I'm way behind #13: Taking Off (Milos Forman)

The Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin recently programmed a short, four-film series of overlooked dark comedies from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The series, called "Mixed Nuts," included Milos Forman's American debut, Taking Off; Elaine May's first film as director, A New Leaf; hack television director Noel Black's atypical oddity Pretty Poison; and the film adaptation of Jules Feiffer's play Little Murders, directed by the actor Alan Arkin. I'll write about the rest of them later, with the exception of Little Murders (I skipped that screening because I'd watched the film on DVD just a few weeks prior.)

Even though Milos Forman's American work includes such well-known films as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hair, Amadeus, and The People vs. Larry Flynt, his first American movie after leaving the former Czechoslovakia, 1971's Taking Off, suffers from neglect and obscurity. Taking Off's lack of availability is the primary reason for this neglect, and to this day, the film has never been released on VHS, DVD, or Blu-Ray in this country. (I first saw it 12 years ago on a bootleg VHS.) Taking Off is closer in structure and spirit to Forman's Czech films like Black Peter and The Firemen's Ball than the accomplished but more conventional American films that followed. Like its darkly comic predecessors, Taking Off has a deceptively loose narrative that only seems undisciplined and chaotic until you relax into its pace. It's then that the careful structure and discipline subtly and slowly reveal themselves. There's a controlled anarchy and inspired common-sense lunacy here that Forman left behind on his subsequent projects. As much as I've enjoyed the later films, especially Amadeus, I feel more personally connected to the early work. I prefer the tiny, infinite playgrounds of the small, personal, loose, and weird to the narrow vastness of the big canvas, the prestige picture, the postcard lighting, and the based-on-a-true-story.

Taking Off is a film that takes its pessimistic message (parents will never understand their children, especially if they try to understand them) and turns it into a party. Suburban New York parents Lynn and Larry Tyne (Lynn Carlin and Buck Henry) are worried because their teenage daughter Jeannie (Linnea Hancock, in her only film role) hasn't come home. They don't know that she wandered off to the city, got a little high, and impulsively signed up for an open audition casting call for a musical, even though she's not much of a singer. The film spends the bulk of its first third alternating between Carlin and Henry as the parents debating what they should do and scenes of various young women auditioning for the role in the musical, including before-they-were-famous Carly Simon, Jessica Harper, and Kathy Bates, who was then trying to make it as a folk singer under the name Bobo Bates, which is how she's billed here.
The Tynes soon begin a countercultural post-hippie burnout-culture New York and New Jersey odyssey attempting to find their daughter and understand her once they've found her, which enters multiple phases when the girl returns home and wanders off again twice more. The odyssey will encompass bars, jails, diners, a hotel/casino where Ike & Tina Turner are performing and a swinger played by Allen Garfield hits on Lynn, a meeting of a society of parents of runaway children where a representative of the freak scene (Vincent Schiavelli) is invited to turn the martini-and-cigarette generation on to the wonders of marijuana so they can try to understand their stoned teenagers, and a return to the Tynes' apartment with the now-stoned parents of another missing teenager (Paul Benedict and Audra Lindley) for an epic game of strip poker. All of this is very funny, with a quiet thrum of panic and hysteria vibrating in every joke. No one is any closer to understanding each other by the film's end, but Forman and his screenwriting partners Jean-Claude Carriere (a collaborator of Bunuel's), John Guare, and John Klein see this as comedy, not tragedy. If you get a chance to see this one, do it.

I'm way behind #12: The World's End (Edgar Wright)

I don't know if Edgar Wright will make a film that resonates with me as much as his television show Spaced, but even if he doesn't, I'll be happy as long as he keeps making films as entertaining as Shaun of the Dead and this one. This is a real throwback to the days when mainstream entertainment actually tried to entertain. An apocalyptic sci-fi/action/horror/comedy whose characters are all very specific movie types but also seem like real people, The World's End plays like a British television comedy version of Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as directed by John Carpenter with a 2013 Hollywood budget. That's what I mean when I say it's a throwback to the days when entertainment entertained.
If you grew up around '70s and '80s science fiction and horror movies, '90s and 2000s cult British comedy, and '80s and '90s British indie rock, you will be very comfortable with the world captured in this movie. I had a fuzzy feeling watching it. We get to know the characters (played by a great mix of comedic and dramatic character actors from the last decade and a half of British cinema), the pacing and framing of shots and editing hark back to the classic model that got thrown out last decade in favor of never-ending climaxes and CGI, and it was fun. This is a real movie made by a guy who likes movies. Stop making movies like I, Frankenstein and make more movies like this, Hollywood jerks.  

I'm way behind #11: The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-Wai)

I'm a massive fan of Wong Kar-Wai's sensuous, sumptuous films about memory, time, love, the end of love, and the ways our memories change and rearrange time. In my view, Kar-Wai has directed four masterpieces (Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Happy Together, and In the Mood for Love), two near-masterpieces (Fallen Angels and 2046), one film I can't quite wrap my head around (Ashes of Time), and one gorgeous, interesting failure (My Blueberry Nights). (I haven't yet seen his first film, As Tears Go By.) Breaking his work into separate entities may be a mistake, though. They're connected, even in ways other strong, highly personal filmmakers' bodies of work aren't. These films talk to each other, and the more of them you see, the more of the conversation you hear.
Kar-Wai generally works without a script, just a rough outline, and he writes the film as he shoots it, getting ideas about where to take his characters and story from his actors' performances and the visual possibilities of the locations. He then spends months editing and re-editing different versions, finding the film's structure in the editing room. It's a lengthy, expensive process that has frustrated and frightened producers and actors, but the results speak for themselves. 
The Grandmaster has a more conventionally structured screenplay than his previous work, but there's no mistaking it for anyone else's movie. Or three movies, to be specific. Kar-Wai made three different versions of the film for Asian, European, and American audiences, and each cut has different scenes, more or less historical information based on cultural common knowledge or the lack thereof, and different narrative structures. The Asian cut played in a few theaters in New York City's Chinatown, but otherwise, the American cut was the version playing on U.S. screens and is the version I'm writing about here.
His last movie, the English-language, American film My Blueberry Nights, was a rare misfire, though not without moments of brilliance, but Kar-Wai is on sturdier footing here in his return to Asia. A Chinese and Hong Kong coproduction in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese, The Grandmaster finds Kar-Wai infusing his personal style into a couple of established genres, the biopic and the martial arts action film. Ostensibly the life story of Wing Chun grandmaster and teacher Ip Man (famous in this country for being Bruce Lee's mentor), Kar-Wai plays with the facts by including several elaborately choreographed (by Yuen-Woo Ping) fight sequences and a fictionalized tragic romance that dominates the second half of the film.
Tony Leung is his usual charismatic self as Ip Man, but the film belongs to Zhang Ziyi, despite the title. Kar-Wai barrels through the early-to-middle age years of Ip Man's life, with some thrilling, if occasionally spatially confusing, martial arts sequences, but he slows down and changes focus in the second half. Though this part of the film is invented drama, it carries more emotional resonance. Ip Man becomes a supporting player in his own story, and Kar-Wai turns his attention to Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi). A former rival of Ip Man's who hated him for taking the grandmaster title away from her father and who struggled with having to hide her prodigious martial arts skills because of the place of women in Chinese society, she becomes his best friend. The two fall in love but refuse to act on it because of Ip Man's marriage and Gong Er's self-imposed vow of celibacy. The way Kar-Wai depicts this relationship calls to mind some of the best moments from In the Mood for Love, and the film's narrative becomes dreamier and more impressionistic, which is simpatico with my personal taste. The film's greatest fight scene also occurs in this half when Gong Er battles a family enemy next to a moving train.
This is a lush, beautiful movie. I don't think it's one of Kar-Wai's best, but I could change my mind about that. It's very easy to like.

