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‘The Lachrymist’ is a Mind-Bending, One-Take Wonder
4 hours ago
Short of the DayHang on to your sanity.
Literally, the word “lachrymology” means “the study of crying.” Philosophically, it describes the belief that spiritual advancement is only possible through pain, both of the physical and emotional varieties.
While The Lachrymist from writer-director Matthew Gowan doesn’t confront this philosophy head on, it is certainly an emotional undercurrent of this taut, chilling, deviously confounding tale of psychological terror.
The plot is hauntingly simple: Savitri (Navi Rawat, Numb3rs, The O.C.) checks into a hotel room with her husband Byron (James Harvey Ward, True Blood, Low Winter Sun). At one point, she leaves the room, but when she tries to make her way back to it, somehow she can’t seem to find it. She asks the staff to help her, but they can’t because she’s not a registered guest of the hotel. Furthermore, they claim to have never seen her, and »
- H. Perry Horton
My Genre-Film Love Shakes The Earth When It Stomps, The Coming of ‘Colossal’
6 hours ago
My Genre Film Love Shakes The Earth When It Stomps, The Coming of ‘Colossal’We’re talking Nacho Vigalondo and his out-of-this-world genre filmmaking.
It’s easy to take for granted the idea that great literature is the only medium out there accurately capturing time, place, and people. Or, that the Great [Insert Your Country] Novel is the only thing studying what humanity is made of in your neck of the woods. And, because of that, movies frequently don’t deserve the same level of consideration. Balderdash. My counter-argument? Basically, Hamlet is a movie, innit? Argument settled.
I kid. It is really easy to see movies as a fun diversion instead of a substantive exploration of humanity. Don’t get me wrong, I know we take our dramas fairly seriously. But, I think folks tend to experience the emotional wash of a movie and then allow it to roll away like the tide going out as the credits run. Genre »
- William Dass
‘20th Century Women’ and the Movement of Memory
7 hours ago
A montage of meaningful repetition.
Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women, on its surface, is the anecdotal story of Dorothea (Annette Bening) and her son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), who are essentially raising each other in late-70s Southern California. From the first scenes we understand that what we’re seeing is a reflection, it’s a composite of memories from Dorothea, Jamie, and the hodgepodge of people in their lives, played by Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, and Elle Fanning. At its core, then, 20th Century Women is a movie of multiple subjectivities and it’s narrative moves like a memory, repeating, refracting, altering, even mythologizing. Mills’ Oscar-nominated screenplay does a deft job of navigating these at-times complementary, at-times conflicting perspectives, but it isn’t just in words that his film deals with the movement of memory, the visuals as well serve as echoes of one another, as proven by this eloquent montage edited by Alice Sanna.
In »
- H. Perry Horton
When Meaningful Cinema Is Entertaining
8 hours ago
‘Wild Tales’ and ‘Get Out’ prove entertainment and depth are not mutually exclusive.
“I am altogether opposed to popular entertainment,” says Jean Cocteau, “because I consider that all good entertainment is popular.” The filmmaker and poet continues by describing how “film expresses something other than what it is, something that no one can predict. In any event, the measure of love with which it is charged will affect the masses more than any subtle and witty concoction.” Whilst there is an over saturation of images in 21st century culture (be that through small-screen phones or widescreen televisions) that leaves viewers familiar with repeated tropes and narrative devices, it’s easy to forget that cinema created to entertain the viewer can still have artistic depth. Rather than being about itself, or l’art pour l’art to use Théophile Gautier’s 19th century phrase, films intended to entertain can only exist with a mass audience. As »
- Sinéad McCausland
Review — ‘The Blackcoat’s Daughter’ Takes a Class in the Devil’s Arithmetic
9 hours ago
‘The Blackcoat’s Daughter’ Takes a Class in the Devil’s ArithmeticThree girls, one night of terror.
High school is an awkward time for most teenagers, but young Kat (Kiernan Shipka) seems especially put off by its mundane norms and cruelties. She’s slightly removed from the hustle and bustle of her peers, and as the campus of her remote all girls’ Catholic school empties out for winter break she finds herself stuck there for a few extra days. Her parents are going to be late picking her up, and she’s left in the company of two adults — sisters in Christ who help run the school and keep the girls in line — and a fellow student named Rose (Lucy Boynton). She’s older but not all that wiser, and after warning Kat about the devil-worshiping “sisters” and how they supposedly don’t have body hair she sneaks out to meet a boyfriend.
Isolation »
- Rob Hunter
The Straw Feminism of Lady Lands in Classic Sci-Fi
10 hours ago
Worlds where powerful women rule just to be dethroned.
In classic sci-fi from the 1950s and 60s, there’s a very specific subgenre that deals with alien planets or hidden worlds populated entirely by women. In the video store where I used to work in Portland, Or, Movie Madness, we called this subgenre “Male Chauvinist Fantasies/Nightmares,” because that’s usually how these flicks go: male astronauts/explorers discover a world where the only inhabitants are lovely alien ladies who’ve gone too long without the company of men. This works itself out in one of two ways: it’s a fantasy world of a commitment-less sex and blind idolatry on the part of the women, or it’s a nightmare, the women are alone for a reason, and that reason usually revolves around breeding men to death. Either way there’s a lot of sex implied, but the connotations fluctuate.
We »
- H. Perry Horton
‘Legion’ Concludes Its First Season an Open (Comic) Book
10 hours ago
Last night’s finale literally drove off into the unknown.
It’s not the best comic book adaptation of all time, nor is it a perfect superhero screen story, but Legion might be the greatest attempt to produce something of this genre for actual grown ups. As its own source material (Marvel’s X-Men comics) also leads the new trend toward R-rated superhero movie fare, the FX series reminds us that swear words and graphic violence and nudity don’t make something more suited to adults. That would be smart storytelling, which is Legion’s currency.
It’s complicated, though, because the show is, at its heart, still just a silly comic book tale of super-powered mutants and weird science and often cartoonish action. But it’s intelligently structured, challenging its audience mentally as it takes us literally into the minds of its characters. Sometimes plots are made more complex like this in order to hide flaws »
- Christopher Campbell
Happy Holidays from Pt Anderson: The Director’s New Film Drops Christmas Day
12 hours ago
Anytime Paul Thomas Anderson releases a new movie is cause for celebration, but this year doubly so.
Via Jeff Sneider, Eic of The Tracking Board, it was announced yesterday at the Focus Features presentation during Cinema Con that the writer-director’s next film, the yet-to-be-officially-titled collaboration with Daniel Day Lewis about a royal dressmaker in the 1950s, will be released here in the Us on Christmas Day 2017.
No footage was shown and that pesky working title — Phantom Thread — was neither confirmed nor denied, but by all accounts production is going swimmingly and an end-date is in sight. As I mentioned above, the film deals with a dressmaker, played by Day Lewis, but specifically the film “illuminates the life behind the curtain of an uncompromising dressmaker commissioned by royalty and high society.” Other members of the cast include Lesley Manville (Secrets & Lies), Richard Graham (Titanic), and Vicky Krieps (Hanna). It wasn’t revealed whether the December 25th release »
- H. Perry Horton
Michael Keaton’s Vulture Could Fix Marvel’s Villain Problem
13 hours ago
Just be happy it’s not another portal.
You know about Marvel movies by now, let’s not be coy. It’s hard to avoid them considering there’re toy, TV (streaming and traditional), comic, snack, amusement park, and film properties developing the lucrative universe and all its heroes. But its villains, that’s always the issue. It’s comic rival, DC, has always had the better villains. Joker, Mr. Freeze, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, General Zod, Bizarro, Brainiac, Lex Luthor. I bet you recognized at least one of those names. With Suicide Squad, it proved even its minor leaguers could make a smash (financial) hit. Marvel’s a bit of a different story.
Would fans watch a film starring a team-up of Obadiah Stane, Whiplash, and Thor’s Dark Elves? Probably not. Would some nod their heads knowingly as I made up a name for the weird bugs/robots/aliens that came through the various portals in »
- Jacob Oller
Is Louise Belcher the Best Defense Lawyer on Television?
14 hours ago
‘Bob’s Burgers’ understands courtroom drama better than its serious minded contemporaries.
Atrial is theater with purpose. We can skip around it. We can willfully ignore it. However, we cannot escape it. Jury trials are the performance of justice in pursuit of justice. Our adversarial legal system is many things but through its focus on the persuasion of a jury of one’s peers it must by its very nature lure the finders of fact to a side through the showmanship of reason. Television trial sequences are doubly so. Sometimes on screen persuasion takes the form of heated drama a la Law & Order and other times, as the case with Bob’s Burgers “A Few ‘Gurt Men,” it is comedy.
