The Screengrab : agnes varda

Paul Clark Previews TIFF '08

Paul Clark — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Today marks the beginning of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Sadly, I won’t be covering the fest for Screengrab as I did last year, since various factors have made it impossible for me to make the trip again. However, I’m still looking forward to it in much the same way I did in the years before I actually got to go myself. I love hearing the buzz about the new movies- whether you’re in the market for Oscar-baity Hollywood fare, out-of-nowhere sleepers, or critical darlings, Toronto has plenty to chew on. Even this year, when a number of festival favorites (Hong Sang-soo, Lucretia Martel, Hayao Miyazaki, Erick Zonca, Fernando Eimbcke) are mysteriously missing from the TIFF slate, there’s still a lot to look forward to there. Bearing in mind that I prefer to skip movies that are getting released in the forseeable future, here are eleven movies that I would make the greatest effort to see at TIFF, in no particular order:

Che- there are other films here I’m more eagerly anticipating, but of all the movies playing at Toronto, Che feels most like an event, particularly the 4 1/2 –hour screening of both segments of the film. Most big-ticket directors come with films that have studio backing, but Che is still seeking a distributor, and since there’s no telling when it’s going to be released in theatres, this festival season may be the last chance for it to be seen in a long time.

A Christmas Tale- a few weeks ago, I declared Arnaud Desplechin’s new movie to be one of my most-anticipated films of the fall, and even though this is allegedly coming out in limited release in December, given the choice of seeing it earlier, I don’t think I could wait. Besides, it’d be a way to ensure I see it in time for certain year-end awards.

Of Time and the City- after eight years trying to get projects off the ground, the great Terence Davies surprised cinephiles by premiering a new film at Cannes. Buzz on his latest, a documentary about Liverpool, was fairly muted, but no matter- a new Davies is always cause for celebration.

35 Shots of Rum- Claire Denis is one of the most gifted filmmakers working today, with a winning streak that’s even longer than Pixar’s. I haven’t disliked any of her features to date, and Venice buzz from her latest indicates this will be a worth addition to her already-impressive filmography.

Wendy and Lucy- after the critical success of 2006’s Old Joy, the talented Kelly Reichardt returns with a new film starring Michelle Williams and her dog. Here’s hoping that the presence of recognizable name in the cast will bring Reichardt’s films a new level of visibility.

Lorna’s Silence- word from Cannes was that the latest film from Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne was something of a departure from celebrated recent work like The Son and The Child. As much as I love those movies, I’m also eager to see what else they can do. Aw, who am I kidding? I’d follow these guys anywhere.

Three Monkeys- a far cry from the Western rip-offs most people associate with Turkish cinema, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a genuine visionary whose films have made him perhaps the most important filmmaker in his home country. After Distant and Climates, Three Monkeys should only confirm this status.

Summer Hours- considering all the world-class directors she’s worked with, it’s sort of surprising that Juliette Binoche hasn’t starred in a film by her countryman Olivier Assayas. This film has been compared with Assayas’ lovely 1998 film Late August, Early September, which is enough to get me excited to see it.

Still Walking- with his first two fiction features, Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda made two masterpieces- Maborosi and After Life. And while none of his subsequent projects has been up to that rarefied level, his 2004 film Nobody Knows is proof that he’s still got plenty of creative juice left in him.

The Beaches of Agnès- some filmmakers find their styles becoming more mainstream as they get older, but not French New Wave veteran Agnès Varda. Her latest essay film should be as chock full of dotty humor as her previous efforts Ydessa, the Bears and I… and The Gleaners and I.

JCVD- the typical pitch I’ve seen for this is Being Jean-Claude Van Damme. With that premise, how could it NOT be awesome?

And since I won’t be covering the festival, here are some links to some cool cats who will be:

Noel Murray and Scott Tobias at the always-indispensible Onion AV Club
Screengrab favorite Mike D’Angelo
Quote identifying machine Victor Morton
Cyprus correspondent Theo Panayides
Self-described Academic Hack Michael Sicinski
The tireless Jeremy Heilman
Honest-to-goodness AMPAS member Ken Rudolph
The good Doctor Girish Shambu
Of course you all know to check out Greencine Daily, Cinematical, and IndieWire. And whether you’re heading to Toronto or simply watching from the sidelines, enjoy the festival.

