Authors — Vadim Rizov
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TIFF 2019, Day 5: Knives Out, The Moneychanger
A passion project Rian Johnson has been mentioning since at least 2010, Knives Out will presumably be a cornerstone of some future retrospective on movies made after fulfilling the imperative to successfully execute a blockbuster, alongside Ridley Scott’s The Counselor and Colin Trevorrow’s The Book of Henry. In 2010, Johnson pegged it as “an old fashioned murder mystery, like an Agatha Christie,” and I’d be curious to read the earliest draft to compare/contrast with the final product — the world has worsened considerably since, and the present is unavoidably imprinted. This begins as a locked-room mystery, concerning the suicide (or is it murder, etc. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2019 -
TIFF 2019, Day 4: Dolemite Is My Name
Eddie Murphy was all of 21 when he started shooting 48 Hrs. There were no years of supporting player quips to work himself up the ladder—instead, he landed the lead in an excellent, commercially successful movie first time out. He wasn’t the kind of comic who needed a movie to be built around his limitations, but an instantly seasoned player with serious dramatic chops. There’s a moment in Coming to America where the subway doors slam shut on him registering surprise and disappointment, and Murphy nails the look without overplaying—I think at that point in his career he was capable of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 8, 2019 -
TIFF 2019, Day 3: The Personal History of David Copperfield, Cunningham
Does Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield have an obvious/meaningful relationship to his other work, and what attracted him to this adaptation in the first place? The former is easier to answer: Iannucci, age 55, studied English literature at Oxford and almost wrote a PhD on Paradise Lost, so it’s not surprising he has an affinity for Charles Dickens, any more so than it’s unexpected that the overeducated Oxbridge students at Monty Python’s core would perform a sketch about Proust. Nor is Iannucci’s love for Dickens recent news: check out his hour-long 2012 BBC special Armando’s Tale of Charles Dickens, where […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 7, 2019 -
TIFF 2019, Day 2: I Was at Home, But…, Zombi Child, First Love
As Giovanni Marchini Camia notes in this valuable, context-providing review/interview of I Was at Home, But…, Angela Schanelec’s fourth feature, 2001’s Passing Summer, was the first to give rise (in a Die Zeit review) to the term “Berlin School,” an imprecise but generally accepted designation for contemporaries including Christian Petzold, Maren Ade, Ulrich Köhler, Christoph Hochhäusler, Thomas Arslan et al. As Camia also notes, Schanelec’s relationship to this term is tense; her work is the most overtly severe, and it’s taken her longer to break through than her highest-profile peers. Internationally, Schanelec didn’t receive significant recognition until her ninth feature, 2016’s The Dreamed Path, until […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 6, 2019 -
TIFF 2019, Day 1: Parasite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Pain and Glory, The Report
For P&I-accredited attendees without the scratch to make it to Berlin/Cannes/Venice (let alone Telluride, with its $780 cost of press entry), day one of TIFF is traditionally a marathon catch-up march through their biggest titles, often scheduled in competing Sophie’s choice slots, with the big-name world premiere titles coming later. All this year’s Cannes main slate awardees are in the program minus two (the pointed omissions are Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe and the Dardennes’ Young Ahmed). This year’s Palme d’Or went to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which is fine by me: he certainly deserves some kind of significant honorific at this point. Bong’s career […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 5, 2019 -
Made For These Times: Ulrich Köhler on In My Room
Ulrich Köhler’s In My Room begins with what looks like a DCP glitch. The view is from a handheld news camera entering a press conference scrum, its operator confirming in voiceover that he’s rolling while roaming from lectern to lectern. Each time an official statement is delivered, the image cuts to the aftermath—the as-yet-unseen cameraman, Armin (Hans Löw), has confused the “off” and “on” switch, and the inadvertent B-roll he shot is unusable. All of Armin’s life is similarly shabbily disarrayed: At a club, he picks up a young lady and brings her home, but an ill-phrased refusal to let […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 4, 2019 -
Venice Film Festival 2019: Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat
Steven Soderbergh’s most persistently recurring subject is economic inequality, attacked from a number of angles: lone dispossessed protagonist vs. powerful corporation (Erin Brockovich), the ways in which minimum-wage employees are demeaned by employers (Bubble), capitalism as sex work against the backdrop of the last recession (The Girlfriend Experience), white collar crime (The Informant!), attacks on pharmaceutical companies (Side Effects) and private health insurance (Unsane), a general emphasis on stratification and the bottom rung of the ladder (Magic Mike and Logan Lucky, the proletarian Ocean’s Eleven, in which a heist doubles as praxis redistribution). Che speaks for itself, and this year there are two […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 1, 2019 -
Toy Story 4: Woody and Buzz Embrace the Gig Economy
A few weeks ago, Apple dropped a staggeringly ill-advised promoted tweet into my timeline: “With the longest battery life in an iPhone ever, you’ll lose power before your iPhone XR will.” I enjoy thinking about death even less than the average person, so my first reaction was that I’m not particularly cheered by a poorly worded suggestion that I’ll probably exit before my technology. My next thought was that Apple had inadvertently provided a solid metaphor for the eternal franchise era: assuming all goes as planned, it is not inconceivable that there will be Star Wars movies coming out after my […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 13, 2019 -
“A Movie Where Nobody Wears Clothes and It’s PG-Rated”: Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli on So Pretty
Before Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli began the bulk of production on her second feature So Pretty, she wrote an essay for this site outlining some of the goals and background behind the production: The film is an adaptation of a 1980s German gay novel [Ronald M. Schernikau’s So Schön] that I am transposing and translating to a cast of feminine people of many genders in 2018, New York City. […] Given the explicit gender-trouble and queer elements of So Pretty, as well as the fact that it takes seriously the novella’s paraphrased subtitle “a utopian film,” my film must create an image […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 12, 2019 -
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese: Tangled Up in Tanner
On a scale of one to ten, I’m probably about a 6.5 when it comes to Bob Dylan. Define one as “Dylan is the single most visible/still living manifestation of hyper-steroidal Boomer nostalgia and must be destroyed,” ten as the level of obsessiveness practiced by the singer-songwriter’s personal scourge A.J. Weberman, who literally coined the term “Dylanology” and famously dug through Robert Zimmerman’s trash for clues. Dylan wasn’t having it; in Weberman’s indelible telling: I’d agreed not to hassle Dylan anymore, but I was a publicity-hungry motherfucker… I went to MacDougal Street, and Dylan’s wife comes out and starts screaming […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 10, 2019
