Screen Memories
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Iron Man 2, dir. Jon Favreau (2010)
Nothing in Iron Man 2 seems old: like the arc reactor in Tony Stark’s chest, everything glows for no reason. The screens with which Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) interacts throughout the film go past physical presence and become the very air of Stark’s workshop, which he can manipulate with his touch. He not only tells robots what to do, he is himself a robot. It becomes difficult to stop thinking you’re watching The Jetsons. (more…)
Varieties of Ecstasy
by Giampaolo Bianconi
The Hurt Locker, dir. Katheryn Bigelow (2009)
The Hurt Locker opens with a quotation from a book by the journalist Chris Hedges called War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. “The rush of battle,” Hedges writes, “is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” (more…)
Weekend Watch: Paris qui dort
by Giampaolo Bianconi
René Clair’s first film, Paris qui dort (1924), is a delightful silent science-fiction romp invoving the Eiffel Tower, a conniving and schlubby Professor X, and scenes of Paris so deserted they recall the earliest, emptiest photographs of the city. You can watch the whole thing online here, or you could seek out the Criterion release of Clair’s Under the Roofs of Paris (Sous les Toits de Paris), which contains Paris qui dort as an extra. At about 30 minutes, this version–retooled by Clair in 1950–is half as long as the original 1924 film.
Annette Michelson wrote about the film:
“Clair proposes, with a cascade of subtlegags, the topography of a great city; he explores its scale and pace, that which sustains its life. Temporality, apprehended as movement in space, is the vital current of metropolis, the medium of “the course of affairs,” of “the business of life.” Their powerful and intricate implication is the film’s generative core. Adopting the genre of science fiction–which is, as we know, one of cinema’s oldest forms–Clair offers a fresh series of critical variations upon the thematic cluster–the city, the crowd, capital–which the art and the cinema of his day had begun to explore. There is in fact no single theme of Paris qui dort which expressionism, in an antithetical register, did not also explore. The accuracy and lucidity of Clair’s enterprise were, however, products of a privileged position, a special preparation.”
It’s a great, important film. And it should be your weekend watch.
Is That All There Is?
by Giampaolo Bianconi
The White Ribbon, dir. Michael Haneke (2009)
A friend once told me: “keep with highbrow, but distrust respectable.” I’ve always found it a useful dictum. When thinking about Michael Haneke’s latest film—the one that took the Palme D’Or at Cannes—nothing comes to mind more than respectable. The film manages to achieve a level of nauseating respectability on par with Schindler’s List, featuring pensive black and white photography, truthfully cinematic long takes, eastern European austerity, classical music, and a self-important relationship to historical events. These clichéd cues, somehow, seem to have been enough to satisfy hoards of hungry film critics around the world who appreciate mature, elegant, and adult filmmaking from Haneke. (more…)
Dispatches from the Web: Whose Tube?
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Video artist Amy Greenfield was recently informed that Youtube would be pulling her work from their website. She was told that “her works, which contain some artistic nudity, did not conform with YouTube’s ‘community standards.’ Under YouTube’s policies, ‘Films and television shows may contain [full nudity]; however, videos originating from the YouTube user community must abide by the YouTube Community Guidelines and are not permitted to include such content.’” Though Youtube has now reversed their decision thanks to efforts from the EFF and the National Coalition Against Censorship, I fear the issue is far from over. I found out about the story through BoingBoing, where one reader identified only as pjcamp commented: “I’m having a hard time telling the difference between artistic nudity and busty.pl[.]” I’m having a hard time deciphering “busty.pl,” but what intrigues me about pjcamp’s comment is how magnificently it manages to miss the point completely.
Youtube isn’t protecting anyone from “busty.pl,” though it might appear so. What’s happening, instead, is that Youtube is continually serving the interests of “films and television shows.” These, to be sure, aren’t your films or the tv talk show you and your friends record every Sunday night: “films and television” shows are films and television shows from networks, studios, and distributors that have a serious financial worries about how their media is viewed. Since Amy Greenfield wasn’t one of those, her work got axed–though, presumably, if it had been from the film Young Adam starring Ewan McGregor, Youtube wouldn’t have thought twice. That’s what is dangerous about Youtube: its interests couldn’t have less to do with you. The question is not one of moral censorship but rather of financial censorship: Youtube isn’t barring nudity, they’re just not allowing it if you aren’t distributed by Fox Searchlight. It’s a question, all the same, about what we’re allowed to see.
