This review originally appeared in slightly different form during Sundance 2008. For further thoughts on Momma’s Man and the work of Azazel Jacobs, see these notes on his recent BAM retrospective.
When a filmmaker casts his own parents as parents––in a film about an adult and his relationship to his parents upon returning to his childhood home, a film which said filmmaker shoots *in* his childhood home––you’d expect (or maybe fear) that the result would be meta-personal to the point of solipsism. But what’s really surprising about Azazel Jacob’s Momma’s Man, which stars his experimental filmmaker father Ken Jacobs and mother Flo Jacobs and was shot in the Manhattan loft in which the family has lived for decades, is that it feels completely universal. The story of a 30-something husband and father of a newborn who extends a stay at his parents’ ramshackle New York apartment indefinitely, it’s an incredible portrait of the final phase of coming of age, the transition from being parented to parenting.
First telling both his parents and his wife back home that the airline is giving him the runaround about rescheduling a canceled return flight, then tailoring his excuses for each discreet party as he needs to buy time in increments, Mikey (Matt Boren) takes advantage of his parents’ bemused hospitality to take a winter vacation. He spends his days visiting with old friends (including a recent parolee with unexpected musical passions) and trying to make new ones, his nights combing through boxes of old notebooks, love letters and comic books. In a lofted bed just feet from his sleeping parents, Mikey pulls out a guitar and plays a love song he apparently wrote in high school. Overhearing the lyrics, “Fuck fuck fuck you/I hope you die too,” his parents exchange a worried glance; maybe there’s more to this visit than they’ve been led to believe.
To be fair: Vicky Cristina Barcelona may not need my defense. Since its debut at Cannes, it has garneredsome of the most positivereviews of Woody Allen’s late career. But it’s always with that caveat: it’s the best he’s done for us lately. At this point, it seems like the critical class is expected to disclaim their vitriol or praise, no matter what Allen actually puts on the screen, or which way it swings. Is it good? Well, it’s not as good as Annie Hall, but it’s not bad. Is it bad? Well, it’s not as bad as Anything Else, but it’s not good. As you might have guessed, I think Woody Allen has produced some work over the past 15 years (since the Soon-Yi “scandal”, which more or less dovetailed with the consensus opinion that his “best years” were long behind him) that is worthy of more serious consideration. But even if I didn’t think the movies deserved it, the sheer laziness that the movies seem to inspire in critics would almost give me enough incentive to passionately defend them.
To go micro before going macro: the worst thing that you can say about Vicky Cristina Barcelona is that it’s exceedingly pleasant, that it has the overall effect of a late summer, late afternoon nap. And sure, maybe, if you were inclined, it would be possible to write it all off as soft core bicurious semi-erotica (and full-on bicurious travel erotica). But I sense that Allen––if no one else––earnestly believes he’s doing more, that even in his lightest mode, he’s deeply concerned with the nagging mysteries of human relationships. Might it be creepy-old-man-ism that requires him to ask two beautiful actresses to kiss each other in an attempt to figure these mysteries out? It might be, but Woody Allen’s been a creepy old man since he was 35. To convince me that he’s totally lost it, you’re going to have to come up with better evidence than that.
The best thing about Alex Holdridge’s In Search of a Midnight Kiss(trailer above) is its conceptual audacity: not only is it a film about walking in L.A., but it devotes much of its screen time to romanticizing corners and aspects of the city well-known to natives but rarely seen on film (and never as the backdrop for meet-cute one-night-stand cinema). As long as it sticks to being a visually stunning love letter to the much-maligned city, an inverse of the L.A. segment of Annie Hall, a filmic rehab from City of Quartz to a city of romantic fantasy––I can totally get on board with it. It’s when the actors open their mouths that I start to have a problem.
Serge Bozon’s La France is a generic clusterfuck, but in the best way––a stunningly confident, category-defying, broken-down dream piece about loss and being lost. It’s a film about war in which soldiers are not only never seen actually fighting for their land, but in fact seem to have lost their way in vague and vain pursuit of a lost land to reclaim as their own. It’s a musical with just one song, performed by non-performers in a handful of mutations throughout the film. And it’s a love story, soaked in romantic delusion but ultimately fatalist in regards to the actual odds that love can overcome existential crisis. After a 14 month festival run (including stops at Cannes, New Directors/New Films and LAFF), it opens for a week in New York at Anthology Film Archives on Friday.
Guy Maddin’s version of his hometown of Winnipeg is a dreamland patchwork of half truths and exaggerations, a standard-issue suburban incubator carved into blank screen fields of snow so blinding white they seem almost hot, on which Maddin has projected a secret life. He was commissioned to make My Winnipeg, an ostensible non-fiction portrait of this birthplace, by The Documentary Channel, but the city itself is only of concern to him insofar as it’s an extension of and metaphor for his psyche. He casts the project as his attempt to come to terms once and for all with his fever stream of memories, real and fabricated, inextricably intertwined with the places and spaces where he grew up. The question of “real” doesn’t matter. While Darcy Fehr, the actor hired to be his (younger, improbably attractive) stand-in, nods off next to a bottle on a moving train, the real Maddin, our narrator, informs us of his designs on Winnipeg: “I must leave it! I’ll film my way out!”
