Tag: Television

Week in Review: May 14th – 20th, 2018

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Claire’s Camera – Even Hong Sang-soo’s experiemental, slapdash editing ruse is more interesting and more fun than most film efforts, a testament to his talent. Here he’s gathered regular Kim Min-hee and French titan Isabelle Huppert to make a low stakes, 70 minute love triangle drama, shot on the streets of Cannes while the three of them were attending the eponymous film festival a few years ago. The film is a sort of artist’s statement (though its difficult to know when Hong is sincere. . .) about Hong’s approach to editing and the act of capturing someone on camera. Claire (Huppert) takes Polaroid pictures of characters throughout claiming that when you take a photo of someone, the person is changed. To look at that photo is to look at the distance between what you have changed into and what you were. Thus, filmmaking is the act of capturing change. Making all of this more complicated is the non-linear editing. Frequently the film jumps backwards and forwards in time, testing the viewer to not only compile the timeline but to focus on how the characters are imperceptibly changing.

Racer and the Jailbird – Belgium director Michaël R. Roskam newest, starring the beautiful Adèle Exarchopoulos and the beautiful Matthias Schoenaerts. I haven’t seen Roskam’s much lauded Bullhead and this film doesn’t whet the appetite. To start, Racer features a bizarre narrative with no less than three jarring plot shifts that actually change what the film is about. Most viewers having seen the first 30 minutes will not be expecting this film to have more to say about terminal illness and reform-based justice systems than bank robbing or racecar driving. Even more confusing, the movie was marketed as a sexy, Euro-crime thriller. At the very least its a surprising ride featuring two genuine francophone stars in their prime, I’m just skeptical that there is much of anything going on under the hood; a strange injection of Americana, sentimentality and Christianity in the final moments left me scratching my head.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant – I saw this Cuban production at the Kennedy Center in Spanish with a very poor translation. Thus, any nuance this performance contained was lost on me. It did make me want to see the Rainer Werner Fassbender film on which it is based. The story is about a lesbian love triangle in West Germany and focuses on the changing power dynamics in a liberalizing Europe. This rendition maintains the location and time period of the film, but utilizes 4 male actors in drag for the lead roles. For an informed review from someone who did not need the subtitles I recommend this: PLACEHOLDER.

My Next Guest Needs No Introduction – Tina Fey is an important and hilarious comic, and this interview is an excellent introductory biography of her. She seems to be truly struggling with how to navigate our ever more politically correct world and the toxic culture of social media. I will talk about this a bit below, but I would like to see her stay away from SNL.

John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City – As a fan of John Mulaney, I was happy to see him provide a mostly entertaining special that, if venue size is any indication, epitomizes his well-earned popularity. I was also surprised by the size of his ambition, as this special is a claim to the comedy throne left vacant by #MeToo. But in lieu of this, I was left a bit sad. When comics go bigger, its inevitable that they will also have to be broader. This is a pop culture law of physics. In this special, Mulaney is louder, nastier, more machismo than normal, and though these are necessary land grabs for a broader comedy identity, I found I was laughing much less. Mulaney in conversations, interviews, working behind the scenes, and in smaller productions is weirder, brainier and riskier, traits that have gotten him this far. I hope he finds ways to maintain those characteristics as his star continues to rise.

Saturday Night Live – I was so high off of the Sterling K. Brown episode that I ended up watching the rest of this season. I would liken it to watching a clown car drive up off a ramp placed at the edge of a cliff and then continuing to watch as the clowns plunge into gorge, exploding on impact. That is to say, it started funny, and then quickly became very not funny and sort of painful. Witnessing Tina Fey host this finale was the final gut punch. She’s so talented and the years where she was head writer on SNL are some of the very best in the show’s history. Unfortunately, the skits they wrote for her were either overly reliant on that legacy, presenting old favorites devoid of their necessary cultural context, or dead on arrival political commentaries that have typified this season. My advice for Tina, follow the wise Kylo Ren’s advice and, “let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you were meant to be.”

Tully – Jason Reitman, Diablo Cody, and Charlize Theron have teamed up again for possibly their weirdest film yet. I was excited for this one, as Young Adult, their previous collaboration is probably Reitman’s best film. Tully is an om to the maternal experience and a fairly interesting indictment of new age lifestyles. I don’t think this movie works in the end, nor have I thought much about it since, but I enjoyed myself thoroughly despite its flaws. Cody is just a fun writer (I recommend seeing Jennifer’s Body for her finest work) and Theron can make any material compelling.

Michael Che Matters – Surprisingly funny. More people should be talking about this. Che is actually offensive in this special and seems sincere about it, repeatedly building a tension with his audience that his jokes then release. The fun is seeing how long he can sustain the awkwardness before he lets the audience off the hook. It goes without saying, but this guy is going places.

