ondine, Living in Emergency | Reviews by Joe Morgenstern ... Wall Street Journal

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Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

An Interview with Neil Jordan about Ondine, screening during ... Simon Abrams interview from the NY Press, April 30, 2010

Ondine Tim Huddleston from Time Out London

Independent.co.uk [Anthony Quinn]

Independent.co.uk [Nicholas Barber]

Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]

Ondine: Movie Showtimes and Reviews on washingtonpost.com Michael O’Sullivan from The Washington Post

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Ondine Review - Movie review: 'Ondine' - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis

Jost, Jon

SPEAKING DIRECTLY

USA (110 mi) 1973

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith)

Jon Jost’s essay film is patently self-indulgent, but that’s really the point. In an obsessive, almost cartesian manner, the film attempts to interrogate every aspect of Jost’s local and global viewpoint, beginning with the particularity of the Montana cabin in which he has made a home for himself and then proceeding to the state of America at large, particularly its dealings in Southeast Asia. Jost shifts from intimate, sometimes amusingly confrontational interviews with his friends to a more conventional TV-documentary voiceover with stock footage of Vietnam, Kissinger, and Coca-Cola. What results is a fascinating account of the disjunctions between perception and reality, and between our individual perspectives and what we imagine to be the perspectives of others.

Notes from practice Talkin’ to us, by Jon Jost from Jump Cut , 1975

BELL DIAMOND

USA (96 mi) 1986

User comments from imdb Author: bseckard from Missouri

The first time I saw this I picked it up about 15 minutes in and was convinced I was watching a documentary for quite some time. There's something totally believable about the production, from the unmannered performances to the blue collar, ghost-town atmosphere of Butte, Montana. It's a film that sucks you into its lonely mood and keeps you there.

The story revolves around the split of a seven year marriage because the husband (a big, slob of a guy) apparently can't make babies, due, we obliquely catch, to something that happened to him in Vietnam. Although his wife does seem to love him, she simply must get away. She does return later on, and what a moment we're left to contemplate. This is a moving and haunting film that lingers in the mind.

Super maverick filmmaker, Jon Jost, is right at home with this material. I consider it one of his best.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review

The strengths of maverick independent Jon Jost's seventh feature—charting the marital breakup of a Vietnam veteran (Marshall Gaddis) and his frustrated wife (Sarah Wyss) in Butte, Montana—are antithetical to what one would expect from a Hollywood feature on the same subject. Shot on a $25,000 budget, with a story developed by the filmmaker and cast and completely improvised dialogue, the film deals with characters who are neither articulate nor particularly attractive, but pays them the kind of respect and attention that they wouldn't normally receive. Jost's feeling for landscapes and domestic interiors remains fresh and unpredictable, and his mise en scene comprises a string of perpetual discoveries. Because Jost eschews the kind of dramatic developments and climaxes that commercial films have taught us to expect, the impact of the film's original form of realism arrives only gradually, but once it registers, it becomes indelible. The title, incidentally, refers to the abandoned copper mine in Butte where a significant portion of the action is set.

BELL DIAMOND (Jon Jost, 1986) Dennis Grunes

It begins as a marital comedy in Butte, Montana. After seven years of marriage, Jeff and Cathy are in a rut. At home, Jeff is glued to the TV set, watching sports, when he could be making the home repairs he promised to do. Only one thing causes him to leave his chair: he has run out of beer. He leaves the door open on his way out. Cathy finishes unpacking grocery bags. On the kitchen table a Sisyphian electric train runs around and around, going nowhere on a tiny circle of track.     

Indeed, Jon Jost’s filmmaking method in this bravura opening undercuts the comedy, rendering it painfully, not pleasantly, hilarious. Jeff’s face is blank while watching the baseball game; superimposed images of his face and the televised game, with the game overwhelming (implicitly, absorbing) the face before the image goes to sheer white, suggests that Jeff is involved in a numbing experience. Cathy announces she is leaving Jeff and in fact leaves. At loose ends over this abandonment, Jeff can’t work the next day. His boss offers him a ride home, but the vehicle won’t start. “This lousy car,” the boss explains to Jeff. “It works like you. It doesn’t.” Jeff is obliged to give the vehicle a push, but as a result he is left behind on the street. Later, drinking with two buddies as they walk down abandoned railroad tracks, the camera withdraws from the trio as though it were one of the trains that used to run there. (The soundtrack assists in this impression.) Jeff, along with others, is perpetually being left behind in America. By this time, incidentally, the comical nature of the film has altogether ceased.     

Jeff, it turns out, is a Vietnam War veteran. His exposure to Agent Orange has left this “Marlboro Man” impotent. Before leaving, Cathy gives Jeff two reasons for her misery in their marriage despite her abiding love for him. “There’s no feeling of family,” she explains. “The one thing I want I can’t have. I want a baby so bad.” Jeff clings to this, noting that he can do nothing about this; but he ignores her other, more compelling explanation, that she doesn’t herself know why she must leave. There’s so much here beyond her understanding and the control of either of them. Reagan is president, and it’s “mo[u]rning in America.” Jeff loses his job, and machinery—dinosaurs—lie idle at defunct work sites. People are being left behind—not attended to—in the Land of Sweeping People Under the Rug. Writer-director Jost proceeds along a path that provides ever widening contextualization for the stress of Cathy and Jeff’s marriage.     

The solitudinous landscapes under heavy skies poignantly project an America out of joint. Pessimistic though not defeatist, Jost suggests that people would help if only they knew there was a problem. But there were no problems in Ronald Reagan’s America, only persons too weak to embrace rugged individualism, personal responsibility, the whole kit-’n’-kaboodle of official U.S. indifference. Why can’t soldiers leave war behind in foreign jungles?     

There’s a racist joke in this film, merely uttered to fill the air by one of Jeff’s buddies. It takes a swipe at both blacks and “Indians.” This joke reminded me of one of Reagan’s most shameful and bewildering moments as president. Reagan delayed signing an extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 while he tested the political waters to see if he could get away with this. Rumors of his racism attended the delay. Realizing that a failure to renew the act wouldn’t swim, he capitulated, disingenuously explaining publicly that “of course” he wouldn’t let the act pass into oblivion. Then he provided the oddest anecdote to demonstrate that he couldn’t possibly be a racist. He referred to his childhood, explaining that his father took a whip to him every time he used a word that was derogatory toward blacks. How then could he be racist? Obviously his dad had corrected him of that problem. With Reagan, as with the current president, there were times when he spoke that one had to shake one’s head in horrified disbelief.

Strictly Film School review

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

Judge, Mike

IDIOCRACY

USA (84 mi) 2006

Idiocracy Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Okay, let's get a few things straight. This isn't being dumped by Fox because it's an incompetent piece of shit. It most certainly isn't. although on a technical level there are some problems, most notably a spells-it-out-for-ya voiceover that suddenly drops out of the film until the final moments. (This smacks of post-test-screening interference.) But lots of films make questionable formal decisions, and far fewer can boast Idiocracy's striking vision of long-slow-apocalypse America, all garbage heaps and skyscrapers held together with twine. As rich and compelling a dystopian horrorscape as anything since Brazil, Judge's complex world of consumer detritus (the ultimate "throwaway" gag) in itself rewards the arduous effort of locating a theatre actually screening the thing. Also, this thing isn't being dumped by Fox because of Judge's swipe at Fox News, or due to any direct hits at the Bush administration. The thing is, Mike Judge has made a political film without a constituency. This is practically a film version of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and as such manages to be offensive even to those to whom it purports to reach out. On the one hand, Judge takes the conservative stance that our language and culture are being degraded by hip-hop and urban slang, as well as white trash influences. (Although several white dumbasses are highlighted, the film's crowd scenes are unnerving in their dense thicket of black and brown faces; a dubious argument about eugenics implicitly becomes a severely wrongheaded example of miscegenation-panic, the sort of complex mutt-culture of, say, Code 46 reimagined as a chorus of grunts and farts. Judge may have been striving for color-blindness, the promise that class-based critique always holds out, but seldom delivers. It's scary how much it looks like sheer racial callousness.) On the other hand, Judge makes it clear that rampant privatization and the substitution of consumerism for civil society is equally to blame. So this isn't going to jive with today's Christian Right, operating as they do with a sort of Max Weber For Dummies assumption of the free market as God's will. (Go to Texas to see this in action most "successfully." The whole state seems to want to walk the mall with Jesus.) There's a lot in Idiocracy that's flat-out hilarious, and often I found myself laughing at the very jokes and ideas I found most troubling. That's the highest compliment I can pay Judge's film -- more so that any recent comedy I can think of, it's a true think-piece, as as such, certainly worthy of far better treatment than what it got. The ensuing discussion on "The McLaughlin Group" would've been dividend enough.

Julien, Isaac

TERRITORIES

Canada (25 mi) 1985

Films of Isaac Julien Look Back and Talk Black, by José Arroyo from Jump Cut, May 1991 (excerpt, also see full section in the essay devoted to the film)

Isaac Julien was one of the filmmakers who benefited from the formation of the black film workshops that were one of the results of the 1981 uprisings. As young, black, working class filmmaker it is questionable whether he would have had access to such an expensive form of communication/ expression as film if Sankofa, the workshop he operates from, did not exist. Because black communities to a certain extent enabled black filmmaking in Britain, filmmakers have often been held accountable to them, though not always by the communities themselves.[1] [see notes in new window ] Their task has been seen by some to speak to and for the black communities. Many filmmakers, however, claim only to be speaking from a black experience in Britain rather than for one (Julien and Mercer, 1988:4). However, questions of filmmakers' personal expression, when they have come up, have been deemed of secondary importance.[2]

One of the implications of such discourse is that black filmmakers must communicate via a "language" which their constituencies can understand, i.e. that of dominant narrative forms. Yet, all of Julien's films eschew traditional film narrative. TERRITORIES (1984, 25 min.) is a short experimental documentary. Recurring, discontinuous images interact with an intoning voice over and various types of music to deconstruct, and find meaning in, Carnival and its context.

THIS IS NOT AN AIDS ADVERTISEMENT

Great Britain (10 mi) 1988

Films of Isaac Julien Look Back and Talk Black, by José Arroyo from Jump Cut, May 1991 (excerpt)

THIS IS NOT AN AIDS ADVERTISEMENT is a short Super-8 film, Like TERRITORIES, it was made as a reaction to a specific situation: In TERRITORIES it was Carnival; in THIS IS NOT AN AIDS ADVERTISEMENT it was homephobic safe-sex ads. The dominant message in the latter is, "Feel no shame in your desire? The formal strategy to convey the message is an extension of that employed in TERRITORIES.

THIS IS NOT AN AIDS ADVERTISEMENT, like TERRITORIES, relies on accretion of images, their repetition, variation, and juxtaposition to create meaning. Unlike in TERRITORIES, the first part employs no voice over, The second part is accompanied by a kind of rap song made up of fragments from various sources arguing against guilt — It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance; it's the dream afraid of waking that never learns to chance" — and for love — "Some say love it is a razor that leaves your soul to bleed; some say love it is a hunger, an endless aching need; I say love it is a flower and you its only seed."

The salient images in the first part are these:

low-angle shots of waves, their caps changing color from shot to shot high-angle shots of skies framed by trees;

a black youth and a white youth hugging as they look at the camera, extend to it a bouquet of flowers and then bring the flowers to their chest;

a face, seemingly dizzy and pained, on which is superimposed a shaft of light coming into a room;

police boots running up steps to stomp on the flower.

In the last image, the couple laughingly kiss.

The images are amenable to various interpretations. Mine is that the filmmaker is trying to express males-loving-males as an activity that is deep, vast, ancient (there is a recurring shot of an ancient Roman relief depicting a male). And one which, in spite of official attempts to deny and stomp it out, persists. The representation of the interracial gay couple is significant in that as Kobena Mercer argues, in the war against AIDS, both blacks and gays have been labeled a threat:

"Racism and homophobia activate similar psychological defense-mechanisms whereby people avoid their inner fears by projecting them externally onto some Other" (1988c:152-153).

The second part begins with a male head turning, trying to face the audience as if struggling to materialize. It finally does so and stares blankly at the audience. This section is characterized by the accretion of images introduced in the first section juxtaposed against new ones. The images are cut to the beat of the soundtrack's rap. The figures in the frame invariably look back at the audience. They are aggressive objects who gain subjectivity through the matching of their gaze to that of the audience. A recurring image in the first section of a blindfolded man unblocking his eyes and gaining sight makes more forceful the power of their gaze. The film's message becomes underlined through a kind of video aesthetic of synchronously superimposing the different words that make up the phrase, "Feel no shame in your desire," onto various images. This section, like the first, ends with the laughing kiss of the interracial mate couple.

"There is a Third World in every First World," writes Trinh T. Minh-ha (198617: 3). If we take that statement metaphorically, we can see in Julien's work a cinematic mapping out of different "Third Worlds." In TERRITORIES oppressed groups are the State's Third World. In PASSION OF REMEMBRANCE the black gay couple and black women can be seen as black heterosexual male activists' "Third World." In THIS IS NOT AN AIDS ADVERTISEMENT a disease is the cause of the First World's combined condemnation of race and homosexuality. Trinh, however, also notes that "'looking back' and 'talking back' form a necessary step to the unsaying of what has been said and congealed" (1986/87:3).

I have tried to show that talking back is an integral part of Julien's work both in the discourse he creates and, integrally interlinked, in the form through which he conveys the discourses, with particular note of the device of "looking back" at the audience as a cinematic form of "talking back." I have also tried to show that TERRITORIES and PASSION OF REMEMBRANCE also engage in a historical "looking back" in that they both try, to different extents, to unearth and reconstruct a history of black British culture. LOOKING FOR LANGS'TON, Julien's latest film, takes this "looking back" and "talking back" a step further.

