by Jack Kentala

It gives me great pleasure to say, in all earnestness, that Haywire (2011 or 2012 depending on the source) is Steven Soderbergh’s best film since Contagion. And the latter came out last September.

I don’t know what the fuck happens in Mission: Impossible – Shitty Title, but I guarantee this is a better film by several magnitudes. While Soderbergh is no stranger to fringe genre filmmaking – Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve, and, uh, Thirteen, as well as the still-underrated Out of Sight and the film-school staple/revenger The Limey – here he tackles an action/spy/thriller mashup that plays far better to his sensibilities than, say, Paul Greengrass or David Fincher.

Much fuss has been made about the casting of Gina Carano, well versed in the world of MMA (mixed martial arts, e.g. punching someone in the face until they lose consciousness…in a steel cage!) and someone you definitely want on your side in a bar fight. Many feared that a non-vet wouldn’t carry a film or, more importantly, stand her ground against phenomenal actors like Michael Fassbender and Ewan McGregor. And she pulls it off completely, with a quiet verve that, for whatever reason, reminds me of Richard Jenkins in The Visitor (or, dare I say, the lead in French Resistance piece Army of Shadows, but with a shade more emotion). Carano also looks like she could double for Rachel Weisz; wouldn’t be surprised if unwitting filmgoers mistook the two.

So that’s probably a good departure point between comparing the real-life exploits of Carano versus pornstar Sasha Grey in Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience. It’s not like Soderbergh hasn’t used non-pros before. Anyone remember Bubble? I sure do, and not just because it was fantastic. I think it’s definitely the fact that sliding Grey into the role of an escort and Carano into a physically-lethal operator in Haywire that led to this dubious comparison. Depending who you ask, the question is either “Who’s the worse actor?” or “Who’s surprisingly excellent?”

I think I’ll leave it at that.

Haywire is also very special because it’s a Soderbergh trifecta: he directed it, shot it (as DP Peter Andrews, as per guild rules), and cut it (as Mary Ann Bernard, also because of guild rules). It’s not as rare as a Soderbergh quadfecta (Solaris, which SS directed, shot, cut, and adapted [very liberally from Stanislaw Lem's book rather than Tarkovsky's film]) or the quinfecta (Schizopolis, with the man as director, writer, DP, lead actor, and music [sort of]). There’s a school of thought (actually a film school of thought that was drilled into my head [by a certain institution] and brashly discarded when I set about both my student shorts and no-budget features) that you should only do one thing on a film, somehow reasoning that if you, say, direct and shoot, you can only concentrate on one or the other. Haywire proves counter to this argument. Contagion (which SS “only” directed and shot), which everyone absolutely loves (right?), proves that the man can wear many hats and still deliver an unfairly-consistent film. (Wish I could do the same!)

I’m working off an outline written on a napkin, so you’re going to have to bear with me. This was also supposed to just be a bulleted list.

I’m mentally going back to Salt, starring Angelina Jolie as a woman spy who can beat the shit out of people. But in that I didn’t once really think about gender roles in action movies, mostly since Jolie has done a lot of those. For a hardcore MMA fighter, Carano is miraculously easy on the eyes (yeah, I’ll trot out the Rachel Weisz comparison again), but she’s not as impossibly beautiful as Angelina Jolie. (If nothing else, Carano’s lips aren’t the size of those wax ones you used to buy as a kid.) So while Jolie has operated largely in the capacity as eye-candy-that-fights (Exhibit A: In Wanted, yeah, she kicks ass, takes names, etc., but also steps nude out of a bathtub while two dudes look on and pop hidden boners.), Carano doesn’t have the burden of having to look too pretty to sell her character because, hell, if her character was too pretty we’d want to check her resume. A colleague and I have an ongoing debate about Haywire, in which he insists Carano is far too low-key to play the lead. I countered saying that this sort of “realistic” spy film (aka not the sort of film with Bourne-esque miracle stunts) exists in the “real world” where a spy’s best asset is their ability to melt into a crowd. Granted, for a film, you have to strike a balance. I thought that Carano made that balance work; my friend didn’t.

(Aside: Just remembered that Salt was actually written with Tom Cruise in mind before they switched it to Jolie with nary a difference.)

And while Soderbergh has dabbled in pretty much everything, he’s fairly new at action outside of some scenes in the Ocean’s, Out of Sight, and a little in The Limey and Traffic. Well, Che is about dudes with rifles and grenades, whereas there are probably less than twenty gunshots in the whole of Haywire. Soderbergh (or screenwriter Lem Dobbs) wisely stuck with close-quarters combat, which is absolutely brutal. It’s much moreso brutal because Soderbergh lets David Holmes’ score completely drop out during fights; all we hear are body blows, things breaking, and gunshots. (Another aside: Gunshots in movies are “movie gunshots” that sound nothing like what actual gunshots sound like. I’ve fired many guns in real life and the sound is more of a singular, blow-out BLAM than a “movie gunshot” that sounds like twenty different things happening at once.) Soderbergh also wisely keeps the shots as wide as possible, which is akin to kung-fu films and early Jackie Chan (like Police Story or Druken Master II, not his American bullshit, back when Jackie Chan could fall three stories onto hard ground [as he did in Project A] and not die), which showed that the actors actually had some skill. This was long before the What The Fuck Is Happening? It’s Cut Too Fast! trend that’s been going on in Hollywood for a while, which was first used to hide the stuntmen and now is employed for reasons that are beyond me. (As much as I love exactly 41% of The Dark Knight, I hate their obtuse, obstructed, dark-as-fuck, edited-so-fast-it-could-induce-a-seizure fight choreography. And it extends far beyond just that film.)

Unfortunately, while scenes with Carano and random dudes (most likely stuntmen) duking it out are kept whole with longer and wider shots (since Carano can easily hold her own), her bouts with Michael Fassbender and Ewan McGregor are cut a little faster because, presumably, those guys needed a double lest they wanted a broken skull.

While I’m grinding out minor quibbles, here’s another: The whole framing device for about 75% of the story is lame. To summarize: Carano gets out of a hotspot by carjacking a car and its driver. For a private-ops spy, she sure spills her entire narrative to her passenger, and even though it’s in the spirit of trying to clear her name, it’s a tad convenient and cuts up the past and present at not-always-perfect points. Also: The carjacked man looks and sounds so much like Edward Norton (especially through windshield glare) that I had to double-check IMDb that it wasn’t him. Here‘s what I’m talking abut, though he looks a lot less doughy in the film.

One last caveat: The film seemed too short. That’s actually probably the biggest compliment I can offer up. It’s just that the spy genre has trained viewers to expect acts 1 and 2 to plot out the final “job” that unfolds in act 3. Here, the two main “jobs” blend into each other and, individually, don’t last that long. If you see Haywire, you’ll know what I mean when, near the end, Channing Tatum has a somewhat dumbing realization and says, “I was in Barcelona seven days ago?”

Much like I gushed in my thoughts on Contagion, it’s astounding how many great players are in the film given its $15 million budget. Carano probably came in on the cheap, and the rest must owe Soderbergh favors for dogsitting or driving them to the airport at 5 a.m. one morning or something. It’s like the starting lineup for badasses past and present: Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton (not Pullman), Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas. All that was missing was a Matt Damon cameo. (And Che Part 2 showed that Damon can have a minutes-long cameo without derailing the film and making everyone say, “Hey!… Isn’t that Matt Damon?” Probably because he was wearing a hat and speaking Spanish, albeit Matt-Damon-sounding Spanish.)

Haywire was great. It’ll be great again when it hits DVD in two months and I can watch it again, most likely with the always-excellent commentaries by Soderbergh. But no matter how hard I try, all these recent Soderbergh films are depressing because the man insists that he’s retiring after Magic Mike (let’s just all pretend it’s not about male stripping so we won’t feel weird getting tickets), his HBO-miniseries biopic on Liberace, and a 2013 film currently titled The Bitter Pill. I feel like I’m pre-eulogizing, but even if Haywire is derided as a subpar genre pic (most likely by those whose palette is more used to Mission: Impossible – Shitty Title, the schizo Bournes, and whatever turd the next James Bond turns out to be), Soderbergh threw his full force (or at least the trifecta) behind a new genre, a first-time lead, and a non-sexy (read: non-Ocean’s) style. And it came together. And I want more.

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on The Informant!
2. Thoughts on Contagion
3. Brief Thoughts on Drag Me To Hell

I have not seen every film that was released in 2011, but I’ve seen a good many, and here are my reflections on the most notable films of 2011.

10.
DRIVE
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
written by Hossein Amini (screenplay), James Sallis (book)
stars: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston

A dirty neon, LA love story, wherein a real taciturn hero (Ryan Gosling), and a winsome young mother (Carey Mulligan), meet under unfortunate circumstances.  Do people make the circumstances, or do circumstances make the people?  Seemingly this is the thematic question underlying the film.

The casting is a success: Gosling and Mulligan are the best part of the film.

