(My First) Artistic Consumption Log: May 23, 2011-May 29, 2011

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—I've finally decided to adopt the viewing-log approach espoused by the likes of Karina Longworth, Kevin Lee, Robert Humanick and other friends/colleagues. But, of course, I'm not content to just straight-up copy what everyone else is doing...so my own twist on this by now well-worn format is: I'm not only including films I see, but also music I listen to, and sometimes even books I read and/or performances I attend.

I wish I had all the time in the world to write about everything that I consume...but you know, having a day job sometimes has its drawbacks. With this format, you all get a snapshot of just about everything I've been watching/listening/reading in a given week; even better, I denote highly recommended work with a ★ next to it. Maybe I'll even add critical commentary to some of them, time permitting.

Films

★ Gaily, Gaily (1969, Norman Jewison), screening at Walter Reade Theater [Those who saw Jewison's Q&A after the Ebertfest screening of Only You will remember him mentioning this rarely screened film in the context of him recounting how he met Roger Ebert in the first place. I hadn't heard of this film before he mentioned it that night; now that I have seen it—in a beautiful 35mm print as part of Film Society of Lincoln Center's Norman Jewison retrospective—I think this idiosyncratic mix of coming-of-age drama and surreal farce deserves to be better known than it is.]

★ The Tree of Life (2011, Terrence Malick), screening at Landmark Sunshine Cinema [My preliminary thoughts on Malick's new one are here.]

★ Black God, White Devil (1964, Glauber Rocha), screening at Anthology Film Archives

★ Sátántangó (1994, Béla Tarr), screening at Anthology Film Archives [This was my first time seeing this art-movie monument, and what an imposing structure it is!]

A bunch of short films presented as part of the now concluded Migrating Forms film festival at Anthology Film Archives, including:

★ A Movie (2010, Jennifer Proctor) [Believe it or not, this is a modern updating of Bruce Conner's famous 1958 short by the same name. It's actually a fairly interesting, worthy update.]

★ Coming Attractions (2010, Peter Tscherkassky)

Despair (2009, Stephen Sutcliffe)

Misty Suite (2009, James Richards)

★ These Hammers Don't Hurt Us (2010, Michael Robinson) [That link brings you to the film itself, available free online on Vimeo.]

Brune Renault (2009, Neil Beloufa)

★ Rosalinda (2011, Matías Piñeiro)

Cry When It Happens (2010, Laida Lertxundi)

★ Antonio das Mortes (1969, Glauber Rocha), screening at Anthology Film Archives

Music

★ +/- (1997, Ryoji Ikeda)

★ 0°C (1998, Ryoji Ikeda)

★ Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 in E-flat major "Romantic" (1970, Berlin Philharmonic/Herbert von Karajan) [my umpteenth time listening to, I think, one of the great recordings of this work, superior in some ways to Karl Böhm's more widely celebrated 1973 recording with the Vienna Philharmonic]

I've Been Writing!

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—This week I added two more published pieces of writing to my portfolio. Both of them took up a lot of my time this past week, thus the nonexistent posting on this blog this week until today.

The first one is my latest contribution to The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog, in which I wrote up a summary of Film Forum's Evening With Claire Bloom event on Tuesday night, in which the legendary British stage and screen actress—she of, among many other films, Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952); Robert Wise's original 1963 The Haunting; and Charly (1968), in which she played opposite Cliff Robertson in an Oscar-winning performance— came around to the New York art-house theater and talked about her life and work. Her anecdotes and insights made for an entertaining evening of conversation.

The second one is my first attempt at an art review. The art work in question is the transfinite, a terrific new art installation from Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda. It's a difficult work to describe, though I gave it a try in my review; really, though, it's more a work to be experienced viscerally and intellectually. Ikeda's multimedia monolith is standing at the Park Avenue Armory now until June 11 (see here for more information), so if you're in New York and have the time to see it—well, it's definitely something to see!

With the help of my trusty iPhone 4, I captured some footage and stitched them together into this video, to give you all a taste. It's no substitute for actually standing in its presence, but for now, it'll do:

***

And oh hey, it's Memorial Day weekend! And I actually have three days off—today, tomorrow and Sunday—because of it! (As usual, though, I don't have the actual holiday off. Oh journalism...)

Normally, I would say, in a situation like this, that I'd be gearing myself for more movie discoveries this long weekend. But then I saw a midnight screening of Terrence Malick's new film The Tree of Life last night...and...oh boy! I'm going to be mulling over that experience for a while! Short version of my rough initial impressions: It's good. Really good. Some of is positively great in Malick's own distinctive ways. I'm still deciding whether I think it quite adds up to the sum of its masterful parts, so I think I'll need a second viewing to sort out my amorphous thoughts on the film before committing any of them to paper.

I do know this, though: Today, when I opened the window of my bedroom to let the breeze in, I suddenly felt an urge to make like a Malick character and wave my hand in the air as if I was touching blades of grass. I'm also looking at leaves on a tree right outside my window and all I can think about are images I took in from The Tree of Life. Malick's film may already be having more of an impact on me than I realized after walking out of Landmark Sunshine Cinema at about 2:20 a.m. this morning.

More to come, of course. In the meantime, enjoy the (hopefully long) Memorial Day weekend, my friends!

An Image of...What Else? Rapture!

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Apparently, one man with a history of getting these kinds of dates wrong predicts the Rapture will happen today, and everyone gets into a tizzy either believing in the imminent end of the world, or joking about how stupid the believers are.

For me, the only real value of all of this Rapture chatter is that it gives me an opportunity to post this screen capture:

That's David Duchovny as Fox Mulder in the (criminally underrated) fourth-season X-Files episode "The Field Where I Died" (an episode that has something to do with the Rapture, but isn't its main focus). Doesn't he look oh so, well, enraptured by extreme possibilities? If the pitch-black background and the skyward direction of Duchovny's teary eyes don't inspire thoughts of religious contemplation on the day that the true believers supposedly go to Heaven, then I don't know what else will!

Oh, and no, I haven't seen Michael Tolkin's 1991 film The Rapture, which also features Duchovny. Though I have to admit, my interest in seeing that has shot through the roof with all this silly Rapture talk in recent days. Remind me of how this became a major news story again?

The Rest of Ebertfest, Part I

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Here is some of the rest of my foreshortened Ebertfest recap—basically a bunch of capsules with a few odds & ends to finish it off.

DAY TWO

Umberto D. What's left to say about Vittorio De Sica's late-neorealist 1952 masterpiece that hasn't already been said? Only that the key word to understanding the film's everlasting power is "dignity," and that while newer filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt, Lance Hammer, Lee Daniels and Courtney Hunt prefer, to varying degrees, to stage undignified horror shows out of poverty, De Sica humanely focuses on the title character's quest to remain dignified even as he finds himself in increasingly dire living conditions. The result isn't exactly uplifting—Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti) does eventually lose his home by the end and contemplates suicide with his dog in tow. And yet, with that emphasis on a man trying to hold onto his personal dignity, the film is somehow life-affirming in its own way.

