The Screengrab : manohla dargis

Cannes Roundup: Day Six

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

They still love Jerry Lewis in France. Lewis was working the press at Cannes, talking up his latest project, and Manohla Dargis of the New York Times was on hand. “‘Jerry’s here to announce the film he will be starring in next October,’ the French translator said. ‘We’re going to do Mutiny on the Bounty again,’ Mr. Lewis said, as laughter filled the room. ‘I’m playing the Christian part, and we need an Arab so we can beat’ the stuffing ‘out of him.’ Silence fell like a lead curtain. Being an old nightclub performer, he didn’t use the word stuffing. Being an old nightclub guy, he also recovered fast, but he clearly wasn’t going to make himself especially loveable. I wonder if he ever had.”

Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces looks a bit too familiar to some critics. “Pedro Almodovar offers nothing new in his latest feature, Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces), but that’s probably enough for his devout followers,” writes Eric Kohn in Indiewire. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw finds it “a richly enjoyable piece of work, slick and sleek, with a sensuous feel for the cinematic surfaces of things and, as ever, self-reflexively infatuated with the business of cinema itself. Yet I wonder if Almodóvar isn't in danger of retreading old ideas.”

“Von Trier and the festival's standout, Police, Adjective, notwithstanding, the energy has so far come mainly from Asia,” J. Hoberman writes in the Village Voice. “Chinese, Filipino, Iranian, Japanese, and South Korean movies have stoked the most anticipation and inspired the most heat. Both the Competition and Un Certain Regard gave prime early slots to movies that, as taboo-breaking as they are, were shot on the QT and are unshowable in their homelands--China and Iran.”

Hollywood Goose-Steps Into the New Year

Phil Nugent — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:45:00 GMT

Ben Crair at Slate writes that "One way to measure the approach of the new year is to count the Holocaust films at your local multiplex. The holidays arrive just as studios begin wooing academy members with serious dramas, and there's nothing more serious than genocide." This year has certainly filled theaters with a bumper crop of Nazi slash Holocaust movies, including Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, Stephen Daldry's The Reader, Edward Zwick's Defiance, Paul Schrader's Adam Resurrected, Good, which is based on C. P. Taylor's play and which opens in select cities today, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which was sent from Hell by the devil in lieu of a new STD. Crair breaks these kinds of films down into various categories, such as the ones hailing the courage of "Good Germans", such as Valkyrie (as well as earlier films such as The Desert Fox, starring James Mason as Rommel, Marlon Brando's Nazi of conscience in The Young Lions, and, of course, Schindler's List; tributes to the bravery of "Resistant Jews", such as the ones in Defiance, who have the good fortune to be led by someone played by the actor currently employed as James Bond, Daniel Craig; "Redemption Stories" about survivors trying to find their way back to normal life and human feeling, such as Adam Resurrected or the Sidney Lumet film The Pawnbroker, starring Rod Steiger, which yesterday was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Crair also has a category called "The Fable", which may be just because he had to come up with something to call Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, and Slate he couldn't have called it what I would have called it because Slate does not carry an "Adults Only" advisory.

