The Screengrab : film society of lincoln center

Screengrab Review: "Eldorado"

Nick Schager — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

An oddball odyssey marked by deadpan comedy tinged with melancholy, Bouli Lanners’ Eldorado charts the preposterous relationship between a man and his would-be robber. Yvan (Lanners) imports, refurbishes, and sells American cars in rural Belgium, a business that the scruffy, portly, distant man seems only moderately interested in. Upon returning home from work, he discovers that his house is in the process of being burgled, and that the culprit is still hiding under his bed. An annoyed standoff ensues, culminating in Yvan thwarting lanky thief Elie (Fabrice Adde) from escaping and, upon realizing that the two-bit criminal is a junkie, kindly offering to give him a ride. Thus begins a contrived road-trip to the home of Elie’s parents on the Belgium-France border in which the duo form an uneasy rapport while all manner of drolly strange happenings frustrate their travels, from Elie’s bizarrely clever trick of taping a drunk driver’s hair to the car ceiling as a means of keeping him awake, to the amusingly random sight of a man emerging from a mobile home in nothing but a hat and sandals and casually introducing himself as “Alain Delon.”

Writer, director and star Lanners, whose forthcoming, entrancingly weird Louise-Michel recently premiered at the Museum of Modern Art/Film Society of Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films series, exhibits a sturdy command of tone in his follow-up to 2005’s Ultranova. Alternating between empathetic close-ups and deep-focus master shots, Lanners dryly expresses the lonely distance between Yvan and Elie, as well as between the men and both their compatriots and environment. In its reverent depiction of the sparsely populated countryside and its open roads, Jean-Paul de Zaeytijd’s cinematography has a distinct Americana vibe, as does Renaud Mayeur’s score, full of jangly, rhythmic, slightly dissonant guitar rock that intermittently adorns the duo’s journey. A pall of isolation and powerlessness hangs over Eldorado even during its humorous moments, a mood born from Yvan and Elie’s aimless course and their similar loss of – and longing for – family, and epitomized by a sustained shot of Elie’s mother silently, heartbreakingly tearing up as the reprimands and insults batted back and forth between Elie and his dad echo downstairs.

Throughout their expedition, which soon takes them from Elie’s childhood home to a highway underpass where a fateful incident sends both spiraling south, Lanners and Adde never so much as crack as a smile. Despite this absence of overt mirth, and even in light of both actors’ modulated performances, what ultimately prevents Eldorado from generating any serious comedic energy is absurdity – such as a run-in with a man (I Stand Alone and High Tension’s Philippe Nahon) who collects cars with dents created from fatal collisions with civilians – that feels unduly strained and limp. Ambling forward on its own peculiar wavelength, the story eventually reveals a motivation for Yvan’s kindness that seems to portend third-act joint redemption. Yet cheery melodrama isn’t in the film’s DNA, and its quizzical action instead closes in surprisingly, satisfyingly downbeat fashion, with Yvan and Elie’s chance encounter with a critically injured Doberman leading to a finale that argues against the fantasy of heroically saving someone else, and in favor of finding your own salvation in small gestures of mercy.

The Rep Report (April 14 - April 22)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: So far as Western critics and film historians were concerned for most of the past half century, the writer-director Satyajit Ray was that country's film industry, a personal artist whose working methods and concern placed him very much at odds with the Bollywood factory. And as Bollywood films have acquired an exotic cachet in the West in recent years, Ray has slipped into perhaps the greatest chasm of neglect of any long-canonized film artist, a man whose vast body of work is seldom seen in retrospectives and next to nonexistent in terms of representation on home video. "First Light: Satyajit Ray from the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy" (April 15-30) at Film Society of Lincoln Center provides a rare chance to catch up with the master's work through the early 1970s, starting with the films that make up the legendary " Apu trilogy" (Pather Panchali, Aparjito, and The World of Apu) and concluding with the lesser-known "Calcutta trilogy", an attempt to portray an India changing not necessarily for the better, The Adversary, Company Limited, and The Middleman. Also included are such rarely screened but highly cherished films as Three Daughters, Devi, and Days andf Nights in the Forest, as well as Shyam Benegal's 1982 documentary Satyajit Ray, Filmmaker.

