Erik Moe: Critic at Large

You probably already know that Breathless is charming and essential and a classic. A newly restored version is making the rounds right now and I caught it in Silver Spring this week. Presumably, this re-release was the catalyst for Dan Hoffman’s timely article on why Breathless resonates so much more than other Very Important Films. It does. Probably because Michel and Patricia’s stories are so deceptively simple. Yes, Michel is a cop killer on the loose in the big city, but he otherwise behaves just like your own goofball friends. Patricia has plenty of glamor, but she’s living in the believable squalor of an intern abroad working at a newspaper. Also, I always forget how amazing Martial Solal’s original score is.

…Now some long-overdue viewing notes:

• Greenberg = Fine. I’m catching up on publishing my film notes, and it’s been a couple of months. As always, I really want to like Ben Stiller. I just don’t remember Greenberg making much of an impression on me.
• La Dolce Vita = Highly recommended. Obviously.
• Exit Through the Giftshop = Highly recommended. A/K/A “the Banksy movie”. Highly entertaining play on documentary conventions with plenty of incredible footage and revealing things to say about the art world.
• Please Give = Highly recommended.
• The Man Who Would be King = Recommended.
• Carnal Knowledge = Highly recommended.
• Freakonomics = Fine. Silverdocs opening night selection strung together several short topics directed by documentary all-stars. Felt a bit like This American Life’s TV show to be perfectly honest.
• The Kids Grow Up = Recommended. Very much enjoyed Doug Block’s latest – a portrait of his own family as his daughter prepares to leave for college.
• Waiting for Superman = Highly recommended. Plenty to quibble with in the details of Davis Guggenheim’s education reform documentary, but his thesis that we’ve largely been doing things that make adults feel comfortable instead of doing things actually proven to help children learn is important. Will make a huge splash this fall.
• My Perestroika = Recommended.
• On Coal River = Fine.
• Utopia in Four Movements = Highly recommended. This is actually a film-performance hybrid. Deserving of a full post, but in the highly likely case that I don’t get around to it, please check Sam Green and Dave Cerf’s website for tour dates near you (San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York, and Minneapolis are all coming up, so none of my four likely readers have any excuse for missing out).
• The Tillman Story = Recommended.
• Marwencol = Highly recommended. Google the plot summary to be astounded and then just let me tell you that it is all done skillfully and with respect for the subjects.
• Sleeper = Recommended. Especially outside in the neighborhood with friends and frozen yogurt and fresh fruit.
• I Am Love = Fine.

Hey everyone. The best time of year in DC is almost upon us: SILVERDOCS!

I went all in for the “Silver Film Buff” pass this year, which guarantees at least 10 films in 7 days. The second night of the festival may even wind up as a film / rock-and-roll double header since I’d also purchased tickets for The New Pornographers that night. Exciting!

As a public service to those who like sitting in dark rooms with me, I’ve pasted (after the jump) the films I’m almost certainly attending. Grab tickets now! Afterwords we’ll hit Silver Spring’s other famous dark room: The Quarry House.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m excited to be heading to SXSW Interactive to meet and learn from the luminaries of the internet/tech world and hope to bring back some inspiration for my team’s work in DC. I’ll be in Austin through the 16th. SXSW Film coincides with the Interactive fest, so there’s a good chance I may catch a hot new documentary or at least bump into a member of the old doc-blog cabal.

If you are heading there for any reason and are within the sound of this blog post, please don’t be shy about reaching out. Tip: my phone buzzes in my pocket when you leave a comment below or tweet @erikmoe .

Hunger = highly recommended

Hunger is brutal and beautiful. The film tells the story of Bobby Sands, who led the 1981 IRA hunger strike at Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. Not easy viewing by any means. The visual depth and humanity created by artist-director Steve McQueen earned him a comparison to Rembrandt from the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones.

• Niloofar = recommended. The Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries had a nice series of Iranian films going. Sadly, I caught only one.
• Since Otar Left = highly recommended. A Georgian film to follow the Georgian feast.
• Nollywood Lady = fine.
• The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers = fine.
• Ajami = fine. A best foreign film Oscar nominee. Impressive for the use of untrained actors, but halfway through I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just watching the Israeli version of Crash.
• The Devil and Miss Jones = highly recommended. Part of a Jean Arthur retrospective at AFI Silver, this is essentially a screwball version of “Undercover Boss” amid a union organizing drive at a New York department store. Every labor activist out there will thoroughly enjoy the ending.
• Terribly Happy = recommended. Aptly billed as Coen Brothers-esque.
• Up in the Air = recommended. Emotionally not all that different from driving a Volkswagen Bug into a brick wall.

Fish Tank = highly recommended

Of the many, many films I saw during the days (Weeks? Months?) of extreme snow here in D.C., Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank was most striking. I went into the film not knowing much about where the film would take me. It turns out this is exactly the situation Arnold threw her actors into: no pages of the script beyond the currently-filming scene were made available. The resulting meandering film about sixteen-year-old Mia’s life in an English housing project with her non-parenting mother has been aptly compared to The 400 Blows.

