This piece was originally published in March during the AFI Dallas Film Festival. The Hurt Locker opens in select theaters today.

When I was finishing my BFA in the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 00s, Kathryn Bigelow was the school’s most famous filmmaker alum, despite the fact that she matriculated at SFAI as a painter (she studied filmmaking as a graduate student at Columbia after a stint in the Independent Study program at the Whitney Museum). The work of the woman who made Point Break and Strange Days wasn’t exactly part of the curriculum of the then fine art-focused (sometimes to a fault) Film program at SFAI, where Hollywood film was rarely considered worthy of scrutiny; those who did readily embrace her success as part of the school’s pedigree often named glass ceiling smashing as Bigelow’s greatest achievement — as if to say, “Yes, she makes mainly action and genre blockbusters with big name stars, but she’s a woman, so that makes her subversive.” The argument that Bigelow’s work is somehow subversive just because she has a vagina is not only ludicrous, but unnecessary, being that her films are actually subversive. Marked by moral ambiguity, insistently complicating easy distinctions between good and evil, using Bigelow’s patented point-of-view camera to implicate the viewer in the dark worlds and questionable choices of her subjects, her films literally subvert the viewer’s expectations dictated by genre.

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Barack Obama gave a speech to the American Medical Association yesterday in an attempt to get the organization’s members on board with his plans for healthcare reform. The president’s appearance alone may have been good for his cause, given that it was the first such address to the AMA in 26 years, but many doctors are apparently still skeptical of the government’s ideas and how they’ll actually work.

Meanwhile, the issue of healthcare reform continues to be a difficult topic in Congress, and the road to legislation is sure to be long and filled with much debate. So, to help Washington in the process, or at least to keep the politicians sane with a little entertainment, we’ve come up with a little healthcare movie marathon.

The ten films selected are admittedly more left-leaning in their potential influence, but that’s not necessarily a political move on our part. We simply chose titles we like, and maybe it just so happens that we like movies that show charity as good, greed as evil and healthcare as a right that all humans should be afforded.

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Of the seven features I watched in full whilst at the 2009 CineVegas Film Festival, it seemed that the bravest endeavors, those that took the greatest stabs into the unknown both formally and conceptually, were actually shot on film. If this isn’t notable enough in a space increasingly dominated by digital photography (and, all too often, an aesthetic indifference that fails to push beyond the ease of use of the tools), the fact that films like Impolex, Modus Operandi and Redland are all the first features of men either barely or not quite the age of 30 is astounding. While other young filmmakers exploit ever-changing technology to shrink production budgets and experiment with non-theatrical models of distribution, Alex Ross Perry, Frankie Latina and Asiel Norton have made uncompromising films that defy contemporary technological trends and notions of financial convenience.

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This review was originally published in slightly different form during the Sundance Film Festival. Moon opens in New York and LA on Friday.

A small, personal story wrapped in the trappings of classic sci-fi epic, Moon manages to be both derivative (most notably, of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001) and deliberately rebellious in its treatment of sci-fi tropes. Moving through familiar territory and yet sparked with a spirit all its own, like any great work of genre cinema Moon’s future-world scenario and super-slick techno-artistry are put to the service of a story that ultimately downplays the traumas wrought by technological possibility in order to dig deep into the trauma of being a person.
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“What has happened to our family? We were so promising!”

So ponders one elder member of the artistic clan at the center of Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro –– and so, one imagines, the film’s detractors will be eager to snark about the director and his filmmaking progeny. FFC is oft-mocked for having whored himself out to studios in the 90s, only to squander the generosity of an indie arm with his pretentious “return to personal filmmaking,” 2007’s Youth Without Youth. As for the younger Coppola generation, Roman went from making highly-cinematic music videos to directing the promising mod homage CQ, but has since apparently done little but shoot second until for his dad, sister and Wes Anderson. After winning an Oscar for the beyond-slight Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola made a personal gesture of her own with the masterfully stylish Marie Antoinette — which subsequently dropped her from the favor of much of the critical class.

Marie Antoinette is a useful film to talk about in the same breath as Tetro, not because they’re similar in terms of means of production (they’re not: the former was a studio-funded biopic banked on North American stars that was considered a disappointment when it failed to build on Lost’s box office and awards tally, the latter a self-financed, self-distributed late-career experiment that can substantively please or disappoint only its maker), but because the finished projects nonetheless share a common DNA. Both films are so drunk on the melding of disparate cultural references (for the daughter, corset porn and Gang of Four; for the father, partner dance musicals and Fellini) that they read as dewy confessions from the filmmaker, feature-length love letters to their own aesthetics, the specific things they personally think are beautiful.

