Breaking the Line

Jonathan Demme: "It'd be fun to get all stylish again."

 
Neil Young Trunk Show widens its release this week, and my interview with director Jonathan Demme is up at the A.V. Club. In addition to his fiction films (The SIlence of the Lambs,Something Wild et al.) Demme has a sporadic but fruitful sideline in performance films, including the epochal Stop Making Sense and the delightful Storefront Hitchcock. Demme's career is too big to take on in a single interview, so our hour-long talk focused mainly on his documentaries, which have become a more regular occurrence in the last decade or so. Not surprisingly, the ease of shooting on the fly with small digital cameras is a big part of the appeal after large-scale (and comcomitantly moribund) studio movies like The Manchurian Candidate, a style that carried over to the making of Rachel Getting Married. Based on our talk, though, it seems like Demme's ready for the pendulum to swing back in the direction of lighting schemes and tracking shots — or, in the case of adapting Dave Eggers' post-Katrina novel, Zeitoun, animation. Should be interesting to see what comes next.

In Theaters: Bluebeard and Terribly Happy

This week, in the A.V. Club and the City Paper, I review Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard, a characteristically provocative take on the Charles Perrault fable, and Henrik Ruben Ganz's Terribly Happy, which is like a Danish cross between Twin Peaks and The Wicker Man.

Bunch of short posts on the way today as I play catchup. More tk soon. 

Greta Gerwig on her Greenberg character: "Life has not hardened her for some reason"

If you know Greta Gerwig — and if you're reading this, the chances are good — it's as the "queen of mumblecore," the dubious appellation bestowed on her for her leading roles in Hannah Takes the Stairs, Baghead and Nights and Weekends. There's little mumbling in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg, a modest film which nonetheless for Gerwig represents a major stride toward the mainstream. Baumbach opens the film with an extended closeup of Gerwig's profile as she navigates through Los Angeles traffic, her eyes flitting from road to rearview mirror and back, occasionally murmuring as she tries to change lanes, "Are you going to let me in?" It's a totally unremarkable activity, the kind Angelenos engage in on a daily basis, and one that most people never give more than a passing thought. But there's an engrossing ease to Gerwig's presence, one that makes her compelling not matter how little she's doing. I could watch her change lanes all day.

A couple of weeks back, Gerwig talked to me on the phone from Brooklyn, and the results are now up at the A.V. Club. We talked Greenberg, of course, as well as her vastly enjoyable role in Ti West's retro-horror The House of the Devil (his take on their collaboration is here), and the future and past of the movement that dare not enunciate its name.

Neil Young Trunk Show: A View From the Floor

 
Neil Young Trunk Show opens today, and my review is in the City Paper. (My A.V. Club interview with director Jonathan Demme will run next week.) But seeing as I was actually present for one of the two shows filmed at Philadelphia's Tower Theater, I thought I'd add a few observations from the 15th row. (NB: Technically, the Tower is just over the border in Upper Darby, PA, but apart from rigging the street-parking regulations so they can rake in the fines from city dwellers, the run-down municipality has little impact on the venue. As Jon Stewart quipped at a show many years ago, "I'd hate to see Lower Darby.") NYTS is the second time a concert I've been to has ended up on the big screen*, and the experience is an odd one. Demme sticks fairly close to the tone of the show, part of a tour (behind the catchall Chrome Dreams II) dedicated to exhuming '70s-era obscurities, including an assortment of still-unrecorded tunes. The concert was rough and spontaneous, and so is the film, which at 82 minutes and fewer than a dozen songs has a somewhat offhand quality. I miss some of the songs Young played on the tour, particularly a full version of the unreleased "Sad Movies," heard in a brief snippet over the opening credits, and I was surprised Demme didn't take greater advantage of the stage show's readymade visual elements. As per the film's title, Young hired painter Eric Johnson to create a canvas incorporating the title of each song in the set list, which he'd embellish in a corner of the stage as Young and band went about their business. It seemed like a gimme that the filmmaker — who I assumed at that point would be Young himself, since Demme's name was absent from the clapper boards, which bore Young's filmic pseudonym, Bernard Shakey — would start each number with a shot of the relevant painting, but instead we catch only a few glimpses of Johnson at work. There's more onscreen art in Demme's Storefront Hitchcock (although not on MGM's pan-and-scan DVD). As a fan who was in the audience, I would have selfishly preferred a more conventional approach, one that captured the show in its entirety rather than one that mixes and matches from both nights. But then, the film is subtitled "Scenes From a Concert," which turns out to be an apt description. You could look at it, I suppose, as a filmic analogue to Young's gargantuan Archives, Vol. 1, with its voluminous but still incomplete record of his first decade, compiled in a manner that encourages and sometimes requires random access. Trunk Show is hardly "Greatest Hits, Live!" but even if you're not familiar with the epic Chrome Dreams II workouts "Spirit Road" and "No Hidden Path," it's worth checking out the film for the 20ish-minute take on the latter alone.