LOOKING FOR LANGSTON

Great Britain (45 mi) 1989

User comments from imdb Author: Rigor from Chicago, USA

Issac Julien's incredibly lush visual exploration of the idea of Langston Hughes' sexuality. In this film Julien creates a space of queer liberation around an African-American literary icon. Julien stated in an interview with the great poet Essex Hemphill (whose writing is used as text in the film) that he sought to "construct a narrative that would allow viewers to meditate and to think, rather than be told." This is exactly what is accomplished in this profoundly beautiful and intellectually thrilling short film.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review

Isaac Julien's frankly erotic black-and-white meditation on the Harlem renaissance of the 1930s. Part narrative, part polemical essay, part lyrical art film, part documentary on Langston Hughes, this 1988 British film employs clips from various kinds of archival footage (including three Oscar Micheaux films), quotes from Hughes, Essex Hemphill, Bruce Nugent, Hilton Als, and James Baldwin (the last read by Toni Morrison), and memorable glimpses of a period nightclub where black and white men in tuxedos dance together. The results are certainly striking--stylistically, intellectually, and sensually. 40 min.

Time Out review

A poetic visual fantasy of the lives of black gay men in '20s Harlem, shot in beautiful monochrome and packed with startling images of dream and desire. Scenes alternate between a dark, smoky club where men in formals dance and cruise, windswept beaches, secluded bedrooms, and scary alleyways where the same men make love, while the poetry of Langston Hughes and contemporary black gay writer Essex Hemphill meditates on the aesthetics of sexual desire. It may sound painfully arty, but the images are fresh and exciting enough to sweep away any such reservations.

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Isaac Julien's poetic essay on the author Langston Hughes, which opened a new discussion of black, and gay, cinema.

Isaac Julien's 1989 film Looking For Langston is a visually sublime, dreamlike documentary poem of homosexual love and desire imbued with, and inspired by, the bluesy, jazzy poetry of the 20th century American writer Langston Hughes.

Julien, a filmmaker, theorist, and one-time Turner Prize nominee, has continually pushed the boundaries of black cinema, albeit in a decidedly avant-garde context. Made with Sankofa, the black filmmaking collective Julien established in 1984, Looking For Langston is experimental art cinema at its most sumptuous but, thankfully, not at its most oblique.

Mixing archival footage from the silent era, images of 1920s Harlem, and exquisitely composed tableaux sequences, Looking For Langston is a visual meditation on sexual and cultural identity and forbidden desire. Hughes' writings, along with the words of the late poet and activist Essex Hemphill, provide the lifeblood to the piece and its inspiration, its subtext, its richness, and its rhythm. Looking For Langston now holds a crucial position in queer cinema and gay black culture. The hero of the piece - a hero in an inspirational rather than literal sense - Langston Hughes, was one of early 20th century America's most important writers. His pivotal role in the Harlem Renaissance and his embracing of the poetics of jazz has given him iconic status in modern literature, and in modern black history.

Looking For Langston is not a biography of Hughes; Julien does not explicitly claim Hughes as a gay icon (although the Hughes estate feared this would be the case when the film was made). Instead Julien reflects on what place Hughes' poetry can, and should, have in a black gay cultural landscape, and explores the sexual and erotic subtexts of the Harlem scene, imagining the speakeasies and private rooms suggested by Hughes' words and the erotic and loving encounters that take place there.

Julien's collaboration with director of photography Nina Kellgren produces a rich, gracefully paced, and deliciously textured monochrome world of great intensity. But it's in the political context, where Julien considers questions of race, sexuality, ways of looking, power play, fetishism and the representation of beauty and masculinity that this film really takes flight. Made at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s, the grim consequences of a closeted life in an oppressive society could not have more resonance.

Verdict
Exquisitely drawn and beautiful to watch, there is a provocative, rich and political imagination at work in Looking For Langston. An important film and a moving fantasy.

DVD Times Anthony Nield, also seen here: Looking for Langston | Film at The Digital Fix

Films of Isaac Julien Look Back and Talk Black, by José Arroyo from Jump Cut, May 1991

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [0.5/5] Phil Hall

The New York Times (Caryn James) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

YOUNG SOUL REBELS

Great Britain France Germany Spain (105 mi) 1991

PopcornQ review Jenni Olson

Winner of the Critic's Award at Cannes, Rebels is a 1977 London period piece which tells the story of two black disc jockeys (one gay, one straight). Late '70s British culture (notably punk and funk) comes through as the primary strength of the film, with lots of good music and fun clothes. The murder of a closeted gay friend, in a park known as a gay cruising place, provides the dramatic tension; and the ongoing hubbub of the Queen's 1977 Silver Jubilee celebration provides an almost surreal backdrop to the story.

Well-produced and beautifully shot (by Nina Kellgren) Rebels is the debut feature from black gay director Isaac Julien, whose previous and subsequent work (Looking for Langston, A Darker Side of Black) has broken new ground in film and video making practice.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

1977: Queen's Silver Jubilee year. Two London soul-boys want their pirate radio station to reach a wider public; but Chris (Nonyela) is distracted both by the big-time lure of the mainstream 'Metro' station and by Tracy (Okonedo), while Caz (Sesay) reacts to what he sees as his old friend's betrayal by taking up with gay socialist-worker punk Billibud (Durr). Worse, the cops suspect Chris of murdering one of Caz's gay friends in the park. Julien's brave, ambitious first feature makes all the right noises in terms of its sensitive treatment of thorny problems like racism and homophobia, and is largely successful in recreating various alternative cultural realities to the jingoistic claptrap which stands as the 'official' history of Britain during the summer of '77. Sadly, despite a strong soul soundtrack and fine camerawork, the film suffers from weak performances and an undernourished script that never frames its ideas within a gripping narrative.

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

I'd say that I was disappointed by English black gay film-maker Isaac Julien's 1991 "Young Soul Rebels," except that my expectations were not particularly high. I think that his earlier short film "Looking for Langston" is overrated in part from sympathy for the difficulties Julien had with the heirs of Langston Hughes (who refused permission to use any of Hughes's words in a film portraying his sexual orientation as gay). I liked Julien's 2002 documentary on American blaxploitation movies, BaadAssss Cinema would like to see his documentary on Franz Fanon ("Black Skin, White Mask," 1996) and some other shorter documentaries Julien has directed.

"Young Soul Rebels" (YSR) was Julien's first feature-length film and first fiction film. Set in 1977 (Queen Elizabeth's silver jubilee year, pre-Thatcher), it unconvincingly mixes the story of two young black (AfroCaribbean) DJs (Caz played by Mo Sesay is gay, Chris, played by Valentine Nonyela is straight) who have a pirate funk radio broadcast called "Soul Patrol" on weekends with a "thriller" story about a murder in a park that is closed at night but in which men connect sexually with men. Of course, the murderer is white and the victim black.

In turning off the Saturday night "Soul Patrol" program, the killer switched the boombox to recording instead of off. He then discarded the boombox in the bushes, where it was found by the younger sister of the straight DJ. Eventually, he plays the tape with the killer's voice and come-on line. It is someone whom Chris knows, but he fails to recognize the voice. Of course, the killer comes after the tape, which leads to a lame chase and a fiery (literally) finish. There are unsubtle homages to "Blow-Up" (Antonioni) and "Blow-Out" (De Palma) in this plot, but a great deal of it is implausible to me, not least the resolution.

It provides opportunities for white policemen to menace Chris (who does not want to turn over the recording of the murder after having been accused of perpetrating it), but suspense and chases are clearly not a Julien forte.

The intersection of race and (homo)sexuality is Julien territory. The heterosexual romance is not very convincing (and the black woman who works for the BBC and is trying to help Chris also has a white girlfriend, who, as played by Sophie Okonedo is particularly abstract or cardboard a character).

That the gay DJ is more conventionally masculine than the somewhat foppish straight one is schematic, but not unbelievable. I'm sure that there is some subtext about the contrast of intraracial heterosexual relationship in contrast the interracial gay and interracial lesbian ones, as well as the fatal park coupling. Someone as preoccupied with race/sex politics as Julien could not have failed to notice this schema that fits with the "race suicide" condemnation of homosexuality by some black nationalists.

On the other hand, Dorian Healy as Ken, the earnest punk rock DJ (and distributor of the Socialist Weekly in an expensive designer t-shirt), is the only standout in the cast older than the girl (Danielle Scillitoe, I think) who plays Chris's preteen sister.

The ending (after the "resolution" of the murderer stalking Chris and Caz part) is contrived, though providing gooey guilty "All You Need Is Love" pleasure.

The struggling entrepreneurs inevitably call to mind "My Beautiful Laundrette" (even if they are not getting it on with each other), a far better movie with far better performances all around. Both movies have menacing neo-Nazis in seedy East London areas. The city is not burned-out (despite the conflagration near the end) as in Stephen Frears' next (and considerably less good) about sex and race in multicultural Britain, "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid." The upbeat finales of it and YSR (and the French coming-of-age romantic comedy Just a Question of Love) are especially similar, but primarily the biting off of more than the film-makers can chew.

The audience roots for Caz and Chris to succeed, but it is difficult to muster much enthusiasm, because they are such unoriginal "rebels," and Chris is so eager to sell out. Perhaps if I had been able to see the movie in 1991 (or some time before "Noah's Arc" debuted on cable), I'd have found it fresher, though the amateur detective/thriller part would have seemed just as perfunctory and unsatisfying to me.

Nina Kellgren cinematography is good and the sound-track is lively, but the writing and/or editing and/or directing make for an odd combination of jerky and rambling. The sex scenes are inept (protracted without being graphic).

(The only bonus features are trailers for five movies, including YSR).

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

THE DARKER SIDE OF BLACK

Great Britain (55 mi) 1993

PopcornQ review Cynthia Rose from The Guardian

Director Isaac Julien travels to Jamaica and investigates the world of rap, ragga and homophobia. In 1992 Jet Star Records released a single by Buju Banton called "Boom Boom Bye Bye," in which he demanded that all lesbians and gays should be shot. It wasn't long before this attitude found the support of Shabba Ranks and other musicians. In A Darker Side of Black, Ranks and Banton get to justify their theories, alongside opinions from Michael Manley (former prime minister of Jamaica), Michael Franti (Disposable Heroes of Hiphopcricy), Ice Cube, and cultural commentators Cornell West and Trisha Rose.

"Julien captures views from across the black diaspora--moving his camera between London, the Caribbean and America. Like all his work, the investigation is rich and provocative, yet it scorns any tinge of easy judgement."

FRANTZ FANON: BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

Great Britain (70 mi) 1996

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review

Isaac Julien directed this excellent British documentary (1996) about the psychiatrist and theorist who wrote about colonial oppression and revolution. In English and subtitled French. 52 min.

Time Out review

A fine introduction to the life and work of the Frantz Fanon (1925-61), the Martinican-born, Paris-educated author, intellectual and activist. Isaac Julien and co-writer Mark Nash's study shows the influence of Derek Jarman's similar work on Wittgenstein. Mixing the talking heads (notably Stuart Hall), interviews with relatives, co-workers and friends, and archive footage, clips and reconstructions, they have produced a clear résumé of Fanon's ideas, but also something rarer, a strong, affecting sense of the man's complex personality. With his interest in violence, black identity and psychiatry (it was Fanon's professional work with war-damaged 'natives' and French soldiers in early '50s Algeria that was to revolutionise his politics, leading him later to join the FLN), Fanon is in many ways a perfect subject for Julien, enabling him to pursue themes that have figured in his work since Territories in the early '80s. In many ways this is the director's most mature film and not without the lyricism of his earlier discursive documentaries. Fanon died young (of leukaemia), just before the publication of The Wretched of the Earth, the analytical manifesto which became the freedom fighter's bible.

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

You can't abstract a cultural sign from its context.
— Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask

"I do not come with timeless truths. My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances." Appropriately, the first words uttered by the subject of Isaac Julien's Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask are elusive. This self-introduction, using language that is seemingly deprecating, even negative, is typically artful, and followed by the philosopher/cultural critic's unavoidable, real point: "Nevertheless," he says, "in complete composure, I think it would be good if certain things were said. These things I am going to say, not shout, for it is a long time since shouting has gone out of my life, so very long."

These "certain things" are arranged here as a kind of puzzle, part biography, part interrogation, part elegy. Alternately disjointed and sinuous, provocative and poetic, the film -- screening in select cites as part of a Julien installation called "Frantz Fanon S.A. 1997-2004" and available from California Newsreel on tape and DFVD -- presents an idiosyncratic vision of Fanon's lifelong struggle, as a colonized subject seeking freedom of thought and identity. Using interviews with Fanon's associates, family, and scholars, the hour-long, 1997 film considers Fanon from his birth in Martinique in 1925 and training as a psychiatrist in Paris, to his work with the FLN in Algeria and death from leukemia in Washington, 1961.

Though Fanon (played here by Colin Salmon, a favorite of director Paul W.S. Anderson, and so best known on U.S. movie screens as a valiant fighter of zombies and aliens) began his professional life as a psychiatrist hoping to "help patients to regain that freedom they have lost in madness." To this end, the young student went to France, where he came face to face with the colonizing force -- the very ideology -- that had shaped Martinique's past and future, and so, the young doctor's. His arrival in Europe is smartly illustrated in the movie as an overlay of images that simultaneously underlines its own artifice and multiple contexts: Fanon stands before a photo image of the Eiffel Tower and turns to face the "documentary" camera to announce, "You must understand, dear boy, that color prejudice means absolutely nothing to me." The moment shows that, early on, he has fully absorbed the social and political frames of Western whiteness, colorblind being a privilege afforded only to those in power to say so.

