jürgen fauth’s muckworld

“You’ve got a serious artist crush,” Marcy remarked — a statement, not a question — when I sent her a link to a gallery of adorably geeky photographs of Paul Thomas Anderson during the Hard Eight period. Guilty as charged: I’ve been rewatching and reassessing and obsessing over all five of PTA’s films, reevaluating Punch-Drunk Love (which I originally hated), rediscovering the ending of Boogie Nights (much different from what I remembered), and unable to resist the pull of Magnolia even on a matchbox-sized iPod screen.

Sez Dennis Lim:

If the Altman comparisons seem grossly reductive, it’s because Anderson is liberal when it comes to borrowing from the greats. Why not combine Altman’s panoramic outlook with Stanley Kubrick’s formal bravura with John Cassavetes’ messy candor? While Anderson fits the profile of a “hysterical realist,” to evoke the pejorative literary buzz-phrase of a few years ago, his films never indulge in excess for the sake of excess. He’s a born showman—his first three films bore the Barnumesque credit “A P.T. Anderson picture”—but his go-for-broke tendencies are tied to an expansive, humanist impulse.

Lim’s entire appreciation of Anderson is spot-on, and before I swipe his video clips, I’d just like to expand on his last point: seems to me, the unifying theme underlying all of Anderson’s films is the desperate need for human connection. Yes, that’s a cloying phrase, and perhaps that’s why it’s dressed up in such unlikely garb: the incendiary monologues, the sweeping steadycams, the assaultive music, the undulating colors. What all of Anderson’s characters really need is a family, but their real families rarely work: in Hard Eight, Jack’s father is dead, Dirk Diggler’s mom throws him out, everybody in Magnolia is messed up six different ways, Barry Egan’s seven sisters are worse than the furies, and we all know that Daniel Plainview’s an oilman, not a family man.

Instead, Anderson’s heroes create impromptu families. Jack finds a father figure in his father’s killer, porn gives Diggler not just a dad (Burt Reynolds) but a sister (Heather Graham) and a mother (Julianne Moore), too. In Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler and Emily Watson start their own family, and Magnolia ends in an orgy of characters coming home to each other. And Plainview? His salvation would have been an impromptu family with a bastard from a basket for a son and a brother who wasn’t his brother-from-another-mother. That he refused them is the tragedy of There Will Be Blood.

Can’t leave you without another word about Anderson’s breathtaking audacity, and you better believe I’m lazy enough to quote Lim again:

The prominent bursts of music—and the way the narratives rely on musical principles like rhythm, tone, and phrasing—result in a kind of delirious synesthesia. His movies set off a crazy multitude of sensory triggers, leaving the impression that Anderson is working from a larger palette than most filmmakers.

Yes indeed.

Hard Eight/Sydney. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1996. ***
Boogie Nights. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997. ****
Magnolia. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999. ****
Punch-Drunk Love. Paul Thomas Anderson. 2002. ****
There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007. *****

More from Stu VanAirsdale, who kept notes on his marathon Anderson retrospective. After the jump, videos with choice clips from Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love.

Read the rest of this entry »

Poodle-in-law Bo needed my loving attention and finely honed dog-walking skills last week, so I only saw three new films along with the never-ending (and frequently repeating) slew of half-watched classics that drifted by on suburban cable TV. Expect this ratio to shift dramatically when I hit the Berlinale next week.

In Bruges. Martin McDonagh, 2008. Review forthcoming. They sent us In Bruges hats, so you know it’ll be a rave! Updated: My About.com review. ****

The Witnesses/Les Témoins. André Téchiné, 2007. Marcy reviewed. ***

London to Brighton. Paul Andrew Williams, 2006. Especially after the grace and humanity of 4 Months, I found this sordid tale of abused women difficult to stomach. *

Also:
The Empire Strikes Back. Irvin Kershner, 1980. *****
One, Two, Three. Billy Wilder, 1961. *****
The Dreamers. Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003. Marcy’s review. ****
Quadrophenia. Franc Roddam, 1979 ****
The Big Lebowski. Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998. *****
The Birds. Alfred Hitchcock, 1963. ****

Musical Bonus: As featured in The Witnesses, here’s Les Rita Mitsuko.

I shelve my Alan Moore books next to Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges, and I am sure all three postmodern masters would get a healthy kick out of this wildly imaginative third book to Moore’s Gentlemen series, which draws on a vast storehouse of influences and blends them into an ecstatic new whole. The last time around, I wrote “Just when you thought you understood the parameters of where the story can go, Moore pulls another fast one” — and that was when we were still with the original Victorian group of heroes (Allan Quartermain, Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, and Mr. Hyde) and happily confined to Kevin O’Neill’s clear, appealing artwork.

