Film Review: Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy

This review is featured in the May/June 2013 issue of Little White Lies. Journey to Italy is currently playing in a restored print throughout the US and UK.

Often credited as the first work of the modern cinematic age, Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 film Journey to Italy pivoted on a spirit of emotional and artistic restlessness. It’s a spirit that its director — and soon, his medium — would work toward reconciling with that of a society on the brink of technological and ideological revolution.

Like the characters it depicts, however, Rossellini’s masterpiece — playing in a restored print at London’s BFI Southbank — arrives at transcendence only by threatening a rupture in unity. Presented as a natural by-product of the neo-realist methodology Rossellini helped to coin, Journey to Italy is a film which treads this radical new path via a convergence of traditional melodrama, documentary-based intimacy and a streak of raw vulnerability prompted by the clandestine affair and eventual marriage of the film’s director and leading lady.

Blu-ray Review: Sean Baker's Starlet [Music Box Films]

Sean Baker's Starlet hinges on a plot concession so tantalizing to the viewer yet so detached from its main character's primary concerns that it almost plays like an afterthought. It wouldn't quite be accurate to label this bit of narrative disclosure a revelation (and certainly not a "spoiler," as no one in the film would ever consider such details worthy of much extraneous thought), but more simply an acknowledgment of a lingering but nonetheless vital piece of character contextualization. In a lesser script, or in the hands of a less intrepid filmmaker (Baker co-wrote, directed, and edited the film himself), Jane's (Dree Hemingway) actions would revolve around this most unique aspect of her everyday life. But Jane isn't defined by her lifestyle, and indeed Baker offers personal information only as these characters likely would themselves.

Indiewire Feature: 'Doing bad for the greater good': Kevin Spacey, Beau Willimon and Co. Look Back at 'House of Cards' Season One

On February 1st, Netflix changed the television industry. After struggling for the better part of a year to regain the trust of subscribers after an unexpected price increase and alteration to its delivery model, the streaming and distribution service took a risk on a new original series with potentially inflammatory political content. The show is "House of Cards," an American adaptation of a novel by Michael Dobbs which was previously the source of a hit miniseries across the Atlantic for the BBC. Showrunner Beau Willimon brought this tale of greed, corruption and disloyalty to small screens across the United States with acclaimed filmmaker David Fincher by his side as co-producer and creative director, with Netflix signing on for two seasons without a pilot.

Film Review: Bertrand Bonello's House of Pleasures

I wrote this piece for Reverse Shot's 10th Anniversary 'Life of Film' Symposium, a celebration and selection of films we believe sum up the last ten years in cinema and might just point the way forward for the medium.

Days of Future Passed

Even a cursory glance at our post-millennial cinematic landscape should spark a mental catalogue of our most popular concerns—those of death, decay, and, in light of the medium’s escapist functionality, our total and utter apocalypse. Broadly speaking, these notions help drive, if not completely nurture, mainstream filmmaking. But the reverberations from these preoccupations can be felt across all strata of modern cinema. Budgets may have risen and our collective appetite for destruction may have nearly devoured itself whole, but we remain ever yearning and susceptible to the cinema’s grand displays of emotional terror and physical and psychological paralysis. Whether by choice or out of necessity, many of the world’s best filmmakers examine similar ills on a more intimate, less portentous scale than those in the typical Hollywood model. Bertrand Bonello’s 2011 masterpiece House of Pleasures was itself a minor-scale tremor sent echoing across the world film circuit, a vivid, audacious vision of the incremental degradation of the female spirit and a work, in its own way, as unsettling as anything our modern cataclysmic cinema has given us.

Fandor Feature: Scenes - Post Mortem

Considering its wide functionality, cinema is perhaps the most well equipped medium to relate the intangible feeling of transience. The essentially absolute weight of the moving image, coupled with the dynamic possibilities of its employment, has resulted in countless articulations of yearning, elegiac ephemerality. From Terrence Malick’s symphonic waltzes to Andrei Tarkovsky’s grand confrontations with mortality to Aleksandr Sokurov’s grave evocations of apparitional communion to even Wong Kar-wai’s hallucinatory displays of emotional paralysis, there has been no lack of near-cosmic demonstrations of modern film’s ability to reflect transitory states of existence.

DVD Review: Eclipse Series 38 - Masaki Kobayashi Against the System [Criterion]

By the mid 1950s, the Shochiku Studio house style was well established. Built on the efforts of such icons as Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, as well as lesser-known masters like Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshita, Shochiku trafficked in intimate, humane storytelling, with a distinct thematic tendency toward the familial and inspirational. During the occupation, these types of films weren't only encouraged, but required by the Allied powers, which strictly regulated all facets of Japanese media and entertainment. It's understandable, then, that in the years following World War II, filmmakers would feel prompted, if not obligated, to confront the atrocities of the war and the effects it had on Japan's economic, corporate, and cultural strata, which would hit punishing lows before admirably rebounding over the second half of the 20th century.