A Short History of 20th Century Paranoia
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Shutter Island, dir. Martin Scorsese (2010)
As Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo approach Shutter Island by ferry, what strikes us is the sky: it goes on forever in a way that anyone from Boston knows is impossible, and the artificiality of the colors and the actors makes it clear that this isn’t Changeling or Schindler’s List. This is the past of film, not a film of the past, and it’s clear that Scorsese is taking his cues from Samuel Fuller’s camp experiments as much as Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological obsessions, tossed with a dose of Hiroshima Mon Amour. (more…)
Coming Soon: Daddy Longlegs
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Fresh off the heels of the romantic and alluring The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Joshua Safdie has teamed up with his brother (and fellow Red Bucket Films mate) Ben Safdie on Daddy Longlegs, also known by the title Go Get Some Rosemary. The film’s two titles are indicative of the film’s own dual identities. If you watch the trailer available now via Apple and then watch what’s on the Red Bucket website, you’ll see two different films. (more…)
Let Her Rip!
by Giampaolo Bianconi
"Hurt Locker" Director Kathryn Bigelow
Co-head New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis just gave an interview with Jezebel, and she held little, if anything, back. “Let’s acknowledge,” she says right off the bat, “That the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially… I’ve learned to never underestimate the academy’s bad taste. Crash as best picture? What the fuck.” (more…)
Thinking in the Box
by Giampaolo Bianconi
A Single Man, dir. Tom Ford (2009)
There’s a moment in the film where George (Colin Firth)—an English professor—lectures about a book written by Aldous Huxley. In the hands of another director and another actor, this would have been a misguidedly rousing moment. George talks about fear and love and aging, all the themes that, in another film, would be seized on to convey a heart-warming, trite, and hollow message about homosexuals. In the hands of Tom Ford, though, there’s nothing falsely rousing about this speech. (more…)
Music Video
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Crazy Heart, dir. Scott Cooper (2009)
There’s nothing surprising or radical in Crazy Heart. Instead, the film serves as a brilliant reminder: it reminds us of Jeff Bridges’ greatness and urges us to recall how irritating and overindulgent a performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal can be. The film also reminds us about a particular kind of movie made in the United States during the 1970s—films with strong main characters and stronger performances. Crazy Heart exists very much in the tradition of those films. Bridges quiet, genuinely soulful portrayal of how country singer Bad Blake gets his groove back carries the film into serious character study territory and keeps it from veering into overly sentimental, saccharine territory while also deftly covering up the film’s heavy reliance on music. (more…)
Memories of the Space Age
by Giampaolo Bianconi
For All Mankind, dir. Al Reinert (1989)
For All Mankind begins with JFK’s announcement that our technology–put together, he says, more perfectly than the finest watch–will take us to the moon. Speaking, JFK looks comfortable in a dated, ancient way. Kennedy’s announcement sets the tone for the rest of the film: it’s not laudatory or patriotic, though it depicts one of the proudest moments in American history. For All Mankind is a strangely distant film, refusing to revel in the triumph of the moon landing and instead constantly wondering what it means to have sent anyone into space anyway. (more…)
Ferpect Comedy
by Giampaolo Bianconi
(The beginning of a series on my own favorite films of the aughts.)
Crimen Ferpecto, dir Álex de la Iglesia (2004)
Crimen Ferpecto is a deliciously wry and bloody satire of contemporary consumer culture—in fact, the last film with such a sharp edge against consumerism was 1978′s Dawn of the Dead, where muzak still rang amongst the flesh-eating zombies. In this film, Rafael (Guillermo Toledo) is a dapper and libidinous clerk at a Madrid department store who aspires to playboy perfection. After he accidentally murders his competitor, Don Antonio (Luis Varela), he covers up the crime with the help of the one sales girl he hasn’t slept with—Lourdes (Mónica Cervera), whom he describes as “not the kind of person you would see on TV.” (more…)
Appendage
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Appendage is a blog run by my friend Brian Ehrenpreis. Brian’s taste is impeccable, and it’s always on display on his blog. Curated with obscure atlases and even The Society of the Spectacle, Appendage constantly reminds me of something I love or introduces me to a new obsession. There’s no reason it shouldn’t do the same for you.
La Película Manda
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces), dir. Pedro Almodóvar (2009)
Almódovar, as he is affectionately known, is admired as a kind of Iberian Fellini. His films are filled with extravagance characterized by flesh, passion, color, drama with a clear debt to melodrama and telenovela style, and above all a clear love of cinema itself. Broken Embraces continues that tradition (more…)
The Counterlife
by Giampaolo Bianconi
(One of my entries in the Best of 2008 discussion.)