My Dog Tulip. Here's another film featuring a dog as a human's closest companion. The human in this case is writer J.R. Ackerley (voiced by Christopher Plummer), who has gone through a lifetime of disappointments with female companions and decides to turn his affections to the titular German shepherd he adopts. Even when Tulip turns out to be a handful, though, Ackerley recounts his experiences with a nostalgic wistfulness in his omnipresent voiceover narration. Meanwhile, husband-and-wife directing team Paul & Sandra Fierlinger illustrate Ackerley's tales with lustrous watercolor animation that actually does suggest paintings come to life. My Dog Tulip—based on Ackerley's own memoir—is especially admirable, in the midst of all these Disney nature documentaries that shamelessly anthropomorphize the animals they present onscreen, for its general refusal to assign Tulip human characteristics to explain her behavior. Ackerley is too thoughtful to fall into such a trap; his voiceover narration occasionally detours into ruminations on the nature of human attraction to dogs and other such broader topics. Tulip, in Ackerley's memoir and in this film adaptation, remains an eating, pissing and shitting animal to the very end—and he loves her more than he's ever really loved anyone else. That's a funny thing, when you think hard about it.

Tiny Furniture. No dogs in this movie, but this does feature its writer/director/lead actress Lena Dunham telling seemingly everyone around her that she's in a "post-graduate delirium"—but doing it in a way that makes us—or maybe it's just me, judging by the very vocal response from this film's detractors that I've encountered on Twitter—wonder whether she's merely using that as an excuse to indulge in self-pity, aimlessness, etc. It's that kind of willingness to lay bare her own faults that suggests to me that mere "narcissism"—the common knock against the film—is far from Dunham's mind. I suppose one person's self-examination equals another's narcissism—but if self-examination equals "narcissism," then what of Federico Fellini's 8½? Dunham's film isn't that one's equal, obviously...but frankly, I find I can relate to Dunham's personal issues more than I can Fellini's, who gets so tied up in his own private obsessions that he threatens to push the audience away.

Anyway, this was my second time seeing Tiny Furniture, and for the most part, my enthusiasm for it remains undimmed, especially seeing it at the Virginia Theatre's large screen. (Who knew Jody Lee Lipes's impeccably framed widescreen compositions could look so gorgeous?) For me, its depiction of a young adult who, after graduating from college, is struggling to find her way, remains poignant—doubly so in the case of main character Aura, who has all this privilege at her disposal and yet has no idea what to do with it, especially on the heels of a fairly useless film-studies degree. But who says this is merely an issue of privilege (examined or not)? Surely this is a crisis most of us have faced at one time or another in our own lives. Hell, I may still be in my own post-graduate delirium...but I'd like to think I'm doing a better job combating it than Aura is.

DAY THREE

45365. Actually, I skipped Bill & Turner Ross's documentary in favor of writing my never-to-be-published Ebertfest dispatch for The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog...but I had seen it previously in preparation for an interview with the two brothers that actually did get published. So I'll let that interview and this extra commentary stand for a review here. Great movie.

Me and Orson Welles. I did come back to the Virginia Theatre for Richard Linklater's 2008 drama, which I had not seen before Ebertfest. I had heard a lot about the film, though, particularly about Christian McKay's performance as Orson Welles...and folks, when I first heard Welles's familiar, beautifully confident baritone coming out of McKay's mouth, I was immediately stunned into submission at just how uncannily he is able to channel this larger-than-life character—or, more accurately, someone who wasn't afraid to act larger than life, to ruthless extremes.

The rest of the film isn't too bad, either. Based on a novel by Robert Kaplow, Me and Orson Welles looks at this great artist through the eyes of a brashly confident (and fictional, I assume) up-and-comer named Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), who randomly catches Welles's eye and is immediately hired to play a small role in a new production of Julius Caesar with his Mercury Theatre players, including Joseph Cotten (James Tupper), Norman Lloyd (Leo Bill) and George Coulouris (Ben Chaplin). Richard has dreams of theatrical stardom himself, and he sees this as a road to his big break. Predictably, it doesn't work out that way; Welles's ego-driven manipulations turns out to be more than he can handle. But even as this coming-of-age drama hits its familiar marks, Linklater offers us the pleasures of a lovingly detailed depiction of life in the theater: the hard work that goes into putting on a production and the joys that lie at the end of it all. You could call it an American equivalent of Mike Leigh's equally loving Topsy-Turvy (1999). And seeing some of the reenactments of the production make me think I must have missed out on one hell of a production. As Robert Schumann once said about Frédéric Chopin, "Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!"

Only You. Yes, this is Norman Jewison's 1994 romantic comedy with Marisa Tomei in full cutey-pie mode and a disarmingly young Robert Downey, Jr. Who the hell remembers this movie? Apparently, as Chaz Ebert said in her introduction to the film, she and Roger wanted to program a good love story in the festival, and so they decided on this one, an out-of-left-field choice that reminded me that Ebertfest used to be called "Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival." It is what it is: a sunny, fluffy throwback to 1950s Hollywood entertainments of the Roman Holiday vein, with charming leads, witty dialogue, quirky supporting characters (Bonnie Hunt does most of the scene-stealing honors here), beautiful Italy locations (shot like picture postcards by the great Sven Nykvist) and a complete lack of cynicism or condescension. As such, it's diverting...and Downey once again proves that he can do just about anything, including imbuing fresh, jittery life into formulaic rom-com shenanigans with his own distinctive vocal cadences. Does anyone else, though, find the lengths Downey goes to win Tomei over to be a bit, um, problematic—creepy, even?

More Ebertfest summarizing to come...soon...

In Theaters Now: Louder than a Bomb

NEW YORK—The closing film of this year's Ebertfest, Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel's documentary Louder than a Bomb, is now getting a theatrical release here in New York at IFC Center. To my mind, the film misses greatness by sticking so closely to its conventional sports-movie structure that it generally crowds out any number of deeper topics that the broader subject matter—inner-city youths finding a powerful means of expression through slam poetry, cast against the backdrop of the largest slam-poetry competition in the U.S., held right in Chicago—suggests. Thankfully, the film is chock full of superb slam-poetry performances, and even when Jacobs and Siskel (the latter of whom is the nephew of the late film critic Gene Siskel) curtail some of those performances to move on to their next plot point or interview, the brilliance of even the foreshortened performances are enough to carry the film along. If nothing else, Louder than a Bomb induces in a viewer the excitement of seeing real young budding artists expressing themselves with abandon; they really are something to see.

How electric is the slam poetry in the film? This might give you an idea:



A few of the students featured in the film performed their poetry after a Q&A session, so I figured it'd be worth capturing on video. Rest assured, though, there is plenty more to witness and stand in awe of in Louder than a Bomb. (See here for IFC Center screening info.)