The peculiar place that movies with this kind of subject matter occupy in our culture was thrown into sharp relief a few weeks ago when Los Angeles Times blogger Patrick Goldstein wrote a five-star stupid piece using New York Times critic Manohla Dargis's dismissive review of The Reader to complain that "in indie Hollywood that no one wants Manohla Dargis to review their movie, fearing that the outspoken critic will tear their film limb from limb. It’s the ultimate backhanded compliment, since what they really fear is Manohla’s persuasiveness — that she’ll write a review whose combination of vitriolic snarkiness and intellectual heft will actually persuade high-brow moviegoers to drop the film from their must-see list." Dargis, he charged, displays a "“lack of empathy for the challenge of tackling difficult material.” Unless you're a third-grade art teacher instead of an actual paid writer, it's a novel thing indeed to argue, or even imply, that someone should get points for "tackling difficult material;" it may even be that having seen too many movies that were praised by gutless reviewers for the filmmakers' intentions instead of what they'd managed to get on the screen may help to drive audiences away from seeing more movies with grand ambitions. Goldstein took a righteous pasting in some quarters for having chosen to use his space on-line to slip into his cap and bells, but it's doubtful that he would have had the nerve to make such an argument at all--on behalf of a ridiculous movie based on a silly book, an expensive major release with attention-getting sex scenes and big stars and a Harvey Weinstein-approved promotional budget, directed by a man who got an undeservedly smooth ride for his previous ridiculous movie (The Hours) based on a silly novel and full of big stars and with a promotional campaign to match--if he hadn't been able, when the shock troops came around to punch some sense into him, been able to squeal, "It must be treated seriously! It's got Nazis in it!" The last word on how flimsy this line of attack is turns out not to be Life Is Beautiful or Hogan's Heroes but The Boy in Striped Pajamas, an atrocity for the whole family that will probably stand as the ultimate demonstration of how to turn historic tragedy into pap until Jerry Lewis kicks off and we all storm his house and watch The Day the Clown Cried. Until then, Lauren Wissot has a new holiday tradition in mind.

Related Stories: In Other Blogs: The Movie Killer

In Other Blogs: The Movie Killer

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Film critics may be disappearing from the pages of daily newspapers by the dozen, but it’s still not happening fast enough for some in Hollywood. Specifically, as Patrick Goldstein writes in The Big Picture, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis is feared and loathed by studio brass. “It's an open secret in indie Hollywood that no one wants Manohla Dargis to review their movie, fearing that the outspoken critic will tear their film limb from limb. It's the ultimate backhanded compliment, since what they really fear is Manohla's persuasiveness -- that she'll write a review whose combination of vitriolic snarkiness and intellectual heft will actually persuade high-brow moviegoers to drop the film from their must-see list. (To be fair, she can be equally passionate about films she loves; for example, Synecdoche, New York, or anything by David Lynch.)… No one blinks an eye when a critic eviscerates a dumb summer comedy -- that's a fair target. It's the filmmakers who've aimed high and been brought to their knees by a Dargis pan who feel as if they've been gored for sport. You might say Manohla occupies a unique perch: She's the critic you love to read, just as long as you're not reading about your movie.”

Karina Longworth takes issue with Goldstein at Spoutblog. “It’s almost as if Goldstein is advocating for a kind of affirmative action for art (or, at least, artsy) films: all pictures may be on a level playing field in Manohla’s eyes, but a certain type of picture should be given special consideration for at least trying to be art, even if it fails… I guess it’s not that surprising that Goldstein’s attack on Manohla would resemble the faux-populist, ‘Let’s see you do better’ line of the over-protective commenter class. But if he’s actually suggesting that critics should allow “empathy” for the architects of blatant awards bait to temper their judgements, then this might be his harshest anti-criticism statement yet.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir chats with Steven Soderbergh about Che. ‘It was still, for a long time, one script. And it was becoming really unwieldy. And worse than that, because it was so long, we were still trying to make it into one film, or one normal-length film. The themes were really, really short, and you really couldn't go into any detail about anything and it started to feel like a two-hour trailer for a four-hour movie. And that's when I suggested busting it in half…My attitude was like, "Look, in nature, when a cell gets too big, it divides in order to survive. That's what we've got here. That's what we have to do." And I think, in retrospect, it was the right thing to do. Now I look at it and wish we'd just gone to HBO and done 10 hours.”

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule pays tribute to Forrest J. Ackerman with a video presentation: My Visit to the Ackermansion. “In 1998 my wife and I made a pilgrimage to the Ackermansion and, some 20 or so years after my obsession with Famous Monsters had been tabled, I finally got to meet the man who had meant so much to me in the formative years of my film education. I brought along a video camera and taped the entire affair, a glimpse inside the halls of the most famous movie mansion of them all…if you never got a chance to take the trip yourself, spend some time with the Ackermonster and enjoy him doing what he enjoyed most—interacting with fans and reliving a life well spent chronicling his beloved history of horror.”

Year-end lists are trickling in. Marshall Fine’s top ten at Hollywood and Fine is topped by Revolutionary Road. “Director Sam Mendes returns to suburbia circa 1956 and reteams Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in this film version of Richard Yates’ novel. The acting is terrific – nuanced yet passionate – and Mendes captures the novel’s era-defining feeling of seekers putting their dreams on hold to chase conventional success.” Nathan Lee has five underrated films that deserve your love, including Mother of Tears. “Dario Argento’s deranged b-movie extravaganza about the uncorking of a witch from an ancient urn that ushers in the second Fall of Rome is the most fun I’ve had at the movies…ever?” Hello, Netflix!

Screengrab Q&A: Joachim Trier, Director of Reprise

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Joachim Trier's debut film Reprise centers on a pair of twentysomething best friends who drop their debut novels into the same mailbox to varied results. It's taken the writer/director on a very interesting journey. The film won Trier a Discovery Award at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival; it debuted in the States at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and was later the featured film in the 2007 New Directors/New Films series, where Manohla Dargis of the New York Times declared it "one of the most passionately and intellectually uninhibited works from a young director I've seen in ages." It also went on to win Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Film at the Amanda Awards in Norway (the equivalent of an Oscar) in 2007. But only after support from superproducer Scott Rudin and Miramax will the film get a general release in American theaters today. Reprise is vibrant, inventive and original in both its ideas and its form, and is sure to be at the top of my own year-end list. — Bryan Whitefield

Foreign-language films typically have a hard time in America, and I remember someone at the MoMA screening asking if you had considered writing an English language version of Reprise. . .
[laughs] I've had offers, actually. But to me Reprise is perfect as it is now in its cultural setting. I'm interested in detail, and not because I'm trying to hone in on one particular part of the audience. You try to see things as they are — these are people who are living like that and have shoes like that and listen to music like this and this is the world where they live. You work to create it and you don't ask questions. To recreate that somewhere else would be absurd. But at the same time, some people were telling me, "This film reminds me so much of people I know on the Lower East Side." I get this even in Turkey. There were people there that were coming up to me to say, "We have boys like that in Istanbul that listen to Joy Division and everything."

You use some interesting formal devices in the film, like skewing timelines or having scenes play where the dialogue track doesn't match the action. How much of that was in the script and how much was done afterwards?
The screenplay is a lot like the film as a finished piece, but along the way you have to create something else and then come back to it. We would write a very intertwined, intercut scene to give the financiers an idea of how it would look. But then I would re-write it, with my co-writer, as a long linear scene that we would then cut up and go back to the initial idea. Dirty formalism, I usually call it. It needs to be alive and chaotic, yet it's also quite particularly planned.

The film plays very loose, but at the same time feels very focused.
I think those are the kind of contrasts we are always looking for when we do movies. I think it's the same for the actors. They go on set and they learn their lines and practice and run them again and again, and then they go on set and kind of lose them.

You're also dealing with the contrast between light and dark; the film balances very serious scenes with very funny ones.
It's kind of like music. In order to [fit in both tones], you need almost musical transitions.

That is how people actually deal with unhappy experiences. If you're going to pick your best friend up out of the mental hospital, you make a joke to deal with it.
Otherwise you won't survive. Compensational dynamics in people are more interesting. When the two boys are closest to each other, they can throw a lot of shit and say bad things to each other, but when they drift apart, they don't have that glue anymore. They end up trying to be polite; they're just not sure what to say anymore.

You cast mostly non-professional actors.
We looked at musicians or friends of friends or stand-up comedians, all sorts of people. In fairness, some of them are trained actors, but the lead parts are all people who have done other things. Like the guy that plays Phillip is a doctor. He worked with young teenage schizophrenics as part of his education as a doctor, so he had great experience, and he knew that madness isn't always excessive and screamy. It can sometimes be very drawn in.

Were there filmmakers or artists in general who inspired you?
Alain Resnais and Chris Marker are people who have meant a lot to me, because they made films that deal with almost the ground substance of cinema — memory, representation, identity — things that I think give themselves as themes to films particularly. Also Woody Allen, with Annie Hall. A lot of that stuff is seen as comedy but it's actually really good drama. But there are millions of references — a lot of music actually. The guy that did the score has a band called The White Birch, and we were listening to that all the time when we were writing. It was great when he said he would do the score for us since he'd never done feature film scores before.

Was he a friend of yours?
Not at the time, but we had some common friends.You know, it's a little ironic since Reprise is kind of about people who fall apart as friends, but I've made a lot of new friends through this process.

[SEMI-SPOILER ALERT] I thought it was refreshing to have an, in a sense, uplifting, almost happy ending.
Not everybody has interpreted it like that.

I kept waiting for something really dark to happen and I thought the way you tied things up was very nice. Did you struggle with that decision?
People interpret the ending differently. Some people see it as quite bleak and others see it as optimistic. I was always, in my mind, cheering for the characters; I just hope that people are open to an open ending.

One of the hallmarks of American indies seems to be that if you have a happy ending, you secretly wanted to make a commercial film.
I remember hearing acquisitions people talking about the films at Sundance: "Was it hopeful? Was it uplifting?" Those were the two words I kept hearing, and it struck me as so odd. . . I mean, what the fuck is hopeful? It makes me hopeful sometimes if a filmmaker can make a film that's truly sad and makes me feel less alone. But this idea of hopefulness I found very funny.

Nathan Lee Loses His Voice

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

When film critic Nathan Lee signed on at The Village Voice in October 2006, he said, in reaction to the staff cuts and other problems then plaguing the paper (even as it was patting itself on the back on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary): "I came into this at a point where the Voice had been bought," he said. "The change was done; it had happened. I'm coming into it afterwards and my sense is, 'What is still valuable here; what can we still do? How can the Voice continue to have a strong, lively, influential and really smart sense of film coverage?' That's what I'm really invested in at this point." The paper turned out to be invested in other things, and now, eighteen months after claiming his first-ever regular staff position ("I've never had health benefits in my entire adult life"), Lee has been let go, from the Voice. Lee's own announcement of the unhappy news reads as follows: "In great Village Voice tradition, I was abruptly laid off today for 'economic reasons.' My employment at the paper ends immediately: someone else, alas, will be tasked with specifying the precise shade of periwinkle frosting atop the cupcakes in My Blueberry Nights. And so I am, as they say, 'looking for work,' though presumably not as a staff film critic as such jobs no longer appear to exist."

Lee, a gifted writer with his own idiosyncratic taste and a brawler's verve, who earned attention for his work in the New York Sun and The New York Times, will surely land on his feet. It's not so clear how much of the Voice's reputation as a vital force in film coverage will be left standing by this latest development. The paper that served as a home base for such writers as Andrew Sarris, Manohla Dargis, and David Edelstein (now keeping house at, respectively, the New York Observer, the New York Times, and New York magazine respectively), still has a living landmark in J. Hoberman (whose thirty-year-career at the Voice is currently serving as the basis for a tribute at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), but the paper had barely recovered from the firing of section editor Dennis Lim and writer Michael Atkinson around the same time as Lee's hiring. Lee's firing may revive talk that the head office (which, make no mistake about it, has also done its best to decimate the other Voice arts sections) has been urging the paper to do more to hype big films and cut back on the more cerebral writing about avant-garde and offbeat fare. As S. T. VanAiresdale has noted, "New York newspapers have now lost four full-time film critics in the last month." If Lee's departure really stings, it may be partly because he's a hot property and also partly because there was a time when you expected better from the Voice.

Come Blow Your Mind

Peter Smith — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Andy Warhol, always a troublesome figure in the American arts scene, has undergone more critical evaluations and re-evaluations than almost any other artist of the 20th century. With his plastic arts enjoying a well-deserved critical renaissance, Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, inspired by a new retrospective of his work at the Queens-based Museum of the Moving Image, attempts to kick-start a similar fresh look at his films. Warhol’s pictures — praised as brilliant by a few and unimaginably tedious by many others — deserve to be thought of as groundbreakingly daring, she argues, having done more than anything before or since to normalize homosexuality and standing as a shameful indictment of what passes for independent film today. — Leonard Pierce