I first saw Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, in September at Telluride. I generally disliked it, but I vowed to see it again at the New York Film Festival and, if my opinion had changed, update my original review. If anything, the second viewing solidified many of my initial, negative feelings about the movie, but I did gain deeper respect for the performances, particularly that of Nicole Kidman, who creates a magnificent villain with a vivid backstory, despite the fact that Baumbach gives her very little to work towards. I’ve updated my review to include some thoughts based on a second viewing; you’ll find the old version here, and the new version after the jump.

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Noticing a fair amount of thematic overlap amongst the films selected for this year’s New York Film Festival, Filmbrain has created a visual aid, awarding 15 of the Festival’s official selections unhappy faces for their representations of things like divorce, adultery, and daddy issues. The exercise reveals that, amongst the 30-something films on this year’s schedule, not only was there a marked lack of “traditional” romance on display, but the Festival as a whole trafficked in “an almost universally negative (and even cynical) view towards marriage, and a preponderance of infidelity.”

Which causes Filmbrain to wonder:

Is cinematic love, like, so last century? Has that infernal machine on the left coast that continues to pump out one cloying RomCom after another sullied the waters forever? Or are these films a genuine reflection of a post-whatever malaise that has succeeded in driving us apart from one another?

To Filmbrain’s disclaimer that he missed Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astree and Celadon, which “sounds like it could have been a genuine love story”––yes, I guess it is. It just comes at through the Shakespeare back door of communication breakdowns ameliorated via cross-dressing.

In her two films at the 2007 New York Film Festival, Asia Argento plays two sexual outlaws, two centuries apart. In Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress, she’s a kept woman who can’t keep away from her now-married former lover; in Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, she’s a stripper and a whore. In Ferrara’s film, she cavorts with a wild dog on stage, for cash; in Breillat’s, Argento is the wild dog, in spite of her money and title, and she clutches the head of a tiger while in the throes of orgasm as if to prove it. In both films, Argento is tough and toxic; her body is on display constantly and yet there’s a never a sense that she’s in anything less than total control. In both films, Argento is at once ultra-feminine and masculine, sexy and “scary”, in a way that maybe hasn’t been seen on screen to this extent since the height of Marlene Dietrich.

In fact, The Last Mistress feels very much like a Dietrich film, with various themes and plot threads borrowed from The Blue Angel and Morocco. Breillat’s method of directing actors is also not totally dissimilar to that of the director who made Dietrich’s Hollywood career, Josef Von Sternberg, in that both tend to privlege physical choeography over the development of a character’s inner life. But saying that Argento plays the Dietrich role in Go Go Tales is essentially like imagining the gorilla suit number from Blonde Venus digitally inserted into the middle of 42nd Street. Ferrara’s made an almost happy-go-lucky glorification of sleaze, with Argento as its dark heart.

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I didn’t even know there *was* a trailer for Silent Light, but I stumbled across a double-subtitled version on YouTube, and now it’s embedded above. Admittedly, I’m just sickeningly in love with this movie so my opinion probably can’t be trusted, but I can’t imagine it being represented by a better trailer. In just eight shots, the above clip truly manages to mirror what it feels like to watch the film. I’m almost ready to step up and distribute Silent Light myself––how much do you think Reygadas wants for it? Do you think I could spread it over a couple of credit cards?

Sigh. I think my heart actually stopped for a second.

It looks like the “battle” over Redacted is over. Brian DePalma was a guest this morning on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. Lehrer asked DePalma to comment on the lead story on the gossip page of this morning’s NY Daily News, which is essentially a transcription of the widely-circulated video documenting Monday’s DePalma press conference at the New York Film Festival. DePalma gave a restrained recap of the situation and then said, “I exhausted my legal options about 24 hours ago.”

He was most likely referencing the alleged DGA decision that ruled Magnolia can, against the director’s wishes, release the film with black bars placed over the faces in the images in question. I say “alleged” because this DGA decision has not been reported in the trades nor confirmed by press release––I’m getting my information from comments made on Movie City Indie by Magnolia’s Eamonn Bowles and someone who appears to be DGA General Counsel David Korduner.