Drive is a soundtrack film, this is made apparent after an enthralling opening chase scene when Kavinsky’s “Night Call” plays over the opening credits.  Driving motifs have always been a part of Kavinsky’s music, so this is a fitting choice for the film.  Along with the Kavinsky track, “Under Your Spell” by Desire and “A Real Hero” by College are a perfect musical fit.  In many ways the soundtrack augments this moody love film — but perhaps sometimes the film is too reliant on its soundtrack for emotional cues — but it still works well, and Cliff Martinez does a fine job laying down the sonic bed of suspense.

On the outside, Drive has a candy-coated shell of action, nuanced-suspense, and retro aesthetic; at heart, the film is a love story, a love story of forlorn hope, where we wait for the people we love, where we commit crimes for the people we love.

9.
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS
directed by Woody Allen
written by Woody Allen
stars: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates

Midnight In Paris definitely is Woody Allen’s best film since Match Point (2005).  Owen Wilson plays Gil, a screenwriter vacationing in Paris with his uptight fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams).  The two spend more time with McAdams’ pedantic friend, Paul (Michael Sheen), than they do alone. Pedantic Paul sets the table for some funny art humor.

Wilson is a screenwriter having trouble with his first novel.  Luckily, he stumbles upon a magic hot-spot where at the strike of midnight, he is carried back to an earlier period marked with creative fecundity and intellectual glamor, where he meets and falls for a beautiful and charming woman (Marion Cotillard), and hangs with artistic heavyweights like Pablo Picasso, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, and is introduced to a famous publisher (Kathy Bates) who proof-reads his novel.

The film also features a lovely soundtrack, which is highly recommended.  According to iTunes, I’ve listened to “La Conga Blicoti” by Josephine Baker over 40 times since the film hit the theatre.

The film is a halcyon fantasy filled with love, creativity, and magical elements of time-travel.

8.
THE TREE OF LIFE
directed by Terrence Malick
written by Terrence Malick
stars: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain

Much like the title denotes, The Tree of Life is an art house epic, and many words could be written about it.  You could write essay on it, a treatise — a tome.

Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography is glorious.  Malick is a great director and there’s no arguing his dedication to this project and to his vision.

A very literal way of interpreting this abstract thing called life.

7.
MELANCHOLIA
directed by Lars von Trier
written by Lars von Trier
stars: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland

Amongst my friends, Melancholia is the most polarizing film of the 2011, which makes sense, because the film itself is bipolar, dark, apocalyptic, and toned with abject depression — but it’s also a dark comedy.

Part 1 of the film features the pulchritudinous Kirstin Dunst as a despondent bride on her big wedding day, a wedding so big that a professional wedding planner (Udo Kier) is on the floor and commanding the events.  The bride makes some outlandish decisions, deviates from the fastidious schedule, and hilarity and absurdism ensues, but in a very fragile and dramatic sense.

Part 2 of the film deals with the characters’ varying expectations, interpretations, and actions pertaining to the oncoming contact with a mystifying planet named Melancholia.

Melancholia deals with absurdism and celestial catastrophe in a very dark and beautiful way.

6. (TIE)
Two gems of American independent cinema.

6. (TIE)
MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE
directed by Sean Durkin
written by Sean Durkin
stars: Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, John Hawkes

Marcy May Mary Marlene is a winner in the storytelling department: despite its prosaic cinematography, its slow-and-steady approach to non-linearity works surprisingly well and allows the viewer to walk in the shoes of a very fragile character experiencing psychosis; it illustrates the cause-and-effect relationship and harrowing aftermath of mental abuse.

Elizabeth Olsen gives a strong performance; director Sean Durkin builds a strong arc of rising action up to a very strong ending — an impressive first feature film effort — great storytelling with little budget.

6. (TIE)
MEEK’S CUTOFF
directed by Kelly Reichardt
written by Jonathan Raymond (screenplay)
stars: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Paul Dano

Meek’s Cutoff — probably Kelly Reichardt’s best film to date — is a realist and minimalistic period drama.  Did you play the oregon trail computer game in school growing up?  Well, this pensive film is like that, insofar as its action involves rationing your food and water, and fixing supplies like busted wagon wheels and axles.  The film is based on a historical event involving a certain frontier guide named Stephen Meek back during the mid 1800s.

Kelly is a homie: she makes films on a scant budget: 2mil for Meek’s Cutoff, an estimated 200,000 budget for Wendy & Lucy (2008), Old Joy (2006) definitely had lesser, and her first feature River of Grass was shot on 8mm (saw River of Grass recently at the Nightingale).

5.
THE INTERRUPTERS
directed by Steve James
stars: Ameena Matthews, Jeff Fort, Cobe Williams

Kartemquin makes many great documentary films; The Interrupters is one of their best.  Directed by the illustrious Steve James (Hoop Dreams, 1994), the film examines the pervasive problem of senseless violence in Chicago, focusing on the benevolent women and men — the interrupters — who obviate the violence by forming relationships with and watching out for those with a short fuse.

Some of the Eddie Bocanegra scenes in the film were shot in/around the neighborhood I live in.  You see the Ceasefire stickers around here, you see the Ceasefire signs around here, sometimes you hear the gunshots late at night.  Senseless violence truly is a problem in Chicago . . . and not just in Chicago, it’s a ubiquitous problem, as we all surely know.

It’s sad, very sad.  It seems every time you watch the local news you see a new story about an innocent kid — walking to school or waiting for the bus — who gets killed by a stray bullet related to gang violence or some senseless altercation.  The Interrupters examines certain stories like these.

I saw this film at the Gene Siskel Film Center; one of the interrupters, Cobe Williams, was at the screening.  He provided great insight during his Q&A.

Fun fact: for those that have seen the film, Cobe said Flamo now lives in Minnesota and is pursuing stand up comedy.

This film deserves academy recognition and wide distribution. Hey PBS, pick it up.

4. (TIE)
SHAME
directed by Steve McQueen
written by Abi Morgan & Steve McQueen
stars: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale

A Manhattan neorealist story (with two magnificent professional actors: Michael Fassbender & Carey Mulligan) about the strife of life and the imbalance of relationships, love, and family.

4. (TIE)
THE SKIN I LIVE IN
directed by Pedro Almodóvar
written by Pedro Almodovar & Agustin Almodovar
stars: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anya, Jan Cornet

A madmen will go to great lengths for love.  Almodóvar at his best.

3.
UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES
directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
written by Phra Sripariyattiweti (inspired by the book of), Apichatpong Weerasethakul
stars: Thanapat Saisaymar, Jenjira Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee

The film’s sublime beauty is enchanting.  Whether it be by dint of a red-eyed monster, a human, a ghost, or a talking catfish, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives channels the Life Force with profound imagery and allegory, expanding the cinematic ambit with the supernatural and other forms of life foreign to our own known existence.

FACING THE JUNGLE,
THE HILLS AND VALES,
MY PAST LIVES AS AN ANIMAL AND OTHER BEINGS
RISE UP BEFORE ME.

2.
TABLOID
directed by Errol Morris
stars: Joyce McKinney, Kent Gavin, Dr. Hong

An impeccable documentary film by Errol Morris, a master of documentary cinema.  Arguably, this is Morris’ quirkiest film to date, and it’s a love story, a very bizarre love story.  A madwoman will go to great lengths for love.

The motion graphics, titles, and animation are supreme.  Right up there with I.O.U.S.A. (2008) for best graphics in a documentary.

Joyce McKinney is a very intelligent and eccentric person, a true romantic; her commitment to true romance is — to say the least — fascinating and admirable.

1.
A DANGEROUS METHOD
directed by David Cronenberg
written by Christopher Hampton (screenplay), John Kerr (book)
stars: Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen

Perfected success.

A glorious story of young woman’s mental liberation and the profundities of true love, the conjugal life, work, friendship, and the conscious and subconscious life.

Keira Knightley, Michael Fassbender, and Viggo Mortensen gift superlative performances as Sabrina Spielrein, Carl Jung, and Sigmund Freud, respectively.  Howard Shore creates a deeply moving musical score (sample “Galvanometer,” or “Siegfried,” or “Letters,” or “Sigfried Idyll”).  Cronenberg directs and orchestrates a marvelous slice of biopic.  A Dangerous Method clearly is 2011′s cinematic best; a perfect success.

The mental fight is a harrowing thing; freedom of the mind is a powerful and beautiful thing.

— A. L. R.

TOP 10
1. A Dangerous Method
2. Tabloid
3. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
4. (tie) The Skin I Live In
4. (tie) Shame
5. The Interrupters
6. (tie) Meek’s Cutoff
6. (tie) Martha Marcy May Marlene
7. Melancholia
8. The Tree of Life
9. Midnight In Paris
10. Drive

HONORABLE MENTIONS
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Certified Copy

BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM
Slow Action by Ben Rivers

BEST 3D FILM
Mercurial Madness by Kerry Laitala

Related posts:

1. DINCA: Favorite Films of 2009: Part I
2. DINCA: Favorite Films of 2009: Part II
3. Jack Kentala's Three Most-Favorite Films of 2010

— David Cronenberg

Related posts:

1. Cronenberg on Technology
2. Cronenberg on Writing
3. Portrait: David Lynch

by Jack Kentala

2011: I finished the picture edit for my second feature film (with a sound overhaul in its late stages for an early ’12 release); wrote a very long book; started prepping my third feature; seriously considered getting a dog and/or getting engaged; and I saw none of the movies that has caused nationwide critics to cream their pants.