Housekeeping, Or "Where the Hell is My Last Blog Post???"

NEW YORK—Normally, I would apologize after an absence of more than a week from this blog...but it only looks like I haven't posted since Mother's Day last week. In fact, those who faithfully read My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second may know that I actually did post something on Thursday morning: my third entry in the "epic, multi-part Ebertfest recap" series I've been running. But then, Blogger had that massive outage on May 13 that laid the service low for, like, a full day. And then when service was finally restored on Friday, I discover, to my supreme irritation, that that last post—which took me a few days to write—was gone! But I didn't panic yet; someone at Blogger indicated on its Buzz blog that tech people were in the process of restoring blog posts and comments missing after restoring the service to its Wednesday, May 11 version.

Since then, my draft for the fourth post in the Ebertfest series has been restored. But that third post that was published on Thursday? Well, it was restored...but it was restored to the incomplete draft version that it was at the beginning of Wednesday! (My official defense of Tiny Furniture, all gone!)

That's enough for me to decide that, if I don't hear from anybody at Google about this issue by the end of today—and I haven't heard jack shit from anyone in the past few days, because Google apparently doesn't believe in good help service—I think I'm going to simply abandon the "epic, multi-part" format and just sum the rest of the experience up in one final post. Frankly, I'm ready to move on from Ebertfest and start focusing on other things both here on this blog and elsewhere in life. (I already feel my career stagnating; I don't need to feel like this blog is stagnating as well.)

I'm open to anyone willing to persuade me to do otherwise, but if nothing changes at the end of the day today, I think that's pretty much my final decision.

For those who care.

To My Mother, on Mother's Day

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—It's Mother's Day, so I'm taking a temporary break from my epic, multi-part Ebertfest recap to mark the occasion. The "holiday" especially means something in my case.

For those who have followed this blog all the way from its humble beginnings in 2006, you will all know of the fraught history between my mother and me. I'm not really inclined to go over all that again; for those who are new to My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second, you can read these old posts to get you up to speed. Let me put it this way: She may not have been quite as extreme as Amy "Tiger Mom" Chua apparently was toward her first daughter, but she was often quite close to it...and it's taken me years to cast off the resentments that built up as a result of frustrations borne out of her imposing, tough-love mothering style.

Distance, though, has allowed me to come to a fuller appreciation of the genuinely loving impulses that fueled everything she did—even when those impulses led her to do things (like, say, guilt-tripping me into majoring into a field in college—accounting—in which I had no interest whatsoever) that drove me to damn near emotional breakdown at the time. And in an indirect way, she has taught me a larger lesson about love and humanity.

I'll be the first to admit that I have not always treated my own mother with the kindness she (more often than not) deserves. All that pent-up resentment has sometimes led to me treat my mother as a enemy rather than as a parent or even a human being, to the point where I would often get angry at her about things she would say or do that clearly didn't deserve my ire. (When she will try to helpfully suggest something to me in a given situation, for instance, I often find it difficult not to read commands into those suggestions, even if nothing in her manner would suggest such a thing.)

And yet, amidst it all, my mother still treats me the same way she always has. Even now, whenever I come back home to visit—as I did, briefly, this weekend—she'll still do things like prepare food for me or ask if there's anything I need for her to buy for me. In other words, she'll still act in as loving a way as she ever did. Even after all the ill treatment, deserved or not, I've given her over the years, she doesn't allow that to build up inside of her and influence the way she acts toward me.

In other words, she accepts me, flaws and all—which is more than I can say for the way I've treated her sometimes. And isn't that kind of love and acceptance, well, the essence of humanism? Nobody's perfect, obviously, and not everything one says or does will endear oneself to others...but if you still value that person's love and friendship, you'll look past those flaws. My mother has been doing that ever since I was born, and this realization humbles me into trying my best to behave in a like manner towards her.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. Even if I may not always show it, I still treasure you in many ways, and I honestly sometimes dread what it'd be like to have you gone from my life.

I'll end this post with a photo:

From left to right: my brother Masao, me and my mother, in Shanghai in 2008. (If you're wondering about the expression I'm sporting on my face in this one: I'm pretending that that lion is biting my hand. Yes, I can be quite the silly boy sometimes.)

An Epic, Multi-Part Ebertfest Recap: Day One

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

DAY ONE: OPENING NIGHT (AND DAY)

The first screening of the 13th annual Ebertfest was scheduled for 7 p.m. (though, as I was soon to discover, none of the screenings ever actually started on time)...but, even as I made my way to Champaign's historic Virginia Theatre at around 4 p.m. to meet up with a few Twitter friends in person for the first time, I noticed a long line away going around the corner outside the theater. People were braving the rain to try to get the best seats in the house. The anticipation was in the wet, misty air!

My first day of the festival didn't begin with that evening screening, though. Instead, it began hours earlier, at around noon, when, upon Ali Arikan's invitation the night before, I decided to walk over to the Illini Union—University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's student center—and meet up with him and a bunch of others to do what anyone visiting Champaign apparently is supposed to do as a matter of course: go to a Steak 'n Shake to consume burgers and milkshakes! Which I did, in the company of, among others, three more of Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents: Michael Mirasol, representing the Philippines (even though he and his family currently live in Malaysia); Gerardo Valero, from Mexico City; and the 17-year-old wunderkind Krishna Shenoi, who comes from India but who currently lives with his family in Dubai. I was especially interested in meeting Michael, with whom I have had frequent online interactions over the past year since first hearing him speak, along with a bunch of other FFCs, at last year's Ebertfest via live-stream.

When we got to the Steak 'n Shake on Neil St., Michael was telling me about how, last year, the local media had swarmed onto that particular restaurant after Ebert had alerted people to that location on his Twitter feed. This time around, however, the coast looked clear...until we all noticed the one cameraman setting up near the entrance of the restaurant. 

Upon seeing this, Michael turned to me and his wife, Claire, and said, "Oh no, not again!" (He eventually did speak to this cameraman for an on-camera interview, though with vocal reluctance.)

As far as the lunch went...well, I wasn't totally blown away by the Western BBQ 'n Bacon Steakburger I had (though it was certainly far better than anything you'd get at McDonald's, to be sure), but the strawberry milkshake? Just look at the size of this thing!

