Over the weekend, The Guardian published a Q & A with Slavoj Zizek, the cultural theorist and film philosopher who will be guest directing the Telluride Film Festival later this month. From the sound of things, the Slovenian academic is in a pretty dark emotional state at the moment. His answers to Rosanna Greenstreet’s relatively innocuous, form-letter style questions are universally, comically negative, especially when the topic is love or sex. Examples:

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Joe Leydon points to the above promo widget for the Telluride Film Festival. If you’re going to Telluride, you’ll eventually be able to use the widget to customize your schedule. If you’re not going to Telluride––and, considering the geographic and financial inaccessibility of the Festival, which is incidentally one of my favorites, I assume that’s most of you––the widget is nonetheless surprisingly packed with interesting content.

There are videos from last year’s festival, including documentation of the tribute to Daniel Day-Lewis; there’s also a short on the festival’s 35 year history, featuring founding director Tom Luddy. You should be able to get your own widget by clicking the “customize and embed” code above. You’ll have to give your email address––be careful not to sign yourself up for Dell bacn.

It’s a good thing I work alone in an airtight concrete room, because I literally, audibly yelped when this press release landed in my inbox. Slavoj Zizek––the superstar Lacanian theorist who Sophie Fiennes bluescreened into Psycho, who analyzed 9/11 through terms set by The Matrix, who is probably the only former Princeton professor to star in a documentary with an exclamation point in the title––will Guest Direct the 2008 Telluride Film Festival. Telluride’s Guest Directors are charged with putting together a sidebar of films, and introducing the screenings at the Labor Day weekend fest. In keeping with Telluride tradition, Zizek’s picks, like the rest of the line up, will be kept secret until the week of the fest, but if anybody want to start putting money down on what Zizek might program, I’m game.

My first impression of Margot at the Wedding (which, admittedly, may change after I see it a second time at the New York Film Festival) is that Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale is an intermittently fascinating exercise that barely holds together as a film. It plays as if Baumbach cut together a footage reel of master-class actors (plus Jack Black, who, perhaps emboldened by the company, somehow gives the finest performance of his career) rehearsing without a script. The characters are half-formed and/or disposed of unceremoniously, the themes are haphazardly integrated, the emotional arc is virtually non-existent.

And yet, some of the performances show flashes of magic, so much so that for all its faults, it’s not entirely dismissable.

It did look good on paper, didn’t it? Nicole Kidman plays Margot, a successful short story writer/prolific drinker who has developed a kind of perfect celebrity-literary scam: she projects her own self-loathing outward, and then drains the frustrations of her friends and family directly onto the pages of the New Yorker. It’s not entirely clear why Margot’s husband (John Turturro), son (Zane Pais) and sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is married to the director) keep letting her get away with this, but in the film’s best scene, her sometime-lover very publicly dresses her down for the same.

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Palme D’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is such a marvel of cinematic naturalism that as the film plays, director Cristian Mungiu’s hand almost seems to be invisible. I’m certainly not the first to heap critical praise on the camerawork (mostly long takes of un-fussy tableau presented in hands-off medium shots), the acting (as unpretentious as high-quality improv, but with the studied intensity injected by the crutch of a stable script), the pitch-perfect period production design (as the Variety review put it, the film is full of “muted cement tones, capturing the crushing ugliness of life in the Eastern bloc”) and, above all, the incredible suspense created by Mungiu’s refusal to foreshadow or explain. 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.

I’m fascinated by the dynamic between the film’s two female leads, so much so that I think I need to see 4 Months a second time before writing a full review; luckily, I’ll be able to do just that next month at the New York Film Festival.

In the meantime, check out Paul’s interview with Mungiu. Paul met the director at Telluride’s opening night feed, and the two talked about 4 Months and why there is a larger renaissance happening in Romanian film right now.
Cristian Mungiu interview

The surprise hit of the Telluride Film Festival, Juno is not quite the unqualified masterpiece that the breathless buzz might lead you to believe: its high-concept slanguage sometimes feels over-written, its visual style can get a bit too twee, and there are two or three bridge scenes in the third act that feel like imports from a much stupider movie. But in a year heavy on halfway-decent studio-supported sex comedies, Juno stands out for successfully plumbing the subversively bittersweet depths that Knocked Up strove for but mostly missed. It’s a crowd pleaser, it’s a tear jerker, and even if it doesn’t completely reinvent the genre, it does move a few fairly familiar sitcomish situations in exciting directions.

Juno’s one truly revelatory element stems from screenwriter Diablo Cody’s apparent intention to have her title character serve, at least in part, as a device through which to examine the sexual desires of teenage girls. Juno (played by Ellen Page) is a boyish, foul-mouthed, kitsch-steeped, irony-packing, hoodie-wearing, Iggy Pop-worshiping smart-ass. She’s savvy enough to understand that the bully who mocks her does so to disguise his crush, but she lacks the self-awareness to truly comprehend her power over men and boys.

In a burst of genuine passion disguised as boredom, Juno swaps virginities with her best friend Bleeker, a lithe, brainy track star played by Michael Cera. We see their single sexual encounter through Juno’s gaze, in brief, golden-hued flashbacks which allude to Juno’s deeper feelings, but when the teenager discovers she’s pregnant, she knee-jerk plays it cool. She arranges to give the baby up for adoption to a couple of grunge-nostalgic yuppies (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), and almost unwittingly distances herself from Bleeker the baby daddy. A horribly inappropriate love triangle ensues.

