VIFF, pt. 5: Little Earthquakes


Grass Robert Christgau wrote the following about Sleater-Kinney's All Hands on the Bad One: "Locked into a visceral style and sound that always maximizes their considerable and highly specific gifts, they could no more make a bad album than the Rolling Stones in 1967." I mention this because what was true of the Stones in 1967 and of Sleater-Kinney in 2000 is also true of the mind-bogglingly prolific and consistent Hong Sang-soo in 2018. It's worth noting that Christgau made this observation at the start of a CG blurb for an album that almost everyone liked and almost no one regarded as S-K's best. Similarly, among Hong's recent work, Grass lacks either the total, caustic impact of On the Beach at Night Alone or the effortless, ebullient charms of Our Sunhi. It also feels fairly minor compared to Lee Chang-dong's Burning, another Korean film about the process of creating fiction and the writer's relationship to the world around him/her, except in Grass the Elusive Woman (of course, the ever-terrific Kim Min-hee) is the writer in question (and arguably, unlike On the Beach..., the on-screen director-surrogate), rather than the enigmatic object of the writer's interest. All that said, its pleasures––the crisp black-and-white photography, the way DP Kim Hyung-koo films people talking to one another, Hong's alternately funny and incisive dialogue, a young couple heatedly arguing and then gradually reconciling while Pachelbel's Canon in D Major plays on the café stereo––are genuine and abundant, especially for a movie that clocks in at a super-lean 66 minutes to Lee's 148.

Father to Son Roughly halfway through Hsiao Ya-chuan's intimate character study, it occurred to me that this might well be my favorite film of the festival. Hsiao's film is wonderful to look at, beautiful and elegant in an unforced way, and so vividly detailed. Hsiao served in the past as Hou's assistant director, and the Taiwanese master's guiding influence (a line in the opening credits reads "with the support of Hou Hsiao-hsien") is evident throughout the film's excellent first half or even two-thirds, although Hsiao's movie is warmer and more character-focused than most of Hou's films of the past twenty years. Alas, at a certain key point in the narrative, Hsiao's movie becomes overwhelmed by the soap opera-like melodrama that it had earlier treated in a more restrained, naturalistic manner. With this shift toward the histrionic, the filmmaking itself also seems suddenly clumsier and more artificially stylized, with obvious cross-cutting between moments in the present and flashbacks shot in an antique-looking black-and-white, pointless slow motion, and over-use of the musical score for unnecessary emphasis. It's a real shame, but we're left at least with half, or even nearly two-thirds, of a great film.

Diane My ultimate impression of this fictional debut from critic/programmer-turned-filmmaker Kent Jones is more or less the same, except that it stays great (in a distinctly Kenneth Lonergan-like way) for a little longer into its runtime, then when it careens downhill it's more abrupt and jarringly incongruous in scope and tone with what had preceded it. Nevertheless, Mary Kay Place, giving one of the best performances of the year, is superb from start to finish. Even where Jones's narrative choices in the film's final twenty or so minutes feel dubious or false (I shouldn't say more), she redeems the material with an extraordinary level of commitment and grace.

VIFF, pt. 4: Believe the Hype


Burning Like the books of the Bible in medieval exegesis, Lee Chang-dong's film can facilitate an enormous range of readings, from the literal (an ambiguous psychological thriller, via Murakami via Faulkner) to the tropological (it's really a story about repressed homoerotic desire) to the typological (the characters are stand-ins are for elements of fictional storytelling: it's really, really an allegory for the internal violence of the creative process, à la Vertigo) to the sociopolitical (actually, it's about simmering, or "boiling," class tensions in the shadow, or earshot, of the DMZ, playing out in an age of increasing political extremism). Some books/chapters/verses/scenes seem to particularly invite (or permit) readings on one of these levels, while others seem open to several at once. Even at its most literal, Burning seems like at least two different movies, split down the middle by an extraordinary, long scene that doesn't feel like it's necessarily part of either what preceded it or what follows it. Of course, as with biblical readings, interpreters of Lee's rightly lauded film have to work with what's there; but--in both cases--there's a lot there, so much so, in fact, that a very loaded text can, in effect, be treated almost like a tabula rasa, or a new document in Microsoft Word, inviting a would-be novelist to shake off his writer's block and get on with the business of creation.