My favorites of 2013

No pronouncements on the state of the industry or the inside of my head this year. Let's just get to my 10 favorites, the runners-up, the interesting failures, and the other shit. The rules: These are my highly subjective favorites, based on my aesthetics, personality, and irritability. I'm a form and structure guy and a performance and character guy and a framing and lighting guy, not a plot guy. The movies that speak to me are a marriage of painting, photography, music, and personality/point of view, not just a vehicle for storytelling or plot (though I do enjoy a good story). To be eligible for my list, the film had to open in my city of Austin, Texas between January 1 and December 31 of 2013, and I had to see it, which eliminates Smurfs 2 from contention. I wrote about some of these movies already, and I will (slowly, eventually) get around to writing about the rest. I'm not ranking them in order of preference, because that changes daily. About half of my picks got the royal screwjob from distributors and the media and were unfairly ignored, hidden, or marginalized because expensive corporate product needed all that airtime and theater space, but that's a tiny speck of an injustice in the much larger screwjob we receive every single day from the corrupt, monstrous power structures that run this planet. Happy New Year! (Don't let anyone tell you I'm not full of good cheer.)

My 10 Favorite Films of the Year (ranked in the order I saw them)
Not Fade Away (David Chase)

Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami)

The We & the I (Michel Gondry)

Mud (Jeff Nichols)

Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas)

Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)

Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski)

Nebraska (Alexander Payne)

Bastards (Claire Denis)

Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen)

Close Runners-Up, or movies that would be in the top 10 if it was a different day and I was in a different mood
The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)
The Grandmaster (Wong Kar Wai)
Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me (Olivia Mori & Drew DeNicola)
Prince Avalanche (David Gordon Green)
Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)
Amour (Michael Haneke)

The B-Team, or movies I can easily support and recommend that nevertheless have some minor annoyances or fall short of excellence
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (Dmitry Vasyukov & Werner Herzog)
Stoker (Park Chan-Wook)
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)
Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro)
The World's End (Edgar Wright)

I Love You, I Hate You, I Love You, or movies full of transcendent visual splendor, breathtaking beauty, and irritating narrative elements that hit my pet peeve button
To the Wonder (Terrence Malick)
Please, no more childlike women twirling their skirts, jumping on beds, making snow angels, or rubbing their faces on vegetation to a voice-over soundtrack of vague Christian mysticism. Yes to everything else.
Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron)
Please, no sentimental backstory for Sandra Bullock. You didn't need it and it stopped the movie dead every time it came up. I would have been more emotionally engaged if the actors spoke less and I didn't know anything about their lives on Earth. Yes to everything else, though. This was a gorgeous movie to see on a big screen. Finally, a blockbuster that's not visually cluttered, spatially incoherent, or assaultive.

Wafer-thin, but likable 
American Hustle (David O. Russell)
Glenn Kenny already covered this on his excellent blog, but all the critics who have been holding this up as a better Scorsese film than The Wolf of Wall Street are delusional. I liked it, especially the performances by Louis C.K., Christian Bale, and Amy Adams, but this is surface flash, a dessert instead of a meal. Entertaining as hell, but it didn't stick with me very long after I finished it.
Promised Land (Gus Van Sant)

Most misunderstood movie
Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)
Most of the puffed-up controversy was in 2012, but it didn't open in Austin until 2013. I was tired of the argument almost before it started, but I didn't see either the pro-torture propaganda film condemned by lefties or the love letter to Obama some right-wing pundits managed to find here. Bigelow's unsatisfying defenses in the press did her no favors with the Glenn Greenwalds of the world, but I saw a very different film than most political journalists and opinion columnists on either side of the spectrum. I wrote about it here.

Biggest disappointment
At Any Price (Ramin Bahrani)
I liked Bahrani's first two films, and I loved his third, but this one was ill-conceived and poorly handled.

Favorite revival and film society screenings
A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes)
Husbands (John Cassavetes)
Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara)
A New Leaf (Elaine May)
Taking Off (Milos Forman)
The Connection (Shirley Clarke)
The World's Greatest Sinner (Timothy Carey)
I didn't enjoy Pretty Poison (Noel Black) as much as I did the first time I saw it, though I still love Anthony Perkins' and Tuesday Weld's performances in it. My memories of the screening may have been marred by the minor fender bender I was in with a crazy man and his expensive car after the movie. He threatened to break my jaw and shoot me, which puts a damper on your night. Fortunately, he didn't do either of those things and blamed his behavior on a migraine. A movie would have to be a masterpiece to overcome that kind of evening, though, and Pretty Poison is too inconsistent to be a masterpiece, despite its fantastic leads.

Worst thing to happen to film this year
The death of James Gandolfini.

R.I.P.  Roger Ebert, Bigas Luna, Les Blank, Karen Black, Dennis Farina, Ed Lauter, Taylor Mead, Mario Montez, Antonia Bird, Joan Fontaine, Peter O'Toole, Julie Harris, Bernadette Lafont, Ray Harryhausen, Richard Griffiths, Kumar Pallana, Haji, Otto Sander, and Nagisa Oshima. And I'm probably forgetting some others.
 
 
 

I'm way behind #10: The Connection (Shirley Clarke)

If I were the religious type, I'd say that Milestone Films have been doing God's work for years. They restore and release great lost and/or previously unavailable films (Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep and My Brother's Wedding, Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles, Lionel Rogosin's On the Bowery, Samuel Beckett's Film, de Oliveira's I'm Going Home and Oporto of My Childhood) in theaters and on video, and they recently restored a trio of films (The Connection, Portrait of Jason, and Ornette: Made in America) by the overlooked and under-appreciated Shirley Clarke, a former dancer who transformed herself into a pioneering independent filmmaker in the boys club art scene of '50s and '60s New York. She also helped another great independent filmmaker get his start when she loaned her equipment to John Cassavetes so he could shoot his first film, Shadows.
Clarke had range. She made avant-garde shorts, fictional narrative features, and documentaries, but these weren't separate, static categories for her. Instead, each of her works contained elements of documentary, narrative, performance, and experimentation. The Connection is Clarke's 1961 adaptation of Jack Gelber's experimental theater piece about a group of junkies waiting in a loft for a member of their circle to come back with some heroin. The play was notable for having the actors break the fourth wall and confront audience members while still in character, and another actor portrayed the play's author who was forced into the action by his own creations. In Clarke's film, a two-person documentary crew (director and cameraman) films the junkies while they wait for their fix, but the addicts aren't the passive subjects the director expects them to be, and soon he, and to a lesser extent his cameraman, become part of the film.

