On David Fincher & Robert Bresson
i was watching this transcendental sequence from Pickpocket yesterday, when my thoughts began drifting to the contemporary filmmakers who Robert Bresson may have influenced… sticking with the subject of thievery, i immediately thought of Johnnie To’s Sparrow, which explores the ritualistic grace of pilfering by exploding it, turning lifts into 5-minute operas of movement and gesture. but the modern maestro to whom i kept returning is David Fincher… the protagonists of his more recent films (namely Zodiac and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) strive to self-actualize through action, losing themselves in ritual in order to achieve some stripe of purity. it’s action, action, action, action, action…. characters always doing, and then re-doing, as if the means are all that matter.
actually, i think the parallels are probably less evident between their respective works than they are between Bresson’s films, and Fincher’s filmmaking. Fincher, with his 100+ takes of the smallest actions, almost seems determined to reduce (elevate?) his actors into a Bressonian state of purity, smothering the artifice out of their actions until they know longer really know why they’re doing something, only that it must be done.
this is just a half-formed thought that you’re watching take some ungainly sort of shape in real-time, but for all of Fincher’s visual excess, i think Bresson may be the filmmaker with whom he most implicitly connects. someone should ask him about this, sometime (Fincher, not Bresson), at the very least it’d be a neat way to reframe the “you did how many takes!?” question.
Michael Fassbender Gets His Ass Kicked In HAYWIRE
so steven soderbergh has a new flick coming our way this friday, and i’m happy to say that despite Michael Fassbender’s presence, Haywire looks absolutely nothing like Full Frontal. har har. seriously, this is a very good thing, cause when Soderbergh isn’t working with David Duchovny’s prop erection, dude pretty much only makes good films (and that includes Bubble and Ocean’s Twelve, for those of you keeping score). i’ve seen this sequence in its entirety, and it’s a doozy, an instant highlight of a filmography that’s comprised of nothing but. Gina Carano’s experience allowed Soderbergh to stage fight scenes in a way that has proven impossible for most western films, and this clip here is a bruising hint at what’s in store.
i’d love to see more Criterion filmmakers branch out and try their hand at action films… maybe Todd Solondz can helm the next Die Hard, or something.
(clip comes via Total Film)
International Poster Tour: BELLE DE JOUR (dir. Luis Buñuel) 1967
so Buñuel’s erotic masterpiece (harvey weinstein’s words, not mine) finally arrives in the Criterion Collection today, and not to spoil my review or anything, but if there’s one 2012 Criterion that you absolutely must own so far this year, it’s this one, and given that it’s almost January 20th, that’s saying quite a bit (sorry, Traffic upgrade for which approximately zero people asked).
unsurprisingly, the myriad posters that Belle de Jour has inspired over the years are both immediately fetching and entirely predictable. it’s only the Polish (natch) who spiced things up a bit, veering away from catherine deneuve’s come hither stare with that inspired abstract design in the bottom right corner of the image tower above. that being said, methinks the Criterion cover art may be the best of the bunch.
what say you?
The First 6 Minutes of Jean-Pierre Gorin’s POTO AND CABENGO (1980)
so criterion unloosed a trio of new releases today, the most exciting of them being Belle de Jour, which has absolutely nothing to do with this post. the *second* most exciting of them however, is certainly Eclipse Series 31: Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin, which collects a triptych of fascinating and open documentaries from a filmmaker still waiting to be rescued from beneath the wide shadow of his contemporaries.
the earliest of the three films included in this set, Poto and Cabengo, chronicles the story of two young San Diego twins, little girls who speak to one another in their own private language. it seems like some TLC material, but Gorin has a master’s command of the medium and his interest in his subjects transcends the journalistic within the first few minutes, which can be viewed up top. watch with caution, as it’ll be tough to resist plunking down for the whole set once you hit the play button.
(h/t/ The Doc Channel Blog)
Film Comment’s Criterion Ads Are The Best
“Beauty… and the beast.”
methinks Lincoln Center’s bi-monthly film magazine is the only place i routinely see Criterion print ads, and this month’s cross between Belle de Jour and Godzilla is particularly fun. Criterion’s january line-up is pretttttyyyy special.
Wim Wenders Visits “The Criterion Closet”
these videos, in which cinema icons squeeze into Criterion’s storage room and pilfer their favorite titles, are always a right bit of fun, but — and i haven’t fact-checked this, so i’m taking a bit of gamble, here — i think this is the first such video in which one Criterion filmmaker tells an epic story about the time he chortled with another Criterion filmmaker while the two of them peed side-by-side. it’s times like these that i really regret not having a staff of interns.
p.s. get used to having Wim Wenders around, cause you’re going to be hearing his name a lot this year…
Criterion Addresses Potentially World-Ending GODZILLA Controversy
so the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone ever has just maybe happened to us (or not?): Criterion has adorned their lavish new GODZILLA release with an image of “Millennium Godzilla,” and not the original King of Monsters as seen in the 1954 film. maybe. either way, the fans are revolting (you said it, they stink on ice). famine… plague… chelsea handler… all terrible, but truly this is the worst evil to have ever visited our civilization.
one fan likened it to “putting Daniel Craig on the cover of DR. NO.”
fortunately, Criterion has taken it upon themselves to answer the pitchfork-carrying hordes:
“Artist Bill Sienkiewicz used the original, ‘54 Godzilla as reference for his artwork, but all of the renderings are nevertheless, in the end, Bill’s personal vision of the creature, albeit one that is Toho approved. We can see why some viewers consider it to be more akin to the 2002 incarnation of Godzilla because the back plates seem more sharp-pointed and jagged than the curved tips of the ‘54 original, for example, or the tail tapers more to a point, but those plates don’t exactly mirror the ones from the 2002-3 monster either.
