Authors — Damon Smith
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CEDRIC KLAPISCH, “MY PIECE OF THE PIE”
Over the past two decades, French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch (L’Auberge Espagnole) has distinguished himself as a writer-director of mature, well-balanced social dramas with a comedic edge. Films like Russian Dolls and Paris (both featuring heartthrob actor Romain Duris, who has made six films with the director) explore the emotional dynamics of ambition and disappointment, love and family relationships against the backdrop of Europe’s ever-shifting cultural identity in the 21st century. Now Klapisch wades into the waters of world financial distress with a snappy satire about haves and have nots that in some respects channels the sentiments of Zuccotti Park’s most […]
by Damon Smith on Dec 7, 2011 -
Michel Hazanavicus, The Artist
Remarkably, given the decibel-raising, sensorial overkill of our current mainstream film culture, Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist—an exuberantly charming black-and-white silent melodrama about the birth of the talkies—is finding a foothold in awards season thanks to a Best Actor win at Cannes for French star Jean Dujardin, effervescent word of mouth, and the mighty muscle of the Harvey Weinstein machine. Hazanavicius, a onetime gag man for a TV comedy troupe and writer-director of the nutty James Bond spoofs OSS 117: A Nest of Spies and OSS 117: Lost in Rio, conceived of the film as a formal experiment that would […]
by Damon Smith on Nov 25, 2011 -
CHRISTOPHER MUNCH, “LETTERS FROM THE BIG MAN”
American independent director Christopher Munch has been making movies now for over 30 years — longer if you count the award-winning short he directed for a PBS affiliate at age 15 about the San Diego Zoo — carving a niche for himself on the international festival circuit as a shape-shifting film artist with a highly idiosyncratic voice. In 1992, Munch won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for his 57-minute black-and-white feature The Hours and Times, a talky, speculative film about an erotically charged weekend that John Lennon and his manager Brian Epstein purportedly spent in Barcelona […]
by Damon Smith on Nov 9, 2011 -
AKI KAURISMÄKI, “LE HAVRE”
In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, published in 2003, critic and film historian David Thomson ends his favorable entry on Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki by noting that the Helsinki-based auteur might gain some edge if “his sardonic eye turned to politics.” It’s hard to imagine what a political film by Kaurismäki might look like, given how masterfully he has balanced deadpan humor and dour heartbreak in his wry tales of social estrangement among the working classes; films like The Match Factory Girl and Ariel feel more like poetic, strangely poignant chamber works. But now, at least in spirit, we have […]
by Damon Smith on Oct 19, 2011 -
NICK AUGUST-PERNA, CHRIS DAPKINS, CARLO MIRABELLA-DAVIS, “THE SWELL SEASON”
After winning the Oscar for Best Original Song in 2008 for John Carney’s breakout hit Once, real-life sweethearts Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová (who co-starred in the Independent Spirit Award–winning film) hit the road with their band, the Swell Season, for what was to have been an exultant, roof-raising tour of the U.S., Ireland, and Europe. Instead, though greeted enthusiastically by thousands of new fans at sold-out shows, the crazy-in-love couple found themselves strained and ultimately divided by the exposure, a bittersweet trajectory charted in the new documentary, The Swell Season, which opened Silverdocs in June. For the film, co-directors […]
by Damon Smith on Oct 5, 2011 -
JOANN SFAR, “GAINSBOURG: A HEROIC LIFE”
Something of a national treasure in his native France, Joann Sfar (The Rabbi’s Cat) is the award–winning author of graphic novels, comics, and children’s books, including the New York Times bestseller Little Vampire Goes to School and a fresh re-imagining of Saint-Exupéry’s classic Le Petit Prince. Sfar was a serious student of philosophy at the University of Nice despite his strict religious upbringing (his mother is Ashkenazi and his father Sephardic), but decided to chase his youthful dream of publishing comics. He studied under painter Jean-François Debord at the School of Fine Arts in Paris (ADERF) and eventually became one […]
by Damon Smith on Aug 31, 2011 -
MARINA GOLDOVSKAYA, “A BITTER TASTE OF FREEDOM”
One of Russia’s most celebrated filmmakers, Marina Goldovskaya, had led a colorful and peripatetic life as a nonfiction filmmaker specializing in docu-diaristic portraits of poets, artists, leaders and everyday people. Currently head of the documentary program at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television, Goldovskaya was also eyewitness to a half century of turbulent history, which she has spent the past 40 years meticulously archiving on celluloid and digital video. After attending the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in the 1960s, she quickly established herself as a leading cinematographer in a business dominated by men, a fertile period she details […]
by Damon Smith on Aug 17, 2011 -
VADIM JENDREYKO, “THE WOMAN WITH THE FIVE ELEPHANTS”
Anyone who reads literature in translation probably has some inkling of the effort it takes a specialist to mold foreign masterworks into readable prose that feels alive and inviting. Some translators have earned renown for their impeccable renditions of the classics — Lydia Davis comes to mind — but such formidably intelligent people are accustomed to working, for the most part, in complete obscurity, unknown except to the book publishers who commission their interpretive labors and those who bother to notice bylines. Until her death last year at age 87, Svetlana Geier was the most distinguished translator of Dostoyevsky in […]
by Damon Smith on Jul 20, 2011 -
John Carpenter, The Ward
John Carpenter has a well-earned reputation as the Master of Horror, even if the legendary director’s still-growing body of work has encompassed everything from TV biopics (Elvis) to sci-fi thrillers (The Thing, Escape from New York) and the occasional action-comedy (Big Trouble in Little China). Early on, he just seemed to have his finger on the pulse of something, well, evil. If you came of age in the late ’70s, before cable and home entertainment systems made R-rated movies easily accessible to viewers of any age, the dread-inducing, nightmarish trailers on network television for films like Halloween and The Fog […]
by Damon Smith on Jul 6, 2011 -
Radu Muntean, Tuesday, After Christmas
Too often in the movies, affairs are either blithely romanticized in the grand European tradition of middlebrow “passion” films (The French Lieutenant’s Woman comes to mind) or used as a teaching tool to bludgeon audiences into accepting a damning moral perspective on the consequences of extramarital activity. (See Little Children, for instance.) Life has its own current, though, and the nature of relationships sometimes follows a pattern that is chaotic and irrational, messy and perturbing, where the boundaries between love and naked contempt (ah, Godard!) are no longer discernible. Movies from Voyage to Italy all the way down to Maren […]
by Damon Smith on May 25, 2011