The setup for the episode is simple. The Belcher kids are involved in a mock trial simulation at school. Gene, as the prosecution, is beyond excited and Louise, as the defense, is »
- Francesca Fau
‘Von Doom’ is the Unofficial Film the Doctor Deserves
29 March 2017 5:02 PM, PDT
Short of the DayForget the Four, This Villainous Film is Fantastic.
For my money, there really isn’t a Marvel villain as classically iconic as Dr. Doom. He looks like a villain, talks like a villain, acts like a villain, and embodies pure, ravenous evil. He’s intelligent, devious, fearless and ruthless, and he puts folks like Green Goblin or Doctor Octopus to shame on the scale of no-goodery.
But man oh man Victor Von Doom can’t catch a break on the big screen. In the 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four films he was depicted as a pretty-boy siphoning electrical energy with his body, and in the 2015 version of events he’s a disgraced lecher turning on old friends. Neither is particularly worthy of the villain from the comics, and with the recent announcement that Venom is getting his own, Spidey-free film next year, I’m wondering if the problem isn’t Victor, but »
- H. Perry Horton
Stephen King’s ‘It’ Wins Us Over With Creepy As Hell First Trailer
29 March 2017 4:42 PM, PDT
We could be looking at the best King adaptation since ‘The Mist.’
If you’re like me, well first off congratulations, but more relevantly, the announcement of a feature film adaptation of Stephen King’s epic horror novel, It, probably left you feeling conflicted. On the one hand, more King adaptations and horror films in general are undeniably good things. On the other though, that’s a lot of book to cram into a feature film, and we already have a fairly competent mini-series adaptation as well.
Plus — and I may be alone on this one — I don’t love the novel. To clarify, the parts involving the kids work really well, but the book as a whole just bites it when that goddamn intergalactic turtle shows up. It stops the story and the scares dead cold.
The film went through a few different creative hands, some more promising than others, before »
- Rob Hunter
The Masterful Sound Design of Fritz Lang’s ‘M’
29 March 2017 2:02 PM, PDT
How what you hear can tell a story as sure as what you see.
In the 1920s, sound started creeping in to motion pictures, first via shorts then later making its feature debut in 1927’s The Jazz Singer. In those first formative years, sound was an accessory, it was a flashy new gimmick and that’s how it was used, for the enjoyment and amusement of the audience. Sound was for musical numbers or punching up comedic scenes, and, of course, for dialogue, but it wasn’t yet considered to be the storytelling element, an equal to film’s visual aspect, that it is today.
Until 1931, that is, and Fritz Lang’s M.
A serial-killer thriller and Lang’s first time working with sound, M is also the first major feature to utilize sound as a narrative and filmmaking tool: it advances the plot, it serves as a transition between scenes, it »
- H. Perry Horton
Beware The Beast (Man)
29 March 2017 12:52 PM, PDT
Approaching the Apocalypse as an essential self deprecating act of survival in ‘The Girl With All The Gifts’ and ‘Planet of the Apes.’
Curiosity killed the cat. But what about Schrodinger’s feline? In Colm McCarthy’s The Girl With All The Gifts, the kitty facing extinction is a young girl stumbling into an inherited wasteland where she must answer the classical thought experiment forced upon her by scientists desperate to cling on to the last dregs of humanity. Like that cat in the box, the film also attempts to exist in two states of being. It is certainly a traditional zombie film ripe with brain chomping ghouls, but The Girl With All The Girts also reaches for the moral high ground of The Twilight Zone with a climax that proudly extends a middle finger to its audience. It joins the ranks of the original Planet of the Apes as a cinematic experience birthed from a pessimistic »
- Brad Gullickson
37 Things We Learned from John Waters’ ‘Multiple Maniacs’ Commentary
29 March 2017 12:02 PM, PDT
Commentary Commentary“Now this is especially hideous. There’s no possible reason that this shot is in the movie.”Multiple Maniacs (1970)
Commentator: John Waters (director, writer, producer, cinematographer, editor)
1. Frequent Criterion Films partner, Janus Films, has been a big part of Waters’ life, and he’s thrilled to be recording this track on the day this film was actually premiering in a Janus art theater. They “were the first ever to show [Ingmar] Bergman to me when I was in high school, I’d see art movies and it was always Janus Films. Criterion always was a class act with what kind of films they’d pick, so I’m incredibly honored that they’d pick to distribute this movie.”
