Monday's Words of Wisdom

Older readers of this blog may remember the weekly Monday's Words of Wisdom feature, wherein I highlighted the best of what I read every week from around the web and print media. The series is returning for good and to celebrate its comeback in 2014, I had to dedicate this space to my absolute favorite piece of film writing in the year that was: Adam Cook's column on the festival experience, which he wrote at the end of the Toronto International Film Festival, where I had the pleasure of meeting him in person.

The piece is a letter in response to a series titled "Correspondences" between two other film critics at MUBI, Fernando F. Croce and Daniel Kasman, who reviewed both the films they watched and their experience in Toronto throughout the festival in letters to one another. Adam's piece concludes their series and it is powerful because it encapsulates perfectly what it means to watch films in the festival environment in all its strange, chaotic, almost romantic glory. In seven years of attending TIFF, among other smaller festivals, with near religious fervor, I have always searched for what it is that sets the sensation of experiencing cinema in the festival so unique and different; why it is that the shared experience is never akin to any other shared "night at the movies." Adam takes those thoughts right out of my head and puts them on paper more eloquently than I ever could.

"What has been particularly illuminating for me is the idea that, ultimately, the festival experience is something intensely private. This may surprise both of you but I do feel this sense of solitude: you’ve watched me have fun, share laughs, opinions, drinks, and questionable dance moves with myriad fellow festivalgoers throughout our time in Toronto. We’ve all talked about movies together... and enjoyed each other’s company, but in the end, we all saw different films in different settings in different situations, watched and worked according to our own personally carved out schedules. There are, of course, overlaps in what we saw, and these intersections are so key to connecting, but even so we may have seen these films in differing time slots (one would be foolish not to admit that what time you see a film doesn’t affect your viewing and also what order and positions one sees films in on any given day). All three of us are returning home, spread out miles apart from one another, with entirely unique experiences, a unique set of memories, and most certainly diverging interpretations of the festival, the films, and everything in between. Indeed, thousands of people are returning home with these unique thoughts and feelings. Therefore, a festival is almost paradoxical: a place where pleasure is derived from sharing, and yet there still exists a gap, seemingly unbridgeable. I think I am at my most and least alone at festivals simultaneously. I wonder if you feel something similar. These correspondences don’t bridge this gap but they point to it, I think, shedding light on the intangible qualities of navigating a festival alone/together and how this aloneness and togetherness is something that cannot be separated from the festival and the films we see there."

You can read the full piece here. 

Monday's Words of Wisdom

"Much Ado was shot cheaply and quickly while the director was occupied with the mighty labor of The Avengers, and it is in every way superior to that bloated, busy blockbuster. Also shorter. Do not suppose that this is reflexive literary snobbery or a preposterous apple-and-orange comparison. Shakespeare’s knotty double plot, propelled by friendships, rivalries and a blithe spirit at once romantic and cynical, is a better vehicle for Mr. Whedon’s sensibilities than the glowering revenger’s tale that every superhero movie is forced, these days, to become."

- From A. O. Scott's review of Joss Whedon's charming Much Ado About Nothing

Monday's Words of Wisdom

"Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I saw "La Dolce Vita'' in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom "the sweet life'' represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamour, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman. When I saw it again, around 1970, I was living in a version of Marcello's world; Chicago's North Avenue was not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful, and I was about Marcello's age.
When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him. And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died, I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal. There may be no such thing as the sweet life. But it is necessary to find that out for yourself."

- from Roger Ebert's Essay on Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (courtesy of Peter Labuza)

Monday's Words of Wisdom

"You wouldn’t think a big-budget adaptation of Les Mis would need much showboating to distinguish itself. Though the show was plagued by bad reviews after its 1985 stage debut, the musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel about post-revolutionary France has since became an enormous hit, a global phenomenon that easily ranks among the longest-running musicals in history. Hooper, though, seems intent on making his interpretation especially memorable, saddling his version with an absurd procession of off-kilter cinematic compositions that either lop off his performers heads or peer dangerously far into their nostrils. This isn’t so much an adaptation as a smell-o-vision extension of the original production, bringing Jean Valjean’s tragic tale of abjection and redemption to life by plunging us ever deeper into his armpits or shaking jowls, as if the camera’s proximity to star Hugh Jackman’s body is better than proper characterization ever could be."

- From Angelo Muredda's brilliant mini-review of Les Miserables

Monday's Words of Wisdom

This week's link roundup is a busy one, but I couldn't leave any of these three great articles out.

