News from Home

NEWS FROM HOME   ****

Chantal Akerman

1977

IDEA:  Images of New York City are set against the narration of a mother's letters to her daughter abroad.

BLURB:  Spectatorship, authorship, absence and presence become poignantly reified in News from Home, Chantal Akerman’s homesick city portrait turned structuralist symphony. With cultural displacement and alienation as her most immediate themes, Akerman juxtaposes yearning letters written to her from her mother with long perspectival shots of grungy mid-70s New York City, its streets and subway platforms transformed into eldritch sites of communal ritual of which we are not a part. Some locations are eerily desolate, landscapes of forbidding concrete and iron. Others are teeming with people who move languidly about their urban dwellings, natural civilian habitats taking on a decidedly alien air through the dispassionate and detached camera. But Akerman, who is pointedly filming but never seen in the flesh, and whose voice assumes her mother’s words over the disjunctive soundtrack, is also very present, her camera apparatus often noticed by the pedestrians who pass in front of it, their stares solicited by its gaze. We watch, absent from the image as she is and yet authoring its look, providing it with the necessary perception to give life to its astonishing audiovisual sensations. An ethnographic time capsule of a place long gone and a singular simulation of what it’s like to be dislocated, within yet without, News from Home welds thrilling form to haunting considerations of estrangement, and ends up transcendent.

Top 10 - 2014

The Oscar nominations were announced yesterday, but you needn’t look at them to know what the greatest cinematic accomplishments of 2014 were (as if the Academy would tell you, anyway). Listed below are my Top 10 films of the year, ranked in general order of preference, with runners-up and honorable mentions.

A quick note on the year before we get down to it: like any other year, 2014 had plenty to offer in the way of diverse, compelling, thought-provoking, and artistically and culturally prodigious cinema. If it seems to somewhat pale in comparison to 2013, at least for me, that’s because there were fewer films I unabashedly loved, and decidedly none I would deem masterpieces. In other words, there was no Inside Llewyn Davis. I awarded only one film all year the full four stars, although a few others came close. But in the absence of undeniable knockout punches, there was a lot to like.

TOP 10 after the jump!

Force Majeure

FORCE MAJEURE   ***1/2

Ruben Östlund

2014

IDEA:  Husband and father Tomas makes a dubious split-second decision when an avalanche seems to be headed toward him and his family. Nobody is physically harmed, but the emotional fallout begins to send shockwaves through a seemingly idyllic relationship.

BLURB:  Force Majeure belongs to a tradition of formally rigorous art films that create atmospheres so eerily becalmed the most ordinary image becomes imbued with an insinuating dread. There’s always the feeling that fragile personal and social equilibriums are being held barely intact beneath a glassy façade, problems held at bay only until the slightest of pressures sends everything crashing to the ground. Collapse is always imminent; as Östlund maintains his fastidiously presented exterior, the people behind it are imploding with astonishing efficiency. Across two agonizing, spectacularly uncomfortable hours, we watch as a family unit’s precarious foundation visibly cracks underneath them, their assumptions, expectations, and insecurities – imposed by gender and self-perception – brought excruciatingly to the fore. Östlund gives neither us nor them anywhere to hide: the false, perhaps untenable ideals that underpin a relationship are dissected and scrutinized unblinkingly, long takes, wide shots, and stifling silences placing human interaction under an anthropological microscope. It’s grueling stuff, and perhaps a mite too studied for its own good, but Östlund’s formal shrewdness, eye for social behavior, and sneaky black humor keep the film’s personal and ethical quandaries alive and smoldering. Best of all, he leaves judgment up to us. The characters may at times be selfish, cowardly, accusatory, or myopic, but their problems, even if we’d like to think otherwise, could emerge at any moment as our own.

Foxcatcher

FOXCATCHER   ***1/2

Bennett Miller

2014

IDEA:  John du Pont, heir to one of the US's largest fortunes, invites Olympic wrestling champion Mark Schultz and the rest of the American team to come train on his expansive estate, where things head toward inexorable tragedy.

BLURB:  The real life story of an Olympic wrestler and his relationship with a sociopathic multimillionaire becomes the grounds for a dissection of the curdled American ethos in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher. Though perhaps somewhat dubious in its ascribing of determinants to a person who was likely mentally ill, as well as in its construing of these true events as a broader cultural statement, Miller’s film is never so conclusive as to read as disingenuous. Instead, he takes a critical look at a truly bizarre and shocking true story and mines it for all its (possible, probable) sociological and psychological implications, leaving the dazed viewer with just enough information to try to make sense of it all. Loyalty to facts or not, what is clear is this: Foxcatcher is quietly mesmerizing, a perpetually simmering portrait of souls lost and corroded on their way to perceived greatness that doesn’t have a hair out of place. With its sensationally able cast – Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, and Mark Ruffalo, among them channeling a spectrum of distressed physical states – it puts into place a roiling fabric of power relations that point up a cultural condition predicated on exploitation, violence, and delusion. Miller and ace DP Greig Fraser train an uncompromising, almost anthropological eye on masculinity, alternately wounded and inflamed, and the milieu that sublimates aggressive impulses into capitalism and privilege. It may be lots of speculation pertaining to ultimately inscrutable events, but that it seems so unnervingly plausible testifies to Foxcatcher's bruising emotional veracity.

