- Outside Noise (Ted Fendt)
- Actual People (Kit Zauhar)
- Deception (Arnaud Desplechin)
- One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve)
- The Cathedral (Ricky D’Ambrose)
- Peaceful (Emmanuelle Bercot)
- In Front of Your Face (Hong Sang-soo)
- Emily the Criminal (John Patton Ford)
- Wood and Water (Jonas Bak)
- Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song (Dan Geller & Dayna Goldfine)
Sunday, January 1, 2023
2022 Theatrical Releases
Wednesday, January 5, 2022
Alan Rudolph: The Only True Romantic Left in This Building
- Sometimes this desire is blatant: as when characters look directly at the camera at the end of scenes, a running practice in Welcome to L.A. that makes a comeback in Ray Meets Helen (via Andre, the boy who befriends Ray).
- Usually it’s subtler, as with the exaggerated use of coincidence and repetition. Choose Me took this tendency as far as it could go: the symmetry of the hookups is like a game the audience is invited to play. We see it again in Ray Meets Helen, with the same building as the residence or the focus of all five main characters.
- A similar tendency is the re-use of a small number of locations, with the same characters present each time we see the location: almost a commentary on making films with limited resources. There are many examples: Mr. Nudd’s drugstore in Remember My Name, Eve’s bar in Choose Me, the café in The Moderns, the bar near the staked-out ranch in Love at Large.
- Dialogue: characters often do the work of categorizing themselves. For instance, Tyra Ferrell’s morgue attendant in Equinox signals her ambition: “This story is going to raise me up out of the junk. People are going to want to sit next to me.” Similarly, Nolte underlines his character’s concept with his many references to finance in Investigating Sex. (Rudolph has this tendency in common with Hartley, by the way.)
- References to genre, and genre dialogue, are often so exaggerated that they are necessarily reflexive: the Fat Adolph story in Trouble (Bujold says, “If it was evil, he was into it”), the entire presentation of Anne Archer’s femme fatale in Love at Large.
- Characters who deviate from our expectations in order to collaborate in creating the film’s tone. A good example is John Hawkinson’s unpleasant cop in Ray Meets Helen, who quickly becomes a bit of a philosopher: “We’re all wearing masks.”
- A purification of gesture that resembles choreography: the violence of the passengers in the crowded bus in Equinox; or Tomei putting Modine’s hand on her breast in the same film. (This is another characteristic that Rudolph and Hartley share.)
- Music: of course there’s the obvious reflexivity of the studio musicians in Welcome to L.A., who are shown creating the soundtrack music. But there are also uses of music that are basically commentative, like the Hollywoodish music over the slapstick-y Emmet Walsh scenes in Equinox. And music that contradicts the scene’s tone in a jarring way, like the diegetic easy-listening music in the beauty salon in Mortal Thoughts that continues over the Headly-Willis fight and the poisoned coffee cup.
- Similarly, there are times in Rudolph when humor so disrupts the drama that one registers it as a form of direct address. The film I’m thinking of that best illustrates this extremity is Trouble in Mind, where a quite serious and emotional genre story increasingly shares the screen with a campy, obstreperous humor that one would expect to banish the initial gravity. (Though of course it doesn’t.)
- While speaking of Trouble, we might as well mention in passing the architectural models that Kris Kristofferson’s Hawk builds, which are introduced as characterization, pass through the stage of metaphor, and end as a bit of the production designer’s work placed within the diegesis.
- People who stand at an amused distance from their own crises. Keith Carradine’s Carroll Barber in Welcome to L.A. is the first and best example. I wrote, “Carroll Barber walks through the emotional wreckage of Rudolph's Los Angeles at a serene philosophical distance from his own pain, smoothing out the peaks and valleys of his psyche just as Rudolph levels the film's tone with his remote but sympathetic overview. A little ironic smile creeps across Carroll's face at the slightest observation, about either himself or others; his gestures are slow and measured, sometimes consciously overstressed, as if the observer within him is amused to see essence transformed into existence by any simple act.” Another good instance is Julie Christie in Afterglow, always half-smiling and looking in on her own sorrow.
- Transpose this detachment into a comic mode, and you get protagonists who become frustrated but manage to deal with it. Tom Berenger in Love at Large is forever perplexed at his encounters with difficult or unmanageable people: his girlfriend (Ann Magnuson), or a bizarre taxi driver. Carradine dealing with medical obstruction in Ray Meets Helen is a running joke - a rather dark one, but ultimately a demonstration of endurance; the bartender who must deal with drunken Samantha Mathis in the same movie shows the same spirit.