First up is a piece over at Fandor, by Iranian critic and editor-in-chief of Iran's Film Monthly magazine, Hooshang Golmakani. The magazine is Iran's oldest and most prestigious publication dedicated to film and Golmakani and his erudite, eloquent group of writers had a huge influence on me during my formative years when I was still living in Tehran. It is no exaggeration to say they shaped my undying love for the medium, so I hold him in extremely high regard.

In this new piece, he's listed the 50 films he considers to be essential to a comprehensive knowledge of Iranian cinema. Needless to say, it includes many of the masterpieces of Iranian New Wave, the socially conscious, subversive films from the pre-revolution era, and several commercial hits that are integral to the importance of cinema in the fabric of Iranian culture. But any list that boils down the history of a massive film industry to just fifty titles is bound to have a few blind spots and I couldn't let this article go without bringing up a few of the eyebrow-raising omissions.

Bahram Beizaei's Ragbar (Downpour, 1971) is a quintessential piece, one that married the arthouse with the commercial and caused a cultural stir at the time. Although he mentions three of Kiarostami's films, including his Palme d'or winning Taste of Cherry, I'm still surprised Close-up is not one of those three. It's turning out to be the director's most universally acclaimed film (as evidenced by its placement on the Sight & Sound poll) and I assumed such international acclaim should count for something here, though the film has never been one of Kiarostami's most popular with Iranian critics. Reza Motori and Dash Akol are both staples of pre-revolutionary social cinema so it's curious to see them miss out, as well as The House is Black, Forough Farrokhzad's landmark documentary which I've discussed in detail here. The most shocking omission, however, comes in the form of Ebrahim Hatamikia's The Glass Agency (1997), an intense and incendiary political film that was controversial despite being approved by the government and remains not just popular, but incredibly relevant to this day. All that being said, Golmakani has my eternal respect for including Redhat and Cousin (pictured above), a children's puppet film that is almost solely responsible for igniting my love for cinema. His full list is posted here.

Fellow Team Experiencer, Joe Reid, has a new piece up at Tribeca Film, in which he discusses the most common types of characters we see in documentary films these days. It turns out The Misfit and The Sage are my favorite types, but this bit on The Self Promoter is absolutely spot-on:

"Joan Rivers is a woman working in her seventies in an industry (showbiz) that values youth, and a subculture (stand-up comedy) that could not be less tailored to someone of her age and gender. She's scrapping for every bit of notoriety that she can get because she honestly doesn't know what's there for her if she doesn't. That kind of pathos can make someone like Mr. Brainwash in Exit Through the Gift Shop seem pretty silly, but Banksy's film makes Brainwash's brand of commercialized outsider art a self-reflexive meta-narrative."

You can read his full piece here.

Finally, because there might still be some of you out there who don't quite know how much I love Tabu, let me point you to this terrific review of Miguel Gomes' masterpiece over at Mile High Cinema, where Joaquin Villalobos channels many of my thoughts on the film. He's almost as impressed as I am and thankfully a much better writer than me so his review is a must-read.

"Gomes presents their story not with techniques mimicking silent film, but with a careful lack thereof more closely resembling a beginning filmmaker with a new Bolex. Natural non-diegetic sound is used to fill in conversations a 16mm camera couldn’t record and the ghosting effect of an incorrectly loaded camera takes on a rare charm. All of this creates a marvelous sense of discovery in the natural world, reckless emotions, and a tale’s formative elements and endurance. The grandiosity and densely-layered tangents in Tabu make it feel like the novel Márquez never got around to writing or that maybe Hemingway scrapped as his desire for a woman kept persisting in between fraternal enterprise on an African mountain."

You can read his review here.

Monday's Words of Wisdom

Fellow Torontonian, Corey Atad, who writes at Movie Mezzanine has discussed the responsibility of documentarians to stick to facts in their films in a piece titled 'Honesty in Documentary'. The discussion is prompted by his experience with Searching For Sugar Man after he found a number of details were omitted from the film. I'm writing about it because no piece this year has changed my opinion of a film as much Corey's has. I simply cannot look at Sugar Man the same way anymore.

In essence, there is nothing wrong with being innovative in documentary cinema. It is appreciated, in fact. John Grierson, one of the earliest pioneers of the form, referred to his own aesthetics as the "creative treatment of actuality." Corey mentions examples of other films that present their story creatively, bringing up Waltz With Bashir as a great example, but he's asking whether that type of creative control over the material is allowed extend to the facts therein.

