Authors — Vadim Rizov
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“It’s Not Funny if It’s Not Bright”: Greg Mottola on Confess, Fletch
I read Confess, Fletch for the first time in high school and, ever since, it’s remained a personal favorite. That often surprises people when I tell them that, not least because the name “Fletch” is less associated with Gregory Mcdonald’s genuinely funny novels than Chevy Chase’s considerably goofier incarnation of the journalist-sleuth in 1985’s Fletch and 1988’s Fletch Lives. The original Fletch adaptation essentially retains the structure and basics of Mcdonald’s original but changes the tone to better suit Chase. For better and worse, Mcdonald’s books string together often hilarious dialogue exchanges with aspirationally Hemingway-esque connective prose; they work better when the emphasis is on […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 14, 2022 -
TIFF 2022: Glass Onion, The Maiden
One argument for the eternally vexed question “Why film festivals?” might be “To watch Netflix movies in a theater.” The streamer does, of course, theatrically release some of its prestige titles but, because of its refusal to accommodate 90-day windows, has effectively barred itself from wide releases. Since I live in New York City, I can go see all of Netflix’s big titles when they come out with ease thanks to their acquisition of the Paris Theater, which isn’t all bad: while some of the programming is grimly reserved for week-long runs of titles like Red Notice, there’s room for pleasant […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 13, 2022 -
19 Months from Conception to Completion: Daniel Goldhaber on How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Daniel Goldhaber’s second feature, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, takes its title and broader inspiration from Andreas Malm’s non-fiction manifesto, published by Verso. Malm’s book is heavy on the language of comrades and cadres, an exhortation to ecoterrorism to the already sympathetically inclined—and, as a friend pointed out, it’d be more accurately titled Why to Blow Up a Pipeline, as instructions aren’t provided. While Goldhaber’s version of How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t a manual as such, its commitment to depicting the means by which one might achieve its title goes much further than most. Eight protagonists from all over the country […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 12, 2022 -
TIFF 2022: The Fabelmans, The Good Nurse
After the first UFOs are sighted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a group of true believers gather and wait for more to arrive. A light appears over the horizon, excitement builds—but disillusionment sets in when the approaching vehicles turn out to be helicopters, and everyone scatters. The chopper beams briefly look like trainlights, echoing the mini-train track Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) assembles in his family’s cramped living room and uses to try to demonstrate a math problem to son Barry by sending the train on a collision course towards a stalled miniature stockcar. The Fabelmans tells us where this image, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 12, 2022 -
TIFF 2022: No Bears, La Pupille
I got out of a jam-packed P&I screening of Jafar Panahi’s No Bears literally two minutes after the Venice Film Festival announced a special jury prize for the film. It’s probably not overly cynical to attribute at least part of both my screening’s high attendance and the festival’s award to the sad news that the director is back in jail—his status as a high-profile Iranian dissident is inextricable from his work since 2011 when, under house arrest and banned from making movies, he started making features with him front and center as the lead protagonist. That on-screen character is by now […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2022 -
TIFF 2022: Other People’s Children, The Inspection
It seemed fitting to enter Toronto by a new route for my first in-person TIFF in three years. Rather than going straight from the airport to the downtown core where the festival unfolds, I took a streetcar further afield to one end of the line, Bathurst Station. The Ed and Anne Mirvish Parkette is just outside, with a plaque dating itself to 2008 that gives a mini-bio of the couple (“Humanitarians, Retail Innovators, Arts Advocates”). A few meters over, a conspicuously newer plaque memorializes Beverly Mascoll as “a community advocate and the founder of the Mascoll Beauty Supply Ltd., a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2022 -
Venice Film Festival 2022: TÁR
Todd Field’s TÁR simulates ethical complexity to “call into question” cancel culture, which—no matter what Gina Carano, Peter Vack et al. have to say about it—is not an unprecedentedly bold or unthinkable move; millions of Americans are waiting to nod in vociferous agreement. The titular Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) first speaks at the New Yorker Festival, in onstage conversation with the magazine’s Adam Gopnik as himself. This prolonged opening (somewhere around 15 minutes) provides an excuse for a lot of expository background: Tár is an EGOT honoree, a revered modern conductor, a lesbian who’s also the first woman appointed to lead a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 1, 2022 -
Battles Won and Lost
In 2015, Tom Secker’s website SpyCulture.com published 1,669 pages of documents from the US Marine Corps Entertainment Liaison Office obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Spanning 2008 to 2015, these internal reports from a variety of entertainment projects covering requests for support from the Marines have become freshly relevant with the success of Top Gun: Maverick and renewed scrutiny of American military involvement with film productions. Below, a selection of highlights. ** NOTICE: This report contains information on the development and progress of TV programs, feature films, and other entertainment-oriented media projects. This information is shared with the Marine […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 14, 2022 -
“A Giant Greenscreen Marvel Movie, Except We Couldn’t Afford the Greenscreens”: Andrew Bujalski on There There
“We’re not sure how to describe it,” Bujalski told the Cambridge Day‘s Tom Meek of his seventh feature, the Tribeca premiere There There. “We’re just gonna put it on the screen and let everybody else tell us what we did.” That promised a strange film, and There There delivers. After a disorientingly shot-at-home sax solo from musician Jon Natchez (whose quarantine-vibes solo sets provide interludes between segments), There There begins the first of six narrative sequences centered around pairs of unnamed characters with Lennie James and Lili Taylor, who’ve spent the night together for the first time. They’re introduced in rigorously locked-off shots […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 17, 2022 -
Cannes 2022: Metronom, Showing Up
For two weeks I lived within a Cannes-imposed schedule, with every day structured by the bookending options of a new Directors Fortnight title each morning and a new Competition film at night. More importantly, there was the 7 am roll call, when tickets were unlocked online for screenings four days out. This became a relatively smooth process once the functionally unusable press URL initially given for this purpose was changed, but those tickets still went fast. Every day (before the last four days of the festival, when this unloved ritual ceased), my roommates and I would wake up at 6:59, log […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 1, 2022