Though Clarke sets the movie entirely in the confined space of the loft, The Connection never feels like a filmed play. This is a cinematic experience, and Clarke's camera moves constantly, gliding through the simultaneously spacious and claustrophobic loft, capturing faces and movement and lack of movement, sometimes aggressive, sometimes backing away in what feels like embarrassment or fear. The men who live in the loft never leave it and are there from the beginning, but other characters enter and leave, including a small jazz group with their instruments. The junk-sick musicians play compulsively while they wait, but each performance is a little different. Sometimes they're just killing time, sometimes a moment catches fire, sometimes they play because they're afraid to do anything else, sometimes the playing is a provocation, a way to interrupt conversation and close themselves off. A man who presumably lives in a different room in the building comes in twice to play a record, plugging the portable phonograph into an outlet on a light bulb fixture. The loft fills with sick junkies until the connection, Cowboy (Carl Lee), finally shows up with the drugs. One by one, the men enter the bathroom with Cowboy. The door closes, we wait outside the door with the relaxed, floaty faces of the newly high and the tight, nervous expressions of the sick men still tensely waiting their turn. An elderly crusader for Christ, Sister Salvation, follows Cowboy into the loft to preach the word of God, oblivious to why the men are there. She eventually gets the picture and leaves, and the other junkies slowly trickle out the door. The instruments are broken down, packed up, carried out. There's a strange camaraderie in the group misery and release of the waiting and the receiving, even when arguments break out and grudges are expressed, but as the high fades, the whole breaks down into scattered, individual parts. These are solitary, lonely people, going back out on the street to live desperate lives.

I'm way behind #9: Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski)

"Mumblecore" is one of those words, like "grunge," that's slightly pejorative and entirely ridiculous, an umbrella term lazy journalists and marketing types use to group together superficially similar work under the guise of a movement that doesn't exist until the word's constant repetition puts a frame on it, but it's also one of those words, like "grunge," that seems to fit its subjects anyway. You know mumblecore when you see it, like you know grunge when you hear it, even though there's really no such thing as mumblecore and no such thing as grunge, even though there is, and you know it when you see it/hear it, even though there's no such thing. 
The group of films lumped into the mumblecore descriptor do share a lot of superficial qualities. They are primarily low-budget independent films with non-actors, made by and focusing on lazy, inarticulate twenty- and thirtysomething "hipsters" (another one of those meaningless but packed-with-meaning umbrella terms) as they experience relationship, career, and/or artistic problems that are too mild or poorly articulated to be considered crises. I dislike a lot of these films and have a guarded enjoyment of others that never quite manages to congeal into respect. Some of these films look like garbage, with not much thought given to shot composition. There are a few gems buried in this movement-that's-not-a-movement, though, and most of them are Bujalski's.
Bujalski's first two films, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation, sound like nothing special on paper. The first is about inarticulate hipsters in Boston and their relationship problems. The second is about inarticulate hipsters in Brooklyn and their relationship problems. Bujalski, though, unlike contemporaries Joe Swanberg and the Duplass brothers, has a real filmmaker's eye for shot composition, a knack for capturing organic unforced weirdness, and a sense of offbeat narrative driven by the characters and the visuals and the rhythmic possibilities of film editing instead of mumblecore's usual aimless narcissism and "eh, it's good enough" camera placement. And when most of his peers were shooting on crappy digital cameras, Bujalski shot on 16mm film. By the time of his third film, Beeswax, he'd become a more relaxed, confident, and visually accomplished filmmaker, and his characters were smarter, more articulate, less smug, and more complex. Beeswax is Bujalski's warmest film, both narratively and visually, and a more successful piece of slice-of-life realism than most of American film's given us lately.
Computer Chess is something else entirely. This is a film that doesn't belong to any movement, media-created or otherwise. It's a weird, weird movie, so full of humor and life and ideas and digressions and moments of unexpected beauty. Set in the very early '80s in a nondescript motel that doubles as the site of a computer chess tournament and a New Age self-help guru's retreat, the film was shot on black-and-white analog video that looks like old security-camera footage. The images created by this camera are simultaneously ugly and beautiful, and they create an atmosphere and tone I've never seen before. This is one of the most convincing period films I've seen as well. It feels like the early '80s, not people pretending they're in the early '80s. Instead of nostalgia, though, Bujalski is creating something new, a hybrid of documentary-style cinema verite, comedy, drug trip, experimental film, science fiction, character study, and exploration of artificial intelligence. Computer Chess is Bujalski's funniest and most disturbing film, by a wide margin, and it's a real leap forward for him. He's way outside his comfort zone, but he's brought all his strengths to the party. This is an original work by a filmmaker I thought I had pinned down, but the way he balances and combines contradictory elements here has changed my estimation of what he can do. I'm excited to see where he goes from here as he continues to move away from the mumblecore ghetto.

I'm way behind #8: Prince Avalanche (David Gordon Green)

I've been a David Gordon Green fan since I took a chance on his first film, George Washington, in 2000. I love the way he composes his shots, I like his offbeat sense of humor, and I like how he's used many of the same crew members on every project, particularly cinematographer Tim Orr. I love the way Orr photographs sunlight. He captures this kind of baked, melancholy, pre-sunset glow that just gets to me. I have a strong emotional response to the light in these films that I can't quite explain.
Green's career so far has been divided into two phases. His first four films (George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow, and Snow Angels) are arty, independently financed dramas taking place in the South (with the exception of Snow Angels' New England in winter setting). These films owe a debt to Terrence Malick, Charles Burnett, early Michael Ritchie, and the photographs of William Eggleston, but they also inhabit a space entirely Green's own. He followed these films with three mainstream Hollywood stoner comedies (Pineapple Express, Your Highness, and The Sitter) that changed perceptions and expectations of Green as a filmmaker. (He also directed several episodes of Eastbound & Down.) This second phase of his career has baffled and/or angered many critics and fans who used to be in Green's corner. While most of these same people enjoyed Pineapple Express (and only an inhuman monster could watch Eastbound & Down without pleasure), they turned on Green intensely when the other two comedies came out in 2011.The usual lines about selling out and tarnishing a legacy were trotted out.
I acknowledge that Your Highness and The Sitter aren't Green at his best, though I am one of the small group of people who enjoys both of them quite a bit, but I don't see evidence of a betrayal or a sellout here. While the genres, audiences, and marketing and distribution budgets have changed, Green's sensibility, Orr's cinematography, and an inventive, '70s-influenced framing of shots remains. Danny McBride, who attended film school with Green in North Carolina and appears in both his artier dramas and his silly comedies, says Green was interested in watching and making all kinds of different films, and that's what he's done. It shouldn't be inconceivable that humans have seemingly contradictory qualities and varied interests, and that the same guy who made a dark tragedy like Snow Angels or a strange, melancholy romance like All the Real Girls could also make a spoof of sword-and-sorcery films with a character wearing a giant minotaur penis around his neck for one-third of the running time. I love that about Green.
Prince Avalanche should go some way toward explaining Green's career to the baffled. I'm the 480th person to point this out, but Prince Avalanche is very much a marriage between the independent art films and the stoner comedies, a fusion of the two phases of Green's career. A loose remake of a recent Icelandic film called Either Way, Prince Avalanche takes place in 1988 in Bastrop, Texas and is about two lonely, lovably dim goofballs, Alvin and Lance, who are painting new lines on the freshly paved and reconstructed highways after a devastating wildfire. A title card at the beginning says the wildfires took place in the 1980s, but this is a convenient stretching of the truth. The wildfires actually happened in 2011, several short months before Prince Avalanche was filmed. The line painters are played by Paul Rudd (Alvin) and Emile Hirsch (Lance), with uniforms modeled after Mario and Luigi. Alvin is married to Lance's older sister. He helped the aimless, not very bright Lance get the job as a favor to his wife, but his marriage is coming apart, and Lance is not too happy about being out in the middle of nowhere with his nerdy brother-in-law. The only other major character is a nameless truck driver played, in his final performance, by the late character actor and stuntman Lance LeGault who lives nearby and shows up periodically to give advice, insult, reminisce, and share his homemade liquor with the men as well as offer up some hilariously bizarre non sequiturs. A fourth character played by Joyce Payne, a local non-actor who lost her home in the fires, was added during filming. She happened to be there looking through the rubble of her property, so Green wrote her into the film.
Prince Avalanche is spare, minimal, and gorgeous, but it's also goofy and playful, and Green finds a bizarre sweet spot between contemplative, meditative stillness and lowbrow comedy. It doesn't all come together. Some of the jokes just hang there, you never quite get a fix on Alvin and Lance, they're a little dumber than they need to be, and Green can sometimes strive a little too hard for pathos. Still, this is nothing like anything else out there right now, and my own puzzlement at how I should be responding to the film kept me engrossed in its strangeness and sweetness. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this movie, and that's usually a good sign for repeat viewings.
Green just finished making an adaptation of my favorite Larry Brown novel, Joe, with Nicolas Cage, Mud's Tye Sheridan, and several non-professional actors from Austin streets and homeless shelters, so my interest in him continues unabated. 