The Museum of Modern Art hosts a retrospective of the films directed by Mike Nichols, from his first, hugely successful films, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate through to his more recent Closer and Charlie Wilson's War. Also included are his theatrical adaptations for HBO, Wit and the two-part Angels in America, both starring Emma Thompson. The program runs from tonight through May 1.

BERKELEY: On Thursday, April 16, Pacific Film Archives screens the camp classic cautionary exploitation film Reefer Madness sweetened with a "Live musical soundtrack by UC Berkeley student DJs. Plus shorts and reefer rolling contest!" We make no judgements here at the Screengrab. Now shut up and pass the brownies.

ALBERTA, CANADA: The Calgary Underground Film Festival runs from tonight through April 19. The lineup includes Azazel Jacobs's Momma's Man, the documentaries Nerdcore Rising, Veer, and Monsterland, and the omnibus flick Tokyo!. Plus a number of shorts, including the seasonal horror comedy Treevenge, which can be sampled in the clip below:

The Rep Report (February 6 - 13)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Film Forum's lollapallooza four-week series "Breadlines & Champagne" lays out an awesome spread of 1930s Hollywood entertainments that might come in handy if you're looking to get some tips on how to handle the death of your stock portfolio with a little grace. In Guy Maddin's nostalgia-drenched The Saddest Music in the World (2003), a brash player in the contest to select the titular song promises to deliver "sadness with some sass and pizazz", and that's how the best early talking pictures responded to hard times, whether it took the form of mixing romance with wisecracks and slapstick (as in My Man Godfrey and the Preston Sturges-scripted Easy Living), hard-boiled tabloid melodrama (such as Night Nurse with Barbara Stanwyck and Three on a Match with a coke-crazed Ann Dvorak), and such varieties of escapism as the Mae West vehicle I'm No Angel and the bug-eyed Busby Berkeley musical Gold Diggers of 1933. Say hello to the bad guy with Little Caesar and the original Scarface; proclaim Hallelujah, I'm a Bum with an exuberant Al Jolson, and show up every Tuesday to participate in the free drawings as Film Forum revives the Depression tradition of Bank Night. These movies are reminders of a time when Americans saw themselves as all being in the soup together and managed to shave enough off the hard-won grocery money to come out to see movies that addressed their problems, both personal and societal, with an insouciant, nose-thumbing attitude and a can-do spirit. Of course, those Americans never dreamed that their great-grandhildren would someday queue up to pay twelve dollars for a movie ticket.

From February 6 through the 19th, Film Society of Lincoln Center remembers "Oscar Micheaux and Black Pre-War Cinema". Long a forgotten and even much-mocked figure, Micheaux has been unearthed in recent years as a pioneering African-American movie mogul and showman, a writer turned filmmaker who began his career with a film based on his own successful novel, The Homesteader. "Unhappily," the theater notes, "few of the films by Micheaux or his contemporaries—Spencer Williams, Richard Norman, Richard Maurice, William Alexander, and many others—have survived in pristine condition. The scratched, sometimes faded copies we’ll be showing are, for the moment, all that is available." But the fact that watching some of these movies now is like seeing something freshly recovered from a tomb may only enhance the alternative-universe-eye view that is part of their incalcuable historical value. Mixed in are some of the earliest attempts by white Hollywood to utilize the talent of black performers, including King Vidor's Hallelujah and Vincente Minnelli's endlessly enjoyable 1943 Cabin in the Sky, a pedestal to the sky-high talent of such entertainers as Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, and the peerless song and dance man John W. Bubbles.

The Rep Report (December 26-January 4)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: "Essential Sturges" at Film Forum crams a week's worth of the good stuff into what's left of the year, with a day after another of the funniest double bills ever offered to a city full of people in full need of a sanctuary from all the sorry weather. Also booked through January 1, but showing only at early-afternoon matinees: the 1941 Hoppity Goes to Town, the 84-minute animated feature that marked the end of the Fleischer Brothers' challenge to the Disney monopoly. It's an unusual movie that saw the Fleischers toning down the trademark anarchy and injecting more of the Disney cuteness into their mix in what now looks like a desperate attempt to stave off the collapse of their company. The attempt failed: pushed back from its original release date so as to avoid direct competition with Disney's Dumbo, the movie wound up being released two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, an event that did little to whet America's appetite for the tuneful tale of a lovelorn grasshopper's attempts to save his community from human onslaught. The movie's failure led to the end of Fleischer Studios, leaving it behind as a little-seen relic from a remarkable time in the history of American animated films.

