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[hadarlaskey]

In praise of two hats in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth

My Dad always wore the same thing to pick me up on a Saturday. A wide black leather jacket, buttoned past his chin, wire-framed rectangular glasses, a scarf tied around the lower half of his face, and a woolly hat around the top. He had a serious face, a heavy German accent, and when we went to McDonald’s he would point at the meal he wanted rather than ordering it. For Newport, South Wales, in the mid-2000s, everything he did felt out of place.

When I first saw Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, my Dad could have been on the screen. The 1991 anthology film follows a series of loners on nocturnal taxi rides. In New York, we meet YoYo (Giancarlo Esposito), a Brooklyn native who after trying unsuccessfully to hail a cab – dozens of vacant taxis drive past him; a Black man – finally gets picked up by Helmut (Armin Mueller-Stahl), an East German immigrant who can’t drive. Helmut says he will take him to “Brookland”, although “better [YoYo] show [him] the way.”

They get off to a stalled start in every sense – YoYo has to take the wheel to get them more than a few meters down the road. In the taxi’s interior, I instantly recognised their stilted conversation. Just like my Dad’s exchanges with so many McDonald’s staff, Helmut, an ex-circus clown from Dresden, grapples with phrases like “cool” and “good to go”. YoYo, who knows the rules, geography and language of New York inside out, looks on with disbelief, himself mistaking Helmut’s stern mutterings for irritation.

But then Helmut points at YoYo’s head and says, “We have the same hat,” and they do. They are wearing nearly the same ushanka hat with ear flaps. Helmut’s is beige suede with worn, white wool around the forehead; YoYo’s is grey, lined with soft fur and clearly more expensive. “No, mine’s different,” YoYo protests, “Mine’s the newest-latest, mine’s fresh.” But it’s too late; the pair are matching.

Through this serendipitous, surface similarity, Jarmusch reveals stronger cultural connections between the two. Dressed in matching headgear, they mirror each other more than clash as they launch into a double act in the front seats. They share a strange sense of humour – both think each other’s name is ridiculous, Helmut because a yoyo is a “toy for kids”, YoYo because he says the name “Helmet” is like “calling your kid Lampshade”.

Helmut mimics YoYo by holding on to an imaginary wheel, admiring his command over the road. Both characters are operating the taxi, and also not. Neither can take the driver’s seat in this city – Helmut because he is an immigrant who doesn’t know how, YoYo because he is treated as “invisible” in Manhattan.

As in so many of his films, Jarmusch sees language barriers and cultural dissonance as fertile cinematic ground. Night on Earth revels in the social misfires I dreaded as a child. It also showed me their value. By the end of the cab ride, we see both characters truthfully for how they behave in tandem. We understand Helmut and his naivety, making his lone onward journey into an unfamiliar New York ever more poignant.

When I was a kid, my Dad was passing acquaintances with one of the servers at McDonald’s. They spoke briefly every time we walked in; both thought the other was bizarre, but I remember them often laughing. Unlike Helmut and YoYo’s rapport, I didn’t find their conversations a joy to watch. But the truth Jarmusch unearths in Night on Earth was still there. Their interactions allowed me to see my Dad clearly – his rare humour, and his isolation living in a city of unknown rules.

The post In praise of two hats in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/articles/night-on-earth-jim-jarmusch/

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[hadarlaskey]

How witchploitation cinema cast its spell on the counter-culture

In the 1960s, dabbling in the occult became an unusually popular pastime. Though initially the preserve of aristocrats and the like, interest in esoteric beliefs and practices – particularly various forms and wicca and witchcraft – became part of the fabric of popular culture. By the end of the decade, what had once been niche was now as much a part of counter-culture life as music, drugs and fashion. Film had its part to play in this growing trend.

Whether in feature films, documentaries, exploitation films or softcore skin flicks, witchcraft in particular became a useful excuse for nudity, violence and various other titillations. Sometimes used as an intriguing expression of suburban social angst while other times just a reason for disrobed rituals, witchcraft became a popular theme for filmmakers of all sorts. Like all boons, it was ripe for exploiting and produced a body of sleazy witchploitation cinema.

It must be suggested that, in many of these films, belief systems and practices are hugely conflated. Witchcraft, wicca, occultism, satanism, paganism, voodoo and all sorts of other practices and theologies went into the melting pot. For the sake of simplicity, they’re referred to as occultism and witchcraft from here on, but it should be noted that filmmakers played fast and loose with such imagery and ideas.

Such themes were arguably already relatively popular in horror cinema. One of the most accomplished examples was Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan: Witchcraft through the Ages, an incredibly influential film that would foreshadow the future blend of documentary and horror imagery. Tellingly, the film was re-released in 1968, re-edited with a voiceover by William Burroughs, just as schlocky variations on Christensen’s film were in vogue.

Films such as Mark Robson’s The Seventh Victim, Claude Alexander’s The Naked Witch, William J Hole Jr’s The Devil’s Hand and Don Sharp’s Witchcraft are also good foreshadows of fictional witchploitation films, albeit ambiguous and lacking the determined kitsch style of later screen renditions.

Witchcraft itself generally had a different flavour before the counter-culture, more a drawing room novelty than an erotic happening for hip young things. Even if the Chelsea mob did eventually retire to their parents’ manors to indulge, its vibe was still something closer to popular rather than underground culture. Think of Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon or Sidney Hayer’s Night of the Eagle, films where there is something distinctly upper class in occult mischief, the latter film especially showing witchcraft used for earnest social climbing.

Not all films later in the ’60s tapped into the counter-culture aspects either, even with the cultural revolution in full swing. Films such as Cyril Frankel’s The Witches and Terence Fisher’s The Devil Rides Out still retained that rural indulgence as opposed to grimy urban exploitation. Even folk horror classics such as Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General and Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw played loosely to some extent with the possibilities of witchcraft; the former looking at what behaviour its possible presence could excuse, the latter looking at its use in influencing groups of youths to help the Devil arise.

It’s easy to see the influence of Christensen’s Häxan on the most important run of witchploitation films. Whether in grimy Soho cinemas or on television, filmmakers used the documentary format to explore the growing practices of counter-culture youth, in a not dissimilar way to mondo and exploitation directors’ use of swingers groups and strip joints.

The first of these was Witchcraft ’70 by mondo maestro Luigi Scattini. Sometimes known as The Satanists, the film globe-trots in order to explore a number of different esoteric practices (similarly to Scattini’s appropriately named debut Sexy Magico), perhaps most importantly zoning in on Diane LeVey, founder of the Church of Satan in 1966. LeVey herself would play a fictional Satanist some years later in Robert Fuest’s underrated The Devil’s Rain. Exploring “the often erotic world of the witch,” the film typifies the witchploitation style; a documentary filled with increasingly Kenneth Anger-esque imagery, all psychedelic nightmares and hippy communes.

The British iteration of witchploitation cinema is perhaps the most celebrated, often because it features the king and queen of the counter-culture witches Alex and Maxine Sanders. It’s difficult to convey the influence these Notting Hill häxans had on b-movie culture at this point, as well as on the general perception of the counter-culture as distinctly witchy, specifically in its growing taste for wicca.

Though Alex Sanders had appeared on an episode of Late Show London in 1966 (tellingly alongside Roman Polanski a year before he started production on Rosemary’s Baby), his real screen debut came in the mesmerising Legend of the Witches. Directed by Malcolm Leigh, the film’s stark black and white imagery is startling and evocative, centring around one particular initiation rite where a naked man walks blindfolded through a series of tests. The eerie calls of “Michael” uttered by the naked witch leading him into the night make for exceptionally compelling scenes.

Leigh’s background and future was in lesser sexploitation comedies, his previous short being about the typically strange British obsession with randy window cleaners, while his latter work such as Games That Lovers Play and Erotic Fantasies show where the director’s true interests were. Other directors took note.

Sanders appeared again in the even more pulpy and psychedelic Secret Rites by Derek Ford. More so than Leigh, Ford really was a skin-flick director. Secret Rites could have been just a witchcraft tinged addition to Ford’s other saucy work such as Groupie Girl, The Wife Swappers and Suburban Wives. But the film is surprisingly effective. Focussing on the Sanders coven allows for a huge range of visual possibilities. The film is a heady, colourful daydream, filled to the brim with effective horror imagery. The genuine costumes are especially magnificent, retaining the sort of grainy authenticity that most occult films today would murder for.