This first day of Ebertfest would be marked by introductions to people I knew only from online interactions, in fact. Only a couple hours later, I would find myself standing in front of the Virginia Theatre, umbrella in hand, meeting with one Donald G. Carder—who heretofore had been known to me only as @theangrymick on Twitter—who was attending the festival with his wife Anne. I also met, for the first time, Moira (@PlaidGirl), Visha (@vanyc) and Greg (@litdreamer)—all of whom I would see again at various points in the next five days. (If nothing else, Ebertfest, by holding his festival in this one festival, helps foster lasting movie-connected friendships in ways that much larger festivals such as, say, South by Southwest can only dream of doing.) Along with Odie Henderson—the man the blogosphere knows best as Odienator—we all went to a nearby bar and hung out for a couple of hours before returning to the theater to try to get our seats for Ebertfest's opening night. Just before I went in, I was greeted by film critic/blogger Craig Simpson, who some of you may know as The Man from Porlock. (One of my regrets about this festival is that I didn't get as much of a chance to chat with him as I did with others. Sorry, Craig! Maybe next year?) And once I was in the theater about a half-hour before Ebertfest's first film began, I finally met in person film critic Mark Pfeiffer, who was sitting with a friend of his in what he said was his usual spot up in the balcony. (Mark turned out to be the one I relied on to offer some interesting historical context regarding past Ebertfests, I may end up sharing some of his tidbits of information later on.)

Noticeably absent from this roll call of film critics and Twitter buddies, by the way, were the estimable film critics/bloggers Jim Emerson and Marilyn Ferdinand, both of whom I was most excited to meet this year, and both of whom were unable to show up this year for various reasons. Sad face. Again, maybe next year?

And then, 7 p.m. struck. Roger Ebert and his wife Chaz came onstage about 10 minutes afterward and made some introductory remarks. Ebert himself came onstage with a white scarf; to me, he had the look of a high priest—a high priest of the cinema, at least for this event. They introduced film scholar Kristin Thompson—sans her equally distinguished husband David Bordwell, alas (laid low due to pneumonia contracted during his recent trip to the Hong Kong Film Festival)—to make some remarks of her own regarding the festival's first film. Then, the three members of the Alloy Orchestra—a group that is known for performing original scores to silent-film classics—took their places in the orchestra pit, and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) began.

Naturally, we watched the recent "complete" version that premiered last year at Berlinale and which I saw during a two-week run at Film Forum. Thompson, as one would expect from a film scholar of her caliber, got into the nitty-gritty about how the extra footage that was discovered in Buenos Aires in 2008 ended up there in the first place (apparently, Argentina and many other South American countries were considered a big market by the German film industry at the time, so they often sent prints of their films there). For me, the extra footage—which includes one extra scene that adds an extra level of menace to a side character that, in previous versions, didn't seem play all that important a role to the action—neither diminishes the film nor makes it a much greater work; it's just longer now, but by no means is it any more sprawling. For a work of this scale, it's astonishing just how tightly constructed it is, really—especially in its third act, appropriately dubbed "Furioso" in this complete version.

The big news with the screening of the complete Metropolis at the Virginia Theatre that night was two-fold:

1. The digital print furnished by Kino International struck me as far more superior to the print I saw at Film Forum last year. With the latter, I was always aware I was watching a digital print; the one I saw at Ebertfest struck me as sharper and far more convincingly film-like. It can't be the larger screen deceiving my eyes, it can't be!

2. This is my first time seeing the famed Alloy Orchestra perform one of their of original silent-film scores live. Oh. My. God! My memory of seeing Gottfried Huppertz's original score accompanying the digital print seen at Film Forum is admittedly fuzzy, but I don't recall it having the same starkness and vividness of sonorities as this particular score conceived by members Terry Donahue, Ken Winokur and Roger Miller. In the film's first shot of the underground workers joylessly marching out of their jobs, all that their score called for were steady timpani thwacks—but the effect was as chillingly empty as the image surely calls for. Even more romantic moments that might have called for a more sweepingly upbeat approach—the moment the real Maria (Brigitte Helm) kisses Freder (Gustav Frohlich) after her rousing speech to the workers—still maintained an unsettling, almost doom-laden modernistic flavor to them. It was thrilling to hear this score accompany this, one of the grandest follies of the cinema, and still as amazing an achievement of the human imagination as ever...and if you missed it at Ebertfest, or last year at the TCM Film Festival in Los Angeles, you most likely won't be able to hear it! (That said, in a Q&A session after the screening, Terry and Roger said that this score was available on the Alloy Orchestra's website, but separately, not as an added soundtrack on home video. You'll have to sync the soundtrack to the film all by yourself.)

Apparently, it's rare for Ebertfest to feature two films on its opening night. But Ebert was one of the judges of the Narrative Feature Competition at South by Southwest in March, and apparently he was so smitten by Robbie Pickering's award-winning Natural Selection that, according to Chaz, he felt he had to try to get this film into his festival, without question.

I was not as big a fan of Natural Selection as Ebert and the other judges were, and I wrote so in this House Next Door dispatch. Nevertheless, when I discovered that Ebert had made this a last-minute selection in this year's Ebertfest, I figured I might as well sit through the film again to see if I could perhaps warm to it more. Let me put it this way: It wasn't an entirely unfruitful endeavor.

Perhaps the best way to look at the film is as a story of one woman's female empowerment (and it's real female empowerment, too, not the Zack Snyder/Sucker Punch male-fantasy bullshit) rather than as the facile satire of religious hypocrisy that it threatens to be in the film's choppy opening 15 minutes. Even in those opening moments, you can sense, in Linda West's behavior and facial expressions, a deep dissatisfaction with her lifestyle that she's possibly been repressing for years. Of course, even around supposed long-lost son Raymond (Matt O'Leary), Linda tries to hold onto that good-girl Christian image...and part of the fascination of Natural Selection, on a character-based level, lies in trying to determine just how much she truly buys into the goody-goody image. Is she secretly ready to cast it off, and is Raymond the one to help her finally do so? The brilliance of Rachael Harris's deservedly praised performance as Linda lies in her empathetic refusal to condescend to her character (unlike the way Pickering often condescends to the rest of her clan—though he said he intended nothing of the sort in the Q&A with him and Harris following the screening). You might find fundamentalist Christians of her ilk insufferable—and with the public prominence of groups like the Tea Party movement, it's arguably difficult for rational people not to find such behavior insufferable, on some level—but her brand of fundamentalism seems to come out of a heartfelt desire to do good—even for those (like her husband, we come to discover) who really don't deserve her charity.

I still can't say I'm crazy about Natural Selection, but I'll concede that there are elements in it worth celebrating. It sure as hell wasn't Metropolis, though...but then, what is?

And thus endeth the first day at Ebertfest.

Coming up next on this epic, multi-part Ebertfest recap: Two movies with dogs in them, another go-round with Lena Dunham's post-graduate malaise, and a raucous night of...what else? Karaoke, of course!

TO BE CONTINUED...

An Epic, Multi-Part Ebertfest Recap: Prelude

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Okay, the idea behind the next few posts on this blog is this: Because I didn't get to update much during my recent Ebertfest experience, and because so far none of the editors of The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog have seen it fit to publish that first dispatch I sent them on Friday—I guess news events like the Royal Wedding (really?) and the death of Osama bin Laden (all right, I concede that is a bona-fide Big Deal) will naturally trump a mere festival dispatch like mine—I will go ahead and try to recap the experience, reasonably complete and uncut, here on this blog.

