Artistic Consumption Log, June 6, 2011-June 12, 2011

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Deep End (1970)

Films

★ Tuesday, After Christmas (2010, Radu Muntean), screened at Film Forum in New York

I'm working on a blog post that partly deals with this film, which I think becomes an impressive one once you adjust to its completely exterior view of the events and characters it portrays. Muntean refuses to provide any easy explanations for the behavior of these extremely down-to-earth characters, instead relying on his trio of terrific actors and the juxtaposition of scenes and shots to suggest the inner emotions driving these characters. The approach got me thinking more intensely than I usually do about just how much we should actually care about explaining character motivations in movies.

The Menacing Eye (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski), screened at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, N.Y.

Erotique (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski), screened at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, N.Y.

Little Hamlet (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski), screened at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, N.Y.

★ Identification Marks: None (1965, Jerzy Skolimowski), screened at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, N.Y.

★ Deep End (1970, Jerzy Skolimowski), screened at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, N.Y.

This weekend, a retrospective of films by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski began up at the Museum of the Moving Image; I caught a couple of his features on Saturday, and preceding the first of those features were three short films he made at Lodz Film School in 1960. All three of them feature some fascinating images; none of them, though, suggest the penchant toward a long-take vignette style that would be evident not only in his tragic sexual coming-of-age masterpiece Deep End, but in his black-and-white debut feature Identification Marks: None, which takes the pulse of Poland's lost, wandering post-war generation through detailing the last few hours before its main character, Andrzej Lecsczyc (played by Skolimowski himself), is set to go off to military service. Even in his first film, though, you can sense a director willing to explore characters, emotions and environments in ways that go beyond the dictates of three-act structures—an aesthetic taken to a certain zenith in a lengthy seriocomic sequence outside a strip club in Deep End. I look forward to seeing more of his work, for sure. (Here is some more information about the Museum of the Moving Image series.)

 Music

Test Pattern (2008, Ryoji Ikeda)

More music featured in Ikeda's recently concluded installation at the Park Avenue Armory, the transfinite. For once, the music works better with the images accompanying it, I think.

★ Immigrès (1986, Youssou N'Dour)

★ The Lion (1989, Youssou N'Dour)

★ Set (1990, Youssou N'Dour)

One of my roommates is a big fan of this Senegalese musician, and offered me an extra ticket to see him at Terminal 5 on June 24 as part of the Blue Note Jazz Festival. So I assented, and am now trying to catch up with his music. Immigrès is the most jazz-like of the three I've listened to so far, featuring as it does a mere four tracks with lots of improvisation within them. It's a lot of fun. Less fun, but nevertheless effective and sometimes haunting, is the more pop-oriented The Lion, which features Peter Gabriel—who apparently was instrumental in bringing N'Dour to the public eye—as a guest voice in "Shaking the Tree." Set, though, strikes me as a more successful fusion of Western and African sounds; certainly, it's the most stylistically and sonically adventurous. Of course, N'Dour's griot-like tenor remains impassioned and compelling throughout.

All that said: I listened to all of these on (legally purchased) mp3s, but without a lyric sheet available. Am I missing anything important by not always having a handle on what he's singing in his native Senegalese tongue?

Bruckner: Symphony No. 5 (1964, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Eugen Jochum)

There are, as far as I know, four recordings of German conductor Eugen Jochum's interpretations of Anton Bruckner's Fifth Symphony. They are all roughly the same interpretively: a second-rate imitation of Wilhelm Furtwängler's freely intuitive style, "spontaneous" in the most studied of ways. The approach probably works best for this particular Bruckner symphony, however. Bruckner's Fifth operates, more so than in his other symphonies, on quicksilver changes of pulse, mood and dynamics; conductors seem to either try to fuse it all together into a unified-sounding whole, or they choose to emphasize the work's near-schizophrenic nature and let the structure look after itself, so to speak. Jochum fits into the latter category, and for the most part I can accept his wayward tempo fluctuations within Bruckner's immaculately worked-out symphonic structure because, more often than not, they usually fit the mood of given moments.

For those who haven't heard this great work—perhaps my favorite of Bruckner's symphonies, for reasons I myself don't even fully comprehend, really—the classic recordings from Bernard Haitink (his 1972 recording with this same orchestra, included in this complete Philips set) and Herbert von Karajan (his epic 1976 account with the Berlin Philharmonic, included in his complete Deutsche Grammophon cycle) offer better introductions. Jochum's performances are for those who already grasp the structure and are looking for a more adventurous approach to the work. In that case, then, it's probably worth seeking out his final recording of the piece, a live recording from 1986 with the Concertgebouw that is arguably the best of his four. But this Philips recording from 1964—taped during a live performance at Ottobeuren Abbey to commemorate its 1200th anniversary—is a decent alternative (especially because the other two performances—one from 1958 with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the other from 1980 with the Dresden Staatskapelle—are only available in complete box sets). 