No turn towards popular witchcraft would be complete without the obligatory Satanic Panic style reaction film and this came thanks to the BBC in 1971. In The Power of the Witch: Real or Imaginary, Sanders again makes an appearance, alongside various authority figures expressing concern about all this preternatural permissiveness, presented by Michael Bakewell. Being the BBC, it obviously doesn’t go to the lengths of the B-movies but it certainly feels a natural cousin to those other films, replacing the sex magick rituals with enjoyably concerned vicars and pious church military.

Though other films looked at witchcraft with more creative aims, in particular Roddy McDowell’s The Ballad of Tam-Lin and George A Romero’s Season of the Witch, it was the b-movie model that dominated. In an atmosphere of sex comedies, mondo documentaries and increasingly camp horror, it was natural that witchploitation reflected the cultural milieu around it.

Ray Austin’s Virgin Witch is the epitome of fictional witchploitation films. Everything that made those films entertaining pulp is present; the typical exploitation tropes of sex and violence, but also the endlessly watchable, kitsch visual style of the early ’70s. The film is enjoyable precisely because it understands the natural coupling of the post-’60s youth revolutions and the occult. It follows a model Christine (Ann Michelle) and her sister Betty (Vicki Michelle) heading to a castle in order to be contracted to a modelling agency run by Sybil (Patricia Haines). There’s only one problem: Sybil is a witch in charge of a coven and requires a young virgin to join their ranks.

Austin himself was really a television director and Virgin Witch was only one of his two non-TV feature films. The other was Fun and Games, another sexploitation film following the unbalanced daughter of a prison governor who decides to work her way through staff and prisoners alike. Virgin Witch is slightly subtler, but only just. It is at least more earnestly fun, aware of its own absurdity and relishing its staging of various rituals.

As with many films of the genre, it’s best to enjoy the pulpy vivaciousness of Virgin Witch rather than think about the scenario too deeply. The film’s aesthetic alone is replete with dated pleasures, all miniskirts, dodgy hip dialogue and a wonderful, heady score by Catweazel composer Ted Dicks. Its role as just another cheap Soho quickie may have been its chief production draw, pulling the punters with promises of copious nudity, lesbian witchcraft and a spattering of ritual sacrifice, but films like Virgin Witch capture the era of their production far better than bigger budget films do, quite simply because they’re more honest about the tastes and drives of a late night audience.

The genre itself didn’t just cannibalise general horror tropes but openly nicked things from other films. It was only a few years later that B-movie don Norman J Warren used the exact same location of Austin’s film for Satan’s Slave. The witchy element is more esoteric than hobbyist in that the main character, played by Candace Glendenning, is suggested to be the re-incarnation of a witch. Michael Gough has macabre, campy plans for her, and the film is filled with wintry landscapes and flowery fashion.

Ultimately, it’s Austin’s film that collects together all that went before it and packages it neatly and entertainingly. Even the semi-documentary form of previous works feels in some way parallel to the youth culture elements of Virgin Witch. It’s British schlock at its best, but then, as happens with many cheap flicks, other directors saw the potential for their own salacious necromancy.

Witchcraft itself had really become ubiquitous by the way time it entered the grindhouses. The BBC Ghost Story for Christmas in 1975, Lawrence Gordon Clark’s The Ash Tree, focussed around the haunting of a period witch and her deadly “children”, while television programmes like Doctor Who, The Tomorrow People and Play for Today all showcased occult tendencies throughout the 1970s (specifically in The Dæmons, The Heart of Sogguth and Robin Redbreast respectively).

Once popularised by the counter-culture, schlock and B-movie cinema found new ways to exploit the most abstract and fictionalised accounts of witchcraft. Supplanting occultism into the modern day was really a blessing for no-budget filmmakers, as well as television directors, as it removed the expensive requirements of period films like Witchfinder General and Adrian Hoven’s Mark of the Devil.

Instead, the linking between esoteric practices and the modern day was taken for granted, tying into youth culture and fashion. It made the job incredibly easy for B-movie directors. In Corrado Farina’s Baba Yaga, for example, the narrative of a jealous lesbian witch (Carrol Baker) is told around a variety of fashion shoots, most of which descend into softcore S&M.

Provided the modern day is present in some form, no occupation is too bizarre or ill-fitting for a spate of witchy action. In Hollingsworth Morse’s Daughters of Satan, an antique dealer (Tom Selleck) buys a painting of witches being burned at the stake, only to notice a strange resemblance between one of the witches and his wife (Barra Gant). Freddie Francis’ Craze also featured a demented antique dealer (Jack Palance) who sacrifices women to an idol. Adding to that Peter Cushing’s non-witchy role as a murderous antique dealer in Kevin Conner’s From Beyond the Grave and it’s easy to believe that antique hunting in the ’70s was a genuinely hazardous pastime.

While most of these films have absurdity embedded within them, as the years went on and the counter-culture continued its slow demise, there’s little doubt that witchploitation films became camper, lumbered with ever more bizarre colonial hang-ups and, overall, entertainingly bad. Films such as Ted V Mikels’ Blood Orgy of the She-Devils, David Lowell Rich’s Satan’s School for Girls, Mario Gariazzo’s Enter the Devil, Amando de Ossorio’s Demon Witch Child and Jordi Gigó’s The Devil’s Kiss are just a few examples that showcase just how schlocky filmmakers were willing to go with their So Mote it Be’s. Filmmakers were literally selling the name on the tin by this point, epitomised most by films like Luigi Batzella’s Nude for Satan which had hardcore scenes cut and uncut, depending on the screening scenario.

What at first seemed a mere ploy to get punters in to horror films had turned almost uniquely into seedy Satanism. Hammer films had tried to mine the post-counter culture trend of hippy witchcraft too, in John Hough’s Twins of Evil, but its period setting made it feel closer to the studio’s regular stock and trade. Elements could also be seen in Alan Gibson’s Dracula: AD 1972 but it toed the line with vampirism rather than witchcraft. Instead, Hammer used their remaining throw of the horror dice to indulge in vaguely erotic witchcraft in To the Devil, a Daughter.

Their second adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s work, the first being the superior The Devil Rides Out, Peter Sykes’ film again conflates modern day London life with ancient practices; following Richard Widmark as he tries to save the soul of Natassja Kinski from Christopher Lee’s ruthless band of occult disciples. The occult had gone through many variations at this point and the days of grainy films showcasing naked witchcraft seemed long gone. Though the film may have contained copious violence and nudity, much to the dismay of Wheatley who wrote to Hammer to express his annoyance, the occult had moved onto bigger things than swinging circles and Notting Hill orgies.

The success of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist showed the future direction of the occult in all its guises; namely that The Devil himself now provided the best box office odds. It was less about frolicking hippy witches and more overtly about political power. Followed further by the success of Richard Donner’s The Omen, as well as Dario Argento’s still witchy Suspiria, the grainy, grimy end of witchploitation was left to decay in the Chelsea basements from where it had bloomed. It was far from those heady days of new freedoms a decade earlier when it really had been the season of the witch.

Virgin Witch is released on Blu-Ray via Black House Films on 6 December.

The post How witchploitation cinema cast its spell on the counter-culture appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/articles/witchploitation-cinema-1960s-counter-culture/

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[hadarlaskey]

Lamb

In the beautiful but harsh Icelandic countryside, María (Noomi Rapace) and her husband Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) tend to their sheep farm in relative harmony. The work is hard and the days are long, but the couple seem content enough – until a shocking discovery among their flock offers them both a gift and a curse.

The fable-like quality of Valdimar Jóhannsson’s feature debut is evident in this premise alone, as a childless couple yearn for a baby to call their own, only to fall prey to the old adage ‘be careful what you wish for.’ Their unexpected arrival, Ada, is an unconventional child who they must keep secret from the world – a situation complicated by the arrival of Ingvar’s reckless brother Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) who is attracted to María.

With its glacial pace and sparse dialogue, Jóhannsson creates a dreamlike atmosphere, leaning into the perception of Iceland as an austere and mystical land. It’s to Rapace’s credit that the film works at all – she is its heart and soul, and is capable of portraying great tenderness one moment and cold brutality the next.