I take a bit of that last part back. It’s rather thrilling to see The Tree of Life tentatively making the top of giant amalgamating Best-Of polls, and it’s a huge victory for director Terrence Malick, who has started a late-career Renaissance that will probably kill him. (I “reviewed” this fine film and own it. I’ve watched the universe-creation sequence roughly fourteen times. No comment on how many of those times I may or may not have cried.)

And now I’m slowly remembering my point: I didn’t see enough awards’ bait to feel like I can make any sort of definitive statement on 2011 as a whole. I didn’t like Drive nearly as much as everyone else. I refuse to see The Artist (and don’t get me started). Hugo gave me my first 3D headache. Shame is playing two states away. I’ve got Tabloid and Margin Call in my Netflix stack (right underneath a disc of Justice League Unlimited cartoons). I’d rather spend the ticket price on an actual racetrack bet than see War Horse.

I did, though, see a fair amount of middling fare, like the unreasonably-enjoyable Fast Five, the oh-god-they’re-probably-going-to-turn-this-into-a-franchise Battle: Los Angeles, and director Zack Snyder lost all his cred with his better-than-it-deserved Watchmen adaptation with the fetish flop Sucker Punch.

I also saw pretty much every superhero film released and, these days, that’s no small feat. So in keeping with the time-honored tradition of making pointless lists at calendar year-end, here are the three worst superhero films from 2011.

The Worst

Captain America: The First Avenger

Let’s get the title out of the way. I’m sure the studio marketing hit squad pulled their hair out over this one. Sure, anyone with a passing knowledge of Marvel’s stable of superheroes knows Captain America (especially after his much-publicized comic-book death). But given that Captain America: The First Avenger is set back in that quaint time of the 40s, Marvel must’ve thought we’re all too stupid to see the fast-incoming Avengers films (set in the present day), so they tacked on “The First Avenger” so we mouthbreathers wouldn’t get too confused between scenes of horrid CGI and Hugo Weaving’s ghastly German faux-accent. (In his defense, he was probably having fun while getting paid.)

A lot of my problems with the film (which are also problems within the film itself) have to do with the framing narrative. It’s World War II. The US is at war with Germany. There’s a reason why so many videogames go back to this era: It was arguably the last time our nation faced off against an adversary that could be considered unredeemably “evil.” It was also a halcyon era sandblasted by the idea of an America owned by middle-class whites, and just off every Main Street there were pies gently cooling on windowsills and pretty girls who’d get “serious” by holding hands.

We all know it’s total fucking bullshit, though, but Captain America’s world is that fantasy world. All the more fantastic because the titular Captain, in his European scrapes, only fights a weird branch of the German Army that spouts lame, just-off-the-mark chants of “Hail HYDRA!” and gear up for war wearing big masks. The latter lets our heroes murder as many HYDRA drones as possible without that pesky PG-13 rating climbing up into the R realm. It’s one of those MPAA tricks: You can murder as many people you want as long as it’s historical (Saving Private Ryan) or you can’t see their human faces (here), but if you say FUCK more than twice, it’s an R for you, sir. (And never mind that Captain America is nowhere near an R-rating. Just saying.)

There’s also the typical Superhero Movie problem in that the Captain America mythology is so huge it has to include some of the bare bones of his band of hooligans. They barely get any screen time beyond Howard Stark (e.g. Iron Man’s dad) and the Captain’s gee-gosh love interest, the criminally-underused Hayley Atwell. (See AMC’s pretty-good miniseries remake of The Prisoner to see her do more than give teenage boys boners.)

So Captain America is dragged down by the central tenets of the genre, though it’s certainly not the first to befall its fate. Simply put, the running time can’t cram in the Captain’s origin story, a love interest, hooks into The Avengers (other than in the title), and any substantial fear wielded one of the worst villains in 2011: Hugo Weaving as a Voldemort lookalike, both missing their noses, though Weaving’s Red Skull is, yep, bright red.

And I didn’t even get around to the creepy-as-fuck scrawny version of Chris Evans, who looks like he desperately needs to find the visual effects supervisor for Benjamin Button. At least Evans won’t need to play a weakling for the planned 2014 sequel.

The Second-Worst

Green Lantern

Hal Jordan, hero of Green Lantern, is given a ring of power by a dying pink fish-man. He plays the reluctant hero and becomes part of the weird-alien collective called the Green Lantern Corps. And with his ring, using sheer willpower and imagination, he can create any solid object. Well, as long as it’s bright green.

So during the first public need for using his power, Jordan is faced with a helicopter about to crash. With his ring, it’s obvious he can easily save it. He could make a giant pillow for it to land on. Or rebuild the broken parts of the helicopter with juicy green energy. Or, hell, do it like the goddamn cartoons and encase it in a giant stasis field and slowly bring it down to land.

But what does Jordan do? He turns the rest of the helicopter into a Formula-1-style racecar and builds a winding track for it to drive on and slow down.

This is what we’re dealing with.

A college friend was big into comics, and he and I saw Batman Begins the day it came out. He was blown away by the film which, while far from perfect, wasn’t as shit as the other Batmans before. Through him I learned a passing knowledge of comics and, like all comic nerds, he always argued that a Green Lantern Corps ring is inherently overpowered. I actually remember getting a rather long treatise on the Justice League and how Hal Jordan is considered to be the greatest Lantern in the Corps.

I’m really glad I wasn’t with him when he saw Green Lantern.

Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by the fantastic casting of the original Iron Man. Robert Downey, Jr. was already Tony Stark. Ryan Reynolds is still best known as Van Wilder and Scarlett Johansson’s leftovers (good thing the Marvel Avengers and DC Justice League stay separate lest there be some awkwardness between Reynolds’ Jordan and Johansson’s Black Widow). He’s not a strong actor, and while his reluctant-hero shtick works, he doesn’t have the necessary gravitas to step into the role of a badass whose power comes from a ring that looks like it was made from melted-down Ring Pops.

Also, I may have spoken too soon when dissing Weaving’s Red Skull as the most laughable villain, since Peter Sarsgaard’s elephant-man Asperger’s-syndrome-suffering troglodyte might beat out silly red makeup.

What’s interesting about Green Lantern, though, is that the studio and DC Comics aren’t pushing for a Justice League movie yet, so we’ll have to suffer through Green Lantern 2 first.

(Note for all three of you interested: Granted, Marvel had a big lead on its superhero-ass-kicking-ensemble with two Iron Man films, Thor, Captain America, an appearance by Black Widow in Iron Man 2 [though neither Ang Lee's Hulk or the Ed Norton-starring The Incredible Hulk will use that Hulk], but DC seems to be having a tricky time assembling their Justice League. While it’s confirmed that there won’t be standalone films for Avengers Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Hulk, only Green Lantern has a “canon” Justice League movie with the other six either in the making or being rebooted. What’s somewhat sad is that after the will-probably-be-very-good-but-not-brilliant The Dark Knight Rises, there will be another Batman that has nothing to do with Chris Nolan’s Batmans, since this rebooted Batman will serve on the League. Zack Snyder is already on damage control, erasing all memories of Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns with the upcoming Man of Steel. If DC goes the route of Marvel and only makes three standalone films before venturing into an orgy of superheroes, there still has to be a sensical way to exhibit the “classic” Justice League lineup of Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Flash, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and the Martian Manhunter without confusing filmgoers insofar as to dry up the box office. In other words: There will be a lot of probably-shitty superhero movies coming out for the next foreseeable, uh, decade.)

The Least-Worst

Thor

Look up the plot synopsis of Thor if you haven’t seen it or want to spoil it or just want to follow along with the few zingers I have left because, my dear Dincanauts, you do realize it’s almost Christmas, right? This writer has to make dog-treat cookies for my favorite canines without typing my fingers off.

Why Thor gets the backhanded compliment of being the least-worst of this honorable three is because, despite unwisely splitting its narrative between fantastical Asgard and boring-as-fuck New Mexico, the film is loaded with brownie points. First being that the early parts of Thor work splendidly as a fish-out-of-water tale, with godly Thor crashing down to Earth and, despite speaking remarkable English, doesn’t quite figure that things don’t work the way here than in Asgard. It speaks enough that I can remember a scene where Thor downs a cup of coffee at a diner, breaks his mug on the table, and shouts for more, confused why everyone else is confused because it’s apparent common in Asgard to smash your drinking object when finished. And I saw this movie back in May whereas the rest were DVD viewings within the last two months.

Thor’s crippling identity crisis stems for aforementioned narrative splitting. We have Asgard and its Shakespearean betrayal (which is probably the exact phrasing they used to attract director Kenneth Branaugh and actor Anthony Hopkins), all rendered in vivid color and crazy CGI. But then Thor quite literally crashes to Earth; and not just Earth but New Mexico, which is where all of America’s unwanted sand goes. I’m sure the disconnect was intentional, but it simply does not work, especially when the Earth story was far more compelling than the boring power struggle in Asgard; it’s like we, the viewer, are being punished for wanting to see candycane Asgard but only in very, very boring scenes, while all the interesting stuff is happening on Earth.