This moment is surely brief. Almost immediately, Fanon will fulfill the role that cultural critic and Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago Homi Bhabha asserts that of the many theorists of his era (including Castro, Marx, and Simone de Beauvoir), Fanon "stood apart," believing in the efficacy of "pure violence" and emerging as "an avenging angel" against the slave-masters -- the "us" who worked so hard and over so many centuries to colonize, contain, and crush a so-called "them." In his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (published in 1952, originally titled "Essay for the Dis-alienation of the Black Man"), he describes being called out on the street by a French child ("Look mother, a Negro!"), and so, "sees himself being seen."

Here, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall puts it, Fanon also "sees that the colonizer-colonized relationship is a struggle to the death," in which the colonizer's terrible, enduring trick is to deny any "recognition" of the colonized, to refuse to see him at all. Fanon theorized this denial, naming the structure of possession and objectification: finding himself gazed on as an other, he resisted the process by articulating it, and finding in it the interdependence of master and slave. "His gaze," he wrote, "fixes me in my place," but the colonizer defines himself in relation to the oppressed ("A white song all around me, a whiteness that burns"). Further, Fanon sees, the relationship is not only about racism, but about desire, the black man's wearing of a white mask, and the white man's desire for the black man, to possess him. Observing this sexual dynamic in power relations, Fanon challenged the colonizing gaze on multiple levels.

His own experience must change wit this challenge. He can no longer understand himself as French, or even as Martinican, in the same way he once had. And so, Fanon takes up the search for an alternative identity, a "post-colonial subject," as well as a community with whom he might feel affinity. As the film has it, he finds this in two very different sites. First, in his love for and marriage to Josie, a white French woman (a relationship the film treats briefly, as it might have embodied what Françoise Verges calls the "desire for whiteness," but also as a wholly individual event: they fell in love).

The film does not explore this relationship, the family it produced (his son Olivier briefly speaks on being "light-skinned," and so a source of some "anxiety" for his father), or even the worries about it among Fanon's political associates. Still, it does present the marriage as a complication, a means to rethink -- again -- the political absolutes that might have once seemed clear. Is Fanon's desire for a white woman a sign of his colonialist indoctrination? Is he able to see past race in his personal life? Or is anyone's identity and desire a function of multiple forces and influences, never to be sorted out wholly or rigidly? As the film puts it, "He was a dreamer perhaps but his dreams born from that nightmare of history, where the third world was neither simply reality nor ideology. No such crude opposition of history and consciousness can represent Fanon's insight into colonialism and the making of the modern world."

The second focus for Fanon's reimagined self has to -- initially -- with his work. He aligns himself with the FLN in the war for independence in Algiers. While working with patients in Blida-Joinville beginning in 1954, Fanon asserts, "We shall deal here with the problem of mental disorders which arise from the war of national liberation that the Algerian people are carrying on." Through this therapy, he began developing his theory of the relations among racism, desire, and colonialism, in his book, The Wretched of the Earth. It is here that Fanon's thinking becomes acutely relevant for today's realities, as he examines torture, imprisonment, and armed resistance. The film includes reenacted testimonies regarding the infamous tortures of the time (also recalled in Gillo Pontecorvo's 1967 film The Battle of Algiers).

While, as Verges says, "the Algerian fighter was for Fanon the real man," the film also suggests Fanon was troubled by the incorporation of colonialist tactics in the battle against colonialism. His patients recall the trauma of being tortured and inflicting torture: "We're not interested in killing them," says one soldier, "What we want is information." And so again, Fanon's work reveals its lasting relevance, as such definitions remain under scrutiny today, as do central questions for Wretched of the Earth, here stated, "Can the peasantry be a revolutionary class? What's the relationship between armed struggle and revolutionary reform?"

Even more complicated is the film's framing of Fanon's controversial essay, "Algeria Unveiled," in which he describes the uses of deception, "what is veiled and what is revealed." The essay describes the insurgent situation, in which women -- because they can turn the expectation of the veil against their French enemies -- were able to move guns and explosives from place to place. It has been read as a "rationalization of Algerian conservatism," and indeed, Fanon sustained a focus on and celebration of a particularly masculine opposition to colonial forces.

This, then, is Julien's most compelling insight into Fanon, who has been both reviled and revered, that his complex interrogations of cultural and political affairs are forever entangled with his self-understanding as a "colonized individual" who lived his own revolt. As Fanon "speaks" at film's end, the story of nationalism and colonialism is laid bare, as a story of power and possession. "Desire," he asserts, "is the movement of memory: the psyche shrinking back, muscular tension, barbed wire entanglements, and then violence. Violence quickens the petrifying. The act of violence is not the killing field, the orgy of destruction. Violence is the visibility, the shared evil that forces together the oppressor and the oppressed. Violence is the awareness of freedom's proximity of the fragility of survival."

BAADASSSSS CINEMA – made for TV

Great Britain USA (55 mi) 2002

Time Out review

Authoritative and entertaining lowdown on the 'blaxploitation' flicks which wowed African American audiences (and others) in the early 1970s. Julien explores what made films like Shaft and Superfly exciting at the time - not least the fact that here black men could stand tall on the silver screen - how black political bodies disowned them and how boom went to bust within four short years. With contributions from Samuel L Jackson, Quentin Tarantino and many of the original film-makers, Fred Williamson, Melvin Van Peebles, Larry Cohen and Pam Grier among them.

blackfilm.com (Godfrey Powell) review

The definition of Black Exploitation. The explosive birth and rapid demise of Blaxploitation. These are some of the issues explored in the BaadAsssss Cinema Docurama which premiered in August of 2002 on the Independent Film Channel (IFC). Baaaad Asss is an hour long study of not only the movies of this genre but how they manifested themselves given the political and economic conditions of blacks at that time. The docurama does this through a plethora of clips from the barrage of blaxploitation films that entered theaters from Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and Shaft (1972) to Coffy (1973) to poorer ones such as Black Hooker.

BaadAsssss Cinema begins with the movie that began this genre of films Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. The director and star of the movie, Melvin Van Peebles states, “I saw films and figured I could do better than that.” Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song tapped into a huge reservoir of pent-up black appreciation. Thousands of blacks waited in long lines to see it. The Black Panther Party made it required viewing for all its members as it defied the cultural limitations placed on black men. With such a success, a struggling Hollywood seized upon this tremendous revenue stream where a film could be produced for $700,000 and made tens of millions of dollars in return. Film critic Ed Guerrero analyzes that Sweet Sweetback began the debate from the beginning between the idea of a revolutionary style of movie or exploitatation of black life. Did these films do more harm than good for the black community? Immediately, outrage arose from the NAACP, Jesse Jackson and Push and C.O.R.E against the output of these Hollywood movies. These black organizations felt the output was not healthy nor a realistic representation of black life. The heroes of these movies degenerated into a long list of pimps, drug dealers, gang leaders that triumphed over the “Man”. They reveled in women, flashy jewelry and of course that 70’s fashion. Melvin Peebles says, “Hollywood suppressed the political messages of the earlier films and added black caricatures and blaxploitation was born.”

Lastly, the strongest point studied in BaaadAsss is the idea of a Black Hollywood. The explosion of black film created tremendous amounts of jobs for black directors, black actors and black production crews. This explosion laid the foundation for a growing influx of blacks into the film business. Unfortunately, this influx did not sustain blaxploitation films nor increase their potential to evolve into a higher plane of film. Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, at the end of the docurama, notes, “It came, it died, it went before it had a chance to grow. Black Hollywood? It don’t exist. Nah, No.”

BaadAssss Cinema is directed by Isaac Julien. Among the many interviewed include: Afeni Shakur, Samuel L. Jackson, Pam Grier, Melvin Peebles, Gloria Hendry, film critic Elvis Mitchell and Quentin Tarantino. Celebrate Black History by picking up this film.

User comments from imdb Author: Michael DeZubiria (miked32@hotmail.com) from Luoyang, China

It was Quentin Tarantino's famous interest in the old 1970s blaxploitation films, as well as Pam Grier, that first got me interested in the genre, but not knowing what the genre was really about, or at least not knowing the history behind it's formation, its themes, even its actors, made me not enjoy the first handful of the films that I watched, like Coffy, Foxy Brown, Black Mama, White Mama, and Sheba, Baby. Granted, I don't think any amount of documentaries could make me enjoy Sweet Sweetback's Badaaasss Song, but I suppose I can certainly understand the society in which it was made.

What I loved about this documentary is the way it gives a look not only at the blaxploitation films of the 19670s, but also gives the historical context under which they were made, including their level of popularity in places like Los Angeles, where I live, and Hollywood's response. There are a number of debatable claims made in the documentary, such as blaxloitation saving Hollywood or Hollywood killing the blaxploitation genre, but what I really appreciated were the interviews from some of the original actors as well as brief looks at several of the more prominent blaxploitatoin films, some of which I enjoyed, like Black Caesar, and some of which remain not really my favorites, like Sweet Sweetback and Super Fly.

The cast give very revealing interviews, both about their experience in being involved in the blaxpoitation genre, as well as giving their insights into the meaning and fate of the genre. I was glad to see that Quentin Tarantino appears to talk about blaxploitation's influence on him and his films because he is obviously so heavily inspired by them, but there were some other heavyweights that are far too conspicuously absent, most notably the tremendously successful Spike Lee. Odd, since this documentary was released in 2002, far too early for them to have already been mad at Spike for She Hate Me.

Gloria Hendry tells the story about getting her first role in Black Caesar and becoming instantly famous, and others talk about their involvement and experience with the genre, such as Samuel L. Jackson and even Ameni Shakur, Tupac's mother, who was a member of the Black Panther party. Pam Grier gives a brilliant interview, revealing a depth of character and a studied intelligence that far surpasses anything that she has ever been able to reveal in any of her films. She speaks so intelligently that this interview alone almost makes it look like she has been accepting roles far beneath her ability for the majority of her career. And she's good, too, I'd like to see a lot more of her in the future. I really think she has adapted well to the changes that have taken place in her life and in the film industry since the end of blaxploitation.

Fred Williamson, one of the most famous actors from the genre, gives a rather sour, disillusioned interview, focusing on pretty negative subjects and ideas. The one that stuck out to me the most was that he said something like no one ever wanted black film, their was never any real desire or need for it, people just wanted to see black people on film. Something like that, at any rate, he claimed that no one ever really wanted blaxploitation, it happened for other, more superficial reasons, which I don't agree with at all. The people that packed those theaters sure wanted it.

Blaxploitation is something of an offbeat subgenre in cultural film history, but I think that it is one that needs some explanation before a lot of people will really enjoy, and some people won't enjoy it even then. Sort of like how some supplemental documentaries included with DVDs will make you enjoy certain movies more than you otherwise would have, this documentary is an excellent way to get a basic introduction to the genre, and make sure to have a pen and paper handy when you watch it, because you'll want to write down some of the movies that it talks about so you can remember to watch them!

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review

DVD Verdict - A Bold Look At '70s Blaxploitation Films Rob Lineberger

CultureCartel.com (Stephen Murray) review [3.5/5]

DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross) dvd review [4/5]

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

MvMMDI Movies Made Me Do It

EyeForFilm.co.uk Keith Hennessey Brown, also seen here: Kinocite

Needcoffee.com DVD Review Scott C

Variety.com [Phil Gallo]

July, Miranda

MIRANDA JULY » About

Miranda July is a filmmaker, performing artist and writer. She grew up in Berkeley, California where she began her career by writing plays and staging them at an all-ages club. July’s videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and in the 2002 and 2004 Whitney Biennials. Her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, was published this year, and her fiction has been printed in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. In 2002 July created the participatory website, learningtoloveyoumore, with artist Harrell Fletcher, and a companion book will be published by Prestel this fall. She wrote, directed and starred in her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Camera d’Or. July recently debuted a new performance at The Kitchen (NY), and is currently working on her second movie. She lives in Los Angeles.

Curve: Miranda July Twilight Greenaway from Curve magazine

Miranda July doesn't like the term spoken-word. Nor does she want her work to be referred to as performance art. When July takes the stage, she does so to transcend the barriers of performance.

"I reenact things you've seen a million times before," she says, "straight things, TV things, and medical things: These are the transactions that we all participate in and memorize accidentally. Then I wiggle my hand and wink and you know that everything I just said was in code, and the real truth is the sick or incredible way you feel."

The characters she brings to life, in theaters and music venues around the country, are at once densely layered and elusive. July does not separate her art from her identity as a queer woman, and while many of her characters seem to be a melding of gender, religion, age and sexuality, her work manipulates mainstream culture in a way that many lesbians can understand. In addition to her performance work, or "live movies," this Portland, Ore. Resident also created Big Miss Moviola, a non-selective video chain letter. Big Miss Moviola is a network for lesbians and other women filmmakers from around the country to exchange their films. The project has now branched off to include an edited commercial venture called the Co-Star Tapes.

BBC - collective - me and you and everyone we know interview also including an audio and video feature by Kaleem Aftab from Interactive Culture magazine, August 19, 2005

Life began to change for Miranda Grossinger when she gave herself the alias, Miranda July. The far sweeter-sounding moniker was put on her first short film, Atlanta, way back in 1996. Since then July has proved that she’s not just good at choosing names. Now 31, she’s established a formidable reputation as a writer, director, actor and performance artist.

July has released two albums – yes, albums – of her short stories, and her radio performances can be heard regularly on NPR’s The Next Big Thing. One of her sound installations, The Drifters, was presented at the Whitney Biennale in 2002, while her web project, learningtoloveyoumore.com - setting out art tasks for the public at large - was part of the 2004 Biennale. Her five short films have been shown in the world’s top museums, including New York’s Guggenheim and Museum Of Modern Art, and she’s given multimedia performances at London’s ICA. As if all of that wasn’t enough, she's also had short stories published in the Paris Review and The Harvard Review.

