The Screengrab : dennis lim

Dennis Lim Hammers Out the Evolution of the Fight Scene

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Set off in part by the arguments over The Dark Knight's action scenes--widely held to be "visually incoherent" even by many of the film's admirers--Dennis Lim has assembled a thoughtful and compelling "slide show" charting the evolution of the movie fight scene. Classic action directors such as Don Siegel and Samuel Fuller used action and space to give their fights a kinetic punch that made audiences sit up and forget to blink, but in recent years directors have come to rely more and more on technological pizzazz to put the viewer in the position of someone right in the action (as in Scorsese's Raging Bull) or to violate the laws of gravity, more purposefully in The Matrix. At their peak, the Wachowskis were able to use stage violent ballets and dissect them even as they unfolded, but more hackish and hollow-headed directors have helped rob movie action of its soul by making scenes that feel so unreal that there's nothing at stake even when they're readable. Still, you do occasionally see something like what Lim calls the "show-stopping corridor fight in Korean director Park Chanwook's Oldboy," adding, "to watch this after trying to figure out what's happening between Batman and the Joker is something like going back to Astaire and Rogers after watching Renee Zellwegger and Richard Gere in Chicago. Fight scenes play on the spectator's dual need for illusion and authenticity. And precisely for that reason, great fight scenes, like Park's one-take wonder, tend to be at once believable and beyond belief. The choreography is intricate and meticulous enough to be convincing, but the scene also calls attention to its artificiality, with sly allusions to the side-scrolling vantage of beat-'em-up video games and the blatant proscenium framing. (To shoot from this "impossible" angle literally required the demolition of the fourth wall.)"

Welcoming Jennifer Lynch Back with Open Arms

Phil Nugent — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Mention the name "Jennifer Lynch" to most people, and you expect a certain reaction — a mixture of respect, admiration, and pride. That lasts for about ten seconds, before they realize that they're thinking of that army soldier who was rescued from an Iraqi hospital. That was Jessica Lynch. Jennifer Lynch, as we keep reminding you, is the daughter of David Lynch whose own debut effort as a writer-director was, Dennis Lim writes in the Los Angeles Times "much-derided", which is actually kind of like saying that maiden voyage of the Titanic drew "mixed reviews." Lim, who's had his own career problems of late, got together with Lynch for an interview that might easily have turned out a little like the scene in Jaws where the guys compare each other's scars. The occasion was Lynch's emergence, perhaps from federal protection or her dad's garage, to promote her second feature, Surveillance, which is premiered last night at the Cannes Film Festival. "It feels kind of miraculous being here," she told Lim, "and kind of surreal." Hey, as Keith Richards likes to say, it probably feels kind of miraculous being anywhere! Thenkyewverymuch.

Seriously, Lynch describes herself as "a different person" from the one who made Helena, and not just because she's 40 now instead of 24 — not that that's not a big part of it. But in the time between her two movies, she also raised a twelve-year-old daughter, conquered alcohol abuse, which she describes as "an ongoing process", and recovered, over the course of three surgeries, from major injuries sustained in a car accident. ("The fact that I get to walk down the red carpet tonight and hold my daughter's hand," she says, "is a big deal — they didn't even know if I'd walk at one point.") On the subject of family, Lynch will always have to deal with the fact that people who care about movies may never be able to separate her from the knowledge that she's her father's daughter. Boxing Helena got more attention than many a first-time director's work does because of that, and people may have been primed to pounce. Surveillance, which stars Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond as FBI agents investigating a case in Nebraska, sounds as if she shares her father's interest in voyeurism and small-town rot: "Originally," she says of the script by Kent Harper, "it was about witches. But what I gravitated to were the elements of desolation and the idea of people watching each other. I also liked the idea of a thriller that right from the get-go lets you in on the fact that all these people are lying." Speaking of both her father and her mother, the painter Peggy Reavey, Lynch says that "If there's one gift I've been given from both my parents it's the idea that you make the work you want to make — the joy is in the making. Once it's done, you let it go, and you move on." Which is great. Of course, there are some people who saw Boxing Helena who will never let it go — and Lynch knows that, too. "I'd be lying if I told you it all didn't really mess my head up," she says of the reaction to her first film. "I still can't Google myself today."

