jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Yesterday, I escaped the puerile, disgusting, and (worst of all) staggeringly unfunny Poultrygeist to enjoy a banana in Central Park.

Today, unrelenting construction noise on our block makes me wish I could seek refuge at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, where the cherries are in full bloom. They’ve delighted us in the past — but alas, the Tribeca Film Festival begins today, and Cannes announced the linup.

A vaguely appropriate Ginsberg poem has been added to my muxtape.

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. Lloyd Kaufman, 2006. N/R

None of the movies I saw this week thrilled as much as the conclusion to the first part of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. After 200 pages of young Wart’s education, we finally get to the part about the sword in the stone. It’s Merlyn’s final lesson, presented in a hallucinatory passage that feels as if Walt Disney adapted Revelations and laced it with zen wisdom:

“Oh, Merlyn,” cried the Wart, “help me to get this weapon.”

There was a a kind of rushing noise, and a long chord played along with it. All round the churchyard there were hundreds of old friends. They rose over the church wall all together, like the Punch and Judy ghosts of remembered days, and there were badgers and nightingales and vulgar crows and hares and wild geese and falcons and fishes and dogs and dainty unicorns and solitary wasps and corkindrills and hedgehogs and griffins and the thousand other animals he had met. They loomed round the church wall, the lovers and helpers of the Wart, and they all spoke solemnly in turn. Some of them had come from the banners in the church, where they were painted in heraldry, some from the waters and the sky and the fields about–but all, down to the smallest shrew mouse, had come to help on account of love. Wart felt his power grow.

“Put your back into it,” said a Luce (or pike) off one of the heraldic banners, “as you once did when I was going to snap you up. Remember that power springs from the nape of the neck.”

“What about those forearms,” asked a Badger gravely, “that are held together by a chest? Come along, my dear embryo, and find your tool.”

A Merlin sitting at the top of the yew tree cried out, “Now then, Captain Wart, what is the first law of the foot? I thought I once heard something about never letting go?”

“Don’t work like a stalling woodpecker,” urged a Tawny Owl affectionately. “Keep up a steady effort, my duck, and you will have it yet.”

A white-front said, “Now, Wart, if you were once able to fly the great North Sea, surely you can co-ordinate a few little wing-muscles here and there? Fold your powers together, with the spirit of your mind, and it will come out like butter. Come along, Homo sapiens, for all we humble friends of yours are waiting here to cheer.”

The Wart walked up to the great sword for the third time. He put out his right hand softly and drew it out as gently as from a scabbard.

I also enjoyed a Greek feast at Zenon Taverna with Jordan and Ann, ramen at Menchanko-Tei, swung a cow in Rayman Raving Rabbids, and installed a brand new operating system. Saw a few movies, too:

Blind Mountain/Mang shan. Li Yang, 2007. ***
Funny Games. Michael Haneke, 1997. **
Funny Games U.S. Michael Haneke, 2007. **
Love Songs/ Les Chansons d’amour. Christophe Honoré ***
My Blueberry Nights. Wong Kar Wai, 2007. ***
Sleep Dealer. Alex Rivera, 2008. **
Water Lillies/Naissance des pieuvres. Céline Sciamma, 2007. **
plus The Wire. Season 2 **** and Prime Suspect 5 ****

Marcy and I will be editing the Spring issue of the Mississippi Review Web. Here’s the call for submissions. Please feel free to forward this to any and all interested parties, and to post wherever appropriate.

24 Words Per Second: The Movies Issue
We are writers who watch a lot of movies. Maybe it’s no surprise that the films we see have a way of seeping back into our fiction: plots that echo silent film, narrative gimmicks borrowed from the French New Wave, characters who spend too much time at the multiplex or model their lives after movie stars. For the MRW Spring issue, we are looking for short stories with a cinematic bend. What that means, exactly, is up to you. Perhaps your story references Aki Kaurismäki, moves like a screwball comedy, or features cinemaniacs trying to kick the habit. Maybe it’s narrated from the perspective of Natalie Wood’s ghost. As long as it’s inspired by the movies, we’re interested.