"Anytime we walk into a film we are making an implicit agreement. If I go see a fictional film I expect that it will be a fiction. I suspend my disbelief and allow the story to do what it wants. When I walk into a documentary, that agreement is different. There is an implicit expectation that no matter how much slant or bias or editorial influence is being had on the subject, at the very least the film is presenting factual information as accurately as possible. Sometimes accuracy is difficult to achieve, but distorting facts is a no-no."

When I watched the film myself, I was quite taken with it. I find it heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure, but I was quite surprised at how Rodriguez remained completely unfazed by his new found success. Though the omissions aren't huge, the fact that Rodriguez had been aware of his success in places like Australia explains why he wasn't at all shocked by the warm reception he received in South Africa.In Corey's words: "The fact is, Rodriguez was not as obscure as the film claims, nor was he as difficult to find as the documentary implies. It’s not an outright lie, but it is a lie by omission, and the information was clearly left out in order to juice the drama in Rodriguez’ story. It’s still an incredible story, just not as incredible as the filmmakers would have you believe going on their account alone."

I can't help but feel cheated a bit, having realized that my emotional reaction to the film wasn't entirely merited, and I've slowly and quietly slipped Sugar Man out of my top 20 films. You can read Corey's piece here. I couldn't recommend it enough.

Next up is perennial favourite, Nick Prigge of Cinema Romantico, who has summed up the narratives overtaking this year's Oscar race in a 100% accurate, 137% hilarious piece titled 'Emerging Oscar Storylines.' I don't agree with his predictions entirely: I refuse to believe Argo can win best picture until I see Affleck jumping up and down on the Oscar stage with a little golden man in his hands and I don't think Tommy Lee Jones is a lock. Then again, I've predicted both of those categories exactly like him, so what the hell is up with my disingenuous disagreement? I am, however, entirely consumed by the idea that Michael Haneke may have an agenda of snuff films.

"The story of Best Actor is that there is NO story. Daniel Day Lewis will win. He will win because he floats in the regal ether above the pedantic stories of the Academy. Hype rolls off of him. Backlash is frightened to death of him. Twitter is powerless to stop him. Daniel Day Lewis is Daniel Fucking Day Lewis and that is why he will win."

You can read his piece here, and if you don't, you deserve the same twitter hate attack as Anne Hathaway.

Monday's Words of Wisdom

I haven't attended to the 'Words of Wisdom' feature on the blog for ages, but I've decided to bring it back for good to highlight my favorites of everything I read during the week every Monday. This week's edition is a triple punch.

First up, Joaquin Villalobos, whose writing I've just recently become familiar with but already love immensely, shares his top ten list of 2012 and it's very compelling. He even manages to make convincing arguments for films I downright loathe, but naturally, my favorite part is his bit on Tabu. If you've been following me on twitter, or have read my semi-review, you already know that it's my number one film of the year - Joaquin places it at number 2 - and I don't think I could have described my passion for it any better than he does:

"Full of the savory romance everyone is wanting, Gomes presents their story not so much with the techniques of silent film but with those of a burgeoning filmmaker to capture a marvelous sense of discovery in the natural world, reckless emotions, and a tale’s endurance. This veritable paradise echoes the settings, objects, and music encountered earlier in Lisbon suggesting a historical continuum to narrative and shows how mental pictures of spoken stories flesh out from indelible memories. Tabu is a film filled with riches attesting to improvisation and the earliest elements of film that its characters can only dream of, crocodiles and all."

You can see his complete list here.

Nick Prigge has written a review of Oslo, August 31st. It's poignant and personal like the film it's about. You may remember Joachim Trier's film was my top film of 2011, and a large part of my affection comes from Anders Danielsen Lie's beautifully performed Anders, whose sense of pathos was immediately tangible for me on a personal level. Nick seems to have found the same magic in the film and his performance.

"And Lie, in a performance mesmerizing in its restrained intensity, lets his face delicately register each piece of newfound information, as if they merely reinforce long held suspicions of the uselessness of taking it one day at a time in a society so insistent on conjuring up Five Year Plans."

You can read his review here.