Thor also suffers from having too much talent that all seem like they’re slumming it for a paycheck. Natalie Portman is just shy of being too hot for portraying an astrophysicist, but she could pick better projects coming off her Black Swan Oscar win. (Never mind Portman’s appearance in the lame stoner fantasy Your Highness.) And while Chris Hemsworth effortlessly charms, the story lazily has Portman going all dreamy-eyed for Thor without reason. Stellan Skarsgard kind of flits around, since he doesn’t have breasts or big muscles. The Wire’s Idris Elba must be the first black guy after Asgard relaxed its Jim Crow laws or started equal-opportunity employment for dudes guarding a big galactic wormhole gate thing. Kat Dennings continues her career-long role as a semi-apathetic smartass who gets most of the one-liners (regardless of whether or not they’re funny).

There’s a common thread here: None of these films – and pretty much every superhero or action film released within the last decade – seem particularly-fulfilling because we know there’s something on the horizon. In the past it’s been a sequel, but now we have these unwieldy superhero-posse affairs threatening to consume the brains of our male youths. There’s already a trailer for The Avengers, despite Marvel confirming Captain America 2, Thor 2, and Iron Man 3 (the latter of which director Jon Favreau is as confused about as am I, because what the fuck can Stark do without his Avenging buddies?). So logic also follows that, at some point in production, someone had a great idea for the film but, nope, we need fodder for the sequel. It’s like climbing the hill of a rollercoaster only to find that there’s no big drop at all; just a low-speed, no-thrill ride through pretty scenery.

Related posts:

1. Film Still and Song: America is Waiting (1982), a film by Bruce Conner; a song by David Byrne and Brian Eno
2. 2010 Rotterdam Film Festival Poster
3. Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde

Dec. 13, 2011 — Vimeo, the amiable filmmaker and artist friendly video-hosting service, opened submissions today for the second Vimeo Festival + Awards, “which celebrates the most creative and original videos online and the individuals that make them.”

Beginning today through February 20, 2012, filmmakers can submit their works for consideration in one of 13 different judged categories.

Last year, the judge panel was impressive — David Lynch judged the “experimental” category — and this year the judges will be equally impressive; however, the judges are to be announced sometime in early January.

Submit your work to the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards ———> click here.  Vimeo will award Grants of $5,000 to all of the 13 category winners, as well as awarding a Grant of $25,000 for the Grand Prize winner.

Jeremy Boxer, the Director of the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards, spoke with us yesterday. Mr. Boxer explains now, more than ever, is a propitious time to be an artist producing work that’s disseminated on the internet.

(1) Why should a filmmaker submit to the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards?

The main difference from traditional film festivals is we only accept work that has premiered online — anywhere — not just Vimeo. The majority of film festivals do not accept work that has premiered online.   Our hope is that in the future every festival will accept work that has premiered online.

(2) What categories/genres are in competition in the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards?

There are 13 categories.  Experimental, which is of course of interest to your readers. Lyrical is a new category this year. The Lyrical category encompasses poetic videos based on a personal world-view. These are personal representations of the way the creator looks at the world. For example, travelogues or time-lapses of a local neighborhood.  Captured is a category not based on filmmaking technique but more on what is being captured by the video, for example, a performance based work or projection art.

The other new categories include Advertising, Action Sports, and Fashion and returning categories from our inaugural Vimeo Festival + Awards are:

• Narrative
• Animation
• Original Series
• Motion Graphics
• Music Video
• Documentary
• Remix

(3) Will David Lynch return to judge the experimental category?

We are announcing a few of the judges now.   The remainder of the judges will be announced January. The judges will be equally as impressive as in 2010.

(4) Filmmakers can submit their work using Vimeo via the Internet; are there post-internet distribution/exhibition opportunities in place for the winners? Will there be a time to P-A-R-T-Y?

We will have an Awards ceremony, talks, workshops and a bunch of screenings as part of the festival.   As we are 6 months out, we’re currently in the planning process and are open to ideas.   As we get closer to making that announcement, we’ll reach out to you with all of those specifics.

(5) Last year, Chris Beckman won the Experimental category award for his film OOPS.

Shortly thereafter, Beckman’s film was named an official selection of the corporate-industry-driven 2011 Sundance Film Festival and Beckman directed a commercial for Motorola, for whom he made a branded short film directly inspired by OOPS.

What potential professional opportunities are available to a filmmaker submitting to the 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards?

Our intention is to provide filmmakers with opportunities they would never have had before. We want to provide the gold standard for what you can find online and in so doing provide filmmakers the potential to be seen by a much wider audience which could lead to their big break. Because of Vimeo’s reach, we can put a filmmaker’s work in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands.

After its discovery at the Vimeo Festival + Awards, Chris Beckman’s Oops was chosen as an Official Selection at Sundance Film Festival 2011.  Chris then went on to direct for such brands as Motorola. Sundance reached out to me directly to ask for Chris Beckman’s information for him to be entered into the festival. This was great, as it was the first time I heard Sundance was accepting films that had premiered online.

Another inaugural award winner was Onur Senturk, he had just graduated university when he entered the Vimeo Festival + Awards.  After winning for his film Triangle, due to the Festival’s exposure, Paramount asked him to create the motion design title sequence for Transformers: The Dark Side of the Moon.

The Overall + Documentary winner, Eliot Rausch, has been showered with media attention that landed him a spot on the Carson Daily Show and more commercial work than he ever expected to see in his lifetime.  He’s in post- production on his latest documentary — a film he was able to produce with the grant money he received from winning the 2010 Vimeo Festival + Awards. He has gone on to be offered more work than he knows what to do with.

To give you a sense of what Vimeo can do for filmmakers, here is another very recent example.  A few weeks ago, James Curran, a 28 year old from UK, put up his own homage credit sequence for “Tin Tin.”   The beautiful animated piece came to the attention of Steven Spielberg who hired him for his next film.

You never know who might be watching.

(6) If you could send a submitting filmmaker one special message, what would it be?

The goal of Vimeo Festival + Awards is to expose your film to a much wider audience.   We welcome you to submit and we wish you all good luck!

(7) Anything else you want to add?

We’re just hoping that more filmmakers will submit so that more of them have a chance at all of these incredible opportunities in existing and new categories added for 2012.

More:

————> Submit

2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards

Jeremy Boxer on Vimeo

Submit : : 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards

Related posts:

1. Five Question Interview with Blake Whitman, Vimeo Founder
2. Seven Question Interview with Matt McCormick, Portland-based Filmmaker and Artist
3. Interview with Tami Yeager of Tribeca

Michael Robinson, U.S., 2011, 5m 50s, color, sound, DV

“This is the new choreography of devotion, via the vlog of southern nightmares.
This is the light that never goes out. This is the line describing your mom.” —Michael Robinson

Screens as part of Looking Through a Glass Onion at the NYFF on Monday, October 10, 2011, at 3:45pm.

More:

2011 NYFF Views From the Avant-Garde

Related posts:

1. Review: All Through the Night (2008) by Michael Robinson
2. Eyes, Stan Brakhage Photographed by Michael Chikiris circa 1970
3. O'er the Land at the New York Film Festival

By Jack Kentala

Here’s how you do it right:

Take a dogshit script and, instead of throwing a few million at the marketing budget to get two decent box-office weekends and enough longtail cashflow like DVD sales and streaming rights, you hire the following people:

• Director Nicolas Winding Refn, who helmed the challenging Broson and the criminally-underseen Valhalla Rising, to try to keep a hold on the nowhere-subplot-heavy screenplay and purge any unnecessary pap from something that should’ve been far more straightforward than the end product;
• Director of Photography Newton Thomas Sigel (his best work: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Three Kings) to light nighttime driving scenes that don’t look like a lazy gaffer taped a mini-kino on the dash to give that always-lit sheen to the driver and passengers;
• Editor Matthew Newman, who, hell, has basically only worked with Refn, but whose work on the triumvirate of Bronson, Valhalla Rising, and Driver should get him his ACE invite soon enough;
• Supervising sound editor Lon Bender who, like any solid soundman, works for the sake of working (between the lines: he’s worked on a lot of duds), and, here, turns the roar of Fast Five to a whisper, in which cars pass like ships in the night save for a gentle razor-blade slice (I swear the source effects he used were lion and tiger roars);
• Composer Cliff Martinez, who just runs with the not-motivated-whatsoever 80s vibe that seems relegated only to some pieces of music, the neon-pink cursive credits, and Ryan Gosling’s racing jacket;
• Ryan Gosling, who acts across all levels of budget to gives James Franco a run for his money as the most chameleonesque actor of his generation; and, hell, he’s better than Franco;
• Carey Mulligan, who’s criminally underused (and whose accent forgivably slips a few times); but then again, she’s been criminally underused in all of cinema except for her turn as the haunted Kathy H. in Never Let Me Go (which just might be the performance of her career… both past and future);
• And Bryan Cranston since he’s Bryan fucking Cranston.