This will take a few days, I suspect...so let's dive right into it, shall we?

PRELUDE

 

There was no doubt in my mind on Tuesday, April 26, that I would eventually get to Champaign, Ill., for Roger Ebert's Film Festival, the five-day film-appreciation extravaganza also known as Ebertfest (this is its 13th year). It just ended up taking far longer than expected.

As I was walking to a restroom after having gotten past the usual security checkpoints at LaGuardia Airport in New York, I overheard someone saying something about a bunch of flights being delayed as a result of brewing inclement weather in the Chicago area—Chicago's O'Hare International Airport being my destination for a connecting flight to Champaign. Uh-oh. My concerns were not ameliorated when I received a text-message alert via American Airlines at around 11:45 a.m. suggesting that the departure time of my scheduled 1:35 p.m. flight was now pushed back by 10 minutes. Then, at around 12:55 p.m., I got another alert saying that departure time was now 1:55 p.m.

At around 1:40 p.m. or so, all of the passengers were finally allowed to board the plane; eventually the plane started pulling out of its gate and slowly made its progress toward takeoff. And then it stopped...and proceeded to stay still. Then, an announcement: This flight was going to be delayed for 15 minutes until they got word from air-traffic controllers in Chicago that it was safe to take off. We waited for about that length of time...and then we got another announcement saying that they needed to wait another 30 minutes for said word!

Well, I said to myself after all this waiting, it sure doesn't look like I'll be making my 4 p.m. connecting flight to Champaign at this rate. And so it came to pass. The plane finally took off at around 3 p.m. and landed in Chicago at around 5:15 p.m.; when I landed in Chicago, I immediately booked a seat on a flight scheduled to leave at 6:15 p.m. Okay, fine, I thought, these things happen (though this was the first time, in my memory at least, that I had had to deal with a delayed flight). But then that connecting flight got delayed! The reason? Apparently, they were waiting for the crew to arrive from a previous flight. So this time, no weather-related delays—just a missing crew!

This was taken by Ali Arikan on his BlackBerry

A silver lining to this particular cloud arrived, though, in the form of Ali Arikan, a friend, fellow film critic/writer and one of Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents; it turned out we were on the same flight from Chicago to Champaign! Funny how things just seem to work out that way in life. So I didn't have to be lonely while waiting for the delayed flight; instead, I ended up having drinks with him and chatting before we were finally allowed to board the plane at around 7:40 p.m.

The trip from Chicago to Champaign took a mere 30 minutes once in the air, so we landed at Champaign's Willard Airport at around 8:50 p.m....but my extended-length voyage to Ebertfest wasn't quite done yet! When Willard's one baggage-claim carousel (it's a tiny airport) had gone around a couple of times, I realized that I didn't see my checked bag anywhere! When I checked with an employee there, he looked up my information on a computer and discovered that my bag was on the Chicago-to-Champaign flight after the one I was just on! Seriously??? (In talking to a couple of random people at the airport, I discovered that this kind of thing is not a rare occurrence at that airport.)

I was given the option of either waiting for that next flight to land in order to look for my bag, or to have it delivered to the place at which I was staying. All right, I figured, if it's just one more flight, and if that next flight is coming within the next hour, I can wait. So, after Ali was forced to part ways with me as he was rushing to get to a Q&A session for Ebertfest's pre-festival screening of Chris Smith's 1999 documentary American Movie (which I would have loved to have seen—given that I haven't seen it yet—if those blasted delays hadn't prevented me from being able to make it in time for the beginning of the film), I sat around until 10 p.m. or so, when the next Chicago-to-Champaign flight landed. When I stood around the baggage-claim area and looked closely for my bag, lo and behold, there it was!

My luggage having finally been procured, I took a cab and noticed the general emptiness of the Urbana streets. (Hey Fever Ray, this might have been just as fitting a venue for your haunting "Keep the Streets Empty for Me" video as...Sweden, I'm guessing?) I was warned that this was mostly a pretty dead town, and so it appeared to be. I really did feel like I was driving through a ghost town; it was eerie...and rather seductive, in its own way. (There is one lively stretch in the town, though, of which I will explain in a future post.)

Through these empty streets, I headed toward the home of my host, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign literature professor whose place I had discovered thanks to the site Airbnb.com—kind of a variation on couchsurfing.com, except people actually get paid for offering up a room for travelers like myself. It was a nice place, and the room I had was comfortably spacious (not that that made a huge difference, in the end, considering how little time I spent at the home). But there was something even more special about this place than I had realized, something I didn't know about until a week before this trip: Apparently, the house was recently designated a historic landmark because none other than former American president Abraham Lincoln slept in one of its rooms! Read this article if you don't believe me!

Oh, and George (whose wife and daughter were away in Toronto during my stay there) also had this dog:



Thanks for your hospitality, George! It was very much appreciated! Maybe we could do this again next year?

Coming up on this epic, multi-part Ebertfest recap: The festival kicks off in grand fashion with the near-complete Metropolis with a live performance of an original score by the Alloy Orchestra. Plus...Natural Selection again? Will I warm to it more the second time than I did the first at South by Southwest in March?

TO BE CONTINUED...

A Round-up of Tribeca Film Festival Links

CHAMPAIGN, ILL.—Sorry for the lack of posting in the past couple weeks or so on this blog. This time, though, I have two good excuses, I think: Tribeca Film Festival and Ebertfest!

For Tribeca, I contributed to Slant Magazine a few reviews of films playing at this year's edition of the Robert De Niro-founded festival. And when I say Slant Magazine this time around, I mean the actual Slant Magazine, not its side blog The House Next Door. So now I have reviews for that site with star ratings and everything! Despite its reputation as a wildly uneven and inconsistent festival in regards to quality of films shown, the bulk of the handful of films I saw at Tribeca this year were actually pretty good, or at least reasonably interesting. I'm happy that one of the films I reviewed, Rwandan director Kivu Ruhorahoza's uneven but intriguing Grey Matter, picked up a couple of awards at the festival, one for lead actress Shami Bizimana and another for Ruhorahoza himself.

Here is a list of all the Tribeca films I reviewed for Slant:
Black Butterflies
Cairo Exit
Grey Matter
Janie Jones
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
The Journals of Musan

And here is a link for Slant Magazine's full Tribeca Film Festival coverage.

I wasn't able to cover more of Tribeca, however...because, at about the halfway mark, I found myself here in Champaign, Ill., for the 13th year of Roger Ebert's Film Festival, or what is more commonly known as Ebertfest!

Thirteen films hand-picked by the legendary film critic himself, screened in the span of four days at the historic Virginia Theatre in this small Illinois town (his hometown, apparently), plus a couple of panels and one epic night of karaoke—all of this contributed to taking away precious time to blog about the experience. So obviously, I'll have much more to say about Ebertfest in one or two future posts (short version: it was a lot of fun, if oddly more exhausting, in less days, than South by Southwest).