- Honest people. Some Rudolph characters are explicitly labeled as honest, and fulfill their missions: Carradine’s Mickey in Choose Me, Nolte’s Lucky in Afterglow make it a point not to lie. Even apart from the obvious examples, there really aren’t many lies in Rudolph at all, which is remarkable given his affection for farce: he seems to enjoy truthfulness. Even the few liars in his films, like Geraldine Chaplin’s Emily in Remember My Name, are so poker-faced and outrageous about their lies that they practically notarize the truth.
- Guys in Rudolph, sympathetic though they tend to be, are often comically afflicted with guyness. Jealousy and sex conflict abounds, from protagonists and antagonists alike: Patrick Bauchau in Choose Me, Keith Carradine in Trouble in Mind, The Moderns and Ray Meets Helen, John Light in Investigating Sex. Macho bluster often takes over an ordinarily balanced personality as a fight looms or subsides: Carradine sets the pattern in Choose Me (“I’m going to kill the son of a bitch”); Nolte and Jonny Lee Miller in Afterglow make a running gag of it. Carradine in Ray Meets Helen is a compendium of guy traits: instead of the expected pathos during his tale of woe, he tells young Andre “Chicks dig boxers”; his regained swagger as he tries to pick up Locke is cliché tough-guy stuff; and there’s a funny running gag of him fending off Sondra Locke’s introspection about death automatically. The most interesting variation on this theme is Hawk in Trouble in Mind: he is maladjusted and borderline criminal in the film’s first half, and Rudolph lets his ear for unregenerate masculinity write the character. Later Hawk reverts to a more typical level of testosterone for a Rudolph guy.
- People who don’t go gently into that good night. Emily in Remember My Name doesn’t submit to being dismissed or blown off, whether by the drugstore supervisor who grabs the cigarette from her mouth or by the bartender who takes her for a prostitute. Even with her lover/superintendent Pike, Emily maintains passive resistance in every conflict until she gets her way. Henry, the less assertive of the two versions of Matthew Modine in Equinox, seems maddened by his suckerhood and becomes increasingly determined to escape it. Modine here recalls Eddie Bracken in Preston Sturges’s films, and the pluck of Rudolph’s marginalized characters is not unlike Sturges’s. As in Sturges, supporting characters also tend to restore their dignity: in Equinox, there’s the beggar who walks away from an offer of money with a poker-faced “Good luck, mister,” and the lawyer’s daughter who is at first bested by Ferrell’s strategy but comes back with a modicum of power restored.
- We get a number of variants on this type right off the bat in Welcome to L.A. The archetypal Rudolph crazy in the film is probably Sissy Spacek’s maid/prostitute, but Geraldine Chaplin’s Karen Hood, barely more in touch with reality, sends a strong pro-crazy signal by winning Carroll Barber’s romantic sweepstakes.
- And Rudolph isn’t even playing much with comic forms yet at this point. Chaplin takes craziness further in Remember My Name, suspending the entire film in a contemplation of her unpredictability; Choose Me, with its embrace of farce, cultivates a number of varieties of craziness, with Bujold’s Nancy Love the most certifiable. (Carradine puts the film under the sign of Crazy by escaping from an asylum at the beginning.) Marisa Tomei in Equinox is a memorable later variation on the theme.
- Of course craziness in life often has the same qualities as comedy does in fiction: displaced behavior, inappropriate repetition, etc. The Rudolph crazy helps make farce work without the lies that Rudolph generally prefers to avoid: characters whose emotions genuinely change in an unstable way are a workable basis for farce when imposture ploys are taken off the table. When Rudolph characters are only part crazy, it’s the part that serves this comic function (e.g., Mickey in Choose Me falling in love with every woman in the movie). The philosophical implication is that people don’t need artificial devices to have relationship problems.
- Many Rudolph characters who can’t quite be described as crazy nonetheless have much in common with the Rudolph crazy. Headly in Mortal Thoughts is one such character (recall that great moment when she nearly crashes the car, completely unfazed and chewing gum), and she still functions in the film as an effective threat; Chaplin in Remember My Name can be pretty scary at times too. Lori Singer in Trouble in Mind is basically an embodiment of romantic innocence, but her childlike demeanor and clumsiness puts us at a comic distance from her and suggests the unpredictability of the Rudolph crazy. Traveling in the opposite direction, Lara Flynn Boyle in Equinox starts out as a full-blown Rudolph crazy, but effortlessly transforms into an affecting embodiment of romantic longing.