 
*I was also at the Wilson Pickett concert featured in D.A. Pennebaker's Only the Strong Survive, although by the time the film came out, I'd forgotten there were cameras present. I had a strange feeling of déjà vu as I watched the moment where a large and very enthusiastic woman attempts to climb on stage to give Pickett some of her love, but I couldn't figure why it seemed so familiar — until, that is, Pennebaker broke up the action with an audience shot that prominently includes me. (I was in the grip of some unfortunate personal grooming choices at the time, so I'll take the Fifth on exactly which shot I mean.) Up until the moment I saw myself on the screen — which, in this case, was a particularly large one — I'm not even sure I recalled the show, which made the surprise doubly so. I've never watched the Mission of Burma documentary This Is Not a Photograph, but I was in the crowd for that show as well (same venue as well), so there's a chance I may have been filmed by both Pennebaker and Albert Maysles, who was shooting that night. Now if I can just work my way into a Frederick Wiseman film...

Liveage: Low Anthem, Scout Niblett, Sondre Lerche, Black Eyed Peas & Snoop Dogg

I've been horribly remiss in plugging my concert reviews of late (bad self-promoter!), but I'll do my best to make up for it with this mega-post. In reverse chronological order, recent musical forays include:

• NPR's beloved The Low Anthem, who mingle acoustic instruments and cell-phone feedback like nobody's business. Video from that show is at the bottom of this post.
• Scout Niblett, who has apparently ditched her (formerly) ubiquitous wig and now dresses like a middle-school art teacher, but still cranks out ferociously mysterious tunes with heavy doses of PJ Harvey and Cat Power. Video from the Johnny Brenda's show, shot by someone who was apparently standing right next to me, is here.
• Also at Johnny Brenda's, I caught up with Norway's Sondre Lerche, as well as the starry-eyed grad student-types who spent the show mooning over him. Thoughts on Lerche's "Heartbeat Radio" courtesy of an A.V. Club Inventory here.
• All the way at the other end of the spectrum (and the other end of town), I took in the Black Eyed Peas along with some friendly and very drunk college students whose gag reflexes are apparently untroubled by the atrocity of "My Humps."
• Snoop Dogg in a medium-sized club? Yes, please. Covering House of Pain's "Jump Around"? Maybe not.

That's it on the concert beat until next week, when if all goes well [sic], I'll be livin' on a prayer.

On Monsieur Hulot's Holiday

Laziness A busy schedule kept me from writing about Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), while a newly restored print was playing in Philadelphia (my City Paper review is here), but since the new print wasn't actually screened until after deadline, I thought I'd post a few thoughts on my most recent viewing. If memory serves, this is the first time I've seen Holiday since becoming familiar with, and deeply enamored of, his later, more formalist films Mon Oncle (1958) and Play Time (1967), and I saw things in the earlier work I hadn't before. (For completeness' sake, my review of Tati's Trafic is here.) My memory of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday was that it was a delightfully warm and nostalgic snapshot of a small seaside resort, but Tati's repeated use of high angles prefigures the interest in architectural composition that dominates the increasingly pessimistic later films. Even here, though, Hulot is something of an anachronism, driving around in an absurdly antiquated car and embodying a courtly manner that hearkens back to prewar Europe. I'm still not as awed by Hulot as Mon Oncle or Play Time — which I was lucky enough to see in 70mm, an experience that radically transformed my understanding of the film — but the elaborate, improbable construction of Tati's environmental gags is equalled only by the giddy complexity of Buster Keaton's most involved set pieces. The new print is touring the country through July, and the Janus logo on the print indicates that a Criterion Blu-ray is not too far off.

Learning to Love Winsor McCay

Meanwhile, back at the A.V. Club, I provide an introduction — a gateway, if you will — to the great cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay, best known for the Little Nemo in Slumberland strips. A shocking amount of his work has fallen out of print, but I tried to focus on the available and reasonably priced collections that are still easily available, while tipping my hat to Sunday Press' massive (and concomitantly priced) So Many Splendid Sundays and its sequel. McCay was also a pioneering animator who drew every frame by hand, which always makes me think of the Simpsons line about how animation is rarely done live owing to the "terrible strain on the animators' wrists." Below is one example of his talents, adapted from an installment in McCay's strip Dream of a Rarebit Fiend. There's a gratifyingly intelligent discussion going on in the A.V. Club article's comments section, so check that out as well.

Red Riding's Triple Play and A Prophet's Gallic Gangsters

Typepad has apparently eaten — twice — my nice long post prefacing my reviews of the Red Riding trilogy and Jacques Audiard's A Prophet in this week's Philadelphia City Paper, so I'll just link to them without further ado and hope that post floats to the surface some time soon. Grrr.

