Authors — Howard Feinstein
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Christian Carnality: Stephen Cone’s Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party
The below review of Stephen Cone’s Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party was originally posted on June 16 as part of a review of BAMcinemafest. It is being reposted to coincide with the film’s opening as part of the IFP Screen Forward series. A nearly lily-white poolside birthday party in the upper-middle-class Chicago backyard of exuberant, righteous minister “Pastor Bob” Campbell (Pat Healy) and his gorgeous, younger, joyless wife Kat (Elizabeth Laidlaw) celebrates the seventeenth birthday of their handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed son Henry — the nice, polite, and well-liked boy parents are proud to call their own. Like many youths his age, […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jan 7, 2016 -
Staggered: The Hateful Eight
The following review contains spoilers. In Quentin Tarantino’s superbly balanced ensemble piece, The Hateful Eight, the passengers and drivers we meet at the start of the picture, dropped off at Minnie’s Haberdashy, a spacious Wyoming way station, by two different stagecoaches on different but overlapping missions, all have masked identities. Six years after the end of the Civil War, these are some of battle’s renegade residue, Confederate vets with few prospects who depend on bounty hunting to survive in a particularly testy postwar America. In the second coach there’s Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins, displaying the best of his high-energy talent), […]
by Howard Feinstein on Dec 24, 2015 -
The Designated Mourner: Son of Saul
“You failed the living for the dead,” Abraham (Levente Molnar) chides fellow Hungarian Jew Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig) in the bowels of Auschwitz-Birkenau in October, 1944. It’s a damning comment, almost a charge of treachery: That is the occasion for the single act of resistance by camp inmates against the occupying Germans. Given recent Russian advances, the Nazis pushed to quickly liquidate not only those who had defied the odds, who had survived unimaginable brutality, epidemics, and freezing temperatures, but also the camp’s naïve newcomers right upon arrival. The latter actually believed they were disrobing for a group shower before […]
by Howard Feinstein on Dec 18, 2015 -
Of Human Bondage: The Big Short
Adapted by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay from The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis’s behind-the-scenes book about the 2008 housing market crash, McKay’s star-stuffed The Big Short is a brilliant demystification. Two scenes, hilarious in completely opposite ways, take place in the middle of an otherwise enervating securitization session at the American Securities Forum in Las Vegas. Hold on: hilarious and securitization jammed into the same sentence? Most people don’t even know what the latter word means. When a term completely sidesteps consciousness, it is probably unavailable to the unconscious—site of the split-second manufacture of humor. To […]
by Howard Feinstein on Dec 11, 2015 -
In Extremis: The World of Kanako
In loving memory of Richard Corliss, who early on championed low and high art in Asian cinema In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the sheltered titular character exposes her pre-adolescent consciousness. Willing to navigate uncharted waters, she follows a dapper rabbit, even allowing herself to fall into the hole he’s entered. Jefferson Airplane sticks with this plot point in the ‘60s acid-anthem “White Rabbit,” adding au courant psychedelics to scramble the child’s perception: Tell ‘em a hookah-smoking caterpillar/Has given you the call. In book and song, Alice is in her element: She basks in unexpected encounters with extraordinary characters and […]
by Howard Feinstein on Dec 2, 2015 -
Booted: Jonas Carpignano’s Mediterranea
A crushing scene in the intense Mediterranea, the first feature by New York City native Jonas Carpignano, exemplifies the nearly unbridgeable chasm that separates recent black African migrants from their reluctant white hosts in contemporary Italy, where the filmmaker has lived for the past five years. Ayiva (Koudous Seihan, an immigrant himself and currently an advocate for migrants’ rights), the single father of a seven-year-old daughter and a recent arrival from Burkina Faso, rides in a truck driven by his boss, Rocco (Davide Schipilliti), on whose estate in the Calabrian town of Rosarno — near the toe of the geographical […]
by Howard Feinstein on Nov 19, 2015 -
Love and Death: James White
Bereavement brackets James White. At the beginning of producer Josh Mond’s impressive directorial debut, we encounter the nearly catatonic eponymous character to the accompaniment of a drug-enhanced, inside-the-mind sound mix: Bursts of blasting synthesized music vie for dominance with smoother, softer fragments from Ray Charles and Billie Holiday. Sweaty, stinky, loaded, and dressed down in his signature raggedy sweatshirt and hoodie after a full night of clubbing, drinking, and pill popping, twentysomething James (Christopher Abbott, no longer the pretty, slender androgyne hooked on Allison Williams in Girls, but hefty and hirsute, hopefully for role construction) barrels past dressed-up adults in the hallway […]
by Howard Feinstein on Nov 12, 2015 -
Now, Voyager: John Crowley’s Brooklyn
“Sometimes it’s nice to be in a place where everybody doesn’t know your auntie,” her heavily made up, peroxided cabin mate tells unadorned Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) on the latter’s maiden crossing from Ireland to the US. It is 1952. Eilis is headed to Brooklyn, home to thousands of Irish immigrants. Having made the trip before (and hardly a maiden), the brassy young woman offers advice on comportment at immigration to avoid quarantine and other hazards. She proceeds to decorate the face of the pasty girl, a withdrawn naif who insists on not ending up resembling a trollop. “Looking like a […]
by Howard Feinstein on Nov 4, 2015 -
On the Down Low: Ulrich Seidl’s In the Basement
“Fassbinder died, so God gave us Ulrich Seidl,” wrote John Waters in Artforum in 2012. You can find obvious parallels between the directors; both are German-speaking iconoclasts (Seidl is Austrian; Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982, was from Bavaria), whose precisely arranged and shot films cloak worlds of odd and over-the-top individuals with a patina of intense, self-conscious color, supplemented with frequently incongruous, unanticipated music. Before it became de rigueur, they explored in depth the intersection of the personal and the political in unique, ideologically loaded and often grotesque narratives. It’s not by chance that their bodies of work […]
by Howard Feinstein on Oct 29, 2015 -
You Can Take a Horticulture: The Margaret Mead Film Festival
Margaret Mead’s achievements during her 52 years as a curator at New York’s Museum of Natural History have been more seminal than my personal favorite, one that for some unknown reason is close to my heart: persuading the American Jewish Committee to publish a book, driven by interviews with immigrants from Eastern European shtetls, which purportedly created the stereotype of the loving, smothering, guilt-inducing (all that suffering!) yiddishe mama. More to the point of this article, I also admire her willingness in 1976, on the occasion of her 75th birthday, to lend her name to an annual ethnographic film festival […]
by Howard Feinstein on Oct 21, 2015