- Simple inaccessibility: Carradine in Welcome to L.A. is the archetype, but Lauren Hutton in the same movie functions solely as an emblem of inscrutability. Carradine in the bathtub in Choose Me is a great, pure moment of mystery.
- Moments of mysterious pleasure: like Carradine’s sunny grin at what should be his worst moment in Welcome to L.A., when Chaplin reunites with her husband. There are many other such moments: Spacek in Welcome to L.A. taking money from Considine; Kaki Hunter’s knowing grin as she says “He’s so skinny” about Alice Cooper in Roadie.
- The impassive onlooker, the master of ceremonies: Cedric Scott, the producer, at the console in Welcome to L.A., flipping a quarter across his knuckles; Terrence Howard sitting behind the spinning bike wheel in Investigating Sex.
- Mystery of the image, images that contain barriers to looking: fuzzy TV images of Demi Moore in Mortal Thoughts; Carradine through the blurry windshield at the end of Trouble in Mind.
- Mysterious transformation: my favorite is Berry Berenson chain-smoking and talking tough at the end of Remember My Name; of course, there’s Carradine’s incongruous glam makeover over the course of Trouble in Mind.
- Unpredictability of behavior - which connects us back to the Rudolph crazy. A good example among many: the scene of Chaplin tearing up the flower garden in Remember My Name, an act rendered mysterious by slow, eccentric rhythms.
- Genre sometimes functions as a wink: we aren’t supposed to feel the oppressiveness of film noir in Love at Large, for instance. Big performances and obvious borrowings have the effect of distancing us from genre here: Archer’s slinky voice, the close-ups of her lips talking on the phone. Sometimes a small dose of genre is a light-hearted or familiar pleasure to ward off heaviness: Hilly Blue’s henchmen in Trouble in Mind come to mind, maybe even the threatening car full of joyriding boys in Mortal Thoughts.
- Even in such cases, though, the wink is partial. Love at Large keeps genre play alive even as it gets serious, and puts the sincere love story into relation with the genre elements: e.g., Berenger’s rejection of Archer’s proposition: “It would be as thrilling as winning the exacta, but I’m in love with someone else.” Remember My Name uses comedy to distance us from the pain implicit in the genre story, but certainly doesn’t disown the pain; Equinox is wildly comic but basically delivers on all its genre expectations. Trouble in Mind is an unusual instance: a very serious genre story disrupted by a campy one, but not displaced by it - its ending is as full-bodied in its emotionality as genre gets.
- It’s worth noting here that Rudolph’s action scenes are consistently very good, often highly choreographed, somewhat conceptual, not much like the ambient action direction of the Avid generation. Endangered Species hinted at his flair for action, which burst forth in the three Carradine-Bauchau fight scenes in Choose Me, was further demonstrated in the Nolte-Miller brawls in Afterglow, and perhaps peaked with Dermot Mulroney’s one-sided fight with John Light in Investigating Sex. An interesting variation is Love at Large’s barroom brawl between Kevin O’Connor and Ted Levine, the action a backdrop to the revelations of the men’s conversation.
- Camera: the omnipresent camera moves seem like a first principle rather than a reaction to material. Give Rudolph a mirror or a TV monitor and he’ll use it to pan or track from one representation of reality to another - there are many examples; even the somewhat calmer camera in Ray Meets Helen hits those mirrors at every opportunity. The camera’s freedom pretty much excuses it from service to plot and genre, and this separation harmonizes well with the detached perspective and self-awareness that Rudolph cultivates in different ways.
- Gels, colored light: again, it feels as if he slaps the gels on first and asks questions later.
- Decor: generally pretty wild. Salient examples: the red apartment with blue painting in Afterglow; the smoked-out period ambience of The Moderns; the crazy nightclub and Hilly’s banquet in Trouble in Mind, which arrive at camp.
- The telephoto haze: a world of long lenses, tight frames, and compressed foreground-background perspective. It’s part of Rudolph’s link to Altman, and is usually coupled with aural omnipresence.
- Wildly exaggerated acting: Jennifer Jason Leigh in Mrs. Parker, Berenger in Love at Large, Considine in Trouble in Mind, nearly everyone in Breakfast of Champions and Roadie.
