Breaking the Line

Ride With the Devil Gets Back in the Saddle

 
A decade is a fairly short window for the Los Angeles Times' "Second Look" column, but Ang Lee's Ride With the Devil is a special case. Originally released in 1999,the heavily promoted Civil War epic film sank like a stone, earning just north of $600,000 on a $35 million budget. The likely culprit is mismarketing, given that the film was sold as a kind of upmarket Young Guns, keyed on the romance between then-heartthrob Skeet Ulrich and then-someone-people-cared-about singer Jewel — evidently a sexier image than the movie's core relationship between first-generation immigrant Tobey Maguire and freed slave Jeffrey Wright. The fact that the ad campaign has long since vanished into the mists is probably more important to the film's reevaluation than the fact that Lee has reintegrated 13 minutes of cut scenes that, while inessential, help flesh out the movie's context. My Times piece on Criterion's Blu-ray is here. Since we're cranking up the WABAC machine, I've also dug out a link to my 1999 interview with the film's cast and crew, from the Philadelphia City Paper. That one is here.

David Milch: "The Jungle Will Find Out What You're Doing There"

In this week's A.V. Club Q&A, "Life-Changing Art," I write about the formative influence of Pauline Kael, as passed on by my high-school reading of her final collection, Movie Love. Kael wasn't the first critic to make an impression on me — I read Canby and Maslin in the New York Times every week growing up, as well as Roger Ebert, who was syndicated in my local paper — but she embodied the power of a persuasive and passionate writer to transform your understanding of a work of art. I didn't need to know who Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot was to know that comparing him to John Cusack's character in say anything... was a radical act. (Almost 20 years later, I got to discuss Kael's review with the film's writer-director, Cameron Crowe — one of the best parts about being a writer is how many of your obsessions eventually pay off.)

A similarly pivotal event transpired four years later, thanks to the man pictured above. I was raised in a house where we were allowed to watch television only on the weekends, not because my parents were intellectuals or Luddites, but because it seemed like the sort of thing responsible parents should do. The weren't totally opposed to the medium — my mother taped nearly every episode of Twin Peaks for me — but my exposure to anything beyond Murder She Wrote (Sundays, just after 60 Minutes) and an orgy of Saturday morning cartoons was severely circumscribed. It stayed that way until my last summer of college, which I spent living alone in the Philadelphia suburbs with only a 13-inch TV and a mumbling philosophy student for company. Lo and behold, there was good stuff on TV. Really good stuff, in fact — better than most of the movies I'd seen. At the very top of the list was NYPD Blue, then entering its second season. Put simply, the show blew my mind, to the point where I'd regale anyone who'd listen, or pretend to, about the quality of acting on the small screen and why serialized drama was the best (and really only appropriate) use of the medium.

I don't blame David Milch for my insufferable blathering (then or now). But I did finally get the chance, in an interview for the Philadelphia City Paper, to thank him for singlehandedly inspiring me to take television seriously, as well as having a hand in some of the finest hours it's even been my pleasure to watch. Between Blue, Deadwood, and his seasons of Hill Street Blues — I'll even cop to enjoying John From Cincinnati, although damned if I know what it was all about — the man has been behind a truckload of righteously excellent TV. And there's more to come: He's currently shooting Luck, an HBO pilot directed by Michael Mann and starring Dustin Hoffman as a compulsive gambler. The occasion for our talk was Milch's visit to the Kelly Writers House on the University of Pennsylvania campus this coming Monday and Tuesday for an evening lecture and brunch conversation. Both are free, but reservations are required. If you can't make it, both will be broadcast live and archived for later consumption. UPDATE: The evening talk is now full, but you can still watch online.

Revisting "Battleship Potemkin": Marxism Meets Melodrama

 
I have been a bad, bad blogger of late, but I'll be playing catchup all week and hope to be back to regular (or at least greater than biweekly) posting. Let's start with my review of Kino's Battleship Potemkin Blu-Ray in the Los Angeles Times. Like everyone else, I was force-fed Potemkin as an undergrad, deconstructing the "Odessa Steps" sequence (above) shot-by-shot, and I don't mean to suggest that's not a useful practice. But I also think it's important to point out that Eisenstein was as invested in melodrama as he was Marxism, and that the film's most thrilling sequences owe as much to D.W. Griffith as to the theory of montage. If that sounds intriguing rather than appalling, please, click away.

Philadelphia Film Festival "Preview": Banksy, Tilda, Loach and more.

For reasons too complex and too depressing to get into, Philadelphia's film-festival landscape has been in turmoil for the past couple of years. First the 18-year-old Philadelphia Film Festival (originally the Philadelphia Film Festival of World Cinema), split in two, with the PFF's artistic directors — essentially the management of local chain TLA Video — keeping the traditional April dates for what they renamed Cinefest, and the non-profit Philadelphia Film Society keeping the name and moving to the fall. Then, after abruptly closing TLA's flagship South St. store, Cinefest's management announced they were "suspending" this year's Cinefest. (They also recently cancelled the remaining screenings in their French Cinemathèque series, which does not bode well.) Re-enter the PFS, who announced a free "film festival spring preview" on what would have been Cinefest's opening weekend. Given that most if not all of the films being shown over the next three days will have opened theatrically or shown on TV by the fall, the "preview" seems, at least in part, to be a means of occupying Cinefest's landscape without violating whatever legal wrangling was necessary to effectuate the split. 

Regardless, the upshot is a bunch of good movies showing for free, including Luca Guadagnino's Desplechinian I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton as the displaced Russian matriarch of an Italian industrial family, and Ken Loach's Looking for Eric, a tart fable about a depressed postman who takes guidance from a manifestation of former Manchester United star Eric Cantona that hearkens back to the heights of Ladybird, Ladybird and Raining Stones. Those films, along with Kim Ji-Woon's "kimchi Western" The Good, The Bad and the Weird and the Romanian omnibus Tales from the Golden Age, scripted and co-directed by 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days' Cristian Mungiu, are reviewed in the Philadelphia City Paper, along with my colleagues' takes on the Aussie noir The Square — basically a far less prepossessing remake of Blood Simple — and Hoop Dreams documentarian Steve James' portrait of ex-Sixer Allen Iverson, No Crossover. 

A late-breaking addition to the preview weekend, the Sundance hit Exit Through the Gift Shop didn't screen early enough for review, but it's well worth checking out if you can't wait for the film's April 16 opening. Credited as the directing debut of the celebrated and enigmatic street artist Banksy, the documentary began as the work of one Thierry Guetta, a French-born Los Angeles vintage shop owner whose obsession with street art and video documentation yielded thousands of hours of videotape. A charismatic maniac who freely uses the language of addiction to discuss his compulsive filming, Guetta becomes both Boswell and Friday to Banksy, Shepard Fairey and dozens of others, keeping one eye on his viewfinder and the other scanning for the cops as they plaster, paint and glue their works to buildings, overpasses and sidewalk curbs. As self-promoting as Banksy is private (which is not to say Banksy's anonymity isn't its own kind of hype), Guetta takes a step into street art by plastering L.A.'s streets with larger-than-life stencils of himself, his enormous head almost dwarfed by a disproportionately large camera. As Guetta starts to fancy himself as a peer to Banksy and Fairey rather than their faithful sidekick, Exit Through the Gift Shop morphs into an examination of the volatility of contemporary art culture, where the rush to discover the next big thing takes precedence over whether the art in question is any good at all. If not quite up to Amir Bar-Lev's fascinating My Kid Could Paint That, the movie also comes with fewer troubling ethical questions attached.