Finally, my favorite blogger Andrew Kendall, who is luckily back full force to his prolific self after a hiatus a few months back, has detailed his thoughts on Zero Dark Thirty while also revealing that he has multiple selves - I'm not surprised! I'm completely torn on his piece, to be honest. I enjoyed the film quite a lot more than he did and we seem to have different perspectives from which we review films. It'd be disingenuous of me to claim that personal emotional investment in the characters or other elements of a film don't affect my appreciation of it (refer back to Oslo, August 31st) but unlike Andrew, I think Zero Dark Thirty's depth is a consequence of the chasm it creates between us and the screen, politically and emotionally. Certain narratives benefit from allowing their audience to project emotions onto the characters that embody it and Zero Dark Thirty fits in that mould. Creating characters for the audience to root for isn't at odds with objectively dissecting a political procedure - a fact Ben Affleck needs to be reminded of - but I think Bigelow aimed for something entirely different here and she succeeded. Maya isn't am emotional vessel through whom the audience connects with this story. Quite the opposite, our distance with her needs to be maintained for the spectator to observe and comprehend how the hunt for Bin Laden really happened. Andrew argues that the film is not really about Maya, which I think is correct, but that's precisely why I appreciate the lack of fabricated emotional investment in her character. The audience isn't meant to live her painfully mundane experience to appreciate her unwavering resolve or feel the emptiness she feels in the final shot. Maya is a character as incomprehensible to herself as she is to us, which makes her final personal catharsis (or revelation, rather) all the more meaningful for me. This is a film that, in my opinion, succeeds precisely because it remains apolitical and expressionless throughout. Then again, it's anreasonable criticism to accuse the film for lack of perspective if it asks the audience to project meaning onto a meaningless bureaucratic procedure in the first place.

"Bigelow, along with her sound and visual team, keeps the tension taut over time and steadily guides the audience through the moments with a fine knowledge of when and how to thrill. It is significant, though, that these best of moments of the film would be just as impressive without any back-story to them.
Movies are called thus because they are moving pictures, but unlike visual art pieces context is always essential for film. A brilliant film scene will be brilliant on its own, but it should take on more profundity within the narrative it rests and the telling lack of profundity is wrested from the film’s persistent disinclination to emotion."

It's a lengthy piece, but a well-judged one. Much as I appreciate Bigelow's film, Andrew's sentiments are understandable for me, so much so that I can see myself echoing similar thoughts on another film that doesn't engage me quite as much. You can read his article here.

Monday's Words of Wisdom

"Congratulations, Peter Jackson. You are George Lucas."
- Kris Tapley

This will, in all likelihood, remain the most poignant review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ever written.

Monday's Words of Wisdom

"And since the movie is basically the "Oscars for Tony and Helen" show, let's go ahead and end with them: both are perfectly satisfactory, neither is revelatory: Mirren can do this kind of character in her sleep and very much seems to have done just that, rousing herself only for the florid Oscar clip scene that showed up so big in the trailer ("all they can see is the Great and Glorious genius AL-fred Hitch-cock!!!"), while Hopkins, considerable more alert and robust in his unashamedly hammy performance, resembles the famous director not at all: his makeup is a joke, but of course that's not the actor's fault, and while Hopkins gets the positively dehydrated sense of humor down, and in the film's opening nails a perfect "good evening", he doesn't come even close to capturing the psychological dysfunction that the movie wants us to see there, very clearly preferring to play a more avuncular Hitch than the screenplay apparently has in mind."
- Tim Brayton

Tim Brayton, as I've noted long ago, is one of my favourite writers, and I can always depend on him for articulating my thoughts in ways much more eloquent than I can ever hope to do on my own. The excerpt above is taken from his brilliant review of Sascha Gervasi's Hitchcock, which you may remember I mildly liked if only because it made for a fun double bill with Psycho. I noted in my own review that "Hopkins is never Hitchcock; he's Hopkins playing Hitchcock. And the same can be said of Biel and Johansson, unfortunately" so I think Tim's right on the money with this one. I do wonder, though, if Mirren and Hopkins have what it takes to be in the Oscar race despite their clip-ready performances. This is far, far from their best work and both have been well-rewarded in the past.

Monday's Words of Wisdom

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. 

We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. 

But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."

 - Anton Ego from Ratatouille

Monday's Words of Wisdom

"Meanwhile, Angelina Jolie is too much of a goddess, at this point, to be touched and the movies too determined to be all things to all people to risk the sort of contact that turns PG-13 into R. As for the men? We don’t make many, anymore. We’re now a cinema of dudes, guys, and George Clooney. You’ve seen “Horrible Bosses.’’ The men are running from Jennifer Aniston. A woman’s function in most American movies is to confirm a man’s heterosexuality more through propinquity than participation. She’s a Kinsey scale with breasts."

