Authors — Livia Bloom Ingram
-
TORONTO: TRAVELING WITHOUT MOVING AT ‘WAVELENGTHS’
Wavelengths, the Toronto International Film Festival program that ferries viewers deep into the world of contemporary experimental film, celebrated its tenth birthday in 2010 and received a sweet birthday gift: A completely sold out first show. Even enthusiasts who had lined up more than thirty minutes early were turned away from the 200-seat theatre at the Art Gallery of Ontario (along with your loyal scribe and similarly surprised colleagues from The Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Pacific Film Archive and the Walker Art Center). It was an auspicious start to curator Andréa Picard’s extensive program of more than thirty individual […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 19, 2010 -
TORONTO: NATIONAL INQUIRER: ERROL MORRIS AND “TABLOID”
I admit a certain obsession with cell phone Scrabble, the band Beach House, and of course, Errol Morris. While the first two are relatively recent acquisitions, that last one has been around for a while (since Cannes 2003 to be exact, and an interview on his film The Fog of War). Morris’ goofy sense of humor remains as addictive as his philosophical and cinematic wanderings. With his latest documentary, Tabloid, my obsession with Morris and his obsessions—in this case, an obsessive beauty queen and the reporters obsessed with her—has reached new heights. While you’re waiting with bated breath for Tabloid to […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 16, 2010 -
TORONTO: ON ELEPHANTS, VIOLINS AND TATTOOS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DOUGLAS GORDON
Have you ever seen an elephant lie down? This question provoked Scottish artist Douglas Gordon to create Play Dead; Real Time, a giant, startling multiple projection depicting just that. Timeline, a beautiful Gordon exhibition the Museum of Modern Art in 2007 that included the piece, was a triumph not only with art enthusiasts but with cinephiles as well, and Gordon regularly walks the line between these two worlds. In addition to his successful art career and installation pieces, he has made two feature films: Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) and a new work, k.364 A Journey by Train (2010). […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 14, 2010 -
TORONTO: ON FESTIVAL STARTS AND THE FORCE OF NATURE THAT IS BROWNIAN MOVEMENT
It’s day four here at the Toronto Film Festival—although based on the post-midnight criteria rather than the 8-hours-of-sleep criteria, I suppose it’s technically day six. The distinctions between days, between periods of lights and darks, have a tendency to become blurry after one’s tenth—or is it the fifteenth?—festival film has come and gone. Already an appalling quantity of fast food has been eaten, numerous cups of coffee have been gratefully slurped, and at least one trusty steno pad, blank as driven snow just moments ago, is nearly full of hieroglyphics that must have meant something when I was scribbling in […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 13, 2010 -
Do the Yam: Astaire & Rogers: The Complete Works
“I wanted to be a dancer,” says Fred Astaire, wheezing out a tune on a harmonica with his gangly frame draped casually over a medical couch. “Till I was psychologized.” Astaire plays doctor—a shrink, of all things—in Mark Sandrich’s Carefree (1953), a little-known screwball comedy gem as antic and goofy as Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) with dance. And what dance! Accompanied by an Irving Berlin score, Astaire and Rogers are at the top of their game in the tale of a therapist (Astaire) who must find the root of the commitment phobia that plagues his new patient (Rogers). […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 1, 2010 -
CANNES DIRECTORS DIRECTING 2010
Each year, before the movies and parties and deals go down at the Cannes Film Festival, thousands of international participants go through the same steps. They complete their registration, receive the color-coded badge that designates their place in a screening hierarchy as rigid as that of a fascistl state, and pick up a mid-sized, branded satchel that holds, among reams of leaflets and ads, the official festival program. This is a slim, beautifully produced book—the 2010 edition is midnight blue—where each film in the Official Competition is given a full double-page spread. There is a portrait of the auteur behind […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Jun 2, 2010 -
2010 Cannes Film Festival | By Livia Bloom
“You know the kind of movie where people laugh and cry?” asked a filmmaker character in Kornél Mundruczó’s Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project (seeking American distribution). “I want you to cry.” “I am crying,” responded the would-be actor before him, his face frozen solid. The internalization of emotion, and the tiny, subtle ways it can creep into the features and postures of even the most stoic characters was explored in some of the best work at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. At first glance, the protagonist of A Screaming Man (pictured above) (Un homme qui crie, seeking distribution), by […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Jun 2, 2010 -
BONG JOON-HO, “MOTHER”
Mother, the latest film by South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho, is an inky affair. The humor is dark and the sky is a soggy shade of gray. The bumbling characters have limited prospects, and when love exists, it’s intense and deranged enough to kill for. The central relationship in the film is between Yoon Do-Joon, a slow-witted young man, and his unnamed mother. The son is played by Wan Bin, a wide-eyed Korean heartthrob cast effectively against type; his good looks leave us continually disappointed by his character’s slow intellect. His protector, oppressor and champion—also known as his mom—is played […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Mar 10, 2010 -
Women Without Men’s Shirin Neshat
UNTITLED (WOMEN OF ALLAH). PHOTO COURTESY OF GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK. “It’s very flattering to be interviewed by a film magazine as opposed to an art publication,” said Shirin Neshat. “I am very flattered anybody would think it’s worth talking to me.” Widely-acknowledged as one of the most influential contemporary Middle-Eastern artists (and apparently one of the most modest), Neshat and her work are staples of museums and galleries around the world, while remaining relatively little-known in film circles. That changed this year when she burst onto the independent international film stage with her first feature film, Women Without Men. […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Jan 23, 2010 -
“DEAR DIARY” — TORONTO’S WAVELENGTHS 6: FLASH POINT CAMERA
In a personal touch, all the filmmakers whose work was showcased in the sixth and final Wavelengths program were present for their screening. German director Ute Aurand presented a reverie on her childhood and family called Snowing Chestnut Blossoms, while American Jim Jennings, apparently a neighbor of mine in Brooklyn, showed a collection of images in Greenpoint that not only documented the quirky, spunky personality of that environ but also reminded me of two pair of boots in that little shoe repair shop with the orange-awning that are just about ready to be picked up.Coleen Fitzgibbon’s FM/TRCS (1974) is an […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 20, 2009