Cool Hunting has a preview of a beautiful book that’s out in the UK in the conjunction with the release there of Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (which I reviewed at SXSW, and loved). The book includes the shooting script, by Harmony and his brother Avi Korine, as well as photographs from the set, some taken by Harmony’s wife Rachel. According to Amazon, the book won’t be available until August 2008, but you can pre-order it now.
The worm turns and squirms in Frownland, an aptly named film made on the cheap in and around New York. An up-close, painfully intimate portrait of a hapless, manipulative schlub, a Loser with a capital L, the film offers for our horror and our empathy a creature whose very existence is a rebuke to the stultifying uniformity (the niceness, the neatness) of what now often passes for American independent cinema. Written and directed by Ronald Bronstein, making his feature-film debut, this is personal cinema at its most uncompromising and fierce.
The first paragraph of Manohla Dargis’ rave review of in the New York Times. Read the full thing here.
I confess: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood has pretty much slain me. In three weeks of trying to nail down what makes this film tick, I haven’t been able to mold my thoughts into anything resembling a traditional movie review. I feel like the first step to defining what this film is, and why it’s had such an impact on me, is to figure out what it isn’t. So, I’ll now proceed to blatantly rip off Filmbrain, and review TWBB in more-or-less list form. What follows is my analysis of five common misconceptions about this film. We’ll have more on There Will Be Blood on next week’s podcast.
Misconception 1: “There Will Be Blood is a Monster Movie, and Daniel Plainview is the Monster.”
Espoused by: Peter Martin at Twitch, Richard Schickel at TIME, Fred Schurers at PORTFOLIO, among others.
We’ll begin with a misconception that I can sort of understand–in fact, I think it’s less a misconception than a missing of the point. Daniel Day Lewis’ presence in TWBB is terrifying, not least because of the booming sing-song in which he speaks. But if this voice calls to mind any sort of known movie villain at all, it’s the type of villains seen mainly in cartoons–he’s essentially a Snidely Whiplash that could kill you with his bare hands. But PTA never lets the characterization have the final word on the character. One of the most intriguing things about this film is its unwillingness to completely vilify anyone: both protagonists (Plainview as well as Paul Dano’s young preacher, Eli Sunday) are equally good and evil, antagonistic and sympathetic. Both are wrong and both are right. Plainview may behave monstrously, but with the final scene excepted, the victim of his terror is mostly himself.
It’s easy to see Plainview as the “bad” guy, if for no other reason because he spends so much time apparently antagonizing the “good” guys. But to do so is to misread. Plainview comes to Little Boston (the nothing Western town that serves as the site of the film’s main action; it might as well be called Manifest Destiny-ville) promising that the oil he excavates will pay the way towards The Future: schools, roads, freedom from hunger and virtually any other brand of want. He’s offering this promise to God-fearing people who may still be grappling with the present and the past, but it’s more than just a struggle between old and new, or even religion and blasphemy. Plainview’s real “gift” to the community is his introduction of cynicism, mistrust, and doubt. His presence represents the literal loss of faith. Scary, sure, but the horror movie dynamics are reductive, and they’ve been way overblown.
Could any film ever hope to overcome a festival drubbing like the one that greeted Southland Tales at Cannes 2006? Screened in competition, in an early incarnation clocking in at 2 hours 40 minutes (director Richard Kelly later claimed it had been a rough cut all along, but that’s apparently not how it was billed to the press at the time), Kelly’s follow-up to the slow-burning cult hit Donnie Darkowas roundly, emphatically, infamously booed. Sometime after the first shockwave of bad buzz hit the States, a handful of critics rose to defend Kelly’s vision. The rest of us sat back and waited a year and a half to get a look for ourselves.
Southland Tales may never be able to live down that first, fateful, fatal screening, but you can’t say Richard Kelly didn’t try to reverse the damage; in fact, he spent a good portion of the 18 months following the film’s ill-fated premiere streamlining his disasterpiece. The 2 hour 24 minute cut premiering in theaters tomorrow boasts a newly-fashioned prologue (wherein a July 4th barbecue is interrupted by a mushroom cloud, touching off World War III), a re-recording of Justin Timberlake’s narration (stoney and oblique, but purposefully so), and the exorcism of one or two subplots (Janeane Garofalo used to be in this film; now she is not).
Most auspiciously, Kelly brokered a deal with Sony that required him to shave a sizable chunk off the running time in exchange for their bankrolling of 90 new effects shots. It would seem that this money was put to good use: I’m not someone who usually takes much pleasure from good CGI, but if there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on when it comes to Southland Tales, it’s that the effects are truly special. Particularly in the film’s spectacular final twenty minutes, Southland Tales contains some of the most purely beautiful digital effects that I’ve ever seen on a big screen.
And the rest of it? It really comes down to what you’re willing to let Kelly get away with.
Cool Hunting