The Image Book Near the end of his latest video essay, Godard reflects that our civilizations (i.e., the West as well as the Arab World, which Godard pointedly contrasts with the more limited Western conception of "the Middle East," much like his sharp distinction between America and the United States in In Praise of Love) come directly from the religions of the book, through which the word became sacralized and thus reified (a friend, afterwards, referred to John 1:1, but I think Godard, like Derrida, has never fully settled on the Johannine primacy of verbum vis à vis imago). This is not an original observation, but in the context of Godard's restless sorting out of the complex relationship of image and language across modern history and of the affects of visual art and literature (both essentially image-making) employed by cultures at liminal fins des siècles, it's a mournful observation--post-biblical history as, in a certain sense, fait accompli, the longed-for utopia evoked by Godard having not only failed to materialize, but (maybe) having been doomed from the get-go. If cinema, for all its polysemous potential to complicate the fateful, scriptural marriage of word and image, offered a kind of Plan B, but also ultimately failed to subvert (or liberate us from) the fixed subject-object representation whereby power is reiterated and reproduced, this is why Godard turns (again) to the Brechtian "fragment" as a last refuge of that malleable, polysemous potential--a last gasp as guttural as his octogenarian smoker's cough.

VIFF, pt. 3: Masters and Disciples


Ash Is Purest White Here, Jia Zhangke is performing his greatest hits--a little Xiao Wu, several cuts off Platform and Unknown Pleasures, lots of Still Life, a touch of A Touch of Sin--while continuing to survey the uneven patterns of "progress" and change in China's recent history. As usual, Jia is particularly concerned with what exactly it means for ordinary people to live through such epochal social, economic, and cultural changes. Where Platform followed its characters, in Jia's native province of Shanxi, from 1979 to the early 1990s, Ash Is Purest White opens in 2001 and concludes in the present, beginning and ending in Datong, the Shanxi industrial city where Unknown Pleasures took place; the new film's middle section is set in Fengjie, along the monumental Three Gorges Dam, which was the setting for Still Life and its companion documentary, Dong. Jia fuses these familiar settings, elements, and themes into something new within his oeuvre, namely his most humane and empathetic film. A friend observed that it's both Jia's least formalist narrative feature and his most emotionally moving work. This is precisely on-point, and within this less formally rigorous context, Jia's muse, Zhao Tao, gives her best performance to date; her co-star, Liao Fan, is nearly as impressive.

Three Faces Similarly drawing from earlier works in a truly fruitful manner, Jafar Panahi's latest not-a-film is his most Kiarostamian, pre- or post-"ban." Indeed, this must be a conscious homage to the late Iranian master: obscuring boundaries between documentary and fiction in both its premise and execution, Three Faces evokes, most of all, Life, and Nothing More and The Wind Will Carry Us (two of my personal favorites among Kiarostami's oeuvre). Yet in its focus on two would-be artists prevented from practising their art (three if one counts Panahi himself), and specifically on the constraints circumscribing the lives and careers of women (in contrast to the director, who has clearly found clever ways around his punitive sentence), this is also quintessential Panahi.

Lush Reeds Yang Yishu's film never fully settles on what type of movie it is--social commentary? investigative-journalism thriller? domestic drama? dreamy mood piece?--and it's this ambiguous, shifting quality that ultimately make it something really special and exciting. In a post-screening Q&A, Yang noted that her film's Chinese title and its structure are drawn from the classical Book of Songs, which may account for its stately rhythms and elliptical form, but not necessarily (to my knowledge, at least) its pervasive sense of mystery. The less said about plot specifics, the better--see it, by all means. Unhurried and quiet (in a rather ghostly way), it's a knockout.

The Eyes of Orson Welles I never grew tired of watching this documentary, jam-packed with film clips, archival footage, drawings, and paintings by Welles, just as I never tire of revisiting most Welles films, but I did tire of listening to Mark Cousins' ponderous voice-over, jam-packed with annoying rhetorical questions, on-the-nose jokes, and interesting stray observations framed as revelatory insights, as well to the treacly, repetitive score that Cousins lays over virtually the whole film. Admittedly, some of the connections that Cousins suggests--particularly between Welles's many surviving drawings and his distinctive film style--are remarkable and persuasive, but these points could've been delivered more effectively (and less irritatingly) in a conventional documentary format, rather than as an indulgent epistolary essay addressed, presumptuously, to "Orson."