Dance

The Bright Stream (2003, Alexei Ratmansky), performed by the American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York

The libretto for this one—basically, the joys of living on a collective farm in Russia during the 1930s—is extremely slight, but once you get past that, Alexei Ratmansky's The Bright Stream becomes a showcase for many coups of choreography accompanying one of Dmitri Shostakovich's most purely enjoyable (read: less emotionally turbulent than usual) and optimistic scores—ironically, one of the scores that (along with his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk) that got him in trouble with Stalin for a period of time before he was welcomed back to the Soviet Union's good graces with his Fifth Symphony. Despite one official recording of the work, with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra led by Russian conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, from 1996, The Bright Stream remained mostly neglected until Ratmansky decided to revive it and come up with his own choreography. And what wonderful choreography it is—filled with the kind of riotous, joyful invention that was missing from John Neumeier's Lady of the Camellias last week.

Art

Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2011, Ai Weiwei), at Central Park's Grand Army Plaza in New York

Seeing these twelve bronze zodiac heads—some of them wearing expressions of snarling fury—in the otherwise placid Pulitzer Fountain in this particular area of Manhattan makes for a thought-provoking contrast. Free Ai Weiwei! (This installation is up until July 15.)

Miscellaneous

Joel & Ethan Coen In Conversation With Noah Baumbach, at Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center in New York
Film Society of Lincoln Center's wonderful new movie house, the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, opened this weekend, and among the many free screenings and talks scheduled for this inaugural weekend was Friday night's evening with the Coen Brothers and Noah Baumbach on the same stage talking about their work. Frankly, it wasn't the most illuminating event of its type I've sat through; fresh insights into their creative processes were fairly sparse, and the evening as a whole was a pretty unfocused affair (there was no moderator for this, and it probably could have used one). But at least I got to see these filmmakers joking around with each other in person. And at least it was free. Plus, I did find one nugget of illumination: I had not realized just how similar the openings of their first feature, Blood Simple (1984), and their later No Country for Old Men (2007) are: a montage of landscape shots with voiceover narration from a supporting character setting up mood and themes rather than the plot.

Oh, and I still haven't seen anything by Noah Baumbach beyond Greenberg and, I guess, his scripts with Wes Anderson. So I was there mostly for the Coens, not for him.

Video for the Day: Angry Theater Texter

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Yesterday, this video circulated among many of my Facebook friends and Twitter folk I follow:



Kudos to the Alamo Drafthouse—the small theater chain in Texas, which I referred to two posts ago—for sticking to their guns and enforcing their no-texting-during-screenings rule. Now, if only most big-chain theaters were nearly as rigorous in such enforcement! Then perhaps this young (I assume) lady wouldn't have assumed—after years, I assume, of getting away with this kind of rude behavior—that texting during a movie was an acceptable habit. While surely this woman needs a lesson in movie-theater etiquette, maybe AMC and Regal theaters also need to do a better job enforcing such etiquette in their theaters; from my experience, if no one speaks up to complain about such problems, nothing is done. It's not like I usually see employees pop in every once in a while to check up on what its customers are doing.

Having watched films at a couple of Alamo Drafthouse theaters, I know how serious they are about providing the best theatrical experience possible for its patrons; perhaps big-chain theaters need to start thinking the same way. Is that too much to ask for? If this recent story about careless projectionists leaving 3-D lenses on while projecting 2-D movies is any indication, maybe it is...

Literary (Film Criticism) Interlude, Vertigo Edition

NEW YORK—

The dream in Vertigo—the dream of a love that leads to death, of a beautiful illusion that gives way to nothingness—is also a dream of the movies....More so than any other of [Alfred] Hitchcock's works (more so, I would say, than any other movie), Vertigo speaks of a passion for film, a passion that isn't always a healthy one. It's a love for the illusory and the ineffable that is also a love for the false, the bloodless, the empty.