Lamb’s premise is intriguing too – a pleasing twist on the familiar horror trope of monstrous motherhood. Even so, the imaginative conceit is let down by a rather sudden and underwhelming climax. It’s a bold arrival for Jóhannsson all the same, and refreshing to see Rapace granted a role outside of her more traditional action fare.

ANTICIPATION. Have we reached peak A24 “elevated horror”? 3

ENJOYMENT. Visually engrossing but a tad too languid. 3

IN RETROSPECT. Refreshing work from Rapace even if the film itself isn’t perfect. 3

Directed by Valdimar Jóhannsson

Starring Noomi Rapace, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson, Hilmir Snær Guðnason

The post Lamb appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/reviews/lamb/

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[hadarlaskey]

Don’t Look Up

Filmmakers have been wrestling with the climate crisis for some time now. In February 2022, it will be 15 years since Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth won Best Documentary at the Oscars; little progress (if any) has been made since then. In 2018 the UN warned we had 12 years to limit the catastrophe; this past November, the COP26 summit was deemed a failure by many critics. It’s understandable, then, that Adam McKay, who pivoted to political filmmaking in 2015 with his scathing take on the 2007-08 financial meltdown, The Big Short, might use his platform for a noble, urgent cause.

Understandable, too, is the impulse from Leonardo DiCaprio to front such a project; he established his own environmental awareness foundation in 1998, and used his Best Actor Oscar acceptance speech in 2016 to highlight climate change, not to mention producing eight documentaries around the subject and narrating two of them. But can a star-studded satire about imminent planetary death lead to material change, or does it land in the same way as a telling-off from a cool headteacher?

McKay’s allegory sees a PhD Astronomy student named Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet while studying under Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). While her discovery is initially cause for celebration within the Michigan State astronomy department, the pair soon realise the comet is on a direct collision course with Earth and that the impact will cause a mass extinction event.

In an attempt to warn the world, they are joined by Dr Clayton Oglethorpe from NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, who takes their concerns all the way to girlboss madam president, Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep). A tug-of-war ensues between scientists, politicians and businessmen (notably Mark Rylance’s tech magnate Peter Isherwell, modelled after Steve Jobs and Elon Musk) as each strives to protect their interests, and Dr Mindy quickly finds himself enamoured with the prospect of becoming a celebrity scientist.

This top-line synopsis barely scratches the surface when it comes to the celebrities packed into the film’s 145-minute runtime. Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett, Ariana Grande, Timothée Chalamet, Tyler Perry and Ron Perlman all have cameos, with mixed results: Chalamet shines as a nihilistic gamer (he should do more comedy) but Grande’s turn as a vapid pop star adds precious little apart from her name on the poster.

It feels more like an exercise in attaching stars to a cause than a successful ensemble cast, and while DiCaprio is charming as the schlubby scientists seduced by celebrity, Lawrence feels ill-cast as the grounded outsider speaking truth to power even though the role was written for her especially. A romance between her character and Chalamet’s is cringe-inducing in how forced it feels, while Meryl Streep, for all her many talents, is just not a natural comedian. It’s a shame McKay has moved away from casting comedians and traditionally comic actors, because a cast with a better sense of rhythm and timing might have been able to sell this clunky script a little more gracefully.

McKay’s stylistic flourishes (use of title cards, interspersed image sequences reminiscent of the Ludovico Technique sequence in A Clockwork Orange) remain distracting, particularly given the presence of so many stars. Even Nicholas Britell’s score feels overwhelmed by the constant bombardment of images, as if McKay is afraid to really let the film breathe. It’s only in the film’s final scene – which is maybe its best – that there’s any feeling of dramatic resonance, and even this is undermined by a slapstick post-credits sequence.

The film does succeed in portraying the lunacy of recent times, however, and although the main thrust is how world leaders continue to turn a blind eye to climate change in order to cling to revenue streams and polling numbers, it’s a handy insight into the political divides during the Covid pandemic as well.

Streep’s president is clearly modelled after Trump, which is funny up to a point, but also feels like too convenient a get-out, as if all we can do is spiral into darkness while our elected representatives continually fuck us over. It’s not like things have been markedly better since Trump retreated into the shadows; the maddening inaction of elected officials is now secluded behind closed doors, rather than played out on the POTUS Twitter account.

The thing is, it all feels a little toothless. While McKay’s previous film, Vice, ascribed every Western evil of the past 20 years to Dick Cheney, Don’t Look Up doesn’t ascribe much blame or responsibility, or even offer a phoney quick-fix ending. In fact, it doesn’t have much at all to say about the climate disaster beyond a shrugging ‘well, this sucks, but we still have each other!’

Perhaps this is an indication that we shouldn’t look (up) to celebrities for any sort of answer or salvation. But what do you do when celebrities are friends with the business execs who ravage the dwindling resources we have left to line their bank accounts? When celebrities are politicians, the very people with the power to enact global change? McKay doesn’t seem to have an answer for that.

ANTICIPATION. Vice was a mess; the bar is low. 2

ENJOYMENT. DiCaprio is on good form, but McKay still over-embellishes. 3

IN RETROSPECT. A TedTalk from Hollywood’s elite that offers no easy answers. 3

Directed by Adam McKay

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Rob Morgan

The post Don’t Look Up appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/reviews/dont-look-up/

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[hadarlaskey]

Being the Ricardos

Certain things age like fine wine; others like warm milk. Set in the antiquated world of cosy American sitcoms and 1960s gender politics, Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos explores the relationship between small-screen legends Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, creators and stars of I Love Lucy. As the opening mockumentary-style interviews tell us, at its peak the show regularly pulled in 60 million viewers – it was so popular that businesses would change their opening hours to accommodate it.

We meet the couple in a “compound fracture” of a week: a magazine has accused Desi of cheating; Lucille is pregnant and being accused of being a communist at the height of McCarthyism. Despite these being real events, Sorkin takes creative licence by compacting them into the same working week, showing Ball and Arnaz dealing with the fall out in between table reads and blocking rehearsals.

Yet while the characters are consumed with the production of the show, the film uses it as only a means to an end. We see flashes of Ball figuring out the minutiae of the physical comedy, the logic of the dialogue, and the composition of each frame – it’s deeply unfunny stuff, but serves to highlight her dedication to her craft and the super-seriousness of her approach.

Ball and Arnaz are a very different people to Lucy and Ricky. Kidman’s Ball is a quick-witted, Katharine Hepburn-esque ice queen, drawing deep on a cigarette before landing insults in a sharply-tailored suit. She’s given period-appropriate arched eyebrows and prosthetics to round out her face, which to be fair to the makeup department, aren’t nearly as eerie as the trailer suggests, but still feel superfluous. Kidman’s performance is strong enough: why couldn’t she have been trusted to convince us as Ball without the rubber cheeks?

“Sorkin largely contains the action within I Love Lucy’s sound stage, which only intensifies the central relationship.”

Unhampered by prosthetics, Javier Bardem is sensational as Arnaz, selling the character’s intelligence and devilish charm. Although casting a Spanish actor to play a Cuban icon is evidence of Hollywood’s failure to address the erasure of Latinx actors, Bardem is otherwise perfectly suited to the role. Having been chased out of Cuba by the Bolsheviks, Desi became an extremely patriotic American despite being treated as a second-class citizen. The love between him and Lucille is deeply felt, but his narrow idea of masculinity means that, for all that he wants Lucille to come see him perform, it pains him to watch the crowd turn away to gawp at her.

In reality Arnaz was the president of Desilu Productions, and while Lucille was certainly the face, she insisted to anyone who would listen that he “runs this show”. While ostensibly Being the Ricardos gives Desi his dues, Sorkin presents us with a complex and flawed man, one whose heritage was weaponised against him in the same way that Ball’s gender, age and appearance were weaponised against her. Tragically, the film posits that rather than empathising with each other’s plights, this drove a wedge between them – one that no amount of romantic gestures could bridge.

Flashbacks aside, Sorkin largely contains the action within I Love Lucy’s sound stage, which only intensifies the central relationship. Lucille declares that the only time her marriage truly exists is on stage, and she (like Sorkin) unwisely clings to this notion. In the second act, nods to the show’s elaborate set-pieces, repeated discussions around camera blocking and a laboured entrance joke are a real drag; far more interesting is the dynamic between Ball and the female co-workers who call her out feminist lapses.