From December 26 through the 31st, Film Society of Lincoln Center offers "Scorsese Classics", a full plate of films by the city's favorite son that includes the early Who's That Knocking at My Door?, the breakthrough masterpieces Mean Streets and Taxi Driver and more recent fare such as GoodFellas and Casino and the exhilarating Bob Dylan doc No Direction Home. Of special interest: the double bill of two short documentaries from the mid-70s that remain unavailable on DVD, the Scorsese family portrait Italianamerican and the jaw-dropping biography-by-monologue American Boy, starring Stephen Prince, who sold Travis Bickle his boom stick in Taxi Driver. Then starting on January 1, Lincoln Center passes the baton for "Under the Sign of Fincher", three days of David Fincher movies double billed with movies Fincher has selected as important to his development as a filmmaker, followed, on January 4, by a screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and, for separate admission, a Q & A about its making between the director and critic Kent Jones. If nothing else, this is probably your only chance in this lifetime to see Se7en paired with Mary Poppins.

The Rep Report (November 14--21)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Film Society of Lincoln Center pays tribute to the late, great Manny Farber with the kind of celebration every film critic (every film nut, for that matter) has probably dreamed of being held in his honor: a couple week's worth of movies that inspired Farber to kick the theater seat in front of him in happy excitement, and to kick out the jams when he sat down to transfer that excitement to his writing about them. Any enthusiast of Farber's will notice something missing that's essential to their own conception of The Manny Farber Experience, but the programmers have certainly done an admirable job of indicating the wide range of Farber's taste, from the grungy crime movies (Howard Hawks's Scarface, Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground) and suggestive scare flicks (the Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur I Walked with a Zombie) and motor-mouthed comedies (His Girl Friday, Preston Sturges's Christmas in July) that Farber pegged as the pride of old Hollywood to such art-house fare as Resnais's Muriel, Godard's Two or Three Things I know About Her, and experimental films by Michael Snow and Jean-Marie Straub. The double bill of the season just might be Don Siegel's The Lineup, a charged thriller based on a forgotten TV series and starring Eli Wallach as a demented hit man, with the classic Chuck Jones cartoon One Froggy Evening. This Sunday, the program also pairs up two short documentaries inspired by Farber's work: Chris Petit's 1999 Negative Space, which includes interviews with both Manny and his soul brother Dave Hickey, and Untitled: New Blue, Paul Schrader's five-minute look at one of Farber's paintings. Schrader will be on hand to introduce the film, and as an associate of Neil Young's once said of another associate of Neil Young's that boy can flat yap.

Film Forum begins a week-long tribute to director Les Blank, a documentarian whose range of subjects--mainly food, filmmaking, music, and wild women--clearly designate him as one of God's better ideas. Included are Blank's classic tribute to Mardi Gras Indians, Always for Pleasure (1978), whose title could also apply very nicely to his career, as could his 1968 God Respects Us When We Work, but Loves Us When We Dance. Other films included cover the life and work of bluesmen Lightinin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, Louisiana musicians CLifton Chenier and Michael Doucet, and Flaco Jimenez, as well as garlic, polka, Tex-Mex, and Werner Herzog, seen in the double bill Burden of Dreams, which is about the making of Fitzcarraldo, and the short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which is literally about what it says it's about. To gorge on this stuff is to come to a fresh understanding of just how thoroughly you've misspent most of your own life.

