More bad news for American film culture--one of the great independent film distributors, New Yorker Films, is going out of business:

Sátántangó

I'm a few hours into Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr's 450-minute-long masterpiece Sátántangó. It's a fascinating film, but one that is a bit of a feat of endurance to get through, so I'm trying to muster the concentration to do so. I anticipate having quite a bit to say about this film in the near future. Stay tuned.

What I've been watching

Here's what I've been watching lately:

The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
Murder!
Lord Love a Duck
The Contract
The Tall Men
Semi Pro
Crossfire
The Walker
The Trouble With Harry
Meet Me in St. Louis

For the record, I particularly recommend Mad Songs and Lord Love a Duck.

The Incredible Hulk

I recently had the chance (after much delay) to get out to my local cinema and see The Incredible Hulk. Some thoughts:

A few years ago Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins was more of an antidote to a series of earlier Batman films—three directed by Tim Burton followed by two directed by Joel Schmacher—than it was a sequel to these earlier films in the usual sense. Similarly, Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk reboots the Hulk franchise following the (in some respects) failed experiment of director Ang Lee’s 2003 film The Hulk (a film I recently saw a second time at Ebertfest 2008).
Lee’s film, which I’m here proposing be immediately retitled Bruce Banner, is dramacentric, focusing on two tragic relationships—Banner’s (Eric Bana) love for Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) and the return of Banner’s estranged father (Nick Nolte)—creating a weirdly skewed quasi-Oedipal love triangle that steals away too much screen time from the shoulda-been star of the show, the Hulk.

Leterrier’s action-drunk revision puts its baroquely muscled and veined CGI behemoth front and center (and for good measure tosses in Hulk nemesis the Abomination at no extra charge), while painting the Banner-Betty Ross (portrayed here by Edward Norton and Liv Tyler) romance in much broader strokes. Between the rock’em-sock’em, the film manages to shoehorn in an origin for Hulk archenemy The Leader, a Lou as well as do so dirty work setting up future Marvel franchises The Avengers, Nick Fury/S.H.I.E.L.D., and Captain America.

All points considered, as I’ve already eluded to above, I slightly prefer The Incredible Hulk to Lee’s earlier film, primarily because I feel that Leterrier takes the comic book character more seriously than did Lee, who seems to me to have been more interested in Bruce Banner than he ever was in the Hulk. At the same time, I prefer Norton’s portrayal of Banner to Bana’s. Granted, Tyler may not be quite as accomplished a dramatic actress as Connelly, but I actually found her lighter touch welcome in the later film. The villains in both films are the really weakness of each film, never really much more than stereotypical “bad guys” (and the latter film’s climatic slugfest is irksomely similar to the final battle in Iron Man, which had been released just weeks earlier). Looking back on the comic book adaptations of 2008, The Incredible Hulk won’t be remembered as the best (that honor will likely go to The Dark Knight), nor probably even the second or third best (Iron Man and Hellboy II, order depending on your tastes), but it’s a good solid entry at #4.

A Night at the Home Theater

Tonight, after much delay (long story short--Netflix shipped me the DVD back in December and I'm just gettting around to watching it now), I finally am watching The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein.

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Library of Congress National Film Registry

Here's a complete list of all the films selected to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress:

http://www.loc.gov/film/titles.html

It's somewhat disappointing how similar (if more expansive) this list is to the list compiled by the American Film Institute several years ago.

Frank Miller and the Man Without Fear

I am currently about half way through Frank Miller’s early-80’s stint as writer/artist on Daredevil (specifically, Daredevil #168-182, collected in Daredevil Visionaries—Frank Miller Vol. 2. At the time these issues were originally published, I was ten or eleven years old, and primarily a Spider-Man fan, so I wasn’t really reading Daredevil at the time. As a result, I wasn’t really aware of Miller as a superstar writer/artist until his later work on Ronin (1983) and Batman: The Dark Night Returns (1986) for DC a few years later. And of course Miller went on to write/draw Sin City and 300 for Dark Horse Comics in the ‘90s.