Light It Up: Perfecting the "Stoner Protest Comedy" with Harold and Kumar

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

It has been suggested that, after the box-office (and, largely, critical and artistic) failure of the big, dramatic "Iraq war" films of yesteryear, the next step at dealing with the great issue of our times in movies will be through satire. But still, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay? It's good to know going in that they escape, but still, is everybody sure that Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg--who created the characters played by John Cho and Kal Penn in their screenplay for the 2004 Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and who co-wrote and co-directed the new movie-- can be trusted to address the subject of "post-9/11 paranoia" with the right tone? Speaking to Dennis Lim, Schlossberg was quick to insist, “It’s not that Guantánamo Bay itself is funny.” Okay, that's a good start. Apparently the Gitmo thread was written into the sequel partly as a response to Penn's own difficulties when he was trying to get around to promote the first film. “Once we were with a friend of mine — he’s the same age, same height as me, except he’s white,” Penn says. “I was stopped at security, but he went through even though he had a hunting knife that he forgot to take out of his backpack. They were so focused on pulling out the brown guy, they didn’t even notice.” He adds, "“That’s probably one of the only parallels between Kumar and me. We both get pulled out of line at airports.” Did you get that, studio bosses, LAPD, and Fox Network? It's one of the only parallels between them. Kal Penn does not toke up!

As Dennis Lim points out, "Race is at once central and beside the point in the Harold and Kumar movies. Casually integrating nonwhite heroes into a genre that has always been a white male preserve, the films seize on smutty, gross-out humor as the great equalizer. The signal achievement of both Harold and Kumar films is that they make race incidental without taking racism lightly; they presuppose an enlightened audience." (Or, as Schlossberg puts it, “If you don’t know that [racism is bad], you’re a moron.") Beyond that, the filmmakers resist being politically pigeonholed--which is in itself a political statement, since it implies that they reject the notion, still prevalent in some quarters, that rejecting racism is a partisan position. James Adomian turns up in the new movie as George W. Bush, an appearance that Lim describes as "while not exactly respectful, it is arguably the most sympathetic movie portrayal of him to date." “In our minds he isn’t that much different than Kumar in terms of motivation and certain life issues," says Hurwitz. "Both characters have a family trade they’re pushed toward and have a certain attitude of resistance.”

Scandal, Awards at Berlinale

Paul Clark — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The jury prizes for the recently-concluded Berlin Film Festival have been announced, and this year's Golden Bear Winner is unpopular, to say the least. The jury's choice for best film, José Padilha's Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), deemed by critic Dennis Lim "a violent, cop's-eye view of Rio's favela drug wars that registers more as glorification of the fighting than as critique," has become the center of a wave of controversy. The film is the fiction debut of Bus 174 director Padilha, and much of the controversy has stemmed not from the film itself, but from its being awarded the top prize over more popular titles such as Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky and P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Filmbrain has even gone so far as to suggest that the Golden Bear was bought by the film's distributor, Harvey Weinstein. It's true Elite was one of the worst-reviewed films in competition — many critics have called it "fascist," making it a strange film for a Costa-Gavras-led jury to get behind, no? However, the idea that it was paid for seems a little far-fetched to me. But what do I know? I wasn't there.

Other prizes from the Berlinale:
Jury Grand Prix- Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris)
Silver Bear, Best Director- Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Silver Bear, Best Actress- Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky
Silver Bear, Best Actor- Reza Najie, The Song of Sparrows
Silver Bear, Best Script- In Love We Trust (Wang Xiaoshuai)
Alfred Bauer Prize- Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke)
10th Panorama Audience Award- Lemon Tree (Eran Riklis)

Source: GreenCine Daily.

Look Back in Analog: VHS Nostalgia

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

VHS cassettes are clunky, fragile, easily damaged and easy to accidentally tape over. When VHS was still new, and later, when it was a staple of everyday life, moviemakers tended to use it as a symbol of lonely alienation, as in sex, lies, and videotape or David Cronenberg's Videodrome (where the cable-TV huckster played by James Woods, his mind twisted into Silly Putty shapes by exposure to sinister cathode rays, is controlled by his minders via fleshy cassettes that are inserted into a slit he grows in his stomach), or as a chilly modern form of trespass, as in David Lynch's Lost Highway, where someone leaves tapes on Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette's doorstep, recording ever-closer invasions of their privacy. Introduced in 1976, VHS would somehow defeat Beta in the marketplace and have no trouble dominating laser disc, even though those rival forms offered superior picture quality, but when DVD appeared, offering superior quality and various bells and whistles in a durable, easily portable format, it was as if home video had suddenly caught up with compact disc technology, except that nobody has ever made the claims for VHS that many audiophiles still make for vinyl records as a "warmer", superior recording medium. The last movie released on VHS was A History of Violence in 2005, which means that VHS's commercial life stopped just short of twenty years. But, as 8-track enthusiasts have demonstrated, it's possible to feel nostalgic for anything, and Dennis Lim sees a growing wave of nostalgia for VHS represented in such forthcoming films as Be Kind Rewind and Son of Rambow, as well as such cult objects as the song "Videotape" on the new Radiohead album and "the deliberately lo-fi video" look of the Snoop Dogg video "Sensual Seduction".