I'm way behind #7: Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me (Olivia Mori & Drew DeNicola)

Warning: There's a lot of personal reminiscence in this post. If that shit drives you nuts, you may want to skip this one.
I had the blessing/curse of growing up a music (and the arts in general) freak in a small, rural town in the pre-Internet days. Our local cable didn't even include MTV. I was, and still am, a curious fucker, and I wasn't going to let my sheltered lack of options and scarce availability of non-mainstream cultural artifacts stop me from finding cool stuff. I relied on late-night local TV, which was pretty strange and varied in the '70s, '80s, and early '90s, the library, mail-order, road trips to the record store 40 miles away, and magazines to expose me to the old, weird America. Now, any outcast kid can go to YouTube and check out a huge chunk of most underground artists' bodies of work when an unfamiliar name pops up, but in the late '80s and early '90s, when I was buying every music magazine that made its way to the two local supermarkets, I would read the names of canonical underground bands hundreds and maybe thousands of times before I ever got the chance to hear their music. You would create your own internal, private mythologies about what Can or Kraftwerk or The Raincoats or Flipper or Sebadoh or Jandek or Gang of Four or Roxy Music or The Slits or The Feelies sounded like based on descriptions by rock critics or pictures of the bands and their album covers. I'd pore over interviews with famous rock stars like Peter Buck, Kurt Cobain, and Flea because those guys would always mention tons of bands that were new to me.
Lincoln, Nebraska doesn't have a national reputation as a mecca of the arts, but it's an interesting place, and when I started college there in 1995, I was a pig in shit. There were tons of interesting local bands (Jesus Lizard and Fugazi were the big influences at the time), a few great bookstores, a few great video stores, and its large student population supported 10 or 11 record stores (almost all of them are closed now, sadly). I was able to load up on all the records I'd previously only been able to read about. I was blowing my own mind on a weekly basis. Thanks to mail order and a few lucky finds in western Nebraska Wal-Marts my senior year of high school, I'd added Minutemen, The Replacements, Black Flag, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, and the big indie-rock releases of the time into my collection, but now I could go wild. Besides the new stuff, I was getting my first aural taste of The Stooges, Hüsker Dü, Captain Beefheart, Patti Smith, Flying Burrito Bros., Michael Hurley, Tim Buckley, Robert Wyatt, Skip Spence, Pere Ubu, early Bowie, Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex, Charles Mingus, R.L. Burnside, Sun Ra, Boredoms, and the non-hits and deep cuts of Devo, The B-52's, The Kinks, The Who, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, and The Beach Boys. I was in a receptive frame of mind, and great stuff was smooshing right into my still-developing frontal lobes.
Big Star was a band name I kept seeing in print without ever getting a chance to hear them. They were supposedly an influence on many of my favorite bands, and a song about one of the band members, Alex Chilton, was one of my two or three favorites on a Replacements CD I bought in a Denver mall a month before I graduated high school. I couldn't find their stuff anywhere, though. I was a fanatic Replacements and Guided By Voices fan by 16, still am, and Big Star's name kept popping up as an influence. They also got mentioned as a link between the '60s stuff I loved (Beatles, Kinks, Who, Byrds, Velvet Underground), some '70s stuff I loved (Cheap Trick, Flamin' Groovies) and some then-contemporary stuff I loved (Replacements, GBV, Sebadoh, Pavement, Teenage Fanclub, Nirvana). Who were these guys and why can't I find any of their stuff?
By my sophomore year of college, my geographical comfort zone around the campus area was slowly growing wider, and I decided to take an exploratory bicycle ride several miles past campus to hit up a record store I had yet to visit. (I would be working there within a year.) It was a longer ride than I'd anticipated and on busier streets, and when darkness fell as I arrived, I regretted my decision. I wandered around the store halfheartedly. It was mostly the same stock as the location near my dorm. My bad mood increased as I thought about the long, dark ride home. I decided to browse the used section to see if I could salvage the trip. My mood grew substantially better when I saw it. The #1 Record/Radio City twofer! There it was! Finally! I snatched it up, and also found a used copy of Cheap Trick's Heaven Tonight. Fuck the ride home. My future coworker who rang me up got a misty look in his eye and asked if I'd heard the Big Star records before. He grew very excited when I said I hadn't.
I pedaled uphill as fast as I could in the darkness, back to the dorm, and threw it on. I was a little confused by the first track, "Feel." It sounded like '70s cock-rock. Good '70s cock-rock, but still. "The Ballad of El Goodo" followed, and I remained confused. I liked the song, and it quickly grew on me, but it still sounded like mainstream classic rock. By the time it ended, I was starting to feel the stirrings of something special. By the first few seconds of "In the Street," they had me. I was drawn to this band with the fervor of a crazed missionary. Once Radio City started, forget about it, I was almost catatonic with pleasure. "O My Soul" and "Daisy Glaze." Holy shit. A few months later, I found a copy of Third/Sister Lovers, and a few years later, Chilton's Like Flies on Sherbet was my Thursday night alone in the basement drinking music. Ever since, Big Star has remained in regular rotation on whatever device technology provides for the playing of music, and I've got a lot of shit to rotate.