Because recorded sound and the photographic image are direct impressions of reality, film is the most immediate and sensually enrapturing. But because those sounds and images are ultimately only a field of light and shadow, the movies are also the least material of art forms. You can't touch a movie in the way you can touch a book or painting; a reel of film is a mute, meaningless thing, articulate only when light and motion make it speak. In Vertigo, Hitchcock dramatizes the duality of the material and the intangible that is the inner mystery of the movies. It becomes a tale of sexuality and death, and the tragedy of the story springs directly from the tragic nature of the medium. On film, presence and absence, sex and death, are inseparable.

—Dave Kehr, from "Hitch's Riddle: On Five Rereleased Films," originally published in the May-June 1984 issue of Film Comment, republished in When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade (2011)

A more eloquent summation of not only the everlasting appeal of Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece, but of the cinema in general, is hard to imagine. What did the late film critic Robin Wood once say about Hitchcock's later Marnie (1964)? That "if you don't love Marnie, you don't love cinema"? I'd say the same for Vertigo, for sure; for me, at least, that film is the movies—as beautiful and disturbing a meditation on the allures and dangers of movies and moviegoing as has ever been made anywhere.

Artistic Consumption Log: May 30, 2011-June 5, 2011

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Yeelen (1987)

Films

★ Yeelen (1987, Souleymane Cissé), screened at Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y. Other than Mahamat Salet-Haroun's recent Chad-set drama A Screaming Man (2010), this may well be the first African film I've actually seen (I know, I know, I need to catch up on my Ousmane Sembène). Being that A Screaming Man had nothing at all do with cultural myths, Cissé's opening evocation of Malian folklore felt like a breath of fresh air right off the bat. The rest of the film gloriously lives up to that opening; its transcendent finish suggests a rebirth with some of the same abstract purity of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

★ The Thin Red Line (1998, Terrence Malick), screened at home in East Brunswick, N.J., on 20th Century Fox DVD  

Yes, I finally caught up with my one Malick blind spot on Friday afternoon...and while DVD is far from an ideal viewing format for a film as visually grand and spiritually ambitious this, I was still mightily impressed; in fact, I might consider this my favorite of his last three features (though that second viewing of The Tree of Life still awaits to possibly nudge me in another direction). I do hope I get another chance to see this on a big screen eventually, having forgone a chance to do so a few weeks ago at the Museum of the Moving Image in favor of singing, among other things, Billy Joel's "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" at a karaoke bar with friends in midtown Manhattan. I regret nothing.

★ X-Men: First Class (2011, Matthew Vaughn), screened at AMC Bridgewater Commons in Bridgewater, N.J.  

With the exception of a couple of scenes involving Magneto lifting an anchor and, later, a whole submarine, the action scenes aren't especially memorable, and some of the CGI is just shoddy. Nevertheless, I ended up enjoying this overall, much to my surprise. This prequel, of course, spends much of its time charting the path toward the eventual rift between Magneto and Professor X—two enemies with vastly different paths toward a common goal—and on that front, it's surprisingly involving and intriguing; Michael Fassbender (Magneto) and James McAvoy (Professor X) are the clear MVPs here. Plus, the whole thing is done with a reasonably light touch, in contrast to the dogged Dark Knight-like self-seriousness that seems to be the comic-book norm. I had fun. (By the way, I saw the film in one of New Jersey's three AMC Dine-In theaters—which one could consider the big-chain equivalent of the Alamo Drafthouse chain in Austin, Texas, in which one can order restaurant-quality food—as opposed to just popcorn, nachos, soda, and so on—before and/or during a movie. It was cool. It's also something that, as far as I know, isn't in any New York AMC theaters yet...so on this front, New Jersey 1, New York 0!)

★ Film Socialisme (2010, Jean-Luc Godard), screened at IFC Center in New York  

This was my second time seeing Godard's latest film, my first being at a New York Film Festival press screening last year; I pooled some initial impressions from that screening here. I think I have a clearer idea of what Godard is up to in this film, though its politics still mostly go over my head. Either way, this is a film that defiantly resists easy interpretation—and to my mind, that's to Godard's credit (Christy Lemire's protests to the contrary). At the very least, its visual beauties remain undiminished, and I actually found it a funnier and warmer film than I had remembered the first time around. It's good to know that this grand old man of French cinema is still capable of being playfully amusing in his perpetually irascible state.

★ Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock), screened at Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y.
This was my first time seeing Hitchcock's masterpiece in a theater, though I doubt I saw it in actual Vista-Vision; apparently, San Francisco's Castro Theatre, not BAM, is the place to go to see it in its full 70mm glory this week. The film—one of my personal top five, I'd say, at the moment—is still as deeply disturbing an experience as ever. I recently wrote a bit about it for this year's Muriel Awards here.

