jürgen fauth’s muckworld

I’ll have photos from holiday sojourn on Cape Cod later, but in the meantime I wanted to point to Commander König’s eerie and beautiful Easter-inspired photo series.

I just happened to mention Phish’s 1998 Prague shows the other day — turns out, the second night is being officially released on LivePhish today. You can listen to the Ghost for free. Some other time, I’ll tell you about how we stayed at an expat commune stalked by a mysterious “sickness” and the mirthless lectures on materialism I received from a future Park Slope real estate agent. I still have the poster we managed to rip off a downtown wall without being arrested by the Czech secret police.

Screening-wise, it’s been a slow week. I walked out of Olivier Assays’ Boarding Gate after it became clear that the tats on Asia Argento were the only interesting thing about it. Instead, I’ve been obsessing over my There Will Be Blood DVD — much more on this later.

Boarding Gate. Olivier Assayas, 2007. N/R

Two reviews of movies opening this week just went up on About.com: David Gordon Green’s drama Snow Angels and the Jason Statham heist flick The Bank Job.  This afternoon, I’m seeing Michael Haneke’s U.S. remake of his own Funny Games, and press screenings for New Directors/New Films start tomorrow.

In the meantime, a few items of note:

• Fresh off of etree, listen to a track from last week’s MMW show.
• David Hudson reports that Kriemhild was stabbed!
• Major Cyrillus’s Mystic Trip to Mars finds its tragic end, just in time for Commander Koenig’s birthday. Herzlichen Glückwunsch — just don’t celebrate with this guy! (NSFW)
• Dan Sallitt on Michael Clayton
• Lars von Trier’s music video for the Kingdom theme song.
• HiddenTrack’s Cover Wars feature Not Fade Away.
• In case you managed to miss these mashups: Saul Bass does Star Wars and The Red Crayola meets Thunderbirds.
• K. Silem Mohammad on Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades.
• Joseph Campbell’s Ten Commandments for Reading Myth.
• Faust image swiped from Tom Sutpen.

Snow Angels. David Gordon Green, 2008. **
The Bank Job. Roger Donaldson, 2008. **

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.

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 Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford
Dullsville and then some. Artfully shot, for sure, but ripping off Malick isn’t as easy as it looks. The voice-over narration, always describing what we already saw, doesn’t create openings but locks the movie down even more than the airless, repetitive scenes between paranoid outlaws. Sam Shepard disappears much too early, and soon thereafter, the drama completely stalls. After thirty minutes, I was begging for Casey Affleck to shoot Brad Pitt in the head already, but there were two more hours to go. Andrew Dominik, 2007. *

3:10 to Yuma
Now, this is how you do a western: engaging, exciting, and steeped in sepia tones. Russell Crowe plays a bandit who has to be brought to justice; Christian Bale is the one-legged stand-up guy to do it. Together with his performances in Rescue Dawn and I’m Not There, Bale is one of my favorite actors this year. James Mangold, 2007. ***

The Bucket List
The trailer for this movie is so hideous, we just had to check it out. Also, we might have been drunk. If Jack Nicholson throwing up in a hospital gown or jumping out of airplanes is your idea of fun, go right ahead. Sanctimonious Morgan Freeman is starting to get on my nerves. Rob Reiner, 2007. *

In Between Days
We had high hopes for this unassuming coming-of-age story about a Korean immigrant. I’m perfectly willing to stomach a slight story, mannered direction, or uncommunicative main characters — but if you heap them on top of each other, I’m probably already asleep. 83% on Rotten Tomatoes. So Yong Kim, 2007. *

The Brave One
Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard have what they call “good chemistry” in this surprisingly gripping tale of New York City revenge. Neil Jordan, 2007. ***

In the Valley of Elah
Worlds better than Crash, but that’s not saying much of anything. Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron try to solve the murder of his son, an AWOL soldier on leave from Iraq. In the process, they discover all sorts of truths about important issues. See Redacted instead. Paul Haggis, 2007. **

Once
Every bit as lovely the second time around. I finally discovered the title in the film, and I have a new favorite line: “Can I bring my mother?” Marcy’s review. John Carney, 2007. ****

No Country for Old Men
Wildly overpraised. Yes, I can see the expert filmmaking here, but all the sumptuous cinematography and vivid attention to detail is lavished on a story full of walking cliches and a lousy third act. On second viewing, the glaring problems with both plot and character — what Marcy called “lack of soul” — are impossible to ignore. Llewelyn’s too foolish to care for, the Coens avert their gaze at the crucial moment, and Bell’s defeatist retread of Marge Gunderson leaves us with a dire moral: “you can’t stop what’s coming.” Oh well then. No Country wastes a lot of hard-boiled effort on a tale that ends with an Old Testament shrug. Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007. **

• Matt Zoller Seitz
• Glenn Kenny
• Jim Emerson
• Jonathan Rosenbaum
• Rotten Tomatoes: 95%

At muckworld, we’re so bleeding edge that some of what we do goes straight from experimental to museum piece, without ever hitting that crucial middle phase of widespread success. Der Brennende Busch, an German-language online lit mag I founded and edited sometime in the last century, has been archived at Deutsches Literatur Archiv Marbach — you can now search for and dig through the proto-blog design, artwork by Dusty Domino, and a collection of stories, essays, poems, and multimedia pieces I’m still proud of.

Speaking of art work: my uncle-in-law Frank Ettenberg, an artist living and working in Vienna, sent along this painting, which I liked quite a bit. It’s called ‘Sea Swoosh’, approx 8 x 10″, acrylic on enameled composition board, and you can click it to enlarge. Frank’s portfolio.

Finally, news from everybody’s favorite red-headed guitar hero, Trey Anastasio. After his recent run-in with the law, Trey’s been holed up at an upstate rehab facility, but he just came out of hiding last Saturday to play a show with the latest incarnation of Phil and Friends. Every song on the setlist somehow referred to his troubles, but the extended arrest joke suddenly gave way to naked sentiment with the second-set appearance of the heavyweight Garcia ballad “Wharf Rat.”

You can download the whole show via bittorrent or watch some shaky videos. Let’s hope Trey gets to go on another furlough when Phil comes to the City next week for an 11-night-run at the Nokia, starting on Halloween. Here’s “Friend of the Devil” from Glens Falls:

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.

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. *****