Lim points out that "The generation that came of age in the ’80s, as the VCR was becoming a staple, is especially prone to VHS nostalgia," and this really isn't surprising. For those who grew up during the first stages of the home entertainment revolution, VHS will always be like the first car you ever drove. It was the means by which consumers redefined their relationship to movies; suddenly, we were no longer at the mercy of theater and TV programmers, but could dig through film history or take the latest blockbuster home in a little box and watch and re-watch it until we were barking sick of the damn thing. It's hard not to feel some lingering affection for a liberating force like that even after you've been made all too aware of its flaws, and I suspect that I'm not the only movie geek in the world who doesn't continue to hoard a little collection of VHS editions of movies and random oddities that haven't been released on DVD. Lim also reports on a "rarer and geekier phenomenon of VCR nostalgia" represented by Andy Hain, "a software engineer in Brighton, England, [who] maintains the Web site and 'virtual museum' Total Rewind, which scrupulously charts the evolution of VCRs from prehistory to obsolescence. Pride of place is given to the 70-plus vintage video players and cameras in the collection that Mr. Hain has been building since 1993. 'It was mainly the technology that appealed to me,' he wrote in an e-mail message. 'The more I discovered, the more strange and unlikely machines I came across, and I wanted to get hold of them and tinker with them. I also liked the design aspect. The early machines were very expensive and would have been proudly displayed in living rooms. They were styled like top-end hi-fi components, or in some cases like the bridge of the starship Enterprise.'” As for the director of Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry, he probably speaks for many in describing one of the natural impulses that makes it harder to let go and ride the wave: “Today new product comes so fast that sometimes the human brain doesn’t have the capacity to adapt.”

Slate's Movie Club Still Swinging

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Just when we think we’re completely burned out on year-end critic’s awards, list-making and assorted summations of What It All Means, along comes another installment of the Slate Movie Club to remind us how much fun it is to argue about this stuff. The annual roundtable of film pundits is always at its most entertaining when the gloves come off. The 2004 edition was particularly juicy, with original ringmaster David Edelstein and guests including A.O. Scott of the New York Times and Salon regular Stephanie Zacharek gleefully taking their shots at everyone’s favorite infuriating contrarian Armond White. (White’s style is accurately characterized by the Village Voice’s Dennis Lim as “entertainingly predicated on a bullying, unpredictable subjectivity.”)

The Movie Club’s heyday may have passed; Edelstein is long gone and big names like Scott, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Roger Ebert are absent from this year’s roster. Still, current Slate critic Dana Stevens and guests Scott Foundas (L.A. Weekly), Nathan Lee (Village Voice) and Wesley Morris (Boston Globe) manage to keep it lively, kicking around such water cooler topics as the ending of No Country for Old Men, the attitude towards abortion in Knocked Up and Juno, and whether Southland Tales will ultimately be regarded as a masterpiece or a mess.

P.T.A. Report

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

For those who've been handicapping the race for supremacy among the American filmmakers who achieved big-deal status during the 1990s, here's how things stand as this year winds down: with Quentin Tarantino providing the half of a double feature that followed the half that much of the audience walked out on, Richard Linklater taking a well-deserved breather, David O. Russell becoming a reality star on YouTube, Alexander Payne ducking through corners in a Groucho mask to avoid explaining his screenwriting credit on I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and Kevin Smith unable to make a long-term thing out of his job directing the pilot for the TV show about an underachieving minimum-wage ape with a secret life battling dark forces that isn't Chuck. We extend wishes of good luck and productivity in the year to come to all of them, except maybe for Kevin Smith. In the meantime, with less than a week of 2007 left to go, Paul Thomas Anderson has vaulted into first place with his first movie in five years, There Will Be Blood. Opening today, Anderson's period epic, starring Daniel Day Lewis as an obsessive, misanthropic prospector, is making a scramble for becoming the best-reviewed movie of the year.

