Tabla de contenidos para November - December 2016 en Film Comment

You play Howard Hughes in Rules Don’t Apply, and you direct Lily Collins and Alden Ehrenreich as Hollywood ingenues. Hughes is a longstanding interest of yours—you talked about him in an interview 25 years ago in these pages. A long time ago when I came to Hollywood, I found the subject of Howard Hughes what I have to call amusing. I never got the feeling that he was a bad guy. Most everyone spoke very highly of him. But I don’t know that I ever felt he was a suitable protagonist for a full movie. Ultimately, given the period—1958 was when I first came to Hollywood— I found the predicament of the young person who came to Hollywood more interesting. I guess that’s a longwinded way of saying I found…

BACK WHEN THE INTERNET WAS SCIENCE FICTION, MASON WILEY AND DAMIEN Bona’s Inside Oscar was the urtext of Academy Awards history, weaving production histories, campaigns, nominees, and ceremonial highlights into an Altmanesque epic of glory and vulgarity. The book furnished few characters more colorful than Sally Kirkland, who attracted underdog buzz for her starring role in Yurek Bogayevicz’s Anna (1987), playing a once-famous Czech actress forced into exile after the Communist takeover. Following a Golden Globe, an Independent Spirit Award, and a vigorous grassroots campaign—Kirkland wrote personal letters to each member of the Academy—she landed a spot on an especially majestic Best Actress roster, losing to Cher in Moonstruck but not before dubbing herself “the Eleonora Duse of the 20th century.” Affectionately or not, Wiley and Bona titter at Kirkland…

Director: Mia Hansen-Løve Country/Distributor: France/Germany, Sundance Selects Opening: December 2 THE TITLE CARD OF THINGS TO COME appears as the capstone on a prologue in which a couple and their two young children pay a visit to Chateaubriand’s grave on a lonesome tidal island near Saint-Malo. This, we may infer, is among the “things to come”—the silence and solitude of the grave. There is a school of thought that believes cinema ought to be inextricably entwined with the unconquerable spirit of reckless youth, and to such a mindset the recent films of Mia Hansen-Løve must constitute an unspeakable betrayal. Her latest centers on a sixtyish philosophy professor, Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert), half of that couple on Saint-Malo, whom we re-encounter some years later, bearing up under a barrage of late-middle-age…

GLUM APPROVAL, GLUM ATTENTIVENESS” IS HOW ALLEN GINSBERG defines the particular quality that he found so attractive in Robert Frank. These words, from a 1985 interview, appear in the big, beautiful book of essays and stills included in the box set of Frank’s film work by the German publisher Steidl, one of four individual books and booklets within the glumly attractive package—the black words ROBERT FRANK FILM WORKS stenciled on a matte gray strongbox that you could easily brain someone with. Steidl is principally known for photography books, and Frank remains best known as a still photographer, with his 1958 collection The Americans his signature work—though he has now spent nearly 60 years creating films and videos, and presumably continues to do so today, in his early nineties. His debut,…

ONE THING I TRIED TO DO ON THE LOST CITY OF Z WAS NOT look at other movies. I used to have a lot of screenings of movies for the crew before we started making the film. For Two Lovers I think we watched A Short Film About Love by Kieslowski and Vertigo. And then for The Immigrant we watched La strada. For The Lost City of Z we watched nothing. Instead, we started by looking at the jungle as a projection of protagonist Percy Fawcett’s desire, not as necessarily a tangible adventure movie. Z is only a stand-in for everything else that he wanted. It’s a form of escape from the rigidity of the class structure and the expectations put upon him. “So we looked at a lot of…

The Living Idol Albert Lewin, 1957, Cohen Media Group ALBERT LEWIN WAS AN ODD SPECIMEN IN THE HOLLYWOOD of the ’40s and ’50s. A producer who came late to directing at age 47, he completed only six features, wrote novels on the side, and gave the supernatural fantasies for which he’s best known (Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The Picture of Dorian Gray) a genteel literary flavor that belied their subdued strains of violence and sensuality. His final feature, adapted from his own book, was a prime example of Hollywood exotica. Set in and around Mexico City, The Living Idol centers on a young woman named Juanita as she reckons with the jaguar god to whom her Mayan ancestors were sacrificed. She becomes the object of a distasteful tug-of-war between…

You walk through the door, transitioning from the dark of the theater to the light of the lobby. Gliding past the concessions, past the posters on stands, past the people milling and queuing. You’re walking in pace with those around you, feeling embodied and out of body at the same time. You pan left to steal an impression of two people in conversation, then push through another door and now you’re outside. The sound changes, the light changes, the horizons widen, and yet you stay steady, even, deliberate, unblinking. It’s almost as if you’re moving in slow motion, though you’re not. It’s almost as if you’re dreaming, though you’re not—or not quite. You’re gliding, or close to it. You carry on like this for a while, until something or someone…

FILM HAS ALWAYS BEEN A collaborative medium. Yet throughout its 120-plus-year history, the contributions of editors, actors, production designers, and other below-the-line talent have all too often been lumped into “the director’s vision” by audiences and critics alike. Now the question of who “authors” the final look of a film is murkier than ever. Out of habit more than out of principle, the central role of the director or cinematographer remains overstated, even as powerful VFX software has become an integral part of filmmaking. It is applied to virtually every frame of not only big-budget Hollywood pictures, as any audience member knows, but also small, talky indies and auteur-driven art films. Even most documentaries now employ VFX artists to “clean up” archival footage and tweak reenactments. To a greater and…