We pushed Bill to address Godzilla as a force of destruction, an elemental being, to step away from a rendering that would be purely literal and fetishistic in detail, and think he came up with a terrific interpretation. This is also why there is color in the packaging art. Although the movie is a beautifully-photographed B&W work, we kept leaning towards the elemental aspects of fire and water and wanted the color palette to evoke that.”so… there ya have it. will they stick to their guns, will they include a note in future printings, or will they scrap this design entirely making this release something of a collector’s item? only time will tell. somewhere, Mothra is pleased.
Owen Wilson Gives Luis Buñuel The Idea for THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL
i assume that most of ya’ll have seen this already, but i just re-watched Midnight in Paris this weekend and was struck by how much better and more thoroughly this silly little bit works than so many of the fun but one-note cameos that pepper the film. i mean, this is just a touch more pertinent to Gil’s reveries than Adrien Brody referring to himself as “Dali!” over and over again.
cute movie. now where’s the twisted, vitriolic, and abstract Buñuel biopic for which the world* has been waiting?
* in this case, the word “world” is used as a synonym for “me.”
CRITERION REVIEW #3 THE LADY VANISHES (dir. Alfred Hitchcock) 1938
THE FILM: The Lady Vanishes is pretty much a one-stop shop for everything that I love about Alfred Hitchcock: It’s got a crackling mystery, a masterful sense of suspense, an impish ear fur humor, and — most importantly — a luminous brunette (Margaret Lockwood). It was the last film Hitchcock made before he packed up and left England for Hollywood, and to my mind it was also the best.
For the first thirty minutes of The Lady Vanishes, the film’s tone is the only mystery in sight, and it’s not a particularly urgent one, at that. We begin in the backwater country of Bandrika, a fictional European nation that seems to be aligning itself with some sinister forces (the word “Nazi” is never spoken). An avalanche has stranded a train’s worth of passengers in a little mountain inn, and Hitchcock guides us through a fun and frivolous evening with this motley crew of clashing personalities. There’s a brash young musician named Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a lovely lady en route to meet her sod of a fiancée (Lockwood), two bantering gentleman who care only for critic, and an elderly woman named Miss Froy who we could all swear that we saw. The dialogue is sharp and unexpectedly dirty, and Hitchcock breezes between the rooms with the same false sense of happenstance that Renoir would later patent in The Rules of the Game. The whole set-piece is such a fluid delight that by the time someone gets strangled to death, it almost feels like part of the fun. When Miss Froy disappears from the train the next day and the other passengers all tell Lockwood that she was never onboard in the first place, the mystery is afoot, and the slap-happy opening act is revealed to be a harbinger of grave things to come.
Chugging along on the strength of Hitchcock’s most devilish Macguffin that side of North by Northwest, The Lady Vanishes isn’t just a tart little mystery or a masterclass in suspense (although it most certainly both of those things — the fogged window enduring as one of the cinema’s most deviously designed bits of snack-sized dramatic irony), it’s also a massively entertaining portrait of a world in transition (evoking People on Sunday, in some way). When that train pulls out of Bandrika it rolls away from a more innocent time, fixed on a one-way course towards a darker place where evil isn’t a fever-dream but a very real presence. Hitchcock has no sense for cynicism, but The Lady Vanishes rolls towards a reluctant realism, ultimately promising an extraordinary number of murders to come — murders about which the only mystery will be how people didn’t see them coming. It’s no wonder Hitchcock got out of there.
THE TRANSFER: Criterion’s Blu-ray of The Lady Vanishes might actually look a little toogood. I mean, it’s one thing to know that Hitchcock is pulling a fake model car through the fake cobbled streets of a fake European country, but in 1080p the illusion is utterly pulverized and the film begins on a needless note of kitsch, as a result. That being said, the transfer’s unrivaled quality begins paying massive dividends shortly thereafter, offering viewers a remarkably clear and consistent image that should play like mana from heaven for Hitchcock purists. And is it just me, or is Margaret Lockwood actually glowing?
THE VERDICT: The deluxe DVD edition that Criterion released in 2007 is still a top-notch product and those who own it shouldn’t feel compelled to upgrade unless their completely understandable love of the film beckons them to do so. Folks looking to add this film to their library for the first time should pull the trigger and never look back.
CLICK OVER TO MOVIES.COM TO READ REVIEWS OF CRITERION’S COMPLETE DECEMBER SLATE.
CRITERION CORNER 2011: A Banner Year
still settling into the new year, over here (still finding individual shoes from my new year’s party… not sure how that happens), and just felt like taking a super quick look back at the very formative year that was for the column / blog. it’s been an amazing experience channeling my private (and compulsively nerdy) passion for the criterion collection and the culture it represents into… well, whatever this is. it’s only been possible because film lives with some people in a way that most folks will never understand, and criterion & co. are always there to remind us that we’re the lucky ones. so in lieu of clogging up your feeds even more than i usually do, let me just say that it’s a huge relief to know you’re out there.
thanks for an amazing 2011, thanks so much for reading, and here’s hoping that 2012 will bring with it a ton of great reasons to start obsessing about this stuff all over again (and from what i’ve heard, there definitely will be…). - david (@CriterionCorner)
p.s. this post is my lame tribute to elisa, who only has to use an infinitesimal fraction of her design talents to quickly slap together these banner images, but whom i appreciate to no earthly end.