- From Wesley Morris' Stuck in a sexless movie relationship 

This vaguely reminds me of the time I mentioned in my review of Black Swan how Aronofsky pulled off every old trick in the book to avoid showing the actual sex in the famous scene. That was in a completely different context, but it was my way of expressing disappointment that sex has left the movies; that even a "sex scene" with so much hype was not actual sex. Not that anyone should go to the movies for sex, but... well, Morris knows how to make the point.

Monday's Words of Wisdom

"What afflicts the movies is not an unpalatable ideational content so much as an idiotic and irritating technic. The first moving-pictures... presented more or less continuous scenes... But the modern movie is no such organic whole; it is simply a maddening chaos of discrete fragments. The average scene, if the two shows I attempted were typical, cannot run for more than six or seven seconds. Many are far shorter, and very few are appreciably longer. The result is confusion horribly confounded. How can one work up any rational interest in a fable that changes its locale and its characters ten times a minute? Worse, this dizzying jumping about is plainly unnecessary: all it shows is the professional incompetence of the gilded pants-pressers, decayed actors and other such half-wits to whom the making of movies seems to be entrusted. Unable to imagine a sequence of coherent scenes, and unprovided with a sufficiency of performers capable of playing them if they were imagined, these preposterous mountebanks are reduced to the childish device of avoiding action altogether. Instead of it they present what is at bottom nothing but a poorly articulated series of meaningless postures and grimaces... These mummers cannot be said, in any true sense, to act at all. They merely strike attitudes -- and then are whisked off. If, at the first attempt upon a scene, the right attitude is not struck, then all they have to do is keep on trying until they strike it. On those terms a chimpanzee could play Hamlet, or even Juliet."

- H.L. Mencken (1927)

Monday's Words of Wisdom

"If you're playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You'll think you've experienced it, but you'll be cheated. It's such a sadness that you think you've seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real!"

- David Lynch

Monday's Words of Wisdom

"He's wonderful to work with. He's really amazing because he's simple. He's as simple as his films. He was exactly like his movies ... He loves movies more than anybody I've ever met in my life. You can take all this new Hollywood bullshit, get all of us guys sitting in a room together and he puts us away. He knows more about the movies than any of us ever will."

- Steven Spielberg, on working with one of my favourite directors of all time Francois Truffaut (1978)

Monday's Words of Wisdom

"My car's my best friend. My office. My home. My location. I have a very intimate sense when I am in a car with someone next to me. We're in the most comfortable seats because we're not facing each other, but sitting side by side. We don't look at each other, but instead do so only when we want to. We're allowed to look around without appearing rude. We have a big screen in front of us and side views. Silence doesn't seem heavy or difficult. Nobody serves anybody. And many other aspects. One most important thing is that it transports us from one place to another."

- Abbas Kiarostami, on his relationship with cars and why they feature so prominently in most of his films

Monday's Words of Wisdom

“For those who think I’m a snob, the list probably won’t disappoint. If you haven’t come across some of the titles before, hopefully you’ll look into giving them a chance. They may not move you the way they moved me, but that’s the real joy of moving outside of the Hollywood system. Once films are not being made to please as many people as possible, they stand a much better chance of pleasing YOU in a transcendent way that only movies can.”

- Chad Hartigan, on his list of favourite films from 2010 which included lesser known titles like Nenette, Videocracy and Daddy Longlegs

Monday's Words of Wisdom

“We thought of Un Chien andalou because of two dreams. He dreamt his hand was full of ants – he told me his dream. And I dreamt of a knife cutting an eye. He said we could make a film with that. Using those irrational elements, we wrote the script in seven days. [The rule was] refuse any image that could have a rational meaning or any memory or culture. That meant any image that appeared to us that we considered impressive or impressed us, was accepted. Veto wasn’t used at all. The veto was: “I don’t like that” and the other said: “Neither do I.”

- on the making of his classic silent short film Un chien andalou with Salvador Dali

Monday's Words of Wisdom

"To me, the glory of what I do is the fact that it starts with a blank piece of paper. You look at something like Inglourious Basterds. If my mother never met my father, that would not exist in any way, shape or form. If my mother hadn't met my father, there would be no Inglourious Basterds in any way. It started off with a pen and a piece of paper, and now I have a movie."