Like Anna Karina's Sweater

Chacun son cinéma...excepté les frères Coen

The good news: for those of us who couldn't finagle our way to Cannes this year, there is a way to see Chacun son Cinema (To Each His Own Cinema), the omnibus film commissioned by Gilles Jacob in celebration of the festival's 60th anniversaire. Thirty-three films. Three minutes each. A celebration of cinema itself. An unbelievably impressive roster of international auteurs asked to illustrate "their state of mind at the moment as inspired by the motion picture theater," In other words, stag loops for cinephiles. Released on DVD in France last Friday, the good people at FNAC whisked a copy to my doorstep in a matter of days (albeit with a shipping charge equal to the price of the disc, but, hey...it's worth it.) The bad news (well, for me at least): Of all the films in the programme, the one I was most excited about was World Cinema, from the Coen brothers. It featured Josh Brolin as a cowboy in front of an art house theater, mulling over the decision to see either Renoir's Rules of the Game, or Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates. Coens + my favorite film of 2006 = cinematic gold. (How can it not?) Yet for some unknown, unexplained reason, World Cinema is absent from the DVD. (Close your eyes for a moment and imagine Filmbrain having a mini-tantrum at 2:30 in the morning.) Still, the remaining 32 are all present, with the added bonus of extended versions of Anna (Alejandro González Iñárritu), The Electric Princess Picture (Hou Hsiao-hsien), and No Translation Needed (Michael Cimino). As tempted as I am to watch the entire film in a single sitting, part of me feels I should savor each one slowly, as one would a box of rich, delicate confectioneries. At the moment I've only treated myself to a single film -- Lars von Trier's Occupations, which finds the depressed Dane suffering the boorish shenanigans of a fellow audience member during the black-tie premiere of Manderlay. The outcome is expectedly dark, amusing, and the kind of act many of us have no doubt secretly fantasized about. (Well, maybe not quite as extreme, but there was that one time at Film Forum...)

Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 12, Week 8

Years before she donned her auteur's cap, the littlest Corleone adopted the stage name Domino for her screen appearances (which include 'Little Girl' in The Outsiders, and 'Child in Street' in The Cotton Club.) Her journey to Japan with Bill Murray and the curvaceous Scarlett Johansson resulted in Lost in Translation, the source of last week's quiz. The combination of the Tokyo skyline and the hips of Woody's latest muse must have been a dead giveaway, for few had trouble ID'ing Sofia Coppola's sophomore effort. The holiday weekend clearly mucked with my circadian rhythm, for it was only at 1:30 this morning that I realized I had a quiz to prepare. Oops. This week: with scant preparation time, this is the first title that caught my eye. Too easy? Perhaps. Name the film. Submit your answers to this address. Good luck!

Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 12, Week 7

"You call this a party? The beer is warm, the women cold, and I'm hot under the collar." Just one of many great S.J. Perelman lines from Norman Z. McLeod's (and not Howard Hawks') Monkey Business, one of the classic five features the brothers Marx made for Adolph Zukor's Paramount Pictures. I recently introduced a certain young viewer to all five of these films, and I realized how long it had been since I'd seen them all. Far more anarchic than their later films with MGM, one can almost understand why depression-era audiences never quite took to them. (Thalberg believed Duck Soup's failure was due to its lack of love story.) I'd be hard pressed to choose a favorite, though the Maurice Chevalier sequence from Monkey Business, wherein each of the brothers unsuccessfully attempts to get through immigration with the chanteur's stolen passport by crooning his signature tune, You've Brought a New Kind of Love to Me, might just be one of the best scenes of the lot. This week: a film I may have used in an earlier round -- I honestly can't recall. What I do remember is arguing about the film on its opening night with an extremely opinionated Frenchman over way too many martinis. Ahh....those were the days. Name the film. (Special Filmbrain seal of approval to those who can get it from the alt-text clue alone.) Submit your answers to this address. Good luck!