Black Dossier explodes all that. Framed by a storyline set in an alternate version of the 1950s, the book concerns the theft of a book that, in the comic, looks like the one you’re holding in your hands. Along with the comic book adventure, the Dossier also contains a facsimile of a lost Shakespeare play (Fairie’s Fortunes Founded), fascist propaganda booklets warning of sexcrimes, the life of Viginia Woolf’s Orlando in nine illustrated chapters, a sequel to the erotic classic Fanny Hill, a few pages from a Beat novel featuring our heroes, reprinted postcards from Shangri-La, cutaways of the Nautilus, and section in 3-D (goggles are provided.) While the first two books concerned a Victorian team of heroes, Moore uses Black Dossier to sketch, through the various fragments, the history of several British incarnations as well as French and German teams that included the likes of Fantomas and Rotwang.

The ease with which Moore accesses high and low culture is truly mind-boggling: Ian Fleming, Herman Hesse, Charles Chaplin, H.P. Lovecraft, and George Orwell are added to the already impressive list of influences (and I’m pretty sure I missed a good third of them.) Any imaginary creation is fair play for Moore’s ambitious tale, and the density of ideas is absurdly high, as if Moore was cramming an entire series’ worth of characters and storylines into a single book.

A word about Moore and the movies: he’s famously taken his name off all adaptations, and rightfully so — most of them have been dreadful (worst of all, incidentally, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Moore’s best effects are always inextricably bound up with the medium of comics, and this holds especially true for Black Dossier, which is essentially unfilmable (and wouldn’t work as a novel, either.) I positively dread Zach Snyder’s upcoming Watchmen.

Like The Tempest, Black Dossier ends with a monologue by Prospero (himself an Extraordinary Gentleman), who celebrates one of Moore’s grand themes: the power and paradoxical reality of imaginary characters. “If we mere insubstantial fancies be, how more so thee, who from us substance stole? On Dream’s foundation matter’s mudyards rest. Two sketching hands, each one the other draws: the fantasies thou’ve fashioned fashion thee. Intangible, we are life’s secret soul.”

The League of Extraodrinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, 2007. *****

• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 2
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
• The 2003 Movie Adaptation
• Wikipedia: LGX
• Discussion on Barbelith
• Salon review by Douglas Wolk
• PopMatters

A woman director working in black and white on a limited budget, a capricious main character with a looming fate, a city that is playground and character at once, a summer’s day full of promise, distraction, and chance encounters, a cast of strangers whose snippets of overheard conversation work themselves seamlessly into the texture of the film, and a fresh New Wave approach to life and art — it’s thrilling to confirm how many similarities Agnès Varda’s celebrated Cleo from 5 to 7 shares with May Spils’ overlooked classic Zur Sache, Schätzchen.

Cleo is now being reissued as part of a shiny new Varda box set from Criterion. May Spils’ films are, so far, unavailable in the US. Zur Sache, Schätzchen is one of my all-time favorites, and I have translated and created English subtitles for the film in hopes of a stateside DVD release. There have been promising stirrings lately so keep your fingers crossed for Zur Sache.

Cléo de 5 à 7. Agnès Varda, 1961. *****

The trailer:

Between the noontime press conference at the Waldorf and the Ziegfeld premiere, Monday completely belonged to There Will Be Blood. If celebrity sightings are your thing, I’ve got a few stories for you — but I’d hate to namedrop Maggie Gyllenhaal, Liam Neeson, John Leguziamo, and the kid who played H.W. just for the sake of baldfaced bragging. Still, Marcy successfully handed copies of Twins to Peter Saarsgard (who high-fived her) and Amy Poehler (who stole her seat) — no doubt, both have already fallen madly in love with the book and are setting the machinery of Hollywood in gear to make us rich and famous, too.

Oh, and the movie? Minute for minute, There Will Be Blood still thrills more than anything else I’ve seen this year, and that’s even more true for the second viewing. I won’t apologize for taking a few more days to fine-tune my review — but I am glad we had already handed the film a slew of awards before Paramount fed us steak and martinis. Previously.

There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007. *****

There will be puns, there will be awards, there will be awesome. Based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson (whose movies I often failed to appreciate in the past) has made a magnificent epic about the price of the precious resources, liquid and otherwise, that we extract from the ground — and from other people. Daniel Day-Lewis is reliably fantastic as Daniel Plainview, a prospector turned wealthy oilman and all-around American monster, but the real stunner here is Paul Dano as his nemesis, the pimply-faced fire-and-brimstone preacher Eli Sunday.

This one’s got “movie of the year” written all over it, and I’m already itching to see it again as soon as possible. We’ll have much more on this before the December 26 release. I drink YOUR milkshake!

UPDATED: My gushing review is now up at About Worldfilm.

There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007. *****

• Karina Longworth found two tacks from the terrific score, and here’s the latest trailer:

Awards season has begun in earnest, preparations for the About.com redesign are in high gear, and the Phil Lesh Halloween extravaganza and marathon is upon us, so I’m resurrecting a category from the early days of muckworld, when everything was still hidden behind a password and we had a grand total of four (4) readers: that’s right, “Konsum” is back, a.k.a the sloppy roundup of everything I’ve been watching/eating/reading. We’ll get back to meatier individual posts as soon as the dust settles.