I soon found out that Chilton had been a part of my life for much longer than I'd realized. When I read that he'd been the singer for the Box Tops, my brain almost melted. My mother was a Box Tops fan and would often play a greatest hits tape of theirs while cooking or doing housework. Chilton had soundtracked a good part of my childhood and teen years, unbeknownst to me. These connections continued. My favorite photographer William Eggleston shot the cover of Radio City and Flies and played piano on the "Nature Boy" cover. Chilton worked with Tav Falco's Panther Burns and The Cramps. Chris Bell was a doomed genius with some beautiful solo stuff of his own. Jim Dickinson produced some of their stuff. He produced, engineered, or played on some of my favorite records by other people like Aretha Franklin, Sam & Dave, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Green on Red, The Replacements, Tav Falco, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Mudhoney, Flamin' Groovies, and The Cramps. There was so much great stuff spinning off of and intersecting with them. 
Big Star was long overdue for the documentary treatment, but I was a bit worried going in. Some rock docs are pretty cheap and shoddy-looking, and too many others are full of a nonstop parade of talking heads telling you how great the subject is, usually including one or all of the following: Bono, John Cusack, Henry Rollins, and Johnny Depp, for some reason. Also, hardly any footage of the band exists. What was this going to be?
Mori and DeNicola did a fantastic job. My heart sank initially when an opening scene featured a parade of talking heads singing Big Star's praises, but this scene was brief. What followed was a detailed, entertaining, heartbreaking, uplifting, visual treat full of fascinating people and great music. Mori and DeNicola did the big work, finding a trove of archival material and interviewing tons of important people. Their timing was fortunate, too, as they interviewed several people who passed away shortly thereafter. They talk to almost everybody. Chilton gave the project his blessing, but wouldn't sit down for an interview. There's great footage of him, though, and his presence fills the frame while his absence haunts it, especially when his death becomes a part of the story. Almost everyone else is here, though, including Andy Hummel, Jody Stephens, John Fry, Van Duren, Jim Dickinson, Rick Clark, Tav Falco, William Eggleston, The Cramps, Chris Stamey, Peter Holsapple, Jon Auer, Ken Stringfellow, and Chris Bell's brother and sister. I'm especially grateful for the public access footage of Tav Falco's Panther Burns with Chilton on guitar inciting a confrontation from a combative and grumpy morning show host just by being themselves and having a sense of humor about it.
This movie just pops off the screen with energy and life and creativity, but it's haunted by death and broken dreams, too. The movie runs for almost two hours and is pretty thorough, but it breezes by quickly, and I would have been happy with another two or three hours. Every damn person in this documentary could be the subject of a fascinating documentary of his or her own. I'd love to hear more about Chris Bell's life, for example. What a sad, fascinating, contradictory, tortured guy, torn apart by trying to reconcile his closeted homosexuality, devout Christianity in a band with guys who didn't have much use for religion, just as devout worship of rock and roll, intense desire to be famous butting heads with his shyness and insecurity, and struggles with drugs and depression. Meanwhile, Chilton, a more irreverent, cantankerous guy, had experienced fame as a teenager with the Box Tops and found it ridiculous. He had no interest in pursuing that particular dream and went down his own bizarre, singular, admirable road, deliberately sabotaging his own songs when they had a potential for mainstream acceptance.
Whether Big Star should have been huge is not something I'm that interested in chewing over. There's more to life than the big time. They had fantastically great songs and were all good-looking, charismatic guys, but their songs were out of step with the mid-'70s. Like most works of high quality that fail to achieve mainstream acceptance in their immediate present, Big Star slowly built a small but devoted following that gets a little bigger every day. Those songs will last until the sun burns out, and this documentary should bring some new people to those songs. Even if it doesn't, it's a good watch for the already converted.

I'm way behind #6: Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro)

I'm still four months behind in my posts, so I'd better take a cue from Tom Waits and get behind the mule.
A handful of times a year, someone I don't know that well will ask me if I've seen some new Hollywood blockbuster or if I'm looking forward to seeing some new Hollywood blockbuster, and I usually give this person the polite but honest answer that Hollywood blockbusters aren't my thing. I don't go into my whole spiel about how the last 15 years of Hollywood product has been a dreary, depressing slog to sit through, how entertainment and craftsmanship have been replaced by CGI, homogeneity, noise, spatial incoherence, monochromatic color palettes, bloated running times, franchises, sequels, remakes, films that are nothing but bombastic climaxes, and motherfucking superheroes up the wazoo, how these films are empty, soul-deadening experiences that bludgeon their viewers into apathetic comas, how actual fun has been replaced by the idea of fun, a fun in quotes, a fun substitute made of thin colorless paste. I just smile politely and say, "Blockbusters aren't really my thing." Somehow, I get the same look I get when I tell people I don't like sports, that subtle look that says, "Oh, you're one of those guys. You hate fun, and I feel a little sorry for you." Sometimes, they even tell me I need to lighten up.
But I don't hate fun. Honest, I don't. I love many crowd-pleasing, mainstream Hollywood films, from '30s screwball comedies to '80s and early-'90s action movies. But I find the recent Hollywood blockbusters so depressing, so dreary, so not fun that I'm baffled and confused by their continuing popularity. For rare blockbusters like Iron Man or Spider-Man that actually capture some of that childlike wonder and light entertainment uplift, you get 40 billion depressing pieces of shit that make you want to hang yourself. You may want to check my math, but you get the idea.
I don't see many big Hollywood movies in the theater, especially tentpole summer action spectacular extravaganzas with kid's meal tie-ins, but there are some rare exceptions. Pacific Rim is one. (It probably underperformed in the United States because I was interested in seeing it. Sorry, everyone.) I'm a fan of Guillermo del Toro. I trust him. I love the way the creatures in his films look. I love the care he takes with the framing of his shots and the intricate design of his settings. His films are actually fun, and he's one of those rare guys who can bounce from small canvases to huge ones, from personal independent projects to big studio movies, with his talent and personality intact. We lost Peter Jackson down the hobbit-hole, but del Toro is still, mostly, here.
Much like the battles between the giant robots and giant monsters that make up the bulk of the film's running time, Pacific Rim sees the del Toro of old battling the form and structure of the modern blockbuster. It's an uneasy and not always successful marriage, but del Toro comes out ahead in the end. The film's weaknesses are very much a sign of the current blockbuster times. Unlike in his other films (I'm excepting his for-hire direction of Blade 2), del Toro's characters here are underdeveloped and thin, a few of the battle sequences have the cameras in so tight to the action that it's hard to tell what's going on, and it's a loud and noisy film full of climactic scenes. Nevertheless, there's a human heartbeat thumping underneath all the blockbuster trappings. The monsters are, once again, fantastic, as in every del Toro movie, and the robots are also meticulously designed to elicit childlike glee. Though I have quibbles with some of the camera placement during the big fights, each battle has moments of visceral, kinetic action that most blockbusters lack. Most of the jokes land where they're supposed to. The cast is unusual for a big sci-fi action movie, made up of cult TV actors Idris Elba, Charlie Day, and Charlie Hunnam, Japanese art-film star Rinko Kikuchi, and the mighty Ron Perlman, a del Toro regular. Perlman, in particular, gets some great moments, and his black market operation has some of the best set design in the whole film. The CGI actually looks good and is integrated pretty seamlessly into the frame, but I still would have loved to see an '80s-style foam and latex handmade edition of this thing. Still, you're left with the feeling that cast and director are having a great deal of fun, and that spirit is infectious.
I'm always going to prefer the Cronos/Devil's Backbone/Pan's Labyrinth del Toro to the Pacific Rim del Toro, and I think I prefer the first Hellboy as a better example of mainstream del Toro, but Pacific Rim gave me something the vast majority of recent Hollywood blockbusters haven't -- a good time, and that's worth something in this sour, divided, alienated present.

