Escapism Film Festival Next Weekend: You're Invited

I'm happy to announce that through my secret identity as a film critic and co-host of The Film Talk, next weekend I'll be at the Escapism Film Fest in Durham, North Carolina.

If you're a regular listener to the show or reader of this blog, you'll know that my love of cinema was catalysed at the impressionable age of 4, when my dad took my brother and I to see the darkest film ever released by Disney, 'The Black Hole'.  I was utterly captivated by the scope of the images - the spaceship might just be the biggest spaceship in the movies; for some reason the old character actors already seemed familiar, even though it was the first time I ever saw them; and I knew there was something dramatic going on, even if I couldn't quite understand the metaphysical proposals that result in [SPOILER AHOY] the mad evil scientist played by Maximillian Schell becoming possessed by the spirit (and the body) of his hench-robot, the imaginatively named 'Maximillian'.  The script's not up to much, but the whole thing looks magnificent; thirty years after I first saw 'The Black Hole', it has an irreplaceably special place in my heart, along with the adventures of Marty McFly, Clark Kent, the pirate-treasure seekers of Astoria, Oregon, and the other cinematic fantasy figures whom I connected with first by seeing them on screen, and spent much of the years 1983-1989 trying to recapture by listening to the soundtrack albums.

So thank God that the Carolina Theatre in Durham is screening these and other pictures of memory next weekend, in its glorious old and cavernous in all the best ways large screen, along with so many of the films that shaped me as a child that I can assume the programmers at the theatre were reading my diary.  Jett and I will be covering the Escapism Film Festivalin person - and if you're anywhere nearby, please join us for the opportunity to see Superman, Back to the Future, Dr Strangelove, The Goonies, Return to Oz, and the camp classic with Topol's second greatest screen performance 'Flash Gordon'.  Please join us if you can.

The Movie of the Year 2009: Moments

And so we continue cutting together the patchwork of the year's best film, today's chapter culled together from the richest moments I've seen on screen in 2009 (there will be more, of course):

MOMENTS

Every part of ‘Sita Sings the Blues’ when the narrating voices contradict each other.

When Andreotti in 'Il Divo' returns to his home village to hand out gifts like a satanic Santa, arms moving from the elbows, eyes unblinking; the lines between generosity and bribery so subtly blurred in a film that seems to turn one man’s life into a comprehensive social history of post-war Italy.

Pretty much anything in ‘Tetro’ – the most physically beautiful film of 2009; the scene at the hospital community, any time Klaus Maria Brandauer appears; and especially the delirious section when a critic called 'Alone' pronounces her judgement on the world.

The converstion between Adam Sandler and Leslie Mann in 'Funny People' in which they re-affirm their love for each other; he’s never been more believable.

The woman who stumbles into shot when Krystof Zanussi is being interviewed in ‘Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky’; like a refugee from a Fellini set. Dmitry Trakovsky’s genius is to keep filming – he knows that’s what Tarkovsky would do too.  Here's a picture of Dmitry - a good friend of The Film Talk and an excellent director.

The choreographed dance in (500) Days of Summer; wherein a man dances to celebrate something that he thinks is miraculous, without realizing his partner rates it much lower.

And...Solo searching for William’s other taxi in the Winston-Salem night; Bahrani utterly avoids the cliché of a chase scene; to the point where the ‘coincidence’ of finding the other car appears nothing less than exactly what would happen in real life... The breakfast provided for the prison officer in ‘Hunger’, capturing the harsh and broken reality of northern Irish life through the 70s and 80s, and making a character who otherwise might be automatised into a recognizably human figure... Joaquin Phoenix and Elias Koteas saying everything and nothing while Gwyneth Paltrow leaves the table in the restaurant scene in ‘Two Lovers’.  Only one of them belongs there... The party in ‘Humpday’ – there’s something about it that makes me want to go there; there’s something about it that makes me want to stay in bed... Eddie Adams walking to his office as the linking sections of ‘An Unlikely Weapon’ – an artist damaged by what he saw, trying to make sense of it and give something back...

Your thoughts?

The Movie of the Year: Overtures

OVERTURES

Three opening sequences have embedded themselves in my mind this year:

Youssou N’Dour’s anthemic call, at the beginning of Elizabeth Chai Versalihis’ ‘I Bring What I Love’ to the young people of Africa, tears streaming down his face, asking his people to be guided by their own vision to unshackle themselves from the dependency fostered by sentimentalized Western views of the continent.

The first section of ‘Up’, which I saw a few weeks before my own wedding in May, the most glorious animation and design fused with a powerfully resonant story: the arc of a love affair, beginning in childhood, and reaching a crisis with the death of one party; whole films have dedicated to this arc, of course; ‘Up’ manages to make you believe it in five minutes; the whole rest of the movie is about what happens next, and how love always outlasts its object.

And the first half hour of ‘Inglourious Basterds’, which manages to invoke the memory of Lee van Cleef, the ‘Hills are Alive’ sequence in ‘The Sound of Music’; and even the face of Stanley Kubrick.  Beyond that, it provides the most credible reason in cinema history for a French and German character to speak English to each other; announces the arrival of a fantastic actor – Christoph Waltz - on international screens; and declares Tarantino’s intention to make Nazi violence look even worse than it has ever done by the very absurdity of its portrayal in his film.

More suggestions?

The Movie of the Year 2009

Earlier in the summer I began an ill-advised attempt at writing haiku over at The Film Talk (what’s the verb for composing a haiku?  Haikuing?  Haiku-tecturing? Haiku-grammising?) in response to some of the films that have intrigued me this year.  The experiment was abruptly ended by an outbreak of good taste, but as we roll into the fourth quarter of 2009, in anticipation of the awards season ‘quality’ epidemic that’s sure to colonise our screens over the next few months, I thought I’d return to reflecting on how intriguing a year this has been at the movies. As the last three months of the year traditionally see the release of Oscar-bait, our vision of the best films of 2009 will inevitably be somewhat skewed toward films that haven’t been released yet.  I’ve mentioned before that Roger Ebert may have made the most sensible suggestion for renewing the Academy Awards in a fashion that would both help films released earlier in the year not to be forgotten, and allow audiences to expect decent movies from January to September.  In that spirit, let’s have a thought experiment: I’m going to attempt having two ‘best lists’ for this year; starting with this last week of the month, I’m going to post my treatment for the film of the year – a quixotic notional endeavour, in which the bits that made me feel happiest to be a film lover are cut together in a genre-bending masterpiece that exists only in my head, because that’s the only place it can exist – you will have your own choices, and I’d love to hear about them here on the site – so please share your own imaginings in the comments section.

We’ll break it down into sections – today I’ve written about the premises that I enjoyed the most; I’ll post again on Wednesday with thoughts on the best intros and moments; Friday will see the best endings and even closing credit sequences (trust me, there are a few) that I’ve seen.

And I promise to return to all of this when the year is done; some of these films will be forgotten in year-end lists, and part of the reason I’m writing this as a reminder to myself. Please forgive the indulgence if you’re not interested; but if you are, I’d love to have a conversation in the comments, starting today with your thoughts on the best premises and/or opening sequences you’ve seen this year.

THE BEST PREMISES OF 2009

Old guy saves the world through non-violence; gives a kid a car.

Middle-aged guy saves world through old movies; gives a guy a scar.

Old guy gets his world back by letting go of a balloon-powered house.

Depressed guy falls in love with both Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw; they love him back.  Kind of.

Depressed artist lives with an incredibly beautiful woman in Argentina but can’t write; learns to love his brother.

Old guy friends try to heal their boredom by failing to have sex with each other but film the foreplay and end up figuring out what happens when a generation is raised on boredom.

Old guy talks about the pictures he took; one of which ended the War in Vietnam.

Old guy runs Italy into the ground.

Old guy and young guy drive around in a taxi.

Guy lives on the moon.

Old guy saves dolphins from amphibocide.

Middle-to-older aged guys play loud music; get big in Japan.

Young guy enjoys bomb disposal; can’t choose between cereals.

The Only Film That Has Everything?

Tarkovsky's  'Andrei Rublev' seems to me to be one of the few films guaranteed to be watched centuries from now, if the art form that captured my heart (and so often betrays it - which means that movies are, in the end, very much like us) lasts past the point when our brains will have been made half synthetic by the friends of Ray Kurzweil.  I finally got to see the film at the weekend; I wanted to wait to see it in a cinema, cued by my old friend the wonderful film critic and art historian Mike Catto who says that watching movies on television is like going to the British Museum to see a mummy rather than visiting the pyramids.  I'm grateful for DVD letting me see films that otherwise would only be evocative titles in my head, but when opportunity arises to get into a theatre, I take it.

And so, 'Andrei Rublev'.

It's a film about resurrection - the central character (who certainly isn't a protagonist in the traditional sense - he responds to circumstances, but doesn't exactly drive the story) is acted upon by the tragic and awful events that can occur when political power and religious law get too tightly bound together; he changes his mind about some things; he loses the comfort to paint the icons that the world knows him for; he fails to intervene to save someone beautiful; he tries to save someone beautiful; he seems ultimately resigned to the world being broken, and to the medieval Russian church being utterly corrupt, but he eventually finds faith that there is a way to let his gift use him.  And, five hundred years later, in the film's coda, it does.

Now, I want you to forget what you just read: because it implies that 'Andrei Rublev' is nothing more than an epic adventure story, comparable to those other two-named eponymous behemoths 'Ben-Hur' and 'El Cid'.  Certainly it tells a story - although the fact that the story seems to include every psychological motivation and consequence known to humanity makes that an understatement so flimsy it might as well be gibberish.  I can't convey how the visual shock of this film affected me - my friend who loves it deeply is right when he says that it's as if Tarkovsky took a time machine back to the fifteenth century and unobtrusively filmed people suffering and praying and living.

It looks that authentic.

And it feels alive.  It has some of the most striking images I've ever seen - the horse rolling over and up at the beginning (which seems to me to be a direct reference to Robert Bresson's 'Au Hasard Balthasar', inverting that film's ending, and an explicit reference to the third day after the Crucifixion), the running of the monks in the rain, the girl frightened and angered by the paint smeared on the wall, the astonishing sequence of horrific pillage, in which one of the most terrifying things in cinema occurs (no more unpleasant than what happens to the bad guys at the end of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', but the tone is so...real?...that you have to look away, and can't ignore what this film is saying about the misuse of power), the tension of waiting for the bell to chime, and the very last image: four horses, alive and representing life itself, a quantum leap beyond the film's earlier equine resurrection.

Like I said, it's a film about life after death, and resurrection of all kinds - the kind that billions of people imagine for the human race, the kind that's necessary to get up every morning, the kind that the medium in which Tarkovsky worked needs with a kind of desperation I'm not sure it has known before. Cinema's a miracle, but has forgotten this

For more on Tarkovsky have a look at my friend Dmitry Trakovsky's lovely documentary.  Meantime?  Life.