By S.T. VanAirsdale

Years ago, John Walter has been heard to say, he decided to make a movie about Bertolt Brecht, the most famous German Marxist playwright of the 20th century who somehow had yet to be memorialized on film. An established documentary editor, Walter had made his directorial debut with 2002's acclaimed Sundance alum How to Draw a Bunny, also a story about an artist, Ray Johnson, whose enigmatic Pop Art perspective on '60s culture and society remained largely undiscovered by contemporary audiences.

Meryl Streep as the title character in Mother Courage, the Brecht masterpiece at the center of John Walter's documentary Theater of War (Photo: Michael Daniel/The Public Theater)

Not unlike Bunny, Walter's survey of Brecht would require more than a few interviews, biographical notes and third-party theorizing. Thus emerged Theater of War, a chronicle following the Public Theater's 2006 production of Brecht's 1949 classic military-industrial allegory Mother Courage and Her Children. The documentary parallels the evolution of Courage onstage -- a new translation by Tony Kushner, Meryl Streep rehearsing the lead role -- to that of its development over years in Brecht's decade-plus of wartime exile, evoking the perennial question of how complicit individuals are (or maybe even must be) in their governments' enduring military endeavors. Theater of War ambitiously tracks the influence of Brecht's life and art across three generations of dissent, ending in 2006 at the Delacorte Theater, where Mother Courage revealed the steep cost of that complicity among one family.

The film opens this Wednesday, Dec. 24, at Film Forum; The Reeler cornered Walter last week with a few questions.

Continue reading "'War' Heroes" »

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Tony Scott is a guy upon whom I've dumped untold barrels of shit here over the years, but after his review today of Seven Pounds -- the most gleeful, funny, withering and essential pan The Times has run in quite a while -- you know what? All is forgiven. Tony, I'm sorry I ever doubted you; you're OK in my book. How could you not be?

Near the end of Seven Pounds a carefully laminated piece of paper appears, on which someone has written, “DO NOT TOUCH THE JELLYFISH.” I wouldn’t dream of it, and I’ll take the message as a warning not to divulge the astonishing things that happen, not all of them involving aquatic creatures.

Continue reading "Slow Clap For A.O. Scott" »

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Wilma Stephenson with one of her Frankford High students in Pressure Cooker

By S.T. VanAirsdale

Pressure Cooker was perhaps my favorite film at this year's Woodstock Film Festival, and thus the one about which I have the most regrets for not getting a chance to cover here before now. I still don't really have that chance this morning, but it feels like my duty to bring its first New York City screening to your attention: The documentary will be presented at IFC Center as part of the Stranger Than Fiction series' ongoing Winter Specials. And "special" is about right: Directors Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker spent a school year observing no-nonsense culinary arts instructor Wilma Stephenson and her class at Philadelphia's Frankford High, following the funny, sublime interweaving of their kitchen educations with the challenges of growing up in South Philly.

It's a competition film, it's a coming-of-age story, it's a profile in courage, all yielding an authentic drama that a film like American Teen only wishes it could exhibit. Still, even with Participant Productions and a successful festival run behind it, a theatrical release has thus far eluded Cooker; you'd do well to support this gem tonight with Becker, Grausman and Stephenson in person for a Q&A. I'm just saying. No pressure! [*Honk*]

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By John Magary

Sometime during the New York Film Festival press screening of Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, I scrawled in my notebook, “WHERE IS AMERICA’S DESPLECHIN?” The Festival left me with the irksome conviction that the French, after eight years of America doing its best to shut them out, still care about us more than we care about us. Meaning, their best filmmakers consider seriously, and with an adult’s attention span, the very things our own narrative filmmakers might, but don’t, at least not very well: public school (The Class), globalization (Summer Hours), family (A Christmas Tale). As much as a certain political party might not like to admit it, French issues are American issues, and vice versa.

Catherine Deneuve in A Christmas Tale, still smoking at IFC Center (Photo: IFC Films)

The scale inversion’s been going on for a while as the big, wide frames of American films get filled with more and more localized and petty inventions, we must look to the little old TV set for... us. So, there’s no here here. More the reason, then, to see, if you haven’t, A Christmas Tale, still humming along after nearly a month at IFC Center. Desplechin breathes jolly, sulphuric air into that old bucking bronco we thought we’d whipped: the dysfunctional family holiday. Tireless, goofy, enraging, laughing in the face of Dull... “How does he make these things?” I wondered.

What follows is a short talk about the processes of M. Desplechin. The setting is mid-autumn, in a capacious room in the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel, the walls splashed with Kubrick’s Imperial Pomegranate Red #46, the carpets smelling of Leona’s recently departed soul. A room fit for A Christmas Tale: matriarchal, relentless, familiar, funny and mean.

Continue reading "Arnaud Desplechin's Gift that Keeps on Giving" »

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By S.T. VanAirsdale

Rania Richardson on Sunday confirmed what New York Magazine had so grimly foretold last week: The Pioneer Theater is no more. The East Village institution shuttered early Saturday after a midnight Halloween screening of Night of the Living Dead; it had faced dire straits for what seems like forever, despite the heroic efforts of programmer Ray Privett to persist as New York's last remaining bastion of independent cinema and funky grindhouse wares.