DVD Review: Hong Sang-soo's In Another Country [Kino Lorber]

South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo's work is built on the concept of repetition. Yet within these constructs he's produced infinite variations on a very specific set of themes. Nearly all of his films feature a break (or breaks) in the narrative, after which either perspective pivots, characters undergo a change in interest or motivation, or the story itself begins a process of refraction wherein individual threads collapse into or are set into relief by each successive alternation. The episodic nature and modest aestheticism of his cinema has led many to reduce his output to a series of retreads and reassemblies of past successes, ignoring the fact that the main thematic concern of Hong's career has thus far hinged on this very preoccupation with personal inquisition, reminiscence, and reevaluation.

Record Review: Marnie Stern - The Chronicles of Marnia

History tells us that artists with an experimental lean tend to topple toward the middle over time, losing a once-unique edge in an effort to curb artistic stagnation or simply as a means of courting a wider listenership. At first blush, the career of Marnie Stern would seem to bear out this trajectory. The treble-voiced, finger-tapping, endearingly self-deprecating New York-based guitar hero has moved breathlessly across a trio of albums with nary a pause for traditional considerations such as melody or structure. That she’s gathered both in intermittent fits of inspiration over the years certainly speaks to her natural talent, yet both have, up to now, felt more like natural by-products of her process rather than premeditated goals. Which is more than fine: each of Stern’s records have provided more than their share of thrills and heart-stopping flourishes, and as a technician she may be the most naturally gifted guitar player of her generation. Nevertheless, she seemed to be exhausting her formula a bit on her 2011 self-titled album. The less defined, more freewheeling moments in her past work were easy to forgive for an artist still presumably finding her footing. But more recently these same feats of strength had begun to feel less like displays of unchecked passion and more like a crutch.

Blu-ray Review: Luis Buñuel's Tristana [Cohen Media Group]

Director Luis Buñuel's first four films were made in three different countries. By the time he reached the peak of his international renown in the mid 1960s, he could rightly be considered the most cosmopolitan of art-house filmmakers. In fact, few directors embody the slightly indeterminate "world cinema" tag more than Buñuel. It's ironic, then, that this iconoclast of Spanish cinema produced only three films in his native country. All three of these disparate projects, however, would prove important. The first, Land Without Bread, evidenced Buñuel's initial move away from surrealism toward a more realist-based approach; the second, the landmark Viridiana, brought the director once and for all to the forefront of the international cinema circuit, a position he would only relinquish upon his death in 1983. But Buñuel made one last momentous return to Spain in 1970 with Tristana, a multi-national production starring a French ingénue and a veteran of Spanish theater and television.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

I wrote this brief description of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom for the Cinefamily repertory theater, who are hosting a 35mm midnight screening of the film on April 24rd, 2013.

Arguably the original arthouse video nasty, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom—the Italian iconoclast’s final film, and infamous transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s “School of Libertinism” texts—brought a career of sexual, religious, and political provocation full circle. Structured as a visceral four-part rite of passage through Dante’s Circles of Hell, the film depicts in unflinching detail the systematic sexual torture and mental abuse perpetrated on a group of teenagers kidnapped by libertine fascists in the wake of the Mussolini regime. Igniting the ire of government officials and Italian Social Republic extortionists before the film had even wrapped, Pasolini’s impassioned portrayal of rape, sadism, sodomy, and murder would, along with his ties to Communism, eventually lead to his murder in the months leading up to the film’s premiere. Whether seen as an allegory of Nazi Germany, a ritual of spiritual agnosticism or a blatant authorial affront, Salò remains a nightmarish vision of inhumanity, and a midnight movie of grave allure and enduring implication. [Cinefamily]

Fandor Feature: Scenes - The Strange Case of Angelica

The cinema of Manoel de Oliveira is one of perspective. Not from the vantage of the 104-year-old centenarian himself—though that’s an inevitable thematic by-product for a filmmaker whose career dates back to the silent era—but that of his camera and, by extension, his characters who gaze at, through, or in discrepancy with Oliveira’s frame. His late work in particular has taken his typically strategic approach to directional composition to uniquely playful ends, suggesting at once a much younger artist and one who has accumulated decades of narrative and stylistic skill. At any given point in these films the viewer may be placed inside the protagonist’s head—via either voiceover, flashback, or point-of-view set-ups—spatially removed from the action to observe objectively from a static position, or put in direct eye contact with a given character, which often leads to further inquiries regarding omniscience or simply the role we play in completing said portrayal.

Indiewire Feature: How to Make the Transition from Indie Film to TV: 5 Things We Learned From Our Panel With the NYTVF

Over the past few years, television's begun to challenge film as the preeminent outlet for American storytelling, the breadth of interest and means of distribution at an all-time high for a medium that can no longer be looked at as of inferior artistic merit. While mainstream film is driven far more by a focus on box office receipts than quality, the small screen has quietly matched (and in some cases usurped) Hollywood as a vehicle for both widespread popularity and artistic dignity. And as industry interest in and funding for mid-budget films wanes, TV has become an ever more attractive place for independent filmmakers looking to work with more resources and to have a platform to which millions of homes across the country have easy access.