VIFF, pt. 2: Res Canadiana


Both Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown's Edge of the Knife (SG̲aawaay Ḵ'uuna) and Bojan Bodružić's The Museum of Forgotten Triumphs are classified as Canadian films, and indeed both were made possible by grants from federal or provincial funding agencies, yet there isn't a word of English or French spoken in either. The former, the first narrative feature in the Haida language, takes place at the edge of the world, on the islands of Haida Gwaii, at some point in the nineteenth century, presumably post-contact but before extensive colonization had made its way up the B.C. coast; "Canada" avant la lettre, or only from hindsight. The latter, a documentary, was shot entirely in Sarajevo, though if you look closely you'll spot a couple Vancouver Canucks T-shirts on the Bosnian-Canadians visiting older relatives who never left Europe.

If Edge of the Knife is fated to be regarded as the West Coast Fast Runnner (it received some of its funding from Zacharias Kunuk's production company)--well, that's very high praise, and indeed Edenshaw and Haig-Brown's film is as thoroughly captivating as Kunuk's masterpiece. But despite its similar origins in local folklore and communal initiative, the story driving Edge of the Knife is markedly different from that of The Fast Runner. This is, in a certain light, a horror movie--complete with a stunning exorcism scene!--but also a powerful examination of forgiveness and reconciliation. Its power stems in large part from its affect of immersive authenticity, from the ravishingly beautiful, unspoiled natural locations to the uniformly excellent cast.

The "triumphs" in Bodružić's film all relate in some form or another to survival through the most perilous of circumstances, across decades of war and austerity--experiences that Bodružić's elderly grandparents speak candidly about in front of his camera. With both palpable affection and intellectual curiosity, Bodružić follows them and other family members across numerous years, alternating interviews about their memories of the past with quotidian scenes of daily life in their Sarajevo apartment. That apartment, and its rebuilt yet unmistakably war-scarred urban envrions, are the "museum" of the title. Where one of the major objectives of Edge of the Knife was clearly to create a vibrant, living record of the Haida language in action, The Museum of Forgotten Triumphs is similarly trying to preserve something important, to retrieve it from near-oblivion--namely, the shared lifetime of two remarkable, resilient individuals. In this respect, both films are exceptionally poignant.

VIFF, pt. 1: Missed Connections


On paper, Transit sounds essentially of a piece with Christian Petzold's last two movies (Barbara and Phoenix, both superb), albeit lacking Nina Hoss and taking place in France rather than Germany: a fastidiously detailed period film, set in a time of high anxiety and moral murkiness in Europe's twentieth-century past. In its execution, Petzold's latest is something else entirely: an atemporal, cyclical series of starts and stops, entrances and exits, merging Europe's past and present (and near future?) into a purgatorial loop, equal parts social morality play and ghost story. The adjective "Kafka-esqe" is turning up in most reviews, and it's wholly appropriate in this case, not least for the distanced, highly literary voice-over narration, though in its doubling of the action on-screen it also calls to mind Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, which is to say, that "literary" (or for that matter, "theatrical") need not be invoked as an antonym for "cinematic."

Yet, if this is Petzold's most literary work (adapted from a 1942 novel by Anna Seghers), it's also the roughest-around-the-edges of his recent films, opting for undisguised real-world locations over museum-like sound-stage curations. The effect is genuinely radical. What seems initially to be a story of Jews, communists, political dissidents, et al. attempting to escape from the the Nazi forces in occupied Paris is quickly confounded by the presence of anachronistic, present-day cars, buildings, graffiti, clothing, hair-styles, plastic products, etc., and later by the trans-Mediterranean migrants from the Mahgreb whom the protagonist encounters hiding out in Marseilles. Ah, so, this is actually a contemporary narrative? Not so fast. While numerous indicators of twenty-first-century (or at least definitely post-WWII) life are conspicuously present, others are no less conspicuously absent––in particular, digital technology. Unless I blinked and missed it, I didn't spot a mobile phone ("smart" or otherwise) or computer of any sort––elements that, unlike T-shirts and haircuts, would've altered the range of possible actions for Seghers'/Petzold's characters.

The result is a film that is neither properly "period" nor contemporary, but located instead in some kind of uncanny time out of linear-historical time, a singular aspect that renders Petzold's sociopolitical allegory both eerie and impactful. In this respect, I thought of BlacKkKlansman, another film this year that blurs conventional lines between past and present, though, to be sure, Petzold's film is not nearly as explicitly polemical as Spike Lee's; I thought also of Groundhog Day and of Peter Watkins' great La Commune (Paris, 1871). And in its sustained psychological tension and suspense (even, and perhaps especially, in moments of apparent stasis) Transit did call to mind Barbara and Phoenix, which can rightly be called Hitchcockian. But ultimately, in the way that all of these elements are brought together, this is quite a singular film, and an essential one, by one of the best filmmakers working today.