Music

★ Op. (2002, Ryoji Ikeda)  

An especially noteworthy album for Ikeda, if only because this one features actual string instruments making the melody-free noises instead of his usual barrage of electronic manipulations.

★ Dataplex (2005, Ryoji Ikeda)
Wherein I heard a lot of the sounds I recognized from Ikeda's new art installation the transfinite. 

Literature

★ When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade (2011, Dave Kehr)  

I hope one day to be able to discuss cinematic techniques and the meaning they create with as much intelligence and eloquence as Kehr can. I knew he was a great critic based on his Chicago Reader capsule reviews and his New York Times DVD columns, but this compilation establishes him as an important one as well—or important to me, at least.

Dance

Lady of the Camellias (1978-81, John Neumeier), performed by the American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House  

This was my first time seeing the American Ballet Theatre live (I have tickets to two more performances in their brief spring season, one coming up later in the week), and at the very least I enjoyed the fact that I had far better seats this time around than I did when I saw the Metropolitan Opera's production of Nixon in China a few months back (I had a $22 standing-room ticket for that one, and ended up standing the whole time). Pity that the work itself isn't better.

The umpteenth adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils's famous novel of the same name—also the basis for Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Traviata and the 1936 Greta Garbo vehicle Camille, among many others—this one apparently hews much closer to the book in its flashback-heavy structure and its mingling of literature-driven fantasy and reality. Problem is, in trying to stay faithful to the book, Neumeier doesn't always make the action easy to follow as ballet, and the whole thing ends up seeming overstuffed. Worse, the level of choreographic inspirations runs hot and cold: for every breathtakingly intimate pas de deux, there are larger-scale dances that struck this admitted dance novice as rote decorative pageantry.

Still, there are some indelibly stylized romantic tête-à-têtes here, especially in its tragic third act, and the dancers brought as much expression as possible to the complex, and sometimes rather violent, movements Neumeier calls upon them to pull off. Oh, and all of it is scored to Chopin—not only some of his piano music, but his entire Second Piano Concerto and parts of his First. The pit orchestra's performance was disappointingly perfunctory, to my ears, but the solo piano playing—handled by three soloists, some of them onstage—was solid enough. If nothing else, Lady of the Camellias immediately made me want to dive into Chopin's music in more depth. (If you haven't heard his piano concertos, though...you're not missing much. They suck.)

If you're interested in watching Lady of the Camellias and won't be able to see it at the Met...well, someone apparently uploaded a filmed live performance of Neumeier's ballet onto YouTube. Here's Part 1, to start you all off:

The Rest of Ebertfest, Part II

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Hopefully after this post, I will finally be done with Ebertfest stuff (sorry if I sound less than completely into this, but I'd really rather move onto other things; Ebertfest was, like, a whole freakin' month ago. Damn you, Blogger and your epic service hiccup a few weeks ago!).

DAY FOUR

This was a big day: four films in one day, culminating in the highlight of the festival as far as celebrity appearances go. If you don't know by now who I'm referring to, you'll see soon enough.

After a better night's sleep than what I had gotten in the previous two evenings, I rolled out of bed early that Saturday, April 30, and took a special shuttle bus with accompanying police escort—to help navigate us through a marathon that was passing through Urbana, Ill., that morning—to the Virginia Theatre for the first film of the day, Jennifer Arnold's documentary A Small Act (2010). 

The film follows the efforts of a Kenyan activist, Chris Mburu, to try to help children in Kenya get a better education and thus put themselves on the path to a better life. Mburu himself was inspired by a selfless act of charity at the hands of Hilde Back, a Swedish Holocaust survivor who, when Mburu was a poor child in Kenya, donated enough money through a sponsorship program to ensure that he could continue his education. Mburu's own philanthropic efforts, then, could be seen as his way of paying it forward.

Things gets complicated, though, when Kenya becomes torn apart by violence after the much-disputed 2008 presidential elections—and Mburu's fight to keep his efforts going as his country is thrown into such turmoil become the most interesting part of Arnold's film. What looked to be a self-congratulatory back-patting documentary about the power of charity suddenly develops a measure of real drama that, I would assume, is something that Arnold & co. could not have anticipated at the outset of shooting this film.

Elsewhere, A Small Act is certainly well-intentioned, and the pro-charity sentiments it expresses are more or less unassailable. Personally, though, I wouldn't have minded a bit more interrogation of Mburu's brand of philanthropy, in which the determination of whether a Kenyan student will get the funding needed to continue his/her education hinges entirely on one single test. And why only select a handful of students rather than, say, a whole village of them? Arnold's documentation of Mburu's charitable efforts strike me as a bit too much hero worship for my taste—though certainly that isn't to deny the laudable heroism behind his efforts. [The film is currently available on DVD through Docurama.]