The Reeler's own history is finely interwoven with that of the Pioneer, from our obsession with Mormonsploitation to our audiences with Dr. Reinhardt van Nostrand to ReelerTV's attempt at multimedia empire from its redoubt on East 3rd Street. This feels like a death in the family, but an inevitable one for which my appeals and eulogies have already been made. As such, after a moment of silence, I turn it over to you: What's your Pioneer Theater story?

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By John Magary

Like civilization, the New York Film Festival plans on ending with a bang this weekend. Go down with 'em, my friends, go down with 'em. But what to watch? You can’t leave the fantasy caskets of the Ziegfeld and Walter Reade for too long -- even if the 70-and-sunny forecasts hold, it’s just too scary out there -- so I’ve drawn up a relentless itinerary for Saturday. Stray from it at your peril.

O Holy Nuit: Mathieu Almaric and Catherine Deneuve in A Christmas Tale, one of the highlights of the closing weekend of the New York Film Festival (Photo: IFC Flims)

First, head to A Christmas Tale at the Ziegfeld (11:15 a.m.). Families have assembled and reassembled for the holidays an awful lot in movie history, but rarely have they been so bracingly and hilariously transparent. Arnaud Desplechin, hurling fearlessly with co-writer Emmanuel Bourdieu into the sweet spot of their collaboration, has carved from quickly melting ice an intensely nuanced comedy, wild with resentment. Despelchin’s astonishing stable of regulars -- Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos, et al -- are so in sync with their try-anything director that, moment to moment, the film takes on an almost collage-like emotional range. The New York Film Festival doesn’t give out awards, but if it did, I’d say this is the pony to beat. And if there were a second place prize, this would probably deserve that, too.

Continue reading "The NYFF Marathon" »

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By John Magary

I have heard from a few people that tickets for Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman are selling like hotcakes. This is a good sign. This could be a swing upward. Perhaps Curiosity is on the march. If you weren’t able to take it in Monday, and you are not currently among the ticketed, buy some online. If you can’t get them online, go to the Ziegfeld today at 5 p.m., and stand. It’s worth it; at the time of this writing, there is no distributor for this unbelievably thick work of art. Bring something to read -- something that wakes you up -- and have a coffee, because once 6 rolls around and you get inside -- and you will get inside -- you will be asked to engage in a crowded, clammy, centerless world, layered with past revelations and present worries: After running over something in the road, Verónica (María Onetto) suffers a head injury and enters a world of newfound distress; all spinning margins and shifting truths, it's not far off from the world you're living in, you know, right now. Go in fresh and focused. The film is a creeping beauty, but a beauty all the same.

I hope to talk more about The Headless Woman in a future post, but for now, a few words from Martel herself, complete with visual aids:

THE REELER: I’d like to start with the nuts and bolts of your writing process. The Headless Woman feels so lived-in. The characterizations are rich and extremely subtle. How did you build the film from the ground up?

LUCRECIA MARTEL: The writing of the actual script begins after a long period of collecting elements from all over the place. I take notes on dialogue that I hear, abstract ideas, my own reflections, thoughts about people I know. I usually end up with a thick notebook full of notes on all these elements. Then at some point, I come up with a plot or narrative structure that allows me to organize all these random elements I’ve collected.

Lucrecia Martel explains it all

Undoubtedly, all of my films are organized in layers. For example, if I had to draw it, it wouldn’t be a straight line ... [drawing a single arcing line] ... Normally the structure of a film would be a single line: starts here, then this happens, then it evolves, then it ends. For me, it’s like this ... [drawing a wavy line] ... this layer is a storyline ... [draws two more wavy lines on top of the first, causing overlap] ... and these are more layers, more storylines ... so that at any given time within the film, you have, say, three layers. Let’s say that in one specific scene, there’s one layer in the foreground, and then a second layer in the background, and then a third layer even farther in the background. This then evolves, and in a following scene, the third layer, which was in the background originally, then pops up to the foreground. And what was in the foreground now gets switched to the background.

So ... [pointing to a single wavy line] ... say this storyline is “crime.” Maybe in the first scene, we’ll see a knife ... [writes “knife”] ... Then in the second scene, the “crime” storyline moves into the background, and we only hear the sound of the knife, or maybe deep in the frame we’ll see the shine of the knife’s blade. So, in all scenes, all layers are present, but in different degrees. For the “crime” storyline, we’ll start with a knife, then perhaps move to a dead body on the ground. “Crime” will be present throughout the film, but in different ways. Because I use this layer structure, I don’t feel the need to put things out there in a very demonstrative way from the start. By the time we get to a later scene, the presence of “crime” will be clearly felt.

Continue reading "A Woman Under the Influence" »

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By John Magary

As we enter the second and final week of the 46th New York Film Festival, we resume our conversation with Richard Peña -- Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Professor of Film Studies at Columbia University, and Omniscient Grand Poobah of the NYFF -- on the topics of film education, film selection, film audiences, filmmakers and more.

