When Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture, writer-director Barry Jenkins and his team weren’t the only ones celebrating. For many filmmakers, the Moonlight triumph was both a victory for indies but also a rebuke against the racism, sexism and prejudice of Trump’s America. It was, perhaps, the entertainment industry’s biggest embrace of “the Resistance” yet. But the Trump regime isn’t just affecting awards shows and celebrity Twitter accounts. Financiers and producers speak about an uncertain marketplace, fueled by the wild vacillations of the Trump presidency, which has the ability to both hinder and bolster independent films. Yellow Bear […]
SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL By Ashley Clark At this year’s ceaselessly snow-pummelled Sundance Film Festival (Jan. 19-29), I hardly expected to experience my first slice of knockout formal invention while languishing at my laptop in my hotel room. But these are strange times and, having landed in Park City on Jan. 20, hours after the surreal presidential inauguration of a bit player from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, I found immediate succor in scrolling through my Twitter feed. It had been colonized by a panoply of speedily crafted user videos depicting white supremacist goon and Trump supporter Richard Spencer […]
The Gatekeepers It may not make for comforting reading at this time, but context is always helpful: Chris Whipple’s new book is succinctly described by its subtitle, “How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.” Whipple — formerly a producer for 60 Minutes and ABC News — uses his years of access to interview all 17 of the living chiefs of staff plus a bonus two presidents. Explaining how the chief of staff can help make or break the implementation of policy, The Gatekeepers may help illuminate the role Reince Priebus will play (or hopefully fail to) in […]
In the current climate of conglomerate studio entertainment, the Holy Grail is no longer the summer tentpole or the once fabled franchise. It is now the “shared universe,” a property capable of infinite expansion across an ever-enlarging landscape of consumption platforms. No outfit has embraced this new paradigm more than Marvel, whose television and film empire spans multiple networks and studios. As a product of FX and Marvel Television, Legion belongs to that universe, yet the new series from Fargo creator Noah Hawley feels like its own creature — not an offshoot or a spinoff or a cog in a […]
For many years I have kept in my nightstand drawer a rectangular electronic address book from the early 1990s. About the size of a flattened wallet, the device is matte black, slim and opens up to reveal a narrow screen and tiny keyboard on which I could type in and retrieve phone numbers and addresses. Or I could when the battery worked. I have saved this little booklet for so many years not because it reminds me of my petty pleasure-flaunting vanguard technology but for another reason: It contains Derek Jarman’s phone number. Then, the sequence of digits signaled a […]
Sheer, unbridled glee — it’s not an emotion one would associate with today’s increasingly portentous blockbusters, their apocalyptic grimness ineffectively untempered by their series of rote one-liners. Indeed, while there is certainly a place for the adult-themed superhero movies following in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, and a certain fascination to the interlocking narratives of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, too often in superhero movies one hopes for more of the out-there, the bizarre and, even, the childlike. All those qualities were what fueled the unexpected success of Marvel’s 2014 picture Guardians of the Galaxy, in which a misfit […]
In the past decade, I have screened thousands of documentary festival submissions. That amounts to countless hours of observing — or, more often than not, being told about — the horrifying effects of war, discrimination, depression, censorship, animal slaughter, plastic bottles, shoddy reporting, asbestos and mountaintop removal. Befitting this past decade of “hope,” I have also been given the tools to fix those problems: a program I can donate to, a message to spread to my community, a website I can visit to learn more. Nearly every one of these films has failed to leave an impression. They don’t make […]
The Lost City of Z, James Gray’s latest writing-directing effort, adapted from David Gann’s 2009 award-winning nonfiction work of the same name, tells the story of an Edwardian-era British military officer, Percy Fawcett, sent on a map-making expedition to the jungles of Brazil. There, he becomes obsessed with finding proof of a “lost” civilization whose existence would challenge all Euro-centric models of history. Lost City has many rich elements woven together: It’s a traditional heroic adventure where men affirm their solidarity against the arbitrary violence of nature at its most unpredictable and murderous. It’s a meticulous allegory of British imperialism […]
“I’m just not going to be the Indian they want me to be.” — Sherman Alexie Native American culture is part of our everyday lives, from the Iroquois confederacy modeled in the U.S. Constitution to half of the U.S. states named in a Native language. It’s in our streets and cities, our sports teams, even the food we eat. Yet, Native people are rarely represented in the stories we see onscreen. Why is that? Well, there are several reasons. One is that America maintains a profound mythology about herself. You could say that she has her own “creation story,” starring the classic […]
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 bruxelles What are the films you lie about having seen ? A friend posed this question to me recently, and it’s a telling query. Not only about your own ethical barometer, but also about what films are deemed unmissable — and by default make you worthy of shame for not having made the time to watch them. For years, my dirty secret was that I had never seen Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. When I confessed this, the responses were of shock. It’s not just that Akerman was a […]