Film Freak Central

Umberto D. (1952) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari, Ileana Simova
screenplay by Cesare Zavattini
directed by Vittorio De Sica

by Walter Chaw Though he's best known for The Bicycle Thief, Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. is, to my mind, the superior film, and ultimately one of the few pictures I've ever revisited from the era of Italian Neo-Realism--a movement I've never particularly understood nor, indeed, liked. It's possible that there's not much to understand, that as a reaction to the execution of Mussolini and during that brief "Italian Spring," Italian cinema, freed by necessity from the studio and looking to present a more authentic representation of the country's broken cities (film critics were to blame for the movement, of course, as they would later be for the French Nouvelle Vague), found non-professional actors to play out social melodramas. I wonder if I've always bristled at the notion that the Giuseppe De Santises and Luchino Viscontis produced during this time were anything like "realism" as I understood it; when I was first introduced to American films noir, I had no idea they were as stylized as they were because of an attempt at "realism," too. Whatever the case, I see Umberto D. as something like an early Fellini, like La Strada or even 8½: There's something that feels very much like a humanistic solipsism at its middle. Which is so much more interesting than the cries for social equality that inevitably turn to plaintive keening in my ear. Sometimes liberals damage their own cause--long-held close-ups of crying children have a way of doing that.

Shallow Grave (1995) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston, Ewan McGregor, Ken Stott
screenplay by John Hodge
directed by Danny Boyle

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by Jefferson Robbins The title, in retrospect, is an indictment. Danny Boyle's debut feature Shallow Grave made a splash both in the UK and abroad, but his flatmate protagonists are so thin and hastily sketched, their interfaces with the world beyond their stylish fourth-floor walk-up so glancing and limited, that even the inevitable comeuppances for their bad behaviour don't interest us much. When three striving young Edinburgh roommates happen into a questionable cash windfall and run afoul of brutal gangsters and nosy coppers, the real marvel is that we're buffaloed into caring by some forthright performances and by Boyle's visually striking helmsmanship. The characters' motivations beyond the suitcase MacGuffin are pretty much absent: They're fatally shallow, with grave consequences. Boyle misdirects us away from these concerns, already hinting towards the vertiginous risks he'd take two years later with Trainspotting (there's even a creepy animated baby, of a sort), and his cast is frighteningly talented and appealing. Yet it's hard to shake the notion that we've unwrapped a prettily-wrapped gift package containing nothing but socks.

Rosetta (1999) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet, Anne Yernaux
written and directed by Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne

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by Bryant Frazer If there were any doubt that the Dardennes discovered what would be their lasting aesthetic with La promesse, it was dispelled in the opening moments of Rosetta. The earlier film spent a lot of time following characters around, hovering behind them as they made their way through their world. As Rosetta begins, we're again in close to a character, but this time we have a velocity: The girl, Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne), is storming from room to room in some kind of industrial facility, and the Dardennes' camera is following her at speed. This isn't a virtuoso tracking shot out of Scorsese or P.T. Anderson, though; Rosetta isn't accommodating the camera. When she exits a room, she slams the door behind her and the camera is caught up short, forcing an edit. When she erupts onto a factory floor, she ducks underneath the machinery, making her own passageways where the camera cannot go, and again forcing a cut. We are not welcome to follow.

In the Mood for Love (2000) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk
written and directed by Wong Kar-wai

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by Walter Chaw The middle film in a loose trilogy by Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar-wai (the others are Days of Being Wild and 2046), In the Mood for Love is a love-drunk ode to the confusion, the intoxication, the magic, and the tragedy of being in love. It speaks in terms proximate and eternal, presenting lovers cast in various roles across years and alien geographies, placing some objects in the position of totem and memento and others in historical dustbins to be abandoned, forgotten. It links the act of watching a film to the act of seduction (Days of Being Wild might be even better at this), and there's a strong sense in In the Mood for Love that Wong is playing the artifactor of both sign and signifier: He's doing the T.S. Eliot two-step of authoring Prufrock while simultaneously providing the distance to criticize it.

The War Room (1993) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
directed by Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker

by Angelo Muredda "When I think of an old calendar, I see George Bush's face on it." How things have changed since lead Democratic strategist James Carville made that case against then-incumbent President George H.W. Bush in the winter of 1992, long before the rise of Dubya necessitated the use of such cumbersome initials. The War Room, a fly-on-the-wall account of the wildly successful but not always charmed Bill Clinton campaign from the POV of his key operatives, now feels like a time-capsule itself, an old calendar from an era before the internet and Super PACs radically changed the way presidential campaigns were run from moment to moment. Far from feeling hopelessly outdated, though, Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker's unofficial sequel to Pennebaker's work on Primary, which followed JFK's vanquishing of opponent Hubert Humphrey, is an illuminating look at how one of the most successful national campaigns in modern electoral history was waged from an unassuming office in Little Rock, Arkansas.

La promesse (1996) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jérémie Renier, Olivier Gourmet, Assita Ouedraogo, Rasmane Ouedraogo
written and directed by Luc Dardenne & Jean-Pierre Dardenne

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by Bryant Frazer Since the mid-1990s, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have been the standard-bearers for French-language Belgian cinema. Born in Engis and raised in nearby Seraing (both located in the industrial Belgian province of Liège), the Dardennes started making documentaries in the 1970s, followed by a pair of narrative films they immediately disavowed. 1996's La promesse was a completely fresh start. The Dardennes' non-fiction work demonstrated a social consciousness that remained in effect once they found their narrative voice, and it's amazing how fully realized this effort is, exhibiting many of the formal strategies and much of the narrative sensibility that would serve them well over the next decade and a half.

Gray's Anatomy (1996) [The Criterion Collection] + And Everything is Going Fine (2010) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Discs

GRAY'S ANATOMY
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
directed by Steven Soderbergh

A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN THEATER
***½/****
directed by Skip Blumberg

AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE
****/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras A
directed by Steven Soderbergh 

SEX AND DEATH TO THE AGE 14
***/****
directed by Dan Weissman and Brad Ricker

by Walter Chaw The first ten minutes of Steven Soderbergh's Gray's Anatomy are obnoxious, and though there are few artists as interesting to me or as influential in my own life as Spalding Gray, the last 109 don't exactly blow my skirt up, either. Let me back up. I tripped over Swimming to Cambodia in English class, Freshman year, then procured my own copy at Boulder's invaluable The Video Station so that I could go back to it and, sure, impress Liberal Arts girls with it on a double-bill with Stop Making Sense. You might say that Gray and David Byrne were my wing-men for a couple of years there; it's fitting that my VHS copies of both those pieces are now and forever in the possession of ex-girlfriends and love interests. I wonder if I would ask for the tapes back were I to run into them again. I know that one of them, after I was married, tried to return Swimming to Cambodia, and I asked her to please keep it. If you don't know what Swimming to Cambodia is, it's Spalding Gray's unbelievably great performance-"monolog" about his time on set, on location, shooting Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields. I've never heard Joffe speak, but I have Gray's impersonation of Joffe--calling out to a tripping-balls Gray, floating in shark-infested surf in the South China Sea--lodged in my brain. I pull it out once in a while at a party, just as a sonar ping to see if anyone could possibly identify the echo of the echo.

Identification of a Woman (1982) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Identificazione di una donna
***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras D
starring Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, Christine Boisson, Lara Wendel
screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni & Gérard Brach
directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Angelo Muredda When SIGHT & SOUND announced the long-awaited results of their 2012 critics poll earlier this month, the Internet was abuzz with the shifting fortunes of Citizen Kane and Vertigo--the flip-flop heard 'round the world. Less noted was the latest demotion of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, which debuted at a startling second place in 1962's poll (the film was only two years old at that point), then steadily declined with each decade before landing at number 21 on the most recent survey. What to make of this seemingly calamitous downward shift? Probably not much. Like fellow countryman Federico Fellini, who's also been increasingly received as a curio despite the continued respect for 8½ (particularly among directors), Antonioni's canonical films are stamped by their era; L'Avventura's downgraded fortune likely says as much about the limited shelf life of European modernism--which its cool classicism and intellectual rigor so fully embodies--as it does about the film itself.

Summer with Monika (1953) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Sommaren med Monika
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Harriet Andersson, Lars Ekborg, Dagmar Ebbesen, Åke Fridell
screenplay by Per Anders Fogelström
directed by Ingmar Bergman

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by Bryant Frazer In the annals of Early Bergman, Summer with Monika is The Big One--the international hit that established the striving Swede's cred as a major filmmaker. The irony is that it's among the slightest of his works. Its notoriety is mainly the result of a promotional campaign selling it as a sex film, using imagery that suggested a nudie pic rather than a melancholy (and cautionary) rumination on life, love, and gender relations. Of course, it wasn't just the trenchcoat brigade that turned out in force for a movie that was at one point evocatively retitled Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl(!). In fact, Monika was the one that made Woody Allen a lifelong Bergman fan. And it left a huge impression on Jean-Luc Godard, who, in 1958, wrote that Monika is "the most original film by the most original of directors," arguing that Bergman's loving photography of Harriet Andersson predated (and thus eclipsed) Fellini's widely lauded use of Guiletta Masina in a neo-realist mode in Nights of Cabiria, and that it surpassed in craft (mais oui!) Roger Vadim's employment of Bardot in And God Created Woman.

Summer Interlude (1951) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Sommarlek
***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras D
starring Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjelin, Annalisa Ericson
screenplay by Herbert Grevenius and Ingmar Bergman
directed by Ingmar Bergman 

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by Bryant Frazer 1951's Summer Interlude offers a glimpse of Ingmar Bergman's later career in embryonic form. Maj-Britt Nilsson plays a sexy, precocious teenager in love, and if that doesn't sound very Bergman-esque to you, know that she also plays a wary, regretful dancer approaching the functional end of her career at the Stockholm Royal Opera. The story darts forwards and backwards in time as the dancer, Marie, recalls an ill-fated love affair on the Stockholm archipelago while considering the status of her current relationship, a tentative affair with a newspaper hack who doesn't deserve her.