Also dropping in at the Forum for a week: Charlie Ahearn's 1982 Wild Style, in a spanking new 35-mm. print. Starring a celebrated graffiti artist, Lee Quinones, and shot in New York back in the day when the city had graffiti, Wild Style was a mainstay of cable TV's Night Flight in the late 1980s, and it seems to come back about once every ten years. To be honest, I've never been able to remain focused on it for all of its 82 minutes. But its hardcore fans don't worship at its altar because Ahearn was a master filmmaker or any kind of storyteller; they revere the movie, which includes glimpses of Grandmaster Flash, Fab Five Freddy, the Rock Steady Crew, the Cold Crush Brothers, artist Sandra Fabara, and onetime "downtown scene queen" Patti Astor, because it's a living record of a moment just before hip hop broke wide open, and because Ahearn had the taste, or the good luck, to capture that moment in a way that seemed to anticipate what was about to come. It's practically a federal law that any mention of the movie include the phrase "time capsule."

More pieces of time can be found at Anthology Film Archives, where they're kicking off an eight-film retrosepctive to 86-year-old director Arthur Penn, who I once referred to at this site as "the late" Arthur Penn, only to turn on TCM's Brando documentary to see him chattering away, still alive and looking more like Iggy Pop than ever. The AFA will be running his groundbreaking Bonnie & Clyde as well as some of the less heralded earlier films that offer tantalizing hints of the triumphs to come--The Left Handed Gun starring Paul Newman as Billy the Kid and the excellent film version of The Miracle Worker, but also his film maudit and first collaboration with Warren Beatty, the fascinating, unclassifable failure Mickey One (1965)--and the ambitious, sometimes fumbling attempts to follow it up (Alice's Restaurant, Little Big Man, Night Moves.)

BERKELEY: "Discovering Teuvo Tulio" (November 15-December 4) at Pacific Film Archives offers those looking for something different and obscure (in our neck of the woods, anyway) the chance to catch up on "the wild and willful director of Finnish melodramas from the 1930s and 1940s." Tulio was an actor in silent films, earning the designation "Finland's Valentino." According to the PFA, when Tulio turned director, "he poured an erotic passion worthy of Valentino into the act of filmmaking itself. In his early 'haystack dramas,' Tulio paid homage to the spectacular nature cinematography of Scandinavian silents and retold classic coming-of-age stories, embellishing these with outrageous use of orchestral music and editing to rival Eisenstein (he produced and edited all his films of this era). As war approached, his themes and imagery became considerably darker, more urban and expressionistic. The thread that runs through all these films is the sexual frankness that overturns the very conventions Tulio so consciously resurrects. Surely if every woman who innocently engaged in premarital sex went down the road Tulio maps, prostitution would have accounted for half of Finland’s GDP." Not having seen any of the four films in the program, I can't vouch for any of this, but it sure caught my attention. Apparently Aki Kaurismaki is a big fan, and for all I know, Tulio may turn out to be the Douglas Sirk to his Fassbinder. So if you love The Man Without a Past, The Match Factory Girl and La Vie de Boheme--and if you don't, to hell with you, I say--here's your chance to see where their roots may lie.

The Rep Report (June 5 --11)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:06:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives honors the late work of the consummate entertainer of twentieth-century Hollywood movies, Howard Hawks, with a series devoted to the movies Hawks directed from his 1948 classic Western Red River, with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, through his later masterpiece with Wayne, Rio Bravo, down to their final collaborations (1967's El Dorado, featuring Robert Mitchum and a young James Caan, and the 1970 Rio Lobo, where you get to see Wayne beat up George Plimpton; the cast also includes Jack Elam and later Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox studios chief Sherry Lansing in her starlet days), which were assembled from parts scavenged from their predecessors. For Hawks fans, the series offers a chance to re-evaluate some works not usually ranked among his finest efforts, notably Land of the Pharoahs with Joan Collins, which proved that Hawks was no more a natural at getting English actors to look unembarrassed while pretending to be ancient Egyptians than any other mortal (even, or maybe especially, when he had William Faulkner working on the script) and Man's Favorite Sport?, starring Rock Hudson as an "expert" author of fishing book who thinks fish are disgusting. (The movie receives an extensive subtextual reading in Mark Rappaport's 1992 Rock Hudson's Home Movies.) In fact, the only Hawks feature from 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to the director's death in 1977 that's not included is his ambitious, personal, and disastrous 1965 race-car movie Red Line 7000. Maybe the programmers were afraid to screen it for fear that it still wouldn't look a lot better than Speed Racer.

