January 15, 2010
Career-long collaborators share Martin Scorsese memories
Today, nobody thinks twice about film school as a path to directing, but Jay Cocks remembers a time when the very idea of teaching such a trade seemed preposterous, even risible. Back in those days, Cocks was working as a reporter for Time magazine, where his editor assigned him to look into the phenomenon, a hunt that led him to a motor-mouthed movie buff -- and recent NYU grad -- named Martin Scorsese.
"We immediately became friends because of the holy communion of movies," Cocks says. "I found in him someone who loved movies even more than I did and had seen even more than I had -- and I thought I'd seen a lot."
Scorsese's career-long editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, was similarly impressed when she met the director a few years earlier. She had responded to an ad in the paper for a six-week summer course at NYU, where Scorsese was putting the finishing touches on his first short, "What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?"
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January 14, 2010
On the debt District 9 (and other '09 releases) owe reality TV
Remember the mockumentary genre? Classics such as This Is Spinal Tap and A Hard Day's Night seem almost quaint by comparison with the narrative tricks featured in such 2009 films as The Hurt Locker, District 9, In the Loop and Bruno, all of which use docu-style tactics to immerse us in the action -- or comedy, as the case may be.
Had those four films been released a decade earlier, moviegoers almost surely would have scratched their heads in confusion. What is Bruno exactly (or Borat before it), with its unique mix of scripted material and Candid Camera-style stunts? But the Hollywood aesthetic has changed radically in the 10 years since The Blair Witch Project -- a span that saw the rise of reality television, a boom in theatrical documentary attendance and the advent of YouTube -- and audiences are savvier for it.
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December 31, 2009
Best of 2009
A rough year, you say? Maybe for your 401(k). Meanwhile, Hollywood raked it in, enjoying record box office numbers, as the indie and foreign scene (though spread between fewer companies perhaps) yielded an unprecedented number of treasures. To be honest, I can’t remember the last time I had such a hard time cutting my best-of list off at 10. Surveying my choices, I’m hard-pressed to find a common theme. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I might even wonder what kind of critic can love a G-rated Japanese-animated cartoon and Lars von Trier’s genital-mutilation opus in the same breath, or reconcile the esoteric with the popcorn populism of James Cameron’s Avatar. But there you have it. Of the 274 first-run and festival films I saw last year (that’s as many movies as qualified for Oscar consideration in 2009 — though not the same ones), these are by far the best:
Top 10 of 2009
1. In the Loop
This mockumentary-style political satire from British comedy savant Armando Iannucci brings the fast-talking BBC Four series The Thick of It inside the Beltway, as bellicose “don’t ever call me fucking English” party enforcer Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, playing the full-body equivalent of a throbbing neck vein) preys on the ego and incompetence of his fellow lawmakers to spin both nations into declaring war on an unnamed country. Applying the unfussy fly-on-the-wall approach of The Office to a screenplay that would’ve made Paddy Chayefsky proud, Iannucci intends merely to update Yes Minister for the Iraq era, but in the way that only comedy can, manages to tap into something deeper. As profound as it is profane, the whirlwind of witty barbs and bureaucratic nonsense demands to be seen twice as it poses the terrifying question, What if the principles of showbiz (where nobody knows anything) governed government?
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Worst of 2009
I lied. These aren’t the worst movies of the year. More like my five biggest disappointments, movies that promised the world and delivered a fraction of their potential. To me, that’s far more upsetting than a bad movie, because they’ve squandered the opportunity, and now no one can go back and do it right. You probably won’t agree with my choices (maybe you went into Where the Wild Things Are expecting to be annoyed and came out enraptured — that actually happened to me with co-writer Dave Eggers’ other 2009 release, Away We Go), but these picks were meant to be personal. Here are five letdowns that could have been so much more:
1. Funny People
Let’s face it: No one’s better than Judd Apatow at raunchy-sincere relationship comedies, and I kicked off 2009 covering a day of shooting on Funny People for Collider, so my expectations were sky-high for what looked to be Apatow’s most personal film yet. It also suggested another shot at Serious Acting from Adam Sandler (I’ve been patiently waiting for him to give us more of that Punch-Drunk Love mojo). The stars, as they say, were in alignment. What we got, however, was a long, rambling and deeply self-indulgent powwow between a bunch of talented comics. The characters dress and talk and slouch like us (making this what exactly, a big-budget Mumblecore movie?), but I couldn’t have felt less connected as Apatow struggled to decide whether the movie was about a young joke-writer (Seth Rogen) trying to make it or an old hand (Sandler) trying to make good.
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December 07, 2009
Observations on 61 Years of Oscar Foreign Language Winners
Two years ago, midway through a mostly uneventful Oscar ceremony, the Academy featured a montage celebrating 50 years of Oscar foreign-language winners. It was a stunning interlude, edited by director Giuseppe Tornatore with the same care he paid the kissing montage at the end of "Cinema Paradiso" and presented without a single word of dialogue — not so much an ironic choice as one that demonstrated the common language of cinema.
I was floored. What were these films? Of the 61 winners to date (counting the eight pics honored before the category was officially introduced in 1956), I'd seen maybe 15. There were landmark films by the likes of Fellini (a four-time winner), Bergman (three), Kurosawa (two) and Truffaut (one), whose titles I knew, yet never managed to see. And what about such unfamiliar and enigmatic-sounding winners as "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion" (1970) and "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" (1980)?
Surely this was a sign. I vowed to track down and watch every Oscar foreign-language winner (no easy feat, as many are unavailable on DVD). My project began in earnest the first week of 2009 with Vittorio De Sica's "Shoe-Shine" (1947) and proceeded in more or less chronological order at a pace of roughly a film a week for the entire year, culminating Dec. 1 with a special Academy-facilitated screening of that most elusive title, 1982's "Volver a empezar."
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