 In a panel discussion last night in Los Angeles presented by Indiewire and the New York Television Festival, speakers from diverse corners of the entertainment industry gathered to discuss the changing tide of the TV industry, and how in many cases indie filmmakers have looked to cable and network platforms to realize projects that might otherwise languish in cinematic purgatory. The panelists were Susie Fitzgerald, AMC's SVP of scripted programming; Ray McKinnon, the creator/executive producer of Sundance Channel's upcoming drama "Rectify"; and Tom Young, a scripted TV agent at CAA. Indiewire's Dana Harris served as the moderator. Here's what we learned:

Record Review: Pissed Jeans - Honeys

Matt Korvette may be skeptical of a majority of humanity, but rest assured he questions and second-guesses himself just that much more. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, the frontman for the Allentown, Pennsylvania noise-rock provocateurs Pissed Jeans outlined his contradictory persona rather humorously: “It’s easy to be this raging guy from up high, shooting thunderbolts down at everyone…But I’m right there thumbing through the organic bananas, too, wondering how I got here.” Then again: “If I jump in the audience and start spitting everywhere, I will be the 10,000th frontman to do that…But if I really call someone out and wish cancer upon them…that might make people’s ears perk up a little bit more.” So yeah, Pissed Jeans are a quintessential punk band: volatile, self-conscious, ethically conflicted. But what’s helped these guys standout over the last half-decade-plus is the way they’ve pitted these impulses against one another, allowing them to careen and combust alongside their even gnarlier post-hardcore afterbirth.

Record Review: Grouper - The Man Who Died In His Boat

As listeners we’ve become so accustomed to the constant influx of new music that we can often times lose focus of the contextual consequence intrinsic to the development of individual artists. In this day and age, once we’ve heard something new, it’s now instantly and irretrievably old. And even if it’s of a certain objective merit, our collective instinct to deify progression can cloud qualitative perspective. Truth is, artists across all mediums tend to work in fits of inspiration, developing periods of rewarding artistic impulse alongside works of misplaced ambition or potentially compromised integrity. Glimpsed from a broader view, however, are those same eras, once curious or underwhelming as individual experiences, revealed simply as periods of transition for the more dedicated practitioners.

Record Review: Ducktails - The Flower Lane

There comes a time in the evolution of any worthwhile guitar-pop group when a conscious decision is made to abandon the charmingly lax approach to songwriting and recording that most young bands adopt and instead develop a unique, concrete artistic personality. It’s what many critics refer to as an artist’s “voice,” and on evidence of The Flower Lane, Matt Mondanile has finally found his. As frontman for New Jersey janglers Ducktails, Mondanile has spent roughly a half-decade wafting through hazy, heavy-lidded, narcoticized pop, only singular in as much as he recorded and played most of it on his own between time with other gigs. In both sound and ambition, the music of Ducktails has, up to now, felt of a piece with that of Mondanile’s full-time band, Real Estate, to which his subtle guitar playing has lent such an indelible grace over the years. But with The Flower Lane, Mondanile and Ducktails have fully come into their own—and in the context of such a detached, seemingly apathetic scene it’s one of the more welcome surprises in a while.

Blu-ray Review: Keisuke Kinoshita's The Ballad of Narayama [Criterion]

Folklore, in its many written and verbal articulations, has played a consistently vital role in the development of modern Japan. Everything from architecture to music to the visual arts to the traditions of the family unit itself have roots in the traditional storytelling and myth-making practices of the ancient Orient. Even Buddhism maintains a unique relationship with customary cultural lore. Eastern cinema, for its part, has had a particularly rich and storied history of marrying the sensibilities of the screen with that of the indigenous texts and tales of Japanese antiquity. Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Kaneto Shindo, Masaki Kobayashi—pretty much any filmmaker who's worked in the jidaigeki genre has had at their disposal generations of fantastical fables to inspire or integrate into their narratives.

Tony Richardson's Mademoiselle

I wrote this brief description of Tony Richardson's Mademoiselle for the Cinefamily repertory theater, who are screening a 35mm print of the film on February 23rd, 2013, at 7pm. 

Full-time school teacher, part-time practitioner of the finer points of arson, the title character of Tony Richardson’s perversely pleasurable 1966 mad-woman mystery Mademoiselle is one of the era’s most complex feminist creations. When a series of “natural disasters” begin to plague an idyllic French village, the affected townspeople immediately accuse an immigrant Italian laborer of the crimes. Unbeknownst to all, however, is the ambiguous motivations of a local elementary teacher pushed to psychosexual extremes by thwarted desire and lustful impulse. As the mentally unstable Mademoiselle, legendary French actress Jeanne Moreau (in one of her best and most underseen roles) is at once mysterious and malicious, proceeding stoically but with an unstoppable, unexplained passion. Equal parts brooding, Bergman-like biblical allegory and prickly, Polanski-like pulp parable, Mademoiselle is a stunningly shot, psychologically provocative work from the subversive European cinema renaissance of the 1960s. [Cinefamily]