Bas-Fonds: Walter Reade, Saturday, February 19, 2011

I have no time to write about this at any length, but if you can muster some tolerance for in-your-face cinematic depictions of depravity and malevolence, you should really try to see Isild Le Besco's remarkable third feature (barely so, at 68 minutes) in the Film Comment Selects series at the Walter Reade. I personally didn't think I could bear keeping company with these characters for a whole film, but Le Besco's control of the experience is extraordinary: on one hand, she stylizes her people into absurdist archetypes, and on the other she carefully disengages the spectacle from drama and identification. The crazy dichotomy between the behavior shown and the religious tone introduced via voiceover commentary is gradually and inevitably resolved. Bas-Fonds screens once more, on Saturday, February 19 at 4 pm.

2010 Manhattan One-Week Premieres

I might still catch a first-run 2010 movie or two, but I think I'm ready to make a ten-best list. This list is for films that played at least one week in Manhattan for the first time in 2010 - which, as I complain every year, is a pretty arbitrary grouping. But I'm in no position at all yet to make a list of 2010 international releases.

(I exclude films that were made too long ago to feel contemporary.)

1. The Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Løve)
2. The Exploding Girl (Bradley Rust Gray)
3. Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat)
4. Mid-August Lunch (Gianni di Gregorio)
5. Between Two Worlds (Vimukthi Jayasundara)
6. Audrey the Trainwreck (Frank V. Ross)
7. Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz)
8. Anton Chekhov's The Duel (Dover Kosashvili)
9. Barking Water (Sterlin Harjo)
10. How Do You Know (James L. Brooks)

Honorable mention: Animal Kingdom (David Michôd). And I'll add two others that could go up or down after another viewing: Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham) and Unstoppable (Tony Scott).

Special category for a uniquely confusing film: Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky). In the unstable transition period following this film's challenge to my aesthetic system, I can imagine putting it in any of the categories above or below.

Films with a lot going for them, in alphabetical order: Another Year (Mike Leigh), Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette), The City of Your Final Destination (James Ivory), Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos), Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé), The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski), Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont), The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet), Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek), Open Five (Kentucker Audley), Soul Kitchen (Fatih Akin), The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira), Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor), True Grit (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen).

Films with something going for them, in alphabetical order: Ajami (Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani), All Good Things (Andrew Jarecki), The Anchorage (C.W Winter & Anders Edstrom), Breaking Upwards (Daryl Wein), Delta (Kornel Mundruczó), Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold), George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead (George A. Romero), I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino), Inspector Bellamy (Claude Chabrol), The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko), Lourdes (Jessica Hausner), Mesrine: Killer Instinct (Jean-Francois Richet), Mundane History (Anocha Suwichakornpong), Ne change rien (Pedro Costa), Tirador (Brillante Mendoza), Women Without Men (Shirin Neshat).

Films that mostly didn't work for me, in alphabetical order: Alamar (Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio), Daddy Longlegs (Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie), Due Date (Todd Phillips), Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (Manoel de Oliveira), Everyone Else (Maren Ade), Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy), The Fighter (David O. Russell), Get Low (Aaron Schneider), Greenberg (Noah Baumbach), Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea), I Love You Phillip Morris (Glenn Ficarra & John Requa), The King's Speech (Tom Hooper), Leaving (Catherine Corsini), Lebanon (Samuel Maoz), Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 (Jean-Francois Richet), The Milk of Sorrow (Claudia Llosa), Mother (Bong Joon-ho), Our Beloved Month of August (Miguel Gomes), Outside the Law (Rachid Bouchareb), Red Riding: 1980 (James Marsh), Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong), Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese), The Social Network (David Fincher), Somewhere (Sofia Coppola), Spring Fever (Lou Ye), Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine), Vincere (Marco Bellocchio), Welcome (Philippe Lioret), White Material (Claire Denis), Wild Grass (Alain Resnais), Winter's Bone (Debra Granik), You Wont Miss Me (Ry Russo-Young).

A lot of directors I admire placed films in the last category, which must mean that I'm an unusually fickle sort of auteurist.

Mister Cory

I wrote a piece on Blake Edwards' Mister Cory (my favorite Edwards film, along with The Tamarind Seed) for issue #7 of Undercurrent. Basically, I expanded two sentences from the middle of my review of the film for Jaime Christley's Unexamined Essentials.