The World of Lists: Documentaries Get Their Due

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Though we love movie-related lists as much as anybody -- indeed, as we love movie-related lists even more than anybody -- we've noticed a somewhat disturbing trend in the recent flood-tide of best-ofs: the documentary often gets the short shrift. Stuck somewhere between a feature film and an educational short, even with the new wave of populist docs that actually make money at the box office, doumentaries are rarely considered part of the mainstream corpus which gets shuffled around for various critics' Top Whatever lists, and thus, leave the average fan with no idea where to start when it comes to the medium.

That's something that Jonathan Kahana, a professor of cinema studies at NYU (and author of the recently released Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary) aims to change with this list.

Originally created as a feature for an in-flight magazine and later severely truncated (a process all to familiar to those of us who have tilled that particular soil), Kahana's list contains a dozen of the finest documentaries in history from the 1920s to the present, available on DVD and otherwise. Compiled by the author to "pay it forward" to an upcoming generations of documentary fans, the list is a solid one -- we'll present it below in chronological order, but please do check out the link for Kahana's insightful commentary on each choice.

1. Manhatta (Charles Sheeler & Paul Strand, 1921) & Rain (Joris Ivens, 1929)
2. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922)
3. The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
4. Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
5. Salesman (Alfred & David Maysles, 1969)
6. Harlan County U.S.A. & American Dream (Barbara Kopple, 1975 & 1991)
7. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1982)
8. The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1989)
9. Little Dieter Wants to Fly (Werner Herzog, 1998)
10. The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)
11. The Corporation (Jennifer Abbott & Mark Achbar, 2003)
12. Bright Leaves (Ross McElwee, 2004)

What do you think, Screengrab readers? What did Kahana include that you'd have left off, and what did he omit that you'd make sure got in? What are your 12 favorite documentaries?

Related Posts:

Doc Around the Clock

Bin-Laden 2, Documentary Filmmakers 0

Hathaway Hotness, Rourke Smackdowns Head Venice Comp Lineup

Paul Clark — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Today brought the announcement of the Competition lineup for next month’s 65th annual Venice International Film Festival. Among the highest-profile American titles in the lineup was the upcoming Jonathan Demme film, Rachel Getting Married (starring the lovely Anne Hathaway, pictured at right) and the sorely-missed Debra Winger. Another intriguing title is The Wrestler, directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Mickey Rourke, no doubt eager to try out a new sport after his abortive boxing career. Of course, if you’re looking for something really great, a solid bet would be the latest film by animation master Hayao Miyazaki, entitled Ponyo on Cliff by the Sea, also in Competition.

Other filmmakers of note in Competition include: Takeshi Kitano (Achilles and the Tortoise), Barbet Schroeder (Inju, la Bete dans l’ombre), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), Mamoru Oshii (The Sky Crawlers), Werner Schroeter (Nuit de Chien), and Ferzan Oztepek (Un giorno perfetto). Then there’s the directorial debut of Babel screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, entitled The Burning Plain. Expect a trio of interlocking stores and plenty of tortured, writerly multi-culti coincidence.

Here’s the full Competition slate:

Darren Aronofsky- The Wrestler
Guillermo Arriaga- The Burning Plain
Pupi Avati- Il papà di Giovanna
Marco Bechis- BirdWatchers
Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic- L’Autre
Kathryn Bigelow- Hurt Locker
Pappi Corsicato- Il seme della discordia
Jonathan Demme- Rachel Getting Married
Haile Gerima- Teza
Aleksey German Jr.- Bumažnyj soldat (Paper Soldier)
Semih Kaplanoglu- Süt
Takeshi Kitano- Akires to kame (Achilles and the Tortoise)
Hayao Miyazaki- Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on Cliff by the Sea)
Amir Naderi- Vegas: Based on a True Story
Mamoru Oshii- The Sky Crawlers
Ferzan Özpetek- Un giorno perfetto
Christian Petzold- Jerichow
Barbet Schroeder- Inju, la Bête dans l’ombre
Werner Schroeter- Nuit de chien
Tariq Teguia- Gabbla (Inland)
YU Lik-wai- Dangkou (Plastic City)

Strangely enough, this year’s Out of Competition selections are more impressive-looking overall than the titles that are actually competing. Playing outside of competition are new films from the likes of Abbas Kiarostami (Shirin, starring Juliette Binoche), Claire Denis (35 Rhums), Agnes Varda (Les Plages d’Agnes), a new version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Rabbia, and short films by Manoel de Oliveira (Do Visivel ao Invisivel) and Jia Zhang-ke (Cry Me a River). Also, there’s a little movie called Burn After Reading by a pair of filmmaking brothers. Didn’t catch their names, I’m afraid.

