The Screengrab : museum of modern art

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 (October 24-30)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: A dependable highlight of the Museum of Modern Art's film programming, "To Save and Project: The Sixth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation" (October 24–November 16) opens with Melvin Van Peebles's 1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Other seldom-seen, painstakingly restored and preserved items on the menu include Marco Ferreri's scandalous Dillinger Is Dead (1969); Ernst Lubitsch's 1025 version of Lady Windermere's Fan; the 1934 James Cagney-Bette Davis vehicle Jimmy the Gent; D. W. Griffith's Hearts of the World; Anthony Mann's Korean War classic Men in War, and the 1947 musical That Man of Mine, "featuring a young Ruby Dee, who will appear after the screening in a discussion with historian Pearl Bowser." All in all, "baadasssss" is putting it mildly.

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives pays tribute to one of the lesser known fixtures of the "Fifth Generation" of Chinese filmmakers, serving this fall as artist in residence at PFA, with "I Love Beijing: The Films of Ning Ying" (October 23, 2008 - October 27). Educated in Italy and employed by Bernardo Bertolucci as his assistant director on The Last Emperor, Ning began her own directing career in 1992 with For Fun, which, along with On the Beat (1993) and I Love Beijing (2000), form her "Beijing trilogy", films in which she considers the current state of her native country with an informed, ironic sensibility and great affection. The PFA will be showing all these films, as well as Ning's most recent feature, Perpetual Motion (2005) and her documentary Railroad of Hope (2001), with the director in attendance.

The Rep Report (May 2--8)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Though it's not clear just how widespread this information was among the average moviegoers of the day, in retrospect it's only become clearer and clearer that Jean-Luc Godard owned the 1960s. None of the gazillions of filmmakers who tried to copy or emulate him at the time found a way to do it without looking ridiculous, and Godard himself has spent the last forty-odd years wondering why nobody believes him when he insists that his later work is much better. Deal with it: Godard's sixties movies, which began with the 1959 Breathless and ended with the 1968 Weekend, which ends with the words "End of Cinema" and which was followed by, of course, more movies, amount to an enduring alternate history of their period, one caught on the fly, and seemingly composed and moods and signals snatched from the air. They are completely of their moment and haven't really dated, and they pointed in a direction that no one has really been able to follow, Godard included. Starting today and continuing through June 5, Film Forum has the whole kicking, biting, flirting package, including the first of Godard's post-Godardian films, the 1969 Le Gai Savoir, and Sympathy for the Devil, which really doesn't belong in this company but has to be included in any comprehensive salute to Godard and the 1960s, 'cause it's got Rolling Stones in it. If you're looking for a place to escape to as summer comes clanking in, this might be the place.

Peter Hutton is a landscape specialist with a moving camera. A former art student, he has traveled the world, sometimes while working as a merchant seaman, recording his visual impressions of Southeast Asia, of the sea, of New York City in the 1970s and Hungary in the 1980s and communal living in Southern California and the Hudson River Valley, turning out a string of transcendentally beautiful, singular films that document his way of seeing. From May 5 through the 26th, the Museum of Modern Artpresents a career retrospective of Hutton's work, which should be eye-opening even for the lucky folks who've managed to have seen some of it. It opens with a "conversation" between the filmmaker and writer Luc Sante.

The Rep Report (23--May 1)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: One of the strangest and most intriguing new filmmaking talents to emerge in recent years, the Korean writer-director Kim Ki-Duk gets his first complete U.S. retrosepctive, courtesy of the Museum of Modern art, running from April 23 to May 8. Originally typed as a bit of a sickie on the basis of his 2000 film The Isle, with its isolated, watery setting, creepy eroticized atmosphere, and creative use of fishhooks, Kim has continued to turn out deluxe midnight-movie fare (such as Samaritan Girl) while also revealing a more restrained, meditative side in such films as Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring and the weird, mute romance 3-Iron. The MOMA show will be of special interest to old fans eager to get a look at some of his movies that haven't gotten much play here before, including his 1996 debut picture Crocodile.

"Creatively Speaking" (April 25-27) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is a series, curated by Michelle Materre and co-curated and produced by Neyda Martinez, that seeks to showcase "realistic, universal portrayals of people of color." It includes documentaries about the culture and political activism of South Africa, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a concert honoring what would have been Bob Marley's sixtieth birthday, the African-American activist Robert F. Williams, and the roots and spread of hip hop culture, along with a number of dramatic short films. Each screening will be accompanied by a Q & A session afterwards.

FESTIVAL NEWS: In spring, the film geek's heart turns to thoughts of film festivals, where the hardcore faithful can seal themselves up in dark screening rooms to take refuge from all that sunshine and pollen. The Independent Film Festival of Boston, which was founded in 2003 and is already well-established as perhaps the city's premier yearly film event, kicks off on Wednesday, April 23, and runs through the 29th. This year's week-long bash includes new features from Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg, Harmony Korine (Mister Lonely), Werner Herzog (Encounters at the End of the World), and the Hoop Dreams, Steve James and Peter Gilbert (At the Death House Door), as well as documentaries on Joy Division, Harlan Ellison (Dreams with Sharp Teeth), and George W. Bush's home away from home, Crawford, Texas. From April 25 through May 8, Pacific Film Archive will be running standout attractions from the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, including Ermanno Olmi's One Hundred Nails, Bela Tarr's The Man from London, Claude Chabrol's Girl Cut in Two, Roy Andersson's You, the Living, and Mock Up on Mu, the latest "pulp serial-cum-political tract" from Bay Area filmmaker and "culture jammer" Craig Baldwin. Across the border, Toronto's fifteenth annual Hot Docs Candaian International Documentary Film Festival begins on Thursday and spends eleven days showcasing the best in nonfiction filmmaking, including more than a hundred new pictures and retrospectives devoted to the work of Richard Leacock and Canada's own Jennifer Baichwal. And New York's youthful-and-still-growing counterweight to the city's fall festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, begins Wednesday and continues through May 4, with a handsome spread of independent and international films sandwiched in between the premieres of Baby Mama and Speed Racer. We'll have more to come on Tribeca as soon as it lands.

The Rep Report (April 15--21)

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

NEW YORK: The coolest noise in town this spring and summer may be at the Museum of Modern Art's "Jazz Score" series (April 17--September 15), which offers "a gallery installation, live concerts, and a panel discussion," as well as a series of features and shorts powered by original jazz soundtracks. Whether by design or just the luck of the draw, the selection makes it clear that the use of an original jazz score, whether composed by Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder) or Elmer Bernstein (The Man with the Golden Arm), reveals a certain level of artistic aspiration, often coupled with a lust for the lower things in life. At the simplest level, music by Miles Davis or by John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet can do wonders for a thriller such as Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows or Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, with Robert Ryan as a racist crook and Harry Belafonte as his unhappy partner in crime. At the other extreme, there's Arthur Penn's Mickey One, a fascinating, incoherent, art-damaged movie that seems to be trying to take its cues from Stan Getz's saxophone improvisations on the soundtrack--bad as the movie is, it's fun to watch just for the visions it gives you of the studio executive's heads melting when they first saw it--and such artifacts as Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy, with music by Ornette Coleman, and Shirley Clarke's off-Broadway verite films The Cool World and The Connection, reminders that the American independent film movement once seemed to be an offshoot of the Beats' world. There are also some international obscurities that sound better than intriguing, notable Dilemma, a 1962 film made in apartheid-era Johannesburg by the Danish director Henning Carlsen (Hunger), starring Zakes Mokae and with music by Max Roach.

LOS ANGELES: Tonight, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ "John Huston Lecture on Documentary Film" at the Linwood Dunn Theater will include screenings of the two great military documentaries that Huston made during World War II, The Battle of San Pietro and Let There Be Light. Although made with the cooperation of the U. S. military and officially intended as part of the war effort, San Pietro--which is both a strikingly clear and cogent account of a battle and a nonfiction war poem composed on film--met with some grumblings from the higher-ups, and Light, a harrowing visit to a medical ward full of soldiers suffering from the psychological effects of war, was actually kept from public view until the early 1980s. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King makes the point that Huston had to deal with much more interference than some of the people now making documentaries about the Iraq war, but many of those current filmmakers could still learn a lot from his work. She also reminds us that Huston had a ready answer for the jarheads who clucked that his movies seemed "anti-war': ""Whenever I make a film that's for war, you can take me out and shoot me." The screening will be introduced by Huston's son Tony and followed by a panel discussion including Dr. Charles Wolfe, Dr. Betsy McLane, and Richard E. Robbins, the producer-director of the Oscar-nominated doceumentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

The Rep Report (March 12-19)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The Museum of Modern Art is honoring the centennial of Rex Harrison. Tall, crisp, and capable of being snide and downright nasty in a way that only enhanced his seductiveness, nobody did sly like sexy Rexy. The programming, which mixes camp giggles such as Cleopatra and King Richard and the Crusaders with prestige bloat-a-thons such as The Agony and the Ecstasy and My Fair Lady, may be too true a picture of how much of this time on movie soundstages was not ideally spent, but the important thing is that it does include his most wonderful film performance in his greatest movie, the beyond-suave superstar conductor whose jealous suspicions towards his young wife (Linda Darnell) turn him into a whirling dervish in Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours.

Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963), the director's heh-heh "commercial" movie, returns to the Film Forum for a two-week run, from March 14-27. Produced by Carlo Ponti and the uncredited Joseph E. Levine, with a cast led by Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance (as an overbearing movie producer), and Fritz Lang as his own bad self, working from the base of a best-selling Alberto Moravia novel and with an actual budget, Godard contrived to turn out one of the strangest and orneriest movies of his not exactly self-effacing career. Long considered a weird misfire, the movie inspired a number of Godard-watchers and other movie lovers to reconsider its qualities after it was revived at the Forum back in 1997; maybe this is going to become some kind of once-a-decade revival rituals. Terrence Rafferty recently used this latest engagement to grapple with the picture in the pages of The New York Times.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Infernal Machines: The Films of Kim Ki-Young" (March 12 – 18) tips its hat to a maverick Korean filmmaker whose work made him a inspiration to many of the newer directors who have been behind the current Korean New Wave. Richard Pena describes him as an "instinctual artist" who "always seems ready to abandon correct or tasteful form for a powerful visual or aural effect. The rawness of the emotions on screen is more than matched by the directness of his cinematic style." Kim's audacity as a filmmaker may have been too much for the Korean film industry, which basically drove him out of the business by the mid-1980s. He was rediscovered and even returned to filmmaking in the mid-1990s but died in 1998.

The Rep Report (February 14-21)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: A dependable annual treat, the "Film Comment Selects" series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (February 14-28) gives the writers and editors of that magazine a chance to decorate the screen of the Walter Reade Theater with a wide-ranging selection of films, new and old, that they love a lot more than the U.S. distribution business does. There are new films by George A. Romero (the opening night selection, Diary of the Dead), Jacques Rivette (The Duchess of Langeais, to be shown with the actress Jeanne Balibar in attendance), Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop), Olivier Assayas (Boarding Gate), Lukas Moodyson (Container), and Alex Cox (The Searchers 2.0). The weird revivals include Cox's 1987 Walker, Crispin Glover's 1992 Rubin and Ed, and a couple of Richard Fleischer movies, the 1971 English true crime story 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough, and the mind-boggling 1975 Southern slave-owners' potboiler Mandingo.

"Milos Forman: A Retrospective" (February 14-28) at the Museum of Modern Art covers the expatriate director's career from his early, attention-getting work (Loves of a Blonde, The Firemen's Ball), traces his American work from the 1971 Taking Off to his finding a groove as a respected Hollywood pro (from the Academy Award-winning smash One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Amadeus and The People vs. Larry Flynt); it also includes some items from off the beaten tracks, such as his contributions to the omnibus films Visions of 8 and I Miss Sonja Henie.

CHICAGO: For one week starting February 15, the Gene Siskel Film Center is showing a new print of Jean-Luc Godard's exploration of youth culture, revolutionary leftist politics, and bright, shiny primary colors, La Chinoise (1967). This is an important film in the career of a major director and a unique experience on its own terms, and it's never been available on home video in this country, and it doesn't get out to play very often, so I'd advise the curious to brave whatever disaster-movie weather you have to brave to make it to the theater.

Wild Style in the Internet Age

Phil Nugent — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

S. James Snyder reports on recent developments in graffiti, which has begun to merge its own subculture with that of the Internet. In the long-gone, heady days of the late seventies and eighties, when graffiti had intricate connections to hip-hop and other emerging forms of urban youth culture, taggers were seen as dashing underground figures with spray cans, risking life and liberty to create eye-catching designs and placing them on the sides of buildings and subway trains designed to get maximum exposure in the places that counted. "Today," writes Snyder, "in an age dominated by technology and people who spend more time in the virtual world than the real world, graffiti artists must do a whole lot more than spray. For starters, there's the technological know-how of getting your work not just online, but into the social networks and channels populated by fans of the art form. Then there's the aesthetic quandary of how to translate one's work to the Internet. Should it exist as a photo album? A slide show? A graphic? A video?" The New York-based Graffiti Research Lab (G.R.L.) is on the case. "Founded by James Powderly and Evan Roth...G.R.L. has risen to fame in the graffiti community by posting an array of short films that show the group's late-night escapades, using a projector and a laser pointer to splash light on the sides of skyscrapers, much as their counterparts did some thirty years ago with spray paint on the sides of subway cars." They also create percussively edited short films, showing the taggers out in action, and post the results to YouTube. The visual imagination and cheeky attitude of the spots has gotten them enough attention that they were invited to participate in this year's Sundance Film Festival, where the group "filmed itself tagging the streets of Park City, Utah, editing together its exploits into final film that went on to enjoy its world premiere at the festial." (Later this month, they'll be having an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art as part of its series, "Design and the Electric Mind".)

Heavy stuff, but the way that Powderly sees it, they're trying to use the Internet and other new technologies the same way an earlier generation of taggers used the trains — as a way of disseminating their work. Powderly admits that "What we do definitely offers a twist to the traditional forms of graffiti. . . In some ways, we aren't facing the same consequences as other graffiti artists, who risk getting arrested. We can do a lot of what they do, but since our tags go away when we turn the equipment off, we can't follow them all the way to that edge." Snyder writes that the outfit's "brand of graffiti art may differ from conventional graffiti art in terms of execution, but not in terms of intent. Much as the taggers of the '70s wanted to express themselves creatively and leave a permanent mark on the establishment, so does G.R.L. approach its missions with a focus on showmanship, artistry, and provocation. If the mark isn't permanent, ideally the effect is." And in fact, their work is already a lot more "permanent" than most of the "classic" graffiti art that didn't last long enough to get its close-up on the Internet. A lot of it didn't last any longer than it took for somebody to hire a bunch of guys with scrub brushes.

The Rep Report (December 19 - January 1)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 04:13:00 GMT

NEW YORK: At Warner Bros. during the prime days of the studio system, Joan Blondell was the platonic ideal of the wisecracking dame, always a pal to the heroine or the hero, hard-working and always dependably lively and funny and likable. She never became a star in her own right, but she was one of those performers who audiences came to be grateful for, knowing that even in bad pictures, she could be counted on to provide some entertaining relief from the dull center of the movie. She kept working long enough to appear in the 1977 John Cassavettes film Opening Night and inspire Seymour Krim to call her "the last of the great troupers." In a move guaranteed to get them on Santa's good side, the Museum of Modern Art pays her tribute with "Joan Blondell: The Bombshell from Ninety-First Street", running from December 19 through January 1. The schedule of golden oldies includes a couple of her many collaborations with James Cagney, including the Busby Berkeley musical Footlight Parade — remember, the baby Jesus cries whenever anyone blows off a chance to see Cagney dance — and such choice, juicy Pre-Code melodramas as Night Nurse (1931), with Joan advising Barbara Stanwyck on how to deal with a household terrorized by a violent, sexually mesmeric Clark Gable, and Three on a Match (1932), in which Humphrey Bogart grins and mimes rubbing something under his nose to tip off the hipsters in the audience as to why Ann Dvorak is acting so tense and hysterical and looking even more wide-eyed than usual. The schedule also includes the 1947 carny noir Nightmare Alley, featuring the older, irresistibly blowzy Joan in one of her best later roles as the fortune teller Zeena, who tutors Tyrone Power in the dark arts of fleecing the suckers, with results that bring happiness to no one.

Terry Zwigoff's snarly black comedy Bad Santa has been a classic showcase for Billy Bob Thornton at his least family-friendly ever since it first lurched into view in 2003. Now, the IFC Center pulls off a seasonal coup with the theatrical premiere of the "director's cut", which was released on DVD last year. Zwigoff's preferred edit--not to be confused with the "unrated" version released on DVD as Badder Santa, which is not that easy to tell from the original theatrical version--is actually shorter than the studio cut and, in what is by now a time-honored tradition with director's cuts, dispenses with the introductory voice-over narration. But any version of this thing is still a hoot.

Film Forum is playing Charles Chaplin's City Lights, starting Christmas Day and running through New Year's. For those who can't imagine Christmas or Chaplin without sentimentality, this may be the greatest of his features and something of a holiday classic even though it isn't about the holidays. Those who have to gnash their teeth a little to put up with the story about how the poor little guy martyrs himself to bring the gift of sight to a blind girl who wouldn't give him the time of day if she could see him may be pleasantly surprised at how much real comic brilliance is mixed in there with all the mush.