Until then, though...chew on this:

More Camera Whoring!

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Since I've apparently become something of a camera whore over the course of the past few months, and apparently have no shame in promoting my appearances in front of a camera (feel free to let me know if any of you think this is a worrying trend), here are a couple more videos in which yours truly is present:



That organization Pro8mm which offered me and others a chance to shoot a bit of footage on Super 8mm film at South by Southwest finally released an edited video compilation of all of that footage. For about a few seconds, from 0:18 on, I'm seen being shown how to use a film camera.

Not impressed by that? Then...how about footage of me eating dinner before a screening of João Pedro Rodrigues's latest film To Die Like a Man on Thursday night? Captured by one of my roommates?



My presence is spreading all over the Internet! Mwahahahaha!

All right, I'm done with this kind of thing for now. One day, My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second will become a blog of serious arts criticism again (if it ever was that). One day.

Finding My Inner Punk, With the Help of The Clash

NEW YORK—Despite having my one umbrella destroyed by the heavy winds yesterday afternoon, leaving me vulnerable to getting heavily rained on by Mother Nature last night, I had an excellent weekend.

But the highlight of my weekend was not the spate of Japanese films I saw for the first time on Friday and Saturday at Film Forum: two black-and-white masterpieces—Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds (1955) and Kenji Mizoguchi's final film Street of Shame (1956)—and one fairly amusing color musical-comedy, Keisuke Kinoshita's Carmen Comes Home (1951), featuring Hideko Takamine in an exuberant singing-and-dancing role—as a stripper, to make things that much hotter—that is as far as possible from the quietly suffering heroines she played for Naruse in her collaborations with him. And no, it wasn't even Jacques Tourneur's fascinatingly dense 1946 Technicolor Western Canyon Passage, seen at Anthology Film Archives—though that experience was marred by a supposedly restored print that was plagued by terribly flawed audio, making some of the dialogue barely comprehensible.

No, the highlight of my weekend was this:



A co-worker of mine at The Wall Street Journal fronts this punk-rock band on the side; the group recently released their first album and celebrated that release on Friday at Fontana's Bar in New York's Lower East Side. Afterwards, Fontana's hosted a session of "Punk Rock Heavy Metal Karaoke," with a live band providing the musical accompaniment as people got up to sing a song of their choice—or, at least, of their choice based on a long list of selections. I decided to take a stab at it with The Clash's "I Fought the Law"...and what you see above is the result of that experiment.(Believe it or not, I was not feeling drunk at all before doing this, despite the one-and-a-half pint of beers I had consumed; over the years, I've developed a pretty good tolerance for beer, at least.)

I'll leave it to you all to be the judge of how successful I was at this endeavor. All I can report is that, against all odds, I actually left the stage feeling like an honest-to-God rock star—for the moment, at least. And isn't that what karaoke is at least partly about?

P.S. As I was getting my ears blown to bits as a spectator and as a performer at Fontana's, many of my fellow cinephile friends and acquaintances were apparently getting their minds blown at Walter Reade Theater by this old film by some French dude I've never heard of. Maybe some of those cinephile friends/acquaintances can tell me if I truly missed something special. I, for one, regret nothing. (Not yet, anyway.)

Nine Types of Light at a TV on the Radio Concert

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—From the Brooklyn band's Radio City Music Hall concert on April 13:

I would have also had video to accompany these iPhone-captured photographs of a by-and-large terrific show, but for some reason—as a result of probably unfounded jitters over whether I was allowed to record any part of the concert or not (clearly, I've been to too many classical concerts and not enough rock concerts)—I ended up not taking any...

...which made the discovery of this video below just a tad gut-wrenching (I could have fuckin' shot that!). But hey, I snoozed (not literally, of course) and I lost. I'll just embed the video here and thank the user by the name of hashmagazine for shooting it and posting it on YouTube:



The song Tunde Adebimpe & co. is performing in that video is named "Repetition," by the way, and it's possibly my favorite cut off their latest album, Nine Types of Light—thus the oh-so-clever title of this post. It's an excellent album, by the way, a worthy complement to their previous—and, to my mind, best-to-date—album Dear Science (2008). If their first two albums, Desperate Youths, Bloodthirsty Babes (2004) and Return to Cookie Mountain (2006) both, to a certain extent, made the tension between intellect and emotion a major theme of their music, in Dear Science, TV on the Radio seemed to finally embrace their wild Dionysian side (yes, rather ironic given its title); it's the first time I actually found them rousing fun to listen to instead of just "interesting" to hear. Nine Types of Light, thankfully, continues in that soulful, funky vein...and there was certainly a lot of joy to be had at their Radio City Music Hall concert on Wednesday night! Especially considering that that was my first time ever stepping into that famous venue!

The Beauties of Burnett

NEW YORK—I was originally going to devote all of last weekend to immersing myself in some of the films of African-American independent filmmaker Charles Burnett, thanks to the complete retrospective of his work currently going on at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It didn't entirely work out that way; on Saturday, instead of seeing Burnett's 2007 film Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation as I had initially planned, I ended up (thanks to Foursquare—see, location-based social media does have its valuable uses!) meeting up with a couple of old friends from college and crawling around the East Village all afternoon and late into the night. Hey, it's New York; that kind of thing happens! And it was such a lovely day out that I felt no guilt about it whatsoever.

Namibia—which, to be perfectly honest, has an unappealingly academic-sounding title—is supposed to be screening again at MoMA a couple weekends from now. One quick look at my calendar suggests that that next screening may conflict with a Satyajit Ray film at Walter Reade Theater that I'm dying to see (his 1973 film Distant Thunder, for those who are curious; Film Society of Lincoln Center has programmed a series of late Ray films after its series of his earlier work in 2009). This weekend, then, may well be the only one in which Burnett's films figure into it. For that reason, I might as well go ahead and discuss the by-and-large excellent films I saw this weekend.

***

Burnett, for those who aren't aware of him, is an African-American filmmaker who has been working on-and-off for about four decades now, making many films about the black American experience that have often found favor from critics but have never found their way into more popular acclaim. The fact that Burnett's aforementioned three-hour epic about Namibia's struggle for independence from South Africa—featuring a big name in Danny Glover, no less—has still only played at film festivals more than three years after its completion gives you an indication of how marginalized a figure Burnett has been over the course of his career, despite the heroic efforts of intrepid film critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum to bring him into the public eye.

But the tide may finally be turning in his favor. It took 30 years, but his 1977 debut feature Killer of Sheep was finally restored and given a proper theatrical release by Milestone Films in 2007; a two-DVD set of that film, his 1983 follow-up, My Brother's Wedding, and some of his short films followed. And now he has this big museum retrospective in his honor.