Even better than Caputo on OITNB


(though, that said, it was my favorite moment of the season).

An obituary-by-committee––a sad, nostalgic must-read; it really is getting harder and harder to be optimistic about much of anything beyond one's immediate orbit.

I know it's late / But wait


Another favorite, also utterly inexhaustible; sixteen years on, it just gets better with age.

You're just a thought that someone somewhere somehow feels you should be here


When I can't think of what else to play, I tend to put on Forever Changes, while working, reading, exercising, cleaning the apartment, etc. It's inexhaustible, and there are few better records.

If the year ended now...

(but VIFF is just around the corner!)

01. BlacKkKlansman (Lee)
02. Zama (Martel)
03. First Reformed (Schrader)
04. Hereditary (Aster)
05. The Third Murder (Koreeda)
06. The Death of Stalin (Ianucci)
07. On Happiness Road (Sung)
08. You Were Never Really Here (Ramsay)
09. Oh Lucy! (Hirayanagi)
10. Paddington 2 (King)

This article on mind-boggling hypocrisy (by Stephen Miller's uncle) is really important.

Similarly mind-boggling: I just explained to my son (who is 10 years old, thinks mainly in terms of good guys vs. bad guys, and has recently gotten into the Indiana Jones movies) that America's two primary foes in the twentieth century were the Nazis and the Soviet Union. Whatever one thinks of the more dubious aspects of America's own political/military/imperialistic history, there are very good and obvious reasons why these two groups make for ideal movie villains. And yet now--it really only dawned on me as I gave him this ad hoc history lesson--the US president and his administration are unambiguously friendly both to people who explicitly self-identify as Nazis and to a Russian autocrat who used to work for the KGB and who aims to restore Russia (and other sovereign territories that he thinks should be Russia) to its former, Stalin-era "greatness."

We cannot for a moment lose sight of just how wholly surreal and profoundly fucked up all of this is.

Real Resistance Cinema


To call Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman the movie of the moment, or of the year, feels like a serious understatement, although it's certainly the former and probably the latter. In short (for now), it's utterly sensational, and one of the most incredible movie-theatre experiences I've ever had: a sold-out Sunday-night(!) screening, with palpable, opening-night-of-a-festival-type anticipation in the air and the crowd proceeding to loudly cheer, laugh, gasp, groan, cringe, and ultimately clap at length before sitting momentarily in stunned silence as Lee's '70s protagonists dolly-float into the future, toward the grimmest of codas. (Contrast this with Kanye's pointlessly contrarian remarks on Kimmel, concerning the past's relationship to the present.) Among Lee's non-documentary work (his docs have been consistently excellent), this one's right up there with Do the Right Thing and 25th Hour--a singular master at the height of his powers, combining all the things he does best to push his art forward in a really exciting, and thoroughly vital, way.

Twenty-first-century TV


I really like The Ringer, but its list of the best TV episodes since 2000 is largely dumb, baffling, and pointlessly provocative--even if it inevitably gets some of the obvious milestones right. My top 25 below (one episode per show, or there'd be way more Buffy and Sopranos).

01. Buffy, the Vampire Slayer: “Once More, with Feeling”
02. The Sopranos: “Whitecaps”
03. Mad Men: “The Suitcase”
04. Black Mirror: “San Junipero”
05. The Young Pope: "Episode Eight"
06. Twin Peaks: The Return: "Part 8"
07. The Shield: “Family Meeting”
08. Angel: “Not Fade Away”
09. Gilmore Girls: “They Shoot Gilmores, Don’t They?”
10. Friday Night Lights: “Always”
11. The Wire: "Final Grades"
12. Orange Is the New Black: “Toast Can’t Never Be Bread Again”
13. True Detective: “Who Goes There”
14. The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: "Party Monster: Scratching the Surface"
15. Wolf Hall: "Master of Phantoms"
16. Breaking Bad: “Fly”
17. Game of Thrones: “The Rains of Castamere”
18. Freaks and Geeks: “Discos and Dragons”
19. Community: “Intro to Political Science”
20. Parks and Recreation: “Li’l Sebastian”
21. Dollhouse: “Epitaph One”
22. Supernatural: “The French Mistake”
23. Fringe: “Transilience through Unifier Model-11”
24. The West Wing: "Two Cathedrals"
25. Riverdale: "A Night to Remember"

In the News



I feel happy for Phil Elverum (though it will be slightly surreal to see him in a tux on the red carpet the next time Michelle Williams is up for an Oscar or Golden Globe...) and sad for DeMar DeRozan (who really deserved better, at the very least one more shot at making it out of the East, post-LeBron). I appreciate what both have done/made and personally been through, and--whatever exactly it means to "care" about celebrities (or quasi-celebrities)--I think I care about them more than I do most of the famous people I like. I wish them the best of luck and success in Brooklyn and San Antonio, respectively.

