In This World
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Debra Granik, Jennifer Kent, Mira Nair, and Lena Waithe are among the jurors Sundance has selected to grant awards during its fortieth edition opening on January 18. Berlin Critics’ Week, which will run parallel to the Berlinale next month, has lined up a first round of films for its tenth edition, and in the meantime, Unknown Pleasures, the city’s annual festival of American independent film, is on through January 30.
Starting today in New York, the Museum of the Moving Image is presenting a weekend of features by Alexander Payne, and on Wednesday, Payne will be on hand for a screening of The Holdovers. “John Ford used to say: ‘I’m John Ford and I make westerns,’” Payne tells the Guardian’s Xan Brooks. “I say: ‘I’m Alexander Payne and I make comedies,’ because I try to maintain a comic attitude, even towards dramatic material. Keep it nimble, keep it charming. But that’s life, isn’t it? And it’s a corny analogy, but life isn’t single notes, it’s chords. Minor keys and major keys.”
Series spotlighting films starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Leslie Cheung open today at Metrograph, and Film Forum is paying tribute to Leon Ichaso: Poet of Latin New York. In Los Angeles, the American Cinematheque is launching a Michael Mann retrospective that will run through January 14.
Here’s a sampling of what caught our eye over the holidays:
- In the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Setsuko Hara “seemed to glow from within, fighting for the right to stand still and defy time,” while Haruko Sugimura “swept forth with the spirit of the modern age—practical, brash, and brassy, always asking for a little too much,” writes Moeko Fujii in the New York Review of Books. “The films that both Hara and Sugimura were in shine so brightly because when they were both onscreen, they embodied the ambivalence at the center of Ozu’s work: Do you fight for the right to stand still, or to push forward? Who is lost in a more convenient, or inconvenient, world?”
- Twenty years ago, Julien Allen launched Orsonwelles.co.uk, and one of his primary motivations was to encourage appreciation of all the films Welles made that weren’t Citizen Kane (1941). Kane remains “in form and substance perhaps the most extraordinary film ever made,” writes Allen at Reverse Shot, but: “Even bowdlerized as they were, both The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil are more mature, fluently accomplished, arguably more enduring and superior works to Kane, and his Chimes at Midnight probably represents the aesthetic apotheosis of the marriage between Welles’s Shakespearian sensibilities (which imbued all his films) and his artistic command.”
- Colin Farrell is “such a transparent actor, his face so active and his energy so bad-student fidgety, that he’s good at playing dumb,” writes Mark Asch in the latest Cracked Actor column at Metrograph Journal. In Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges (2008), Farrell plays Ray, a hit man wresting with guilt after a tragically botched job. “There’s a slight hop to his movements when he remembers something; he’s often open-mouthed, as if the words are taking longer than expected to arrange themselves into a sentence,” writes Asch. On the big screen or off, Farrell “simply can’t keep a poker face. He’s a man with no secrets.”
- Sean Gilman has revived the guide to the “Shaolin Cinematic Universe” that he wrote about ten years ago. “Taken collectively,” he writes, “these films (and there are a lot of Shaolin films) form an interrelated and at times contradictory mosaic of history and legend. A uniquely cinematic mythology nonetheless grounded in actual events and personages whose transmutation into folk heroes was underway decades before the invention of cinema. These films, focused on the Shaolin Temple as a center for anti-Qing resistance, provide a dizzying metaphorical potential, with the Qing variously standing in for Western imperialists, the Japanese, the Nationalist Kuomintang, the Communists, or even simply the Manchurians themselves, while the Buddhism of the monks allows for examining of the contradictions at the heart of traditional Chinese belief systems, between the imperatives of social justice and withdrawal from worldly concerns.”
- At RogerEbert.com, Nancy Savoca tells Marya E. Gates about coming very close to losing her 1993 adaptation of Francine Prose’s novel Household Saints. She worked with Amy Heller and Dennis Doros of Milestone Films to recover the essential elements and create a remastered restoration, and she’s also teamed up with Milestone and other filmmakers to launch Missing Movies “so that we can educate filmmakers now so that in twenty years their movies don’t go missing. It’s about self-preservation, literally.” Savoca and Gates also talk about Household Saints, of course, and about “the three stages of our relationship to the Divine.”
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