Breaking the Line

Boardwalk Empire, "Ivory Tower": Cooking With Gas, on a Low Flame

My week two recap of Boardwalk Empire is now up at Salon. (At least for the next several weeks, they'll be up immediately after the first east coast airing, whether or not I get around to linking to them then.) The show is a little steadier on its feet post-pilot, with Terence Winter's old Sopranos colleague Tim Van Patten taking the monocle and jodhpurs from Martin Scorsese. That means fewer flash-freezes and temporal leaps, but also a lot more solid characterization. The show still feels pedantic in its period detail, tacking signifiers like a Ku Klux Klan recruit handing out flyers on the boardwalk onto the beginning and the end of scenes, but then that was a fault of Mad Men's early episodes as well. (Look! Sally's playing with a dry-cleaning bag! They don't clean up after picnics! Oh tempora, o mores!) But the show still feels like it hasn't found its focus. I let HBO's screener DVD play halfway into next week's episode while I was doing some chores, and found that a character I'd assumed to be mere window dressing was the subject of his own scene, which is part of the problem: There are so many characters to maneuver into place that it still feels like we're engaged in an act of faith, with the consequences for not paying it off growing steeper each week. A lot of the substance is engaging on its own — although sweet Jesus did they rip off The Remains of the Day this week — but a better sense of where we're going would make the journey seem a whole lot shorter.

Enter the Void With Gaspar Noe: "Even myself, when I get into the movie, I feel I'm stoned."

 
What's not to love about Gaspar Noé? Well, a lot. The French director makes deliberately abrasive movies full of brutal violence and explicit sex, with retina-searing visuals and droning soundtracks that drill right through your skull. His previous feature, Irreversible, hinged on a 10-minute rape scene filmed in a single grimy low-angle shot, a tactic that, depending on who you ask, either brought home the appalling violence of the act with unprecedented force or served as wank material for sexual deviants. His new feature, Enter the Void, is his most concentrated and sustained provocation yet, two and a half hours (in its uncut version) of strobelit psychedelic madness, much of it filmed from the perspective of a disembodied spirit. It's an endurance test by design, even minus the reel subtracted at the request of his American distributor, but sticking it out will get you a cinematic experience that, love or hate, you will not soon forget.

I've written about the film before, and will review it at greater length when it opens in Philadelphia next month. But my interview with Noé, conducted at Sundance in January, is up at the A.V. Club now, and it's a fantastically entertaining read. In person, Noé is the opposite of pretentious, to the extent of sounding a bit like an idiot savant: Name another significant filmmaker who would describe a sequence thusly: "You see the abortion, and the camera flies through and hits the fetus and gets into another dimension or whatever." (The description, sadly, concerns the reel missing from the U.S. version, which Noé describes in extensive if marginally comprehensible detail.) 

Like Harmony Korine, and most of the self-styled bad boys I've talked to, he's totally personable in the flesh. (I hope someday to put that theory to the ultimate test when I talk to Vincent Gallo.) If it's not too faint a compliment, he's a lot less of an asshole than you'd think. For those in the New York area who wish to test that theory, Noé and star Nathan Brown will host screenings at the IFC Center on Saturday and Sunday nights.

Catfish: A Better Facebook Movie Than The Social Network

In what may be the canniest non-marketing since The Crying Game, the distributor of Catfish has been pushing the film with the line "Don't let anyone tell you what it is." But truthfully, while the documentary has its twists and turns, it's hardly so surprising that merely knowing its outlines would ruin it for you. Click through to my Philadelphia City Paper review, but before you do, a few thoughts on the relationship between Catfish and that other social networking movie, which I'll be reviewing properly next week.

In essence, Catfish is a story about digital deception, about the carefully controlled and often contrived exhibition that passes for openness on the 'net. Sure, Facebook lets you "share" information about yourself (and often shares it without you telling it to), but it only knows what you tell it, which means that what appears as a snapshot of your life could as easily be a complete fabrication, and is almost certainly less truthful. Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook page says he's trying to "make the world a more open place," but does anyone believe, even for a second, that's what he wants, or that's what Facebook does?