Before this series began, I had only seen Killer of Sheep and My Brother's Wedding, so I was looking forward to seeing his later, more difficult-to-see work. Here's some of what I wrote about Killer of Sheep for the Daily Targum—Rutgers University's daily newspaper—upon its belated theatrical release in 2007:

From its deliberately unassuming—and, in this 35mm blow-up, noticeably grainy—black and white cinematography (Burnett shot the film himself) to its authentic location settings, and from the fairly amateurish performances of its mostly nonprofessional cast to its episodic plot—all of these elements serve to give us the feeling of real life taking place right in front of our eyes.
The real life of this film isn’t particularly glamorous, either: its main character, Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), works at a slaughterhouse for a living—thus the film’s title—and goes through much of the film palpably disillusioned by the depressing reality of his lower-class existence in his Watts, Calif. community. In its interest in capturing the harsh realities of the everyday lives of ordinary citizens, Killer of Sheep works in the great tradition of neorealism, the famous post-World War II artistic movement that attempted to render real life on film as authentically as possible with documentary-style techniques—handheld camerawork, outdoor location shooting, etc.

But Italian neorealist classics like Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves or Roberto Rossellini’s Open City aren’t great just because of its documentary-like realism. Like De Sica and Rossellini, Charles Burnett has both compassion and a poetic—yet fiercely unsentimental—sensibility to go along with his sharply observant sense of lived-in realism.

Thus, no one is made out to be exaggerated caricatures in Killer of Sheep—not even the two show-offy “rich” guys who are first seen stealing a television set, and then are shown asking Stan to participate in a murder for money. Even scenes like those, Burnett suggests, are an unmistakable part of life in an African-American ghetto; you do what you feel you have to do in order to get by in such dire surroundings.

And even in the midst of Stan’s sense of despair, Burnett is still able to find, and poetically convey, moments of indelible beauty and joy. Perhaps its most touching moment comes in long sequence in which Stan and his wife (Kaycee Moore) share a silent slow dance in their apartment to the tune of Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth.” It’s all in one unbroken shot, and Burnett’s camera simply sits there, observing the wife’s attempt to try to reach out to her emotionally distant husband. When the song is over and the dance ends, everything seems to be back to (dreary) normal. Within Killer of Sheep, however, those small gestures—and there are many of them at unexpected, isolated moments—have the power of giant deliverances.

The Burnett films I saw this weekend generally build on the more enthralling qualities of both Killer of Sheep and his worthy second feature My Brother's Wedding. All of them, though, are quite different from either of his two early features, suggesting a stylistic adventurousness on his part that supplements his sociological and humanistic concerns.

His rarely screened 1990 film To Sleep With Anger is an intimate family drama that, as a result of its spiritual elements, becomes the stuff of folklore. Danny Glover, probably the most high-profile actor in this cast, gives a beautifully insinuating performance as Harry, an old acquaintance of Gideon (Paul Butler), the patriach of the film's central clan. Gideon kindly lets Harry stay over his house...but Harry turns out to have a malicious streak, as he slowly but surely begins to wreak havoc on the family's relations, threatening to tear the unit apart in subtly insidious ways. His malice manifests itself in its most physical form when Gideon himself suddenly falls into a coma one morning—surely not unrelated to Harry's continued presence in the household.

The character of Harry, however, doesn't represent anything quite so simplistic as the "evil" to the family's "good." As others have commented, Harry is a modern incarnation of the Trickster, a being who acts in a dangerous manner but whose actions often have unexpectedly positive outcomes. In this case...well, as Burnett depicts in the opening scenes of the film, this family was already swimming in buried tensions and generational divides; they only needed someone like Harry to push those tensions to a boiling point—to the point of bloodshed, in one instance—and apparently they only needed someone like Harry to at least help pave a way toward a promising resolution. In the world Burnett creates in To Sleep With Anger—realistic yet full of magical possibilities, a kind of supernatural variation on the milieu he explored in his first two films—even that mediocre kid trumpet player who annoys everyone in town manages to get at least one tune right by the end; tellingly, the kid gets this strange and oddly heartwarming film's final image, as his cacophonously tuneless trumpet playing transforms into a beautiful improvisation that plays over the end credits.

There's more beauty in Burnett's 1994 police drama The Glass Shield—to date his only film to get released by a major studio, in this case Miramax—though it's a stark kind of beauty, one that highlights the film's angry substance. Instead of the kind of harsh, gritty realism of other urban crime dramas made during that time—films like Boyz N the Hood (1991), for instance, or Menace II Society (1993)—Burnett, with the aid of cinematographer Elliot Davis, bathes much his based-on-true-events tale in neon-blue colors and dark shadows, turning the Los Angeles county precinct headquarters into some kind of Hell on earth. He also  encourages composer Stephen James Taylor—who wrote the folksy score for To Sleep With Anger—to turn up the heat in his music for the film, imparting an operatic grandeur to the story. It's still quite harsh and gritty—its sprung editing rhythms (Curtiss Clayton did the editing) keep us on our toes as the story unfolds—but there's a visual radiance to it that, surprisingly, doesn't detract from the power of this tale of police corruption, racism, compromised morals and idealism punctured.

The Glass Shield is a more story-driven film than any of his previous feature work, and Burnett's economical approach to storytelling here sometimes makes the film seem choppier and neater than his previous work. It's still a gripping and brilliantly told story, though, and its underlying themes and emotions still pack a punch, especially the bitter irony of its concluding twist (which apparently Burnett had to fight to keep in, as Miramax demanded a softer ending). It's as socially conscious as Burnett's previous films, except done in a more urgent and electric style than any of them.

Social consciousness is not the first thing one might think of when encountering The Annihilation of Fish, Burnett's as-yet-unreleased 1999 comedy-drama with James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave both playing endearing elderly nutcases who fall in love when they both move into an apartment building owned by Mrs. Muldroone (Margot Kidder, barely recognizable here in her aged makeup). Actually, "nutcase" is a bit too strong of a term to describe them—though they certainly seem like little more than crazy people during the film's set-up, which comes so perilously close to drowning in its "look-at-me" quirks that it nearly tried my patience. But even with the titular Fish (Jones) claiming to be literally wrestling a demon named Hank, and with Poinsettia (Redgrave) experiencing heartbreak after being forced to split for good from her invisible friend Giacomo Puccini—yes, that's right, the famous Italian opera composer—Burnett somehow manages to look past the relentless whimsy and locate the emotional heart within Anthony C. Winkler's oddball screenplay.

It's not so much that Fish and Poinsettia are "crazy," as in mentally insane. In Jones's and Redgrave's performances, there are underlying hints of deep personal pain—perhaps from tragic pasts that the film only slightly hints at—that these idiosyncracies mask; their quirks are their defense mechanisms from worldly hurt. In that sense, their madness is metaphorical in nature rather than literal; at least, that's the way Burnett seems to treat the material. (In a few moments of outright stylization, when Fish wrestles Hank the demon, Burnett's camera sometimes playfully adopts the demon's point-of-view; when he throws the demon out into the trees just outside his apartment window, there's a rustling sound heard in the leaves every time.) Much of the drama of their relationship, then, comes from whether these two characters will eventually break through those defense mechanisms, confront their pain directly and move past the (for lack of a better word) demons unsettling them both.