Regardless, this appears to be as far as DePalma is willing to fight. At the end of the segment, Lehrer asked DePalma if the battle will delay Redacted’s release date, and the director said no. “I’m afraid that controversy is over,” he sighed, clearly resigned. There’s no indication he has any plans to take Mark Cuban up on his offer to let DePalma take the film off Magnolia’s hands.

I did it: I survived Peter Bogdanovich’s 4 hour and 15 minute Tom Petty documentary, Running Down A Dream. I cannot call myself a Tom Petty fan–In fact, I’d probably be more inherently receptive to a four hour documentary about Peter Bogdanovich–but there’s something about this film that fascinates me. I think maybe it’s that, in terms of the nature and total efficiency of the production, it actually achieves Bogdanovich’s apparent lifelong ambition to emulate Howard Hawks.

But more on that in a future episode of FilmCouch. Right now, here’s what you need to know: it feels shorter than four hours, it’s gonna be a wet dream for Tom Petty fans, it’s screening in 20+ cities on October 15 (you can find out where and buy tickets at TomPetty.com), the DVD will be available at Best Buy only the next day, and it premieres on the Sundance Channel October 29.

Bogdanovich did a press conference after the screening, and surprisingly, in forty minutes he lapsed into just one impersonation of a dead film icon. It makes sense that he’d want to make most of his time on stage at Lincoln Center to promote the movie–after all, this is his first appearance at the New York Film Festival in almost forty years. “This is the first time I’ve had a film in the New York Film Festival since 1971, when I had two films at the festival, The Last Picture Show and my first version of Directed By John Ford,” Bogdanovich said. “Which [together] totaled about four hours. So every 37 years, I get four hours at the New York Film Festival.”

The director is well aware that the film’s length lends it a bit of stigma–and he’s more than prepared to defend it. Listen to him do so here. We’ll have more Bogdanovich soundbites on next week’s podcast.

 

 Peter Bogdanovich at the New York Film Festival: Play Now | Download

Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures and key player in yesterday’s Redacted press conference dust-up, responds to the chatter that the incident was a publicity stunt on Movie City Indie. As I noted earlier, DePalma has been milking the issue at a number of festivals, and it appears that Bowles finally reached a breaking point:

there was absolutely no calculation involved at the press conference yesterday. depalma has been on a toot about how we’ve compromised his film, and then he stated publicly at the official nyff press conference that in no uncertain terms mark cuban, for aesthetic reasons, wanted the photos out of the film. i had just arrived and this was one of the first things i heard. in an almost tourette’s like moment, i just blurted out out that it wasn’t true. [...] the fact of the matter is, none of the companies that have released depalma’s work in the last 30 years would ever touch this film. and because our company, which has had it’s fair share of controversial, uncompromising films, actually was the one stupid/brave/committed enough to do so, we end up being the evil force trying to shut down a director’s vision.

Bowles also notes that the Director’s Guild has sided against DePalma on the matter. You can read Bowles’ full comments here. Jurgen Fauth also has video of the press conference, which I’ve embedded above; you can here his take on the fracas here.

UPDATED 10/10: Last night, a commenter at Movie City Indie calling himself “A. Nonymous” disputed Bowles’ note that the DGA voted against DePalma, and stating that “an arbitrator ruled the company could use redacted photos in the film, rather than the unredacted photos Mr. De Palma wanted to include”–so it’s not so much that the DGA voted *against* DePalma, but that they sided *with* Magnolia/Mark Cuban.

And in the comments to this post, Matt V writes: “Check out the TypeKey profile name of the anonymous commenter on the mcindie site. DKorduner - Who, since he has a “DGA email address” is probably David Korduner, who is the General Counsel for the DGA. Why is he making (or at least trying to make) anonymous comments on a blog site?” A fair question, although perhaps the bigger issue, is what kind of lawyer tries to make anonymous blog comments using his work email address?