Some classic Sorkin’ and talkin’ brings energy to proceedings – particularly when Bardem threatens to pull someone’s lungs out of their throat – but Being the Ricardos falls apart in a third act that feels forced and anticlimactic. While Sorkin, Kidman and Bardem breathe life into these sitcom icons, their lives ultimately prove too big and too messy to fit within this film’s constraints.

ANTICIPATION. Interesting enough for a biopic, but Kidman looks… odd. 3

ENJOYMENT. Oh, how I long to swap snide remarks over cocktails with Kidman while Bardem sings “Cuban Pete”... 4

IN RETROSPECT. I like Lucy. 3

Directed by Aaron Sorkin

Starring Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, Nina Arianda

The post Being the Ricardos appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/reviews/being-the-ricardos/

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[hadarlaskey]

A checkout clerk gets Jokerfied in this German grocery store’s parody advert

It’s almost Christmas, which means elaborate meals feasted upon with loved ones, which in turn means grocery shopping. German chain store Lidl has unveiled a new advert for the holiday season, featuring an oft-portrayed character known to one and all — no, not Santa Claus.

We are referring instead to Batman’s constant nemesis The Joker, whose 2019 vehicle in the form of Joaquin Phoenix provides the basis for this strange, memorable TV spot. As Arthur Fleck, Phoenix buckled under the psychological weight of a society that ignored him and a woman who spurned him — but for the troubled young checkout clerk featured here, all it takes is one instance of embarrassing public “cringe” to leave him green-faced and Jokerfied.

His attire and behavior are right on point, aping Phoenix’s ’70s suit and delirious cackle in a series of scenes directly recreated to mimic the film. He fantasy-kisses his crush in the elevator, gets roughed up by some street hooligans, stretches his face in a gesture of desperation, and even bares his emaciated torso — somehow, this will convince customers to patronize Lidl as opposed to German food-sales rival Aldi.

This being a commercial, the ending doesn’t head in the direction of pitch-black darkness staked out by its inspiration, instead going for a comic button in which a normal couple winds up in the checkout lane of our demented hero, who then throws a wink in the direction of the camera. While an understanding of the German language would certainly illuminate what’s going on here, something about its odd mix of the morose and comical speaks to deeper cultural currents of the country.

The post A checkout clerk gets Jokerfied in this German grocery store’s parody advert appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/articles/lidl-advert-joker-grocery-store/

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[hadarlaskey]

What is the greatest film score of all time?

What is the greatest film score of all time? That’s a debate that has the potential to range all day, but whatever one’s answer, the relationship between music and the moving image is incontrovertible. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, filmmakers were swift to capitalise on the powerfully symbiotic relationship between visual poetry and subjective, illusory notes on a cue sheet. In the days of vaudeville and silent cinema, it was common practice for live pianists to perform live to picture before increasingly sophisticated working practices began to take hold.

Organs were installed that could mimic objective sound elements like bird songs, and a boom in cinema construction saw movie theatres equipped with specially designed orchestra pits capable of accommodating the finest classical musicians of the period. An increased emphasis on narrative-driven, feature-length drama resulted in D.W. Griffith’s controversial yet groundbreaking The Birth of a Nation (1915), whose score by Joseph Carl Breil deployed the use of the Wagnerian ‘leitmotif’ whereby specific musical motifs are assigned to particular characters and situations.

Many of the early 20th century’s most prominent comedians, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin, favoured a sense of intricate melody and harmony within their films. With the transition from silent cinema to sound pictures, or ‘talkies’, the film score was somewhat destabilised and no longer the prominent element in the sound mixture. Full synchronisation between picture, music, and sound elements would not be completely achieved until Al Jolson’s musical The Jazz Singer (1927), which showcased the newly developed Vitaphone system. Don Juan’s pioneering approach, mixing objectivity of sound effects and dialogue with the subjective emotion of music, paved the way for every movie in its wake. Howard Shore is one of the most celebrated composers of the modern age.

Acclaimed for his work on a host of diverse genres, Shore broke new ground in fantasy scoring with his gargantuan, extraordinary The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003) for director Peter Jackson, a landmark achievement that won the composer three Oscars. Shore says that “the collaboration between sound and score can produce interesting results”. He continues: “Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) benefited from Eugene Gearty setting the train station, clocks and train whistles in the same key as the score. Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) benefited I believe from the close collaboration between music and sound editing and design by Skip Lievsay.”

That said, it would still be some years until the non-diegetic film score came of age in the early 20th century. Non-diegetic refers to music heard outside of the context of the film; diegetic means the source of the music is visible within the context of the scene. In 1933, Max Steiner delivered what was arguably the first-ever creature feature adventure score, King Kong, a leitmotif-driven extravaganza of interlocking themes and impressions. The score benefited from the recent invention of the click track, which allowed the composer to achieve infinitesimal synchronisation by listening to ‘clicks’ through headphones.

The industrial innovations, combined with Steiner’s dramatic intuition, inspired scores of talented film composers who flourished during Hollywood’s so-called ‘Golden Era’, including Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, Franz Waxman, and Dimitri Tiomkin. Newman would invent the 20th Century Fox (now 20th Century Studios) fanfare, one of the world’s most famous musical signatures. The scores of this period began to transition from European romanticism, imported from Austria by the likes of Steiner and Korngold, to a more typically ‘American’ sound that had already been popularised in the concert hall by Aaron Copland.

Emile Mosseri is a composer whose sound mixes delicate tones, unusual intervals, and chord suspensions with lush orchestral textures. Off the back of praised works such as The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) and the Oscar-winning Minari (2021), Mosseri’s voice has been hailed as invigorating and distinctive.

“The main reason why a composer is hired is that they’ve composed something in the past that resonates with the director,” Mosseri explains. “It’s just your musical instincts. Everyone has something they gravitate towards. It’s going to sound like you if it comes from you. In Minari, the music was intended to float in an impressionistic way. The music is dreamlike and suggests things without using a heavy hand. Working on that film was an absolute dream.”

“The goal was to figure out what childhood memory would sound like musically. I must praise the instincts of director Lee Isaac Chung and editor Harry Yoon – they placed music where I hadn’t imagined it going. In a way, I feel like they co-scored the film. Certain pieces of music weren’t necessarily powerful on their own, but via this strategic, poetic placement, the music took on a new life. On the other hand, for a particular scene in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, we removed the music and left it dry, which, as it turns out, was the best approach. In terms of spotting, where you put music is just as important as what goes in.”

This is an extract from an essay that originally appeared in Composer magazine.

The post What is the greatest film score of all time? appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/articles/greatest-film-score-composer/

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[hadarlaskey]

George MacKay staves off World War Two in the Munich: The Edge of War trailer

By the year 1938, the Nazis had spread through Europe with enough aggression to draw the concern of other superpowers in the region, but the British government was convinced war could still be avoided. A summit was convened in Munich to hash out an agreement between Hitler and his westward opposition, with a goal of finding a resolution that would appease the fascists while stemming their expansion.

The new film Munich: The Edge of War walks viewers through the motivations, events, and aftermath of this momentous gathering by focusing on two of its key players. In the upcoming Netflix release, the first trailer for which arrived online just today, George MacKay and Jannis Niewöhner star as a pair of diplomats scurrying to keep both of their nations out of the annihilation we all know they were powerless to stop.

MacKay plays Hugh Legat, a civil servant of the crown tasked with finding a solution alongside his old friend and colleague, the German attaché Paul von Hartmann, portrayed by Niewöhner. Jeremy Irons also stars as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, remembered today predominantly as the guy who allowed Hitler to continue his genocide until things got out of hand in Poland one year after the Munich meeting.

Legat is tasked with retrieving a crucial document exposing Hitler’s true intentions – not to establish peace, but rather conquer the world – from von Hartmann, who shares his old university mate’s wish to avert catastrophe despite the Führer’s wishes. The two must collude to get the evidence in the proper hands, all under the watchful eye of the Third Reich, including an appearance from Hitler himself at a high-power dinner for state officials.

Director Christian Schwochow may be perfectly suited to this trans-European job, as a German filmmaker whose most noteworthy item on his CV is a stint directing episodes of The Crown. Judging from the trailer, he’s checked all the crucial boxes for the genre – furtive rendezvous, narrowly evading exposure, bilingual murmuring, a race against the clock. History buffs will be chuffed.

Munich: The Edge of War will come to UK cinemas on 7 January and then Netflix on 21 January.

The post George MacKay staves off World War Two in the Munich: The Edge of War trailer appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/articles/munich-the-edge-of-war-trailer-jeremy-irons-george-mackay/

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[hadarlaskey]

Discover the film that helped kickstart the found footage phenomenon

We know from the beginning how a filmed expedition into New Jersey’s remote Pine Barrens in search of the legendary Jersey Devil will end, because it has already ended. On the night of 15 December, 1995, cable TV host Stefan Avkast (Stefan Avalos) went missing while doing a location broadcast, leaving behind only his hat and a lot of his blood splattered nearby, while the copses of his brutally murdered co-host Locus Wheeler (Lance Weiler) and their sound man Rein Clackin (Rein Clabbers) were later found scattered in pieces not far from the campsite.

Only their guest and guide, the magician/clairvoyant Jim Suerd (Jim Seward), appears to have walked out of the forest unscathed and confused, claiming to have no idea what happened to the rest of the crew. After police found an item of clothing in Suerd’s home splashed with traces of blood from all three of his colleagues, the reclusive psychic was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life imprisonment for Wheeler and Clackin’s murders, only to die in his cell under questionable circumstances.

Now filmmaker David Leigh (David Beard) is making a documentary on the incident, trying to uncover answers to the questions, “why would a man commit such murders… what really happened that night, and is Jim Suerd truly responsible?” By the end of Weiler and Avalos’ sophisticated horror mockumentary The Last Broadcast, the last two of those questions will have been answered in an unequivocal – if unexpected – way, while the first will remain a mystery.

“The following people are not actors,” reads text near the beginning of The Last Broadcast. It is a statement that comes with layers. On the one hand, it is variant on the ‘based on a true story’ claim made at the beginning of many horror films: an authenticating assertion of veridicality, even if in fact it already forms a part of the film’s fiction.

On the other hand, it is a true statement, if perhaps not quite in the way that viewers might imagine. Most of the cast members here are genuine non-professionals, appearing in this film for their first and only on-screen role. Accordingly, much as Avkast and Wheeler’s gonzo show is called Fact or Fiction, and investigates the paranormal, both Avalos and Weiler’s own feature and Leigh’s documentary within it set the viewer sorting fact from fiction, and reality from its framed, mediated and manipulated presentation.

This quest for truth unfolds not just within the film’s diffracted narrative, as an event is examined and reexamined through not always reliable evidence and newly emerging videotapes, but also at a formal level, as The Last Broadcast insists upon its own status as a documentary, and adopts all the tropes (talking head interviews, police tapes, to-camera commentary, archival footage, newspaper headlines, etc) of that genre, while in fact being a work of fiction. Even a cursory look at the cast list will reveal that the performers here are not playing themselves, but near namesakes, in a tantalising approximation of actuality.

Leigh’s dogged pursuit of this forgotten case, and his determination to reveal the truth behind it, will turn out to be an ancient, Oedipal impulse, updated to a technological world. The Last Broadcast takes place not just at the ever-shifting boundary between fact and fiction, but also at a strange intersection between the primordial and the postmodern.

Avalos and Weiler’s film and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project both featured a doomed expedition, all captured on portable cameras, into the deep, dark woods, and both helped kickstart a ‘found footage’ horror movement that would explode in the mid 2000s. Yet despite their overlapping productions (The Blair Witch Project was released a year after The Last Broadcast, but conceived before it), these two films were made in complete independence and isolation from each other, and their similarities are not the result of theft or influence, but rather a coincidental response to something buzzing in the airwaves of the Zeitgeist.

Both these horror mockumentaries emerged at a time when nascent technologies were coming into their own. The Blair Witch Project was famously one of the first films to promote itself with a highly successful online viral campaign. Meanwhile, not only does The Last Broadcast purport to show Fact or Fiction’s field recordings from the world’s first live simulcast of a programme both online and on cable, but The Last Broadcast itself was the first ever feature shot and edited entirely on consumer-level digital equipment.

“These were murders of a high-tech age,” as Leigh says in his voiceover, featuring “children of a digital age” who use the latest tech at their disposal to get the truth out there, and who are addicted to the intimacy and anonymity of Internet Relay Chat. All these technological innovations offer an opportunity to tell ancient stories in new ways.

The second half of Avalos and Weiler’s film (and Leigh’s documentary) hinges on the last missing video shot by Wheeler and Clackin before their deaths – video which had, like Akvast, vanished, but which has mysteriously been delivered in a box on Leigh’s doorstep, in damaged strips. Leigh hires “magnetic media recovery expert” Michelle Monarch (Michele Pulaski) to go through the painstaking process of retrieving whatever secrets this found footage might hold, perhaps casting new light on a very cold case, or even identifying a killer.

Indeed, The Last Broadcast is a work of investigation and reconstruction: it involves the reenactment of a trek into the primal woods, the recovery of bodies and DNA and the reassemblage of gravely fragmented video – all pieced together to offer a mosaic picture of a crime that hides in plain sight, or possibly a distraction from what is being kept just out of frame. “It is as though the Jersey devil is a monster reborn in a digital age, reborn on the internet,” Leigh will say. “A demon captured on IRC logs, mangled video, whispers in the dark.” Here indeed, the Jersey devil is in the digital details – and when this monster finally shows its face, it does so in a way that demonstrates how easily manipulable these new media are.

The big surprise reveal in The Last Broadcast is the only part of the film shot extradiegetically, with cameras being operated by no character from within the narrative. While this might lend the denouement a semblance of objectivity, it is also notable that it expressly takes place on the 1 April, 1997 – April Fool’s Day. Here everything is overtly shot, edited and mediated; the illusionist’s trick and the prank rule; and perhaps nothing, aside from the materiality of the mysterious woods themselves, is real.

The Last Broadcast is released on Blu-ray from 6 December via 101 Films.

The post Discover the film that helped kickstart the found footage phenomenon appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/articles/the-last-broadcast-found-footage-phenomenon/

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[hadarlaskey]

Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It

Sixty years ago, Rita Moreno made Oscars history when she became the first Latina to win an acting Oscar for her role as Anita in the 1961 musical West Side Story – famously, she also gave one of the shortest speeches. A true Hollywood trailblazer, Moreno’s career stretches all the way back to the old studio system, when she was spotted by an MGM talent scout as a teenager in New York City.

“I can’t think of anybody I’ve ever met in the business who lived the American dream more than Rita Moreno,” says Norman Lear at the start of this documentary, which takes a linear approach to Moreno’s long list of achievements (she is one of just 16 people with an EGOT) and the numerous challenges and setbacks she has faced since moving from Puerto Rico at aged five.

Mariem Pérez Riera’s film offers insight into the casting practices of Old Hollywood that saw Moreno emulate Elizabeth Taylor in a bid to impress MGM mogul Louis B Mayer. There were no performers who looked like Moreno at the time and Taylor was the closest she had to a role model. To contemporary audiences, it is shocking to see the heavy dark makeup applied to a young Moreno in a string of “native girl” parts (as Moreno refers to them). This was still the case for the Hispanic performers when West Side Story was made.

Now in her eighties, Moreno is still probably best known for her role as Anita, but this film isn’t merely a West Side Story retrospective. Clips are not relied on but help to illustrate Moreno’s impact as a versatile film, stage and television performer. The mix of talking heads – featuring Moreno and the likes of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Gloria Estefan and Whoopi Goldberg – with present-day vérité footage and archival interviews paints a vivid portrait of Moreno’s personal and professional struggles and triumphs.

One recurring theme is of a woman who has been treated like a doll through various stages of her life. Moreno’s on-off relationship with therapy adds to this, and topics such as the Hollywood men who sexually assaulted her, her tumultuous relationship with Marlon Brando, and a marriage that was not as happy as it seemed are clearly difficult for her to discuss. Moreno’s painful recollection of a backstreet abortion is juxtaposed against the current political climate in the US; her stance on this issue is unwavering (“A woman should have the right to an abortion if she needs it”).

Through all the accolades bestowed by colleagues, critics and even presidents, the documentary is at its strongest when it speaks to Moreno’s impact on future Latin American performers, giving them the role model she never had. At the time of writing, Moreno is still the only Latina to win an acting Oscar. Despite the shifts in Hollywood that are covered here, there are still barriers to break through.

ANTICIPATION. A trailblazer who deserves our attention beyond her role as Anita. 3

ENJOYMENT. So much more than a West Side Story retrospective. 4

IN RETROSPECT. Hollywood still has much work to do, but Moreno rightly gets her flowers. 4

Directed by Mariem Pérez Riera

Starring Rita Moreno, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Eva Longoria

The post Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/reviews/rita-moreno-just-a-girl-who-decided-to-go-for-it/

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[hadarlaskey]

Encounter

A film I find myself thinking about a lot is Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter from 2011, in which Michael Shannon plays a father plagued by apocalyptic visions which lead him to construct a bunker beneath his property in Ohio. The question hangs over the film as to whether his premonitions are real or a symptom of mental illness; it’s a beautiful, haunting end-of-days drama that regularly springs to mind whenever I have a nightmare, or see a particularly overcast sky.

Michael Pearce’s second feature Encounter recalls Nichols’ work, but only in that it’s an inferior film which deals with similar subject matter. Riz Ahmed plays ex-marine Malick Kahn, who appears to be on some sort of covert mission concerning extraterrestrial parasites that are invading the world. He travels to his ex-wife Piya (Janina Gavankar) and her partner Dylan (Misha Collins) to rescue his young sons, Bobby (Aditya Geddada) and Jay (Lucian-River Chauhan). The trio then set off on a road trip to a base Malick believes should provide safety.

But not everything is as it seems. Violent run-ins with other people on their journey lead Jay to question his father’s story, and it soon becomes apparent that the threat may be closer to home than any of them wants to admit. Encounter has an interesting premise, but the film rehashes harmful tropes about the potential danger people with mental illnesses pose to others.

Time and again we see schizophrenia used as a plot device in films, usually painting people with the condition as unstable and dangerous to those around them. Encounter sadly typifies this stereotype, as the local law enforcement becomes convinced that Malick is a “family annihilator”. The film becomes so concerned with action scenes that it fails to challenge this preconception, and the sci-fi plot is dropped entirely once Malick’s psychosis is revealed, leading to frustrating a lack of ambiguity.

While Ahmed gives a typically strong performance, the real stars are Lucian-River Chauhan and Aditya Geddada. They have a charming screen presence and wonderful rapport with Ahmed, and really are the film’s saving grace among a plot that is at best ill-advised, at worst offensive to people living with a mental illness. It’s a shame considering that Pearce’s debut Beast felt like a more nuanced approach to mental instability and avoided presenting the most vulnerable members of society as a threat to their loved ones.

There is already a stigma around PTSD and mental illness in soldiers returning from war zones; Encounter makes no attempt to challenge this, instead leaning into the notion that trauma often leads to violence. It’s a deeply unpleasant and reactionary film that even compelling central performances can’t save.

ANTICIPATION. Pearce’s 2017 debut, Beast, was remarkable. Excited for this. 4

ENJOYMENT. A cruel and strangely reactionary film. 2

IN RETROSPECT. A bitter disappointment. Here’s hoping some of that Beast mojo returns for the next one. 2

Directed by Michael Pearce

Starring Riz Ahmed, Janina Gavankar, Octavia Spencer

The post Encounter appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/reviews/encounter/

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[hadarlaskey]

West Side Story

Human life is finite. Time’s relentless march brings us closer to the casket every single day. As such, we need Steven Spielberg to be super selective when it comes to the films he choses to make. With three quarters of a century in the bank, and a workhorse ethic that has resulted in roughly a film every other year, we’re eking ever closer to the end zone of one of cinema’s most illustrious careers. Sorry to be maudlin, but it’s a fact.

“Everyone has their reasons,” as Jean Renoir famously mused, and the sublime mysteries of human inscrutability come into play when pondering the question: why on earth did Spielberg chose to make an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink rendition of West Side Story, the jazz musical conceived by Jerome Robbins and with music and lyrics care of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim? There was muted surprise when it was announced, and now having seen the film, a sense of perplexed irritation remains.

Curtain up. The camera presents a mid-century New York skyline in transition, the skyscrapers flanking a worksite in which grubby brick tenements are being wrecking-balled to make way for ritzy apartments and Lincoln Centre – an epicentre of American visual culture, here used as shorthand for chattering class gentrification. Set to the familiar rhythm of clicking fingers, we meet the Jets, led by Mike Faist’s Riff, as they execute a plan to ruin a mural on a Puerto Rican playground, contested territory of the Sharks, led by David Alvarez’ kiss-curled pugilist, Bernardo.

The first thing you notice is that this doesn’t look like a musical in the classical sense of the term. The colours are strangely muted, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski opting for pastel ochres and washed-out browns rather than the glowing reds of Technicolor dreams. The edges in the film are all softened – aesthetically and emotionally. The camera, too, manically dances and swishes around the actors, the sharp cuts slicing through the action in an overzealous attempt to stake the film’s claim as a piece of bells ‘n’ whistles cinema rather than filmed theatre. Initially the razzle dazzle does enough to hold the interest, but after a while it comes across as empty showmanship, technique at the expense of focus.

Enter stage left, Rachel Zegler’s wide-eyed Maria, the department store cleaner with dreams of romantic escape. And then, from stage right, we have Ansel Elgort’s Tony, the Polack goon with heart-melting capabilities and a dark past. In the history of dramatic art, their cosmically-aligned love transcends the banal everyday to achieve something close to the magical sublime, and this particular story only works if that idea is conveyed believably and with staunch conviction.

Alas, here the chemistry between the two leads is negligible – even the massive height difference emphasises an awkwardness that really shouldn’t have been entered into the equation. Zegler is decent – clearly on the level with the fairytale aspects of the material. Yet there’s barely a moment where Elgort doesn’t feel as if he’s waded too far into the deep end, his small, dark eyes adding an air of unnecessary mystery to a character whose heart should literally be there on his sleeve. The earnest simplicity of Tony has been taken for granted, and this feels like a major miscast when it comes to making sure the emotional foundations of this towering story are there, set deep in the ground.

The songs are all delivered with ample conviction and Rita Moreno steals the show as widowed Puerto Rican shop-owner who has taken errant Tony under her wing (her rendition of ‘Somewhere’ is the film’s highpoint.) Yet it’s a strange thing to say about one of the world’s foremost forgers of cinematic imagery and sveltely assured storytelling, but on this evidence, Spielberg has no feel for musicals. He appears resistant to just showing the actors performing – placing bodies in the frame and painting with people. There’s a cloying need to make himself, the director, feel at every moment. The individual performances are all fine, but there’s no dynamism and connectivity.

And yet the brash, overly pronounced delivery of the dialogue – as if it’s being shouted for those in the cheap seats – dents the social realist air that Spielberg is attempting to cultivate through his ultra-detailed vintage production design and ungainly foregrounding of the story’s political subtexts. At one minute it feels like a music video, the next it’s as if the director is desperate to hold the attention of a fidgety audience through overly choreographed set-pieces for numbers which – as we saw in Robert Wise’s superior 1961 film – can simply soar on the wings of the songs and the performances.

It’s a rare, backwards looking misfire for this director who has always been at the vanguard of cinematic innovation. The care and attention that has gone into the making of this film is undeniable, though at times it feels misplaced and others overwrought. The story is so baked into the collective consciousness that this does feel like we’re going through the motions by the final act. And as the final credits roll, the “why” of Spielberg’s West Side Story is as unclear as it was when news of its conception first hit the trades.

ANTICIPATION. It’s Spielberg, so we’re in the tank. Even if we’re not quite sure about this one… 4

ENJOYMENT. Individual elements work, but just flat and stiff in the main. And Elgort a dead weight right at the centre. 2

IN RETROSPECT. Perplexingly off, too filmy to be a musical, to musical to be a film. If that scans? 2

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Starring Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Mike Faist

The post West Side Story appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/reviews/west-side-story/

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[hadarlaskey]

Ari Wegner on how she created The Power of the Dog’s visual identity

Ari Wegner is fast becoming one of the most exciting cinematographers around. From William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth and Peter Strickland’s In Fabric to Janicza Bravo’s Zola and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, her work is highly imaginative, varied and always evolving. We’ll next see her behind the camera for Sebastián Lelio’s The Wonder and Oldroyd’s second feature, but before then she spoke to us about the The Power of the Dog.

On beginning a new project

“I really like to start afresh on each film and take the lessons from the last project but not take any of the visual ideas or rules or approaches. I really try and start completely fresh with the script and the director, completely open-minded to what they’re thinking and I’m imagining. I love variety and I really love morphing the way I work to suit how a director wants to work because I really believe that the way a director works is so specific to them. How a director likes to work infuses into the film and I really enjoy as I’m getting to know someone beginning to understand not only how they want the film to look, but how they want the shoot to look. In many ways, I feel the DoP is an advocate for that because it’s not a given that a film shoot will morph to how a director wants to work.”

On working with Jane Campion

“I’d met Jane previously when we worked on a really short commercial together, so when she called me we knew each other but not that well. The first thing she said was that she’d read this book, and that she was adapting it into a screenplay, and would I be interested in talking about it. The main thing she wanted was a DP that was going to be available throughout the next year, and I didn’t know what form that would take, whether it would be a couple of conversations or something more. But the first thing I did was read the book, and I completely fell in love with it. That was before I’d even read Jane’s screenplay.

“The first thing she wanted to do was get out on the road and find the location, because she really knew the place had to work and had to work as for real as possible, without cheating too much. That said we were looking in New Zealand for a farm that was supposed to be in Montana, but we wanted to find something that would evoke the spirit of what you feel in the book, but also had a mountain range that felt powerful and iconic. Our first conversations were in the back of a van, between me, Jane and Grant Major the production designer, just driving around for days looking at different properties. Jane’s a great explorer, so there’s a lot of ‘Ooh, let’s go down that road, that looks cool!’ and jumping out, walking up hills.”

On finding the film’s visual identity

“After we found the place, we dove into what the challenges would be. I really love that about Jane because I can be a terrible procrastinator. Everyone’s natural instinct to start with the thing that will be the most fun, and ignore the things that will be harder or more daunting. One of the first things we talked about was ‘The Dog’ and the town of Beech; the two biggest worries from the visual effects side. The next scary thing was cattle. Jane’s quite an outdoorsy person, she grew up around horses and cattle, so she has some kind of idea that when the scene says ‘thousands of cattle go over the ridge’ it’s easier said than done. One of the other things I learned about Jane is that she really gets excited about things she doesn’t know. She’s very confident in saying ‘I don’t know’ and finding experts to give us the information.

“Then we started talking about colour, which was another big conversation. The great thing about having a year of pre-production was that we could sleep on something for a month and really mull it over, think about the best choice, get more information. We explored every possible option, we looked at black-and-white, we looked at more Technicolour intensity, trying to do a hand-coloured look, and made a variety of different palettes of colour approaches with old photos and paintings and postcards. We were drawn to this palette I’d probably call ‘dusty’ – the colour of the grass, the cattle, the timber of the buildings. Those sun-bleached colours, with the idea that Rose would stand out with her pastel pinks and yellows.”

On working in widescreen

“We thought about 16:9, because as much as Jane is a romantic she’s also a realist and knows that so many people enjoy watching things at home. We explored whether we should make it the perfect shape for the home experience, or go more 4:3, do something totally unexpected for a film set in such a vast landscape. Then we started doing storyboards, and as Jane was drawing she kept going off the edges of the rectangular board templates. Eventually, we realised this film really wanted to be widescreen. We did think about the fact it would have a home on a streaming service, but I think people are open to a cinematic experience at home.”

On the interior language of the film

“In many ways it’s like a monster movie. We wanted the audience – and Rose and Peter – to be constantly aware of Phil’s presence, and thinking about where he is. What they’re going through, it’s never gonna end – it’s their life now. They’ve entered into this world. On the surface there’s visual elements of the western, but as a film I don’t think it quite fits, just because the typical themes of the western were not so much things that we were interested in. In westerns, the danger often comes from the outside, whether it’s the sheriff or the outlaw or someone that wants your land. In our film the danger comes from within the family unit, within the house. Nowhere is safe. We kept the house quite dark, so there’s a feeling Phil could be around any corner. For example, we knew we wanted it so that from Phil’s room you can see the piano, like that kind of visual connection. There’s so many doors everywhere in the house, but it’s impossible to feel really safe there.”

On working with cattle

“There was no getting around the cattle. Some of the guys who play cowboys in the film were real ranchers: there was one guy Jane met at a rodeo in Montana; another who works in Northern Queensland where there’s a lot of cattle. We had to get some people who were really comfortable being on a horse surrounded by cattle. You can’t act that kind of confidence. Cattle are interesting because they’re a prey animal – they’re a big animal that’s quite afraid, which makes them hard to train. But they’re also very curious, and when they’re calm they’re really cute.

“It took a lot of planning. Like, how many times do you need to see a lot of cattle to believe and understand that this is what this family does? And what tone and atmosphere do you want that scene to create? In the first scene with the cattle being taken to Beech, we were trying to create a sense of place and scale, as well as a sense of time passing. But the actual through line is Phil trying to get George’s attention; the cattle are sort of a background excuse for one brother to try and elicit some nostalgic thoughts from the other.

“Then there’s the scene with the castration. It’s really about emasculation and domination, and it’s no coincidence it happens just before Peter arrives at the ranch. It’s a real moment of male-on-male violence, and foreshadows this idea of the space not being big enough for more than one male presence. We had a great visual effects supervisor too, Jay Hawkins, who we worked with very closely to understand to what extent we could do digital cows, never as the main event but as an addition. There’s actually a lot of real cows, but then a lot of cow clones. You can’t see them! I’ve even forgotten which cows are what.”

The Power of the Dog is now streaming on Netflix. Read the LWLies Recommends review.

The post Ari Wegner on how she created The Power of the Dog’s visual identity appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/interviews/ari-wegner-the-power-of-the-dog/

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[hadarlaskey]

Blue Bayou

There’s no doubt that the subject matter at the heart of Justin Chon’s Blue Bayou is compelling and prescient – it focuses on the injustice of foreign-born adoptees in the United States being deported due to a legal loophole as a result of the Child Citizenship Act of 2000.

Despite having spent the majority of their lives in America with no family or life in their native country (and potentially having endured abuse at the hands of their adoptive families) these people are forced to endure lengthy and expensive legal battles, else accept deportation.

For Antonio LeBlanc (played by Chon) this means leaving behind his pregnant wife Kathy (Alicia Vikander), adoptive daughter Jessie (Sydney Kowalske) and his job as a tattoo artist, after the immigration department rule he must leave America for his native South Korea – a country Antonio has no relationship with.

Chon gives a strong performance as Antonio, and the supporting players are equally charming, but the script is weak and often clichéd, featuring a tangle of subplots which don’t quite mesh. Advocacy group Adoptees for Justice claim Blue Bayou utilises real-life stories without consent and have called for an apology from the director who’s heart appears to be in the right place by highlighting this devastating issue of displaced adoptees.

But his execution is heavy-handed, with the ending steering into a mawkish spectacle which undercuts the seriousness of the topic at hand.

ANTICIPATION. Chon is a promising but slightly inconsistent talent. 3

ENJOYMENT. Ambitious but inelegantly executed. 2

IN RETROSPECT. A documentary would have better served the real-life adoptees who face this issue. 2

Directed by Justin Chon

Starring Justin Chon, Alicia Vikander, Mark O’Brien

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source https://lwlies.com/reviews/blue-bayou/

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[hadarlaskey]

There is No Evil

Unfolding across four divergent stories, Mohammad Rasoulof’s Golden Bear-winning anthology film There is No Evil presents a potent tapestry of perspectives informed by capital punishment in present-day Iran. Rather than being caught between poetry and censorship, Rasoulof strays from the stronghold of allegorical aesthetics and instead adopts a necessary and uncompromising antagonism against governmental oppression with fearless narrative urgency.

Each short is emotionally draining in its portrayal of the personal responsibility of executioners against a backdrop of authoritarian rule. Depictions of complex family dynamics, mandatory military conscription and corrupt state practices work in tandem to create a textured understanding of violence and its banality, of its immersion in the quotidian and the mundane.

The first two vignettes are captivating and thrilling, making the chest tighten with anxiety, while the didactic dialogue of the third and fourth shorts falter in focus and tonally complicate the whole. Despite an excessive 150-minute runtime, a fair share of abrupt tonal shifts and a somewhat heavy-handed execution of metaphors threatening to rob the anthology of power and cohesion, the dramatically consistent depictions of contempt, grief and rage bring an adequate sense of uniformity.