"Open Roads: New Italian Cinema" (June 6-12) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center showcases the work of what the programmers see as "a new generation of Italian filmmakers .. defined by neither a political position nor an aesthetic approach but unified through a spirit of independence that has allowed them to break away from old models and genres." It includes Biùtiful Cauntri, an eco-minded drama that is being shown in conjunction with the Film Society's "Green Screens" program, and The Waltz, which tells its multi-character story in a single, continuous ninety-minute shot.

Opening today and running through June 15th: "NewFest 2008: The 20th Anniversary NY LGBT Film Festival". On tap and buzzed about: Affinity, Meadowlark, and the documentary SqueezeBox!, a movie whose accompanying party at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival took no prisoners.

BERKELEY: Through June, Pacific Film Archives presents a quartet of punk concert clips and documentaries just in time for anyone looking to get nostalgic over the fortieth anniversary of the summer when London punk in particular was in full, frothing snarl mode. The schedule begins tonight with The Blank Generation, which captures such New York bands as the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Television when they were young, loud, and snotty. Still to come: D.O.A., in which Johnny Rotten does not spend the Sex Pistols' "terminal" American tour desperately looking for the man who's fatally poisoned him, and Penelope Spheeris's first and finest document of noisy West Coast alientation, 1981's The Decline... of Western Civilization.

The Rep Report (April 8--18)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO: Anyone who's had the aurally disheartening experience of watching a silent film with one of those canned, rinky-dink organ accompaniments that used to predominate public-television broadcasts should want to tip his hat to the Club Foot Orchestra, the San-Francisco-based ten-piece group that, starting in 1987, has composed and performed a whole string of new scores for various silent classics. On April 12, the Castro Theatre presents three great movies with live music from Club Foot: Buster Keaton's perfect comedy Sherlock Jr. as a special "discount-priced matinee", and an evening double bill of two peerless nightmares from Germany, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and F. W. Murnau's gloriously contaminated vampire film Nosferatu. It's hard to think of a better way to treat your eyes and ears on a Saturday night.

BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives gets its goofy on with "American Nonsense: Frank Tashlin" (April 11--18), a retrospective of the work of the onetime Warner Bros. animation director who saw his years working with Bugs, Elmer, and Daffy as a mere apprenticeship for handling Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and Jayne Mansfield. In his most distinctive work, Tashlin used his "living cartoons' and color and the Cinemascope screen as tools with which to create a Silly Putty universe. Things kick off with Tashlin's rock and roll movie, The Girl Can't Help It, a Mansfield vehicle that includes performances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Platters, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, Abbey Lincoln, Eddie Cochran, and Julie London. Part of the humor now comes from the film's cluelessness about the staying power and the sound of rock; between that and the exaggerated sleaziness of its show business milieu, it's a movie in which Little Richard comes across as practically the most rational person on screen.

NEW YORK: The Fifteenth New York Annual Film Festival opens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on April 9 and runs through the 15th. This year's festival, which includes forty features from across the continent, includes a special focus on the emerging phenomenon on female African filmmakers, including Osvalde Lewat-Hallade, Ngozi Onwurah, Katy Léna Ndiaye, and Zina Saro Wiwa. The festivities will also include receptions honoring Charles Burnett, the director of Killer of Sheep, and Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soynika, to be held at the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery, adjacent to the Walter Reade Theater.

And we couldn't let this pass without a salute: tonight, at 7 P.M., the Film Society presents Erik Nelson's documentary profile of our man, Harlan Ellison, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which includes an original score by another living god, Richard Thompson. Both Nelson and Ellison his own bad self will be in attendance.