Several film blogs have posted Jamie Stuart’s thoughts on yesterday’s NYFF press conference for Brian DePalma’s Redacted. In a nutshell: DePalma mentioned that the film’s final montage (which consists of real photographs of real victims of real terror and war-associated violence, and which is thought by many to be the most powerful portion of the film) is in danger of being “redacted” by the film’s distributor, Magnolia Pictures, at the request of the Magnolia/HD Net founder Mark Cuban. According to Stuart, DePalma’s comments were discredited yesterday by Magnolia’s president:

As [DePalma] began discussing the film’s use of actual war photographs and their graphic nature, Eamonn Bowles from Magnolia began shouting from the rear of the Walter Reade Theater to refute De Palma’s claims that Mark Cuban was trying to, well, redact them from the picture’s release. Then, just as the press conference was coming to a close, producer Jason Kliot rushed the stage and grabbed moderator Jim Hoberman’s mic to offer the crowd his version of this distribution controversy. I was left wondering how spontaneous this all was or whether they knew it would be immediately blogged upon to stoke media attention.

I was less inclined to see this as a pure stunt. I knew DePalma had been pushing this button at press conferences as far back as Telluride, where his statements were vague enough to be misinterpreted but loud enough to be difficult to miss. If this fighting between filmmaker and distributer started as a ploy for attention, then it doesn’t make sense that Magnolia would wait this long to publicly respond. Still, unsure how to interpret this latest event, I sent an email this morning to Mark Cuban to get the official word. Cuban confirmed to me that Magnolia has, indeed, asked DePalma to remove the images from the film, and will not release Redacted unless the final montage is cut. More details after the jump.

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Almost two weeks ago, I posted the news that Brian DePalma canceled a press conference previously scheduled to coincide with a screening of Redacted at the New York Film Festival. NYFF’s press office has just sent out a press release announcing that, “by popular demand”, DePalma has agreed to the meet the press after all.

The press conference, rescheduled for Monday afternoon, should be particularly interesting in light of the fact that Redacted has been widely reviled by most of the New York press (myself included). In fact, the only local defender of the film that I can name off the top of my head is New York Magazine’s David Edelstein, who just this morning blogged about not being able to get a word in edgewise at Tuesday’s Todd Haynes event. I wonder: will the Redacted haters cancel their Columbus Day plans en masse in order to get all up in DePalma’s face, or will Edelstein have a much easier time getting his questions answered?

Todd Haynes. photo by Karina Longworth.

At Tuesday’s press conference following the press and industry screening of I’m Not There, writer/director Todd Haynes talked about referencing Godard and Fellini (but not, he insists, Don’t Look Back), the ability of film to collapse time, and why he chose to cast a woman and a black child to represent two of the six disparate facets of Bob Dylan’s life. We have audio from the press conference after the jump; to skip to a specific section of the 28-minute clip, see these handy show notes:

00:01: Getting Bob Dylan’s music and life rights
04:03: Why six Dylans?
04:49: Working in different film stocks/formats
05:41: Dylan didn’t have approval of details
06:29: The collapse of time, in the film and in Dylan’s work
09:21: On breaking free of the constraints of the biopic
11:23: Casting
12:51: Don’t say Don’t Look Back
16:05: References to other films
21:41: Fitting the strands of the story together
23:48: Why have Dylan played by a woman?
25:45: Portraying Dylan’s cultural influences, and Dylan-as-wannabe

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Amongst the small cadre of film bloggers and critics that have been filing dispatches from the New York Film Festival’s press screenings for the past three weeks, Stellet Licht (Silent Light) seems to be the surprise hit of the festival. I wrote a glowing review last week; with the film’s second and final public screening coming up this evening, after the jump you’ll find a round-up of what people are saying about Carlos Reygada’s mesmerizing Mexican Mennonite drama. If you’re in town, I urge you check it out–I’m pretty sure it’s the best undistributed film I’ve seen all year.

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Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There is a postmortem–but of what, exactly? It opens with the examination of a corpse, played by Cate Blanchett; the press notes tell us we’re supposed to connect this image to Bob Dylan’s 1968 motorcycle accident, in which he almost died but didn’t, and after which he was allegedly never the same. So on some level, it’s a love letter to a dead man whose body is still with us-–although, at the press conference following the New York Film Festival screening of the film yesterday, Haynes kept referring to Dylan in the past tense, as though his own private Dylan was long gone and never to return–but it’s also a catalogue of various shards of the dead culture of the 1960s. It’s as vital as it sounds: like so many of Haynes’ films, it’s based on a provocative concept that plays in practice like a museum piece.