Two-Legged Freaks

In the first few minutes of Bug, William Friedkin's 2006 thriller that is only now getting a stateside release, Friedkin references two other well-known cinematic opening scenes – an incessant, audibly exaggerated phone ringing recalls Once Upon a Time in America, while a shot of a whirling ceiling fan where we hear the "whup-whup" sound of helicopter blades is an unmistakable nod to Apocalypse Now. These obvious shout-outs to fellow masters Leone and Coppola are (perhaps) a signal that Friedkin, after years of churning out Hollywood fodder, is attempting to pick up the auteurist reins he let go of in 1980 after the controversial (and underappreciated) Cruising. Based on Tracy Letts' play of the same name (he also penned the screenplay), Bug is a psychological thriller set in an Oklahoma motel located (literally) in the middle of nowhere. Ashley Judd (finally rediscovering her acting chops) plays Agnes, a white-trash, coked-up alcoholic attempting to recover from the disappearance of her child (abducted from a supermarket), and a dangerous relationship with the violent Jerry (an unrecognizable Harry Connick, Jr.). Her lesbian, single-mom friend R.C. (Lynn Collins) introduces her to a drifter named Peter (Michael Shannon, star of the magnificent Shotgun Stories), a somewhat-intense but seemingly safe individual who is simply looking for a friend. Lonely, and frightened by the sudden reappearance of her psychotic ex, Agnes invites Peter into her squalid motel room, where the two slowly develop an awkward relationship. Then the bugs begin to appear... What follows is something of a paranoiac pas de deux, as Peter slips deeper and deeper into madness, creating a grand meta-narrative conspiracy theory that connects Desert Storm, the US government, Jim Jones, Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski, to name but a few. As the film's tagline says, paranoia is contagious, and soon Agnes is tying her own grief and suffering into Peter's deluded fantasies, for so desperate is she to find meaning to her misery. It's a slow burn, but the film steadily builds with ever-increasing intensity, culminating in a frenetic third act far removed from the languid, almost dreamy pace of film's first half. As Richard Linklater demonstrated with Tape, it is possible to mount a successful drama within the confines of a motel room, though unlike the DIY aesthetic of Linklater's piece, Friedkin applies a remarkably jarring visual style, and matching sound design, that succeeds in enhancing the tension and capturing the paranoid gaze. Though not as severe as Gaspar Noé's gunshot punctuations in I Stand Alone, this is Friedkin's greatest use of sound since The Exorcist. After fifteen or so years of phoned-in efforts such as Blue Chips, The Hunted, and Rules of Engagement, it's truly wonderful to see Friedkin as auteur once again, taking risks and approaching the material with the same kind of daring and originality that informed his earlier works (i.e., everything pre-1980). Its closest relative in the director's oeuvre is The Birthday Party, his 1968 rendition of the Harold Pinter play, which like Bug, places its characters in an equally claustrophobic setting with mounting tension. Though there's much to admire in both the filmmaking and the performances Friedkin coaxes out of his cast (particularly Judd, who hasn't been nearly this good since Ruby in Paradise), Bug falls just a few feet short of hitting its mark, though the fault might lie in the source material, which, given its subject matter, simply can't work as well on screen. Successful buy-in of the folie à deux that the play is predicated upon requires a tearing down of that fourth wall – we need to be there in the room with Agnes and Peter, and the inevitable distance created by watching it on screen leaves us as mere observers, ultimately reducing the impact the playwright intended. Lionsgate is marketing Bug as a straight-up horror film (vide the trailer here), and targeting a more mainstream audience. (I've heard the film will be preceded by a teaser of the first seven minutes of Hostel II. There's one way to get assess in seats.) However, fellow cinephiles, don't allow the ad campaign to dissuade you. Bug has far more in common with Cronenberg or Polanski than Eli Roth. It might not be another Sorcerer (to my mind, his real masterpiece), but even Friedkin in a flawed return to form is an opportunity that should not be missed.

Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 12, Week 6

Annie K from London sent along this link, apropos to last week's quiz: How to make your own Han Solo in carbonite chocolate bar. Pretend you're Jabba the Hut as you gobble down a mouthful of chocolaty Han goodness. As many of you were quick to point out, Han can be found in both The Empire Strikes Back and Revenge Return of the Jedi trapped in his carbonite prison. Yet the appearance of Colt 45 spokesman Billy Dee Williams (or his hand, at least) makes it a dead giveaway for Episode V, in which the Empire does indeed strike back. I've spent the better part of the last six days transcribing and creating subtitles for a certain DVD being released in a few months, and I'm completely drained Who knew timing subtitles was such a Sisyphean task? More on that anon, but needless to say it's kept me from actually watching other films (let alone blogging.) Color me envious green over the fact that everybody and their kid brother is heading to Cannes this week for what, on paper at least, sounds like a super-spectacular-stellar festival. To cheer myself up (a bit) I've chosen a shot this week from a film that never fails to bring a smile. Name it. Submit your answers to this address. Good luck!

Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 12, Week 5

"Be Black, Baby!" Though a few late submissions came trickling in last night, I think we've broken the all-time record for fewest correct answers. In retrospect, it was a difficult shot, from a film that isn't all that popular (though it should be.) Brian De Palma's Hi, Mom! (a quasi-sequel to Greetings) is a brilliant pastiche of late 60's counterculture, with pokes at white liberals, black revolutionaries, and the burgeoning porn industry. It's a bit uneven, with sequences that border on comic genius, while others simply fall flat. Penelope Gilliatt summed it up nicely in The New Yorker; "Hi, Mom! is the ersatz form, ruled by the times." Robert De Niro is great as a Vietnam vet looking to make it big in the porn industry, and the Greenwich Village location shots (all around NYU) take me back to my childhood -- a time when Manhattan wasn't the overcrowded mall it's rapidly becoming. The Cinema Sociables double feature that De Niro takes date Judy Bishop (Jennifer Salt) to is at the wonderful Bleecker Street Cinema (R.I.P. - it's now a drug store), one of the finest art houses of its day. I saw my first Godard film there (À bout de souffle) and was there the night a crazy Christian stormed in, hoping to put a halt to a showing of Hail Mary. Those were the days... After last week's head-scratcher, I'll toss out an easy one for the fan boy (or girl) in all of us. Name the film. Submit your answers to this address. Good luck!

On Being Laidback & Independent

While I was positively delighted at being quoted in The Guardian Unlimited Arts Blog piece on the Tribeca Film Festival, what made it that much more special was author Danny Leigh's description of me as "usually laidback." Those who know me well will no doubt let out a healthy guffaw over that, but it warms my heart to know that the unbelievable cloud of stress I've been living under the past four or five months hasn't extended itself to these pages. As for the piece itself, I was pleased that Leigh drew attention to the lack of American Indies at the festival. However, I find his conclusions bordering on the flippant, and proof of the inherent danger of grouping filmmakers under the 'Mumblecore' moniker, which leads to generalizations like "pasty, middle-class naval-gazing." The American Indie scene is thriving at the moment, and the lack of attention from Tribeca is a combination of geographic snobbery and a desire to distance itself from other festivals that showcase this work (Slamdance, SXSW, Boston, Miami, etc.) Last year's festival featured a small handful of Indie films by NYC-based directors, many of which were, quite frankly, awful (or otherwise forgettable). Though NY is certainly not lacking in talented filmmakers, many of the more interesting Indie films are coming out of small towns and cities, giving the traditional Indie hubs a run for their money. After a several-year slump, and millions of dollars of corporate co-opting (cf. Little Miss Sunshine), American Independent cinema is once again interesting and, well, independent. Filmmakers such as Joe Swanberg, Aaron Katz, Ronnie Bronstein, Todd Rohal, Kentucker Audley, Frank Ross, Jennifer Shainin, Randy Walker, and Michael Tully (to name but a few) are producing unique, challenging, personal works that are infused with a true sense of Indie spirit, and driven by something other than dreams of a six-figure deal at Sundance. Yet more importantly, they're simply damn good films. Jeff Nichols' Shotgun Stories (whose appearance at Tribeca was most likely due to its success at Berlin) is easily one of the best films I've seen this year. The dearth of American Independent cinema at this year's Tribeca Film Festival (sorry, Kevin Connolly's Leo DiCaprio-produced Gardener of Eden hardly qualifies) is in no way indicative of the current state of the Indie scene, but rather the result of disinterested programmers, and/or the festival's emphasis on premieres. Now I need a nap.

Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 12, Week 4

Those alt-text clues can really slip you up. Many went for the literal reading of 'Leary', and there were hundreds of submissions from the collected oeuvres of both Denis and Timothy. (Shocker was my personal favorite.) Still, a fair number of you were able to recognize the stone fox head from Akira Kurosawa's quasi-take on King Lear (with a touch of Macbeth in there as well), Ran. Well done, Kurosawa fans. A while back I toyed with the idea of an entire round dedicated to marquees in cinema, but never got around to finding a dozen of them. (There was that one back in Round 1.) Here's a good one I was reminded of not long ago. Other than the titular commonality of he and she, David & Lisa and Porgy & Bes_ (and Ted & Alice?) share little else, but it does make for an interesting double bill. Name the film, and for a bonus point, tell me the name of the movie theater seen in this scene. Submit your answers to this address. Good luck!