I was deeply saddened yesterday to hear of the death of Andrew Sarris, a passionate critic and elegant writer who didn’t just change the landscape of criticism; he changed the way many of us think about movies, challenging, with gentle humor and lots of grace, everything we thought we knew.
Sarris was at the vanguard of film criticism in the ’60s and ’70s, along with Pauline Kael and Manny Farber. Over the years, there’s been plenty of fuss made over the Sarris/Kael feud, and movie lovers have often felt pressured to choose one camp or the other. But why? As I’ve said elsewhere, criticism isn’t about consensus – what’s most valuable is a critic’s ability to open your eyes, to make you see things that wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise.
The challenge isn’t just part of the bargain – it’s the whole bargain. And especially as we move further into an era of critic-proof big-budget movies – abetted by newspapers and other publications that happily repackage studio hype even as they’ve decided that professional critics are relics – Sarris’ contributions to the tradition and craft of film criticism have come to seem even more precious. In fact, they’re immeasurable.
I knew Andrew only a little, but he and his wife, the extraordinary film critic Molly Haskell, have shown great kindness and generosity toward me. It would have been enough for Andrew Sarris to have been a fine critic. But in the end, it’s how you treat people that matters, and Sarris, who was a teacher as well – he was beloved by his students, and I can only imagine he was wonderful – led by example. Those of us who care about film – who continue to care about its guts and innards as an art…
Full Story »No one, as far as I know, has come to the Berlinale in search of Gillian Anderson, the strawberry-blonde vixen who set millions of hearts aflutter — and not just male ones — with her role in the supernaturally beloved ’90s show The X-Files. But Anderson has surprised those of us who love her by showing up — in small roles, but still — in two films here, James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer and Ursula Meier’s Sister. In Shadow Dancer, a thriller set in early-‘90s Belfast, she’s a British secret-service officer who squares off against a colleague (played by Clive Owen). In Sister, she’s the well-heeled patron of a tony Swiss ski resort — and a mom — who befriends a young thief and rapscallion who barely knows what it means to be a child.
Anderson hasn’t really been in hiding. She was one of the best things — perhaps the only good thing — in last year’s Johnny English Reborn, and she recently played Miss Havisham in the British TV adaptation of Great Expectations. She chooses her roles carefully and doesn’t seem particularly attracted to big Hollywood vehicles — though it’s more likely that Hollywood isn’t particularly interested in her, which is certainly its loss.
There are plenty of movies to parse and examine here at the Berlinale, but at dinner last night with some colleagues (who happened to be guys), Anderson came up in the conversation, and we just looked at one another: “Gosh! Isn’t she something?” is the gist of what we said. Perhaps we love her more because she shows up so infrequently and so fleetingly, like a ginger comet. Her role in Shadow Dancer is small and tokenlike, but it’s interesting for its metallic coldness, not a quality we usually associate…
Full Story »John Mellencamp: It’s About You isn’t really about you, or me, or even about John Mellencamp, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who has built an enduring career with his eminently likable, real-person stage demeanor and his songs’ connection with the way regular people live. It’s About You is quite possibly mostly about the filmmaker, Kurt Markus, a commercial photographer who has shot portraits for publications including Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and GQ, as well as ad campaigns for the likes of BMW and Armani.
But that’s surprisingly OK: Mellencamp invited Markus and his son, Ian, to tag along, video camera in tow, to record his summer 2009 concert tour and to eavesdrop, visually and otherwise, on recording sessions for his 2010 album No Better Than This. Mellencamp even told Markus at the outset, somewhat cryptically, that the movie should be about Markus. And so It’s About You — whatever the heck it’s actually about – is in the end a kind of visual journal, a photographer’s way of seeing and responding to what’s around him. Those events and moments and glancing touches might include a group of musicians huddled around a single microphone in Memphis’s hallowed Sun Studios, or the flash of producer extraordinaire T. Bone Burnett’s cuff-links during another session, held in the same room where Robert Johnson cut a potent handful of songs in 1936. Markus accompanies the visuals with a voice-over narration that’s sometimes grating and other times startling in its perceptions. The result is a kind of homespun video scrapbook, bumpy seams and glue splotches and all; it’s flawed, but at least it feels handmade and human.
Mellencamp could have faded away when he was still John Cougar Mellencamp, in the late 1980s, but somehow he’s managed to thrive as a modern…
Full Story »
Mark Pellington’s bromantic thriller I Melt With You made quite the splash at Sundance, just not the kind a filmmaker necessarily wants to make: Critics walked out of the film, recoiling at the bleakness on display in the tale of four former college friends (Jeremy Piven, Thomas Jane, Rob Lowe, and Christian McKay), reuniting for a weekend bender, who confront their collective middle-aged disillusionment with increasingly violent ends. Co-star Piven knew from the start it would be a polarizing project to take on.
“This movie isn’t for everyone — and, I think, in a really great way,” Piven admitted to Movieline in Park City, Utah following the film’s infamous festival debut (a longer version of this interview was previously published). “But… listen,” he continued. “I knew this movie wouldn’t be for everyone, but it’s for me. And that’s why I totally, emotionally, committed to this movie in every way, shape, and form.”
Read on for more with Piven on the value of the darkness in I Melt With You, getting under the skin of his crooked Bernie Madoff-esque character, and how he’s attempting to gain some distance from Entourage’s Ari Gold.
Did this seem like material that people would find difficult when you first read the script?
Yeah. This movie isn’t for everyone — and, I think, in a really great way. If you don’t want to even approach the idea of addressing who you are in this life, it’s gonna be a difficult movie for you to sit and watch. It can be very polarizing; at the same time, you could recognize totally committed people and you may not love these characters but… listen, I knew this movie wouldn’t be…
Steve McQueen’s Shame is perhaps mistitled: It’s the story of a man who has sex more often than he probably wants it, though still not as often as he needs it, which is a pretty fine distinction to make. And the word “shame” by itself is too loaded, too inherently judgmental. The idea isn’t that this character — his name is Brandon and he’s played, superbly, by Michael Fassbender — is doing anything he ought to be ashamed of. It’s simply that the shame he feels is nearly unbearable. Shame could have gone all wrong with the wrong actor. Luckily, McQueen has the right one in Fassbender, and that makes all the difference.
Shame is formal to the point of austerity: It opens with a nearly still overhead shot that’s inherently painterly, a tableau of a male nude — that would be Fassbender — semi-obscured by drifts of artfully rumpled blue sheets. McQueen, of course, is a fine artist himself — that’s how he made his name before he became well-known as a filmmaker, with the 2008 Hunger, also starring Fassbender. And there are ways in which Shame is too deliberate, too naked in its specificity. That may account for why some of its detractors consider it moralistic — again, the movie’s title isn’t helping it any. I did groan when Brandon is shown having desperate, uncomfortable outdoor sex, and later when, in what is supposedly the ultimate debasement, he allows a man to perform fellatio on him in the dim back room of a gay bar. (Immediately after that, he has to re-establish his…
Full Story »
James Mangold was just as apprehensive as the rest of you when the idea of a Wolverine movie fell into his lap — so much so that he spoke with predecessor Darren Aronofsky, who was originally set to direct, before taking on the project. So what enticed him to take the helm on the Hugh Jackman-starring X-Men spin-off, anyways? And how exactly will it evoke such American classics as Chinatown and Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales?
From The Playlist:
“I think part of the reason I’m doing this picture has been because it isn’t to me a conventional superhero movie. It isn’t an origin story, so I’m freed from that burden, and it also isn’t a save-the-world movie, which most of them are. It’s actually a character piece; I actually think it has more in common with The Outlaw Josey Wales and Chinatown, what we’re doing, than the conventional, ‘Will Wolverine and his compatriots save the world from this thermonuclear device’ question.”
And further:
“…The fact that half of the characters in this movie speak Japanese, this is like a foreign-language superhero movie that’s as much a drama and a detective story and a film noir, with high-octane action as it is anything like a conventional tentpole film.”
So, Mangold’s Wolverine is an unconventional foreign language superhero detective noir-actioner character piece, set in Japan, with shades of Chinatown and The Outlaw Josey Wales. Gotcha. Another way to look at it: Wolverine will finally reunite the star and director of Kate & Leopold! Rejoice or lament as you will.
• James Mangold Calls ‘The Wolverine’ A Dark Character Piece Like Eastwood’s ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’ [The Playlist]
Full Story »
Some actors are chameleons, shifting drastically from one color to another depending on the role. Ryan Gosling may not be one of them: There will always be a little Ryan Gosling, even just a mischievous glimmer, in any character the actor plays. But then, that’s part of what makes a movie star a movie star: It’s impossible to separate Cary Grant from his Cary Grantness, or to think of Bette Davis without seeing an enormous pair of eyes framed by mascara fringe.
Though Gosling is still young, he’s at his Goslingest in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, playing a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a wheelman. Drive is a vibrant and meticulous piece of filmmaking, an homage to existential driving movies of the ’70s like Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point and Walter Hill’s The Driver. Refn — the Danish-born director who may be best known for his Pusher trilogy — understands the heart of his hero, a maestro who coaxes music from the gas pedal. The action sequences serve the conception of the character, not the other way around, an important distinction to be made in a time where there’s an undistinguished action movie being released almost every week. (The screenplay is by Hossein Amini, from James Sallis’s novel.) Drive has a pulse, a soul and a style — three elements that don’t always come together in contemporary entertainment — and they’re all channeled though the conduit known as Gosling.
We know Gosling’s character only as Driver, a laconic man of action whose very name doubles as…
Full Story »