And all of it, she says, has been preparation for her debut feature, the Sundance and Cannes award-laden Me And You And Everyone We Know, written/directed by, and starring, July. “It was definitely a challenge,” she says of the jump from art world to cinema. “But in terms of my progression it was a very appropriate next transition for me. I had been writing dialogue for so long; really the biggest challenge was the film industry and its conventions.”

The main problem was people trying to interfere with the film. Luckily, though, July held firm and knew when she had to do better in creating the myriad characters, including a six-year-old boy, a shoe salesman, two teenage girls, a lovelorn pensioner and a performance artist (played by July, of course) trying to make something happen in their lives. It’s a real gem that has a lot more substance to it than first appears. A bit like July herself.

miranda july City of Women

"Miranda July is a hero to many and an enigma to many more" - Amy Kellner, Time Out.

"One day some little girl in Ohio is going to make a beautiful film with her father's camcorder and for once the so-called 'professionalism' about movies will be destroyed for ever, and it will really become an art form." -- Francis Ford Coppola

As you may know from your own experience, a lot of us ladies do not have the time, energy, resources or support to make movies, or even think of ourselves as storytellers. Missing movies are particularly easy to ignore. It is easy to say: too much sex and violence in the theatres. But not enough WHAT? What are the missing movies about? Is is hard to even guess. Maybe they are very sexy and very violent. More sexy and violent than we can even imagine. Maybe they are Dullsville… Who knows?
If you want to know what the missing movies are about, check out Big Miss Moviola. Big Miss Moviola is a challenge and a promise to all woman moviemakers. You send her your film, she sends you the latest Big Miss Moviola Video Chainletter, a compilation of 10 lady-made movies - including your own…

Big Miss Moviola was founded in 1995 by Miranda July, a 26 year-old multi-media artist from Portland, Oregon. An unconventional moviemaker herself, she completed last January her fourth film, Nest of Tens, which made its world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Her previous video, The Amateurist (about a woman obsessed with numbers), has been screened at venues around the world (including "The American Century" exhibit at the Whitney Museum).

Besides making her video-work she is also active as a performance artist. After "the paranoid fable" Love Diamond, "a kaleidoscopic examination of love in all its dimensions", Miranda July is currently finalising her second "live movie", The Swan Tool. This performance features herself as a "technician who is waiting to die, or fall in love, or win the lottery".

July has also recorded several music albums. Last year she directed a video for the girl band Sleater-Kinney (introduced at the City of Women 1997) and made her feature film acting debut in Alison McClean's, Jesus' Son. Earlier this year she co-created the story for the upcoming feature film Center of the World with director Wayne Wang and writer Paul Auster.

In a 2 hour-programme, City of Women proudly presents "The Best of Big Miss Moviola" (or America, the Quintessential Other Half, or The Way You've Never Seen It on Screen), and July's intriguing latest Nest of Tens. In between we'll treat you to a surprise act.

MIRANDA JULY official website

July's blog

Film Comment Chris Chang from Film Comment, July 8, 2000

Putting all they know to work Wesley Morris from the Boston Globe, June 26, 2005

Performance artist's new role -- film director G. Allen Johnson from the San Francisco Chronicle, June 29, 2005

A moment with performance artist/filmmaker Miranda July Regina Hackett from Seattle Post Intelligencer, June 30, 2005

Get Up: Sleater-Kinney's last show: A retrospective Julianne Shepherd from Pitchfork, August 28, 2006

Sleater-Kinney music video on Wikipedia

YouTube - Sleater-Kinney "Get Up" directed by Miranda July

Sleater Kinney Videos - Sleater Kinney Video Clips

Video: Blonde Redhead: "Top Ranking or on Wikipedia here: Blonde Redhead

YouTube - Blonde Redhead (Miranda July)- Top Ranking

PAPERMAG: WORD UP!: Blonde Redhead and Miranda July

David Byrne Journal: 3.2.07: Miranda July comments of her performance, Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely are Not Going To Talk About

The Portland Mercury | Blogtown, PDX | Attention Miranda July Fans Chas Bowie from The Portland Mercury, April 9, 2007

Miranda Writes: Arthouse queen Miranda July gets literary Scott Indrisek from Radar Online, May 7, 2007

You and Her and Everything She Knows Angela Ashman from the Village Voice, May 8, 2007

LA Weekly - Art/Books - Miranda July's Childlike, Unchildlike Art ... Miranda July’s Childlike, Unchildlike Art, by Nathan Ihara from LA Weekly, May 16, 2007

Filmmaker Miranda July's New Book 'No One Belongs Here More Than ... Kimberly Cutter from New York magazine, May 21, 2007

All 'miranda july' Posts - New York Magazine's Entertainment Blog Miranda July, David Byrne, and a Whole Lot of Cuteness, from New York magazine, May 29, 2007

Summer Movies: Atlanta: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker Atlanta, written by Miranda July from The New Yorker, June 11, 2007

Our Date with Miranda Lorrie Moore from The New York Review of Books, March 15, 2015

BOMB Magazine: Miranda July by Rachel Kushner

The Miranda July Story Underground Literary Alliance

Miranda July at Modern Times on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

planetdan a tribute

cloverfield press a story website

Zoetrope: All-Story: Back Issues The Shared Patio, a short story by Miranda July, from the Winter 2005 edition of Zoetrope All-Story

an excerpt from No one belongs her more than you, from this site: Miranda July — KCRW | 89.9FM

Atlanta short film

Joanie 4 Jackie 4Ever

Everything About Some Kind of Loving

Peripheral Produce Nest of Tens

Learning To Love You More

Miranda July interview 4 part interview by Tony DuShane on Drinks with Tony

GreenCine | article feature and interview by Craig Phillips from GreenCine June 20, 2005

Interview with Miranda July by Greg Shapiro from AfterEllen, June 27, 2005

Interview with The Onion A.V. Club by Nathan Rabin, July 6, 2005

Loving Miranda More | AssignmentZero telephone interview by Leah DeVun, May 14, 2007

Books - Miranda July - Portland Mercury feature and interview by Chas Bowie from The Portland Mercury, May 17 – 23, 2007

So, Miranda July, do you miss Portland? - OregonLive.com interview by Jeff Baker from The Oregonian, May 21, 2007

The Sound of Young America: Podcast: Miranda July ))<>(( July 27, 2007

The Believer - Interview with Miranda July by Eli Horowitz from The Believer, August 2007

The Believer - Interview with Khaela Maricich from The Believer, August 2007

Miranda July Interview by Michelle Thomas from Future Movies

Miranda July short feature and KUCI interview by Anji

Autumn de Wilde - Miranda July photos

No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July a “you could get lost here if you have all the time in the world” website, which announces her upcoming book, commented on here: SpringBoardMedia: Miranda July knows Websites

MySpace.com - Miranda July - L.A., California - Other - www ...

Miranda July - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW B 84

USA (95 mi) 2004

Written, directed by and starring a 32-year-old performance artist who previously wrote short stories, made experimental short films, and a rock video for the band Sleater-Kinney (“Get Up”) among other things, her debut feature is a quirky, but ultimately unsatisfying film about lonely souls and their lost connections, which attempts to remain whimsical and upbeat about a darker edge of our society. Set in a suburb outside Los Angeles, there is a very peculiar tone, obviously intended to be one blanketed in love and affection throughout, which never registers, which is always predictable in the manner in which it remains abnormal, outside the sphere of our comprehension, which, while taking us there, doesn’t really offer a very compelling reason or vision of why this should mean something to us. Everything is exaggerated to the extreme, where the two lead adults are so disoriented and underplayed that they could be lobotomy patients. It’s as if they are constantly in a daze, perhaps reflecting a hazy, marijuana state of mind, where no one ever raises their voices or shows emotion. There are periods of prolonged, inexplicable silences, where awkward, off-beat conversation replaces the norm. This is a film where the entire length and breadth of the film is quirky acts and conversations, like witnessing a car drive down a freeway with a goldfish inside a plastic bag filled with water sitting on top of a car, or someone setting his hand on fire in a misguided attempt to gain sympathy from a separating spouse, or a neighbor who places lurid signs in his window and can’t stop talking dirty to a couple of teenage girls, who themselves wish to determine which of them provides a better blowjob, or a little girl who has already purchased blenders and toasters and other electrical appliances for her dowry at her wedding. While there are several original and imaginative scenes, will this ultimately change the way we look at ourselves or the world around us?

The film interweaves the story of the peculiar and beyond-shy character played by July and a recently separated shoe salesman with two interracial kids, a guy who is even stranger and weirder than July. The Fates apparently are pulling them together, as there isn’t an ounce of interest or compelling attraction between them, they’re just each weirder than the other. They do have an inspiring conversation together while walking down the street one day, but this reverie is broken in short order, leaving us in a state of having to watch this filmmaker put her stamp of innocence on the world around us, adding “cute” and “charming” as adjectives to supplant the reality of what happens to latch key kids, unsupervised kids left alone by adults too busy to notice, or adults who may have other more prurient intentions with such easy prey. But not in this film, as there’s no basis in reality, instead it’s all supposed to make us smile and feel like we have entered an overly pat enchanted world of misfits and lonely hearts where it’s OK to observe lonely people, and laugh at how silly they are for doing all the silly things they do. The film spends plenty of time with the kids, and there’s a haunting scene on a park bench, the result of an on-line chat discussion, which resonates fully with the audience, perhaps even generating a few gasps. While the scenes with the kids are compelling and feel at least a bit more natural, it’s the misfit adults that just left me scratching my head, as there’ll be no best acting nominations from these performances, and little left to linger afterwards other than the stylistic weirdness.

Shots from the suburbs Charlotte Higgins from the Guardian

Already feted at Sundance, Me and You and Everyone We Know is charming Cannes audiences with its quirky vision, as it interrogates with witty lightness of touch those age-old preoccupations of the struggle to connect with other people, the alchemy of love, and the hunger of loneliness. The interstices between childhood and adulthood are deftly investigated: the children in the film seem at times knowing in their grasp of the world, better able in their naivety to connect with others than the blundering adults - and at others deeply vulnerable.

Perhaps one of the reasons the film seems so fresh is that July - a slight and rather wide-eyed figure, with a mop of curly brown hair - is entirely self-taught, and simply found herself writing her first film one day as she took a train ride through Chicago. Raised in Berkeley, California, she dropped out of university, but "I started writing plays at 16 and putting them on, then making little movies, doing everything my own way, teaching myself in my own room, kind of like Christine." Her career to date (once based in Portland, Oregon, but now in LA) has involved everything from performance art (some of which has been seen at the ICA in London and the Arnolfini in Bristol), short stories, shooting a video for the band Sleater-Kinney, experimental short films, sound installations, even recording her own albums in the 1990s on the punk scene.

Me and You and Everyone We Know Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Well, it's a split decision for Big Miss Moviola. Her feature film debut, for all its faults, is sui generis -- I never thought I'd see a Todd Solondz / Fred Rogers mash-up, but to all intents and purposes that's what M&Y&EWK is. Suburban sexual dysfunction, loneliness, and the perverse explorations of under-supervised kids are combined with a warm-fuzzy sweetness that, in its own way, justifies Solondz's bleach-and-ammonia anti-humanism. I guess I should have seen this coming, since, if I'd seriously thought back on July's earlier works, like The Amateurist and Getting Stronger Every Day, I'd have realized the obvious. She's our 21st century Laurie Anderson. But while Anderson's wide-eyed, women-in-technology stance maintained a certain ambivalence, allowing the viewer / listener to accept her warm evocations of American suburbia as straight-up appreciation or as gentle irony, July takes it in an overly earnest direction. The sad-sack shoe salesman, the lady who drives senior citizens to the IMAX, the precocious girl next door -- everybody's just looking for love [sigh]. Easily the most refreshing (at times, even bracing) element in July's roundelay is its positioning of children on equal footing in this quest. This results in some of the frankest, funniest examinations of adolescent and teenage sexuality I've seen in an American film in ages. (It's as though we weren't living in Bush-land, and yet paradoxically it is clearly a direct response to the times, a kind of bashful, ladylike dare.) But unfortunately, July takes all the gooey-eyed idealization that most filmmakers lavish on children and slathers it onto her adult characters, resulting in moony swoony romanticism that practically made me want to bold from my seat, run to the men's room and brush my teeth. Even at their best, July's verbal cha-cha's of seduction call to mind a clunkier, less rigorous Hal Hartley. (But then, that describes even Hartley himself these days; see above.) Despite these excesses, July's direction tips the film mostly over into the 'win' column. There's a primitivism in the way she stages sequences and constructs spaces through editing, not just like a first-time filmmaker but like someone who, in the very best possible sense, doesn't know how to make a feature film. It's the jolt of someone blithely violating rules she's not aware of, like Sam Fuller as an eighth-grade girl. Unfortunately I expect these formal pleasures to dissipate once July finds surer footing in the medium.

Me and You and Everyone We Know: The ... - Senses of Cinema Asad Haider from Senses of Cinema, May 5, 2006 (excerpt)

“I can’t believe I bought these shoes”, exclaims the performance artist Miranda July in her hit indie film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). “They’re exactly the same as my old shoes. Except they’re pink.” I had a similar feeling about her film. It is bright, cute and attention-grabbing, but it’s the same as my old shoes.