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This weekend in Telluride, I recorded an audio interview with experimental filmmaker George Kuchar. We talked about YouTube, the trickle down economics of DIY filmmaking, and Telluride’s history as a haven for criminals and whores. Somehow, someway, the audio file got corrupted and the interview is unusable. Which is really depressing, because this interview was kind of a big deal to me. When I was 20 years old, I moved from Chicago to San Francisco, and I did it for George Kuchar.

(That’s not entirely true, but it might as well be. Years later the other factors that led to the move–petty relationship problems, an intolerance for Midwest winters, a foolish youthful faith in the power of geographical change to correct deep-seated emotional issues–seem far less significant.)

I was already skipping classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to watch George Kuchar’s movies at the Video Data Bank. Shot first on Super 8mm, then 16mm, then prosumer video, sometimes aided by his brother Mike, the Kuchar films were cheap and intentionally schlocky, but the best of them were somehow funny, poignant, and even beautiful. They were exactly the kind of movies I wanted to make! The idea of finishing my final three semesters of art school in a sunny clime, where I would take classes with Kuchar and surely in no time convince him to take me under his wing–it was like an actionable fantasy.

Of course, the reality of it was nothing like I fantasized. …Read more

I’ve already detailed the last (and best) 17 minutes of yesterday’s Daniel Day-Lewis tribute; I’ve been stalling on recapping the previous hour-and-43 because they were somewhat less impressive. I’ve seen four films since yesterday morning, including a very solid Cannes winner and a much-discussed work of warsploitation by an American master, and nothing has excited me as much as that single reel of There Will Be Blood.

Earlier in the day, I wondered how the tribute would approach Day-Lewis’ unique star persona, and keeping an eye on that element kept me entertained even when the discussion between Day-Lewis and moderator Davia Nelson faltered. At one point, Day-Lewis praised a former professor who allegedly taught him to suppress the mechanics of acting by asking him to imagine a hazard sign with the words, “Danger–Actor at Work.” Which is odd, because the excerpts of Day-Lewis filmography shown almost immediately before that anecdote reek of the kind of showiness that makes a viewer (and an Oscar voter) think, “Wow! Now THAT’S Acting!”

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I’ll have more on the Daniel Day-Lewis tribute in my diary entry later tonight, but first thing’s first: almost two hours into the tribute, Day-Lewis said, “Oh yeah — let’s invite Paul up here now,” and Paul Thomas Anderson took the stage to introduce 17 minutes of There Will Be Blood.

Anderson called it “the third reel,” but my first impression was that it played more like a product reel, with what felt like an entire second act condensed into less than 20 minutes. But thinking back on PTA’s body of work, this kind of temporal pacing wouldn’t be unprecedented–the guy loves his montages, and what we saw was so impeccably, purposefully edited to a gorgeous score (violin heavy, by turns subtle and scary–it’s so dynamic that it might be an existing piece of music, but if so I’ve never heard it before) that it could conceivably play within the film. And, could very well be amazing.

My full notes on the footage follows after the jump.

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In preparation for this morning’s tribute to Daniel Day-Lewis here in Telluride, I took a look at the actor’s Wikipedia entry. It’s full of breathlessly-recounted anecdotes meant to manifest Day-Lewis’ reputation as the eccentric method-acting rebel. He was so wild as a teenager that he got sent to boarding school! He broke two ribs to play Christy Brown! He quit stage acting after being visit by the ghost of his own father while performing Hamlet! He once disappeared into the Italian countryside, where he allegedly learned how to make shoes!

It’ll be interesting to see if the tribute plays up/plays into that persona, or if it attempts to puncture it at all. More later.

I arrived at the Telluride Film Festival just in time for the opening night feed, a public buffet where all festival attendees are invited to drink beer (thank you, Heineken), eat indian buffet, and mingle. After a 15 hour, misadventure-laden journey, I felt like a zombie, but Paul and I managed to chat briefly with Jason Reitman (whose sophomore feature Juno screens here before officially premiering next week in Toronto), Wayne Wang, Jar City director Baltasar Kormákur, and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days director Cristian Mungiu. And I was ecstatic to grab a quick interview with George Kuchar before he ran off to “a great Finnish melodrama.”

But none of that could compare to our run-in with Werner Herzog. We snagged Herzog as he whisked through the dinner with a stylish blonde on his arm. When we asked about his schedule, Herzog detailed his “many burdens” — apparently, as a friend of the festival, he had agreed to fill in on a variety of tasks, up to and including introducing a film he hadn’t seen. “It’s what we do in times of transition, you know,” Herzog said. “I help out wherever I can.”

Much, much more, including a report on Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, coming tomorrow.

• Laszlo Kovacs, the Hungarian-born master cinematographer who shot Paper Moon, Easy Rider and Ghostbusters, has died. A documentary about Kovacs and his friend and fellow cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is currently in the works. Above: a clip from one of his most visually stunning works, Martin Scorsese’s batshit-insane 1977 musical New York, New York, via YouTube.
• The Telluride Film Festival has invited Edith R. Kramer to serve as guest diretor of the 2007 festivities. Kramer served as lead curator at UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive for two decades, and as Telluride’s Tom Luddy notes in this press release, “Her international reputation will result in Kramer bringing movies to Telluride that nobody else could get from archives.”
• George A. Romero’s latest will debut in the Midnight Madness program at the Toronto Film Festival. The director promises that George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is “not a sequel or a remake, it’s a whole new beginning for the dead.”