I'm way behind #5: Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)

This light, charming, black-and-white homage to the French New Wave films of the 1960s opens with a scene that made me immediately hostile to the film and its characters, even as I admired the shot composition and B&W cinematography. I braced myself for a grating, irritating 90 minutes, but I should have known better. I'm a fan of the three previous films I've seen by Frances Ha writer/director Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming (not the Will Ferrell little league soccer movie), The Squid and the Whale, and Greenberg) and the two Wes Anderson films he cowrote (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and the Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox), so I should have trusted his instincts. That "asshole" (according to the world's most insane film critic, Armond White) Baumbach took me from hating this movie to really liking it within 20 minutes. What sorcery is this?
To be fair, my initial hatred of the film may stem from my premature fogeyism and aversion to the stereotypical Williamsburg (or at least, the media-created fairytale version of "Williamsburg") hipster and all local and regional versions of this partially fabricated beast. The film opens with Frances (Greta Gerwig, also the film's cowriter) and her BFF and roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner, fruit of the loins of the artist we all know and love as lute-playing boner-killer Sting) sharing Frances' bed as they peruse the Internet on a laptop and engage in too-clever banter these young women seem to have absorbed like water from the comments sections of Gawker, the AV Club, and Brooklyn Vegan. It's a more naturalistic but just as annoying post-collegiate version of Diablo Cody's Juno irritations. Good work on nailing the way these people talk, Baumbach and Gerwig, but why would I want to spend a movie with them?
Here's why. We've seen far too many movies about aimless, inarticulate young people wandering through bohemian urban milieus, but they've all been men (or man-boys really), their childish aimlessness is romanticized, and they are usually saved by a patient, kind woman who's got her shit together but wants to help because of aimless boy's sexily hip charisma. This time, the aimless slacker is a woman, her lack of motivation and direction is seen as a negative and is a constant source of anxiety for her, and the movie is about her growing up and pulling her own shit together. Also, she's actually likable when she's being herself. Baumbach and Gerwig have fun making fun of the hipster man-children whose parents pay for their spacious New York apartments and who Gerwig has to crash with after her BFF and roommate moves into a nicer place with a different roommate. There's some very funny stuff here about the cultural differences between the aimless-by-choice trust-fund early twentysomethings and the employed yet aimless-by-circumstance Frances, who is approaching thirty and is seen by these guys as some hilarious, hapless eccentric from an earlier generation.
Baumbach and Gerwig mildly and comedically subvert expectations for this type of story. I like how Sophie is a picture postcard Williamsburg hipster archetype, but her boyfriend is a fratty jock who works in business. He's also a nice, likable guy but is a little bit scared of her and does what she says. I've seen this kind of relationship in life but never in a movie before, this coldly intimidating hipster/kindly dude-bro couple. Also, through a Curb Your Enthusiasm-style comedic chain of uncomfortable events, Frances flies to Paris by herself for a very brief and very expensive two days, and spends a miserable weekend alone. Boy, I made that sound hilarious. It is, and it's the only time I've ever seen Paris represented on film as a cold, depressing, alienating, average metropolis, where magic does not appear on every corner, and where the atmosphere is unforgiving if you don't know anyone and don't have any plans.
I also like how Baumbach's take on New York in the present evokes moments from the '60s French New Wave films without explicitly referencing them, with the exception of the soundtrack, which features several excerpts from those films' scores. The black and white is gorgeous, and the cast is natural and sharp. The happy ending was too sugarcoated for my tastes, I don't understand friendships like Frances' and Sophie's, and that opening scene still bugs me, but everything else charmed me.  
 

I'm way behind #4: Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)

Richard Linklater has a knack for using actors I normally dislike, find boring, or enjoy only in small doses (Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Adam Goldberg, Giovanni Ribisi, Steve Zahn, Jack Black, Marcia Gay Harden, Wilmer Valderrama, Bobby Cannavale, post-1991 Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, post-1980s Winona Ryder, Zac Efron) in mysteriously pleasing ways that bypass my usual issues with them, but he had to put all his English on it to make me stomach Ethan Hawke, probably my least favorite of all the actors Linklater has used. I don't know how he did it, but he did it. Hawke, an actor I find unbearably smug in everything except Explorers (he was a little kid), Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (his character was too desperate to be smug), and the last two parts of Linklater's Before trilogy (the Linklater voodoo) and who seems like a smug, arrogant prick in every interview and talk show appearance I've had the misfortune to see (especially his thankfully brief moments in Abel Ferrara's Chelsea Hotel documentary Chelsea on the Rocks), has a genuine chemistry with Julie Delpy in these films and knows this guy he's playing inside and out. Something wonderful and a little bit scary is developing with this series, which started as a slight but enjoyable twentysomething romance and picturesque Europe-as-seen-by-an-American slideshow and has become a melancholy, funny, sad, and tough look at aging, relationships, love, and the passage of time. (The European backdrops are still ridiculously postcard pretty, though.)
Three films, three days, separated by nine years. The couple, in their early twenties and just out of college, meet and fall in love in Vienna in Before Sunrise but have to separate when Hawke's character returns to the United States after his vacation ends. They agree to meet again the following year. That meeting, we learn in Before Sunset, never happened, but the pair reconnect in France nine years later. Now in their mid-thirties, they find they still have the same chemistry. Again, we're left with an open ending. Will Hawke stay with Delpy or go back to his family in the States? Before Midnight is a darker and tougher film than its predecessors. Hawke's and Delpy's characters are now deep into a long relationship, with twin daughters, and some major tension is simmering over Hawke's desire to move the family to Chicago so he can be near his son from his failed marriage with Delpy wanting to stay in Europe.
It's impossible not to be charmed by Delpy, but I pushed back against Before Midnight at first. This is a film about good-looking people with great careers living and vacationing in the most beautiful parts of Europe, and so much of the first part of Before Midnight is a glimpse into a fabulous life I'll never have. It seemed like a softer, more domesticated retread of the great second film, and a few of the long conversations pushed the themes a little too neatly. (I also don't buy Hawke as a writer, even though he is a published author in what we call "real life." Reading three pages of one of his novels in a bookstore convinced me he would never have been published if he weren't a famous actor. Maybe the terribleness of his actual writing makes me doubt the veracity of his being a critically acclaimed author in these movies.) An easy film to enjoy at this early stage, but a hard one to admire or respect. That soon changed. Things start to get really interesting when an almost tossed-off line of dialogue reveals that Delpy's and Hawke's characters still haven't married. The tension about the proposed move slowly increases, and the film's final third is one of the rarest things in film, an explosively accurate and honest depiction of a major fight between a couple with a long history. They know just how to hurt each other with the most carefully placed insults, and the hotel room war of words is one of Linklater's greatest moments as a filmmaker. It's also the best thing I've seen Hawke do. Delpy nails it, but I never had any doubts about her. This scene hurts, it's so true. If you've ever had a long, brutal argument with your significant other (and I wouldn't trust anyone who hasn't), you will recognize parts of yourself here, and you will cringe, laugh, and take an emotional beating. It's a rough watch, but it's full of humor, too, and it ebbs and flows and stops and starts and quiets down and explodes again in noise like the real epic fights do. It's a scene that turns an almost good film into an almost great one. Where will they be nine years from now?