The exciting colours, unusual designs and athletic swooshes that one can find on shoes amount to an excess of form, which compensates for a fundamental lack of content: they’re really all just shoes. Artists should take this reality as seriously as political economists do, since art takes place in a society in which the referent of culture is consistently the commodity. One way of dealing with art’s social position is to adopt the æsthetics of consumerism and mass culture, and, in doing so, shock the viewer into a different relation with those cultural forms. Other films this year have done exactly that: for example, George A. Romero gave a dazzling reinterpretation of commodity fetishism in Land of the Dead (2005), presenting relations between people as relations between zombies; and David Cronenberg’s History of Violence (2005) used the conventions of a commercial crime-thriller to trace the genesis of violence in culture, the family and cinematic spectatorship itself. By taking up the discursive forms of the culture industry, by pushing them to an extreme and/or resolving them into a cinematic reconstruction of meaning, these films present us the complexities of the existing reality, without either obeying its orders, like a reactionary television sitcom, or pretending that there’s nothing to worry about, like a happy-go-lucky adventure flick about pirates.

In July’s highbrow film, however, the colourful candy-coating of the commodity is not a means of critique: it is an emotional experience. Her pink shoes are worth the money, after all: they bring her a comfort she never realized shoes could deliver and she falls in love with the department-store clerk who sold them to her. July wants to find those little spots sprinkled throughout the immense accumulation of commodities that are pretty and poignant; as the film’s website puts it, “Me and You and Everyone We Know is a poetic and penetrating observation of how people struggle to connect with one another in an isolating and contemporary world”.

The Village Voice [Jessica Winter]

The inclusive title of polymath Miranda July's first feature film is apt for a multimedia artist who has often sought to forge virtual communities through her work. Her Joanie 4 Jackie chain letter video project generated a cheap distribution network for unaffiliated female filmmakers, while on learningtoloveyoumore.com, July and collaborator Harrell Fletcher concoct offbeat art class homework ("Make a paper replica of your bed") and post the results—every assignment begets its own online group show. In the beguiling ensemble Me and You and Everyone We Know, July measures the distances between people in a suburban Los Angeles neighborhood and knits together cockeyed comedies of attraction and repulsion. A prizewinner at Sundance and Cannes, July's witty ode to only-connecting sustains a delicate tone of pensive whimsy.

The film's focal points—perhaps even its Me and You—are a pair of dazed, searching outsiders lacking a certain We. Earnest, goofy video artist Christine (played by July) is trying to nudge a foot in the door at the local Center for Contemporary Art, but even once she penetrates the fortress, she can't get her work-sample tape into the hands of the standoffish director. (Is it ironic or only fitting that art-world superstar July finds her most piquant sample of enforced estrangement inside a gallery?) Meanwhile, frazzled shoe salesman Richard (a superb John Hawkes) is splitting with his wife and moving out of the house they share with their Internet-glued kids, Peter (Miles Thompson) and Robby (Brandon Ratcliff). The separation appears amicable enough, but bewildered Richard is badly unmoored, appearing at his sons' bedroom door like a vagrant, wild-eyed supplicant ("Do I look well to you guys?") and setting fire to his hand on the front lawn, as if trying to invent an ancient Ceremony of the Broken Home.

The attractions of impromptu ritual are a constant in Me and You, in the incantatory recitations Christine records for her videos, the last rites she gives to a doomed goldfish, and the solo mating dances she performs at the margins of the shoe department—flashing the reflected light of a compact mirror toward an unwitting Richard or attaching ornamental socks to her ears. Any tenuous offer of an emotional or sexual bond is treated like a dangerous dare. Richard and Christine finally exchange some flirtatious banter—imagining the sidewalk beneath their feet as a timeline of their hypothetical relationship—but he's angered when she jumps impetuously into his car; Richard's jolly colleague Andrew (Brad Henke) affixes lurid come-ons to the windows of his house but hides in panic when teenage neighbors Rebecca (Najarra Townsend) and Heather (Natasha Slayton) call his bluff.

Trying on their nascent feminine wiles and seeing how they fit, Rebecca and Heather also enlist doleful Peter as judge in a fellatio competition, while little Robby wins a passionate online admirer when he pens a surely unprecedented coprophiliac fantasy. As she proved in her bracing video Nest of Tens (2000), July ascribes sexuality to persons under the age of consent without coyness or moral hectoring. And while Peter and Robby's pain and alienation following their parents' breakup are evident, Me and You absorbs rather than underlines them and refuses to sentimentalize the flexible forbearance of youth. When a regular customer asks after Richard's boys and coos fatuously that kids are "so adaptable," Richard replies, with weary self-indictment, "Yes, well, they have absolutely no control over their own lives, so . . . "

Crisply photographed by Chuy Chavez and buoyed by winsome beep-and-buzz keyboards on the soundtrack, Me and You proceeds with childlike discursiveness. The film conjures a heightened reality where characters verbalize their thoughts, desires, and impulses without submitting them to the usual filters first; July takes in their foibles unblinkingly and folds them into an awkward, heartfelt embrace.

IndieWire [Kristi Mitsuda] with responses from Nicolas Rapold and Elbert Ventura from Reverse Shot

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Beth Gilligan]

Back to the future, or the vanguard meets the rearguard Bert Cardullo from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW - Ruthless Reviews Matt Cale

Revisiting: Miranda July's 'Me and You and Everyone We Know ... Omar Kholeif from Pop Matters

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DVD Times Noel Megahey, also seen here: Me And You And Everyone We Know | Film at The Digital Fix

filmcritic.com Norm Schrager

Martin Tsai's Blog

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Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") easily the most negative review out there

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Me and You and Everyone We Know Movie Review (2005) | Roger Ebert

New York Times (registration req'd) A. O. Scott, also seen here: An Artistic Eye Wide Open, Observing Odd, Lost Souls - The New York ...

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

ARE YOU THE FAVORITE PERSON OF ANYONE?

USA (4 mi) 2005 d: Miguel Arteta writer: Miranda July

User reviews from imdb: Author: sophieglazer from Fort Wayne, Indiana

This is a simple, poignant short film, shot on a budget of $150: a man with a survey stops passersby and asks them, "Are you anybody's favorite person?" What a heartbreaking question, for somebody who DOESN'T come first in somebody else's heart! Miranda July, who wrote the short story this is based on, had just finished shooting ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW and made this film in the week between shooting and editing the first rough assembly. Miguel Arteta, who directed, was still in love with her at the time, and in an interview with WHOLPHIN said, "The shoot was painless but sure enough, by the time I started editing, we were broken up. This little short is like a rear-view mirror that survived a fabulous, painful crash."

THE FUTURE C+ 79

USA (91 mi) 2011

I'm just a rock in the sky... and the world is so far away. —Voice of the Moon (Joe Putterlik)

This is one of the least involving films you’ll ever see, so much so one wonders why it was even made at all? One can only think it’s a bleak, personal reaction to a separation or a loved one’s death, where the film lists a dedication to Joe Putterlik, a real life person who acts in the film, but died before it was released. While this bears the distinct quirkiness of a Miranda July film, a slow detachment that borders on boredom, short verbal outbursts that seem restricted to ten words or less, characters that seem to remain in a perpetual state of limbo, momentary occasions of laughter, and a near plotless storyline, yet it’s surprisingly absent in establishing any relevancy in our lives. Walking out of the film afterwards, one suspects this is one of the least effective pieces in the collected works of someone as clever and imaginative as Ms. July, who is also a performance artist who works in multimedia formats, including short films, music videos, books, and feature length films that she writes and directs while also appearing as a main character. This is a film that clearly establishes its own boundaries and ground rules, so the audience is open to something fresh and unique, but what Ms. July provides instead is a rather lame relationship movie about a bored, middle class Los Angeles couple that finds it hard to commit. Starring Hamish Linklater as Jason, her live-in boyfriend, the two are living together friction free in perfect harmony and bliss, but there is no chemistry between them other than a close friendship. They may as well be brother and sister, though that’s perhaps an exaggeration. They get along fine and enjoy each other’s company, but neither one has a life, yet are unaware of their deep seeded emptiness.

The film is narrated by Ms. July’s voice as an injured cat that is sitting in an animal shelter waiting to get adopted, where this couple comes ready to adopt but is told they must wait 30 days due to a medical condition that must heal before the cat can be released. This momentary setback plays havoc with the couple’s future, as they suddenly feel their best years are behind them, failing to live up to their dreams, where they have become, well—ordinary. As they believe the cat will somehow unify their lives, the 30 day interim becomes an exploratory stage to chuck it all and begin anew, as they believe afterwards this newly discovered commitment will send their lives on a downward end-of-their-lives spiral, including a decided lack of freedom. What would they do if they only had 30 days left to live? July quits her job as a ballet dance instructor of infants while Jason quits his online computer service and walks the streets of LA selling trees door to door as part of the city’s outreach program to allow trees to naturally replenish the smoggy atmosphere with more oxygen. While in theory this may work, Jason finds he is easily sidetracked, as the city’s residents show little interest or enthusiasm, so instead he starts hanging around the home of a man named Joe (Joe Putterlik) that he discovers in a Penny Saver advertisement. Joe has many interests, including electrical repair, weird philosophical sayings and holiday cards with lewd limericks attached. Jason uses him as a kind of father figure, as he effortlessly dispenses with good natured advice.

Ms. July, on the other hand, decides to make a YouTube dance video for every day of the 30 days, inspired by the music of Beach House- 'Master of None' (seen here on YouTube: 3:49), but becomes dismayed with her lack of talent, so quickly loses interest. Instead, she calls at random a phone number listed on the back of a drawing Jason recently purchased, which leads her into the home of David Warshofsky, a well to do single father in his own home in the suburbs raising a daughter (Isabella Acres) who expresses a maturity level well beyond her years. This random act alters the balance between Ms. July and Jason, as she mystifyingly becomes attracted to his rather crude nature, becoming sucked into a new dream fantasy that doesn’t even appear to be her own. Where this all leads is to a kind of magical realism, where characters think time can literally stop, where they can sort out the major difficulties in their lives, but time moves ahead anyway without their realizing it, altering the landscape as they know it, which will never again be as it was. The film seems to thrive on despairing ambiguities and a wandering curiosity about very ordinary things, but much of it is an avoidance mechanism to avoid having to make a commitment, where they may never know how love feels, still withholding their emotions, keeping their freedom and individuality on reserve. There’s a beautiful use of the song Peggy Lee - Where Or When (seen here on YouTube: 3:20), which is the epitome of romance, a fleeting illusion that fades into the hopes and dreams of the next couple.

The House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]

The opening of The Future promises gruesome whimsy: A caged cat named Paw Paw (played by a puppet's furry limbs, voiced by writer-director Miranda July) laments its impending death while hoping for potential new owners. That said owners are played by July and Hamish Linklater as a Los Angeles couple with matching curly coifs and New Age singsongs doesn't exactly lower the twee level. It's something of a small miracle, then, that July's follow-up to Me and You and Everyone We Know manages to find its groove, sidestep the cutesy trapdoors it sets for itself, and pull these free-floating bits of oddball pathos together into an acutely yearning, strange, and even dark whole. A singular harlequin presence on screen, July brings an eye for mercurial forms and a sense of rhythm to what may ultimately be the most surreal study of artistic and parental dread since Eraserhead.

The Future Noel Murray from The Onion A.V. Club

In Miranda July’s second feature, The Future, the quirky performance artist casts herself as a dance teacher who has difficulty dancing when she’s by herself, because whenever she starts to move her head, she gets distracted by the fine details of the room around her, and whenever she starts to move her body, so many possibilities open up that she freezes. That’s also a fair description of July’s filmmaking, which is preoccupied with the minuscule almost to the point of being trifling. July’s debut feature, Me And You And Everyone We Know, for example, contrasted people in real pain with emotionally stunted ninnies, and seemed to hold both in distressingly equal regard.

On the surface, The Future seems eminently mockable. July stars opposite Hamish Linklater (from the underrated sitcom The New Adventures Of Old Christine, and not incidentally, a July look-alike), who plays her equally immobile boyfriend. When the couple agrees to adopt a sickly cat with a wounded paw—a cat that narrates its own scenes—they worry that even this small amount of responsibility will impede their ability to do all the awesome things they currently aren’t doing. So they decide to make the most of the remaining month while the kitty is convalescing at the shelter. They quit their jobs, disconnect the Internet, and pledge to remain open to whatever the universe throws at them.

The Future’s main characters are, undeniably, dopes. But July and Linklater turn their ineptitude into a funny running joke, which becomes surprisingly affecting in the second half, as July decides to jump-start her life by having an affair with a wealthy suburbanite, while Linklater decides to freeze time. (It makes sense in context.) The Future is full of amusing, lovely little moments that are just a degree removed from being too cute, whether July is being stalked by her favorite comfy shirt, or following a little girl’s plan to sleep in a hole to its logical endpoint. The Future is elliptical, but never shaggy. July is focused throughout, mediating on movement—the seduction and fear of it—while encouraging the audience to care about a pair of do-nothings who like to preserve the broken. There’s even a creeping level of tension in the movie, as July and Linklater decide what to do when it’s their relationship that’s busted. Do they toss it out? Or just tape up the frayed wires and get a few more not entirely satisfying years out of it? In July’s constrained world, the resolution to that question qualifies as a nail-biter.

The Future review :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Maggie Coughlan

Miranda July’s penchant for the peculiar hasn’t suffered in the six years between Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and her latest film, The Future. But it’s more than the peculiar that keeps audiences returning to July’s films, books and performance art; it’s her ability to celebrate the mundane. In The Future July creates a surreal world that toes the line between reality and fantasy, inviting audiences to constantly question what’s playing out in front of their eyes.

