Deep Focus

The Ballad of Narayama

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:03:27 -0500

The Ballad of Narayama, a 1958 film by Keisuke Kinoshita, a Shochiku studio stablemate of Ozu and Mizoguchi, opens with an unconventional gambit for a Japanese melodrama from the 1950s. A masked M.C. knocking two blocks of wood together matter-of-factly announces the film's title and offers a brief abstract of its content. The fabric behind him proves to be a curtain, drawn aside after the credits are displayed--Narayama is staged as theatre, filmed by a movie camera. The voiceover narration, accompanied by music plucked on a shamisen, draws on traditional Japanese styles of drama. The sets are lavishly dressed with flowers, trees, and even gently burbling brooks. And Kinoshita's repeated strategy of changing sets in full view of the camera by pushing platforms to the side, casting a shadow across a character, or suddenly dropping a curtain or background to reveal a new scene behind, is borrowed from the kabuki tradition.

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Ivan's Childhood

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 22:53:15 -0500

Ivan's Childhood opens, unexpectedly enough, inside a dream. The film is impatient. Its dreaming actually begins before the Mosfilm logo has faded from the screen, as the call of a cuckoo echoes softly on the soundtrack. Young Ivan appears, surrounded by trees (their pine needles dripping with what must be cool morning dew), our view of his face criss-crossed by the lines of a spider's web strung up between the branches. The shot is perfectly composed, with the tree's slender trunk and one of its branches creating a secondary, off-centre frame around the boy's face. Ivan pauses there for only a moment--he must be looking for the cuckoo--before turning abruptly out of frame, a move that sends the camera skyward, moving vertically up the body of the pine and revealing more of the landscape. When the camera finishes its ascent, Ivan is again visible, in the midground of the image. His scrawny body, now seen in apparent miniature, turns again towards the camera. Nature is large and beautiful; he is small and, while lovely in a way, still awkward in his skin.

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Spring Breakers

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:19:24 -0500

Upstream Color

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:04:40 -0500

Reality

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 22:20:00 -0500

Matteo Garrone does a 180 from his acclaimed crime film, Gomorrah, in this keenly observed cautionary tale about pop culture, moral scruples, and the human mind's capacity for self-delusion. The title is ironic, yes -- the film's charismatic but hapless fishmonger Luciano (Aniello Arena) spends his time coming unglued, losing his perspective as a working-class family man as he sacrifices his ordinary life in a misguided bid to become a reality-TV star.

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Skyfall

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:10:20 -0500

The Kid with a Bike

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:04:05 -0500

This Is Not a Film

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:47:32 -0500

Lincoln

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:55:38 -0500

Zero Dark Thirty

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:53:16 -0500

The Master

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:42:56 -0500

Holy Motors

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:27:40 -0500

Argo

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 20:38:10 -0500

Ben Affleck does it again, with this tense, exceptionally well-made alternate-history time capsule. It's lacking in flavor, yes. (The harmless in-jokes about the movie business are the film's most personal element, since the Affleck character's rote estranged-dad role is utterly generic.) It embellishes history, yes. (On reflection and some research, the film's elevation of the derring-do of feisty CIA agent Tony Mendez way beyond the apparent facts of the historical matter seem a bit gauche.) But, boy, is it a cracking story while it's up there on the screen. It does just exactly what it has to do for two straight hours, and its period trappings have the strength of sense memory. Hell, I was ready to stand up and applaud the old-school WB logo. It's not remotely the best film of the year. But it is a ton of fun.

The Deep Blue Sea

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:11:47 -0500

Gorgeous, depressing, magnificent, infuriating. Love, lust, and something else that embraces and evades the two; what a show. Rachel Weisz is terrific.

Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 20:22:08 -0500

Chamber music for fists, feet, and fluorescent lights. It's as if Gaspar Noe were a genre director on contract with Menahem Golan in the late 1980s. The story owes royalty payments to the estate of Philip K. Dick, but it's enhanced by enthralling NC-17 action beats, a seamy and fully staffed R-rated titty bar, and an overall sense of existential despair thick enough to choke on. Watching it feels a little like smelling a T-shirt soaked in blood, sweat, and testosterone. Recommended.