This changes everything


Well, that happened fast; no long, drawn-out "decision" this time around!

I had long expected that he'd go to the Lakers, even when the popular predictions had shifted to Philadelphia or Houston. But I thought he'd wait to see first if L.A. could nab PG (nope) or Kawhi. Does this perhaps mean that the Spurs will soon be dealing Kawhi to the Lakers, but the exact terms of the deal just haven't been worked out yet...?

The East is now finally, genuinely up for grabs: Boston (will Kyrie and Hayward be 100% of their pre-injury selves? how well will the two of them together gel with the young core that overperformed in the playoffs?), Philadelphia (if they manage to work a trade for Kawhi without sacrificing Simmons or Embiid, they'll be the obvious conference frontrunner), and Toronto (will they make major moves this offseason as has been widely predicted/anticipated? Or will they give it one more go with DeRozan, Lowry & Co. now that LbJ has taken his talents West?) all have legitimate shots at it. To a lesser extent, maybe Indiana (if Oladipo is as good as, or better than, he was last season) and Washington (if they can add a strong no. 3) too. Who knows, at this point, what a post-LeBron Eastern Conference will actually look and feel like?!

The West, meanwhile, will be arguably the most stacked, hyper-competitive conference in modern NBA history, especially if Kawhi stays in San Antonio or is dealt to one of the L.A. teams. WOW...I can't wait for next season to start!

Top 100


For the first time in several years, I've revised and updated my top 100 movies list. I prefer the vague "top" because this list, as it stands, is some imprecise mixture of favorite films, films I admire the most, films that move me the most, films that really stick with me, films that I never tire of revisiting, films that remind me why I love this singular/composite art-form as much as I do. Inevitably, some of my favorite filmmakers are represented with numerous films, while other great filmmakers and even entire genres are barely (or not) represented at all--not because I don't appreciate their films but only because one hundred is a very limited number and this is just a personal list with no pretense to completeness or evenness, and it would no doubt look at least a little different if I posted it tomorrow rather than today.

Le Diable probablement...


The three best films I've seen so far this year all centre on middle-aged men experiencing physical-cum-psychological breakdowns while on personal missions of one sort or another. I'm not sure whether this says more about the state of arthouse cinema in 2018 –– deliberately anti-superhero movies? –– or just about the state of my idiosyncratic tastes and preferences. Lucretia Martel's Zama is the most beautiful, the most open and immersive, and probably the best of the three. Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here is the most sealed-off and cryptic; despite my admiration of the film and especially of Joaquin Phoenix's performance, I can't claim to be able to make heads or tails of it.

Paul Schrader's First Reformed is the darkest and most upsetting, not least because Schrader casts a superb Ethan Hawke (one of my favorite actors, though I can scarcely separate him from Jesse in the Before... trilogy and the dad in Boyhood) as his suffering leading man. First Reformed really feels like the culmination and apotheosis of all things Schrader–-not just his own filmography as a screenwriter and/or director (this is obviously of a piece with Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Last Temptation of Christ, Affliction, etc.) but also his influential work as a theorist of film style, with unmistakable echoes of Bresson, Dreyer, Bergman, and Laughton's Night of the Hunter, among other key touchstones. Occasionally, these cinephilic references are a slight distraction (more often, they're effective), and in certain places, Schrader's film feels a touch too allegorically schematic or politically on-the-nose. But its flaws in no way lessen its total, seismic impact. Rather, a subtler, more elegant, more "perfect" version of this film would not be as flooring, and despairing, an experience. It's some kind of peculiar masterpiece.

SCUM


This is utterly fucking revolting. It's unfortunate that we exhausted all the relevant (historical and contemporary) analogies two years ago –– or, hell, maybe back during the second Bush administration –– because now this irredeemable scumbag is writing about immigrants "infest[ing]" the U.S. while creepily hugging a flag and sending children off to detention camps. Each time you think things can't get worse, they do.