The photos above are from from last Saturday’s panel “Haverford and the Power of the Pen,” a title that makes me giggle and think of Indiana Jones. From left to right in the top picture: Luke, the friendly student moderator, Marcy Dermansky, author of Twins, David Behrman, publisher, Richard Lingeman, author/editor The Nation, Ron Christie, author of Black in the White House, and Alison Grambs, Friar’s Club writer and author of The Smart Girl’s Guide to Getting Even. In the photo on the right, Christie, Marcy, and Behrman. With a roster this diverse, the resulting discussion was plenty interesting, but I couldn’t stop thinking: we’re now one degree of separation from both Victor Navasky and Dick Cheney. Eek! More photos from Haverford and Bryn Mawr at flickr. On to the movies:

Diva
Film Forum is rereleasing this celebrated 1981 French film, and the press notes they’re handing out might as well have a fat disclaimer on top: anything you may have to say about his movie is redundant. There are pages of raves here by Pauline Kael and the like, along with a fascinating interview with Beineix that moots whatever you might want to add. Yes, Diva sparkles with ideas, every shot is a delight, every element aims to please — it’s a joyous celebration of the possibilities of cinema. Regardless, I better get a review ready for the Friday opening. Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981. *****

Open Hearts
Where does domestic melodrama end and soap opera begin? Susanne Bier’s dogme drama doesn’t care. Mads Mikkelsen is excellent as a doctor who falls in love with the fiancee of the guy his wife put into a coma. There’s a whiff of General Hospital about all of this, but it should go without saying that the acting and writing are far superior. Still: lots of people talking about theiremotioms in hallways. From the director of After the Wedding and Things We Lost in the Fire. Elsker dig for evigt. Susanne Bier, 2002. ***

Things We Lost in the Fire
Look, it’s a foreign film with Hale Berry, Bencio del Toro, and David Duchovny. Another Bier melodrama, this one slightly more appealing than Open Hearts because of del Toro and those adorable children. I’m hoping Marcy will review this for About. Susanne Bier, 2007. ***

Knocked Up
Another faux-transgressive family values commercial by Judd Apatow, filled with improbable characters and unbelievable plot developments. The jokes are funny exactly to the degree that you consider them “racy.” I laughed twice and shook my head the rest of the time. Who the hell are these people? Judd Apatow, 2007. *

Wheel of Time
Herzog gets fantastic footage documenting a Buddhist ritual in Bodh Gaya, India, but the film loses steam when when the action moves to Graz, Austria. The sand mandala is amazing, and who doesn’t want to see Werner cracking jokes with the Dalai Lama? Werner Herzog, 2003. ***

Zodiac
Reception of this Fincher epic was mixed, but I found the twists and turns of the hunt for the late-sixties California serial killer extremely compelling. Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr. are a great trio of leading men, and there’s an old-fashioned, All the President’s Men feel to the film. Because it’s based on a true, unsolved case, there’s no telling where the narrative will go next. Freed from the confines of formula, Zodiac also becomes a study of the nature of obsession. David Fincher, 2007. ***

Michael Clayton
Solid legal thriller about the moral quandry of a man who finds himself on the wrong side of an Erin Brockovich class action suit. George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, and Sidney Pollack are spot-on and the narrative is laid out without condescension. Tony Gilroy, 2007. ***

La Jetee
It’s always good to revisit the classics. YouTube has the entire film but Criterion is nicer. Chris Marker, 1962. *****

Citizen Kane
Like I said. There’s always new things to admire in Welles’s masterpiece–this time I was concentrating on details of the elaborate narrative structure. Orson Welles, 1941. *****

It Is Fine. EVERYTHING IS FINE!
Crispin Glover’s second film as a director, a mad sex murder mystery featuring a hero/villain with cerebral palsy, will require a few more days to digest. I’ll confess right here that I might have walked out if Mr. Glover himself hadn’t been guarding the doors; in the end I’m glad I stayed. He also performs a slide show with the film that has to be seen to be believed. David Brothers and Crispin Hellion Glover, 2007. ***

Bonus: I always thought that the Grateful Dead’s “Dire Wolf” was inspired by the Zodiac killer, but I can’t seem to find a reference for this — not even at David Dodd’s Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. Here’s a video of an acoustic ‘81 version anyway:

I took a break from the festival today to catch up with reviews. Here’s a quick rundown:

I’m Not There
Todd Haynes’s Dylan picture only truly takes off when a Dylan song is playing, and that should tell you something. Cate Blanchett is great fun, but I liked her even better in tonight’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age. More on that soon — and I’ve got video of the press conference with Haynes, too.

Paranoid Park
I saw this strictly out of professional curiosity, and Gus van Sant did not disappoint: yet another artful bore.

The Man From London
Everybody seems to be digging out their favorite “on drugs” lines for this year’s NYFF, so here goes: The Third Man on Ambien.

Secret Sunshine
Once again, my festival favorite (at least so far) comes from South Korea. No distributor yet, but you can get Lee Chang-dong’s Oasis and Peppermint Candy on DVD.

I’m Not There. Todd Haynes, 2007. ***
Paranoid Park. Gus van Sant, 2007. *
The Man From London. Béla Tarr, 2007. ***
Milyang. Lee Chang-dong, 2007. *****