Catfish hinges on the often unearned trust we place in people's online personae, as well as the equally speculative trust documentary subjects place in the people filming them. (In Catfish, the principle subject's brother is one of the filmmakers, and the relationship is still far from transparent.) For all its slick Fincherisms, The Social Network boils down to yet another story about people fucking each other over for money, which they've been doing since people used livestock for currency. The piddling observations of Aaron Sorkin's script barely qualify it as the defining movie of the week, let alone the decade. From a filmmaking standpoint, Catfish can't hold a candle to the surprisingly light, almost jazzy style Fincher brings to The Social Network. But Catfish is the more perceptive and intriguing movie by far, and the one you're more likely to see people arguing about in the aisles as the lights come up.

Toronto Film Fest 2010: Meek's Cutoff Leads a Lackluster Year (Plus Philadelphia Film Fest Preview) UPDATED

I normally think it's presumptuous to pass judgement on film festivals as a whole. With only a handful of exceptions, even the lowliest of fests packs more films into each day than anyone can possibly see, so even if you see nothing but lousy movies, there's always the chance that the fault lies with your selections rather than the programmers' choices. But as days went by at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, I searched in vain for someone who was having a better festival than mine, which was composed of a lot of middling stuff, a few outright stinkers, and a small handful of good-verging-on-great. I found no one. Only towards the very end of my week-long trip, which included nearly three dozen movies, did the enthusiasm level start to rise, due largely to Kelly Reichardt's lyrical anti-Western Meek's Cutoff and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Uncle Boonmee has proven elusive for me; I skipped it at Toronto, planning to catch the press screening at the New York Film Festival, which I then got shut out of. Luckily it's part of the just-announced lineup for the Philadelphia Film Festival, which also includes a number of movies I saw at Toronto and a few I regretted missing. Short takes on the opening and closing night movies, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan and Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, figure in my TIFF overview for the Philadelphia City Paper, although I would have devoted less space to those titles had the PFF lineup been announced a few days earlier. I also fell hard for the aforementioned Meek's Cutoff, which I think I'll like even more the next time around (and when I'm not at the fag-end of a week where I never got more than 6 hours sleep a night), and James Gunn's delightful Super, a blackly comic superhero story that, to put it bluntly, kicks Kick-Ass's ass.

This fall's PFF marks the debut of the festival's new programming team, which includes Ryan Werner and Tom Quinn, better known for their day jobs at IFC and Magnolia, respectively. Not surprisingly, the 107-film slate includes generous helping from both distributors' slates: Five from Magnolia, mostly in the midnight movies section, and a whopping 16 (out of 95 total) from IFC. To be sure, IFC owns a hell of a lot of films, and of those I've seen, there are none whose inclusion I'd quarrel with. Werner and Quinn have definitely adopted more of a "best of the fests" approach, cherry-picking many of the better-received titles from Cannes and Toronto, but considering how frequently the festival's former programmers would pass over, say, the new films from Godard or Weerasethakul, I'm only too happy to have Uncle Boonmee and Film Socialisme pay a visit (although the latter is going to leave a lot more people frustrated than intrigued).

What's more interesting than the expected surfeit of IFC and Magnolia titles is which distributors' films aren't in the festival. Most notably, Sony Classics scored a big fat goose egg, which is the first time in memory that one of their prestige titles hasn't occupied a prominent slot, and Fox Searchlight has only three, all carryovers from Toronto. The Weinstein Company has two, and Miramax scores another zero. Compare that to four films from tiny Strand and four from even tinier Film Movement. 

Just to be clear: No one is suffering from having to wait a few months to see The King's Speech, which won Toronto's audience award but sounds like a middlebrow special. But it's worth noting that some of IFC and Magnolia's bigger competitors have effectively been shut out of what is now the city's only major film festival, while their smaller brethren move towards the head of the table. The list of titles I'm excited to see at this year's PFF — including Le Quatro Volte, Heartbeats, The Housemaid, How to Fold a Flag, Lebanon, PA, A Screaming Man, Serbian Film, Tiny Furniture and We Are Who We Are — is longer than ever. But so is the list of movies I've already seen. 

