Somewhere, dir. Sofia Coppola (2010)
Richard Brody—a critic whom I respect—said of Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere that it was “One of the most radical films ever made in Hollywood, if the root of the cinema is the conjuring of inner life through outer particulars. The gap between the life lived and the life perceived—a quiet tragedy, Sartre-style—is traversed with the tender, near-weightless glide of a Ferrari on a freeway.” I thought about Brody’s assessment of the film for a long time after I saw it. Aside from being simple amazed with Brody’s coining of the term Sartre-style to refer to an aesthetic, I wondered if we could have seen the same film: I would hardly call Somewhere, with its by now clichéd neo-Antonioni visual metaphors strained through Stephen Shore cinematography, radical.
Let the year end lists roll out. In preparation for our Company selection of the best films of 2010, I thought I’d tease out a selection of the best DVDs of the year from the Criterion Collection, one fetish for which I will never apologize.
1) Colossal Youth, dir. Pedro Costa (2006) — This film is enormous. Puts Costa in league with Béla Tarr. I love this movie.
2) Lola Montes, dir. Max Ophuls (1955) — Lush from the man who invented it. A spectacle gets the DVD it deserves.
3) Red Desert, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni (1964) — There’s only one way to watch Antonioni’s first foray into color filmmaking: on film. If you can’t do that, do this.
4) Underworld, dir. Josef von Sternberg (1927) — The film that launched the classic American gangster genre. There is a world inside the world.
5) Paisan, dir. Roberto Rossellini (1946) — Rossellini’s episodic follow-up to Rome, Open City is even more beautiful and, until now, much harder to find.
Runners-up: Make Way for Tomorrow and Night Train to Munich. No matter how good Criterion’s releases are, I always manage to find a fault: couldn’t they put out more Godard instead of Broadcast News? Do they really need to remaster The Ice Storm or Easy Rider instead of giving Kiarostami some extra distribution? But I guess Criterion gotta eat. Either way, a continual tip of the hat from me (even though you’ve been tipping my wallet for a while now).
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…)
(Quick note: This review, which takes the form of an essay, does contain spoilers. If you haven’t yet seen the film, you should.)
The Passenger, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni (1975)
In his time, Michelangelo Antonioni was a melancholic enfant terrible. L’Avventura caused impassioned boos at Cannes, while Zabriskie Point is now recognized as a hysterical mega-flop where everything laughable about European artistry converges with American 1960s kitsch. The Passenger, a film surrounded by noir conventions yet shot in blistering color in 1975 with Jack Nicholson as a man outrunning his own identity, has a strange reputation. On the one hand, the film saw Antonioni crawling out of the grave in which he’d been prematurely buried by the failure of Zabriskie Point (Nicholson met him half way, digging from the surface); on the other, he seemed to emerge weakened by his tribulations: gone was the force of his play with space, replaced by the speed and diligence of his camera. Antonioni himself, perhaps, was on the run. (more…)