The Rep Report (March 19-25)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:20:00 GMT

NEW YORK: "Thorold Dickinson’s World of Cinema" (March 19-25) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center pays tribute to an important but largely forgotten figure from the early history of the British cinema. The unassuming but movie-mad Dickinson worked his way up from editing jobs and various assignments pitch-hitting behind the camera on various productions before making his official directorial debut with the 1937 thriller The High Command. Dickinson got his chance to go Hollywood after the producer David O. Selznick saw his 1940 melodrama Gaslight; Dickinson turned the offer down, and Selznick showed him that there were no hard feelings by not only remaking Gaslight in slick Hollywood style (with George Cukor directing) but seeing to it that screenings of the original was suppressed in America. Dickinson's other films include the Pushkin adaptation The Queen of Spades, the Disraeli biopic The Prime MInister starring John Gielgud, and Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (1955), his last film but the first ever produced in Israel. He lived almost another thirty years, which he largely devoted to teaching, as Britain's first university professor of film in 1967. "It's terribly difficult to direct a film you don't want to make," he once said, by way of accounting for his early retirement with a total output of nine features. "That's why I've made so few." The retrospective shares its title with a new book of essays and interviews, edited by Philip Horne and Peter Swaab.

LOS ANGELES: The American Cinematheque dips into the long and varied career of George Stevens between March 20 and March 23. The program includes several of the giant '50s chin-pullers (A Place in the Sun, Shane, and, well, Giant) that kept Stevens in Oscar nominations, though its real charmer may be the opening selection, the modest 1933 comedy Alice Adams, with a barn-burner of a performance by the young Katherine Hepburn. On Easter Sunday, celebrate by getting messed up pre-show time and settling in for the umpteen-hour Biblical film The Greatest Story Ever Told, starring a bemused Max Von Sydow as J.C. Yes, that really is John Wayne in a special cameo appearance as the hungover-looking centurian who looks at Max hanging there and mutters, "Truly this man was the son of God" before wandering off somewhere to tap a kidney. Ed Wynn, Robert Blake, and the professor from Gilligan's Island are supposed to be in in too, but it's a very long movie, and their appearances must be timed to coincide with the little naps I always take at strategic intervals to restoreth my soul.

Rep Report Addendum – Rendezvous with French Cinema

Peter Smith — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Screengrab contributor Bryan Whitefield reports from the Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual Rendezvous with French Cinema program.

While this year's crop of films couldn't boast about anything as high profile as last year's opening night film La Vie En Rose, which featured the eventually Oscar-winning performance by Marion Cotillard as French icon Edith Piaf, this popular annual series presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center did include several notable films for cineastes and admirers of all things French.

French New Wave director Claude LeLouch (A Man and A Woman) opened this year's series with his latest film Roman de Gare, a thriller about a popular novelist whose life and fiction become intermingled. Another New Wave veteran, Claude Miller, screened his latest film, A Secret, which focuses on the French-Jewish community during World War II. This is one of two films that feature Mathieu Amalric, the star of Julian Schnabel's much-acclaimed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The other, Nicolas Klotz's Heartbeat Detector/La Question Humaine, could be tagged as a French Michael Clayton with Amalric as an in-house psychologist for a giant chemical company who uncovers some serious big-business skeletons.

Perhaps the most easily digestible film in the series is Cédric Klapisch's Paris which features an ensemble cast led by the consistently excellent Romain Duris and Juliette Binoche. The film certainly has its flaws, and does rely on a multi-line narrative, a screenwriting tool that feels a little too easy at this point, but also gives a view of the city and its many landmarks that feels like a feature-length postcard of Paris itself, sure to invoke memories for those who have been there and further romanticizing it for those who have not.

The shining star of this year's series for me is also likely to be a hate-it-or-love-it film for many — Christophe Honoré's modern musical Love Songs, essentially about a girl-girl-guy threesome. Honoré, no stranger to controversy or mixed reviews, began his career with Ma Mere, a film about mother-son incest generally seen as either a first glimpse of genius or a loathsome pile of shit. His second film, last year's Dans Paris, was met with similar raves and reviles. Love Songs, written by Honoré from a shared personal experience with French songwriter Alex Beaupain, actually uses its beautiful little songs as a narrative trick that allows the characters to stand outside reality and express emotions that would have been lost in a more straight-forward drama. The filmmaking has a stylized yet in-the-moment feeling that evokes the best of the French New Wave. The gifted cast, including Louis Garrel, Ludovine Sagnier, Clotilde Hesme and Chiara Mastroianni, allows the songs to fold into the overall action, a big part of why so much of this film works as well as it does. My giving a "musical" a chance is pretty unusual, but this film's inventive storytelling and strong performances won me over immediately and it's certain to be on my year-end list.