2. “Is it ironic, or is it a natural ending to my career in the best kind of way,” he says regarding his arrival on the Criterion label. He adds the film is what he started with (it was »
- Rob Hunter
The Perfect Shots of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’
29 March 2017 11:02 AM, PDT
A companion piece to this week’s Shot by Shot podcast.
For this week’s episode of Shot by Shot, the official cinematography podcast of One Perfect Shot and Film School Rejects, Ops founder Geoff Todd and myself selected easily one of the most popular films of the last few years, as well as one of the outright greatest action films of all-time: George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, shot by legendary cinematographer John Seale, who came out of retirement just to work on this picture.
As usual, both Geoff and I have chosen three shots or types of shots from the film that we use as the basis for an in-depth discussion about the particular brilliance of Fury Road, which is an adrenaline-fueled nightmare from start to finish that simultaneously manages to be a rich drama full of heart and hope. This balance is only one element of the film to which cinematography lends itself »
- H. Perry Horton
Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman Want to Laugh at Your Crafts
29 March 2017 10:22 AM, PDT
Will Hipsters Finally Get Their ‘American Idol’?
Reality-tv historians rightly remember Antiques Roadshow as one of the genre’s formative forebears. One of the earliest updates of the storied traveling freak show for the televisual medium, the venerable institution (the original British version dates to the very punk year of 1979) paved the way for cheap, glorious crap like the early rounds of American Idol, everything about Hoarders, and everything on Hgtv. But what if, instead of finding garbage in their attics, insufferable people made the garbage with their own two hands? What if NBC filmed it? That’s the question that hipster hero Amy Poehler and her production company, Paper Kite Productions, are asking in their sell of The Handmade Project, an “unscripted series” focused on competitive arts and crafts. To make things even more affable, she will be joined by Nick Offerman, her co-star on NBC’s hit Parks and Recreation. NBC »
- Andrew Karpan
6 Filmmaking Tips from Richard Kelly
29 March 2017 10:00 AM, PDT
The ‘Donnie Darko’ director imparts important Hollywood lessons.Richard Kelly on the set of ‘Southland Tales’
It only takes one movie to make you a notable filmmaker, as we’ve seen with Richard Kelly. His 2001 debut feature, Donnie Darko, is a “mainstream cult classic,” if the oxymoron may be allowed. Initially a flop, the sci-fi teen movie is now popular enough to warrant a new 4K restoration and re-release in honor of its 15th anniversary last year.
He has made two other features, neither of them so successful, and hasn’t directed anything in eight years. But that one movie is enough to make him an expert on the good and bad of Hollywood, and fortunately he hasn’t become a curmudgeon sitting on the wayside, so we can still look to his lessons learned and the six tips collected below as positive guidance.
Take Risks
Kelly’s first two movies (the second is Southbound Tales) are »
- Christopher Campbell
How ‘The Force Awakens’ and ‘Rogue One’ Brought One Grumpy Film Critic To The Force
29 March 2017 9:22 AM, PDT
A Star Wars Story.
One of the quirks of my cinephile upbringing was that, despite Star Wars coming out the year before I was born, I didn’t see it until I was eighteen. At the time I was preparing to major in film at a program focused specifically on non-narrative experimental filmmaking, and we were actively scorned for caring about popular films or indeed any popular art. (I only lasted a year before they gave me the heave-ho, partially for liking Led Zeppelin, although that was a symptom, not the disease; it was thus that I became a literal film school reject.) The desire to fit in didn’t supersede my personal taste, but strictly in terms of the kind of movies I was seeing at the time, and not having grown up with Star Wars like everyone else my age, watching the original trilogy for the first time on VHS, in »
- Danny Bowes
Godard on Godard Biopic: ‘Stupid, Stupid Idea.’ But the Show Goes On
29 March 2017 8:58 AM, PDT
From Michel Hazanavicius, director of ‘The Artist.’
Jean-Luc Godard is no less than one of the five most influential filmmakers in the history of the medium. He’s best known as the figurehead of the French New Wave, but that’s a movement that’s been over nearly a half century now, and point of fact the overwhelming majority of Godard’s 124 directing credits come after the Fnw. He’s a man who started a movement and then was somewhat forced to remain in its shadow. There’s a feeling of old cinema — perhaps “classic” is the word — to the director’s oeuvre, but in truth Godard has always been at the forefront of cinematic experimentation no matter what the year or movement du jour, he’s always put innovation ahead of traditional storytelling. This is the man, after all, who gave us the famous quote: “A story should have a beginning, a »
- H. Perry Horton
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