This was not an altogether predictable development. In a thoughtful piece on where Anderson has been so far and where he's at now, Dennis Lim describes Anderson as a thirty-seven-year-old "enfant terrible" who "incites strong, divided opinions." "Strong, divided opinions" may seem to be a soft way of putting it for anyone who went through the great Magnolia wars of 1999. In that high-pitched, three-hour film, which had the feel of an attempted career summation despite its only being the director's third movie, Anderson delivered a titanic audience-divider, just in time for the end of the millennium. Since it came out, the movie has gradually acquired more and more supporters who tend to regard it not just admiringly but downright protectively, but at the time of its release, the roars of derision were deafening. To a great degree, Magnolia was not criticized as a disappointment or an honest failure but as some sort of violation of aesthetic law whose creator ought to be stripped of his epaulets and driven into the Forbidden Zone. For a self-taught filmmaker who wasn't yet thirty, dealing with that must have been an interesting experience. The bonus-features disc on the Magnolia DVD includes a little home movie in which Anderson's then-girlfriend, Fiona Apple, apparently playing the movie, performs an interpretive dance while Anderson hisses, "Boogie Nights made money! You want to be the only one that doesn't...It's too fucking long, there's too many blow-ups--it's all just too fucking too!"

As Lim points out, Anderson is indeed "a size freak", but he also "invites emotional responses because he's an emotional filmmaker, and this, too, distinguishes him from most of his cohorts. The signature trait of the '90s indie school is detachment, whether in the form of self-conscious cleverness or numb ennui, but there's nothing detached about Anderson's films...Given the dominant American pop idioms of snark and quirk, Anderson's sensibility can be confounding. He's satirical, but also achingly sincere. His characters often speak with a declarative directness that is both breathtaking and a little ridiculous." Those viewers not swept up in Magnolia's emotional flow seem to have responded to its steady stream of heartfelt monologues by desperately unhappy people desperate to connect (to the people onscreen and to the people in the audience) as proof that they were at the mercy of a high-school amateur. In his follow-up to Magnolia, the Adam Sandler movie Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson sensibly scaled down and tightened the focus on a single character, but the picture was still huge in the audacity of its approach. Anderson is as much a cerebral movie geek as any of his contemporaries, but he's probably the only one of them who might have taken a look at Adam Sandler's screen image and actually thought about it on an emotional level, dissecting it and exploring what it might be like to live at such an unstable level of passive-aggressiveness. The movie was still direct in its emotional current but more atylized, with a central character nowhere near as articulate as those in Magnolia. (The movie was much better received critically than Magnolia but it didn't do much business; the publicity department failed to rise to the challenge of somehow alerting people that this was an Adam Sandler movie for people who can't stand Adam Sandler.)

With his fifth film, Anderson may have found a story that enables him to indulge his taste for spectacle and vast canvasses while presenting a conventional enough surface to appease the likes of The New Yorker's David Denby, who dismissed both Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love as "whimsical". (Denby likes There Will Be Blood, except for the conclusion, which he figures proves that "some part of him must have rebelled against canonization." I must have been dozing when we all agreed to put Jughead in charge of the canon.) For the moment, for some of us, the price of Anderson's surprise success may be having to listen to some people use his new movie as a club to beat on his earlier work. But we'll settle so long as he doesn't get in the habit of making us wait five years between movies.

Auto-Baumbach-graphies

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

After years spent working his way back after the box office failure of his second feature, the underappreciated 1997 comedy Mr. Jealousy, the writer-director Noah Baumbach struck gold with 2005's The Squid and the Whale, about the emotional fallout from the divorce of a culturally ambitious Park Slope family. Because Baumbach's own parents divorced when he was a teenager, and because his father, Jonathan Baumbach, is, like the hero's father in his movie, a novelist — his mother is Georgia Brown, who used to be a film critic for the Village Voice — part of the buzz around the movie was always based on assumptions that it was autobiographical. Baumbach tells Dennis Lim that while he was doing promotion for the film, "Someone would ask me if something was true, and I’d say no, and then they’d ask me a follow-up question under the assumption that it was true. I’d get tripped up answering a question about my real father based on something in the movie that wasn’t real." Baumbach's new follow-up, Margot at the Wedding, is another emotionally charged comedy about marriage and family, and it too draws on Baumbach's life, which now includes the experience of having people ask you presumptuous questions about your life based on what they assume they know about you and your family from your work. The new picture's title character is a writer (Nicole Kidman) who has to contend with readers hell-bent on seeing her fiction as a blueprint of her life and the lives of her family, including her sister, whose busted first marriage served as the basis for one of Margot's stories. (The movie is a family project in another way: Margot's sister is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is married to Baumbach.) So, now that the director can get his projects funded again, does he have any other pipe dreams about the future? "My hope is that I will make enough movies that they can’t all conceivably be autobiographical." — Phil Nugent