THE REELER: What about a community outreach for film, like reaching kids? By the time you show a kid his first black and white film in high school or whatever, it’s almost too late.

RICHARD PEÑA: We do have a kind of educational outreach program that we’ve been doing for about a year and a half now, and I think that we all see it as something we’ll be doing more intensely when we have our new theater. We’ll just have a lot more room. The Walter Reade is just one screen, and we don’t have access to it all the time... We’ve been more limited with that. Also, funds: It’s a great thing to do, if someone’s paying for it. But it’s hard to spend money if there’s no return on it. Obviously, there may be a long-range return, but it’s hard for an organization that’s paying its own way.

Just for an example, one of the things I’m really looking forward to when we have the new theaters is the ability to do a sort of constant program of screening film classics. Every Tuesday, we’ll have, you know, Open City, the next we’ll have Citizen Kane, the next week Stagecoach, the next week The 400 Blows, the next week Ivan the Terrible. So that these films are in sight -- it’s not like they’ve disappeared. When I was growing up in New York, you would have so many repertory theaters. Films would be in the New York Film Festival, then they’d open commercially -- the vast majority of them. Then after that, they’d move into these repertory circuits. You’d never have to wait too long [to see any given film]. Within a year, all these films would be shown in various cinemas. Nowadays, when’s the last time Dancer in the Dark was shown on screen in New York City? I don’t know. Who’s the last person to do a Lars von Trier series? I can’t even remember. It’s the idea that these films disappear from a theatrical presence. Of course, they’re on DVD, but I think we all feel that’s different. So one of the things that I’m looking forward to as a programmer is the ability to bring back films like that so that new generations can discover them as films.

Continue reading "King Richard II -- The Sequel" »

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By S.T. VanAirsdale

Woodstock this year isn't the upstate whirlwind The Reeler experienced as a rookie in 2007, when a mid-Friday arrival gave way to a panel/screening marathon that remains one of my great festivalgoing experiences. This time around brings a 36-hour sojourn, all back roads and bad cell reception, perfectly fine in every way but the one that allows for revelation. It's over before it begins when you do it this way, bleary-eyed and bittersweetly counting too few rewards while mainlining coffee at the Colony Café. So! Memo to self (and to you by extension): Next time, give yourself three days.

Prince Adu does daddy duty in Prince of Broadway, this year's Best Feature Narrative prize-winner at the Woodstock Film Festival

Though in fairness it only took one screening to find the eventual best of show; by late Saturday morning the word on the street had Prince of Broadway scoring the festival's Lee Marvin Feature Narrative Award, and by late Saturday night director Sean Baker and his $50,000 gang of upstarts had officially claimed their WFF hardware en route back to the city. It was Baker's second win in as many tries; his story of knock-off Nike merchant Lucky (Prince Adu) and the toddler dumped in his lap by an ex claiming he's the tyke's father had already notched a win at last summer's Los Angeles Film Festival.

Continue reading "Prince Reigns in Woodstock" »

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By John Magary

I love the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, but he annoys the crap out of scores of people -- and considering his unfortunately low profile in the United States, I do mean “scores.” Like Robert Altman or Tsai Ming-liang or Woody Allen, his films blend into one another, with a hushed merry-go-round of characters who seem more or less a bald reflection of their creator. No controversy to teach here -- this is Intelligent Design, straight up. Not to say that his films pump out the same EKG, but there is, on his part, a hesitancy to stretch one’s legs beyond familiar reflection, or even personal document. Patience with Hong depends on patience with the following things: clumsy misogyny, drunkenness, misguided love, misguided obsession, bad-idea sex, repetition, sluggishness, melancholy, confusion, narcotized will and lots of sleeping. The days burble by on the shoulders of a passive brand of bad judgment.

The films are a lot funnier than I’m making them sound.

High art: (L-R) Kim Young-ho and Park Eun-hye in Night and Day, screening today at the New York Film Festival

And his narratives are meticulous. This is romantic hyperbole, but it’s fun to write: Night and Day is Hong’s Moby Dick. His Ahab is Sungnam (Kim Young-ho), a perpetually bemused (and married) 40-something painter, who has escaped to Paris after getting caught smoking pot in Seoul. His white whale is Yujeong (Park Eun-hye), a suitably fogged art student roughly two decades south of Sungnam, whittling away her ex-pat art school days by plagiarizing other students’ paintings. What we see is a day-by-day log, more or less, of Sungnam’s time in Paris, broken up with date-specific title cards and the creeping second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. In place of whalers, we get tourists. In place of the ocean, we get the milky overcast skies of Paris. In place of single-minded obsession, we get... Actually, we get single-minded obsession. Sungnam takes his accidental exile as a chance to cast off the ties of adulthood and find himself, which, considering his age, will strike the viewer as either poignantly funny or gratingly pathetic.

Continue reading "Night and Day Difference" »

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