Years later, with the title by then in the hands of writer Ed Brubaker and artist Michael Lark, I found myself reading Daredevil on a regular basis. While keeping up with their run on the book, I also went back to a critical point in Daredevil history—the title was cancelled and rebooted under the Marvel Knights imprint in 1998 by writer Kevin Smith and artist Joe Quesada. I went on to catch up with the narrative in trade paperback as it passed through the hands of David Mack, Brian Michael Bendis, Bob Gale, then Bendis once again, until finally arriving back at the point at which (beginning with issue #82) Brubaker and Lark took over.

It’s well known, of course, that most of the best work on the title during this period, both in terms of writing and artwork, can be traced back to Miller’s groundbreaking work on Daredevil in the 1980s (writer/artist teams Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev and Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark provided particularly adept at adapting, interpreting, and expanding Miller’s noirish vision of the character and the world in which he moved). So, naturally, the next step was back to Miller’s Daredevil.

. . . to be continued . . .

A Few Interesting Movies I've Seen Recently

Funny how times gets away from you (more on that later). I'm back, hopefully none the worse for wear. I have a lot of things to cover in the coming weeks. Meanwhile . . .

A Few Interesting Movies I’ve Seen Recently:

Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (2007)
Brian DePalma’s Redacted (2007)
Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006)
Fabián Bielinsky’s Nine Queens (2000)

The Big Relaunch (coming soon . . .)

Hi everyone. After an unexpectedly long hiatus, I'm back. Over the next few weeks, I'll be doing an unofficial re-launch of this blog, including my recent trip to Urbana, Illinois to attend Ebertfest 2007. See you soon.

My DVD collection

See my DVD collection @ Chasing the Frog

Leonard Schrader

I was saddened yesterday to learn of the passing of Leonard Schrader at the age of 62. Schrader was the brother of writer/director Paul Schrader, with whom he co-wrote The Yakuza and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Blue Collar, and Old Boyfriends. Schrader also received an 1986 Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman. He also taught at USC, Chapman University, and the American Film Institute, where he was the Senior Filmmaker-in-Residence and chairman of the Screenwriting Department.

Oscar Contenders, Coffee Table Movies, and Prestige Pictures

After an appalling barren spring and summer, we’ve finally reached the season of milk and honey for Hollywood releases. We’ll now have the chance to see the best (according to them, anyway) the studios have to offer, including Scorsese’s The Departed, Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, and Todd Fields’ Little Children.

'The Departed': Choppy craftsmanship?

Check out the discussion on Jim Emerson's blog I'm involved in surrounding remarks that the outstanding film scholar David Bordwell made on his own blog regarding Martin Scorsese's The Departed. What makes a well-edited film anyway?

Schrader's canon

In the September/October 2006 issue of Film Comment, writer-director/critic Paul Schrader offers an interesting contribution the recent discussion regarding the necessity of film canons, defining and defending his own personal vision of the canon and the aesthetic tradition that supports it. Schrader posits seven aesthetic criteria on which to base the canon: beauty, strangeness, unity of form and subject matter, tradition, repeatability, viewer engagement, and morality. You can read the preface and introduction to Schrader’s article at the magazine’s website. Below is a list of the 60 films that comprise the author’s version of the canon, which Schrader has arranged hierarchically into tiers of twenty films each, each with a “medal” level of gold, silver, and bronze, respectively (I've bolded the films on the list that I have seen, in case you're interested):


Gold
The Rules of the Game – Jean Renoir (1939)
Tokyo Story – Yasujiro Ozu (1953)
City Lights – Charlie Chaplin (1931)
Pickpocket – Robert Bresson (1959)
Metropolis – Fritz Lang (1927)
Citizen Kane – Orson Welles (1941)
Orphee – Jean Cocteau (1950)
Masculin-Feminin – Jean-Luc Godard (1966)
Persona – Ingmar Bergman (1966)
Vertigo – Alfred Hitchcock (1958)
Sunrise – F.W. Murnau (1927)
The Searchers – John Ford (1956)
The Lady Eve – Preston Sturges (1941)
The Conformist – Bernardo Bertolucci (1970)
8 1/2 – Federico Fellini (1963)
The Godfather – Francis Ford Coppola (1972)
In the Mood for Love – Wong Kar Wai (2000)
The Third Man – Carol Reed (1949)
Performance – Donald Cammell/Nicholas Roeg
La Notte – Michelangelo Antonioni (1961)

