Authors — Damon Smith
-
Lu Chuan, City Of Life And Death
When Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death won the top prize at the San Sebastián Film Festival two years ago, it was a testament not only to the emotional resonance and technical mastery of his widescreen black-and-white epic, which dramatizes the infamous 1937 Nanjing massacre at the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War, but a tacit acknowledgment of the film’s daring revisionist ambitions. A graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, Lu had previously directed a small-scale crime thriller, Missing Gun, and the critically well received Kekexili, Mountain Patrol, a rural drama about efforts to stop antelope poachers that screened […]
by Damon Smith on May 11, 2011 -
Clio Barnard: The Arbor
Although Clio Barnard’s new film The Arbor chronicles the rough-and-tumble life of celebrated British playwright Andrea Dunbar (Rita, Sue and Bob Too), an alcoholic who died from a brain hemorrhage at age 29, it is anything but conventional in its aims and methodology. Shot in and around Brafferton Arbor, a street on the Buttershaw Estate in Bradford, Yorkshire, where Dunbar lived and worked while raising her three children, The Arbor reconstructs the late writer’s gritty milieu through the testimony of her eldest daughter Lorraine and other family members, whose words are lip-synched by professional actors in evocative set-designed environments. Barnard, […]
by Damon Smith on Apr 27, 2011 -
Janus Metz, Armadillo
It’s difficult and perhaps impossible to imagine the experience of war from the vantage point of one’s living room, Sunday paper in hand. Besides, nine years after U.N. troops entered Afghanistan, who reads Week in Review analysis of the conflict with avid interest or watches cable-TV pundits exhorting us to stay the course or, alternatively, arguing the wisdom of withdrawal? Who, among our friends and family members, can explain with confidence why we entered a country the Soviets abandoned in defeat, what we are attempting to accomplish in the Hindu Kush, and what the parameters of success are? For […]
by Damon Smith on Apr 13, 2011 -
MATT HARLOCK & PAUL THOMAS, “AMERICAN: THE BILL HICKS STORY”
Until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard of the Texas stand-up comedian Bill Hicks, who died in 1994 at age 32, having found resounding success overseas and little more than professional respect at home. Since then, I’ve devoured several hours of his comedy specials on my Netflix Instant account, marveling at the way this artist managed to blend blisteringly caustic commentaries on sex, politics, rock music, religion, and drug addiction with a weirdly humane, almost holistic philosophy of life. Stand-up comedy in any form is not normally my thing, but I’ve become rather attached to The World According to […]
by Damon Smith on Apr 6, 2011 -
PATRICIO GUZMÁN, “NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT”
“Most of my work refers to the historical memory of Chile and Latin America,” says acclaimed documentarian Patricio Guzmán (Salvador Allende, The Pinochet Case), a Santiago native who has lived in exile for more than three decades, after reflecting on the arc of his long, legendary career. “It’s a passion — creative territory that I have always followed.” Best known for his monumental three-part film The Battle of Chile (1973), an on-the-ground account of democratically elected leftist Salvador Allende’s brief term in office before a U.S.-backed coup d’etat brought dictator General Augusto Pinochet to power, Guzmán has always fought to […]
by Damon Smith on Mar 16, 2011 -
KIM JEE-WOON, “I SAW THE DEVIL”
Korea’s love affair with genre film continues unabated in the hands of cult favorite Kim Jee-woon, the versatile 46-year-old writer-director of A Bittersweet Life (revenge thriller), The Good, the Bad, and the Weird (Eastern Western), and the award-winning A Tale of Two Sisters (ghost story). This avatar of Extreme Asian cinema certainly has his share of fans at home and abroad—a major retrospective of Kim’s work, “Severely Damaged: The Cinema of Kim Jee-woon,” ends a five-day run at Brooklyn’s BAM Rose Cinemas this evening—but his latest ultra-stylish provocation, I Saw the Devil, made the censors queasy. Several minutes of the […]
by Damon Smith on Mar 2, 2011 -
LISA CHOLODENKO, “THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT”
Originally posted online on July 7, 2010. The Kids Are All Right is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Annette Bening), Best Supporting Actor (Mark Ruffalo) and Best Original Screenplay (Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg). It’s been eight years since Lisa Cholodenko’s last feature film (six if you count her TV adaptation of Dorothy Allison’s novel Cavedweller), but for the 46-year-old writer-director of 1998’s High Art (winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance) and 2002’s Laurel Canyon (starring Frances McDormand and Christian Bale) the time has, if anything, only sharpened her wits and powers of empathic observation, not […]
by Damon Smith on Feb 27, 2011 -
Peter Weir, The Way Back
Originally posted online on January 19, 2011. The Way Back is nominated for Best Makeup (Edouard F. Henriques, Gregory Funk and Yolanda Toussieng). A pioneering figure of the new independent Australian cinema in the 1970s, 66-year-old Sydney native Peter Weir (The Truman Show) gravitated to Hollywood in the mid ’80s, found success with a handful of well-crafted studio pictures (Witness, Dead Poets Society), and never really looked back. At least that’s how it might appear after a cursory glance at his unusual oeuvre, which encompasses everything from 1975’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (an oneiric film awash in foreboding, in […]
by Damon Smith on Feb 25, 2011 -
Xavier Dolan, Heartbeats
A native of Montreal, Dolan is a former child actor who wrote and directed his first film, I Killed My Mother, at age 20, after dropping out of university. That movie, a semi-autobiographical tale of coming out which debuted at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, won three awards at the 2009 festival, including the Regards Jeune given to young filmmakers of great promise. A stylized depiction of hopelessly “imaginary” love, Xavier Dolan’s sophomore feature Heartbeats (which also premiered at Cannes) trails a pair of close friends—witty, Audrey Hepburn manqué Marie (Monia Chokri) and sweet-faced Francis (Dolan)—who simultaneously […]
by Damon Smith on Feb 23, 2011 -
AARON KATZ, “COLD WEATHER”
If you pore over writings on the loose grouping of “mumblecore” or “New Talkies” films from the past few years, writer-director Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA, Quiet City) is the young American indie filmmaker most often singled out for unqualified praise, regardless of the commentator’s assessment of this so-called movement as an artistic whole (or whether it constitutes a movement at all). And with good reason. A filmmaker attuned as much to the gestural nuances of his characters as he is to the expressive beauty of cityscapes and natural settings, Katz has a rigorous eye for the tiniest of details, […]
by Damon Smith on Feb 2, 2011