Week in Review: April 2nd – April 8th, 2018

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Three Sisters – Wang Bing’s beautiful and heartbreaking documentary from 2012 traces a year in the lives of three sisters in an unconnected and undeveloped village in rural Yunnan Province. The three sisters, ages 4 through 10, are left to fend for themselves while their father works in the distant city of Kunming; the mother has abandoned the family. Yang Yang, the eldest, becomes the work horse and pseudo-mother to the younglings, performing all of the rigorous farm and house work in addition to attending grade school. The key sequence is late in the film, when the father takes the younger two children to the city, relieving Yang Yang of her responsibility, but leaving her completely alone as a consequence. It’s an overwhelming portrait of poverty, isolation and resilience. Often relying on a crew of himself, Wang captures it all with a hand-held, low-grade video recorder for a cinéma-vérité style. As a viewer, you almost never forget that Wang is in the scene filming and yet he rarely loses the fly on the wall invisibility that allows life to unravel in its natural rhythms.

British Sounds – Another Godard directed Dziga Vertov Group political film, this one set in Great Britain in the late ‘60’s. It’s divided into roughly 5-10 minute segments each with entirely different visual stratagems. The first and best sequence features one long continuous pan through a Renault automobile assembly line, Marxist commentary included. Another one features a newscaster reading over-the-top, politically incorrect right-wing political commentary. This segment is remarkable in how it resembles actually politically incorrect talking points featured any given day on Fox News. Godard’s satire is now just real life. A less positive sequence features a long take of a naked woman from the waist down, the voice over describing the need for female agency and empowerment in society. This didn’t offend me per se, in fact, it is quite powerful, but I would have been more comfortable with this scene coming from a female director.

Freer Gallery of Art – This took three attempts, but I finally made it through the entirety of the newly renovated permanent collection of the Freer Gallery of Art. Though the building isn’t particularly large, like any good museum, it rewards patience and careful consideration. It features ceramics, sculpture and painting from across the Asian continent paired with some American work for contrast. The Chinese and Japanese Art collections were my favorites, especially the Chinese jade Bi from the Liangzhu culture and the various Japanese wabi-sabi vessels. The former are particularly mysterious because historians are unsure what function they played in society. Sometimes individuals would be buried with them, and others would be passed down within families for generations.

Meshes of the Afternoon – Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s short avant-garde debut. This was a re-watch and I was blown away by the cinematography. The turbulent identity loop Deren’s character literally climbs through sits in a continuum, building on the promise of Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, anticipating the later work of Jean Cocteau and even Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Thematically, the woman in psychological peril subject matter feels as accomplished as David Lynch’s oeuvre. A reminder that we should all be paying more attention to the avant-garde. Speaking of which, where is the avant garde in film today? Surely Lynch and Malick are too mainstream now. Who else?

Queer Eye – The first episode of this reboot is just ridiculous fun. I find that intimate moments in reality TV are harder for me to buy into than in fictional or documentary film; The staging and editing room manipulations tend to be too obvious. BUT, this Fab Five are so likeable and their feel good message of self-love and empowerment is so important that it was easy to forgive the show’s flaws. I particularly enjoyed the little montages each host gets before their segments. For example, Jonathan Van Ness, the hair stylist, will be twirling his admittedly amazing hair while dancing with a huge smile for multiple quick shots. Totally infectious.

Port of Shadows – Marcel Carné’s moody, noir-ish portrait of a world at the brink of oblivion. It’s 1938, Jean (a sterling Jean Gabin) has deserted the army and hitchhiked to the port city of Le Havre, intending to escape the dark shadow looming over Europe. In the city, Jean gets entangled with the locals and falls for the charming Nelly (Michèle Morgan), giving fate enough time to wrap its tentacles around him. Nearly everything and everyone is great here, most notably Carné’s expression of masculinity through Gabin. Gabin’s Jean is running away from his duty and his country, yet Carné directs only sympathy with this choice. Moreover, throughout the film Jean stands as a moralizing force for the other male characters, literally beating them when they get out of line. This code, a personal hierarchy of masculine values, strikes me as particularly French, a precursor to the type of cool masculinity that defines the later crime noirs of Jean-Pierre Melville.

A Quiet Place – Jim from The Office directing a pretty good horror film! I would give this movie an A for concept and a B / B- for execution. John Krasinski is a competent director and, if A Quiet Place is any indication, an ambitious one. The best scene is at the halfway point when the wife, played by Emily Blunt (Krasinski’s real-life wife), must give birth in silence after stepping on a nail. Also promising is Krasinski’s aptitude for spatial management on a massive farm set. Too much of this film is directed safely, the visual puzzle pieces are a little too big to make it challenging. Worse, I found myself grasping at straws to build a coherent thematic response from its swirl of Biblical and Americana imagery. Perhaps a larger interpretation will congeal over time. In the meantime, I am eager to see what this box office success will afford Krasinski next.

The New Yorker

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In the Fall of 2012, my late Grandma Lydia and my father came to visit me in college at SMU. My Grandma brought with her several copies of a magazine called The New Yorker. I was vaguely familiar with this magazine, but had never actually held a copy before that point. On one of those afternoons, resting in their hotel room before heading out for the next activity, I eyed one she had left on the couch. Enticed by its colorful cover design, I picked it up, slumped in a chair and began to flip through it; within minutes I knew this was something I needed.

It was the September 10, 2012 Fashion issue. I really only turned the pages, reading little bits here and there, but I knew. In that issue, as in all of them, there were endless descriptions of New York City’s surplus of cultural events, trendy political commentary, personal essays by famous writers, long form journalism, long form culture articles, short fiction, poetry, cartoons and reviews of what at that time seemed like everything. My grandmother, noticing the glint in my eye, urged me to keep that issue. In the days that followed, I read that magazine from cover to cover, a rarity for anyone familiar with it. My thirst unquenched,  I then signed up for the trial subscription. And when that was finished, I became a yearly paying subscriber which has been the case for the last 5 years. In that time, I’ve received the magazine weekly, devouring and struggling to keep up with that relentless pile, often bringing my own stacks of back issues on vacations and holidays.

As of April 9th, 2018, I am no longer a subscriber. Without going into detail as to why, I instead want to use this space to reflect. The magazine was, without a doubt, one of the integral catalysts for my broader intellectual curiosity late in college. I can honestly say I wouldn’t be who I am today without it. Despite any criticisms that have led me to this decision, it is more true to say that my leaving the The New Yorker is a signifier of just how influential it has been. Perhaps I will be a subscriber again one day, and I will still be loosely following it online (within the 10 free articles a month constraint). But for now, a heartfelt goodbye and thank you to The New Yorker.

Week in Review: March 26th – April 1st, 2018

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The Constitution of the United States – I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it’s surprisingly short and simple, elegant even. The Founder’s laser focus on preventing future authoritarianism remains striking, though I’m most impressed with its inherent capacity for self-correction and evolution.

A Film Like Any Other – My first step in an effort to watch Jean-Luc Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group political films he made, along with Jean-Pierre Gorin, in the wake of the failed French student revolution of 1968. This conceptual film consists of nearly two hours of political discussions between a group of French communists sitting in a field, occasionally intercut with montages of the ‘68 uprising. There are two simultaneous audio tracks of independent debate one gets to read through, and the frame limits your vision to the backs of the comrades in the surrounding tall grass. . .only Godard. This is an excruciating sitting, recommended for Godard completionists only.

Kaili Blues – Bi Gan’s very beautiful Chinese drama from 2015. Set in a rural Chinese town, a doctor feuds with his step-brother over the raising of his nephew. The second half of the film, following the doctor on the road looking for his nephew, is punctuated by a roughly 40 minute continuous shot, the camera traveling several miles via two motorcycles, a car, a boat and then circumambulating an entire town on foot, all while following multiple characters repeatedly interacting. Its impressive stuff, though I was even more taken with the still photography throughout the film. Bi extracts a somber moodiness from the sort of detritus typified by a rural town undergoing uneven development. Wet concrete, cloudy skies, industrial materials, unfinished construction and slow motorcycle rides are expressionistic cues that build out the emotional thrust of the work. The Chinese title translates to “Roadside Picnic”, the same name as the Russian science fiction novel that would inspire Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Though the influence of Tarkovsky is notable on Bi, that potent comparison doesn’t keep this first film from feeling a bit under-baked. Perhaps a re-watch would help but I felt there was too little going on plot-wise. Still, Bi’s visual instincts appear fully formed. This is an auteur to keep an eye on.

Barry – SNL alum Bill Hader’s new HBO show. Hader stars, directs, writes, and produces here, and surprise!, he’s good. Like, really good. Hader plays a lonely assassin, former marine, who rediscovers the joys of human connection in a hack L.A. acting troupe while honing in on his next mark. Like many of the dark, anti-hero led prestige television shows from the last decade, there’s a certain perversity baked into the concept. The show requires the viewer to root both for Barry’s emotional fulfillment and his professional success (i.e. killing people). If the pilot is any indication, these two things will rarely be aligned.

Colossal – The premise is unique: a woman’s self-destructive alcoholism in upstate New York personified as a rampaging kaiju in Seoul. In execution, this movie falls apart. The ‘fight scenes’ were often unintentionally laughable and tonally awkward. Worse, the film clumsily alternates between which characters are deserving of your sympathy during any given scene. I would normally leave it here, but in the wake of Barry, I have to mention Jason Sudeikis. The contrast with the talent and ambition of Hader is stark. I don’t know if it’s the script, the direction or him, but Sudeikis is unusable in this film. Every dramatic moment involving his character feels false, a cartoonish depiction of alcoholism and personal resentment. I like him, I find him hilarious at times, but at this juncture I’m skeptical that he has the dramatic chops to do anything but broad comedies.

Translations – Brian Friel’s 1980 play about the Irish-English cultural divide set the 1830’s. During this time, the British Empire was actively employing the Royal Engineers to standardize Ireland through language and cartography. Their job was in effect to rename the entire country. The majority of the characters are Irish people speaking Gaelic but this is all performed on stage in English. Likewise, the Royal Engineers obviously speak English. Thus, very cleverly the language and cultural barriers of that time are conveyed using a common language for the audience. Fitting too, as this play was a pointed commentary on the then ongoing Troubles with its central theme around translation. The question of how to translate a random street crossing with a nearby well becomes an existential dilemma of whether one should fight to maintain a cultural heritage or assimilate into what will be the future paradigm.

Week in Review: March 12th – 18th, 2018

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D’Annunzio’s Cave – Another Heinz Emigholz architecture film, this time about the home of Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio. I was unfamiliar with the man, or his celebrated novels, but it seems his political ideas may have influenced the eventual spread of Italian fascism. For this fact, or for the ghastly interior decorating, Emigholz directs this space as a horror film. As the camera does its usual Emigholz tessellations, an experimental discordant score by David Byrne and Brian Eno puts one in a perpetual state of unease. The rooms of the house are uniquely dark, jarring, over-stuffed, lacking any recognizable or appealing style. It feels like the home of a serial killer.

Koyannisqatsi ft. The Philip Glass Ensemble – Philip Glass was back again, again with friends! This night was a screening of Godfrey Reggio’s city-symphony classic, Koyannisqatsi, with Glass’s original score played live by him and his Ensemble. The Washington Chorus was also there to help. The performance was shaky during the slower nature sequences, but the stage found its groove mid film in time for the rapturous climax. The film remains as relevent today as it was in 1983, and we are still catching up with Ron Fricke’s cinematography.

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez’s surprising and delightful, if bittersweet novel about the power and importance of impassioned love at any age. Stylistically, Márquez abandons the literal magic here, and instead refines his near mystical talent to twist his characters in new directions throughout their lifetimes. The majority of the pages are devoted to several of the steamy 622 love affairs of our hero, Florentino Ariza, as he bides his time, waiting over 50 years for another chance at his first love, Fermina Daza. By the end, you have felt the draining strain of time on Florentino and Fermina as they approach Death’s door-step, but even stronger, you feel these character’s natural will to revivify a type of passion most only get to feel once in a lifetime. That this may be self-delusion is irrelevant to Márquez. The magnetic strength of this urge inspires him, and the reader, above all.

A Brighter Summer Day – Edward Yang’s 1991 epic four-hour coming of age story is a lush time capsule into early 1960’s Taipei. Yang’s primal filmic theme is the erosion of filial piety and A Brighter Summer Day may be his deepest exploration of this process. His narrative strategy this time involves rhyming disparate threads utilizing similar motifs – illumination vs darkness, architectural framing, pop cultural fixations – to layer his multiple story threads. For me, this is the pivot point for Yang’s output, an integral piece of the puzzle in how he moves from the outright fatalism of Taipei Story to the broad humanism of Yi Yi.

Saturday Night Live – This week’s episode with host Bill Hader hit a lower mark than the Sterling K. Brown episode, but there continued to be sketches that were pushing the show’s normal absurdity boundaries. One featured Cecily Strong sitting on her geriatric husband (Hader) in an electric wheelchair during a game night with her girlfriends. His Cialis has just kicked in and they have a limited timeframe to take advantage. In response to the consternation of her friends sitting across the table, Strong pleas, “Its no different than breastfeeding!” A second brilliant skit was a fake ad for an office lamp toilet that you can keep on your desk. Beck Bennett, the office worker who becomes addicted to the lamps, is second only to Kate McKinnon as the most consistently funny and versatile players in this cast.

Plants – I’m told that Chilean film is on the up and up, and was excited to see this 2015 effort by Roberto Doveris. It’s an atmospheric sexual awakening tale about a young girl named Flor who’s family unit is in the midst of decay. Her brother is in a coma (one of the titular plants) and her mother is in the hospital with a terminal illness. The father is out of the picture. Flor spends her free time going to comic conventions, preparing dance choreography with her friends, and naively messaging guys on chatroulette. Real life chat windows, plant life and comic book drawings feature sporadically in the frame as Flor sexual urges lead her into some dangerous encounters. Ultimately, this movie feels like a stew of visual ideas that never congealed. Pablo Larraín remains the face of this emerging cinema, but Doveris could be a director to watch, especially with a more cogent script.