Silver
Mother and Son – Alexander Sokurov (1997)
The Leopard – Luchino Visconti (1963)
The Dead – John Huston (1987)
2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick (1968)
Last Year at Marienbad – Alain Renais (1961)
The Passion of Joan of Arc – Carl Dreyer (1928)
Jules and Jim – Francois Truffaut (1962)
The Wild Bunch – Sam Peckinpah (1969)
All That Jazz – Bob Fosse (1979)
The Life of Oharu – Kenji Mizoguchi (1952)
High and Low – Akira Kurosawa (1963)
Sweet Smell of Success – Alexander Mackendrick (1957)
That Obscure Object of Desire – Luis Bunuel (1977)
An American in Paris – Vincente Minnelli (1951)
The Battle of Algiers – Gillo Pontecarvo (1966)
Taxi Driver – Martin Scorsese (1976)
Ali: Fear Eats at the Soul – Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974)
Blue Velvet – David Lynch (1986)
Crimes and Misdemeanors – Woody Allen (1989)
The Big Lebowski – Joel Coen (1998)

Bronze
The Red Shoes – Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger (1948)
Singin’ in the Rain – Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly (1952)
Chinatown – Roman Polanski (1974)
The Crowd – King Vidor (1928)
Sunset Boulevard – Billy Wilder (1950)
Talk to Her – Pedro Almodovar (2002)
Shanghai Express – Josef von Sternberg (1932)
Letter from a Unknown Woman – Max Ophuls (1948)
Once Upon a Time in the West – Sergio Leone (1968)
Salvatore Giuliano – Francesco Rosi (1962)
Nostalghia – Andrei Tarkovsky (1983)
Seven Men from Now – Budd Boetticher (1956)
Claire’s Knee – Eric Rohmer (1970)
Earth – Alexander Dovzhenko (1930)
Gun Crazy – Joseph H. Lewis (1949)
Out of the Past – Jacques Tourneur (1947)
Children of Paradise – Marcel Carne (1945)
The Naked Spur – Anthony Mann (1953)
A Place in the Sun – George Stevens (1950)
The General – Buster Keaton (1927)

Major Shakeup at Village Voice Leaves Only J Hoberman Standing - Cinematical

In what (for me anyway) is a major blow to film criticism, the new management at the Village Voice (a publication that's been in a downward spiral for quite some time now) has fired film editor and critic Michael Atkinson, leaving J. Hoberman as the only critic left to make the Voice's Film section worth reading:

Major Shakeup at Village Voice Leaves Only J Hoberman Standing - Cinematical

Incidentally, the Voice also purged longtime music critic Robert Christgau, one of the most important pop music critics of the last half-century.

With Roger Ebert still on the mend, that leaves frightening few outstanding critics current writing reviews accessible on the 'net. There's Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Chicago Reader and Manohla Dargis at the New York Times. Anyone have any other suggestions?

While I'm away . . . film festivals

Due to some major league procrastination, I’m unbelievably busy this weekend, but  here are a couple of interesting pieces written by two of my favorite critics about two recent film festivals:

• Manohla Dargis on the New York Film Festival

• Jonathan Rosenbaum on the 42nd Chicago International Film Festival

Viva Pedro

If you're in the neighborhood, and haven't experienced the films of the unique Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, this month the Galaxy Cinema in Cary, North Carolina is having "Viva Pedro," a retrospective of the eight of Almodovar's films. Included are Matador and Law of Desire, neither of which has ever been released on DVD in the U.S.

http://www.mygalaxycinema.com/viva.asp

village voice > film > The Varied Provocations of a Mainstream Auteur by Elliott Stein

Here's a nifty introduction to the films of Otto Preminger (occasioned by a retrospective of the director's work at New York's Museum of Modern Art) by Elliot Stein from this week's Village Voice:

village voice > film > The Varied Provocations of a Mainstream Auteur by Elliott Stein