A better film about Africans struggling through adversity followed A Small Act: Life, Above All (2010). Like last year's Winter's Bone (2010), Oliver Schmitz's film focuses on a young girl, a South African 13-year-old named Chanda (Khomotso Manyaka) as she singlehandedly tries to hold her family together in spite of serious obstacles: the death of a sibling, a drunken father and deterioriating mother, the looming specter of AIDS, the suspicions of a backwards village. The plot outlines may be rather familiar, and stylistically the film is never particularly adventurous; unlike Debra Granik's Gothic depiction of life in the Ozarks in Winter's Bone, for the most part, one wouldn't mistake this film's depiction of South Africa for anything but grounded and realistic. Nevertheless, Schmitz and screenwriter Dennis Foon, adapting a young-adult novel by Allan Stratton, manage to craft an affecting human drama out of Chanda's struggles without lapsing into melodramatic hysterics (a trap that eventually ruined Debra Granik's overpraised drama), and Manyaka's toughness and generosity of spirit keeps you watching. It has a problematic finish that can be read either as the heroine's own wish-fulfillment or as a forced attempt at a happy ending—but it's not enough to mar an otherwise solid film. [Life, Above All is set to get a theatrical release on July 15, 2011; New Yorkers will have a chance to see it on June 30 as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.]

A more surprising revelation came in the next film on that day's roster: Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass (2009). I didn't get a chance to see this when it got a small, much-delayed theatrical release in New York during the second half of last year, so this screening at Ebertfest represented my first encounter with it. If I had seen Leaves of Grass last year, it might have cracked my Top 10. It's that good.

Leaves of Grass, on a broad level, is about the ways all of us human beings try to reconcile our intellectual and emotional sides. Nelson starts out by presenting us with two twin brothers, both of them played by Edward Norton in perhaps one of the great dual performances in cinema. One of them, Bill, is a Brown University philosophy professor who approaches life in an overly logical manner; the other, Brady, is a small-time pot grower in Oklahoma who lives a life of carefree excess. You could say Bill represents the Apollo to Brady's Dionysus, to borrow Friedrich Nietzsche's famous formulation in The Birth of Tragedy. Eventually, though, the film's Apollonian and Dionysian impulses clash as Brady lures Bill back to Oklahoma and the Ivy League professor finds himself embroiled in all sorts of Fargo-like shenanigans when Brady's attempt to rip off a local drug lord ends in disaster. But it's not only Bill who is forced to adopt a more impulsive approach in the wake of so many dead bodies; the film's narrative also, in a way, starts to go haywire, with its second half's sudden turn toward darker, more violent and more outrageous terrain.

Leaves of Grass reminded me of one my most cherished films of recent years, Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang's 2003 film Last Life in the Universe. Though Pen-ek's sensibility is far more lyrical and elusive than Nelson's, his film also pits two contrasting characters—one a shy Japanese librarian who lives a life of neatness and restraint, the other a free-spirited Thai woman in thrall to her emotions and aspirations—against each other and watches the sparks that fly. The narrative in Last Life in the Universe also takes a (far subtler and stranger) turn toward a kind of intellectual abstraction, but I think the general idea that animates both these films are, at heart, the same: a humane embrace of the messiness and confusion that sometimes envelops all of us in our own lives. Sometimes life itself just doesn't operate in any logical way, however much we might try to mold our own experiences in something intellectually satisfying; it may be better to just go with the flow and see where you end up. In those ways, Leaves of Grass proves not only be to be shocking and funny, but also rather profound. [The film is available on DVD and Blu-ray from First Look Studios.]

But the main event of this penultimate day of Ebertfest came in the form of...

Yes, that's right: the one and only Tilda Swinton came to Urbana, Ill., to talk about her work in conjunction with a screening of I Am Love (2009). For many at Ebertfest, this was clearly the big event of the festival, the climax of which the next day's one final screening would be little more than an agreeable epilogue.

