Innholdsfortegnelse for March - April 2015 i Film Comment

WHEN PEOPLE THINK OF FILM COMMENT, IT’S SAFE TO SAY THAT THEY THINK OF IT, correctly, as a magazine that approaches cinema primarily through the discussion of directors and their films. This puts us solidly in the mainstream of publications about movies. That said, over the past 50-plus years, FILM COMMENT has traditionally put films on its cover, not the people who directed them. And when you put a film on the cover, what that really means is you’re going with an image of an actor, usually the star of said film—even though the cover story is almost never about said actor. So there we have it: images of actors embody the films we’re interested in. This is a very long-winded way of saying that despite being a magazine about…

Who Runs the World WHEN WRITER, DIRECTOR, AND VISUAL ARTIST Elisabeth Subrin told people about her upcoming feature, A Woman, A Part—about a middle-aged actress struggling to find herself independently of her career—even actresses responded by asking her why she would tackle such a subject. Her new website, Who Cares About Actresses, is partly animated by her belief, as she explains in a simple but powerful manifesto, that “our culture does not recognize the utterly critical role actresses have as ambassadors for female identity.” Launched last November, the site (which is dedicated to Maria Schneider) showcases interviews, short films, artwork for galleries, and even Internet art in the form of animated GIFs. Fully embracing the potential of multimedia, these selections play on issues of identity and reflect the widespread demand…

The altered relationship between directors and actors that began with Brando and really took hold in the Seventies is the secret heart of Pauline Kael’s extremely particular approach to movies. ACTING IS THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE OF FILM commentary, written and spoken. There are so many ways of getting around or over or past actually talking about acting in the movies that we take them for granted. Acting is brushed off with generalities (regular reviewing), displaced by descriptions of actors’ physiques and mannerisms and physical alterations per character (criticism of the more elevated variety), devalued or nullified by fixations on form and patterning (essentialist critics and bloggers), banned from consideration by moral edict (politically grounded film commentary), or simply ignored altogether and reconfigured as moving figures in a field (film theory…

LIKE MOST BIG FESTIVALS, ROTTERDAM RARELY MANAGES TO LAND A really first-rate opening night film, but Tom Harper’s War Book, which kicked off the festival this year, was an impressive exception that also perfectly represented a festival that falls all over itself to emphasize social concern and political engagement. Folded into a programming strand called “Everyday Propaganda,” War Book—a kammerspiel if you liked it, and a filmed play if you didn’t—locks us in a conference room with a group of British government officials and ministerial aides convened for a three-session rehearsal of an imaginary scenario for World War III as it unfolds day by day. In this case it’s triggered by a nuclear strike on India by Islamic militants affiliated with Pakistan. These eight men and women are there to…

Philip Castle BRITISH AIRBRUSH ARTIST Philip Castle—known for his chrome-breasted Farrah Fawcett pinup and the liquid metal in Bowie’s clavicle on the cover of Aladdin Sane—hasn’t made all that many movie posters in his career, but he impressed no less exacting a client than Stanley Kubrick enough to be rehired some 16 years after their first project together. His iconic illustration for A Clockwork Orange so won Kubrick over that he urged Castle, who was not a graphic designer by trade, to also create the title lettering that is now so inextricably connected to the film. Castle spent a year hand-lettering the words in multiple foreign languages and also produced illustrations for the Orange Times tabloid given away during the film’s initial release. Working with Kubrick’s marketing guru Mike Kaplan,…

THE COW | Dariush Mehrjui | 1969 | National Film Archive of Iran HALFWAY THROUGH DARIUSH MEHRJUI’S debut feature, the story is transformed by a quietly violent rupture. Hassan (Ezatollah Entezami), a middle-aged farmer in an Iranian village, sits on the roof of his house as his friends attempt to inform him, unsuccessfully, that his beloved cow has run away. He’s watching his barn—where, he insists, the cow is still resting—and waiting for the moon to rise. “The moon comes out,” he tells them, “every time my cow is thirsty.” The Cow, which Mehrjui adapted with Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi from the latter’s own play after earning a philosophy degree from UCLA, has often been called the film that launched the Iranian New Wave. But from this pivotal moment onwards, it becomes…

I’M NOT ALONE IN HAVING TROUBLE WITH THE term “guilty pleasure.” Most of the films listed below have clear artistic or technical merits and enjoying them would seldom inspire any guilty feelings. However, I do watch “bad” films, for a mixture of reasons: to learn from the mistakes of others, to find consolation in the fact that somebody failed harder than I did (on difficult days when I’ve had a rejection or setbacks in production), and to find something special in what others consider disreputable. I don’t regard Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda? as a film to laugh at. It’s a film born out of inexperience and limited means, but its askew nature is its strength and its moments of strangeness come from somewhere inexplicable. There are other films that…

SURE, LOUIS JEAN HEYDT WAS IN Gone with the Wind (39), BUT MORE importantly he was in Zombies on Broadway (45). In Gone with the Wind, Heydt shows up for only a moment, as a hungry and defeated Confederate soldier, his hair dyed as red as his phony-ass Dogpatch beard; you probably won’t spot him if you aren’t a hardcore fan. In Zombies on Broadway, as a sort of lesser Walter Winchell, he radiates the Heydt his acolytes know and love: some light banter, some pallid sarcasm, never given much to do but obviously paying attention anyway, never overselling, always on time. He’s the one who looks like Joel McCrea’s blonder, lankier brother. He even sounds a bit like McCrea at times: sharp and nasal, relaxed but never laconic, usually…