And then there’s what you don’t do but, well, sometimes end up doing them because of a crap script:

• Have all sorts of gratuitous violence that is 1) sudden, 2) uncharacteristic of the characters, and 3) uncharacteristic of the actors portraying said characters;
• Slap some 80s vibe on the posters and realize, shit, there’s nothing 80s about this movie;
• Introduce about ten subplots or big details that are never important or explained (Gosling as a Hollywood stunt driver; Mulligan falling in love with a total dude [pre-Gosling, natch]; a mess of mob ties that go nowhere; the whole thing with the mask; and, well, how some parts of the ending just kind of fizzle out).
• Start the movie with a taut setpiece that gets you hoping the movie will be that exciting, only to repeat a semi-heist later that doesn’t come close to eclipsing the beginning.

But this is me here. Probably the biggest compliment I can give Drive is that the ending is exactly what the characters and style dictate. Chalk it up to Hossein Amini, who wrote the adapted screenplay, or maybe credit is due to Refn for draining it of all surplus; or all bloated emotion (un)deserved by all bloodied Heroes that may or may not make it to the end of the movie is probably not what said Hero wants, or ever wanted, or ever will want.

Postscript: My WTF moment: Refn won Best Director at Cannes? Well, at least they gave Malick the Palme d’Or, else there’d be hell to pay. Drive is a good film, but a Palme d’Or winner it definitely is not.

Related posts:

1. Brief Thoughts on Drag Me To Hell
2. Thoughts on Iron Man 2
3. Brief Thoughts on Avatar

Going natural 4 First Nature.

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BEAST from Ben Russell on Vimeo.

Three tall guys. Skulls. Strobe. Raucous. Strobe skull. = BEAST, a noise band fronted by BR, with Thad Kellstadt and Tim Nickodemus.

Synopsis: BEAST, described in numerous circles as a “three-piece percussive drone/noise force, complete with two drummers and skull-based strobe-electronics” is comprised of three 6’ 2”+ artist/ musicians Thad Kellstadt, Tim Nickodemus and Ben Russell. Members’ projects have been viewed at La Casa Encendida (Madrid), the Rotterdam Int’l Film Festival (Netherlands), the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). Epileptic eyes! Heart attack ears! BEAST BEAST BEAST BEAST BEAST

Filmed on 7/9/11 at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Chicago, IL; recorded by Jesse McLean, edited by Ben Russell.

More:

BR on vimeo
Jesse McLean on Vimeo
Thad Kellstadt

Related posts:

1. MAZES at the MCA, Chicago, Ben Russell and Joe Grimm
2. This week: Ben Russell Week
3. Ben Russell: Uh-Oh It’s Magic: March 11-April 23, at Threewalls, Chicago

by Jack Kentala
Steven Soderbergh: Easily one of the ten best American directors alive; who has directed over a dozen films (most of them very, very good); whose hyper-prolific output began a mere twenty years ago, with the Palme d’Or-winning Sex, Lies, and Videotape, when the son-of-a-bitch was only 26; who turned the modern noir The Limey into every film school’s selection for the day they talk about non-linear editing; who churned out three better-than-necessary Ocean’s films that made gobs of money so he could finance little-seen cheapo masterpieces like The Girlfriend Experience and the epic Che; who serves as cinematographer (as Peter Andrews, per guild rules) for most of his films, which seems almost impossible; who redefined the use of color in film in his 2000 Best Director-winning Traffic (competing against himself with Erin Brokovich, splitting his own vote and winning) and, by extension, probably spurring the rise of hyper-saturated films through a digital intermediate instead of negative manipulation; who has one film in post, one shooting, and two in pre-production; who, at the tender age of 48, has made repeated, probably-serious claims that he plans to retire to become a painter, simply to express himself in another visual art form–

–has just unleashed Contagion (2011), one of the best thrillers in a very, very long time.

Here’s hoping the guy just might change his mind and go Altman-style, directing until, shit, he dies.

So here we have Contagion. You’ve seen the previews. (I didn’t; I just heard who directed it.) You get the gist. Virus, pandemic, chaos. 1, 2, 3, right?

The greatest praise I can give to Contagion is that not a single scene (save, maybe, a bit of a tacked-on pre-denouement [let's just call it Prom Night] that reeks of test-audience input) drifts along on a lazy, panicked emotion; that Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns (their second collab since the tonally-opposite The Informant!) have enough faith in the unashamed bleakness of the story to have absolutely zero comic relief (and, hell, even Traffic had some buddy-cop hijinks with Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman); and manages to cram what could’ve easily been an entire television series into a sub-two-hour film.

And whereas a director like Danny Boyle’s style is that he has no style, Soderbergh is the ultimate chameleon, in which he tailors each film’s aesthetic to exactly what it needs. Here he’s smart enough to know that Contagion is all story, and he doesn’t fluff it up with flashy editing or overblown cinematography. He has the rare gift, like Terrence Malick, to turn major stars into ordinary people, though it may just be as easy as not putting any makeup on Kate Winslet. Maybe chalk it up to Soderbergh’s lighting (or his gaffer’s, really), but this is as far removed from any CSI bullshit as you can get.

I majored in cinematography in college, so I like to imagine that I know a thing or two about it; namely, who has the chops to helm a Big Movie and who doesn’t. While Soderbergh might not be able to earn an ASC invite, he’s one of the finest cinematographers around. While he knew he could get away with murder (uncorrected bulbs, weird angles, odd, unmotivated camera movements) in the Ocean’s trilogy given their built-in profitability, his recent Che epic showed that, armed with the freakishly-awesome Red camera, he can do anything, and usually he’s the one doing it as operator. (Though on the Criterion commentary for Traffic, Soderbergh professed that he simply can’t work a gear-head tripod. Maybe in the eleven years since he’s learned how.) Though Che worked beautifully as a two-parter, each with a well-defined cinematographic style, Contagion might give it a money-run for his best lens work.

I can’t decide, though, that what I initially perceived as Contagion’s greatest weakest might actually be its strength. There’s not much substance here. Characters are given only basic motivation (protecting their family, trying to cure the world, et cetera et cetera) to soldier on with their increasingly-difficult lives and survival. We know the stakes are high just by looking at the world maps that pop up every ten minutes that show the world plunging into illness. The film expertly balances the trials of Matt Damon’s role as a Minneapolis dad keeping his daughter healthy and the ensemble of WHO and CDC employees trying to prevent the world from going out with a whimper-bang. Simply put, for this type of story – the Ticking Time Bomb, a rugged screenplay model among the pantheon of plot templates – we don’t need much else.

And here comes the part where I spiral back down to earth, find myself hitting this keyboard with less and less frequency, and trying to give my usual sort of non-conclusion. I hope you’re at least content that I’ve never slapped on a number or a letter grade or some bullshit to distill a movie into something to glance at to decide if you’ll check out Contagion tonight or stay in and watch Mad Men on Netflix Instant Watch. No, Contagion probably won’t be the best film of the year. No, it probably won’t make a Scrooge McDuck-sized vault of money akin to Ocean’s worldwide take. (Though with the inexpensive Red camera and Soderbergh’s knack for working hella fast and on the cheap, I doubt that there’s really much money to lose.) And yes, you’ll probably still hate Gwyneth Paltrow after seeing it. But Contagion is one of Soderbergh’s best films, and that’s no small praise. It also happens to give a good thrill-scare for something more terrifying than any terrorist can dream up or execute.

(Footnote: I was going to mention how I didn’t hear anything at all on the news or from friends that Soderbergh was shooting a film set largely in Minneapolis and, by extension, that they’d at least film exteriors here. IMDb doesn’t have MPLS listed as a shooting location, and if that’s true, production design Howard Cummings did his research to make the snow look like snow and not those damn soap flakes they use for everything else. And, thank god, there’s not a single hint of the not-real-at-all Minnesota accent as seen in Fargo. Yeah, some people have a trace of that accent, but dammit, don’t play it for comedy.)

(Footnote 2: These fine ears swear they picked up some recycled dissonant piano from The Limey for Cliff Marinez’s score here. And did I mention that Contagion has a great score?)

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on The Informant!
2. Thoughts on Richard Kerr's Action: Study (2009)
3. Brief Thoughts on Collision (2005) by Max Hattler

An existential and poetic musing on Waldoian existence by the charismatic German film director, Werner Herzog.

Thanks to this video, I’m going to unearth all of my Where’s Waldo? books. Yep, I buried all of those books a while back, and it’s time to exhume.

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I rarely use exclamation points, but I include one in the title of this post for good reason: there are three days left to help Dirty Looks reach their kick-starter goal — they are so close — donators are compensated with swag and nobility. (Swag includes an ill DVD compilation, limited edition Michael Robinson art print, et cetera . . . more here.)

If you cannot contribute a donation, please promulgate. Click the “Share/save” button below this post to email, tweet, FB, google + google=google (?).

More information:

Dirty Looks is a roaming series held on the last Wednesday of the month. Designed to trace contemporary queer aesthetics through historical works, Dirty Looks presents quintessential GLBT film and video alongside up-and-coming artists and filmmakers.