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The Hangover, Todd Phillips’ return to fratastic form after the disappointing School for Scoundrels, marks itself as an aesthetic step up for the Old School director right from the get go. With moody, pensive music playing on the soundtrack, the opening credits play out over a montage of Las Vegas By Day — giant cranes breaking the skyline of dull towers, Godzilla-size advertisements for “talent” like Marie Osmond baking in the sun — fading into the more palatable, glittery, and familiar images of Vegas By Night. This tells us right away that The Hangover means to say something about the contradictions of the city in which its set, and particularly the contrast between the Vegas myth of endless nights of full-on debauchery, and days spent nursing head-splitting regret at all-you-can-eat buffets. But Sin City presents Donnie and Marie is only the half of it: more importantly for The Hangover’s purposes, Vegas is a city constantly in construction, creating and erasing its own totally manufactured history,  a vacation spot paradoxically designed to provide inspiration for amateur photographers, which simultaneously boasts of its ability to send the same tourists home without memories that they could relate in mixed company.

In other words: the whole goal of the contemporary trip to Vegas is to come home with a digital camera full of evidence that you had a bunch of fun that you can’t recollect and certainly are not going to talk about. So when Phil (Bradley Cooper) Stu (Ed Helms) and Alan (Zack Galifinakis) wake up in their suite at Caesar’s the morning after Doug’s (Justin Bartha) bachelor party to find that their room is trashed and they’ve been left to care for a wandering chicken, a live tiger and a mysterious baby, the initial assumption is that this detritus is Vegas business as usual. Why can’t they remember anything that happened the night before? As Phil puts it, “Because we obviously had a great fucking time.” So great that the groom has gone missing.

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When the trailer for David Lynch’s new web series Interview Project premiered in early May, I was so skeptical that I mocked the repetitive banality of Lynch’s “drinking game-inspiring intro.” I’ve since had a chance to see five episodes of the series — which premieres publicly on June 1 and through which Lynch and Co. will unveil one short video each day for the rest of the year — and now I think I’ve found the method motivating the mundanity.

We’re to take that introduction as its producer’s statement of its thesis, but it also reveals something about its form. Addressing the camera in his rumpled shirt and jacket, firing off a deliberately prosaic monologue in sing-song, with the words “people”, “interview” and “different” pushed so many times as to completely lose meaning, Lynch appears to be using that banality as a smokescreen. And why not? This is, essentially, what he’s done for most of his working life.

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Thanks in part to the ever-impressive professionalism of Delta Airlines, I didn’t arrive in Cannes until after Martin Scorsese’s big announcement that his World Cinema Foundation (newly executive directed by Kent Jones, who collaborated with Scorsese on Val Lewton — The Man in the Shadows) is teaming up with Criterion, B-Side and The Auteurs to align the cause of film restoration with emerging models of online film distribution and discussion. And not having much time to read press releases while overseas, I didn’t realize until I returned to New York a couple of days ago that fruits of the collaboration are already tangible: there are currently four WCF films streaming for free on The Auteurs. And not knowing anything about any of the four films, I decided to watch 1964 Berlin Film Festival Winner Dry Summer last night. In trying to sum up the experience of spontaneously watching that film on my laptop, completely blindly without any real knowledge as to what I was in for, two words immediately come to mind: Holy. Shit.

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In 2008, The Class won the Palme D’or “out of nowhere” — or so it seemed, as the film hadn’t screened before a large chunk of the press had gone home. Almost as if pulling a bait and switch on journalists who stayed through the final weekend the following year in fear of missing a second Oscar-safe “surprise”, the 2009 Cannes lineup saved not the best for last, but certainly the most balls-out and commercially unviable. The two films I saw on my final day in the South of France were admirably experimental, undeniably gorgeous to look at, obstinately focused on form over narrative, so ambitious as to threaten to render that word meaningless as an adjective, and really fucking hard to watch.

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What does it take to start a controversy in Cannes? Do you need to show real sex? Will a hand job do it, or does it have to be a blow job? Does the penis necessarily *have* to ejaculate blood? What about self-mutilation — if it’s not of the sexual variety, does it go far enough? How about the disemboweling of animals? I saw two films in two days literally dripping with graphic sexuality, violence, and the general philosophy that explicit depravity is the only way for the filmmaker to get their point across — if either even have points, which I guess is debatable.

With its depiction of forced incest, two explicitly not-fake images of sex acts, liberation via very bloody self-harm and the on-screen disemboweling of a housecat, Greek Un Certain Regard title Dogtooth should by all rights be giving Antichrist’s raspberry to art film seriousness a run for its money –– and maybe it would be, if anyone was paying attention. It’s not much of a surprise that Dogtooth, the only narrative I’ve seen that really feels like it represents the work an emerging new talent, is rocking a low profile: after all, it is a star-less film on a sidebar by a virtually unknown director (Giorgos Lanthimos) and thus seems to have been seen thus far by very few members of the press. It’s also done no great service by its description in the March guide, which gives no clue to the most exciting thing about it: it’s essentially science-fiction.

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We’re at the halfway point of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and as of this writing Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète (A Prophet) is without doubt the press corps’ collective favorite film to screen in competition. Audiard has made an elegantly composed crime epic about an illiterate French Muslim teenager who goes to prison on unmentioned charges (he protests “I didn’t do anything!” after he’s been sentenced, and considering that over half of the French prison population is Muslim, he may not be lying), immediately falls in with the band of Corsican thugs who run the joint and eventually learns how to play various factions against each other to the benefit of his Islamic brethren. It plays like, well, gangbusters to an audience of journalists starved for intelligent, artistically satisfying entertainment. Whether it’ll actually play at all to North American audiences is, at this point, anyone’s guess.