Director: Anna Biller Country/Distributor: USA, Oscilloscope Opening: November 11 PRESIDED OVER BY THE ANGRY SPIRIT OF Helen Gurley Brown, Anna Biller’s The Love Witch is a sprawling, beguiling world unto itself. Biller’s sharp film stands in stark contrast to the complacency and crushing safeness of the vast majority of independent films made in the U.S., and is far more than the lighthearted genre pastiche or retrophile curiosity it may seem to be at first glance. Continuing with the concerns of Biller’s past work (2007’s Viva), The Love Witch explores the contradictory conditions under which Western women live: existing somewhere between second and first wave feminism, when the only choice about your body everyone truly feels comfortable with your making is what cute accessory to buy next. The damage and…

The current state of horror streaming AWARD-WINNING ORIGINAL PROGRAMMING notwithstanding, the leading streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are riddled with gaps in content, with at least 10 disposable films for every interesting one in their catalogs. “Curation” for the streaming giants is simply a matter of licensing and shuffling titles into generalized categories that dare to group together outdated blockbusters with straight-to-VOD duds and films like the Christian-sploitation epic Left Behind (2014), all under the aegis of “Action and Adventure.” Some of the best titles are actually found slightly off the beaten path of the major streaming channels, scattered generously across subscription-based VOD channels like Fandor, IndiePix, and CuriosityStream (for documentaries). For horror films, one need not look very far to find new, classic, and cult titles.…

WHEN JULIA DUCOURNAU WAS SHOOTING her theatrical debut feature—a (deep breath) veterinary-school-hazing coming-of-age cannibal dramatic thriller—she kept bumping into the crew for another film production at the local bar in Liège, Belgium: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s The Unknown Girl. As readers will recall, Liège is home base for the Dardennes, and The Unknown Girl could be an alternate title for Ducournau’s Raw—which watches an unassuming straight-A student discover carnal (and carnivorous) urges that she never knew she had. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves: Raw has teeth even before its drama of greasy adolescent awakening enters the transgressive territory allowed by genre. Justine (Garance Marillier) is just moving into her college dormitory as the film begins, and while apprehensive about following in the footsteps of her too-cool sister, Alexia (Ella…

AS GUEST EDITOR OF THE 2004 EDITION OF THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, Lorrie Moore offered the following somewhat broad, unadorned consideration about the form: “A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” Appraising length alone, I see Moore’s point, who in a Paris Review interview three years prior characterized the labor involved in writing a novel—“A novel is a job”—and suggested how a story is, instead, similar in tone to “a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.” Again: duration. Intrigue condensed into a fleeting period of time, or drama sentenced to—wonderfully so—a finite stretch. With that in mind, I would argue that short stories, far more than novels, are…

FILMMAKERS ARE NOT BEHOLDEN TO ANY CONCEPTS OF WHAT YOU CAN OR CANNOT do when making a film. The medium is ours to invent and shape as we come up with new ideas. Regarding the 50 percent of the medium that is sound, as a sound designer, I have one rule: if it sounds good, it is good. An example: a brilliant Brazilian director and friend, João Jardim, made a beautiful documentary in 2001 called Window of the Soul that he brought to me for the mix. The first scene is a close-up of a campfire. Brazilian sound designer Waldir Xavier used the sound of a babbling brook instead of fire. It was beautiful and poetic and evoked a feeling that can’t really be described. It set a slightly irreverent…

WHAT DOES GRIEF LOOK LIKE? Those of us who have lost dearly loved ones before their time know that this is hard to describe. It’s not a darkening or dimming, even though it feels like that; it’s more like a dissolving of the world’s foundations, a sense that what we’ve known as truth is breaking apart. Everything feels like it’s crumbling into smaller pieces, compartments where we must store new and difficult knowledge. What does grief look like on film? It’s usually viewed as a matter of performance, of how an actor registers emotionally: is the actor weeping or keeping it all in? Or it relates to how the actor is framed in the shot: in tight close-up for supposedly empathetic intimacy or kept artfully out of focus. Mourning and…

Reviews of notable new films opening in theaters (hopefully near you) Director: Ang Lee Country/Distributor: USA, Sony Opening: November 11 ACROSS THE U.K. THIS NOVEMBER, ABEL Gance’s Napoleon is showing in a freshly scored five-and-a-half-hour digital restoration reviving the triple-screen climax that first blew minds in 1927. Gance’s bravura techniques, which encompassed an array of adventurous camerawork, reportedly helped inspire the anamorphic lens that would be crucial to the creation of Cinema-Scope. And so one spectacle begot a fresh lineage of others, till the pursuit of bolderstronger-truer cinema led us through the years—by way of 3-D, high-def, high frame rates, sheer studio muscle—to the latest larger-than-life experiment: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. “Have an open mind,” director Ang Lee implored at the New York Film Festival, where his film…

Director: Ken Loach Country/Distributor: UK, Sundance Selects Opening: December 23 ONE WOULD THINK THE SUFFOCATING centralization of the movie industry today would have encouraged a robust political counter-cinema. But the homogenizing tyrannies of studio-backed commercial product and social media have become too powerful for alternate voices to get heard. A strange result is that, despite the preponderance of issue-driven documentaries and far-right religious parables, the kind of left-wing humanist agitprop that Ken Loach has specialized in for 50 years (since 1966’s Cathy Come Home, which shocked the British populace with its depictions of homelessness and systemic poverty) is largely nonexistent in this era of outrage. So for those who are looking for more to get angry about and are unfamiliar with Loach’s brand of social-realist soapboxing, I, Daniel Blake may…