I've already written a bit about Luca Guadagnino's melodrama here; seeing it again on the Virginia Theatre's large screen—a perfect medium for a film of such extremes, visually and emotionally—only made me appreciate even more not only how beautiful it consistently looks, but how its beauty—rather than being merely decorative or pictorial—works in concert with the emotions of its main character, a Russian housewife in Italy named Emma (Swinton). Guadagnino's camera roams around the various spaces she inhabits, whether coldly sterile or lushly passionate (he is, of course, assisted invaluably by cinematographer Yorick Le Saux), and finds all sorts of visual correlatives to the feelings she is unable to verbally articulate—and Swinton herself lends the character a tactile emotional transparency that helps push the film, especially during its second hour, into the realms of near-silent cinema. (I know most people think her performance in Julia (2008) is one of the greatest feats of screen acting in recent years, and it's impressive, don't get me wrong—but I rather prefer her performance here, maybe because of how internal it is by comparison to her relentlessly, if necessarily, showy turn in Zonca's film.) 

It was an inspired choice on Ebert's part to juxtapose I Am Love and Leaves of Grass, because Guadagnino's film, it turns out, also explores the same intellect vs. emotion dichotomy that Nelson's film tackles. Here, that "intellectual" side takes the form of the repression brought on by upper-class privilege, an emotional prison that threatens to contain Emma's more passionate side. When she meets her son Edoardo's friend and business partner Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), she throws caution to the wind and starts a torrid love affair...but is it love that spurs her on, or merely the thrill of breaking a societal taboo? Emma has just received a letter from her daughter, Betta (Alba Rohrwacher), in which she admits to carrying on a lesbian relationship; the intrigue that this inspires in her can be seen in Swinton's face. Is the conclusion—in which, aided by the raucous conclusion of John Adams's Harmonielehre, Emma defiantly casts off her classy high-end wardrobe, puts on less glitzy suburban wear, takes one last approving look at her daughter, and escapes that prison of a fancy house—a pure feminist triumph or an ambiguous one? It's telling that, in the middle of the end credits, Guadagnino includes a final, dreamlike image of Swinton and Antonio in a cave, with Swinton slowly peering out of it. Her defiance has, in essence, brought her back into some kind of metaphorical womb, looking into a deeply uncertain future.

Nothing uncertain about what happened after the screening, though: Tilda Swinton arrived onstage to a standing ovation and treated us all to an approximately hour-long Q&A session that never flagged in fascinating anecdotes, bits of artistic philosophy and such.

Apparently the livestream still exists online, if you're willing to put up with what I assume is consistently lackluster video quality:

I would have tried to crash a VIP-only after-party afterwards to try to meet Swinton in person, but I couldn't even begin to summon up the energy to think about such a thing as I staggered out of the Virginia Theatre at around 1 a.m. after this whole long day was over.

DAY FIVE

Being that only one film was shown on the last day of Ebertfest—Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel's rousing documentary Louder than a Bomb—and that I already wrote about it here...well, I guess I can move on to my postscript.

POSTSCRIPT

The one thing I treasured most about my first Ebertfest experience wasn't meeting Roger Ebert in person or making the new friends that I did. No, Ebertfest did what not even South by Southwest was quite able to accomplish: reawaken my awareness of the pleasures of the cinematic theatrical experience. It had been a while since I felt real tingles of anticipation whenever the lights went down and the curtains went up as a film began...but every film at the Virginia Theatre—even films like Metropolis, Umberto D., Tiny Furniture and I Am Love that I had seen previously—felt like an honest-to-God event. It helps that every film looked spectacular on that screen; high marks to ace projectionists James Bond and Steve Krauss. Ebertfest helped remind me of what I love most about seeing movies in a theater—and in the age of movies being watched on smartphones, this strikes me as no small accomplishment indeed.

But, of course, it was tons of fun in the social department as well, the highlight coming on the night of Thursday, April 28, when I tagged along with a whole group of people to indulge in some hot karaoke action at a nearby bar. Having become quite the karaoke fiend recently, I naturally seized upon this opportunity to get in front of that large group of people to sing one of my new favorites tunes, The Cars' "Just What I Needed" (off their great 1977 self-titled debut, of which I may devote an entire blog post to in the near future).

Alas, this time around, I didn't think to record myself in the midst of what I was told was an impressive performance. So instead, here's a video of another memorable performance from that night, this one courtesy of...Chaz Ebert!

And finally, one last long, wistful look at the historic landmark of a house in which I stayed:

I never did find out, by the way, which room President Lincoln actually slept in—though that's because the host wasn't even entirely sure himself. It was nevertheless a nice place to stay for Ebertfest; if I return to Urbana, Ill., for next year's Ebertfest, I might stay here again. Hey, the price is right, at least!

And now the Ebertfest 2011 chapter of my life is closed. Moving along...

(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: