****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B starring Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue written and directed by Leos Carax
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by Angelo Muredda It's no great shock that Holy Motors is innovative, coming from
the same headspace as The Lovers on the
Bridge and Mauvais Sang--movies
that seemed fashioned out of whole cloth despite their indebtedness to names
like David Bowie and Herman Melville. What's most surprising is that beneath
the formal variety and cheekiness, mainstays of Leos Carax's freewheeling cinema,
is a moving and altogether serious exploration of what it means to be an actor,
in both a professional and a metaphysical sense. Carax's films have been ranked
among the boldest aesthetic manifestos since the 1980s for good reason, yet the
ineffable quality that distinguishes them from the superficially similar
grandstanding of nascent stylists like Xavier Dolan is their deep sincerity and
unabashed adoration of the eccentric city-dwellers who cross paths on the
loneliest roads in urban France. If Holy
Motors is even wilder in presentation than its predecessors, then, it's
also perfectly legible within a body of work that's always found a human streak
in the avant-garde.
**/**** Image
B Sound B starring Takeshi Kitano, Kotomi Kyono, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano
by Walter Chaw
Midway between Fellini's 8½ and Bob Fosse's All
That Jazz is Japanese auteur Takeshi Kitano's Takeshis',
a film that indicates with its possessive title that it belongs to both
the director (Takeshi Kitano) and star ("Beat" Takeshi); acknowledging
that they're one and the same (Kitano is billed as the former when he
directs, the latter when he performs), they each have a function and
persona unique unto themselves. The burden of that division, which
Takeshi has taken on since midway through Violent Cop,
is illustrated in the picture as a series of fractures that meld
reality with televisual reality and filmic reality--nothing so
ostentatious as Sven Nykvist and Ingmar Bergman reflected in a mirror
in Persona, but going so far as to have "Beat"
Takeshi, dressed as a clown, refer to Takeshi Kitano as "that asshole."
The omniscience of the director is referred to often in the text as
casting directors (rather, actors playing casting directors, or casting
directors playing themselves) remark that Yakuza never look like Kitano
(who has made something of a name for himself as a Yakuza: he's a
little like the Japanese Robert De Niro)--and yet the central narrative
of the picture then involves the slow evolution of the actor who looks
like Kitano into Takeshi Kitano's Yakuza persona. Kitano is thus
marking the difference between the devices of the director and the
relatively passive objectification that is the primary definition of an
actor--between the godhead inscrutable and the subject humiliated, as
well as the eventual bleed-through between the roles actors assume and
the mold into which perception forces them.
KOYAANISQATSI (1983) ***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+ directed by Godfrey Reggio
POWAQQATSI (1988) **/**** Image A Sound A Extras B directed by Godfrey Reggio
NAQOYQATSI (2002) ½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B- written and directed by Godfrey Reggio
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by Bryant Frazer There's nothing quite
like Koyaanisqatsi. Some six or seven years in the making, the mid-1980s
arthouse favourite was a genuine screen spectacle that gave audiences a taste
of the avant-garde and elevated Philip Glass to the status of popular
musician. It's the 1970s brainchild of Godfrey Reggio, a progressive activist
and community organizer who lived in New Mexico and took a dim view of
industrialization in general and the information revolution in particular.
Accordingly, it exalts the natural landscape, recoils from the computer-chip
gridwork of the modern city, and wallows piteously in the human condition.
****/**** directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
by Angelo Muredda What is there to say about Leviathan, a nearly-wordless
maelstrom of ravenous seagulls, blood-red waves, and severed fish-heads piled
to the horizon? Colleagues at Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, directors
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel take the sensory as seriously as the
ethnography here, producing a truly singular documentary account of a
commercial fishing vessel off the New Bedford coast that puts the so-called
immersive quality of 3-D baubles like Avatar to shame. Their work more than lives
up to the biblical title, delivering what might be described as a fish-eye view
of the Apocalypse.
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK. **½/****
starring David Strathairn, Patricia Clarkson, George Clooney, Jeff Daniels
screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney
DOMINO ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo
screenplay by Richard Kelly
directed by Tony Scott
by Walter Chaw Rigorous and principled, George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. is a curiously slight film for more reasons than the fact that almost a third of it is comprised of archival footage integrated semi-successfully into the story. It's a recreation of a very specific battle in a very specific war that resonates with our Patriot Act/Guantanamo Bay situation, and indeed, that's the target Clooney seems most interested in striking. But without a larger context (the sort that would have weakened its allegorical usefulness), the picture sets itself up as something as obvious as it is minor and feather-light. It's a professional, high-minded, and staid biopic is what I'm saying, a film that says what it says with the stark B&W cinematography of a Dr. Strangelove, but in its icy, humourless way, it's the same stark B&W cinematography of a Fail-Safe, too. It's close and under-populated--and even with so insular and finely-focused a spotlight, it contains at least two completely superfluous characters.
by Bryant Frazer The avant-garde in film has always had an uneasy relationship with home video. Grainy old VHS tape of works by luminaries like Bruce Conner or Kenneth Anger might have made the texts themselves available for more careful study by a larger audience, but the picture quality compromised the work tremendously. The arrival of DVD technology allowed for a better visual representation, yet brought with it certain dangers. For one thing, there's a moral issue: Filmmakers who had objections to the commodification of art and culture were put on the spot as their once-ephemeral films were transferred to a new medium that was easy for an individual consumer to purchase and own. There's also an aesthetic issue. No matter how close a video transfer gets to the visual qualities of a projected film--and a good transfer to Blu-ray can get very close indeed--a video image is not a film image. For avant-garde filmmakers, and especially for so-called "structural" filmmakers like the late Hollis Frampton, for whom film itself was subject, text, and subtext, the difference is key.
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