Whiplash

WHIPLASH   ***

Damien Chazelle

2014

IDEA:  An aspiring jazz drummer comes to a prestigious music conservatory, where he is subjected to the cruel, authoritarian mentorship of his ruthless instructor.

BLURB:  Rarely has giving blood, sweat and tears to your art been depicted as literally as in Whiplash, Damien Chazelle’s blistering, somatically exhausting portrait of unrelenting artistic pursuit. Through Sharone Meir’s dread-soaked cinematography and Tom Cross’s frenzied editing, the mastery of music becomes not only beautiful but potentially deadly, the act of drumming a visceral display of masculine violence that requires as much in the way of precision and elegance as in animal fury. In the combustible relationship between J.K. Simmons’ virulent instructor and Miles Teller’s increasingly fevered protégé, written and performed with great complexity, Chazelle finds a highly unnerving representation of the artist as sadomasochist, driving himself toward destruction while justifying internal and external abuse as necessary motivators. The dynamic is deliciously multifaceted, never settling for an easy mentor/mentee dialectic but shifting, in increasingly disturbing ways, the negotiation of power and dominance between the two and the dangerously symbiotic exchange of influences that reinforces the beliefs of both. Unfortunately, Chazelle often loses his thread of logic – the world he’s set up is rather ill-defined, both realistic and heightened, often veering into outlandishness – but any depiction of all-consuming artistic obsession that dares venture into territory this dark and provocative is one that can get away with spiraling out of control every now and then.

Broken Flowers

BROKEN FLOWERS   ***1/2

Jim Jarmusch

2005

IDEA:  The aptly named Don Johnston, an aging and taciturn former ladies' man, receives an anonymous letter in the mail informing him he's the father of a 19-year-old son. Spurred on by his enthusiastic neighbor, he travels the country, visiting the four past girlfriends who may have sent that letter.

BLURB:  The only certainty in Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch’s marvelously droll study of late-life arrest, is that nothing is certain. Bill Murray’s Don Johnston figures this out in the director’s characteristically laconic fashion: amongst coolly curated spaces and inscrutable past flames, he partakes in a domestic odyssey that only curves, elliptically, to reveal question marks proceeded by telling silences. The answers are always out of reach, the guarantees stymied by the possibility, however farfetched, of yet more possibilities. Everything adds up to nothing, which is also, maybe, something. The film’s brand of nihilism is enlivened by humor and pathos, Jarmusch’s observations on ponderous notions – of impossible communication, of cosmic indifference, of chaos theory and karma – filtered through a pithy awareness of how simultaneously terrifying and archly funny those concepts can be. Where he looks, we look, and where he teases the suggestion of something important, we are inclined to go along with it, forming connections in our head that may or may not actually be there. Who can’t relate? Broken Flowers is about the perpetual questioning of probabilities, of seeing things and wondering if, how, or when they may pertain to you. That we might never know for sure is certain.

The Long Day Closes

THE LONG DAY CLOSES   ****

Terence Davies

1992

IDEA:  Bud, a lonely young boy growing up in Liverpool, seeks solace in family, daydreams, and, most importantly, the movies.

BLURB:  The Long Day Closes is a movie of memories, which is also to say it is a memory of movies, of life and time wedded inextricably to the hypnotic movement of film. Forgoing narrative for a mélange of exquisite, almost unspeakably beatific impressions, Davies crafts a vision of his childhood in mid-1950s Liverpool that breathes with the cinema’s uniquely oneiric language. Images billow and float and seep into one another; mellifluous tracking shots and painterly tableaux are synced in rhapsody with music and dialogue; everything appears to be recounted as much by a human mind as by the ethereal flickering of a movie projector. Most filmmakers might have mounted this film-drunk picture as pastiche, but Davies has something infinitely more profound in mind: less a quoting of classic cinema and song than a full-bodied absorption of them, an integration so seamless their entire histories seem to have been ingrained in the film’s fiber. The result is a movie of near celestial stature, one that manages to align and conflate the processes of cinema, memory, and dream to such a degree they feel divinely enmeshed. But Davies never lets us forget the transience of those processes, and by the time the last frames fade away from the screen, it feels as if a sacred experience has been inevitably curtailed. Somehow, that’s what makes it all the more miraculous.