I'm way behind #3: At Any Price (Ramin Bahrani)

At Any Price is a disappointing stumble for New York-based, North Carolina-raised filmmaker Ramin Bahrani, especially after the leap forward that was his last film, 2008's Goodbye Solo. I hope it's a temporary aberration and not the first act of a sad decline. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Bahrani, the first-generation American son of Iranian immigrants, made three features of increasing excellence and the endearingly oddball comedic short Plastic Bag (with Werner Herzog as the voice of a plastic bag and music by a member of Sigur Ros) before the conventional, overheated At Any Price got the better of him, and it's been a pleasure to follow his career over the last eight years. His promising first two films, Man Push Cart, about a former Pakistani pop star struggling to make ends meet in Manhattan with his coffee and bagel cart, and the Italian neo-realist-inspired Chop Shop, about a couple of teenage orphans living above and working in the auto repair shops and scrapyards of the Willets Point area of Queens, made me take notice. They were good films with minor flaws, and they gave me the sense that Bahrani would have some great films ahead of him once he acquired a little age and experience.
The first (hopefully not the last) great Bahrani film appeared in 2008. The filmmaker returned to his home state of North Carolina for Goodbye Solo, a sad, funny, and visually beautiful story about a complex friendship between a Senegalese immigrant cab driver named Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane) and one of his fares in Winston-Salem, William (Red West, an actor, songwriter, and stuntman most famous for being an integral part of Elvis Presley's Memphis Mafia as a driver, bodyguard, songwriter, and close friend).
While that film ended with a hypnotic but emotionally intense, nearly dialogue-free, formally gorgeous long scene in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains that relied on the composition of images, the landscape, the characters' faces, and meditative silence to tell the end of the story, At Any Price is full of long speeches, melodramatic outbursts, soapbox preaching, and a plot full of soap operatic twists and turns. The story of an Iowa farm family, the Whipples, and their ambitious patriarch Henry (Dennis Quaid), who has turned a small but successful family farm into a large agribusiness machine, the film is a confused mix of puffed-up melodrama and rural slice-of-life. Quaid's ready for his grown sons to enter the family business, but the unseen prodigal son is inexplicably climbing mountains in Argentina (his letters home, read in voice-over, provide some of the film's most ridiculous low points) and the younger son, Dean (Zac Efron) is more interested in breaking into NASCAR, getting into trouble with his redneck friends, taking his smart but younger girlfriend Cadence (the excellent Maika Monroe) for granted, and brooding and sulking in attempts to cultivate his sensitive bad-boy image. Meanwhile, Heather Graham has a thankless, one-note role as a former teen beauty stuck in her Iowa hometown who now sleeps with everyone, including Henry and Dean. Kim Dickens is the suffering, noble wife and mother. Clancy Brown is Henry's agribusiness competition, and Red West (thank god for Red West) is Henry's hard-assed, distant dad. We start at this fever-pitch of melodrama, and rev it up from there.
What happened? Look at how evocative the titles of Bahrani's previous films are. Then look at the flat, generic title of this one. Look at how Bahrani wrote his previous films either alone or with a friend and how he wrote this one with a professional writer. Look at how he swapped his casts of nonprofessionals and offbeat character actors for this cast of Hollywood pros. Look at how his previous films' visual palette gives way to the flat, anonymous look of this movie.
I will give Bahrani some credit. This is a disappointingly conventional film, but the conventions Bahrani follows here are currently unfashionable and unusual. The template for At Any Price is a combination of '50s melodrama and the late '70s/early '80s message movies about factories and farms like Norma Rae, The River, and Silkwood. At Any Price plays like a Joshua Logan period piece like Picnic or Bus Stop without the Technicolor, fun, and charisma or like a message movie with too much message. Still, it's an interesting choice of model in today's world of CGI action and rise-and-fall biopics in Hollywood and the inarticulate, distanced young urban bohemia in indie land. Bahrani gets the rural Midwestern landscape, speech patterns, and social life just right, and Clancy Brown, Red West, and Maika Monroe give better performances than the material deserves. The normally excellent Dennis Quaid (my wife is absolutely right when she says that every Kevin Costner movie would be substantially improved with Quaid in the Costner role) gives an oddly mannered performance, and Zac Efron can't do much with his silly character. I could get into the disastrous home movie montage that opens the film, but I don't have the heart. I'm guardedly optimistic for his next film, but any more like this one, and I may have to bow out. 

I'm way behind #2: A Woman Under the Influence & Husbands (John Cassavetes)

The Austin Film Society hosted a mini-retrospective of my favorite filmmaker, John Cassavetes, a few months ago, giving me a chance to see two of my favorite movies on the big screen for the first time. (I skipped the third film in the series, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, only because I caught that one on the big screen last year.) I almost talked myself out of going because of my temporarily shitty work schedule and because I've seen both films at least a dozen times, but Cassavetes' work has this insane hold on me that manages to blast through my strongest stores of inertia. If my arm was ripped off in a horrific industrial accident right before a Cassavetes screening, I would just slap a bunch of Band-Aids on it and head into the theater. I guess I'm saying I like these movies.
As much as I admire Cassavetes, I have a hard time understanding or agreeing with the ways his films, directorial style, screenplays, and methods have been described, praised, slammed, or represented by the media, fellow admirers, and irritated detractors alike. There are a lot of oft-repeated misconceptions about his work that have hardened into conventional wisdom. He has a reputation for being a sloppy technician and a maker of improvised, neo-realist films that are primarily actor-driven (acting exercises masquerading as narrative films to his non-fans). Many mediocre filmmakers claim they're making Cassavetes-inspired cinema when they throw some inexperienced actors into dialogue-driven, improvisation-heavy scenarios with manufactured revelations, framed in sloppy, stagy awkwardness. These films have about as much to do with Cassavetes as Cassavetes' films have to do with Star Wars.

Cassavetes' first two purely independent productions, Shadows and Faces (with two unhappy dalliances in Hollywood in between), do have some occasionally sloppy technical moments, due to the fact he and his collaborators were learning as they went with a nonprofessional crew, but Cassavetes became a graceful, accomplished visual stylist with an innate yet unconventional sense of composition and camera movement. He's partially responsible for the misunderstanding about his screenplays being mostly improvised on the set. Shadows ends with a title card reading, "The film you have just seen is an improvisation." That film was created from improvisations in an acting workshop Cassavetes ran with Burt Lane (Diane's dad) in the late 1950s, but the story and most of the dialogue was set in stone by the time the cameras rolled. Cassavetes' dialogue, with the exception of a handful of improvised lines, was scripted for the remainder of his career, and he instructed the actors not to deviate from the words on the page. What is improvised in Cassavetes' films is what makes them so peculiar and so emotionally affecting. The actors could move where they wanted and say the words in whatever cadence, volume, pace, and tone they wanted. Cassavetes avoided storyboards and marks. He lit and miked the entirety of the locations and sets so the actors were free to move around without worrying about having to stand in a particular spot or hit their marks. This freed them up to concentrate on the characters they were playing in more intuitive, experiential ways than the mainstream or independent filmmaking norm and to honestly and intuitively react to their fellow actors, but they still had to stick to the structure and words of the script. This was no sloppy acting exercise as movie. This was a carefully devised method, a serious approach to film form from a genuinely visually oriented filmmaker. He created a formal structure based on the movements and performances of his actors as well as the wonderful strangeness of his scripts, and he managed to do this without turning his movies into filmed plays. This was cinema, not theater. (To be clear, I'm not knocking theater here. I am knocking the unfair, inaccurate putdown of Cassavetes' work as uncinematic, theatrical exercises.)