It’s a collage of personality impressions and visual styles. Grainy, fluttering black and white gives way to a bottle green landscape, spotted with the second best psychedelic lens flares of the NYFF thus far. The film’s hallucinatory logic seems at first to defy any kind of stricture, until the references start to stack up: visual quotations from Dylan album covers, The Beatles doing silent comedy, La Strada; actual, scripted quotations from at least two Godard films. Each of the six protagonists is a walking (though hardly living or breathing) quotation, a riff on a Dylan phase or personality thread. A young ruffian who uses poetry to deliver uncomfortable truths to The Man. A prepubescent compulsive liar. A misunderstood prophet who finds his true calling by turning to God. An aging cowboy in hiding, laying low in a town obsessed with Halloween. A bad actor who becomes a big star and neglects the woman he loves. A put-opon speed freak who uses pop music to deliver uncomfortable truths to The Man.

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The New York Film Festival opens to the public tonight with two screenings of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. Since today also marks the midpoint of the press screening schedule, here’s a recap of the films we’ve covered so far, with info on when they’re screening for the public at NYFF and when/where you’ll be able to catch them if you’re not in New York.

*The Darjeeling Limited
Screens 9/28 at 7:45 and 9pm; opens in New York tomorrow and expands next week.
“It’s this kind of style-as-substance that has earned [Wes] Anderson a lot of flack over the years, but I’ve come to the point where I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to fault the guy for pursuing his balls-out personal vision. And though the quirk factor of that vision can be grating, Darjeeling’s DNA is more in line with the sentimental glamour of Margot Tenenbaum’s furs, and less with the antiseptic affectation of Steve Zissou’s nautical suit. Watching the feature, for me, often felt like being welcomed back into the embrace of an old friend.”

*The Romance of Astreé and Céladon
Screens 9/29 at 10am and 9/30 at 9:15pm; no U.S. distribution
“For a film in which a hot-to-trot nymph princess imprisons a cross-dressing himbo, it offers a surprisingly touching celebration of the spiritual over the physical, and as a tale of a crisis of romantic faith, it could play comfortably alongside any of the 1930s marriage comedies.”

*4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Screens 9/29 at 12:30 PM and 10/1 at 9:15 PM; opens in select theaters and on VOD later this year.
“It all adds up to a portrait of a political situation that transforms even the most mundane personal activities into a negotiation process, ranging from frustrating to humiliating, to downright horrifying.”

*The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Screens 10/29 at 6pm and 10/30 at 10am; opens in limited release on 12/19
“Julian Schnabel’s third feature is an almost excessively beautiful aestheticization of misery.”

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To skip straight to images and audio from the NYFF press conference for The Darjeeling Limited, click the “Read More” link at the bottom of the page.

The plot of Wes Anderson’s fifth feature concerns the misadventures of Jack, Francis and Peter, three 30-something brothers who gather on a train in India. It’s been twelve months since they last met, at their father’s funeral. They’ve been brought together by Francis (Owen Wilson), who, in the intervening year, almost killed himself in a motorcycle accident; he arrives on the train with his head bandaged like he’s had a lobotomy. Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is fresh off a self-destructive tryst in a Paris hotel room with an ex-girlfriend; he’s grown a George Harrison mustache but walks around barefoot, like Paul McCartney on the cover of Abbey Road. Peter is about to be a dad for the first time; he insists on wearing his late father’s prescription sunglasses, even though they give him tension headaches.

All three are heavily medicated, trading black market Indian opiates at the dinner table before soup is served. Francis first tells Peter and Jack that they’re in India to reestablish their brotherly bonds by visiting a number of “spiritual places,” an itinerary which has Jack planning to jet off to Italy at the first snag. Francis then reveals that they’re actually on their way to find their mother, who is living in a convent in the Himalayas and who, for reasons unknown, failed to show up at their father’s funeral.

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