Visit http://dirtylooksnyc.org to see our past programs.

In contributing to this Kickstarter, you are ensuring the continuation of our programming and supporting the filmmakers, artists, graphic designers and volunteers that make our series possible. You are also ensuring the wider distribution of these works through our touring program.

We have been running since January 2011, screening in venues like the alternative space PARTICIPANT INC, P.P.O.W Gallery and the rooftop project space Silvershed. Our suggested ticket price frequently helps us to cover the rental of 16mm prints and artist DVDs, a cost which ranges from $150 – $300+ per event. Your support will go to:

• Cover all print rentals and facilities fees
• Artist honorariums for guest speakers and participants
• Produce our lengthy program notes
• Intern stipends and payment of our projectionist staff
• Graphic design of our promotional materials
• Fund the tour of these rare and important works across the country.

A West-Coast tour is already in the works, with two destinations presently committed. Please contribute so that we can spread these voices to a national audience.

More:

Dirty Looks KickStarter page

Dirty Looks website

Related posts:

1. 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour Visits Chicago: Columbia CC and SAIC
2. Nicolas Sassoon: Hot Springs: 11 Dec – 18 December, 2010, 304 Days, Vancouver
3. What is Life Without the Living? October 21st, 2010, Contemporary Art Center, NYC

Watch 70 by Robert Breer.

More:

More details over at bad lit.com

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2. Audio Interview: Robert Breer Interviewed by Charles Levine, July 1970
3. 8 Films by Robert Breer, 13 March, 2011, SAIC

guy maddin on the set of the hauntings from clint enns.

New work from Canada’s Guy Maddin has a forthcoming (re)-release. This is lovely news. Hauntings (2010–2011), a series of short films originally commissioned by the 2010 opening of the TIFF Bell Lightbox, will run at the WNDX Festival of Film and Video Art, Winnipeg, the home of Guy Maddin. The installation is September 2011 – October 3, 2011.

Guy Maddin on the Set of Hauntings (2011), from Winnipeg-based filmmaker, Clint Enns, is a pleasant little one-minute film portrait of Guy Maddin on the set thereof.

If you’re not familiar with Guy Maddin, his work is widely distributed on DVD, which is quite surprising for a wild avant-garde filmmaker like Maddin. His films are available via Facets Multimedia (rental), Kino Video, the Criterion Collection, and Netflix (rental). I certainly have his releases sitting on my shelve.

In other news, happy birthday to the Big Daddy (and Leo brother), Barack Obama. CHI represent. Our birthdays are 3 days and some years apart.

More:

Clint Enns on Vimeo
Cineflyer
Bad Lit: 2011 WNDX Acquires Guy Maddin’s Hauntings
TIFF: Guy Maddin’s Hauntings I & II
2010 Torontoist Interview with Guy Maddin

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3. Careful (1992) by Guy Maddin | Film Review

Your lynx are so hot.

The internet is about linkin’, right? Well, we have updated our links page: check it out here.

We haven’t found all of our special links yet, sometimes it just takes a little extra time.

Cheque das lynx here.

In other news, happy birthday to Pet Cortright.

Related posts:

1. Nicolas Sassoon: Hot Springs: 11 Dec – 18 December, 2010, 304 Days, Vancouver
2. Hot 2010 Grid-Based Typography Calender
3. Sparkling I & Sparkling II (2010) by Petra Cortright

(Limited Release.) See it before it’s too late.

Log line: Settlers traveling through the Oregon desert in 1845 find themselves stranded in harsh conditions.

More:
Official Website for Meek’s Cutoff
Meek’s Cutoff on IMDB

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CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

Views from Cassini at Saturn
Credit: Images: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA; Video Compilation: Chris Abbas.
Music Credit & License: “Ghosts I-IV” by Nine Inch Nails.

Saturn, master of time. So staid and stately; the one guide that tells us ‘no’ when he means ‘yes.’ He teaches (forces) us to be patient, prudent, and to acknowledge the confining linear timeline of our world; however, this is a good thing. Saturn teaches us that we have more to do: more knowledge and experience to assimilate, more responsibilities to tend. He teaches us that under one’s own volition, we find what we seek. The rings of time, much like a tree: plant your seeds, love, care, nuture them, and watch your seeds grow into something beautiful and worthwhile. It’s a simple and lovely universal law of existence. Koolgrow.

Saturn teaches us to enjoy our continuance down ye merry path. Bubblemagic.

Indubitably, the Cassini orbiter has collected indelible, Earth-shattering imagery and here is a mystifying amalgamation of images assembled by Chris Abbas, with imagery from the Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL. ESA, NASA.

Explanation: What has the Cassini orbiter seen since arriving at Saturn? The above music video shows some of the highlights. In the first time-lapse sequence (00:07), a vertical line appears that is really Saturn’s thin rings seen nearly edge-on. Soon some of Saturn’s moon shoot past. The next sequence (00:11) features Saturn’s unusually wavy F-ring that is constrained by the two shepherd moons that are also continually perturbing it. Soon much of Saturn’s extensive ring system flashes by, sometimes juxtaposed to the grandeur of the immense planet itself. Cloud patterns on Titan (00:39) and Saturn (00:41) are highlighted. Clips from flyby’s of several of Saturn’s moon are then shown, including Phoebe, Mimas, Epimetheus, and Iapetus. In other sequences, moons of Saturn appear to pass each other as they orbit Saturn. Background star fields seen by Cassini are sometimes intruded upon by bright passing moons. The robotic Cassini spacecraft has been revolutionizing humanity’s knowledge of Saturn and its moons since 2004.

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by Jack Kentala

It seems oddly appropriate that I spent yesterday in a suburban mondoplex, eyes glued to X-Men: First Class like any respectable summer moviegoer. X-Men: First Class was a film that has its merits like any other, sure, but it has superheroes and thus has to blindly prescribe to the Louder Is Better school of filmmaking; so much sound and fury that Faulkner wouldn’t know what to do with it.

During the much-publicized climax, Michael Fassbender’s Magneto hangs precariously from the exposed landing gear of the mutants’ ship, focusing all his energy into lifting a nuclear submarine, propeller still churning, up into the skies around Cuba. It’s the film’s money shot; it’s something so awesome, in the truest definition of the word, that I couldn’t help but get a little dumbstruck at considering that kind of world-changing power, lodged in the mere shell of a man. It’s a showstopper. As a lover of giant spectacle, I had to wink a few tears out of my eyes.

Now imagine if I hadn’t seen a thing about it in one of the millions of trailers.

The Tree of Life (2011), by way of its increasingly-experimental director Terrence Malick, contains scores of these money shots – something so beautiful or rapturous that you can do nothing but take a deep breath – that are almost tossed off, as though they have no value. Malick – and I don’t want to waste unnecessary prose on this short attempt at highlighting the film, so if you don’t know about Malick’s reputation, do some research and find out what a fascinating figure he is – is known for his visual flair. He and his cinematographers (here, Emmanuel Lubezski, a second collaboration since 2005′s The New World) take the usual ordinariness of the natural world and blow it up to screen-filling wonder. Here, the nearly-80-years-old director sets his sights a little grander – including universe- and earth-creation footage that I presume will mostly be withheld for the rumored IMAX documentary about such events – and shows us not only the world, but the way in which that beauty in our world was created.

Here is where I make the semi-apologetic statement that, yes, I plan to see The Tree of Life at least another time, maybe another after that, since I’m such an unashamed Malick fan that I doubt I can really find solid footing about The Tree Life so soon after my first viewing. The first time I saw The New World – my first Malick film in theaters (was, alas, too young for the R-rated The Thin Red Line, and my twelve-year-old sensibilities would’ve probably hated it) – I came out of a 20-screen compound into a 2 a.m. parking lot, frozen in a Minnesota winter and freezing in a poorly-warming-up car, mostly with a head-scratching “Huh?” on my mind. I had known I had just seen another very, very, very great film by my favorite living director (I’m very guarded what I call a “masterpiece” – it takes at leas ten years of hindsight to give that gavel-pounding verdict), but I had to let it settle like a, uh, big meal. Only later did I come up with my little theories about the film that I didn’t see elsewhere – like how the Wagner suites played over scenes of the “Naturals” showed that the film is viewed through the prism of Smith and the West, and how they can only equate the Naturals’ beauty with something they know (Wagner) and around and around we go – and tried to bury the still-in-film-school attempt to write a paper about it and, thus, invariably ruin the movie forever.

So The Tree of Life is about a mom and a dad father and their three sons in suburban Waco, Texas sometime in the whitewashed 1950s. To say that it’s a mostly-plotless film that sort of gives and takes – disregarding the usual axis of peaks and valleys that characterize most three-act films that don’t actively engage the viewer – will be, for most, a source of many yawns. Ever since The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick films haven’t worked the way other movies function. While there’s usually some element that anchors or pushes the narrative – the crimes in Badlands (1973), something similar in Days of Heaven (1978), the battle for Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line, and the colonization of Jamestown in The New World – The Tree of Life might be Malick’s coming-out party that, after a mere five films but certainly forty years of conceptualizing unrealized projects, he’s decided to stick with his guns of visual arrest and running voiceovers and, maybe, just maybe, throw linearity out the window and following a sort of elliptical narrative that recalls Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971).