The Annihilation of Fish isn't quite an overlooked masterpiece; it's less visually distinguished than some of Burnett's previous features (someone at the Q&A session after the film's screening on Friday night suggested that this film might work as a Hallmark Hall of Fame-type movie, which gives you an indication of its visual ambition), and, as I suggested earlier, it's so aggressively whimsical early on that it may drive some viewers nuts in the beginning. And yet, once you ease yourself into the film's zany world, one senses traces of Burnett's usual sensitivity and humanity. He refuses to condescend to this zany material; the film never becomes the cutesy-poo "two-old-codgers" comedy one expects. The result is a film that, against all odds, becomes strangely moving without becoming overly saccharine. (Maybe Burnett would have been a better choice to direct The Beaver than Jodie Foster.)

MoMA's Burnett series runs through April 25, with these aforementioned films receiving second screenings. Again, I'm not sure if I will be able to see any more films in the series (which is exhaustive enough to include a lot of his television work, including his Disney Channel film Nightjohn (1996) and a 2003 PBS documentary about Nat Turner), but if any of you live in New York and don't know much about Burnett, his films are worth taking a chance on. On the basis of what I've seen—all of them brimming with beauty, warmth and insight—I think he's not only one of the finest filmmakers we have in America, but certainly one that deserves to be better known that he is.

[Of these three films, only The Glass Shield is easily available on DVD here in the United States. To Sleep With Anger was released on DVD in England by the British Film Institute, but it looks to be technically out of print now...though, if you're willing to spare the greater expense, you might be able to find used copies somewhere online.]

A Literary Interlude in Honor of Sidney Lumet (1924-2011)

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

...Over the years, critics and others have remarked that I'm interested in the judicial system. Of course I am. Some have said my theater roots show because of the number of plays I've done as movies. Of course they do. There have been a bunch of movies involving parents and children. There have been comedies, some done badly, some better, as well as melodramas and a musical. I've also been accused of being all over the place, of lacking an overwhelming theme that applies to all my work. I don't know if that's true or not. The reason I don't know is that when I open to the first page of a script, I'm a willing captive. I have no preconceived notion that I want the body of my work to be about one particular idea. No script has to fit into an overall theme of my life. I don't have one. Sometimes I'll look back on the work over some years and say to myself, "Oh, that's what I was interested in then."

Whatever I am, whatever the work will amount to, has to come out of my subconscious. I can't approach it cerebrally. Obviously, this is right and correct for me. Each person must approach the problem in whatever way works best for him.

I don't know how to choose work that illuminates what my life is about. I don't know what my life is about and don't examine it. My life will define itself as I live it. The movies will define themselves as I make them. As long as the theme is something I care about at that moment, it's enough for me to start work. Maybe work itself is what my life is about.

And don't get me wrong: The body of work Lumet, the legendary Hollywood director who died at the ripe old age of 86 on Saturday, amassed over the course of his long and fruitful career is certainly a considerable one, in many ways. Me, though, I treasure Lumet not so much for his films (though, of the handful I've seen, I'm wholeheartedly on board with the consensus anointing 12 Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon masterpieces; Network not so much), but for his great book Making Movies, from which the above quote is taken, from its first chapter, titled "The Director: The Best Job in the World."

In Making Movies, the veteran filmmaker not only goes into the nooks and crannies of the filmmaking process in a warm, wise and accessible fashion, but also articulates his own philosophies on filmmaking in ways that usefully illuminate his own art. In the book's third chapter, Lumet offers these valuable and somewhat provocative thoughts on "style" in a film:

Making a movie has always been about telling a story. Some movies tell a story and leave you with a feeling. Some tell a story and leave you with a feeling and give you an idea. Some tell a story, leave you with a feeling, give you an idea, and reveal something about yourself and others. And surely the way you tell that story should relate somehow to what that story is.

Because that's what style is: the way you tell a particular story. After the first critical decision ("What's this story about?") comes the second most important decision: "Now that I know what it's about, how shall I tell it?" And this decision will affect every department involved in the movie that is about to be made.

...Critics talk about style as something apart from the movie because they need the style to be obvious. The reason they need it to be obvious is that they don't really see. If the movie looks like a Ford or Coca-Cola commercial, they think that's style. And it is. It's trying to sell you something you don't need and is stylistically geared to that goal....From the huzzahs that greeted [Claude] Lelouch's A Man and a Woman, one would've thought that another Jean Renoir had arrived. A perfectly pleasant bit of romantic fluff was proclaimed "art," because it was so easy to identify as something other than realism. it's not so hard to see the style in Murder on the Orient Express. But almost no critic spotted the stylization in Prince of the City. It's one of the most stylized movies I've ever made. Kurosawa spotted it, though. In one of the most thrilling moments in my professional life, he talked to me about the "beauty" of the camera work as well as of the picture. But he meant beauty in the sense of its organic connection to the material. And this is the connection that, for me, separates true stylists from decorators. The decorators are easy to recognize. That's why critics love them so.

As the quote above suggests, Lumet as a director was all about serving the script as much as possible, adapting one's style to fit the material. Often, he aimed for as invisible a style as possible, as he was always more interested in allowing storytelling and acting, rather than show-offy directorial fireworks, to make the biggest impression. There's a reason why his films are often acclaimed for the high-quality acting and expert storytelling more than for any consistent signatures on Lumet's part. That is not to say he was lacking in vision—though what that vision is, Lumet, as the passage from Making Movies that opened this post suggests, seemed happy to leave to critics to elucidate.

Whether such conscientious craftsmanship is enough for a filmmaker to be considered a great artist is open for debate, and I won't pretend that I value Lumet's work quite the same way I do other filmmakers—I'm thinking of directors like Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, and many others—who managed to carve out arguably more memorable visions within the classical-Hollywood-cinema tradition. Nevertheless, especially these days, with many mainstream Hollywood releases openly flaunting visual incoherence and pandering to the lowest common denominator, Lumet's humble classicism and respect for an audience's intelligence is worth treasuring, especially now that he's gone.

So rest in peace, Mr. Lumet. And if you haven't read his book yet...well, it's a quick and breezy read, but it's also genuinely enlightening, not only about the filmmaking process, but about Lumet himself and where he was coming from as a director. Other than watching some of his films, I can't think of a better way to commemorate his passing.

At least I can say to myself that I did get to see the man in public once before he died, at an event hosted by The Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2009 featuring him, his daughter Jenny (fresh off of having her script for Rachel Getting Married filmed by Jonathan Demme) and the Journal's film critic, Joe Morgenstern. In fact, I wrote about the event for the organization's Speakeasy blog here!

Enjoy some videos from the event: