Winter 2014
Act Break: Director Denis Villeneuve Talks His “Jaw-Droppingly Weird” Enemy
In his newest film Enemy, French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve immediately springs on us an omnipotent sense of dread. The chiaroscuro-tinged opening — a dynamo dream sequence in a film that feels like one long, unending hallucination — takes us inside an invitation-only sex club, populated by hard-looking, well-dressed men, one of whom is Jake Gyllenhaal. What are they watching? Scantily clad women doing seemingly erotic things that involve tarantulas. Bear with me. Soon we meet a pregnant blonde (Sarah Gadon) who’s waiting at home for her husband. Is it Gyllenhaal whom she’s waiting for? The next time he’s glimpsed, he […]
Features
Observe & Report: Godfrey Reggio, Jon Kane and Trish Govoni on “the Perfected Image” of Visitors
Alternately lulling and urgent, otherworldly and deeply intimate, visionary filmmaker Godfrey Reggio’s Visitors is a film like no other. With its 74 shots — most feature films have hundreds if not thousands — and exquisite black-and-white imagery, it is, as Reggio says, “the odd one in” in today’s multiplex environment. And even with its Philip Glass score — mournful, haunting and one of the composer’s best — it still feels radically different than Reggio and Glass’s previous collaborations, the poetic films comprising the “Qatsi Trilogy.” No less visually seductive than those works, the non-narrative Visitors uses its images — which […]
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Gun Crazy
Revenge is a dish best served cold. That famous proverb has provided the template for many a revenge thriller, as steely protagonists emotionlessly hunt and mow down the enemies that have caused them pain and suffering. With a slight eyebrow raise or lip quiver, ’60s and ’70s icons Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin meted out their justice with a hypnotic intensity. Later, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal and Robert Englund (as Freddy Krueger) added touches of black humor in the form of sardonic, post-killing one-liners. But by the early aughts, the revenge thriller would seem to have run its […]
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Mumbai Masala
The way Ritesh Batra tells it, he used to be not very good at his job. The Indian-born writer/director had studied in the U.S. as an undergrad and ended up working at the financial consulting firm Deloitte, but though he “had a business background of sorts, I was a terrible, terrible consultant,” Batra says. “They call it ‘sitting on the bench,’ when you’re a bad consultant and they don’t want to send you to clients. I quit because I didn’t want to do something I was bad at all my life.” Batra, born and raised in India, had always wanted […]
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Eyes Wide Shut
French director Alain Guiraudie’s first feature, the 2003 coming-of-age film No Rest for the Brave, opens in a nondescript bar in a sleepy town where Basile, the agitated protagonist, is recounting a strange dream to his friend Igor. The disturbed young man believes the dream carries a fatal warning: if he falls asleep again, he will die. What follows is a Buñuelian picaresque that is shot in the style of social realism but structured as a series of narrative ruptures creating the filmic equivalent of the surrealist game of exquisite corpse. Guiraudie has, over the past decade, continued to probe […]
Gun Crazy
Mumbai Masala
Eyes Wide Shut
Other articles
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I Am A Camera
About halfway through the documentary Tim’s Vermeer, the San Antonio-based inventor Tim Jenison is granted a private viewing of Johannes Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson” at its private exhibition site, Buckingham Palace. The Queen had originally denied Jenison’s request, but after a certain amount of cajoling she relented — although cameras weren’t allowed and Jenison’s collaborators, director Teller and producer Penn, of the anarchic stage magic duo Penn & Teller, were asked to stay behind. Jenison spends one half hour with the painting — the Vermeer work he’s been diligently replicating in his Texas studio — and emerges shaken. As Teller […]
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The Women of Sundance 2014
Women, this is our year. I don’t say this because I’ve got numbers to back me up (because I don’t), or because I’m generally an overly optimistic cheerleader of life (though I am). I say this because it’s our only choice. This has to be our year. As Sundance kicks off in Park City, a large handful of women are about to debut their new films and fresh voices to the world. And after interviewing almost all of them myself I can say, in my most eloquent terms, that this year’s slate of Sundance female filmmakers is absolutely badass. The […]
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Downstream Color
Calling video on demand the emerging wave of film distribution no longer seems accurate: with YouTube, iTunes and Netflix all into or fast approaching their second decade, digital streaming and downloads are arguably already the primary means of independent film distribution. But what is still emerging is the vast array of VOD and download services available to independent filmmakers seeking to reach audiences of paying, online movie viewers. The companies composing today’s field, discussed here, roughly fall into three permeable categories: the established players; the large cadre of new start-ups, many of which offer tools for filmmakers beyond simply hosting […]
I Am A Camera
The Women of Sundance 2014
Downstream Color