 

"Alice" Doesn't Live Here Anymore, or Tim Burton's Botch of a Botchness

Given that my mini-jeremiad against Tim Burton is the most clicked-on thing I've posted on this site by a factor of three, I should say something about his most recent atrocity. I thought of using Jan Svankmajer's characteristically brilliant Alice to underline the tepid, neutered quality of Burton's adaptation, but my industrious A.V. Club editor Keith Phipps beat me to it, which just leaves me and Burton, mano à mano.

I should preface by saying that I'm not one who believes that bad adaptations devalue their source material. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are on my shelf right where they've always been. It is truly unfortunate that a good many children will be first exposed to Carroll's work — or at least a shoddy knockoff thereof — through Burton's movie, but perhaps a few of them will seek out the source material and realize what an unholy hash he and screenwriter Linda Woolverton have made of it.

To be fair, Burton's Alice in Wonderland isn't a straight adaptation of Carroll's books, so much as an unauthorized sequel. The colorless Mia Wasikowsa (who nonetheless looks quite fetching in Medieval armor) plays Alice as a not-quite-grownup, a 19-year-old woman on the cusp of adulthood who flees a snot-nosed suitor's marriage proposal and tumbles back down the rabbit hole. (And when I say "snot-nosed," I unfortunately mean that literally: among the many unpleasant attributes Burton heaps on the unlucky fellow are a clenched, plugged-up voice and a perpetually wheezy demeanor.) The story has vague outlines ofMulanesque girl power, but this Alice is so bland she has little potential to realize. I missed the petulant brat of Carroll's books, who at least had a personality, however unpleasant. Alice, it seems, has forgotten everything about her previous trip to Wonderland — or, I should say, Underland, since one of the film's conceits is that the "real" home of the White Rabbit, Red Queen et al. differs in numerous small ways from Carroll's account, as if it the details had gotten fudged in the retelling. 

There's an idea, or the germ of one, here, but all it really does is give the film license to play fast and loose with the source, which generally means strip-mining it for familiar nuggets while showing a complete lack of interest in understanding it. Svankmajer's is hardly a literal adaptation, but it can at least legitimately claim to be inspired by Carroll's work; Burton's Alice is not inspired at all. One niggling detail that stuck jaggedly in my craw: The scaly monster that Alice must slay to complete her generic heroine's quest is called the Jabberwocky — not, as in the book, the Jabberwock. "Jabberwocky" is the name of the poem. It's a small difference, but that's the point. Perhaps the poem's title is more widely known than the creature itself, but surely it would have caused no more than an instant's confusion to call the damn thing by its proper name. Every time one of the movie's characters discusses "the Jabberwocky," it's a reminder of its craven capitulation to popular expectations. God forbid any man, woman or child should engage their brain while lapping up Burton's CGI goo.

The movie has a few bright spots, mainly Helena Bonham Carter's turn as the top-heavy Red Queen. Rather than whooping "Off with their heads!" at every opportunity, she spits out the line in a rapid-fire torrent, as if prolonging the sentence would only delay her morbid pleasure. But the movie is stilted and lifeless, and the actors are enslaved to Burton's prosaic visuals. You can actually see Wasikowska and Anne Hathaway's limbs tremble as they hold awkward poses to match Burton's storyboards. Lewis Carroll's Alice, and Jan Svankmajer's for that matter, are just fine. The only thing Burton has disgraced is himself.

Mother's Bong Joon-Ho: I'd kill for my child, but it would be the perfect murder

In the last couple of days, a number of people have asked what I thought of the Oscars, and the truth is that I didn't much care who won or lost. There are years when I have a dog in the fight — I was pulling for the Coens and for the duo from Once last year — but this wasn't one of them. In the documentary and foreign-language film categories, where the films could most benefit from the recognition, most of the worthy contenders were knocked out by the Academy's nominating process. Now if Bong Joon-Ho's Mother had made it to the final round, then I'd have had something to root for. Best known for the eccentric creature feature The Host, and beloved by fans of South Korean cinema for Memories of Murder and Barking Dogs Never Bite — Bong is a difficult artist to categorize. His films constantly shift shape, and the latest is no exception. It begins as the story of a desperate mother (Kim Hye-Ja) embarking on a desperate quest to clear her retarded son of a murder he did not commit. But no sooner has it established itself as a kind of off-kilter policier than the film begins to shift again, becoming a story of obsessive love and the dark side of maternal instinct. The movie is platforming across the country, opening in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, in Philadelphia March 19, so keep an eye out for it. I talked to Bong for the Onion A.V. Club, and although our interview was conducted over the phone and through a translator, we managed to hit it off despite the layers of mediation. One caveat, which was excised from my introduction: Bong freely discusses several plot twists, so if you like to have your surprises preserved, bookmark and come back later.