2010 Wrap-Ups at MUBI

I made two contributions to MUBI's 2010 wrap-ups: an item in this compilation of present/past fantasy double features; and a top-five list of "new old movies" seen in 2010.

My Girlfriend's Wedding and Pictures from Life's Other Side: Union Docs, January 15, 2011

Sorry about the short notice, but tomorrow, January 15, I'll be participating in a discussion of Jim McBride's films at Union Docs in Williamsburg after a 7:30 pm screening of McBride's documentaries My Girlfriend's Wedding (1969) and Pictures from Life's Other Side (1971). Jed Rapfogel of Anthology Film Archives will lead the discussion.

Hideko Takamine

I put up a few words at the MUBI.com Notebook in commemoration of the great actress Hideko Takamine, who died on December 28.

Lamont Johnson, 1922-2010

I tend to avoid commemorative pieces: anything sorrowful one writes about a death seems pale. But Lamont Johnson, one of America's best directors, died a few weeks ago with little fanfare, and I wanted to talk him up a bit.

Johnson started as an actor, and had a large supporting role in Joseph H. Lewis's very good 1952 Korean War film Retreat, Hell!. As a director, he put in a decade or so of hard work on television series and specials before getting a few no-prestige theatrical features in the late 60s. If memory serves, Johnson's theatrical debut, 1967's A Covenant With Death, a cheap-looking suspense film with George Maharis and Red Line 7000's Laura Devon, was surprisingly good against all odds, taking its characters more seriously than the genre required. 1968's Kona Coast wasn't nearly as successful, but 1969 saw Johnson acquit himself well in the emerging TV-movie format with Deadlock, a Leslie Nielsen cop drama. By this point Johnson had arrived at something like his mature style, combining dramatic intensity with fast and informal performances that discharged rather than built up the drama.

1970 was an important year for Johnson, on both the TV and theatrical fronts. The TV movie was carving out its own audience, which gravitated to topical subject matter with prestige actors; and Johnson caught the wave with My Sweet Charlie, a strikingly good drama with a racially charged plot reminiscent of The Defiant Ones, and a star turn from Patty Duke. Emmys went to Duke and to writers Richard Levinson and William Link, who were to become the Aurenche and Bost of 70s TV drama; and Johnson was permanently established as an A-list TV director. A string of successes in that medium followed, including 1972's That Certain Summer and 1974's The Execution of Private Slovik, both written by Levinson/Link. Though Johnson's prestige TV dramas of the 70s are probably his best-known work, most of these efforts are handicapped by the form's ostentatious social relevance.

Like other prestige TV directors, Johnson couldn't get arrested in theatrical features. But, a few months after his TV score with Charlie, Johnson released the POW drama The McKenzie Break, a tense, memorable acting duel between Irish officer Brian Keith and German prisoner Helmut Griem. Cultivating an interest in extreme characters that suited his explosive yet swallowed-up style, Johnson churned out a number of strong films over the next few years: 1971's A Gunfight, with Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash; 1972's The Groundstar Conspiracy, with George Peppard as a charismatic American fascist; and 1973's The Last American Hero, a car-racing film with a potent Jeff Bridges performance. Few paid much attention, but Andrew Sarris put McKenzie, Groundstar, and American Hero on his runners-up lists, and a small, largely auteurist cult coalesced.

Johnson, and other filmmakers of the time who lacked clout, were clearly the beneficiary of the looseness of American film before the Tax Shelter Law of 1976, and as far as I know, he never made another theatrical film to equal McKenzie and American Hero. 1977's One on One with Robby Benson is the best of his later efforts; after 1983, he never tried his hand at theatrical again. TV movies were a different story, and Johnson continued to rack up Emmys and nominations into the 90s. Given an opening, Johnson never lost his ability to find unexpected excitement at the nexus of character and drama: for my money, the unheralded 1982 Dangerous Company with Beau Bridges stands with Charlie as Johnson's best work in the medium.

I lost track of Johnson's career after the effective, award-winning biopic Lincoln in 1988. He isn't the only good filmmaker whose reputation was written on the wind of the TV movie: perhaps someday we'll have the access and the interest to go back to the important TV work of John Korty, Joseph Sargent, Daniel Petrie, William Hale. I'm thinking Johnson may have been at the top of the pile, though.