• The White Ribbon is also about poverty and parenting. German pre-WWI feudal poverty and deeply conservative parenting. Highly recommended.
• The Cove is going to win this year’s Oscar for best documentary since it is an informative, engaging, advocacy doc about cute animals in danger. Nonetheless, I consider it recommended
• Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 = Fine
• Inglorious Bastards = Recommended
• Niloofar = Recommended (finally caught part of the Iranian film series at the Freer-Sackler).
• The Hurt Locker = Highly recommended. I feared this would just be a series of classic MacGuyver bomb-defusing scenes. Instead it paints a fairly nuanced portrait of the modern soldier technologically (and otherwise) insulated from war.

The Deer Hunter

I couldn’t help thinking of Avatar while reading Jonathan Rosenbaum’s over-the-top takedown of The Deer Hunter, originally written in 1979. Excerpt:

Try and imagine a boneless elephant sitting in your lap for three hours while you’re trying to think. It’s flabby beyond belief, convinced not only of its importance but its relevance to Americans (i.e., human beings) everywhere, and even winds up bleating a mournful rendition of “God Bless America” in your ear, hoping that you’ll join in or at least have sympathy for its plight.

The Deer Hunter is on my list of Very Important Movies™ that I haven’t seen. Is it time to take care of that? Maybe just to fish for parallels with James Cameron’s Very Important Movie™ ?

Two strong films about desperation amid tough times in Eastern Europe. The bleakness of the former is haunting even as it verges on becoming a crime thriller. Import/Export paints a much seedier, grittier portrait. Much (all?) of the interior scenes are filmed in static/unmoving camera shots reminiscent of the recently released 1975 classic Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

The Seagull = Fine
Screened as part of the National Gallery of Art’s “Celebrating Chekhov on the Russian Screen” series. The best parts were the subtitled translations of Russian insults. I’m still waiting for an opportunity to call someone a “Bourgeois Kievian.”

Encounters at the End of the World = recommended
Werner Herzog’s documentary about Antarctica focuses on the people who live there: scientists, adventurers, wandering philosophers. A nice detour touching on some of Herzog’s old man vs. nature themes. The shots of strange ocean creatures living deep under the Antarctic ice are amazing.

New World Order = highly not recommended
Clearly at least one of the “best documentaries of the decade” lists I added to my Netflix queue was a mistake of enormous magnitude.

I have no problem with the Academy’s choice to expand best picture nominees to ten this year. It is high-profile exposure for great films. Unfortunately, I’ve seen most of the just-announced ten and they are not great. A look at Metacritic’s assessment of Blind Side inspired me to highlight that site’s clearest critical insult of each nominee.

Avatar

“Avatar clears the hurdle in terms of being optical candy. Its story, though, is pure cheese.”
—Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News

The Blind Side

“…peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them.”
—Melissa Anderson, Village Voice

District 9

“It’s a bad joke that District 9 will be hailed for its ‘originality.’”
—Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun

An Education

“…a third-act tonal shift makes for an incongruous, excessively moralistic fit with everything that’s preceded. Most insulting, though, is the way in which the climactic passages miraculously tidy up every frayed edge of Jenny’s life.”
—Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

The Hurt Locker

“Stretched both timewise and for plausibility.”
—Kyle Smith, New York Post

Inglourious Basterds

“The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did “Springtime for Hitler”: because it’s so bad they think it’s good.”
—Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun

Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire

“In its eagerness to drag us through the lower depths of human experience, Precious leaves no space for the audience to breathe or to draw our own conclusions. For a film about empowerment and self-actualization, it wields an awfully large cudgel.”
—Dana Stevens, Slate

A Serious Man

“All the Coens come up with is a movie about bad things happening to limited people.”
—Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun

Up

“Save for a few inspired canine gags and a handful of very pretty visual details, Up left me cold. Its charms appear to have been applied with surgical precision; by the end, I felt expertly sutured, but not much else.”
—Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

Up in the Air

“[Writer/Director Jason Reitman] feels the constant need to “deepen” his characters, granting them wants and motivations–especially during the moralistic third act–that are totally alien to how they’re initially portrayed.”
—Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

I’ll probably try to see The Hurt Locker and Up in the Air before the 22nd, but so far I’m not excited to call any of these films the best of 2009. The big winner this year might end up being The Baltimore Sun.

Moon = fine

My recollection of the trailer for Duncan Jones’ Moon deceptively had me believing that the film would be a long, drawn out contemplative work focusing on boredom and isolation in a mining shack on the Moon. I am a big fan of films about boredom. Instead, it turned into a tight little corporate dystopia flick. On the moon. Sam Rockwell was great. The film was enjoyable. Not enjoyable enough that I’d call it “recommended.”

Lesser films seen this week:

• Vision = not recommended. Saw this as part of the Goethe Institute’s “Film | Neu” German language festival. Hopefully there were better films in the series. This story about a group of 11th Century nuns earning a tiny degree of liberation under the leadership of a charismatic absinthe-addict certainly offers an unusual historical setting. Unfortunately, the narrative is completely conventional.
• Up = fine. Watched via Netflix because it figured prominently in respectable end-of-year lists. As a part-time curmudgeon who likes to travel, I identified with Carl. I just didn’t find this particular flying house adventure all that entertaining.

P.S. Viewing Habit is the first in a series of series I think maybe I can possibly post to this space regularly. “Habit” does not imply that each post will involve nuns. I will continue to rate films on my five point scale as either highly recommended, recommended, fine, not recommended, or highly not recommended.