ANTICIPATION. Defying a 20-year filmmaking ban, the Iranian auteur made his seventh feature in secret. 4

ENJOYMENT. Potent and unsettling shorts portrayed with meandering pace. 3

IN RETROSPECT. The film’s political importance is explored with a sincerity that outweighs it shortcomings. 3

Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof

Starring Baran Rasoulof, Mohammad Seddighimehr, Zhila Shahi

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source https://lwlies.com/reviews/there-is-no-evil/

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[hadarlaskey]

The Hand of God

Paolo Sorrentino loves breasts. This is striking to anyone who has watched The Great Beauty, Youth or Loro, in which naked female flesh is as integral to his set decoration as whooshing dolly shots are to his cinematic language.

Among other things, The Hand of God is the story of the patient zero of boobs, which belong to Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri) aunt to the Chalamet-esque protagonist, Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti). This Naples-set coming-of-age story is a portrait of the artist Sorrentino as a young man, before and after a tragedy of worst-possible-nightmare-so-couldn’t-really-happen proportions replaces boisterous family life with a lonelier path.

We’re introduced to the sprawl of the Schisa family through Patrizia one night as she waits in a long queue for the bus that’s never coming while wearing a white strappy dress – braless, naturally. A limo creeps up beside her, containing a strange old man who knows all about her and whisks her away to see ‘the little monk’, a local urban legend who can, apparently, make dreams come true.

As a result of this unexpected detour, Patrizia is late home and her husband flies off the handle. Cut to Fabietto on a scooter with mum Maria (Teresa Saponangelo) and dad Saveria (Toni Servillo), roaring through the night, cracking jokes.

Theirs is a bubble of good vibes despite being en route to a scene of domestic violence. Saponangelo and Servillo cause mini lightning storms of delight for every moment they’re on screen, even in scenes that are otherwise hard to parse. Completing the family is older brother Marchino (Marlon Joubert), an aspiring actor who loses his ambition after Fellini – whose presence looms large off-screen – tells him he looks like a waiter from Amarcuri.

Like the sport played by the icon hanging over its title, The Hand of God is a game of two halves. In the first, there is rarely a quiet moment in vignettes that span Maria’s incorrigble appetite for pranks, brotherly bonding, such Marchino asking Fabietto to choose between having sex with Patrizia and Maradona being signed by Naples and – more weightily – the discovery of an affair. An extended family is drawn crassly, with Sorrentino othering physical difference, reaching for cheap jokes that are clearly inspired by Fellini, and yet Fellini himself could not have carried them off in today’s world.

Still, the dynamic of the central four is a pleasure incarnate. Equal parts funny and warm, each actor brings a specific dynamism that, when combined with the rest, crackles with life and love. Time passes like a rippling summer breeze in a mode that does not quite equal the cinema of Mia Hansen-Løve but is comparable to the way she makes forward momentum feel like a delicate pleasure. Then comes the transformative incident. The film quietens down and in Fabietto’s words, “I don’t like reality any more.”

The Hand of God is the autobiographical origin story of a filmmaker that exudes the warm intimacy that such personal storytelling enables. It’s this intimacy that coaxes audiences in-the-know to be forgiving over gauche streaks, such as Sorrentino’s view of female flesh as either sleekly pornographic or ridiculously grotesque.

ANTICIPATION. Always interested in the next glossy beast from Sorrentino. 4

ENJOYMENT. One hell of an emotional sweep. 4

IN RETROSPECT. Lovely and jarring in equal measure. The man needs to step back from Fellini homaging. 3

Directed by Paolo Sorrentino

Starring Filippo Scotti, Teresa Saponangelo, Toni Servillo

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source https://lwlies.com/reviews/the-hand-of-god/

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[hadarlaskey]

Discover the digital film festival where you’re on the jury

With most film festivals celebrating the long-awaited return to in-person screenings, ArteKino remains a torchbearer for virtual viewing. The festival takes a love for cinema and opens it up to the European public – with no advance Covid tests required – by offering another edition of robust programming to discover.

Europe-based audiences with the inclination to seek out exciting new films and catch the hot new auteurs before they’ve exploded onto the scene have a selection of 12 features to choose from in the 2021 ArteKino line-up: from festival favourites to unsung gems that, despite critical success garnered at festivals, haven’t had the ease of finding distribution in movie theatres.

From 1-31 December, viewers across 32 European countries, including the UK, can explore the selection in six close caption languages (French, German, English, Spanish, Italian, Polish) accessible through arte.tv and ARTE Cinéma on YouTube. Being entirely free and unequivocally promoting participation, viewership lies at the heart of this collaboration between cultural programming channel ARTE and screening platform Festival Scope, giving viewers the chance to vote for our favourite film to win the ArteKino Audience Award. So all there is left to ask is, what does this year’s programme have in store?

The curated selection combines poetry and politics, subjectivity and authenticity, innocence, loneliness and struggle for survival, offering a snapshot of the eclectic spirit at the core of contemporary European cinema.

Gender and hardship are central to this year’s thematic undertakings. Call Me Marianna is Karolina Bielwka’s first feature-length documentary, and it swept four awards at Krakow before winning the Zonta Club Prize at Locarno. We enter the private sphere of a 40 year old Polish trans woman who has legally had to sue her parents in order to pursue sex reassignment surgery. The film expresses the turmoil of being trapped in a prison of flesh that doesn’t feel yours, as much as the solace that gender affirming surgery can offer to a trans person living in Poland.

Another emotional documentary on women whose courage doesn’t waver lies in Masha Kondakova’s documentary Inner Wars, which takes the filmmaker directly into a warzone. The ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia is presented through the eyes of three Ukrainian women on the frontline who are also consistently fighting on the front against patriarchal standards and the media’s caricatured representations of women in the army.

An unexpected relationship forms the basis of Nathalie Biancheri’s kitchen-sink drama Nocturnal, in which an emotionally stunted yet sensitive brute in his 30s forms a precarious friendship with a 17-year-old student, providing a compelling portrait of flawed masculinity and a remarkable performance by British actor Cosmo Jarvis. In Süheyla Schwenk’s Jiyan, a similar unlikely relationship develops between a young mother and her aunt-in-law, after a young couple moves from Syria to Berlin to provide a better life for their unborn child.

With an intimate portrait of her brother and mother, Paloma Sermon-Daï’s Petit Samedi looks at a painful relationship with addiction and dependence which intertwines the personal and familial. A family living in the idyllic Southern Italian countryside, where Sara Summa’s The Last to See Them takes place, lives its last moments of quotidian simplicity with an overarching sense of foreboding. Maternal love and its shifting meanings are also explored in Jonas Bak’s atmospheric Wood and Water, a psychological investigation of a woman who, upon entering retirement, abandons her solitary life in rural Germany to travel to protest-ridden Hong Kong.

Political critique frames the hybrid doc Uppercase Print, a 2020 Berlinale favourite by prolific director Radu Jude. A forgotten piece of Ukranian history is dramatised through the theatrical conceptualisation of a Romanian teenager’s protest against the dictatorship of Ceausescu. Theatrical reconstruction is juxtaposed with archival footage and looks at state surveillance, the banality of dictatorship, and the vitality of Romanian youth.

Astute explorations of adolescence are to be found in LOMO: The Language of Many Others by Julia Langhof, a portrait of online coming of age and computerised teenage angst, as well as Ivan Ikić’s Oasis, where an unanticipated love triangle forms between three teenagers navigating feelings of desire and envy in a special needs institution. Blossoming teen friendships in the suburbs of Zurich is Karin Heberlein’s contribution to coming of age with Sami, Joe and I, while Marysia Nikitiuk’s tactful portrayal of innocence, fragmented identity and tragic romance in When the Trees Fall, looks at rural Ukraine through a lens of magical realism.

As you can see from this line-up, this is a selection of engaged and engaging works which seeks to explore the trials, tribulations and traumas of contemporary Europe. Watch them all and vote for the one which speaks to you the loudest.

ArteKino 2021 runs from 1 to 30 December. For more info visit artekinofestival.arte.tv

The post Discover the digital film festival where you’re on the jury appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/festivals/artekino-digital-film-festival-programme/

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