It’s this lack of one standard timeline that gets the movie into its most trouble. Sure, there’s some bouncing between the 50s and the modern day in some anonymous urbanscape. The latter is the first time Malick, in the whole of his career, has set part of a film in contemporary times, and, if nothing else, it gives him a new visual playground. His naturalist’s suspicions of glass-and-steel high-rises give the modern-day segments a natural claustrophobia. (The sequences are painfully short – including scant screen time by Sean Penn, who’s in the movie about as long as George Clooney in The Thin Red Line [the first collab between Malick and Penn, who had a substantial role].) That stuff is easy to kick through vis a vis what is happening where. But a few spots in the 50s timeline either point to my terrible abilities as a filmwatcher or my own half-certainty it was all a cinematic device. Particularly, one of the three sons of Brad Pitt and the luminous, haunted Jessica Chastain seems to die twice, yet subsequent scenes show all three boys together. Given that a possible read on the POV is that it’s all in Penn’s head, maybe you can chalk it up to an Unreliable Narrator. Or maybe I’ll go on Wikipedia after I write this and see how wrong I was.

(Update: I did indeed check some sort of plot summary, and while I’m [mostly] wrong, it’s still confusing given that there’s no warning that the narrative sort of fractures at one point and jumps forward. Minor quibble.)

The universe-creation scenes are mostly confined to one reel and act  elsewhere as intertitles between major sections of the film. Rumor is that The Tree of Life was going to be coupled with an IMAX documentary called The Voyage of Time (and yes, I know it sounds like a Disneyworld ride that exits through a gift shop). To get ready for Cannes, this supposed time-voyage was scrapped, and what was completed was put into The Tree of Life. For the large part, it’s hypnotic, astounding, and mind-bending enough for a certain LA theater proudly advertising they have daily Tree of Life showings at 4:20 p.m. During the sustained narrative of how our hot, lava-covered, noxious-gas-filled earth turned fertile, it soon comes clear that it plays as a perfect analog to how a tumultuous, oft-ugly process can create something beautiful, the same as – ta da! – the birth of a human child.

Here’s another PSA about what’s probably the biggest misstep of the film: You’ve well known by now that there are DINOSAURS (capitalization necessary) in The Tree of Life, and yes, they’re fortunately relegated to the deep past and play no part in man’s future. After the free-flowing exhibition of oozing primordial matter and cold, cold wind forming the earth, a mini narrative suddenly takes brief shape as a few dinosaurs show up. Of course the CG isn’t the greatest, and that always has the nasty tendency to pull back a disbelief-suspension layer. There’s a scene of some dinosaurs interacting – such as a predator possibly finding mercy within its reptilian brain by sparing a wounded iguanadon (right?), which has about as much evolutionary significance as Moon Watcher picking up a bone in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – and while it’s done with a minimalism that makes it work within the context of the greater film, it still seems like a cast-off scene from the (obligatory) supposed Voyage of Time documentary.

We’re almost done, I swear.

Again, any filmwatcher with an opinion of Malick usually sides with one of two opposite poles, and Malick’s refusal to make a film without a voiceover track leaves some permanently turned off of his work. What’s really sort of amazing is how little voiceover there is in The Tree of Life. Gone is the somewhat heavy-handed expository VO of The New World and some of the on-the-nose poetry of The Thin Red Line’s stacked cast. Here, it’s mostly barely-heard whispers, nothing ever enunciated clear enough to get across any plain meaning. The Tree of Life also has barely any dialog whatsoever. It’s one of the closer attempts at a modern silent film I’ve seen.

In interviews with nearly everyone who’s worked with Malick and uncomfortably spoken about Malick’s methods (since a man of such intense privateness doesn’t like his trade secrets aired, I imagine), apparently it’s a common practice for Malick to run a take with script lines, then run another with no words said at all. It’s something that I’ve – rather successfully – ripped off in my own work, and something that Malick, in his quiet, impressionistic films, can get away with and have few people be the wiser.

At the risk of sounding like some Ebert-style fuddy duddy: Filmmaking and film have been cheapened with every passing year and the many, many ways you can watch them. I have my first feature up on YouTube, but I cringe at the thought of someone watching it piecemeal, prone to distractions, hideous compression artifacting, seen under too-bright lights and played out of shitty laptop speakers. And that brings me back to where I started: I watch movies like X-Men: First Class because, aesthetically important or not, they’re designed to play on a big screen with big sound, in a big dark room where you’re not allowed to talk or use your cell phone. But that experience, to me, is like a meal full of empty calories. Shortly after seeing The Tree of Life, I said to a friend, “This might not have much stock coming from an atheist, but seeing a Terrence Malick film, for me, is like going to church. There’s just something… nourishing and fulfilling about it.” (And yes, I was laughed at.)

Feel free to put that blurb on a poster, Fox Searchlight. Not that there’s any harder way to market a film like this other than, thank god, getting to plaster the Palme d’Or logo on one-sheets and trailers. (The one-screen arthouse theater in Minneapolis I saw this at – the Landmark Uptown – had on its marquee “THE TREE OF LIFE – CANNES WINNER” like that’s supposed to bring in more traffic?) The Tree of Life, in extremely limited to release, is pulling in huge per-screen averages (the metric best used to determine limited-run box-office takes versus something like X-Men, which opens on several thousand screens while The Tree of Life opens on several dozen), and it always raises the little specter of hope that the adult filmgoing public still has an appetite for something daring and slow and, many times, terrifying beautiful about the fleeting joy and intense sorrow of life and death.

Now that Malick – again, about to top eighty years – might be entering his most prolific phase now that, honestly, he doesn’t have that many years left. And even though there’s still his stubborn (but by no means unnecessary) trademarks voiceover and the nature-doc cinematography, he’s still the only man who can do what he does. It’s a thrilling time to know one future Malick feature is in the can – the prospective The Burial with Javier Bardem, Ben Affleck, and Rachel McAdams – and another prepped for shooting this summer. Even at his glacial pace, and even without any official word from the man for decades, Malick’s looming presence is felt in every frame of The Tree of Life and, for those perceptive enough to feel it, over the entirety of modern filmmaking.

Related posts:

1. Tree of Life in the Four Worlds by Harry Smith
2. Thoughts on The Informant!
3. April 17, 2011: SPACE PROGRAM presents: Mercury, or One-Half a Life Spent in Darkness is One-Half a Life Spent Facing the Sun

MERCURIAL MADNESS by Kerry Laitala

Below is the schedule for 2011 Chicago Underground Film Festival, which is this week, with opening night on Thursday, June 2. The 18th annual CUFF runs June 2–June 9 at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

The festival will screen new work from Deborah Stratman, Ben Russell, Jesse McLean, Ben Rivers, Kerry Laitala, Leighton Pierce, Michael Robinson, Jodie Mack, and many more.

Click here for the robust schedule with stills and synopses. Click here for ticket information. More information at the CUFF website.

THURSDAY, JUNE 2nd

8:00PM

OPENING NIGHT

SOME GIRLS NEVER LEARN
2011, Jerzy Rose, USA, 80 min.
Interdimensional premiere!

with:
MONICA PANZARINO SINGS THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER
2011, Monica Panzarino, USA, 3 min.

FRIDAY, JUNE 3rd

6:00 PM

SHORTS PROGRAM: MY HEAD IS MY ONLY HOUSE UNLESS IT RAINS
2009-2010, Various directors, Various nations, 89 min.

TAMALPAIS Chris Kennedy, 14 min., 16mm, 2009, Canada
ANNE TRUITT, WORKING Jem Cohen, 13 min, 16mm on Video, 2009, USA
PERIPETEI’EM Andrew Mauset-Mooney, 3 min, 16mm on Video, 2009, USA
SECOND LAW: SOUTH LEH ST. Mike Gibisser, 14 min., 16mm, 2011, USA
RETROGRADE PREMONITION Leighton Pierce, 5 min,. Video, 2010, USA
PROJECTIONS Kendra Ryan, 3 min, Video, 2009, USA
ZEITRISS Quimu Casalprim i Suárez, 11 min,, Video, 2009, Germany
HOME MOVIE John Price, 27 min, 35mm, 2010, Canda

8:00PM
(Repeats Thursday, June 9th, 8:00PM)

THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE
Marie Losier, 75 min.,16mm on Video, 2010, USA

with:
IRMA Charles Fairbanks, 12 min., 16mm on Video, 2010, USA
LÁZSLO LASSÚ Ben Popp, 3 min., Video, 2010, USA

10:00 PM
(Repeats Wednesday, June 8th, 8:00PM)

PROFANE
2011, Usama Alshaibi, USA, 78 min.

with:
TEARS CANNOT RESTORE HER: THEREFORE, I WEEP 2011, Jennifer Reeder, USA 10 min.

SATURDAY, JUNE 4th

1:00 PM

AND AGAIN
2010, Adele Horne, USA, 56 min.

with:
DEVIL’S GATE 2011, Laura Kraning, USA, 20 min.
THE VOICE OF GOD 2010, Bernd Lützeler, India/Germany, 10 min.

2:00 PM

SHORTS PROGRAM: THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE BLUES (OR THE BIG DIG)
2009-2011, Various directors, USA, 90 min.

CURRENT (REPRISE) Brian Doyle, 7 min., super 8 on Video, 2010, USA
HISTORY MINOR Ryan Garrett, 19 min., 16mm on Video, 2010, USA
ARSENIC Robert Todd, 11 min, 16mm, 2011, USA
BROAD CHANNEL Sarah Christman, 14 min., 16mm, 2010, USA
THE SOUL OF THINGS Dominic Angerame, 15 min., 16mm, 2010, USA
MEASURES KINDLING JB Mabe, 30 sec., 16mm, 2010, USA
TO ANOTHER JB Mabe, 57 sec., 16mm, 2010, USA
YOUNG BIRD SEASON Nellie Kluz, 19 min., Video, 2011, USA

4:00 PM

SHORTS PROGRAM: POMPADOUR SWAMP
2009-2011, Various directors, Various nations, 90 min.

HOW TO HAVE A SEIZURE Michael Wawzenek, 3 min., 16mm, 2011, USA
BLOOD & CINNAMON Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke, 6 min., Video, 2010, USA
UNCONTROLLABLE JOY FOR LIFE Kari Corbett and Crispin Rosenkranz, 7 min., Video, 2010, USA
CHAINSAW FOUND JESUS Spencer Parsons, 22 min., Video, 2010, USA
UNICORNHOLE Lucas Dimick and Dax Norman, 5 min., Video, 2011, USA
DARE DOUBLE James, N Kienitz Wilkins, Eugene Wasserman and Dan Fridman, 29 min., Video, 2010, USA
UNSUBSCRIBE #3: GLITCH ENVY Jodie Mack, 6 min., 16mm, 2010, USA
SECOND FIRING Kelly Oliver and Keary Rosen, 3 min., Video, 2010, USA
ZOLTAN: THE HUNGARIAN GANGSTER OF LOVE Justin Reardon, 14 min., 16mm on Video, 2010, USA

5:15 PM

(Repeats Tuesday June 7th, 6:00PM)

SHORTS PROGRAM: I’M GONNA BOOGLARIZE YOU BABY
2009-2011, Various directors, Various nations, 87 min.

SPACEBOY Mike Olenick Video, 2009, USA
MERCURIAL MADNESS Kerry Lataila, 7 min., Video, 2010, USA
THESE HAMMERS DON’T HURT US Michael Robinson, 13 min., Video, 2010, USA
AGAINST CINEMA Alberto Cabrera Bernal, 9 min., Video, 2010, Spain
THE PROGNOSTICATOR (OR WE ARE ALL PYTHAGOREANS NOW) Brent Coughenour, 26 min., Video, 2011, USA
CEIBAS EPILOGUE – THE WELL OF REPRESENTATION Evan Meaney, 7 min., Video, 2011, USA
THE BLOCKBUSTER TAPES Daniel Martinico, 6 min., Video, 2009, USA
LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH Nicolas Provost, 14 min., Video, 2009, Belgium

6:00 PM

THE COLOR WHEEL
2011, Alex Ross Perry, USA, 83 min.

8:00 PM
(Repeats Wednesday, June 8th, 6:00PM)

BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN
2011, Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley, USA, 93 min.

10:00 PM
(Repeats Tuesday, June 7th, 8:00PM)

SNOW ON THA BLUFF
2010, Damon Russell, USA, 79min.

with:
WE’RE LEAVING 2010, Zachary Treitz, USA, 12min.

SUNDAY, JUNE 5th

1:00 PM
(Repeats Thursday, June 9th, at 6:00 PM)

SHORTS PROGRAM: A CARROT IS AS CLOSE AS A RABBIT GETS TO A DIAMOND
2008-2011, Various directors, Various nations, 87 min.

THE MAN WHO WENT OUTSIDE Jennet Thomas, 10 min., Video 2008, UK
NEGATING THE INCREASING POWERLESSNESS OF THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED THING IN AMERICA Olivia Ciummo, 5 min., Video, 2010, USA
POSTFACE Frédéric Moffet, 8 min., Video, 2011, USA
LIKE Luis Arnias, 3 min., 16mm, 2010, USA
ACCEPTING THE IMAGE Karel De Cock, 19 min., Video, 2010, Belgium
BATHING IN MILK Jenna Feldman, 18 min., Video, 2010, USA
SLIPSTREAM D. Rickman, 4 min., Video, 2010, USA
MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS Jesse McLean, 21 min., Video, 2010, USA

1:45 PM

TOTAL BADASS
2010, Bob Ray, USA, 91 min.

with:
THE FOREST 2010, Steven Summers, USA, 16 min

4:00 PM

THE OBSERVERS
2010, Jacqueline Goss, USA, 69 min.

with:
TRYPPS # 7 (BADLANDS) 2010, Ben Russell, USA, 10 min.
IMUM COELI (BOTTOM OF THE SKY) 2011, Mirka Morales, USA, 6 min.
EVERYTHING IS EVERYDAY 2011, Patrick Tarrant, UK, 10 min.

6:00 PM
(theater 1)

SHORTS PROGRAM: FLASH GORDON’S APE
2010-2011, Various directors, Various nations, 97 min.

THESE BLAZEING STARRS! Deborah Stratman, 14 min. 16mm, 2011, USA
BEADS Andrew Rosinski, 8 min., 35mm on Video, 2010, USA
A TIME SHARED UNLIMITED Zachary Epcar, 10 min., 16mm on Video, 2010, USA
ALTER HUMAN Lars Stiltberg, 20 min., Video, 2010, Sweden
SLOW ACTION Ben Rivers, 45 min., 16mm, 2010, UK

8:00 pm
(theater 2)

SHORTS PROGRAM: CARDBOARD CUTOUT SUNDOWN
2010, Various Directors, USA, 89 min.

THE GARDEN Ann Steuernagel, 10 min., Video, 2010, USA
DARLING Kate McCabe, 4 min., 16mm on Video, 2010, USA
HOPPER REPAIR Ross Nugent, 5 min., 16mm, 2010, USA
ILLNESS MAGNIFIED Julia Fuller, 17 min., Video, 2010, Video, USA
SHOALS Melika Bass, 52 min., 16mm on Video, 2011, USA

8:00 PM
(theater 1)

CLOSING NIGHT FILM!

HEAVY METAL PICNIC
2010, Jeff Krulik and John Heyn, USA, 66 min.

with:
HEAVY METAL PARKING LOT 1986, Jeff Krulik and John Heyn, USA, 17 min.
MOBY DICK 2010, Tony Balko, USA, 8 min.

MONDAY, JUNE 6th

6:00 PM

HALFLIFERS AND FRIENDS: REACTIONS IN REACTION
1991-2007, Various directors, Various nations, 75 min.
Curated by HalfLifers

8:00 PM

HORI SMOKU SAILOR JERRY: THE LIFE OF NORMAN K. COLLINS
2008, Erich Weiss, USA, 77 min.

More information at the CUFF website.

Related posts:

1. Experiments in Cinema v5.1 2010 Film Festival Schedule
2. Submit to the 2010 Chicago Underground Film Festival
3. SUBMIT: Call For Entries – 18th Chicago Underground Film Festival

Back in ’92, Greenspan mooted US currency should be changed to Dincabux in order to forestall a global economical crisis. Unfortunately, this concept was too abstruse for the ’92 house party crew.

Watch the entire televised debate here.

No related posts.

Peter Hutton, 2007, 59 min, 16mm, color, silent
Stills are presented in reverse sequential order.

Peter Hutton (born 1944 in Detroit, Michigan) is an experimental filmmaker, known primarily for his silent cinematic portraits of cities and landscapes around the world. He has also worked as a professional cinematographer, most notably for his former student Ken Burns. Hutton studied painting, sculpture and film at the San Francisco Art Institute. He has taught filmmaking at CalArts, Hampshire College, Harvard University, SUNY Purchase, and Bard College, where he has served as the director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program since 1989. Hutton’s films are distributed by Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. In May 2008 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a full retrospective of Hutton’s films. — Peter Hutton Wiki

More: At Sea animated .gif

Related posts:

1. Video Interview: Peter Hutton, Robert Gardner, the Screening Room (1977)
2. Big Waves and Beach: Peter Hutton's At Sea, Maya Deren's At Land, and Vimukthi Jayasundara's Between Two Worlds
3. Joseph Conrad

Breaking news: President Obama and Ben Bernanke have officially announced the launch of a new website for the Chicago-based Video Data Bank. Thank god their new video excerpts are larger than the previous *tiny* little quicktime clips.

Check out their new expansive website — vdb.org — an invaluable resource for all.

vdb.org

Related posts:

1. Video Data Bank: Radical Closure Box-Set and London Screening
2. Erie (2010) and Selected Shorts Presented by Kevin Jerome Everson, Gene Siskel Film Center, November 11
3. Early Computer Generated Video Art: Sunstone (1979) by Ed Emshwiller