Two Lovers, dir James Gray (2008)
At a time when films get progressively more expensive and more explosive, the pleasure in the films of James Gray comes from their smallness. His films are crafted with care and subtlety as opposed to largesse and glossiness. Two Lovers is no exception: it is an intimate story fused with place and the visible power of actors in the hands of an intelligent director. (more…)
The Dude v. The Man
by Giampaolo Bianconi
(The first in what is hopefully an ongoing series of reflections of the best films of the 90s–a decade that began twenty years ago and perhaps hasn’t yet ended.)
The Big Lebowski, dir. Joel Cohen (1998)
Bowling involves a straight shot down a smooth wooden lane. It’s a mechanized ritual; mediated by the apparatus that replaces the pins (perfectly), the chute that returns your ball. Nothing confused about it. The Dude (Jeff Bridges), Lebowski, a California tumbleweed leftover from an era when your opinion, man, was respected; Walter (John Goodman), Vietnam vet who, though the haze of his profanities, is obviously haunted by the ineffectiveness of his sacrifice; and the peripheral Donnie (Steve Buscemi), transparently born to die as a narrative cop-out—but who wasn’t? Together they form a bowling triumvirate: straight shots, the three of them, focused on rolling a heavy ball down a lacquered runway from which they never take off. (more…)
Growing Up at the End of Humanity
by Giampaolo Bianconi
The Road, dir. John Hillcoat (2009)
One of the most harrowing moments in The Road comes early, when the boy’s father (Viggo Mortensen) reminds him how to kill himself: put the gun in your mouth, aim upwards, and pull the trigger. When the time comes you’re gonna have to do it just like everybody else. The moment perfectly encapsulates the film’s unpretentious bleakess. I must seem to you like I’m from another world, the father tells his son. Mortensen’s pale, emaciated body carries encyclopedic knowledge of a world that has passed to ruins—when he dies, it will die also, making room for the innocence of the child (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and his overwhelming humanity. It’s something, we’re reminded at the end of the film, the father may have been close to forgetting. (more…)
Snowed in Pleasure
by Giampaolo Bianconi
We’ve just had our first substantial snow of the season here in Boston, and it looks like it’ll be a long haul (as usual) until it’s gone. With that in mind, here’s a list of four things I’ll be enjoying until I make my winterly migration south of the equator.
1. Friday Night Lights Season One — One of my professors recommended this when we were reading Don DeLillo’s football novel End Zone. There’s nothing more satisfying than the tribulations of small town Texas football, no actor more earnest than Kyle Chandler, and no bad-ass momma more fun to listen to than Liz Mikel.
2. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick — I’d never read Dick before I picked up this fast-reading and fascinating alternate history about a world in which the axis powers had won World War II. If you haven’t, do.
3. Hot Chocolate from L.A. Burdick — Burdick, as I understand it, has three outposts: one in Cambridge, MA, one in Walpole, NH, and one in New York City. If you live in those places, odds are you’re familiar with their mousse-thick hot chocolate. It’s unbeatable. If you’re not familiar with it–well, you can order some online.
4. Die Hard — Last but certainly not least is my favorite Christmas movie. Oliver Stone said that Bruce Willis was the Humphrey Bogart of our generation. I don’t know about that, but in Die Hard he proves to be just as compulsively watchable as Bogie in To Have and Have Not or The Big Sleep. Alan Rickman, too, is delightfully devilish as the leader of a German terrorist group (oddly similar to the Icelandic hockey players from The Mighty Ducks). As for John McTiernan being Howard Hawks–I’d like to say time will tell, but it doesn’t look good…
The Machine in the Ghost
by Giampaolo Bianconi
(Adam Hirsch’s review of Avatar can be found here.)
Avatar, dir. James Cameron (2009)
I can only imagine how much fun James Cameron had designing every aspect of Pandora. Its luminescent landscape, shiny-coated animal life, and floating islands all convey the sense of wonder Cameron himself must have felt in the face of his technological toys. The film’s 3D is barely noticeable, which I consider a victory. 3D has always been a distraction; in Avatar it seems—ironically—natural. (more…)
Going Mobile
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Up in the Air, dir. Jason Reitman (2009)
1.