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With Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist being branded as a debacle and other highly-anticipated auteur premieres drawing shrugs (Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock) and measured praise (Jane Campion’s Bright Star), the rest of the press and industry chattering classes have settled on Jacques Audiard’s undeniably well-made crime drama A Prophet as 2009’s sole breakout thus far. I walked out thinking it’s fine for what it is, but not much more. In the hours since exiting that two-and-a-half hour examination of spiritual and socio-economic transcendence via criminal calculation, I’ve gone back and forth between pondering a potential political subtext, and wondering if said pondering was more than the actual primary text required; I’m not yet ready to render a verdict, but I’ll let you know when I am.

Meanwhile, I spent much of my second full day in Cannes thinking about a Directors’ Fortnight double feature I caught the night before: Like You Know it All, the latest ode to drunken paralysis and hungover confusion by Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo (see my review here); and Go Get Some Rosemary, the second Fortnight feature in as many years from Red Bucket Films and their 20-something progenitors, New York-based brothers Josh and Benny Safdie. Both films are (at least) semi-autobiographical portraits of men who work in film but languish on the far margins of what we think of as “the industry”; both use humor to ingratiate us into the worldviews of protagonists who, at best, display a thought process that’s skewed, and at worse, exhibit behavior that cannot be excused. Where the former may depend on a familiarity with the director’s previous work to complete the joke, the latter’s blend of slapstick and surrealism in what should be super-serious situations helps to crystalize the Safdie style sketched out in last year’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed. Fueled by a go-for-broke lead performance by Frownland filmmaker Ronnie Bronstein, the Safdies’ follow-up should win over at least a few skeptics who failed to see the charm in their debut.

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If you look at Steven Soderbergh’s body of work from the last dozen years or so, it seems with every film the director becomes more obsessed the way careerists lose themselves in their work. Out of Sight and Che join up thematically with the Ocean’s films, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, even the The Limey, as movies about work, in which the people who do the work are so single-mindedly focused on the tasks ahead of them that work and life become a continuum, and the identities they create to get through the former can’t get put away at the end of the day when it’s ostensibly time to attend to the latter. They’re films in which life ends up happening in sudden moments, organically, as an unexpected side effect of the job.

The Girlfriend Experience is no exception, though this is not exactly the meticulous document of process that Che was. Starring porn star Sasha Grey as a high-end escort who alternately goes by the names Chelsea and Christine, Soderbergh’s quick and cheap digital feature is not the graphically sexual verite that fans of Grey’s previous filmography might have expected/hoped for. Instead, it’s a cold (although understandably, necessarily so), hands-off portrait of a certain New York City life about a month before the 2008 presidential election. Though improvised based on a linear outline and shot in sequence, as edited Experience jumps back and forth in time somewhat frantically. At Sundance, Soderbergh cited his own The Limey as an inspiration for the new film’s construction, and though there are similarities, this seems slightly more methodical. Here Soderbergh often jumps ahead to sketch out an events or conversation, then moves on to something else, then goes back to color in the details of the sketch.  (The version available now on VOD and premiering in theaters next week felt slightly tighter to me than the rough cut shown in January, but that might have been an illusion; I might have just been more ready for its non-linearality the second time around.)

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Where Jesus Camp played the conflict between contemporary evangelical Christianity and the secular community for liberal-baiting horror, Michael Jacobs takes the route of real-life mockumentary with Audience of One, which debuted at SXSW in 2007 and concludes a long festival run with a run in Chicago last week and its New York premiere this weekend. It’s a lighter approach applied to a culture war battle with somewhat less urgency, but its own less-than-optimistic implications.

Jacobs finds an unwitting star in Richard Gazowsky, second-generation pastor of the Voice of Pentecost church in San Francisco, and the would-be director of Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph, an epic evangelical sci-flick to which he and his churchgoers have devoted their lives and sunk their savings. Gazowsky calls his “studio” WYSIWYG –– that is, “What you see is what you get”; though Richard explains that the name has something to do with battling the “cliques” of both Hollywood and other religious sects, this is one of many instances in which Gazowsky offers a ramble that seems to insufficiently explicate his case. Regardless, under the auspices of WYSIWYG, Gazowsy has assembled a crew that’s an uneasy blending of enthusiastic Craig’s List-sourced amateurs, devout family members/parishioners — none of whom have any experience with filmmaking — and non-believing professional technicians drawn in by the scope of Richard’s vision. Jacobs follows, patiently and without apparent intervention, as Gazowsky leads his clan from pre-production in San Francisco to a disastrous five-day shoot in Italy, then back home, where WYSIWYG sets up shop in a film studio on Treasure Island and ultimately refuse to leave, even after the city has shut off their power for non payment of rent. So basically, it’s just like any indie film production, except that any problem large or small is ameliorated with the faith that “God will save us all.”

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