The Rep Report (February 1-7)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Since last Thanksgiving, Village audiences have been turning out in force at the Film Forum for I'm Not There, so the theater shouldn't have too much trouble drawing an audience for a week-long showing (February 1-7) of D. A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back, the documentary record of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of the United Kingdom, complete with Joan Baez singing away in her own little bubble, Dylan's notorious manager Albert Grossman auditioning for Tony Hendra's role in This Is Spinal Tap (and maybe Joe Pesci's role in GoodFellas), drop-in appearances by Donovan and Alan Price, and one of the all-time great pre-MTV music videos, with Dylan standing in the street flipping cue cards while Allen Ginsberg standing off to the sidelines looking as if he knows deep and ancient truths, even if he was really just wondering about the location of the buffet table. Released in 1967, Pennebaker's movie established Dylan as an icon of movie cool, much more effectively than his early attempts at actual movie "acting" (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Renaldo and Clara). If you've never seen it, you'll want to check it out to decide for yourself how the man himself compares with Cate Blanchett.

On February 1, as part of its "Golden Silents" program, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is hosting a special one-night event, a rare screening of Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, a 1927, sixty-seven-minute film by the men who made King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The simple story about a family farm in a jungle setting is a pretext for the exciting natural wildlife footage; the movie includes fights with big cats and a bang-up elephant stampede — make no mistake, animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture. But its mixture of awe in the face of natural beauty and man-on-safari edginess will help you understand why everyone in Hollywood understood that the jungle-raping showman in King Kong was a Cooper self-portrait. Live musical accompaniment will be provided by the Alloy Orchestra.

The Rep Report (January 23 - 30)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO: The 6th Annual Noir City Film Festival at the Castro is jam-packed with seamy rarities and not-available-on-DVD obscurities. It opens on January 25 with a tribute to actress Joan Leslie, who'll be interviewed onstage between screenings of the 1947 Repeat Performance and the striking 1943 backstage drama The Hard Way. There are also tributes to Dalton Trumbo — the Trumbo-scripted Joseph Losey film The Prowler will be introduced by modern noir master James Ellroy, and they'll even show the movie if ever stops talking — actress Gail Russell, and the granite-jawed Charles McGraw, who appears in Anthony Mann's Border Incident and Reign of Terror (sometimes known as The Black Book, and starring Richard Basehart as that least likely of noir villains, Maximilien Robespierre. ("Don't call me Max!")

LOS ANGELES: Your obedient Jew, Mel Brooks, will be on hand fora festival of his films at the American Cinematheque from January 23 through the 30th. Brooks will kick things off by introducing his little-seen sophomore effort, the 1970 The Twelve Chairs, based on an Ilf and Petrov novel and starring the young Frank Langella, Dom DeLuise, and the criminally underutilized British actor Ron Moody. On Saturday, he'll participate in a discussion between films during a double fill of his first big hit, the 1974 Blazing Saddles, and perhaps his most underappreciated comedy, the 1981 centuries-spanning vaudeville show The History of the World — Part 1. Given Brooks's legendary reputation as one of the funniest talkers of the age, this event might be of interest even to comedy aficionados who already have the movies themselves well memorized.

NEW YORK: The Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking" (January 25 – February 14) is a big, ambitious program that concentrates on the output of Mosfilm, "the largest and most productive film studio during the Soviet era, which remains Russia’s most important film institution even today." Included are such chestnuts as Potemkin and the post-Stalin The Cranes Are Flying, as well as Tarkovsky's Mirror and other, lesser-known films such as Karen Shakhnazarov's1983 Jazzman, about a musician whose tastes run counter to those officially sanctioned by Moscow, and the more recent Happiness and Cargo 200.