The deadline is March 15. Send submissions (3000 words max) to mississippireview.movieissue@gmail.com.

My list of top ten films of 2007 is up on About.com. I’ve taken some liberties this year, and instead of summarizing every movie’s appeal in a superlative-filled blurb, you get quick takes on my favorite scenes from each film. Hope you like the new approach. Marcy’s well-considered list is still being, well, considered, but we do have a list of most talented newcomers of the year — and soon, we’ll be listing our disappointments, too. But for now, “the six-pack stays where it is.”

It’s hard to believe I’ve had this gig since last century, but it says right there under my picture: Guide since 1999. After months of planning and frenzied behind-the-scenes work, About.com rolled out the new design for our site this morning.

I dig it — it’s much less cluttered and more web-2.0-y, with support for tags on all articles and a new row of tabs that’s supposed to let you access accumulated content more easily. A number of widgets in the sidebar highlight reviews, photo galleries, and our all-but-dead forums. In exchange for a new promo spot up top, they’ve pushed down the blog a little, but you can still subscribe to the feed or get nothing but the blog on a dedicated page. Vain as we are, we’re most concerned with our mugshots, which weren’t the ones we submitted and will hopefully change any moment now.

What do you think?

We’ll be voting for the annual New York Film Critics Online awards tomorrow, and below is a round-up of all the last-minute watching and re-watching we crammed in. Instead of fabricating any more blurbs, is it ok if I just slap some star ratings on the titles and grab a few telling screen shots? Oh, good.

My best-of list for 2007 is almost done, too, but I’m waiting to see There Will Be Blood one more time before posting it.

• Atonement. ****
• Eastern Promises.****
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. ****
• Michael Clayton. ***
• Superbad. ***
• Into the Wild. ***
• Juno. ***
• Hairspray. **
• Gone Baby Gone. **

People who, like me, have seen too much:

The New York Film Festival is a marathon, not a sprint, and I hit the wall somewhere around week 3 (sorry, Alexander Sokurov and In the City of Sylvia) but recovered for the final stretch. It’s been a heady month: from the dizzying heights of Blade Runner: The Final Cut and Secret Sunshine, the joyful surprise that is The Darjeeling Limited to the horrors of Redacted, dog-on-girl action of Go Go Tales and Bela Tarr’s elegant snoozefest The Man From London. I also got to shake David Cronenberg’s hand, engage in epic debates over I’m Not There, take candids of Nicole Kidman and Sam Elliott, and meet fellow critics and bloggers who were just names and URLs to me before. Some of my suitcases from Berlin are still not unpacked.

Here are a few gut reactions to the last stray movies; we’ll have thorough reviews for all of them on About.com before long.

No Country for Old Men
The Coen’s Cormac McCarthy adaption is certainly accomplished, and the word “masterpiece” has been bandied about. Maybe so. But especially after seeing Joel and Ethan hem, haw, and shrug their way through the post-screening press conference I can’t help but wonder what this tough-minded, sun-beaten blood letting is all about. Nobody I know ever found a suitcase — or satchel — full of money, and no matter how many significant dreams Tommy Lee Jones narrates in high-falutin’ prose, all of this stuff is nothing but macho artifice. It’s like they made a movie about the “Stranger” character played by Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski but forgot not to take it too seriously. Ethan and Joel Coen, 2007. ***

Actresses
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (Munich, 5×2) directs and stars in a long hard look at the fears and insecurities of the artist’s life, specifically that of an aging actress, harangued by her mother, warned by her gynocologist, terrorized by her director, but always lonely and unfulfilled. Moving but overlong, Actresses reminded me of the Ellen Fanshaw character played by Martha Burns in the outstanding Canadian TV show Slings & Arrows, which handled the same topic with sharper wit. Actresses also stars Louis Garrel and Mathieu Amalric. Actrices. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, 2007. **

Runnin’ Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Forget about the Redacted brouhaha: this was the real scandal of NYFF45. Only the hardiest of us turned out for this four-hour-twenty-minute rock’n roll documentary directed by Peter Bogdanovich, which lays out Petty’s career in meticulous album-by-album fashion, spiced up by the occasional drug binge and band member flame-out. Mostly narrated by a warm and winning Petty himself, the film is studded with hit songs and quality collaborators including Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, Stevie Nicks, Dave Steward, Eddie Vedder, and George Harrison. Even at its exhaustive length, the film doesn’t drag.