The pending adoption of a sick cat creates an unexpected ultimatum for Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), a thirty-something couple exhausted by the monotony of their daily routines. Once they realize that when the cat is released in thirty days, he’ll need around-the-clock medical attention, their worlds are turned upside down. Coming to grips with the fact that everything they know will inevitably change, Sophie and Jason decide to quit their jobs, disconnect from the Internet, and pursue the dreams they’d pushed aside to embrace mediocrity.

Sophie chases YouTube fame by forcing herself to create a new dance in front of her webcam every day while Jason, seemingly grasping onto the idealism of his suddenly fleeting youth, takes a more existential approach. “I’m going to look for coincidences … mistakes … I’m going to listen to what people are saying—especially if they’re touching a doorknob,” he mutters, glassy eyed.

What at first seems like a harmless stab at finding one’s self abruptly evolves into a something so unexpected, it’s hard to tell if any of it is really happening. July blurs the line between her character’s thoughts and reality so well, determining if scenes are playing out in her character’s minds or in their actuality is, for the most part, left to the audience’s discretion.

The casting of Linklater as July’s complacent boyfriend is flawless. Linklater’s shaggy hair is a mirror to July’s own, almost as if the couple’s dark curls are the physical embodiment of the idea that couples who have lived together for so long eventually begin to resemble their partner. More so, every ounce of dialogue between July and Linklater rings achingly true, every gesture (specifically, an incredibly hostile slurp of an oversize soda amid an incredibly tense exchange) so profoundly accurate, anyone who has ever loved another will find it difficult to keep her heart from racing. They make a perfect pair.

July’s adoration of crippling kitsch runs rampant throughout the entire 91 minutes. For example, Marshall (David Warshofsky), a 50-year-old man living in the Valley who Sophie takes interest in, states (in total deadpan) that he wears a gold chain around his neck because it tells certain kinds of women that he’s “ready to fuck.” Joe, an elderly repairman, is surrounded by so many tchotchkes, they seem to have personalities more dynamic than his own.

There is no such thing as coincidence in The Future. Every word spoken, every visual detail has an innate purpose, be it a repaired hair dryer or July’s habit of seeking solace in an oversize t-shirt. July’s mastery of detail is the key, because it’s all the tiny moments that make The Future so compelling.

The Future, Berlin Film Festival - Reviews, Films - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab

Performance artist Miranda July's second feature is fey, quirky and mannered in the extreme. At first glance, this is the kind of film you expect to see as part of an art installation, rather than in official selection at the Berlin film festival.

In its lesser moments, such as the scenes featuring narration from the squeaky-voiced cat with the injured paw, it evokes memories of shows like The Clangers and Bagpuss.

But if you stick with it, The Future is moving and perceptive about the predicament of its rudderless Thirtysomething protagonists.

Sophie (played by July herself) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) are a couple living in torpid intimacy in a tiny Los Angeles apartment. Both have dead-end jobs: she's a dance teacher giving ballet lessons to kids in tutus; he is an IT consultant. They spend their free-time lying on their couch, staring at their laptops. Their lives are going nowhere and they're already beginning to fret about being on the cusp of middle age. In a month's time, they plan to adopt a stray cat called Paw Paw. This will mean responsibility – a source of terrible anxiety. As they worry, they take action of sorts, giving up their jobs and trying to take advantage of their last few days of freedom.

The Future can't be billed as a comedy. Sophie and Jason both seem to be in a daze throughout. They make an extraordinarily listless couple (their levels of energy are signalled early on when they are too lacking in energy to even get up for a glass of water).

At times, The Future resembles a version of Scenes From A Marriage, done slacker-style. July is probing away at a relationship that is slowly falling apart, in spite of the obvious affection that Sophie and Jason feel for one another. In her own kooky way, the writer-director-star is venturing into "the darkness that it is not appropriate to talk about" (as the feline narrator puts it). Sophie begins an affair with a grizzled, middle-aged man. The sex is perfunctory; she has very little in common with him, but that's what seems to draw her to him. Jason is deeply hurt by her betrayal.

Between the bouts of prolonged navel gazing, there are grace notes; individual scenes that are lyrical and very inventive. These range from July's strange dances to shots of the moon (which, like the cat, talks).

July hones in on throwaway details that other filmmakers would miss, like a drawing of the little girl and her pet they buy at the animal shelter (it's on the back of this image that Sophie finds the number of the man with whom she randomly begins an affair). The minimalist musical soundtrack is beguiling too.

The Future is a deceptive film. For all its kookiness, it's a very bleak study of an unhappy couple; disappointed with where their lives have taken them and unable to support one another.

July's idiosyncratic storytelling style will be off-putting to many. However, if audiences can tune into her wavelength, they may find themselves moved and surprised.

In her own outlandish but delicate way, The Future is dealing with accessible and universal themes – love, trust and betrayal. Sophie and Jason are terrified of commitment and yet equally fearful of solitude.

New York Magazine [David Edelstein]

In her second feature, The Future, Miranda July has the look of a disappointed ghost that can’t fully materialize. Her eyes are the palest blue, her skin less milky than skim-milky, her body never quite seizing the space. Her panpipe voice is all from the head, devoid of chest tones, of air—which might account for both her light-headed aura and her evident gift for self-hypnosis, for going back in time to evoke the helpless little girl she once was. The character she played in her first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, was most at home in her cozy bedroom playing with puppets, and it’s easy to imagine July writing scripts that way: On some level, she’ll always be a solo performer. But that doesn’t hurt her as a dramatist, surprisingly. In July’s universe, we’re all solo performers, and the more creative the performance, the better the chance of connecting—making a dance—with another soloist. When the creative impulse dies, you get the discordant loneliness of The Future.

The movie has a frame that’s both whimsical and wrenching: narration by a scratchy little voice (July’s) that’s meant to belong to a cat, seen largely as a pair of puppet paws. (Her name is Paw Paw.) The idea is that this cat, born in the wild, injured and unloved, is scheduled to be adopted by an unmarried L.A. couple, Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), and the thought makes Paw Paw warm inside: “They petted me and I accidentally made that sound that said, ‘I am a cat and I belong to you,’ and upon making the sound I felt it to be true.” But the couple’s sudden realization that in 30 days (when the sick Paw Paw can leave the shelter) they’ll be tied down to a dependent creature (symbolizing a human child or just the burdens of adulthood) fills them with dread. Jason works from their tiny apartment in computer tech support, while Sophie teaches (without enthusiasm) dance to little girls. They still have big dreams. But they’re both, says Jason, five years from 40, which (he adds) is the new 50, after which those dreams will go unrealized. So they have 30 days to be free, whimsical spirits and do something big.

This could be the premise of a zany comedy, but the mood of The Future is, from the outset, defeatist—annoyingly defeatist, to be frank. This is one unfun couple. Jason accepts a job selling trees door to door for an environmental group but shows neither faith nor ingenuity. He’s hopelessly ineffectual. Sophie vows to create, perform, and post on YouTube 30 dances in 30 days, but loses the thread on day one. To overcome her paralysis, she phones a stranger whose number she finds on the back of a drawing Jason bought. That brings her to Marshall (David Warshofsky), a fiftyish single father with a well-appointed house in the Valley. Meeting him, she robotically turns her back and hikes up her skirt, so he can take her from behind. Marshall and his house seem like a quick ladder out of the slough of despond.

The Future will be an unpleasant shock to many fans of Me and You and Everyone We Know, which had its share of dark (and transgressive) elements but was leavened by deadpan jokes, romance, and moments of blissful transcendence. This one’s unleavened—and motorless, and squirmy, with no safe harbors. I hated watching it almost as much as I loved watching Me and You. But by the end I’d come around. July is often derided as self-consciously dotty, but those dots are connected. Her life is a hunt for modes of self-expression, for people’s creative escape hatches from the (transient) here and (ephemeral) now. An old man (Joe Putterlik) whom Jason meets through a Pennysaver ad displays a series of holiday cards handmade for his wife that are full of bracingly lewd verses. Marshall’s daughter, Gabriella (Isabella Acres), decides to bury herself in a backyard hole, in which she vows to spend the night—and then, hours later, comes weeping to the door, in need of love and a hot bath, the full realization of her little-match-girl life having just sunk in. Sophie’s final quasi-dance, inside one of her shirts, is a physical meditation on entrapment—and an astonishing distillation of her journey. July is working as hard as any artist alive to find new forms to express the dread of formlessness.

The Future has one failed creation: Linklater’s Jason, who’s too morose and closed-down, too much a mirror image—almost an incestuous reflection—of Sophie’s immobilization. July has given him a vaguely artistic impulse—he says he can stop time—but it’s more vague than artistic. On the other hand, July’s failure of imagination might also be a sign of her integrity. There’s no future with a guy with no faith in the future.

WEBTAKES: The Future — Cineaste Magazine Graham Fuller, Summer 2011

In her 2005 debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which addressed the difficulties people face connecting emotionally, Miranda July depicted several adults who behave like children and several children who behave, or riskily try to behave, like adults. July’s follow-up film depicts a cohabiting couple in their mid thirties who, having attained adulthood and supposed stability, contrive a situation that leads them to abandon their adult responsibilities, damaging—perhaps destroying—their relationship in the process. In both films, which are deadpan comic dramas of social inquiry that unemotively deploy static camera set-ups and medium shots, and augment July’s work as a performance artist and short-story writer, the Internet plays a significant role.

In Me and You, July positions chatrooms as a threat to children who stray into them. In The Future, she glances at the addictiveness of channel surfing and the motives of those (young women especially) who post videos of themselves. In the new film, as in the last one, July raises more questions than she answers. She isn’t didactic or censorious, but the news isn’t good. If there’s a warning in The Future, it may be that, as mortality dawns on the early middle-aged, the issues of how one spends one life —“How do we fill our time?,” someone muses—and who one spends it with gain crisis urgency.

It is the thought of confronting life without unlimited freedom that undoes liberal, middle-class Los Angelenos Jason (Hamish Linklater) and Sophie (July). Instead of having a baby, which would confirm their commitment to one another, they hedge their bets by adopting a sick cat, Paw Paw, whose life expectancy is six months to five years, and whose scheduled pickup in a month’s time throws them into a tailspin, as if they had learned they have terminal illnesses. They decide to divest themselves of work and to stay off the Internet that month in order to fulfill themselves in meaningful ways.

Jason quits his job in technical support and effectively goes back to nature by becoming a door-to-door tree salesman for a green organization; he is sidetracked by the people he meets through PennySaver classifieds, especially an elderly man, Joe, who makes greeting cards and has written bawdy verse for his wife’s Christmas cards throughout their sixty-year marriage. (The late Joe Putterlik played himself in this role—July has described the scenes in which he appears as “sort of documentary”; she is compiling a book of thePennySaver sellers she found during research.) To his consternation, Jason sees in Joe’s apartment an M.C. Escher print and hippopotami ornaments, similar versions of which are also to be found in his and Sophie’s place. As charming as Joe is, no young man wants to find that his taste mirrors that of an eccentric octogenarian.

Sophie, meanwhile, resigns her job as a dance instructor for little girls with the goal of creating thirty dances in thirty days for her friends to watch on YouTube, though, as Jason informs her, her friends won’t want to watch them. An awkward dancer with no choreographic skills, she fails at this immediately; even her attempts at exercise are pathetic. All too easily, and because the devil finds work for idle hands, she slips into an affair with the fiftyish, very straight Marshall (David Warshofsky), a banner manufacturer who lives with his alienated nine- or ten-year-old daughter, Gaby (Isabella Acres), in a suburb. Later, she tries to get back her dance-studio job, only to be humiliated by landing in reception.

Self-consciously quirky and calculatedly listless—July’s signature tone—The Future lurches pleasingly into surrealism when Jason, sensing that Sophie is about to admit her infidelity, grasps her head and stops time. He later goes to the Pacific shore to seek spiritual advice from the Moon (voiced by Putterlik) and, since it can offer no help, pulls it into the tide. At the dance studio, Sophie encounters two pregnant friends and, in another surreal moment, fantasizes their children coming there as married adults with a child of their own (one of the mothers having died) while she remains a childless thirtysomething with the same lame job. Despite Jason’s and Sophie’s awakenings, the most existentially aware character is the ailing Paw Paw, who (voiced by July) warbles a plaintive voice-over narration.

Each lanky, mop-haired and dorky, Jason and Sophie could pass as siblings: July films them symmetrically, sitting opposite each other, knees up, on a sofa with their laptops, or facing each other on the extremities of the frame, the space between them ominously huge. Although July offers little in the way of psychology, it can be surmised from Sophie’s flight into the bed of the virile but otherwise unsuitable Marshall that the couple’s sex life has petered out during their five years together. A woman who avows that she wants to be watched, but who can’t complete her YouTube project, she finds herself in the company of an objectifying male who says he wants to watch her all the time. But having cast herself in the role of his surrogate wife—they barbecue in his back garden, she sees him off to work in the morning—Sophie rebels against her willed self-effacement. Reuniting herself with a voluminous yellow T-shirt, for all intents and purposes an asexualizing “blankie,” she climbs into it, covers her head, and finally creates the kind of subversive dance she had attempted to create earlier. It ruins Marshall’s illusion that they are soul mates, and he walks away in disgust. In simultaneously creating art and curtailing the male gaze, Sophie has freed herself to return to her real soul mate, Jason.

Unlike Me and You, however, The Future ends ambivalently, though Jason and Sophie have learned respectively that spiritual questing and diving into the first available romantic bolt-hole cannot be sustaining. They have grown—as July has as a filmmaker, one seemingly better equipped now to marry images and ideas. Playfully expressed, if serious in intent, her use of infantile scatological language, her verbal delineation of one man’s pedophiliac longing and elliptical visualizations of teenagers having oral sex unfortunately outweighed Me and You’s slowburning, central love story. In her new film, she doesn’t clog the canvas and her storytelling is consequently sharper and more potent. Six years on her, her future is still bright.

Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

REVIEW: Miranda July Looks Into The Future and Sees a ... - Movieline Michelle Orange

Review: 'The Future' offers up a personal, quirky view of late-30s relationships Drew McWeeny from HitFix

In The Future, Miranda July Grows Up - Page 1 ... - Village Voice J. Hoberman

Moving Pictures Magazine [Jeremy Mathews]

Cinemablographer [Patrick Mullen]

The Future Jason Bailey from DVD Talk

Battleship Pretension [David Bax]

Film-Forward.com [Michael Lee]

Sound On Sight Alice Gray

GordonandtheWhale.com [Kate Erbland]

Hollywood Jesus [Darrel Manson]

Filmcritic.com Jesse Hassenger

World Socialist Web Site [Richard Phillips]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson] also seen here: JEsther Entertainment [Don Simpson]

DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]

SBS Film [Lynden Barber]

Flickering Myth [Blake Howard]

Tonight at the Movies [Ryan Rojas]

The Film Stage [Daniel Mecca]

Film.com [Eric D. Snider]

LonelyReviewer.com [Vatche]

Quickflix [Simon Miraudo]

Nightlife Magazine [Michael-Oliver Harding]

eFilmCritic [Jay Seaver]

Box Office Magazine [Ray Greene]

The Future Review | I Can't Decide Whether to Fall in ... - Pajiba Dustin Rowles

CultureCatch.com (Brandon Judell)

Criticize This! [Andrew Parker]

exclaim! [Mathew Kumar]

The Reel Bits [Richard Gray]

The Future: movie review - CSMonitor.com - Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Rich On Film [Richard Haridy]

Screen Fanatic [David O'Connell]

Seattle International Film Festival 2011, Dispatch 1: Galas (The First Grader, Beginners, The Future) Sean Axmaker from The House Next Door

Writing a Duet With Miranda July Michael Idov from NY Magazine, June 19, 2011

Variety [Peter DeBruge]

Miranda July's New Film The Future and MOCA Exhibit "Eleven Heavy Things" Karina Longworth from The LA Weekly, August 4, 2011, also seen here: The Future With Miranda July

The Make-Believer Miranda July Is Totally Not Kidding, by Katrina Onstad from The New York Times, July 17, 2011, also including a 30 second video shown here: Behind the Scenes with Miranda July

Jun, Brian

JOINT BODY C 74

USA (86 mi) 2011 ‘Scope Official Facebook

A film shot in the small towns of Southern Illinois, accentuated by bars, strip clubs, motel rooms, and local police departments, offering a decidedly different pace of life, like the kind of place where one could start a new life. Nick Burke (Mark Pellegrino) is just such a man, recently released on parole in his mid forties, but a violent offender since age 15. Looking a bit like Viggo Mortensen from Cronenberg’s A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005), perhaps a similar ultra violent character who never got a fair shake out of life, this is a guy looking for a fresh start. Divorced from his wife while incarcerated, a condition of parole is that he relinquish all custody rights of his daughter, someone he obviously obsesses about, still carrying her picture around with him at all times, now he’s a quiet loner not looking for any hassles. Simultaneously, we see a story developing of Michelle (Alicia Witt), an independent minded exotic dancer also living on her own, where as luck would have it they live in the same motel. Nick’s younger brother (Ryan O’Nan) shows up describing his life as a newlywed, also a police officer just out of the academy, where he’s optimistic, inexplicably supplying him with a gun for protection, which of course immediately comes into play.

Just as Nick gets the nerve to ask his attractive neighbor for coffee, where she agrees to meet in a few minutes, Michelle also has a visitor from her past, a deranged veteran that she barely knows who has obsessed about her for months overseas and violently confronts her, demanding a personal reward for his service to his country, sticking a gun in her face as he brutally rapes her in her own room, making so much commotion Nick overhears and comes to intervene, leaving both men shot and lying on the ground while Michelle limps out of the room. Society judges harshly with violent offenders, offering no leeway when it comes to the use of guns, so Nick is screwed, having violated parole, no matter what his intentions were in the matter. Michelle, on the other hand, appreciates the effort and visits him in the hospital, helping him out with a few things, like a new pair of clothes and money from his brother that he kept hidden in the room. However she runs into a police detective who interrogates her, where the obvious slant is a career criminal has murdered a highly decorated war veteran, so what interest does she have with this loser? It’s a good question, and one she apparently doesn’t ask herself, as even though the detective is a belligerent prick with her, what does she stand to gain by helping a wanted outlaw? Nevertheless, the two are outlaws on the run soon afterwards, which you’d think might lead somewhere, but it doesn’t. By the way, the title refers to the body language of convicts when they come out of prison (the joint), easy to detect, supposedly, by those in the know.

While Pellegrino and Witt are both excellent, especially as they examine each other’s haunted pasts, but the director’s own script is abysmally weak, as rather than getting the hell out of town and starting a new life far away with a couple thousand dollars in their pockets, they never leave the vicinity and continue to show up in very public places like restaurants and bars, as if they’re just waiting to get caught. The narrative couldn’t be more hackneyed and stereotypical, where there’s no investment whatsoever in a unique idea or vision, where the audience is rather appalled at the choices the characters make, as they appear to be smarter than that. It’s a waste of good performances, including Nick’s brother and his wife (Daesha Lynn) after a fairly decent set up, where the director allows a slow introductory development of the characters within an observant view of the neighboring community, only to have the story itself betray the audience’s piqued interest. Not sure why the director couldn’t see the contrivances in this kind of finale, which would be dull even by Movie of the Week television standards, but after listening to him address the audience afterwards, he’s apparently still living on the laurels of his first film STEEL CITY, which won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance in 2006.

SLFS 2011 Review: JOINT BODY | We Are Movie Geeks Travis Keune

JOINT BODY is the newest film from indie writer and director Brian Jun, whose 2006 film STEEL CITY earned him the Sundance Channel Emerging Director award at the St. Louis International Film Festival. The film was shot just across the Mississippi River in Illinois, Jun’s home state.

The story takes place over seven days in a small town, following Nick (Mark Pellegrino) as he stumbles through an uncertain future. Having served seven years in prison, Nick is released on parole, with the condition that he relinquishes all rights of custody over his now teenage daughter to his ex-wife. Nick settles into a shabby halfway house and secures a job welding for a fabricator. Nick’s brother Dean (Ryan O’Nan) is now a cop on the vice squad, fresh out of the academy. In an awkward attempt to rekindle some connection that never exists between him and his brother, Dean supplies Nick with a throwaway revolver as protection.

As Nick slowly acclimates to life outside of prison, he meets an exotic dancer named Michelle (Alicia Witt) who lives in his building. With nothing left to lose, Nick proposes he and Michelle get coffee, with about as much confidence as a high school nerd asking the prom queen to dance. As it turns out, Michelle has little more to lose and they form the fragile beginning of a blind relationship, but their relationship is turned on its head shortly after it begins when someone from Michelle’s past returns unexpectedly, resulting in a violent incident putting Michelle and Nick down the wrong path once more.

Brian Jun, in my eyes, is already showing signs of a master storyteller. JOINT BODY is unpretentious, down to Earth and unassuming. The human drama he weaves is like a minimalist tapestry with the finest details. The suspense that builds in JOINT BODY is a slow burning sensation, taking a back seat to Jun’s development of tactile characters the viewer can connect with, only enhanced by performances that should result in a heightened respect for these two lead actors, as well as the director.

Mark Pellegrino, most recognizable for his television work on shows including Dexter and Lost, delivers fully as a misunderstood ex-con who only wants to live what little is left of his life without being noticed, but can’t shake the stigma now attached to his presence. Alicia Witt, best known for her role on the TV series Friday Night Lights and her recent role in PEEP WORLD, gives the audience one more reason to love her, embracing her role as a stripper, but adding so much to the character’s well-written role to lift Michelle out of the stereotype and into the hearts of the audience. Michelle is a good woman, stuck in a dead end situation by an immature decision made as a teenager.

JOINT BODY is shot with a gritty, almost sepia-tinged color palette, giving the story an added sense of decay. Layer the crumbling appearance of the small town on top of this and the film carries with it a subconscious tone of impending tragedy. Whereas the average reaction to such a setup would be for Nick to defy the law and set out to reconnect with his daughter, Jun takes the story in an entirely different direction. Nick makes every effort to do things right, while Michelle inadvertently pulls Nick into a worst-case scenario like a magnet for bad luck, despite her best intentions.

What I love most about JOINT BODY is how Brian Jun makes everything about this story beautiful, not in a storybook perfect sort of way, but in a way that takes all the bad things and unhappy feelings that are inherent in life and shows that even the darker gray shades of the human experience can have a poetically somber beauty. Where Hollywood would inject melodrama, Jun relies marvelously on realism and authenticity. This element of the film is present throughout the film, leading up to a partially open-ended, bittersweet conclusion that is as heartbreaking as it is fittingly appropriate.

I am proclaiming JOINT BODY as one of my favorite films of 2011. Within an hour of first seeing the film, I found myself with an overwhelming urge to revisit it a second time. I wanted to reconnect with Nick and Michelle, almost as if I wanted to make sure they were all right. Few fictional films actually make me feel like I actually care about the characters, but JOINT BODY does this effortlessly, leaving a deep and lasting impression with me that keeps resurfacing in my mind. If this is something you enjoy experiencing in a film, or never have and would like to know what it’s like, go see JOINT BODY and tally this as one more reason why independent film needs and deserves your support!

NBFF Filmmaker's Five with Brian Jun - Lights, Camera, Film Fest! Kelly Strodl interviews the director from The Newport Beach Film Festival, April 2011

Jung Sung-il

NIGHT AND FOG IN ZONA (Cheon-dang-ui bam-gwa an-gae)

China (235 mi) 2015

History of documentary [Matteo Boscarol] November 23, 2015

I have recently resumed my collaboration with the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, where from 2004 to 2011 I used to write about Japanese cinema and Japanese culture in general. Most of the stuff I write is of course in Italian, but the newspaper has also a new section in English. As I blogged few days ago, I’d like to broaden the geographical area covered by this blog and more generally to expand my “interests” towards the Asia continent and its documentary world. No best way to kick it off that with a piece on a documentary about Wang Bing (Chinese) made by a Southkorean critic, Jung Sung-il. I wrote a review of the movie, Night and Fog in Zona, for the newspaper (here the original).

It’s always fascinating when cinema reflects on cinema, and even more so when a documentary whose subject is director Wang Bing reflects on itself. Night and Fog in Zona is a documentary, or better yet a cine-essay as it is called by its author: South Korean critic turned director Jeong Sung-il, who follows the renowned Chinese filmmaker throughout a whole winter while he works on two of his projects, ‘Til Madness Do Us Part and a sequel to his Three Sisters.

The “coming” of Wang Bing has been, and still is, one of the most important events that occurred in the world of cinema during the last 15 years: not only did he contribute asserting the aesthetic value of digital filmmaking, but with his documentaries he also brought an auroral and liberating gaze upon the world.

It’s thus interesting that Jung Sung-il had the same kind of dawning experience watching West of the Tracks in 2001. “When I was at the Rotterdam Film Festival I bought a ticket for a movie 9 hours and 10 minutes long, I was surprised by its length but went anyway. It begins with a train in movement and it reminded me of the first movie ever made by the Lumière brothers in 1895. Watching Wang Bing’s work I had the feeling of witnessing the cinema of 21st Century just like the audience in 1895 witnessed its birth.”

There’s no narration in Night and Fog in Zona, everything – to be honest not so much — is explained with intertitles: geographical coordinates, places where Wang Bing is headed to, his plans. Sometimes these intertitles also work as a poetic comment to the following scene.

The only time when Wang Bing speaks directly to the camera in an interview-like fashion is at the very beginning of the film, a sequence that works as a brief introduction to his world and his filmmaking style. A few minutes where, among other things, he talks about his filmmaking process, truth in cinema, the impossibility of conveying the totality, his projects, Chinese history and peasants, and the similar cultural background his generation shares with Andrei Tarkovsky.

In the course of almost 4 hours — 235 minutes that however pass very quickly — Night and Fog in Zona encapsulates a lot about Wang Bing’s approach to making a movie: we slowly learn about his habit of taking pictures of the people he films, of talking friendly to them, and about his “interview technique” where he switches from “chatting with” to “shooting at” very smoothly, as if there was a continuity between the two actions.

It’s also interesting to witness how “Wang searches for the ‘strategic point’, the single position from which all of the actions in the scene can be recorded”. This is a fundamental feature of his filmmaking, as the relationship between the camera and the people and things around it determines both the movie’s sense of space and how space itself is conveyed in his works. And space, together with time/duration, is one of the most crucial elements of his cinema.

Another thing we learn from the film is how Wang Bing is a director whose involvement with the subjects of his movies is deeper than we might think from just watching his works: when the camera is off, he’s often seen giving practical help and advices to his “protagonists”.

Particularly fascinating, from a movie making point of view, is a scene where the director and his two collaborators have an evening meeting to watch the footage shot during the day at the Asylum — footage that would eventually become ‘Til Madness Do Us Part. A few but meaningful minutes where he explains the reasons behind his use of long takes, why avoiding telephoto lens, and other rules to follow while shooting, so that the final work can gain a certain consistency, a certain style.

However, the best quality of Night and Fog in Zona is that it’s not only a documentary about Wang Bing shooting his movies, but it’s also shot and conceived — with all the due differences – just like one of them. In terms of style, it mirrors Wang Bing’s work: long takes, no narration, abstract landscapes and experimental music, everything put together to explore his filmmaking and, in a broader sense, contemporary China, a country gazed upon, as in most of Wang Bing’s works themselves, from a peripheral and rural point of view.

One of the best examples of this mirroring process is to be found towards the beginning of the documentary, when the Chinese director and his collaborators move the Yunnan province.

A very long sequence shot from the car everyone is on, that shows us streets, mountains, plains, lights and tunnels almost melting together. A scene almost 10 minutes long, matched with a hypnotic and minimalistic music interacting with the abstract landscape captured by the camera.

We encounter these sort of sequences a couple of times during the movie: another powerful one, shown in slow motion, is inside the asylum. Bing is sleeping and ten or so patients are sitting and moving around him. To give Night and Fog in Zona a further experimental and even meta-filmic touch there are two scenes, placed at the beginning and at the end of the movie, showing us a Korean girl dressed in red sitting in a theater and making a phone call.

The only flaws to be found in this documentary, an otherwise almost perfect work, are some editing choices, in some cases too abrupt, and the pace of the intertitles, definitely too fast. But that’s just splitting hairs, Night and Fog in Zona is definitely one of the best non-fiction movies seen this year, not only for its fascinating subject, but also for its ability to resonate with Wang Bing’s own style at a deep and aesthetic level.

ps: Just for precision’s sake I have to add that Giovanna Maria Branca did the editing of the piece and not the translation, as reported in the newspaper’s website, I wrote it directly in English. 

FIPRESCI - New Currents Section in Busan Freddie Wong, 2015

Junghans, Karl

SUCH IS LIFE (Takovýje Zivot) B 84

Czechoslovakia (73 mi) 1929

A silent film without pretense, showing a raw, rough-edged look at working class life, where mistreatment is the norm and kindness is a luxury for others, as it’s something that rarely comes in your lifetime. The heart of the film is a middle-aged washerwoman, Vera Baranovskaya, from Pudovkin's MOTHER, who could easily be Brigitte Mira, the aging charwoman from Fassbinder’s ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL (1973), a woman who spends her lifetime toiling for others, is largely unappreciated, even within her own family, and who carries herself with that shy look of gloom in her eye, nearly always cast downward. Her husband is a drunken lout, something of a brute when he drinks, so she’s forced to kick him out of the house, while her daughter loses her job and gets pregnant, leaving her family in a state of turmoil.

Featuring plenty of close ups of world weary faces of all ages, some staring glumly straight at the camera, never even blinking, as if the presence of the theatricality of cinema is meaningless in this neighborhood. True to form, there are brief chapter titles of a series of vignettes, each leading to ever more dire circumstances, with occasional day dream sequences imagining pictures of nature, where everything is in harmony. Unfortunately, in this image of grim reality, accepting death is the natural state of things, and it’s something we all have to face. Such is life.

CZECH MODERNISM IN FILM: The 1920'S to the 1940's Charles Coleman, Facets Film Programmer

Such is Life can best be summed up by its subtitle, "A Novel About Prague Washerwomen." Creating cinematic poetry from the poverty in the streets, Junghans shot on location this story about a washerwoman, her no-good husband, and her remarkable resilience in the face of tragedy. This is an early precursor to the Czech realist tradition; imagine if Murnau had shot Sunrise on location, and you have some idea of its beauty. With Vera Baranovskaya, Theodor Pištěk. Directed by Karl Junghans, Czechoslovakia, 1929, 35mm, 73 mins.

Screening with live piano accompaniment by David Drazen and the Czech titles will be read aloud in English.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Sandwiched between Germany and the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia produced filmmakers who embraced German and Soviet styles, often simultaneously. Karl Junghans's 1929 Such Is Life (December 7) delivers Neue Sachlichkeit realism with montage-based punch. A middle-aged Prague washerwoman (Vera Baranovskaya, star of Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mother) perseveres, suffers, and dies—leaving a drunken husband and unmarried, pregnant daughter. A silent without intertitles, shot entirely on location, the movie is part semi-doc character study, part tenement symphony—making bravura use of fast cutting and parallel action.

The Reeler Peter Hames

Juráský, Zdenĕk

FLOWER BUDS (Poupata) B+ 92

Czech Republic (91 mi) 2011

The short 3-word take on this film, according to a friend Kirk, is “snow, trains, bleak,” and indeed this post-Communist glimpse of life in the Czech Republic couldn’t be more gloomy and miserable, where the oppressive, anti-humanist feel is overwhelming, reminiscent of the János Szász Hungarian film WOYZECK (1994), an excellent film adaptation of the brilliant German playwright Georg Büchner’s 19^th century play, a working man’s tragedy where in both films humans can find no salvation under social institutions or oppressive regimes, much of it set in the decaying remnants of an isolated, broken down train post where Jarda, Vladimír Javorský, works as a railway signalman, spending most of his time carefully building ships inside a bottle while splurging his earnings boozing and gambling every night, where he’s addicted to the slot machines in a local bar. His wife Kamila, Malgorzata Pikus, is a railway cleaning lady, where they have two teenage children, Agáta, Marika Soposká, who is inseparable from her best friend Magda, Natalie Rehorova, and Honza, Miroslav Pánek, who hangs with a group of pot-smoking slackers. There isn’t an unpretentious note anywhere in this film, but it has the unyielding bleakness of East European miserablism, set mostly in the constant winter snow, beautifully shot on film by Vladimír Smutný, much of it in crowded bar interiors, claustrophobic living rooms, or the dark of night. No one in this film is spared, as all are up to their necks in trouble, where misfortune is the prevalent sign of the times, where early on we see one of Honza’s friends nearly freeze to death in a drunken stupor, permanently losing the loss of his legs.

Agáta is pregnant, but refuses to tell anyone, waiting for the right opportunity to spring it on the most unsuspecting, hoping that could be her ticket out of town, even if it means betraying some of her friends, while Honza’s buddies overindulge in drink, spending their time getting wasted, where he and a friend Cryil grow cannabis plants in the basement, where neither child works, has a cent to their name, or has any illusions about the future. Kamila seems to have a secret yearning for her lost youth, as she and a large gathering of the town’s women put out a naked calendar to raise money for the 25^th anniversary of the state-sponsored Spartakiada festival, a song and movement routine that reflects physical fitness, even though these are mostly older, out of shape, middle-aged women. She befriends a Vietnamese couple selling food out of a truck on the street, where the wife joins in the dance training. In stark contrast, the local bar hires a weekly stripper, Zuzana (Aneta Krejcíková), who takes it all off in a raucous interplay with the drunken customers, where Honza immediately falls madly in love, driven by the purest intentions of noble youth, which she finds amusing, but also green around the collar. Honza persists, holding nothing back, literally losing his right mind, discovering the only way to save her is to buy her outright from her pimp, like stolen merchandise on the black market. Jarda, meanwhile, becomes so uncontrollably over his head in debt, selling the deed to his home where his family will be evicted come spring.

When Jarda loses his job for missing work, he goes in a homeless tailspin, literally missing for days on end, riding trains day and night, where his family hasn’t a clue where he is, even as the Christmas holiday approaches. The film is a series of interconnecting vignettes, each one filled with tragedies more dour than the next, but some are absurdly hilarious, where Honza literally buys Zuzana and brings her home to live with the family, while Agáta has announced her pregnancy, trying to pin it on one guy after another, but none fall for it, where family dysfunction reigns supreme, but the underlying tenderness expressed at Christmas is remarkably moving, making this a memorable holiday movie unlike any other you will likely experience. The harshness of the world around them is inescapable, like any Béla Tarr film, or like a world of lost hopes. The finale is a true pleasure, almost completely shot in darkness, where looming in the town’s background are industrial smokestacks spewing toxic smoke. One of the real pleasures of this film is it screens on actual film, the only one out of 13 films seen so far at the Chicago Film Festival. The film won 4 awards out of 10 nominations at the Czech Academy Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Actor (Vladimír Javorský) in the director’s first feature film effort. In much the same vein as fellow Finnish miserablist Aki Kaurismäki, Juráský gets terrific performances overall and does an excellent job balancing bleak amusement with the hauntingly oppressive, dire economic circumstances.

Nisimazine | Finale Plzeň 2012: Flower Buds (Poupata)

After being crowned as best film at this year’s Czech film awards, Flower Buds (Poupata) competes in Finále Festival. And with a tenderly hopeless story of family disollution, ironically set in the few days before Christmas, Zdeněk Jiráský’s film may have many chances to win again. As the story unfolds with no hurry, wild laughter errupts from deadpan humour, but this is no comedy. Or is it?

Flower Buds focuses on small lives from a small town: Jarda is a train station signal worker whose only task is to press a button when a train comes. In fact, his whole family is a portrait of different forms of failure, perfectly framed in bleak snowy landscapes. The extremely expressive long-haired Vladimír Javorský is an excellent choice for a character who fills his time with useless matchstick sculptures and his high hopes with slot machines, who only tries to fix things when it is too late.

With the Christmas warmth creeping into a tale of lost hopes and family crisis, the humorous effect is inevitable, and Jiráský handles well all of these elements, with a touch of Jarmuschian ennui. Although there is a certain depressing potential in the film, there is something in these touching life stories, beautifully shot by D.o.P. Vladimír Smutný, that will stick with you long after the ending credits.

European Film Awards - Flower Buds / Poupata

The family of Jarda Hrdina lives in a remote small town near the border. Jarda works as a signalman on the railway. His hobby is making matchstick models in bottles, and his weakness is his addiction to playing slot machines. Jarda’s wife Kamila is a cleaning woman at the railway station’s public toilets. It is her dream to rehearse, together with her peers, the song “Poupata” (flower buds) which they performed at the state-sponsored Spartakiada festival of physical culture twenty-five years previously, and then to perform it for the whole town. Their children, Agáta and Honza, who have just become of age, are without work, without money and without illusions. Honza’s crowd spends their time in the local pub, and together with his friend Cyril he grows cannabis in the basement of their housing project. Agáta senses that she hardly has a chance to get out of the tedium of provincial life. Unplanned, she has become pregnant by the local dandy, Matěj. The only person she confesses her secret to is her friend Magda.

Director's Statement

Both the main and supporting roles were cast with actors whose style is easy-going and empathetic. The choice of actors was guided, among other things, by their social intelligence and the veracity of their acting style. A good model for directing actors was free cinema. The actors were partly given room for improvisation, and the sense of their co-authorship was enhanced by their being asked to edit dialogue, so that it fitted “coming from their mouths”.
I want everyone in the crew to care about the result, and to want to be involved in the film as a creative contributor. For this reason, I wanted to organise a crew meeting before the film in order to motivate people, and make them feel that without them the film would not be as good as with their contribution. We have been approaching the best professionals in their field (among others the DP Vladimír Smutný, who has been awarded with the Czech Lion five times).

Flower Buds | Review | Screen Mark Adams from Screendaily

A bleakly gloomy - though at times also mischievous and darkly funny - slice of tough life in a snowy and cold remote Czech border town, Flower Buds (Poupata) is packed with a gloriously disparate bunch of dysfunctional folk as they struggle to get by, dream their own modest dreams, but are gradually worn down by the small-town environment.

At the heart of the story – or rather a strange and brutally amusing series of incidents – is the Hrdina family, headed by lank-haired father Jarda (Vladimir Javorsky) – apparently ‘Jarda Hrdina ‘ translates roughly into ‘Jimmy Hero’ – who works as a signalman on the railway, where he engages in his hobby of making matchstick models in bottles. Every evening he is to be found in the local bar pouring his money into slot machines.

His wife Kamila (Malgorzata Pikus ) assiduously cleans toilets at the railway station, though real moment of enjoyment comes from her regular rehearsals with other local women as they practice the song-and-movement routine for the song Poupata, which they had performed at the state-sponsored Spartakiada festival of physical culture 25 years before, and are set to perform again for the whole town.

Their grown-up children Agata (Marika Soposka) and Honza (Josef Laska) have no work – Honza grows cannabis with friend Cryil in the basement of their housing project and takes a shine to a stripper Zuzana (Aneta Krejcikova) who performs at local bar, while Agata dreams of escape from provincial life, but has just found out she is pregnant by local boy Matej.

The series of interweaving stories are dour, but also bleakly funny at heart – in a rather similar fashion to the UK TV series Shameless, peopled by equally dysfunctional types – and while there is an underlying tenderness in the family (especially as they celebrate their Christmas), they live in a harsh world where there is little money and even less hope.

The film recently won Best Czech film (the Czech Lion award) – as well as Best Actor in a Main role (for Javorksy’s strong performance) and Best cinematography (for Vladimir Smutny’s excellent work) from the Czech Critics – and while not easily accessible for regular theatrical releases beyond the Czech Republic, its dark humour, confident direction and strong performances make it well worth catching, with other festival invitations likely to follow.

Jutzi, Phil

MOTHER KRAUSE’S JOURNEY TO HAPPINESS (Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück)

Germany (121 mi) 1929

User reviews from imdb Author: AugusteB from Berlin, Germany

A masterpiece about a working-class family in the late twenties in Berlin. You see Mutter Krauses fight for survival shown in such a modern way that you feel close even if it is nearly ninety years away. The way the camera (operated by the director himself) films the scenes and sometimes just the everyday life on the streets of Berlin is so energetic and real. The actors are playing very physical and natural (which was surprising for me as i expected acting in silent movies as much more stiff and awkward). All characters are very pure and just like in a documentary. Ilse Trautschold as the daughter is unforgettable. Whenever you get the chance to see this film go and watch it. Faßbinder once said it was his favorite film.

German Communist Kinokultur, 1 German Communist Kino-Culture, Part 1 by Jan-Christopher Horak from Jump Cut, December 1981

Mother Krause's Trip to Heaven Kino-culture in Weimar Germany, Part 2, by Jan-Christopher Horak from Jump Cut, July 1982