The 65th Annual Venice International Film Festival runs from August 27 through September 6. Click here for more information.

They Should Call Them ROCKumentaries!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:45:00 GMT

Like me, Agnes Varnum of IndieWire saw a whole lot of music documentaries at the recent South By Southwest Film Festival, and like me, her ass probably got pretty tired doing it. Even if you aren't straddling both sides of the movie critic/film critic fence, or particularly fond of the you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter synergy of music and film that SxSW is peddling, you can't help but notice that there are more rock documentaries (and rap documentaries, and jazz documentaries, and minimalist concert music documentaries) being made than ever before, and, as Varnum puts it, "2008 will be the year of the music doc".

With the question of what out of the way, though, we have to approach the question of why. While it's nice that some of these films are being made -- especially ones that painstakingly gather together footage and concert material from influential, if lesser-known, musical figures, as with The Upsetter, the Lee "Scratch" Perry doc that tipped at SxSW this year. And it's undeniably a good thing when a masterful filmmaker like Martin Scorsese turns his hand to the job for a band he really cares about, like in Shine a Light. But there's such a flood of rock docs these days that you have to wonder if it's not so much a golden age of musical documentaries as it is another manifestation of the document-everything zeitgeist that's been made possible by media oversaturation and cheap, easy access to digital cameras. Fifty years from now, is anyone going to care about the brief eruption of the microgenre of nerdcore? As much as I loved them, is Tad really worth making a feature-length documentary about? Has everyone already seen all the great movies in the history of film, that they can spare the time to see an hour and a half-long documentary about Harry Potter-inspired "wizard rock"?

At this rate, it's only going to be a few years before we get making-of documentaries about the rock documentaries, and then, inevitably, documentaries about the documentarians. At which point I'm going to have to become one of those old cranks who won't listen to anything not released on vinyl before 1966...

DVD Digest for January 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week: a triple dose of Criterion, four films by a Hollywood favorite, and some old TV pals do their best to compensate for another slow week for recent releases.

DVD of the Week: Long one of the film history's most undervalued directors, Lindsay Anderson is finally starting to get his due on DVD. Last year saw the DVD releases of his classics If... and O Lucky Man!, and this week sees the deluxe two-disc Criterion treatment of his 1963 breakthrough film This Sporting Life. The film stars the Oscar-nominated Richard Harris in a star-making role as a young man trying to make it as professional rugby player, and is one of the key examples of the British "kitchen-sink" dramas of the 1960s. The DVD also includes commentary by Anderson associate Paul Ryan and screenwriter David Storey, a documentary about Anderson's career, and most notably, several of Anderson's short films, including his autobiographical final work, 1992's Is That All There Is?

This week's Criterion releases are Alf Sjöberg's 1951 adaptation of Strindberg's Miss Julie (featuring a young Max Von Sydow in a small role), and the box set 4 by Agnes Varda, which features her new-to-DVD films Le Bonheur (1965) and Le Pointe Courte (1956), as well as new editions of the previously-released Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962) and Vagabond (1985). Also of note this week is MGM's John Frankenheimer Collection, a rather bare-bones affair that includes the new-to-DVD Burt Lancaster film The Young Savages (1961), plus existing editions of The Manchurian Candidate, The Train, and Ronin.

New TV on DVD includes: Barney Miller: The Complete Second Season (Sony); Hawaii Five-O: The Complete Third Season (Paramount); The Odd Couple: The Complete Third Season (Paramount); Torchwood: The Complete First Series (Warner); and ER: The Complete Eighth Season (Warner).

Finally, we've got the new stuff, which aside from the DVD release of one of my favorite films of 2007, Richard Shepherd's The Hunting Party, is looking pretty dire. How about Jessica Simpson in the straight-to-DVD Working Girl "remake" Blonde Ambition (Sony)? Or the Amanda Bynes "Snow White goes to college" romp Sydney White (Universal)? Of course, there's also Sony's classy period farce Molière. I mean, Molay really pumps my nads, but that hardly makes up for the gruesome twosome of Disney's The Game Plan and (three separate versions of) Lionsgate's Saw IV, both of which are also coming out on Blu-Ray. Seriously folks, if you want us to take this new format seriously, you're going to have to start releasing some good movies instead of the latest pandering crap.