There was a time when the kinesis depicted in Up in the Air was synonymous with rebellion. The life lead by Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) in the film is not so dissimilar from, say, the life of the unnamed protagonist in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. Despite the necessary divergences, both signify the triumph of mobility. In Antonioni’s film, David Hemmings takes pleasure is his perpetual motion, rootlessness, and cruelty; his lack of relationships or even identity. Bingham is peripatetic in a more obvious sense: he movies through the gleaming, super-sanitary corridor of international travel and identical airport Hiltons; the film makes it painfully crystalline that this “lifestyle” has distanced him from everyone he knows. He takes an almost melancholy pride in the difficulty of his heatless job—travelling around the country to fire people. Despite the “miles” he’s so proud to have racked up—ten million by the end of the film—it would be fair to say that he hasn’t moved at all. The homogeneity of airports and hotels and the ubiquitous “lounge” ensures that all of Bingham’s movement is merely illusory. What Up in the Air signifies is the transformation of movement from an element of vibrant, youthful counterculture to a way of life for millions of corporate cogs. (more…)
Of Blood and Beards
by Giampaolo Bianconi
If only Philip Seymour Hoffman looked like Heather Graham (Anderson directing "Boogie Nights")
Variety broke the news yesterday about Paul Thomas Anderson’s next feature, which it describes as exploring “the need to believe in a higher power.” The film will star frequent Anderson collaborator and now-portlier-than-ever Philip Seymour Hoffman as the founder of a fictitious religious movement in the 1950s. Hoffman’s character, according to Variety, is referred to in the film as “the Master,” (in the sense of a master of ceremonies) which gives me hope that Anderson might delve into the art of stage magic and slight-of-hand trickery–a concept not so foreign to the idea of religion in the twentieth century. Anderson, for those of you who don’t know, is the son of this man. He’s also collaborated with the great Ricky Jay. (more…)
Domestic Animals
by Giampaolo Bianconi
The Fantastic Mr. Fox, dir. Wes Anderson (2009)
It’s been widely remarked that, in a sense, Wes Anderson has been making animated films all along: consider the seeds of his kid-in-a-candy-store stylizations in Bottle Rocket, the prep-school pretensions of Rushmore, the whole-hearted storybook sentimentality of The Royal Tenenbaums; through to The Life Aquatic’s more playful and adventurous scenarios and The Darjeeling Limited’s barely-there characters and overpopulated, super-symmetrical frames. Anderson’s pop-baroque style necessitates that he take a heavier-than-heavy hand in the design of his films, culminating perhaps in his collaboration with Louis Vuitton on the animal-print suitcases for Darjeeling. Animation, then, gives Anderson the opportunity to exert near-total control on this film: not only the shots and performances, but every set, object, and character was cut from whole cloth to Anderson’s specifications. The Fantastic Mr. Fox, though, was animated in London, while Anderson spent most of the shoot in Paris, issuing commands via a barrage of emails, telephone calls, and other fiber optic channels. He literally phoned this one in. (more…)
Coming up at The Harvard Film Archive
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Quel style!
We’ve blogged about Robert Gardner before, but in case you missed his appearance at Bard College and are from the Boston area, he’ll be at the Harvard Film Archive on Friday, December 4th, at 7 PM. He’ll be showing fragments from unfinished films and discussing films that could have been. Also, he seems punctual, so I wouldn’t want to be late.
On Sunday, December 6th, at 7 PM, Vlada Petric will be in the house. Petric will be showing films and discussing his career, which includes–like Gardner–teaching at Harvard. These are your last chances to get to the HFA before it shuts down until the end of January, so don’t miss them. I wish I didn’t have to.
The 9/11 Imagination
by Giampaolo Bianconi
(The recent DVD release of this summer’s Star Trek film deserves some consideration and–ta-da!–here it is.)
Star Trek, dir. J.J. Abrams (2009)
“Each epoch,” said Jules Michelet, “Dreams the one to follow.” That dream rests on our conception of ourselves, now. As a genre, science fiction has always rested upon our vision of ourselves in the future. This is a responsibility from which the Star Trek franchise—consisting of television shows both live-action and animated, many films, and various incarnations—has decidedly never shirked: Star Trek in the 1960s was suave, sexy, and cool—just like us. Pavel Checkov, the Russian aboard the Enterprise, let us know that in the future the Cold War had ended and (don’t worry) we won. Later tales, which featured Patrick Stewart’s Shakespearean pomp, were more self-important though decidedly less political: it was the late 80s/early 90s, late Reagan and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It signaled the arrival of the comfortable Clinton years.
Its most recent imagining is no different. (more…)