I also take issue with the widespread characterization of Cassavetes' films as slices of life or documentary-like cinema verite. His films are far stranger than that. Though the emotions his films stir up in the empathetic viewer are visceral, real, and raw and some of his characters are everyday working people, his dialogue is a mixture of hysterical outbursts, tangents both mundane and bizarre, non sequiturs and jokes, singing, laughter, hairpin-turn shifts in tone, repetition, verbal tics, and naked emotion. He has a particular and stylized way of making his characters talk that is every bit as strange as any other unique writer of film dialogue. Beginning with The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Cassavetes' films become dreamier, more melancholy, even stranger. The Crazy Horse strip club and cabaret in that film is Fellini by way of Ed Wood by way of an idealized burlesque house from remembered history. Opening Night contains several scenes of Gena Rowlands' actress character talking to the ghost of a teenaged fan killed in an accident. Gloria is Hollywood fantasy and escapism colliding with the Cassavetes method. Love Streams features multiple hallucinatory fantasy sequences and a musical number. The man doesn't get enough credit for being a visual stylist and formal innovator.

I can blather on about Cassavetes, can't I? Time to move my blather to the particular films at hand.
A Woman Under the Influence is probably Cassavetes' best-known film, with Gena Rowlands' deservedly famous, very intense embodiment of Mabel Longhetti, a housewife whose eccentricities push at the constrictions placed on her by herself, her family, and 1974 American society until they burst. Peter Falk is just as good as her equally eccentric (though his eccentricities are more socially acceptable) city construction worker husband. These are inadequate descriptions, as almost every description is when attempting to write about a Cassavetes film. These films follow their own beats, their own rhythms. They don't work like other movies. They're all Mabels.
I was surprised at how much I'd absorbed A Woman Under the Influence while watching it for the first time on the big screen. I had it down. I had it memorized. I knew every beat, every line of dialogue, what was coming next, how many scenes were left. I'd seen it so many times before, on video or DVD. But it was still a new experience. I don't know how he did it. Each viewing is like a first viewing. I feel differently about the characters every time I watch. This time, I was more disturbed by and less sympathetic to Peter Falk, but I still felt so much love for his character, and for all the characters. I love the way they move through the house, up and down the stairs, into the kitchen, into the living room. That house is a character, too. The day trip to the beach after Mabel is committed. The young kids drinking beer with their dad in the back of the pickup. This is a film that exhausts you, but it recharges you, too. The construction crew scenes have a greater impact on a big screen. They don't have the same intensity on the television. I don't know why. There are so many mysteries here, so much worth going back to again and again, but most people would rather watch Transformers 4. I don't know what else to say. This movie is worth your fucking time.

Husbands was different. I didn't have it memorized. I mean, I did. But I didn't. It played so differently on a big screen. I don't know why. I'd always loved it from the first time I saw it, but I didn't think it was one of his masterpieces. It was almost there, but it fell a little short. I have to revise that now. I've bumped it up to masterpiece status. The humor played well with a Friday night crowd. So did the tough stuff, the ugly stuff. It had an electrical charge to it, seeing it with an audience. That extra juice, that jump from being with a crowd who's also affected by it. After seeing it, I felt lonely but also a part of something. Those guys in Husbands. So likable. So unlikable. Such a rhythm to that movie. You go with them until it's time to stop, and then it just stops, right where it's supposed to stop. The greatest bender in movie history. These movies resist analysis, summing up, description. Look at all the words I've just wasted trying to tell you about something that can only be seen. Stop reading this shit and go see them.

I'm way behind #1: Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas)

When I decided to start writing about every film I see in a theater, I thought I could stay on top of things. I didn't count on a temporarily inconvenient work schedule and my innate laziness, and now I'm almost three months behind. I plan to rectify the situation with a series I'm calling "I'm way behind."
I may be a misguided fool, but, to me, Mexican writer/director Carlos Reygadas is an anomaly. He makes films as if the last 35 years of prevailing trends in both mainstream and arthouse cinema never happened, but his films aren't retro-nostalgia throwbacks. They feel very contemporary, but you'd have to go back to people like Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Bresson, "trilogy of faith"-era Bergman, the Herzog of Aguirre, and the Erice of Spirit of the Beehive to find a similar ambition and tone. He makes visionary, emotional epics on an intimate scale with mixed casts of professional and nonprofessional actors in Mexican landscapes and communities free from the usual cinematic cliches of what that country looks like. His films are largely meditative and slowly paced, but they contain outrageous moments of apocalyptic/mystical provocation and psychedelic lunacy, and his approach to sexuality and nudity walks a thin line between matter-of-factness and titillation. His shot composition is remarkably beautiful, with a subtle undercurrent of menace. He's an artist, not an entertainer or commercial huckster, but there is just enough P.T. Barnum in him to make the viewing experience slightly unsettling. 
I have yet to catch up with his first film, Japon, but the two preceding Post Tenebras Lux, Battle in Heaven and his Dreyer homage Silent Light, may be two of my favorite films of the past decade. Silent Light, in particular, gave me a glimpse into a community I'd never known about previously, the white Mennonite settlements in Chihuahua that have existed since the 1920s. The film was the first made in Plautdietsch, the dialect spoken by low-German Mennonites. Those two films were well received by critics, but Post Tenebras Lux is a much more divisive animal. An abstract semi-autobiography of fragmented narrative, Post Tenebras Lux features Reygadas' children playing the lead characters' children, uses Reygadas' house as a primary location, and includes two scenes of English boys playing rugby, which initially baffled me until I read some biographical information about the director and discovered the rugby teams were affiliated with an English boarding school Reygadas attended as a boy. This impressionistic approach to narrative and form has made some critics pull out that old saw of an insult, "self-indulgent," but I think their problem is that Reygadas is not indulging or validating their own laziness, prejudice, and lack of engagement.

The film opens with a virtuosic piece of filmmaking; Reygadas' young daughter Rut wanders unsupervised in a rural, mountainous landscape at dusk while dogs and cattle move about her and a thunderstorm punctuates the enormous sky with yellows and purples and huge claps of percussive sound. The rest of the film can't quite live up to this visual embarrassment of riches (though it comes close), but what other film of the last thirty years could?
The rest of Post Tenebras Lux includes both quiet and fraught domestic moments, an animated devil wandering the home at night, a transformative sexual experience in a French bathhouse, a robbery gone bad, an off-key but emotionally affecting Neil Young cover, a meeting of recovering addicts in a reconfigured shack, reverently mystical shots of the landscape, and the most unexpected sacrificial atonement of sins you'll probably ever see. The film was shot in the rarely used 1:33 aspect ratio that is square instead of rectangular. Reygadas also shoots his exterior scenes with a distortion effect around the edges of the frame that makes the viewer feel as if he's staring through glass. Rather than the pretentious distraction this sounds like on paper, the lens distortion has the effect of making the film seem like a dream or hallucination, as well as setting it apart from conventional filmmaking technique and forcing the viewer to acknowledge it as a piece of art on its own terms, a personal expression from a man with a very particular way of looking at the world. I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to see it on a theater screen.