Lately Films of Note: Herzog, Denis and Kiarostami

What follows is a brief update on some of the outstanding movies I've seen lately--and for a change, there are quite a few! Some are old, some are new, but come to think of it, none are much more than a decade out from their original release. Funny how so many slip through the cracks.


Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005) was on what I thought was a short list of to-see movies, but three years hence its release and it's apparent that that list must actually be quite long. Herzog is one of my favorite documentary filmmakers because he's so astonishingly honest, and handles his own presence in his movies with a lot of reluctance. In Grizzly Man his physical presence is sublimated first through a proxy voice over narration, and later, most profoundly through an old friend of bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, Jewel Palovak: a sound recording of Treadwell's slow death is captured on camera; Palovak has wisely never listened; through a shot over the shoulder of Herzog (we never see his face) we watch her watching him listen to the tape of Timothy dying. Without overtly addressing the audience, we read his reaction on the face of her instead. "You must never listen to this tape. You must destroy it," he tells her.


Claire Denis's The Intruder (2004) is the last movie in my short queue of her works, and it is possibly my favorite. Then again, I've said that after seeing Chocolat (1988), I Can't Sleep (1994), Beau travail (1999) and Friday Night (2002). So to qualify this beyond the great love and admiration I have for all of her films, maybe I can argue that The Intruder is the best for its careful depiction of life lived slowly: nothing is ever rushed in a Denis film--that's Denis 101--from illegal immigrants border crossing, a couple making love while being careful not to wake the baby, to an old man's frustrated search for a heart transplant and his long lost son. This movie takes us to locales as cold as the French-Swiss countryside to the thick, warm breezes of Tahiti. Temperature is rarely as poetically saturated (or desaturated) as it is in a Denis film.


My final thoughts for the next couple of days rest with Abbas Kiarostami and his lovely Taste of Cherry (1997), a film so completely absorbed in its natural landscape--the urban and undeveloped urban outskirts of Tehran, Iran--that you wonder, is this documentary? Of course to the contrary, it is highly staged, but of the neorealist sort that borrows non-actors, location shooting and natural dialogue as its primary means of illustration. There will be more developed thoughts on Kiarostami in the coming weeks as I filter through the (many) missed films from his oeuvre too.

The Website Is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Guy

Last week I reported the wonderful news of Barry Jenkins' first feature being bought up by IFC Films, and this week there is more excitement coming out of the world of "6g," who for those wondering, consists of a small group of pals (myself included) who met at the 2002 Telluride Film Festival and have kept in touch since.

Rising snarky-man and director, Josh Weinberg, who has been mentioned previously on this site for his work creating and curating the First Look Festival, a student film festival in Denver, Colorado, now managed under the wing of The Denver International Film Festival, has released his new video to the web, The Website Is Down. It's a short narrative goofing on the plight of the office IT guy, starring Weinberg (Web Dude) and his two friends, Casey Cochran (Sales Guy) and Jesse Johnson (Trevor from Arvada), in a testament to homemade regional movie making that refuses to take itself too seriously.

If this video was turned into a series, it would probably look like Office Space overdosing on Homestar Runner. I would enjoy that!

Barry Jenkins' Medicine For Melancholy Gains Distribution

Excitement and adrenaline is abound in one of director Barry Jenkins' small circles of friends, mythically known as "6g," when the news was revealed to us that his feature film, Medicine For Melancholy (2008) was picked up for distribution by IFC Films today. This is Jenkins' first feature film which will be released in theaters sometime in 2009.


When I interviewed Jenkins back in November 2007 the movie was about to premiere at SXSW. Since then, it has toured numerous festivals across the country, including the San Francisco International Film Festival, and beginning tomorrow, the Los Angeles International Film Festival.

About two twenty-something African Americans who peruse the city of San Francisco after a fateful one-night-stand, the film has a controlled style reminiscent of the intimacy found in Godard's slice-of-life characters, his romantic and affectionate picture of city life, and also for some of that New Wave jump cut editing. Male lead Wyatt Cenac's character, Micah, even has a moment making faces in the mirror, a la Godard's Breathless (1960).

Jenkins' poetic imagery that was desaturated to appear almost black and white, is combined with a sobering smack of racial and social discourse concerning gentrification in the nation's 14th largest city that reminds us of activist directors like Spike Lee. I like to think of Medicine For Melancholy as a Do The Right Thing for lovers of the French New Wave.

I'll provide more updates on Medicine For Melancholy and director Barry Jenkins as I get them. Keep your fingers crossed M4M will make it to your city! In the meantime, check out this cutting edge academic study on shot counting and editing conventions at Cinemetrics, where Jenkins' film has been added to the database.

Cyd Charisse has passed away

Yesterday, Tuesday, June 17th, 2008, the strikingly beautiful and dynamic dancer Cyd Charisse passed away at the age of 86. Charisse was particularly memorable for her roles in such classic Hollywood musicals as MGM's Singin' In the Rain (1952), The Band Wagon (1953), Brigadoon (1954), It's Always Fair Weather (1955), and Silk Stockings (1957).

Rest In Peace Tim Russert

This may be a film blog, but for this critic, politics is equally important as the movies. And if you're talking politics, at some point or another Tim Russert is bound to enter the conversation.


For me, he was the most visible and recognizable of the political talking-heads, both through his reportage of the 2000 Presidential Election—known now for his famous white board usage; and his calm and clear-headed presence on NBC's Meet The Press.

I traveled to Buffalo for the first time last weekend. The first thing I asked the natives was, "So do you love Tim Russert? Is he a local hero?" Wandering through that Rust Belt town I couldn't remove him from my consciousness. The defining feature of Buffalo, I found, was the calm, quick-witted and sharp thinking people; everything that you find in the northeastern intellectual circles, but without a hint of pretension. As a person and journalistic figure, Tim Russert suddenly made a lot more sense to me.

I love how he made the political process thrilling: Counting electoral votes on a veritable scorecard in the 2000 Presidential Election, lively moderation of Meet The Press's diverse roundtables, and his signature sign-offs saluting the Buffalo Bills, Boston College, and most recently, the 2008 graduating class of that school. Sometimes he would throw a comic wrench in the roundtables, popping the question, "Who's going to win tonight's Superbowl?" to top-notch politicians. He kept the political process human in this way; he always reminded us that there are practical, concrete terms in which to understand political jousting and the election process. You always knew what he meant when he spoke and when he asked questions. He took the complexity of electoral politics and made you un-intimidated. For this, I will miss Tim Russert. Gone, but not forgotten.

Sex and The City (2008) And Alpha Dog (2007)

What do the movies Sex and the City (2008) and Alpha Dog (2007) have in common? Well, nothing per se. I just happened to have watched them both in the same one-week period, meaning I got a hefty dose of both super-masculine and super-feminine cinema almost all at once, and neither being the desired representation of either sex.



Director Michael Patrick King's Sex and the City has been aligned as the woman's superhero film of the summer, and that might be so, if for no other reason than it is entirely concerned with the female perspective. There is hardly an instance where the man's point of view is not censored (and by that I mean not explored at all), and Sex and the City takes that to the nth degree, to the point where you begin to think the men in this film are really just figments of the female foursome's collective imagination, something, maybe, along the lines of Garfield Minus Garfield for the single New York woman.

There is something incomplete about Sex and the City : 2 hours and 28 minutes of run time and hardly a dialogue between the women and their men. Is it any wonder these women find it difficult seeking resolve to the bumps in their relationships? For a career relationship columnist, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) must know that she has to communicate with her boyfriend, Big (Chris Noth), to heal her wounds, not spam label his emails. Also to be witnessed in Sex and the City is the cleanest and quietest breakup in relationship history. This is a bit of a spoiler for those concerned, but Samantha's (Kim Cattrall) departure with Smith (Jason Lewis), her hunky boyfriend of 5 years, barely objects to her leaving, only showing a tightly knit brow in response. This from a man who nursed her through chemotherapy in episodes past on the HBO show. I know men are traditionally the ones to show less emotion in these sorts of situations, but after 5 years of commitment, even the toughest dude is likely to shed a tear, or at least let out a little yelp.

But this is not the reason women flocked to the theaters to the tune of a $56 million weekend gross. Undoubtedly, it was for the spectacle, for it was indeed a phenomenon: our theater manager warned us "No running!" on our way to our seats, and a friend brought a flask of pre-mixed Cosmopolitans. And don’t forget the fashion: vast collections of dresses, shoes, bags and accessories that an average woman could never afford. The ladies wear it very well. Manohla Dargis has pointed out the film's penchant for clothing montages; my girlfriend and I counted three and materialism has never been so redundantly and bizarrely pretty. When 40-something Carrie hires Louise (Jennifer Hudson) as her personal assistant, a 20-something single in search of “love and labels” (as Carrie so poetically puts it), it is spelled out with frightening forthrightness that this is who Carrie wants to be, always in search of her younger, more optimistic self. Clock’s ticking.

Enough with makeup and Manolos, Nick Cassavetes's Alpha Dog is characterized by keg parties and makeshift weight rooms. Just over a year now from its initial release, I made my way to see this on DVD one random May weeknight and couldn’t be more overwhelmed, yet pleasantly entertained by its testosterone levels.



Alpha Dog suffers from the inverse problem of Sex and the City, showcasing iron-pumping adolescents longing to be men, in particular, pack leader Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch), the gangster of the upper-class 'hoods of Southern California, also the idol of his groupies. Therein this social hierarchy lies the core problem for these boys: individual identity led astray by Johnny's bossy pressures, means the eventual death of their rival's younger brother, Zack (Anton Yelchin). The movie is cleverly narrated by subtitles that retrace the time and locations of the crime (taken from actual police reports), a device that doesn't diminish the story's suspense, as it very easily could. Justin Timberlake gives a surprisingly good performance (there is apparently nothing Timberlake can do wrong these days), and I was reunited via TV interface with an old friend from 6th grade, Vincent Kartheiser, a supporting cast member who I remember regaled our classroom of 12-year-olds with reports from the set of Untamed Heart (1993) (Christian Slater, he said, had a very bad complexion, as I recall).

But what would the women of SatC have to say about the tarts of Alpha Dog? Merely arm candy, a good lay and someone to blame for their boyfriends' shortcomings, the women (or more aptly, girls) in this film are beaten to a pulp with insults and objectification. I can't imagine Carrie would approve, but I can't think her classic prescription of retail therapy would further their cause either.