The Rep Report (December 26 -- January 3)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Film Society of Lincoln Center spends the end of the 2007 charting the evolution of a couple of decades in the life of the American dance musical, as seen through the career of one of its legendary practitioners, with "All That Fosse" (December 28 - January 1). Included are all five of the movies that Bob Fosse actually directed (starting with the clumsy debut of Sweet Charity and including the sizzling instant classic Cabaret and the self-lacerating, autobiographical All That Jazz. But Fosse worked his way up from a lowly dancer to a choreographer-director, and the program also offers a chance to follow his development by including the 1953 Give a Girl a Break, in which he has a featured role and dances a couple of numbers; the 1955 My Sister Eileen, in which he appears and for which he also did the choreography; and the 1957 film version of The Pajama Game, based on the first Broadway show for which he served as full choreographer. Musical fans who've never seen Fosse's own dancing may be startled to see how much he literally remade Broadway stage movement in his own image.

SAN FRANCISCO: From December 26 through January 3, the Castro hosts a cunningly programmed string of double features paying tribute to Hollywood composer Miklos Rozsa. The films on tap include Robert Siodmak's Hemingway-based noir The Killers (double-billed with the Steve Martin-Carl Reiner noir parody Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid) and the nifty Barbara Stanwyck vehicle The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, which provides a rare, treasurable chance to see Kirk Douglas playing the town wimp. The festival, which "will be hosted by Castro organist and film music specialist David Hegarty", also offers "onstage interviews with Rozsa’s daughter Juliet Rozsa, award-winning writer and film historian Steve Vertlieb, and Rozsa authority and orchestrator Daniel Robbins."

BOSTON: To kick off 2008, the Brattle offers a January 1 Marx Brothers marathon, including their greatest films (Duck Soup, Horse Feathers), their greatest hit (A Night at the Opera), and the giddiest record of their stage act (Animal Crackers). If snybody's had a better idea than this recently, I hope they won a MacArthur Grant for it.

The Rep Report (December 13 - 24)

Peter Smith — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Thursday, December 13, Film Society of Lincoln Center has an intriguing double bill: Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, a new documentary directed by the critic Kent Jones, and produced and narrated by Martin Scorsese, will be shown along with the classic Lewton production I Walked with a Zombie. Installed on the RKO lot and given his own production company and a bagful of nickels, Lewton developed horror films in his own distinctive house style, long on angled shadows, underpopulated sets, and the tingly dread that talented directors like Zombie's Jacques Tourneur could create out what remained unsaid and unseen. Jones will be on hand to talk about his own movie and introduce Zombie.

On Sunday the 16th, Lincoln Center has another double bill, this time starring the face that launched a thousand bathtub-gin parties: the iconic flapper heroine of the silent era, Clara Bow. The Film Society, with a little help from the Library of Congress, will be showing Helen's Babies, a 1924 comedy starring Edward Everett Horton, and James P. Hogan's newly restored melodrama Capital Punishment. Live musical accompaniment will be provided by pianist Donald Sosin.

The period of Woody Allen's career when he seemed to be the New York Times' officially selected poet laureate of the Upper East Side may have peaked with the 1986 Hannah and Her Sisters, a sprawling (for Woody) family comedy-drama that includes one of Allen's finest performances as Woody Allen, given a few years before he started to look a little too old for the part. Film Forum brings it back for an eleven-day run starting December 14. On the 14th, the 7:40 P.M. screening will be introduced by Eric Lax, author of the new Conversations with Woody Allen. — Phil Nugent

The Rep Report (Dec 6 - 14)

Peter Smith — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual Spanish Cinema Now begins on December 7 and runs through the 27th. The schedule this year includes a special program devoted to the works of the late Pilar Miro, one of the rare women to make a filmmaking career for herself in the wake of Franco's death. Seven of her features will be shown, including her last movie, the 1996 version of Felix Lope de Vega's The Dog in the Manger.

BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives' Ingmar Bergman: Light and Shadow (December 6 - 20) gives admirers of the late director, whose death last summer was one of the supreme, sad film events of the year, to remember some of his proudest achievements (including Persona, The Seventh Seal, and Shame) in handsome prints on the big screen. The final selections, wisely, are The Magic Flute and Fanny and Alexander, either of which can serve as a timely rebuttal to the idea that Bergman has nothing to offer in the way of holiday festivity.

— Phil Nugent