Still, something seemed off to me. Neither live nor on MTV, Tom Petty has ever transported me quite like my favorite rock bands do, but as a veteran of the deafening Walter Reade screening of The Kids Are Alright, I couldn’t help but wonder what was wrong. When Bogdanovich took the stage for the Q&A, he immediatley cleared this up: we were shown the movie in mono.

No wonder I felt underwhelmed; now I was livid. Apparently, there’s a “spectacular” 5.1 mix that would have “lifted [us] right of our seats,” but somebody somewhere fucked up good. I’m sorry, Film Society at Lincoln Center, I dearly love what you do, but if you’d told me I was going to waste an entire day on an epic rock’n roll documentary and only see it in mono, I would have caught up on some desperately needed sleep. Peter Bodanovich, 2007. ***

Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical comic books are marvels of deceptively simple storytelling and clear black lines that carry surprising emotional weight. The movie adaptation does a fantastic job of setting the images I loved to linger over into motion. One of the best of the year. Much more very soon. Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, 2007. ****

Here’s a list of all the films I saw at the festival, ranked by how much I liked them. Movies I most regret missing include Silent Light, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, and the repeat screening of The Darjeeling Limited.

• Blade Runner: The Final Cut. *****
• Secret Sunshine. *****
• Persepolis. ****
• The Darjeeling Limited. ****
• Redacted. ****
• A Girl Cut in Two. ***
• Runnin’ Down a Dream. ***
• I’m Not There. ***
• Flight of the Red Balloon. ***
• Fados. ***
• The Orphanage. ***
• Go Go Tales. ***
• The Man From London. ***
• No Country for Old Men. ***
• Actresses. **
• The Axe in the Attic. **
• Margot at the Wedding. **
• Paranoid Park. **
• Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. **
• Married Life. *

See all posts about the New York Film Festival.

And finally, here’s the video for “Into the Great Wide Open,” starring Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway — because somehow Bogdanovich couldn’t spare the 6 1/2 minutes of his 253 to show us the entire thing. You’ll find that the YouTube clip actually sounds better than what we saw at the Walter Reade.

Brian De Palma’s Redacted, the devastating reconstruction of the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by American soldiers, has been one of the most divisive films at the New York Film Festival and it came as no surprise when tempers flared at a NYFF press conference with De Palma yesterday. “Did you intend to make a horror film for hipsters?” one incensed journalist asked. Answer: “No.”

When selection committee member J. Hoberman asked about the black bars that now cover some of the photographs at the conclusion of the film, Palma didn’t pull any punches, either: Redacted is now itself redacted,” he said. “My cut was violated.” No sooner had he fingered producer Mark Cuban for the changes in the film that a lone voice spoke up from the back of the Walter Reade Theater: “That’s not true!”

Eamonn Bowles from Magnolia Pictures went on to contradict De Palma, and after the conference, co-producer Jason Kliot took to the stage to explain that he saw the problem not as a “Cuban vs. De Palma type silly debate” but an issue of Fair Use laws, which he considered completely unfair: “they set it up so we cannot use images of our own culture to tell the truth about our own culture.”

De Palma also spoke about desensitization, voyeurism, and whether it’s easier to be labeled a misogynist or a traitor. At Spoutblog, Karina Longworth gets a statement from Cuban, and Bowles comments at Movie City Indie. My review of Redacted is up on About.com. The redacted version of the film will screen for the public on October 9 and 10. Magnolia will release the film in November.