WHO IS ROBERT REDFORD? Movie star? Rebel? Political activist? Visionary? Upsetter of the industry’s proverbial apple cart? The glib answer is: yes, all that and more. We think we know him but, closer to the truth, we know the Robert Redford he wants us to know. He is an intensely private man who understands that the things he wants require a very public engagement. He is complex, contradictory, and sometimes confounding. Even today, he still frets about the undue attention to his youthful beauty. For him it has been almost a straitjacket. “You want to be seen for what you can do... The ‘golden boy’ thing became a screen in front of everything else,” he told Playboy in 2007. By the time fame struck, he was a married father of…

LAST JULY, USA TODAY PUBLISHED AN ARTICLE TITLED “Indie Films Salvage a Slumping Summer Box Office.” The headline overstates the case—nothing could salvage a box-office year that was down five percent from the previous one and saw the fewest tickets sold (1.2 million) since 1993. But coming from a publication generally more focused on touting Hollywood’s latest, the coverage correctly suggests that things weren’t all that bad in the indie sector. Eight specialized releases (i.e., debuting on under 500 screens) crossed the $20 million mark, versus six in 2013, and while that may not seem like a jump, the top 10 such releases have already posted over $20 million more. Boosted by its eight Academy Award nominations, The Weinstein Company’s The Imitation Game overtook The Grand Budapest Hotel as the…

Fast Lane DINO RISI’S 1962 FILM CAN be watched and enjoyed as a comedy… or as something else. It is the story of Roberto and Bruno, an odd couple thrown together entirely at the behest of Bruno. Roberto (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a shy law student who plans to spend the holiday studying. Bruno (Vittorio Gassman) is an aggressive, talkative extrovert with a sports car. On one pretext after another, Bruno drags Roberto further and further from Rome, away from his law books, borrowing money from him, with the promise of a shopping trip, or lunch, or dinner, always receding. When the film opened in a high-class theater in Rome, it was a disaster—people didn’t laugh. Only as it rippled out to the cheaper cinemas did Il Sorpasso find its audience,…

THE BALLOTS CAME THUNDERING IN FOR Boyhood over Birdman (among other 2014 films), with Godard’s Goodbye to Language—the runner-up in our Critics’ Poll—shunted to lucky #13. Readers also went their own way in plumping for the dastardly doings of Gone Girl (#9), Nightcrawler (#10), and Foxcatcher (#17), as well as the nobler impulses of Selma (#14) and Interstellar (#19). Note: numbers in parentheses refer to the film’s ranking in the Critics’ Poll (Jan/Feb 2015). For each ballot, a first-place choice was allotted 20 points, 19 for second, and so on. Congratulations to the winners selected randomly from this year’s poll participants to receive Criterion Collection DVDs of their choice: Stacy Davies of Pomona, CA (First Prize); Kathleen DeGuzman of Nashville, TN (Second Prize); and Mike Feine of Rushford, MN, and…

THE MOVIE INDUSTRY TODAY FACES A GENUINE threat to its existence. Thanks to a decade of willful blindness, the studios have failed to create a coordinated response to the transformation of almost every aspect of its century-old way of doing business imposed by digital technology. Distribution fiefdoms are a relic of the past. Copyright protection is under assault, increasingly from legitimate, not just illegitimate, sources. Most crucially, an industry that has sold its products on an à la carte basis through a series of carefully spaced windows that—in theory—maximized its profits is now facing the reality of all-youcan-eat subscription pricing in the form of Netflix and others. All of this might be manageable were the studios not run by people who have been permitted to combine, to a shocking degree,…

IN A THRIVING YEAR AT SUNDANCE—SEEMINGLY INCREASED ATTENDANCE, big acquisition bucks spent—“easy” was the word that kept jumping into my head. Not easy as in lazy or cheap, which can sometimes be said of the typical slate of Sundance indies, but in a pleasant, fleeting sense. Movies that were enjoyable in the moment and moved briskly along—yet that also threatened to fade from memory just as quickly. Perhaps the easiest of this type was James C. Strouse’s People, Places, Things, a palatable trifle starring Jemaine Clement as Will, a graphic novelist and teacher at the School of Visual Arts who has to face reentering New York’s brutal dating pool after his wife leaves him for a schlump (played by Michael Chernus, also an improbable lady-killer in another Sundance standout, Noah…

EFFIE GRAY Director: Richard Laxton Country/Year: U.K., 2014 Opening: April 3 Where: Nationwide EMMA THOMPSON’S Screenplays FOREground sexually restrained women. Her 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility was prompted by her television comedy sketch about an ignorant Victorian newlywed disgusted by the sight of the lifeless “mouse” attached to her husband’s lap. The disgusted Victorian newlywed in Effie Gray—conceived by Thompson as a feminist fairy tale—is the art critic John Ruskin (Greg Wise). He takes one look at his naked bride, Euphemia (Dakota Fanning), on their wedding night in 1848 and flees the bedchamber. The forced abstinence and psychological cruelty that ensue cause Effie’s psychosomatic alopecia. Things come to a head after the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais (Tom Sturridge) joins the couple on a Scottish holiday. Millais sympathizes with…

By Larry Ceplair & Christopher Trumbo University Press of Kentucky, $40 DALTON TRUMBO EMERGES FROM THE MISTS OF HOLLYWOOD history as a gallant rogue worthy of Dickens—he used his teenage son Chris as his nervous bagman to collect the cash owed for his black-market scripts, and offered the man who served him his HUAC subpoena a glass of cold water, which was gratefully accepted. “Something will turn up,” could have been Trumbo’s motto just as it was Mr. Micawber’s. But Trumbo had one grievous flaw that would have been anathema to Micawber: compulsive financial improvidence, which hobbled his life and career nearly as much as the blacklist—he was always planning to write plays or novels that would follow up on the success of Johnny Got His Gun, written when he…