Tuesday, January 4, 2022
2021 "Theatrical" Premieres
2. El Planeta (Amalia Ulman, USA/Spain)
3. The Disciple (Chaitanya Tamhane, India)
4. Short Vacation (Kwon Min-pyo & Seo Han-sol, South Korea)
5. Isabella (Matías Piñeiro, Argentina)
6. The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
7. France (Bruno Dumont, France)
8. Suzanna Andler (Benoît Jacquot, France)
9. The Year of the Discovery (Luis López Carrasco, Spain)
10. About Endlessness (Roy Andersson, Sweden)
11. The Fever (Maya Da-Rin, Brazil)
Monday, August 16, 2021
Frivolous Lists: Mexico
- The Passion According to Berenice (Jaime Hermosillo)
- Nazarin (Luis Buñuel)
- Matinée (Jaime Hermosillo)
- Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas)
- Sangre (Amat Escalante)
- Highway Patrolman (Alex Cox)
- The Young One (Luis Buñuel)
- Japón (Carlos Reygadas)
- The Summer of Miss Forbes (Jaime Hermosillo)
- Simon of the Desert (Luis Buñuel)
- The Passion According to Berenice (Jaime Hermosillo)
- Nazarin (Luis Buñuel)
- Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas)
- Sangre (Amat Escalante)
- Highway Patrolman (Alex Cox)
- Machete Language (Kyzza Terrazas)
- Canoa (Felipe Cazals)
- 40 Days (Juan Carlos Martín)
- The Chambermaid (Lila Avilés)
- Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón)
- The Shadow of the Tyrant (Julio Bracho)
- Cochochi (Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán)
- Drama/Mex (Gerardo Naranjo)
- Artificial Paradises (Yulene Olaizola)
Monday, June 14, 2021
What I Did on My Pandemic
Yesterday, June 13, 2021, I finally returned to a movie theater, the Paris in Manhattan, to revisit Chaitanya Tamhane's excellent Court (2014). The last movie I'd seen in a movie theater was in Cartagena, Colombia, on March 12, 2020 at FICCI: another fine film, Nicolás Rincón Gille's Valley of Souls (2019). Unlike many film buffs, I didn't go into theater withdrawal during those intervening 15 months, and actually quite enjoyed the liberty of dipping into reserves that get short shrift in peacetime because I run around to arthouses so much. I don't yet know how I'll adapt to the new world - assuming that the Delta variant doesn't shut us down again - but, for purposes of commemoration, here are the home screenings of new-to-me films that excited me most during the pandemic. I left out very new films that I would likely have seen anyway, and restricted myself to historical titles that did not wield the urgency of festival or theatrical or streaming release. In reverse order of release date:
- Alice T. - Muntean - 2018
- Aferim! - Jude - 2015
- Beautiful Valley - Friedlich - 2011
- The Beginner - Coccio - 2010
- Tourists - Scherson - 2009
- Kippur - Gitai - 2000
- Aux Petits Bonheurs - Deville - 1994
- Changeling - Saless - 1987
- Les capricieux - Deville - 1984
- The Willow Tree - Saless - 1984
- Offre d’emploi - Eustache - 1982
- Reifezeit - Saless - 1976
- Street of Joy - Kumashiro - 1974
- Memories of Helena - Neves - 1969
- But What If This Is Love? - Raizman - 1962
- Mashenka - Raizman - 1942
- Le grand jeu - Feyder - 1934
- The Murderer Dimitri Karamasoff - Otsep - 1931
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
2020 "Theatrical" Premieres
2. Yourself and Yours (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
3. Heimat Is a Space in Time (Thomas Heise, Germany)
4. Hill of Freedom (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
5. Jeanne (Bruno Dumont, France)
6. I Was at Home, But... (Angela Schanelec, Germany)
7. José (Li Cheng, Guatemala/USA)
8. Dear Comrades (Andrei Konchalovsky, Russia)
9. The Misogynists (Onur Tukel, USA)
10. Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman, USA)
So y'all didn't get excited about Young Ahmed, I see from the year-end lists. I think you're missing out. Never Rarely could go higher or lower on next viewing: it's one of those films that I didn't get a fix on until after it was over.
Friday, February 5, 2021
Frivolous Lists: Israel
Just for fun, my favorite Israeli films as of today.
2. Ben Zaken (Efrat Corem, 2014)
3. Beautiful Valley (Hadar Friedlich, 2011)
4. Kedma (Amos Gitai, 2003)
5. Or (Mon Tresor) (Keren Yedaya, 2004)
6. A Thousand Little Kisses (Mira Recanati, 1981)
7. The Wedding Plan (Rama Burshtein, 2016)
8. Slaves of the Lord (Hadar Friedlich, 2002)
9. Red Cow (Tsivia Barkai Yacov, 2018)
10. The Day After I'm Gone (Nimrod Eldar, 2019)