UPDATE: PFF Executive Director J. Andrew Greenblatt got in touch to clarify a few issues (and correct my faulty addition skills; the size of this year's slate is actually 107 films, which I've corrected above). His response read, in part:

Regarding the lack of Sony Pictures Classics films in the Festival, we love their films and certainly wanted to feature them in the Festival.  I believe we invited 6 of their films, but unfortunately were unable to program any.  Hopefully we'll have them next year.  We programmed all the films Fox Searchlight had available this year (3), and also invited more films from the Weinstein Company and Miramax, but were unable to secure them prior to schedule-lock.  That said, we are extremely proud of our line-up, and are very excited to present these fantastic films to Philadelphia.

Boardwalk Empire, "Pilot": Welcome to Nucky's

The first of my weekly Boardwalk Empire recaps is up at Salon, where I take a gander at the pilot episode of HBO's costly and heavily promoted new series, directed by a scrappy young tyke named Marty Scorsese. Even on the low-quality DVDs sent out in advance (grrr), the scope of the production is stunning; $5 million was spent on the recreation of the Atlantic City boardwalk, circa 1920, alone. But still and all, it's a pilot, which means that there are lots of scenes that essentially consist of characters introducing themselves to one another and explaining things only the audience needs explained. (My friend Noel Murray nailed it with this only slightly exaggerated dialogue snippet: “Gentleman, thanks to prohibition we’ll be able to charge more for illegal booze and we’ll all get rich! By the way, I’m the city treasurer, you’re the mayor, and that guy over there’s my brother.") Scorsese deploys an arsenal of iris-ins, freeze-frames, temporal jumps and cross-cut action sequences  — if it were any other director, the similarities to Goodfellas would constitute an inexcusable ripoff — but in essence, the point of the pilot is still to get people to tune in for the second episode. Go back some day and watch the first episode of any show you've grown to love, and you'll be surprised at how off it seems. No matter how experienced the talent (and Boardwalk creator Terence Winter is a veteran of The Sopranos), it always feels like they're just getting their feet wet. The mechanics can certainly be handled more gracefully — the Breaking Bad pilot is an object lesson in how to structure exposition that doesn't feel like exposition — but there's plenty in Boardwalk's opening salvo to merit a follow-up visit.

I'm Still Here: Define "I," and "Here."

Is it real? I don't know. But I'm Still Here, Casey Affleck's maybe-kinda documentary about Joaquin Phoenix's decision to give up acting for rap, isn't entirely fake, no matter how sincere Phoenix's pursuit of hip-hop stardom may or may not be. Here in Toronto, press releases have been flying with regard to the alleged presence of a "Joaquin Phoenix impersonator" (bet he's fun at parties) who is supposed to be performing sometime after midnight tonight. Score one for team hoax.

But even if Phoenix's embrace of terrible, terrible rap music is some kind of elaborate gag, he's still a nutbar; in fact, I'd argue that he's even crazier if it's a put-on than if it's legit. It's one thing to abandon a promising career — all but obliterating one of his best performances in James Gray's Two Lovers, the movie Phoenix was ostensibly promoting when he had his notorious meltdown on David Letterman's show — to follow a passion project, no matter how cock-eyed it may be. But to do it for some kind of abstruse conceptual prank? Now that's wacko.

More along those lines in my Philly City Paper review. If you see the film, keep your eyes peeled for my second cousin Larry, once the Phoenix family nanny and now one of Phoenix's retinue of professional minders. Can't say based on the evidence that he's doing a bang-up job keeping his boss out of trouble, but it's good to see him anyway.

Metallica: Next Stop, Shitsville

I don't often post links to the A.V. Club's weekly Q&A feature, since my contributions tend to be a small fraction of the whole. But in this case, my answer to the question of which artists have the biggest gap between their best output and their worst prompted a response that clued me into something well worth sharing. Going after Metallica's recent output isn't exactly back-breaking labor, and I knew that there were some fans who parted company with the back as far back as their self-titled "black album." But I didn't know that some pulled the ripcord with ...and Justice for All, which I thought was their unassailed masterpiece, or that their complaints centered on the (supposedly) spiteful removal of departed bassist Jason Newsted's tracks from the final mix. That in turn led to the mention of "...and Justice for Jason," a fanmade corrective which adds in, depending on the source, either the isolated and amped-up bass tracks from Metallica' edition of Rock Band or new parts played by a 17-year-old metal aficionado. Not surprisingly given the band's generally poopy attitude towards music-sharing, a lot of the online links to the "...Jason" recordings hit dead ends, but a few are up on YouTube. Enjoy, and crank up the low end.

Jimmy Webb: From 'MacArthur Park' to Outer Space

Like half the other film writers in the northern hemisphere, I'm headed off to Toronto Film Festival this afternoon, so posting will be light for the next week. (If you care to follow my adventures in the world of TIFF, may I suggest my Twitter feed.) Before I go, though, I'll point to a handful of articles I've neglected in recent days, and week. First up, my interview with songwriter Jimmy Webb for the A.V. Club, which ranges from his recent album Just Across the River to the days when he was growing up in Cheyenne, Oklahoma as the son of a Baptist preacher, sneaking out of the house to play gigs at night. Among the most fascinating finds for me is that the man behind "Wichita Lineman" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (not to mention "Up, Up and Away" and "Worst That Could Happen") was a teenage science fiction fan, which explains why he nicked the title of a novel by Stranger in a Strange Land's Robert Heinlein for his song "The Moon's a Harsh Mistress." (If you ever need to connect the author of Starship Troopers and Judy Collins in two steps, that's how to do it.) Despite being one of the most lauded and commercial successful songwriters of his generation, it's obvious Webb is still stung by the accusations of critics, particularly with regard to his landmark production "MacArthur Park," a seven-minute baroque suite that became an unlikely single and even more so hit when recorded by the outsize actor Richard Harris. Webb took a shellacking for the song's lyrical overkill and purported obscurity, and when he's in defensive mode, he claims it was about nothing at all, but when you know the title comes from the place where he used to wait for his girlfriend to get off work, the imagery falls neatly into line. Also in the A.V. Club interview, he talks about scoring Frank Perry's overlooked anti-Western "Doc" and his relationship with fellow songwriter P.F. Sloan, who he turned into a flesh-and-blood metaphor for the transience of pop stardom.

The Tillman Story: The Outrage Keeps on Coming

I'm not one of those "You owe it to yourself to watch this movie" people; it feels too much like you're doing the advertising department's work for them. Put it this way: I'll be mad if you don't see The Tillman Story. I thought what I knew about the cover-up of former NFL star Pat Tillman's combat death in Afghanistan, how the military circulated disinformation to disguise the fact that he was a victim of friendly fire, was bad enough, but in Amir Bar-Lev's deeply enraging documentary, it gets worse. It turns out, based on interviews with soldiers from Tillman's unit, that his death was less a consequence of the fog of war than it was the posturing of gung-ho troops more eager to participate in a potential firefight than to be sure what they were shooting at. Not only did they fire once at Tillman, who had gone ahead and doubled back to check on troops stuck fixing a broken Humvee, but they fired, repositioned themselves to get a better shot, and opened fire again. The documentary's original title, I'm Pat Fucking Tillman, reflects Tillman's last words, an anguished and disbelieving plea that no one stopped shooting long enough to hear.

I didn't have much space for my review in the Philadelphia City Paper, but I hope it's enough to spur you to keep an eye out for this essential documentary when it comes your way. You owe it to yourself.

 

The American: George Clooney's Old Soldier Among His Soulful Best

Given that Focus Features held Anton Corbijn's moody thriller The American back from critics until two days before its opening, and that said opening falls into the back hole of the Labor Day weekend, the natural assumption is that it's a dog. That's wrong. Corbijn's movie may not be what Focus was banking on, and perhaps after The Limits of Control  they're wary of arty movies about taciturn killers, but The American is a respectable and sometimes moving piece of work, anchored by one of George Clooney's most soulful performances. More in that vein in my Salon review, where I argue that the movie's schematic, almost off-the-shelf plot is one of the things that makes it most enthralling.